The Science of Eating for Health, Fat Loss & Lean Muscle | Dr. Layne Norton

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Dr Lane Norton Dr Norton is one of the foremost experts in protein metabolism fat loss and nutrition he did his degrees in Biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered one of the world experts in understanding how we extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we eat combine to impact things like body composition and overall health today we discuss an enormous number of topics Under the Umbrella of nutrition and fitness including for instance what is energy balance that is how do we actually extract energy from our food we also discussed the somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners whether or not they are safe or not and whether or not they are an effective tool for weight loss in particular for people suffering from obesity and different types of diabetes we also talk about gut health that is the gut microbiome and how it's impacted by food and how it can actually impact the metabolism of the foods that we eat we also discuss fasting or so-called intermittent fasting or Tim restricted feeding what it does and what it does not do in terms of how effective it is for weight loss and perhaps even for Health and Longevity we also talk about protein and Define very clearly how much protein each and all of us need depending on our daily activities and life demands we discussed the various types of diets that you've probably heard about including ketogenic diets vegan diets vegetarian diets and pure carnivore diets as well as more typical omnivore diets and how to make sure that you get all of the essential amino acids that are critical for healthy weight Maintenance Weight Loss or directed muscle gain we also talk about supplements in particular the supplements for which there is an immense amount of science pointing to their safety and efficacy for fitness and for overall body comp position what I'm sure will become clear to you as you hear Lane talk about each and every one of these topics is that he has an incredible ability to both understand the mechanistic science but also the real world applications of the various discoveries that are made in particular papers and in particular in the randomized control trials that is when a given scientific hypothesis has been raised he's extremely good at understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating whether or not it works in the real world which is what I believe most everybody out there is concerned with I think this is one of the things that really distinguishes him from the other voices in the nutritional landscape I assure you that by the end of today's discussion you will have a much clearer understanding about what the science says about nutrition about Fitness and about how different diets and fitness programs combine to achieve the results that you want before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is element element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing that you don't that means it contains sodium potassium and magnesium the so-called electrolytes but no sugar as you may have heard me discussed before in this podcast every cell in our body and in particular cells within our brain the so-called neurons or ner cells critically rely on the presence of electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium in order to function properly I myself am a big believer in consuming electrolytes anytime I've been sweating a lot so that could be after or during exercise or after doing the sauna 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personalized nutrition program that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals now I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be analyzed with a quality blood test one of the major issues with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there however is that you get information back about levels of hormones levels of lip lipids levels of metabolic factors but you don't know what to do about that information with insid tracker they have a easy to use platform that allows you to assess those levels and then determine what sorts of Behavioral changes nutritional changes maybe even supplementation changes you might want to make in order to bring those numbers into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try insid tracker you can go to insidetracker docomo to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off the huberman Lab podcast is now partnered with momentus supplements to find the supplements we discuss on the huberman Lab podcast you can go to live momentus spelled o us liv.com huberman and I should just mention that the library of those supplements is constantly expanding again that's Liv mous.com huberman and now for my discussion with Dr Lane Norton Lane Dr Norton thank you so much for being here this is a long time coming and I have to say I'm really excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere I've listen to a number of your other podcasts and as a fellow PhD scientist I feel a great kinship with you I know you have tremendous experience in in Fitness and Nutrition a number of areas we also got a lot of questions from our audience and I'm really looking forward to talking with you today yeah I'm excited too I mean this like you said it's been something we've been talking about for a long time so I was glad we were able to make it happen yeah indeed and um I think some of the audience has requested a debate or a battle and I can tell you right now it's not going to happen actually one of the things that um brought Lane and I together uh in conversation online and then via text Etc was the fact that I love to be corrected um and that's what happened I I did a post about artificial sweeteners which we will talk about a little bit later in the episode and Lane pointed out some areas of the study that I had missed um or maybe even misunderstood and I revised my opinions and I think it's wonderful and other Studies have come out since then so hopefully our conversation will serve as a as a message of how uh science and actionable science can um can be perceived and and and that it doesn't always have to be a battle but hey if we get into it we get into it um it won't get physical because we know you would win so in any case I'd like to start um with something that's rather basic and yet um can be pretty complex um and that's this issue of energy balance and energy ization I think most people have heard of a calorie um I assuming that most people don't actually know what that is in terms of how it works what it represents and so maybe you could just explain for people what happens when we eat food of any kind and how is that actually converted into energy as a way of framing up the discussion around weight loss weight maintenance weight gain and body composition it's a great question and like you said this is one of those things where you know people use the term calories in calories out and they say well that's way too simplistic and I'm like if you look at what actually makes up calories in and calories out it's actually very complicated right so let's deal with the uh what you mentioned first what is a calorie because I think a lot of people don't quite understand this so a calorie just refers to a unit of energy of heat specifically and so what does that have to do with food what does that have to do with like what we digest and eat really what you're talking about is the potential chemical energy that is in the bonds of the macronutrients of food right and by digesting assimilating and metabolizing those nutrients we are able to create energy and the in product of that mostly is ATP um a denin triphosphate which is your body's uh energy currency so to understand ATP just try to think about if you're trying to power these various reactions in your body um and we're talking about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP um you know it doesn't make sense that you would have to create a bunch of micro explosions right you want something that can transfer high energy phosphates to power these reactions to give up essentially its energy to power something that might otherwise be unfavorable so a lot of metabolism is simply creating ATP which the end of the line of that I'm going to kind of work backwards is what's called oxidative respiration so that happens in the mitochondria everybody's heard mitochondria Powerhouse of the cell and that is done uh through essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across the mitochondria which Powers the production of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ATP now the way that hydrogen ion gradient is created is through um you know creating hydrog hydrogen ions that can be donated through the kreb cycle now the KB cycle is linked to glycolysis so if we talk about carbohydrate metabolism carbohydrates basically other than fructose get converted into glucose which can go into glycolysis and you can produce some atps through glycolysis and then it boils down to pyruvate then acetylcoa which goes through the KB cycle produces a lot more atps from that uh if you talk about protein protein's a little bit different because protein uh gets converted to amino acids which can be used for muscle protein synthesis or protein synthesis and other tissues uh but it also can be converted through glycogenesis to glucose and there also are some ketogenic amino acids as well um and so you can have a few different ways to get to the kreb cycle either being through um acetyl COA or through glucose going through the glycolysis to pyate then you have fatty acids which um are able to create energy through what's called beta oxidation where essentially you're taking these fatty acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time to produce acetylcoa which again can go into the KB cycle produce those hydrogen ions that can then power the production of ATP so that's kind of like at the cellular level of how this stuff works but stepping back and taking it back out like what does that have to do with weight loss or weight gain right well when you think about the balance of energy in versus energy out sounds very simple but let's look at what actually makes up energy in versus energy out first of all you've got to realize that the energy inside of the equation is more difficult to track than people think right so one uh food labels which we like to think is being you know like from Aon High uh can have up to a 20% error in them really oh yeah so 100 calorie is something listed as 100 calories per serving it could what's actually in there could be 80 or 120 right exactly so that's one aspect of it the second aspect is there's what's called your energy but then there's also metabolizable energy right so if you have uh food stuff with say a lot of insoluble fiber typically insoluble fiber uh is not really digestible and so you could have you know quite a bit of carbohydrate you know but if you can't extract the energy from it and typically this is because ins soluble fiber from like plant material the carbohydrate or and even some of the protein is bound up in the uh plant structure which makes it inaccessible to digestive enzymes and so this is what like adds bulk to youro stool and whatnot but again reduces the metabolizable energy in there and there's some evidence that based on people's individual gut microbiome that some people may actually be better at extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people so just starting off right there okay there's there's quite a bit of play in the energy inside of things now one of the things people will say is well see that's why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories cuz you know if the food labels can be 20% off off and what I'll say is okay that's a that's I understand where you're coming from but typically if it's off it's going to be consistently off and if you're consistent with how you track it eventually you'll be able to know kind of what you're taking in and it's kind that's kind of like saying well don't worry about tracking you know if you're I I like to use Financial um examples you know we know that to save money or you have to earn more money than you spend well you can't exactly know how much money you're earning at a time you know cuz there's inflation and then there's uh if you have Investments those can be you know different interest rates and whatnot it's like okay but you're you know if you have a budget you have a reasonable idea of what it's going to be you know and you make you make certain assumptions but you can relatively guess yeah that's a good example right so now let's look at the energy outside of the equation which is actually way more complicated right and so your energy out is a few different uh buckets the first one and the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate so your RMR and that for most people is anywhere from 50 to 70% of your total daily energy expenditure now people use the term metabolic rate and energy expenditure kind of interchangeably but they're not the same thing so your total daily energy expenditure is the summation of all the energy you expend in a day walking upstairs exercise if you do it fidgeting plus you're resting metabolic rate right so resting metabolic rate is a big part of that but it's not the only thing so that's usually about 50 to 70% and sedentary people will be on the higher end of that so it'll be a bigger proportion whereas people who are more active it'll be a little bit lower not because their metabolic rate is lower but because they're expending a greater percentage of their calories from physical activity then you have something called the thermic effect of food which is a relatively small percentage of your total daily energy expenditure it's about 5 to 10% uh and very difficult to measure and usually what researchers do when they're kind of looking at this stuff is they just kind of make an assumption about it they use a constant uh but that's about 5 to 10% of your daily energy expenditure and that refers to the amount of energy it takes to extract the energy out of food so think about your body kind of like a car right you don't just have gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up right like you have to have a battery so you put in energy so you can get the energy out of the the petrol that you have in your car similar with with food you can't just eat food and then you know it just appears in your cells and you start doing stuff it has to be systematically broken down and put into forms that can actually produce energy and so you have to put some energy in to achieve that and a lot of times people will say something like well not all calories are created equal that's not true because calories just a unit of measurement right that would be like saying not all seconds on a clock are created equal yes they are all sources of calories may have differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite so if we look at something like um fat for example the TEF of fat is about 0 to 3% meaning if you e 100 calories from fat your net will be about 97 to 100 so the process of breaking down that fat essentially subtracts some of the the calories away because you used it in creating energy corre by breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP correct okay correct so you have like for example some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes now fat is actually the easiest thing to convert into energy then you have carbohydrate which has a TEF of like 5 to 10% so you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate and obviously like the fiber content makes a big difference on this but if you eat 100 calories you'll net 90 to 95 protein is about a 20 to 30% TF so if you eat 100 calories from protein you're only netting 70 to 80 now you're still net you know say well you can't eat too much protein well you know people will ask well can protein be stored as fat the carbons from protein it's unlikely it's going to wind up in adapost tissue but if you're eating a lot of protein overall as part of a lot of calories it does it has to be oxidized and it can provide a calorie cushion for other things to be stored in fat but protein itself does provide you know a net positive for calories but less so than carbohydrate or fat and tends to be more satiating so again when people talk about you know are all calories created equal yes but all sources of calories may have differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite so that's the TEF bucket and the BMR bucket then we go to physical activity and physical activity is essentially two parts there's exercise which is kind of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk you do a training session I mean whatever any purposeful activity and then you have what's called neat which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis which I think is actually really cool it's fascinating yeah it is so it's I was actually hanging out with somebody last night and I was noticing them they they were fidgeting their feet and their their fingers and I said you know have you always like been pretty lean and they were like yeah I never really had a problem maintaining leanness and when you look at the obese resistant phenotype people think they have high BMR or you know they exercise a lot and really what it it seems to be is neat they tend to if they overeat they just spontaneously increase their physical activity now people get neat confused I've heard people say well I'm going to go out for a walk to get my neat up that's not neat neat is not something you can consciously modify what you're doing there if it's purposeful it's exercise so for example if when I'm talking if I'm waving around my hands if I'm tapping my feet if I'm whatever that's neat but you know trying to like get yourself well I'm just going to tap my foot more well now if I'm consciously having to do this then my focus I mean you you know how the brain works very hard to do you know you don't really do two things at once you kind of switch quickly between tasks right absolutely can I quickly ask U was the person that you're referring to our friend U Ben Bruno no no but he is fidgety too amazing online fitness channel um he's a freakishly strong individual yeah yeah and uh um I can't remember whether or not Ben you're a fidgeter or not but anyway I'll have to go go check and we'll measure your fidgeting um about uh non- exercise induced thermogenesis neat um my understanding of the old papers on this old being I guess back to the the mid90s is that the calorie burn from neat is actually pretty significant we're not talking about 100 calories or 200 calories per day we're talking about in some cases hundreds of thousand excuse me hundreds to maybe even close to a thousand calories per day could you elaborate on that yeah so there was actually a really classic study I think from I want to say it's from Lavine in 1995 it was metabolic award study and hopefully I don't butcher the study because I'm trying to you know pull it out of my brain I don't expect you to have Pub in your head although I must say you have a a quite extensive uh PubMed ID um grab bag in there so I try to bring the receipts I try to bring the receipts we can put we will put a link to the study in the show note caption so um people can peruse it if they like so I I believe they had people overeat I think it was by like 1,000 calories a day I think for 6 weeks and I mean this is the metabolic Ward so they are this is very tightly controlled it's as tight as you get and what was interesting is of course on average people gained weight and gained fat Mass but some people gained more than expected and there was one person in particular who only gained like just over half a kilo right they should have gained like I think it was something like 3 to four kilos was was predicted and what they found is this IND individual ual just spontaneously increased their physical activity like he didn't purposefully do it it it just happened and I mean you know anecdotally I've seen people who are again you know very lean even eat a meal sit down and start sweating you know and be very fidgety there was a a natural bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova and this guy was just very lean all the time and he was exactly that phenotype you know he would walk up a flight of stairs and all of a sudden he's sweating sit down eat a meal he's sweating you know he just he's a furnace Just expending Energy MH and what's very interesting about neat is that seems to be the most modifiable I mean exercise is very modifiable because you can be intentional with that but of you know BMR TEF and neat neat seems to be far more modifiable so even a body weight reduction of 10% they 've observed a decrease in neat of almost 500 calories a day for for a 10% uh reduction in body weight now you also do get a decline in BMR when you lose weight one because you're just in a smaller body now and so it takes less energy to uh locomote uh but also there's what's called metabolic adaptation which is a further reduction in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass and that's on average usually around like 15% but it does seem to be there's new evidence coming out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR and it seems to be a little bit um kind of in the transition phases so if you if you start a diet within the first few weeks you will have a reduction in BMR that then kind of just a thereafter any further reduction is mostly from the amount of body mass you lose and then if you like for example finish a diet and move your calories to maintenance um within a few weeks BMR kind of starts to come back up there is still a small reduction uh but I used to be somebody who thought the BMR you know the metabolic adaptation was a big reason why people stopped losing weight or plateaued and now I think it's much more to do with neat interesting and youve said that it can't be conscious um because of that will distract us from other activities I don't know if you've had a chance to look at this study and I'll send it to you may it be fun to do a kind of an online Journal Club about this at some point soon but there's a study that came out at University of Houston recently having people do now this is a long period of time four hours a day of basically a Solus push-up which basically a heel raise kind of a seated calf raise with one foot not weighted and then they looked at a bunch of things about glucose metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels and they didn't conclude that people burned a ton of calories but what they concluded was that um blood sugar regulation improved greatly and I think you know there was a lot of excitement about this um at some level but based on everything you're telling me this is fits perfectly with what's known about neat so this sort of fell somewhere in between with um in between excuse me uh sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement I guess they've tried to make that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious well what I'll tell people is if if you're worried about neat one thing you can do like these watches for example people like oh well told me I burned this many calories the they are not accurate for energy expenditure I mean it is like there was a metaanalysis in 2018 I want to say between a 28 and 93% overestimation of energy expenditure by these watches Fitness track so for those of you listening we're not going to name the brand but uh fitness trackers so wrist-worn Fitness tracker and this and this is across the board um so like depending on the brand it could be you know more or less but they all overestimated the amount of the calories you burn from exercise so this is actually a great example where people go well calories in calories out doesn't work for me because I ate in a calorie deficit I didn't lose weight and when I talk to them usually it's they went to an online calculator it's one it's a few things they went to an online calculator put in their information it SP it spat out some calories to eat and they ate that and didn't lose weight and it's like well what do you think is more likely that you're defying the laws of you know um conservation of energy or that you're you might have not gotten the right number number for you the rule the measurement tool was off y the next thing is a lot of people weigh very sporadically and I'll tell people like if you're going to make an intentional weight loss a goal um and again this can be different for different people but typically I tell people weigh in first thing in the morning right after you go to the bathroom do it every day and take the average of that for the week and then compare that to the next week's average could I ask one sorry to interrupt but one quick question about that when you say go to the bathroom not to get um too detailed uh here for unnecessarily but are you talking about urination and emptying your bowels ideally because you eat a big meal the night before yeah yeah got it so wake up uh use the bathroom um in all all forms that you're ready and then and then get on the scale take that measurement average that across the week and then maybe every Monday you take that value and see how you progress and the reason I I recommend doing that is if you're just kind of sporadically weighing in as somebody who weighs themselves pretty pretty regularly I mean my weight will fluctuate you know 5 six pounds and not seemingly changing much you know and that's just you know those short-term changes are fluid so I'm I've had it before where week to week my average didn't change but between the lowest weighin from a previous week and the highest weighin might have been like eight pounds right so if you're somebody who just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in a calorie deficit it and you just weigh in one day where you've just whatever reason holding some more fluid and you oh see this isn't working when in reality your average might be dropping so that's one of the reasons and actually um Believe It or Not uh weight fluctuations are actually identified as a major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss um that it it kind of stops the buyin you know when they have a fluctuation up so that's one of the reasons one of the reasons early on that low carb diets tend to work really well is cu people lose a lot of water weight really quickly and they get that buy in right so oh this is working yeah we can return to that in a little bit because I have theories as to how that um you know when people eat less carbohydrate they screet more water and they'll see you know for the first time they'll see some definition in their abs oh my God this diet's amazing yeah um and the fluid loss does hold that promise I think fluid loss can do some other things that might people lit make people literally feel lighter although it can have some negative effects I do have one quick question and um I do want we'll return to neat in a moment but when you say the caloric burn as a consequence of exercise I want to ask about the caloric burn during that exercise so for instance somebody's on the treadmill and they'll see okay they burn you know 400 calories actually I think this is a month where a number of prominent podcasters like Berke ker Tom sigura Joe Rog and others are doing they call it sober October but in addition to avoiding alcohol they they're burning 500 calories per day during the exercise they're they're measuring it a lot of people do this they think they take track of whether excuse me take stock of how many calories they burn my understanding is