The New Science Of Rapid Muscle Growth - Menno Henselmans

how much truth is there that your body can only absorb 20 grams of protein per meal because this is something that's been floating around for a very long time so this myth has a kernel of truth behind it but the idea that the body can literally only absorb 20 grams of protein in a meal is outright ludicrous the body can easily digest and absorb basically infinite amounts of protein in a meal there is no practical limit you'd have to be doing like massive food challenge hot dog eating contest stuff even then it's probably not really a limit so the problem is that after the digestion and absorption of the protein comes the metabolism stage and there is a limit to how much muscle protein synthesis the body can stimulate with a single meal that's called the muscle full effect now it seems that if you inest something like whey protein which is very rapidly absorbed a very high quality protein in resting conditions when you are fed 20 grams of protein seems to pretty much maximize muscle protein synthesis over the span of a few hours however when we start looking at mixed meals when we start looking at post-workout conditions protein sources that are not super high quality not whey protein things that are matched with fiber you know meat for example which is much more slowly absorbed then we see that the absorption limit changes or that the maximum productive amount of protein that we consume in a meal goes more up to 80 grams at least 40 grams and in a recent study seemingly even 100 grams at least if that's pretty much your only meal for the day so it seems that the body is quite flexible in how it handles protein if you fasted beforehand if you had a workout beforehand the body can use more protein because it wants to build more muscle so in that sense the body has adapted evolutionarily speaking well to using the protein when there is indeed a demand for muscle protein symphysis like you can't just eat your way to the Olympia you have to actually stimulate muscle growth and then the protein will be used for muscle protein Services right so when people were saying you can only absorb 20 grams of protein per meal what they meant was that was what your body can utilize for mus muscle protein synthesis and that seems to have a ceiling which is raised through exercise through a scarcity of protein over the last period 24 hours 20 whatever 30 hours something like that uh and also presumably androgens whether or not you're on testosterone yes so we have this thing called mtor which is a master enzyme and it integrates all of the signals for protein synthesis essentially it looks at all the factors that govern whether this person needs to get very jacked or whether we are okay with minimal jackness and if this person person is on a boatload of testosterone there are lots of amino acids floating around in the blood and you have thoroughly trashed your muscles with a workout beforehand then Emptor is maximum effort if on the other hand you are rested well fed you have not worked out then mtor is like eh we're gonna keep it at this level right what is the takeaway for people who are probably training moderately hard not doing aggressive intermittent fasts once per day what do you think is an acceptable protein Target to hit per meal I think as long as you distribute it roughly equally over at least three meals per day and you are sandwiching your workouts within a 5H hour intermeal window meaning that your workout has to be sandwiched between two workouts within that 5H hour period so you can shift them your workout has to be Sandage within two workouts workout has to be in two meals two meals right yes sorry so you can have a pre-workout meal workout 5 hours after another meal or you can have five hours before the workout four hours say if your workout is one hour you have the meal and then right after you have another meal that counts in terms of the the sandwiching requirement and then one other meal somewhat um removed from these two other meals you're probably going to be okay and at least those meals should all have at least 20 grams of high quality protein or three gram um protein per kilogram body weight so it's usually going to be 20 to 40 grams depending on your size you're probably fine if you want to really optimize muscle growth maybe you want that fourth meal and to distribute your protein more equally and so protein more protein after the workout versus before not just right after but in the periods between the workout and sleep that's seems to be the most important period then there's some optimization there but for the average gym goer that's not counting every gram of food three three roughly Square meals per day you're pretty good okay how much protein do you actually need because this seems to have been thrown up in the air is it .3 grams per kilo should we get up to two grams per kilo it's all over the place I conducted the last big mat analysis on this uh together with true All-Star team in evidence-based uh circles um as far as that Niche goes and we have stars we um found that in in in line with pretty much every study that's been done and we have a lot of research on this that the ceiling the maximum effect seems to occur at about 1.6 gram per kilogram per day that's total protein intake per total body weight which is in Freedom units7 grams per pounds so um that's pretty much the point at which research no longer finds increases in lean body mass if you increase protein intake further holding mual frequency and the like constants a recent meta analysis also verified that for strength development that is also sufficient they came at 1.5 so almost exactly the same number I reviewed all of the data on this as one of my very first articles which actually ranked on number one on Google for a long time because I was one of the first in evidence-based Fitness that just looked at the data and throughout everything that we thought we knew about how much protein you need and most of the recommendations came from supplement companies and the like and I concluded actually the number doesn't seem nearly as high as almost everyone recommends like one gram per pound was kind of the minimum that was being thrown around recommended and it seems that quite a bit less um is also going to maximize your gains now I typically recommend for maximum gains 1.8 gram per kilogram which is 82 grams per pound that will surely maximize muscle growth assuming again you have those free meals roughly Square meals that and you not training fast that you have a post-workout meal within at least a few hours after the workout you're pretty much going to maximize muscle growth what happens if you eat over that for protein does it just get excreted away or do you actually are you risking maybe gaining unnecessary weight that you don't want most of it gets oxidized the body doesn't store protein directly as fat but protein can still contribute to fatane in the best controlled research metabolic watch Studies by Bray atol for example find that if you increase protein intake far above requirements it's simply the calories that counts not the protein per se but the protein does contribute towards Fain there have been some studies that um contest this but they are in Free Living constant in Free Living settings rather than a controlled metabolic W so I put a lot more stock into the most controlled data just practically difficult though to really overeat on protein because if you go up to like four gram per kilogram you get um people around you do not like it you yourself like it yeah it's just impractical dude no one has ever accidentally fallen into doing more than a gram per pound MH no one accidentally does that unless this is the one day where you go to a Brazilian steakhouse one of those things with the [ __ ] ping pong paddles that it's green and they just keep bringing you me no one does that by accident like you have to work hard to think you know you just don't tumble into that much meat so okay well I mean that's I guess like kind of a stress alleviating for a lot of people that were you know I I'm probably pretty average weight for most of the guys that are watching like 84 kilos which I think is like maybe 180 185 something like that in terms of but for me to think okay I need to get at least one gram per pound of body weight like 180 grams of protein per day is to be honest unreasonable to expect that you're going to get it from food which means that you then okay well I'll put a shake in oh maybe I'll do a double scoop sh okay well there's 40 but that's still 140 right okay so I have three meals the of 40 gram which is a lot that's a ton of meat each time three times throughout the day which means I've got a big breakfast and I'm still under I'm like okay well I better have and then you start looking at stuff that should I really be using this as like the basis for my nutrition protein bars and stuff like that so uh reassuring for those of us trying to hit our protein goals it's it's interesting that you say that I fully agree with that funny enough when you mentioned this to most people that are that I would consider serious lifters they're like it's super easy but it's only super easy because we as serious lifters have pretty much revolved our whole lives around getting that protein oh we've gaslit ourselves into believing that 180 grams of protein per day is an acceptable way to live a dietary life yeah that's a nor normal regular amount but only indeed when you have um set your whole life around a meal being protein like we think oh we need a meal and the first thing you think about is oh how do we get protein and with that mindset it's it's not so difficult and the difference between you know 082 Gram per pound or one gram per pound is not massive but I find in practice for a lot of people especially people that are not super um hardcore about going to the gym it makes a substantial difference and also it introduces some fattier foods maybe even cheese as potential protein sources yeah so it actually makes a significant difference in terms of what you can eat in