Lose FAT and Get HEALTHY With These Simple WEIGHT LOSS Hacks | Gary Taubes

so there's clearly something about the american food environment that has triggered this obese diabetic phenotype the question is what is it [Music] gary talbs welcome to the show um pleasure to be here man i'm really excited for this your book good calories bad calories changed my life and my entire approach to diet and uh just read your new book the case for keto and i am blown away so gary uh there's a quote from your book that really stopped me dead in my tracks as somebody that really believes in the things that you have written about uh even i have a hard time with this one and so i want to start there and the quote goes like this fat people are not lean people who eat too much how on earth is that possible okay so let me start with one thing and using the words fat people in the book uh i am speaking as they did uh 50 60 years ago knowingly and typically i would have said people who suffer from obesity are not people who don't who eat too much so i just want to point out that the uh social and acceptability of the language was on purpose to make a point and in the book it feels completely contextual okay so you know we've grown up with this belief system that people get fat because they ate too much that's what we've been taught if you if you gain weight easily if you're someone who fattens easily another term i knowingly sort of co-op from 1950s diet books um the you are supposed to get that way not because your body gains fat easily or your body gains weight easily just like somebody who's you know my 12 year old son soon to be 13 is uh plays aau basketball and there are kids who gain height easily and kids who don't particularly at 12 so he's five five and he wishes he was five ten and he'll never get there that's not determined by how much he eats or exercises that's biological so the alternative hypothesis those of us who get fat and easily simply our bodies want to store calories as fat so some people's bodies don't some people's bodies do and the problem with thinking that those of us who do get that way merely because we eat too much is in the advice you give them is to eat less and exercise more which doesn't fix the problem the body's still trying to accumulate fat or it's still trying to technical terms partition the calories it takes in into fat all right i think we need to dive deeply into that because that that moment there is where all the conflict is so talk to me about the um the energy balance equation and how it could be possible and you talk about the mouse study in the book which was fascinating i never heard that before but talk to me about how the the energy balance equation isn't the only thing that matters it just seems impossible for a lot of people that it isn't a simple equation of if i put in 2 000 calories and i don't burn 2000 calories i am obviously going to gain weight and if i'm burning 2 000 calories and i only eat 1800 then i should lose weight and therefore i should just be able to tell people eat less and you're burning so why doesn't that end up working okay so that energy balance equation which is the first law of thermodynamics and energy is conserved um and again since so occasionally since the 1930s then it accelerates in the 1960s in the history you start you seeing people rely on thermodynamics is the explanation for obesity so the idea is you've got delta e the change in energy in a system is equal to the energy in minus the energy out that's what the law of thermodynamic tells us and it basically just says energy is conserved so if a system is getting more energetic it's got to take in energy more energy than it expends system's getting less energetic it means that it's letting energy out the energy isn't magically appearing or disappearing so the amount of energy in the universe is conserved the amount of energy in a closed system is conserved it's all makes perfect sense and it's always true that's why we call the law of physics but all it says is that one thing is equal to something else so in this case if you think of the energy in the system is the energy stored in fat the energy stored in fat goes up if delta e is positive then that's equal that's the equivalent of saying more energy is going into the fat than is leaving the fat okay if delta e the energy stored in the fat goes down delta e is negative that's equal to the equivalent of saying more energy is leaving the fat than is going in it's like makes it's so crazy simple it's one law of thermodynamics it's easy to understand it's an example i use in my lectures is imagine if we were asking the question why is the energy you've got a room full of people and the energy in the room of people is increasing because people are more and more people are appearing in the room you know if they're coming into the room that means more people are entering the room than leaving it so the room's getting more crowded the energy in the rooms you know it's just obvious if your bank account is going up if you're getting richer you're taking in more money than you're spending you know if you're getting poorer you're spending more money than you're taking in it's all the same thing but it doesn't tell you anything about causality so for instance somebody the fat storage can go up for many reasons but the fact that more energy is going in than is leaving is just another way of saying that the energy stored in the fat is increasing okay but where this gets interesting is for what what people attack on this point is okay i'm willing to buy that the body has hormonal responses and like given if the insulin levels going up then i'm more likely to store fat but that doesn't change the fact that if this person who is getting obese would just eat less that they would hit a certain point where it isn't possible for them to store fat so while there might be some complexities at play like let's just go to the chase they just need to eat less and it will work and you don't deny that that's true right no of course not one of the arguments always for this energy balance idea was if you starve humans or you starve in rodents they will lose weight and they'll eventually preferentially burn their fat stores they won't at first first they'll go through their glycogen then they'll go start using their protein and they'll shift over to using fat to preserve their protein but they will lose weight so often times and i recently wrote about this for