that if that particular form of exercise is a muscle building form of exercise that at some point later there might be an increase in muscle if you did it everything right do everything right and then you will burn more energy as a consequence of adding that tissue that's a long process as as you know and we will discuss but I have heard about this post exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism I'm probably not using the right language in here so if I were go out for instance and Sprint do some Sprints run hard for a minute jog for a minute run hard for a minute do that 10 times over they'll let's assume I burn 400 calories during that um exercise uh bout but my understanding is that in the hours that follow my basil metabolic rate will have increased is that true and is it significant enough to care about so answer both those questions um yes there does seem to be a small increase uh in metabolic rate and know it does not appear to be enough to actually make a difference so when they look at and again this is where um I tell people I think I have a good perspective on this because I my undergraduate degree was a biochemistry degree so I was very into mechanisms you know what I mean it was like oh if we just do this and this we'll get this right and then I did nutrition as a graduate degree and then my adviser was so great because you could do something over here and he could tell you how it affect vitamin D metabolism over here this is Don lay yeah Don so he you know he would always kind of say yeah but what's the outcome going to be right so this is actually one of the things I changed my mind on was I used to be very much well I think you know high-intensity interval training is probably better because you get this post exercise energy burn which they do see in some of these studies but in the kind of metaanalyses and like more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between high-intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity uh cardio so equating work uh they don't see differences in the loss of body fat and so to me if I'm looking at that's the example of a mechanism which is okay we're seeing this small increase in basil metabolic rate that should lead to increased loss of body fat but again remember you're capturing a a snapshot in time right but we don't see a difference in the loss of body fat so what may be happening and again I'm just speculating but a way to explain it could be you might have an increase and then you might actually have a decrease that tends to just kind of wash it out right I see and I have to imagine some forms of exercise this would be highly individual but um will Spike appetite more than others so for instance if I go out for a 45 minute jog or which I do a 45 to 60 minute hike or jog once a week I just make it a point to do that or Ruck or something like that throw on a weight vest and hike after that I find I I'm very thirsty I want to hydrate but I'm not that hungry that's true of most all cardiovascular exercise for me um but after I weight train about 60 to 90 minutes later I want to eat the refrigerator and so obviously calories in calories out dictates that that will play an important role as to whether or not I gain or lose weight Etc so is it safe to say that the specific form of exercise that people choose uh needs to be taken in consideration of calories in calories out so how much is burned during the exercise also how much that exercise tends to stimulate appetite I don't know whether or not people explore this in in the rigorous studies and whether or not that form of exercise actually increases lean muscle mass or not um so now we've taken exercise and split it into a number of different dimensions but this is what you are so masterful at is really parsing how the different components work individually and together so if you would just um you know expand on that I'd love to know what you're thinking yeah so this is actually really fascinating thing um so first thing I want to I want to just go back to talking about like for example Bert and Tom and and Joe we're going to do 500 calories a day on whatever um so those apparatuses don't measure those things effectively either right just like these watches but the one thing I will say is if you are like for example if I do two hours of resistance training typically this will say I burned about a th000 calories right that's a lot of resistance training right my my weight workouts are like are warm up for 10 minutes and then one hour of work done I just I love to train it's and you and you can recover from my recovery quotient is pretty low so I've been training for 30 plus years and I found that if I do more than an hour of hard work in the gym meaning resistance training if 75 minutes maybe I'm okay but past that I have to take two maybe even three days off before I can train my nervous system just doesn't tolerate it well so I I limit it to an hour um you know but and part of that to remember is like I've kind of built up to that over a long period of time right you know so you couldn't just throw somebody in and start having them do two hours a day it's not going to go well for them I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors athletic greens athletic greens now called ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic green since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health our gut is very important it's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health and those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health in addition athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and it tastes great if you'd like to try athletic atic greens you can go to athletic greens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road in the car on the plane Etc and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's athletic greens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2 what I will say about the calorie trackers is so if I'm used to okay usually burn about 1,000 calories according to this it's not accurate but if I go in tomorrow and I do 1300 it may not be accurate I don't know what the exact number is but I can be relatively confident that it's more than the previous session right and so in terms of comparison it might be okay like you know kind of within subject um and then the other thing I was kind of circling around on was if you're worried about neat tracking your steps can be helpful because people's step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're on a fat loss diet they don't even realize it so uh and and that again not a complete measure of need but what we've had some clients do with our team Boling coaches is they'll say okay you're at 8,000 steps right now we're not going to add any purposeful cardio but whatever you need to do to maintain that 8,000 steps do that and sometimes they have to add you know 15 20 30 minutes of cardio because their spontaneous activity that they're not even aware of goes down that's a really excellent point I I I've heard you know the 10,000 steps per day number was um we all heard that and then I learned that 10,000 was just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number so like The 8 Hour intermittent fasting thing that there's a story behind that because I actually spoke to sain and it turns out that the graduate student in his lab that did that initial study which was on mice by the way um was limited to being in lab for about eight hours by their significant other so the eight hour feeding window is actually the consequence of this person's relationship um that is that is a really great point that people don't realize when they a lot of people will to copy like scientific studies and I'll I'll tell people like listen scientific studies are so confined you you need to be very careful with how broadly you apply what's in there right like they're they're a very big hammer is kind of the way I look at it okay they're not a scalpel they're a big hammer and I think a lot of times in terms of coaching scientific studies will tell you what not to do rather than what to do right uh but getting back to your question about like exercise appetite so first off I'm not really aware if there's uh evidence showing like differential effects of different forms of exercise on appetite it's possible um but again it also could be like a placebo effect right because we like for example you and I grew up in an era where the muscle magazines it was like well as soon as you finish your workout you got have your biggest meal of the day right and you know when I say placebo effect I think people have the wrong idea of what the placebo effect is they think that's just a feeling placebo effect can actually change your physiology people don't people don't realize this um there's research showing that a placebo or the power of suggestion is basically as powerful as some Pharmaceuticals and one of the the great examples I like to use is actually there was a study we just covered in our research review on creatin where they did um four groups not supplement with creatin told they weren't supplemented with creatin not supplemented told they were supplement supplemented told they weren't supplemented told they were basically it just matters what they told them really oh yeah this is incredible um I have to get this study we'll so we can link to it a colleague of mine at stord she's been on the podcast I'd love to introduce you to because I think you guys would um really riff first of all she was a former D1 athlete um and then is a runs a lab at Stanford in Psychology this is Lea Crum and she's and grew up um in this you know very athletic obviously and very very smart and her laboratory focuses on these belief Placebo effects where if you tell people all the horrible things that stress due to you in terms of your memory and cognitive functioning and then you give them a memory test they they perform well below Baseline if you tell them that stress sharpens them in the short term and that adrenaline is this powerful molecule that can uh really tune up a number of memory systems memory improves and it it's remarkable um and it's consistent and uh and this and they've done this for any number of different things including allergies for instance you know incredible results in any case I I'm I'm so glad you're bringing this up um I take creatine monohydrate uh and I have for years five grams a day I don't and um and it's great and I believe it's great so so is there a compound effect of believing it's great and it actually being great not in this study but so I think the thing to point out people will Mis interpret that as creatin doesn't work and that's not what that says what it says is your beliefs about what it does are probably just as powerful as what it does right so uh they actually did a study and I don't have the citation but it was I think within the last 10 years where they told people they were putting them on anabolic steroids and wouldn't you know it they had better gains even though they weren't actually on anabolic steroids they had better gains than people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids and that's like hard outcome strength lean body mass you know those sorts of things so when people say well I wouldn't fall for the placebo effect it's like eh you don't have to fall for it if if you believe it to be true the power of belief is very very powerful and as a scientist I wish sometimes I was ignorant so that I could subject myself to the placebo effect more often absolutely um so kind of getting back to that's just a possible explanation of maybe why you know and I'm the same way like I get done with a a workout like a resistance training session I'm like I'm ready to eat right now if you look at the literature overall on exercise and appetite it's not always what you'd expect consistently it seems to show that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect so um people don't tend to compensate at least fully for the amount of movement they do and there is some evidence that you've probably heard people say well exercise is a really poor weight loss tool right like it like if you figure out how many calories you should be burning from it and you do that you end up getting less weight loss than you than you would predict I have a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less but doesn't loath exercise but dislikes exercise and they and they're of healthy weight but I'm always encouraging them to exercise more and this is an ongoing battle in our in our sibling relationship well one thing I would say is that exercise independent of anything that happens with your body weight you will be healthier so exercise is one of the only things that will actually improve your biomarkers of Health without even losing weight so there's like it'll improve your insulin sensitivity inflammation all that stuff so everybody out there looking for a hack to be healthier exercise is the hack right crucial point and our um uh mutual friend Dr petera I think has gone on record several times now saying that of all the things that one could take NN Etc metform of all regardless of whether or not one takes those or doesn't take those that the positive effects on longev ity by way of bi biomarkers from regular exercise is you know far outweighs all of those things combined not that those things don't necessarily work we're not going through them in detail now but that exercise is by far the best thing we can do for our health span and lifespan yeah absolutely I I 100% agree and when you're talking about weight loss people miss the point of exercise I think yeah there's some work that came out from Herman poner as well that basically showed like well if you do 100 calories from exercise you have a like 28 calorie reduction in your basil metabolic rate in response to that so it's kind of like this constrained energy expenditure model right but what I would say is okay well there's still a net of 72 right so it's still it's still okay and the other thing is I think the effects of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to what it does to appetite um so if you look at people who lose weight and keep it off for a number of years kind of outli because most people don't keep it off for years over 70% of them engage in regular exercise of people who do not keep weight loss like maintain weight loss less than 30% exercise regularly so now that's just a correlation that doesn't necessarily prove causation but there are some pretty compelling studies showing that exercise increases your sensitivity to satiety signals so basically you could have the same satiety signals but you're more sensitive to them when you exercise and there's actually a really classic study um from the 1950s in Bengali workers where they looked at basically four different quadrants of activity so you had sedentary lightly active moderately active heavily active basically based on their their job choice and they didn't have an intervention they just wanted to track them and see how much you know how many calories did they actually eat so it was like a j-shaped curve so the sedentary ate more food than the lightly active or moderately active but from lightly active to heavily active they almost perfectly compensated how many calories they should be eating so to me that suggests when you become active you can actually regulate your appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than if you're sedentary and do you think this has to do with changes in the brain brain centers that respond to satiety signals from the periphery um and or do you think it has to do with uh changes in blood sugar regulation what I was taught and I don't know if this is still considered true is that you know spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar and there's this kind of and we'll get into this when we talk about artificial sweeteners this is idea in mind I think I adopted perhaps falsely that you know you eat something that's sweet or that tastes really good and and you are suddenly on the train of wanting to eat more um and I could imagine how exercise um if it is increasing the satiety signals uh could be working an number of different ways yeah I I think it's a I think the effect is probably mostly at the brain level um you know the the effects on blood sugar the research out there is not very compelling for blood sugar driving uh appetite now if you become hypoglycemic yes you you'll get hungry but it's a different kind of hunger than like your normal like I feel kind of Y and my stomach's growling like those are they can go together but usually like the hypoglycemia is like I am hot I feel like I'm going to pass out like you want to eat something not because your stomach's crawling but because you know that you just need some fuel it's like you're getting pulled under oh yeah absolutely I've been there I've been there when I've uh done longer fasts something I don't do anymore and drank a lot of black coffee there was probably an electrolyte effect there because coffee has you excrete sodium and other electrolytes and then just feeling like needed something this whole thing like I need something this kind of desperation I I never want to be back here again hypoglycemia is very uncom it's not fun so you know again I when they and when then when they look at you know actual randomized control Trials of implementing some exercise where they're you know pretty controlled environment they typically see people if if anything they eat less as opposed to eating more now some people again that's you know studies report averages right and there's individual data points so there are some people who at least anecdotally report that exercise makes them more hungry that's completely valid it's now it could be their beliefs around it it could be a number of different things but it's important to understand that there is individual variability and I think one of the things that I've learned to appreciate more is not trying to separate Psychology and Physiology we we do this a lot and so well I want to know the physiology I don't care about the psychology of it and now I'm kind of appreciating more psychology is physiology you know that like with most things now we have kind of the biopsychosocial model and I'll give you an example of this a lot of people get really caught up with appetite and if we could just suppress people's appetite that's part of it but people don't just eat because they're hungry they eat for a lot of different reasons social reasons especially so can you remember the last social event you ever went to that didn't have food no right uh if you look at dinner plates from the 1800s they're about this big now how big are dinner plates the whole Buffet right right yeah um if you there's um situational cues right you're sitting down to watch TV oh grab some popcorn grab some you know snack whatever I even see this with it you know how one person will pick up their phone and then everyone picks up their phone I think there's a similar effect with food yeah and and same thing right like how many times have we either done it ourselves or been uh experienced people saying oh you should have some you should have like you know alcohol especially right like people will um I was hanging out with somebody last night and I had a beer and they just had you know a water and I'm like I feel no need to try and convince them to do that with me you know what I mean but as humans you know we're we're kind of hurt animals like we don't want to be doing something out and isolation on our own now I'm this is a very tenuous I guess belief of mine but you know doing things alone in isolation you know during kind of you know ancestral times that's going to set off your alarm system you know because if you don't have other people you can't protect yourself right so typically things were done together in groups and I think that's a lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in nature about a lot of things right so the whole point to that is you know on the list of reasons why people eat I mean I've gotten to the point where I think that hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat you know stress um lack of sleep boredom boredom yeah absolutely so unless you know we can do something that addresses all those things um there's a there's a line from a review paper this review paper came out in 2011 by a researcher named McAn and it's the best review paper paper I've ever read it was called uh biology's response to dieting the impetus for weight regain and basically went through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that happened during fat loss diets and how biology's response is to try to drive you back to your your previous and I'm going to butcher the quote but at the end of the study he said basically the B's systems are comprehensive redundant and well focused on restoring depleted energy reserves and any attempt or any kind of strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to address a broad spectrum of these things is going to fail and so that's why when people say well just do low carb you won't be hungry I'm like yeah but people don't just eat because they're hungry so I think really like trying to get outside the box and and think about these things and especially when you read some of the literature I I recently read a a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers which I thought was really interesting um so they took people who had lost a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for for I think it was three years and they basically asked them questions and tried to identify commonalities and there were some things that I expected like cognitive restraint self-monitoring um you know exercise and then one of the things they said that I found really fascinating was pretty ubiquitous between people they said said I had to develop a new identity so are you familiar with Ethan suple no so Ethan is a actor he's been in like Remember the Titans and American History X I certainly saw American History X yeah so he was he was very large like he was like 550 lb and now he's like 230 and jacked wait he was five he was how 550 lbs wow um and he has it whenever he puts up posts on his Instagram of him training it'll say I killed my clone today and I asked him like is this what you're talking about like creating a new identity and he said this is exactly what I'm talking about because I had to kill who I was because there was no way I was going to be able to make long-term changes if I just didn't become a new person because there's I mean and addicts talk about this right like um people who were alcoholics they had to get new friends they had to hang out at different places because their entire life had been set up around this lifestyle for alcohol and I would actually argue that Eating Disorders or disordering patterns is much harder to break than other forms of addiction and think about food addiction well in some ways bulimia and anorexia are still addictions you can't stop eating like if you're alcoholic you can abstain from alcohol if you become addicted to say cocaine you can abstain from that you can never abstain from food and so now imagine telling a gambling addict well you've got to play this slot you know couple times a day but no more like that's that's really challenging so um yeah I just like all this stuff it's so important to be comprehensive with how we treat these things all these are incredibly important points and to my knowledge I don't think anyone has really described it in a piece of way the way that you're doing here so important for people to understand this because obviously as a neuroscientist I think you know the nervous system is creating our thoughts our thoughts are and feelings are related to psychology and therefore of course our physiology and our psychology are one in the same it's bidirectional now there's nowadays there's a lot of interest in brain body in particular gut brain AIS and we we can talk about that but I I really appreciate that you're spelling out how there are these different variables each one can account for a number of different things exercise clearly has a remarkably potent effect both during the exercise in terms of caloric burn overall health and biomarkers and then um this is wonderful to learn that it can increase the sensitivity to uh to satiety signals uh I think that makes at least in my mind places very high on the list of things that people should absolutely do but that there are other factors too um and the identity piece is fascinating um it reminds me also your story reminds me also of David goggin who is you know you know he talks about his former very overweight self almost as if it was a different person um and he uses language that I'm not going to use here um but you know I know met David know David a bit and he's he's every bit as intense and driven as and a remarkable human being as he appears to be uh online he is that guy um but it does seem like he had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and and continues to do that every day and I think what your point about that this other fellow who did um does a uh does it through a similar process I the word today seems to really matter it's not like you defeat this former version of yourself and then that that that person is buried and gone you said you know I killed my clone today and that's the way that David talks about it also so this is a daily process and I think um this is not just a small detail in tying together all these things I think that what you are describing is is fundamental because we can pull on each one of these variables and talk about each one of them but at the end of the day we're a cohesive whole as a as an individual in um sorry you were about to say that gets that's get actually into one of my my favorite topics which is you know why do we have such a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off because of obese people six out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount of body weight in their life so why do we still have an obesity problem they don't keep it off why don't they keep it off when you look at the research basically what it suggests is is because people think about I'm going to do a diet and I'm going to lose this weight and they do not give any thought to what happens afterwards right it's like think about if you have some kind of chronic disease or a diabetic right you you can't just take insulin once and that's it right you got to take it continuously otherwise you're going to have problems um if you do a diet and you lose you know uh 30 PBS fantastic but if you then just go back to all your old habits you're going to go back to where you were if not more you can't you can't create a new version of yourself while dragging your old habits and behaviors behind you so what I'll tell people is because people say well I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this diet or that diet and I'll say that's fine do you see yourself doing that for the rest of your life and if the answer is yes if you if you really believe that that's going to be sustainable for you and plenty of people low carb intermittent fasting what whatever they say felt easy you know I could do this forever great what if you're going to lose weight you have to invoke some form of restriction whether it is a nutrient restriction like low carb low fat a time restriction intermittent fasting any form of time restricted eating or a calorie restriction tracking macros whatever so you you get you get to pick the form of restriction so pick the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive to you as an individual and also do not assume that it will feel the same