and it doesn't just have to be tilapia F think about I he was a study that keep people keep on bringing up to me about how um participants are given a shake of some kind and they're told that it's either high calorie or low calorie and their expectation of the caloric amount contained within this shake has a um effect on how they metabolize it how their body uses it how much truth was in that study it has a significant effect on the satiety or the satiation of the shake it can also influence energy levels but depending on how motivated and serious you are as a lifter it has minimal effect on actual exercise performance and those more um objective measures so the reason I was thinking about that was if bodybuilders every bro listening for the last decade has been thinking oh another day not hitting my protein goals I only managed to get 160 gram of protein in per day uh I have to presume that there's a little bit of cortisol that's going to get released from that if nothing else just the texture of your own sort of phenomenological existence is going to be like G God I don't feel like I did the thing today I didn't take the box I'm not feeling like as satisfied as I should be because you have this potentially according to science wildly [ __ ] unreasonable goal of one gram per pound of body weight it's like it's no I think the most interesting study of placebo and nobo effects which is most effects that you're touching on here right is when they give people fake steroids and this is a a mind-blowing study uh probably wouldn't pass ethics committees anymore it was it's quite old but they gave a bunch of already well Tred lifters essentially fake dial so they told them it was steroids yeah like androgenic anabolic steroids were in there in reality it was a placebo and the gains they got were massive so these were well-trained lifters and they got very serious additional gains in a span of eight weeks essentially the level what you would expect from lowo actual steroids wow so the mindset and the effect of believing that you can make greater gains or any other it's all in your mind lifting these weights stop going into the gym and sweating and spending all your time around men just believe that you can gain and that's what you need no it's there's a book called the expectation effect by David Robson and uh it's outstanding my two favorite ones from that um gluten intolerances have 10 xed in the last sort of years unbelievable increase and you know the maybe there's more gluten in food I'm open to that as a potential explanation uh maybe the type of metabolic sort of environment that people are in means that gluten they're more susceptible to gluteny problems something like that I don't know maybe it's degradation of a microbiome or maybe it's all of the news articles telling you how bad the gluten is for you so the researchers brought participants into the room sit them all down feed everybody the same meal they tell everybody in the room that this meal's got gluten in it there isn't gluten in the entire building five minutes later people are breaking out in hives they're running to the toilet with diarrhea they're vomiting they've got inflammation they've got headaches they're unbalanced they've got vertigo no gluten in the entire building so that was the first one the second one this is the best one and it relates to I guess what you do uh participants were split into um two groups 50% of each group had an equal proportion of people who do and don't have a particular genetic mutation that allows them to blow off CO2 more effectively apparently this is not that uncommon in the population that people are they tend to be more efficient breathers basically which is also correlated with their ability to be good at Cardio group a half and half do and don't have the uh genetic mutation and they're told you do have the genetic mutation you should be really good at this group b half and half do and don't have it they're told you don't have the genetic mutation this might be a little bit tough shock horror the group that was told that they did have the genetic mutation they outperformed interestingly the people who didn't have the mutation but were told that they did outperformed on average the people who did have the genetic mutation but were told that they didn't so David coined this term which was your expectations are even more powerful than your genes in some instances yes there's similar research actually on caffeine where the effects of believing you are on caffeine is stronger than the objective effect of being on caffeine but not knowing it God that's so funny the DI anabal one's Wild Well I mean there's also um there's a justification I think for why you should always buy the name brand painkillers because even though you know that the literal makeup of the drug is the same the expectation of it being neuropen as opposed to CVS own brand is so great that it's actually worth buying it because the painkilling effect will be increased yeah I personally actually drink uh Red Bull uh or energy drink in general even though research quite clearly shows that it works no better than just anhydrous caffeine just caffeine powder in fact it might work a little bit worse According to some research but I for one prefer the taste and subjectively I do feel which is most likely at the sibo effect but I do feel more and it's it's very persistent so I'm sticking with the energy rinks Rory southernland has this idea about Red Bull and he says that they purposefully dialed the taste back of Red Bull to make it taste a little bit worse than it needed to because humans associate poor tasting liquids with medicinal properties like there's no medicine that you were used to having that tasted like strawberry dreamsicle unicorn dust or whatever you know new bang flavor gets released and the fact that Red Bull does it's kind it is kind of herbal it's a little bit bitter it probably could be a little bit sweeter like it's you know you get to know the taste of it but it's you wouldn't go as far as to say from first principles oh this is like a an optimal human [ __ ] pallet tasting drink and uh yeah he thinks that and I think he's probably right the oddness of The Taste kind of played into the magical we don't know why it's working but we think it's working properties when it first got released it could be uh I personally wouldn't say it about Red Bull but I know that there are products where that is actually being done for example parodont toothpaste is horrible absolutely horrible and they made a big deal out of it being uh I think it's also natural and whatever um some other stuff that doesn't really matter for your teeth but mainly it's disgusting it's it's absolutely horrible uh but they had a doctor saying it's better than the others and the others are chemical and whatever and this is how natural toothpaste tastes like and it was a wild success for some time I think eventually people realized that uh it just wasn't worth it well I yeah like the enjoyment dude of having minty fresh breath yeah uh okay so something else that I guess during mine and your uh trajectory of bro lifting on the internet has come and gone and I whether or not it's going to come back is flexible dieting or If It Fits your Macros what is your postmortem on If It Fits your Macros as a diet methodology If It Fits your Macros which is the idea that only the macronutrients you eat count it doesn't matter where they come from whether it's McDonald's or protein shake or super healthy Whole Foods paleo meal uh in the end all that matters for at least your gains like fat loss and the like is your micronutrient in like the amount of protein in particular and the amount of total calories in particular that has largely been validated in the sense that those are by far the most important factors and there have been numerous studies and individuals showing that even on a absolutely terrible super unhealthy diet you can still lose fat at least theoretically speaking uh as long as you get that low energy intake is just a whole lot harder to do it with junk Foods because it's so easy to over eat on them you want a high fiber intake and the like for satiety normally to make it long-term sustainable and in general I think that has been a very very positive development it ended for at least some parts of uh Fitness the debate between high carb low carb all these things they are not nearly as important as total energy intake you know whether you consume super blueberry super food or whether you're eating Twinkies your total energy intake is by far the most important factor that influences whether you lose fat or not if you are in energy deficit regardless of your diet quality you are most likely going to lose fat so in that sense I think if it fiture macros and what later became flexible dieting has been a godsent for the fitness Community as a whole but a lot of people certainly took it to extremes and um it is not the case that the effect is exactly the same like fiber does have some fmic Advantage um protein does also have a fmic Advantage the type of carbohydrate it seems that there are some effects there was a recent study that probiotics prebiotics and the like may also have a few percent effect but even if you add all of that together you're getting maybe 5% 10% total difference in fat loss so for most intensive purposes it's just how much protein are you consuming what's your total energy intake across the week even not even across the day or whatever and that determines your fat loss so that's the the positive Legacy of if it fit your Macros what about the uh negative Legacy of it I think it scared or it drove a lot of people away from healthy eating and when you look not shortterm but long term most people like in decades not you know months or years which is long term for a lot of people in Fitness but really in what we are interested in as individuals uh or at least that what I try to teach your clients and students is you know how are you going to live for the next 20 30 years the next Decades of your life how are you going to age and if you look at it that way even