the the new site stat news uh and i got numerous um versions of emails that said in effect i got i hate this um there were no fatties at auschwitz okay and unfortunately obesity researchers actually thought that way because you could starve people and they lost weight somehow that translated to meaning they got fat to begin with because they ate too much so one of the ways you challenge that kind of thinking is you find other examples of biological systems that you could affect in a similar way so for instance you could you have a growing child and you can starve that child and stunt its growth but you would never say that it grows because it eats too much because you know that the growth is a hormonal phenomenon driven by growth hormone and something like growth factor and other things and the child eats a lot because it's fueling the growth which is a you know biological response to the hormonal secretions you could starve a tumor and inhibit the growth of the tumor but you would never say that the tumor grows because it eats too much even though once a cell becomes malignant it start it will upregulate the receptors it needs to take in more fuel to feed it that's gross i think there's a subtle change in there that i think you make clear in the book and i just want to see if i'm understanding this right which is the you can starve the child and it will still grow despite the lack of calories it won't grow as much you can starve the tumor but it will still grow it won't grow as much and what's interesting in like this whole debate is yes there you're not going to find any obese people in auschwitz because you've you've gone past some certain point that is the realm of reality right so most people are are never going to live like that there's huge implications when they're not um you know confined and having their food restricted that they're going to go and eat to another balance but where the story gets really fascinating is somewhere in there is a breaking point where you can actually and you talk about this mouse study you can actually have them in a semi-starved state and they still get a little fat they don't get as fat as they would yeah um that's not a mouse study i do use examples of specific my studies but it is effectively every mouse study so you have any animal model of obesity and the most famous two were the the where you lesion the part of the brain called the ventrum medial hypothalamus um and then these uh leptin deficient animals ob animals and in those cases you can um in again literally semi-starve the animal so then what what that means is you measure the amount of food that a lean animal will eat and then you feed this for instance the leptin deficient animal only half of that okay okay so the lean animal would eat so we should be more or less in starvation mode we should be in starvation mode and yet as the animal grows up it accumulates a massive amount of excess fat anyway so that animal will grow up to be obese it'll be smaller than the lean animal it'll weigh less but most of its calories will be it'll have stored a significant amount of calories as excess fat because that's what its body is trying to do and the point is in every animal model of experiment you can literally you can if not half starve animals you can calorie restrict them you can only feed them as much as a lean animal and the animal will get fatter anyway it might not may or may not get as fat as it would if it got to eat at libidum but it will get excess fat anyway and in some cases will be definitively obese as with these obob mice or the the bmh lesion the animals um what that tells you what it should have told the researchers who began doing these studies around 1940 is that the animals are have whatever the defect is it's trying to make the animal store calories as fat or the fat tissue is now wired to take up fat and not to let it go and instead people just assumed that somehow these animals were eating less or they were more efficient so they were still in the energy imbalance they tried to hold on to their paradigm rather than just simply say look these animals are clearly storing calories as fat even when they have starved humans say they do that all the time okay so that's always been a you know the idea was people obese people said yeah sure i can i can lose a little weight by eating less but i'm hungry all the time and eventually the weight comes back and in fact there are trials done there are famous starvation studies done by ansel keys at the university of minnesota where he's starved conscientious objectors for wanted to get 25 of their weight off and they lost significant weight in the first six weeks i forget the numbers at the moment then they lost a little less weight and then eventually their weight loss stopped they were hungry all the time they thought about food all the time they're exhausted all the time their hair fell out their sex drives went away they were miserable and then when they started refeeding them at the end of the trials they put fat back on at extraordinary speeds at rates that were different than the caloric intake would predict would predict that rate so you would predict a certain amount of weight gain but instead it was just sort of extraordinarily quick weight gain and they all ended up fatter than they started so one of the things that study would say well you took them off you let them eat whatever they wanted of course they're overeating the calories they're in this massive surplus and they're just putting it on as fat there's there's no contradiction there in the energy balance well you know when you have competing paradigms there's often no current contradictions the paradigms tend and by paradigms i mean you know the literal understanding of a paradigm so you have a way of thinking about the problem and you tend to ask different questions so another way to look at this is just to ask different questions and sure if we starve an obese person they'll lose weight if we starve a lean person they'll lose weight also okay so the question is then when you re-feed them why do they go back to being obese when you allow them to refeed why do they go back to being obese um for the obese person the lean person only goes back to being maybe a little fatter than they used to be um but the other issue is why is it you have to starve the obese person to make them lean where the lean person can eat as much as they want and remain lean for them and it's people's argument