Peter Pardini and Vinnie Tortorich present "FAT: A Documentary"

B.C. Wehman:

Drink eight glasses of water a day.

Heather Grayson:

Calories in, calories out.

B.C. Wehman:

A low fat diet is a healthy diet.

Heather Grayson:

Saturated fat is the cause of heart disease.

B.C. Wehman:

Coffee raises blood pressure.

Heather Grayson:

Eat whole grains for a healthy heart.

B.C. Wehman:

The question still remains, what food should we eat to achieve and maintain good health?

Heather Grayson:

Health expert, Vinnie Tortorich, gives us the history behind America's biggest diet myths. We learn about Charlie Abrahams, who suffered from epileptic seizures for years with no option other than surgery and pills until his dad discovered the secret that would help his son, a ketogenic diet.

B.C. Wehman:

We'll hear the story of a doctor in Australia who had his medical license revoked when he started telling patients to eat a low sugar diet.

Heather Grayson:

And the McKenzie family, who took control of their son's diabetes by taking control of his diet.

Heather Grayson:

Hi, I'm Heather Grayson, writer, producer, and director, who craves passion in filmmaking, and documentarians are just that. I write fiction, but I love to watch the truth.

B.C. Wehman:

My name is B.C. Wehman. I'm an actor, a writer, an entertainer, all sorts of creative endeavors. But what I love most? Being a storyteller. It's why I love documentaries. They're extraordinary stories from every day extraordinary people. This is Behind the Doc.

Heather Grayson:

Today, we are behind the scenes with FAT: A Documentary. We are joined by the producer and star of the film Vinnie Tortorich.

Movie Clip:

We're in a war for information, and the fallout affects all of us. The media's just going to sell what people are going to buy, and if people knew the truth they wouldn't know to ask for. My name is Vinnie Tortorich, and I've been in the health and fitness game for the better part of 40 years, specializing in weight loss. Over the years I've seen everything come and go at least a hundred times, but as a country we've only gotten fatter.

B.C. Wehman:

So before we get started, Vinnie, I just want to tell you, after watching FAT, which I did late last week. And I've seen it two times now. Watching it, about four years ago, I watched a documentary, King Corn, if you're familiar with it, that really changed my life. When I watched that, I realized how much... In that time, how much corn we were ingesting. And I was going through a period in my life where I was 250 pounds. I was a heavy smoker, a heavy drinker, really unhappy and had a mild heart attack, and watch that documentary and said, "I need to change my life. Change my lifestyle." And that's what I was reminded again, watching FAT recently is this can help someone change their lifestyle. Not just their diet, but their lifestyle. So is that what you kind of set about to do when you decided to make this film?

Vinnie Tortorich:

No, I didn't kind of do anything. I was very deliberate in my, doing. The reason I say that is because we see all these films, and over the years I would see things like Cowspiracy, or Forks Over Knives and all these movies, and once the internet got popular, these people... These movies got popular. People are like, "Wait a minute. Aren't we killing ourselves by eating meat?" And I'm like, "No. No, that's not the truth." They're taking bad science, and they're putting it in the forefront and making it look like real science.

Vinnie Tortorich:

I guess a couple of things happened in a row. I wrote a book eight years ago, I put it out seven years ago. But the year before I put the book out, someone told me I needed to be popular on the internet, so I started a podcast. And by the way, the week before I started a podcast was the first time I heard the word podcast.

B.C. Wehman:

That's what happens.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Yeah. Someone said, "You should be doing a podcast." And I said, "Well, what is that?" And they said, "Well, you used to do radio, so you can do a podcast, right?" I was like, "I don't even know... The words coming out of your mouth right now, I'm not really sure what they are." But one week later I had a podcast. And this was before everybody and their brother had a podcast. I started doing the podcast, it was called America's Angriest Trainer Podcast, because I was yelling about all the injustice. The tagline was, your good intentions have been stolen, I'm here to help you get them back.