calorie tracking in general is not the most sustainable strategy for most individuals it is great to develop calorie awareness but long term you probably want to transition away from that and actually start thinking of food choices that allow you to eat a libitum as much as you want without having to track every single gram of food that you're eating and making sure that oh yes I can be super flexible now because my macros are correct but you are being exceedingly inflexible in the sense that you're literally weighing every gram of food that you're eating and that has I think done some damage and it's also why things like paleo do work quite well for a lot of individuals even though in the end yes it's all about calories and protein it it does work when you instruct people you give them relatedness and a frame of mindset certain foods that are better than others these are satiating foods that they can eat as much as they want out of of course people also take that to extremes and start making paleo cookies and stuff but that aside uh it gives a frame of reference some foods that are better than others and most people long-term do well on that and it's quite sustainable so I think we have to strike a bit of a balance between what is theoretically the answer and what works in practice long term yeah I mean all of me and my friends when we found out Oh you mean I can get shredded on Haribo we were like this is Tero it is this is ma this is Magic you mean I can like eat I get to eat cheesecake and I can get Lena um but practically you know it's one of those things fantastic Works in theory but does it work in practice uh and I just struggle with it you know you you're playing with fire it's like [ __ ] about with nuclear grade weapons uranium because like all right if you're going to use Haribo as part of your carb source for the day that's fine but it's really hard to stop eating once you've started and you only need to go over by three Haribo and that's like an non- insignificant amount of [ __ ] sugar that you've gone over your very tight amount of calories for the day so yes I think uh it was fun it was a fun period to be involved in where I would have birthday cake on an evening time dude c backloading c backloading another one when I thought that or skip loading you remember that you remember skip loading every Sunday I'd go to wait ro oh dude skip loading was crazy so skip loading was basically like carb night but once per week and the goal on the Sunday was to maximize as many like half a kilo of carb if you could do it on a Sunday and it was like a metabolic reset you know it was so that your metabolic base rate didn't drop too low because you going to keep yeah like but like just a single really [ __ ] aggressive refeed once per week um oh dude so much like hor [ __ ] experimentation in my background um okay you mentioned caffeine earlier on what have you learned recently about caffeine I think that most of the effects of caffeine in in light of that earlier study that we talked about and most research in general suggests that caffeine is by and large a psychological Aid it does very little longterm if you look at studies where people are giving caffeine for a period of weeks and you look at how much muscle they're gaining how much fat are they losing much strength for gaining in a vast majority of research there is no effect on those measures even if acutely if you give people a boatload of caffeine they do perform a little bit better in certain conditions and it also seems that if you narrow it down to like which individuals respond better it's works better when you are sleep deprived it works better in the morning it works better in individuals that are not as well trained which all shows that you know or all Trends in the direction of if you are well rested and you are super motivated then the effect is probably not really there maybe you can use a little bit of a kick in the ass but for most individuals it's going to be a marginal effect and long term it's pretty trivial so I think people should should use it that way as a psychological Aid and it's very easy to overdo it on caffeine the main problem for a lot of individuals is that caffeine seems like magic and therefore you can solve a lot of life's problems including the ones created by caffeine with more caffeine or so it seems and you run into this negative spiral where caffeine starts interfering with Sleep Quality and the effect of that in the latest meta analysis is present for 1 hours for the average individual if it's it's a good dose some 7even hours even at a low dose and some research even finds that a a strong double espresso in the morning like 200 milligrams caffeine still affects objective measures of Sleep Quality at night which is long after the subjective effects have waned off and then you enter into this spiral where you consume more caffeine worse sleep more caffeine worse sleep and in the end you're just consuming a lot of caffeine and it feels like you're functioning better than you were before but in reality the caffeine is simp keeping you at Baseline so you are not improving your cognitive functions your life or anything you simply using the caffeine to beware you would be if you were well rested and not using any caffeine I'm not saying don't use any caffeine I'm just saying it's a drug most people don't even realize it's a drug use it as a drug not as a supplement or not as food where it's just like use it just to use it actually see whether you get an effect out of it monitor if you're still getting a similar effect or if you're not getting massive tolerance can you function after one day without caffeine or do you get massive headaches and are you intolerable those are indications maybe dial it back and the good news is only a few days will resynthesize your receptors to Almost 100% it's nine days after massive tolerance so just a few days for most individuals nine days n nine days for someone who is completely dependent on caffeine will reset them back to Baseline mhm wow so you're why is that so fast is that that it's just acting so directly on the adenosine receptors and they they seem to be quite robust at at kind of going back to Baseline yeah it is a relatively safe drug in that sense compared to say heroin that's the that's what I want all drugs to be compared to it's a relatively safe drug dot dot dot compared to heroin yeah it just it's still easy to abuse but the abuse effects are not nearly as bad as that of the drugs that are norly banned because people would abuse them right yes what about um the difference between caffeine and pre-workouts I haven't used pre-workout for quite a while probably five or six years uh did for a long time the world of Jack 3D and no explode and and stuff and then dipped out presumably the technology whatever that means uh behind pre-workouts has continued to get comp I know there's no stim pre-workouts now I don't even know what that means um talk to me what what's the science say about pre-workouts for improving performance that versus caffeine if you are using a pre-workout what should you look for etc etc we never Advanced past jacked right we peaked we peaked in 2011 Jack was Peak pre-workout okay okay okay um yeah Jack was not so safe actually but um caffeine uh is pretty much as good as it get and funny enough most comparisons involving caffeine with pre-workouts find that anhydrous caffeine which is caffeine powder or pills Works a little bit better it also works a little bit better in at least a few studies than coffee and it works better in at least some research than pre-workout formulations it seems that there are some negative interactions there they're small and if you like your pre-workout it's fine because in the end it's almostly a psychological effect anyway but there is some negative interaction it seems between at least caffeine and creatine and possibly between caffeine and citrine or B alanine one of the more popular rework outs that are at least somewhat promising in terms of supplements so by and large I would say just consume what you feel best or what you like best but you don't have to spend a lot of money on fancy pre-workouts they're absolutely not essential in fact they are pretty much useless for the vast majority of products so so if you like your coffee if you like your Red Bull or if you want the theoretically best just in hydrous caffeine I don't care about the bitterness and uh uh I care about my wallet then you know just use caffeine powder you can dose it uh super accurately uh so that is the theoretically optimal solution I suppose but yeah no pre-workouts I have very uh little uh regard for their efficacy what about fat burners do fat burners work uh no uh there have been a couple reviews uh which all essentially concluded that fat burners don't actually burn fat at best they increase energy expenditure a little bit and maybe decrease your appetite the best ones are illegal though and they are decidedly worse than for example fiber supplements and even those are not great because of the digestive side effects you're better getting it from foods but for example fiber supplements somewhat reliably result in Fat Loss because when people supplement fiber the it decreases their appetite it makes them Fuller they eat less and therefore they lose fat fat burners maybe increase energy expenditure a few percent over a few hours until you become tolerant to them and that goes for caffeine and pretty much every else that works and is now illegal like jacked God damn it yeah an FDA ruining the party as per usual isn't it interesting that so many of the things that we've spoken about so far today to do with satiety that there's this you know it's such a like principle such an underlying fundamental principle of you have a degree of hunger how much is that going to make you eat and then what are the foods that you're choosing how calorie dense are they how palatable are they how sick do you get of eating them I had a conversation with Johan hary about his new book uh Magic pill about OIC and um it it's crazy just how much of modern human weight gain Health