though that lean person isn't eating as much as they want they've got more control or they're doing more exercise or maybe some are generous and say um their hypothalamus has turned up the thermostat and their you know burning some of these calories by kicking off body heat or something like that yeah and all of that's possible but now you've got a whole variety of hypotheses you could test so one of the things you know one of my problems with the research community in general is they never bothered to test their hypotheses once they embraced them so that's you know at the end if you remember at the end of good calories bad calories in the epilogue i spent those first time my editor really let me say what i thought and i went off on the absolute failure of this nutrition obesity research community to do reasonable science because even if when confronted with a viable hypothesis so what scientists do is they test their hypotheses rigorously before they believe them to be true and this that didn't happen in this field so the alternative is yeah it's quite possible that you know the people remain lean just uh consciously to moderation or one of the things they believe they you know they are smart enough to see when they're getting heavy so then they eat less but then you could ask the question how do animals do it okay because animals seem to eat as much as they want um certainly you know you look at the deer that you know are so copious in new england um you know you get a lot of food available you get more deer you don't get fat or deer and you don't get obese steer and they seem to eat all the time and they're only physically active when they have to be they're not going out jogging or running an extra mile um i had these experiences in reporting good calories bad calories one of my favorite was um i was interviewing this uh new zealand epidemiologist who michael pollan had talked about in his book in defense of food and she had done these studies with aborigines actually in australia aboriginal populations who were living in urban areas so they had relatively high rates of obesity and diabetes and hypertension and she moved them back to the bush and they lived like their ancestors did and some of their populations still were and they all got much healthier and she said in the bush they couldn't overeat and then she told me the story of them killing a kangaroo the day before and eating six pounds of meat each and i said this you're gonna have to define overeating to me because these people are eating six pounds of cake roommate one day and then she said yeah that's a good point then she told me the story about some of her colleagues coming out from the university in this in the city where they worked and they came out to visit the experiment going on in the bush and they went for a jog and these aboriginals were sitting around on their haunches laughing hysterically because this was the funniest thing they'd ever seen people voluntarily exercising if they didn't have to you know people come along like herman poncer the duke anthropologist who recently wrote a book about his studies of aboriginal populations around the world and how they do not expend any more energy than the rest of us do and yet they remain remarkably lean as long as they eat their traditional diets you know as a journalist covering this field i had the opportunity to move from discipline to discipline to discipline and to ask these questions to look for the experiments to see if they were done to look for the observations to see if you could find observations that were contrary so you can find populations that had extreme obesity despite relative starvation before we go any farther i think especially because i want to deal with herman poncer who i've had on the show um and i i want to get your hypothesis about what is going on and in the book you go into a lot of detail about you know it's really a tiny fraction of caloric difference between somebody that maintains their weight and somebody that ends up putting on you know 20 pounds in 10 years or whatever right and it was pretty startling to hear that and so you're like nobody ever talks about it's it's it's like i forget what you said like 12 calories a day 20 pounds in a decade is 19 calories a day stored as fat okay so that's the equivalent of like uh i don't know two almonds worth of fat maybe one and a half i forget the number so and it's it's more interesting than that because you basically store all the fat you consume so when you eat a mixed meal your body immediately starts partitioning the fuel so the the glucose goes to the portal vein to the liver and then to the rest of the body and you burn that for fuel and then the fat that you consume gets carried by the lipoproteins called chylomicrons to the fat tissue and stored and over the course of a day uh if you're eating a sort of relative you know a diet of say typical fat composition um you'll store on the about a thousand calories in your fat cells every day and then if you're remaining lean on average a thousand calories will come out of your fat cells and be used for fuel by then by the next day but if you're getting fatter only 980 calories will come out okay so that's what you have to explain and again one of my arguments about the the science in general is because people don't even never bother to quantify these effects and because they don't actually study the people who study obesity and hunger don't actually pay attention to the science of fat metabolism and fat storage they're unaware of these numbers some are some they're getting more aware as people like me have been hammering on them but that's what you're explaining so even if you say okay people get fat because they eat too much you still have to explain why eating too much only leads to 19 or 20 calories a day being trapped in the fat tissue out of a thousand that goes in and 980 come out you know it's a real just to say it in like super layman's terms it is it is this really tiny amount that no one is going to be conscious of doing that would be extraordinarily easy if getting obese over a 10-year period were really the difference between eating or not eating two almonds like you know it's pretty hard to believe that somebody would be incapable of doing that so that's the other thing so if you're telling them to eat less what's the issue especially you know we all imagine okay well somebody is obese they're 40 50 100 pounds overweight you could