Harvard Professor: “I Tried Every Diet. This Is By Far The Worst.” - Daniel Lieberman

You've spent years researching every major diet and trying many of them yourself. I want to go through and review all of those, but first off, what was that journey like? >> Well, it was fun. I mean, um I I I've been working for quite a few years on on a book about the evolution of diet, and I thought rather than just simply studying them, which was the majority of the book, I thought I should try them as well. So kind of you know on and off as I was working on the book my my wife who joined me for many of these diets kept trying some of these you know diets some of them some of them better some of them worse but just kind of give a little first of all some participant observations so I get a sense of what these diets are like but also to kind of add context and experience them for myself. >> What did you start that journey believing about food that you no longer agree with? [laughter] Um gosh that's I changed my opinions about so many things. I mean the reason I started this book um and this and this journey as you say is that um I'm actually my research is mostly on physical activity. I'm I I study the evolution of running and walking and throwing and and various other physical activities but I also teach nutrition and digestion and physiology and you know that kind of stuff. and I read the literature and a few years ago actually with some uh colleagues I taught a course on diet and exercise and I've just been so confused by what I read right because one you can read in the New England Journal of Medicine you know the arguably the top journal in the world articles in the same year that tell you that saturated fat is good for you and then articles that tell you saturated fat is bad for you know this much salt is too much for you and this much salt is actually just perfect for you I mean you you name it there's controversy and confusion. And so I wanted to explore those problems myself. >> Um, but as an evolutionary biologist, I wanted to integrate an evolutionary perspective, an evolutionary lens with hardcore biomedical data, cultural data, anthropological data, experiential in, you know, information, all that together to think about it in a whole. So, so my so I was really trying to do this in order to answer questions for myself. What use does an evolutionary lens give you that is typically missed when people make assessments about diet and nutrition? >> Oh gosh, it's hard to know where to start. There's a famous expression in my field that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It was written by a guy named Theodosius Dubzensky in 1972. And what he meant was that we didn't we weren't engineered, we weren't designed, we evolved. And if you want to understand why things are the way they are, you need to take an evolutionary perspective. Right? So evolution answers a lot of why questions and when you start addressing why questions you begin to think differently also about how questions and what questions. So so I mean so nothing makes sense except in light of evolution and diet is no exception. >> It feels like nutrition and diet are a little bit like new religions. [laughter] There's dogma. It's a super sensitive topic. People get tribal. It's often impossible to change their belief no matter how much evidence you give them. Why do you think that's the case? Why do people become so ardent? >> That's that's I completely agree with you. And in fact, I think that one of my biggest takeaways from working on the book was just how tribal people are about their diet. And I and I I I don't know the the answer, but I suspect it has goes something along the lines of this, which is that for for millions of years or thousands of years, depending on which time scale you want, people ate the way their culture dictated. Right? If you lived in the Middle East, you'd eat like a Middle Eastern. If you lived in Japan, you'd eat like a Japanese person. And now we live in a world where everybody kind of eats the same stuff. And um and a lot of uh institutions are sort of crumbling. And I think people are searching for identity. And I think one of the ways in which we define ourselves is by what we eat or very often by what we don't eat, right? And that's been sort of the case all along. You know, if you're kosher, you don't eat this. If you're if you're Jane, you don't eat that, etc., etc. But but I think um uh people are searching for for meaning and identity and diet is really important way of defining that. A lot of the a lot of diet um I mean some diets are kind of like cults. I mean um they're sort of online nutritional theology. >> They're kind of online cults and everybody kind of agrees. It's kind of like group think. >> You know why I think at least part of it is because we all understand that the diet that we eat is related to longevity. what we are faced with when somebody says that they disagree with our they diverge from what it is that we're eating. It's kind of a threat against our own existence that if this person is right implicit in that if I believe deeply about my diet and they believe deeply about theirs and we diverge in our opinions that means maybe they're going to live longer than me or that means that maybe I'm going to die sooner or that means that I'm wrong in some sort of a way. It's not an abstract >> discussion. It's got it's going to have real world implications. Is this going to come into land at some point? >> Yeah. But I think the one of the key words you just said is belief, right? Because one of the real problems about diet is that it takes years, many years for the effects of diets to manifest themselves in terms of our health. And so we all have to take leaps of faith when we pick our diet, right? I mean, right now I'm, you know, let's just say I follow the the Mediterranean diet. you know, I can read all the the studies I want about how good the Mediterranean diet is for me, but I won't know for 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years if if it's true, right? So, we all have to take a leap of faith to some extent when we pick a diet. Some people take leaps of faith based on their friends, their the group, the community. Others are a little bit more scientific, but no matter who you are, you have to figure out what you believe and how you're going to or what information you're going to use uh to credit. >> Okay, let's get into some of the religions. Maybe two of the most ardent groups of vegans and carnivores. [laughter] Plant-based diets superior. [sighs and gasps] >> You know, I try not to be that judgmental about anything. I mean, if you look at the data, um, look, no matter what you, everybody who has a particular diet idea, and including the fat diets, almost all of them are based on some grain of truth. All of them, the carnivore diet included. However, when you look at the data and you look at like big metaanalyses, large scale studies, um I don't think there's much contest that, you know, plant-based diets of various sorts, and they're not all the same, uh tend to have better health outcomes, uh in terms of metaanalyses, long-term studies, and there's also mechanistic data as well. So, I think if you're going to air on the side of animals versus plants, I I think that science is pretty clear. Plants. >> Why? Gosh, there are a lot of reasons for that. Um, well, one is that plants um, again, not not all plants are the same. If you eat crap plants, right, if you eat sugar and, you know, highly refined grains and carbohydrates, you're not eating a very healthy diet. I mean, a lot of ultrarocessed foods are mostly plant. >> Um, that doesn't make them, the fact that they're plant-based doesn't make them healthy. Um, but so, so, so, so, you know, it's it when we oversimplify, we can get ourselves into trouble. But um but there's evidence that that uh meat for even though we evolved to eat meat, meat has been played an important part in our evolutionary history, meat is nutritious. Um there's no question about that. But for example, there are studies which show that there's a dose response effect between how much meat you eat and your risk of cancer. Um I think it's um like one serving of meat which I think they count as 85 grams increases your your your risk of cancer over that over x years by I think 13% and if you if you double that it you double the risk. So there's a there's a dose response effect. So that's a that's epidemiological data and there are quite a few studies which show that. Secondly there are mechanistic studies right? So we know for example that meat has a protein called carnitine and carnitine when it goes to your gut is transformed into another molecule called TMAO. Don't ask me to give you the long form of the of the of the molecule. And TMA TMAO is a known inflammatory molecule that causes inflammation and has been associated with risk of of um um actually it's been shown to be mechanistically related to atheroscerosis to hardening of the arteries. to increase blood pressure. Um, another effect of meat is that that uh red meat not not u not poultry or fish has a has a glyoprotein. So a glyoprotein is a little you know every cell has these little kind of like forest of of like sugar protein molecules that stick off and red meat has a particular kind of glyoprotein called NU5GC. I mean that doesn't really matter with the the name but turns out that humans have an inflammatory response to that. um we all humans all humans there's a gene called cah which causes us to um to transform one proteoglycine into another kind and that makes us um have a response to any red meat and um and that's also been argued to be another mechanistic reason for the the data I mentioned earlier that there's a relationship between dosage of meat eating and and [snorts] cancer risk but again it's not so simple because Everything has trade-offs, right? There's no such food that doesn't have a trade-off. Um and and meat is just one of them. And u so uh the other, of course, the issue about meat is that meat tends, not always, but tends to have a higher amount of saturated fat. And saturated fat is [clears throat] one of the most controversial things on the planet, right? In when especially when it comes to nutrition. And and we all don't we don't you there's a lot of variation in how we respond to to saturated fat. Some of us can eat as much saturated fat as we want and it doesn't really have any negative effect but others um do have some genetic susceptibility to saturated fat and it does raise their their risk of raise the levels of of lipoproteins or cholesterol molecules that cause um heart disease. So it's complicated. Um there's there's never a simple answer for anything. >> It's seems like maybe some of the reasons for plant-based diets having better outcomes, at least epidemiologically is not maybe to do with what's in the plants, but what's not in the meat that isn't being eaten. It's like the elimination diet of meat as opposed to the inclusion diet of plants. >> Of course, I mean, that's part of the problem with studying nutrition, which is that every time you don't eat something, you're eating something else or every time you eat something, you're not eating something else or almost. So, so that's one of the reasons why, you know, you can't do a study, right? I can't I there's no one is ever going to do a study where they take, you know, 100 groups of twin, 100 sets of twins and have one group of twins eat an all meat diet >> and one group of twins eat an all plant diet. And even if they did do that, how would you separate all the other effects, right? Because when the ones are eating the meat diet, what is it they're not eating? And the ones are eating the plant diet, what is it they're not eating? And so on. and how do you correct for the effects of exercise and and and smoking and you know all those other factors? It's it's not possible to do that. >> Why is it that the carnivore movement has had such a boon recently if some of the data seems to be skeptical about the kind of outcomes of a very heavy meat-based diet? >> You know, that's a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, I think part of it is again it's a bit tribal. I think meat is associated with manliness and and your masculinity. Uh that's explains I think some of it. Uh in the book I I recount um you know James Blunt the English singer. Yes. Went on an all meat diet and ended up getting scurvy. But he describes um he describes that um that the reason he did is he thought it made it more manly. >> Um now I mean that that that's probably not everybody. Um there are others who, you know, that they they hear um uh podcasts or or or whatever that uh that that um um that expound the the benefits of of a meat diet and they're attracted to it for one reason or another. And and and um you know, one other issue is that a lot of people are on really unhealthy diets. And if you pick pretty much any diet that's not a crap diet, for lack of a better term, you're going to do better. And so you might think, okay, wow, I'm eating all this meat. I'm feeling better than when I ate lots of McDonald's and drank swile lots of, you know, soda and and whatever. It doesn't mean that you do wouldn't do even better on say a Mediterranean diet or a DASH diet or a Blue Zones diet or, you know, fill in the blank. >> Are you saying that the best diet is the one that you're able to stick to? >> Well, it depends what your goals are. Um, if you're trying to lose weight, absolutely. I mean that's actually there's something called the National Weight Loss Registry where they've actually analyzed uh again because you can't randomize huge numbers of people to different kinds of diets perfectly. So what this study has done is that they've looked at they've tracked people who managed to lose weight and keep it off for a long period of time. I think the average for the respondents is at least six years or something like that. 5.6 years or something like that. And and um and people's diets are kind of all over the place. But the but what they all share is they're not junk food diets. they're tending not to eat a lot of sugar and a lot of you know added fat and things like that and they're able to stick to them. Um um because because you know a lot of people find diets hard, right? Um if you go for a low-fat diet, I mean it's I tried a low-fat diet. It's not it's I fat makes food tasty. You know, going on a low-fat diet is really hard. And a lot of major studies have failed uh um to have very much effectiveness because people can't tolerate the diet. They they they they just start eating more fat. What do you make of the current protein maxing push given what sounds to me like a degree of skepticism around the importance of meat? Protein is the new hot girl in school. Everybody wants her. Everybody's having more of a What do you make of the current world of protein? >> I mean, I find it fascinating. I mean, protein's having its day. And you look, there there's some truth to the the interest in protein. Protein is important. It's you need protein. Uh there's every day you need protein. You can live without eating fat and you can live without eating carbohydrates, but you cannot live without eating protein. >> Is that true? >> Absolutely. Yeah. Your body can turn anything into fat and your body can turn and can your body can transform um uh fats and proteins into sugars. Uh but you cannot there are a bunch of amino acids that are essential. You have to have them in their diet or you'll die. There's actually two fatty acids that you need to eat a little bit of omega3 and omega 6, but apart from that um you you do need to eat protein. Secondly, protein is filling. So, um uh so people tend to be a little bit more sated on eating protein. Protein takes a little bit more energy to digest. Um and and it's pretty nutritious. But here's the thing. Um uh and I think a lot of people um and if you're you know very physically active, if you're menrating, if you're pregnant, um you need you need extra protein. As people age, they also lose muscle mass and it's really important for them to have protein. But here's the thing, the body can't store extra protein. If you eat more protein than your body can use, you can't store it. So what do you do? You turn it into turn it into fat. So eating massive amounts of protein um is probably not that harmful unless you get to ridiculous levels and you can do kidney damage, but you have to really eat a lot of protein for