for everybody else because I made this mistake where it's like I I track things and so I I allow myself to eat a variety of foods I allow myself to eat some fun Foods uh but I track everything and I'm able to modify my body composition and be in good health doing that now doesn't feel hard for me part of it I've just been doing it for so long but to other people that's very stressful they don't want to they said well I'd rather just not eat for you know 16 hours if that feels easy for them do that because the one thing that there was a couple of metaanalysis on uh popular diets and basically what they showed was they were all equally terrible for for long-term weight loss but when they stratified them by adherence and none of them were better for adherence overall but when they stratified people just according from lowest adherence to best adherence it was a linear effect on weight loss so really what it says is what is the diet that's going to be easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you should probably do that and people again this is where I step back and take the 10,000 foot view somebody will say well I'm going to do ketogenic because I want to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this and they're talking about all these mechanisms and everything and that's great can you do it for the rest of your life right is that is this going to be something sustainable for you and if the answer is no you probably need to rethink what your approach is going to be it's incredibly important message um basically that you know if I could highlight you know if there was a version of highlighter boldface and underline in uh in the podcast space I I would highlight bullace and underline what you just said um and for those of you that heard it uh listen to it twice and then go forward because it's absolutely key I think it also explains a lot of the so-called controversy that exists out there I think um it also crosses over with the placebo effect I almost want to say um pick the the nutrition plan that you think you can uh stick to for for a long period of time ideally forever and pick your Placebo too because there there is a lot of placebo woven into each and every one of these things intermittent fasting uh keto probably even um vegan versus omnivore versus carnivore well they even talk about um you know the diet honeymoon period right where like you go into a diet and you're all fired up about it and like you're very adherent and then what happens with every single diet without exception in research studies is once you get past a few months adherence just starts wanting and going off here we are really talking about a form of relationship you know I'm not I'm not saying that to be tongue and- cheek actually we had a guest early on in the podcast Dr Carl dith he's a psychiatrist and um bio engineer at Stanford um tremendously successful lasar Award winner Etc and he talked about love as a sort of a a an interesting aspect of our psychology where it's a story that you co-create with somebody but that you live into the future of that story you know when you pair up with somebody that he was referring to romantic love that there's this sort of mutual agreement to create this this idea that you're going to live into so it's not just about how you feel in the moment it's also that you project into the future quite a lot I'm seeing a lot of parallels with um a highly functional and effective diet and um and I love it I'm not setting this parallel up artificially I'm setting up because I think that ultimately it boils down to what you said earlier which is that the brain and our decisions about what we are going to stick to are tremendously powerful and I think one thing I will say is like keep in mind um when you look at the research data the met analyses on say Tim restricted eating versus non when calories are equated doesn't seem to be a difference in in weight loss fat loss and most biomarkers of Health same thing for low carb versus low fat F equate calories and protein there there was a meta analysis done by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the and again actual loss of body fat and another important point was there was I think there was 22 studies in this but all of them provided food to the participants right that's important because that makes ensures that adherence going be much higher in those studies whereas like various Free Living studies sometimes you can see funky results people are sneaking food or or they're just not really diffing the way that the study would ideally have to me unless unless the person is getting like continuous support like studies where they have a dietitian talk to people like every week tend to actually have pretty good adherence but I mean that's expensive to have done a study and again like what limits studies money money and money right um but the low carb versus low fat when protein and calories are equated basically no difference in fat law now some people get upset about this but it's like well to me that's like this is great because you get to pick the tool you want the one tool it doesn't seem to be that much better than another so pick the one that works for you right whatever lever you've got to pull you've got a bunch of different options you mentioned um picking something you can stick to for a period of time is there ever a case for someone saying look I like to eat low carb or even keto for six months and then switch to a more standard omnivore caloric maintenance type diet and then switch back is there any downside to doing that for sake of health or or weight loss over time or weight maintenance over time because I realize not everyone is trying to lose weight um and I definitely want to talk about at some point how to eat to maintain weight because I think there are a significant um fraction of people out there who are trying to do that yeah is there anything um is there any downside to being a dabbler you know keto for a few months and then uh omnivore for a few months Etc I think that's actually a great thing especially to like maybe find what you feel is easiest for you right um but in terms of like as a strategy I mean I guess you know some people uh this might get into dopamine but like oh change and get something new and like you know you feel a little bit more positive about it partner model yeah yeah exactly so I don't think it's how I would usually set things up initially for somebody but if somebody said hey I just like to have some variety and and change it up as long as they're still like you know their behaviors and they're doing portion control or whatever it is and they're able to sustain a calorie deficit or you know depending on whatever their goal is I don't think there's really any downside to it I I do think the one thing to keep in mind is when you look at like going between extremes So like um low fat to low carb or or vice versa um there can be in that transition period a little bit of weirdness for lack of a better term like for example if you've been on a ketogenic diet and all of a sudden you move to like a higher carb diet you'll be like basically insulin resistant for just a short period of time now is that going to cause any health problems probably not in the long term as especially if you're still controlling calories but just because your body has kind of like upregulated these systems dealing most with mostly with fat and glucose production rather than glucose metabolism so now if you start taking glucose or carbohydrate back in like for example you get somebody oral glucose tolerance test after they've been on keto they'll do pretty terribly at it uh but that doesn't last that long about how long few weeks I think that's important for people to know because I have a feeling during those first few weeks are the period of time when a lot of people go running back to what they were doing previously which is not to say that they shouldn't but um I've certainly done that I I've tried um very low carbohydrate diet and I would have assumed and now I know I'm completely wrong but I assumed that I was so carbohydrate starved for so long that my insulin sensitivity which is a good thing by the way folks would have gone through the roof and I would be able to just sponge up every bit of glucose that I would have ingested through carbohydrates so I did indeed switch over and I felt like I had pretty terrible brain fog I even got some Jitters and I thought wait what is this you know my blood sugar was low before now my blood sugar should be in more moderate territory but based on what you just said I had upregulated the enzymes and systems in the body for fat metabolism on the keto diet and then switching over um there was a basically a ramping up of the of the the the molecules involved in presumably in glycolysis transition period I mean think about like if you haven't weight trained before and you start weight training you're going to feel pretty terrible right like you're going to be sore and stiff and all that kind of stuff but I will say you aren't necessarily wrong in what you said about being more insulin sensitive because it depends on how you measure insulin sensitivity so if you measure with something like um you know fasting blood glucose or fasting insulin or even hom IR those tend to be pretty good on low carb but then if you do an oral glucose tolerance test it tends to be pretty bad and so it it depends on your specific measure right um so I I think that you know the idea that keto makes you you know glucose intolerant or insulin resistant I think again it's just a transition period and I'm not too worried about it but it is something important to keep in mind and one of the reasons like if somebody wants to transition out of keto typically if like I'm working with them or one of our coaches are working with them will kind of instruct them to do it like slowly and kind of systematically over like a 4 to 8 we period that way hopefully you know they're not having that period of two weeks where they're like oh man why why do I feel so terrible very important point I want to go to the other end um literally and figuratively and talk about gut health because up until now and certainly I see what you did with that and certainly in the last um few minutes we've been talking a lot about sort of top down processes you know that the brain the psychology Placebo effects but the very real aspects of those not that I can imagine 2,000 calories is a th000 calories and somehow change the law of thermodynamics can't do that but we've been sort of top down in integrating a lot of different ideas into weight loss maintenance and and weight gain but gut health at least the the more popular studies on gut health have of blown a lot of things out of the water for instance this idea that you could take obese mice and literally give them feal transplants from lean mice and yes that sounds like what it sounds like um uh fecal transplants definitely um inserted through the same end in which it comes out and I point that out because a lot of people have asked me that they you know it was kind of scary to me I thought yes this is not about ingesting feces this is they they they literally do a a transplant of Fe from lean mice into obese mice and the obese mice get lean and yes this has been done in humans limited number of studies and observed um some pretty impressive effects on weight loss that I have to assume could be related to placebo effect they might have told these obese people hey look you're going to get lean through this feal transplant from lean people but more likely it had some effect on their core physiology I don't know which aspects although I can speculate which ones and they became leaner they lost weight and that is in some sense miraculous when especially given the important role of psychology and exercise and satiety signals because I'm going to assume that they controlled for a number of those other variables although no study is perfect what are your thoughts about gut health as it relates to metabolism energy utilization and balance yeah so the first thing I'll say is I'm not a gut gut health expert but I will I feel relatively comfortable talking about it based on conversations I've had with people who are experts uh one being um Suzanne devota who's um are you familiar with her I well she's sort of a Phenom in this area from what I understand so she was actually doing her Masters when I was doing my PhD in layman's lab so she was one of my labmates terrific um and you know I I the other thing to say is even gut health experts and Suzanne will tell you this they're like you know talk to me in 20 years we we just know so little and I I think that's an overall thing that people don't understand is the scientific consensus moves very very slow and probably for good reason because if we just flipped our scientific consensus based on one study I mean you it would be a mess right so it's going to take time before you really understand the implications of the gut and what it means so when it comes to weight loss there probably is a role in there I mean we've seen that there's something going on now whether that's is it um something where a gut back microbiome makeup that's more obese resistant uh perhaps it extracts less calories out of the food you eat right uh or perhaps it's elevating BMR although I I think that that's probably somewhat unlikely do you think it could impact the way satiety signals are I mean back to the brain again is we know that there's a link in the the gut brain axis and so my suspicion is that it probably is uh working via apetite regulation so that I mean if we look at um if we look at the most effective uh um obesity treatments out there which is like simig glutide uh I mean you consistently see a you know 15% you know on average loss of body weight which is massive and people keep it off um that is a glp1 mimetic which is a gut hormone and it basically just is a very very powerful appetite suppressant uh not well I guess I'm interrupting but hopefully with a purpose um there's this really interesting study and it's in mice admittedly but uh published in a neuroscience Journal L and the basically the takeaway is that like so many things in Neuroscience it The glp1 Works in two parallel Pathways in the brain it seems to impact neurons in the hypothalamus that control satiety so exactly what you're saying and in the gut it seems to create a um the an activation of the mechanos sensors in the gut so the perception is that the gut is full even or Fuller I should say not full because I think people who take semaglutide don't feel bloated I don't know they might but that one feels as if their gut is actually Fuller because these mechano sensors that send stretch are sending signals to the brain oh like I actually have some food I'm not empty down there right um anyway I I I'm tickled by this result mostly because every time I hear about a a drug or a or a molecule having effect we think it has an effect at one location but it's kind of interesting that especially for something like um appetite regulation that it would be impacting body and brain in parallel anyway forgive me I'm you can tell I'm I'm really excited about this and and here you are telling a neuroscientist me that a lot perhaps circles back to these brain mechanisms of society yeah I mean I think that and especially looking at the research on leptin you know like we used to think okay metabolism is mostly like liver based and then you know there's um there's uh you know metabolism in the atopos site and skeletal muscle but none of this stuff exists in is there's so much cross talk between these Pathways and that's you know when we get into mechanisms the one of the things I love mechanisms but one of the things I tell people is keep in mind that when you're dealing with an outcome right so like when I say outcome based we're talking about physical outcomes like weight loss fat loss changes in blood markers whatever though that is the summation of thousands of different mechanisms so sure sometimes you can affect a mechanistic pathway and you get kind of straight down the line outcome but not always you know whenever you make a treatment or you know kind of anything into the system it's like throwing a pebble in a lake right it creates Ripples and we don't always know what those are going to be right um and that's why I mean we've seen you know certain drugs well it works on this pathway and then they list off all the side effects and you go well how would it create that many side effects it's because nothing for the most part they don't just work in one place there's multitude of places it works um and and to your point about um seig glutide and the effects on uh mechano sensors it's probably why a lot of people report actually kind of like no lowgrade nausea um when when they're using S glutide uh because of that because if you're you know that feeling is usually not like a real comfortable feeling but I mean it will get you to not eat so I think there's absolutely likely a connection uh but we haven't fully hallucinated how that works and when you think about how complicated the gut is I think I heard something like there's more you know there's more cells in our microbiome by far than there are in our body so we're actually more in terms of a cell per cell level we're actually more bacteria than we are UK carote right there's a Justin sonenberg who's one of the world experts on microbiome he's in the lab upstairs for mine at Stanford and um he has this idea it's just an idea that because we are indeed more bacteria than we are cells the question is who's the host and who's the passenger you know like maybe we we are just maybe they are exploiting us to take them around and interact because they interact and grow on one another and so this idea this freaks people out Lex Friedman will love this that maybe human beings are just actually the vehicles for the microbiome and not the other way around anyway kind of a um a scary thought um do you do anything specifically to support your gut microbiome are you a probiotic guy or a fermented foods guy or a fiber guy so again I'm going to kind of go straight down the line from what I've heard from Suzanne other experts so if you want to improve gut health one of the biggest levers the three biggest levers you can pull is not eating too many calories exercising there's a there is a connection between exercise and the gut and fiber so we it is of the things we know dietary fiber seems to positively impact the gut because it is a what's called a Prebiotic so your gut microbiota can take especially soluble fiber although there's actually some evidence at least in mice that they it might be able to use some insoluble fiber as well uh I think Suzanne was doing a study looking at hemicellulose and actually seeing that some like specific forms of microbiota flourish with hemicellulose suggesting that they may actually be getting some kind of fuel out of it which is really interesting um again in mice so you know just huge caveat so your gut microbiome can produce these short chain fatty acids from by fermenting uh this this this soluble fiber and there's quite a bit of evidence that these volatile fatty acids which can be then actually reabsorbed in through the liver that they have some positive effects um like for example butyrate when they've done butyrate supplementation they've actually seen positive effects on insulin since ity so what we seem to understand is that more diversity seems to be better fiber seems to be positive prebiotics seem to work much better than probiotics supplemented prebiotics yes so the problem with most of the probiotics is they're typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize and even if you do colonize what happens is like let's say you colonize um some microbiota that you didn't really have much of if you're not fueling it with the appropriate fiber it's not going to stay anyway because it's essentially going to starve so the research seems to really clearly suggests that eating enough fiber which is again a Prebiotic that that is a better way to get a a healthier gut per se than probiotic what fiber sources do you use and I think I'm I realized there's a huge array of choices out there but people will want to have some ideas as to how they could perhaps mimic what you're doing yeah and I would just say diversity right so you know U some there's there's various evidence from various different fiber sources um fruits and vegetables obviously um you know grains some whole grains uh some cereals uh and then various other sources so this is one of the things where we don't really have a good idea if you know this one source of fiber f is better than another source of fiber we just know that fiber overall is pretty good and one thing I'll tell people is like if you want a longevity hack I mean fiber is kind of the longevity hack if if you look at some of these cohort studies there was actually a recent really large metaanalysis of over a million subjects um and basically what it showed was that for every 10 gram increase in fiber there was a 10% reduction in the risk of mortality and that extended specifically also to cardiovascular disease and cancer so one of the things I'll tell people when they get like really into you know whether it's inter fasting or you know all these other things like that's great that's great are you eating like over 50 60 grams of fiber a day and I conceptualize 50 to 60 grams so if I were to eat uh like a a bowl like a let's just say a quarter plate of broccoli um and the broccoli is in stacked to the ceiling the broccoli is just reasonably stacked on there approximately how many grams of fiber is that if it's like two cups of broccoli which is a lot yeah so if you like 200 gram of broccoli per se would probably be like five six grams of fiber and I need to get how much per day well I would say I would typically what the recommended dose is is 15 grams per thousand calories intake because if you're eating you know low calories it's it's difficult to get enough fiber in uh but based on and again these are cohort studies so but you can't do 20 year long randomized human control trials unfortunately there doesn't really appear to be a top end at least for the benefits of Fiverr that it probably boils down to like how much you can tolerate without feeling uncomfortable right because if you're eating like a ton of fiber I mean at some point it's not going to be very comfortable exercise becomes uncomfortable or hazardous yeah and actually kind of touching on that because I think it is important um you know a lot of people have kind of in the carnivore Community said well you don't need fiber you poop just fine without it and always say well pooping is the last reason to have fiber like yes it does help it does seem to make uh elimination easier uh you can you know do it more frequently adds bulk to stool but that's not why you should eat fiber why you should eat fiber is because of the effects on mortality and you know some of the push back will be well this is healthy user bias and what I'll say is meaning healthy people do this and therefore it's working healthy people eat more fiber and therefore and I mean yeah there's there's something to that but if it was just healthy user typically you would see some disagreement between the studies and a great example of that is like red meat so not every study shows red meat has an association with cancer and mortality there's there's differences depending on the population used depending on like what they Define as high red meat low red meat whether it's processed unprocessed but I have not found a study on fiber and cardiovascular disease and cancer and mortality where it did not show improvements from higher fiber so to me that suggests that that that effect is real um and so again you know as much fiber as you can get in comfortably I would try to do it uh because it seems to have some really powerful effects and is good for the gut microbiome the other thing that may be a consideration for the microbiome is there's some evidence that saturated fat may not be great for the microbiome that it um reduces the um the prevalence of some some of the more positive strange of bacteria and that appears to be um not So Much from the saturated fat itself but from the bile in products that combine with saturated fat seems to have a negative effect on some of these more um healthier forms of gut microbiota but again this is really difficult because we don't even know necessarily yet which species of gut microbiota are positive or negative and that's I mean this gets into some of these studies where they may call it disbiosis sounds scary but disbiosis just means that the gut changed it doesn't necess I mean it doesn't tell you anything qualitative about whether the change was bad or good uh and so these are just things I think we need to keep in mind when we talk about this stuff that this stuff is still very much in its infancy but in terms of the big Leever levers I mean it pretty much fits with what we know about a healthy lifestyle exercise don't eat too much consume a good amount of fiber from diverse sources fantastic uh fantastic because it fits with what I like to think of as kind of the center of mass of evidence right and I I'm starting to get some window into what your process is around selection of studies and no one study being wholly but when you look at as you mentioned all the studies on fiber having a positive effect to some degree or another it's pretty hard to refute that there isn't something really interesting there yeah and one thing I'll tell people is like you know one study I mean sometimes I'll change my opinion based on a single study when it's really well done and very powerful but usually like one study is just going to move me just a little bit right then maybe if another one comes out move me a little bit more right and then like very slowly I'm going to get some I mean my my experience with um uh LDL cholesterol this is something I changed my mind on a while back when I was younger like Circa 2005 getting into grad school kind of the prevailing thought was well it's not so much the LDL it's the ratio of LDL to HDL that's what matters and probably about five years ago and I was I was pretty strong about that opinion and then five years ago looking at these melan randomization studies I kind of went I can't hold this position anymore what's your new what is your uh revised position on LDL so if you look at the research HDL is important because it's a marker of metabolic Health if you have high HDL it suggests that you are metabolically quite healthy you very rarely will you have high HDL and like high CRP which is inflammatory marker or disregulated blood glucose almost exclusively people who have high HDL will have good biomarkers of metabolic Health but if you take drugs that raise HDL it doesn't reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease in m in melian randomization studies which melan randomization basically uses natural randomization so some people are in the case of HDL naturally higher secretors or naturally lower secretors of HDL and you know we talked about how you can't really do a 20-year human randomized control trial and when you're trying to examine something like heart disease I mean that is a lifetime exposure issue it's very unlikely that you're going to pick out differences between treatments in two years or even five years I mean people don't develop typically don't develop heart disease until they're in their you know 50s 60s and 70s what melan randomization allows is to say okay we have these people who naturally secrete more or less so we can stratify those and look at what is their risk so if you look