imagine how hard it is to get that back down to normal but as we're getting fatter we're getting fatter at this rate of 20 or 40 calories a day i have a friend i use as an example in the book who by the time he was 18 weighed 400 pounds it's about six foot three so he was you know if he had been 220 pounds lighter he would have had a healthy bmi and you figure out that 220 pounds over 18 years is about the equivalent of 100 calories a day stored as fat okay so he was storing 100 calories of fat a day that his lean friends were not if you could stop that i mean he was miserable you know this kid was tormented because he was trying to get lean there were two reasons he was miserable because he was trying to get lean so he was hungry his whole life and he was being bullied and ridiculed for not being lean so the extraordinary social burden of this disease on top of this idea that you're trying to eat less your whole life so you're hungry your whole life on top of the idea that you should be out there exercising so it's like you know i don't know if you've ever watched a gym class of um like 10 year olds run around the track but you could separate they they separate out basically by body fat content so on the front you have the short very lean ones who look like kenyans but they're 10 years old and they're flying around the track and their feet are barely touching the ground at the back you've got the poor obese kids who are you know every step is painful and the idea is if those obese kids are being ridiculed right because they're running slowly they seem miserable they're not flying and they're sitting there thinking why can't i fly around the track like these other kids what's wrong with me you know but the point is that's you're talking 100 calories a day that's you know don't eat that egg one day your your point with that is that this is still such a small number that if it really were just that this would be an easy problem to solve now where this gets messy is that a lot of times the people that really get in bad shape if you look at their diet it's not exactly health food and so what i want to begin to understand and i think that the the idea of the lesion in the brain of the um i think it was mice uh and how they they become so ravenous that even as they're waking up from the anesthetic they're like almost you you refer to it as as gasping for air but in like an eating mechanism like they're they're just there's something compelling them to eat and you had a subtle read on that that was different that really begins to upend like what the the paradigm as you were referring to earlier is because i think people watching right now still are not going to be quite sure what your hypothesis is about what's going on if it isn't we know that eating less once you get to a breaking point does work but why there's this tremendous gray area in people that put on fat easily well again let's think about one of the arguments i'm making against the energy balance idea as soon as you decide that obesity is an energy balance disorder that means either intake is too high or expenditure is too low you fix it by decreasing intake or increasing expenditure and what you study is appetite and hunger and energy expenditure so you have these hypotheses like you know maybe obese people just burn off more calories or they run hot or something like that and that could explain why their fat tissue doesn't accumulate fat what you don't study is what was called intermediate metabolism it might still be which is all what happens to the foods after you eat them and you could create hypotheses effortlessly whereby the fat tissue is trapping fat remember it only has to do 20 calories a day if it somehow figures out a way to just hold on to 20 calories of the thousand that goes in you're destined to become obese and what effect that's going to have on appetite and expenditure in the case of these vmh lesioned animals with their gasping for food which is how it was described to me by a researcher who did these rodent experiments in the 60s and 70s what's so interesting is when you leash in that part of the brain the ventral medially ventral medial hypothalamus the first um measurable physiological effect you see is an increase in insulin secretion so basically these animals start hyper secreting insulin and what insulin does is it partitions doesn't just partition calories into fat it also shuts off the oxidation the use of fat for fuel okay so now you imagine these animals there are you uh uh knock them out to do the surgery they wake up from the surgery an hour or two later and while they've been asleep their insulin has been elevated and their ability to oxidize fat is gone so fat is the fuel you're burning when you're not eating and you're not getting the carbs so you've an effect created two hours of starvation and you've cut off the fuel supply that they would normally be burning for fuel while there's like for instance when they're asleep insulin levels go down fat comes out of the fat cells you burn the fat for fuel that's why we don't wake up in the middle of the night to go eat because we're burning our fats our insulin levels are low that allows us both to mobilize fat from our fat cells and to burn the fat for fuel once you've created an infectious what's called hyperinsulinemia you've shut off that fuel supply since the surgery the animal has been literally starved and then it wakes up from the surgery starving and the reason it's been literally starved it's because it's can't use its fat for fuel so it doesn't have any glucose in the system and it can't access the fat so it's literally dying for energy what is it about damaging that region of the brain that causes this is it that damaging that region of the brain causes a spike in insulin and the spike in insulin is the problem or is there something else going on well that's the sort of thing i mean you know the way when the researchers in the 1930s when brain anatomists were doing these kind of studies one of the ways you figure out what the brain does have different regions of the brain do is you lesion that region of the brain you basically break it and you see what no longer functions so just happened to be that that was the region of the brain that if you lesion the animal will both get obese and what's called hype manifest this hyperphagia this extraordinary hunger but the interesting thing was again you could control its food intake and the animal's going to