Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is dr. Lane Norton, dr. Norton is one of the foremost experts in protein, metabolism, fat loss and nutrition. He did his degrees in Biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered one of the world experts in understanding, how we extract energy from.
From our food and how exercise and what we eat combined to impact things like body composition and overall health. Today, we discussed an enormous number of topics Under the Umbrella of nutrition and fitness including for instance, what is energy balance that is, how do we actually extract energy from our food? We also discuss the somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners, whether or not they are safe or not, and whether or not, they are an effective tool for weight loss, in particular for people suffering from obesity, and
Current types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health, that is the gut microbiome and how its impacted by food, and how it can actually impact the metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting or so called intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding what it does and what it does not do in terms of how effective it is, for weight loss. And perhaps even for Health and Longevity, we also talked about protein and Define very clearly how much protein each and all of us need depending on our daily activities and life demands.
We discussed the various types of diets that you probably heard about including ketogenic diets. Vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as well, as more typical omnivore diet, and how to make sure that you get all of the essential amino acids that are critical for healthy weight, Maintenance Weight Loss or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense amount of science pointing to their safety and efficacy for fitness and for overall body composition.
Position, what I'm sure will become clear to you as you hear Lane talk about each and every one of these topics is that he has an incredible ability to both understand the mechanistic science but also the real world applications of the various discoveries that are made in particular papers and in particular in the randomized controlled trials. That is when a given scientific hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at understanding. Why it was raised but also at evaluating whether or not it works in the real world.
Is what I believe most everybody out there is concerned with. I think this is one of the things that really distinguishes him from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that. By the end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer understanding about what the science says about nutrition about Fitness and about how different diets and fitness programs combined to achieve the results that you want. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however,
a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains sodium potassium and magnesium, the so-called electrolytes, but no sugar, as you may have heard me discuss before on this podcast every cell in our body and in particular cells within our brain. The so called neurons or nerve cells.
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huberman Lab podcast you can go to live momentous. Spelled ous live, momentous.com huberman and I should just mention that the library of those supplements is constantly expanding again. That's live momentous.com / hubermann and now for my discussion with dr. Lane Norton Lane dr. Norton thank you so much for being here. This is a long time coming and I have to say, I'm really excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also
To a number of your other podcasts and as a fellow PhD scientist, I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have tremendous experience in Fitness and Nutrition and number of areas we also got a lot of questions from our audience and I'm really looking forward to talking with you today.
Yeah, I'm excited to I mean this like you said it's been something we've been talking about for a long time so I was glad we're able to make it
happen. Yeah, it need and I think some of the audience has requested a debate or a battle and I can tell you right now it's not
And it happened actually, one of the things that brought Lane and I together in conversation online and then via text Etc, was the fact that I love to be corrected and that is what happened. I'm a I did a post about artificial sweeteners which we will talk about a little bit later in the episode and Lane pointed out some areas of the study that I had missed, or maybe even misunderstood and I revise my opinions. And I think
It's wonderful and other Studies have come out since then. So hopefully, our conversation will serve as a message of how science and actionable science can can be perceived and and that it doesn't always have to be a battle, but hey, if we get into it, we get into it, it won't get physical because we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like to start with something that's rather basic and yet can be pretty complex and that's this issue of energy, balance and energy utilization.
And I think most people have heard of a calorie, I am assuming that most people don't actually know what that is in terms of how it works and what it represents. And so maybe you could just explain for people what happens when we eat food of any kind and how is that actually converted into energy? As a way of framing up, the discussion around weight loss, weight, maintenance, weight gain and body composition.
So great question and like you said, this is one of those things where people use the term calories in calories out and they say, well, that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what actually makes up calories in calories out, it's actually very complicated, right? So, let's deal with the what you mentioned. First, what is a calorie because I think a lot of people don't quite understand this. So, Cal just refers to a unit of energy of heat, specifically. And so,
What does that have to do with food? What does that have to do with like what we digest and eat? Really what you're talking about is the potential chemical energy that is in the bonds of the macronutrients of food, right? And by digesting assimilating and metabolizing those nutrients, we are able to create energy and the in product of that mostly is ATP adenosine triphosphate which is
A body's energy currency so to understand ATP. Just try to think about if you're trying to power these various reactions in your body, we're talking about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP. You know. It doesn't make sense that you would have to create a bunch of micro explosions, right? You want something that can transfer high energy phosphate to power these reactions to give up essentially it's
Orgy, to power something that might otherwise be unfavorable.
So a lot of metabolism is simply creating ATP, which the end of the line of that, I'm going to get a kind of work, backwards is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria Powerhouse of the cell and that is done through essentially creating a hydrogen, ion gradient across the mitochondria which Powers the production of ATP by converting free phosphate.
Plus ATP to ATP. Now, the way that hydrogen ion gradient is created is through, you know, creating Hydra, Dodge hydrogen ions, like we donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about carbohydrate metabolism of carbohydrates, basically, other than fructose get converted into glucose, which can go into glycolysis and you can produce some atp's through glycolysis and then
It boils down to pyruvate then acetyl-coa, which goes to the Krebs cycle. Produces a lot more atp's from that. If you talk about protein proteins, a little bit different because protein gets converted to amino acids, which can be used for muscle protein synthesis or protein synthesis and other tissues. But it also can be converted through gluconeogenesis to glucose and there are so are some ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have a few different ways.
To get to the Krebs cycle of other, being through acetyl, Co a or through glucose going through the clock glycolysis, to pyruvate.
Then you have fatty acids which are able to create energy through what's called beta oxidation. We're essentially you're taking these fatty acids in your lopping them off. Two carbons at a time to produce acetyl-coa, which again can go in the Krebs cycle, produce those hydride ions. That can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and taking it back out, like what does that have to do with weight loss or weight gain, right?
Well, when you think about the balance of energy and versus energy out, sounds very simple. But let's look at what actually makes up energy and versus energy out. First of all, you've got to realize that the energy inside of the equation is more difficult to track than people think, right? So one food labels which we like to think is being you know like from upon high can have up to a twenty percent error in them really
Yeah, so 100 calorie is something list is
100 calories per serving. It could what's actually in there? Could be 80 or
120? Right, exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's what's called your energy but then there's also metabolizable energy, right? So if you have food stuff with say a lot of insoluble fiber, typically insoluble fiber is not really digestible and so you could have you know quite a bit of carbohydrate, you know, but if you can't extract the energy,
G from it. And typically this is because insoluble fiber from like plant material, the carbohydrate or and even some of the protein is bound up in the plant structure which makes it inaccessible to digestive enzymes and so this is what like adds bulk to your school stool and whatnot but again reduces the metabolizable energy in there and there's some evidence that based on people's individual gut microbiome that some people may actually be better at extracting energy.
Out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting off right there. Okay. There's there's quite a bit of play in the energy inside of things.
Now, one of the things people will say is, well, see, that's why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories. Because, you know, if the food labels can be 20% off, and what I'll say is, okay, that's a that's I understand where you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent with how you track it eventually, you'll be able to know kind of what you're taking in. And it's kind, that's kind of like saying, well don't worry about tracking, you know, if your I like to use Financial examples
You know, we know that to save money or you have to earn more money than you spend. Well, you can't exactly know how much money you're earning at a time, you know, because there's inflation and then there's if you have Investments, those can be, you know, different interest, rates and whatnot, it's okay. But you're, you know, if you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea of what it's going to be, you know, and you make you make certain assumptions but you can relatively guess. Yeah. That's a good example, right? So now let's look at the energy outside of the equation, which is actually way
More complicated, right? And say your energy out is a few different buckets. The first one. And the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your arm are and that for most people is anywhere from fifty to seventy percent of your total daily energy expenditure. Now people use the term metabolic rate and energy expenditure kind of interchangeably but they're not the same thing. So your total daily energy expenditure is the summation of all the energy you expend.
In a day
walking upstairs exercise if you do it fidgeting, yeah. Plus your resting metabolic
rate, right? So resting metabolic rate is a big part of that but it's not the only thing. So that's usually about 50 to 70% and sedentary. People will be on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger proportion. Whereas people who are more active, it'll be a little bit lower. Not because their metabolic rate is lower, but because they're expending a greater percentage of their calories from physical activity, then you have something called the thermic effect of food.
Which is a relatively small percentage of your total daily energy expenditure it's about 5 to 10% and very difficult to measure and usually what researchers do when they're kind of looking at this stuff as they just kind of make an assumption about it, they use a constant but that's about five to ten percent of your daily energy expenditure and that refers to the amount of energy, it takes to extract the energy out of food. So, think about your body, kind of like a car, right? You don't just have gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up, right? Like, have to
A battery. So you put in energy so you can get the energy out of the petrol that you have in your car similar with with food. You can't just eat food and then, you know, it just appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be systematically broken down and put into forms that can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times people will say something like, well, not all calories are created equal.
That's not true because calories just a unit of measurement, right? That would be like saying not all seconds on a clock or created equal. Yes they are. All sources of calories, may have differential effects on energy, expenditure and appetites. So if we look at something like fat for example, the TEF of fat is about 0 to 3 percent. Meaning if you 200 calories from fat, your net will be about 97 to
100. So, the process of breaking down that fat essentially, subtracts, some of the
Worries away because you used it in creating energy by breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP
correcto, correct? So you have like, for example, some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes now, fat is actually the easiest thing to convert into energy then you have carbohydrate, which has a t.f. of like five to ten percent. So you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate. And obviously, like the fiber content makes a big difference on this, but he 100 calories, you'll net 90 to 95. Protein is about a 20 to 30.
Sent TEF. So if you 200 calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net, you know, people say well you can't eat too much protein. Well, you know, people will ask what can protein be stored as fat. The carbons from protein, it's unlikely, it's going to wind up in adipose tissue, but if you're eating a lot of protein overall, as part of a lot of calories, it does, it has to be oxidized and it can provide a calorie cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide, you know, a net positive for
But less so than carbohydrates or fat and tends to be more satiating. So again when people talk about, you know are all calories created equal, yes but all sources of calories, may have differential effects on energy, expenditure and appetite. So that's the tee eff bucket and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity and physical activity is essentially two parts. There's exercise which is kind of your purposeful movements like you off for a walk. You do a training session. I mean, whatever any purposeful activity,
And then you have what's called neat, which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which I think is actually a really cool, it's fascinating. Yeah, it is. So it's, I was actually hanging out with somebody last night and I was noticing them, they, they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers and I said, no, have you always liked been pretty lean and they were like, yeah, I never really had a problem maintaining leanness. And when you look at the obese resistant phenotype, people think they have high BMR.
Or, you know, they exercise a lot and really what it it seems to be as neat. They tend to if they overeat, they just spontaneously increase their physical activity. Now people get neat confused. I've heard people say, well I'm going to go out for a walk to get mine. Eat up. That's not neat. Neat is not something you can consciously modify what you're doing there. If it's purposeful. It's exercise. So for example, if I what I'm talking, if I'm waving around my hands if I'm tapping my feet if I'm whatever
That's neat but, you know, trying to like get yourself. I'm just going to tap my foot more well. Now, if I'm consciously, having to do this, then my focus. I mean, you know how the brain works very hard to do. You don't really do two things at once, right? You kind of switch quickly
between tasks, rightly can I quickly ask was the person that you're referring to our friend? Ben Bruno? No, no, he was. He is fidgety. An amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly strong individual. Oh yeah. And
Um, I can't remember whether or not Ben, you're a fidgeter or not. But anyway, off to go. Go check, and we'll measure your fidgeting about non exercise-induced thermogenesis, neat. My understanding of the old papers, on this old being, I guess back to the mid 90s because that the calorie burn from neat is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100 calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about in some cases, hundreds of thousands excused by hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day.
Could you elaborate on
that? Yeah, so there was actually a really classic study I think from I want to say it's from Levine in 1995 as metabolic Ward study and hopefully I don't butcher the study because I'm trying to, you know,
pull it out of my brain. I don't expect you to have PubMed in your head although I must say you have it a quite extensive PubMed ID grab bag in there.
So try to bring the receipts, I try to bring the receipt we
can, but we will put a link to this study in the show. No captions.
People can peruse it if they like.
So I believe they had people overeat and I think it was by like a thousand calories a day and I think for six weeks and I mean, this is the metabolic Ward. So they are, this is very tightly controlled, it's as tight as you get. And what was interesting is, of course, on average people gained weight and gain fat Mass but some people gained more than expected. And there was one person in particular who only gained like just over half a kilo.
Right? They should have gained like I think it was something like 3 to 4 kilos, it was was predicted and what they found is. This engine individual just spontaneously increased their physical activity. He didn't purposely do it, it just happened and I mean you know anecdotally, I've seen people who are again you know very lean. Even eat a meal, sit down and start sweating, you know, and be very fidgety. There was a natural body builder back in the day named Jim Court.
Over and this guy was just very lean all the time and he was exactly that phenotype. You know, he would walk up a flight of stairs and all of a sudden he's sweating, sit down, eat a meal. He's sweating. You know he just he's a furnace, Just expending Energy.
And what's very interesting about neat is that seems to be the most modifiable, I mean exercise very modifiable because you can be intentional with that but of, you know, BMR TEF and neat neat seems to be far more modifiable. So even a body weight reduction of 10%, they've observed. A decrease in neat of almost 500 calories a day for a 10% reduction in body weight. Now you also
You get a decline in BMR when you lose weight one because you're just in a smaller body now and so it takes less energy to locomote but also there's what's called metabolic adaptation which is a further reduction in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass and that's on average usually around like 15 percent but it does seem to be. There's new evidence coming out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR and it seems to be a little bit
kind of in the transition phases. So if you if you start a diet within the first few weeks you will have a reduction in BMR that then kind of just after their after any further reduction is mostly from the amount of body mass you lose. And then if you like, for example, finish a diet, move your calories to maintenance within a few weeks BMR, kind of starts to come back up. There is still a small reduction.
But I used to be somebody who thought the BMR, you know, the metabolic adaptation was a big reason why people stop losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's much more to do with
neat interesting. And you said that it can't be conscious because of that will distract us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at this study and I'll send it to you. Maybe it'd be fun to do a kind of an online Journal Club about this at some point soon, but there's a study that came out of University of Houston recently, having people do. Now, this is a long period of time.
Time for hours a day of basically a Soleus push-up, which basically a he'll raise Cava seated calf raise with one foot, not waited. And then they looked at a bunch of things about glucose metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels, and they didn't conclude that people burned a ton of calories. But what they concluded was that blood sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, you know, there was a lot of excitement about this at some level but based on everything you're telling me this it fits perfectly with
Is known about neat. So this sort of fellow somewhere in between with in between, scuse me sort of deliberate exercise. And spontaneous movement, I guess they've tried to make that spontaneous movement. A little bit more
conscious. Well, what I'll tell people is if you're worried about need, one thing, you can do like these watches for example, people like, oh well told me I burn this many calories, the they are not accurate for energy expenditure. I mean it is like there was a meta-analysis in 2018. I want to say,
Between a 28 and 93%, overestimation of energy expenditure by these watches and
its tracks over those of you listening, we're not going to name the brand but fitness trackers and so wrist-worn Fitness tracker.
And this is and this is across the board. So like depending on the brand, it could be, you know, more or less. But they all overestimated the amount of calories you burn from exercise. So this is actually a great example, where people go while calories in calories out, doesn't work for me because I in calorie deficit, I didn't lose weight and when I
Talk to them. Usually it's they went to an online calculator, it's one. It's a few things. They went to an online calculator, put in their information, it's bad, it's bad out. Some calories to eat and they ate that and didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what do you think is more likely that you're defying the laws of, you know, conservation of energy or that your you might have not gotten the right number for you, the rule, the measurement tool is off? Yeah, the next thing is, a lot of people way, very sporadically and I'll tell people like if you're going to make an intention,
It'll weight loss goal. And again this can be different for different people, but typically I tell people weigh in first thing in the morning, I have to go the bathroom, do it every day and take the average of that for the week and then compare that to the next week's
average. Could I ask one quick, sorry to interrupt. But one quick question about the when you say go to the bathroom, not to get too detailed here for unnecessarily. But are you talking about urination and emptying your bowels ideally because you can eat a big meal the night before. Yeah, got it. So
Wake up, use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready. And then and then get on the scale, take that measurement average, that across the week and then maybe every Monday, you take that value and
CIA. And the reason I recommend doing that is if you're just kind of sporadically, weighing in as somebody who weighs themselves, pretty, pretty regularly. I mean, my weight will fluctuate, you know 56 pounds and not seemingly changing much, you know. And that's
Just, you know, those short-term changes are fluid. So, I've had it before where week-to-week, my average didn't change, but between the lowest way in, from a previous week and the highest way in might have been like eight pounds, right? So, if you're somebody who just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in a calorie deficit and you just weigh in one day where you just whatever reason holding some more fluid and you also see this isn't working when a reality, your average might be.
Dropping. So that's one of the reasons and actually believe it or not weight. Fluctuations are actually identified as a major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss that it kind of stops the buy-in, you know, when they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons early, one of the reasons early on that low carb diets tend to work really well, is because people lose a lot of water weight really quickly and they get that buy-in,
right? So all of this is working. Yeah we can return to that in a little bit because I have theories as to how that, you know, when people eat less
I'd rate, they excrete more water and they'll see, you know, for the first time no, see some definition in there. Absolutely. Oh my God, this diets, amazing. Yeah. And the fluid loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can do some other things. That might people literally make people literally feel lighter although because we have some negative effects, I do have one quick question and I do we'll return to neat in a moment, but when you say the caloric burn, as a consequence of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric burn during that exercise. So for instance, somebody is on the treadmill.
And they'll see okay, they burn 400 Cal, actually, I think this is a month where a number of prominent podcasters like Bert, Kreischer, Tom, Segura, Joe Rogan others, and they call it sober October. But in addition to avoiding alcohol, they are burning 500 calories per day during the exercise, they're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think they take track of whether excuse me, take stock of how many calories. They burned my understanding is that if that particular form of exercise is a muscle building form of exercise that at some point later there.
Might be an increase in muscle if you did it everything right? You everything, right and then you will burn more energy as a consequence of adding that tissue. That's a long process as you know, and we will discuss. But I have heard about this post exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the right language in here. So if I were to go out for instance in Sprint do some Sprint's run hard for a minute jog for a minute. Run hard firm and do that ten times over they'll let's assume I burn.
400 calories during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate will have increased, is that true? And is it significant enough to care
about? So answer both of those questions. Yes, there does seem to be a small increase in metabolic rate and no, it does not appear to be enough to actually make a difference. So, when they look at and again, this is where I tell people, I think I have a good personality
Spective on this because I, my undergraduate degree was about chemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms, you know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do this and this will get this, right? And then I did nutrition as a graduate degree and then my advisor was so great because you could do something over here. And he could tell you how it affect vitamin. D metabolism over here. This is gone lame. Yeah, Don Lemon. So he, you know, he would always come say yeah, but what's the outcome going to be right? So this is actually one of the things I changed my mind on.
I used to be very much well, I think, you know, high intensity interval training is probably better because you get this post-exercise energy burn which they do see in some of these studies but in the kind of meta analyses and like more tightly controlled studies, where they equate work between high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity cardio. So equating work they don't see differences in the loss of body fat. And so to me if I'm looking at, that's the example of a mechanism.
Which is okay. We're seeing this small increase in basal metabolic rate that should lead to increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're capturing a snapshot in time, right? But we don't see a difference in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening? And again, I'm just speculating, but a way to explain it could be. You might have an increase and then you might actually have a decrease that tends to just kind of wash it
out right now. I have to imagine some forms of exercise. This would be highly
You will, but will Spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out for a 45 minute, jog or which I do of 45 to 60 minute hike or jog, once a week, I just make it a point to do that or rock or something like that. Throwing a weight vest in hike after that, I find. I am very thirsty. I want to hydrate but I'm not that hungry. Hmm, that's true of most all cardiovascular exercise for me but after I weight train about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the
Derp and so, obviously calories in calories out, dictates that, that will play an important role as to whether or not I gain or lose weight etcetera. So is it safe to say that the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to be taken in consideration calories in calories out? So how much is burned during the exercise? Also, how much that exercise tends to stimulate appetite? I don't know. We're not people explore this in the rigorous studies and whether or not that form of exercise actually increase.