that. So eating huge amounts of protein is not going to have some massive benefit. And there's no ev I don't I've never seen any strong evidence to the to that state. >> One gram per pound of body weight is the rubric. >> That's what they say. Yeah. >> And what do you where do you come in to land on one gram per pound of body weight for protein consumption? >> I don't have a strong opinion on that. I mean, I think, you know, we're all different. I mean, part of the problem with the way we think about diet is we we we medicalize it, right? You know, that you just gave a dose, right? But it doesn't work that way. Um it's it's complicated. It depends on what you're doing and how old you are and whether you're losing muscle and whether you're working out and whether you're 20 or whether you're 80. >> Um um I don't think anybody's able to come up with a perfect dose of protein. I mean, it's, you know, the old definition of economical, you know, enough but not too much. And I think that and we all have to figure out that out. But but it's not, you know, it's it's really hard to come up with a very simple diagnosis for any human being. And that's again part of the problem with diet. We all we all want to be told what to do. We all want to make it simple. We want a magic bullet. We want a quick fix. >> And the problem with diet and nutrition is that it doesn't work that way. >> I imagine we're only two religions in to our >> [laughter] >> uh nutritional theology. uh trip around the world. I imagine some people are already feeling a degree of maybe uncertainty or confusion. Well, okay. So, it's important for me to have protein that I need that it's actually mandatory. It's one of the few things that I have to have or else I'm going to die at some point. But also, there's some pretty sort of negative effects, especially around red meat, it seems, over long-term populations. The plant-based thing appears to maybe win out a little bit, but the carnivore thing is missing some stuff. Well, well, what but one of the weird things about the whole protein thing is that people seem to associate protein with meat. You know, when you go out all all those plants out of there, they're there a lot of protein in those plants. Beans are filled with protein. Legumes are filled with protein. Um uh whole grain foods have a lot of protein. You don't need meat in order to get protein. And in fact, you know, soy is a complete protein. You could actually live your life off soy. You don't actually need to eat meat in order to get protein. So the equation of meat with protein I think has been uh exaggerated. It's true meat is rich in protein and meat is a complete protein but you can also get a lot of protein from quinoa and from you know from nuts and whatever you know it's not a you and you can certainly by and and every culture on the planet has figured out you know every farming culture on the planet figured out how to get sufficient amounts of protein by combining a grain with a legume. So rice and beans or corn and beans, all of those are ex are solutions that that cultures worldwide figured out in order to help make ensure that people got adequate amounts of protein. >> 95% of people don't get enough fiber, which is why Momenus built Fiber Plus, because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually kind of hard, even harder than your last toilet trip. Fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed, everything else you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber Plus is a threein-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. That's why I plan to make my next big dump momentous. Best of all, they offer a 30-day money back guarantee. So, you can buy it and try it for 29 days, and if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemus.com/modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout. That's lim nus.com/modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. Mediterranean diet is regarded as one of the most healthy on the planet. Is that right? it has probably more scientific evidence um to support it than any other diet because and that's partly euroentric because of course you know Europeans and do most of the research and Americans do most of the research so there's a lot of there's a lot more data on it. I'm not sure that the Mediterranean diet is necessarily healthier than a traditional Asian diet or a traditional American diet or, you know, mess diet or traditional Asian diet, but absolutely there's a ton I if you were to go purely on epidemiological data at the moment you would pick a Mediterranean. >> Can you explain what epidemiological data in the world of diet and nutrition means? >> Excellent question. So, so there's a number of ways to figure out the effects of food and diet on health. And so one is to do I'm going to back up a little bit if you don't mind. So one of them is do a randomized control study. That's the gold standard, right? I give you and your twin two different diets and I follow you for x number of years, right? And then I can measure its effect on your cholesterol levels and your this you know your steroid levels and your you know your nasal mucosm production whatever you know I can measure anything I want right but of course it takes a long time to do that and so because we can't wait for you to die um we're going to then measure proxies right uh rather than your actual health outcome. The other is to take large samples of the people and then try to make associations between what they eat and their health outcomes. And that's what an that's an epidemiological study. So So there are statistical associations within a population between say what people eat and their likelihood or their prevalence of getting heart disease or hypertension or cancer or arthritis or whatever it is. And so for um the Mediterranean diet, there are both epidemiological studies, large scale ones, huge, I mean they're now metaanalyses involving hundreds of thousands of of individuals, but they're also prospective studies. So that's the kind of the gold study is when you take a bunch of people and you again randomize them into two groups. So, one of the biggest studies was one done in Spain, for example, where they had over 7,500 Spaniards, and they assigned some of them a Mediterranean diet where they had to have olive oil or or walnuts. There were two arms to that versus Spaniards who were not eating a Mediterranean diet. And after um I think after 5 years they stopped the study because the effects the beneficial effects of the Mediterr Mediterranean diet were so high that they felt that it was unethical to continue the study and and and not get >> deny the other group from the benefits of having a Mediterranean diet. >> That's correct. That's correct. >> Wow. It was so study a non-mediterranean diet was essentially seen as kind of a toxic >> as unethical. As unethical. >> No way. >> Yes way. So uh so that's just one study. Um there's other studies in France, elsewhere. So these are again these are prospective studies. So those are the the best studies right now. Every study has its drawbacks and its problems and its flaws right you can't you know because you have to account for for you know all the other things that people are eating their smoking their physical activity you know whether or not they're you know whether they're lawyers or not who knows what. But uh but when you combine all those different and but there's and then on top of that there are studies where you can feed people a Mediterranean diet for just a few weeks in a lab for example and then measure its effects on on on on aspects of your health that have a outcome like like a cholesterol level, right? Or or or so on and um um or markers of inflammation. And so you combine all those kinds of data together, the mechanistic studies, the epidemiological studies, the perspective studies, and the Mediterranean diet comes out as a very, you know, probably I wouldn't say it's a clear winner, but it's a, you know, it's it's it's it's probably has the most evidence in its favor of any diet that's ever been studied. >> I imagine when it comes to the epidemiological studies, people's dietary choices are idiosyncratic. They're informed by the culture that they're from and the the job that they have. You know, if you're there's an entire industry of PTs that are probably overeating meat, which means that you have meat eaters that are disproportionately personal trainers, but that means that they have the lifestyle of a personal trainer. Or perhaps there's something cultural that, you know, red meat is eaten by uh dudes that like to barbecue from the deep south. Maybe they're doing other stuff with their health, maybe they're smoking or whatever. So the uh selection effect of what people eat which diets and what are the things that aren't under the studies uh purview and what does that sort of >> huge huge effect like you know vegetarians also tend not to smoke right and and so how do you separate the fact of eating a vegetarian diet but the fact that you you're much more likely to smoke and people who uh tend to be um more physically active also tend to eat a healthier diet. In fact, you know, big studies where they like when when you and I die, right, there's going to be a death certificate, right? Saying we died of such and such, and it might be, you know, cancer or a heart attack or whatever, but then what was it that caused the cancer? What caused the heart attack, right? And that's there's a there's a a bunch of epidemiologists out there trying to try to figure that out. And many studies are unable to separate statistically the effects of exercise and diet because people who exercise tend to eat well and vice versa. So, so the coariation user bias. >> Exactly. So, the coariation is what we call coariation is so strong statistically it's very difficult to separate these things. >> Does that make epidemiological studies in nutrition and diet largely useless then? >> No. They're so that's the wrong way to think about it. Epidemiological studies cannot measure cause and effect. They are one of many forms of of information that we can and should use because again you can't I mean like again the gold standard study for a true skeptic is a randomized control study but as we had talked about before you can't do a proper randomized control study and wait 50 60 years for somebody to to see the effects of the diet and control for everything else too. So we we need to be do you know the the the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox? >> No. >> Okay. So there's a famous uh piece of paper from the 7th century BC by a guy named Archiligus of Paris which wrote he wrote and it's like a frag he's a poet like a boring poet but but apparently he he wrote this like bit of a poem that survived and it says um the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing and what he meant by that was that when you chase a fox it'll do anything to run away right it'll hide it'll it'll you know it'll it'll climate, >> climate tree, you do whatever, right? You chase a hedgehog, it just rolls into a ball, right? Hedgehogs just do one thing. And that analogy was used by a very famous uh English philosopher named Isaiah Berlin to think of to kind of divide the world up into hedgehogs and foxes. So, so hedgehogs are big idea guys like they protein is your answer. Um, you know, meat is your answer, um, never eating meat is your answer, etc. Those are what I call hedgehog diets. They're single idea big fix diets. Whereas foxes are the see nuance. They see trade-offs. They see complexity. They realize that every time you eat one thing, you don't eat something else. And and um and and we need to apply I think that you know the hedgehog approach to diet is always the wrong way because it's complicated. People vary. The effects of foods are complicated. There are tradeoffs. And when we start to oversimplify, we inevitably get things wrong. And that's true for even how we analyze the scientific record. If we decide, well, epidemiological data, it's just junk because you can't test cause and effect. You're missing important information. Just as if you decide, oh, you know, randomized control studies are really problematic because they're too short term and they don't involve variation or whatever, you're also missing something important. The best approach is to look at as much of the information as possible and put it together. And that's [laughter] I if I can be a little you know self-promoting that's why I wrote the book because I tried and fed up to take all that evidence and to digest it put it into kind of plain English and make it uh you know uh help people understand that because I think all of us need to try to answer these questions. Let me put let me put it another way. For millions of years millions of years our ancestors they had to know enormous amount to get their food. Right? If you're a hunter gatherer you know you have to know how to hunt animals right? you need to know um you know where they are and how to track them and how you know what's the right you know what environments they're going to be in and and how to butcher them and all that kind of stuff to find plants I mean I've gone out foraging and hunting with hunter gatherers finding plants is not a trivial matter right finding where the plants are knowing how to dig for them and knowing where they are different season we had to be naturalists we had to know a huge amount of information in order to survive now you and I can walk into a Whole Foods or whatever you know whatever sainsbury or whatever or whatever it is. And we're confronted with 40,000 different kinds of food. We don't know how to we don't need to know how to get our food anymore. We now need to know how to choose our food. So, we we need a different kind of knowledge. And and you can you can throw up your hands and just have somebody tell you what to do or you can try to learn for yourself what you what you want, what you care about, what's important to you, what your tradeoffs are. M >> so I think all of us need to educate ourselves to to figure out how to choose our food because that's the challenge our modern world has set us. >> The question of what should I eat today evolutionarily is pretty novel. >> It's completely novel. Nobody ever asked that question. I mean the people >> I will eat what is in front of me because otherwise I die. >> Yeah. I mean the people I work with in in my field work, you know. So I've done a lot of work in Kenya. I've been working recently in Rwanda and you know occasionally people invite me for meals right uh in the in the area where we work we work in a very remote we've worked for 15 years in a very remote part of Kenya actually where a lot of the famous runners are from and I don't even have to ask what I'm going to be served it's always exactly the same meal you have a dish called ugali which is like a like a cornmeal kind of porridge with with either sakuma wiki which is a which is basically colored greens that have been chopped up and sauteed or sometimes if you're lucky with beans or something like that. That's it. That's what you get. Nobody asks what's for dinner. They know what's because they eat what they grow. That's all the food that they have available to them. >> Or I've gone out, you know, with hunter gathers. I've had the privilege of spending some time with hunter gathers. They don't like, well, gee, tonight am I going to have Italian or Chinese or shall I have, you know, um shall I have turtle or shall I have, you know, tortoise or shall I have, you know, kudu? They eat whatever they manage to hunt and whatever they manage to gather. That's it. There's no nobody's asks what's for dinner. They they eat what they have. And all of us and farmers and in hunter gathers. This is that's the way life was for for most people except you know the king of England or whatever. He got to choose what he wanted to eat. And now we're in this completely weird bizarre modern environment. And and surprise surprise we have a hard time because not only do we not know what to eat, we're also confronted with a lot of really bad stuff. I mean, typical, as I said before, the typical American supermarket has 40,000 different kinds of food. 40,000. It's kind of amazing. Um, and over 50% of that is ultrarocessed, designed to be highly appealing, addictive, convenient, inexpensive, although that that's going up a bit. Um, and and and how are we supposed to how are we supposed to cope? We're not we're