get obese anyway so you can starve these are the mice that you starve and they still end up adding fat yeah in these cases you uh you pair feed them so you only feed them as much as a lean animal eats you only feed them you calculate what they're eating pre-surgery and you only give them that much access to that much food and they'll get obese anyway so again the argument is that you blame it on the eating too much so you assume and the field did assume that the vengeful medial hypothalamus is a is an appetite control center this is at the heart of still many theories of obesity and the way we know this is because when you break the animals get ob you get hyperphagic they eat so much but they'll and they then get obese but they'll get obese even when they don't aren't allowed to eat any more than lean animals so what does eating too much have to do with it and what's interesting is back in the early 1940s when these studies were being done the leading neuroanatomist of the day a man named steven ransom at the chicago i think was northwestern university ransom had just come out of doing similar studies where you could create a disease called diabetes insipidus by lesioning a different part of the brain and in diabetes insipidus the animals urinate constantly and they're thirsty all the time so they drink constantly and what um ransom figured out is that the the lesion actually causes them to urinate and so the thirst that they manifest is not caused by the lesion it's caused by the urge to replace the body water that they're losing through the urination the same thing happens in in you know untreated diabetes of any kind so ransom said to himself look if the animal is losing water and he's so thirsty it's so thirsty because it's replenishing that water maybe this animal the vmh legion is losing calories into the fat and it's eating so much it's hyperphagia because it's replacing the calories that it can't that it's losing into the fat just like the other animals losing water by urinating so his theory was basically just that that the lesion causes the animal to accumulate excess fat and the animal eats a lot to try and replace those calories and then three months after he wrote that paper ransom died of a heart attack and his graduate student who had created this lesioning technique albert hetherington of 1943 joined the air force and went off to participate in the second world war and so they stopped arguing for that theory and the counter theory that the lesion caused the hyperphagia was being touted by another former graduate student of ransoms a guy named john brobeck and john brobeck kept writing about it and brobeck's theory took over the field purely because ransom died and heatherington joined the air force so crazy so your hypothesis if i can put a fine point on it is the reason that people who get fat easily get fat is not because they're overeating per se because that is still some part of the equation um they're still in taking enough food that they're not below that breaking point where no matter what you're going to have a problem you're going to lose weight their fats their fat cells for reasons we have not yet discussed are taking up more calories than they ought to and it is leaving them perpetually accumulating fat because they'll be hungry enough that for them to eat so few calories that with their supercharged desire to grab fat it's basically an impossible way to live unless somebody locks you in a cage and so now people say this concentration camp is the case may be right yeah so people thusly look at it and say and this is where i think the complexity comes in they know the the judgmental person looking at that person knows there is a caloric point that i could drop you to where you are going to get lean but what they're not realizing is that hey some people's fat cells are sucking up an unusual amount of fat which is leaving them extraordinarily hungry and i'm going to guess that part of this mechanism of sucking up too much fat is an increase in insulin and so now you're not only storing too much fat but you're not accessing the fat to burn and so now to get fed you're going to need to eat and this part now i'm really guessing that you may find yourself drawn to carbohydrate foods because that's going to turn to glycogen or glucose excuse me uh in your system and therefore now finally i have something that i can burn but that's going to exacerbate the situation because now your insulin levels are going to go back up and so you're in like this death loop of the only thing that makes me feel fed are these high carbohydrate meals i'm able to pull a ton of fat into my cells as it is but i can't get it back out because of elevated insulin levels it's not just that you can't get about you you can get it out on occasions but as long as the insulin is elevated your body is being told not to burn the fat but to burn the carbs so if insulin is elevated carbohydrates are your fuel so part of this theory is also this concept of insulin resistance so your body becomes if you're overweight the you know particularly abdominally if your waist size is increasing that pretty much tells you you're insulin resistant if you're insulin resistant your body has to secrete more insulin to take up a set amount of glucose from this from the circulation and burn it for fuel so you have elevated abnormally elevated levels of insulin most of the day and when the insulin is elevated it's telling the rest of your body to burn carbs it's telling your fat cells to store fat it's telling the rest of your body don't burn the fat because it's only supposed to be elevated when there are carbohydrates available to be burned and so it's telling them to burn carbs so carbs are in effect your body's primary fuel source when insulin is elevated and you can't switch over to burning fat because the insulin prevents that from happening so now you crave carbs because that's your fuel as your blood sugar starts to go down you need to raise it back up so you could burn it for fuel you crave carbs and then sugar might be a special case which gets into the hepatic metabolism of the fructose and we probably don't want to go there at this moment not not at this moment because i think there's um more to say here so so if insulin is raised and that's part of why the fat isn't being unlocked it's part of why you crave carbohydrates as part of how you get in this death loop then the answer is well if there were a food that you