Downstream health problems heart disease stroke all of that stuff is just food is way easier to overc consume because of how palatable it is and way more calorie dense than it was typically and designed so and like what pretty much everything that we're doing now is to try and like oh well if you eat more fiber fiber actually takes up room and real estate in your stomach and that means that you can't take it up with Pringles or whatever like so much of what we're doing is just basically trying to compensate for this evolutionarily mismatched diet environment yes uh a good frame of mind that I like to use is that you have a certain amount of appetite units every day and you have to fill those up because realistically speaking long term you're not just going to be hungry every day right nobody is sixpack lean and they're like yeah I've been hungry for 10 Years bro but look at these abs nobody wants that so in the end not being hungry at least up to a certain point is essentially a long-term requirement to be sustainable and happy so you want to fill up those appetite units and there are different foods that have a certain different number of units that they fill up so if you have harabo it fills up very few units but it has a lot of calories and then there are other foods that fill up a lot of those units uh vegetables in particular for very few calories and that in itself or that by and large is is it the puzzle that we have to solve for fat loss like you want to get your protein in and you want to fill up those appetite units and I like to have the frame of reference that most meals should have a protein source and a filler something that fills you up without having a lot of calories and you want to get your protein in protein also helps itself as a filler but usually you want something like vegetables potatoes depending on Preparation something with um fiber and more volume to fill you up with that mindset I think for most individuals you can have very good fat loss diets that are long-term sustainable without even necessarily tracking your calorie intake and weighing every gram of food that you eat yeah well I suppose what you're trying to do by weighing the food is to reverse engineer the environment that you would get into if you did what you're talking about in any case yes and it is exceptionally beneficial to count your Macros to weigh your food for at least a few weeks if you've never done it to develop calorie awareness and you will it will blow your mind and when you have that calorie awareness then eventually when you have created a sustainable me plan which is also extremely beneficial one of the most uh important predictors of long-term diet success people having a a meal plan that they created that they like which is satiating and satisfying and when they have that then transitioning away from Counting is essentially a simple as not doing it anymore because when you have a fixed meal plan and you know that what you're eating then you don't have to track it anymore because you're eating the same things anyway now then you can change the proportion sizes in the like a little bit but by and large when you found that with calorie tracking these Foods fill you up without resulting in overeating then you don't actually have to track anymore so tracking is a great first step to allow you long term to transition away from tracking because I think most individuals will not want to track their macros over the next Decades of their life yeah yeah I uh I feel like two other areas that you need to pay the price upfront at some point is time blocking or some kind of sort of calendar tracking Pomodoro Technique I need to learn the physics of how productivity Works thing I think that's important even if you know you end up coming full circle around to I just do what feels good bro on on each day but you actually understand what deep work is and you kind of understand that time times intensity equals work done and so on and so forth like you need to what are the constituent Parts kind of uh and the other one is I'm a huge fan of sleep trackers if for nothing else than to Red Pill you on hey you're not getting as much sleep as you thought you were and it's like 70% as much sleep as you thought you were it's way less it's the same as you thought you were in a surplus no you're not you thought you thought you were in a deficit no you're not you're in a huge Surplus like 500 calories off because you forget about that banana that you had and that little bag of chocolate and you got to some crisps from the drawer earlier on um but yeah with sleep it's exactly the same thing well I was in bed for 8 hours no you weren't you were in bed for 7 hours 15 and of 7 hours 15 you were asleep for 6 hours 20 so you got 6 hours 20 and you told yourself you got eight and that's just like a like a sniper looking down the scope of his rifle it's an adjustment that you need to kind of really only make maybe once every couple of years to just remind yourself of oh yeah that thing about I don't sleep anywhere near as much as I thought oh yeah that thing about I eat 500 calories more than my brain told tells me that I did mhm sleep is another one of those things where we have kind of come full circle with sleep tracking technology where now we have all of these smart watches and a lot tracking devices and before that we just had gold standard polysomnography which measures your brain waves and heart rhythm and a lot of different things and that's the gold standard and when you really look at what the the validity of all those devices is then in the end it aligns up pretty well with do you wake up naturally and do you feel refreshed if you wake up naturally and you feel refreshed you could do this with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index or anything less in formal literally just ask yourself those questions and if the answer is yes then your sleep quality is probably good and if you wake up with an alarm indeed after six and a half hours of sleep and you're like oh my God no and you're like yeah I had enough sleep um no you didn't yeah yeah there's a a really great study that was done where they paid people to fall asleep faster and the control group was people who weren't paid to fall asleep and the control group that weren't paid fell asleep more quickly than the group that were yes um happiness sleep and productivity to an extent are extremely deceptive areas to optimize because the process of optimization itself deters from attaining the end goal yes yes yes very OD there needs to be a name for that like like it's inversely inversely productive or something like that because it is it is the harder that you try to achieve these things often the more difficult it is and in some ways there's very little that benefits from more cortisol there's not much stuff where you think oh yeah my outcome in X domain would be improved if I was more stressed and the Very Act of applying pressure to yourself to achieve the thing induces the stress which probably makes the achievement of almost anything harder definitely okay talk to me given that we're on sleep talk to me about the relationship between sleep fat loss muscle gain Beyond I want to wake up feeling rested and not like I want to shoot myself in the head what happens to our bodies based on the amount of sleep that we get so the traditional kind of bro mindset to that which is also how I used to think about it is that sleep is somewhere quite low on the hierarchy where we know important but not nearly as important as how many sets of biceps girls do I do and how much protein am I consuming at lunchtime right in reality that hierarchy is completely upside down sleep has massive effects on well everything but also fat loss and muscle growth so there have been at least four studies to my knowledge that have found very significant effects of sleep restriction in particular on reduced fat loss reduced muscle grow for do strength development and the effects in multiple of those studies are over 50% so there was one study where they contrasted I believe seven and a half and 5 and a half hours of sleep and the group with just two hours of sleep deprivation essentially lost essentially half the amount of fat and double the amount of muscle so the effects on your body composition during a fat loss diet which is how most people or how most of the studies have looked at it is massive it's not on the scale of how many grams of carp do I have at lunch it's on the scale of am I even going to the gym so sleep right up there with just the big effects like high protein diet resistance training decent number total volume or decent total volume of resistance training sleep is pretty much right up there with the pillars the fundamentals it's not something to optimize it's one of the pillars it is the thing yeah wow sleeping 5 hours instead of seven and a half hours reduces fat loss and increases muscle loss by over 50% what so that's in a fat loss phase presumably the effect is exactly the same like that that doesn't matter whether you're in calorie deficit or calorie Surplus your muscle would it reduce muscle gain by I'm trying I'm trying to work out what the converse of this would be I think during a bulking phase like an energy L the effect would be less and the most drastic effects are found in the studies where they have weight loss diets it might be the interaction that sleep deprivation and stress have a very negative interaction effect like if you have a certain amount of stress that you experience and you're well rested you can tolerate it but when you're also sleep deprived it has a very negative interaction effect where this the stress interferes further with your sleep quality and because you are not well rested you also respond a lot more adversely to the stress mhm and it's probably the same in this sense but we don't have a lot of research on that so that's largely speculative on my part I would suspect that the effects are in significant part mediated by diet adherence and no matter how well you try to control it in research there's always a limit to how how people actually