at people who are low secretors of HDL versus high secretors of HDL withholding some of the other key variables consistent like LDL you don't see an effect on heart disease really of LDL of HDL got it okay but when you look at LDL and you look at the lifetime exposure to LDL it is like a linear effect on heart disease and we we know that it's actually not so much LDL but it's more APO lipoprotein B but but that tends to track with LDL just in general and if you look at the mechanism I mean we know that LDL can penetrate the endothelium um so there's the mechanism is present if we look at the epidemiology it supports that it's a an independent risk factor and then again these melan randomization studies where we can kind of look at people's exposure over a lifetime and then we see that linear kind of dose dependent effect to me that was convincing enough to change my mind on that particular topic and then if you look at like some of the Framingham data look at um high if you like stratify like high HDL versus low HDL both groups looking at high LDL and low LDL so if you have high HDL low LDL you will still be lower risk factor than somebody who with high HDL and high LDL right so the ratio does matter so the ratio does matter same thing with with inflammation if you look at people who are low inflammation low LDL they'll have a lower risk than people who are low inflammation high LDL so again that was kind of sufficient for me to changed my mind but it took it was like not just one study came out it was okay then there was another study and then another study and then another study and at a certain point I go okay well now I either have to change my mind or I'm basically just gonna be cognitively dissonant and say nope I don't believe all that you know and and so I think that's one of the things to keep in mind people will say oh or you're saying this is a bad study very rarely why I call something a bad study because data is just data but the issue becomes how it is presented and how broadly it's applied in the mainstream Media or by you know people on you know Fitness influencers and what I'll do is try to step in and say okay let's consider X Y and Z as well and then it's not a bad study but let's just be careful about how broadly we imply the the interpretation yeah well and I I think you are in a very unique and important position to be able to place things into their proper context because of this for lack of a better word holistic view of how the psychology Placebo effects also core uh core physiology um relate to one another and so on in fact I think that your training as a biochemist and then training as a um in nutrition with somebody who Don Layman who was pushing you to focus on outcomes I think that's a beautiful um capture of the the Continuum at which one can look at something because for those of you who don't know out there you know a lot of laboratory studies on mice and humans for instance in the realm of biochemistry or in vitro studies you'll see a change in some molecule can be quite traumatic and then the assumption is oh you just take you take the drug that will change that molecule in a particular direction and then you'll get the effect you want at the at the whole or organism level the person will lose weight the person will gain muscle the animal will um not uh have Alzheimer's Etc but it just doesn't work that way because of the redundancy and this interplay well a great example of that is so my research was actually in rodents all my all my studies on protein metabolism and and Lucine in particular is what we were studying well we know if you give Lucine increases muscle protein synthesis but we also know if you supplement with Lucine people don't get more muscular I was long all you have to do is supplement with Lucine right right right and so how is that possible where you know muscle building is not just protein synthesis it's also the balance between synthesis and degradation so um and degradation just happens to be very very difficult to measure but uh a great example and again one of the cool things about my PhD was actually change the way I ate um which I think is interesting so before I had been like uh I eat eight meals a day eat every two hours try to keep meals a day yeah when I got to get that 30 grams of protein per meal get that Amino drip going in was the idea right like just have an IV hooked up of amino acids not really folks not really yeah but that that was kind of the concept but the first study I did we basically looked at okay a lot of people had measured the amplitude of protein synthesis in response to a meal we wanted to see how long does this last and where does it Peak right and so my thought was okay well it'll probably track with plasma Lucine you give for those that are not familiar Lucine is the amino acid that is almost exclusively responsible for increasing muscle protein synthesis when you eat protein so it's it's one of the branch T amino acids so we wanted to see okay how long does this effect last so we we fed these animals uh whey protein and again I thought okay well however long plasm Lucine stays up that would be how long uh protein synthesis stays up and so we got the protein synthesis data back and it was peaked at 90 minutes or sorry peaked from 45 to 90 minutes and then was back down a baseline by 180 minutes and so when I went to do the plasma Lucine analysis my shock was at 3 hours plasma luuc was still plateaued out and I said okay well when I look at the initiation factors that will show me something so um for those not familiar um this is part of the mour signaling pathway so one of the two of the targets of mtor when it stimulate Lucine stimulates mtor two of the targets of mtor are a uh protein compound called 4 ebp1 and then another one is called um ribosomal protein s6k so I don't want to get into the specifics about it because it's kind of beyond the scope but basically when these things are phosphorilated by mtor uh it increases uh the rate of translation initiation which translation initiation is basically the process of the ribosome hooking on to the MRNA and then starting protein synthesis so I I was looking at the phosphorilation of 4 bp1 and rps6 I was like okay well I'll probably see these things come down at at three hours still plateaued and so then it was like what is what's going on here so I kept actually kept rerunning the data and rerunning the data and rerunning the data and I'll never forget I went into Layman's office and this is like you know six months after we've done this study because this analysis takes time he's like so where are we with this duration study I said well I just got to run the plasma data again because it's not right and he's like well why is it not right and I said well it just doesn't make any sense you know and I kind of went through he's like well like describe to me your Technique like how are you doing this and I described it he said well what how's your standard air and I I told him what the numbers were he said it sounds like it's good data he said it sounds like you are trying to get the data to fit your conclusion and you need to change your conclusion to fit the data and that statement this is why we do phds yeah you need an advisor this is why I'm so skeptical of everything because I have had so many of my ideas crushed by my own data right so we actually ended up this this um this kind of effect this phenomenon is called uh muscle protein synthetic refractory period so basically like once you trigger the system kind of runs for a defining period of time and then it takes time to essentially like reset for lack of a better term it's also been referred to as the muscle full effect uh but so I looked at that and said why am I eating every two hours then you know and there was even a study uh out of Wolf's lab like back in 99 I think where they infused Amino essential amino acids for six hours protein synthesis went up peaked at 60 Minutes came back down 120 and never went back up again maybe I'm being naive but I would have thought that if protein synthesis goes up and then comes back down that eating more often would be exactly the thing you would want to do if your goal was to get increased protein synthesis because you'd be pinging the system periodically but the but the problem is the plasmo acids are still elevated so it's essentially like eating the whole way through from the perspective of loosing from the cells yeah so that was one of those things where I said you know what I'm actually going to eat less often because like if I'm eating in three hours later I've still got you know capped out plaso acids you know and we looked at all kinds of stuff like we looked at intracellular Lucine just to make sure that you know that wasn't falling off it wasn't we looked at all the plasma essential amino acids because you we were thinking well maybe protein synthesis is you know sucking some of these amino acids out of the plasma and they're dropping and that's causing it to kind of short circuit the system that wasn't the case it just essentially what the evidence suggests I think we're the only ones to show this so far so I'm not ready to say that this is a real effect because I hold out the idea that data artifacts do exist and you can't be totally sure but but we saw uh an increase in amp kyes kind of around this Mark where uh protein synthesis started falling off and we also saw a decrease in intracellular ATP and protein synthesis is an ATP dependent process and so what we think might be happening is you're you know consuming protein and your up you're increasing muscle protein synthesis and then at a certain point it's has enough effect on your you know energy metabolism and your cells that it kind of short not short circuits it but it kind of cuts it off right so again we're the only ones to show that that I'm aware of so and that was again in rats so I I I I always talk about data like there's data I'm willing to bet my my toe on my foot on my leg on and my life on I'd probably barely bet the end of my little toe on that one I'm not quite sure but it's interesting nonetheless so that's a great example of okay we're looking at this mechanism of mour signaling and if we just looked at that we'd say oh well protein synthesis is going to stay elevated for you know past three hours but that's not what we saw so yeah I think it's again that's why I really try to you know get people to say well that's mechanisms are important it's and especially if you're seeing an outcome it's important to identify mechanisms that may explain that but let's step back from the mechanisms from trying to chase mechanisms and let's look at like chasing outcomes in terms of what we recommend to people excellent point in terms of uh chasing outcomes a number of people I know are interested in weight loss or weight maintenance and several times throughout today's conversation we've come back to this issue of satiety signals whether or not they're brain based body based or both you know not wanting to eat more is a great way to maintain or lose weight because you simply don't want to I heard you mention earlier that Pro protein and maybe specific types of protein or sources of protein May provide better satiety signals than other macronutrients could you briefly talk about how macronutrients including protein but also carbohydrates and fats impact satiety and from the standpoint of somebody who for instance would like to quote unquote lose a few pounds right probably would be happy to gain a little bit of lean body mass provided it was in a particular location on their body that seems to be a a thing now directed hypertrophy if you will and how much they should focus on protein as a core component of creating this diet you know assuming everything else has being done correctly they're going to hit the right number of calories relative to their um their output neat Etc uh how should we think about protein and satiety signals and are animal sources of protein indeed more bioavailable that's a tricky word um it for sake of muscle building but also for sake of somebody who just would like to lose body fat they don't want to lose muscle and theyd like to bring their weight down a few pounds so a lot of things more yeah a lot of things to unpack there uh of the macronutrients protein is definitely the biggest lever that you can pull because even if you know it doesn't take a ton of protein to get a lot of the muscle building benefits I mean I think the benefits really start to Plateau out around 1.6 gam per kilogram of body weight there's some evidence that maybe even up to like 2.4 or 2.8 G per kilo may give like a little bit more benefit I think it probably looks something like an ASM toope in terms of a curve where as you put more into the system you always get a little bit more but it just gets to the point where it's so infantes small benefit that it's for all intensive purposes no benefit but you mentioned 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is that would you consider that a a threshold that most people should try and Achieve daily I I think I see very few downsides to hitting that uh I mean I know some people and this is going to get into a separate conversation but I know some people will say well I don't want to stimulate mtor because that's going to make me die early and I think one of the things to keep in mind is if you look at there's kind of this thought process out there that if you're stimulating inor that protein is going to make you die early and first off we have very little human outcome data to support that claim and the second thing is if you look at any macronutrient isolation I can make a mechanistic argument that it's going to kill you so fat if you take in fat and decreases flow mediated dilation flow Medi dilation is important for heart health in the short term carbohydrates stimulate insulin insulin you know pro-inflammatory and you know all these other things and so I can make an argument for any single macronutrient to be negative for longevity I want I really want people this is something that even scientists get wrong they look at an acute response of something and assume that that is going to relate to long-term outcomes in signaling so let's just take exercise for example if I if you didn't know anything about exercise and I said to you Andrew I'm going to do something that's going to make you your heart rate go up your blood pressure go up your inflammatory markers go up your reactive oxygen species increase you're going to say and it's going to damage your muscles you're going to say I'm not doing that that sounds horrible you know but it does all those things in the short term but what is the long-term effect of exercise you actually get healthier all those things improve now I'm not saying that you know protein is a a longevity hack or anything like that but what I'm saying is I think some of the arguments out there based on mechanistic you know this increases intor therefore we don't want to do it I think it is a much more complicated argument than than just that so there's that so protein is the biggest lever I would shoot for 1.6 you know grams per kilogram if you you can do more great there doesn't seem to be really downsides to it even like up to very high levels of protein uh Jose Antonio did a study that was a year-long randomized control trial um and again it's just one year but they were looking at all sorts of different biomarkers and basically even up to like four grams per kilogram of protein they couldn't really find any negative Health outcomes from it other than people were just so satiated they ended up eating less calories uh so protein is a big Le lever because one it has a higher thermic effect of food so you're getting a little bit more calorie burn per day even though it's not a ton because TEF is a pretty small percentage of your overall energy expenditure but still a benefit you're getting the effects on lean body mass it's going to if you're in a diet it's going to help preserve lean body mass if you're at maintenance it's going to help build a preserv lean body mass and if you're in a surplus it's going to help build a preserv lean body mass then you get the effects on appetite so now I want to be careful because appetite effects tend to be very specific to individual Foods right so you can take a high protein food and make it not very uh not very Sadia so take for example like a really tasty protein bar which you know back when we were getting into this there no such thing existed um now you have protein bars actually take pretty darn good but if you eat one of them I mean are you really satiated I I don't really feel satiated that's my premal snack right right so why because I mean it's processed refined and uh made to be very palatable okay but take something like a 200 gram chicken breast very satiating right um and that's why when people say well carbohydrates aren't very satiating depends on the carbohydrate I mean when you look at the like the satiety index a plain baked potato is about as satiating as it gets if I eat a bowl of oatmeal I feel pretty good afterward yeah for a while right I mean I usually I'll eat that along with some other things but I I completely agree um the so you're saying that the the form that it comes in maybe even how much chewing is required how good it smells that your psychological associations because to me a steak is an incredible meal like I I mean if I had to pick one food that I could eat even though I'm not pure carnivore for the rest of my life it would be that because I think it would get me where I need to go and then I'd probably have to sneak some Fiber um you know but uh it's an excellent point I I have a question that I don't want to take us off track but I'm hoping it relates enough that you could answer it now in the context of this if I'm going to eat let's say two grams um per kilogram of body weight protein and I'm not eating multiple meals per maybe I'm eating two or three meals per day I'm certainly going to be eating more than the 30 gram threshold that was thrown around for a long time that we can only assimilate 30 grams of protein per meal should I just not worry about that some of it is going to go towards the thermic uh effective food some of that might be converted into glucose of all things through gluconeogenesis so should I worry about this 30 gram cut off because I think balancing the the 1.6 gram per kilogram body weight threshold with number of meals with the need to exercise and work and live my life and sleep Etc pretty soon you you you run into bottlenecks where you just can't do it all or you're spending so much time trying to focus on it you can't optimize all the things at the same time you lose your mind and your body so um what what what is necessary in terms of um frequency in if one is getting enough protein and then tied into that question is there any reality to this idea that if you eat one meal per day or you're fasting and then you eat you let's say a 200 grams of protein in a single feeding that you can assimilate more because you were protein starved is that is that a real thing so most the studies with protein are after a fast um like because U to assess it with stable isotope you have to be in a steady state so um we haven't observed that it doesn't appear that fasting really kind of allows you to assimilate more protein after a fast so this gets into a core of one of the things I looked at in my PhD which is does protein distribution matter because most Americans get about 65 to 70% of their protein at dinner right breakfast tends to be pretty minimal protein uh foods do any cultures is actually a big breakfast and not a big lunch and dinner I you know we all heard that that was ideal we'll get into circadian timing in a little bit but does anyone actually do that steak and eggs for breakfast and then taper off the rest of the day I know German culture tends to have a big breakfast but it also tends to be like sugary foods and what not as far as like te logically I'm not I'm actually not sure about that um so if you look at that and then you consider that protein doesn't really have a storage mechanism right like people will say well you know lean issue is a storage mechanism uh that's like saying a house is a storage facility for wood you know yeah if the house is made out of wood you could get wood out of it but that's not why you build the house right like you're building the house out of a demand same thing for a muscle tissue um there is a free pool of amino acids but it's very very small so when you consider things like fat which basically has unlimited storage capacity carbohydrate a relatively large storage capacity you can store you know 4 or 500 grams of carbohydrate between your liver muscles and then protein which almost has no storage capacity um the idea that okay you could make up for low protein at one meal by overc consuming at another meal didn't make sense to me so one of the studies we did and again in rats we took uh both groups were getting whey protein so high quality protein they were getting the exact same amount of calories EX exact same amount of you know nitrogen exact same macros everything was the same the only difference was one group basically got kind of three meals of similar amounts of protein like dinner was a little bit bigger because we wanted to keep it somewhat similar to how people eat but each meal was going to be over the threshold to stimulate muscle protein synthesis whereas the other group I constructed it so the first two meals of the day should not stimulate muscle protein synthesis it should be under that threshold and then the last meal was about 70% of their total daily protein and so we had them eat those for 11 weeks and I'll never forget this this is how like obsessive I became about it is there was 110 animals in this study and I made all the diets and I weighed out exactly every single meal for every single animal for 11 weeks so I was in there at 6:00 a.m. I was in there at you know noon and then I was in there at 6 p.m. you know I love it a kind of PhD student that uh professors dream of you must have been a dream student so at the end of 11 weeks we looked at like lean body mass we looked at body fat we looked at um uh hind limb weights we didn't really see differences in lean body mass but what we did see was a difference in hind limb weights it wasn't massive but there was a significant difference in the size of the muscles of the hind limbs of these animals and so it's interesting that there wasn't a a difference in lean body mass and what we found at least with the liver the animals that were EA eating uh the like one meal with really high protein actually had bigger livers um not like a huge amount and not something that I would consider unsafe but they it was a statistically significant difference and so to me at least like if I'm trying to explain like no difference in lean body mass but a difference in these hind limb weights maybe there's some like sequestering of you know uh like that that that's fueling a little bit more uh protein synthesis of the splank niic tissues rather than you know because you're capping out skeletal muscle protein synthesis and we do know that the splank Nick tissues are more sensitive or have a greater rate of protein synthesis per day like the rate of skeletal muscle protein synthesis in humans is about like 1% per day so it takes like a 100 days to turn over you know skeletal muscle whereas like your entire gut your entire GI will turn itself over in like two to three days right so really and the liver also has a very high amount of protein synthesis which is one of the reasons it's actually one of the most metabolically active organs so all that to say it has not it's been there's been one human study that showed something similar um and then there's been a couple others that didn't and then in the intermittent fasting studies which is maybe a good tool to look at compared to continuous feeding it one thing I will say is it looks like the 168 intermittent fasting style there's been a couple studies with Grant Tinsley um and this this is something I've changed my mind on as well Grant Tinsley has done a couple studies where they did use the 168 protocol they had them train during their feeding window and they had them eat I think it was at least three protein containing meals during that eight hours these are humans these are humans and they saw no difference in lean body mass at the end of the study compared to people who were eating like you know as many times as they wanted throughout the day now if you look at some of the more uh extreme forms of fasting like alternate day fasting or like 222 or 24 there are some studies where you do start to see differences in lean body mass so my suspicion is and I'm I'm I'm just guessing so this is tenuous my suspicion is probably if you're getting like two to three like high quality protein meals in a day uh you're getting the vast majority of the benefits of protein that the most important thing is getting enough total uh and then secondarily trying to you know at least two or three meals with high quality protein in but if you're going like pretty extreme with like alternate day fasting or you know maybe only one meal a day then I think there may be some effects on lean body mass but again these can be M mitigated as well if you're doing you know hard resistance training typically that is the biggest lever in terms of lean body mass yes you know protein distribution may make a difference but I'm trying to put it in context so people don't feel like they need to go out and eat you know four meals a day um but again so what I would say is like some of the more milder forms of you know Tim restricted eating appear to be fine for lean body mass now the the caveat is the following one of the nice things about animal studies is when you consider if you want to have a high subject number high level of control and a long duration it's pretty much your only option right so I I have a in our research review uh reps I created a VIN diagram which basically is like three um you know circles crossing over one is study duration one is um level of control and the other one is subject number and to get all three of those circles to cross over it almost has to be in animals right so and this and Reps is it's a newsletter or a book so it's a it's our monthly research review great so every month we review like five um studies that come out in Fitness and Nutrition like we'll usually do at least one nutrition one training and One supplement per per month we will put a link to where people can sign up this is a a sign up format great y yeah so it's a subscription based service so basically when people might look at like my study well why did you see a difference in in muscle weights whereas some of these other studies don't see a difference I weigh out every single meal for 11 weeks and keep in mind that 11 weeks in in a rodent's lifespan is a really long time that's about an eighth of their total lifespan so is it that there's no effect or is it that the effect is relatively small and would take a really long time and very high level of control to see in humans I don't know but I think what I would say relatively confidently is if you're going to do like a 168 intermittent fasting you're probably fine especially and again what is the goal right like if you're a bodybuilder looking to be the most massive person you possibly can or you're a a football player you're some in some field that having as much lean body mass as possible is really important for you then I would say well you're not really gaining a whole lot by doing some form of time restricted eating I think most of the people listening to this do do not fall into that