Lean muscle mass or not. So now we've taken exercise and split into a number of different dimensions. But this is what you are. So masterful at is really parsing how the different components work individually and together. So if you would just, you know, expand on that, I'd love to know what you're thinking.
Yeah, so this is actually really fascinating thing. So first, I want to, I want to just go back to talking about like, for example, Burton Tom and Joe. We're going to 500 calories a day on whatever so
Those apparatus is don't measure those things effectively, either, right? Just like these watches, but will the one thing I will say, is, if you are like, for example, if I do two hours of resistance training, typically, this will say, I burned about 1,000 calories. All right, that's a lot of resistance.
My worry, my weight workouts are like our warm-up for 10 minutes and then one hour of work done,
I just, I love to train. Okay? It's in
you and you can recover from my recovery. Quotient is pretty low. So I've been training for 30 plus years and
I found that if I do more than an hour of hard work in the gym, meaning resistance training, 75 minutes, maybe I'm okay. But past that I have to take two, maybe even three days off before I train my nervous system, just doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to an hour.
Yeah. And part of that to remember is like, I've kind of built up to that over a long period of time, right? You know, so couldn't just throw somebody in and start having to do two hours a day. It's not going to go well for them, I'd
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to, but I will say about the calorie trackers is. So if I'm used to, okay, usually burn about 1,000 calories. According to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do 1300, it may not be accurate. I don't know what the exact number is, but I can be relatively confident that it's more than the
Your session, right? And so, in terms of comparison, it might be okay, like, you know, kind of within subject. And then the other thing I was kind of circle around. I was if you're worried about neat, tracking your steps can be helpful because people step counts can spontaneously decrease, when on a fat loss diet than we even realize it. So, and that again, not a complete measure of neat, but what we've had some clients do with our team by Elaine coaches, is, they'll say okay? You're at 8000 steps right now. We're not going to add any
Purposeful cardio, but whatever you need to do to maintain that 8000 steps do that. And sometimes they have to add, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous activity that they're not even aware of goes
down. That's a really excellent point. I I've heard, you know, the 10,000 steps per day. Number was we all heard that and then I learned that 10,000 just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like an hour, intermittent fasting thing that is a story behind that is actually
Spoke to such in. And it turns out that the graduate student in his lab, that did, that initial study, which was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in lab for about 8 hours by their significant other. So, The 8 Hour feeding window is actually the consequence of this person's relationship
found was, that is a really great point that people don't realize when they, a lot of people will try to copy like scientific studies and I'll tell people like, listen scientific studies are so confined.
You, you need to be very careful with how broadly you apply, what's in there, right? Like they're, they're a very big hammers, the kind of, the way I look at it. Okay, they're not a scalpel. They're a big hammer and I think a lot of times in terms of coaching scientific studies will tell you what not to do, rather than what to do, right? But getting back to your question about like exercise appetite. So first off, I'm not really aware if there's evidence showing like differential effects of different forms of exercise on
It's possible. But again, it also could be like a placebo effect, right? Because we like, for example, you and I grew up in an era where the muscle magazines. It was like, well, soon as you finish your workout, you have your biggest meal of the day, right? And, you know, when I say placebo effect,
I think people have the wrong idea, what the placebo effect is. They think that's just a feeling placebo effect can actually change your physiology. People, don't people don't realize this. There's research showing that a placebo or the power of suggestion is basically as powerful as some Pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples I like to use is actually was a study. We just covered in our research review on Creatine where they did four groups
Not something with creatine told, they weren't supplemented with creating not supplemented told. They were supplemented. Supplemented told. They weren't. Supplemented told they were
Basically, it just matters what they told them really? Oh, yeah,
this is incredible. I have to get this study, will it? So we can link to it, colleague of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce you to because I think he has we could really rip. First of all, she was a former D1 athlete. And then, as a runs, a lab at Stanford and psychology is Alia crumb and she's and grew up in the, you know, very athletic obviously, and a very, very smart and her laboratory focuses on these beliefs /, Placebo effects.
Where if you tell people all the horrible things that stress due to you in terms of your memory and cognitive functioning and they give them a memory test. They perform well below Baseline. If you tell them that stress, sharpens them in the short term and that adrenaline is this powerful molecule that can really tune up a number of memory systems memory improves and it's remarkable and it's consistent and and this and they've done this for any number of different things. And again these food allergies for instance you know, incredible results in any case I'm
So glad you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate and I have for years 5 grams a day, I don't know what's great and, and it's great and I believe it's great.
So
so is there a compound effect of believing? It's great. And it actually
so night not in this study. But so I think the thing to point out, people will misinterpret that as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is your beliefs, about what it does, are probably just as powerful as what it does, right?
They actually did a study and I don't have the citation but it was I think within the last 10 years where they told people they were putting them on anabolic steroids and wouldn't you know it they had better gains even though they weren't actually on anabolic steroids. They had better gains than people that they didn't tell her anabolic steroids, and that's like hard outcomes, strength, lean body, mass, those sorts of things. So when people say, well I wouldn't fall for the placebo effect. It's like you don't have to fall for it if you believe it to be true.
Through the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish sometimes I was ignorant, so that I could subject myself to the placebo effect more often. Absolutely. So, kind of getting back to, that's just a possible explanation of maybe why, you know, and I'm saying way, like I get done with the workout. I like resistance training session, like I'm ready to eat right now. If you look at the literature overall on exercise and appetite, it's not always what you'd expect.
Consistently. It seems to show that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't tend to compensate at least fully for the amount of movement they do. And there is some evidence that
You've probably heard people say. Well, exercise are really poor weight loss tool, right? Like it, like if you figure out how many calories you should be burning from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight loss than you didn't. You would
predict, I have a family member, who is perfectly happy to eat less but doesn't load exercise, but dislikes exercise. Yeah, and they and their of healthy weight but I'm always encouraging them to exercise more. And so, this is an ongoing battle in our in our sibling
relationship. Well, one thing I would say is that
Exercise, independent of anything that happens with your body weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the only things that will actually improve your biomarkers of Health without even losing weight. So there's like an improve. Your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking for a hack to be healthier exercises, the hack.
Right? She'll point and our mutual friend. Dr. Peter T, I think has gone on record several times now, saying that of all the things that one
Could take an immense etcetera of Metformin of well, regardless of whether or not one takes those or doesn't take those that the positive effects on longevity by way of bar. Biomarkers from regular exercise is, you know, far outweighs all of those things combined, not that those things don't necessarily work. We're not going through them in detail now, but that exercise is by far the best thing we can do for our health Span in life span.
Yeah, absolutely. I 100% agree. And
You're talking about weight loss people miss the point of exercise. I think there's some more that came out from Herman pain sir as well that basically showed like, well if you do 100 calories from exercise, you have a like 28 calorie reduction in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this constrained energy expenditure model, right? But what I would say is okay well there's still a net of 72, right? So it's still, it's still. Okay. And the other thing is, I think the effects of exercise on weight loss.
Are actually more due to what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who lose weight and keep it off for a number of years, kind of outliers because most people don't keep it off for years. Over 70% of them, engage in regular exercise of people who do not keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss less than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just a correlation that doesn't necessarily prove causation, but there are some pretty compelling studies showing that exercise.
Increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So, basically you have the same satiety signals but you're more sensitive to them when you exercise. And there's actually a really classic study from the 1950s in Bengali, workers, where they looked at basically four different quadrants of activity. So you had sudden Terry lightly active, moderately, active heavily, active, basically based on their job choice.
And they didn't have an intervention, they just wanted to track them and see how much, how many calories do they actually eat? So it was like a j-shaped curve. So the sedentary actually ate more food than the lightly active or moderately active
But from lightly active to heavily active, they almost perfectly compensated. How many calories they should be eating. So, to me, that's suggest when you become active, you can actually regulate your appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than if you're sedentary. And
do you think this has to do with changes in the brain, brain centers that respond to satiety signals from the periphery? And or do you think it has to do with changes in blood sugar regulation? What I was?
And I don't know if this is still considered true, is that spikes in blood, sugar will trigger a desire to eat more, even though it's kind of exactly the opposite of what you need. When you have a spike in blood sugar, and there's this kind of and we'll get into this. When we talk about artificial sweeteners, this is the idea in mind, I think I adopted perhaps falsely that you eat something that sweeter that tastes really good and you are suddenly on the train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine how exercise if it is increasing. The satiety signals could be working a number of
Different
ways. Yeah I think it's a I think the effect is probably mostly at the brain level, you know, the effects on blood
sugar.
The research out there is not very compelling for blood sugar, driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic, yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of hunger than like you're normal. Like I feel kind of empty and my stomachs growling like those are they can go together but usually like the hypoglycemia is like I am hot. I feel like I'm gonna pass out like you want to eat something, not because your stomach growling but because you know that you just need some fuels
like you're
Pulled Under. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There have been there when I've done longer fast something. I don't do anymore and drink a lot of black coffee. There's probably an electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete, sodium, and other electrolytes. And then just feeling like I needed something this whole thing. Like, I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be back here again. Hyperglycemia is very young, cause it's
not fun. So, you know, again when they and when then when they look at you,
Actual randomized control, Trials of implementing some exercise where they're, you know, pretty controlled environment. They typically see people, if if anything, they eat less as opposed to eating more. Now, some people again that's, you know, studies report averages, right? And there's individual data points. So, there are some people who at least anecdotally report that exercise makes them more hungry. That's completely valid. It's now, it could be their beliefs around it, it could be a number of different things, but it's important,
Understand that there is individual variability and I think one of the things that I've learned to appreciate more, it's not trying to separate Psychology and Physiology. We do this a lot. And so I want to know the physiology. I don't care about the psychology of it and now I'm kind of appreciating more psychology is physiology. You know that. Like, with most things, now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model and I'll give you an example of this. A lot of people get really caught up with appetite.
Right? And if we could just suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat because they're hungry. They eat for a lot of different reasons, social reasons, especially so. Can you remember the last social event you ever went to? The didn't have food, right? If you look at dinner plates from the 1800s about this big. Now, how big our dinner plates the whole Buffet, right? Right. Yeah. If you there's situational,
Is right. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn. Grab some snack, whatever.
I even see this with it. You know how a one person will pick up the phone and then everyone picks up their phone. I think there's a similar effect with
food. Yeah. And and same thing, right? Like, how many times have we either done? It ourselves, or been experienced people saying, oh, you should have some, you should have like, you know, alcohol, especially right, like people. I was hanging out with somebody last night and I had a beer and they just had, you know,
A water and I'm like I feel no need to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans, you know, we're kind of hurt animals. Like we don't want to be doing something out isolation on our own. Now I'm this is a very tenuous, I guess belief of mine but you know, doing things alone.
And isolation, you know, during kind of you know, ancestral times.
That's going to set off your alarm system, you know, because if you don't have other people you can't protect yourself, right? So typically things were done together in groups and I think that's a lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in nature about a lot of things, right? So the whole point to that is, you know, on the list of reasons why people eat. I mean, I've got the point where I think that hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat, you know, stress lack of sleep, or do both.
Them. Yeah, absolutely. So unless you know, we can do something that addresses. All those things. There's a there's a line from a review paper. This review paper came out in 2011 by a researcher named McLean and it's the best review paper I've ever read was called biology's response to dieting the impetus for weight regain and basically went through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that happen during fat loss diets and how biology is response is to try to drive you back to
To your your previous and I'm going to butcher the quote, but at the end of the study he said basically the body's systems are comprehensive redundant and well focused, on restoring depleted, energy reserves and any attempt or any kind of strategy for weight loss. That doesn't attempt to address a broad spectrum of these things is going to fail.
And so that's why, when people say we'll just do low carb, you won't be hungry but you have it. People don't just eat because they're hungry. So I think really like trying to get outside the box and think about these things and especially when you read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic review of successful weight loss, maintainers which I thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost a significant amount of body weight and kept it off first for I think it was three years and they basically asked them questions.
Try to identify commonalities and there were some things that I expected like cognitive restraint self-monitoring exercise and then one of the things they said that I found really fascinating was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to develop a new identity.
So are you familiar with Ethan suply know? So Ethan is actor. He's been in, like, Remember the Titans and American History X.
I certainly saw American History X.
Yeah. So he was he was very large like he was like 550 pounds and now he's like 2:30 and
jacked when he was five. He was how 550
pounds. Wow! And he has it whenever he puts a post on his Instagram of him training, it'll say I killed my
Clone today. And I asked him like, is this what you're talking about? Like creating a new identity and he said this is exactly what I'm talking about because I had to kill who I was because there was no way I was going to be able to make long-term changes. If I just didn't become a new person because there's, I mean and addicts talk about this, right? Like people who are alcoholics, they had to get new friends, they had to hang out at different places because their entire life had been set up around this lifestyle for
And I would actually argue that Eating Disorders or disordered eating patterns, is much harder to break than other forms of addiction and the about food addiction. Well, in some ways bulimia and anorexia are still addictions
You can't stop eating like your alcohol. You can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted to say cocaine, you can abstain from that you can never abstain from food. And so now imagine telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this slot, you know, couple times a day, but no more like, that's, that's really challenging. So yeah, I just like, all this stuff. It's so important to be comprehensive with how we treat these
things. These
Are incredibly important points. And to my knowledge, I don't think anyone has really described in a cohesive way, the way that you're doing here. So important for people to understand this, because obviously is a neuroscientist. I think, you know, the nervous system is creating our thoughts are thoughts are, and feelings are related to psychology and therefore, of course, our physiology in our psychology are one in the same. It's bi-directional. Now, there's nowadays, there's a lot of interest in brain body and particular gut brain access and we can talk about that. But I
I really appreciate that. You're spelling out. How there are these different variables? Each one can account for a number of different things exercise. Clearly has a remarkably potent effect, both during the exercise in terms of caloric, where an overall health and biomarkers and then this is wonderful to learn that it can increase the sensitivity to to satiety signals. I think that makes, at least my mind places is very high on the list of things that people should absolutely do. But that there are other factors to and the identity piece.
This
is fascinating. It reminds me. Also your story reminds me also, David Goggins who is eating you know you know he talks about his former very overweight self. Yep. Almost as if it was a different person and he uses language that I'm not going to use here but you know I know met David no David a bit and he's every bit as intense and driven as and a remarkable human being as he appears to be online. He is that guy but it does seem like he had two more or less kill off of a former version of himself and
And continues to do that every day. And I think what your point about that, this other fellow who did does it does it through a similar process? I the word today seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this, former version of yourself and then that person is buried and gone. You said, you know, I killed my clone today and that's the way that David talks about it also. So this is a daily process and I think this is not just a small detail in tying together. All these things, I think that what you are describing is is fun.
Until because we can pull on each one of these variables and talk about each one of them. By the end of the day, we're a cohesive whole as an individual in. Sorry, you were about to say that
gets that's good. Actually, you know what? My favorite topics which is, you know, why do we have such a hard time with losing weight but more so, keeping it off because of obese people, six out of every seven obese. People will lose a significant amount of body weight in their life. So why do we still have an obesity problem? They don't keep it off.
Why don't they keep it off when you look at the research, basically what it suggests is because people think about I'm going to do a diet and I'm going to lose this weight and they do not give any thought to what happens afterwards, right? It's like,
Think about if you have some kind of chronic disease or a diabetic right? You can't just take insulin once and that's it, right? You got to take it continuously otherwise you're going to have problems if you do a diet and you lose, you know, 30 pounds fantastic. But if you then, just go back to all your old habits. You're going to go back to where you were. If not more, you can't. You can't create a new version of yourself while.
Getting your old habits and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is because people say, well, I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this diet or that diet and I'll say, that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that for the rest of your life? And if the answer is yes, if you really believe that, that's going to be stable for you and plenty of people low-carb, intermittent fasting, whatever they say, felt easy, you know, I could do this forever, great. What if you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction, whether it is a nutrient restriction, like low-carb, low-fat, a time, restriction, intermittent fasting any form of time restrictive, eating or calorie restriction, tracking macros, whatever. So you could you get to pick the form of restriction. So pick the form of restriction. That feels the least restrictive to you as an individual. And also do not assume that it will feel the same for everybody else because I made this mistake, whereas like I
Track things. And so I allow myself to eat a variety of foods. I allow myself to eat some fun foods but I track everything and I'm able to modify my body composition and be in good health doing that now doesn't feel hard for me part of it. I've just been doing it for so long but the other people that's very stressful. They don't want to they said well I'd rather just not eat for, you know, 16 hours, if that feels easy for them do that because the one thing that there was a couple of men analysis on popular diets,
And basically what they showed was, they were all equally terrible for for long-term weight loss. But when they stratified them by adherence and none of them were better for adherence overall, but when they stratified people just according from lowest adherence to best adherence, it was a linear effect on weight loss. So really what it says is what is the diet that's going to be easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you should probably do that? And people again this is
I step back and take the 10,000 foot view. Somebody will say, well I'm going to do ketogenic because I want to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this and they're talking about all these mechanisms and everything and that's great.
Can you do it for the rest of your life, right? Is that, is this going to be something sustainable for you? And if the answer is no, you probably need to rethink what your approach is going to be, it's
incredibly important message basically that you know by the Highlight you know if there was a version of highlighter boldface and underlined and in the podcast space I would highlight both face and underline what you just said and for those of you that heard it listened to it twice and then go forward because
Absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over with the placebo effect. I almost want to say pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick to for, for a long period of time, ideally forever and pick your Placebo to because there's there is a lot of placebo woven into each and every one of these things, intermittent fasting, keto, probably even vegan versus omnivore versus
carnivore. Well,
Even talked about, you know, the diet honeymoon period right? Where like you go into a diet and you're all fired up about it like you're very adherent and then what happens with every single diet, without exception in research studies, is once you get past a few months, adherence just starts
waiting. So then going off here, we are really talking about a form of relationship, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying that to be tongue-in-cheek. Actually, we had a guest early on in the podcast, dr. Karl deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist and by engineer at Stanford tremendously, successful last,
Award winner at cetera. And he talked about love as a sort of a, an interesting aspect of our psychology where it's a story that you co-create with somebody, but that you live into the future of that story, you know, when you pair up with somebody that we use referring to romantic love that there's this sort of mutual agreement to create this this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how you feel in the moment. It's also that you project into the future, quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of parallels with a
Highly functional and effective diet and and I loved it. I'm not setting this parallel up artificially. I'm setting up because I think that ultimately, it was down to what you said earlier, which is that the brain and our decisions about what we are going to stick to our tremendously
powerful. And I think one thing I will say is I keep in mind when you look at the research data, The Meta analyses on, say time restricted eating versus non when calories are equated doesn't seem to be a difference in weight loss fat loss. Most
Health, same thing for low carb versus low fat, you equate calories and protein. There was, there was a meta-analysis done by Kevin Hall, back in 2017 where they looked at the. And again, actual loss of body fat and another important point was, there was, I think there was twenty two studies in this, but all of them provided food to the participants. Right. That's important because that makes ensures that appearance can be much higher in those studies. Whereas like various free-living studies, sometimes you can see funky
results. People are sneaking food,
Or, or they're just not really, it's very limiting the way that it study would ideally
have to. Unless, unless the person is getting like continuous support like studies, where they have a dietitian talk to people, like every week, tend to actually have pretty good adherence. But I mean, that's expensive to have done a study and again like what limits studies? Money money and money, right? But the low carb versus low fat protein and calories are acquainted. Basically, no difference in fat loss.
Some people get upset about this but it's like what to me. That's like this is great because you get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one that works for you, right? Whatever lever you've got to pull, you've got a bunch of different options, you
mentioned, picking something you can stick to for a period of time. Is there ever a case for someone saying, look, I like to eat low carb or even keto for six months and then switch to a more standard omnivore caloric, maintenance type diet and then
Which back is there any downside to doing that for sake of health, or weight loss over time or weight maintenance over time? Because I realize not, everyone is trying to lose weight and I definitely want to talk about at some point, how to eat to maintain weight because I think there are a significant fraction of people out there who are trying to do that because there anything is there. Any downside to being a dabbler, you know, keto for a few months and then omnivore for a few months etcetera.