follow the programs yeah because someone who sleeps for five or five and a half hours a night are more likely to overeat the next day they're going to have a preference for salt salty and sugary Foods they're going to lean into more highly their willpower is going to be decre maybe it's because the fact that they're trying to get into the gym and even just like for like you on 5 hours sleep versus you on 7 and 1/ half hours sleep what's your training look like your training is going to suck so we don't need to get into the you know cortisol sympathetic arousal state of your body throughout the day it's like hey just your training sucks on five hours of sleep yeah if you don't give it maximum effort then all the optimization in the world it's not going to matter what about artificial sweetness has anything new come out recently in my view artificial sweeteners and low calorie sweeteners in general are by and large safe and very effective for fat loss there have been multiple studies where they found that it can even help with diet adherence and at worst they are equal to water so they don't stimulate uh blood sugar response they don't affect your insulin and this is not just me saying it's actually pretty much all the big scientific institutions that agree with this uh just not the uh media headlines which are very keen to take a rat study where they have dosages that are the equivalent of consuming like 200 cans of Diet Coke per day and then if you do that for the equivalent of a lifetime then there is an increase in the number of uh tumors that are found in these in this group versus the other group right so there have been numerous organizations the European Union FDA that have looked at pretty much all of the popular sweeteners especially aspartam culos and concluded that they are safe got microbiome also in most well-rolled studies not an effect now are they 100% perfectly safe for your whole life regardless of dosage no definitely not regardless of dosage and when you consume them for decades is there potential for harm sure it's still something that we have not fully researched like we don't have randomized control tiles spanning 50 years but you also have to weigh the pros with the cons so there are potential negative health effects maybe not really in the best controlled research but at least in animal research with super I dosages and stuff you have to weigh that with the more with the better diet adherence that you might get with the higher satisfaction from your diet with just the enjoyment of consuming foods that uh you like to eat more when they are sweeter with the fact that maybe now you're eating vegetables instead of uh something with a lot more sugar because you can sweeten the vegetables and it's now okay for you you so you have to weigh all of these positives with any potential negatives and in that sense I think for most individuals on practical basis sweeteners are a net positive if you don't want to use sweeteners fine but if it helps you with fat loss and that in itself is probably going to affect your then that in itself is probably going to more positively affect your health than any negatives of their consumption yes that if the choice is between high calorie drink containing a shitload of sugar and you getting a trace amount of [ __ ] a or something uh we probably take that this was the um I I found it really interesting takeaway from Johan on on that book about AIC and he kind of created a um kind of like a taxonomy or like he stratified out people into bmis and said anybody under BMI 20 27 he thinks there's no real benefit this is largely for aesthetic reasons and there's all of these down stream health risks that may be worrying 27 to 35 is the gray area in which where he said H you know it really depends on kind of what you're trying to achieve because you're going to discriminate it seems more muscle loss than fat loss by using OIC you get OIC face which is this sort of new trend that's going around said over 35 consult your doctor blah blah blah blah blah but I think that the risks of OIC seem to be less than the risk of you being a BMI of 37 or something like that and I think that looking at you know this sort of cost benefit analysis even when it comes to artificial sweetness like what what's the alternative if you are someone with a sweet tooth and you need to put something away to satiate that desire on a regular basis the choice between I mean how many is like 250 calories probably 40 grams of sugar in a D in a normal Coke something like that um it's usually like 50 calories per 100 milliliters most soft drink products okay yeah so not far off um what about what how effective are artificial sweeteners at satiating our desire for sweet stuff because there's an argument to be made that you're conditioning your palette to like sweet things and by having your Zia during the day you're then you know going to relapse with cheesecake on a nighttime have you is there anything to do with that there is something there but not difference between sweeteners and any other sweet food so sweeteners don't hijack any of the systems in your brain or anything like that they can be very sweet of course and in general humans learn to like what they eat it's funny people think that they don't eat things because they don't like them but research actually shows that we learn to like the foods we eat so we like Foods because we eat them in in part of course we also eat food because we like them but you can actually retrain your brain and even your reward Pathways in your brain to like vegetables for example and you can see that when you do brain scans with people that have eaten vegetables for a long time the reward Pathways actually light up more in their brain when they're used to vegetables now a similar thing can occur with salty food sweet food anything so if you eat a lot of sweet food you might like sweet food more and it might increase your um what level of sweetness you find agreeable but it's very context specific it's limited and as long as you can satisfy that with your sweeteners there is not really a problem there so I I don't think that um there's anything malicious there in terms of sweeteners having these negative effects I can't believe that you suggested somebody putting sweeteners on vegetables that seems like a like I don't know I've never even I've never even considered it who knew that I could just sprinkle some Splendor across broccoli and it would taste it's amazing broccoli maybe not but I add sweetener to almost everything I put in in my soy sauce yeah so oh my God what is wrong with you it works super well if you eat for example pasta or tomato soup and what what is the difference between like a super good high quality tomato soup and a really average one it's the level of Sweetness by and large So and I've actually tested this with individuals if you give them like canned tomatoes with a little bit of sucos they'll be like that is good and then you can tell them like yeah fresh from Italy um best tomato quality I I doubt many people will tell tell the difference between higher quality tomato they're naturally sweeter versus cheaper ones with a little bit of suc in wow I didn't realize everybody that comes around to your house for dinner is now going to know that they're being cooked by Splendor you're just secretly lining up Splendor in the kitchen and they don't know okay one of the other areas that I've been pretty interested in recently is high protein versus low protein for longevity um you know there's a whole bunch of people many of whom have been on the show Brian Johnson Rich R uh Peter diamandis all of whom are concerned about mtor activation and the amount of protein that you're having and how definitively in your opinion can the science tell us the outcomes of high protein versus low protein diets when it comes to let's say health span I'm personally not very concerned about that and again it's a consideration of pros and cons because we know that there are decisive health benefits of high protein diet in fighting sarcopenia in reducing diabetes and lot of positive effects so these have to be weighed against any potential negative effect and I think the the concerns with mtor and the like are generally overblown most of the best controlled long-term trials and uh cross-sectional studies so epidemiological research they do not find that protein intake has a significant relationship with all CA mortality and there are health benefits so that would suggest that there's also no effect on longevity the research on mtor and the like is somewhat concerning in the lab but we have to weigh that against the tissue specific effects that we get in real life so just like muscle tissue just like you cannot eat your way to the Olympia with more protein the same is true for entor Activation and other tissues you cannot just eat more protein and enlarge your heart for example right fortunately it doesn't work that way so it's also not the case that just eating more protein everything's just going to get bigger and you're going to get tumors everywhere you're going to get cancer right so the fact that you get ENT activation in muscle tissue nobody gets muscle cancer so that's by and large not a concern bicep cancer that's what everyone's worried about yeah so in general I think the the rationale the the mechanisms there there is cause for concern but the current research does not Point towards negative effects uh in the longest randomized control trials we don't see negative health effects and in the associative long-term research we don't see effects on L cost mortality there was actually also in that study where they looked at protein intakes up to 100 gram and if that still contributes to protein symphysis they also looked at autophagy and it was not affected actually by high protein attaks it's also tissue specific and by and large I think in particular if protein helps you stay lean that is going to be worth more than any negative effects of protein attack because we know that if there's one thing that will extend your lifespan it's probably caloric restriction which