category I think most people want to maintain or lose weight they'd like to perhaps add a bit of quote unquote shape or muscle to specific areas of their body and lose body fat right and I think your normal forms of time restricting you're probably perfectly fine for that right and again if I don't want somebody to think well I do you know um alternate day fasting there's no point to me resistance training because I'm going to lose muscle mass no no no no no no no you can still build muscle doing that you just might not build as much muscle as you would if you were eating in a more traditional format but if that's something that works for you and your goals and especially if it's Fat Loss or you know controlling your calories then again it's it's about the height hierarchy of what's important right so to answer your question I do think that timing and frequency matters a little not so much frequency but distribution more so um so I think the distribution matters but it's a it's a much smaller lever than just getting enough total protein in and then as far as like animal versus plant I used to be in the camp of there's no way somebody can build as much muscle on a plant-based diet and now I think I've come back to you can it just requires a little bit more plant um and I don't want to say always but it's very difficult to do without an isolated source of protein so unless you're going to supplement with an isolated plant source of protein it's very difficult to get enough without going over on total calories because you can figure that especially like take somebody who may be calorically restricted trying to get enough protein from Whole intact plant sources so you've got a few different things working against you one the sources of protein you're consuming also have carbohydrates and or fat um two it's a less bioavailable form of protein and three it's a lower quality of protein in terms of it has typically less Lucine less Branch amino acids and less essential amino acids you answered the question that I almost interrupted you to ask which was does it boil down to the Lucine content and um it sounds like that is one of the components and that uh a lot of the vegan and vegetarian sources of excellent protein um that excellent protein vegetarian or vegan source is co-packaged with calories from carbohydrates and or fat that make it hard to stay stay under the chloric threshold whereas a steak is I'm not and obviously for people might want to avoid that for ethical reasons sure but that's a different matter entirely but a steak or a piece of chicken or an egg is well an egg you know has a Yol which is there's fat there but is almost a pure protein fat Source there's no carbohydrate along for the ride right so I think what I would say is you know you can do it takes a little more planning um and you're almost always if you're a vegan especially you're going to be better off like suppl with some isolated form of protein uh or vegan form of protein now this where gets into people say well what about the limiting amino acids and those sorts of things it's a consideration um some of the better forms of uh vegan protein in terms of amino acid content are like soy now I can everybody I hear everybody screaming online about their testosterone levels in terms of actual outcomes and looking at testosterone there was a recent metaanalysis looking at soy and I think if it's your only source of protein then maybe the dosage is high enough to cause some weird effects um but if you're just using it like once or twice a day it doesn't seem to have an effect on testosterone or estrogen so that can be a decent source of protein because it is a complete protein Source um it does have a Picos of one which pic CA is basically a uh a measure of protein quality based on does it provide enough of all the amino acids so that none are limiting and so soy is one of the only vegan sources that does that interestingly potato protein isolate actually has a similar essential amino acid content to whey so isolated potato protein it's just really hard to find I've been trying to vegans take note vegetarians take note because or vegans rather because wey is a vegetarian um and wey is a a very high quality protein Source high quality protein sour and actually they're actually um creating way now out of um I think it's I I may mischaracterize this but I believe they're able to produce it now out of like yeast or something like that amazing that um you know so for vegans now this is a great option because you can have whey that's not animal based that is going to be every bit as good as an animal-based way so I think that's great um getting to the Lucine let me go back sorry so another reason that the using an isolated protein can be helpful is um because it's more bioavailable as well when it's been isolated out when it's the protein bound up in the actual plant material it tends to be less bioavailable now cooking can help increase the bioavailability bioavailability because it breaks some of those bonds and and whatnot but it still seems to be lower and you don't it's really interesting there was a recent study where they did a corn wheat and P blend of protein versus whey and basically the outcome was uh 30 gram of each simil stimulated protein synthesis to a similar degree but the plasma amino acids in the uh plant-based protein still did not get as high as with whey now it may be that that's just it doesn't matter because once you get to a certain level you get all the benefits so um but I still found it interesting nonetheless that they didn't quite get as High um the other thing to consider with the vegan sources protein is the lucing content so one of the studies we did was we looked at wheat soy egg and Whey isonitrogenous meaning we equated protein between the groups isocaloric we equated we equated calories and we looked at muscle protein synthesis and I think this was the meals were 15% of total energy from protein so like a like your food guide pyramid level of protein uh and we saw that in the wheat and soy group uh they did not increase muscle protein synthesis but the egg and wayy group increased muscle protein synthesis now what's really interesting is we went back and we took wheat and added free Lucine to it to match the Lucine content of way and the protein synthetic response was identical so again I I don't like to simplify things too much but Lucine appears to really be driving this ship and and uh I'll never forget uh Layman called me into his office one day and he would always do these like thought experiments of he he liked to think about why something occurs the way it does dangerous dangerous territory yeah so he would say one day I'll never forget he's like Lane why do you think the body evolved to just sense Lucine for muscle protein synthesis and of course I'm like uh I don't know man I just work here like I'm just trying to get my PhD um and he said well think about it you would want something that really wasn't extensively metabolized by the gut and liver because you would want it to show up in the blood in values that reflect what you just ate makes sense and you would want it to have passive diffusion across the muscle cell because you'd want it to be concentration dependent which it is so get into the tissues and cells that need it most right so you know not having active transport but rather passive transport uh so yeah I thought that that was really interesting the way he broke that down so few few different options for the vegan folks out there you can use an isolated source of of protein and again like there's going to be good options coming because this plant-based whe is going to be a great option for folks um you can add free Lucine to it to whatever your source of protein is just by supplemented Lucine powder now it tastes horrible yeah I think I've heard that maybe I've even tried it it's completely non-polar does not dissolve in anything put into capsules gross it can be put into capsules yeah so you could take a capsule like for example if you're eating your normal meal you could just take a capsule of like one gram of Lucine it's probably going to bump you off bump you up enough that you're going to be good to go um and then there's there's options like um Blends especially with corn corn is actually very high in Lucine as a percentage of its protein now you got to remember like you go eat corn on a cob and you're getting like two grams of total protein so it's not that much lucing but if you isolate out the protein put it into a powder well now you know when you're getting like 80 90% of the weight is now protein corn is actually about 12% Lucine in terms of the protein so a great source of Lucine it is like almost Frank deficient in some other amino acids but you can blend it with a few other sources of protein like you could blend it with a soy uh a pee and you can create these complimentary Blends that would actually have quite a bit of Lucine but also some of the other essential amino acids so there are options out there for plant-based folks and I mean we have seen people who are plant based um you know build impressive amounts of muscle there's quite a few bodybuilders that are plant-based and a lot of the endurance athletes like it and even though um when we talk about muscle we think about muscle building often um performance in Endurance Sports and also just performance for the typical person who's doing some cardiovascular training hopefully some resistance training also and just living life I mean many more people now seems are vegan or at least avoiding meat in particular red meat uh I'm not one of those people I limit the amount and I certainly focus on the quality of what I eat but I do eat red meat which brings me to a question um about you know just generally in terms of food choice you know I can we come up with a relatively short summary at of the following tell me if this is um correct or not that most of us should be focused on for for sake of health health span and lifespan um should be focused on inest ing minimally nonprocessed and minimally processed foods you know maybe even cooking our own food you know I realize that's heresy now but ideally we would do some of that and and really trying to avoid foods that um are highly processed and have lots of sugar and I'm using this as a segue to get into a question that I really want your answer to I've been dying to ask you this which is if a sugar intake is not actually going up um as much as people think it is why are people getting so much fatter um so what what do you think about um just a general statement that we should try and eat foods that are low to no minimally to not processed for about 80% of our Foods is that a re number it's hard to actually get you know completely unprocessed food because almost everything goes through some form of processing so I'm thinking like anything that wouldn't survive long um on without Refrigeration yeah on a shelf like like an apple or a banana or something oatmeal like ground oats to me as long as there is in a bunch of other stuff and there would be minimally processed um a steak is not really processed although it's cut off the the animal Etc so there's a there's a few steps in there but yeah um that sort of that's what I mean yeah and and I think everybody kind of gets the gist I I'm probably a little bit pedantic when it comes to this stuff no this is good actually one of the things I appreciate appreciate about you is something I get teased a lot by people close to me which is the caveats and the insistence on Precision is really important because especially with online um Communications these days it's like a runaway train you know people will you know it's too easy to misinterpret what you're saying very easy to misinterpret and the misinterpretations are often used to leverage whole new ideas about what is and isn't true mostly about what is true um so I really appreciate the nuance and this is what a long form podcast really allows us to do is is catch every every curve you know so I would 100% agree with what you said that if you were going to make a broad stroke that trying to focus on minimally processed foods is very important the one caveat I would say is I think it's important to understand why because otherwise people can make this weird Association that like if I eat any Mally or any processed food it's going to kill me or like every time I eat it it's like I'm smoking a cigarette and my health you know my longevity is declining based on the studies we have it's mostly about the energy that processed food just gets people to SP spontaneously eat more and and uh Kevin Hull showed this in his study that was I very I mean he designed some of the most elegant studies in nutrition he's great and they basically took people from a minimally processed food diet and then gave them access to ultra processed foods very few instructions just eat till you feel satisfied and they spontaneously increase their calorie intake by 500 calories a day I mean that's that's massive so there's some and we quite haven't quite figured it out you know people say well it's it's car it's sugar it doesn't appear to be sugar uh in terms of just an isolation well it's fats doesn't appear to be fats in isolation well it's the combination of sugar and fat partly well it's the combination of sugar fat and salt partly but there's some kind of like overall magic to the texture and the mouth feel and just the overall palatability of stuff which is always why I say there's like right and wrong ways to do these different diets like for example like there's a right way to do plant-based and then there's you know like what's in some of these documentaries where they're eating like plant-based mac and cheese you know and again I love a good mac and cheese but like that should not form like that should not be pitched as a healthy diet just because it's plant-based right because I mean you're eating a highly processed food that's very palatable and easy to overeat same thing for keto you've now got like keto ice creams and you've got you know keto cookies and all these sorts of things and I'm like yeah and if you look at them they actually have more calories than the normal stuff and I'm like yeah this is completely missing the point here like you're actually just taking yourself like the whole point of those diets is the reason you tend to lose weight is originally like good luck you know 10 years ago doing a keto diet eating processed food right like you just couldn't do it really now you can but the problem is it's not going to work because you're going to be still consuming too many calories because even though it's keto what are they doing well they're trying to make it more palatable they're trying to make a better mouth feel which I guess if you're being keto for the sake of being keto great but if there's if you have hopes of body composition modification uh it's going to you know really negatively impact so yes I think minimizing the amount of processed food you consume can be important now that being said it depends on the individual and their goals if your goal is to for example build muscle or maintain a high body weight for a sport for example like an NFL offensive lineman or or something of that nature or if you're you know I worked with a an NBA team when they were kind of I can't disclose anything but they were looking at drafting a certain player um and you know like for them processed foods may actually be a tool or teenagers you know we all want young people to eat uh more healthfully I think develop great habits but some of them their caloric needs are so high that if they were eating what I eat they're going to um dissolve into you know they're just wasting away so I I I describe this again with a financial example it's like a budget right so if I make a million dollars a year for example um is it okay for me to buy like a $100,000 sports car let's assume that loans don't exist right is it okay for me to buy a $100,000 sports car if I still am able to pay my mortgage and pay my utilities and like take care of my responsibilities the things I should do is it okay if I do that if it like makes me feel good and it's fun me yeah it's fine right like it fits in your budget if my if I have if I make you know 50 Grand a year should I be going out and you know buying a sports car probably not because I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage and all these other responsibilities so your your protein your fiber your micronutrients these are your responsibilities but those become much easier to hit when you have higher calories right so if you're if you're you know eating 4,000 calories a day for whatever goal you have um you're probably going to have some left over and like good luck eating 4,000 calories from minimally processed foods you quite frankly you'll be miserable because you're you're going to have such gut fill that you're going to feel like you can't even move and so again now it becomes okay well is there something inherent to that food processing is there something you know that we can pick out that we know okay well this is going to be a negative effect on health even like body composition stuff aside and I would say there's not really great evidence of that so far and u a great example of that is sugar I mean I I actually just wrote a really long article on my website about why I think sugar was not the root cause of the Obesity epidemic and you kind of mentioned like sugar intake in the last 20 years has actually gone down a little bit alcohol intake well if you look on the whole it might have gone up a little bit but it you know certain in certainly in the male sector it's gone way down drinking used to be there was a 5:00 people were drinking all day um people are smoking a lot less um there I think it's a real puzzle I'd love to know what your um Hyo could actually be an opp opposition because nicotine is actually an appetite suppr appetite suppressant and also increases Focus the problem is it often arrives in a delivery device that can kill you but nicotine itself is a powerful agent it also can offset age related cognitive de decline not entirely but it's it makes the brain work better I've got a buddy who uh doesn't like caffeine and he just takes those nicotine pouches like basically has one in almost all day because he's a like a he has a very stressful job and is a high performer you know yeah you have to be careful how you deliver it but there's a Nobel prize winning neuroscientists that uh will chew five or six pieces of nicette an hour which I do not recommend and but when he quit smoking he just simply couldn't function as well and he was the one who pointed me to the literature on offsetting age related cognitive decline even neuron maintenance and uh it's pretty interesting no it's a pretty it's a pretty impressive new Tropic to be honest um so now the first thing to realize is when we're talking about consumption data this is based on actual production basically they're assuming that okay we're producing this amount of these Foods so we can assume the consumption is going to follow that so it's not a direct measurement uh but it has been validated in a few different studies we know that oil consumption has gone up like that that's that's that's yeah that's one of the the big ones is and this kind of forms the Crux of like the the seed oils or like the root definely question that I'm going to they're going to you know come into your house and kick your dog and you know punch your mom and all kinds of stuff uh and I'm happy to address those but um so calories have still gone up um there there's some people who claim that they've gone they've kind of plateaued I think the data seems to suggest that calorie intake is still increasing and the other thing to keep in mind is even if it's plateaued it's still at a high level that obesity is probably going to continue to increase up to a point where it'll probably Plateau if calories are plateaued what about energy output um leaving aside neat because that sounds highly individual I mean people are the people we know are focusing on exercise but there are a lot of folks out there that don't exercise and and and energy output has gone down over the years I mean and it's very obvious when you look at how people work now compared to even you know 30 40 years ago it's it's much different less walking also I learned recently that um kids in High School don't take PE class in many schools we had to suit up and run and suit up and if you didn't bring your change of clothes or you didn't wash them in which case you'd be better off just not wearing them uh nothing like the smell of a boy's locker room after a weekend you know I can still remember it and it's not um it's not pleasant but you had to run and do your push-ups with everybody else or play volleyball in your in your regular school day clothes so that I'm my understanding is that physical education is not part of the the basic education any longer uh it probably depends on the state but I I know many states have done away with it just because of budget cuts so activities going down caloric intake is going up maybe pling a little maybe plateauing is that sufficient to explain the Obesity epidemic uh based on what I've seen I I I think it's pretty sufficient so it might not be that big of a mystery after all no I don't think it's a big mystery I think that um people don't like the concept of energy balance and I think because they insert judgment into it which is okay if you're gaining weight over time at a fundamental level it means you are eating you're consuming more energy than you're expending people insert the Judgment which is you're lazy you're a sloth you're whatever it is and I think there's a lot of people out there who actually think that I I actually remember talking to somebody who was like well I would never hire an obese person for a job because it's just obvious that they're lazy and I just remembered going um are you serious like there are plenty of very very smart High achieving people who are obese like it's not this is what happens when you just put people in buckets you know like people are much more complicated than this yes there is there is some in personal responsibility but then when you look through the data and you like take uh there was a study done in obese women where they found that women who were obese were 50% more likely to have had some form of sexual assault trauma in their past right um we know that people from lower income areas are more prone to be obese um there's several like people who have a higher Ace score I believe which is kind of measures like traumatic childhood events I believe there're there was a study showing they're more likely to be obese so there's yes it is an energy imbalance problem but you know just saying eat less move more that's like telling broke people well just earn more money than you spend it's technically right but it's very unhelpful right what is more helpful is to describe and implement the habits and behaviors that will allow them to achieve that right so kind of I realized we kind of got off track a little bit but circling back to like sugar Circa 2005 I believed that sugar was fattening and bad for your health independent of any other variable so independent risk factor and again I want to be very clear about what independent means independent means independent of all other variables this thing is bad for your health and uh body composition so on its own independent of whether or not for instance it increases hunger and appetite right or or caloric intake right um I was at a graduate school mixer and one of the professors there was somebody who had done research on high fructose corn syrup and fructose specifically as well and he was talking to another professor and he had done this study in um rodents where he'd fed like uh I think it was like 60 or 70% of their calories from fructose and they saw some really weird things happen in the liver with the Nova lipogenesis and all this kind of stuff and the other Professor is saying to him yeah it's pretty obvious that high fructose corn syrup is you know fattening and this professor who had done this research said yeah because it's people ovat and he's like don't you think there's something inherent to it and he said no I think it's just calories people are eating too many calories he's like we we did a proof of concept looking at you know could we like try eating 70% of your daily calories from fructose you actually can't do it like high fructose corn syrup is only 55% fructose so if you ate nothing but high fructose corn syrup you would still not get to this level that they fed in this study so that got me kind of like questioning my beliefs about it so then I went through and I said okay like let's take out the epidemiology not that epidemiology is useless but people who eat more sugar are also likely to eat more calories so then I looked for the randomized control trials where they you know match calories and Vary the amount of sugar and it doesn't seem to make a difference at least from Fat Loss or fat gain but what about health so for instance if somebody um and I know somebody like this who loves sweets is thin gets some exercise not a ton but my concern is that a significant fraction of their cies are coming from these sugary foods and therefore they're not getting enough fiber maybe protein Etc so let's look at epidemiology for a second then I'll address this more directly when we look at epidemiology people who eat higher amounts of sugar tend to be you know more obese they tend to have you know worse biomarkers of Health but people who eat fruit a lot of fruit sugar don't have those same associations so why is that well because fruit has fiber with it right so I started to kind of believe based on the data I was looking at that high sugar intake was not the problem per se the problem was that high sugary Foods typically are very low in fiber but if you're getting enough fiber is sugar a problem so there was a classic study uh by surt in 1997 I think it's still the best study to this day looking at this and I know there people say well it was done 1997 has no relevance you know I know if it's a good study it's a good study oh some studies are Timeless in fact they have greater we're not going to go back and undo the discovery of DNA because it was you know 60 years ago or whatever it is no so they they looked at an 1100 calorie diet so lowc calorie diet one group was eating over 110 grams of sugar a day like sucrose the other group was eating about 10 grams of sugar per day calories protein carbs fats all matched right and they provided all the meals to these participants so very tightly controlled and it was over 6 weeks both groups lost the exact same amount of body fat so it doesn't seem to matter for body composition in terms of like sugar per se then they also looked at some biomarkers of Health like blood lipids and you know blood sugar and some other things again there was no real differences um the only difference was so all their biomarkers improved in both groups the only real difference was a small difference in LDL so the group eating low sugar had a better Improvement slightly in LDL and but that's probably because they were eating more fiber and we know fiber can you know bind the cholesterol and lower LDL cholesterol so is now I want to I want to caveat this sugar probably doesn't have any like positive health effects so there's that right and and nutrition is an exchange if you're eating one thing you're not eating another thing right so I but what I would tell people is focus probably less on sugar focus more on fiber so if you're eating 30 40 50 60 gram of fiber a day but your sugar is you know 80 90 grams I I would