Vinnie Tortorich:

That went on for a year, and once the podcast started getting traction, and I guess we had about a 100,000 people a month paying attention at that point, we put the book out, Fitness Confidential. So now we have these two things going on, the book and the podcast. And the book ended up being this crazy best seller, which was way beyond anything I could have ever dreamed of. Here we are seven years later, and this is a testament to when you write the truth, and it sounds like I'm being grandiose and I'm patting myself on the back, and I'm really not doing that.

Heather Grayson:

Be grandiose. Come on, it's all right.

Vinnie Tortorich:

No, no. Look, the book is seven years old now and it still sells like hotcakes over on Amazon. And I was like, "Oh my God, people are still buying this thing." And it's because the book tells the truth. I went and wrote a 27 page PDF that's been living on my website. It's there because it's stuff I wish I would have put in a book. So that's the kind of community... I'm telling you this for a reason. That's the kind of community I was trying to build, of just giving people the truth.

Heather Grayson:

I did want to ask, just because with making this film, it looks like you used Indiegogo. And as a filmmaker myself, how was that experience for you? We saw the credits, we saw how many people helped to contribute to this, what was it that you were doing, particularly with Indiegogo, and how are you marketing it out to make the film?

Vinnie Tortorich:

Well, if you want the truth, I'm going to have to lie.

Heather Grayson:

Okay.

B.C. Wehman:

I thought we just did a whole dialogue about how we have to tell the truth and not lie.

Heather Grayson:

I know, what?

Vinnie Tortorich:

Everyone wants to know what that magic was. Well, first off, when Peter Pardini... Peter Pardini is this great writer and director in Hollywood, and he's a young guy. And the guy ran into me walking. I do Adam Carolla's podcast-

Movie Clip:

When it comes to the core issues and the ones that just affect everything, such as family or such as diet-

Vinnie Tortorich:

Well, one day I'm giving my seat up to the next person and the guy whispers to me, "Hey man, I'm a big fan." And I'm looking, and I said thank you, and I left the studio. And I was like, "Who is that guy? He's not Jeff Goldblum. He's not Howie Mandel. He's not someone I recognize, he's just some guy who says-

Heather Grayson:

He's a producer.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Yeah, he's a film guy.

Heather Grayson:

Right.

Vinnie Tortorich:

I literally listened to the show the next day to find out who this guy was, and he even talked about it on the show. He goes, "I'm a big fan of Vinnie's, I've been following what he recommends on his podcast and on this show." And he had lost like 80 pounds, or something like that. So I looked him up, his name is Peter Pardini. I looked him up, and I went, "Oh, he's got a great movie out there about the band Chicago." And I'm 57 years old, at the time, I was 55 and I went, "I grew up with Chicago." It's like that's the best band in the world.

Vinnie Tortorich:

And so I watched the documentary, and after the documentary I got his number from the Adam Carolla people and I just sent him a simple text and said, "Hey man, it's Vinny. I loved your movie." And he called me back almost immediately. I invited him onto my podcast, now called the Fitness Confidential podcast. And he came on and he was this great guest. And when he was leaving my little studio, he goes, "Hey man, why don't you do a documentary?" And I said, "Peter, I'm not a documentary guy. I just... That's not what I do." And he goes, "Yeah, but I can edit everything. I could do it all. You just have to do what you do on the podcast, and just talk into a mic."

Vinnie Tortorich:

And I said... He wouldn't let it go. So I said, "I'll tell you what, where do we get the money from this? No one's going to give me the money." And he said, "Do Indiegogo." And that's when I realized I would never have to do the movie. I went, "Nobody's going to give me money just by me asking for the money." So I came up with a crazy high price of $150,000, because I figured if we didn't get that amount of money, there was no way we can do a documentary. Well, we ended up getting over a quarter of a million dollars.

Heather Grayson:

That's amazing.

B.C. Wehman:

When you get into that filmmaking process, and you have the six months, the film has a couple of different angles that's working, right? We have a couple of different... We have doctors and we have scientists. We have some personal stories on how it affects people's lives, whether it's the McKenzie family and the Abrahams family, and then we have your narration at the fireplace. How did you think about all these scenes? Did you have one idea, like the narration, and then we edit together? What was that creative process between you two like while you were filming?