translates into being and staying lean long term I think those positive effects will be much more important on the on the scales of of time when you say staying lean how can someone normal what's the adjudication the metric that they I'm I'm staying lean this I am within a healthy whatever what does that mean at least not overweight by conventional s based on what BMI yeah if you're not if you're not doing uh strength training then BMI is probably fine uh if you are if you have some estimate of your body fat percentage then you want to be below about 21% for a man and Below 33% 31% for women just to interject that everyone that listens to this podcast is jacked everyone trains so um given that BMI becomes a more a yet a less useful metric I suppose because it can't account for where is this weight being held and muscle is pretty dense how should someone balance off okay I'm not at 21% I'm I walk around at 17% body fat or something like that is there still a consideration would you still have a particular consideration when it comes to BMI I just the total amount of stress on your system from holding weight I don't know how many people are going to be high BMI 177% at like getting into this realm but there may be some Mass monsters listening that would be interested that's a very good question for body fat it seems pretty much that lower is better for most health markers up to unsain up to the levels where people don't go anyway because it's unsustainable for muscle growth most of the research is only positive so in that sense you would think bodybuilders are going to be insanely healthy at least the natural ones because they're they're jacked and they're super lean however there is something to be said about having very high body mass putting stress on the heart there is ventricular hypertrophy you are lugging around a lot of meat and it does put strain on the tissue so maybe the engine burns up quicker but it also adapts like we know with loading of the spine for example that powerlifters lift loads that untrained individuals would not be able to without basically shattering their whole spine apart and the spine adapts it it can learn to tolerate those loads and the Heart is also very adaptive in the and that's the most that's the driver of the cardiovas health so in that sense I'm also not super concerned especially not when we're talking about natural ranges right so you're saying that your your Natty limit will probably cap out the be leanness plus BMI equation that we're trying to come up with here uh because let's face it you're just not going to get that big right you're not going to be a r Coleman so right that's good in in in one way that's kind of I know it's sad for those of us that just want linear growth uh across our time in terms of lean body mass but it is nice that there's this kind of like a built-in fail safe um that presumably ancestrally would have been pretty rare to have tapped like I don't know how many nomadic hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago were dying soon because they were just too jacked and lean um but that given that we now have all of this luxury time to go and lift things and put them down in the same place in an air conditioned room that we still presuming again that you stay natural uh we still do have this kind of ceiling and maybe that is the thing around about that where you go hm like until the time I start taking androgens I'm probably going to be fine and this just gain as much muscle as possible you're probably going to be fine you don't need to really worry about lugging around all of that extra weight yes in particular because I would again go back to the cost benefit analysis we know that muscle growth is very effective at lowering blood sugar levels and increasing insulin sensitiv it's like you have a huge sponge where that could always absorb a lot of blood sugar so being jacked is actually insanely effective at preventing type two diabetes it's almost impossible to get type two diabetes without a huge genetic propensity if you are lean and jacked and indeed in research we see that people that lose a lot of fat and built muscle they can effectively cure or reduce all the symptoms of type two diabetes sometimes in a matter of eight weeks there have been some studies no way yes massive effect um because again it's both of those things fat loss and muscle growth are both exceptionally effective at reducing fasting blood sugar levels and improving insulin sensitivity that is not just a concern for diabetes because it's also why diabetes is such a big problem blood sugar levels or your average blood sugar exposure and your insulin sensitivity are quite strongly associated with your chronic or your systemic level of inflammation and that in turn is associated with pretty much every Health predicament there is so everything that pass for you is pretty much associated with systemic inflammation all the leading causes of death and because of that positive effect on uh insulin sensitivity and thereby on reducing your systemic inflammation level I think that the effects of muscle mass again in line with most of the research that we have are positive up to the Natty Max now maybe we there is research you know we don't have a lot of research on super Jack guys but um again sticking with what we know is probably positive that is an area that I'm not really too sure why but continuous glucose monitors uh talk of reducing insulin sensitivity blood sugar levels glucose monitoring all of this stuff that's like a new wave I think that I I wasn't really hearing too much about I would say the first time I heard about it was car backloading skip loading uh Carbonite that stuff because that was the way that you portion off carbs and your instance sensitivity is is decreased later in the day which you know can like partition it more effective some [ __ ] I can't remember um but this is now you like it's a big deal you've got like Karen mother of two and a half golden retrievers wearing a CGM what is how legit is using that kind of technology to inform us and what what should people that using that take away from it what what's real and what's rubbish well I think the the biggest factors are simply being jacked and lean so all comes back I love the fact that it just comes back to being jacked and lean that's my favorite thing yeah body composition is simply a huge Factor so just like with when we talk about worst sleep ranks on the hierarchy of like uh factors that influence muscle growth and fat loss your body composition itself has huge effect on your health that's also why we see in research for example to illustrate how effective fat loss is for health improvements people that lose fat in research almost invariably get healthier regardless of diet quality regardless of whether they crash diet there's there's even been a case of the some Professor that did a Twinkie diet or something and he just took some multivitamins and ate some twinkies and lost a lot of fat over the course of a year or something and pretty much all his blood work was better despite essentially living on Twinkies so the effects of being lean and if you especially if you add being muscular to that are massive and indeed in research we see with very few exceptions that people that lose fat their cholesterol levels go down their blood sugar levels go down their heart rate goes down blood pressure can go down not as consistent as the other factors but almost any metric you look at as a health biomarker it improves the leaner you get and there's not even a very clear limit like at some point we know that hormone levels anabolic hormone levels they start tanking when you get super lean but it's even debatable if that is really bad for your health so by and large for most people up to the point where they wouldn't go anyway because it's not sustainable to be 5% body fat year round or whatever being leaner probably is better and realistically I guess people are probably going to struggle to hold what's the leanest that you've ever been actually probably four or five% wow what is that feel like crap feels like crap wow yeah I I think maybe the lowest I've ever been I probably got down to maybe like 8 8 and a half something like that and I didn't actually feel that bad daytoday but just the process of getting there to me was so miserable my body seems to want to sit at maybe like between 12 and 15 and it's just it's sweet doing that and I can be training or not I can be active or not I can be eating well or not and it kind of just fluctuates around about there what what are the things that you wish when it comes to diet body composition and the modalities as well that people are looking at what are the things that you wish people would pay less attention to what are the things where people are kind of very unnecessarily Manic and focused on that you think I I know this sounds sexy or this is something that you're really bothered about or it's trendy or whatever but I I really don't think that it's worth the effort a lot of things I think carbohydrate intake is massively overemphasized uh in my latest systematic review of the literature we found minimal effects of carbohydrate intake on strength training performance now if you are a tennis player or a soccer player it's a whole different ball game no pun intended but if you are just doing strength training you go to the gym you lift weights your carbohydrate intake has minimal effects on your performance most of those effects are psychological there are no coo effects and there's even direct research showing that people that believe they need CS they respond more positively to CBS than people that don't have that um essential um constraint so carbohydrate intake definitely very overrated supplements supplements are massively overrated in general bran Amino assets are still super popular like pre-workouts we talked about uh most supplements in general are just there are the fine tuning right at best um other than that for training I think exercise order is actually something that is it's it's not negative that people pay a lot of attention to it but they