Tools for Nutrition & Fitness | 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 my guest today is Dr Lane Norton Dr Lane Norton did his training in Biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is one of the world's foremost experts in exercise and nutrition he is also an expert in the topic of supplementation and other tools to augment Health today we discuss a large number of very important topics in these categories and we start the conversation by establishing what Dr Norton's thresholds are for what he accepts as evidence in particular actionable evidence so what follows is a description of what Dr Norton really believes is worth paying attention to versus what he believes is worth ignoring in the Realms of nutrition training and supplementation so you can be certain that as we start to go through the topics of sugar glp1 agonists things like OIC artificial sweeteners whether you should train to failure or not during your resistance training sessions how much volume of training you need to do cardiovascular training and its different forms in terms of how they benefit Health span and lifespan and body composition protein and its different sources and on and on indeed we cover many Topics in this episode you can be sure that all of the information you hear from Dr Norton is being filtered through that extremely stringent filter that Dr Norton is so well known for and thus by the end of today's episode You Will Be armed not only with the latest information on nutrition training and supplementation but you'll also be armed with your own filter to determine what sorts of Health Protocols are actionable for you 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 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for my discussion with Dr Lane Norton Dr Lane Norton welcome back thanks for having me back before we jump in I want to get your stance on what constitutes evidence because I think a big reason why you are considered one of the if not the most trusted person in the realm of nutrition and training is that you set a very high bar for what you consider science-based fact that motivates action so to just kind of break this down based on my read of the landscape online it seems that there's a group of people I don't know what to call them purists or something who unless there's a randomized controlled trial so that means Inhumans or several that points in a particular direction they are very unlikely to adopt a new practice say removing a given food or nutrient adding a given food or nutrient training a certain way not training a certain way okay that's one group then there are the people who if they are told something could be of value they hear it's worked very well for somebody maybe they see some before and afters and it gets mapped to a mechanism that EX in humans and animals like oh there's this molecule and if this molecule increases um X Y and Z happens and training in this way or reading this way increases that molecule for instance but no randomized control trial then they're willing to try it or adopt it and then there's a third probably a fourth category as well where people say they don't trust science anyway science is flawed or the the controls required to design a really good experiment are so constrained that they don't mimic the real world well enough and so they're really just interested in what works so they look to people that seem to have achieved the results they want feel free to add another group but which group would you consider yourself in personally and then where does your evidence that you put out uh online and today come from and I already know the answer to the last question but I think it was important to kind of spell out the landscape so everything you just mentioned would fall into the category of evidence everything that we can obser deserve is evidence but I think what people really struggle with is the idea of different levels of quality of evidence and if I had to put myself into a group I have definitely been on the side of well there's a case study in this journal and we're going to try that now because it must work and or you know my friend tried this and and they said it worked so I'm going to try it and then I've also gone to the group of well there's no human randomized control trial so I don't believe it and I think now you know I'm 42 now and I've been doing this for two decades I think where I'd fall into is it really depends on how the individual is talking about the evidence okay so you as you can probably imagine I get sent a lot of stuff for people to like oh debunk this and a lot of times people will send me things and I'll go hey this person said this is their opinion it that's fine like I may disagree with their opinion but I like I'm not going to like rake them over the C for them saying this is an opinion or this is my personal experience that's evidence it's lowquality evidence but it is evidence I think I kind of fall in a a line of I ideally want to see human randomized control trials but there's also as you mentioned practical limitations with how things are implemented and I think one of the things that gave me a very unique perspective was the fact that I was doing my PhD nutrition after I did a bachelor's in Biochemistry so I had that mechanistic understanding and then I had a an absolutely wonderful PhD adviser Don Layman who just shout out to him got a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of nutrition 20 years too late but uh he was just incredible at being able to understand the small things but how they impacted the big things and what it looked like overall it's like a conductor looking at a symphony right and understanding how the trumpet sounds affects everything else but then not getting so tied up in that that he can't hear all the music right and he was so good at that and was so good at getting me to think that way and so I think where people out in the landscape trying to dissimilate this really struggle is they don't really know well this person decided to study and they equate that as evidence that's equal with any other evidence right and as a researcher you know not all evidence is created equal not all Journal articles are created equal and I mean honestly people who don't have research background it's hard to unpack this stuff so what I would say is you have to be very careful with people who cite studies and one of the things I'll say too is there's nothing more dangerous than somebody who's read a biochemistry book because they're going to see pathway biochemical pathway there must be an outcome so out outcomes are what we really care about right at the end of the day and when I say outcomes uh gaining muscle mass losing fat Mass um risk of cardiovascular disease insulin sensitivity cancer right these are hard outcomes right and those outcomes are the summation of dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of biochemical Pathways all summing up up to an outcome and just because something has a biochemical pathway doesn't mean it will create an outcome but if there's an outcome there's absolutely a mechanism to explain it now let me give you an example of why this stuff can be so complicated and why it's so easy for people to if you want to create a narrative you can always find a study to create a narrative aspirin we would agree is an anti-coagulant um there's a reason they give it to patients who are at risk for heart disease or a heart attack it's because it reduces blood clots reduces coagulation it also activates procoagulant Pathways but the overall outcome is anti-coagulation but if I wanted to create a narrative that aspirin was bad for blood clots I could say We'll look at these biochemical Pathways it activates and you see this like for example I could create a narrative that smoking is not bad for you okay I I remember reading a meta analysis of the effect of smoke smoking on the risk of adental carcinoma right and there's a force plot with probably about 50 studies and most of those studies are to the very far right of the line which is increases risk and I think the overall effect was like 3 or 400% increased risk of adenocarcinoma but there were two studies that were to the left of the line not by much and it wasn't statistically significant but I could say hey look I could cite these two studies pmid um you know they showed no increased risk of idental carcinoma actually might be slightly protective and by the way did you know that smoking decreases the risk of Parkinson's by 30 to 40% and by the way that's very consistent in literature yeah that's true so I can start creating this narrative that Smoky but we know smoking is not good for you it's not good for you raise the risk of lung cancer all different kinds of cancers uh cardiovascular disease massive increase in Risk right but I could you I could thread the needle of science using using these cherry-picked studies and so what I'll tell people is if I go into a topic or if I go into something what I'm looking for highest quality of evidence is first off do we have some meta analyses on this topic right you want to just explain for the general listener what a metaanalysis is just in kind of top Contour absolutely so a metaanalysis is basically where you're trying to compile studies that ask similar questions and look at what is the overall effect do we have a consensus in the literature and usually they they're going to show some kind of force plot of all these studies and however far right or left of the center line is kind of giving you an idea of how powerful the effect was in that study and then you can see the confidence intervals in terms of how much V variability there was and then you can see the thickness of the dot on there which shows how much it contributed to the overall uh analysis by usually how many subjects were in it right one study with 10 subjects would have a very small dot compared to a subject with 500 subjects exactly and so you're trying to now you can do a bad meta analysis based on inclusion criteria you know and that's where it's important to look at but let me give you an example of a meta analysis I cite pretty frequently um the inclusion criteria is very important to make sure that you answer the question that you want to answer and I say this when you're reading scientific studies I'm like listen just because there's a headline in even a paper just because the conclusion says something that is the author's opinion okay you need to check to see did they actually test what they're talking about and are the tests they use valid right so this meta analysis was looking at low lower carb diets versus higher carb diets or low fat diets and the inclusion criteria this was done by Kevin Hall the NIH back in 2017 I want to say and I I thought he did a great job at the inclusion criteria which was we're only going to include controlled feeding trials where the food is provided to participants because obviously we know the limitations of you know Free Living studies with nutrition right self-report people sneak people forget yeah we are going to make sure that these studies equated calories for the reasons we talk about you got to compare apples to apples right so a lot of studies will come out saying fasting produce more fat loss low carb produce but then they didn't control calories and it's it's very likely these people just ate less so they controlled calories and they controlled protein which is also important because protein changes the composition of weight loss protein has a thermic effect uh protein increases lean mass retention so that can change how much fat you lose and I think that also had a requirement of like a minimum of four weeks right and the outcome was looking at changes in fat Mass not fat oxidation not energy expenditure it actually looked at the outcome that they cared about and they they showed no difference right so I thought well that's a very well done metaanalysis because the inclusion criteria make a lot of sense for the question that they want to answer which is not is one diet easier to stick to not is it um you know more practical the question was mechanically do these diets produce differences when we're comparing Apples to Apples in actual fat loss and the answer was no right so and and then when you look at the the other meta analyses that have been done they tend to kind of support that right so the first thing I'm going to look at is all right these meta analyses tend to be looked at as kind of the highest form of evidence right because you're compiling a bunch of different studies which listen we know there are bad studies that get done I think the amount of studies that get like just straight up faked is probably much lower than people think um but one hopes but yeah yeah I I would agree I think that um people make errors um I do think that a lot of quote unquote bad papers or let's just say false conclusions arise from um elimination of data that did not fit the person's uh desired outcome and the reason I say that is I think it's impossible to control for so you've got the student or postto doing the experiment the results don't come out the way they would have preferred and then they're you know let's just say I've observed before never in my laboratory fortunately but cases where people um come up with reasons why that particular experiment wasn't valid because you know the mice were initially sick or the drug the lot of drug that they used wasn't it was heading towards expiration they come up with reasons to exclude MH rather than outright data fabrication where people literally create results that aren't there yeah um and you know and there are a number of different examples throughout history that where people have done that but I like to think that those are more rare I think that's probably pretty small my experience is the same as you I didn't see much of that or I never saw it observed uh usually end up reading about that in the form of retractions right in journals that come out nowadays more close to the Publications because of ai's ability to scan images and things of that sort yeah I I think um you know usually if I see a paper and the conclusion like just straight up I go oh I don't know about that when I go in and I read the methods and I read how they analyzed it and I read how they measured things 99% of the time I walk away and go okay okay it's not I'm not surprised they found what they found right because again a lot of and this does happen and it shouldn't but a lot of studies are set up to kind of find what people want to find you can bias things in a certain way well and what nobody talks about where it's not discussed enough is that a lot of times the way the paper is written poses a question after the results are in I mean I mean and this is a this is a a really a not correct way to do science I mean in clinical trials one has to wage a hypothesis excuse me wager a hypothesis from the outset and you go test that hypothesis you're not asking a question say what you're going to measure right exactly whereas in more typical laboratory science people will design an experiment they have hypothesis but then depending on how the experiments work out or don't work out often times they'll change the question they'll modify the hypothesis and one wouldn't as a reader as a journal as a as a reviewer one will never know and so that that's a that's a slight of hand that is I would say unfortunately is very common in B science but I will say like there's very rarely I say this was a bad study often what I'll say is you know I don't agree with their conclusion based on their data and their design um but the data is the data you know I I was just very fortunate again sh to my PhD adviser I have so much gratitude because he just right away was like hey I'm good with I'm if we're wrong about something that's fine you know and I I'll give you an example of how results can seem to conflict but um you know how things are designed we actually wanted to test does protein quality make a difference and we wanted to look at it at like not low but like just kind of like RDA levels of protein um and we saw that protein quality did make a difference at those levels of protein but if you look at experiments where people are feeding like high levels of protein like 1.6 to two grams per kilogram of body weight you don't really see much difference in you know lean mass or protein synthesis with looking at different protein sources well that's because it's much more regulatory on a low end because you're closer to those thresholds that trigger that signaling and so you know we wanted to show at that level that it made a difference but then we also acknowledged okay at this level it probably doesn't make as much of a difference but people can read those things and say well I don't believe studies because they're conflicting but no when you read how it was designed I can easily set like I remember there was a somebody sent me a study and said well how does this fit with your data which they were comparing Rice versus whey protein and found that both stimulated protein synthesis to the same degree and I said well they used 40 grams of protein like if you get protein high enough you can max out protein synthesis regardless of the of the form of protein you're using and so that's just like one of those examples right so when I'm looking through this stuff I'm looking at okay does there seem to be a consensus in the data and then is it like in these met analyses does the inclusion criteria make sense and then if there's no real agreement amongst the uh metaanalyses then I'm looking at okay what do the most tightly controlled studies show like in the randomized control trials and then I'm kind of like basing opinion off that but you know you you know the the hierarchy of evidence the pyramid you got meta analysis systematic reviews randomized control trials you have cohort data epidemiology and then animal studies tend to get kind of lumped in together and then you got like case studies and so on and so forth right and so all that stuff is valid it's all valid I think where I spend a lot of time on social media is for example I'll give you a great example um someone saying well you don't want to eat cruciferous vegetables because they have isocyanates in them which can bind to iodine and that is going to impair your thyroid function lower your metabolic rate and cause you weight gain and so that's a that's a pathway that's a mechanism is it possible possible I suppose it is possible right that pathway does exist iodine is important for thyroid function isocyanates do bind to iodine you can take any food even organic food and you can find a compound in it that if you fed it in a high dose it would have weird effects right and so the question is not if you eat something are there compounds in it that maybe activate negative biochemical Pathways the question is what is the overall outcome and so when these pathways are promoted versus let's see if we actually have randomized control trials in humans that measure what we actually care about and so we do have like in that particular case we have randomized control trials looking at okay cruciferous vegetable intake and thyroid function and there's no difference in the outcome and so what that says and then no difference in BMR and then actually people who eat more crucifer vegetabl actually tend to be a little bit leaner but that could be a little bit healthy user bias and they probably just eat less calories because they're more satiated but it's certainly not going the opposite direction right and so the point is again if an outcome exists there is absolutely a mechanism to explain it but just because a mechanism exists does not mean you're going to produce an outcome and I got exposed to this very early because I cut my teeth on the bodybuilding message boards back in the day where it was a bunch of you know nerds arguing with each other mostly who had no background arguing but there were some actual like sports scientists and professors who would get on those every once in a while this was before social media existed and I remember I was in Biochemistry class this is 2003 and they're talking about how caffeine inhibits glycogen phosphor which is a mechanism and it exists caffeine inhibits glycogen phosphor and so I I made this post where I on the forums and I said well we should be having caffeine after a workout then because it'll help with glycogen resynthesis because it'll keep you know glycogen phosphor from breaking down glycogen and somebody came in and said you're really like zooming in on a blade of grass instead of zooming out and looking at the Forest right and biochemists I was guilty of this and biochemist by trade we get very focused on Pathways but if you think about what caffeine does overall activates the sympathetic nervous system it it it's its function is to like you're liberating fuel like you and and some people when they take caffeine actually have a rise in blood glucose so that is the outcome is actually counter to what that biochemical pathway is and so we've got to be really careful with how we promote these biochemical Pathways I mean I did a really funny post on Twitter where uh myself and Joseph zundell I'm not sure if you're familiar with him but he's a a cancer biologist great guy Y and we were joking back and forth I said you know what I bet I could like come up with a uh a pathway to get people to eat poop like I could make a compelling argument for just eating poop and then he goes goes I'll bet I he's like I'll take that bet I'm like okay let's give it a shot so I'm like what is the some of the most common compounds in human feal matter and one of them is butyrate Right which is a short chain fatty acid produced by um fermentation butyrate so I I did this post where I'm like here's why you should eat poop to lose fat butyrate increases fat oxidation I think it activates Brown fat increases insulin sensitivity decreases inflammation it's been shown to actually amarate uh the development of obesity in um the in studies and I cited all these PBM ideas now what I didn't didn't tell people was those are all mostly in rodents right and it's giving an amount of butyrate that You' need to eat about 50 to 100 pounds of fecal matter a day in order to get right is sounding like a worse and worse idea by the moment but that is very similar to a lot of the content that is out there which is find isolated compound scare people or promote it to be the best thing ever and then link it to an outcome and then sometimes you can tie an epidemiology with it as well to support whatever you want but again like I'm not saying I do things in my training and my nutrition that don't have randomized control trials to support right they don't really have anything to support it's just it's how I how I've kind of fallen into doing things um so that's okay but what I wouldn't do is come out and say what I do is the best thing ever and here's why especially if there was human randomized control control trials to the counter that is the biggest thing right if we have human randomized control trials and they're going the opposite direction of a case study or an observation there's a reason human randomized control trials I scream about them all the time and why they're considered the gold standard of evidence when we look at cohort data you're just observing people there's no inter maybe explain what cohort data are is it comparing two groups sure so cohort data you're comparing groups but you're you're not having an intervention so you're tracking them over the course of over what period of time a lot of cohort studies like looking at cardiovascular disease cancer these people decided to be vegan these people decided to be uh let's just say omor those are some of the classic experiments right and there was they weren't assigned to this experiment they agreed to join the experiment they've been eating this way for a while right you ask them a bunch of questions and you look at okay over 10 years over 20 years who gets whatever more often or less often right and then we try to figure out and about calculate okay what's the effect and is this real the problem is you're you have a lot of bias with those sorts of studies meaning people don't do single habits they don't isolate habits uh I was I actually put up a real the other day from my appearance on Steven Bartlett's podcast where he said if I want to fix my diet I go to the gym because a lot of people do that if they're training in the gym they don't want to waste their effort by having a subpar diet now in reality eating a healthy diet is more important if you're not going to the gym right because at least you're getting something but people do this habit coupling and so it's really hard to disentangle those sorts of things now the reason that human randomized control trials are important is if you're designing an experiment and you randomize what you are doing by randomly assigning people to groups you're washing out that bias because you can assume that whatever in inent characteristics that might be coupled to whatever you're going to try are going to be randomly distributed and evenly distributed across the groups therefore we say human randomized control trials are kind of what's needed to establish causation because by randomizing you can assume whatever differences are observed between the groups are due to your treatment and not due to random chance or data artifacts now randomized control trials especially nutrition have very strong limitations which is you you can't do a randomized control trial for 30 years you can't I mean I think the longest randomized control trial I heard about nutrition is like two years long right and even then it's not going to be a very tightly controlled randomized control trial I mean and if you're doing if you're talking about like the tightest level of control like a metabolic W study four six weeks maybe because you're keeping people in food jail and I think where some of this confusion comes from is I think people think that there's just like this pool of people waiting around to be selected for experiments like yes I'm ready I've been waiting here no there are people like you like me like just the average person walking down the street who saw a flyer and goes okay I'll volunteer for that and the more control you try to establish over their lives the less likely they are to do it and you probably got to pay them you know I don't know anybody who would do a metabolic W study without getting paid for it I mean you're basically giving up four or six weeks of your life to go do that and so while I love human randomized control trials for some things they're not always appropriate for example if you're trying to look at heart disease and you want to do a one-year human randomized control trial looking at say you know saturated fat LDL cholesterol those sorts of things well how many people have heart attacks within one year after age 60 I mean it's going to be a really you're going to look for really small differences between really small numbers right and the problem with that is you have no idea about their diet 40 years leading up to that and we know based on now the melan randomization trials that the risk of LDL is more of like a lifetime exposure risk it's not just in this narrow sliver of time and so I love human randomized control trials but it's also I try to tell people never turn your brain off just because something gets published in a certain Journal just because a certain researcher said something just because uh it was a certain design it doesn't make it infallible okay science is perfect science science is perfect science is what is but it's done by humans and humans are fallible imperfect people with their own personal beliefs and biases and that's why I look at consensus of data first because yeah you could maybe some of experiments got faked or maybe they had but when it's done over let's take something like creative monohydrate right you have thousands of experiments done over Decades of time in hundreds