I think that's actually a great thing especially to like maybe find what you feel, is easiest for you, right? But in terms of like as a strategy, I mean I guess you know, some people this might get into dopamine but like, oh, change and get something new and like you know you feel a bit more positive about it, partner model? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I don't think it's how I would usually set things up initially for somebody, but if somebody said, hey, I just like to have some variety and change it up, as long as they're still like,
You know, their behaviors and the doing portion control or whatever it is, and they're able to sustain a calorie deficit or, you know, depending on one of their goal is. I don't think there's really any downside to it. I do think the one thing to keep in mind is when you look at like going between extremes, so like low-fat to low carb, or
Or vice versa. There can be in that transition period a little bit of weirdness for lack of a better term. Like for example, if you've been on a ketogenic diet and all the sudden you move to like a higher carb diet, you will be like basically insulin-resistant for just a short period of time. Now, is that going to cause any health problems? Probably not in the long term as well, especially if you're still controlling calories. But just because your body has kind of like upregulated these
Systems dealing mostly with mostly with fat and glucose production, rather than glucose metabolism. So now if you start taking glucose or carbohydrate back in like for example, you give somebody an oral glucose tolerance test after they've been on keto, do pretty terribly at it but that doesn't last that long
about how long
few weeks, I think that's important for people
to know because I have a feeling during those first few weeks are the period of time when a lot of people go running back to what they were doing previously, which is not.
To say that they shouldn't, but I've certainly done that. I tried, I've tried very low, carbohydrate diet and I would have assumed. And now, I know I'm completely wrong, but I assumed that I was so carbohydrate starved for so long, that my insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing. By the way, folks would have gone through the roof and I would be able to just sponge up every bit of glucose that I would have ingested through carbohydrate. So I did indeed switch over and I felt like a pretty terrible brain fog. I even got some Jitters. And I thought, what is this? You know, my blood
Sugar was low before now my blood sugar should be in more moderate territory but based on what you just said I'd up regulated, the enzymes and systems in the body for fat metabolism on the keto diet and then switching over. There was a basically, a ramping up of the molecules involved in. Presumably in
glycolysis transition, period. I mean think about like, if you haven't weight train before and you start weight training, you going to feel pretty terrible, right? Like you're going to be sore and stiff and all that kind of stuff, but I will say you aren't necessarily wrong.
Wrong it. What you said about being more insulin sensitive because it depends on how you measure insulin sensitivity. So if you measure with something like, you know, fasting blood glucose or fasting, insulin or even home, why are those tend to be pretty good on low carb. But then, if you do an oral glucose tolerance, test, it tends to be pretty bad. And so, it depends on your specific measure, right? So I think that, you know, the idea that keto makes you, you know.
Glucose intolerant or insulin resistant. I think again it's just a transition period and I'm not too worried about it but it is something important to keep in mind and one of the reasons like if somebody was to transition out of Quito typically if like I'm working with them or one of our coaches are working with them, will kind of instruct them to do it like slowly and kind of systematically over like a four to eight week period that way. Hopefully you know they're not having that period of two weeks where they're like oh man why do I feel so terrible
very important.
Point, I want to go to the other end, literally, and figuratively, and talk about gut
health, because up
until now, and certainly what you did with that thing and certainly in the last few minutes we've been talking a lot about sort of top-down processes, you know, that the brain, the psychology Placebo effects, but the very real aspects of those, not that I can imagine 2,000 calories is 1,000 calories and somehow change the law of thermodynamics, can't do that. But we've been sort of top down and in
Degrading a lot of different ideas into weight loss, maintenance and weight gain, but gut, health least, the more popular studies on gut, health have blown. A lot of things out of the water. For instance, this idea that you could take obese mice and literally give them fecal transplants from lean mice, and yes, that sounds like what it sounds like fecal transplants definitely inserted through the same end in which it comes out. And I point that out, because a lot of people have asked me,
Me. They, you know, it was kind of scary to me, I thought, yes, this is not about ingesting feces. This is they, they literally do a transplant. If he's from lean, mice into obese, mice, and the obese, mice, get lean. And yes, this has been done in humans, limited number of studies and observed. Some pretty impressive effects on weight loss that I have to assume could be related to placebo effect. They might have told these obese people. Hey, look, you're going to get lean through this fecal. Transplant from lean people, but more likely it
Had some effect on their core physiology. I don't know which aspects although I can speculate which ones and they became leaner, they lost weight. And that is in some sense miraculous when especially given the important role of psychology and exercise and satiety signals because I'm going to assume that they controlled for a number of those other variables. Although no study is perfect. What are your thoughts about gut health as it relates to metabolism energy, utilization and balance?
So the first thing I'll say is I'm not a God got health expert, but I will I feel relatively comfortable talking about it based on conversations. I've had with people who are experts. One being Suzanne Dakota. Hooves, are you familiar with her?
Well, she's sort of a Phenom in this area from what I understand. She was
actually doing her master's when I was doing my PhD in, layman's lab. So, she was one of my lab mates traffic. And, you know, I think the other thing to say is even got Health experts
And Suzanne will tell you this. They're like, you know, talk to me in 20 years, we just know. So little I think that's an overall thing that people don't understand is the scientific consensus moves very, very slow and probably for good reason because if we just flipped our scientific consensus based on one study, I mean, you it would be a mess, right? So it's going to take time before you really understand the implications of the gut.
And what it means. So,
When it comes to weight loss, there probably is a role in there. I mean we've seen that, there's something going on now, whether that's is it something? Where a gut back microbiome makeup, that's more obese resistant, perhaps it extracts, less calories out of the food you eat, right? Or perhaps it's elevating BMR. Although I think that that's probably somewhat unlikely,
do you think it could impact?
The way satiety signals are so that's mean back to the brain. Again
is so that's we know that there's a link in the, the gut brain axis. And so my suspicion is that it probably is working via appetite regulation. So that I mean, if we look at if we look at the most effective obesity treatments out there which is like some Igloo tide, I mean, you consistently see a, you know, 15% you know, on average loss of body weight, which is massive
People keep it off. That is a glp-1 mimetic, which is a gun hormone, and it basically just is a very, very powerful appetite
suppressant. Not well, I guess I'm interrupting, but hopefully with a purpose, but there's this really interesting study and it's in mice, admittedly, but publishing at Neuroscience Journal recently and the basically, the takeaway is that, like so many things in Neuroscience. It glp-1 works in two parallel. Pathways in the brain. It seems to impact neurons in the hypothalamus.
That controls satiety so exactly what you're saying and in the gut it seems to create a inactivation of the mechana sensors in the gun. So the perception is that the gut is full even or Fuller I should say not full because I think people who take some glute, I don't feel bloated. And as I don't know, they might but that one feels as if they're got is actually Fuller because these meccano sensors that said stretch are sending signals to the brain. Oh, I actually have some food. I'm not empty down there, right? Anyway, I
I'm tickled by this result, mostly, because every time I hear about a drug or a, or a molecule, having effect, we think it has an effect at one location, but it's kind of interesting that especially for something like appetite regulation, that it would be impacting body and brain in parallel. Anyway, forgive me. It's okay, that's all I'm really excited about this. And and here you are telling a neuroscientist me that a lot, perhaps circles back to these brain mechanisms of satiety.
Yeah, I mean
I think that especially looking at the research on leptin, you know, like we used to think, okay metabolism is mostly like liver based and then, you know, there's a there's, you know, metabolism that up a site and skeletal muscle but none of this stuff exists in isolation. There's so much crosstalk between these Pathways. And that's, you know, when we get into mechanisms the one of the things I love mechanisms, but one of the things I tell people is
Keep in mind that when you're dealing with an outcome, right? So like when I say outcome-based, we're talking about physical outcomes, like weight loss, fat loss changes, in blood markers, whatever,
Though that is the summation of thousands of different mechanisms, so sure. Sometimes you can affect a mechanistic pathway and you get kind of straight down the line outcome. But not always, you know, whenever you make a treatment or you know kind of anything into the system, it's like throwing a pebble in a lake right creates Ripples and we don't always know what those are going to be, right and that's why I mean we've seen you know, sir
Drugs. Well, works on this pathway and then they list all the side effects and you go. How would it create that many side effects? It's because nothing for the most part. They don't just work in one place, there's multitude of places. It works and and to your point about some Igloo tide and the effects on meccano sensors. It's probably why a lot of people report actually kind of like no low-grade nausea when they're using some Igloo tied because of that. Because if you're, you know,
That feeling is usually not like a real comfortable feeling, but I mean, it will get you to not eat. So I think there's absolutely likely a connection but we haven't fully elucidated how that works. And we think about how complicated the gut is. I think I heard something like there's more, you know, there's more cells in our microbiome by far than there are in our body. So we're actually more in terms of a cell per cell level. We're actually more bacteria than we are eukaryote.
Right, there's a Justin Sonnenberg who's one of the world experts on microbiome? He's in the lab upstairs from mine at Stanford and he has this idea. It's just an idea that because we are indeed more bacteria than we are cells. The question is, who's the host and who's the passenger, you know, like maybe we are just maybe they're exploiting us to take them around and interact because they interact and grow on one another. And so this idea, this freaks people out, Lex Friedman will love this. That maybe human beings are just actually the vehicles for the micro
Maya and not.
Not the other way
around. Anyway, kind of a scary thought. Do you do anything specifically to support your gut microbiome? Are you a probiotic guy or a fermented foods guy or a fiber guy?
So, again, I'm going to kind of go straight down the line from what I've heard from Suzanne other experts. So if you want to improve got health,
One of the biggest levers, the three biggest leavers you can pull is not eating too many calories, exercising. Those it there is a connection between exercise in the gut and fiber. So we, it is of the things we know dietary fiber seems to positively impact the gut because it is a what's called a Prebiotic. So your gut microbiota can take, especially soluble fiber. Although there's actually some evidence at least in mice,
They might be able to use some insoluble fiber as well. I think Suzanne was doing a study looking at him. He cellulose actually seeing that some like specific forms of microbiota. Flourish with Hemi, cellulose suggesting that they may actually be getting some kind of fuel out of it, which is really interesting began in my so, you know, just huge caveat. So your gut microbiome can produce. These short chain fatty acids from by fermenting this these the
Able fiber. And there's quite a bit of evidence that these volatile fatty acids, which can be then, actually reabsorbed into the liver, that they have, some positive effects. Like, for example, butyrate when they've done butyrate supplementation, they've actually seen positive effects on insulin, sensitivity. So, what we seem to understand is that more diversity seems to be better.
Fiber seems to be positive. Prebiotics seem to work much better than probiotic. Supplemented Prebiotic? Yes. Yes. So the problem with most of the probiotics is they're typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize. And even if you do colonize, what happens is like, let's say you colonize some microbiota that you didn't really have much of if you're not fueling it with the appropriate fiber, it's not going to stay.
Anyway, because it's essentially going to starve. So, the research seems to really clearly suggests that eating in a fiber, which is again, a Prebiotic that, that is a better way to get healthier gut per se, then
probiotic, what fiber sources do you use? And I think a moment, I realized there's a huge array of choices out there, but people will want have some ideas as to how they could perhaps mimic, what you're
doing. Yeah, and I would just say diversity, right? So you know some
There's, there's various evidence from various different fiber, sources, fruits, and vegetables. Obviously, you know grains, some whole grains, some cereals and then various other sources. So this is one of the things where we don't really have a good idea. If you know this, one source of fiber is better than another source of fiber. We just know that fiber overall is pretty good and one thing I'll tell people, it's like if you want a longevity hack, I mean fiber is kind of the longevity hack. If you look at some of these
Cohort studies. There's actually a recent really large meta-analysis of over a million subjects and basically what it showed was that for every 10 G increase in fiber, there was a ten percent reduction in the risk of mortality and that extended specifically also to cardiovascular disease and cancer. So one of the things I'll tell people when they get like really into, you know, whether it's intermittent fasting or you know, all these other things say that's great, that's great. Are you eating like over
50, 60 grams of fiber a day
and I took conceptualize 50 or 60 grams. So if I already like a boat like a let's just say I quarter plate of broccoli and the broccoli is in stacked to the ceiling. The Rock layers just reasonably stacked on there. Approximately how many grams of fiber is that if it's like a like two cups of broccoli, there's a lot. That's so. If you like
200 grams of broccoli per se would probably be like, 56 grams of
fiber and I need to get how much per day.
Well, ideally I would
Typically, what the recommended dose is, is 15 grams per thousand calories intake, because if you're eating, you know, low calories, it's difficult to get enough fiber in. But based on and again, these are cohort studies so, but you can't do, 20 year long, randomize human control trials. Unfortunately,
The doesn't really appear to be a top end at least for the benefits of fiber. The it probably boils down to like how much you can tolerate without feeling uncomfortable, right? Because if you're eating, like a ton of fiber, I mean, at some point it's not going to be very
comfortable. Exercise becomes uncomfortable and we're hazardous. Yeah. And I actually
kind of touching on that because I think it is important. You know, a lot of people have kind of in the carnivore. Community said, well you don't need fiber. You poop just fine without it, you know.
I say well whooping is the last reason to have fiber like yes it does help. It does seem to make elimination easier. You can you do do it more frequently as bulk to stool but that's not why you should eat fiber. Why should eat fiber is because of the effects of mortality and you know, some of the pushback will be well, this is healthy user bias and what I'll say is,
meaning healthy people do this and therefore it's
working. People eat more fiber and therefore, and I mean, yeah, there's there's something to that. But if it was just healthy user by
Us typically, you would see some disagreement between the studies and a great example of that is like red meat. So, not every study shows, red meat has an associated with cancer mortality. There's, there's differences depending on the population. Used depending on like what they Define as high red meat, low red meat whether it's processed unprocessed but I have not found a study on fiber and cardiovascular disease and cancer, and mortality, where it did not show improvements from higher fiber. So to me,
That suggests that that effect is real and so again, you know, as much fiber as you can get in comfortably, I would try to do it because it seems to have some really powerful effects and is good for the gut microbiome. The other thing that may be a consideration for the microbiome is, there's some evidence that saturated fat may not be great for the microbiome. That it reduces the prevalence of some, some of the more positive strange of bacteria and that
It appears to be not so much from the saturated fat itself but from the bile in products that combine with saturated, fat seems to have a negative effect on some of these more healthier forms of gut microbiota. But again, this is really difficult because we don't even know necessarily yet which species of gut microbiota are positive or negative. And that's, I mean, this gets into some of these studies where they may call it dysbiosis.
Sounds scary, but dysbiosis just means that the gut changed. It doesn't necessarily mean, it doesn't tell you anything qualitative about whether the change was better. Good. And so these are just things, I think we need to keep in mind. We talk about this stuff that this stuff is still very much in its infancy. But in terms of the big lever levers, I mean it's pretty much fits with what we know about a healthy lifestyle exercise, don't eat too much, consume a good amount of fiber from divorce diverse
sources. Fantastic fantastic. Because
It's with what I like to think of, as kind of the center of mass of evidence. Right. And I'm starting to get some window into what your process is around selection of studies and no one study being holy. But when you look at, as you mentioned, all the studies on fiber, having a positive effect to some degree or another. It's pretty hard to refute. That there isn't something really interesting there. And one thing I'll tell people
it's like
You know, one study, I mean sometimes I'll change my opinion based on a single study when it's really well done and very powerful but usually like one studies just going to move me just a little bit. All right, then maybe if another one comes out, move me a little bit more, right? And then like, very slowly. I'm going to get some, I mean, my, my experience with LDL cholesterol is something I change my mind on a while back. When I was younger, like Circa 2005 getting into grad school, kind of the prevailing thought was well, it's not so much the LDL.
It's the ratio of LDL to HDL, that's what matters and probably about five years ago. And I was I was pretty strong about that opinion. And then five years ago, looking at these mendelian randomization studies. I kind of went, I can hold this position anymore.
What's your new, what is your revised position on LDL?
So if you look at the research HDL is important because it's a marker of metabolic Health, if you have high HDL, it suggests that you are metabolically, quite healthy, you very rarely, will you have high HDL?
Well, and like high CRP, which is inflammatory marker or dysregulated, blood glucose, almost exclusively. People who have high HDL will have good biomarkers of metabolic Health. But if you take drugs that raise HDL, it doesn't reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease in Mendel and mendelian randomization studies which mendelian randomization basically uses natural randomization. So some people are in the case of HDL.
Nationally higher, secretor Zoar naturally, lower secrete, has of HDL. And you know, we talked about how you can't really do a 20-year human randomized control trial and when you're trying to examine something like heart disease, I mean that is a lifetime exposure issue. It's very unlikely that you're going to pick out differences between treatments in two years or even five years. I mean people don't develop typically don't develop heart disease until they're in their 50s 60s, and 70s. What mendelian randomization allows is to say,
Say, okay, we have these people who naturally secrete more or less so we can stratify those and look at what is the risk. So if you look at people who are low screws of HDL versus high secreted, vhdl withholding some of the other key variables consistent. Like LDL you don't see an effect on heart disease, really availa, TL of HDL, got it, okay. But when you look at LDL and you look at the lifetime exposure to LDL
It is like a linear effect on heart disease and we know that it's actually not so much LDL, but it's more April lipoprotein be but that tends to track with LDL just in general. And if you look at the mechanism, I mean, we know that LDL can penetrate the endothelium. So there's the mechanism is present, if we look at the epidemiology, it supports that, it's a, an independent risk factor. And then again, these mendelian randomization studies where we can kind of look at people's exposure over a lifetime.
I'm and then we see that linear kind of dose-dependent effect to me. That was convincing enough to change my mind on that particular topic. And then if you look at like some of the Framingham data, look at high, if you like stratify, like high HDL versus low HDL.
Both groups looking at high LDL and low LDL. So, if you have high HDL low LDL, you will still be lower risk factor than somebody was high HDL and high LDL, right?
To the ratio does matter. So the
ratio does better, same thing with it with inflation. If you look at people who are low inflammation,
Low LDL, they'll have a lower risk than people who are low inflammation, high LDL. So again, that was kind of sufficient for me to change my mind. But it took it was like, not just one study came out, it was okay. Then there was another study and then another study and another study and at a certain point I go. Okay, well now I have to change my mind or I'm basically just going to be cognitively dissonant and say, nope, I don't believe all that, you know? And so I think that's one of the things to keep in mind people.
We'll sell you, are you're saying this is a bad study. Very rarely why call something a bad study because data is just data, but the issue becomes how it is presented and how broadly it's applied in the mainstream Media, or by people on, you know, fit this influencers. And what I'll do is try to step in and say, okay, let's consider X Y and Z as well, and then, it's not a bad study. But let's just be careful about how broadly we imply the
The interpretation
well, and I think you are in a very unique and important position to be able to place things into their proper context. Because of this, for lack of a better word holistic, view of how the psychology Placebo effects. Also corphish cor physiology relate to one another and so on. In fact, I think that your training as a biochemist and then training as a nutrition with somebody who Don Layman, who was pushing you to focus on outcomes?
I think that's a beautiful capture of the Continuum at which one can look at something. Because, for those of you who don't know out there, you know, a lot of laboratory studies on mice and humans, for instance, in the realm of biochemistry, or in vitro studies, you'll see a change in. Some molecule can be quite dramatic. And then the assumption is, oh, you just take you, take the drug, that will change that molecule in a particular direction, and then you'll get the effect. You want at the whole organism level, the person will lose weight. The person will gain muscle. The animal will not have Alzheimers
Sir. But it just doesn't work that way because of the redundancy and this
interplay. Well, great example of, that is just so my research was actually in rodents. All my, all my studies on protein metabolism and leucine in particular, is what we were studying. Well, we know, if you give Lucy and increases muscle protein synthesis, but we also know, if you supplement with leucine people don't get more muscular I was
around. As long as all you have
to do, is supplemented Lucy right, right, right. And so, how is that possible where, you know, muscle building is not just protein synthesis? It's
The balance between synthesis and degradation. So, and degradation just happens to be very, very difficult to measure, but a great example. And again, one of the cool things about my PhD was actually changed the way I ate, which I think is interesting. So before I had been like, I ate meals a day, eat every two hours, trying to kills a day. Yeah. When I can order
to get that 30 grams of protein, get that, that Amino
drip going in was the idea, right? Like just have an IV hooked up of amino acids, not really folks, not really. Yeah.
but that was kind of the concept, but the first study I did,
We basically looked at okay, a lot of people had measured the amplitude of protein synthesis in response to a meal. We wanted to see how long does this last and where does it Peak, right? And so my thought was okay, well, it'll probably track with plasma leucine. We you give for those that are not familiar. Leucine is the amino acid that is
almost exclusively responsible for increasing muscle protein synthesis when you eat protein. So it's one of the branched-chain amino acids. So we wanted to see, okay, how long does this affect last? So we fed these animals whey protein and again, I thought, okay, well, however, long plasma leucine stays up. That would be how long protein synthesis daisa. And so we got the protein to the sustained, aback. And it was peaked at 90 minutes, our sorry, Pete from 45 to 90 minutes and then was back down to base.