not be that worried about it especially if you're controlling calories as well um you know what I would be worried about is if you're eating you know just a decent amount of calories and not getting enough fiber in in general right and even in studies there's a few metaanalyses out now looking at isoenergetic exchange of different carbohydrates with sugar carbohydrates so fructose and glucose and sucrose now why is this important well again you know if you're not equate when I say isoenergetic that means equal in energy equal in calories so basically when they exchange either sucrose or glucose or fructose for other forms of carbohydrate do they see differences in these markers of Health like hba1c um fasting blood glucose you know blood lipids and with rare exceptions and I I can't remember all the data points exactly but the the takehome is doesn't really seem to make a difference now before anybody out there straw man's my argument I am not advocating for sugar consumption but I think it's important for people to not create weird associations in their minds because one of the things I've observed especially in the fitness industry is when people feel like they can't eat something like it it's one thing if you say I am choos choosing not to eat this just because I'm choosing to but it's a very different thing when you're purposely restricting because you feel like something is bad and this this I mean you know the human brain is in many ways amazing in many ways really dumb um so when you purposely try to restrict something what tends to happen is you're more prone to binge on it so people who will try to well I'm never going to eat you know sugar again or I'm going to try and limit sugar this isn't the case for everybody but they have actually shown now in studies people who are purposely restricting a specific nutrient they tend to crave more of that nutrient and if they do get exposed to it they're more likely to have what's called a disinhibition reflex which is basically a binge response because the thinking goes well this is bad any and there's no context on you know dosage making the poison this is just bad in general so if I have it I've already screwed up I might as well just have as much as I want and I like uh Spencer nsk's comparison to this is you know that's like you know getting a flat then going out and slashing your other three tires because you know you might as well so I I really I try to come from that perspective of I've seen so many people struggle with you know maybe not an eating disorder but disorder to eating patterns because of these kind of associations they've made in their mind and so that's why I'm so pedantic and a stickler about saying okay yes it's it's a good idea to eat Mally processed food and try to avoid processed foods but not because processed foods are bad per se but what the outcome tends to be from a lot of processed food consumption which is overc consuming calories and then therefore you know energy toxicity negatively contributing to your health yeah it seems like it again returns this the uh potential for a positive negative or neutral behavioral change and perceptual change of like craving of food all the time that you can't have is is terrible that's a terrible state to be in and um this I think is a perfect segue for something that first brought us together which was you know which was this this thing about artificial sweeteners and let me just uh for the record um be very clear I have long ingested foods with artificial sweeteners so I throughout graduate school I didn't have the best habits they're healthier now that they were back then but I would drink you know a Diet Coke or two per day I still have the occasional Diet Coke I'm not completely um averse to uh to drink something that has artificial sweetener um although I do avoid sucralose for reasons that maybe can um get into a little bit later but a lot of the things I consume contain Stevia which is not artificial plant but it is a plant-based non-caloric sweetener low caloric sweetener um and I don't have a problem with that I became very interested in artificial sweeteners because of the animal data um pointing to the idea that they may disrupt the gut microbiome and then disrupt the gut microbiome as you pointed out is a very broad statement we don't really know the percentage of lactobacillus at basilis or whatever basil whatever silus um ilis in there um they all seem to end in ilis um is ideal and in fact a lot of these companies that are having people send in their uh stool samples for analysis of the microbiome I mean take note we don't really know what a healthy microbiome looks like but we know what an unhealthy microbiome might look like and it's one that doesn't have a lot of diversity in there so I was interested in that then there's the recent human study which I we should definitely get into but I was mostly interested in artificial sweeteners for the reason that there is this um food conditioning effect and you see it in animals and you see it in humans that if you ingest um well coffee is a really good example coffee doesn't actually taste good folks even though I like but when you taste coffee for the first time most people think it's bitter and disgusting most everybody like 95% of people say this doesn't taste good beer same thing yep but people learn to associate the state of being caffeinated which most people like in order to just feel normal right caffeine is one of the few drugs we inest just to feel ourselves um enough that soon myself included really look forward to and enjoy a cup of coffee it's a so it's a powerful example in my opinion of the food conditioning effect so it's like a pavlovian thing instead of salivating you crave right um and it did seem that this study from Dana small slab which admittedly was a small no pun intended study itself not very many subjects showed that if you ingested artificial sweeteners along with food that contained glucose that you could sort of maybe even get a heightened glucose response just from the artificial sweeteners after a while you and I um connected over this study on social media you pointed out that the that the design of the study wasn't superb there was um there was co co co-consumption of glucose which made it complicated we can go into that but the reason I'm spouting off all this context is artificial sweeteners are many things so I'd like to talk about their effects on blood sugar in the acute sense and according to what we might ingest them with what and how they might be changing blood sugar regulation at the level of brain and or body and then the gut microbiome data I think are interesting enough to discuss and I have changed my view on artificial sweeteners based on what you've taught me so this is a case where I've completely changed my view which is that um now I don't I don't have any problem with them whatsoever based on the current data which is not to say that I'm you know gulping down a cupfuls of suos um but I feel okay ingesting some Stevia and some aspartame and I'm not too worried about it yeah so I I think kind of stepping back from a broad view we have to think about again the hierarchy of importance right and what are you replacing with right so there is no situation where it is not a net positive to take somebody who drinks sugar sweetened Beverages and have them drink an artificially sweetened beverage like the and the metaanalysis there was actually a recent Network metaanalysis looking at like markers of osity um you know hba1c a bunch of different Health markers and when you substitute you know uh uh we'll call it non-nutritive sweeteners since Stevia is not artificial but so when you substitute nns for the sugar sweet and beverages you see improvements in a lot of different things okay what was really interesting about this network metaanalysis was they also looked at Water substitution in place of sugar sweeten Beverages and the effect wasn't as powerful as and these are randomized control trials as so artificial sweetener containing beverages are more beneficial we're we're we better for osity uh for improving osity and then in the health markers it was kind of a wash water and um water and um non-nutritive sweetener beverages performed similar but they were better than sugar sweeten beverages obviously so they then based on a network met analysis is kind of where you can um compare two things that didn't get compared directly so there's not many studies comparing nns for versus water directly but if you have a common comparator so if you compare a to B and B gets compared to C you can compare a to c based on how they interacted with B I'm butchering it a little bit but that's kind of the Crux of a network metaanalysis so they looked at um nns versus water and found that actually nns was slightly better for improving osity nns of course being non-nutritive sweeteners right yeah so now again I'm I if you like drinking water and you you don't want to I'm not trying to convince anybody to do that what that seems to suggest is there is a little bit of an appetite suppressant effect from these artificial sweeteners or non-nutritive sweeteners now this gets a littleit more complicated because if these were people drinking sugar sweet and beverages maybe they've already developed a sweet taste and trying to go to water is too much of a jump for them and so going to having something like intermediate is a little bit better like there's a lot wrapped up in this but these are the randomized control trials which are a little bit more tightly controlled which I I tend to default to a little bit more than I do the epidemiology which epidemiology is just so messy because sure you know nonnutritive sweetener consumption may be associated with different things but there's also a whole another set of lifestyle and habits that are tied up in that so I tend to hang my hat a little bit more on the randomized control trials so understanding that okay now all things being equal understanding that this is a tool that may help some people and whenever ever I post about non-nutritive sweeteners in the comments there's always one or two or three people who say all I did was cut out soda and I drank diet soda instead and I lost 50 pounds or I lost 75 pounds I even had 1% I lost 100 pounds that's the only thing I did wow I mean that's a pretty massive lever to pull if you consider somebody who might be having like I mean five or six Cokes a day I mean that's you know we're talking a serious amount of calories and that also means that by replacing with artificial sweetener containing beverages they did not replace the soda with food correct so like let's now let's talk about right this is where we can get into the microanalysis but is that obese person who lost 100 pounds by doing that do I really care about maybe a small alteration to their B gut microbiome no because their gut microbiome is actually much more healthy now by them having lost all that excess adapost tissue so again the ranking of what I'm worried about you know can change depending on the specific situation now let's take somebody like me who's lean um and doesn't really have you know any health problems that I'm aware of um what about artificial sweeteners for me well for me I kind of got using them because of bodybuilding contest prep because it was about the only appetite suppressant that worked for me um but do I think that they are healthful probably not um do I think they're unhealthy I would say based on the current data I don't think they're they're unhealthy now the information on blood glucose so there there's some of the problems with some of these metanalyses or these these reviews is they kind of lump all the non-nutritive sweeteners together and then they may say well there's no effect on this or there's an effect on this well the problem is is these probably are these are different molecules and they can interact differently aspartame very clearly seems to have no effect on blood sugar or insulin um that has been repeatedly shown um Stevia doesn't appear to have much effect sacon and Sucralose the the jury is kind of mixed now there was the study that we first connected on which um I think their primary outcome measure was actually they were looking at like kind of the sweet taste like how it affected sweet taste so what they did was the group that was getting the sucralose was also paired with maltodextrin the control group was getting sucrose which the is an appropriate way to compare the sweet taste because maltodextrin is not as sweet as sucrose so when you're trying to combine you know sucrose which is already Sweet with another form of carbohydrate you'd want something less sweet compared to your control but for the outcome measure of uh insulin and blood glucose probably not as appropriate because we know maltodextrin has a much higher glycemic index than sucrose right so they they appropriately controlled for for Taste but not for the effect of the the sweeteners and I think that that was a key component and I think yeah the the part of that study that intrigued me um actually was um in a Talk version of that because that study drove me to watch a talk that and we'll get Dana small on on the podcast at some point hopefully was that they had they had kids do this study and they actually had to Cease the study because a couple of the kids became pre-diabetic I mean it seemed like there was something hazardous about this is a Yale School of Medicine it's good place I mean you know every you know there's um a range everywhere but uh it just seemed like there's something about sweet tastes that if taken to the extreme might be able to impact blood sugar to uh this has impacted um my sort of behavior in the I trying to I try to avoid really sweet things unless they're exceptionally delicious or the occasion calls for them because I do think that it increases my craving for sweet things well it might not be necessarily a craving but it just programs you so so let's your taste buds are extremely adaptable so take for example um like Indian food if you bring like Indian people over to America and have them eat some of our food they think it tastes extremely Bland because they are used to such spicy food that unless they have a certain level of spice they they hardly even taste it if you've ever done a high sodium diet and then gone to a low sodium diet it feels very Bland that's like Styrofoam but you're you're over time your taste buds adjust so sweet is the same thing if you're used to eating a lot of sweet um you get kind of desensitized to it and then if you go to something less sweet um it can kind of uh taste Bland at first over time it'll get better but so I think it's one of those things that again it depends on the situation right like if somebody's obese and they said well this is going to help me you know eliminate sugar sweeten beverage like why would you want to take that tool away from them like that's a a great lever to pull I mean if somebody can lose literally 100 pounds from just one change in lifestyle that's not even really that inconvenient of a change that's that is powerful but again is it the most healthy thing they could do and I think that's kind of like what tends to get asked we don't know it it is it healthier than water probably not maybe as healthy as it who knows now the but I I really make all those caveats because you don't want to have people who could use this as a tool think well no I can't do this cuz it's actually bad for me right if it helps you lose 50 lb or 75 lb or whatever it is trust me it's not bad for you right well it does seem to increase these satiety signals what do you think about the microbiome effects in this recent study because the recent study I think had some nice features to it um and you've done a detailed um description of the study so for those that want that is this a twoe study or two we study yeah and we we will provide a link you did an excellent video on this on your YouTube channel that really parses each piece but they compared the various artificial sweeteners um and looked at the glucose response looked at microbiome a number of different measures what was your general takeway and this was in humans for the for I think the first time looking at microbiome in humans due to artificial sweetener there's there's there are a few studies on the microbiome in humans with artificial sweeteners the first two that came out showed pretty much no effect um but they were a little bit shorter in duration they were like two to four weeks and again it depends on like what what bacteria are getting measured right like there's you know many different kinds of bacteria so they could just be measuring one that didn't change and then there was a 10we study that came out that that got a lot of press um and they showed I think it was sucralose I think they showed an effect uh of change on the gut microbiome now what was interesting is when I went into the species that changed the the species that changed the most compared the control was a species called um I'm going to butcher the name but let like blaa ctis I think it's called I must say for those that work on the microbi um it's so difficult to pronounce you need a nomenclature committee and you need acronyms I'm sorry just do it enough enough already you're killing us uh we'll call it BC call BC thank you we're going to start the nomenclature committee without you if you don't do it soon so they they noticed that this went up by like three to fourfold so I I kind of went down the rabbit hole on this so interestingly that particular species of bacteria is actually associated with lower osity better insulin sensitivity and people who are obese and children who are obese tend to have less of it so I said well based on that study you could actually argue that maybe sucrose actually improved the gut microbiome now again I'm not making that claim because you know we have a hard time understanding what a healthy microbiome looks like already what this last study that came out my my biggest takehome was I think it's safe to say that some of these non-nutritive sweeteners are not metabolically inert that there there are some effects now are those effects good bad or neutral I think has yet to be fully hallucinated now the the I focused more on the blood glucose responses in my analysis so in that 10-week study they looked at um they did oral glucose tolerance tests and their conclusion I didn't really feel like fit their data so their conclusion was that and I again I think it was sucralose that it elevated um blood glucose and this is where statistics can get kind of tricky so my take-home was the area under the curve the incremental area under the curve which is looking at the basically the entire glucose response was not different between the control and the sucrose group to me that's the biggest take-home there was one time point at the end of the study in the sucos group The 30-minute time point that was statistically significantly higher blood glucose than the control group that's kind of one of those things where I go okay it was at one time point it's statistically significant but even then we've seen things be statistically significant that end up being data artifacts because they're not reproduced so I'm not saying that's what's happening here but again the overall area under the curve was not different so to me that was the biggest take home and papers we should um probably mention are published because of effects generally lack of effect harder to publish no hypothesis doesn't it's actually really unfortunate because a null hypothesis is just as useful data as the the non-null hypothesis but you're right there is a very strong publication bias towards um showing an effect versus not yeah unless you can flip a field on its head entirely by showing something did not happen um typically the positive result out does the negative result in positive meaning you see a result um and then of course it's one study and you know yes and I think that as you talked about earlier the center of mass of data in a given field are probably the best basis for what we should do right in terms of and so I'm not changing my behavior around the intake of artificial sweeteners I personally I'm still going to consume Stevia and aspartame in relatively small amounts yeah but um now I'm thinking well okay if something contains sucralose I don't have to perhaps actively avoid it whereas before I was I was actively avoiding it so the the the new study I thought was very elegantly dis very involved I mean be quite Frank some of the animal stuff they did was extremely impressive um so there was actually two arms to the study one was a human arm one was the animal arm I I focused much more on the human side of it um so basically this was a two-e study and the really unique aspect of this which I think is both a strength and a weakness they had almost 1,400 people uh apply for this study and they only had 120 I think that actually went into it because they did a very detailed food analysis of these folks all these people said that they avoided artificial sweeteners or didn't consume them and I think people don't realize how ubiquitous sweeteners are prior to the study these people were like it was like jury selection they had never it's like not ever hearing of the the plaintiff and the defendant these These are these mutant people who have never had an artificial sweetener right so the strength is now you don't have a lot of like pre-existing you know effects that may be clouding what would actually happen when you added in like for example if you have people who are already consuming artificial sweeteners and then you have them consume artificial sweeteners the likelihood things are going to change is pretty low right so I think that that's a strength it's also a weakness and I want to be really careful because I think people took my words a little bit too far which means I probably didn't do a good job of being nuanced enough there is the possibility for a placebo effect here so to me if somebody has gone through that much painstaking care to avoid artificial sweeteners it's likely they have a preconceived notion that those are bad for you like to because they're difficult to avoid um yes it's possible if they're eating a very minimally processed diet that they're just not exposed to them and that's very true as well uh but the other thing that the researchers acknowledged was they weren't able to Blind the study because if you've never had an artificial sweetener before you're only used to like regular sugar and you have an artificial sweetener you know you taste it you know um it's still sweet but it's not the same sweet yeah and there's an interesting effect there where a lot of people don't like the taste of aspartame the first time yeah I actually quit drinking diet soda for a while thinking I should and then had one it tasted really I can only describe as kind of artificial chemical and then pretty soon tasted great again Y and so there is some attenuation there and whether or not that's Central meaning within the brain or peripheral I don't know but very interesting well I I see you as playing a critical role in defining what is and what isn't what still needs to be determined um in terms of this landscape and and the entire landscape really of nutrition and that study did change my opinion in terms of okay I I think we can clearly say now that like these aren't these aren't neutral or sorry that they're not inert right like that that was the thought process before was well they're not digested or or whatnot so they must be inert that doesn't appear to be the case um but again like when we look at the the blood glucose data there's and I'm not saying this is what happened I want to be very clear not saying this is what happened I'm saying it's possible this happened and so this is why we need studies to verify if these people had a preconceived notion that artificial sweeteners were bad for them it's possible knowing they're ingesting artificial sweeteners that they could have had a a blood glucose response now the my push back on my own point there would be then we should have expected to see it in all the in all the non-nutritive sweeteners which they didn't it was just in sucos and sacarin yeah it was kind of a graded effect where suas and sacran showed the most dramatic change y um and stevia uh and a few of the others did not and the the other issue I took with it maybe it's a Ticky Tac thing was their primary outcome measure was uh blood glucose so the oral glucose tolerance test but they had people administer their own oral glucose tolerance tests which basically they have them they said okay drink this drink and they were wearing continuous glucose monitors which should have been fine um but again to me and I'm I'm being ticky tacky and again I know all studies are limited by funding so I think overall this was great study but I would have liked to seen them uh you know monitor the the um oril glucose tolerance test ad before or after right you want to know that they didn't ingest this or did ingest that yeah those those two things but the other one of the caveat is it was a two-e study right so we got to be really careful how much we interpret in this because it's also possible that this is a transing effect right and maybe it goes away over time we don't know but again I think it's we can clearly say it's not inert right now how much emphasis we put on that on a two-e study I I'm I still will say okay maybe if you're worried don't consume sucos right but if you're you know 100 pounds overweight and you want to use some sucrose as a replacement to help you lose weight I would say don't let this study deter you from doing that because the net effect is still going to be more positive than you not losing the weight right so if it's tool that helps you fine but I do hold open the idea that well there could be negative effects from it as well but again we're we're looking at like what's the what is the overall outcome right and then when I looked at um they examined like some of the uh different things that were increased with these different uh sweeteners and again this word gets messy because one of the I saw was a big increase in butter rate production from the change in the gut microbiome presumably well as we discussed earlier butter rate's actually associated with like positive outcomes in terms of insulin sensitivity inflammation and some other things so I just I want to be real cautious before people say well there's a change in the microbiome it must be a bad change we don't know it's possible and again if we have you know 10 more studies come out and start to show this then I will start to shift my personal opinion of artificial sweeteners so in anticipation of sitting down today I did solicit uh for questions on social media and one of the questions that got a lot of upvotes likes if if you will was it one that I think raises interesting questions about short-term and long-term health and it's the following I think it's a common scenario a number of people want to know what is the healthiest way to approach a kind of rapid weight loss and here what I think is happening is somebody has an event coming up or they're just tired of being uh the weight they are carrying the amount of adapost tissue they are and they wanted to know whether or not it is safe to for instance lose three pounds a week for a few weeks in anticipation of a wedding or some other event and whether or not straight caloric restriction and increasing activity uh is the best way to approach that um with the understanding that they may gain back a little afterwards they might I think ideally they'd like to maintain it afterwards but what do you think of that sort of approach