of different Labs with many different funding sources in bunch of different countries under a bunch of different conditions it works right like if you go to consensus and you type in does creatin build muscle it's like 92% yes right which is crazy right consuming 5 to 10 grams of creatine monohydrate per day is going to benefit strength and muscle mass and likely cognition to some extent yeah yeah I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 by now many of you have heard me say that if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 the reason for that is ag1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available what that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals but also probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life for me even if I eat mostly Whole Foods and minimally processed foods which I do for most of my food intake it's very difficult ult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables vitamins and minerals micronutrients and adaptogens from food alone for that reason I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 and often twice a day once in the morning or midm morning and again in the afternoon or evening when I do that it clearly bolsters my energy my immune system and my gut microbiome these are all critical to brain function mood physical performance and much more if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim their special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer I realize I've been on a long diet tribe no no this is It's I I wouldn't even call it a diet tribe I think for those listening like this is pure gold because never before certainly on this podcast or other podcasts has anyone ever really spelled out how to discern differences in quality of evidence right and every it's mostly a free world most places uh and people can do what they want but I think they need to decide what their thresholds are for Quality yeah and uh I think the one other thing I'll tell people is I saw this the other day I saw somebody post I think it was a comment on one of my post I actually commented back they said you know I just I know I can trust you and I just whatever you say I know it I can take it to the bank and I said I appreciate that but I am a flawed human like anybody else please don't turn your brain off like and one of the things I've really tried to do now in this stage of my career is I want to teach people how to think because if I just give you the information and I'm giving you a fish great but I'd rather you understand how I came to these conclusions you can see my logic and how it tracks and then you can start applying that elsewhere one of the things I say to people is I'm like if you want a quick and dirty back for knowing who to follow try not to listen so much to exactly the information people say but listen to how they say it okay I was just telling you I was on a podcast the other day where I said you know here's this study um I might butcher the details and if I get the math wrong if uh experts out there want to comment and correct me please do that like that is a way of talking about something where you're saying hey I could get this wrong or hey I might be uncertain that's very different than saying you know just hard pure you know real experts don't really talk like best worst always never like they don't really use words like that um and one of my favorite phrases that I tell people it's actually from an economist named Thomas Soul he said there are no Solutions there are only trade-offs and for for example um you know there's data out there that if you lower saturated fat it may lower your testosterone but there's also data out there that that saturated fat raises LDL which is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease okay well there's trade-offs there right like what do you value more I would argue that probably the decline in testosterone isn't really physiologically meaningful for most people but again there's there's not a good or bad there's trade-offs and I think when people get talking about biochemical Pathways one of the things I I really try to hone in on it's like hey there's not there not really good or bad biochemical Pathways either like all these things exist for a reason like people like one of the things popular is like well inflammation inflammation I'm like hey you know like inflammation does some things that we really need too like you just don't want like no inflammation like it's actually important physiological process right now you don't want it to run away for sure and so again I I just give my PhD adviser a lot of credit of he's like know what you know but always question everything even the things we feel most fundamentally are true cuz that is the job of a good scientist and I'll give you one more story and we'll move to another thing when I did my first experiment well actually sorry no this has been like my 15th experiment cuz my first 14 blew and didn't work um a typical graduate career yeah yeah and again very patient man very supportive I I I honestly cannot give him enough credit um and if you look at the the people that came out of that lab a lot of studs um so I I did a uh an experiment looking at whey protein or sorry complete meal with wayy protein ingestion and how long the duration of muscle protein synthesis was because we most people kind of measured at 60 or 90 minutes like the the snapshot post prand for protein synthesis looking for a peak and we're like is that really where the peak is we don't know we're we're basing this off of a purified Solutions so let's do a duration experiment right and my hypothesis was well however long bline is elevated in the blood is going to be how long protein synthesis stays up and when we got the data back on protein synthesis protein synthesis had come up peaked at 90 minutes and by 3 hours had come back down to Baseline and I went to run the plasma Amo acids and I'm like okay well this is what we're going to see and that's not what we saw so plasma amino acids not only were still elevated they were like maxed out or plateaued at the highest they would level they would be at 3 hours where protein synthesis was back to Baseline and so I said okay well it's got to be mour signaling intour signaling is got to be turning off or something's happening nope inor signaling was still elevated right um and we saw this through phosphorilation of The Binding protein 4 ebp1 which is a proxy for mtor Activation um and then I said okay well maybe Lucine isn't getting into the cell maybe that's why so we looked at intracellular Lucine followed the exact path of plasma Lucine and so then I kept rerunning the plasma data over and over I probably ran it five times right and Layman finally calls me into his office one day and he goes so where do we stand with this duration experiment and I said yeah it's almost done I just I I got to run the data again because the plasma data has got to be wrong and he he I saw his like little eyebrow go up you know and he goes why do you think that let me see your data he goes your standard air bars are good this looks to be relatively tight data um how's your Tech and I'm going through like how I you know all the steps of to analyze plaso acids it's not like CSI by the way everybody you don't just like take a pipet put something in a cuge and all a sudden you get back data there's a there's many steps in here um and so I I showed them all that and he goes you know it sounds like you are trying to get the data to fit your conclusion and what you need to do is change your conclusion to fit the data and that one line again it just opened my whole world up to one I if I'm wrong okay cool like I care more about getting the right answer than being right and that's why we were talking earlier I'm like there's so much stuff that I just don't believe I want to see 10 20 studies before I go yeah you know and the other thing I'll tell people is hey I don't plant my flag real strong very often so when you see me do it I'm not saying I'm not not fallible but if you see me do it you probably should pay attention cuz I don't usually do that I love that description but now my curiosity is peak and you got to tell me so if 90 minutes after ingesting protein protein synthesis Peaks and then it drops to Baseline at 3 hours but lucing one of the key amino acids in mtor which is in the pathway of cellular growth and protein synthesis are still elevated 3 hours what is the conclusion that explains the discrepancy yeah so we actually looked for this for years um so a few things there was some other studies that supported that uh we called it a refractory response actually we didn't name it that there was another lab named it that basically that protein synthesis was becoming refractory to the signal for protein synthesis so Ju Just for real quick I'm going to try and explain this easily so protein synthesis you know this sounds like probably a very abstract thing but it's how you make your body makes more protein and whether it's in skeletal muscle whether it's in the liver whatever you have your DNA which is your genetic code right and then that gets transcribed to an mRNA by the way I'm leaving out a lot of steps here but just bear with me that mRNA gets translated by a ribosome into a polypeptide chain or a protein so a ribosome is basically attaching to the MRNA and then based on the MRNA sequence is bringing in amino acids to match that sequence so all the proteins in your body are coded for in your DNA right so when it comes to to this process there's a complex called eif4f which acts as a scaffold for the ribosome to hook on to the MRNA and e4f the formation of it is basically rate limited by the Association of two proteins called eif4e and eif4g and eif4e is bound by a binding protein for ebp1 and when you stimulate when Lucine stimulates him Tor intor stimulates the phosphorilation of 4 bp1 which makes it unavailable for binding with e4e it combined to eif4g that eif4f complex can be made brings the ribosome onto the MRNA and now it can read it can translate it so there's a little uh cellular biology lesson if people didn't follow that um don't worry about it what Lan's describing is that the presence of a bunch of molecules involved in protein synthesis is necessary but not sufficient for the protein synthesis right a few other things have to happen and apparently those other things are not happening after 120 minutes so another lab called it the the muscle full effect basically the the idea is like once you've initiated that signal it kind of runs and then it's done right and just pounding more amino acids into the system is not going to further stimulate in fact there was a there was a study done back in I think it was 2001 by I want to say by renie um another very well-known protein lab and they infused essential amino acids for six hours and looked at scal muscle protein synthesis and they found it went up and then came back down by by two hours and then never went back up right good experiment yeah very interesting so we looked at a bunch of different things the only thing we found that perhaps explained it a little bit and I'm sure there's other labs that would argue with me on this and and again this is in Rat skeletal muscle which by the way is a good model for human protein metabolism but still we looked at at intercellular ATP levels and actually found that they were declining kind of in concert with the decline in muscle protein synthesis and muscle protein synthesis is an ATP dependent process but the the process of protein turnover is energetically expensive it's one of the reasons that protein has a higher thermic effect of food and so our hypothesis was perhaps by the effect of protein stimulating protein synthesis to start this Machinery is inter i al expensive enough that eventually you kind of run out of steam and so you have the signal there but it just kind of ends right now there have been other experiment like Jordan trlin just published a paper a few months ago that got a bunch of you know you know feedback 100 grams of protein after a m after a resistance training exercise and saw you know that it was basically like a lot more of it was used than we thought would be used right because for many decades it has been purported believed and propagated that the maximum amount of protein that you can utilize after a meal is 30 grams you became the the holy number and this study essentially showed that more than 30 grams can be used yeah not just as energy but for the sake of protein synthesis in muscle correct yeah and it and how did that study land with you given that it's one study without going into all the details I did did that inspire you to change anything about your protein intake after training so what I tell people is I don't make big shifts in my opinions based on single studies yeah why does that not surpris me it shimmy it shimmies me a little bit right so and what even before that study came out what I had said is I think protein distribution matters but I think it matters much much less than total protein intake per day because all we need to do is look at some of these resistance training studies with intermittent fasting where people are eating all their protein in an 8 Hour window and theoretically you would think they would get less muscle growth especially based on this refractory data because less times to stimulate um but at least in the studies out of Grant Tinsley's lab we I think there's two studies that were very well done where we don't see that now important to point out they trained during their feing window and they had three they made sure they ate three high quality high protein meals during that eight hour time right so at least in that context there was no difference in the amount of lean mass gained between intermittent fasting groups versus continuous feeding groups now and in the continuous feeding groups the uh do you recall what duration they were eating their meals over was it probably 12 hours or so I I don't recall specifically but I I don't recall an actual defined time I'd have to go back more than eight hours for sure you know I'm so glad we're Landing here because my first um let's just call it sort of operational or actionable question which came from um uh you know asking on social media for questions for you was um many many people if not in the thousands asked how to make sure that they're getting enough protein if they're doing something like intermittent fasting and I myself fall into this category um I don't do it for any specific purpose this was long before sain Panda started doing his work on Tim restricted feeding AKA intermittent fasting but I don't tend to want to eat any food until about 11:00 a.m. right occasionally I wake up hungry like this morning and I had you know some eggs was particularly hungry but that's I think that's representative of a lot of people I want hydration and caffeine in the morning I want a train in the morning and then I want to eat pretty soon after I train but what that means is that I'm eating in during an 8 to n hour right feeding window and if I only manage two meals in there and a snack and I can only assimilate or excuse me I can only uh put 30 gram of protein per meal toward protein synthesis we have to be careful not about using it for energy but protein synthesis does that mean that I'm not going to hit my uh Target of one gram of protein per pound of desired lean body mass because I'm 100 kilograms I weigh about 220 PBS I can easily eat 220 grams of protein in a 9h hour period like give me three ribey I'll eat all three I love ribeye steak right but the question is can I use that so and I'm going to bring this back around to that particular experiment so over time and and when I left grad school my position was that it matters protein distribution matters so I'll give you the straight down the line scientific answer and then I'll give you if you inject me with true serum what I really think answer um and in so we did an experiment again in rats uh we fed them uh completely same diets same total calories protein carbs fats but uh in one group they got that pretty much evenly across three meals and the other group 70% of their protein was coming at their last meal and then the other two meals for like 15% protein 15% of their daily protein and 11 weeks again 11 weeks out of a rat's life rodents live 18 to 24 months um that's a big chunk of their life right and we did see about a five to 10% difference in the weights of the hind limbs uh in terms of muscle mass okay in what direction uh favoring equal distribution right now again hard to repeat that study in humans right and for the duration it's done so I came out saying you know what that's actually less than I thought we were going to I thought we're going to find bigger differences than that you know because I mean if you're thinking about number of times you're stimulating protein synthesis I mean one per day versus three per day I mean shouldn't there be like a pretty significant difference there and it was I mean it reached the level of significance but again I I thought the effect size was smaller than I thought and so I kind of walked out saying you know what total protein intake is the most important thing per day and then if you can distribute it relatively evenly that's maybe the last five to 10% right and you've seen some human studies where it seems to matter most seem to show it doesn't M really matter that much here's here's what I think if you're measuring an outcome like lean mass that doesn't change much in 8 weeks unfortunately it's very small differences and so I think it's going to be hard to detect that but what I'll tell people is can't if you asking can you build muscle intermittent fasting absolutely can you build a lot of muscle probably if you are a bodybuilder specific population or if your goal is to be the most muscular strongest human being you can possibly become I think you're probably better off not doing intermittent fasting just because those last that last 5% may make a big difference and you're never going to be able to pick that out of a human randomized control trial in eight weeks at least I don't think you will and so again I don't have any human data to really back that up but just based on what I know about signaling and the effects we saw on animals that's kind of a recommendation but most people don't fall in that category most people are just worried about hey I want to look good build a little bit of muscle intermittent fasting is perfectly fine tool for doing that I will say you know obviously we haven't studied some of the more extreme forms of fasting in terms of building muscle right like the 168 has been studied but like I'm thinking of a study that was done without resistance training alternate day fasting versus continuous kind of normal feeding one day no eating next day eat right so they did brutal or at least for somebody like me I can't think of anything worse I'd rather fast for three days in a row and then eat for you know four days in a row simply because I know that by day two it's probably going to get easier not not hard but on off fasting eating's got to be just torturous so the way they did it was they did um The Continuous group gr was getting 75% of their maintenance calories per day so in a deficit and then the alternate da group was doing 150% and then zero right so you're getting an average of 75 and they actually saw differences in lean mass at the end of that study the continuous feeding group uh lost less lean mass than the alter day fasting group so what that's only one study and it didn't have resistance training it's possible that resistance training could attenuate some of that stuff but what I'll say is you know the more extreme forms of fasting probably aren't optimal for a lean mass right also can you imagine training complet on a day of complete fasting after three hours after that you're going to be dying you can say well you could just train on the days when you eat but then if you ever train legs hard which I know you do or if anyone does and then the next day you're not going to eat anything right the day after training legs properly I'm my appetite's increased yeah so I think this is where the rubber kind of meets the road in terms of straight down the line the randomized control trials say this but I still do something a little bit different right uh because the randomized control Tri say protein distribution doesn't really seem to matter right but again you inject me with true serum I think it probably does matter a little bit right now does it matter as much as total protein absolutely not uh that is by far the biggest lever but again if my context is I want to become the most muscular strongest human being I can be which I do because that's where I compete um I'm going to distribute my protein probably over four to five meals per day right and so for you just personally uh what what time of day do you wake up and when's your first meal so well it's summer right now so kids are off of school so we're usually getting up around like 7:30 8:00 in the morning and um my first meal is usually within an hour um and then I usually eat within an hour of going to bed then I'll have two or three meals in between those so I usually I have about four meals a day um sometimes I'll have five if it's just a longer day or just how my timing kind of goes or whatever and does each one of your meals include approximately 30 plus grams of quality protein some starchy carbohydrate fibrous carbohydrate and and some fat I mean sometimes they end up being like mostly protein or or whatnot but for the most part there's a mix in each one um and usually around 50 grams of protein at a meal I eat about 235 grams of protein a day some people would argue that oh that's more than you need the research is shown that 1 Point six gam per kg maxes out the response here's the thing and again this is where like scientific experiments are big blunt instruments okay they will tell you what not to do more often than they will tell you what to do okay when it comes to protein my personal opinion and this is just I guess a little bit of intuition based off of 20 years of studying this stuff is that I don't know if there's an actual amount of protein that maxes out the protein synthesis response I would bet if I was a betting man that it's kind of an ASM toope you're familiar with Y so your not everyone's watching I just drew an ASM toop um an ASM toot plot but for those not watching just think about a um a plot quickly Rising very very high and then essentially stays stable at the high level yeah um maybe with a slight bit of taper yeah so it's it's so it's easy to explain if it's going towards zero so an absm toope might be okay you start out you have 10 then five then two and a half okay so you're running in the opposite direction still ASM toope going from high to low so asmt can go from low to high can go from high to low correct so I'm I'm trying to explain it because it makes more sense when people kind of go this way you never reach zero but it keeps getting incrementally closer on the other end I don't think protein synthesis ever maxes out I just think the increment of increase becomes so small that practically there's no difference and you wouldn't see a difference in outcome right and so I think that you know one you know there's debate over is at one .6 G per kg 2.4 G per kg I I and there's even been a meta regression that showed up to 3.3 G per kg had benefits I think a lot of this is with protein synthesis you're looking for small differences between small numbers it's not a very sensitive analysis to be quite honest with you and again we would never be able to pick out those differ I'm thinking about there was a study by Stu Phillips who if people don't know who Stu Phillips is this is he's the best researcher going in protein metabolism right now um but one of the best sorry I don't want to take anybody off um and he he did a study probably 15 years ago where they gave uh people different levels of egg protein and they looked at 5 10 20 and 40 grams of egg protein and their conclusion was that 20 grams of egg protein maximized the protein synthesis response but that's because straight down the line if there's a P value of more than 05 you you can't say there's a difference right but if you looked at the absolute difference between 20 and 40 G I think it was like 11% and if you look at the the the graph it almost looks like the start of an ASM toope right now this was one study wasn't a huge subject number but that's kind of where my personal thoughts land on it that there's that kind of also support this okay 100 grams at a meal you know could still be utilized um is I'm not sure if there's a max out I think there's a practical max out where you get to a point where hey you're like slamming down 50 grams more protein for 0.00001% more protein synthesis it doesn't make sense um but yeah we'll never be able to I I doubt we'll be able to pick those numbers out in actual scientific experiments and the other thing to keep in mind with this whole protein metabolism picture is we're really only talking about one side of this equation so net gain or loss of skeletal muscle mass is the balance between protein synthesis and protein degradation and most of us protein researchers just kind of stick our fingers in our ears and go la la la when it comes to protein degradation because it's so incredibly hard to measure and so yeah like when we start to put all that stuff together it's like now this picture gets really complicated so what I tell people when it comes to that kind of stuff is listen you could really get into the Weeds on this stuff the big rocks are about a ground per pound of body weight if you want to really for all intents and purposes max out the anabolic response you're going to be fine one gram per pound of body weight which is what Dr Gabrielle lion also essentially recommended right I'm probably like you know real sticklers might be like no it's actually more like 7 or 08 and then it's well it's actually based on lean mass which I agree with but just for all intents and purposes you could say you know your body weight ideal body weight whatever it is that number is is going to be very sufficient for maxing out muscle building for the majority of people and we should probably point out not just for muscle building um unless you disagree uh and feel free to of course not that I need to tell you that uh Dr Gabrielle lion uh when she was here made a really um key point which is that ingesting sufficient quality protein each day isn't just about building muscle even for folks that don't want to build muscle and perhaps even particularly for women who assume that um you know building muscle is it can be a runaway process that maybe they're going to build too much muscle that's a false false Assumption of course that ingesting one gram of protein per pound of body weight or ideal body weight is going to be beneficial because it's going to improve muscle quality one's own muscle quality the health of the muscular tissue and and then she did an excellent job of relating the health of muscular tissue skeletal muscle that is to overall Health and Longevity so I I just raise that because I know that many people listening to this probably want to add a little bit of muscle here or there um some perhaps want to keep the muscle they've gotten loose fat and some of course want to add a lot of muscle but it sounds like the recommendation is always the same since we need to eat sooner or later one gram of quality protein per pound of lean body mass or current body weight or desired body weight that's going to be a good starting Place yeah for sure and I I think I would tend to agree with her you know that the process because when you eat protein you're not just going to start laying down slabs of lean tissue just from eating protein there has to be a stimulus which is resistance training um or some people would argue you could stretch really hard and get the same thing which