180 minutes. And so when I went to do the plasma leucine analysis,
My shock was at three hours plasma, leucine was still plateaued out.
It's okay. Well, when I look at the initiation factors that will show me something. So for those not familiar, this is part of the mtor signaling pathway. So one of the two of the targets of mtor when it stimulated leucine stimulates him tour to of the targets of mtor, are a protein compound called for EBP one. And then another one is called ribosomal protein s 6K. So I don't want to get into the specifics about it because it's kind of
The scope. But basically, when these things are phosphorylated by mtor, it increases the rate of translation initiation, which translation initiation is basically the process of the ribosome hooking onto the MRNA and then starting protein synthesis. So
I was looking at the phosphorylation of would be P1. + RP. S, 6. I was like, okay, well, I'll probably see these things come down at three hours, still plateaued. And so then it was like, what is what's going on here? So I can't actually kept rerunning the data and rerunning the data, rerunning the data and I'll never forget. I went into Layman's office. And this is like, you know, six months after we've done this study because this analysis takes time. Like so, where are we with this duration study? I said, well, I just got to run the plasma data again because it's not right. And he's like,
Why is it not right? And I said, well just doesn't make any sense, you know, and I kind of went through. He's like well like describe to me your Technique. Like how are you doing this? I described it. And so what, how is your standard error? I told him what the numbers where he said, it sounds like it's good data. He said it sounds like you are trying to get the data to fit your conclusion and you need to change your conclusion to fit the data. And that statement, this is why we do phds this is
What? Yeah, you need an advisor. This is why I'm so skeptical of everything because I have had so many of my ideas crushed by my own data. Right? So, we actually ended up this, this, this kind of effect this phenomenon is called muscle protein synthesis refractory period. So, basically, what once you trigger the system, kind of runs for a defined period of time, and then it takes time to essentially reset for lack of a better term. It's also been referred to as the
Muscle full
effect. But so I looked at that and said, why am I eating every two hours then, you know, and there was even a study out of wolf slab like back in 99, I think where they infused Amino essential amino acids for six hours. Protein synthesis went up peaked at 60 Minutes came back down 120 and never went back up
again. Maybe I'm being naive but I would have thought that if protein synthesis goes up and then comes back down that eating more often
Would be exactly the thing you would want to do if your goal was to get increased protein synthesis because you'd be pinging the system
periodically. But the problem is the plasma amino acids are still elevated. So
it's essentially like eating the whole way through right from the perspective of loose
skin the cells. Yeah. So that was one of those things where I said, you know what I'm actually going to eat less often because like if I'm eating in three hours later, I've still got, you know, capped out plasma amino acids, you know, and we looked at all kinds of stuff. Like we looked at intracellular leucine just to make sure that, you know, that
Wasn't falling off. It wasn't. We looked at all the plasma essential amino acids because, you know, we were thinking, well, maybe protein synthesis is, you know, sucking some of these amino acids out of the plasma and they're dropping and that's causing it to kind of short circuit the system that wasn't the case. It just essentially what the evidence suggests. I think we're the only ones to show this so far, so I'm not ready to say that this is a real effect because I hold out the idea that data artifacts do exist and you can't be totally sure.
But we saw an increase in A and P kinase kind of around this Mark where protein synthesis started falling off. And we also saw a decrease in intracellular ATP and protein synthesis is an atp-dependent process. And so what we think might be happening is
You're, you know, consuming protein and you're upright, you're increasing muscle protein synthesis and then at a certain point it's has enough effect on your, you know, energy metabolism in your cells, the kind of short, short circuits, it but it kind of cuts it off, right? So, again, we're the only ones to show that that I'm aware of. So, and that was again, in rats. So I always talk about
Like those data, I'm willing to bet my my, toe on my foot, on my leg on in my life on, I'd probably barely bet the end of my little toe on that one. I'm not quite sure, but it's interesting nonetheless. So of course that's what that's a great example of, okay. We're looking at this mechanism of mtor signaling. And if we just looked at that, we'd say, oh well, protein synthesis going to stay elevated for, you know, past three hours but that's not what we saw. So, yeah, I think it's again that's why I really try to, you know, get people to say well, let's
Mechanisms are important. It's an especially if you're seeing an outcome it's important to identify mechanisms that may explain that but let's step back from the mechanisms from trying to chase mechanisms and let's look at like chasing outcomes in terms of what we recommend to
people excellent point in terms of chasing outcomes. A number of people, I know are interested in weight loss or weight maintenance. And several times. Throughout today's conversation, we've come back to this issue of satiety signals whether or not their brain based body based, or both.
Not wanting to eat. More is a great way to maintain or lose weight because you simply don't want to. I heard you mention earlier that protein and maybe specific types of protein or sources of protein, May provide better satiety signals than other macronutrients. Could you briefly talk about how macro nutrients, including protein, but also carbohydrates and fats impact satiety. And from the standpoint of
somebody who for instance would like to quote unquote lose a few pounds, right? Probably would be happy to gain a little bit of lean body mass provided it was in a particular location on their body. That seems to be a thing now, directed hypertrophy, if you will and how much they should focus on protein as a core component of creating this diet, you know, assuming everything else has been done correctly. They're going to hit the right number of calories, relative to their their output neat at cetera.
How should we think about protein, and satiety signals, and our animal sources of protein? Indeed more, bioavailable, that's a tricky word, it for sake of muscle building, but also for sake of somebody, who just would like to lose body fat, they don't want to lose muscle and they like to bring their weight down a few pounds. So a
lot of things are more. Yeah, a lot of things to unpack their of the macronutrients protein is definitely the biggest lever that you can pull. Because even if, you know, it doesn't take a ton of protein to get a lot of the muscle building benefits. I mean, I think,
The benefits really start to Plateau out around, 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. There's some evidence that maybe even up to, like two point four or two point eight grams per kilo. May give like a little bit more benefit. I think it probably looks something like an asymptote in terms of a curve. Where, as you put more into the system, you always get a little bit more, but it just gets to the point where it's so infinitesimally small benefit that it's for all intensive purposes, no benefit. But
you mentioned 1.6 grams of protein per
Per kilogram of body weight. Is that would you consider that a threshold that most people should try and Achieve
daily? I think I see very few downsides to hitting that. I mean I know some people in this is going to get into a separate conversation. But I know some people say, well, I don't want to stimulate him tour because that's gonna make me die early. And I think one of the things to keep in mind is if you look at this kind of thought process out there, that if you're stimulating him toward the protein is going to make you die early. And first off, we have very little human outcome data to support.
Claim. And the second thing is, if you look at any macronutrient isolation, I can make a mechanistic argument that it's going to kill you. So fat. If you take in fat and decreases flow mediated dilation, let me know. That dilation is important for heart health in the short term carbohydrates, stimulate insulin insulin, you know, pro-inflammatory and you know, all these other things. And so I can make an argument for any single macronutrient to be negative for longevity.
I want I really want people. This is something that even scientists get wrong, they look at an acute response of something and assume that that is going to relate to long-term outcomes in signaling.
So let's just take exercise for example if I didn't know anything about exercise and I said to you Andrew I'm going to do something that's going to make you your heart rate, go up, your blood pressure, go up your inflammatory markers. Go up your reactive, oxygen species, increase
You're going to say and it's going to damage your muscles. You're going to say, I'm not doing that. That sounds horrible. You know, but it does all those things in the short term. But what is the long-term effect of exercise? Actually get healthier, all those things improve. Now I'm not saying that, you know, protein is a longevity hacker, anything like that, but what I'm saying is I think some of the arguments out there based on mechanistic, you know, this increases mtor, therefore, we don't want to do it.
I think it is a much more complicated argument than just that. So there's that. So protein is the biggest lever. I would shoot for 1.6, you know, grams per kilogram. If you can do more great, there doesn't seem to be really downsides to it even like up to very high levels of protein. Jose, Antonio, did a study that was a year-long randomized, control trial, and again, it's just one year, but they were looking at all sorts of different biomarkers. And basically even up to like four grams per kilogram of protein, they couldn't really find any -
Health outcomes from it. Other than people were just so satiated. They ended up eating less calories. So protein is a big lever lever because one it has a higher thermic effect of food so you're getting a little bit more calorie burn per day even though it's not a ton. Because T EF is a pretty small percentage of your overall energy expenditure, but still a benefit, you're getting the effects on lean body mass. It's going to if you're in a diets can help preserve lean body mass. If you're at maintenance, it's going to help build a preserve lean body mass. And if you're in a surplus, is going to
Help build a preserve lean body mass.
Then you get the effects on appetite. So now I want to be careful because appetite effects tend to be very specific to individual Foods, right? So you can take a high protein food and make it not very not very say dating. So take for example, like a really tasty protein bar, which, you know, back when we were getting into this. There's no such thing existed. Now you have protein bars, I should take pretty darn good.
But if you one of them, I mean, are you really satiated? I don't really feel
satiated. That's where my protein bars, my premium
snack, right. Right. So why? Because, I mean, it's processed refined and made to be very palatable, okay? But take something like a 200 grams chicken, breast area satiating, right, and that's why, when people say, well, carbohydrates are very satiating, depends on the carbohydrate. I mean, when you look at the like the satiety index a
Plain baked potato is about as satiating as it gets like I eat a bowl of oatmeal.
Hmm, I feel pretty good afterward, yeah, for a while, right? I mean, I usually all eat that along with some other things but I completely agree. The so you're saying that the form that it comes in maybe even how much chewing is required, how good it smells that you're at all logical associations because to me a steak
Is it an incredible meal? Like I mean if I had to pick one food that I could, even though I'm not pure carnivore for the rest of my life, it would be that because I think it would get me where I need to go and then I'd probably have to sneak some Fiber. Yeah, you know, but it's an excellent point. I have a question that I don't want to take us off track, but I'm hoping it relates enough that you could answer it. Now in the context of this, if I'm going to eat, let's say, two grams per kilogram of body weight protein. And I'm not eating multiple meals for it. Maybe I'm eating two or
Meals per day. I'm certainly going to be eating more than the 30 G threshold that was thrown around for a long time that we can only assimilate 30 grams of protein per meal. Should I just not worry about that. Some of it is going to go towards the thermic effect of food. Some of that might be converted to glucose of all things through gluconeogenesis. So should I worry about this 30 G cut off? Because I think balancing the 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight threshold with number of meals, with the need to exercise and work and live my life and sleep and Cetera. Pretty soon. You you run into
Bottlenecks. Yeah, where you just can't do it all or you're spending so much time, trying to focus on,
can optimize all the things at the same
time, lose your mind, and your body. So what, what is necessary, in terms of frequency in if one is getting enough protein? And then I tied into that question, is there any reality to this idea that if you eat one meal per day or your fasting? And then you eat you, let's say, 200 grams of protein in a single
Feeding that you can assimilate more because you were sort of protein starved. Is that, is that a real thing?
So most of the studies with protein are after a fast like because to assess it, with stable isotope, you have to be in a steady state. So we haven't observed that it doesn't appear that fasting really kind of allows you to assimilate more protein after a fast. So this gets into a core of one of the things I looked at my PhD which is
As protein distribution matter because most Americans get about 65 to 70 percent of their protein at dinner, right? Breakfast. Tend to be pretty minimal. Protein
foods, do any cultures, actually, a big breakfast and not a big lunch and dinner. I guess, you know, we all heard that. That was ideal will get into circadian timing and a little bit. But does anyone actually do that steak and eggs for breakfast and then taper off the rest of the day? I
know German culture tends to have a big breakfast but also tends to be like sugary foods and whatnot as far as like teleologically. I'm not
I'm actually not sure about that. So if you look at that and then you consider that protein, doesn't really have a storage mechanism, right? Like people will say, well you know, lean tissue is storage mechanism. That's like saying a house is a storage facility for would, you know? Yeah, if you're the house is made out of wood you could get wood out of it, but that's not why you build the house, right? Like you're building the house out of Adam and same thing for muscle tissue. There is a free pool of amino acids, but it's very
Very small. So when you consider things like fat, which basically has unlimited storage capacity, carbohydrate a relatively large storage capacity. You can store for 500 grams of carbohydrate between your liver and muscles and then protein which almost has no storage capacity.
The idea that okay, you could make up for a low-protein at one meal by over-consuming. Another meal didn't make sense to me. So, one of the studies we did and again in rats, we took both groups, we're getting whey protein, so high quality protein, they were getting the exact same amount of calories. Exact same amount of, you know, nitrogen, exact same macros. Everything was the same, the only difference was one group, basically.
Kind of three meals of similar amounts of protein, like dinner was a little bit bigger because we wanted to keep it somewhat similar to how people eat. But each meal was going to be over the threshold to stimulate muscle protein synthesis whereas the other group I constructed it. So the first two meals of the day should not stimulate muscle protein synthesis, it should be under that threshold and then the last meal was about seventy percent of their total daily protein and so we had a meet those for 11 weeks and I'll never forget this is how like obsessive I became.
But it is, there was 110 animals in this study and I made all the diets and I weighed out exactly every single meal for every single animal for 11 weeks. So I was in there at 6 a.m. I was in there, you know, noon and I was in there at 6 p.m., you know, love it. So
kind of PhD student that professors dream of wasn't a dream student. So
at the end of 11 weeks, we looked at like lean body mass. We looked at body fat, we looked at
Hind limb weights, we didn't really see differences in lean body mass but what we did see was a difference in hind limb weights, it wasn't massive but there was a significant difference in the size of the muscles of the hind limbs of these animals. And so is interesting that there wasn't a difference in lean body mass. And what we found at least with the liver, the animals that were eating the like one meal with really high protein, actually had bigger livers.
Not like a huge amount and not something that I would consider unsafe but they it was a statistically significant difference. And so to me at least, like I'm trying to explain like no difference in lean body mass but a difference in these hind limb weights. Maybe there's some like sequestering of, you know, like that. That's fueling a little bit more protein synthesis of the splanchnic tissues rather than, you know, because you're capping out skeletal muscle protein synthesis and we do know that the splenic tissues are
Sensitive or have a greater rate of protein synthesis per day, like the rate of skeletal muscle protein synthesis in humans is about like 1% per day. So it takes like 100 days to turn over, you know, skeletal muscle. Whereas like your entire gut, your entire GI will turn itself over in like 2 to 3 days, right? So very, really in the liver. Also has a very high amount of protein synthesis, which is one of the reasons is actually one of those metabolically, active organs. So, all that to say it has not, it's been there's been
One human study that showed something similar and then there's been a couple others that didn't and then in the intermittent fasting studies which is maybe a good tool to look at compared to continuous feeding.
It one thing I will say is it looks like the 16 8 intermittent fasting style. There's been a couple studies with Grant tensley and this is something I've changed my mind on as well. Grant Tinsley is done a couple studies where they did use the 16-8 protocol. They had them trained during their feeding window and they had them eat. I think it was at least three protein containing meals during this heat out these are
humans. These are humans
and they saw no difference in lean body mass at the end of the study compared to people who were eating you like you know,
As many times as they want it throughout the day. Now if you look at some of the more extreme forms of fasting like alternate day fasting or like 20, 22 or 24. There are some studies where you do start to see differences in lean body mass. So my suspicion is and I, I'm just guessing. So this is tenuous, my suspicion is probably if you're getting like 2 to 3, like high quality, protein meals, and
In a day, you're getting the vast majority of the benefits of protein. That the most important thing is getting enough total and then secondarily trying to get, you know, at least two or three meals with high-quality protein in
But if you're going like pretty extreme with, like, alternate day fasting or, you know, maybe only one meal a day, then I think there may be some effects on lean body mass, but again, these can be mitigated as well if you're doing, you know, hard resistance training. Typically that is the biggest lever in terms of lean body mass. Yes, you know, protein distribution may make a difference but I'm trying to put in contact so people don't feel like they need to go out and eat, you know, four meals a day. But again, so what I would say is like some of the more Milder
Terms of, you know, time restricted eating appear to be fine for lean body mass. Now the caveat is the following one of the nice things about animal studies is when you consider, if you want to have a high subject number high level of control,
In a long duration. It's pretty much your only option, right? So I have a, in our research review reps. I created a Venn diagram which basically is like three, you know, circles crossing over one, is study duration, one is level of control and the other one is subject number and to get all three of those circles to cross over, it almost has to be an animal's, right?
So in this and Reps, as it's a newsletter or a book,
Look so it's it's our monthly research review gray. So every month we review, like five studies that come out in Fitness and Nutrition like will usually do at least one nutrition, one training in One supplement per per
month. We will put a link to where you can sign up. This is a sign up form at great. Yeah.
So it's a scripture subscription-based service. So basically,
When people might look at like my study well why did you see a difference in muscle weights whereas some of these other studies don't see a difference.
I weighed out every single meal for 11 weeks and keep in mind that 11 weeks in a rodents life, span is a really long time. That's about an eighth of the total life span so is it that there's no effect or is it that the effect is relatively small and would take a really long time and very high level of control to see in humans
I don't know, but I think what I would say relatively confidently is, if you're going to do like a 16-8 intermittent fasting, you're probably fine, especially and again, what is the goal, right? Like if you're a bodybuilder, looking to be the most massive person you possibly can or you're a football player, your some in some field that having as much lean body mass as possible is really important for you. Then I would say, well, you're not really gaining a whole lot by doing some form of time restricted.
I think most of the people listening to this, don't do not fall into that category. I think most people want to maintain or lose weight, they'd like to perhaps add a bit of quote-unquote shape or muscle to specific areas of their body and lose body fat,
right? And I think you're normal forms of time restricting. Your probably perfectly fine for that, right? And again, I don't want somebody to think, well, I do, you know alternate day fasting. There's no point to me resistance training, because I'm going to lose muscle mass. No, no, you can still build muscle doing that. You just
might not build as much muscle as you would, if you were eating in a more traditional format. But if that's something that works for you and your goals and especially if it's Fat Loss or you know, controlling your calories, then again it's about the hierarchy of what's important, right? So to answer your question, I do think that timing and frequency matters a little not so much frequency but distribution more so. So I think the distribution matters but it's a it's a much smaller lever than just getting enough total protein in and then as far as like animal versus plant
I used to be in the camp of. There's no way somebody can build as much muscle on a plant-based diet and now I think I've come back to you can it just requires a little bit more planning. And I don't want to say always, but it's very difficult to do without an isolated source of protein. So unless you're going to supplement with an isolated plant source of protein, it's very difficult to get enough without going over on total calories because you can figure that especially like take somebody who maybe Cal clearer.
I did try to get enough protein from Whole intact plant sources. So you've got a few different things working against you one, the sources of protein, you're consuming also have carbohydrate and or fat to. It's a less bioavailable form of protein and three. It's a lower quality of protein. In terms of it has typically less leucine, less Branch, amino acids and less essential amino
acids.
You answer the question that I almost interrupted you task which was, does it boil down to the leucine content? And it sounds like that is one of the components and that a lot of the vegan and vegetarian sources of excellent protein. That excellent protein vegetarian or vegan source is co packaged with calories from carbohydrates and or fat that make it hard to stay. Stay under which the clerk threshold where as a steak is, I'm not an obviously for people might want to avoid that for ethical reasons. Sure. But that's a different matter entirely.
