Fascinating Interview with Dr. Chris Knobbe on Vegetable Oils and Macular Degeneration

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good morning everyone i am back with a new guest and today we have dr chris kenobi he’s a clinical associate professor at university of texas southwestern medical center and he actually is a doctor ophthalmology so he he’s an eye physician and eye surgeon so welcome doc i’m so happy that you’re able to make it thank you dr eric it’s great to be here thanks for the opportunity well you know the reason i bring you on is number one um i wanted you to speak at our upcoming summit for sure but your data is fascinating i uh you cover a point that um is just rarely talked about but it’s probably one of the most important things out there that i think people need to talk you know emphasize and understand and i know you’re going to get into it and so i have a bunch of questions for you so i just want to dive right in uh you’re a doctor of the eye so you you basically see things from a certain viewpoint and i want to know a little bit about how you got interested in the diet connection and how that related because you really talk about the vegetable oils and the impact of vegetable oils on the your eye but how did you stumble on this well uh yeah first first of all i definitely stumbled into it and uh to be honest with you and the audience is that i wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my own suffering with arthritis that’s how it all started eric uh was i’d suffered with arthritis for 16 years and just in a nutshell i kind of went partial paleo and in about 10 days my arthritis improved about 80 that was back in 2011. wow and eric it was so phenomenally uh life altering to me after all this suffering i had had and after seeing so many of my physician colleagues to try to help me and a dietary change which nobody had suggested made that kind of change for me it just it just uh instilled a desire in me to want to know more and then the more i started digging into this the more interested i became and and that just kind of ballooned and really i guess if you want the rest of the back story it’s that that was 2011 and in 2013 i came across the research of weston a price and are your is your audience quite familiar with price’s work most of them are um absolutely so yeah i think so okay so so just very briefly um weston price uh did phenomenal research in the 1930s where he evaluated people all over the world on five continents as they transitioned from native traditional diets over to westernized diets and westernized diets essentially contained refined white flours added sugars vegetable oils trans fats canned goods sweets confectionary in essence processed foods and price noted how those foods drove westernized disease that started with dental decay and then was followed by arthritis and cancers and all kinds of degenerative disease and so that was 2013 for me eric and later that year as i continued to study it just suddenly hit me in late 2013 that after i had understood that westernized processed foods are driving heart disease cancers strokes hypertension type 2 diabetes metabolic syndrome obesity autoimmune diseases when i understood all that finally it hit me and i thought could processed foods be driving age-related macular degeneration amd which is the leading cause of irreversible vision loss and blindness in people over the age of 65 worldwide and uh this is something that you know i had dealt with in the clinic for 24 years at that point and in any case so then i followed down that path and i continued and to investigate that while i was in practice for about the next year and a half and in early 2015 i felt i had enough evidence and i was convinced that i was on the right path although i couldn’t bear i knew i had needed a ton of study and some more you know fundamental research and i left practice to pursue that so so a question about where did you personally have arthritis was it all over your body was it in your back where was it yeah so it when i was about 34 years old um it you know it started mostly in my knees and i had a lot of trouble with my knees in my mid to late 30s and then and then it i think next it kind of hit my elbows and then my shoulders and then my neck and then eventually my fingers my toes pretty soon i was riddled with arthritis and i was 50 years old at in 2011 and eric i was in severe pain and i i’ve always been athletic and i got into where i just it was so hard for me to even just jog or warm up to lift weights uh it was just i just you know was on a disastrous path wow it sounds like we go ahead well i was given uh an immunosuppressant which i took for one day and the next day i heard about the paleo diet and started like i said kind of a makeshift paleo because i wasn’t convinced i was very skeptical everything i’d done for 16 years with my arthritis was a you know a fail and those but that was all drugs wow like i said i’ve probably seen a dozen of my physician colleagues and um i don’t want to make this all about my arthritis but nevertheless i mean none of them had ever said one thing about diet it was always a drug an injection steroids you know all that fascinating i think we have i think we have something in common because when i was 28 i had the ex similar thing i started noticing arthritis in my hands all down my back my spine i told my wife i’m like what the heck is going on yeah i’m in my 20s and i got arthritis and so i had it a little bit earlier than you but i know exactly what you’re talking about i’m going everywhere trying to help at that time i lived in san diego um and i actually stumbled uh price and pottinger had a whole center there and that’s where i got introduced to them as well which is interesting so i started turning things around but um getting back to the macula okay what is the macula of the eye so the macula is the central retina it accounts for about the central 10 degrees of vision and it is responsible for you being able to see somebody’s face to read words on a page to see a stop sign it’s it is your central vision and if that part of the retina degenerates then your vision will begin to decline and macular degeneration is probably for ophthalmologists today it’s probably uh second only to cataracts in terms of what uh ophthalmologists deal with at optometrists too in westernized countries and so yeah so this disease um it’ll it gradually steals your vision typically and then it can progress to a wet stage which can be severe and um let me just tell you that today this year they estimate that 196 million people are affected with macular degeneration in the world and of those by some estimates the world health organizations data would suggest that as of 2006 and that’s the latest data i have for blindness the bilateral blindness probably around 3. 15 million people in the world bilaterally blind meaning both eyes centrally blind they can’t see their their their they can’t see their spouse’s face their grandchildren’s face they can’t see to drive or read and if you think about that that is a staggering number of people it may be more than that so it could be approaching the population of the state of colorado where i live today in the world all blind you know from this disease and and you know when i first investigated this eric what i saw i had to go back and look at all the history and this i couldn’t find anybody who any research that had done this and what i found was that in a nutshell that between 1851 when mac when the when the retina was first visible uh because of the invention of the ophthalmoscope and then over the next 80 years up until about 1930 there was no more than about 50 cases of macular degeneration in all the world’s literature and ophthalmologists were using the ophthalmoscope and recording images and diagrams in the 1850s and so i go i go through that data but in a nutshell you know what i found was that this d