uh you know cutting cleric intake in half for instance and then doubling and also doubling your physical output so it's interesting because the you might be surprised by what I'm going to say which is the research data actually tends to suggest that people who are like obese who lose a lot more weight early are more likely to keep it off which seems a little bit kind of contradictory right like well that doesn't seem very sustainable but again you're you're weighing competing things so there's sustainability aspect but then there's also like buyin is huge for sustainability right so for a lot of overweight or obese people if they start a diet and they don't see something quickly they kind of bail on it because it's you know it's not working whereas if they see some rapid results pretty quickly they buy in even harder right and so I think the the conversation especially for if there's any coaches or trainers out there is just presenting that as the their you know one of my favorite lines is there are no Solutions there's only tradeoffs I think Thomas Soul said that so you're you're having a trade-off here um it is yes you're going to lose fat faster you might lose lean mass a little bit faster too which can be a problem but I will say the more adapost tissue you have the more aggressively you can diet without negative consequences somebody like me doing a really aggressive diet is not going to be good for my lean mass one I have a higher lean mass than normal two I have a lower body fat than normal as your body fat goes down the percentage of weight loss from lean mass goes up so um people who are very obese because they have so much adapost tissue to pull from there's very little reason for the body to catabolize tissue now that being said if you go on a people misinterpret like they're like well I got a inbody done and or aexa done and I've lost you know two pounds of lean mass and they've you know they've lost 20 PBS overall well keep in mind adapost tissue itself is 133% lean mass so there's actually like you know protein component to like the structural component of the adapost tissue and it does have some water so it's about 87% lipid but the other part is lean so at minimum you should expect a 13% reduction in lean mass when you diet and then when you consider like you lose body water overall which is registers as lean mass um and you lose uh your splank neic tissues can shrink a little bit so it's normal to lose you know for the average person to lose like 25 or 30% of the weight that they lose from lean mass but that doesn't mean skeletal muscle tissue and again the the more adapost you have the more aggressively you can approach the diet without really negative long-term consequences to lean mass or your overall health but balance that with okay if I'm going to do this I need to understand that I'm not going to be dieting this way forever I'm doing this to give myself a boost at the beginning and I have to be okay at some point with transitioning to something that's a little bit more sustainable based on what you just said It reminds me of the satiety signal effect of exercise you mentioned earlier that exercising can improve um our sense of when we've had enough to eat I just want to briefly mention that when Ali crumb was on the podcast she mentioned that they'd been doing a study that I I have to pair you to and have hear the conversation as a fly on the wall because what she was telling me was that if people believe that a food is nutritious for them then eating less of it uh registers as more satiating whereas if people view dieting as a deprivation system you know like oh you know dieting is hard and the food sucks and it's terrible well then they crave all sorts of other things whereas they could they actually observe in their studies where people report reduced craving if they are told for instance a chicken breast and broccoli and some olive oil and rice is actually quite nourishing it's actually really good for you then people eat that and they feel like they've actually eating more the satiety signaling goes up so it's just a just a point that Ali made those aren't my data saet is so impressive because even the rate at which you eat and right down to the size of the plate and the color of the plate like the contrast in color really they they see I can't remember exactly I think it's if the plate is a similar color to the food I I think people eat more whereas if it's a bigger contrast they eat less so even like plate color can make a difference on how much you eat so again human brain very amazing but also very dumb in some ways right like not an optimized algorithm I always I always joke with people I'm like just look at how stupid humans are you put some water in front of them like you know the ocean they're like oh yeah I'll pay 10 times more for this you know like but it's just we're kind of wired that way the um the reward signaling Pathways in the brain run one chemical mainly dopamine there are others of course but and very few algorithms it's sort of like a intermittent reinforcement is one random reinforcement but in the end that there aren't many algorithms and we we are probably not optimized certainly not optimized for our own health because people will eat themselves to death drug themselves to death Etc simply because something felt good at one point it's it proves your point one of one of the things I tell people I I said this on um Andy filla's podcast was interestingly the dichotomy of life is if you do what's easy in the short term your life will be hard if you do what's hard in the short term your life will get easier it's very strange and actually Ethan suple had a great example of this when he was over 500 pounds he said the amount of work I had to do to construct my life that I could just live was so much more work than just going to the gym for a couple hours a day he's like the gym work is hard he's like but when I look back how much work I had to do to sustain that lifestyle versus just going to the gym and like you know restricting calories he's like to maintain the lifestyle of being 500 pounds was infinitely more difficult than what I do now and so again great example shortterm hard going to the gym calorie restriction longterm life's easier just really interesting dichotomy I think about a lot and and can't be restated often enough seed oils people want to ask about seed oils and for the and for and for those of you that are listening who are wondering why we're we're sort of chuckling already I should mentioned that both in the Twitter sphere and Instagram and online there's there these very polarized views that probably aren't worth focusing on for too long but there are a number of folks out there who are arguing that seed oils are the source of all you know the Obesity epidemic inflammation Etc Illuminati everything and then there are those that would argue just the opposite um that you know meat is the source of all problems Etc and I think we've thanks to your nuance and and expertise we've uh hopefully appropriately frame things that it's never that black and white it's simply not um rarely um I love olive oil I I realize that doesn't fit exactly into the seed oil category um I love olive oil I use it in moderation I do also consume some butter in moderation um Etc but are there any data on seed oils and here good example I think would be like canola oil which comes from the rape seed that literally was renamed canola oil because rape seed oil is not good marketing no no exactly um so the first thing I'll say is seed oils have have negatively contributed to our overall health because people in the last you know 20 30 years what they have tend to added to add into their diet that has increased the overall calorie Lev is oil uh like these various um mostly from seed oils but when we look at like one to one replacement with other fats and so I if you look at the epidemiology yeah you can find some epidemiology showing people who consume more seed oil have more negative Health outcomes problem is again tied up with a multitude of other behaviors and then you can find mechanisms and the the idea is well these have uh they're poly saturated which means in the fatty acid chain there's multiple double bonds which those double bonds can be oxidized uh when they're exposed to heat and some other things and so the idea is well when you cook with these things and you know they get they get uh o they make get oxidized and that's going to cause inflammation in your body so that's a a plausible mechanism so as always I defer to the human randomized control trials and so what you tend to find is when you substitute polyunsaturated fats or sorry when you substitute saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats it's either neutral or positive in terms of the effects on like um inflammation is basically neutral there there's some studies that show a positive effect of doing uh polyunsaturated fats but it probably depends on the individual polyunsaturated fat and that's the other thing I I don't really is ult because you're you're categorizing like everything in this one bucket and there are some differences between individual fatty acids uh even with saturated fat like um for example steric acid doesn't tend to raise LDL cholesterol whereas you know saturated fat as a whole tends to raise LDL cholesterol but there are some saturated fats that don't so again it's it's like we're putting things in buckets and it's a little more nuanced than that uh then if you look at um like the effects of um you know polyunsaturated fats on markers of cardiovascular disease again tends to either be a neutral or positive effect when you substitute U saturated fat for polyunsaturated fat now if you want to get into like monounsaturated versus polyunsaturated there's some there's quite a bit of disagreement between the studies what I would say based on the human randomized control trials is that you're probably better off consuming monounsaturated and polyunsaturated in place of saturated fat but again if the idea is well that means poly unsaturated are good for me so I'm just going to dump a bunch of oil on everything and now you're upping your calories well that's that's that's a negative now right because you have to deal with the bigger problem of overall energy toxicity so I I'm not somebody who likes to demonize individual nutrients I just haven't seen really compelling evidence that seed oils are the root cause of the problems that are being suggested and I think this is a good example of kind of like like whenever there's a something that pops up in the fitness industry there's always like the opposite thing that pops up and it's like the reactionary you know extreme reaction to whatever this thing was over here and I think that's what we're seeing with some of the the seed oil stuff is it's it's mostly people who are trying to kind of expose the virtues of saturated fat and listen I think it's fine to consume Sim saturated fat but again you know I think limiting it to you know 7 to 10% of your daily calorie intake is probably wise again based on the the all the consensus of the evidence I've seen and so once again like we're we're struggling with this okay we've got this epidemiology and these mechanisms that sound good but then what actually happens when we we do some human randomized control trials and and so far I just haven't seen the evidence to suggest that seed oils are in independently bad for you independent of the calories they contain you said the words overall energy toxicity and I just want to highlight that I think that's a fabulous term I don't uh I don't think enough people think about that because they they are primed or we are all primed to think okay seed oils might be bad or artificial sweeteners might be bad or this particular component of blood work might represent something good or bad without taking into account overall energy toxicity of the toxicity of over consuming calories energy and um thank you for uh pointing out that most of the data point to the fact that saturated fat should make up about no more than 7 to 10% of total daily caloric intake is there a lower end threshold that can be problematic um for instance I've noticed that my blood profiles especially in terms of hormones improve when I'm getting sufficent saturated fat maybe I'm a mutant but years ago because I'm a product of growing up in the 90s I tried a lowfat diet I it certainly crushed my Androgen levels I started adding some butter back in and I was right back in the in the in the sweet Zone uh where I wanted to be so you know 7 to 10% of totally daily choric intake is I'm guessing is probably about what I do now I'll have to check but is there a danger to going too low in saturated fats so again no Solutions only trade-offs right what maximizes out testosterone might not be the best thing for longevity right and and vice versa now I'm not I'm not making that claim specifically but I think it's important to understand this that I think we all have this idea that there's this one iconic diet out there that is going to be the best diet for building muscle and burning fat and uh preventing cancer and heart disease and the reality is like there's overall healthy dietary patterns that we see that are good for those things but when we get down into the weeds there's probably some push and pull here as well right so when it comes to saturated fat um there is some evidence that if you're too low on it that yes you can have a reduction in testosterone now is that reduction in testosterone let's say 15 20% whatever it may be is that sufficient to actually cause loss of lean mass that we don't know that's that's never been shown interestingly um I just remembered this there was one study that was comparing um polyunsaturated fat versus saturated fat um and they equated total fat and one of the really interesting things was the group getting the polyunsaturated fat had more lean mass at the end of the study compared to the group getting saturated fat now so only one study I've never seen this replicated so I I'm very this is a situation where I I say I would like to find out what the mechanism of that is because this could just be random um but if that gets shown over and over what I might say is okay well what's the what are we if polyunsaturated are somehow increasing lean mass compared to saturated fat who cares what happens with testosterone unless that reduction in testosterone is causing some kind of impedant uh impedence for your life right um so all that to say I don't really know and uh by the way that's something for those watching and listening um real experts every once in a while you should hear them say the following words I don't know exactly my graduate advisor was exceptional that and she and she was brilliant right um and then in terms of like um cholesterol synthesis you really need a very very small amount of saturated fat for LDL cholesterol synthesis your your liver can synthesize like the amount of LDL cholesterol or cholesterol that your body requires is so small in terms of like just living and being healthy so I don't think you need to worry about that and from a cardiovascular disease standpoint there is some evidence that even taking people who have like quote unquote low low LDL of like you know 80 or 90 and taking them down to like 30 or 40 that there is still a a a benefit for the risk of cardiovascular disease so again you're you're weighing these these two buckets right so what I say you know if you're doing 7 to 10% from from saturated fat you're probably fine received a lot of questions about whether or not there are female specific diet and exercise protocols and I realize this is a vast landscape but um some of those questions related to menopause and premenopause and some related to the menstrual cycle most related to variations across the menstrual cycle in terms of um let's just say diet maintenance or sub caloric diet um are there any things that you've observed we'll talk a little bit later about um the the wonderful app that you've produced this carbon app which helps people manage their energy intake and a number of other things um and so there you have a sort of a database or at least an experience base and then I'm guessing there are probably also studies exploring male versus female differences in terms of adherence and what sorts of diets work as it are there any general themes that one can extract from that this going to be a really unpopular segment for the women um doesn't seem to make a big difference well actually they may be relieved to hear that because it would makes sorting through the information space and certainly the information we've covered in this podcast up until now simpler it means that everything isn't different for them yeah so if you look at the male versus female studies relation to diet they seem to respond a s similar way like um similar calor calorie deficit teams to produce similar results um if you do low carb high carb regardless it it seems to boil down to the same principles now training wise we do know that female like the mus MUSC fibers adapt a little bit differently to training but it without getting too far into the weeds it doesn't really change the way you should train um because for the most part building muscle there's a lot of different ways to build muscle so we know that like light loads up to maybe like 30 reps as long as it's taken close to failure have basically the same effect on building muscle at least in the short term as heavy loads for low reps it's mostly about taking the muscle close to fatigue or failure right you don't have to go you don't have to go to failure but getting close within a few reps um if you're between one rep and 30 reps if you're getting close to failure seem to produce similar results so again great you can pick with whichever form of discomfort you you prefer right um when it comes to female specific training again females actually this is one thing a lot of don't know they actually put on a similar amount of lean mass as a percentage of their starting lean mass as men in fact there's no statistically significant difference in the amount of lean mass they put on now the absolute amount of lean mass that's added will be greater for men because they started with a greater amount of lean mass but the relative increase in lean mass is pretty much the same from similar training now uh females there there's some differences in like fiber types females tend to be a little bit less fatigable than than men they can they can go a little bit harder a little bit longer and there's also some evidence that they recover a little bit better but that also could be simply due to the fact that they're not able to use as heavy of loads to to induce hypertrophy so I kind of have this theory that while you know as a percentage your one rep max you can program things I think absolute load matters when you look at like the most elite powerlifters the super heavy weights aren't squatting three or four times a week because you know they're squatting 8 900 lb they need more recover I I I think that there's an overall recovery effect there again I have no data to back this up this is just my my observation but when you get into the lighter weight classes and this goes for men too you do see quite a few people who do you know many training sessions at high rpes and seem to be able to recover from that so I do think the absolute load makes a difference now when it comes to like menstrual cycle this is one of those things where I kind of tell people you know do what you prefer so there's some people who have said you should program you should like kind of schedule your training around your menstrual cycle which is um whenever you're going through your menstrual cycle you know reduce the intensity reduce the volume because you're you know you're not going to feel as good you're not going to train as well what I would say is just Auto regulate that if you go in and you're on your period but you you feel good and you're doing well that day then I don't think you necessarily need to back it off and there there was one study that kind of supported that notion but if you go in and you feel terrible and you know you feel like you could use you know a reduction in intensity and volume then it's totally fine to Auto regulate that and when I say Auto regulation I'm Auto regulation means you are regulating the individual training session based on your performance so um I auto regulate in so far as um like I'm a I'm a super nerd so I have a a velocity device so I can actually attach to the bar and see how fast the load moves and I know at various different like warm-up weights what velocities I should be hitting so if I hit my last warmup and my velocity is about 10% higher than usual um I can be pretty confident that that's going to be a good day for me if it's lower then I can back it off a little bit in fact at Worlds uh when I hit my last deadlift it was 30% my last my last deadlift warmup it was 30% faster than I usually hit in the gym and I turned and looked at my coach and I said yeah we're going to get this today so there's various forms of ways to autoregulate but again women if you're on your period but you feel good I don't think there's any reason you need to back off but if you're not feeling good then it's totally appropriate to back off Raw versus cooked Foods people wanted to know uh whether or not for instance you know eating a raw apple versus I don't know does anyone cook apples I guess you people used to bake they were baked app was a dessert when I was a kid it was kind of the let down dessert sorry Mom it was kind like not awesome unless it had a scoop of ice cream in it even then maybe not awesome but anyway Raw versus cooked um obviously if you burn a piece of meat to the point where it's pure charcoal that's too much and if you there is a small movement uh surrounding eating raw meats that's not something I particularly enjoy frankly Sushi is the only raw food I I personally ingest and I'm very I am very careful about the sourcing frankly um reputable places um is there anything you know real about this in terms of being able to extract the amino acids vitamins and minerals from the food Raw versus cooked it just looks cool for Instagram um so when you cook foods they actually tend to become in terms of protein containing foods they tend to become more digestible not less uh eggs are this way me to this way um people say well you know when you when you heat protein you denat it and I think they hear that word denat and they think destroy and that is not what Den nature means so proteins fold up into 3D dimensional structures you know this of course uh based on their amino acid sequence and their specific energies of those amino acids um when you heat protein or add acid it starts to unfold that um that protein structure that happens during digestion anyway so I always chuckle when like the like I've seen some companies come out with way that you can cook with right that that's not going to you know destroy the amino acids I'm like so you mean like regular way right so um yeah cooking typically cooking actually makes amino acids more bioavailable not less now um I would stay away from charring your meat um because there is some evidence that charring creates polymatic hydrocarbons which uh at least in animals when they give those uh they appear to be carcinogenic so if you do Char your meat by accident I would just cut off the charred portions um and then you should be fine the Char is delicious not not if it's charred too much but there is something about a charred crossed onom me my dad's Argentine and I like a good Char barbecue um what about um people referred to them in their questions as carb blockers but I think what they're referring to are things like berberine and some of the glucose scavengers and um one glucose scavenger I'd love for you to comment on is this assertion that taking a brisk walk after a me or maybe even a slow walk after a meal some movement can help um downshift the amount of circulating glucose in some way I've heard that um not a lot of people but some are starting to pay attention to this idea of taking things like berberine or even metformin um Can scavenge glucose I personally can't take Burberry if I take it I get massive headaches unless I've ingested tons of sugar and carbohydrates so I just don't mess around with it but I I know there are a number of people out there that want to know whether or not these glucose scavengers can be useful I think that is really majoring in the minors if I'm being honest um as far as like the card blockers there's like some white kidney bean extract and those sorts of things they can um they do block the digestion of carbohydrate some so when I say block that's those watching or listening uh metabolism is typically not on andof switches okay so we when we say things like block or attenuate or inhibit typically we're we're not talking about just a switch on the wall that you press it and everything turns off we're talking about a dimmer switch okay like so you it just changes the emphasis uh but these carb blockers can reduce the absorption of carbohydrate now they don't seem to cause weight loss when when you just do at a normal diet now why is that well all it does is once those carbohydrates get to the um large intestine and your bacteria get a hold of them they fitting them to volatile fatty acids which get reabsorb into your liver so you don't get the increase in blood glucose but you still get almost all the calories from it it's just in a different form so you know if carb blockers if they actually worked really well I mean if you block something from being absorbed your GI typically does not just let undigested material sitting there you get diarrhea I mean that would be the outcome that's also how I like debunk the whole like 30 grams of protein at a meal you can't absorb any more than that I'm like if that was the case like when you ate a steak like you would just start having diarrhea every time you went over that 30 G threshold right I remember during college so this would be early 90s there was The olestra Craze oh yeah this idea of of putting a non-digestible um thing into things like potato chips so that it would um clear through uh the the GI tra faster not absorb as many calories it does raise this went nowhere obviously um you don't hear about this anymore but it does raise an interesting question related to energy balance which is gastric empting time um and obviously in in the landscape of Eating Disorders in particular anorexia abuse of La use and abuse of um laxatives is a way in which people will in an unhealthy way try and control their weight and there's a lot of problems with that uh approach but um what about gastric emptying time is this one way that people could um control their energy balance in a healthy way and um where does fiber come into play uh fiber tends to improve GI Transit time because it adds bulk so you know your your GI system is basically a tube and it has Paralis which is wave like contractions that moves the food down through the tube well if you have more bulk to the food like with fiber you can move it through a little bit better now in the gastric the stomach specifically fiber tends to delay gastric in and slow it a bit um probably because it congeals a little bit um now this kind of gets into like the glycemic index argument right like if you do if you do like low GI Foods you'll have a slower release of glucose um it's a slower gastric emptying time does that affect energy balance and so there are quite a few studies looking at like low GI versus high GI Foods um in the studies where they don't control calories low GI tends to outper per High GI but when they control