But a steak or a piece of chicken or an egg is, well, - you know, has a yoke, which is there's fat there, but is almost a pure protein fat Source. There's no carbohydrate along for the
ride, right? So I think, what I would say is that, you know, you can do, it takes a little more planning and you're almost always. If you're a vegan, especially, you can be better off like something with some isolated form of protein or vegan from a protein. Now, this is where it gets into people say, well, what about the limiting amino acids, and those
Sorts of things, it's a consideration. Some of the better forms of vegan protein, in terms of amino acid, content are like soy. No, I can everybody hear everybody's screaming online about their testosterone levels in terms of actual outcomes and looking at testosterone there was a recent meta-analysis looking at soy and I think if it's your only source of protein then maybe the dosage is high enough to cause some weird effects but if
Using it like once or twice a day, it doesn't seem to have an effect on testosterone or estrogen so that can be a decent source of protein because it is a complete protein Source. It does have a PD, COS of one which PD cos is basically a measure of
Protein quality based on, does it provide enough of all the amino acids? So that none are limiting. And so soy is one of the only vegan sources that does that. Interestingly potato protein isolate actually has a similar essential amino acid content to way. So isolated potato protein, it's just really hard to find. I've been I've been trying to
force against take note vegetarians take note because or vegans rather because way is vegetarian and way is a very high quality
proteins. There's a quality produce ours, actually,
Actually creating way. Now out of I think it's I'm a mischaracterize this but I believe they're able to produce an atom like yeast or something like that that you know. So for vegans now this is a great option because you can have way that's not animal-based. That is going to be every bit as good as an animal-based way. So I think that's great getting to the leucine. Let me go back. Sorry so another reason that the, using an isolated protein can be
Be helpful is because it's more bioavailable as well. When it's been isolated out, when it's the protein bound up in the actual plant material, it tends to be less bioavailable. Now, cooking can help increase the bioavailability of bioavailability because it breaks some of those bonds and whatnot, but it still seems to be lower.
And you don't it's really interesting. There is a recent study where they did a corn wheat and P blend of protein versus way. And basically, the outcome was 30 grams of each similar, stimulated protein synthesis to a similar degree.
But the plasma amino acids in the plant-based protein, still did not get as high as with way. Now, it may be that that's just, it doesn't matter because once you get to a certain level, you get all the benefits. So, but I still found it. Interesting nonetheless, they didn't quite get as high. The other thing to consider with the vegan sources of protein is the loosing content. So one of the studies we did was we looked at wheat, soy, egg, and
A ISO, nitrogenous meaning we equated protein between the groups isochoric. We had created club, we equated calories and we looked at muscle protein synthesis. And I think this was the mules were 15% of total energy from protein. So like a, like your food guide, pyramid level of protein. And we saw that in the wheat and soy group, they did not increase muscle protein synthesis, but the egg and way group, increased muscle protein synthesis
us.
Now what's really interesting is we went back and we took wheat and added free leucine to it to match the leucine content of way and the protein synthetic response was identical. So again I don't like to simplify things too much, but leucine appears to really be driving this ship and I'll never forget Layman called me to his office one day and he would always do these, like thought experiments of heel heel.
To think about why something occurs the way. It does. Dangerous, dangerous territory. Yeah. So he would say one day, I'll never forget his Lane. Why do you think the body evolved to just since leucine for muscle protein synthesis? And of course I'm like I don't know man. I just work here. Like I'm just trying to get my PhD and he said, we think about it. You would want something that really wasn't extensively metabolized by the gut liver because you would want to show up in the blood in value.
Use that reflect what you just ate makes sense and you would want to have passive diffusion across the muscle cell because you want to be concentration dependent, which it is
so get into the tissues and cells that need it
most, right? So, you know, not having active transport, but rather passive transport. So yeah, I thought that was really interesting the way you broke that down. So,
Few different options for the vegan folks out there. You can use an isolated source of protein and again, like there's going to be good options coming because this plant based way, is going to be a great option for folks. You can add free leucine to it to whatever your source of protein is
just by supplemented
justify our scene now, it
tastes horrible. Yeah, I think I've heard that. Maybe. I've even tried
it. It's completely. Non polar does not dissolve in anything. Katie wasn't a capsule gross. It can't be putting a
Chuckles. Yeah. So you could take a capsule like for example, if you're eating your normal meal, you could just take a capsule of like one gram of leucine is probably going to bump you off. Bump you up enough that you're going to be good to go. And then there's there's options like Blends especially with corn, corn is actually very high in leucine as a percentage of its protein. Now you got to remember like you go eat corn on a cob and you're getting like 2 grams of total protein. So it's not that much leucine. But if you isolate out the protein, put it into a powder.
Well, now, you know, when you're getting like 80, 90 percent of the weight is now, protein corn is actually about 12%. Loosing in terms of the protein. So great source of leucine, it is like almost Frank deficient in some other amino acids. But you can blend it with a few other sources of protein. Like, you could blend it with a soy, a pea, and you can create these complimentary Blends that would actually have quite a bit of leucine, but also, some of the other essential amino acids. So, there are options out there for plant-based folks. And I mean we have seen people who are
Plant-based, you know, build impressive amounts of muscle. There's quite a few body builders that are
plant-based and a lot of the endurance athletes like it. And even though, when we talk about muscle, we think about muscle building often performance in Endurance Sports and also just performance for the typical person who's doing some cardiovascular training. Hopefully, some resistance training also and just living life. I mean, many more people. Now, it seems our vegan, or at least avoiding meat in particular red meat. I'm not one of those people. Yeah.
Limit the amount and I certainly focus on the quality of what I eat. But I do eat red meat which brings me to a question about, you know, just generally in terms of food choice, you know, I can we come up with a relatively short summary of The Following tell me if this is correct or not that most of us should be focused on for sake of health health span and lifespan should be focused on in
Testing minimally non-processed and minimally processed foods and maybe even cooking our own food. You know, I realize that's heresy now but ideally we would do some of that and, and really trying to avoid foods that are highly processed and have lots of sugar and I'm using this as a segue to get into question that I really want your answer to. I've been dying to ask you this, which is if sugar intake is not actually going up as much as people think it is. Why are people getting
Fatter well. So what do you think about just a general statement that we should try and eat foods that are low to no minimally to not processed for about 80% of our Foods? Is that a reasonable
number? It's hard to actually get, you know, completely unprocessed food because almost everything goes through some form of
processing. So I thinking and like anything that wouldn't survive long on without refrigerator? Yeah, on a shelf like an apple or banana or said oatmeal like ground oats to me.
Me as long as there is in a bunch of other stuff and they would be minimally processed. A steak is not really process, although it's cut off the, the animal etcetera. So there's a, there's, a few steps in there. But yeah, that's sort of, that's what I'm
yeah. And I think everybody kind of gets the gist. I'm probably a little bit pedantic when it comes to this stuff. No, this is good. Actually. One of the things I
appreciate appreciate about you is something I get teased a lot by people close to me, which is the caveats, and the insistence on Precision is really important because especially, with online.
Communications. These days is like a runaway train. You know, people will.
It's too easy to misinterpret. What
you're saying very easy to misinterpret. And the misinterpretations are often used to leverage whole new ideas about what is and isn't true, mostly about what is true. So I really appreciate the nuance and this is what a long-form podcast really allows us to do is to catch every every curve. Yeah.
So I would 100% agree with what you said that. If you were going to make a broad stroke that trying to
focus on minimally processed foods is very important. The one caveat I would say is I think it's important to understand why because otherwise people can make this weird Association that, like, if I eat any mentally or any processed food, it's going to kill me or like, every time I eat it. It's like I'm smoking a cigarette in my health. You know, my longevity is declining based on the studies we have. It's mostly about the energy that processed food just gets people to sponsor.
Painlessly eat more and and Kevin whole showed this and his study that was very, he designed some of the most elegant studies in nutrition, he's great. And they basically took people from a minimally processed food, diet, and then gave them access to ultra-processed Foods. Very few instructions, just eat to feel satisfied and they spontaneously increase their calorie intake by 500 calories a day. I mean, that's that's massive. So
There's something we quite haven't quite figured it out, you know, people say well it's car it's sugar. It doesn't appear to be sugar in terms of just an isolation. Well it's fats then appear to be fats, in isolation. Well it's the combination of sugar and fat. Hartley was the combination of sugar fat and salt partly. But there's some kind of like overall magic to the texture and the mouth feel and just overall palatability of stuff, which is always why I say there's like, right and wrong ways to these different diets. Like for example like this, right way.
Plant-based. And then there's, you know, like what's in some of these documentaries where they're eating like plant-based mac and cheese, you know? And again, I love a good mac and cheese, but like, that should not form like that should not be pitched as a healthy diet, just because it's plant-based, right? Because I mean you're eating a highly processed food. That's very palpable and easy to overeat. Same thing for keto. You've now got like keto ice creams and you've got, you know, keto cookies, and all these sorts of things. And I'm like, yeah, and if you look at them, they actually have more calories than the
Normal stuff and I'm like yeah this is completely missing the point here. Like you're actually just taking yourself like the whole point of those diets is the reason you tend to lose weight is originally like good luck, you know, ten years ago, doing a keto diet eating processed food, right? Like you just couldn't do it, really now you can but the problem is it's not going to work because you're going to be still consuming too many calories because even though it's keto, what are they doing? Well, they're trying to make it more palatable.
The try to make it better mouthfeel, which I guess if you're being keto, for the sake of being keto, great. But if there's if you have hopes of body composition modification, it's going to, you know, really negatively impact. So, yes, I think minimizing the amount of processed foods, you consume can be important. Now, that being said, it depends on the individual and their goals. If your goal is to, for example, build muscle or maintain a high body weight for a sport for example, like an NFL offensive, lineman or something of that.
That nature. Or if you're, you know, I worked with a an NBA team, they were kind of I can't disclose anything, but they were looking at drafting a certain player and you know like for them processed foods may actually be a
tool or teenagers, right? And we all want young people to eat more healthfully. I think develop great habits but some of them, their caloric needs are so high. So high, that if they were eating, what I'm going to do, you're going to dissolve into
You know, they're just waste
away. So I describe this again it with a financial example it's like a budget, right? So if I make a million dollars a year, for example is it okay for me to buy like a 100,000 dollar sports? But let's assume that loans don't exist, right? Is it okay for me to buy 100,000 dollar sports car? If I still am able to pay my mortgage and pay my utilities and like, take care of my responsibilities? The things I should do, is it okay if I do that? If it like makes me
Feel good and it's fun. I mean, yeah, it's fine, right? Like it fits in your budget if my if I have if I make you know 50 Grand a year should I be going out and you know buying a sports car? Probably not because I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage and all these other responsibilities. So your your protein, your fiber, your micronutrients, these are your responsibilities but those become much easier to hit when you have higher calories, right? So if you're, if you're, you know, eating 4,000 calories a day, for whatever goal you have, you're probably gonna have some
And like, good luck eating 4,000 calories from minimally processed foods, you quite frankly, you'll be miserable because you're gonna have such gut fill that you're going to feel like you can't even move. And so again now becomes okay. Well is there something inherent to that food processing? Is there something you know that we can pick out that? We know. Okay well this is going to be a negative effect on health even like body composition stuff aside.
And I would say there's not really great evidence of that so far and a great example of that is sugar. I mean, I actually just wrote a really long article on my website about why I think sugar was not the root cause of the Obesity epidemic. And you kind of mentioned like sugar intake in the last 20 years has actually gone down a little bit
alcohol intake. Well, if you look on the whole it might have gone up a little bit but it you know certain in certainly in the mail sector it's gone way down. Drinking used to be before there was a 5:00 people.
Drinking all day. Yeah, people are smoking a lot less there. I think it's a real puzzle. I'd love to know what your
house Pockets could actually be an opposition because nicotine is actually an appetite
suppressants President also increases Focus. The problem is, it often arrives in a delivery device that can kill you. Yeah, but nicotine itself is a powerful engine. It also can offset age-related cognitive decline, not entirely, but it's, it makes the brain work better.
I've got a buddy who doesn't like caffeine
Dean and he just takes those nicotine patches. And like, basically has one in almost all day because he's a like a he has a very stressful job and it's a high performer, you know.
Yeah. Be careful how you deliver it but there's a Nobel prize-winning neuro scientists that will chew five or six pieces of Nicorette and our which I do not recommend. And but when he quit smoking he just simply couldn't function as well. And he was the one who pointed me to the literature on offsetting age-related, cognitive decline, the neuron maintenance and it's pretty interesting.
What?
Pretty. It's a pretty impressive, nootropic, to be honest. So the first thing to realize is when we're talking about consumption data,
This is based on actual production. Basically, there are assuming that, okay, we're producing this amount of these Foods so we can assume the consumption is going to follow that. So it's not a direct measurement but it has been validated a few different studies. We know that oil consumption has gone up like that. That's that's yeah, that's one of the big ones is in this kind of forms. The Crux of like, the the seed oils are like the root of definitely question that I'm gonna, they're gonna, you know, come into your house and kick your dog and, you know,
Punch your mom and all kinds of stuff and I'm happy to address those but So Cal have still gone up. There's some people who claim that they've gone. They've kind of plateaued. I think the data seems to suggest that calorie intake is still increasing. And the other thing to keep in mind is even if it's plateaued, it's still a high enough level. That obesity is probably going to continue to increase up to a point where it'll probably Plateau if calories are Plateau.
What about
About energy output leaving aside neat because that sounds highly individual. I mean people are the people we know are focusing on exercise but there are a lot of folks out there that don't exercise
and and and energy output has gone down over the years. I mean it's very obvious when you look at how people work now compared to even you know, 30 40 years ago, it's much different lesson, okay?
Also I learned recently that kids in high school don't take PE class and many schools. It's but we had to suit up and run and see.
But if you didn't bring your change of clothes or you didn't wash them in which case you'd be better off, just not wearing nothing like the smell of a boys locker room after a weekend. You know, you can still remember it and it's not it's not pleasant but you had to run and do your push-ups with everybody else or play volleyball in your in your regular school day clothes. So that I my understanding is that physical education is not part of the basic education, any
longer, probably depends on the state, but I know many states have done away with it. Just because of budget cuts
Cuts so
activities, going down, caloric intake is going up. Maybe plateauing, lady plateauing is that sufficient to explain the Obesity
epidemic based on what I've seen. I think it's pretty sufficient, so it might not be that big of a mystery after all. No, I don't think it's a big mystery. I think that
People don't like the concept of energy balance and I think because they insert judgment into it, which is okay. If you're gaining weight, over time at a fundamental level, it means you are eating, you're consuming more energy than you're expending.
People insert the Judgment, which is you're lazy. You're a sloth, your whatever it is. And I think there's a lot of people out there who actually think that I actually remember talking to somebody who's like, well, I would never hire an obese person for a job, because it's just obvious that they're lazy. And I just remember, going, are you serious? Like, there are plenty of very, very smart high-achieving. People who are obese, like, it's not. This is what happens when you just put people in buckets, you know, like people are much more complicated.
This yes, there is there is somewhere in personal responsibility. But then when you look through the data and you like take there was a study done and obese women where they found that women who are obese were 50 percent more likely to have had some form of sexual assault trauma in their past. Right? We know that people from lower income areas are more prone to be obese. There's several like people who have a higher Ace score I believe which is kind of measures like traumatic.
Hood vents, I believe there was a study showing them more likely to be obese. So there's yes. It is an energy imbalance problem. But you know just saying eat less move more that's like telling broke people will just earn more money than you spend. It's technically right but it's very unhelpful. Right? What is more helpful is to describe and implement the habits and behaviors that will allow them to achieve that right?
So kind of I realized we kind of got off track a little bit circling back to like sugar.
Circa, 2005, I believe that sugar was fattening and bad for your health independent of any other variable. So independent risk factor. And again I want to be very clear about what independent means. Independent means, independent of all other variables, this thing is bad for your health and body composition,
so on its own independent of whether or not for instance, it increases hunger and appetite right
or calorific intake, right?
I was at a graduate school mixer and one of the professor's, there was somebody who had done research on high fructose, corn syrup and fructose specifically as well. And he was talking to another professor and he had done this study, in rotes, worried fed. Like, I think it was like 60 or 70 percent of their calories from fructose. And they saw some really weird things happen in the liver with the Nova lipogenesis, and all this kind of stuff. And the other Professor is saying to him. Yeah, it's pretty obvious that high fructose corn syrup is you.
No fattening. And this professor who had done this research said, yeah, because it's people overeat. And he's like, don't you think there's something inherent to it? And he said, no, I think it's just calories. You were eating too many calories. He's like, we did a proof of concept looking at, you know, could we like try eating 70 percent of daily calories from fructose? You actually can't do it like high fructose. Corn syrup is only 55% fructose so if you ate nothing but high fructose corn syrup, you would still not get to this level that they fed in this study.
So that got me kind of like questioning my beliefs about it. So then I went through and I said, okay let's take out the epidemiology, not that epidemiology is do slowest, but people who eat more sugar are also likely to eat more calories. So then I looked for the randomized control trials, where they, you know, match calories and Vary the amount of sugar and it doesn't seem to make a difference at least from Fat Loss or fat gain, but what about
health? So for instance, if somebody and I know somebody like this who
Love sweets. Hmm, is thin get some exercise, not a ton but my concern is that a significant fraction of their calories are coming from these sugary foods and therefore they're not getting enough fiber. Right? Maybe protein, Etc. So
let's look at epidemiology for a second and I'll address this more directly. We look at epidemiology people who eat higher amounts of sugar tend to be more obese they shouldn't have you know worse biomarkers.
Of Health.
But people who eat fruit, a lot of fruit sugar, don't have those same Association. So why is that? Well, because fruit has fiber with it, right? So I started to kind of believe based on the data. I was looking at that high sugar intake was not the problem per se. The problem was that high sugary Foods typically are very low in fiber.
But if you're getting enough, fiber is sugar a problem. So there was a classic study by Sir wit in 1997. I think it's still the best studies of this day. Looking at this. I know there's people say, well is done 1997 has no relevance, you know, I know if it's a good study, it's a good
stuff. However, some studies are Timeless. In fact, they have greater are not going to go
back and undo the discovery of DNA because it was, you know, 60 years ago, whenever it is. No. So,
They looked at 11:00 calorie diet. So low calorie diet, one group was eating over, 110 grams of sugar a day. Like sucrose the other group was eating about 10 grams of sugar per day. Calories, protein carbs fats all matched, right? And they provided all the meals to these participants. So, very tightly controlled. And it was over six weeks, both groups, lost the exact same amount of body fat. So it doesn't seem to matter for body composition in terms of like sugar per se. Then they also looked at some
Markers of Health like blood lipids and you know, blood sugar and some other things. Again, there was no real differences. The only difference was so all their biomarkers improved in both groups. The only real difference was a small difference in LDL. So the group eating, low sugar had a better Improvement slightly in LDL and but that's probably because they were eating more fiber and we know fiber can be 0 bind a cholesterol and lower LDL cholesterol. So is
Now, I want to I want to caveat this sugar. Probably doesn't have any like positive health effects. So there's that, right? And nutrition is an exchange, if you're eating one thing, you're not eating another thing, right? So I, but what I would tell people is focus, probably less on sugar focus more on fiber. So if you're eating 30, 40, 50, 60 grams of fiber a day, but your sugars, you know, 80 90 grams
Would not be that worried about it, especially if you're controlling calories as well. You know, what I would be worried about is if you're eating, you know, just a decent amount of calories and not getting enough fiber in in general, right? And even in studies, there's a few meta-analyses out now looking at. I so energetic, exchange of different carbohydrates with sugar carbohydrates. So fructose and glucose and sucrose. Now why is this important? Well again, you know, if you're not equate when I say I so energetic that means
One energy equal in calories. So basically, when they exchanged either sucrose or glucose or fructose, for other forms of carbohydrate, do they see differences in these markers of Health? Like, hba1c fasting, blood glucose blood lipids, and with rare exceptions and I can't remember all the data points, exactly, but the take-home is, doesn't really seem to make a difference now.