people are wasting a lot of time and they're being needlessly inflexible with their exercise order most research finds that you can be quite flexible and you can what I do what I call combo sets with a lot of exercises that stimulate non-overlapping muscle groups for example squats chinups over at press you can combine all of those but you don't have to superhet them so you can take a minute of rest after squats then do your chinups in the same rack and then take a minute of rest reduce some of the weight then do barble over at press in the same rack and it's super time effective and it's it's just as effective for your gains as doing your set of squads five minutes rest set of squats five minute rest and you're just spending a whole lot more time in the gym dude the I can't remember when it was I think it was probably about six years ago when I saw that every leg extension and hamstring Co in the gym is next to each other they're like brother and sister you know or next door neighbors every single one of them and I I had this like the sky opened and Moses came down and I realized why the [ __ ] have I not just been using these two and you actually can superset these two things because you're not cardiovascularly you're just not that yes drilled and I I honestly don't think that there's been any difference other than I've saved myself 15 minutes a session every leg work out for the last like half decade uh just by moving between those two and that's one of those things where I it's it is kind of like Bro Science in that this is look it's a um procedural sort of structural thing that you do when you're training and you just get into this rhythm of oh okay like I know that that's like when you realize that for you because of the articulation of your shoulders that actually overhand pull-ups are better than underhand chin-ups and you've always wondered why your your forearm hurts after this it's like I just struggle to get into that position or whatever it might be or you go neutral and you're like oh wow all my shoulder pain goes away just accumulating little bits of personal wisdom like that is that's what training age I think is really beyond the I have good sort of set point muscle activation neural Drive is good um that's like one of the other best things that you compound by getting older in the gym specifically about the super set of L curls and leg extensions there there is actually a difference but it's positive so it's called an antagonist superet because you are basically training the exact opposite muscle functions and if you do the lag curls first this has been directly researched you get a better effect so if you do L curls and then leg extensions they are leg extensions actually have higher levels of muscle uh activity it's it's a marginal effect but H you also have higher total performance so you can actually do more reps and that's probably just more mechanical tension which should lead to more muscle growth so you not only do your safe time you actually increase your performance that's why they put them next to each other in the gym one other thing that I've been sort of considering today as we talk about artificial sweeteners and continuous glucose monitors and and the timing of your pre-workout shake and whether it's grass-fed or whatever how do people that are super obsessed with the small details of training and diet usually pan out as far as getting Fitness results goes you mean how effective obsession is for result yeah like the focusing on the small details of because you know a lot of people want to I want to optimize I want to see all of the things under a really closeup microscope and I want to get it all right have you got any idea whether or not the people that like the guy on the left of the midwit meme like the the dude with the Neanderthal brow that's like I just lift heavy weight and eat meat uh is it like the dude on the left or the dude in the middle of the right who who does best um it's hard to say on average because you have to disentangle motivation and Obsession so there are certainly a lot of people that are massive over analyzers like they're not going to the gym but they are you know worrying about how many grams of carbs to eat or um they're not tracking their calories but at the same time or they are tracking their calories but at the same time still going to McDonald's and all o and are overeating you know people have just their priorities completely mixed up that's definitely a real thing on the other hand generally people that are more obsessed are probably also more motivated and motivation is huge more motivated people just get better results for sure so it probably depends on kind of where you fall on the are you over analyzer obsessive type or are you just super motivated like I want to know everying single detail because I will take advantage of every single Advantage I can get yeah this that's such a good point to say that the type of mentality that someone has that would cause them to be very obsessive and pay attention to the details probably has more Upstream effects which means that they are going to be more consistent with their training they are going to be said the problem the the if this is a matrix of like how obsessive you are versus how much you pay attention to details the worst one to be in is someone who pays attention to lots of details but isn't obsessive because that's the person who is going to be bothered about whether continuous glucose monitor is but hasn't trained twice this week and that's stepping over dollars to pick up cents so to speak talking about motivation to train what have you come to realize is through your own experimentation personally and the literature and stuff like that how can people keep their motivation to train nice and high you can keep your motivation to do anything nice and high basically by cultivating intrinsic motivation which means you need relatedness competence and autonomy those are pretty much the driving forces of both happiness and intrinsic motivation to do anything in life which means that specifically for training you need to have a certain degree of freedom to make your own training program do things the way you like it so that you're not um in some rigid program that you don't understand why it works and you just have to follow it and you don't like the rules but you know this is the diet so that's the autonomy aspect that you want and if you can combine it with competence that you also know why you're doing what you're doing and you have some basic understanding of human physiology you can create your own training program your diet that is very beneficial and then you also need some degree of relatedness with the activity so whether that's being a gy bro or whether that's just having strong relatedness with the with being jacked like oh the identity of this kind of you wear the clothes like you enjoy wearing gym shark or whatever uh right okay that's interesting I thought when you said relatedness I thought um a community of people but I suppose this would be a part of that like if if if you're someone who considers your identity to be wrapped up in your fit and training you're likely to hang around with people whose identity is also wrapped up in it which presumably is a a positive flywheel crossfits does it exceptionally well cultivating relatedness to training because it's not just that you go to the gym and you exchange your time and effort for muscle growth no you are part of a community you are also following a certain type of diet you are part of a tribe you are not just doing your workouts you are doing their special workouts you have a language you have a way to dress yeah yeah that's funny what was that study posted about talking to yourself making you stronger so there are a lot of ways to motivate yourself and most of them are effective including talking to yourself so you can do it internally or you can actually do it out loud depending on what your personal preference is but if you kind of hype yourself up then and you tell yourself like I can do this or you visualize that you are actually doing it that's also very effective those things do actually increase motivation and can help you you know set that PR or give it maximum effort for your next set especially exercise like squats which have a high kind of anxiety component if you want to perform well uh so pretty much whatever floats or boat uh is my conclusion in terms of getting yourself riled up is effective and can therefore be good to implement have you ever applied that motivation formula to other areas of your life life uh wanting to become smarter or wanting to learn something or become more proficient at a a hobby or a job or get a partner or anything like that have you ever tried to use that same formula effectively in different domains of your life I'm personally very bad at that uh I am I consider myself a reasonably rational individual which means I have great difficulty with all of these positive psychology tricks I always feel like I'm just fooling my myself and like it doesn't work but I know from research that it does work and it doesn't actually depend that much on your personality so I'm in this difficult spot where I'm not doing things that I know work because I just feel weird doing them yeah there's a there's a level of sort of rationality that you get to where you realize that you've made yourself less effective by being more rational I mean you know like maybe a a perfect example of this would be religion that people that are religious they live longer they have better life satisfaction and happiness they have all of this other stuff and you know Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or someone can come in and go well that's stupid like you can't all be right and we mean that Muhammad flew to the moon on a winged horse or whatever it might be but then you go look what are we what are we what's the outcome that we're trying to get here are we trying to live a effective happy fulfilled flourishing AR life or are we trying to be truthful and ultimately rational and really what is the reason for being