calories there's no difference and so what that tends to S what I think that suggests is low GI Foods just by their nature tend to be higher in fiber and so I think it it just kind of comes back to the fiber issue got it like to ask you about supplements for a moment um it's an enormous landscape but I believe there are a few things that you believe in meaning they exist and and there are decent data to support their use maybe even some anecdotal data based on your own experience as long as we highlight it as such it could be interesting I've heard you talk about two in particular one that I'm very familiar with which is creatine monohydrate you could um share your thoughts on that not just for muscle building but maybe any other purposes for it um and then the other one is one that um frankly I'm learning more about all the time now thanks to your prompt which is rolia Rosa I think I pronounced that correctly and um and why that might be interesting or of use to people yeah so touching on creatin it it is the most tested safe and effective Sports supplement we have I mean it's just there are thousands of studies on creatin monohydrate now and I I would I would say very clearly too um if you're using any other form of creatin I think you're wasting your money um creatin hydrochloride has some um hype around it it it's apparently it's a little more soluble um the claim is that you need less um but there's only a couple studies on it and and it's more expensive and cre monohydrate is not particularly expensive I realize people have different budgets but it's not it doesn't land in the it's not a budget breaker Yeah it's gotten more expensive because of covid and supply chain issues even the there's forms of creatine that appear to be as good like hydrochloride but it's more expensive and then things like creatin ethylester has been shown to be worse than creatin monohydrate uh buffer creatin is as good or worse and it's much more expensive so I tell people just take Crea monohydrate it is tried and true it's been shown to saturate the muscle cells 100% with phosphor creatin and that's what you want so creatin uh Works through a few different methodologies one through increasing phosphocreatine content which helps improve exercise performance um it also appears to improve incover it appears to improve recovery and it creases lean mass a lot of which is through bringing water into to the muscle cells but that is I mean muscle cells are mostly water so when people say well it's just water that's what muscle cells mostly are um and uh it also increases strength and some other metrics now it also has been shown in studies that people tend to get a decrease in body fat percentage now that's probably because they're getting an increase in lean mass and so the relative is a decrease in body fat percentage but there are a few studies that show a decrease in fat mass as well I don't think that creatin is a fat burner I think that people were able to train harder build more lean tissue and so that's probably having an effect on fat mass then they've actually shown more recently some cognitive benefits to creatin which I find really interesting as well but the only knock on creatin that anybody's been able to come up with because they've that they've debunked the kidney stuff they've debunked the liver stuff there's no evidence that it harms healthy kid kidney or liver uh is hair loss so what about hair loss because there was one study in 2009 that showed that creatin increased DHT um but they didn't really show an effect on any other sex hormone so it's kind of strange like you would think if there was an increase in DHT there would be like something else that changes as well um and it's only one study and again didn't directly measure hair loss measured DHT which we know is involved in the loss of the follicule the follicle so what I would say is that I am not convinced it's only one study never been replicated to my knowledge and it was looking at a mechanism rather than an outcome so uh if you if you're somebody who's prone to hair loss and you want to avoid creatine because of that I understand but for most people I don't think it's a I don't think it's something to worry about do you emphasize the classic loading of creatine taking it a bunch of times per day and then backing off or just taking it consistently at the I think five grams per day is kind of the typical um dose that people take so again no Solutions only trade-offs um you can load it and you will saturate your fos phosphor creatin stores faster like usually within a week uh if you just take 5 grams per day it'll take 2 three 4 weeks uh but you will get to the same place and you're probably going to have a much lower risk of GI issues some people creatin can be a gut irritant um if it is for some folks I would recommend splitting it into multiple doses so maybe like multiple two one or two gram doses per day and definitely don't load it if you're someone who has GI issues from it as far as uh Rola Rosa the research is still in its infancy I was just reading a new systematic review that kind of concluded that we need more high quality research but the research that is out there seems to suggests that not only does it reduce physical fatigue but it also reduces the perception of fatigue and may also enhance uh memory and cognition as well and it's referred to as an adaptogen so I I really like it um my anecdotal experience is when I combine that with caffeine it tends to kind of smooth out the effects of caffeine it's a more pleasant experience and there's also some evidence that if you're like coming off caffeine that it can reduce the uh the negative side effects to caffeine withdrawal which by the way I I didn't really believe in that until I actually did a cold turkey uh so before a meet I will cut out caffeine for 7even days because is you can basically reset your caffeine tolerance in 7 days and like two days in I mean I'm groggy I've got the headaches usually I'll get like body aches that come up because caffeine is actually a mild analgesic um and yeah so it's very interesting to say but I slept like a baby I'll tell you that I S you took caffeine prior to to your event to to the meat so you really want the maximum punch from it that's why you do that yeah and like I said riola tends to it doesn't eliminate those those negative effect effect but they tend to it tends to dampen them a little bit so I really like it again would like to see more research on it but there's a lot more stuff coming out like um ashwaganda is another thing that looks pretty promising uh seems to increase testosterone modestly interesting um I don't think it's an like they've shown increases in lean mass I don't think the increase in testosterone uh explains the increase in lean mass it's just not a big enough increase could it be the decrease in cortisol people have talked about possible it does decrease uh stress stress hormones it also has been shown to help with sleep um but I would like to see more research looking at mechanistically how it's increasing lean mass before I kind of say conclusively that this is you know the next creatin there's more research that needs to come out and then there's some other things that that have an effect um you know citrine malite there there was a new metaanalysis that showed that citrine malite can reduce fatigue and uh increase uh I think time to fatigue and it may actually have some small recovery benefits as as well um different forms of Carn carnitine can actually have recovery benefits and actually interesting um I think it's carnitine tartrate actually has been shown uh VC published a study that actually show that increased Androgen receptor density in muscle cells that's interesting ELC carnitine and its other forms that are pretty I think there's good evidence that they can improve um sperm and egg health for people who are looking to conceive oh interesting yeah they're um surprising number of studies on this in in humans um but yeah anden receptor density and that that's from oral lcarnitine people are taking capsules not injecting directly into a muscle yeah and then you've got things like obviously like the other most effective supplement out there is probably caffeine I mean like if you look at the research studies caffeine produces very consistently improvements in performance um so that's another one some people don't like the effect of caffeine that's okay but I wouldn't know because I've never come off it exactly exactly well interestingly they they do show that the effect appears to be consistent that that even if you're a habitual caffeine user you do still get a benefit every time you take it but like you said you're just used to it you know um so you know there's those things you then you've got like things like uh beta alanine which for it's in our it's in our pre-workout probably not super helpful for um most people for resistance training it does seem to have some uh benefits for like high intensity like if you get a out you know more than like 45 seconds or 60 seconds of like really hard training it does appear to help with delaying fatigue for that um and then you've got things like uh betane or also called trimethyl glycine which there's some evidence that can improve lean mass um there's some evidence that it can um improve power output so there's a few things out there but you know most of the stuff is not very good so you know I I think that that's you know those kinds of supplements you know very useful U but again I would never tell people they need supplements like again even like something like creatin is going to be a very small effect compared to like proper nutrition recovery and hard training you know one of the things I I was I was talking with Ben Bruno the other day and uh I said you know like some people will ask me like how does this person make progress because you know their programming is you know it's not evidence-based or or you know this guy how's he like he's his exercises are dumb and I I'll say yeah but they train really hard for 20 years like you know one commonality you see between like really successful athletes or bodybuilders is they train really hard and one of the things I have observed is the more into the weeds people tend to get and again this is just my own anecdote and observation the more into the weeds they tend to get the less hard I see them train and so one of the things I really like that Mike Israel said who's got a PhD and is a bodybuilder himself he said you can't out science hard training that if you're looking to build muscle and you're looking to improve your body composition the main thing is just doing the work over time consistency and the hard work and I would add to that and this is true of uh academic Endeavors um too of course I I think I hope you'll agree absolutely which is that yeah you know the other thing is given the mental side earlier we were talking about how satiety signals and the brain and you think about foods can be relevant learning to really enjoy training hard in addition to learning to really enjoy eating well not just for the effects that it has on body competition composition excuse me those two of course but just learning to really enjoy the process of training hard and a and a really hard workout or a really hard um paper that you have to sort through or really digging through a book that's challenging learning to really enjoy that I think is is a if there is a power tool out there it's it's the psych iCal end and I think a lot of that is getting the confidence of doing something hard that there's a payoff at the end you know and a lot of people I get asked a lot in my Q&A how do I get more confident how do I become more confident I'll tell people you have to do you have there there's no hack you can't read about it you got to get in the arena and I don't mean like compete in sports necessarily but like doing a PhD or doing something just something hard where you're putting yourself out there and you're saying this is my goal and I'm going to go go for it you just learn so much by doing that about yourself um and so just what you said I will reframe things in my mind when bad things happen from it's not to say I never get stressed out because I do and it's not to say that I never get down because I do because I'm a human but when something bad happens I actually post about this in my store today when something bad happens I very rarely anymore do I go wo is me why did this happen to me because you're in the UN verse random bad things are going to happen so instead I say you know if I'm not dead instead I say well what an exciting opportunity to overcome an obstacle and I bet because in the experience of my life the biggest lessons and the best things in my life have actually come out of the most challenging worst things that have happen and so again this is I would never have been able to do these sorts of things if I hadn't taken up weightlifting because weightlifting taught me so much about perseverance delayed gratification overcoming obstacles and that's why I love it even to this day and I'll still get butterflies when I go in for a squat session even though I've been doing it for 23 years that's wonderful well it's clear that you Embrace hard things and I for people listening to this obviously it doesn't have to be weightlifting you know picking hard things learning an instrument learning a language um challenge is is a is an absolute Builder and they've actually shown like um those sorts of things like when you challenge yourself and also mentally that um I think there was a new study that came out basically showing a reduction in the risk of Alzheimer's and other age related cognitive decline I mean basically like use it or lose it right yeah the the the will the desire and the will um to persevere no doubt translates to this thing that we we call the will to live right it's it's related to the will to live well I think think that what you just said you know beautifully embodies what most people are aspiring to which is to I think most people actually want to do hard things uh they don't just want to have the results I think that most people deep down un have some understanding that their reward system works that way I must say this conversation for me has been tremendously rewarding first of all it allowed me to meet you in person for the first time which I've really enjoyed I'm certain this won't be our last interaction on this podcast and and else where uh also the amount of knowledge that you contain inside you is is astonishing and there's a lot of stuff rattling around up there well and and we all benefit because your ability to pull from the mechanistic side again I think in not limited to but related to your background in Biochemistry all the way through to the um the impact in humans animal studies being able to understand where those sit relative to one another and then you're obviously a practitioner of you practice what you preach and what you talk about pertains to men to women younger people older people people who are vegan keto carnivore you really are able to net a tremendous number of ideas while staying really nuanced and data driven and so just want to say for myself and on behalf of the listeners really appreciate you coming in here today and sharing with us your knowledge we will absolutely Point people in the direction of um where they can learn more about you and um one of the places uh that I want I definitely want to mention before we we part however is um this carbon app and I should just mention I'm not this isn't a paid promotion or anything of that sort actually one of our podcast team members is has been using carbon for a long time this is an app that you devised which allows people to navigate the exercise nutrition energy balance space for weight loss muscle gain fat loss weight maintenance I would just like to briefly ask you about that before we conclude um without necessarily telling us everything that's in the carbon app I'd love to know what are the major things that it does and is good for and then what were some of the key things that you wanted to make sure were in there when you built it like what what's the sort of logical backbone behind it because I think there are a lot of um food counting calorie counting exercise apps out there um everyone I've talked to that uses carbon um including uh our mutual friend cigar and Getty that's member of my podcast Etc Raves about it so what is carbon and and what does it do and what was your mindset in building it what did you you really want to see there that you didn't see elsewhere so those listening may not know but I really I started online coaching people for nutrition back in 2005 and that was the the vast majority of my business all the way up until like 2017 and I had a lot of success with that where whether whether it be just average folks looking to Lo lose weight or build muscle and right up to Elite level uh competitors in physique sport so I kind of had this idea like I don't want to say I had the idea a few people had the idea what if we could take what I do in coaching and try to automate as much of that as possible because you know by the time I was becoming a really popular coach I mean I was expensive you know you were looking at like you know me charging I got to the point where I was charging about $1,000 a month for coaching right and not most people cannot afford that and I would like to not just coach people you know what I mean uh I would like to be able to help other people so the idea was to create an app that could do some of this stuff now there's always a place for human interaction but for people who can't afford that our app is basically 10 bucks a month and basically what we wanted to do was set up an app where think about if you went to a nutrition coach what what would they do they would probably ask you some questions about your goals uh take some anthropometrics um and then they would use like that information maybe dietary preference and they'd use that information to kind of formulate a baseline plan that's what carbon does so we ask you I think there's eight questions in the signup flow about like your activity um your exercise uh your lifestyle your body weight um your body fat percentage and if you don't know it we help you calculate it it's not perfect but it's better than nothing um and then your dietary preferences and we use that to come up with kind of your Baseline and your Baseline will be you know your calories your protein your carbohydrates and fats and what's different about our app because like apps like U you know my fitness P whatever will do that as well uh what's different about ours is you we encourage people to log their weight daily for the reasons that we talked about earlier um and then you can also track your food in the app and honestly I think our food tracker is actually like way easier to use than most of them out there our our what we typically get great rave reviews about is how userfriendly our interface is that it makes intuitive sense and so you track your food try to hit these these macros that you're prescribed and each week you will be prompted to check in with the coach on your check-in day and then you you put in some information and then based on how you're progressing the app will adjust or not adjust based on how you're progressing so for example if if you're hitting a weight loss Plateau it will sense that and it will you know reduce your calories or or if you're trying to gain weight and you're you know hit a plateau to increase your calories and there's a lot of you know backend algorithm stuff that that takes care of this but the fundamental Crux of the app is we we try to determine your total daily energy expenditure because that's going to tell us the first big thing we need to know which is how many calories do you need to be eating for your goal right so on the front end we we B basically um do our best guess based on your anthropometrics not going to be perfect but it'll get us in the ballpark and if you do know like some people already know well I know what I maintain my body weight on there's actually a spot where you can man manually enter that during the signup flow so that's helpful for people who are super nerds like me um but then if you're just people will ask well do you do you take Apple watch data do you take this do you take that and know for the reasons we talked about that it overestimates energy expenditure what app does is it's an algebra equation if you because your body weight your your maintenance calories is your total daily energy expenditure your average calories that you eat to maintain your body weight will be the same as your total daily energy expenditure so if we know how body weight is changing and we know how many calories the person's consuming we can actually solve for what energy expenditure is right and you can see in the app that well uh there's there's a kind of a a maintenance calorie tracker or energy expenditure tracker and typically after about 3 to 4 weeks even if the app was off at first it will have you pretty darn close because like let's say somebody um comes on and they their goal is to lose you know a pound and a half a week or something like that and the first week they lose three pounds now the app actually accounts for the fact that you can lose more water weight the first week so they probably wouldn't get an adjustment but let's say the next week they lose three pounds the app will sense that and adjust their calories up because it will be estimating that their energy expenditures are actually higher than what it had previously estimated based on the amount of weight they're losing and the same thing goes in reverse if they're not losing the amount of weight that they're supposed to uh it will lower them based on the fact that it may have overestimated their energy expenditure but um that's the first Crux of it is tracking that energy expenditure and then then the next thing is protein so when the the backend algorithm stuff is happening calories are set first based on your energy expenditure and your goal so for example if you have an if you're on an aggressive diet um your calories are going to be lower even if your energy expenditure might be a little bit High um just because if you're trying to lose two pounds a week I mean you're going to be in a pretty aggressive calorie deficit so it's going to set the calories first then it will set protein based on your lean body mass then the calories that are left over will be allotted to carbohydrate and fat depending on your dietary preference and we have a few different dietary preferences there's balanced which is um about 5050 to 6040 carbohydrate to Fat of the remaining calories then you have low fat which is obviously a higher ratio of carbohydrate you have low carb you have a ketogenic diet which is very very low carb and then there's also a plant-based option and within each of those options still you can go in and actually shimmy the macros a little bit within a certain range so that you can kind of dial in what your specific dietary preference is because again if we go back to what is going to produce the best long-term results it's whatever the person can adhere to so we really try to start with the concept of adherence by allowing people to have the dietary preference that they want and there's some other apps out there that are good apps like um for example we get asked a lot what's the differ our app and the Renaissance periodization app and they have a great app um but theirs is kind of more rigid and it'll say you know you're going to eat this many meals and you're going to have these Foods at these times so we're kind of the opposite we want to give you maximum flexibility now for some people they would prefer the the rigid structure at first uh but we find that for most people giving them more flexibility uh typically improves adherence over the long run so that's kind of how the app works and again like there's multiple different goals it's not just a weight loss app there's a maintenance there's a muscle building um so you've got all kinds of different goals that can be accommodated different rates of each of those goals and I mean I've used the app for over three years now to do my body weight and I mean like when I say that it's dialed me in because I'm I'm very regimented with you know logging and and and logging my weight so what I targeted to weigh in at Worlds I got down to the 0.1 kilogram so Fant it it's pretty cool to be able to like use a tool that I help develop to actually coach me so it's a great tool um you know we we we did some statistics we pulled 2 200 members and uh one of the questions we asked is would you recommend this to a friend and 91% said yes so we we our average I think our average retention is like 7 months which for an app that costs $10 a month is is really great so great yeah as I mentioned a number of people I know use it this is not a paid promotion I um but I think people need guidance and tools and what we know about the human brain is that winging it can work but that uh the brain will cheat itself often um's there's a fan quote about this and I'll get it wrong and always bad to try and quote Fineman any way because he said it so much better but that we are the easiest uh you know it's easy to fool our ourselves basically is what he was saying easiest to fool ourselves absolutely um sounds great we will put a link to it so that people can um check it out uh again it sounds like a a wonderful tool and and a tool that Nets a lot of the the principles that sit as um major themes for weight loss weight gain I would assume uh directed uh lean muscle lean tissue gain is what most people are after and weight maintenance because a number of people would like to just maintain listen I really appreciate your time and all that you're doing um certainly your time and energy and knowled today but also what you're doing on the various social media channels and and just the fact that somebody from the depths of Academia um is out there sharing so much knowledge across so many domains um you're a a gem in this landscape of of nutrition and one that people really um need to hear from so thank you so much for your time oh thank you I appreciate the opportunity I I really enjoyed it we'll do it again thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Dr Lane Norton I hope you found it to be as interesting and informative and actionable as I did if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions or suggestions about topics and guests you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments in addition please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning of today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast during today's episode and on many previous episodes of The huban Lab podcast we discussed supplements while supplements aren't necessary 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newsletter and if you're not already following us on social media we are huberman laab on Instagram huberman lab on Twitter and huberman lab on Facebook and at all of those sites I provide science and science related tools for mental health physical health and performance some of which overlap with information covered on the hubman Lab podcast but often which is distinct from information covered on the hubman Lab podcast so again that's hubman laab on Instagram Twitter and Facebook thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Lane Norton if you are interested in some of the resources that he and I discussed including his carbon app as well as other resources that he provides please go to the links in the show note captions and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]