The for anybody out there, strongman's my argument, I am not advocating for sugar consumption, but I think it's important for people to not create word associations in their minds because one of the things I've observed especially in the fitness industry is when people feel like they can't eat something, like it's one thing. If you say, I am choosing not to eat this just because I'm choosing to but it's a very different thing when you're purposely restricting because you feel like something is bad. And this this I mean you know the human brain is
Is in many ways, amazing. I'm going to ways really dumb. So when you purposely try to restrict something, what tends to happen is, you're more prone to binge on it. So people who will try to well I'm never going to eat, you know, sugar again or I'm going to try and limit sugar. This isn't the case for everybody, but they have actually shown now, in studies people who are purposely restricting a specific nutrient
They tend to crave more that nutrient, and if they do get exposed to it, they're more likely to have what's called a disinhibition reflex. Which is basically a binge response, because the thinking goes, well, this is bad any and there's no context on, you know, dosage making the poison. This is just bad in general. So if I have it I've already screwed up. I might as well just have as much as I want and I like suspension it all skis compares to this is you know that's like getting a flat and go out and slashing your other three tires.
Is because you might as well. So I really I try to come from that perspective of I've seen so many people struggle with, you know, maybe not an eating disorder, but disordered eating patterns because of these kind of associations they made in their mind. And so that's why I'm so pedantic and a stickler about saying, okay, yes, it's a good idea to minimally processed food and try to avoid processed foods but not because processed foods are bad per se, but
What the outcome tends to be from a lot of processed food consumption which is over consuming calories and then therefore, you know, energy, toxicity negatively contributing to your
health. Yeah, it seems like it again returns to this, the potential for a positive negative or neutral, behavioral change, and perceptual, change of like, craving a food. All the time that you can't have is terrible. It's a terrible state to be in and this I think is a perfect segue for something that
First brought us together, which was, you know, which was this thing about artificial sweeteners. And let me just for the record be very clear. I have long ingested foods with artificial sweeteners, so I threw out graduate school. I didn't have the best habits, they're healthier now than they were back then, but I would drink, you know, Diet Coke or two per day. I still have the occasional Diet Coke. I'm not completely averse to to drink.
Something that has artificial sweetener, although I do avoid sucralose for reasons that maybe get into a little bit later, but a lot of the things I consume contain Stevia, which is not artificial plant but it is a plant-based non-caloric sweetener, low, caloric, sweetener and I don't have a problem with that. I became very interested in artificial sweeteners because of the animal data pointing to the idea that they may disrupt the gut microbiome and then disrupt the
Like door biome as you pointed out, is a very broad statement. We don't really know the percentage of lactobacillus at so bacillus. And whatever bacillus, whatever sillas illus in there. They all seem to end an illness is ideal. And in fact, a lot of these companies that are having people send in their stool samples for analysis of the microbiome. I mean, take note, we don't really know what a healthy microbiome looks like, but we know what an unhealthy microbiome might look like. And it's one that doesn't have a lot of diversity in there. So I was interested in that.
Then there's the recent human study which I, we should definitely get into, but I was mostly interested in artificial sweeteners for the reason that there is this food conditioning effect and you see it in animals and you see it in humans that if you ingest will coffees are really good. Example, coffee doesn't actually taste good folks even though I liked it but when you taste coffee for the first time, most people think it's bitter and disgusting, most everybody like 95 percent of people say this doesn't taste good
wine beer. Same thing. Yep. But people learn to
He ate the state of being caffeinated, which most people like in order to just feel normal, right? Kevin is one of the few drugs, we ingest just to feel ourselves enough that soon, myself included, really look forward to and enjoy a cup of coffee it. So it's a powerful example in my opinion of the food conditioning effect. So it's like a pavlovian thing instead of salivating you crave, right? And it did seem that this study from Dana small slab, which admittedly was a small no pun intended.
I did study itself, not very many subjects, showed that if you ingested, artificial sweeteners, along with food, that contains glucose that you could or maybe even get a heightened glucose response just from the artificial sweeteners after a while you and I connected over this study on social media, you pointed out that the if that's designed to study wasn't superb. There was there was a cocoa consumption of glucose, which made it complicated. We can go into that, but the reason I'm spouting off all this context is artificial sweeteners are many things so I'd like to talk about there.
Exxon blood sugar in the acute sense. And according to what we might ingest them with what and how they might be changing blood sugar regulation at the level of brain and or body. And then the gut microbiome data, I think are interesting enough to discuss and I have changed my view on artificial sweeteners based on what you've taught me. So this is a case where I've completely changed my view, which is that. Now I don't, I don't have any problem with them whatsoever based on the current data, which
Is not to say that I'm, you know, gulping down cupfuls of sucralose, but I feel okay ingesting. Some Stevia and some aspartame and I'm not too worried about it. Yeah
so I think kind of stepping back from a broad view
We have to think about again, the hierarchy of importance, right? And what are you replacing with, right? So there is no situation where it is, not a net positive, to take somebody who drinks sugar-sweetened Beverages and have them drink, an artificially sweetened beverage, like the and the meta-analysis was actually a recent Network man analysis, looking at like at markers of adiposity, you know, hba1c a bunch of different Health markers. And when you substitute, you know,
We'll call it non-nutritive sweeteners since Stevia is not artificial. But so when you substitute in an S for the sugar-sweetened beverages, you see improvements in a lot of different things. Okay, what was really interesting about this network, meta-analysis was, they also looked at Water substitution in place of sugar, sweetened Beverages. And the effect wasn't as powerful as the and these are randomized, control
trials. So artificial sweetener containing beverages are more
beneficial. We're better for
Adiposity for improving adiposity. And then in the health markers, it was kind of a wash water and water and non-nutritive sweeteners beverages performed similar, but they were better than sugar-sweetened beverages. Obviously, so they then based on a network meta-analysis is kind of where you can compare two things that didn't get compared directly. So there's not many studies comparing in an
Versus water directly, but if you have a common comparator. So if you compare a to B and B gets compared to see, you can pair a to see based on how they interact with be. Butchering it a little bit, but that's kind of the Crux of a network meta-analysis. So they looked at in and S vs water and found that actually in a nest was slightly better for improving adiposity
and then s of course being non-nutritive sweeteners, right? Yeah.
So now again, I'm
If you like drinking water and you don't want to, I'm not trying to convince anybody to do that. What that seems to suggest is there is a little bit of an appetite suppressant effect from these artificial sweeteners or non-nutritive sweeteners. Now this gets a little more complicated because if these were people's drinking sugar sweetened beverages, maybe they've already developed a sweet taste and try to go to water is too much of a jump for them and so going to having something like intermediate is a little bit better. Like there's a lot wrapped up in this but these are the randomized control trials which are a little bit more tightly controlled which I
I tend to default to a little bit more than I do the epidemiology, which epidemiology is just so messy because sure, you know, non-nutritive sweeteners consumption. May be associated with different things but there's also a whole nother set of lifestyle and habits that are tied up in that. So I tend to hang my head a little bit more on the randomized, control, trials. So understanding that, okay? Now all things being equal,
Understanding that this is a tool that may help some people. And whenever I post about non-nutritive sweeteners in the comments, there is always one or two or three people who say all I did was cut out soda and I drink diet soda. Instead, I lost 50 pounds, I lost 75 pounds, I even have one per se, I lost 100 pounds, that's the only thing I did. I mean, that's a pretty massive lever to pull. If you consider somebody who might be having like, I mean, five or six coax a day, I mean, that's, you know, we're talking a serious amount of calories, and that
also means,
So by replacing with artificial, sweetener containing beverages, they did not replace the soda with
food. Correct. So, like, let's now, let's talk about, right? This is where we can get into the micro analysis but is that obese person who lost 100 pounds by doing that. Do I really care about maybe a small alteration to their gut microbiome? No, because the gut microbiome is actually much more healthy. Now, by them having lost all that excess adipose tissue,
So again, the ranking of what I'm worried about, you know, can change depending on the specific situation. Now, let's take somebody like me who's lean and does it really have, you know, any health problems that I'm aware of?
What about artificial sweeteners? For me? Well, for me, I kind of got using them because of bodybuilding contest prep, because it was about the only appetite suppressant that worked for me. But do I think that they are healthful? Probably not do. I think they're unhealthy.
I would say based on the current data, I don't think that they're unhealthy now the information on blood glucose. So there's some of the problems with some of these men analyses or these these reviews is they kind of lump all the non-nutritive sweeteners together and then they may say well there's no effect on this or there's an effect on this. Well the problem is is these probably are, these are different molecules and they can interact differently aspartame. Very clearly seems to have no effect on blood sugar or and
That has been repeatedly, shown Stevia doesn't appear to have much effect saccharin and Sucralose. The jury is kind of mixed. Now, there was the study that we first connected on which I think their primary outcome measure was. Actually, there were looking at like kind of the sweet taste. Like how it affected sweet taste. So what they did was the group that was getting the sucralose was also paired with maltodextrine.
The control group was getting sucrose, which the is an appropriate way to compare the sweet taste because maltodextrine is not as sweet as sucrose. So when you're trying to combine, you know, sucralose, which is already Sweet with another form of carbohydrate, you want something less sweet compared to your control, but for the outcome measure of insulin and blood glucose, probably not as appropriate. Because we know multi, dextrin has
Much higher glycemic index than
sucrose. So they appropriately controlled for for Taste, but not for the effect of the, the sweeteners. And I think that that was a key component and I think. Yeah, the part of that study, that intrigued me actually was in a Talk version of that. Because at that study, drove me to watch a talk that will get Dana small on on the podcast at some point hopefully was that they had, they had kids, do this study and they actually had to cease to study because a couple
All of the kids became pre-diabetic. I mean, it seemed like there was something hazardous about this was a Yale School of medicine's good place. I mean, you know, every, you know, there's a range everywhere, but it just seemed like there's something about sweet taste that have taken to. The extreme might be able to impact blood sugar to. This has impacted my sort of behavior in the eye. Trying to, I try to avoid really sweet things. Mmm, unless they're exceptionally delicious, or
Occasion calls for them, because I do think that it increases my craving for sweet
things. Well, it might not be necessarily a craving, but it just programs you. So let's, your taste buds are extremely adaptable. So, take, for example, like Indian food. If you bring like, Indian people over to America and have them, eat some more food. They think it tastes extremely Bland, because they are used to such spicy food that unless they have a certain level of spice, they think.
Oddly even taste it. If you've ever done a high sodium diet and then gone to a low sodium diet, it feels very Bland. That's like Starbucks but you're over time your taste buds. Adjust so sweet is the same thing. If you're used to eating a lot of sweet, you get kind of desensitized to it and then if you go to something less sweet it can kind of taste Bland at first over time, it'll get better but so I think it's one of those things that again, it depends on the situation.
Action, right? Like if somebody's obese and they said, well this is going to help me, you know, eliminate sugar-sweetened beverage. Like why would you want to take that to away from? Like that's a great lever to pull. I mean, if somebody can lose literally a hundred pounds from just one change in lifestyle. That's not even really that inconvenient of a change. That's that is powerful. But again, is it the most healthy thing they could do. And I think that's kind of like what tends to get asked. We don't know.
It is it healthier than water? Hmm, probably not. Maybe as healthy as it, who knows. Now the but I really make all those caveats because you don't want to have people who could use this as a tool think. Well I can't do this because it's actually bad for me, right? If it helps, you lose 50 pounds or 75 pounds or whatever it is. Trust me. It's not bad for you, right? Well, it does
seem to increase the satiety signals.
What do you think about the microbiome effects, in this recent study? Because the recent study I think has some nice features to it and you've done a detailed description of the study so for those that
want, that is this two-week
study or the to we study. Yeah. And we will provide a link. You did an excellent video on this on your YouTube channel that really parses each piece but they compared the various artificial sweeteners and looked at the glucose response looked at microbiome. A number of different measures. What was your general take it? And this was in
Ins for the for I think of the first time look at microbiome in humans to artificial sweetener.
There's there are a few studies on the microbiome in humans with artificial sweeteners. The first two that came out, showed pretty much no effect, but they're little bit shorter in duration. They like two to four weeks and again, it depends on like what what bacteria are getting measured, right? Like there's, you know, many different kinds of bacteria. So they could just be measuring one that didn't change. And then there was a 10-week study that came out that got a lot of press and they showed
I think it was sucralose. I think they showed an effect of change on the gut microbiome. Now, what was interesting is when I went into the species that change this, the species that change the most compared to control was a species called. I'm going to butcher the name, but let's like, Claudia coitus. I think it's called,
I must say, for those that work on the microbiome, that it's so difficult, different things that you need to nomenclature committee and you need a
Acronyms. I'm sorry. It's just do it already. You're killing us.
I've got BC BC. Thank you.
We're going to start the nomenclature committee without if you don't do it soon.
So, they notice that this went up by like three to fourfold. So, I kind of went down the rabbit hole on this. Interestingly, that particular species of bacteria is actually associated with lower out of paucity better insulin sensitivity. And people who are obese and children who are obese tend to have less of it.
I said, well based on that study, you could actually argue that maybe sucralose actually improved the gut microbiome. Now again, I'm not making that claim because you know we have a hard time understanding what a healthy microbiome looks like already.
What this last study that came out, my my biggest take home.
Was, I think it's safe to say that some of these non-nutritive sweeteners are not metabolically inert. That there are some effects now are those effects, good bad or neutral? I think has yet to be fully elucidated now, the I focused more on the blood glucose responses in my analysis. So in that 10-week study, they looked at they did an oral glucose tolerance test and their conclusion.
I didn't really feel like fit their data, so their conclusion was that and I guess I think it was sucralose that it elevated blood glucose and this is where statistics can get kind of tricky. So my take-home was the area under the curve, the incremental area under the curve, which is looking at the basically the entire glucose response was not different between the control and the sucralose group to me that's the biggest take-home
But there was one time point at the end of the study in the sucrose group. The 30-minute time point that was statistically significantly, higher blood glucose, then the control group
It's kind of one of those things where I go. Okay, let's do it one time, point it statistically significant, but even then, we've seen things be statistically significant that end up being data artifacts because they're not reproduced. So, I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but again, the overall area under the curve was not different. So, to me that was the biggest
take-home and papers, we should probably mention our published because of
Effects, generally, lack of effect harder to
publish. This is doesn't, it's actually really unfortunate because a null hypothesis is just as useful data as the non null hypothesis. But you're right, there is a very strong publication bias towards showing an effect
versus not unless you can flip a field on its head entirely by showing something did not happen. Typically the positive result out does the negative result in positive.
The meaning, you see a result and then of course it's one study and you know us and I think that as you talked about earlier, the center of mass of data in a given field are probably the best basis for what we should do right in terms of. And so I'm not changing my behavior around the intake of artificial sweeteners. I personally am still going to consume Stevia and aspartame in relatively small amounts. Yeah. But now I'm thinking well okay. If
It contains sucralose, I don't have to perhaps actively avoid it, whereas before I was, I was actively avoiding
it. So the the new study I thought was very elegantly doesn't very involved. I mean, be quite Frank. Some of the animal stuff they did was extremely impressive, so there was actually two arms to the study. One was a human arm was the animal are my focus much more on the human side of it. So basically, this was a two-week study and the really unique aspect of this which I think is
All the strength and a weakness, they had almost 1,400 people apply for this study. And the only had 120. I think that actually went into it because they did a very detailed food analysis of these folks. All these people said that, they avoided artificial sweeteners, or didn't consume them and I think people don't realize how ubiquitous
sweeteners are prior to the study. These people were like, it was like jury selection, they'd never acts like not ever hearing of the plaintiff and the defendant these
These are these mutant people who have never had an artificial sweetener,
right? So the strength is now you don't have a lot of like, pre-existing, you know, effects that may be clouding. What would actually happen when you add it in. Like for example if you have people who are already consuming artificial sweeteners and then you have a consumer, artificial sweeteners. The likelihood things are going to change is pretty low, right?
So I think that that's a strength. It's also a weakness and I want to be really careful because I think people took my words a little bit too far, which means I probably didn't do a good job of being nuanced enough.
There is the possibility for a placebo effect here. So, to me, if somebody has gone through that much, painstaking care to avoid artificial sweeteners, it's likely they have a preconceived notion that those are bad for you like to because they're difficult to avoid, yes, it's possible through reading a very minimally processed diet that they're just not exposed to them and that's very true as well. But the other thing that the researchers acknowledged was, they weren't able to Blind the study because if you've never had an artificial sweetener,
For your only uses like regular sugar and you have an artificial sweetener you know you taste it you know it's still sweet but it's not the same sweet and there's an interesting
effect. There were a lot of people don't like the taste of aspartame the first time. Yeah I actually quit drinking diet soda for a while thinking I should and then had one it. Tasted really I can only describe it as kind of artificial chemical and then pretty soon. Tasted great again. Yep. And so there is some attenuation there and whether or not that's
Central meaning within the brain or peripheral? I don't know but very interesting. Well I I see you as a playing a critical role in defining what is and what isn't what still needs to be determined in terms of this landscape and the entire landscape really of nutrition. When in
that study did change my opinion in terms of okay I think we can clearly say now that like these aren't these are neutral or sorry that they're not inert, right? Like that that was the thought process before it was wild.
Digested or whatnot. So they must be inert. That doesn't appear to be the case. But again, like when we look at the blood glucose data,
there's and I'm not saying this is what happened. I want to be very clear, not saying this is what happened. I'm saying it's possible, this happened and so this is why we need more studies to verify. If these people had a preconceived notion that artificial sweeteners were bad for them, it's possible knowing they're ingesting artificial sweeteners that they could have had a blood glucose response. Now the my push back on my own point, there would be then we should have expected to see it and all the honor and all the non-nutritive sweeteners, which
Didn't, it was just in sucralose and
saccharine. It was kind of a graded effect where she grows and saccharine and showed the most dramatic change. Yep. And Stevia. And a few of the others did not,
and the other issue I took with it, maybe it's a ticky-tack thing was their primary outcome measure was blood glucose of the or glucose tolerance test but they had people administer, their own oral glucose tolerance test which basically they give them. They said, okay, drink this drink and they were wearing continuous glucose monitors, which should have been fine.
Fine. But again to me and I'm being ticky, tacky and again I know all studies are limited by funding. So I think overall this was a great study but I would have liked to seen them, you know, monitor the the or glucose tolerance test and to
administer, or after. Yeah. You want to know that they didn't ingest this or did
enjoy. Yeah. Those those two things but the other one of the caveat is it was a two-week study.
Right. So we got to be really careful how much we interpreted this, because it's also possible that this is a transient effect, right? And maybe it goes away over time, we don't know.
But again, I think it's we can clearly say it's not inert right now, how much emphasis we put on that on a two-week study.
I'm I still will say, okay, maybe if you're worried don't consume circles, right? But if you're, you know, 100 pounds overweight and you want to use some sucralose as a replacement to help you lose weight, I would say, don't let this study deter you from doing that. Because the net effect is still going to be more positive than you. Not losing the weight, right? So if it's tool that helps you find, but I do hold open the
That well, there could be negative effects from it as well. But, again, we're looking at like, what's the, what is the overall outcome, right? And then, when I looked at, they examined like some of the different things that were increased with these different sweeteners. And again this work, it's messy. Because one of the things I saw was a big increase in butyrate production from the change in the gut microbiome. Presumably. Well, as we discussed earlier, butyrate Ataxia associated with positive outcomes in terms of insulin sensitivity and
Malaysian and some other things. So I just I want to be real cautious before people say, well, there's a change in the microbiome. I must be a bad change. We don't know. It's possible. And again, if we have, you know, 10 more studies come out and start to show this, then I will start to shift my personal opinion of artificial sweeteners.
So in anticipation of sitting down today, I did solicit for questions on social media, and one of the questions that got a lot of up votes.
Mike's, if you will, was that one that I think raises interesting questions about short-term and long-term health and it's the following, I think it's a common scenario.
A number of people want to know, what is the healthiest way to approach a kind of rapid weight loss and hear what I think is happening is somebody has an event coming up or they're just tired of being the way. They are carrying the amount of adipose tissue they are and they wanted to know whether or not it is safe to for instance lose 3 pounds a week for a few weeks in anticipation of a wedding or some other event and whether or not
Straight caloric restriction and increasing activity. Is the best way to approach that with the understanding that they may gain back a little afterwards? They might think ideally, they'd like to maintain it afterwards. But what do you think of that sort of approach? You know, cutting caloric intake in half for instance and then doubling and also doubling your physical
output? So, it's interesting because the you might be surprised by what I'm going to say, which is the
The research data actually tends to suggest that people who are like obese who lose a lot more weight. Early are more likely to keep it off, which seems a little bit kind of contradictory right. Like, well, that doesn't seem very sustainable, but again, you're weighing competing things, so their sustainability aspect. But then there's also a like by in is huge for sustainability, right? So for a lot of overweight or obese people. If they start a diet, they don't see something quickly. They kind of bail on it because
You know, it's not working whereas if they see some rapid results pretty quickly, they buy in even harder. Right? And so I think the the conversation especially for if there's any coaches or trainers out there is just presenting that as the there. You know what? My favorite lines is there are no Solutions. There's only trade-offs, I think Thomas Soul said that.