Vinnie Tortorich:

It was very interesting because we sat down, literally... Some people would say, "We went to the woodshed," but I went into my shed in Woodland Hills. And Peter came in there with... It was a hundred degrees, and we sat there and he was sweating, we were sweating in the shed. And he wrote notes and I talked, and I said, "We should have this, and we should have that. And we need to get this person and that person." So we came up with a dream list of people we wanted to have. I went with the story of Dr. Gary Fettke From Tasmania and what happened to him, because the truth was stranger than fiction.

B.C. Wehman:

Why don't you fill them in real quick. Because we read that story, but can you tell us real quick how he got basically Australian... I don't know what the official name is at the medical board, the Australian Health and Practitioner Regulation Agency put a stop to him telling people to eat less sugar, right? That's it in a nutshell, which sounds ridiculous.

Movie Clip:

I started talking to my patients about reducing sugar, and the benefits were immediate.

Vinnie Tortorich:

He's an orthopedic surgeon. His job was to chop people's limbs off because they were getting type 2 diabetes, and of course your legs will rot, your feet will rot-

Heather Grayson:

Which was an amazing scene, by the way.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Yeah. I said, "We can't just tell the story. I have to show an amputation happening."

Movie Clip:

I used to see the occasional person and they had a diabetic foot ulcer management, and needing an amputation and it started becoming virtually weekly. There's something which really upsets me, and that's when you actually amputate someone's limb, there's a sound of actually dropping that leg into a bucket.

Vinnie Tortorich:

We literally sat there, Peter and me, because we had to get the sound of the limb dropping into a bucket just right. We worked... We must have worked-

Heather Grayson:

You did that well.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Yeah. Three hours on that. But Gary Fettke was saving people's limbs by saying, "Look, we can turn your type 2 diabetes around if you just cut out sugar and grains." And he was healing people without doing surgery. Well, the dietitians of Australia, which runs that part of Tasmania said, "No, no, no, no, no. We don't want you to saving people's lives, and saving their limbs. We want you to tell them to eat all the sugar they can and you just go ahead and start chopping people's legs off." Well, he didn't stop doing that, so they took his medical license. Now, I don't know if we had anything to do with it, but sometime after he... Word got out that he was in our movie, and that we were doing the whole exposé on it in the movie, somehow he magically got reinstated. So they gave him his license back.

Heather Grayson:

See? Working miracles already.

Vinnie Tortorich:

And then we had this dream list of doctors, and I knew this convention was coming up. So we went down to San Diego and literally we got about half of them in San Diego. I took a whole film crew from Hollywood. They just did everything. And we turned that room into a sound stage. The bathroom was the audio village, and the balcony was the video village. And we had a whole film crew in there, director of photography, photographer, lights, cameras, everything. And we got about half of our doctors in San Diego to sit down. And when they walked into that room... They thought they were going to walk into a room and see like a cell phone hooked to a tripod or something. When they walked in, it got real for a lot of these doctors, and they were like, "Wait. Whoa, whoa, what did we sign up for?" It's like, "You're in the movie."

B.C. Wehman:

It's a great way to keep your budget down too though, right? Set them all into one spot, as opposed to chasing. And you're working on a tight budget here, even though you did really well with your Indiegogo. To have them in one spot versus chasing them around the country, or around the world. You got a lot of all over the globe experts in one spot. That's a great tip for budget, cheap budgeted, filmmaking, right?

Vinnie Tortorich:

Yeah. Look for the convention where they're going to all be. And then the second group came to my house. We had two sets set up in my house. We changed out my curtains, and put up those curtains you see for where I'm sitting. So in one section of my living room, we set up that side as my set. But then when that chair was removed, we rolled tracks in there and just put the camera on tracks so we can pull it in and pull out. And we got everyone else.

Vinnie Tortorich:

And we were already in the editing process, and I got this call or an email from this woman, McKenzie. And I was like, "Who are you? What do you want?" She was like, "We want to give money to your movie, because we're doing our own movie." And I say, "Well, why do you want to give money to my movie?" And she said, "Well, if we could be in your movie, maybe that will help us finish our movie. Maybe we could get more funding." She said, "Look, before we do anything else, let me show you what we have. And she sent me a little 20 minute clip of what they were doing on type 2 diabetes. I'm sorry, on juvenile diabetes, type 1. And her husband was also a surgeon.

Movie Clip:

We both concluded that we were going to make drastic changes in our diet, reducing carbohydrate intake. Shortly thereafter, we were told that we didn't need to do that, that we could feed our son, recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, whatever he wanted to eat.

Movie Clip:

I'm trusting these people who are now in charge of caring for my son, and they're telling me, "Give him pancakes, and give him french fries and cupcakes and pizza. Because now that your kid has this disease, his life was pretty crummy already, and the worst thing you could do as a parent is to try and change his food."

Vinnie Tortorich:

They were controlling their kids insulin to a much lower level... Because type 1 you can't get rid of, type one diabetes. But their kid was not having these wild swings, and they didn't have to use the very expensive quick acting stuff and all that. They were able to just give this kid regular insulin, and small amounts of it.

Movie Clip:

And during that appointment, our very kind-hearted doctor looked at me and told me my son was going to resent me for the rest of his life, that this way of eating is not sustainable, that I'm subjecting my son to an eating disorder. And he also handed me a business card to go see a therapist, because he thought maybe I was struggling with some things and had some issues for wanting to do this for my son and to change his diet.

Vinnie Tortorich:

When I saw their 20 minutes, I dare everyone to watch that 20 minutes, and if you don't cry, you're not human. You are not human. They wanted to go and take some of these parents and take their kids away because these parents were taking the kids off of sugar to control the amount of insulin they would have to give them. And these kids were just thriving. I swear to God, I cried at least twice watching that 20 minutes.

Heather Grayson:

Which is crazy, because you think as a parent, you are the ultimate decision maker for your child. Whether it's their diet or the meds that they're using. Women out there, men out there who are completely against vaccinations, they're allowed to make that choice. They might get a little bit of flack for it, but they're still allowed to make that choice. So it's so sad-

Vinnie Tortorich:

Oh, but Heather, Heather-

Heather Grayson:

Oh no.

Vinnie Tortorich:

We're living in an all woke, no joke society.

Heather Grayson:

That's true.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Come on, you're talking crazy talk over there right now.

Heather Grayson:

I am, I know. It's frustrating as a parent to see Charlie, and to see these doctors talking about these kids.

Movie Clip:

The seizures increased in intensity, and in duration. He wound up having seizures in the arms of the Chief of Pediatric Neurology at Boston Children's Hospital, Seattle Children's Hospital, UCLA, LA Children's Hospital. So we tried all the drugs that were available at the time. Charlie had a brain surgery, a horrendous brain surgery, and nothing really stopped his seizures. And we lost hope. We were basically told, "There is no hope." I started researching pediatric epilepsy. One of the first things that came up was a ketogenic diet.

B.C. Wehman:

Well, let's dig into that. The lifestyle that you talk about... And by the way, I love the term lifestyle versus diet, because I do think it's more than just the food you eat. It's a whole mental set. You very much promote the NSNG, No Sugar No Grains lifestyle. What is that like compared to say keto, or the carnivore diet, which is big? How is No Sugar No Grains... Is it the same thing essentially? Is there a difference between keto and the carnivore diet and all these meat heavy, protein or fat heavy diets, versus a lot of grains and sugar and veggies and fruits?

Vinnie Tortorich:

Well, the reason I promote NSNG is because, well, let's be honest, I own the trademark.

B.C. Wehman:

Good for you, by the way.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Yeah. I don't like to BS people. And the reason I came up with No Sugar No Grains is you got to remember eight years ago when I was writing that book, I didn't want to use words like keto back then. I know that sounds crazy today, because now you can buy a glass of orange juice that's going to have keto written on the side of it. That's the furthest thing from keto.

Movie Clip:

Up to say two or 300 years ago, the average consumption of sugar in this country was about four pounds a year. And that's splendid. I'd be very happy if everybody had four pounds of sugar a year. They eat a hundred pounds.

Vinnie Tortorich:

But I was trying to soft-sell eating lower amounts of sugars and starches, so I came up with No Sugar No Grains, NSNG. Now keto is you're going to live in dietary ketosis. Now, I personally live in dietary ketosis because I had cancer at one time. I had leukemia. So I find this better just to stay in ketosis in order to not to get that back. And by the way, it's working like a charm because my cancer was supposed to reappear after five years, and I'm 12 years out.

Vinnie Tortorich:

If I'm breaking every record for people who have had the leukemia that I have, that I've gone past five years, I've gone past 10 years and I'm heading towards 15, and they can't find the leukemia coming back. Don't you think medicine would be curious too to go, "Wait a minute, what's this guy doing?" They don't care.

Heather Grayson:

Well, that's because they're not going to make money off of pills and radiation.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Right, exactly. So that's how keto is... Keno is very low carb where your body just generally lives on ketones. Atkins is the same way. The way NSNG is different is that it's flexible. The first time I figured out the whole low carb thing was, I was doing a lab with a girl named Lisa, and we're doing a lab and we had a couple of our track stars from the university in the lab. And you ever see the Gatorade commercial where they have every... You're on a treadmill, and they got the thing in your mouth and all of that wires hooked to you?

B.C. Wehman:

I always think of Dolph Lundgren training and Rocky IV. That whole thing where Rocky's slinging pigs, and he's training with the big Star Wars face mask on, and they're pushing them harder. That's what I think of, yes.

Vinnie Tortorich:

That's what we were doing. And we were checking... We were doing VO2 max, or something like that. And we were pricking the guy... People don't realize you're also taking blood, you're taking sections the whole time to figure out when we get them to the red line. We left the lab, I left with Lisa, and we were sitting on this bench right outside of the university, and we were having lunch. We were having a sandwich, and when we were done, she had a small bag of M&Ms. Now, I'm 57 years old. M&Ms used to come in a tiny bag, not these extra King size super-duper bags you get now. So she took some out and poured some in her hand, and she handed them to me.

Vinnie Tortorich:

And I poured some in my hand, And out of curiosity, I looked at the back and I said, "Huh." And she said, "Huh, what?" I said, "Huh, there's 187 calories. There are 168 calories or something like that in this small bag of M&Ms." She said, "Yeah, so?" I said, "I don't know if you noticed, we just had a track star that we kept at red line for like 26 minutes, and he barely got to 125 calories." We couldn't even get this guy to 200 cal. He didn't even work off this bag of M&Ms. And she said, "Okay, so what?" I said, "So everything. Calorie in, calorie out can't possibly work." And she was like, "But that's the way it works." I said, "No, it can't work that way. There's no way." And that was the beginning of my journey.

B.C. Wehman:

That's great, because that's one of the many myths you have in there, calorie in, calorie out. Because it would seem, if you're going to eat that bag of M&Ms, that you should be able to burn it off. But you're saying it's not so much calorie in, calorie out, it's hard to burn off the calories in it sounds like.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Well, think of it this way. You have a car B.C.?

B.C. Wehman:

Yes.

Vinnie Tortorich:

What kind of car do you have?

B.C. Wehman:

Honda Accord 2018.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Does it have an electric engine, or is it just gas?

B.C. Wehman:

It's just gas. I haven't hopped that hybrid train yet.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Okay. If you take it down the street, and you keep running it and you don't go to the gas station, just keep running it, eventually it runs out of gas, right?

B.C. Wehman:

Correct.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Okay. Can you coerce that car to keep going down the street unless you get out of it and push it?

B.C. Wehman:

Oh, I have begged some times, "Please make it another five feet." But no, it will not. How much I beg, "Please make it to the gas station," there are times when you just don't make it quite there.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Right. But if you don't make it to the gas station, you're hoofing it, right? Well, calorie in, calorie out is asking your body to run out of energy, and then keep going. Isn't that the craziest thing you've ever heard?

B.C. Wehman:

When you say it that way, it does sound like, "Duh."

Heather Grayson:

Yeah, it does. You put it in a way that I understand, and wow. Okay.

Vinnie Tortorich:

It's really that simple.

B.C. Wehman:

Is there any alcohol? As someone who, I have these two deliciously cold IPAs in my fridge that are probably about a thousand calories each, and I know I shouldn't have them and I may still Vinnie. But is there any alcohol? If you're going to take away people's sugar and grains, is there any kind of alcohol? Is vodka okay? Is that kind of keto friendly?

Vinnie Tortorich:

It's not kind of keto friendly. Is keto friendly all the way around.

B.C. Wehman:

Oh, okay.

Vinnie Tortorich:

So IPAs have more carbohydrates. Basically you're drinking-

Heather Grayson:

A loaf of bread.

Vinnie Tortorich:

You're drinking pasta, bread.

Heather Grayson:

Yeah, you're drinking a loaf of bread.

B.C. Wehman:

Its delicious pasta though, to drink. It's way better than spaghetti, let's be honest,

Vinnie Tortorich:

I could go on, on the subject all... We might have to do another show.

Heather Grayson:

I think we do.

B.C. Wehman:

Yeah, because I wanted to get to your love of coffee, which I love and how it doesn't raise blood pressure.

Heather Grayson:

And I really wanted to know if you went out with Cher.

Movie Clip:

Cher is on the phone. Cher, My name is Vinnie Tortorich. I want to say it is in front of the whole country. Is the camera on me? Yeah, camera's on you. Cher, I live in Beverly Hills. Let's get together and have lunch. I'll have my agent call your agent and we'll do it because we'll have a great time.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Never went out with Cher.

Heather Grayson:

Dang.

Vinnie Tortorich:

And yes, I do love coffee. I have a company called purecoffeeclub.com, go check it out. The movie Fat: A Documentary, first it ended up on... it was an iTunes and Amazon at the beginning. And Vimeo and a few other places. So the first thing it did was it started climbing. With no money... We had no money to advertise this movie. It climbed to the top of iTunes. It beat out Free Solo, which was topping the charts at the time. We beat Free Solo.We stayed in the number one position on iTunes for God only knows how long. We made it to like number six or seven on their overall iTunes movie list. I could do another whole movie with what we left on the cutting room floor, so we're considering that. We put 90 minutes out, we could've made it a three hour movie, but it would have been like the Irishman and no one would vote for it. We have that much more. There's another whole story I can tell about other stuff that these scientists and these doctors were talking about that would literally blow your mind. It would blow your mind.

B.C. Wehman:

Well I hope to get... Here's what... We have to wrap up, but I do hope we get that second podcast, because we want to hear your thoughts on the future and where we go. But we thank you Vinnie for joining us. You are a personal trainer, a public speaker, a podcaster, a best-selling author in now a filmmaker. Congratulations sir.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Thank you.

B.C. Wehman:

You can check Vinnie out at vinnietortorich.com. Follow him on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. His book, FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL: Adventures in the Weight-Loss Game, as well as of course, FAT: A Documentary. Thank you for joining us, Vinnie. Keep preaching this lifestyle, getting people out there, getting people healthy. And we look forward to see what comes next from you, sir.

Vinnie Tortorich:

Thank you guys for having me.

Heather Grayson:

Thank you so much, Vinnie. It was a pleasure.

Movie Clip:

If you think it's up to government, you're wrong. If you think it's up to industry, you're wrong. It's up to you. And if you're going to make a change, if you're watching this change right now, tonight.

B.C. Wehman:

Behind the Doc is produced by Evergreen Podcasts in association with Gravitas Ventures.

Heather Grayson:

Special thanks to executive producers, Nolan Gallagher and Michael DeAloia.

B.C. Wehman:

Produced by Sarah Willgrube.

Heather Grayson:

And audio engineer Eric Koltnow.

B.C. Wehman:

And you'll find us everywhere in anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.