not we never evolved the mechanisms um to handle that. Going back to the Mediterranean diet, what is it about that diet that seems to what what's the mechanistic reason for why it seems to outperform others? >> Um there's probably a number of reasons. Um there's again there's no one reason. Um so one is that it tends to be whole grain, right? So you so when you take uh flour and you refine it, right? you remove the the outer layers and you remove the germ, you're removing a lot of the protein and you're removing a lot of the fiber. Um, it's um it's it has a um a healthy balance of fats. So, of course, it's famous for olive oil, which is a monounsaturated fat. We can talk about that if you want. And monounsaturated fats are associated with a lot of health benefits. There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. Mediterranean diet often has fish in it. And fish has these omega-3 fatty acids. Um, so it's the constellation of of nutrients that are healthy plus an absence of a lot of stuff like added sugar and a lot of >> say what what are the things that it eliminates most? >> Well, it tends not you Mediterranean diet tends not to have a lot of added sugar, right? tends not to have that much um proper Mediterranean because what you define as a Mediterranean is you can be canled all over the what what the what the Mediterranean with a capital M capital D right which is what's been defined by um by the by the nutritionists isn't necessarily what people always eat in the Mediterranean. I've spent having a lot of really carb rich dinners in in Italy, for example. But um but it, you know, tends not to have added sugar, tends not to have a lot of refined carbohydrates, tends not to have a lot of saturated fat, tends to be diverse and rich in in in phyitochemicals that are healthy and you have a lot of antioxidants and things like that, tends not to have too much red meat. Uh so it's it's it's a mixture of things that have in to been shown to to be reasonably healthy. Now, is it a is it a is it like an optimal diet? Is it perfect and will guarantee perfect health? No. U no diet is optimal. But is it does it has it been shown to be effective for preventing weight gain and for reducing your risk of a wide range of diseases? Absolutely. >> How much is it the lifestyle? I've heard about the importance of the sociality around the Mediterranean diet and stuff like that. Has that been separated out? You know what I'm talking about, right? >> I mean that's again it's very hard to do that. Um but but for example that that study I mentioned, the Spanish study, the predimed study, I mean that that essentially by randomizing people who all presumably had similar lifestyles, they were >> hanging out on the street corner having a coffee at 9:00 p.m. at night with their friends. >> Both arms of the diet were probably the same. So So that so that study, for example, controlled for that. U so but of course there's more to to health and longevity than just your diet. >> What about blue zone diets? Oh my god, don't get me started on that one. [laughter] I mean, blue zones are fun. I mean, look, there's a lot to say about blue zone diet. The first is again, you know, if you it's kind of like a Mediterranean diet, but with even less meat if you if you look at what it prescribes, you know, and but it also prescribes um skipping breakfast. Um it tells you to be social. um it tells you to uh not finish your plate. Um you know there's some social aspects to it but but what's I find and you know if you look at the the the the the sort of prescription of the diet especially nutritionally it's kind what a lot of you know it's not far off from the Mediterranean diet. Um I don't know of any really good highquality studies for the Blue Zones diet compared to say the Mediterranean diet. But what I find amusing about the Blue Zones diet is how it's been advertised because it's advertised and marketed as a diet that'll help you live to be a 100. And that's where I begin to have some concerns because even if you look at the data for the blue zones, like if you there's these supposed blue zones, there's these five regions on the planet where >> where are they? >> Let's see. One of them is in the Nicoa Peninsula of Costa Rica. One's a little kind of little village in Sardinia. It's like a little area of Sardinia. One is uh an island in the Mediterranean. I've forgotten the name of the island. Um, one is uh Okinawa and the other is Lomol Linda, California, [laughter] right outside of LA. >> I didn't know that. >> Those are the five blue zones. And and the idea behind these are these are supposedly areas where a twice as many people live to be centinarians. They live to be 100 years old. And so the idea is if you eat like the people in these areas, you too are going to live to be 100 years old. Now, there's some problems with this. The first is that even if you believe the data that that these these regions have a have a higher percentage of centinarians that turns out that the percentage of centinarians is tiny. So it's like it's like six people out of 10,000 as opposed to in the United States where it's three people out of 10,000. >> The base rate's so low that small changes are massive proportions. >> These are statistical outliers. So you basically have to if if you're not a statistical outlier, which most of us are not, it's irrelevant. It's not a very it's statistical nonsense basically. Secondly, there's a guy in Oxford is in um a demographer at Oxford. I'm trying to remember his name. Saul Newman I think his name is. He's published this really fascinating paper. He did a deep dive onto these blue zones and found out that only 18% of the people in these blue zones actually had birth certificates. So we don't even know who these people are. They just self-report their age. And these are areas. So, and here comes >> Are you telling me Are you telling me that a good chunk of the blue zone fervor could have been around the fact that people just didn't register how old they were? >> Correct. Or it could be insurance fraud. I mean, I have no idea. Um, yeah, exactly. [laughter] Sorry. >> You can get online, you can read Sol Newman's paper. It's hilarious paper to read. Um Um, but also think about it this way. Like he there's this like little area in Sardinia. If you go on if you look on the blue zones map, there's this like, you know, think about Sardinia. It likes, you know, it's this kind of ovalshaped island, right? And there's this little area on the on the western side, there's a little blue, you know, zone on the map, right? And in that little area, you have all these centinarians. Now, tell me that if you like go like 30 miles north or 30 miles south that people have totally different diets. And it's like, so why in this little spot are they all centinarians? and just 20 m north or 20 m south. They're not. It's kind of suspicious. >> What are the What is the blue zone proponent explanation for that? >> Uh I think he's answered. I don't think he's >> Is it a guy? >> Uh yeah, it's a guy named um what's his name? Um Wetner. Betner. I can't remember. He's a he was a he was a um he was a National Geographic reporter who who got really excited by this and figured out how to market all this. But now the one of the most interesting blue zones is Lomol Linda, California. Do you know who lives in Lomol Linda, California? What? Why LMA Linda is a blue zone? Because obviously they're not little, you know, peasanty, you know, farmers eating their traditional foods. >> No, >> they're Seventh Day Adventists. And the Seventh Day Adventists don't believe in smoking. They believe in exercise. They're, you know, they believe that many of them are vegetarians. They believe that >> they don't believe in exercise. >> No, they do believe in Yeah. They they believe that that God gave us our bodies. their body is a sacred thing and that it's our responsibility as um as as as as Christians to to take good care of our God-given body. >> That's the physiological theology. Very good. >> It is. It is. And and so um you know, they don't smoke, they exercise, many of them are vegetarians. They have they do all these sorts of things that the you know, most doctors will tell you is what you should do. And guess what? They have a high percentage of people who live. >> Do they eat the same thing as the people in Sardinia? >> No, of course not. They're eating >> What's going on with this Blue Zones thing? Is it [laughter] fair Is it fair to say that the Blue Zone diet isn't a diet? It doesn't. It's It doesn't do what it says it does. >> Well, I mean, it does. If you read the Blue Zones book, it tells you what to eat. Tells you at least a half a cup of beans a day. It tells you eat lots of vegetables. It tells you not to eat too much of this and not too much of that. So there it's got some it's got some parameters, you know, um but it's not a it's not a it's not a rigidly defined diet. Um and you know the the suggestions aren't totally crazy. Um but they're again it's it's kind of oversold. I mean like one of the one of my you know one of the refrains from in I you know that I keep going back to in my book is that there are a lot of people telling sell telling us optimal diets you know and I have come to hate the word optimal. If you want to piss me off, say your diet. That's your trigger word. >> It's my trigger word. Tell me your diet is optimal. First of all, is it optimal for you or optimal for me? Because you and I are not the same, right? We have different genetics. We have different background. You're young and strong. You have a lot more muscle, you know, but I'm probably faster than you. Who knows what certainly? But [clears throat] um um I'm 62. You're probably a lot younger. um um um you know um is is um are you are you more worried about heart disease or Alzheimer's or or arthritis or this or that or the other? Are you are you do you care more about the environment etc. There's you there's no such thing as optimal um and um and it's it's kind of a it's just marketing and and we and I and so I I now react against people who claim their diet is optimal because it's just marketing. It's salesmanship. It's not science. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? >> Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. >> Aren't you younger than me? >> Yeah, I bet my dad got a DUI. >> Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if your setup is messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Gym Shark, Skiims, Aloe, and Newtonic. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best-in-class. Their checkout's 36% better on average compared to other platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can boost conversions by 50%. So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modwisdom.dom.dom.dom.dom.dom.dom. That's shopify.commodernwisdom. Okay, let's piss off some more people. What about [laughter] lowcarb, highfat? >> Oh boy, am I gonna get in serious trouble after this one. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. We both are. It's fine. Low carb, highfat. >> Well, again, there >> used to be Atkins, now it's keto. >> Yeah. I mean, look, both depends what your goals are, right? Um, it turns out if you want to if your goal is to lose weight, for example, you can lose weight on a low carb diet and you can lose weight on a low-fat diet. Um it is true that people tend to lose a little bit more weight on low carb diets than low-fat diets. Um but the but um and in fact I'm one of the co-authors of the carbohydrate insulin model big paper that was recently American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. So I've put my >> I've signed my name in blood on the you know I believe in the biology behind uh the low carb diet. So we can >> can you explain that in layman's terms? We we can but before we do let me let me just get to this which is that >> uh pretty much any non-crap diet can help somebody lose weight. Uh um and the hard part is to sustain it. And so you need to make a distinction between efficacy and effectiveness. So efficacy is basically how well a diet works when in the perfect world, right? When there's no cheating and you eat exactly what you're told and you can do it for a long time and and you know it's perfect. effectiveness is how it works in the real world. And it turns out that low carb diets have this higher efficacy for weight loss than low-fat diets. This is for weight loss, but their effectiveness because people have a hard time sustaining them >> is only slightly larger, >> right? >> Uh so >> if you could do it, you might perform very well, but being able to do it, the difficulty is somewhat harder, which means that it mitigates some of those gains. >> I mean, I tried it. I mean, I tried it. I've tried every single one of these. By the way, I I have done a much more bros science equivalent of what you did in the research for this book. I've tried all of these. >> Yeah. I mean, I tried the I tried an Atkins diet and it was hard because I had intense carbohydrate cravings and I'm a runner and you know, it's hard to be a runner and not eat carbs. >> The hunger is rough. >> Yeah. I mean, I just just [laughter] I didn't like it that much. Um but I didn't like a lot of the diets that much. But let's let's go into the biology behind low carb diets because because it it's really interesting. So when you eat food um your um some of that food of course is carbohydrate and carbohydrates your body breaks down into uh some of it into glucose which is the bas one of the two major kinds of sugar. There's fructose and glucose. Fructose is what you get from fruit. It's kind of it's is sweeter. Glucose is the kind of more starchy you know less sweet form of sugar. And so that goes straight into your bloodstream. Glucose is your body can only handle a very very small range of glucose because too much is toxic. In fact, I think average human being has about a teaspoon and a half of glucose in their entire bloodstream. And if it goes above that, you're in trouble. You become hypoglycemic and you can go into you can get have serious medical problems. So our body is super sensitive to glucose. So when you eat a meal and it has glucose in it, your your blood sugar level goes up and because the body has to maintain a very tight range of glucose, you your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. [snorts and clears throat] >> And insulin is your basically it's your growth hormone. It's the hormone that causes you to store stuff. It so it insulin causes your your your cells to take up that glucose so the levels go down. Now, insulin also tells your cells to hold on to energy. So, so to prevent your cells from releasing releasing fat because you store that energy as fat. Your cells turn the glucose into fat. Excuse me. So when you are on a low carb diet, you keep your insulin levels low and that means that you're storing less and also you're not holding on to that fat and that helps you and and that can and so so so the biology is pretty simple and I guess pretty clear though it gets more complicated because there's another hormone called glucagon which makes it more complicated. Um physical activity affects things. there's, you know, there's nothing is ever simple and and and the carbohydrate in insulin model is is is no exception. So, so there's a real basic logic behind the the the the carbohydrate insulin model. Uh the problem is that when people go on these low carb diets, they're hard to sustain and a lot of people um uh can't maintain them for that long and their carbohydrate levels creep up and and uh and and that's the end of the diet. Um, but you can also lose weight on a low-fat diet and plenty of people have. And >> I didn't even know that low-fat, high carb diets were a thing. That's one that I haven't tried. >> Oh, so so there are plenty. I mean, I mean, there were the some of the biggest diets in the country were, you know, the Pritikan diet, the Ornish diet. There's a whole bunch of >> These sound like fantasy races from a Lord of the Rings novel. [laughter] >> Um, DASH stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension. So it was originally developed for >> blood pressure >> for blood pressure but it turns out to be a low-fat diet and it's actually probably the second most studied diet after um after Mediterranean. It's very well studied. So it was developed by NIH and there's a lot of scient there are a lot of randomized control studies for the DASH diet and people who stick to the DASH