there may be some evidence of that with weights and lift them in between stretches no I'm just kidding which is basically weight lifting there actually are studies now where they like put people in like really kind of Hardcore stretching for you know several minutes and they actually see hypertrophy with it um yeah very interesting we could talk about those if you wanted but the the the the point is either way it's mechanical tension right so that's the that's the stimulus to build muscle to to lay down lean tissue um but the process of remodeling is probably beneficial for multiple reasons so when you eat protein like we said synthesis goes up degradation goes up right because you're stimulating that process you're stimulating protein turnover one that's that's relatively energetically expensive all things being equal so that's where the thermic effect of protein comes from uh CU people say well it's the Ura cycle and this and that most of those most of those atps you you get back in different phases of that cycle really I in my opinion the thermic effect of protein is due to like kind of activation of this futile cycle of You're Building more protein but then you're also breaking down more protein and so part of that is you are remodeling you are making sure that that protein is higher quality in that tissue by continuously breaking it down and building it back up and so I I would probably agree with that um and then it's it's again even if you're at a resistance training program where you're not really building much more muscle anymore the process of remodeling is probably good for you you know and I I would just say try to Ally some of these concerns um from people who are concerned about gaining too much muscle so I have been lifting really hard consistently for 25 years I am very comfortable saying I train harder than almost anybody else you can possibly imagine and anybody who has trained around me will back that up back me up in the comments I'm I train very hard and in a shirt I look like an athletic guy who lives I I don't look like a monster you know like you might see pictures of me when I was a bodybuilding show like very very lean and that looks you know over the top but for the most part I just look kind of athletic and I spent my entire adult life trying to get too big right so for most people unless you're on performance-enhancing drugs or you just have incredible genetics that's not going to happen and if it starts to happen just back off on your lifting easy fix so yeah I think most people's concern with that is is is a little bit misplace and the other thing I'll tell people is like hey some of these like Fitness like especially like for women a lot of these fitness models you follow they they show you certain workouts they do they built that physique by lifting weights right and you're you're thinking that's a ton feature now that person is actually pretty muscular right and so again especially for women there are exceptions some PE some women have very great genetics for building muscle they usually wind up in track and field that sort of thing but it's very hard to get too muscular for a woman and and what I'll say is like you know typically muscle look s good and fat is what makes you kind of look bulky you know so again I don't want to play it with too broad of a brush but I would say that you don't really have too much to worry about when it comes to to getting too muscular I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium in the correct ratios but no sugar now I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance it's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body especially your neurons or nerve cells to make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes I dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning and I drink that basically first thing in the morning I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element.com huberman spelled drink LM nt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element.com huberman to claim a free sample pack since we're sort of in this realm of protein maybe we build out from there cuz I lot of questions related to um something uh akin to the following so okay so somebody strives to get uh one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight per day um and I realize that whether somebody follows a pseudo intermittent fasting thing where their first meal does you know around 11: and they end you they finish up eating around 8:00 p.m. or a more traditional eating schedule really is just the addition of one more meal like in the morning it's like whether or not you eat breakfast and of course some people will shift it the other way they start with breakfast and they don't eat dinner but um I would argue that in order to if you have kids or a social life of any kind the the most people can deal with um sitting across the table W with someone just having a cup of coffee for breakfast but it's sort of awkward you limit yourself a lot in life if you if you can't eat dinner with other people I don't know at least and that's and that's again where the rubber meets the road with what is practically doable because there's been some of these like circadian rhythm studies that suggest well maybe early Tim restricted feeding is better than late time restricted feeding the more high quality more rigorously controlled uh randomized control trials we're coming out now seems to show that it doesn't really make a big difference um and and some of the again the measurements you use matter right so there was actually a very recent study where they looked at 12 weeks they provided all the food to participants equal in protein calories the whole deal the only difference was one group was eating 80% of their calories before 100 p.m. and they had a 8h hour feed window in total the other group had a 12-hour feeding window and we're eating over 50% of their calories after 5 p.m. I want to say and so really like based on some of the the chrononutrition stuff we've seen from some of the Lesser well-rolled trials we were they were expecting to see differences in like glucose metabolism and whatnot and they just didn't really see a difference in anything and the only the I think the only thing they saw a little bit of a difference was was in fasting blood glucose and here's what I tell people when you see a difference in fasting blood glucose but not hba1c you're you're looking at a transient difference and and what I mean by that is hba1c is such a great measurement because it's a SP an area on hemoglobin that can be glycosilated and so that is very dependent on what is your overall concentration of glucose in the blood over a 24-hour period of time because it's exposed the entire time it's in your bloodstream so whether you're getting it you know glucose spikes at meals where you have higher fasting blood glucose it's going to be very reflective of the overall 24-hour area under the curve right so why did they see why do some of these studies see a little bit better Improvement in lowering fasting blood glucose whereas hba1c doesn't show up well think about it if somebody's early Tim restricted feeding and they finish most of their food intake before 1 p.m. they have an extra like six seven eight hours that they're not hardly eating anything it doesn't surprise me that the next morning because they've technically fasted for longer you have a lower blood glucose now I can't I can't really back this up straight up because nobody's ever me measured it but that I think is a logical explanation while you see some of this stuff and that's why I tell people you know the measurement you take really matters I think fasting blood glucose is a useful measurement but I put much more value on something like home IR um ug glycemic clamp or hba1c um so anyways I I think the early versus late time restricted is kind of doesn't doesn't matter too much great you answered a future question right there um see i' I've you're telepathic uhuh that's what you didn't know about them um the uh so so the the scenario here is whether or not meals are distributed evenly through the awake day or um stacked a little bit more toward the morning or stacked a little bit more toward the evening if somebody gets that one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight then they need to make up the rest of the calories with other stuff MH um and we have broadly speaking starches fibrous you know fruits and vegetables starches and of course fats right and weight gain and weight loss I think we both would agree is or weight maintenance is going to largely be dictated at this point by not you consume more calories than you burn or not so assuming somebody's getting that 1 gram of quality protein per pound of body weight is there any data that support or do you believe just by your own experience that there's some value in stacking the starchy carbohydrates toward the earlier part of the day versus the later part of the day and this has been an ongoing debate like I for instance like a nearly pure protein and fat meal for the first meal plus maybe a salad some fibrous carbohydrates and then as I get towards evening I like more starches and I actually taper off the protein I find personally that matches what I need to do with my brain I'm more alert when I'm drinking caffeine and hydrating on a backdrop of slightly lowered carbohydrates but then as I get towards evening taper off the caffeine of course for me because I want to sleep well start ingesting some more starches it's not starch heavy but I sleep like a baby but everyone would tell me and does tell me eating starches late in the day is going to make make me fat eating starches late in the day is going to do all sorts of terrible things I find the exact opposite for me so is there any real evidence that where one places their starches throughout the day matters and let's just forget resistance training for the moment because there is this posttraining window where I'll if I train first thing in the morning I will eat starches at that time but I'm let's just remove resistance training for for the moment so again we're rubber me to the road in practicality versus what Hardline research says um so I am not real convinced at all that it really matters when you eat your carbohydrate intake thank you thank you my goodness I knew I brought you here today for Reon no I brought here for many for many reasons but my bias has been validated I can leave now so I really try to get people focused on the stuff that matters the most right so this is if we're worried about carbohydrate timing even if there are differences we are zoomed way in on the blade of grass right we're not zooming out all the way and I think hey if somebody likes to eat more carbohydrate in the morning and that fits their lifestyle and that is easy for them to continue to do then I would would say do that and and could I add um in terms of not focusing on a blade of grass but something that I consider a major lever if eating fewer carbohydrates in the afternoon and evening doesn't impede your sleep then you're okay but I would argue if anything is interfering with your sleep on a consistent basis you've got a serious problem y so there are no Solutions only trade-offs right and when it comes to carbohydrate intake you'll hear people say the DAT is all over the place okay in terms of like timing and how people feel some people say well I feel sleepy after I have carbs some people have I feel great after I have carbs like I'm I'm ready to go lift I'm I I have a big carb meal before I go lift you know it seems to be all over the map now here's the thing what I'll tell people because people ask me how I eat people have wanted me to do a you know a full day of eating video and I've kind of put it off for a while because I'm like so much of the stuff I do I'm not gonna to give you guys a citation for you know and and I know you're gonna want it and some of the stuff I do because I just like doing it that way right like I I grew up in the era of bodybuilding magazines where they said you got to have a big carbohydrate intake and a big meal before you go training and a big meal after you train so guess what I did I got in the habit of eating like that and it still sticks to this day I don't try to tell people it's better doing it that way plenty of people have told me um hey I I don't feel good with a lot of my stomach when I go train or I if I have a carb heavy meal in the morning I feel tired the data doesn't really support that in terms of like you know on an average response but if you know that you feel that way then by all means avoid right like uh there's I remember one time I um so I used to go to massage therapist in Tampa who would do cupping and there's really no data to back up the efficacy of cupping is right yeah not much but she did it I like the way it felt and I'm like okay whatever so I I post a picture of me flexing one time you know and and there's the cut marks all over and everybody's like going crazy like how can you do this you're I'm like hey hey hey hey wait a second I never said this does this and I never made any claims about it she does it and I like the way it feels I'm not saying it does anything actually one of the things about being a scientist is like now I'm impossible to Placebo which is really annoying cuz I would love to be able to Placebo myself a little bit more cuz placebo effect is powerful it's powerful and it's one of the I was telling you earlier before we started filming I'm like it's one of the reasons I just don't believe a lot of stuff because I know how powerful the power of belief is I mean you had uh Sean Mackie on here your beliefs about pain change your pain like actually change how much pain you get it changes your pain experience so one of the things I've become big on recently is hey what happens in the mind affects the body and what happens in the body affects the mind so just because I don't have a randomized control trial to support something if we know the rcts don't say it's worse right then you do whatever you like right and I think a lot of people get been out of shape when I say well you know when they control the variables that need to be controlled there's no difference between intermittent fasting or just regular old calorie restriction or there's no difference between lowfat diets and high fat diets what people hear is low carb sucks intermittent fasting sucks he said they don't work no no no this is great this is great news for everybody it means you have all the tools at your disposal and you get to pick the one that fits in your lifestyle best because that is what makes the difference is what your overall lifestyle looks like and we have way too many people worrying about the minutia who just don't even exercise on a consistent basis or they don't sleep well on a consistent basis or they don't manage their psychological stress well or they try to be perfect with their nutrition then they fall off the deep end and what I'm saying is like no like be imperfect but be consistent with what you do right and so for you obviously carbs at night have not made you fat like I have eyeballs so we can just dispel that myth right now yeah I would say eating eating the way I eat now I'm leaner at 49 even than I was 10 years ago or 10 years before that I was pretty lean then and I don't put a ton of attention to uh tracking calories although and I want to be very very clear I this I was not paid to say this like I I've purchased and use Lane's carbon app he happens to be wearing a shirt that says carbon today but I've talked about this before on other on other podcasts and social media and uh it's absolutely true that I there's no endorsement relationship I but I love the app because that was really the first time probably since College because I started lifting when I was 16 running end lifting has always been my thing since I was 16 but um since college that I uh used a tool in this case carbon to um you know basically track what I'm eating like exactly what I'm eating and what I like about it is that I can just click on different boxes of things like it um within the app and really you know it makes it very easy say oh like I ate this thing that you know white rice from this package and like and it it generally knows products it knows Brands and it did a really good job of letting me check in and just see how many calories I was consuming how much protein how much fat and from what sources but one of the major takeaways that at least I got from carbon was that you can arrange your diet in any number of different ways in fact it has like a really nice little slider where you can put in um you know you want to eat more carbohydrates and less protein even or you want to have a vegetarian diet which I I don't I'm an omnivore I'm an omnivore my dad's Argentine I like I like meat I like meat in fact I don't even really like fish that much or chicken I just like I like eating meat and eggs those are like my preferred sources and whey protein okay fine um but you can arrange things within the context of different types of diets and I think there's real value to tracking precisely what one eats for even short periods of time and then I confess I I stopped using the app for it but then I went back to it you know um and not because things want to drift I think some people really need that consistent checking other people um need to perhaps just kind of eyeball it for themselves um but for me I found that knowing exactly what I'm doing for some period of time allows me to explore things in a way that's really effective and so I just want to you know I just want to you know give a nod to to carbon um and I don't do product endorsements on this podcast you know I read I do ad reads and that kind of thing for things I love but I say that because I think it's it lands squarely in the context of what we're talking about which is that I know what works for me I also know that some people really love like a giant carb meal in the morning some people don't like meat some people you know and I think what's so beautiful about the way that you've been talking about science and nutrition in particular over the last few years and still here now is that you don't really seem to care whether or not people are vegan vegetarian omnivore or even carnivore dare I say it's just a matter of how people are couching the advice for sure and the reason I keep coming back to this is that I I really think that you this discussion but you in particular are best poised in this whole field of public facing Health nutrition advice to really change the way that the messaging occurs and the way that people hear that messaging and I say that with with the utmost like respect that means a lot to me thank you because most people are not going to go read The Meta analyses right and most people don't know how to parse data but I think that paying attention to the the words that are spoken right before the advice should be we need to think come up with something like that's like the the Norton the Norton method pay attention to the words provided right before the advice yeah I I think how you say it uh makes all the difference right and even you know take somebody I've had you know conflict on social media with which is be Paul salino which you know when he would say something like well I I cut vegetables out of my diet and I felt like my Eczema got better okay that's your exper you can't go f on average that's definitely not reflected in the research you know but hey if you know that you did this thing and you felt better that's fine but how we're overgeneralizing to the population is the problem right and so I think I mean again I'll say hey I I calorie cycle a little bit which again you can do using the app right you can change your days and whatnot give you more calories some days more calories other days and I was I showed a screen shot of it one time and somebody goes so why do why do you do it like that like is that because it's it's better this way for like muscle growth and fat loss and I go uh no cuz I had a uh uh a get together with friends on Saturday and I knew I was going to have a couple beers and I knew that there was going to be some fatty food so I put 4,000 calories on that day and less the rest of the week and they're like that that's it that's your reasoning yeah like compliance is the biggest one I I will tell people I'm like the reason that I and we talked about this earlier like I've never used performance- enhancing drugs I've never even even when pro hormones relievable I didn't use them I've never and you're not on trt we need to distinguish this uh because people um nowadays like kind of put trt well as long as it's keeping someone's testosterone in the normal reference range which is somewhere between 300 and 1,200 NRS per Des or then they're like they're not you you've never injected a synthetic version of a hormone no and like my testosterone even from like a 18 when the first time I had it measured up until like even a year ago the the lowest it's been I think has been like 750 and the highest it's been was like 1050 and so I obviously don't need it you don't you're you're well you're on the upper you're you're high normal right yeah so the reason that I've been able to have so much Su and I get the skepticism I really do um so many people say I mean look at how many people are out beating their chest saying they're drug free and then it comes out that they weren't right um but I have been brutally consistent for 25 years in 25 years the longest I ever took off of resistance training was seven days and it was after I won World Championships in 2022 uh for m193 kilo you know I so I've been able to be really consistent with my training and I always give this comparison of and I think it just really highlights how powerful consistency is and it relates back to my favorite quote I've ever heard the magic you're looking for is in the work you keep attempting to avoid the work is the hack if people and I liked what our friend Peter AA said this when he was talking about biohacks and why I didn't like the term biohack he said I don't like that it occupies so much mind space right you get people really focused on the minutia which is fine if they're already doing the big stuff if they want to kind of level up a little bit cool for me minutia is where I live because the difference between me winning a power of thing meet and me losing World Championships is 1% right but for most people we just got to get them consistent if I said Andrew I want you to become the best three-point shooter you possibly can be but you can't get any coaching you can't even watch any tutorials right but all you did for 10 years was go out and shoot three-pointers for two hours a day you probably won't go to the NBA but I bet you'd be pretty good at three-pointers right and I feel like if people could just get that message and internalize it more no it's it's not that you didn't have your carb to Fat ratio perfect no it's not that you ate your carbs at the wrong time no it's it's not that you didn't get exactly this much protein it's you just stop being consistent you stop doing it you you yeah you were really consistent Monday through Friday and then Saturday and Sunday came and you blew out right like if I'm consistent with my budget Monday through Friday but then I blow it on the weekend hey guess what that weekend money still counts and calories are the same way and you enjoy resistance training I love it I love it do you do cardiovascular yeah defined as because people get I'm starting to catch Flack these days when I say cardio um Believe It or Not uh repetitive motion movement designed to elevate your heart rate for 12 minutes or more so I'll usually do like a FIV minute warmup on the bike before I train and then I will um I will also make sure I get at least 10,000 steps on average per day um I usually average more closer to like 11,000 uh but don't do a lot of purposeful cardio now what I will tell you is my average heart rate in lifting sessions is about 140 to 150 um so if the definition of cardio is that then I'm getting cardio and actually when we when I've had you know most my markers of metabolic Health assessed I'm very metabolically healthy um I've got good actually it was funny um I I just competed at Nationals in late May and go won so I won and actually again very cool kind of Side Story you we talked about the injuries I've dealt with and and so I'm 42 now it's been an eight-year journey and I mean going from I've had back pain so bad I couldn't even get off the floor needed a cortisone injection in my spine at one point just to be able to stand up and multiple hip injuries and a lot of chronic pain I dealt with and I'm very proud of myself that I never gave up because in my heart of hearts I felt like I haven't hit my last PR yet and at Nationals this past year I actually set a national deadlift record for my age and weight congratulations and um it was actually an unofficial world record and qualified for World Championships but the one of the team uh USA coaches his name is Matt Gary him and his wife Susie are like in evidence-based powerlifting they are the goats and they are there is no better game day coach to pick attempts than Matt and Susie Gary other than maybe my coach Ben escrow shout out to Ben um but they were at the meet and we we've known each other for 15 years and the next day I came down into the lobby and they're down eating breakfast and Matt's like your ears must be burning we were just talking about you and I'm like oh what he goes you know what I'm impressed with he goes your cardiovascular fitness and you know a pting meets nine lifts right you get three attempts on squat bench press deadlift and so I kind of like looked at him weird he goes we were there between warm-ups and finishing it was about 4 hours you never sat down you were yelling the entire time you're talking the entire time because I'm a very extroverted active person then when I'm firing myself up it it comes out very EXT he's like you're yelling the entire time and you never were tired you're you're and and I again when I look at my heart rate and I was at the meet I think the average was like 150 or 160 and so you know some people would not consider that cardio but I would say my cardio vascular system does all right so I would argue it might be related to your not getting sick very often you know it's very clear that activation of the sympathetic nervous system is one main driver of the immune system um this is why often people observe that they go through a very stressful period of life and then they go on vacation and they get sick or they're taking care of a loved one and you know that person either gets better or passes away or you know they some ending to that caretaking and then they get sick um I've observed that exact thing when I went through my first divorce um I was also getting I was also involved in a lawsuit with a A company that I used to own a portion of it's a very long story ended up having a good ending for me um and all that stuff kind of resolved itself the divorce the lawsuit everything resolved itself in about a six week time period as soon as it resolved I got sicker than I ever had been in my entire life I got the actual influenza you know I tell people after that experience in 2018 I go here's words I'll never use again I think I might have the flu no you know after you've had it for sure you know and um I mean it but it was like my body had just I maybe it's a little bit of woo but it was like my body I dragged it across the finish line and then said okay we'll see you in a couple weeks cuz we're taking a break you know you think about human evolution I mean these are just so stories anytime people talk about human evolution by the way like no one really knows but the idea that you know if there was a famine or you need to take care of children in famine the idea that you would be more vulnerable to disease at those moments sure but uh it's also true that the cacam meines dopamine epinephrine nor