could eat that didn't raise your insulin then even though you put on fat more easily you should be able to get into a position where you're just not giving any extra oomph to the system telling it to store and store and store and so now we get into cutting out carbohydrates yeah well there's another aspect of this which is um your fat tissue is the most sensitive tissue in the body to insulin so if insulin is elevated even a little bit your fat tissue will hold on to fat that's what it does and this sensitivity of the fat the exquisite sensitivity of fat insulin is something that's been known since pretty much as soon as they could measure insulin in the bloodstream which was the 1960s um actually even before that when researchers wanted to test whether or not there was insulin in the like you want to find out if someone secreting insulin you take a blood sample you inject some of the blood into a petri dish which has fat cells from a rat in it because the fat cells will respond if insulin is in the blood at any level whereas other tissue might be resistant to it the fat always stays sensitive to it so the idea is if you want to get fat out of your fat tissue the fat has to see in effect no insulin and how do you know if you're how do you minimize your insulin levels while you eat and affect the ketogenic diet in fact if you're in ketosis it means your liver is seeing basically very little insulin and your fat is seeing no insulin because it's mobilizing fat from the fat cells so that they can be converted to ketones in the liver so the case for keto is literally some people you know the idea is so there's some simple ideas that come out of it carbohydrates are fattening because they raise insulin and insulin makes us store fat as fat in our fat cells so the carbohydrates regulate the fat storage in effect through primarily the hormone insulin other hormones also play a role but you can simplify it to insulin um so carbohydrates are fattening to those of us who fatten easily not all of us are susceptible and if you want some of us the case for keto if we want to get significant fat out of our fat cells and keep it out then we have to minimize insulin and minimizing insulin means and affect minimizing carbohydrate consumption one thing you said in the book really plainly that it it sort of put everything together for me was when you're thinking about people that put on fat easily it really might be as simple as the amount of insulin that needs to be present in the bloodstream in order for the fat cells to lock down to pull in the fat and not release anything just might be really low and so my wife has a friend who man this woman all she eats is carbohydrates and she is just stick thin now if if that's true that would make a lot of sense that she just has a very high level that where she can have insulin in her bloodstream that's pulling out the glucose but her fat cells tolerate quite a high level and don't have that same ravenous desire to partition the available um calories into the fat cells and when you think about it like that my only remaining question is okay that makes sense but where given that energy balance is a real thing the energy has to be going somewhere so what is happening for her does does anybody know have they done any tests like what's going on is she breathing it out is she running hotter is she you know when i was growing up uh i have an older brother is two years older than i am and he's always a little taller and he's always very lean the kind of kid you could see like the the veins on his arms and you know when he was 10. um i never really thought about it we were just different we were just different you know he we both ate as much as humanly possible in fact by the time we were in our teens we ate dinner and it was 18 minutes so back then you know your mother was a work you know a working housewife would cook family style so like two roast chickens for four people and you know some starch and some green vegetable and we would eat fast because if i didn't eat fast my brother would get to it before i did so massive amounts he was he could not put on fat and i could not have been as lean as he was unless i starve myself he grew up he became didn't want to play football in college because he saw on a chart in the coach's office when he was making the rounds of colleges that they had him bulking up from 190 to 240. he was six foot five and he thought that's out of the question so he became a rower and he would grow an hour a day and then run an hour a day and you know lift weights an hour a day and i became a football player and i did get up to 240. you know but i couldn't run 10 miles he could do it you know run 10 miles come home change into a street clothes and go off to class i would if i did it i would a my body would break down and then i would be you know in a coma for two days um it's conceivable that the reason he exercised so much he ate enormous amounts of food i mean he once told me that he didn't get never got stuffed he just got bored of eating after a couple of hours whoa okay but he could not put on fat he just couldn't do it so his body must have burned those calories off and one way you do it and when you again you go back to the you know pre-1960s medical literature the research would talk about the impulse to physical activity like literally having energy to burn so somebody like him he's he's going for 10 mile run he's not thin because he's running 10 miles he's running 10 miles because his body doesn't want to store calories as fat so it's got to burn them off it's a different way of thinking about everything so you kind of flip the causality going going back to herman ponzer and his take on the hadza is that they're not burning any more calories than anybody else they intake a ton of carbohydrate in the form of honey but i'm very curious what what is going on there is do you think that the data is inaccurate and they really are being more active and burning more calories i mean the question is what so the issue was always not the amount of carbohydrates but the quality of the carbohydrates being consumed so western populations you transition basically refined grains and sugars were the problem um and those hit harder in terms of insulin versus honey well that's what we don't know so then the question is because in the west you rarely see people eating more than a pound or two of honey a year you look at honey consumption over a century it barely changes