truthful and ultimately rational presumably it's to improve the tiny sliver of existence that you've got while you're on this planet and you kind of like sacrificed the thing that you wanted for this outcome that is supposed to be able to get it but actually doesn't when you look at it in the cold harsh light of day yeah so I struggle with the same thing what you have with religion I think you talked about it in your Q&A where you want to read the benefits of religion without actually being religious and I try to reap the benefits of positive psychology without feeling like I'm tricking myself but it's hard it's hard it's tough life yeah okay what are the most underrated bodybuilding Foods we've got a panoply of different things that we can throw on our plate what's the most underrated ones for someone that wants to get janked olives I am no way shut up there is some olives are just a generally a generally super healthy quite satiating food with great fat source there is actually some research suggesting that the fats in or some of the foch chemicals in olives have also anabolic properties for your muscle but I wouldn't get your hopes up on that being very significant but it's just a food that you almost never see in Fitness circles but it's super healthy it has fiber it's quite satiating great fat source so I put that one up there and other than that berries probably berries are also EXT exceptionally satiating for how few calories they have and you don't hear that much about them um in health circles yes in Fitness circles less so and then I would probably list pangasius fil as um also very underrated what what is that it's a white fish that is actually flavorful so unlike dapia or Cod or whatever which just tastes like nothing like sea water pus is only marginally more fatty with 3 to 5% fat per 100 grams or 3 to 5 grams for 100 grams um 20 plus gram protein so super good protein source as most fish uh and just much more flavorful and good types of fat too like omega-3 fatty acids so it again all of these things just fall under practical considerations in heal things because if it fit your Macros is largely correct in terms of muscle growth and fat loss that there are no magic muscle building foods and there are no magic fat loss Foods it's just foods that you like that fit into your diet that are satiating and satisfying for you and are also healthy what about eggs are eggs healthy eggs are not healthy but they are also not unhealthy so acts in most studies score essentially neutral they have no relationship with all cost mortality and the best research for example effects on cholesterol are also super modest much more modest than you would think based on their cholesterol content their fatty acid balance is quite good especially if there are um um omega-3 eggs or flax seed fat then the ratio is a little bit better between the fatty acids so generally a very nutritious food high protein decent ratio of fatty aets but in terms of health like are you going to be healthier when you eat them which is the case for say avocado or olives like you can give that to people in a study and eight weeks later you can see that their biomarkers are better than they were before that's not the case for eggs and some people are hyper responders they might um experience a more significant increase in cholesterol levels in LDL cholesterol levels in particular or um apple b which is the better marker than LDL cholesterol so in that sense I would say they're definitely wrongfully demonized because they're very nutritious food and it has a lot of utility but they're not healthy in the sense of you know Health promoting I would the mostly As neutral okay what about red meat what SIM similar ballpark right the latest meta review of meta reviews found essentially no effect there's a lot of research on on red meat it dwarf the whole exercise science field makes me uh very envious when I look at research on eggs or red meat and I'm like I wish we had like 10% of this for exercise science no just study after study after study unfortunately most of them are really poor but still um mostly neutral effects again very nutritious food so it's healthy in the sense of having a lot of good nutrients a lot of protein but not healthy in the sense of when I eat this I can see that my blood biomarkers improve in in the span of weeks but also not unhealthy and definitely wrongfully demonized in that sense especially when you consume it in moderation and it's not processed rat meat how much magic is in liver very nutritious very very nutritious so in the sense of nutrient indices liver scores off the charge on a lot of indices not just liver also kidney most organ Meats score very well but again I don't think that you will see objective improvements in your longevity or any health biomarkers when you consume a lot of it unless you were for example iron deficient and liver is a particularly convenient and Rapid way to correct that deficiency it's so interesting man the looking from the outside is someone that I don't really care about what camp I'm a part of I've like been non- monogamous with my diet approach and even even within my non- monogamy I'm non- monogamous like I I'm I don't even stick to diets all that much but the like level of vehement tribal adherence and how aggressive people get have you got any idea or Theory as to why diet is such a and nutrition is such a Battleground for like this semi- religious existential war between different tribes I do I believe that as a society we have become less materialistic due to the digitalization of our society and further increased welfare levels making it less important whether you were whe you have Prada I don't even know what they make shoes or braceless or whatever uh but whatever if you have Gucci or just uh generic type clothing that used to be a big driver of socio economic status but these days it's more about what you say because you also don't have to do things anymore because it's mostly online now so it's just what you post and which it seems like that you may be doing in life so things that signal your identity in some way which you can display on especially social media are a lot more important indicators of your identity now than they were before because it's less about material Goods it's less about what you actually do it's more about social media what you portray that's why what we are currently you know whether do you consume Starbucks now is all about whether they support Israel or not and just like it's not so important anymore whether the diet is right for you whether it's healthy now it's about you know am I a carnivore or am I a vegan because you know do you care about the environment and do you care about um animal welfare and these things have suddenly become very intertwined with Fitness making it kind of confusing uh at first glance that a lot of people are now suddenly extremely invested in how many grams of carbs they eat or whether the diet is ketogenic or not whereas before that was simply a utilitarian consideration like what diet suits my needs for dietary purposes suddenly these days it has become a lot more of an identity indicator Which is far more important for our um welfare then you know what type of um like for it's the equivalent of for our training for example is nobody cares whether you use a dumble or a barble for your identity but maybe we'll get to the point that even that matters oh god well I mean there was there was a there was a period for a while of free weight versus machine that was kind of an equivalent right yeah yeah there is but that's Niche you know that because if you tell that to the average individual on the street they're just like what do you mean yeah exactly yeah yeah but within the niche of strength training individuals and evidence-based Fitness it's like you have the the natural lifters the enhanced lifters the people that are free weights and um people that are strong versus people that just lift for aesthetic purposes there's that but Val is definitely on a whole different level these days yeah I think that that's probably a pretty good uh reason for it that your you self brand through your diet it it says something to the world about who you are or what you are or what people should expect of you I think another element of it this is my bro science example was your diet is in some way supposed to be Upstream from your longevity and by attacking somebody else's diet what you're basically doing is reminding them of their impending death that you know it's death denialism to to say that um going vegan or going keto or going carnivore or whatever focusing on protein or whatever muscle Centric medicine uh all of these things are I am going to live longer because of this thing that I do and implicit in the not all religions can be right because they contradict each other not all diets can be right right whatever that even means uh because they contradict each other and implicit in me saying that my diet is optimal is me saying that your diet is suboptimal and the downstream effect of that is you're going to die sooner I'm going to still be here yeah that's interesting um there's a lot of psychology about mortality and how that affects a lot of the things we do or our thoughts about mortality um but I'm not up to date on that literature yeah it's an interesting one Mano henselman ladies and gentlemen Mano I've been really looking forward to this for a long time there's like a million more things that we need to get into but uh we can bring this one into land today where should people go they need to follow your Instagram they need to check out all the other stuff you do where should you send them for your listeners probably best is my Spotify and YouTube I'm very active there these days and yeah my Instagram is also uh doing quite well at men. Hansons and you can also go to my website meno handson.com and my newsletter will provide you with like a tour of my most popular contents for those that are new to my contents hell yeah dude I appreciate you thank you likewise if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give my watch