epinephrine activate certain components of the immune system that protect you against things I mean it's not going to protect you against everything but it's when you relax and rest finally that you are more vulnerable to incoming infection we see this with pain too right like um you had SE maon talking about this stuff where you know I forget who was talking about this I remember listening to a podcast with it wasn't him but it was another pain expert and they said um you know because your beliefs about pain your stress level your sleep like your psychological milu actually matter in terms of your pain experience in fact the single biggest lever I've pulled to get me consistently training and painfree was becoming more relaxed and less stressed out all the time and managing my psychological stress better you know when you're not vibrating and spun up all the time your body has again this is a little woo wooy but I think you have more energy I mean if you makes sense it makes sense I mean those catacol Mees I mean there are other molecules involved too but that you know uh dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine you know cocktail is driving us forward in motion and thinking it you know all the time and if you're putting thoughts into one set of things they're not going elsewhere like you said it's all trade-offs I I read something from a PhD in Psychology who said stop thinking about your problems the problem is you're thinking about your problems too much thinking about them doesn't solve them and just ruminating on them makes it worse and actually again if you look at like pain literature uh fibromyalgia chronic fatigue syndrome very close ties to psychological stress um and we were talking earlier about like if you look at the the data on mortality cardiovascular disease cancer on with Aces scores which is adverse childhood event scale so zero being best you were loved as a child that sort of you had no real big worries 10 being basically abused there's like a a very uh I don't want to say very tight but there's a a dose response of Aces scores on the risk of mortality so what happens in the body affects the mind and what happens in the mind affects the body and we we were talking about with pain literature what happens if the Mind affects the body in your pain experience and even just something like sleep there was a study done where they looked at um uh military members and they had 8 hours of sleep versus 4 hours of sleep and they looked at the risk of acute injury 236 per increased risk in the people getting four hours of sleep versus eight hours and now here's where people get this wrong people somebody reached out to me say well I got four hours of sleep last night should I no no no one bad night of sleep doesn't do that sleep is a cumulative effect just like if you have a week's long worth a bad sleep but then you sleep 12 hours on the weekend you're not making up that sleep debt it's more about what you're doing time over time just like nutrition just like training exactly and so this actually brings me to I know we kind of have gone down the rabbit hole here but when you look at um Ben Carpenter did a great example of this um he has a good social media account he had a um a jar of like blue marbles and a jar of green Marbles and he said let's pretend that this is all junk food these blue or these green marbles are all junk food Ultra processed this blue is minimally processed Whole Foods right if my diet is mostly junk and I add one good meal and he puts a Blue Marble in the green did it change things no and everybody knows that right like if you eat a mostly a junk diet you have one good one salad or one you know good meal it's not going to change things so why does everybody think if we take one from here and put it over here that it drastically changes things because it doesn't it's about what you do consistently over the course of time and so um speaking of we're talking about the Mind affecting the body but then the body also affects the mind and so there was just a study published I just covered it on my on my channel where they took men with general anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder and they had them resistance train two times a week for 25 minutes a session 50 minutes total eight weeks it's not much training I think it was like 6 hours and 40 minutes of total training over the entire two months now in statistics you're familiar with an effect size which is basically how meaningful is an effect because you can have a a significant effect that isn't very meaningful if you have enough subject number so when we say things like an effect size 02 is considered small 0.5 is considered moderate and 08 is considered large anything above 08 ssris are typically in the. 3 to 0.5 range um I think in like best case scenarios I get around a 08 7.8 the effect size for resistance training two times a week 25 minutes a day for eight weeks was a 1.7 wow on major depressive disorder wow anybody who's a scientist out there if they hear effect size of 1.7 they do exactly what you did their eyebrows go up and they go they you know they sure that's right you don't see effect sizes like that very often and I want to be very clear I'm not saying do resistance training in place of ssris that's a very but these and these uh individuals had not trained they hadn't trained yeah they were they were healthy or I actually don't know the specific characteristics but I knew they were coming from like not training right now hey like listen both these things can be true maybe somebody needs to get an SSRI because like depressed people don't even want to get out of bed a lot of times right so getting them to the gym even if they know it's going to help them is a hard it's a hard swing so maybe coupling that but that's just resistance training and that affects this right so I think one of the biggest revolutions we're going to see in science is the broad application of biopsychosocial across a bunch of different disciplines and stop thinking about well your body's a bag of meat and it's attached to your brain and if you poke the bag punch the bag burn the bag cut the bag brain goes owie and I think we're going to start thinking about things much differently and I think it's going to open up a lot more in science and in fact honestly if I had to go back and do a PhD again it it would be in some sort of like psychology or or whatnot because I just think there's so much untapped in that realm and I was actually talking about this with um somebody the other day and it's pure anecdote I'm completely speculating I have yet to see an interview with somebody who's in their 90s or hundreds who sounds really stressed out they're they're mostly like dgaf right and when you ask them what they did like most of them say I drink wine every night or I the one thing I remember she was like0 she like yeah I drink Dr Pepper every day or whatever it strikes me that and again genetics matter their lifestyle matters I'm not saying that stuff doesn't matter I I don't see at least in my experience people who make it old age they not usually very spun up all the time I I just I haven't observed that I don't know if you've seen similar observations or they seem to enjoy life I have a grandfather on one side that died um earlier but a grandfather on the other side who lived into his 90s and he ate a steak every day he smoked till pretty late in life before he eventually uh quit he had ice cream dessert uh after every dinner is Argentine so they they stack their meals toward the end of the day definitely like walking did I guess the point is that he was always interested in what was in the newspapers but he wouldn't get riled up about it he liked walking he really enjoyed life like if there's one you know key characteristic to describe him is he really enjoyed life um now he didn't take the best care of himself in the in the sense that had he perhaps never smoked or quit earlier or you know dropped the excess calories he might have lived in additional two or three years but he was really happy until the end and that's the lesson there is we're not saying that that stuff doesn't matter he would have gotten better results if he hadn't smoked if he had you know paid more attention to his nutrition that sort of thing but we have to keep in mind like what is the the hierarchy of importance and the power here right and so I I'll give you an example it's it's a it's we're going to zoom in on the blade of grass but I believe it relates back to this this conversation we're having so we know creatin works because we've got thousands of double blind Placebo control trials showing that creatin works right but there was a study where they gave people creatin or didn't give them creatin and then randomly told them if they got it or not meaning you had people who didn't get creatin got creatin who didn't get it told they didn't get it people who got it told they got it and people who got it told they didn't get it and what they found was the results and I forget what they actually specifically measured but the results basically were like not what they got what they told them okay now people will misinterpret that as see creatin doesn't work no no no it works it just means your beliefs about what creatin does are more powerful than what it actually does just like actually there's a similar trial with caffeine and um I'm thinking about um there was a study um braad I don't have the specific citation but they they had two groups of men train drug free one group they told they were getting steroids that group gained significantly more strength than muscle mass now I would argue that's probably because they're going into training sessions believing that they can train harder believing that they will recover better but that goes to show the power of placebo and the power of belief when I say Placebo people think what I'm saying is you're lying about your experience that is not what I am saying at all I think your experience is probably quite valid what I'm saying is it may not be due to the thing you think it's due to but your beliefs about the thing and so where I get really focused is let's do the big stuff right because so many people are so worried about little stuff and one of the things I'll tell them is hey I have no data to back this up but my intuition tells me that the amount of stress you're spending on these small variables is probably killing you faster than if you got those variables wrong and if we could just focus on the big rocks first and and and if we can pick up some Pebbles after we get the big rocks great but don't drop the big rocks trying to pick up Pebbles I love it and I love this example of uh the creatine experiment because just to repeat the conclusion um because I want to make sure that people don't take away the wrong conclusion creatine Works absolutely but your belief about creatine Works more in this case yeah so two things can work one more than the other and the placebo AKA belief effects are very very powerful exactly I completely agree with you there wonderful way to set the stage for some of the specific questions that were uh asked when uh I said on social media I'm going to sit down with Lane Norton again um and I'm very curious about some of these as well so I'll I'll inject um some of my own experience and questions training to failure and Reps and Reserve we should um Define these a little bit before we get into it um it's fun to have these kinds of conversations nowadays about resistance training knowing that both men and women should resistance train people who want bigger muscles and who don't should resistance train because in the past it was always about like bodybuilding and preseason football and people going to the military I think thanks to the great work that you've done but I'll just give a particular shout out to some of the women in the nutrition and fitness space namely Dr gabri lion uh in terms of uh menopause per menopause Dr Mary CLA Haver and women in that sector are really um emphasizing the key need for resistance training they're other names as well but you know really championing the importance of resistance training training to failure in my book means when you can't move the weight by whatever means um anymore in good form MH in proper form that's failure so we're not talking about for stps we're not talking about um swaying the upper body or or using momentum when so train to failure you can't move the resistance anymore in good form and Reps in reserve my understanding is one's own subjective understanding about how close they are to that point of failure do I have that right yeah so you Define failure the way I Define failure which is you cannot take the weight through another concentric repetition without breaking form um reps and Reserve would be an R of one means you stopped one rep shy of failure rf2 you stop two repy of failure and so on and so forth right and so I would define those that way okay so with those definitions in mind is training to failure more effective at generating strength and hypertrophy increases than if one keeps a few reps in reserve and of course we have to balance this against all the factors related to recovery Etc but assuming that one follows a program of doing and I'm really just trying to cut us right through the middle here let's say two or three exercises per muscle group and does after a sufficient warm-up let's say two to five sets that we're going to call work sets you could imagine an extreme scenario where every single work set is taken to failure you could imagine taking only the last set of each exercise to failure you can imagine taking none of them to failure yeah assuming adequate volume is achieved across the week my understanding is this is 10 to 20 sets per muscle group across the week it could be distributed across different workouts or all done in one workout is training to failure going to generate more strength and hypertrophy than leaving some repetitions and Reserve so let's start with the extreme scenario I go to failure on every single set and I do what I need to to recover mhm doesn't matter if it's a one you know only doing that muscle group once per week or spread out multiple times per week I'm I'm doing what I need to to recover in between my genetics my hormone status my sleep my nutrition on and on is going to failure more effective than not going to failure this going to generate a lot of discussion in the comments I can't wait to see it um so I'm going to cite uh quite a bit of work from my power lifting coach Zach Robinson because he is at FAU just finished his PhD and did a lot of meta regressions and analyses uh on this exact topic so I'll give you the answers first that are straight down the line scientific answers and then I'll explain things for muscular hypertrophy you need to get close to failure uh but you probably don't need to train to failure to maximize hypertrophy but you got to get pretty close you can be stronger but to maximize strength you're probably better off not touching failure very often so there are a few studies now looking at this showing that I think there was one study recently and I can't remember the exact details but that that I remember it being pretty welld designed and the takeaway was hypertrophy was similar between the groups but the group that went to failure or stayed a few reps shy of failure actually got stronger compared to the group that was taking um most sets to failure and did they control for total volume of work okay cuz I can imagine not going to failure you can do more sets because you've got and that's exactly more quote unquote gas in the tank right practically that may be a benefit of stopping shy of failure right but uh yeah they control for those variables so when we talk about volume the way we Define that is essentially number of hard sets which a hard set would be a set close to failure the general consensus is within five reps of failur is considered a hard set now um what I will tell people is that may not sound like much most people have never truly pushed themselves to failure okay and I'll I'll give some practical examples of me so my best set of squats ever I did 530 for 10 this was long time ago yikes um I when I finished that set I actually somebody had to come save me because I couldn't fully lock out my Lumbar and I couldn't get the bar on my right side all the way back up somebody to run over in the gym and help me after that set I laid down and I physically hardly couldn't move for about 15 minutes so this is you know gun to the Head yes do as many as you can your family's been kidnapped if you don't get these 10 reps you're you know all those mental games that that sort of thing um and I mean I was done you know what I mean and so one of the things I'll tell people is the first five reps of that set were still hard they still felt hard right and so people who will say oh you stop a reper too shy failure you you're training like a I'm like so you're telling me if I stop two reps shy on that one that that's an easy set cuz it's not I can tell you that and then the the reason I'm I'm giving this background is because in research studies where they have people who are like uh beginners or intermediates and they ask them to rate their rir they tend to underestimate their R right so they they'll say you know during a set say your R and they might say two and what they find is when the researchers push them to True failure yell at them crank the music get them really psyched up they get five more reps than they think they'll get on average right so most people if you've never actually taken things to True failure you actually probably don't know what it is so I do think it's useful to train to failure at times I think you make a very important point which is that occasionally training to failure gives you a sense of what failure really is for you and and no one can really tell you that only you can tell you that and experience that but if I understand correctly earlier you said once you know what failure is for you than if strength gains are your goal and I think more and more people by the way are training for strength who don't want hypertrophy at least not across every muscle group I think when I talk to the general public which I do a lot I get the sense that men in women are like yeah I'll I'll lift weights I I can see the value of that um would love a little bit more muscle here a little bit more muscle there but they don't want to be generally larger MH and yet they can understand and appreciate the value of getting strong everywhere right because being strong across your whole body is one of the kind core definitions of Health being strong is fun um so again for hypertrophy doesn't seem to matter if you take every set to failure or stop a couple reps shy I would argue that probably you you'd want to leave most reps most sets shy of failure and if you're going to take one to failure take the last set of an exercise to failure uh because then you can get whatever benefits might be there but if you take the first set to failure I mean imagine if I did that like set of 10 with you know 530 on squats as my first set to to what am I going to get the next set if I try to do 530 I can tell you based on how I felt maybe three reps maybe you know um and so your performance is just going to really drop off a cliff if you're going to True failure on like a compound exercise isolation is a little bit different um and so I would say whereas if you you probably could have done like sets with you know six seven Reps for multiple sets and then have gone to failure on your last one right now it may seem a little bit counterintuitive why would it be the same for hypertrophy but different for strength well with strength you also have to think about stimulus fat to fatigue ratio because fatigue will Mass strength right and I know this because I've like when I overreach for power lifting competitions which is basically like we're taking me a little bit past my point of what I can recover from I mean I've had literally before Nationals in 2017 I was warming up on deadlift in my last heavy deadlift session like 10 days before the meet and I went to pull my final warm-up which is 585 and I couldn't budge it off the ground I was so tired sore I couldn't get it was like I couldn't get my body to do what I wanted it to do 10 days later I pulled 716 right it it's amazing what what fatigue will mask and so if you're always training to failure you're going to be training under pretty high fatigue circumstances doesn't really matter for muscle growth because it's really just about doing enough hard sets and putting that mechanical tension on the muscle with strength you also have to think about like what is the most pure form of strength it's Force production right and force is mass times acceleration so you have a you have a mass component you have a you have a speed component and so this is actually Zach Robinson and his company D data driven strength who I've been coaching with for three years I heard them on a podcast and he was giving his like hypothesis of how to optimize strength in a powerlifter and I remember thinking I really like the way this guy is thinking he's thinking outside the box and it makes a lot of sense so one of his things was if you're training close to fatigue all the time uh and the goal is strength think about what that means in terms of your Force production so let's let's say you do a set of eight reps right your first few are pretty fast and then by the end they're pretty slow the load hasn't changed so what happens to your Force production your Force production is going pretty far down he said I don't really want my athletes grinding reps in training I I want them to hit some heavy singles and doubles and triples because they need that because that's a skill you have to have those neurological if everybody's done this with they go I hit this for 10 reps and here's what my one rep max should be and then they go in and get stapled with it right because it doesn't necessarily translate because a one rep max or the purest form of strength is a very specific skill if you've never trained it it's very difficult to get accustomed to so we want to hit some his idea was you know in workouts we're going to hit a heavy top set heavy single double or triple or whatever it is and then our back off sets instead of taking those close to failure instead of doing say well we'll do you know 75% of your your training Max for uh sets of eight and have you getting pretty close to failure instead of doing three sets of eight why don't we just do like six sets of four with that weight because now you're doing those first four reps which you can move that weight faster you're having greater force production and creating the same good stimulus but with less fatigue and so again that was kind of the hypothesis is and he did uh a met analysis metal regression that supported this and now some of the randomized control trials have come out and shown something similar and in my experience I was honestly shocked at because he had all kinds of stuff to deal with when he first started training me because I still was dealing with a lot of back pain a lot of hip pain I hadn't really gotten that under control yet and when I got ready for worlds in 2022 which I think we did our first podcast like the week after I had won worlds I worked up to being able to do like two or three hard sets of squats a week and deadlifts and that was all I could do that was all my body could tolerate before I get pain and so we did a lot of low load relatively low low for me you know 60 to 70% 1 RM for low rep number sets but trying to move it as fast as possible to keep that pain under control for me but to get the stimulus and I was shocked at strong I got because before in 20145 when I was winning open national titles I mean I was doing 15 20 hard sets of squats and deadlifts a week and and way more for bench press and so I always thought well that's how much I need to get to that level of strength and even now like so we we've been able to keep progressing it now I'm doing probably more like six seven harder sets of those exercises per week and I'm basically back to the the strongest I've ever been doing way way less sets and I think a lot of it is we have learned to find The Sweet Spot with managing that stimulus to fatigue ratio so all that to say if your goal is building strength it's mostly about you know doing enough like heavy lifting that you actually do get stronger and then if you want to train closer to failure you can because again most my audience isn't trying to be a powerlifter right no but I think a lot of the audience would like to be stronger and not necessarily gr their muscles bigger except in a few specific places on the body and so this would be the protocol there we go protocols little plug um this would be a protocol for probably not necessarily like growing the most muscle mass but getting stronger because you're not training so close to failure um but you know obviously you're trying to move as Zach says you whatever that given load is you want to move it as quickly as possible and so uh and there's actually also data to show that like if you train slower purposefully that it's not as good for strength um so they actually there was a I think a met analysis recently where they looked at either concentric repetition of slower than two SEC of more than two seconds or less than two seconds and saw strength outcomes were better and people taking less than two seconds to complete a rep interesting that's the concentric phase of the lowering phase the Ecentric phase yeah we're not sure about that yet interesting so so I mean we do we do use some Tempo training and my training but it's mostly because like me doing a slower Tempo squat if my back starts acting up I can uh do some squatting and not really hit that pain trigger as much so but I'm still trying to move the concentric as quickly as possible and so I I you know I don't know about that doesn't matter how slowly you move the concentric versus how fast you move it um but yeah what I would say is you know when it comes to building muscle really the world is your oyster the the the research really shows machines versus free weighs Low Reps High going low reps High Reps going to failure stopping a few reps shot it all builds the same amount of muscle for the most part um but you have to work hard but you got to work hard yeah you got to be consistent with it obviously like the the the theme of this podcast right but you can do it anyway and if we look at the I mean obviously anecdotal but if we look at the history of the Mr olympias they all train very differently you know I mean Ronnie Coleman I mean I'm sure you remember when the unbelievable came out the his DVD back in like 2001 where he's tossing around 200 lb dumbbells and he's doing 7 800 lb squats 600 PB front squats and everybody's just looking at this like my God and then you watch somebody like Phil Heath train who again one of the greatest Mr olympias of all time Phil mostly did machines but he built obviously a great amount of month now people will say Well they're on steroids all those guys yeah it's all controlled trust me it's an equal playing field right cuz they're all doing they're all doing it right and the research shows anywhere from whatever you know 5 to 30 repetitions can generate hypertrophy as long as the final few repetitions are really hard and correct you know and volume is is adjusted I I really like there is no hypertrophy rep range like people used to think oh it's like six to 15 reps is hypertrophy now I think practically it makes sense to do a lot of your sets in that range because you know if you're trying to do 30 reps getting close to failure I mean gosh I'm going to run out of breath if I'm doing you work out in a uh boring for me yeah and if you work out in a gym where there are other people like be kind you know like other people are going to need the the space and the equipment so you know it could take forever you know