but what did change was massive amounts of sugar um it's his question what constitutes a black swan for hypothesis so the part of the hypothesis another aspect of it discussed in good calories bad calories is this western disease observation which begins actually in the late 19th century with a french physician who documents higher rates of cancer in urban areas in rural areas and in europe than in northern african populations and postulates that's cancer as a disease of civilization and then to the 20th century a whole series of physicians from all around the world observe that when populations transition from eating whatever their traditional diet is to western diets and lifestyles they manifest obesity diabetes heart disease hypertension arthritis a whole cluster of metabolic diseases that that also cluster together in patients so the theory becomes what's causing it by the 1960s the leading theory is for sugar and white flour and that's british physicians who have sort of you know been surveying all these missionary and colonial physicians and hospitals and clinics around the world then that transitions into the sugar only hypothesis of a fellow named john yudkin and then it ends as the idea that it's not the presence of sugar or white flour it's the absence of fiber in this foods and the carbohydrate foods we eat and it's a story i tell in grade length and good calories bad calories and how you end up with a theory that could coexist with the idea that dietary fat causes heart disease the point is it's clear that when populations are westernized they manifest obesity diabetes and all these things and the viable hypothesis is the refined carbohydrates and the sugars maybe particularly the sugars the caloric sweeteners and maybe even particularly coke and pepsi that you drink leads to insulin resistance which causes or exacerbates the risk of all these diseases now the question is you find a population like the hards hadza and they're honey eaters and they don't have high levels of obesity and diabetes is that enough to refute these other this other idea so once you say this population can eat significant honey does that mean that it's not the coke and the pepsi and the sweets and the candy and the chocolate bars and the white flour influencing insulin and all these other populations and the answer is i don't think it's enough because one possibility is that when the hots has started consuming honey say a thousand years ago they had their obesity diabetes epidemics then and so what we have left is a population that's particularly resistant to the effect of the fructose in the honey and the uh it could be that when you eat honey you eat it differently than you do you know we drink sugary beverages all day long um starting with breakfast and then between snacks even if we're coffee drinkers if we drink our coffee sweetened we're basically um titrating sugar all day maybe i don't know how they eat honey that could be different so the question is you know herman poncer as far as i know i have to cop i didn't read his book because it never got cheaper than 25 on amazon on kindle and i've been waiting for the price to come down even though i know he's got a couple chapters in which he makes fun of my ideas i should read it um i don't believe that's technically a black swan because the the hypothesis is when a population transitions to western diet particularly the refined grains and sugars of a western diet that triggers this physiological effect that manifests as this cluster of metabolic diseases the hadza have never made that transition one interesting thing to find out would be if there are members of the hots or who move into urban areas and do start drinking their sugar instead of eating it as um honey that would be interesting because many of these observations were made by uh actually british and and physician missionary physicians who spent time in africa who said look i see different disease rates in rural african tribes that i see in urban african tribes so a different spectrum of chronic diseases and in africa i have uh urban black population that has very low levels of obesity and diabetes but if i go to america i will see a black population only 200 years separated in time with very high levels of obesity and diabetes so there's clearly something about the american food environment that has triggered this obese diabetic phenotype the question is what is it if it's not the honey if it's not the sugar that if they you say that honey refutes it i don't think it's enough um i think there are too many other explanations for why the hodzin might be able to consume honey and not get obese and diabetic and heart disease and all the rest and what role if any do you think that modern hyperpalatability of food which would drive people to over consume you know what role does that play like in in i'll speak for myself like it's hard for me and i'm super disciplined it's hard for me not to just gobble gobble gobble right it's there's so much good food and it's literally designed to make you want more and so do you think that that's one of the things that plays a role or again let's see if we can find a counter example france have you ever spent time in paris i have okay now there's a city that is full of extraordinary food and yet the french are not do not tend towards obesity okay so why not you could say well they have a food environment they eat they eat with their family they eat slower they don't eat between meals blah blah so you come up with all these hypotheses to explain them but clearly the presence of delicious food isn't enough and i don't think there's a french chef in the world wouldn't be insulted by the idea that he doesn't try to make his food hyper palatable and make sure that you come back to his restaurant or her restaurant rather than somebody else's so if you had to guess um what what is going on is it is this an insulin game or something else well again if you just look at fat storage so here's the idea we have a disorder of excess fat storage okay that's first principles you know somebody come they're 200 pounds overweight their problem is 200 excess pounds of fat fat storage is dominated by the hormone insulin we know that that's no that's textbook medicine it's been textbook medicine for roughly 70 years um fix the fat storage problem did and the way one obvious way to do that is to take the carbohydrates out of the diet and there are studies even going back animal studies