diet which which by the way tried in the book uh do lose weight. Absolutely. They can and do >> surely somebody that's on a low-fat higher carb diet is going to be ripping their insulin levels around more. No, because it depends on the kind of carb you eat because there are good carbs and there are bad carbs. So if you eat a refined carbs and you know lots of stuff with lots of sugar, lots of crap, your insulin levels are going to go skyhigh. But if you eat unrefined carbs, right, if you eat I mean if I mean if I eat lots of kale and you know whatever, is that my are my glucose levels going to go skyh high? Of course not because all the fiber in that kale is going to is going to slow the rate of digestion. There's not. So, so there are plenty of foods that that are that have carbohydrate that are not high glycemic. Um, so the idea that all carbs are poisonous and cause you to raise your your your your blood sugar levels ridiculously is just not true. I mean, if that were the case, because think about it, for most of human existence, people have eaten mostly carbs. All those farming diets in the Mediterranean, in Asia, elsewhere, are mostly carbs. They're eating corn. They're eating rice. they're eating wheat, etc. But until recently, none of those people or very few of them were obese or or or or overweight. So these diets, you can eat a a a high carb diet if it's high in fiber and not high in sugar and not highly refined. These are not high glycemic diets. >> The area in Rwanda where I work, right, and the area in Kenya I work, people are getting at least 65% of their diet from carbs. At least 65. That's a high carb diet. And I dare you to find somebody with overweight or obesity in the area. They don't exist. There's none of them. They don't they're not around. >> How much of that is because of the type of carbs and how much of that is just because of the number of calories? >> Well, they're eating a lot of calories. It's it's a combination. It's it's it's the kind of foods they're eating. So, they're they're eating, for example, when I go have that that meal I described earlier in the Nandi Hills, right, where we have some agali, but we also have sukuma week and we have beans. Those are all high highly fibrous low low glycemic foods. They're it's a generally healthy diet. They're also very physically active and that helps. And when you're physically active, so one of the reasons physical activity helps people prevent g weight gain. It's not just how many calories are going in versus out, but when people are very physically active, it changes the insulin sensitivity of their muscles so that they're um so that you actually produce less um you actually produce less insulin for a given amount of carbohydrate. So again, nothing is simple and and and and when we try to oversimplify, we we get into trouble. and and and and I wish it were simple, but again, one of the major arguments that I'm trying to make is that this please it's it's a plea to stop oversimplifying complex multiffactorial things. We just all need to educate ourselves a little bit so that we can help make sense of all the diversity out there and all the different people out there trying to make money off of us with their various different diets. It it just doesn't work the way um we've been told it does. I understand that people shouldn't be trying to over complicate or oversimplify things, but the degree of the the even just so far we've done like five diets or [laughter] something and all of them kind of feel like they're pointing in the opposite direction. And you said, "Well, lowfat can work because of what it doesn't do to insulin in terms of spiking insulin, but high carb can work as long as you eat the right kinds of carbs and the plant-based stuff that works, but you do need to get some protein, but it doesn't matter where it's from." And you some people feel good on the carnivore thing, but so it's I understand why people feel this like malaise, this a degree of overwhelm like, okay, we shouldn't be oversimplifying it. optimal as your Russian sleeper agent activation code was. >> But at the same time, if I'm so >> So I have a solution for you. >> Burdened, I don't know what to do. >> I have a I I have a solution for you, which is that again, there's there's there are kernels, even large larger than kernels, are whole cobbs of truth to all of these diets. And why do we have to pick between lowfat versus low carb versus low calorie? I haven't talked about low calorie, right? Why do we have to pick? You can actually take the best of all of all of that, right? >> So, you can take the best of the low carb diet by eliminating or removing or not eating too much of refined carbs that raise your insulin levels. You can take the best of the low-fat diet by not eating too much highly caloric saturated fat, which does to according to a lot of studies um either increases your risk of cardiovascular disease or doesn't lower your risk of cardiovascular. We can talk about that later on. So polyunsaturated, monounsaturated fats are are risk lowering fats and also you know calories do matter. How many calories you eat do do matter? >> We we need to talk >> and so so you don't you know not eating too much is also helpful. So why not combine the best of all these various kinds of diets without without going down the the kind of >> but as soon as you combine the best of all of those kinds of diets, you now have a new diet. >> No, you have the med you know what you have? You have the Mediterranean diet. >> That's the diet. that is a new diet >> or or or you have essentially any traditional farming diet. Okay. So, so I would say that a a traditional Asian diet, a traditional African diet, a traditional Mesoamerican diet, a traditional Mediterranean diet, all share the same basic characteristics that we've just talked about. a lack of highly refined carbohydrates that raise your insulin levels, not too much saturated fat, not too much food, not too, you know, it a diversity of foods, a mixture of of whole grain uh cereals combined with legumes that give you complimentary protein. People have been eating these for thousands and thousands of years now. Are they optimal diets that are going to guarantee you to live to be 100? No. But are these diets that have over the t course of time plus in recent studies been shown to be generally healthy and prevent weight gain? The answer is yes. >> Okay. >> So it's so in a way it's not that complicated >> that we've started to simplify. What about calorie restriction? I've been told that it's the only reliable intervention that actually works for extending lifespan. How >> if you're a mouse? >> Are you saying that? Are you saying that the rodent studies don't come across into humans when it comes to calorie restrictions for >> lifpan? No evidence yet in humans. In fact, not even in primates. So, do you know there's there was a big study that was done in um in um was Wisconsin where they took a whole bunch of macaks, right? And they gave uh one group of macaks uh calorie restricted diet and another group of macaks and this is a 20-y year long study. Imagine how much time it took and >> two decades of calorie restriction if you're in the wrong group of macaks. [laughter] >> And guess what? The group of macaks that were in the calorie restriction diet were way healthier than the ones that were not in the calorie. So, so there were these papers published saying, "Tada, calorie restriction works in primates, which means it probably works in humans." But guess what? When people looked at the data, the non-calorie restricted macaks were basically being fed a crap food diet. They were getting lots of sugary foods. They were getting obese. They were, you know, they were not healthy normal macak diets. They were fed an adlinum crap diet. So the NIH at vast expense, I mean, we're talking millions of taxpayer dollars redid the experiment. We're >> another two decades. >> For another two. >> If you're the guy If you're the guy that fed those macaks fries for two decades, you really should be out of a job. >> It's very shameful. But anyway, so the MH redid the experiment and and this time they had them on the same monkey chow diet. So just chopped one in half away >> and and one had a third 30% less food than the other. And guess what? No difference zilch in terms of health and longevity. >> Why do you think it does show up in mice? >> Because mice have totally different life histories. So life history is the series of stages that you go through how you use energy to grow up, reproduce and and whatever. And you know, a typical mouse is ready to reproduce after 3 months, you know, and has series of babies, etc., etc. mice have totally different metabolisms and different growth trajectories and different microbiomes and different you know than than humans. So, so yes, it is true that for some species, for some um mouse lines, but not all, caloric restriction has been shown to improve their lifespan, but not all of them, by the way. Um certainly true for yeast, certainly true for fruit flies, but the evidence for humans is so far mixed. Now, I should also say that it's not based totally on hoie, right? I mean, there are reasons to believe that caloric restriction can be very beneficial. And and again I try to explain the biology kind of carefully in the book but one of them is that it causes what's called metabolic switching. So after a meal our body's got all this nutrients and energy etc. He wants to use it and so you go into growth mode and there's a famous gene called mTor. You've probably heard of it. Malian target of rapamy and mtor is like a it's like a it's like an on gene right? It's like a growth gene. It causes you to grow muscle and grow this and grow that and produce proteins and do all kinds of good stuff. Um, but the consequence of that is that it also causes damage, right? The when you get your muscles produce producing more proteins, you produce what's called reactive oxygen species that can cause damage. You you get you get you get um you get um you know misfolded proteins. You get all these problems, right? that you but but so there's another pathway that's turned on by another big gene called AMPK. Um and EMPK is like your repair gene. And what happens when you go through inter intermittent fasting or calorie restriction is that you turn down or turn off the mTor and turn up the AMPK. So you're turning off growth and you're turning up repair. And that's obviously good, right? But you can't repair all the time. Sometimes you have to grow. And so this kind of metabolic switching between the two is really good. The problem I think is that a lot of Americans and Europeans and you know people in high-income countries, we're constantly in growth mode. I mean how often are we hungry anymore, right? There's there's >> permanently grazing. >> We're grazing. There's there's there's you know in my building you know if anybody gets hungry for just you just go down one flight of stairs and there's these snack machines and you you never have to be hungry. So that means that some people are just constantly in this on mode and they're not turning on on on the repair mode. Um and but we obviously evolved to have these mixture of repair and growth and so so there is and of course when you go into intermittent fasting or you know calorie restriction you are turning on that repair mode and that's good. So there so I'm not saying that it isn't necessarily beneficial or that it might not lead to increased longevity. It's just that the evidence so far it doesn't exist. Uh so you're you're taking another leap of faith. Um I I'm sure it's it's generally healthy. Whether it'll help you live to be a 100. Anybody who tells you that's the case is is is going beyond the evidence. It might it might it's not a bad strategy, but it's not there there's no strong evidence to that effect. >> That's crazy. I didn't know that there was no strong evidence. I mean, look, the hommetic stressor That's how people make money. You know, [laughter] if they told you, if they told you like what I just told you that, you know, this is how it might work, but we're not really sure, you're not going to buy, you're not going to buy the product. >> Many many of your arguments are highly unsexy is a way like unmarketable. >> Completely unsexy. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, but because we want quick fixes. We want Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if I just by skipping breakfast, I could live to 100. I wish that were the case, but I can't promise you that. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades, and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most sciencebacked effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So, all you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP Strength app could wipe your ass for you, probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below by heading to rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. The reason that I think people are not only drawn to it because simplicity is seductive, but also just think about how many different choices you need to make. Now, again, what am I going to eat today? Is an evolutionarily novel question that humans have never had to ask before. >> Yeah. >> And never had to answer before. Uh, and if somebody comes along with something that feels like a relatively tight set of guardrails, it's why I think constrictive diets generally, whatever they are, just help. Like I I speak for myself, right? So, um, couple of years ago lived in a house with toxic mold, one of the uh, byproducts that comes out of that an awful lot of inflammation and brain fog and and TGF beta and C4A and MMP9 blah blah blah, all this stuff. One of the uh often cited diets that seem to help people with some of the brain fog is going carnival. So get rid of anything that spikes blood sugar. I felt remotely human for the first time in 6 months. >> Yeah, I'm sure you did. >> I also had LDL in the 400s [laughter] and uh I then had to unwind that. >> Everything is a trade-off. >> So you looking at my bloods versus looking at how I felt. Uh I'm like, well, it was so good because it was restricting something. It made it very easy for me to follow. It's a super simple set of rules. Is it meat or blueberries or raspberries? If not, don't eat it. But what it did to and it made me feel good and it made me look I was shredded out in my mind. Look fantastic. Finally hitting my protein goals for a bodybuilding, you know, diet. But also, what's this going to do to my arteries over if I keep doing this for only a couple of years? uh like even on a a clearly scan uh I could see a little bit of progression just from a short space of time, right? Plaque progression in the space of like >> 9 months that we done this clearly scan 18 18month intervals. So I understand why people want that simplicity. What is interesting to me around the sort of calorie restriction thing is the super magical source that's inside of the intermittent fasting. It's the 168 Right. >> 52. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's >> Or there's the there's the um what's it called? The the the warrior diet. >> Is that OMAD? >> I can't remember. The warrior diet is you eat like like only once a day. >> Yeah. Oh, one one meal a day. Um is there something special about intermittent fasting? >> Well, again, intermittent fasting moves your body in and out of what's we call positive and negative energy balance. Therefore, turning on and off mtor and MPK. It's called metabolic switching. >> But you could imagine >> but there's no one way to do it. You could imagine a world in which you did calorie restriction. Let's say maintenance for me is 2400. I could calorie restrict even down to like a significant amount. It's 1,800 or 1500 or something. But I could do that by consuming uh 100 calories every hour for each week waking hour that I was this would be kind of highly inefficient diet to have. But you understand what I mean, right? There's a difference between grazing your way to calorie restriction or fasting your way to calorie restriction. If you were to take, have you seen any evidence that if you were to take two populations, one of whom was doing OMAD and another of whom was grazing to a similar kind of calorie restriction that they would have different outcomes >> in terms of weight or in terms of inflammation or whatever? So, so if those studies exist, I don't know them because I'm a cool study to do. >> Well, I don't Yeah, maybe. But >> don't maybe be my suggestion. That's a cool study, okay? Says a guy that's not in your industry at all. I'm I'm just thinking about the the hypothesis that we're trying to test. So the the the mechanism by which intermittent fasting or low calorie, you know, calorie restriction is supposed to work is by by putting the body into a negative energy balance. And as you say, there's two ways of doing it. One is to fast or the other is not eat. Certainly there's a lot of data on not eating very much. Um that's just called the diet, right? And and um and the problem with diets is that people get hungry and they're really really really hard to maintain and they're not very useful for most people because you're tired, you're exhausted, you're cranky, you're hangry, you're whatever, right? Intermittent fasting, one of the reasons people love intermittent fasting is that you just, you know, basically skip breakfast for example if by one one form of intermittent fasting. And so you can it's much more tolerable. And plus the other benefit of intermittent fasting again is that is the metabolic switching going from one to the other because nobody in their right mind would think that being a constant state of negative energy balance is a good thing. >> It's called starvation. [laughter] >> It's called starvation. Right? This is and and here's another thing. In addition to the fact that there are trade-offs. Every time you do one thing you don't do something. Every every food, every t diet, everything there benefits and there costs. There's nothing. Find me one that doesn't have a trade-off and I'll be I'll be really interested. But I have yet to find one. But remember this also that we are adapted not we're not adapted to be healthy. We na natural selection didn't put us on this earth to live to be 100. We evolved for one thing and one thing only as far as natural selection is concerned is that's to have babies. Um so we evolved to to maximize our reproductive success not to be longived and healthy. And so we uh so a lot of the adaptations that we have are are are are there not to improve our health, they're to improve our reproductive success and and that makes things complicated and and that adds to the trade-offs. Get me to puberty and hope for the best. [laughter] >> What about the sort of world of the modern paleo movement? Because what it sounds like paleo is in one of the titles that you have for the world that you come from. uh looking at a more ancestrally aligned natural without falling into a naturalistic fallacy type diet. You could assume, hey, well, if we just eat like hunter gatherers did, and the paleo movement kind of promised this from a dietary perspective, but is it right to say that there is an ancestral diet that we can recreate? Has the Paleo movement got it right? Uh, I wish they had, but they again um, [laughter] I'm going to sound like a broken record, but they got some things right and they got some things wrong. So, it is true that some aspects of the pale diet make a lot of sense, right? You know, don't eat a lot of sugar, don't eat a lot of saturated fat. That's the original Paleo diet is don't eat a lot of saturated fat. There are some Paleo dieters dis dispute that. Um, but the Paleo diet also says you should never eat legumes and you should never eat grains and you should never eat dairy. And and their the argument for that is that our ancestors didn't eat legumes and grains. Um, and then we only had dairy until we stopped nursing and then you know that for after we stopped drinking our mother's breast milk that was it. Um, well several problems. First is it's not true that hunter gatherers don't eat legumes and grains. Uh it's absolutely just just absence. >> Don't or didn't. >> Don't and didn't both. We have paleontological evidence. We have Neanderthalss with grain starch thing on their teeth. We have >> Oh, that sounds like reliable evidence. >> We have very reliable you know we have this kind of cartoon character of the Neanderthalss eating like all meat like you know Inuit in the in Greenland. But you know you know 125,000 years ago there were hippos frolicking in the temps when the Neanderthalss were hanging out in southern England. The Neanderthalss were not living in arctic conditions all the time. They were there were times when there was plenty of plants available and they were eating plenty of plants. We have archaeological evidence for that. In addition, for example, hunter gatherers in the Kawahari, the second most consumed food are a kind of bean. It's called the morramama bean. It's their number two food. So don't tell me they don't eat legumes. They do. Um um hunter, we evolve off to eat almost everything. And so actually we did a study on this a few years ago. It was actually during COVID when you know it was a lockdown and I had a undergraduate was going to do an experimental project in the lab that involved you know putting people on treadmills and that kind of stuff and of course she couldn't do it because the lab was closed. So we decided since she was stuck at home to to go through the literature on all the highquality data on huntergather diets from the tropics and just analyze the hell out of the data and compare that to what the paleo diet prescribes because the paleo diet says you should have I can't remember it's like 35% protein and x% carbohydrate and I I can't remember the exact formula. [gasps] The there are 12 hunter gatherer groups for which we have really good data uh excellent data where people actually measured carefully what they eat and they're all over the place. Some of them are eating pretty much all plants almost no no animal food. Some are eating tons of animal food everything in between. Hunter we evolved to eat anything. We are the world animal kingdom's ultimate omnivores. We evolved through cooking and fermentation and various other techniques to because again remember the equation of life is food in equals babies out and that's all that natural selection cares about. You if you if you can eat it and it can help you make babies you should. So the idea that we evolved to eat some particular diet is just not true. We evolved to eat incredible diversity of diets. And remember that we didn't evolve to eat them to be healthy and to live to be 70 80 90 although hunter gatherers do end up being relatively healthy. We evolve them to maximize our reproductive success. So the paleo diet is based on kind of a naturalistic fallacy that if our ancestors ate it must be good. I mean by that imag by that token you know we shouldn't you know if if we shouldn't we maybe we shouldn't like brush our teeth or sleep on mattresses or whatever right and and it's also based on this idea that that um that um that that that that these you know legumes and cereals are are filled with these quote unquote anti-nutrients. So antiutrients are compounds that like bind to vitamins and minerals and and prevent us from absorbing them. >> But guess what? If you cook your food or you ferment your food, you get rid of the anti-nutrients. Otherwise, you know, all those people in Japan who have the greatest longevity, you know, they'd be they'd be dying of malnutrition. They're clearly not, right? Um uh so there's there's again there's a lot of these diets are based on elimination and and and they're based on on stoking certain kinds of fears. Um and um and and and that's problematic. So the paradise is not completely wrong, but it's not completely right. Sorry to long answer to your simple question. >> I'd never heard of anti-nutrients before, but I knew that people get worried about lectins and and and fitates and oxalates. >> Those are antiutrients. >> What's the truth about the danger of lectins and oxalates and fitates? >> Well, if you ate raw beans, you'd be in trouble, right? Because they're filled with these lectins and they would, you know, they could cause all kinds of problem. But guess what? If you cook your beans, you're just fine. Um uh so these are compounds that um that are that we you that's why we can't eat raw beans and raw grains because of those those those compounds. >> What do they do to us? >> They again they bind to to minerals and and and vitamins so that you can't absorb them in your gut. So you'd have malnutrition. You'd have vits absorb it. >> Correct. But obviously that's not the case, right? I mean, I know plenty of healthy vegetarians who are clearly not malnourished. They're doing >> despite eating lots of beans >> because they cook their beans. Paraselus, remember Pariselus, famous alchemist from chemist from from the 15th or 14th century, he famously said, "It's the dose that makes the poison, right?" And and these these compounds by the time you cook them and ferment them, they're in such harmless doses, there's absolutely no reason. Even the oxalate thing I've heard even cooked spinach spin that's a concern for some people you're taking come on >> maybe for some people but not for most of us >> right you're not these aren't anti-nutrients aren't a concern as long as things >> I mean I think there are some people with certain kidney issues that that that have problems with spinach but for the rest of us I think spinach is a delicious healthy food >> you've activated another trap card now which is the raw food diet you [laughter] know >> oh my god I have to tell you of all the diets I tried by far the worst It was >> what what was a typical day for you eating the raw food diet? >> I mean we gave it up because it was so hard. I mean I mean look I first of all I was eating because look cooking increases how much energy you get from food. It actually cooking releases nutrients from food. So on a raw food diet you have to eat ridiculous amounts of food just to just to get enough food. I mean I was just eating constantly. I was always hungry and I spent huge amounts of time thinking about food. >> What were you eating? What's a typical day? >> Oh, we were like Well, I mean it was it was it was it was difficult because so much of what we eat requires cooking. Humans evolved to cook. It's there are no the only people on the planet who don't cook are raw foodists in places like Berkeley and Cambridge and stuff like that, right? Um and and and there >> the most developed places in the world, not the least developed. >> You cannot possibly survive on a raw food diet without a really high quality diet. And even then it's difficult to thrive because because cooking releases energy. Cooking releases nutrients. You get more energy from cooked foods than from that. So we were eating like you know zoodles you know zucchini noodles and we were eating you know uh smoothies and we were eating um um um >> fish. Did you eat any raw fish? >> I ate raw fish. Absolutely. I love I love sushi but you can't have it with the rice because the rice is cooked right. So um um it was really hard to to I mean I was just constantly hungry and my wife got depressed. Um um she um she I describe it in the book. She u after 3 days uh she disappeared and came back looking really happy. She went out and got a bagel and that was that was it for her. >> She broke containment. >> I I made it another day. I mean >> you lasted four days on the raw food. >> I lasted four days. It was it was it was um it was really hard. Yeah. And look uh it's based on the again it's a naturalistic fallacy that somehow because you know you know animals don't get these various diseases because they eat raw food that that somehow it must be really good for us. But but we our species started cooking maybe a million years ago. Certainly by 400,000 years ago. Cooking became extremely common among our ancestors to the point that it's changed our digestive systems and enabled us to have these big brains and big bodies and high metabolisms that that we cannot support without cooking. >> How important was cooking to human development? >> Uh crucial. I don't think we would be the species that we are without cooking. We would not we wouldn't have our big brains. We wouldn't have the levels of body fat that we have. Cooking enabled us to have the kind of uh reproductive rate that we have. Cooking. Cooking gave us more energy and you know we are an energetically extravagant species and and and cooking is one of those key elements. Food sharing is another. Meat was part of it as well. Um cooking is an incredibly important part of the of the human evolutionary story that g that made us who we are. >> What does cooking do to digestion? >> Cooking cooking breaks down cell walls most importantly. So that you know when you eat a cooked cooked like if you eat cooked corn versus raw corn and then you look in the toilet the next day what what do you see? Right. I think I that experiment is pretty easy to do. You you digest a lot a lot more more of your food when it's cooked because you break down the cell walls. You break down the down the down the you release the nutrients. Cooking also makes food safer. So if you eat raw meat versus cooked meat, uh which is more likely to make you sick and and when you're sick, you have to if if you survive it, you have to spend a huge amount of energy fighting that, right? And >> speaking to somebody that got salmonella in Rwanda. Yes. [snorts] >> Oh dear. I'm so sorry. >> It's okay. I survived. I survived. But I did get a call from uh the UK um it's like food and safety people that they go around and they if if you go to your GP I felt horrible obviously and uh went in did some stool sample thing and I got a call from environmental health before my doctor called me to tell me what happened and they said Mr. Williamson uh we understand that you were part of a salmonella outbreak. I'm like, "Okay, well, thank you for telling me what's wrong with me." But they wanted to work out where I'd been. They wanted to know, "Hey, what was the restaurant? What restaurants have you been?" I'm like, "Unless you're going to fly out to Rwanda, this is not in your purview, I don't think." But that took a long time to recover from like fully fully recover digestion from it is gnarly. >> Sal I've had salmonella once. It's tough. Yeah, it's really hard. I got it at I got at the at the um at the at the um cafeteria my medical school in in in Elderette, Kenya. [laughter] My entire team got got sick from the >> Oh, at least it was something that you could bond over. >> Bonding is one [laughter] word for that. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can be in the stalls next to each other all all hating your life. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low tea faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where Function comes in. Gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone paddle. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged and you get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. Whether you just need to go to the gym more or you need to play Creed louder in your car, Function will tell you exactly where your testosterone and everything else stands. 