you know uh you know 10 sets of 30 like that's that's a that's impolite um so we're only half kidding there um one of the more common questions is about training for people 50 years old and older and I love the fact that we're talking so much about strength this seems to be one of the key Evolutions in this field again in my opinion um the people have come through this podcast as guests Dr Gabrielle lion um yourself um Andy Galpin who now is his own podcast the perform podcast like more and more discussions about strength and training for strength for the general public not just people who want to be powerlifters so I think there's a lot of carryover there and I think the more that people hear us say that resistance training can be really powerful for Health and Longevity and getting strong is one of the best things you can do for your Health and Longevity injury protection Etc peteras talked about this and it's not just about building muscle want to know how they should adjust their training if at all if they are 50 and older so obviously one of the key things to getting and staying in great shape over time I always say is you know avoid getting hurt could we say okay don't don't try anything to kn and crazy without e easing into it could we also perhaps but I would say that goes for anybody quite frankly okay could we also say perhaps find the movements that you can do without injury and just keep doing those over and over is there is there any evidence that that mixing up the exercises is important meaning doing new movements or if you find two or three movements that work well for you can you just stick with those and just work on Progressive overload I think you can stick with those I think you know muscle the whole concept of muscle confusion muscle knows tension and how long it's under that tension and for how many sets it's under that it doesn't it's not like well this is a I can tell that this is an inclin bench press versus an inclin dumbbell I mean you know you might move through different ranges of motion and whatnot but the tension on the muscle is the tension on the muscle so what I'd say to people is I think most people probably change up things too much because there is like a neurological adaptation to doing a specific exercise where you get stronger at it and so now you're using more load you can create more mechanical tension but if you're always changing things up you you might not take advantage of that full you know kind of neurological adaptation but if you're always doing the same exercises it's too easy to get comfortable and fall into well today I do three sets of 10 and I always do three sets of 10 and I use this weight and that's what I do and now you're no longer progressively overloading so I think there has to be a balance between enough changing of exercises to kind of promote some novelty because as you know novelty there is a reward center in the brain for that just changing something and think about anytime You' going to try a new workout you get a little excited about it you know when I was going to try Zach's way of training you know three years ago I was like oh I was very very excited about it you know so I think there is a place for that but I think people tend to fall into a little bit too much of doing the same thing over and over or constantly changing things because they're always faing that novelty and I think that the reality is probably somewhere in the middle but specifically for older over 50 I think whatever you can do with low pain level and be consistent with that you enjoy that's what's best for you I mean I I always tell this story I had a client who they loved CrossFit they loved doing CrossFit and they said you I want to but I I want to build muscle and I know it's not the best workout for building muscle I said it might be for you because if you hate bodybuilding training and you're not motivated to go do it and you don't enjoy it you're probably not going to work hard at it and so maybe for you a crossfit workout is the best muscle building workout because if I try to get you to do something else you'd hate it and would lose motivation right it feeds back to that consistency principle that you talked about before exactly so when we look at like I think this is might be interesting for some of your listeners so when we look at how much muscle you can build after a certain age you can build the same amount of muscle as a percentage of your starting skeletal muscle mass okay so what I mean by that is once you're 50 60 you've usually lost some muscle okay and if you've never lifted before if you go into lift as a percentage basis it appears that you will still gain the same amount of lean mass but for example if somebody has 80 kilos of starting are most of your podcast listeners are USA assume so let's say somebody has 150 PBS of lean mass when they start just throw a random number and they gain 10% over a couple years now they have 165 pounds of lean mass they've gained 15 pounds but they the percentage is 10 if somebody starts and they have 100 say 20 pounds of lean mass 10% of that is 12 pounds they gained an absolute less amount but as a percentage it was similar or same and we actually see that with women too women actually develop as a percentage of their starting lean mass the same percentage increase in lean mass as men when they do the same level of hard training so what I tell people who are I'll he people say well you know I'm too old to start resist no no now is the perfect time to start right now um and honestly it doesn't take a huge dose I mean if you want to be like you know go get into powerlifting and like compete at compet yeah now it takes a bigger dose right but what it takes to get and I'm just going to throw a number out 80% the majority of the benefits for health strength resistance training you could probably get in three four sessions of 30 to 40 minutes you know you don't have to have a huge input of time and just look at the depression study we talked about obviously that's not like muscle and strength but two sessions of 25 minutes I mean it is a uh absurdly low dose that you require and I think a lot of people I tried to be careful about this too we'll see how I train which is 2 three hours a day for 5 days a week and think that's what's needed no no that's what I want to go win a world championship that's what's needed for that it's not needed for you to build muscle and get stronger and even uh when I was at grad school across the street they did a study in fril elderly where they had them basically they had trouble like standing up from a seated position and by the end of a 12we study of them like progressively overloading them which was basically like them just lowering the seat at first right and then maybe adding like a little little bit of weight they saw these people built muscle built bone uh got healthier better quality of life and these are people in their 70s and there was a study in Australia that actually got on the news Peter AA talked about it um with uh elderly women who I think they were above age 70 and there's some of them in there deadlifting like 150 like like upper hundreds in deadlift you know it's incredible how I I took a class called uh skeletal muscle structure function in plasticity your skeletal muscle is so adaptable it is such an adaptable tissue it's amazing the same thing that can allow somebody to squat Jesus Aliva shout out squat over a th000 pounds is the same tissue that can allow somebody to run a 100 miles like David Goggins think about that that's really incredibly adaptive and so what I'll tell to people regardless of your age your sex whatever demographic you are in resistance training for just a couple times a week for a short period of time will drastically improve the prospects of your quality of life your longevity I mean if we look at hand grip strength we look at lean mass they're all inversely associated with mortality especially the older you get becomes a stronger Association and I always tell people I'm like it's not about the hand grip strength this is a proxy for just strength overall right there was a study where they looked at push-ups and found push-ups were inversely associated with mortality it's not that doing push-ups is Magic it's that that is a proxy for that person being strong and we focus so much of our attention especially like on Falls and the elderly right of well if they had more bone mass they wouldn't break their bones what if they didn't fall in the first place cuz they were strong enough and had good enough gate and balance to catch themselves and oh by the way nothing better for increasing bone mass than resistance training so I am a huge fan and and then we already talked about like the metabolic like skeletal muscle Gabrielle touched on it was one of the first things Don Layman said when I came in his lab he goes skeletal muscle fits every definition of an organ and we don't talk about it like an organ we talk about like it's this inner tissue that just sits there and it is not it sends out signals to other tissues it integrates signals from other tissues it is an endocrine organ and so many people have unhealthy skeletal muscle and if we treat and what happens when you resistance train what happens when you build muscle muscle is a metabolic sink it is greedy right it's sucking up it's incred you can take people who are type two diabetic and if you get them on a slight calorie deficit you get them to start exercising it is incredible how fast they're blood markers will start to resolve like they can still be obese and you'll see their blood markers start to resolve within like you'll see improvements in weeks uh Layman did a I want to say a 16-week study in uh either diabetic or pre-diabetic women back in like 2003 I want to say and he said within four weeks he said we already saw these blood markers start to resolve like your hba1c hasn't resolved but a lot of these other markers started resolved because at a fundamental level at least in my opinion and other metabolism people may disagree I'm a big fan of aam's Razor which is plainly stated the simple all things being equal the simplest explanation is typically true the the the actual hardcore scientific definition is the the hypothesis that requires the least amount of assumptions is usually true you're putting in so much energy into a system and you're running out of places to put it so you have skeletal muscle mass you have liver these other tissues in the periphery and then you have adapost tissue and did you know they actually show people who have more adipocytes are actually more resistant to type 2 diabetes so they have more smaller fat cells that can soak up more of this stuff and since type two diabetes is basically too much glucose in the blood right and uh a lack of insulin sensitivity small adipocytes are more insulin sensitive and so what happens is we at least in atopos site physiology we used to think of of adapost as also an inert tissue and now we know that's not true either and lots of different cell types to just think that there was you know Brown beige and white fat cells and subcutaneous and intval and now they've done you know sequencing of different white fat cells and like 25 probably Now 50 different I mean different genetics among those cells that respond differently to insulin I mean fat is a very interesting and heterog tissue tissue yeah but most fat cells at least based on the literature I've read and again I'm happy to have somebody correct me who's an expert in this but they can expand to a certain point where they it really becomes difficult for them to get bigger the Integrity of the cell because you still got a cell wall you plasma membrane everything and you have an extracellular Matrix that is scaffolding this fat tissue on your body and so at a certain size of osy it basically becomes you just can't pack any more in there okay and so if you can't put any more in muscle because muscle isn't you're not active and muscle's not moving and churning through uh substrate and you can't pack any more into atopos where does it wind up it's in your blood you can't care and now when your blood levels of it's interesting because there are some people who have all these theories about like one person uh researcher was like well I think Branch T amino acids actually cause insulin resistance because we see them elevated in the blood in type 2 diabetes and I was actually in a I was I was in a um I was a grad student watching this person present and I put my hand up I said isn't everything elevated in the blood in type two diabetes you know why are we why are we picking on Branch amino acids so you do have some people who are who can become type two diabetic who aren't obese they tend to have not as many fat cells which sounds like it'd be an advantage and if you're lean or sorry if you are not overeating right and getting enough exercise in it probably is an advantage because you have less overall fat Mass but you are going to reach that critical mass of an atoy of about 100 microns I think it is faster because your your overall fat cell number so at the same fat Mass your fat cells are bigger and bigger fat cells are less insulin sensitive in fact one of the treatments for type 2 diabetes um Sano uras I think they're called they P gamma Agonist they actually increase the production of fat cells they create new small fat cells now you have a place to put stuff and you lower your blood glucose so very a reservoir exactly and I'm overgeneralizing to be sure um and again I hope if I've butchered anything somebody will come and correct me no they will but what's amazing is this stuff in the blood you just got to get stuff moving like because you start doing exercise start controlling your calories a little bit guess what you're oxidizing things to the KB cycle you're oxid you're going through glyco you can now start to pull things in right you're you're using this substrate you can start to pull things in and because you're pulling things in now atopos can start to release some of its free fatty acids into the or some of Tri triog glycerides into free fatty acids into the bloodstream which can also facilitate this this muscle so using muscle you are it is a partitioning effect and it doesn't take long to start lowering this glucose blood lipids these things in the blood it can actually resolve you know at least those markers can start resolving themselves pretty quickly which is why you know when we look at Weight Loss what level of weight loss they say is clinically relevant it's only 5% right which you'll have obese people and they'll say well 5% weight loss you see these big benefits in like blood lipids and metabolic Health you wouldn't think with just 5% weight loss you would get that but you do because just you're just giving a little bit of space to get that stuff in the blood out now again this is my I want to be very clear this is not a proven thing I I feel pretty strongly that this explains a lot but again this is my personal opinion about how these diseases develop and whatnot but it is I think it's relatively simple yeah using thinking about muscle as an organ thinking about feeding muscle we talked about that earlier thinking about moving muscle and in particular training for strength resistance training of different kinds hypertrophy yes and but I you know I'm kind of given a little bit of a a biased vote for more strength training out there across the pop population for really for the longevity reasons I mean peteras pointed out that uh the percentage of people who die after a fall um not because of the Fall itself but because of a hip injury or a wrist injury and then they're they go immobile not or they're just not exercising as much anymore then they get an infection and then it it Cascades in fact I had a conversation with one of my parents recently on their 79th birthday I said you know in the next five 10 years your biggest risk is probably going to be going downstairs or stepping off a curb not going up but as Peter's pointed out going down so that that Ecentric movement break you know being able to sustain a fall being able to not fall to catch yourself so to speak well practically you fall farther going downstairs and you do going exactly and this and that pattern of falling while going down precedes a lot of infections and that end up deadly right so um and you know hats off to Peter for really pointing out the relationship between those things and to you for encouraging people to strength train also I love the idea that I don't have to go to failure if I'm in strength training because I like training heavy but the the training to the point where the the muscles are quaking it even though that's how I initially started training because I came up in the Mike mener uh you know uh Camp um I actually find that it eats into my recovery in a way that um maybe is a little more subtle but meaningful nonetheless which is that I feel fatigued later in the day whereas if I complete a training session where I can complete every rep I notice I don't get into that quaking um thing I actually have a lot of mental and physical energy later in the day and it's psychologically and emotionally fatiguing as well maybe this one could be kind of a brief answer or maybe not I don't know um are there true age related changes in metabolism that are independent of of decline in muscle mass you know I I saw a paper I think it was published in science a few years ago that said that metabolism actually doesn't slow that much as we age of course total muscle mass so you mean BMR BMR basal metabolic rate in general you know I well I should just say up until that paper came out I thought okay as we get older our quote unquote metabolism slows then of course we have to remember that puberty and and childhood is sort of like um being on performance-enhancing drugs in the sense that protein synthesis is just massive and ongoing but in a let's just say from age 30 onward let's say between 30 and 80 assuming that somebody's doing things to maintain muscle mass is there any reason to believe that their their basil met metabolic rate actually goes down just as a function of age yeah you're stting the work from Herman poner um and uh really great lab looking energy expenditure that he he does a lot of great stuff um and so that study was looking at several thousand people I think looking at their total daily energy expenditure and and really found it's pretty flat from like age 20 to age 70 and then it kind of starts to go down but you can tie it to the loss of lean mass and same thing for Basil metabolic rate when they do IND indirect ketry um if you look at and this goes for so older people also women versus men and then also um type two diabetics versus non-type two diabetics obese versus non- obese 80 I think the the number is like over 80% of the variance in BMR is completely explained by the lean mass by the amount of lean mass somebody has and by the way the last 20% probably is explained by where that lean mass occurs because liver for example is a more metabolically active tissue gram per gram than pretty much any other tissue um skeletal muscle is more metabolically active than like than fat tissue but for a lean tissue is actually somewhat like metabolically slow because its turnover rate it's only like one two% per day you just have a lot of it yeah right right but on an absolute amount of calories you burn you burn a lot in muscle because you have so much of it great Point um so things like gut liver tissues per gram of TI tissue are very active so yeah there just doesn't seem to be a for a long time we spent so much time focused on the metabolism side of things when we're looking at aging when we're looking at obesity and we just didn't really find impressive stuff even so obese people don't have slower metabolisms on average the the the research shows that actually uh on an absolute basis they're faster than people who are normal weight when you standardize for lean mass it ends up being about the same uh people who are typee 2 diabetic same thing when you standardize for lean mass if anything they have a little bit faster BMR and so if you think about it it actually kind of makes a little bit of sense on a biochemical level because if you're insulin resistant you're also insulin resistant in fat tissue right so like okay so it makes sense that maybe you like waste some more energy because you're not able to put it where you want to put it right so the people get upset about this because oh no it's it's got to be metabolism metabolism and then glp1 mimics have really kind of shown no the answer to this question is very much on the appetite side of things it it's like we tried to make a bunch of different drugs that would increase metabolism we tried to do all these things to increase metabolism and nothing seemed to really make a big difference and then we came out with the most powerful appetite suppressant in the history of mankind and people are losing large amounts of weight and keeping it off so I think you know people got too focused on that metabolism side or or what I hear a lot of um is from like uh like postmenopausal women I'll hear somebody say my metabolism dropped what probably happened you're sleeping less you're more stressed you don't feel as good because the hormonal changes you don't feel as good and so you spontaneously became less physically active and didn't realize it because our neat like our non exercise activity thermogenesis our our nonpurposeful physical activity that we do fidgeting pacing is actually a large portion of our daily energy expenditure and and people get this wrong you can't make yourself do more neat because then it's just exercise if you're purposefully doing its exercise it's all it's all subconscious right but if you're not sleeping as well and you're feeling worse spontaneously you'll just not move as much and I know that people like that feels like there's like a lot of judgment shame associated with that but it it's it is the truth it is a practical limitation and it may not be metabolism I guess I'm a little bit pedantic with that but it still contributes to your overall energy expenditure and so again they they've looked at this and um I mean there there is some evidence that like if your estrogen drops and you replace that with supplemental estrogen that that can like help out with like maybe 50 to 100 calorie energy expenditure per day so if you're replacing something that's like now clinically low but my guess is that it would also drive more activity feeling better more activity sleeping better more activity and that's where it's hard to to disconnect that right so yeah I I think metabolism wise the results ended up being pretty underwhelming for all this stuff that we just assume well if somebody's overweight it's because they slow metabolism the research didn't pan that out but I still think it was very interesting and again it speaks to like the power of the mind and the connection in the mind of how some of these drugs act but I do tell people people when they say well you know I you know calorie deficit didn't work for me and I I I you know obviously my metabolism was messed up cuz you know I had to get on OIC to lose weight I'm like well it doesn't really do anything to metabolism like the speed of your metabolism what happened is you just you no longer mindlessly snack you feel you you you are now in touch with your satiety signals and and that's why you're losing weight and that's why these drugs they work all right so speaking of OIC munaro and similar let's talk about these drugs that are reducing appetite and you know In fairness have allowed millions of people to lose substantial amounts of weight and keep it off this topic tends to uh get people a little bit riled up on social media because I think for some reason people believe that if one gives these drugs the nod you're essentially saying you don't need to exercise but I didn't see anywhere or hear anywhere that the use of any compound drug or otherwise um is mutually exclusive with taking good care of oneself in other ways too so what are your thoughts on these compounds and what you're seeing out there I think my take is pretty balanced on this which is I think they appear to be great tools for people reducing their intake and reducing body fat and it functions through appetite I mean the drugs are glp1 mimetics and so gp1 is a hormone secreted by the gut in response to feeding and it acts on the gut as well as the brain to reduce appetite uh you know slow motility uh so it's a it's a society hormone essentially now it has a very short halflife in the body so the reason a lot of people will come out say well there's things you can do naturally to increase your glp1 this is like talking about I mean yes a BB gun fires a projectile and a tank fires a projectile but there's a pretty big difference right so with glp1 mimics what's happening is they are taking that protein and changing out some of the amino acids in that protein and basically just gives a much longer halflife that's why people can take it you know once a week or whatever it is because it just stays around much longer and so if you think about the food environment we live in which is free access to cheap hyper palatable Foods our brains for the most part are probably not equipped to regulate appetite in that environment and it really actually is kind of incredible how resilient the human body is because if you look at when the Obesity crisis started we already had Ultra processed foods available we had cakes cookies all these sorts of things but the difference was you had to go to the bakery and get it or you had there there there had to be some small barrier right and then you know I think kind of the the barrier that got flipped was basically now you know in the last 30 years you can go anywhere and get access to cheap Ultra processed hyperpalatable calorically dense foods and they just don't have the same effect on satiety that normal food does where like in Kevin Hall's study at NIH where they took people from a miny processed diet and switched them to an ultr processed diet and they spontaneously increase their caloric intake by 500 calories a day like overnight that may sound like not a big deal to some people listening that is a very big deal it's about a pound of we per week of increase in body weight yeah I mean you know assuming assuming that there's no increase in energy expenditure which we know happens over time but um with these glp1 mimics they're slowing down motility they're acting on the hypothalamus they're reducing appetite and it's a very powerful effect now some of the side effects are like nausea some people reported kind of like a not freezing but like too slow motility essentially um so there's some GI side effects which are kind of to be expected with something like this and and you know on one side you've got it's so funny how thing everything gets politicized these days but on one side You' got people saying oh these drugs have no side effects whatsoever and you know I think everybody should be on gp1s because uh they we're not made to live in this food environment and then on the other side you got people saying well this just obliterates the need for hard work and these people don't take accountability and I don't really think either of those messages are really useful I think there's a lot of nuance here and I mean it's a drug and every drug is going to have side effects some worse than others for different people and so for some people it's not going to make sense to take it based on their lifestyle and side effects they get but for other people I did a post on this where you know I talked about um how much weight people lose on average and so many people in the comments said you know I've lost 100 lb or I've lost 80 lbs or whatever it is taking monjaro or yeah one of these gp1 mics and again going back to our conversation of big rocks people worry about lean mass loss they worry about there was a study in I think rodents where they saw an increase in thyroid I