So you're having a trade-off here. It is yes there you're going to lose fat faster. You might lose lean mass a little bit faster to which can be a problem but I will say the more adipose tissue you have the more aggressively you can diet without negative consequences. Someone like me doing a really aggressive diet is not going to be good for my lean mass one. I have a higher lean mass than normal to. I have a lower body fat than
As your body, fat goes down, the percentage of weight loss from lean mass goes up. So people who are very obese because they have so much adipose tissue to pull from. There's very little reason for the body to catabolize lean tissue. Now,
that being said, if you go on a people misinterpret like like, well, I gotta in body done and or a deck set done. And I've lost, you know, 2 pounds of lean mass and they've, you know, they've lost 20 pounds overall will keep in mind. Adipose tissue itself, is 13 percent lean mass. So there's actually like, you know, protein component to like the structural component of the adipose tissue and it does have some water so it's about 87% lipid. But the other part is lean. So at minimum, you should
Expect a 13 percent reduction in lean mass when you diet and then when you consider like, you lose body water overall which is registers is lean mass and you lose your splanchnic tissues can shrink a little bit so it's normal to lose, you know, for the average person to lose like 25 or 30 percent of the weight that they lose from lean mass but that doesn't mean skeletal muscle tissue. And again the, the more adipose you have, the more aggressively, you can approach the diet.
Diet without really - long-term consequences to lean master your overall health. But balance that with okay, I'm going to do this. I need to understand that I'm not going to be dieting this way forever. I'm doing this to give myself a boost to the beginning, and I have to be okay at some point with transition into something that's a little more sustainable
based on what you just said, It reminds me of the satiety signal effect of exercise. You mentioned earlier that exercising can improve.
Our sense of when we had enough to eat. I just want to briefly mention that when Ali crumb was on the podcast. She mentioned that they've been doing a study that I have to pair you to and have a hear the conversation as a fly on the wall. Because what she was telling me was that, if people believe that a food is nutritious for them, then eating less of it registers as more satiating. Whereas, if people view dieting, as a deprivation system, you know, like oh,
No dieting is hard and the food sucks and it's terrible. Well, then they crave all sorts of other things. Whereas they can, they actually observe in their studies where people report reduced craving. If they are told for instance, a chicken breast, and broccoli, and some olive oil, and rice is actually quite nourishing. It's actually really good for you and people eat that and they feel like they've actually eaten more. The satiety signaling goes up. So it's just, just a point that Ali made of those aren't my
data already is so impressive because even the
rate at which you eat and right down to the size of the plate and the color of the plate like the contrast and color really. They see I can't remember exactly. I think it's if the plate is a similar color to the food, I think people eat more whereas if it's a bigger contrast, they eat less. So even like plate color can make a difference on how much you eat. So again, human brain, very amazing but also very dumb and some ways, right?
Out an
optimized
algorithm. I always, I always joke with people, I'm like, just look at how stupid humans are, you put some water in front of them, like you know, the ocean. They're like, oh yeah, I'll pay 10 times more for this, you know, like, but it's just we're kind of wired that way
the reward signaling Pathways in the brain run. One chemical mainly dopamine there are others, of course, but and very few algorithms. It's sort of like a intermittent reinforcement, is one.
I'm reinforce it, but in the end, that there aren't many algorithms and we are probably not optimized. Certainly not optimized for our own health because people will eat themselves to death drug themselves to death Etc simply because something fell too good at one
point where it's it. Proves your point. One of the things I tell people I said this on Andy, for someone's podcast was
Interestingly the dichotomy of life is, if you do what's easy in the short term, your life will be hard. If you do what's hard in the short term, your life will get easier. It's very strange. And actually Ethan suply had a great example of this when he was over 500 pounds. He said the amount of work I had to do to construct my life that I could just live was so much more work than just going to the gym for a couple hours a day.
He's like the gym work is hard. He's like, but I look back how much work I had to do to sustain that lifestyle versus just going to the gym and like, you know, restricting calories. He's like to maintain the lifestyle of being 500 pounds was infinitely more difficult than what I do now. And so again a great example, short-term hard going to the gym calorie restriction long-term life's easier just really interesting dichotomy. I think about
a lion and
But I can't be restated. Often enough seed oils.
People want to ask God, seed oils and for that. And for and for those of you that are listening, who are wondering why we're sort of chuckling already, she mentioned that both in the twittersphere and Instagram and online, there's these very polarized views that probably aren't worth focusing on for too long but there are a number of folks out there who are arguing that seed oils are the source of all, you know, the Obesity epidemic, everything inflammation, etcetera, Illuminati everything and then there are those
That would argue just the opposite that you know meat is the source of all problems Etc. And I think we've thanks to your nuance and and expertise we've hopefully appropriately frame things that it's never that black and white. It's simply not are really. They rarely. I love olive oil. I know I realize that doesn't fit exactly into the seed oil category. I love olive oil. I use it in moderation. I do also consume some butter in moderation, Etc, but
Are there any data on seed oils? And here, I good example. I think would be like, canola oil, which comes from the rape seed that literally was renamed canola oil because rape seed oil is not good marketing. No,
no, no, exactly. So, the first thing I'll say is seed, oils have negatively contributed to our overall health because people in the last you know 20 30 years, what they have tend to added to
Add into their diet that has increased. The overall calorie load, is oil like these various mostly from seed oils.
But when we look at like one to one replacement with other fats and so I if you look at the epidemiology yeah you can find some epidemiology showing people who consume more seed, oil have more negative Health outcomes problem is again tied up with a multitude of other behaviors and then you can find mechanisms in the the idea is well these have their polyunsaturated, which means in the fatty acid chain, there's multiple double bonds which those
Double bonds can be oxidized when they're exposed to heat and some other things. And so the idea is, well, when you cook with these things and, you know, they get, they get Ox, they make it oxidized, and that's going to cause inflammation in your body. So, that's a plausible mechanism. So as always, I defer to the human randomized, control, trials. And so what you tend to find is, when you substitute
Toot polyunsaturated fats, are sorry. When you substitute saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats, it's either neutral or positive in terms of the effects on like, inflammation is basically neutral there. There's some studies that show a positive effect of doing polyunsaturated fats but it probably depends on the individual polyunsaturated fat. And that's the other thing. I don't really is difficult because you're categorizing like everything in this one bucket and there are some differences between
Fatty acids, even with saturated fat. Like, for example, a stearic acid doesn't tend to raise LDL cholesterol, whereas, you know, saturated fat as a whole tends to raise LDL cholesterol. But there are some saturated fats that don't. So again, it's like, we're putting things in buckets and it's a little more nuanced than that. Then if you look at, like, the effects of polyunsaturated fats on markers of cardiovascular disease again, 10.
Has to either be a neutral or positive effect when you substitute saturated fat for polyunsaturated fat. Now, if you want to get into like monounsaturated or polyunsaturated, there's some there's quite a bit. Disagreement between the studies what I would say based on the human randomized, control trials, is that you're probably better off consuming monounsaturated and polyunsaturated in place of saturated fat. But again, if the idea is well,
That means polyunsaturated are good for me. So I'm just going to dump a bunch of oil on everything and now you're up in your calories. Well that's that's that's a negative now, right? Because you have to do what the bigger problem of overall energy toxicity. So I'm not somebody who likes to demonize individual nutrients, I just haven't seen really compelling evidence. That seed oils are the root cause of the problems that are being suggested. And I think this is a good example of kind of like
Whenever there's a something that pops up in the fitness industry, there's always like the opposite thing that pops up and is like the reactionary, you know, extreme reaction to whatever this thing was over here. And I think that's what we're seeing with. Some of the the seed oil stuff is it's it's mostly people who are trying to kind of expose the virtues of saturated fat and listen, I think it's fine to consume saturated fat but again, you know, I think limiting it to, you know,
Seven to ten percent of your daily calorie intake is probably wise again based on the all the consensus of the evidence I've seen. And so, once again, like we're struggling with this, okay? We've got this epidemiology in these mechanisms, that sound good, but then what actually happens when we do some human randomized, control, trials, and so far, I just haven't seen the evidence to suggest that seed oils are independently.
Lee bad for you independent, the calories, they contain
You said the words, overall energy toxicity and I just want to highlight that. I think that's a fabulous term. I don't I don't think enough people think about that because they they are primed or we are all primed to think, okay? Seed oils might be bad or artificial sweeteners, might be bad or this particular component of blood work. Might represent something good or bad without taking into account. Overall energy toxicity of the toxicity of over-consuming calories
Energy and thank you for pointing out that most of the data point to the fact that saturated fat should make up about no more than seven to ten percent of total daily caloric intake, is there a lower and threshold that can be problematic. For instance, I've noticed that my blood profiles especially in terms of hormones improve when I'm getting sufficient saturated fat, maybe I'm a mutant but years ago because I'm a product of
Of growing up in the 90s. I tried a low-fat diet. It certainly crushed my Androgen levels. I started adding some butter back in and I was right back in the, in the, in the sweet Zone where I wanted to be so, you know, seven to 10% of totally daily. Caloric intake is, I'm guessing is probably about what I do. Now I'll have to check, but is there a danger to going to low in saturated
fats? So again no Solutions only trade-offs, right? What maximizes out testosterone might not be the best thing for longevity, right? And
Vice versa. I'm not I'm not making that claim specifically but I think it's important understand this that I think we all have this idea that there's this one iconic diet out there that is going to be the best diet for building muscle and burning fat and preventing cancer and heart disease. And the reality is like, there's overall healthy dietary patterns that we see that are good for those things, but we get down into the weeds, there's probably some push and pull here as well, right? So when it comes to,
Rated fat.
There is some evidence that if you're too low on it, that yes, you can have a reduction in testosterone now, is that reduction in testosterone? Let's say, fifteen, twenty percent, whatever it may be is that sufficient actually cause loss of lean mass that we don't know. That's, that's never been shown interestingly. I just remember this. There was one study that was comparing polyunsaturated fat versus saturated fat.
And they equated total fat. And one of the really interesting things was the group. Getting the polyunsaturated fat had more lean mass at the end of the study compared to the group getting saturated fat now. So, only one study, I've never seen this replicated. So I'm very, this is a situation where I say I would like to find out what the mechanism of that is because this could just be random, but if that gets shown over and over what I might say is okay,
Well, what's the, what are we if polyunsaturated are somehow increasing lean mass compared to saturated fat, who cares? What happens with testosterone? Unless that reduction in testosterone is causing some kind of impedance impedance for your life, right? So all that to say I don't really know and by the way, that's something for those watching and listening real experts, every once in a while you should hear them. Say the following words, I don't know exam,
graduate advisor was
Exceptional dad and she's and she was brilliant, right?
And then, in terms of like cholesterol synthesis, you really need a very, very small amount of saturated fat for LDL cholesterol synthesis. Your liver can synthesize, like the amount of LDL cholesterol or cholesterol that your body requires is so small in terms of like just living and being healthy. So I don't think you need to worry about that. And from a cardiovascular disease standpoint there is some evidence that even taking people who have like
Quote local low LDL of like, you know, 80 or 90 and taking them down to like 30 or 40 that. There is still a benefit for the risk of cardiovascular disease. So, again, you're weighing these, these two buckets, right? So what I say, you know, if you're doing seven and ten percent from from saturated fat, you're probably fine.
Received a lot of questions about whether or not there are female specific diet and exercise protocols. And I realize this is a vast landscape but some of those questions related to menopause and perimenopause and some related to the menstrual cycle most related to variations across the menstrual cycle. In terms of let's just say, diet maintenance or sub clerk diet, are there any things that you've observed?
We'll talk a little bit later about this wonderful app that you've produced this carbon app which helps people manage their energy intake and a number of other things. And so there you have a sort of a database or at least an experience base and then I'm guessing, they're probably also studies exploring male versus female differences in terms of adherence and what sorts of diets work as it. Are there any general themes that one can extract from that.
This can be really unpopular segment for the women. Doesn't seem to make a big
difference. Well she they
May be relieved to hear that because it makes sorting through the information space and certainly the information we've covered in this podcast up until now simpler. It means that everything is in different for them. Yeah, so
if you look at the male versus female studies relation of diet, they seem to respond to some similar way. Like, some more code word, calorie deficit seems to produce similar results. If you do low carb, high carb regardless, it seems to boil down to the same principles.
Now, training wise, we do know that female like the muscle fibers adapt, a little bit differently to training but it without getting too far into the weeds. It doesn't really change the way you should train because for the most part building muscle, there's a lot of different ways to build muscle.
So we know that like, light, loads up to maybe like 30 reps, as long as it's taken, close to failure. Have basically the same effect on building muscle at least in the short term, as heavy loads for low reps. It's mostly about taking the muscle close to fatigue or failure, right? You'll have to go. You have to go to failure, but getting close within a few reps. If you're between one rep and thirty reps, if you're getting close to failure, seem to produce
Similar results. So again, great you can pick with whichever form of discomfort you prefer, right?
when it comes to female specific training,
Again females actually this is one thing that a lot of people don't know, they actually put on a similar amount of lean mass as a percentage of their starting lean mass as men. In fact, there's no statistically significant difference in the amount of lean mass they put on. Now the absolute amount of lean mass that's added will be greater for men because they started with a greater amount of lean mass, but the relative increase in lean mass is pretty much the same from similar training.
Now, females that there's some differences in like fiber types of females tend to be a little bit less fatigue able than men. They can, they can go a little bit higher a little bit longer and there's also some evidence that they recover a little bit better, but that also could be simply due to the fact that they're not able to use as heavy of loads to induce hypertrophy. So I kind of have this theory that while, you know, as a percentage or
one rep max, you can program things. I think absolute load matters. When you look at like the most elite powerlifters, the super heavy weights aren't squatting three or four times a week because, you know, they're squatting eight, nine hundred pounds. I think that there's an overall recovery effect there again. I have no data to back this up. This is just my observation. But when you get into the lighter weight classes, and this goes for men to, you do see quite a few people who do you know, many training sessions.
Ends at high RPM E's and seem to be able to recover from that. So I do think the absolute load makes a difference. Now, when it comes to like menstrual cycle, this is one of those things where I kind of tell people, you know, do what you prefer. So there's some people have said you should program. You should like kind of schedule your training around your menstrual cycle, which is whenever you're going through menstrual cycle, you know, reduce the intensity reduce the volume because you're, you know, you're not going to feel as good.
Good, you're not going to train as well. What I would say is just Auto regulate that if you go in and you're on your period but you you feel good and you're doing well that day then I don't think you necessarily need to back it off and there was one study that kind of supported that notion but if you go and you feel terrible and you know you feel like you could use, you know, a reduction in intensity and volume that it's totally fine to Auto regulate that. And when I say autoregulation, I'm autoregulation means you are regulating the individual training session.
Based on your performance. So I ought to regulate and so far as like I'm a super nerd. So I have a velocity device so I can actually attach to the bar and see how fast the load moves and I know it various different like warm up weights, what velocities? I should be hitting. So if I hit my last warm-up and my velocity is about 10% higher than usual, I can be pretty confident that that's gonna be a good day for me. If it's lower than I can back it off a little bit, in fact, it were
Olds when I had my last deadlift. It was 30% my last my last deadlift warm up. It was 30% faster than I usually hit in the gym and I turned and looked at my coach and I said, yeah, we're going to get this today. So there's various forms of ways to Auto regulate but I again women if you're on your period but you feel good, I don't think there's any reason you need to back off but if you're not feeling good then it's totally appropriate to back off
Raw vs. Cooked Foods. People wanted to know whether or not for instance,
You know, eating a raw apple verse. I don't know if there's anyone cook, Apple's, I guess you could people used to bake and they were baked. Apples was a desert. When I was a kid. It was kind of the letdown desert. Sorry there was a like, not awesome unless it had a scoop of ice cream in it and even then they may be not awesome. But anyway, Raw vs. Cooked obviously if you burn a piece of meat to the point where it's pure charcoal, that's too much and if you'd there is a small movement surrounding eating raw meats, that's not something I particularly enjoy.
Oi. Frankly Sushi is the only raw food. I personally ingest and I'm very I am very careful about the source. Frankly reputable places is there anything you know real about this in terms of being able to extract the amino acids vitamins and minerals from the food Raw vs. Cooked?
It just looks cool for Instagram. So when you cook foods they actually tend to become in terms of protein containing foods. They tend to become more digestible, not less eggs are this way.
Me to this way people so well, you know, when you, when you heat protein, you denature it and I think they hear that word denature and they think destroy, and that is not what denature means. So proteins, fold up into 3D dimensional structures. You know, this, of course, based on their amino acid sequence and their specific energies of those amino acids. When you heat protein or add acid, it starts to unfold that that protein structure.
That happens during digestion anyway. So I always chuckle when like the, like I've seen some companies come out with way that you can cook with, right that it's not going to, you know, destroy the amino acids. I'm like, so, you mean like regular way, right? So, yeah, cooking typically, cooking actually makes amino acids, more bioavailable. Not less. Now I would stay away from Charing your meat because there is some evidence that charring creates polyaromatic hydrocarbons.
Which at least in animals when they give those they appear to be carcinogenic. So if you do charging me by accident, I would just cut off the charred portions and then you should be fine. The trailer is delicious. Ha ha ha ha
notnot of his charge too much, but there is something about a charred crust on a me. My dad's Argentina. And I would like to good, oh yeah. What about people? Referred to them in their questions as carb blockers, but I think what they're referring to are things like berberine and some of the glucose scavengers,
And one glucose cabbage. I'd love for you to comment on. Is this assertion that taking a brisk? Walk after a meal, or maybe even a slow walk after a meal, some movement can help downshift the amount of circulating glucose in some way. I've heard that not a lot of people but some are starting to pay attention to this idea of taking things, like berberine or even metformin can scavenge glucose. I personally can't take bourbon if I take it, I get massive headaches unless I have ingested, tons of
Are in carbohydrates so I just don't mess around with it. But I know there are number of people out there that want to know whether or not these glucose scavengers can be useful.
I think that is really majoring in the minors if I'm being honest. As far as the carb blockers there's like some white kidney bean extract and those sorts of things they can they do block the digestion of carbohydrates some so I say block that's those watching or listening metabolism is typically not on.
And off switches. Okay, so when we say things like block or attenuate or inhibit typically we're not talking about just a switch on the wall that you press it and everything turns off. We're talking about a dimmer switch. Okay. Like so you it just changes the emphasis but these carb blockers can reduce the absorption of carbohydrate. Now, they don't seem to cause weight loss when, when you just do it, a normal diet. Now, why is that? Well, all it does is once the
Those carbohydrates, get to the large intestine in your bacteria, get a hold of them. They start fermenting them to volatile fatty acids, which could reabsorb into your liver. So you don't get the increase in blood glucose but you still get almost all the calories from it because it's just in a different form. So you know, if carb blockers, if they actually worked really well, I mean, if you block something from being absorbed, your g.i. typically does not just let undigested material, sitting there, you get diarrhea, I mean that would be the outcome.
That's also how I like debunk, the whole, like 30 grams of protein at a meal. You can absorb any more than that. I'm like if that was the case that when you ate a steak like you would just start having diarrhea. Every time you went over that 30 G threshold, right? I remember
during college. So this would be early 90s. There was The olestra Craze this idea of putting in non-digestible thing into things like potato chips. So that it would clear through the GI tract faster not absorb as many calories.
It does raise this, a window where obviously you don't hear about this anymore but it does raise an interesting question related to energy balance, which is gastric emptying time and obviously in the landscape of Eating Disorders in particular, anorexia abuse of lack use. And abuse of laxatives is a way in which people will in an unhealthy way, try and control their weight, and there's a lot of problems with that approach. But what about gastric emptying time?