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And it has been observed that that sometimes like after a brush fire, the chimpanzees will eat the the burnt stuff. Oh, a barbecue. >> Yeah, it's like a natural barbecue. But they're they're taking advantage of a natural brush fire. They're not they're not cooking it themselves. If there are animals that that you know, no that that that I don't know of. >> Was unique. >> Would you say that farming was a healthy human development? >> Oh my god, that's an interesting topic. I mean, it's [laughter] How many hours? just throwing grenades at you here. >> Um, remember the equation of life, right? Food in equals babies out. >> Yep. >> So, some people say that farming was the biggest mistake that humans ever made. Um, because once people ate farming diets, they had less nutritional diversity and they ate more grains and cereals and blah blah blah. And if you look in the archaeological record, once farming starts, people's health declined. But the reason for most of those declines in health was because of infectious disease because we started several things. First is we started living with animals, right? So we had we living with our sheep and our cows and whatever. We started getting diseases from those animals. So So in fact >> as opposed to only having the animals with us that we could kind of kill or use to maybe pack like carry packs and >> Yeah. We don't Yeah, exactly. We don't we didn't get many animal animal diseases. >> Exposure of human to animal was so low. >> So that's one. The other is that with farming you produce way more food. I mean hunter gatherers struggle to get you know a few thousand calories a day but farmers can even you know neolithic kind of farmers you know with simple non without machines and all >> the farmer can get more calories than he needs >> way more right this they have much larger families. So and with farming not only did populations start to increase but we also became sedentary and started living permanently in villages. So now you have higher [snorts] population densities, higher populations, living with animals. Now you're surrounded by your own cuz you don't have you don't have san, you don't have toilets and you don't have you don't have um sewers and all that kind of stuff. And so now you get the perfect uh mix of factors to increase infectious disease and infectious disease transmission. And so with the advent of farming, you had more people, but you also had a lot more disease. And so um so on the one hand farming was great from an evolutionary perspective because we had more babies. I mean the population of the world by the end of the farming era was up to about a billion people from probably about you know just a few million from before farming was invented which is only what about 600 generations ago. So in six like 590 generations the world went got up to about a from about a few million to a billion people. So from that perspective, from a natural selection perspective, farming was a great idea. >> Scale good from the from from in from disease and misery it was terrible. Also with farming you get famines, right? If you're a hunter gather and and the the weather is bad and you have a you know drought or whatever, you just move, right? You [snorts] you you're in enormous territories at extremely low population density. There's a lot of variation. So you go to where the food is. Now doesn't mean it's easy or you're necessarily going to you know you know live in the lap of luxury but if you're a farmer and you're living in a village and you can't go anywhere else because the next folks over are going to kill you and you you have a drought or say two years of drought and famine you die right so so farmers are much more vulnerable to famine and and disease also with farming you also have the rise of complex civilizations and armies and and you know the you know Napoleon's going to come and you know burn your fields and you know I mean so you have more of this kind of organized violence. It's not that hunter gathers don't kill each other they do but with farming you have you have and civilization you begin to get more uh largecale warfare which of course who suffers it's the peasants. So farming brought a lot of misery and and and and problems although it did provide more food and more energy. So how's that for a >> yet another mixed bag? It's just it's >> I'm sorry I'm an academic. Not at all. No, I I think it's so it's so wonderful. Like the the understanding the fifth order effects of something like that, what happens downstream, I think is so cool. >> But if I could say something more about farming diets, so a lot of people mistake farming diets with modern diets because when farmers were eating their grains and cereal, like think think of a typical like let's go back to the Mediterranean diet. Think a typical farmer from somewhere along the Mediterranean. They're growing barley or wheat and they're having their lentils and their whatever and they're, you know, they're they're chickpeas and whatever. They're having their legume and their cereal, etc. When they're and they're making bread, but they're it's going to be sourdough, whole grain, whole wheat, you know, sourdough bread with lentils. These are healthy diets in the general. They're not these are not insulin spiking diets. Um, these are these are effective diets. Um, and it wasn't until the late 19th century, actually was in Hungary, that that uh in the industrial revolution, that we figured out how to mill flour to get rid of the the the germ and the sperm. And then now all of a sudden, we when we think of like high cereal diets, we think of white flour, not brown flour. And that's a very different thing. I mean, there's actually a fair amount of nutrition in whole grains. Um, they're not they're not the kind of poison that some people think they are. They're not. and especially when you combine them with legumes. So, so I think people have a kind of a funny conception of what a traditional farming diet is. It's been a bit warped by modern by modern um uh cereal diets. >> What's going on with modern gluten intolerances? >> It's gone skyh high. I mean, but so have peanut allergies and I mean we have all these autoimmune diseases where our immune systems have start essentially erupt when we eat certain foods and and and gluten which is a protein in in in in in wheat uh is one of them. Um but I would uh and >> what do you think's going on with gluten? >> I think it's if I had I I have you heard of the hygiene hypothesis? >> Yes. Yes. where if you live in a house that's got a dishwasher, there's an increased chance of asthma. If you live in a house that is that as you make >> that's that's a that's a that's part of it. Yeah. So the hygiene hypothesis is this idea that we have these we have immune systems that evolved to be very active, right? The world was full of germs and worms basically until until until modern sanitation. But you and I still have the same immune system that our great great great grandparents had with the same kinds of cells and all that waiting waiting to defend us against all the all the all the pathogens out there. Now we have dishwashers and we have bleach and we have you know you know we clean everything right and and the result is that we have much less we have fewer I mean how many worms have you had to deal with recently in your in your food? Probably very few. Yes. But until recently and in many parts of the world, everybody is dealing with worms. >> Worms are an important uh hormetic stressor for the immune system. >> They are. So, but you still have the same immune system and now your immune system is is still waiting to do its job. And the analogy is >> hyper sensitized. Well, it's not that it could be hypers sensitized or the or the other analogy I use is is it's like bored teenagers like you know they have all these cells waiting around to do stuff and there's nothing for them to do and they're more likely to get into trouble because they now are more likely to attack self versus nonself because there's no non-self to attack. >> Have you seen the data around children that grow up in houses that have got dogs in? >> Yeah, exactly. And they're much less likely to get autoimmune diseases. >> Yeah. Any any excuse to make dogs great again. >> But there's another factor too. So, so one, so that's one possibility, which is all the all the all the all the sterile environments that we're in. But another important factor could be uh antibiotics. I mean, we now have so many antibiotics that we are constantly taking and it's even even if you don't take them, it's in your food because the antibiotics are given to animals. We are in a in an antibiotic zone. >> Millu, >> millu, thank you. That's a much better [laughter] word. And and of course those antibiotics are affecting our gut microbiome in all kinds of ways and they're breaking down the mucous barriers. They're affecting bile. They're affecting all kinds of aspect in ways that we do not understand. And I think I think there are there's a there's a lot of people trying to study how th those antibiotics may also predispose us to to having things like celiac. So farming mixed bag probably good overall for having more humans on the planet for individual humans. Cooking same thing. I'm I'm interested over time typically things get better. Obesity is now a bigger global health issue than malnutrition. How come so many people are overweight? [gasps] Well, there's no one answer. Um, but if there's any one dominant factor, it's obviously processed food. I mean I I think you'd be hardressed not to I mean we are surrounded by you know you walk into a supermarket and you were just surrounded by foods that are uh engineered for us to be they be hyper palatable that um [clears throat] are loaded with with with sugar and fat and then and you know hitting our bliss point uh so that we keep eating more and more and more and more. Um and um um and you add and you add to that physical inactivity. Although exercise is not the world's best is not that great for losing weight. It is extremely important for preventing weight gain. Um and then um and then you add antibiotics and you add various other factors and and of course some people have genetic proclivity although that doesn't explain the recent rise. Uh yeah we are we are we you we are surrounded by food that makes us um makes us gain weight and the then the then the difficult thing is that once because of natural selection we have this we never evolved to lose weight. So we have these adaptations to hold on to fat because we are we never evolved to to lose >> once you once you create fat cells you can't get rid of the fat cells they only empty themselves. Is that correct? >> That's correct for the most part. Yeah. the fat cells swell and so what you're doing is reducing but each cell is its own little kind of you know metabolic powerhouse and >> if cells get sufficiently big then they split and you now have two fat cells which means that getting fat in future becomes easier when I first learned this I'm not off with the science right this is >> no you're you are not off and furthermore when you have more fat cells remember we talked about the carbohydrate insulin model when you have more fat cells those fat cells are signaling >> sucking up all that stuff so you eat the same food but now body thinks you're you're you're you're starving because you've sucked up all that glucose. You become hypoglycemic. So, gaining weight actually makes you eat more. >> Yeah. I mean, it blows [laughter] this this learning this when I this was in uni when I was thinking about bodybuilding and wanting to be, you know, lean and jacked and stuff and uh hearing that if you get sufficiently fat, fat cells grow and grow and grow and then when they grow big enough, they split into two and then maybe you lose fat. Maybe you're going through the the classic sort of bulk cut uh seesaw, but when you lose fat, those two now, what used to be one, two fat cells, they shrink down. They become smaller or more empty or whatever, but there's still two. And and they're also they're also they're producing less of a hormone called leptin, which is now telling your brain, we're losing energy. You need to eat more to replace us. So So it's this called we called it the lepinostat. So the fat cells when you lose fat you're you're you're the fat cells send a signal to your body to eat more. So so so >> becoming fat at one point in your life makes not being fat for the rest of your life harder. >> Correct. Yeah. So that's the problem. So if we are going to tackle this problem a we need to help people figure lose weight but b we need to spend more energy and more effort to help prevent people from gaining weight in the first place. And one of the scariest statistics I know is the percentage of young people who are having who are overweight or obese. It th those numbers are going up and up and up and up. >> How many young people are >> I think in the United States something like 30% of of of American teenagers um are now classified or 25% are classified as as being obese. Yeah. And that's a really scary number because those kids for the rest of their lives are going to be fighting their weight and and and of course now we have GLP1s which we haven't started to talk about which which may be very helpful for them but but that's that's not the necessarily going to be the magic bullet either. You mentioned before about um the particular combinations of of flavors, flavors rep representing uh macronutrients and what's inside of this and uh some of the texture as well. I learned about orification >> about the design of the texture of food and how that's used to kind of bypass our our usual levels of of satiety and stuff. Can you just explain to let's say that somebody didn't understand why particular combinations of flavors and textures are seductive and attractive to our system. What what are they and why is why does that work in that in that way? I've seen these videos of hunter gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time and it looks like they've taken MDMA. [laughter] Well, you know, we we um I describe them in in in in the book actually one one the last day we were with with a group of hund gathers and we and we cooked for them and I've never seen anybody eat that much food as these at these hunter gathers. I mean they they were just like they were like complete non-paleo diet nightmares you can possibly imagine because humans are humans. We like we like we like sugar. We like fat. We like energy rich foods. >> But we don't just like sugar on its own, right? But we don't just like fat on its own. >> You mix the two. Yeah. So, so too much fat is greasy, right? Too much sugar is cloying. But it turns out that if you have a if you balance them, it turns our brains on like crazy. Like, can you name All right, here's a here's a quiz for you. Can you name a natural food that's high in both sugar and fat that you can get without, you know, stores? I was the fact there's only one. There's only one. >> It's not going to be It's not going to be honey cuz that's just the sugar. It's not going to be avocado because that's just the fat. >> It's not going to be some sort of mushroom. It's not going to be a kind of berry because again, that's going to be too much in the sugar. >> I'll give you a hint. It's the first food you ever ate. >> Milk. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> Milk is rich in fat and it's rich in sugars, right? And and but after you wean, you know, that's it. Unless unless you have [laughter] a supermarket or you know from food factory near you. Now we're able and think about the foods we love. They combine fat and sugar. They there's something Freudian about it for sure. Right. Um and you can h and if you balance high amounts of fat and high amounts of sugar that on their own wouldn't be pleasurable together. They balance each other out. Now add some salt your brain is on fire. >> And then if you can do the texture development if you can get fluffy with crunchy again >> hot and cold. I mean, think about a McDonald's Big Mac. I describe it in the book, right? I actually, you know, a Big Mac has, I think, every flavor pretty much except for spicy that you can possibly think of. It's got it's got hot and cold, it's got crunchy and smooth, it's got sweet, it's got salty, it's got everything. There's a reason that people love that stuff, right? It lights everything up, right? Um, Doritos. Doritos have more than Go get a package of Doritos. don't necessarily eat them. But there are 30 ingredients in Doritos the last time I counted and they have, you know, garlic and I mean there's all these different flavors, but they're all balanced so your brain doesn't think any one is too high. So there's a there's a book by by a guy named Michael Moss called Salt, Sugar, Fat, which is really worth reading, where he's an investigative journalist. Um, and he uh studied and, you know, collected information on how [gasps] the big food companies, you know, through serious testing. These are not accidental foods. These are carefully formulated foods to keep us >> precision engineers, >> keep us reaching for more. Another example I got from his book is M&M's. You know why M&M's have all these different colors? no >> to turn our brains on because you know think oh I'll have a red one now I'll have a green one now I'll have a brown one whatever your your bra even though they all taste exactly the same it's it gets you to eat more right so so we've been subjected to to foods or we have to cope now with an environment with all these foods that have been literally engineered to get us to eat a lot of them and and of course there and and then and you add all the chemicals to them which are probably not very Um and uh you you you end up with what we have today which is that 40% of American adults are classified as having obesity and another 35% are classified as having over as being overweight. So only one