want to say thyroid cancer or something like that but it was at a not really a physiological dose and again it's it's rodents people say well we don't know what the long-term effects of these drugs are well they've actually been around for um diabetes treatment for a couple of decades now but I mean do we know what they do in 50 years I guess not but we know what obesity does so uh I'm going to take Ron White's line which is shoot the alligator closest to the boat I think if somebody's very overweight or obese and they've tried a bunch of different methods and they just people say well they just haven't been consistent okay so we can live in fantasy land or we can live in the real world which is maybe some people just need some more training Wills than other people okay if we could stop putting like an ethical judgment on how easy or hard it is for certain people to do certain things I mean it's easy for me to say just be consistent because nutrition has never been a problem for me I've never struggled with my weight um but I struggled in other areas of my life that why can I just be more consistent why can't I just do the things I know I need to do I'm sure you would feel the same way about certain things in your life where it's like well I know logically what to do but it's hard for me to do it right and so if we look at the burden on the Health Care system of obesity and these dis type two diabetes and then all the metabolic diseases associated with them it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where this is not a big net positive to be quite Frank now I want to this is as my friend John delone says it's both and okay some people this is really going to help them and it should be done in concert with lifestyle changes and lifestyle education because we don't want people to go from eating a lot of a crappy diet to a little of a crappy diet right we want them to make better choices overall but sometimes again habit coupling people don't get motivated and then get results people start getting results and then get motivated right and so a lot of times people will start losing weight and now they're motivated to go to the gym they're motivated to eat better it's it is it doesn't happen in a linear path these things are kind of like you know like the opposite of a vicious cycle where this is you're getting into a good cycle right and a lot of people tend to fall into these categories where when things go bad they go really bad because it's a vicious cycle when things go well they go really well because it's a good cycle and so what I would say is with the concerns about gp1s the one I hear most is loss of lean mass so in studies people who use glp1 Medics they lose like 30 to 40% of the weight from lean mass which is a concern but by the way that is similar to the amount of weight from lean mass people use who diet without resistance training or exercise so I I don't think that it's a unique problem to glp wants and my guess is when we start getting studies that combine exercise with gp1s and look at um lean mass retention we'll probably see pretty similar results so I'm not I'm not super worried about that on a practical level I can see some concern with it because if you don't have much appetite you're usually not selecting protein as kind of your first you know line of what you're going to pick and additionally fiber you're not usually going to select as your first so I think again these are great kind of like if we think about like training wheels I think these are great training wheels for people and through natural just having less appetite um people start controlling their intake better and then all these other habits start to fall in the pl for some people and um I talked to a friend who uh she's a nurse practitioner and she tried a go1 a medic um just cuz she's like I'm a nurse I want to see what this stuff was like for me and then um she talked to a lot of her clients and the the anecdotal feedback that popped up a lot was it stopped the food noise in my head I wasn't thinking about food all the time I just stopped thinking about it so much and if you look at obesity I mean again it really is on the appetite side we we know that obese people have lower sensitivity to sociiety signals they get a greater reward from food like I just posted about a study the other day where they gave a a milkshake to people and they didn't really see a dopamine response and but in people with binge eating disorder when they give something like that they do see a dopamine response so a lot of it is contextual right and so I think a lot of is contextual around obesity of okay these are people who get a greater reward from food on average they're thinking about food more often they've probably also dealt with people telling them their entire life however long that they need to lose weight and so food is always on their mind in one thing or another it's kind of like uh in Ghostbusters where they say you know don't think about anything bad what's the first thing you're gonna do you're gonna think about something bad right and so trying to calm down food noise while knowing that you need to eat less food is probably pretty difficult so on the whole I think these drugs are positives I think it's going to lower the health care burden and I think it's going to help a lot of people and the other thing I'll say is like there's been a lot of push back in the fitness industry by by Fitness influencers why do you think that is like as if it's going to take their jobs away it's like the same way that people fear AI like it somehow like like this stuff is here to stay it benefits many many people I feel this way about these gp1 um mimics and I mimetics excuse me and I feel the same way about AI it's like these things could be yes potentially used for evil but but you know also for good if I think back about when I might have had that sort of reaction I was in my early 20s and that's when I thought obesity was a choice um I still think there is personal responsibility involved in obesity um but I think my feelings about obesity at that time were when some if somebody's obese they're making the choice they don't care about the stuff they eat that mindfully they're choosing to eat these Foods knowing this is going to be the outcome like self-inflicted Yeah and I don't think that's the case at all I think a lot of people's habits and behaviors are are on autopilot you know I can remember very clearly I I dropped my kids off at school one day I stopped at 7-Eleven um to fill up with gas and like grab something from the store a drink and there was somebody there was a obese woman in front of me and she was getting two slices of pizza at 8:00 a.m. and at first I kind of had that knee-jerk response of H so lazy of course you're over and then I thought you know what this is probably something she's done for a long time this is probably a very habit where she goes to 7-Eleven she gets pizza or on Tuesday morning at 8:00 a.m. she's around this area and she goes to 7-Eleven and gets pizza and maybe not but I think a lot of people out there are like that where their habits and behaviors are very much on autopilot it's not this mindful mindfulness that we think they're doing and that translates into other areas and the other thing I I realized is I'm like it can't be laziness like all of it because there's obese people who are very successful in other areas of their life so they know how to work hard and so at least not for everybody that can't be the explanation and I think with Fitness influencers or people who have you know actually they've worked hard they've built a good physique it's almost like how dare you get results with with with without doing it yourself without I did this without any help you know and the reality is you might have had help because your upbringing might have not been food focused you might not have had a mother who was always on you about food or you might not had parents who shamed you if you didn't clean your plate you you might have had genetics that made you more sensitive to satiety signals you might have had a phenotype where if you overeat you tend to just become spontaneously more active that's part of the obese resistant phenotype and so you might have had an advantage and you just didn't realize it so I think if we could just get away from the Judgment of stuff and look at take the Judgment all that stuff out of it does this seem to help people and is it going to be a net positive on society Thomas Soul said in order to have make compassionate policy you have to have dispassionate analysis of the data and the data says this is going to be massive for our society and it's it's a huge benefit so regardless of my personal feelings of hey somebody should be able look look at Ethan suple lost 300 lb doing it through all hard work and exercise I I'm pretty sure I've talked to Ethan about this and he said I think this is great you know because it's hard to get people to believe if people believe what they can see and so if they start seeing results then they can buy in and yeah I I think overall it's a net positive so I mean maybe studies will come out in 10 years and people are falling over dead from this stuff and we'll say whoopsies but I mean you have to shoot the alligator closest to the boat and right now the biggest burden on our health care System I think I'm correct in saying this and the biggest threat in a lot of ways is how metabolically unhealthy our society is getting yeah I think also when people hear about these drugs they think about the person who's slightly overweight or who is already fit who wants to be even thinner and that's not what we're talking about here and you I have a good friend who is a air traffic controller he works very very hard very stressful job obviously um High consequence job uh and he's very overweight he's got to be more than 300 lbs by by a significant margin and he's really struggled over the years and for years he talked about getting his you know quote unquote stomach stay you know sometimes referred to that way couldn't afford the surgery this sort of thing and I asked him about it I was like you know what's that about he's like I just need something that's going to allow me to move without pain or a little bit less pain every time he tries exercising he injures himself and he's probably going about that incorrectly but he doesn't have a lot of time and he literally has lives in his hands he's married now you know he may have kids soon so I haven't spoken to him recently about these drugs but to me it seems like that's like the perfect candidate for these drugs if he could eat less with more ease and lose some weight and then also start exercising I think that'd be a significant win for him so scenarios like that are what I think of and then also you know it's a mostly free world and many places not all um so if people can afford these things and they want to take them like who am I to say they shouldn't take them you know I I just like I feel like the amount of judgment involved um to say that somebody should or should not use a drug is um that's safe and potentially helpful for them is like kind of uh I mean that's that's almost offensive in in a way yeah I mean if you had something that like if we came out with a drug and it's like it looks like for a lot of people this can fix opioid addiction right yeah you'd give them that drug we'd be shouting from the rooftops and celebrating right we wouldn't say well you just got to gut it out and work harder you know you just got to you just got to want it more it's like no like there's some there's yeah there is some personal responsibility there and there there are choices and things that can be made but why are we trying to make this barrier so high for people like let's lower this barrier I love that on the other side of the coin you've been pretty vocal elsewhere about the fact that sugar is not a drug yeah you know um because sometimes people will say you know sugar is a drug I I would um sort of put in the soft argument from my side soft argument that highly processed foods or let's just call high density of taste Foods right that combine you know processed carbohydrates and fats you know at high Heats that can be consumed in you know where you can easily consume several thousand calories you know almost unconsciously right I mean unless you're asleep or in a coma you can just pop these things in your mouth and keep going they I don't even know if they taste that good but people just keep going that there's a there's a bit of kind of lack of awareness and compulsivity to them very different than addiction of course because people aren't necessarily going out robbing um robbing people but maybe just touch on your view of sugar as a substance we're not talking about the sugar in fruit we're talking about candy ice creams desserts quote unquote hidden sugars yeah what are the real risks of these things if people are consuming them still within the confines of their daily caloric needs so they're not eating excess calories what's the deal with sugar okay so this is where it's very important to give the appropriate context and nuance and I'm glad you set it up the way you did so I always tell people when it comes to almost anything have guidelines not hard rules because hard rules will get you to do things that are kind of dumb right so for example if you say I'm never going to eat processed foods uh well whey protein is processed but if you look at the data on whey protein it improves metabolic Health it increases lean mass body composition even lowers inflammation so I mean if we're just going to say all processed foods are bad well isn't then then way bad so guidelines in that nature same thing for sugar because obviously okay well added sugar is it's not it doesn't have a big satiety benefit um it's calorically dense makes food very palatable I'm going to come back to that because it's contextual but fruit has sugar and biochemically not really that different I mean if you're talking about sucrose okay it's a molec Fu of glucose and fructose okay a lot of fruits have glucose and fructose in them right so if sugar has some inherent lipogenic biochemical toxicity addictive quality whatever we should see similar effects across different sources of sugar and we don't see that right and even when it comes to some of the the processed foods people don't realize what goes into create making something hyper palatable is complex it's not just sugar it's not just fat it's not just sodium it's texture mouth fuel you mentioned temperature all these things matter and in fact there was actually a study a while back that suggested that texture might actually make a bigger impact on the palatability of a food than even the sugar content interesting and let's take it more from a mechanistic level from your example if you're in the confines of your calories what happens I would say a high sugar diet is still not ideal because it's going to be hard to get enough fiber in a high sugar diet but I long time ago beginning of grad school I was under the opinion that sugar and high fructose corn syrup were calorie per calorie more fattening metabolically unhealthy now is that a a graduate mixer with a professor named Manny Nakamura who was at Illinois and he had done some of the feeding studies in rats with uh fructose and seen these weird metabolic effects right and I've overheard him having a conversation with another professor and I was shocked by what he said because he's the one that did this some of this research and the other professor said so you know high fructose corn strip is bad and fructose is bad he goes no it's really just the calories that are in it it's it's easy to overc consume consum people consume it through soda and you know they just eat too much and and the guy was like well you showed all these things in the in these mice he goes we fed them like over 50% of their calories were from Pure fructose that's pretty much impossible to get through the diet unless like you're literally doing nothing but drinking soda and he said you know we showed a pathway but that's not practical in terms of like the application to humans and so I I got curious I really started going down to literature on sugar trying to okay was is he okay is he right about this is it is it really not you know calorie per calorie more damaging than than non sugar carbohydrate when you look at sugar intake it is associated with increased levels of inflammation It's associated with obesity but there are what we call confounding variables which is people who eat a lot of sugar tend to eat a lot of calories so if we look at here's my favorite human randomized control trials where we control total calorie intake and sugar intake what do we see and probably the best example of this was a study from surt back in I want to say 1997 and the reason I'm going to pick out this study is because it had the best controls in it so they provided all the food to participants the protein carbohydrates and fats were all the same it was a I think it was a 12200 calorie diet and they provided all these meals for 6 weeks and looked at fat loss and some blood blood lipids and those sorts of things and they found that so one group was getting over 100 gram of sugar a day I think it was around I mean it was based on some like body weight energy expenditure stuff but it was I think it was around like 110 grams of sucrose per day right lot of sugar other group like around 10 so 10 times different sugar and at the end of the study there was no difference in Fat Loss there was no difference in lean mass retention there was no difference in almost any marker they looked at the only difference they saw all the blood markers improved the only difference they saw was that LDL cholesterol improved a little bit better in the low sugar group and that is probably a function of the fact that the low sugar group had more fiber we know fiber canbin to L to to cholesterol and lower LDL cholesterol in the blood so when I saw that I was like oh man and then when I look through all these other studies with similar kind of controls they pretty much show the same thing across the board on metabolic Health on um inflammation like inflammation really isn't different if calories are controlled with high sugar versus low sugar as long as you're getting enough fiber what about feelings of satiety because um well that's the that is the real downside if you're eating a lot like if you're eating a 1,00 calorie diet and 400 calories are coming from pure sugar I mean you're probably going to be kind of hungry right yeah I'd be extremely hungry I mean I consume artificial sweeteners for the record but there are enough data and I have enough experience with them to know know that sometimes they will curb my appetite like they'll get me over the bump but I've come to associate it's probably just pure paired Placebo Association if there is such a thing where if I drink a Diet Coke pretty soon after that I want to eat something now I've challenged that by not eating something because I have pretty good discipline um and it passes but I think I've come to associate the the sweet taste with wanting to eat something and nothing to me is more delicious well there are many things like a diet coconut slice of pizza if I'm in New York or a Diet Coke and a burger or you know there are these food associations but I don't think for instance that sweet taste necessarily stimulates appetite but I could imagine if I only had as you said 1,200 calories a day to eat and I'm getting you know 400 of those calories from sugar like you said there's not going to be much I better be eating a lot of broccoli as well or else I'm going to be pretty hungry just based on my learned relationships between sweet taste and food consumption what I tell people is I would focus Less on like sugar intake I mean if you want to focus on added sugars that's fine um focus on calories protein and your fiber content right because if you're if you're getting enough fiber it's going to be hard to eat a lot of junk doing that right and when we look at um the sugar intake and calorie levels all that kind of stuff actually a great example would be the case of Dr Mark CB are you familiar with him he's a Kansas State he's a nutrition Professor um in 2011 he got the name the twinkie diet Professor I'm not sure if you saw this but he I know about the the twinkie defense right so he he he asked his students what they thought mattered more for for fat loss the calories you eat or the food choices you make and they said most of them said food choices and he said okay let's do an experiment do you think if I do an 1 18800 calorie diet from ultr processed foods exclusively that I will lose weight and get healthier and most of the students said no and so for 12 weeks he ate 1,00 calories he called it originally the 7-Eleven Diet he basically like if I couldn't get at the 711 I didn't eat it he now the caveat is he had multivitamin and he had some way protein so that he was getting enough protein because it's hard to get protein from some of those ultr processed foods and but 1,00 calories and he lost 27 pounds and all of his blood markers improved and his insulin sensitivity improved now that seems crazy to a lot of people but for those people who have worked and looked at blood work with weight loss and whatnot I mean it's not that surprising that is the one of the biggest levers for metabolic health and so when they asked him afterwards well you that what a like what a great diet like you could eat all the all this junk food and he goes well not really like it's 1,800 calories of junk food it goes really fast I was pretty hungry and honestly like first week it was like oh this is kind of nice and then after that I was like you know I'd really like just a really big salad you know just something satiating so again no Solutions only trade-offs there is a benefit to being able to go well I can if I can fit into my calories it's okay as long as I get enough fiber and protein all yeah the tradeoff is it's a it's a high budget cost right um same thing with people's um you know the data on like moderate alcohol consumption shows that it doesn't impede fat loss it it doesn't if you account for the calories in it but I'll tell people like hey do you really like if you have like two craft beers do you really want to spend four or 500 calories on like 24 ounces of fluid that's not going to impact your satiety at all and so I think a lot of people view this for a very black and white lens right where it's like oh Lane says or this person says I can eat sugar and lose fat so I can eat as much sugar as I want no no no no no because there are practical limits to this right but take somebody like me right if if my calorie intake is my budget I train 2 three hours a day my maintenance calories are anywhere from 33 to 3,400 calories a day which is a not crazy amount but a healthy amount for somebody of my size I have a decent size budget right if I if I can still get my protein in get my fiber hit my micronutrient targets and I have calories left over for energy filler sure just like if somebody makes a million dollars a year and they want to go buy a sports car it's not a great investment it's not a good investment at all why wouldn't they just Bank every single scent they make well because maybe for them having that little reward motivates them to keep doing what they're doing and making that level of money right but if if you're making you know let's take loans out of it right if you're making $100,000 a year does it make sense to spend $90,000 on a sports car if it means you can't pay your mortgage and you can't save money for retirement you can't meet your obligations no it's it it doesn't make sense right and so if you're a small woman small lean mass wise who is trying to lose some weight does it make sense if you're eating 1,200 calories a day to lose weight to spend 300 calories of that on some Ultra processed junk food I don't think it does but if you're an Olympic athlete who's burning four or 5,000 calories a day good luck eating that level of calories from good minimally processed foods you're going to feel full all the time there there does seem to be a kind of a requirement in books in um sometimes even in podcast or to take a stance like to be anti something y um because saying you know what I personally believe based on my read of the data is that most people should strive to get anywhere from 70 to 90% of their food from nonprocessed minimally processed Quality Foods and then allow some space for the you know some processed food highly processed foods and sweets and things like that but mostly to get the the macros right as we've described them earlier and what the range will depend on age will depend on activity level depend on prior health history I mean there are some people who have um enough issues that relate to diet and lack of exercise that when I've seen them get it right and undergo such incredible Transformations that like I also know these people's capacity to fall off the train right like and you want to say you know maybe make that number 100% so you never go back because I've seen them slip before and they and then the guilt and then they come back excuse me so there are two ways to look at it one is you just tell people listen you don't have to be perfect right cuz if if Perfection is the goal you're going to fall off but then there are those individuals like severe alcoholics who quit drinking you don't say like hey like you going to have a beer on Christmas you don't say that right it's all or none but anyway um here we're getting into the psychology of it but I think that that's what you're saying right there is that's where the individualization comes in right like it's it's it's contextually dependent and it's dependent on the individual and what makes sense for them and I I think we as people if we find something that works for us we're a little bit too quick to want to evangelize everyone else around us because we want we do want to help we do have good intentions for the most part and we overgeneralize and I've you know for me again like counting macros flexible dieting when I I I dealt with a little bit of Bing eating when I was young when I first got into bodybuilding because I was trying to you know eat clean and I would end I was in college so my buddies would order pizza or whatever and I end up eating like an entire Pizza by myself right and so once I allowed myself to just have that the foods I wanted in moderation I just got brutally consistent right so it that for me that was the switch that flipped but other people that may not be the right solution and I think we we we make a bunch of uh well that diet worked for me we we assume physiology when actually I think it's much more psychology and just trips that compliance algorithm in somebody's head and it makes sense and if we could just if we could just be willing to say more often hey this is what I do but I I like this and and you don't have to do it maybe try it yeah oh and and everyone struggles with different things and everyone finds certain things easier like I I'm not an alcoholic I'm an adult so I can have a drinker too I just don't like it so everyone assumes because I did this episode on alcohol that I'm like anti-alcohol like I'm like if you're an adult you're nonalcoholic you don't have issues with Al you know um alcohol use disorder or something like be might guess like just know the data right um but there are certain things like steak I'm never giving up like you could tell me it takes 10 years off my life and I'm not going to give it up I'll do other things to offset whatever and that you know decrease in longevity might be I don't think that that's a real thing um but I'm just not going to give it up it's Central to my enjoyment in life yeah like the period Speaking of which um when if one really wants to weade into the Waters of strong opinions and conflicting data we covered this a bit last time you were on the podcast but the questions were replete with