with diabetes and animals you could uh this famous physiological psychologist named kurt richter did these experiments in the 1940s where you create diabetic rats you give them this chemical that destroys the the beta cells and the pancreas so you have diabetic rats you let them choose their own food and they'll choose fat and protein and not manifest diabetic symptoms because they don't need the ins while they need the insulin for the protein but they have enough insulin left to deal with the protein so and then we've got you know 100 years of history of the efficacy of very low-carb ketogenic diets for weight loss it's just it's not nobody ever doubted that they worked the problem was people thought they would kill you because of the high fat content yeah so walk me through how how do you live your life from a dietary standpoint like are you worried about cholesterol in the book you talked about gout and uric acid that was the one part where i was like yo if the diet is giving you gout i would say we have a problem here um how do you well so that's again it the question is there's always a short-term and long-term responses to the diet so if you store for instance uric acid in your fat cells now you're mobilizing fat and the uric acids being dumped into the circulation with the fat and then you accumulate to get hyperuricemia and you now have gout symptoms or reactivates gout i knew a wall street partner and a big wall street firm who said he tried atkins and his gal backed it up so he stopped doing it which makes perfect sense but the question is maybe after a month it'll go away if you have gotten rid of the uric acid that's been stored to access and the uric acid from my understanding is it would be coming probably from i guess you could get it from seafood uh but more likely you're getting it from fructose consumption you know one of my favorite sayings in this business was from uh eric westman who said it's not what juliet is what your body does with what you eat and so yeah it could be from the fructose it could be that you're just whatever reason insulin resistance all these years whatever reason caused you to put on excess fat to begin with to also generate you know some excess uric acid you know and as for the getting back the cholesterol on the saturated fat let me say this about the red meat the idea remember we talked about western diseases and western diseases were you know you take any traditional diet you give them that population a western diet and lifestyle and they manifest this cluster that's obesity diabetes heart disease other things that are going to kill us prematurely at some point um many of these populations were mostly carnivorous or very you know so the inuits or the native americans of the great plains or the pastoral populations of kenya living on like you know animal meat were healthy until they ate western diets so they would have been eating significant red meat would the red meat have been different from the red meat wheat that's a possibility you know there's no way to avoid that but i just don't see that as the causal factor here and as for cholesterol itself i very much doubt that ldl cholesterol matters in an environment of low insulin um if i had a his family history of heart disease i would probably do a statin just to hedge my bets you know for someone whose father had i have my best friend's father died of a heart attack at 53. wow um you know it's a different risk benefit analysis for him um ideally we would do the studies to resolve this issue and you can do you know uh scans and the like to look to see if you're actually if your arteries are calcifying and then make some decision based on that how do you teach your kids how to eat uh nagged them constantly but um what are you talking about no carbohydrate uh they hear that protein they hear that from me professionally my youngest is an athlete and naturally lean and can eat a burrito the size of his head without blinking and uh pretty much craves carbohydrates and my oldest has my body type is thick set and it's not athletic and pretty much avoids carbs so if you looked at them you would say well clearly carbohydrates make you lean because it's the lean one who's eating them all the time they have very different body types um you know they both know how i feel about sugar we don't keep fruit juices in the house or sodas and uh you know moderating their intake they don't get dessert after meals but you know then at some point like me if they start getting ex you know gaining weight easily though they certainly have the intellectual tools now and they've heard me talk about it enough to other people that they can give my lectures for me um but uh at this stage they don't need it if they had real weight problems and they were concerned you know then we would what do you say to somebody who does have a weight problem they're an adult they're prepared to do whatever it takes um what's your case for keto i wrote that book to make the argument that carb if you're overweight you have to carb restrict it's not about eating less it's about lowering insulin levels and if you really have a problem then you might have to go to a ketogenic diet and here's how to do and here's how to think about it it's not a religion it's not you know it's it's your body is can tolerate the carbohydrate content so here's how you eat without it yeah it's really incredible gary the book was amazing um where can people follow along with you to learn more about the way that you think and how to think about food well my books are available everywhere fine books are sold um case for keto is the latest that's coming out in paperback in the end of december 2021. um my website is garytalbs.com i tweet gary taub's um i usually wish i didn't after i did um so that's interesting uh i wrote the books because i there's a lot to understand here but once you get into it it's very simple it's basically abstaining more or less rigid abstinence from the cartridge foods in the diet and you know makes people healthier i agreed man thank you so much your work has really changed my life in the way that i eat and i can't thank you enough i've been so excited to have you on the show for a very long time so boys and girls make sure that you read his books uh the case for keto is absolutely phenomenal i loved it a lot uh really really enjoyed that one and speaking of things you will really enjoy if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace you