My name is danny lennon Of course alongside. Alan flanagan as usual and today we are delighted to have a very very special guest professor. David jacobs someone who is influenced both allen and i in our thinking around nutrition science in a number of ways. Both broadly about nutrition science as well as specifically on some of the concepts will hopefully discuss today so Professor jacobs welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here. Yes and There's lots that we could get into. But i suppose as a good starting point give people listening. Some context could you. Maybe i speak to perhaps the regions of how you came to start thinking so deeply through these metal level questions about nutrition. And what drew you to that in the first place. I think i'd like to start with my work on whole grain foods. We could go a little bit further back if you're interested in the relationships with answer keys and that work and a little bit before i started really getting into nutrition but starting in nineteen ninety four. There was a question asked to me as part of a consultation. With general mills the cereal company flour company about whether whole grains were better than refined grains. I had done quite a bit of work. Kind of on the edges of nutrition and especially with respect to serum cholesterol but. I had not done that kind of thing. And so We did a project in found That whole green in the literature was related to reduced cancer rates in a series of case control studies and the power of that single nutritional variable was pretty remarkable. But still if it seems too good to be true. It probably isn't so we had another study. The iowa women tell study which was about forty thousand women aged about sixty two and they were followed at that time for about nine years was so we could look prospectively at especially vascular disease which was my main interest cancer Consumption of whole grains was related to future disease. We only had death in these women so we did not have nonfatal events but it turned out to be very strong and that was published in nineteen ninety eight and by that time i had become a true believer in nineteen ninety nine. We published a paper showing that in the iowa women. The relationship was actually extending to a wide variety of different conditions. Not just basketball.