Is this one way that people could control their energy balance in a healthy way. And where does fiber come into
play? Fiber tends to improve GI Transit time because it adds bulk. So, you know, your your g.i. system is basically a tube and it has peristalsis which is wave-like contractions that moves the food down to the tube. Well, if you have more bulk to the food like with fiber, you can move it through a little bit better now in
The gastric, the stomach specifically fiber tends to delay. Gastric emptying and slow it a bit. Probably because it congeals a little bit. Now, this kind of gets into like the glycemic index argument, right? Like if you do if you do like low GI Foods, you'll have a slower release of glucose. It's a slower gastric emptying time. Does that affect energy balance? So there are quite a few studies looking at like low GI versus
Hi GI Foods in the studies where they don't control calories low GI tends to outperform high GI. But when they control calories there's no difference. And so what that tends to say well I think that suggests is low GI Foods just by their nature tend to be higher in fiber and so I think it's just kind of comes back to the fiber issue. Got
it like to ask you about supplements for a moment, it's an enormous landscape but I believe there are a few things that you believe in, meaning they exist and and there are
Some data to support their use. Maybe even some anecdotal data based on your own experiences as long as we highlighted as such could be interesting. I've heard you talk about two in particular one that I'm very familiar with which is creatine monohydrate. Share your thoughts on that, not just for muscle building, but maybe any other purposes for it and then the other one is one that frankly, I'm learning more about all the time now thanks to your prompt which is weird olya rosacea hmm. I think I pronounced that correctly and
And why that might be interesting or have used to people.
Yeah, so touching on Creatine it is the most tested safe and effective Sports supplement. We have, I mean, it's just there are thousands of studies on creatine monohydrate now. And I would, I would say very clearly to if you're using any other form of creates and I think you're wasting your money. Creatine hydrochloride has some hype around it, too. It's apparently it's a little
Soluble the claim is that you need less but there's only a couple studies on it and it's more expensive.
Probably monohydrate is not particularly expensive. Know I realize people have different budgets but it's not it doesn't land in the it's not a budget breaker.
Yeah. It's gotten more expensive because of covid and supply chain issues. Even the there's forms of creatine that appear to be as good, like hydrochloride, but it's more expensive and then things like create, an ethyl Ester has been shown to be worse than created a monohydrate.
Buffered creatine is as good or worse and it's much more expensive. So I tell people, just take creatine monohydrate, it is tried and true. It's been shown to saturate. The muscle cells 100% with phosphocreatine and that's what you want. So, creatin Works through a few different methodologies, one through increasing phosphocreatine content, which helps improve exercise performance. It also appears to reprove and cover appears to improve recovery and it is
Lean mass, a lot of which is through bringing water into the muscle cells. But that is, I mean muscle cells are mostly water. So, when people say, well, it's just water, that's what muscle cells, mostly are, and it also increases strength and some other metrics. Now, it also has been shown in studies that people tend to get a decrease in body fat percentage. Now, that's probably because they're getting an increase in lean mass and so the relative is a decrease in body fat.
At percentage. But there are a few studies that show a decrease in fat mass as well. I don't think the creatine is a fat burner. I think that people are able to train harder, build more lean tissue. And so, that's probably having an effect on fat mass then, they've actually shown more recently, some cognitive benefits to creatinine, which I find really interesting as well. But the only knock on creates in that anybody's been able to come up with. Because they've, if they've debunk the kidney stuff, they've debunked the liver studied it, there's no evidence that it harms healthy kidney kidney or liver is hair loss. So, what about her?
Us because there was one study in 2009 that showed the creatine increased DHT but they didn't really show an effect on any other sex hormone. So it's kind of strange like, you would think if there is an increase in DHT, there would be like something else that changes as well, and it's only one study and again, didn't directly measure hair loss. Measured DHT, which we know is involved in the loss of the follicle, the follicle. So what I would say,
Is that I am not convinced, it's only one study never been replicated to my knowledge and it was looking at a mechanism rather than an outcome. So if you, if you're somebody who's prone to hair loss and you want to avoid creatine because of that, I understand. But for most people, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's something to
worry about, you emphasise the classic loading of creatine, taking it a bunch of times per day and then backing off, or just taking it consistently at the, I think five grams per day is kind of the typical dose that people
take. So,
Again, no Solutions only trade-offs you can load it and you will saturate. Your phosphocreatine phosphocreatine stores faster like usually within a week if you just take five grams per day, it'll take two, three, four weeks. But you will get to the same place and you're probably going to have a much lower risk of GI issues. Some people create in can be a gut irritant. If it is for some folks, I would recommend splitting it into multiple doses. So maybe like multiple
O2 1 or 2, G doses per day.
And definitely don't load it. If you're somebody who has GI issues from it as far as regular Isaiah the research is still in its infancy. I was just reading a new systematic review. That kind of concluded that we need more high quality research, but the research that is out there seems to suggest that not only does it reduce physical fatigue but also reduces the perception of fatigue and may also enhance memory and cognition as well.
And it's referred to as an adaptogen. So I I really like it. My anecdotal experience is what I combine that with caffeine, it tends to kind of smooth out the effects of caffeine. It's a more pleasant experience. And there's also some evidence that if you were like, coming off, caffeine that it can reduce the, the negative side effects, to caffeine withdrawal, which by the way, I didn't really believe in that until I actually did a cold turkey. So before me,
Meet. I will cut out caffeine for seven days because you can basically reset your caffeine intolerance and seven days and like two days in. I mean I'm groggy I've got the headaches. Usually I'll get like body aches that come up because caffeine is actually a mild analgesic and yeah. So it's very interesting to see if I slept like a baby. I'll tell you that. I sending
a big caffeine prior to your, to the meat. Yeah. You really want the maximum punch from. Yeah, that's why you do that.
Yeah and like I said, rhodiola tends to
It doesn't eliminate those those negative effects but they tend to tend to dampen them a little bit. So I really like it again would like to see more research on it, but there's a lot more stuff coming out, like ashwagandha is another thing that looks pretty promising seems to increase testosterone modestly. Interesting. I don't think it's a like they've shown increases in lean mass. I don't think the increase in testosterone explains the increase in lean mass, it's just not a big enough increase. Could it be
the decrease in cortisol? People have
talked about possible, it does.
Is decrease stress, stress hormones also has been shown to help with sleep, but I would like to see more research looking at mechanistically, how it's increasing lean mass before I kind of say conclusively that this is a, you know, the next Creighton, there's more research that needs to come out. And then there's some other things that, that have an effect. You know, citrulline malate there was a new meta analysis that showed that citrulline malate, can reduce fatigue and increase. I think time to fatigue and it may actually
Of some small recovery benefits as well. Different forms of carnitine. Carnitine can actually have recovery benefits and actually interesting, I think it's carnitine. Tartrate actually has been shown. Volek published studies actually show that increased Androgen receptor density and muscle cells. That's interesting.
No l carnitine and it's other forms that are pretty. I think there's good evidence that they can improve sperm and egg health for people who are looking to conceive. Interesting. Yeah, they're surprising number of studies on this in hue.
In humans. But yeah, Androgen receptor density and that's from oral L-Carnitine. People are taking capsules, not injecting directly into the muscle.
Yeah. And then you've got things like obviously like the other most effective supplement out, there is probably caffeine. I mean like, if you look at the research studies, caffeine produces very consistently improvements in performance. So that's another one. Some people like the effect of caffeine that's okay
but I wouldn't know because I've never come off it.
Exactly exactly what interesting lie they do. Show that
The effect appears to be consistent that that, even if you're a habitual caffeine user, you do still get a benefit every time you take it but like you said, you're just used to it, you know, so you know, there's those things, you then you've got like things like beta-alanine which for it's in our it's in our pre-workout. Probably not super helpful for most people for resistance training. It does seem to have some benefits for
For like high intensity. Like if you get out, you know, more than like 45 seconds or 60 seconds of like really hard training, it does appear to help with delaying fatigue for that. And then you've got things like betaine or also called trimethylglycine, which there's some evidence that can improve lean mass. There's some evidence that it can improve power output. So there's a few things out there but you know, most of the stuff is not very good. So
You know, I think that that's, you know, those kinds of supplements, you know, very useful, but again, I would never tell people, they need supplements. Like again, even like something like written is going to be a very small effect compared to like proper nutrition recovery and hard training. You know, one of the things I was I was talking Ben Bruno the other day and I said, you know, like some people will ask me like, how does this person make progress? Because, you know, their programming is, you know, it's not every
Evidence-based or this guy? How's he like, he's exercise are dumb and I'll say, yeah. But they trained really hard for 20 years. Like, no one commonality. You see between like really successful athletes or bodybuilders, is they trained really hard? And one of the things I have observed is the more into the weeds, people tend to get. And again, this is just my own anecdotal, observation, the more in the weeds, they tend to get the less hard. I see them trained. And so, one of the things I really like that, Mike
Israel said who's got a PhD and is a body builder himself, he said, you can't out science hard training that. If you're looking to build muscle and you're looking to improve your body composition, the main thing is just doing the work
overtime and Sami and the hard work and I would add to that and this is true academic Endeavors to of course I think I hope you'll agree. Absolutely wait which is that? Yeah you know the other thing is given the mental side earlier. We were talking about how
How satiety signals in the brain and what you think about foods can be relevant learning to really enjoy training hard in addition to learning to really enjoy eating. Well, not just for the effects that it has on body composition, the composition, scuse me, those two of course, but just learning to really enjoy the process of training hard and a really hard workout or a really hard paper that you have to sort through or really digging through a book. That's challenging learning to really enjoy that. I think, is a
Is a power tool out there. It's the psychological
end and I think a lot of that is getting the confidence of doing something hard that there's a payoff at the end, you know, and a lot of people, I get asked a lot. My q&a's, how do I get more confident? How do I become more confident? I'll tell people you have to, do you have to? There's no hack. You can't read about, you got to get in the arena. And I don't mean, like compete in sports necessarily, but like, doing a PhD or doing something. Just something hard where you're putting yourself out.
Out there and you're saying, this is my goal and I'm going to go for it. You just learn so much by doing that about yourself. And so, just what you said, I will reframe things in my mind, when bad things happen from thoughts. I never get stressed out because I do, and it's not to say that I never get down, because I do because I'm a human. But, when something bad happens, I should post about this. My store today, when something bad happens.
I very rarely anymore. Do I go? Whoa, is me why did this happen to me? Because you're in the universe, random bad things are going to happen.
So instead I say you know, if I'm not dead instead I say well what an exciting opportunity to overcome an obstacle and I bet because in the experience of my life, the biggest lessons and the best things in my life have actually come out of the most challenging worse things that have happened. And so again, this is, I would never have been able to do these sorts of things if I hadn't taken up weightlifting because weightlifting taught me. So,
Much about perseverance delayed, gratification overcoming obstacles. And that's why I love it and even to this day and I'll still get butterflies when I go in for a squat session even though I've been doing it for 23 years.
That's wonderful. Well it's clear that you Embrace hard things and I people listening to this obviously doesn't have to be weightlifting, you know, picking a hard things, learning an instrument, they're learning a language challenge. Is is a is an absolute Builder
and they've actually showed like
Those sorts of things like when you challenge yourself and also mentally that I think there was a new study that came out basically showing a reduction in the risk of Alzheimer's and other age-related cognitive decline. I mean basically like use it or lose it,
right? Yeah. The the will the desire and the will to persevere. No doubt translates to this thing. We call the will to live, right? It's related to the will to live. Well, I think that what you just said, you know,
Fully embodies what most people are aspiring to, which is to. I think most people actually want to do hard things. They don't just want to have the results. I think that most people deep down under have some understanding that their reward system works that way, I must say this conversation for me has been tremendously, rewarding. First of all, it allowed me to meet you in person. For the first time, I've really enjoyed certain, this won't be our last interaction on this podcast and elsewhere. Also, the amount of knowledge that
that you contain inside you is is astonishing and there's a lot of stuff rattle around Bell and and we all benefit because your ability to pull from the mechanistic side. Again, I think in not limited to, but related to your background in Biochemistry, all the way through to the, the impact. In humans. Animal studies being able to understand where those sit relative to one another and then you're obviously a practitioner of you practice, what you preach and what you talked about pertains to men to women. Younger people older people
All people who are vegan, keto carnivore, you really are able to net, a tremendous number of ideas while staying really nuanced and data-driven and so just want to say for myself and on behalf of the listeners, really appreciate you coming in here today and sharing with us, your knowledge. We will absolutely Point people in the direction of where they can learn more about you. And one of the places that I want, I definitely want to mention before we part. However, is this
This carbon app and I should just mention. I'm not, this isn't a paid promotion or anything of that sort. Actually, one of our podcast team members is been using carbon for a long time. This is an app that you devised, which allows people to navigate the exercise nutrition energy balance space, for weight loss muscle gain, fat loss, weight maintenance. I would just like to briefly, ask you about that before we conclude without necessarily telling us everything that's in the carbon app. I'd love to know what are the major things that it does and is good for. And then what were some of
The key things that you wanted to make sure we're in there when you built it, like what's the sort of logical backbone behind? Because I think there are a lot of food. Counting calorie counting exercise apps out there everyone I've talked to that uses carbon including our mutual friends, cigar and Getti. That's member of my podcasts Etc, Raves about it. So what is carbon and and what does it do? And what was your mindset and building it, what did you really want to see there that you didn't see else?
We're
so those listening may not know but I really, I started online coaching people for nutrition back in 2005 and that was the vast majority of my business all the way up until like 2017. And I had a lot of success with that where whether whether it be just average, folks looking to lose weight or build muscle, and right up to Elite level competitors and physique sport.
so,
I kind of had this idea like I don't want to say, I had the idea a few people had the idea. What if we could take what I do in coaching and try to automate as much of that as possible? Because you know, by the time I was becoming a really popular coach. I mean, I was expensive, you know, you were looking at like, you know, me charging, I got to the point where I charge you about a thousand dollars a month for coaching, right? And not most people cannot afford that and I would like to not just coach rich people.
You know what I mean? I would like to be able to help other people, so the idea was to create an app that could do some of this stuff. Now, there's always a place for human interaction, but for people who can't afford that our app is basically 10 bucks a month.
and basically, what we wanted to do was set up an app where
Think about, if you went to a nutrition coach. Well, what would they do? They would probably ask you some questions about your goals, take some anthropometrics and they would use like that information, may be dietary preference and then use that information to kind of formulate a baseline plan, that's what carbon does. So we asked you, I think there's eight questions in the signup flow about like your activity, your exercise, your lifestyle, your body weight, your body fat percentage. And if you
No, it will help you calculate it, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. And then your dietary preferences and we use that to come up with kind of your Baseline and your Baseline, will be your calories, your protein, your carbohydrates and fats. And what's different about our app because like apps, like my fitness power will do that as well. What's different about ours is you, we encourage people to log their weight daily for the reasons that we talked about earlier, and then you can also track your food in the app and
And honestly I think our food tracker is actually like way easier to use than most of not. There are what we typically get great rave reviews about is how user-friendly are interfaces that it makes intuitive sense.
And so you track your food, try to hit these, these macros that you're prescribed. And each week, you will be prompted to check in with the coach on your check-in day and then you put in some information and then based on how you're progressing, the app will adjust or not adjust based on how you're progressing. So for example, if you're hitting a weight loss Plateau, it will sense that and it will reduce your calories or if
You're trying to gain weight and your, you know, hit a plateau, it'll increase your calories. And there's a lot of back-end algorithm stuff that takes care of this, but the fundamental Crux of the app is we try to determine your total daily energy expenditure because that's going to tell us the first big thing. We need to know which is how many calories do you need to be eating for your goal, right? So on the front end, we basically
Do our best. Guess based on your anthropometrics. Now can be perfect. But it'll get us in the ballpark. And if you do know, like, some people already know, well, I know what, I maintain my body weight on. There's actually a spot where you can manually enter that during the signup flow. So, that's helpful for people who are super nerds like me. But then if you're just people will ask what do you do? Take Apple watch data at you. Take this to take that and no for the reasons, we talked about that, it overestimates energy, expenditure what our app does is.
It's an algebra equation. If you because your body weight, your, your maintenance calories is your total daily energy expenditure, your average calories that you eat to maintain your body. Weight will be the same as your total daily energy expenditure. So if we know how body weight is changing,
And we know how many calories the person is consuming. We can actually solve for what energy expenditure is right? And you can see in the app that will there's a kind of a maintenance calorie tracker or energy expenditure tracker. And typically after about three to four weeks, even if the app was off at first, it will have you pretty darn close because like let's say somebody comes on and they their goal is to lose, you know, pound and a half a week or something like that. And the first week, they
Use three pounds. Now, the app actually accounts for the fact that you can lose more water weight. The first weeks they probably wouldn't get an adjustment. But let's say the next week, they lose 3 pounds, the app will sense that and adjust their calories up because it will be estimating that their energy expenditures are actually higher than what it had previously. Estimated based on the amount of weight they're losing. And the same thing goes in reverse, if they're not losing the amount of weight that they're supposed to, it will lower them based on the fact that it
May have overestimated their energy expenditure but that's the first Crux of. It is tracking that energy expenditure and then the next thing is protein. So when the backend algorithm stuff is happening, calories are set first based on your energy expenditure and your goal. So for example, if you have an if you want to rest of diet, your calories are going to be lower even if your energy expenditure might be a little bit High just because if you're trying to lose two pounds a week, I mean,
Going to be in a pretty aggressive calorie deficit. So it's going to set the calories first then it will set protein based on your lean body mass.
Then the calories that are left over will be allotted to carbohydrate and fat depending on your dietary preference and we have a few different dietary preferences there's balanced, which is about 50 50 to 60, 40 carbohydrate to Fat of the remaining calories. Then you have low fat, which is obviously a higher ratio of carbohydrate. You have low carb, you have a ketogenic diet which is very, very low carb. And then there's also a plant based option and within
Of those options still, you can go in and actually shimmy the macros a little bit within a certain range so that you can kind of dial in what your specific dietary preferences. Because again, if we go back to what is going to produce the best long-term results, it's whatever the person can adhere to. So, we really try to start with the concept of adherence by allowing people to have the dietary preference that they want. And there's some other apps out there that are good apps. Like for example, we get asked a lot, what to do.
And our app and the Renaissance Period ization app and they have a great app. But there's this kind of more rigid and it'll say, you know, you're going to eat this many meals and you're going to have these Foods at these times. So work on the opposite, we want to give you maximum flexibility. Now, for some people, they would prefer the rigid structure at first. But we find that for most people giving them more flexibility typically, improves adherence over the long run. So that's kind of how the app works. And again, like there's multiple different goals, it's not just a weight loss.
Up, there's a maintenance. There's a muscle building. So you've got all kinds of different goals that can be accommodated, different rates of each of those goals. And I mean, I've used the app for over three years now to do my body weight. And I mean like when I say that it's dialed me in because I'm very regimented with, you know, logging and and and logging my weight. So what I targeted to weigh in at Worlds, I got down to the
The point 1. Kg so testing is pretty cool to be able to like use a tool that I helped develop to actually coach me. So it's a great tool. You know, we did some statistics. We polled 2,500 members and one of the questions we asked is, would you recommend this to a friend and 91% said, yes. So we are average. I think our average retention is like 7 months which for an app that cost $10 a month is really great. So,
yeah, as I mentioned,
Number of people, I know use it. This is not a paid promotion, I but I think people need guidance and tools and what we know about the human brain is that winging it can work but that the brain will cheat itself often what there's a Fineman quote about this, and I'll get it wrong and always bad to try and quote Fineman anyway, because he said it so much better, but that we are the easiest TC to fool ourselves. Basically is what he was saying, easiest of who absolutely sounds great. We will put a link to it.
So that people can check it out again. It sounds like a wonderful tool and a tool that Nets. A lot of the principles that sit as major themes for weight loss weight gain, I would assume directed lean muscle lean tissue gain is what most people are after weight maintenance. Because the number of people would like to just maintain listen, I really appreciate your time and all that you're doing certainly your time and energy and knowledge.
Today, but also, what you're doing on the various social media channels. And just the fact that somebody from the depths of Academia, is out there. Sharing, so much knowledge across so many domains. You're a gem in this landscape of nutrition and one that people really need to hear from. So thank you so much for your
time. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. I really enjoyed it. Well, do it
again. Thank you for joining me today for my discussion with dr. Lane Norton. I hope you.
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