requests to discuss seed oils I'm sure seed oils and I must say this whole thing about seed oils has really gotten in my head even though even though I'm a scientist like the the other day I went to my sister's for dinner and she made a really nice dinner it was for her mom's birthday and then she made a really nice salad and I love fruits and vegetables so it's was like salad and then I looked I was like she's made this out with like grape seed oil and I was like why' you use grape seed oil instead of olive oil and she's like well I ran out of olive oil and I I found myself like looking at the at the salad like is this safe to eat I was like I heard your voice in my ear I also heard Paul's voice in my ear salados all these people I thought well I ate the salad by the way I really enjoyed it was good grape seed oil doesn't taste as good to me as olive oil I generally try and use olive oil butter things like that when I when I cook but um what's the deal with seed oils I understand that they are calorically dense you told us that last time I understand people tend to overc consume them and then blame them for a bunch of things that are not related to their seed oiless rather than their calorie containing this these aren't real words of course but you get the idea but are there any data out there that have your you know ears kind of pricked up to the possibility that assuming equal equal calories that there might be something bad about seed oils or is there zero and there's no pressure here to answer one way or the other not that you would respond to pressure for me anyway um so I think it's all about making the appropriate Apples to Apples comparison right because if we're looking at addition studies of you know adding something to a diet adding Omega sixes um L lolic acid linolenic acid whatever well if you're adding those you're adding calories which is a confounding variable right so ideally what we what the real question is because the the debate tends to be the people who are anti-ed oil tend to be very pro- saturated fat and so the question really is okay if we swap out these things in a one:1 ratio what is the outcome right so not like when outcome I mean metabolic Health um inflammation those sorts of things so in the studies I have yet to find a good human randomized control trial where they give polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat you know exchange it a one:1 ratio and see negative like actual outcomes what about swapping with mono unsaturated fats like why why are we talking about seed oils versus lard and butter why aren't we talking about seed oils versus olive oil yeah that's um I've looked less into that just because people ask that question yet less um but it seems like both pufas and mufas are better than saturated fat in terms of metabolic health and uh risk of C vascular disease those sorts of things does anyone have a problem with olive oil I'm sure you could find somebody with a Terri terrible way for me to pose the question is there any reason to think like like for the person who isn't sure about seed oils cuz they just heard enough negative things even if there's no basis for it like me who's like I like butter and I also assume that eating too much butter might not be good for me just cuz I'm a rational human being based on my read of the data anyway uh so I have some butter yes but I like olive oil olive oil is tasty I'm told it's good for me is there any knowledge about anything in olive oil that says listen even if you consume it in concert with your caloric thresholds meaning you're not eating too many calories is there anything bad in olive oil I'm not aware of anything um but I will say like if you extend the logic of the the seed oils crowd or anti-ed Oils crowd which actually I'm going to make a new logical fallacy which is just appeal to seed oils cuz I so many times when I've laid out this data I have people go basically like have a freak out and go but it's seed oils how dare you defend seed oils and I'm like I'm not defending them I'm just talking about data people on x when I put out questions for your coming on this episode literally there were multiple people that claimed that you are paid off by this by them by big seed oil and I was just like I have to laugh out loud I was like there might be a lot of companies that are large that make seed oils but I I guarantee they're not paying Lane Norton to say what he say um so I find this actually very funny as somebody whose research was funded by the national Dairy Council the egg nutrition center and the national Catalin beef Association that somehow I would be the person who would be you know Def and all these things act in opposition too it's like well you think I'm Pro seed oil but then over here I've been defending meat with this thing right and then over here I've been defending not sorry defending is the wrong word discussing the data on sugar which by the way those would be in opposition to each other because you're and you're very Pro fiber right so yeah so and even when I talk about sat fat I don't like say it's toxic and it's going to I say hey it raises LDL cholesterol which is independent risk factor for heart disease I'm just discussing it right so I'll say what I said online which is uh I don't defend nutrients they don't need defending there's not ethical considerations here if you want to eat them I don't think you're less of a person um and I find it curious that some people get so uh emotionally and um just like ethically entrenched around certain nutrients so the the the the logic goes something like well you have these multiple double bonds and so they can be oxidized and so that oxidation is going to cause an increase in inflammation which is going to cause heart disease and cancer okay well olive oil is a monounsaturated fat it still has a double bond so by that logic it would still be worse than saturated fat so when we look at trading out and and mufas would fall in this too I believe um if you look at the cohort data polyunsaturated fats substituted for saturated fats have a stronger effect on reducing heart disease than than monounsaturated fats but monounsaturated fats do still tend to have an effect of reducing the risk of heart disease compared to uh compared to saturated fat okay so that would be trading out um butter and lard and meat fats for you know more olive oil right and and just to add some Nuance to it not all saturated fats is created equal there like steric acid I believe doesn't raise LDL cholesterol like it but in general saturated fat is going to be something that raises cholesterol more it also again and I'm thinking of several randomized control trials where they feed the same calories they feed the same amount of fat and they just have people either eat you know saturated fat or polyunsaturated fats you see either neutral or positive effects on inflammation you see neutral or positive effects on liver fat you see neutral positive effects on basically overall metabolic health and insulin sensitivity so again and and uh Paul actually countered this one time and he he recited a study looking at uh I think it was I don't want to say it wrong but it was like giving Omega sixes and they saw an increase in lipid peroxidation I don't think they were comparing it to saturated fat I could be wrong but again this is an example of a mechanism right so lipid peroxidation mechanism we can try to project what that might mean down the road but when we look at actual levels of inflammation actual risk for cardiovas dises actual insulin sensitivity actual levels of liver fat these are outcomes we can actually if we're worried about those we can actually measure them and again some studies show no difference some studies some some of the studies I've seen on like inflammation between uh polyunsaturated fats and liver and and saturated fats don't really show a difference in inflammation but I'm not aware of any that show it going in the opposite Direction Where substituting in polyunsaturated fats actually raises inflammatory markers like CRP and il6 those sorts of things um and actually one of the things I tell people when they're worried about you know fructose activates the Nova lipogenesis in the liver and I'm like well here's this study where they overfed fructose and saturated fat by the same amount and saturated fat increased liver fat by 70% more than fructose so if you're worried about fructose you better really be worried about saturated fat now again both that's an overfeeding study they were eating excess calories but again calorie per calorie saturated fat was worse for liver fat um so that's kind of where I land on it I just you know maybe I'm missing some data but when you're when you're looking at these studies again I'm looking at not one study not two studies I'm looking at 50 studies or however many studies there on the topic and I go on this Forest plot where do they land and when they're almost all on one side or neutral I feel pretty confident that that's something not to worry about right so let's let's take another discussion to tie this in I think this will help people understand how I come to a conclusion about this sort of stuff so I do not necessarily think red meat is carcinogenic even though the IRC has classified it as probably cogenic right um because when you look at the studies you can find studies that associate red meat with cancer and you can find studies that show no associate of red meat with cancer and so it's kind of all over the place now there's probably more that show the association than don't but when you look at like studies where they control for overall diet quality so I'm thinking of a study out of uh Canada back in 2020 I think the author was uh maximova I want to say they looked at different levels of red meat intake and incidents of cancer but also with different levels of fruit and vegetable intake and so what they found was at low levels of fruit and vegetable intake lower red meat consumption reduced the risk of cancer relative to higher red meat consumption but at high levels of fruits and vegetable consumption I don't think there was a significant difference but actually the high level of red meat consumption was lower risk than low red meat high fruit and vegetables I believe I'm I believe I have that correct in terms of the absolute risk and I don't know if it was statistically significant but what that says to me is red meat is more of a proxy of poor overall diet quality and if you control for that with some Diet proxy of fruit and vegetable intake you know if you're eating a lot of red meat and a lot of fruit and vegetables there's not really a whole lot of room in your diet for a bunch of crap you just described the way that I eat and that anytime a friend of mine and this happens a lot uh comes to me and has you know 20 to 50 lbs to lose and well make it as easy on yourself as possible you can eat meat eggs vegetables and fruit and that's all you're going to do for two months and most of those guys in this case they were guys lost a substantial amount of weight and kept it off they all exercised as well and of course it's choric restriction related but but they're not touching pasta they're not touching bread they asked me all the things that can I do this and I just said listen if it wasn't in the list I just gave you you're not eating it sounds restrictive the good news about something like that is that fruit generally tastes good and steak is very satiating it's delicious yeah um if you don't like meat I suppose this wouldn't work but um but I don't think there's anything magic about that diet it just gets people below their maintenance calories with relative ease well it's simple you could probably still do it at a restaurant right because you just ask for meat and vegetables right socially compatible so there's there is some beauty and simplicity there's Beauty in what I do which is I track everything and I can have whatever I want you're going to have to have some form of restriction to lose weight you you pick the the kind of restriction that you can stick to right so bringing that all back so you have this data that's all scattered on meat right and then let's look at something like dietary fiber okay because people say well you you can't establish causation this is some people might say well the the carnivores might say well it's all healthy user bias if it was healthy user bias there'd be some disagreement in the data and there's no disagreement in the data I am not aware of any study looking at dietary fiber intake or fruit and vegetable intake that doesn't show reduced risk of cancer reduced risk of cardiovascular disease reduced risk of mortality usually in a dose response and it is very consistent now some studies might show more of a risk reduction versus other studies but if we're doing a line of a force plot and this is risk reduction this is increased risk everything's on this side right eating more fruits and vegetables can only be good for you right so um and there's like kind of a dose response so that's when I become even without randomized control trials necessarily that's when I get pretty confident okay this is a very consistent effect and there's a dose response and we're seeing a bunch of different populations across a bunch of different countries in a bunch of different Labs okay I feel confident and so for somebody to make the claim that seed oils are toxic or that they're bad for you independent of the calories I mean you're basically relegated to using animal studies um inv vitro mechanisms and then epidemiology which trying to like tie those all together I mean that's not really high quality evidence really high quality evidence is the you have the mechanisms okay there's a mechanism right because if there's an outcome there's a mechanism the animal date agrees with it there's a dose response the human randomized controls TR support it and then the epidemiology supports it like in order for something to really truly be strong evidence we need that now let's take our example of fiber again right epidemiology supports it we have mechanisms in terms of short chain fatty acid production in terms of like insoluble fiber moving like getting food through the gut faster might be actually better because there's some some I don't want to use this word lightly but like some semi toxic in products of like metabolism in the gut that if they stay around too long it might have negative interactions with some of the the the chorti cells and that may be one of the reasons that insoluble fiber helps decrease the risk of colcy cancer so we have the mechanisms the animal studies show it when we do the human randomized control trials looking at shorter term surrogate markers they show it move in the right direction and the epidemiology is in the right direction that's when I become very confident about something so I'm not ready to say like hey seeds are really really good for you and you should have a bunch of them I'm not saying that obviously they're calorically dense right people add oil to stuff and it adds calories but so anybody trying to claim that they strong evidence that they're bad for you it we have very different definitions of what strong evidence is and you have to apply your logic symmetrically if you were going to use a certain level of logic for one thing you have to apply it to another thing right and I I'll give you an example of this um like the the the when they were talking about the cruciferous vegetables and isocyanates and it reduces iodine I said well you know this person was advocating for a meat-based diet and I'm like okay well there's nue 5gc in meat which by the way human uh they found antibodies for that in human thyroid now I'm not saying that meat's going to mess up your thyroid but if you're worried about this stuff in cifer vegetables don't you have to worry about it in meat too because if you're applying that logic symmetrically I would actually argue that there's stronger evidence that the you're worried about the nu5 GC in meat since you actually see those antibodies show up so with the the seed oil stuff I'm like okay let's apply this logic to saturated fat for a moment all right so do we have a mechanism we do saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol well LDL cholesterol can penetrate the endothelium we know this so there there gets to be this debate about small oxidize versus large fluffy both can penetrate the endothelium even large LDL can pen penetrate the anthium now small oxidized penetrates more easily but it carries less total cholesterol deposits less cholesterol in the indel large doesn't penetrate as easily but per unit of LDL cholesterol it's depositing more cholesterol because it's bigger the net effect is both are equally atherogenic in the end so we have the mechanism right now let's look at the epidemiology well the epidemiology tends to support it as well and then if we look at the the really what for me changed my mind because I used to be somebody who was on the side of ah it's not LDL doesn't really matter it's HDL to LDL ratio and was when I saw the mandilion randomization studies which for those who aren't familiar you're basically looking at natural polymorphisms on genes that cause differences in secretion of LDL right and since LDL is a lifetime exposure risk meaning if you're doing a a two-year randomized control trial looking at LDL levels it says nothing about what they ate before and you know in that time frame what's the likelihood people are going to have heart attacks or some sort of myoc Carter Andia it's pretty low now that we have all these like data banks of you know blood samples and whatnot from people from all these old studies they go back and do these analyses and when they look at LDL cholesterol and plot it so lifetime exposure to LDL cholesterol and plot it against the risk of heart disease I mean you can pretty much draw a straight line through it and so to me that's pretty strong evidence if you're if you want to apply the same logic of well we have this you know and LDL by the way can cause inflammation in the endothelium so you have that damage to it because of the apoo protein that attracts inflammatory marker so people are getting some of this cart before the horse and then the other thing that sealed it for me was again like HDL they looked at the same thing at HDL turns out HDL is just kind of a marker of metabolic Health it's good to have high HDL but it HDL itself doesn't appear to be protective because if they raise it with drugs or look at people who secrete more or less it doesn't seem to independently modulate risk of cardiovascular disease so all that to say saturated fat is really only an issue I would say for the LDL the fact that it can raise LDL and there is some evidence it's not necessarily good for the gut microbiome because the bio salt in products from emulsifying saturated fat because it requires more bile that those might be toxic to some beneficial species of bacteria but here's what I'm not saying not saying don't eat any saturated fat what I'm saying is again your overall diet quality is what matters I think it's fine to have some saturated fat I think probably try to keep below 7 to 10% of your daily calorie intake what also matters is there's no Solutions only trade-offs and so if somebody says to me you know I was able to lose 50 pounds on low carb and everything got better but my LDL went up a little bit and they felt like that was the only thing they they were able to be consistent with I'd say on balance they're probably better off with that slightly elevated LDL than they would be if they' kept the 50 PBS on now I would argue if they had lost the 50 PBS and lowered their LDL their overall risk would be lower than it is now but again we have to look at what can somebody consistently execute so all that to say I'm not saying you should consume seed oils I'm not saying that there's no negative downsides but if we look at comparing it to a comp terrible molecule of saturated fat there's a much more compelling argument that saturated fat is bad for you versus seed oils thank you for that very thorough and very clear answer and I just will highlight that you ate a steak last night so you were by no means anti- meat or saturated fat ate a steak right in front of a vegan so it was uh not to not to aggravate them just because they they approve they stuck to their principles you stuck to yours I was originally going to order fish and they said it's okay if you want to get a steak and I said okay if you say so now they did make a a couple of comments in just during the during the meal fair enough fair enough let's talk about artificial sweeteners sweet uh that's the other those are the other people that pay me um that's right uh he's kidding folks goodi um you and I got into it wasn't a scrap we got into a little disagreement about this um years ago so long ago that it's probably not even worth mentioning that you know I was um somewhat in enticed by the data from Dana Small's laboratory then at Yale I think now she's up at McGill um looking at some kind of pavlovian conditioning of artificial sweetener so basically um children children in that case um consuming a high amount of I think it was either sucralose or sacran MH in combination with a meal kind of standard meal and looking at the insulin response and then removing the food component sometime later and what they essentially observed was a conditioned insulin response so they you then have these kids just have the the sweet tasting non-caloric drink minus the food and they still s and they then saw an elevated insulin response in other words the same way that Pavlov got dogs to salivate in response to a bell that was paired with food then you removed the food and then they just simply salivate in response to the Bell the idea was well maybe you can um create a conditioned pavlovian like response to artificial sweeteners okay I thought it was kind of a cool study looking back I I probably wouldn't have covered it the way I did because it's not a typical scenario I think the more important questions are is there any evidence that artificial and low calorie or zero calorie sweeteners like Stevia we have to be very careful here not all artificial that they are somehow dangerous in any of the following ways one do they alone increase insulin to levels that are problematic two do they stimulate appetite in a way that's problematic independent of insulin or maybe as a consequence of insulin and then three what's the story with their potential effect on the gut microbiome I think those are the three categories that come to mind they're probably other categories and I just want to say for the record then and now I'll consume some aspartame every once in a while in the form of a Diet Coke Stevia seems to be in a lot of the things that I consume and I don't have a problem with that um so I'm not anti- artificial or lowc calorie sweetener although for reasons that are entirely personal and have no scientific basis whatsoever I avoid things with sucralose in them I don't really like the taste of it and I have kind of an aversion to it for an interesting reason and and that's a great way to couch that of I don't have data for this this personally I don't do it yeah if I see something I'm like yeah no aspartame fine Stevia gets a thumbs up by me um and I will choose low calorie or zero calorie sodas or drinks or energy drinks when I have the option to have something with sugar it's just kind of but I'm not anti-sugar either I just developed this as a habit yeah i' prefer to get my calories from food yeah you'd prefer to have a steak as opposed to having the cola right steak strawberries blueberries oatmeal rice butter olive oil and all the other delicious wonderful things as opposed to a Coke I'd rather just have a Diet Coke and eat a bit more steak so let's take the insulin thing first um so it's interesting mechanism that they're showing there um what I would say is there's been a couple metanalyses now looking at different non-nutritive sweeteners and their effects on insulin and they they don't show an effect so there's no there's no real effect and let's just kind of play it out logically a little bit if there was a significant effect on insulin one of two things is going to happen you're going to see a drop in blood sugar because you're not eating anything right so most of us if we eat if we take drink a diet soda we don't then go hypoglycemic right or if there is an increase in insulin if blood glucose isn't dropping then there must be a corresponding increase in glucagon which is basically offsetting all of insulin's issues I don't think either of those things happen I I think it's it's inert and that the research the metaanalyses tend to show this there was a I'm thinking of two meta analyses where they looked at these they looked at glycemia they looked at um insulin sensitivity they looked at insulin release and they just didn't see any effect now when it comes to what was the second point so we have insulin we have does it stimulate appetite in ways that may or may not be related to insulin you ruled out insulin increase so um like could there be a pairing of like okay every time I eat I have a diet soda then if I have a diet soda on on its own does it stimulate the desire to eat Allah the Dana small study but and by the way that study was halted mhm they this is the problem with that study is it was being done in kids the increases in insulin that they saw in a subset of the kids were so dramatic this is the way she described it in a talk so I feel comfortable saying this maybe she's changed her tune but in this online talk and academic talk the increases in insulin were so dramatic that they were concerned about the kids becoming pre-diabetic so they halted the study which means the totality of the data never came in means there was it's hard to draw a conclusion okay when we talk about studies we're always talking about means and averages right I I leave open the idea that there could be subsets of populations that there could be individual responses I I leave all that open so on average if that's true and there is a condition response we're worried about well one is there effect on appetite where there people are going to eat more even if those things don't have calories they're not going to make you fat there's no insulin release okay they're stimulating you to eat more well if we look at the randomized control trials where they tell people hey instead of regular Cola drink diet cola if that was true an actual an actual outcome we would see people on diet soda either not lose weight or gain weight definitely compared to water and probably similar compared to a regular Cola um maybe a little bit less but we would expect to see weight gain we actually see the exact opposite thing so we have several randomized control trials now where people like comparing not just diet soda I don't want to just say diet soda a lot of them are low no calorie beverages is kind of the what they talk about cuz not everything's technically diet soda but I think people know diet drinks in particular where they're comparing them they tell people either switch out either have Cola either have diet soda or or sorry diet drink or just use water now they absolutely every single one of these trials they lose weight going to diet drinks um usually a pretty significant amount of weight yeah and usually as I recall pretty sign significant amount of of diet drink like a two liters a day even like the person will carry around a liter or a two liter of of diet drink and sip on it whenever they get thirsty or hungry y yeah so then what's really interesting is they they've done direct comparisons to water and some studies don't really show a difference but several studies and several metaanalyses now have shown that when people if they have either them use water in place of regular soda or diet drinks in place of regular soda that people actually lose a little bit more weight and it's statistically significant with the diet drinks now I don't think