in four Americans today >> is actually by you know by BMI classification which is has its own problems um is considered normal weight. one in four. Um and and look, you gota and there's probably other factors, too. Um exercise is probably one of them. Um but um but obviously our food environment is is unquestionably uh is is is the main reason. If there was a pie chart contributing to weight gain and some of it was calories in and some of it was calories out, how much of it would be diet consumption increased and how much of it would be sedentary movement increased or or or lack of movement uh movement decreased? What do you think's the sort of proportion? Because obviously we've had this big change in terms of obesity over the last few decades. >> That's a it's a hard number to come up with, but obviously the vast majority has to be with calories in. >> You think it's mostly on diet? >> Yeah. But but remember our metabolism isn't just calories in versus calories out because it that that's important. But remember that when you so I I didn't get because I got up at some ungodly hour this morning to get the airplane to come here. I have not had a chance to go running today. I'm a I'm a bit of an exercise addict. But had I gone running this morning and I just had lunch, I my the amount of insulin I would have produced from the taco that I had in the airport would have been less than than the fact that I didn't go running this morning. So physical activity doesn't just affect your calorie balance, it also affects your metabolism. So that's one of the reasons why physical activity, although it's not the best way to lose weight, it's very hard to diet by just by exercising. You can lose, but you have to do a lot. But physical activity has been shown, even moderate amounts of physical activity have been shown to help prevent weight gain. And part of that, it's not just the calories spent, but part of that is the fact that it changes our metabolism. >> Why are the calories on a label not the calories that you absorb? >> Oh, yeah. That's an interesting question. So, because the calories on the label are a kind of an idea. It's a formula. Actually, it's over 100 years old. This formula was created by by a guy named Wilbur Atwater who who who analyzed more poop than you can imagine. But anyway, Wilbur Atwater uh was a professor at in um in in Connecticut who who came up with these these and what they do is you take some food and you you separate out the carbohydrates, the fats, and the protein. And then you use a formula 4.1 uh calories per gram of of carb um for um um 4.1 uh calories per gram of of protein and 9 something, you know, for for the fat. And and that's the number on your on your canned food, but that's what's that's what's available to you that an average person would get. But it's not actually what you because you're you're you're not a you're not a particip you're not a you're not a bomb calerimeter in Atwater's lab. You're a human being, right? And and so for example, if you take a uh peanuts, right, and and you measure the the content of the energy in your peanuts, and now you grind those peanuts up into peanut butter, which by the way is the world's greatest food, you you get way more energy, about 25% more energy than if you ate the peanuts whole because the food processing, even though it's the same stuff, the food processing gives you access to more of those nutrients >> because you don't have to work as hard. >> That's right. Because you break the food down to tiny little particles, right? And and your enzymes, right? Surface area to volume ratio. Your enzymes can break that food down. If you take a banana and you blend a banana, you get more energy from that banana than if you just eat the banana whole. People have done that experiment. Another example, >> if you were to just swallow the banana as well without chewing it, [laughter] that would also help. >> Good luck doing that. But um um one of my favorite experiments is a guy named Steven Seor at the University of Alabama who studies what's called diet induced thermogenesis. you know, the energy it takes to break down food because food takes energy to digest. It's a lot actually. And he he used boa constrictors because boa constrictors you can, you know, they can not eat for like weeks and then you can give it a rat and then you can measure how much energy the boa constrictor spends eating, digesting the rat. And he would give the boa constrictor a rat and then he give the you wait a few months and measure how much energy the bo constrictor spent. You could do that by just measuring how much the boa constrictor heats up. Y and then you wait a few months. Bo is very happy. You give it the same rat or the exactly the same size rat, but this time he grinds it up. Same rat, same amount of calories, ground rat. And the bo constructor slips right through his digestive system. It doesn't heat up at all or much less so because the bo conctor is getting way more energy from that rat. So when we pulverize our food, we grind it up, etc. When you make a smoothie, for example, you're getting more energy from a smoothie than if you ate the same amount of fruit whole. >> Does that mean that people should or shouldn't eat smoothies? Well, if you're depends if you're trying to lose weight or not. I mean, if you know if you I mean, I like smoothies. Smoothies are great. I eat them all the time, but I'm not trying to lose weight. But if I was on a diet, I would probably cut down on my smoothies. >> I've heard that uh celery is net calorie negative. >> Yeah, I've heard that, too. I don't believe that. Uh I'm I'm sure you don't get >> the energy needed to digest the celery because of how rough and fibrous it is is greater than the amount of calories. >> Fiber doesn't take a lot of energy to digest. Actually, fiber is just what you send to your microbiome. And by the way, we don't when we measure the calories from food, we're not taking into account the the contribution from our microbiome. So all those bacteria that are once the celery passes through your, you know, the fiber from the celery passes into your colon, they're all these happy bacteria and they're delighted that you had the celery and they're breaking that celery down into what's called short- chain fatty acids of which you which you then up take up into your bloodstream and then you use. So we think actually that for some people maybe about 10% of the energy that they get from their food is not even measured on those nutrition facts labels because it's our comes from our microbiome. We have no idea really. When you have studies that tell you how much energy somebody's eating, they're making it up. We're not making up. They're estimating it. And and it's actually extremely inaccurate. Which is another problem with our studies of calories in versus calories out because nobody really knows how many calories go in. >> Modern food environment, novel, calorie dense, hyper palatable, processed, etc. But as soon as you create a problem, solutions come out for that too. And we have modern technology and people can design new foods. What are some of the foods that people are eating every day that they think are healthy, but it's actually making them worse? I don't know. Um I worry about some of the ultrarocessed um um uh foods that um that like like meal replacements um for lack of a I hope I don't get in trouble, but like hule and Soylent. I mean there's all I mean you could and I actually tried them for a few weeks. Um I didn't eat dinner, but I had all my lunches and breakfast. I I >> How was that? It was awful actually because I it got so boring and I got to really fear, you know, I mean, at first I thought, okay, it's a milkshake, it's not so bad, etc. But after a few days, it's like I really missed food. Um Um but there's like emulsifiers in there. There's all kinds of stuff in there that we don't know what they're doing. We're just guessing. >> Um and and and you know, over months, weeks, years, you have no idea. Or another example would be uh a lot of people eat a lot of soy products because they think, you know, they're trying to be very vegetarian. That's fine. Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian. They're eating a lot of soy. But some soy products um are um are made by by by through solvents. They use hexane. You don't want hexane in your food. Hexane is >> sounds like some that I'd put in my barbecue. >> Yeah. Or your in your car, right? You know, [laughter] it's a it's a solvent. It's a flammable solvent. and and and then you try to wash the hexane out. But hexane is is a toxin. It's a neurotoxin. And um and and studies have shown that you can actually measure people's urine and people who who who are not in the petroleum industry and they have hexane in their urine and it's probably coming from soy or from non-expeller press seed oil. So, like when I get canola oil, I only get expeller pressed canola oil because I don't want my canola beans, you know, uh uh dissolved with hexane in order to get my oil. >> Um and so >> I thought seed oils were bad for you. >> Oh, no. That's that's there's that's another one of those myths. I'm sorry to say. Um um but let's go we'll get to that in a second. But so I think there are some foods that people think are healthy, but the way in which they're processed might be unhealthy. Again, it's very it's as Paris also said, it's the dose that makes the poison. We don't yet know. It's very hard to do the studies. You can give huge amounts of like these foods to rats and they get cancer, but we just don't know about humans. So, it depends on what your null hypothesis. So, right now, the government's null hypothesis is that this hexane that we get in our food is okay. It's generally recognized as safe. Others think, well, unless you can prove it's safe, I don't I don't want anything to do with this. >> Seed oils. seed oils. Okay, so the idea behind seed oils there there are different kinds of um little little jargon here. There are different kinds of um polyunsaturated fats. So a polyunsaturated fat. So fats are these long chains of carbon, lots and lots of carbons and and if the carbons have single bonds between them, remember single bonds from chemistry, that means that they can have two hydrogens, one on each side that bind to them. So a saturated fat is all single bond carbons and that each carbon has two hydrogens. So that's saturated with hydrogen. That's why it's called a saturated fat. If you make one of the carbons a double bond now you don't have the hydrogen next on it and that creates a kink in the fatty acid. So that's why um fatty acids that have have have a double bond are either mono or polyunsaturated. So mono is one double bond. Poly means there's more than one. That's why they're liquid at room temperature. They have kinks. So they're they fold up. So it turns out that and and we and we label polyunsaturated fats by where those double bonds are. So omega so remember in the Greek alphabet alpha omega alpha is the beginning omega is the end. So omega3 means that the double bond is three carbons away from the end. I don't know if this is too much information. So, so omega-3 fatty acid has um is um is the double bonds three carbons from the end and omega6 fatty acid is is six bonds from the end. And so fish and are really rich in omega-3s. Omega-3s are great for your nobody disputes that omega eat eat a ton of omega-3s good for good for your brain, good for your nervous system, good for your immune system, etc. Omega6 fatty acids used to be much more rare in our diet. And so the Paleo diet, I think it started with the Paleo diet. Paleo diet said, "Well, look, you know, we should we didn't evolve to eat that many omega-6 fatty acids because we didn't have seed oils." And so we should try to have a like a huntergather kind of omega-3 ratio. So try not to have more than twice as many omega sixs to omega-3s. And the and the argument behind that is that the the omega6 fatty acids can be turned into a by your digestive system into another thing called a raachidonic acid, which can then be turned into an inflammatory compound like a prostagland. and it gives you like a headache, right? So they so there there is a biochemical pathway by which these fatty acids can become inflammatory. So that's the concern. However, people have done studies, they give people like you and me, they go go sit in a lab, they give people omega-6 fatty acids and then measure whether their metabolism does that. Turns out that doesn't. There's no evidence and and there are quite a few studies, my book cites them. you can go look them up where where the the the increasing the amount of omega-6 fatty acids actually increases inflammation. It was a it's it was a fear but the fear turns out not to be the case. Furthermore, there's epid so that's mechanistic study. There's now epidemiological studies as well which show that people who eat a lot of omega-6 fatty acids do really well. In fact, people eat in fact omega-6 fatty acids have been shown to be more preventive like the Nurses Health study and various other big huge studies. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people, prospective studies over decades, actually have lower risks of heart disease, cancers, etc. than people who don't eat them. So, so although there were concerns about them, the evidence, if you're if you're just purely evidence-based, >> the evidence suggests you should stop worrying about omega-6 fatty acids. >> If you walked through the average healthy person's cupboard, a kitchen, what do you think would concern you most? the average healthy person. >> Yeah. Someone that considers I'm eating a modern healthy diet. I'm the sort of person that shops at Whole Foods. I try and make sure that I'm remotely paleo and naturalistic informed when it comes to my diet. I'm a healthy person. You're going through my kitchen. What are the common things you think would concern you most? >> That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I think what's I think the more I study diet, the more I realize that there's incredible variety of foods that we're able to eat. Uh, so you're asking like what's an unhealthy food that people think that's healthy that they tend to eat a lot of. [sighs and gasps] >> I need to think about that. I'm not sure. Good question. >> Yeah, I am. >> You stumped me there. >> I guess >> I'm not a very judgmental person actually. So that's part maybe that's one of the reason >> healthy versus unhealthy is not necessarily a judgment, right? we can say hey that would be you think that this thing is sort of net positive for your health but I would be a little bit more concerned about it or whatever uh for instance I can give you one uh I think maybe dried fruit might be one of those things where people think oh well you know this is it's a fruit it's a little bit of a snack but you go that is some really refined sugar in there >> okay that's a good one thank you you win that wasn't >> you get an A you get an A you get an A would be fruit juice >> right >> um because fruit juice is basically soda I I mean, it's, you know, um you're not getting a lot of nutrients from fruit juice. You're just getting a lot of sugar. >> So, I would think that would be another one. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I look, I like dried fruit, too, but I I um um I I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that, but >> dried pineapple chunks, dried mango strips. >> Good stuff. >> Yeah. But just straight sugar. >> It's it's it's a candy. >> Yeah. Why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working? Do they I mean there are some that keep working. I mean >> how when you look at people longitudinally over time and somebody does a diet how many of them that lose weight maintain that weight loss? >> Well again um there you know various studies uh have shown that a lot of the standard traditional diets people do fall off them um and they're the numbers run all over the place but yeah I would say that probably a reasonable estimate is about 75% of people fall off their diet. And why? because they can't sustain them. Um, again going back to the natural weight loss registry that we mentioned earlier, the people who manage to to keep lose weight and keep it off are the ones who manage to keep the diet going. And what's interesting is that many of them don't follow an actual prescribed diet. They just avoid junk food. They avoid foods with a lot of sugar. They avoid foods with a lot of added fat. Um, they cook most of their meals at home. They tend to exercise. They tend to weigh themselves on a regular basis. So they're keeping track of how they're doing, but very few of them actually are following an Atkins diet or a this diet or a that diet. They're just trying to eat reasonably sensibly. >> Uh that's the that's the evidence. Um uh so I think it's you know the old joke is you know the the the um you know the best worst part about diet is the second day in the diet because you stop you you know that's when you stop the diet right many diets remember the difference between efficacy and effectiveness. Yeah, many most diets are effective >> in vitro. Wonderful. >> I mean most diets have high efficacy but they have low effectiveness because and they low effectiveness is generally because we have a hard time maintaining them and that's because of our food environment. >> Does the body fight weight loss very aggressively? >> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean the biggest one is hunger right? When you lose weight, your body sends all kinds of signals. There are leptin and there are peptides PY etc. that tell your body you are losing weight and turn on your appetite and that's why >> in the stomach. >> Yeah. Grlin. Exactly. I mean, it's very hard to fight all those all those deep and fundamental adaptations and and so the best diets are the ones that kind of trick your body and but also require um um um you know, they're hard and and that's why GLP1s have been so incredibly successful because GLP1s for many people just turn off that appetite and enable them to eat less. And >> what do you think about GLP1s? >> Well, I mean, they're game changers for many people. I mean, they've they've they've been incredibly successful. Some people lose 25% of their body weight, and there are new ones being formulated that maybe even they've been more powerful. So, for for I mean, that can be really huge for somebody to really lose that kind of weight and turn off those cravings. Um, but there are some concerns. So, we published my colleagues and I published a paper in JAMAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association recently. One of the big concerns about about GOP ones is that people not only lose fat, they also lose muscle and they and they seem to lose a lot of muscle. It's a bit like beriatric surgery too. Like when you lose a lot of weight really fast, uh people lose a lot of muscle and that can put you at serious risk of frailty and you get older because when you lose muscle as you age, you get you can get what's called sarcopenia. Sarco is the Greek word for flesh and pineia is loss of flesh loss. Sounds bad, doesn't it? And sarcopenia is really debilitating because as it becomes a vicious cycle because as you become less strong, you know, just get doing acts of daily living become harder getting up from a toilet, you know, shopping and doing stuff and then you become less physically active and and you become get into this vicious cycle and things get worse and worse. My basically my, you know, my my mother for lack of better, you know, she she died essentially of sarcopenia. She got more and more frail as she got older. I tried to get her to eat anything, you know, ice cream, this, yeah, you never know, whatever. Try to put on some weight and she just couldn't. Um, it's was really hard to watch. And >> some people are kind of self- enforcing that inability to eat food through GLPs, >> right? and and and so so the so the one of the big concerns about GLP1 is that if if you're taking them, do strength training, please, because that can help reverse or help you maintain your muscle as you lose those GLP1. So that's one concern about GLP1s. Another is that a lot of people quit them. Uh the last study I saw, and again, things may change because they're now oral versions of the pill. They're now there's now a pill version so you don't have to inject it. But something like 60% of people who have tried GP P1s have quit them after a year or two. 60%. And the problem is that when you quit them, your body just still will your appetite comes roaring back and you want to go back to your previous weight for for reasons that we do not understand. So most people who use GLPs take them for a period of time that they can lose an appreciable amount of weight and then stop. >> Don't maintain the weight loss. >> Exactly. >> So it's a lifetime contract. >> So Exactly. So that's that's what we're currently seeing at the moment. Um [snorts] so that's that's a concern because then when they regain the weight, they tend to gain it almost completely as fat, not as muscle. And so then in a way they're worse off. Oh, so they've lost muscle on the way down and gained fat on the way back up. >> Yeah, so that's one of the concerns. Look, we're still we're conducting this experiment in real time without knowing the results. And then a final concern about GOP1 is that look, nobody likes taking medications, right? At least most people don't like taking medications. And and it doesn't solve the problem of what you should eat in the first place and it doesn't prevent obesity in the first place. So, it's great for people to lose weight, but we also need to focus on helping the people not have to take those GLP1s in the first place. So, I'm a little worried that we're going to take our eye off the ball. >> And even if you're on a GLP1, you still have to figure out like what to eat, what? And the GLP1 might help you with your cravings for, [clears throat] you know, really fatty sugary foods, but it might not. We just still haven't done those studies very well. So, so look, they I think they're a useful tool for a lot of people, but I think we have a lot to learn and we have to figure how to use them better. They're not going away, but um but I think they're you again, they're not the magic bullet that some people think they are, but they may be very very helpful for some folks. >> It feels like an artificial solution to an artificial problem. We have this novel food environment which like we shouldn't be in, right? In an ideal world, if we were to design things better and we now have this thing which kind of solves it. We solve the calorie dense, hyper palatable food world with this thing that comes in and puts the kaibosh on our ability to either eat or gut motility you know level of hunger stuff like that. >> Yeah. So I I I a few about 13 years ago I wrote a book called the story of the human body and in the in this end of that book I proposed an idea called disevolution. Dissevolution is when we treat the symptoms not the causes of a mismatched disease. So we're talking about mismatched diseases. These are these are illnesses that are caused by not being adapted to our modern world. Right? But when we treat the symptoms not the causes we keep the system going. Right? Um, and and I think GLP1s might be an example of a kind of a diseolutionary process. We can still have our, you know, frozen pizzas and our, you know, fried chicken and our, you know, donuts and all that kind of stuff. Now, we get get obesity, take the GLP1s, but we still have that same food system, >> 1700 calories of the frozen pizza and the donuts [laughter] and the >> We still have that food system that's going to keep going, right? We need to solve our food system problems if we're going to help prevent people from getting the and that and and and right now we're not doing enough to help each other eat what eat sensibly so that we don't gain weight. It seems to me when you get to kind of that point of the conversation, the food environment is predatory, engineered, capitalistic, uh, uh, designed to hook people. Um, people tend to split in one of two ways. One is they go towards systemic change. Um, we need grass to be uh, changed. We need to look at what can SNAP payments be spent on. and we need to kind of step in and there should be a additive restriction. We can't have these food dies and some of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. A degree of top down sort of bureaucracy that'll come in and fix it. Then the other side is aggressive agency. It's you need to take control of this. No one's coming to save you. Uh you know, constrain yourself only to the outer aisles in the supermarket or shop in one that that doesn't have any of the hyper palatable stuff. Like across all of this research and self-experimentation, what are the most robust principles that you think people should take away when it comes to having a good diet nutritionally complete and evolutionarily at least not totally uh deranged? >> Um, avoid processed foods. I mean, and by processed, I would include foods that are refined. So, white flour. Um, I would include, you know, foods that have a lot of added sugar, foods that have a lot of added fat. You know, fat's not your as bad as maybe some people think, but filling your food with fat and sugar is certainly not great for you. Um, avoid foods that have I avoid foods that have really weird ingredients that I have no idea what the hell they are. You know, things like maltodextrin. If you see maltodextrin in your food, run away. Why? Maltodextrin is a kind of sugar that your body can't actually detect as sugar. It's used as an emulsifier. So, it keeps food from particles from breaking apart. So, foods have a long shelf life. It makes things creamier and smoother, but it's risks havoc with your metabolism. So, it's it's a it's a food you would never eat on your own. It's a chemical additive. It's a chemical additive to to me is like a like a canary kind of in the coal mine kind of evidence that this is a ultrarocessed food I don't want to have anything to do with. So, if I see malt maltodextrin on a food, I do not touch it. Right? Um, we need so we need to educate ourselves again. You know, our ancestors needed to know a lot how to get their food. Now, unfortunately, like it or not, we need to know how to choose our food. And we don't teach this in school. They don't even teach it to medical students. You know, medical schools, you know, RFK Jr. is right on this regard that, you know, most physicians are given very little training in nutrition. I teach my undergraduates more nutrition. I tell them in my their lectures, you're going to get more from me than you're going to get in medical school. And that's crazy, right? Why we teach kids in school, we teach them geometry. We teach them American history. We teach I mean there's nothing wrong with geometry and American history. Why don't we teach we teach them chemistry but why don't we teach them when we teach them chemistry let's teach them the chemistry of food so that they they learn about when they learn about chem you know chem you know carbon bonds and hydrogen bonds etc. Why not teach them that chemistry in the form of so that they understand saturated fats versus unsaturated fats? Why why don't we teach this stuff so that we can all learn because it's right now all this stuff I'm I'm talking about is is some of it's considered arcane knowledge but it's actually not that complicated. Um, and I and I think most of us can learn this. I I tried to put it in the book so that you know, anybody can learn it. But but you know, unfortunately that that's that's part of the the puzzle. But the the fact of the matter is a lot of us aren't going to learn that stuff. And so we need help helping ourselves because I think most people would not want to get obese. Most people want to eat a healthy diet, but they're stressed. They're they're they're, you know, their their finances are limited. They don't have a lot of time. Imagine you have a you commute, you have kids, you rush to the supermarket, you don't have a lot of time to be, you know, whatever. We can't get rid of processed foods, but if we could help have processed foods that are more healthy, I think that's the solution. And so, like in England, for example, like when you go to the supermarket in England, there are the green, yellow, and red labels, right? They're super easy, right? And the, you know, I mean, you can debate the fine points about whether they've got the labels right, but for the most part, they're pretty sensible and they're a quick way for somebody to see, oh, you know, this is good for my kids and this is less good for my kids. Why can't we do that? It's so simple, right? Green, yellow, red. So, and then you're not forcing anybody. You can still buy the red label, >> informed choice. >> Yeah. Just give people more information. And and so we can we we could do more. Another another opportunity is to tax. We tax cigarettes. Cigarettes. We all Everybody agrees cigarettes are bad for you, right? Everybody agrees that cigarettes, we don't prevent people from smoking. And I I'm not going to prevent somebody from smoking if they want to, but we we we but we've agreed as a society that cigarettes should be taxed. >> Why don't we tax junk food? I mean, they're they cause probably, you know, >> is there no additional tax on sugary or hyperprocessed? >> No. And in fact, in Mexico when they tried to put a tax on on on soda, uh it got fought by the big uh by the like Coca-Cola. Yeah. And and and and the tax was reversed. So, no, we don't. Uh so, again, I'm not saying we should, but but we should be having a public discussion about this because it's a it's a it's a problem that's larger than any one of us. It's a public health issue >> that we all pay for. Um um because it's it's and it's you know, there's never going to be one solution. I I'm a bit of more of a libertarian paternalist. I think that I'm not into pretending, you know, telling people what they should do, but I think we should have we need help helping us do what we would actually like to do. >> And and often we don't know what's in our food or we don't know what the effects of their foods are. So, or for example, fruit roll-ups. You go to the supermarket, you buy fruit roll-ups, and they says made with real fruit filled with vitamin C. Well, very few kids are vitamin C deficient. And yes, it's made with real fruit, but they've removed all the fiber. So a fruit roll-up is basically like a form of candy, right? Um but but the advertising allows, you know, advertisers are allowed to basically misinform. >> So that might be another one of the I think it's healthy, but in reality, it's not and it's in a healthy person. >> It deserves a red label. Now, if you want to get a fruit rollup, fine, but you should know that it's not a healthy food. >> Scary stuff. I mean, look, I it doesn't surprise me that America is kind of the battleground for this. You I think French fries from McDonald's in the US have got 18 ingredients and in the UK they've got three and one of them salt and that one's optional. So, this really is, you know, patient zero as a country, wonderful meritocracy, free market, American dream thing. But if you take those reins off, you there's going to be some pretty negative consequences. isn't the only way that you can step in is to reconstrain yourself through your own choices or then have some bureaucracy come in to start to restrict optionality for people. >> I think I think most people would like help >> because we we are we are we are not completely free agents in this system and um >> it's certainly an unfair battle when you think I've got the biggest >> it's not a fair fight >> companies on the planet trying to attack the fundamental drive to not die from starvation. Oh, and what I love also is that you have in one aisle of the supermarket, you have the companies that are selling you foods that are really unhealthy and then you go to the health food section where you can buy like, you know, Weight Watchers, you know, kind of foods owned by the same companies. So, they're think they're they're on both sides of the equation. They're on the on the on the um on the weight loss side and on the weight gain side. They're they're making money on both sides. >> Daniel Leman, ladies and gentlemen, Daniel, you're great. Your work's awesome. Where should people go to check out the book and everything else that you got? >> Uh, well, Fed Up comes out August 11th and I tried to make it fun and and and readable and with information that I think all of us u need and it's filled with references so you can find, you know, end notes so you can find the data yourself. >> Heck yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes. So fun. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are deeply. It thinks you're going to like this one [music] even more. Go on.