diet drinks are fat burners okay they're not causing you to have increased energy expenditure but if you are somebody who is used to a sweet taste if you switch to water perhaps you're seeking out that sweetness elsewhere and so maybe those people are are consuming a little bit more sweet food or whatnot whereas in the diet drink group maybe that's filled that sweet taste for them so I don't get into the back again this gets like people get very like ethically charged about this what's wrong with drinking water there's nothing wrong with drinking water if you can drink water you feel satiated and you maintain your B I'm just chuckling because if drinking water becomes an issue online then I might quit no no it already has not quitting but that's that's that's ridiculous yeah well so again perhaps that mechanism exists but at least on average it's obviously washed out by the fact that for whatever reason for most people who do this they get a little bit more satiety out of consuming a diet beverage as opposed to substituting water for a beverage now again if you're somebody who you can drink water and you don't have an inclination for diet drinks then don't do it it's you don't need it um but again I look it at as we need to lower the barriers for people to start getting healthy and unfortunately a lot of people with the message of just drink water and they'll say well Diet Coke is just or diet soda is just bad for you as regular soda or it's worse for you the regular soda their intention might be I just want people to drink water but the outcome is people go I can't iag give them my soda so I'm just going to drink regular soda then right and so while your intention was positive POS the outcome is actually kind of disastrous right and so we have to disconnect what the intentions of the message are from what the what it actually produces and so that's why I say hey if we're moving levers th if somebody if somebody is obese and they came to me and they're like well you know I drink five colas a day I'm like fantastic because I'm thinking five diet sodas instead and now we have just saved 750 calories and you're going to start losing weight just by doing that right which again people say well what about a hundred years down the road or whatever I'm like well most of these sweeteners have been around for decades now we do have quite a bit of data on them but let's say that there is something we don't know again I'm shooting the alligator closest to the boat right like we know what obesity does so and and people who do these diet drinks lose weight they get more metabolically healthy so again if it comes down to soda or diet soda by all means let's do the diet soda and if there's some small negative effects to it we'll deal with them so that brings me to the gut microbiome most of the research studies in humans where they use reasonable doses don't really show much effect on the gut microbiome however there are a few with particular sweeteners like sucrose that do show an effect now there was one that got a lot of play and you and I actually talked about this I think we actually talked on the phone about this and it was an interesting study I thought it was well done but I want to be careful about how overgeneralized it was so the first part is in this study they selected for people who basically they did a very very like intense selection process where I think there was over 1500 people who were like originally included in the study and they riddled them down to like aund something because they wanted people who had really hardly ever used artificial sweeteners in their life and that's a pretty small percentage of population what they found was a lot of people submitted saying I I don't use them I've never used them and then when they did dietary recall logs like oh well actually you're using it here and you're using it here so they selected all these people out and they found that when they gave them sucros that the compensation of their microbiome changed and they called it disbiosis and I'll I'll come back to that because that's a scary sounding word um first off what's interesting is if you're somebody that population that there selecting those are probably people who have been specifically trying to avoid them because if you're not even if you don't try to consume them they're everywhere so if you haven't been consuming them it's likely that you're specifically trying to avoid them which probably means that you have negative thoughts and beliefs around artificial sweeteners and again we've discussed the power of belief before I'm not saying it was a bad study because of that I'm just saying we have to be careful about how much we over interpret this research data are you saying that the the potential that those subjects had to believe that zero calorie sweeteners or lowc calorie sweeteners could be bad for the microbiome might have actually made their gut microbiome more dis biotic maybe I mean again we've talked about the power belief is very powerful now I have I have no way to support that right I'm just saying be careful before we overgeneralize plus it was a twoe study and just two weeks yes it was two weeks um now again two week is two weeks is enough time to show differences in the gut microbiome actually a few days is typically enough time and only for sucalo so Stevia no change there was another there was another sweetener that I think had a change it might have been sacran sacran and sucrose are the ones that seem to always show the biggest effects quote unquote and I don't know how often those are used in diet drinks these days I mean less and less I mean it's usually aspartame Stevia more in the kind of Wellness Health Fitness craft drinks sucrose is pretty ubiquitous in a lot of diet products and whatnot but I like like being frank my way protein powder with outward nutrition is sweetened with sucralose I mean it's it's a great sweetener um and so some people will take that as well of course he's going to defend sucrose because in his protein but if I thought it was really bad I would just use a different sweetener so what I will say as well is gut dysbiosis sounds bad but it simply means that the gut microbiome changed and I have several friends who are gut microbiome experts and they'll when we sit down and talk about this stuff they're like I mean their takeaway is yeah like 50 years we'll we'll probably have a really good idea of this stuff but right now we like we just know that certain things change it we don't really know like if it's a good change bad change um so I'll give an example in there was another study that did show a gut microbiome shift with sucralose and they showed some of the species of bacteria that were increased or decreased and one of the species that was increased I believe I'm going to butcher this so badly I think it was blodia ctis was was the name of it or at least how I tried to read it right because these are very like strange Latin words yeah the the names of bacteria are really difficult to to pronounce now what's interesting is this species of bacteria was associated with better metabolic Health lower risk of obesity um better insulin sensitivity and so I kind of walked away saying well couldn't you make the argument that sucos actually changed the gut microbiome for the better based on some of this data and so I'm not saying that what I'm saying is the following we don't really know if that change to the gut microbiome is a good change bad change or neutral we just know that it changes so if you want to avoid fine but if you're somebody who really struggles with moderating your intake and a sucralose is or an aspartame or whatever have you helps you moderate that intake then again you're shooting the alligator closest to the boat let's let's focus on the big stuff right and that's kind of where I land and again I I hold open that perhaps my mind will change and adjust but su's been around a long time the the other thing people bring up is canc they'll bring up cancer with artificial sweeteners and I'll give you an example why I'm not worried about this um first off you have to keep in mind the negativity bias in the news all right things that are negative are much more likely to get play than things that are positive okay think about how much you hear about this causes cancer this causes heart disease versus this protects against this this protects against this it's also safer to when the media warns people off things as opposed to to WS things because if they push people towards things there's more liability right push people away from things R rarely uh are they responsible for the opportunity cost there or the trade-off as you as you referred to it right so you hear a lot people are like oh man all these studies say that these cause cancer so again I'm going to give a shout out to consensus because it's a great AI tool that basically will give you like if you ask a question um and there's some filters that help with that it will give you kind of like this percentage of studies say yes this percentage say possibly and this percentage say no I've used it a little bit yeah it's a great tool and if you type in does aspartame cause cancer for example 80% say no and then like I think the split is like 13% say possibly and 7% say yes right but you would never know that from like listening to Social Media watching the news but I I want to point out one study in particular that did show an association of aspartame intake with cancer and it was from the neutri cohort I think that was out of France like 100,000 people and they looked at uh like people who didn't use it versus people who were like low moderate users and then people who were like high users they categorized them into tertiles and between the no non-users and the low moderate users there was like a I believe it was like a 15ish perc relative risk increase in cancer incidents and that's what got reported in the news and then that dropped to like a 6% increase risk in the High group so it did thish which I'm not aware of any carcinogens that they actually decrease in terms of the risk like can carcinogenesis as they go up in like the concentration and so to me you know one of the things you've got to realize my my PhD adviser used to say if you torture the data enough it will confess what you want it to say and so if you go through a large group of people and you start trying to associate things with other things you'll find things but you got to be very careful with how strongly you interpret it and so for me again if I'm if I'm feeling strongly about for me to feel strongly about something there has to be some kind of dose response or at least like if there's a bell curve sometimes you see that but you know very rarely especially with with cancer stuff usually this is kind of a linear effect and so again that's where I land right now on artificial sweeteners I I land on them as a a useful tool for a lot of people um I don't think they're magic I think they occupy that sweet taste for a lot of people and if you can completely avoid them and abstain from them and you're perfectly happy then by all means do that but if they help you maintain a healthy body weight then by all means do that love it you've dealt with some injuries you've dealt with pain you talked a little bit about how reducing your stress and interpretation of the pain could help I want to talk about pain and pain management but before we do that a more general question that relates is about recovery tools many many people want to know okay if we were to create the Pyramid of uh the hierarchy of tools for recovery after training and here let's change out or let's use resistance training and cardiovascular training inter interchangeably some people run hard other people lift hard or do do both from the moment that session ends what do you have in your in your kit of things to maximize recovery over the shortest possible amount of time and I can immediately think of sleep as critical but what are the things that you can do starting from that final repetition so I I think it's not so time dependent and like I said it's more about what you do over the course of 24 hours and you know in your day-to-day lifestyle but uh sleep as you said uh also your nutrition so being consistent with your nutrition and you don't have to get in you know Ultra fast digesting carbohydrate and you know 50 grams of wheight isolate right after you you know but it's it's probably a good idea within a couple hours of finishing your workout that you have you know a meal with high quality protein and that you're just eating an overall healthy diet throughout the course of a day and we've kind of discussed that at at at at length you could do it immediately after your workout yeah you can absolutely um quick I'm going to layer in an additional question is there any evidence that fruit is not good at replenishing glycogen as compared to starch because the reason I asked this is that um you know like if I finish a workout and I have some like a whey protein shake with a bunch of berries in it and a couple bananas assuming equal calories is that going to replenish glycogen the same way as if I have a couple scoops of whey protein and a bowl of oatmeal or rice this is going to circle back to our mechanism versus outcome and and this is one where I changed my mind because of seeing outcomes so the reason this comes up is you fructose your muscles and other tissues lack the enzyme to turn fructose into muscle glycogen your liver has that enzyme so your liver can take fructose and turn it into liver glycogen so that has led some people in sports uh science or or Arch to say well don't have fructose after a workout and actually fructose is kind of a a dead carbohydrate right because it's not going to replenish muscle glycogen and then I was reading a study from Tracy and Josh Anthony which were they came out of Layman's lab and they actually are responsible for really flushing out a lot of the intour pathway a lot of that translation initiation pathway very very brilliant people and I was glad I got to see them a few weeks ago when my adviser got his award Tracy personally taught me how to Western blot so thank you Tracy they did a study where they looked at glycogen replenishment after exercise giving either sucrose which is 50% glucose 50% fructose or pure glucose and actually if I recall correctly they actually got a little bit better muscle glycogen replenishment with sucrose now this how do you explain it that seems completely counterintuitive and there I believe again it's been some time since I read this paper but I believe the explanation was by providing some fructose what you're doing is you're kind of satiating the liver's need for glucose and so that glucose that does come in from sucrose can then kind of just bypass the liver and be available for muscle whereas if you're getting pure glucose the liver is going to start picking things off now it wasn't a if I recall correctly it wasn't a big difference in the rate of glycogen replenishment but um the other thing is people don't realize well even though fruit ose can't be used to replenish muscle glycogen directly you forget about how the body operates in terms of whole body metabolism and you can store fructose as glucose glycogen in the liver and then the liver can release that glycogen at some point into the bloodstream and then that can be taken up by the muscle and turned into muscle glycogen so again when it really boils down to us what are you doing on a 24-hour basis and and what I will say too is the rate of glycogen replenishment gets really tossed around a lot as something really important for the most part the rate isn't so important if you're eating enough total carbohydrate on a total daily basis and enough calories you'll replenish your muscle glycogen and most these people I always say dude you you're weight training for an hour you're going to do it again in 23 hours you got plenty of time to replenish that glycogen you don't need cyclic destrin or dextrose or whatever and so I'm not really worried about that I think where the rate of glycogen replenishment really matters is when you're dealing with athletes who have multiple events in a day right where it is they're going to perform and then they need to replenish quickly before they go to their next event or you know people obviously doing like endurance exercise where like Iron Man's triathlons and that sort of thing where you know getting in that replenishment and keeping it going is very important but I think for the average person who's just exercising once a day not really a big deal just make sure you're eating enough total carbohydrates so for you the berries and and the fruits in the in the Whey Protein afterwards excellent okay and then perhaps and then typically I'll do a meal that includes some starch a little bit later in the day y great so nutrition post-workout or in the hour or two post-workout making sure you eat enough in the following hours um do you include any kind of stress down regulation are you you are do you do anything else besides nutrition and sleep to accelerate recovery so Stress Management like you said so um I I am blessed enough that I currently live in a home on Tampa Bay and I get to watch the sunet over the water every night and that might say that might seem like a a weird thing but I really feel like that has helped with my stress level viewing Horizons we know puts you into panoramic Vision we know this from stuff my right your wheelous right here oh yeah panoramic vision is is a will you know come off the the accelerator of the of the uh sympathetic arm and the autonomic nervous system which is just nerd speak to say enjoy those sunrises and sunsets they are very calm I was uh talking to a friend of mine we're sitting out I said well you know Andrew would approve of the uh Sunset viewing he might not approve of the bourbon I'm having with it but you don't need my approval anyway yeah so whatever gets you just slow down a little bit you know and just decompress and feel better and so I mean another thing I'll do is I'll you know once the if I have the kids once I go to bed I'll go downstairs and I'll lay on the couch with my cat and I'll play a video game nice you know just relax decompress decompress you know things you enjoy yeah I think things you enjoy like obviously like you can't drink a 12-pack of beer and have that be conducive to to to that sort of thing but the other thing I will say is I think a lot of people focus too much especially with resistance training there's some evidence that being just overall active lifestyle like going out like I remember when I was first getting into lifting like back in the early 2000 guys like I go in and I lift and then I lay down the rest of the day right cuz I got to I got to I got to recover right I think the research actually suggests that you're better off like having kind of an overall active lifestyle you know that that yeah it's important to rest and recover but it's probably important to move your body throughout the day you know active active recovery does have some good data on it awesome earlier we were talking about protein actually several times we talked about protein and I neglected to ask a a question that is very timely because I just did an episode a solo episode of this podcast recently about skin health and appearance and I looked at the data on ingesting collagen could be from bone broth or other sources of collagen typically it's powdered collagens anywhere from five to 30 grams of collagen and I was kind of surprised at the results I also talked to some dermatologists basically the results say in these papers these metaal The Meta analysis I looked at and in speaking with dermatologists that the conclusion was that regular consumption of collagen on the order of anywhere from 5 to 30 gram per day with a little bit of vitamin C a couple hundred milligrams of vitamin C for whatever pathway related reason seemed to improve skin appearance fewer wrinkles reduction wrinkles more skin tautness appearance of moisture Etc these are subjective measures right I don't think they were caliper in the skin and looking at tensile strength and things like that but um people felt they look younger Etc and I was surprised really surprised because without making this too long a question or story a few years back there were some claims by not to be named individuals on Instagram saying well if you want to improve the function of your liver eat liver if you want to improve the function of your heart eat heart if you want and and you and I were just like no okay you're the nutrition biochemistry guy I'm the Neuroscience guy have a little bit of a background in cold physiology that I rarely talk about but in any case but you know physiology yeah I mean there is we both agree there's like zero evidence that ingesting a protein which of course is broken down into its amino acid constituents in the gut would somehow lead to selective shuttling of those amino acids from liver that you ingest to your liver that just is like a there's only one word for that it's like a crazy unsubstantiated claim and then some papers were sent my way which were in a different language and like I was trying to anyway zero minus one evidences I would say yeah and yet the whole notion that consuming collagen protein which Dr Gabrielle lion told me is actually a pretty low quality protein on the kind of protein quality scale it's like tendon and toenails and all this stuff gross but yeah that's what it is um somehow leads to improvements in actual collagen which is of course is a native protein of the body right so I went digging I just want to up before I get your your answer I went digging and I found again a not to beamed individual has this kind of wild story on the internet that ah well this is because um it's broken down into the dipeptides and tripeptides in the gut that somehow inform the body that there's an injury in the collagen and we have quote unquote breakdown of collagen AK injury I don't know breakdown of collagen and elastin in the skin all the time and then the body recognizes the presence of those dipeptides and tripeptides so little groups of twos or three peptides not just one and sends those selectively to the skin and so it's like once again it's like it makes sense as a mechanism if it were true but like I just had to like roll my eyes I was like oh no okay I'm going to pitch this over to Lane as I am right now so Lane take it away what's the story does ingesting collagen improve skin appearance and does it do we have any idea what the mechanism might be okay sorry for the long uh question folks but had to set the stage well first off I will never make somebody apologize for giving a long- winded Preamble right because you know how long I'm about to go well we're both scientists so I will tell you I actually like after I commented on that post I went and looked up some more research and I've actually changed my mind a little bit okay which which probably wouldn't surprise you that haven't completely changed my mind but I've shifted a little bit so first off my first thought was exactly what your thought was this is all getting broken down to constitutive amino acids it's not like you're taking collagen and just like putting it in the place you want it like just you know like that sort of thing so my and my skepticism was also because one of the highest quality protein metabolism Labs out there where Jordan tromlin is is is Luke vanloon Luke Van loon's lab is one of the best protein metabolism labs in um the world and they were publishing research back when I was in graduate school in fact I think Jordan and I were actually in graduate school at the same time so they did a study where they looked at after exercise giving either whey protein or collagen protein and they looked at sheld muscle protein synthesis and they looked at connective tissue protein synthesis right and they saw no difference between whey protein and collagen protein in connective tissue synthesis after exercise and so but by the way collagen did not stimulate muscle protein synthesis even like 25 grams I think it was which most protein sources even like plant protein sources will stimulate muscle protein synthesis at like 25 gr so so it's very low quality so it's low quality in terms of skill of muscle anybody who's telling you like you're like col is good for building muscle um I mean it's better than no amino acids but it's one of the worst you can get in terms of all protein sources so that study I I again since I know this lab I have a lot of trust of the data that comes out of there right and it was a well-designed study it was well executed study but then there's these meta analysis out there looking at skin looking at you know even like some were trying to make associations with uh nective tissue injuries and whatnot and again I'm always a little bit have the heebie jeebies when we we jump straight to we have an outcome but we don't know what the mechanism is right and then I started reading uh a review by Luke vanloon actually and was talking about like the so the collagen is um three Alpha helixes so if you think about DNA right it's it's a it's a double helix right so think about three helixes and an alpha Helix just refers to the way a protein is shaped and they are they have a very large amount of glycine so glycine is a non-essential amino acid and every third residue in collagen in the three Alpha helixes every third residue is a glycine molecule so 33% of collagen is glycine and then I want to say 10% is Proline and then another like 10 perish is hydroxyproline so Proline that's had a hydroxy molecule added to it and that's done apparently the the hydro nobody needs to know this but just for fun stuff uh the hydroxyproline helps stabilize the structure because of the hydrogen bonding with the hydroxy molecules which I found interesting so you have these three amino acids and amino acid derivatives that make up over half the amino acids in the collagen protein and well my next thing was well a lot of non-essential amino acids if you give them in the diet They Don't Really raise non-essential amino acids in the plasma because the gut liver extract a bunch of them glycine is different if you give there was a study looking at giving just one gram of pure Glycine and looking at the rise in plasma Glycine and it I think it went up like I think the the like native level of glycine in the plasma something like 250 micromolar and after giving a gram of it it went up to like 400 micromolar I'm I'm I'm giving my best estimate based on the graph I saw and so then I got thinking okay that's I guess possible if you have more Glycine and Proline I didn't look I didn't see the proline data but if you have more Glycine and Proline that's winding up in the plasma not that they're being directed to those tissues but since those tissues use so much of that amino acid perhaps it does help and then if you look at like whey protein versus collagen and the content of glycine and Proline I I think collagen has like three to 10 times the amount of glycine and proline in it compared to whey protein so am I ready to say collagen helps skin and connective tissue and what I'm not because I'm still you know this study looking at connective tissue synthesis doesn't show anything so the mechanism is incomplete but there is a plausible at least they've shown that glycine can go up in the plasma from taking it in and it is a big component of collagen so why aren't we just suggesting that people take glycine instead of collagen that well I think what they would say is like there's because you're getting hydroxyproline in the collagene in the collagen that you're taking that probably I don't know how much hydroxyproline is typically in the diet you know um but I would say again I am a little bit nervous about like a lot of these subjective measurements of skin appearance and skin tightness I mean I'm not saying faking data I'm just saying that data is easy to get wrong because it is subjective right it's less the the more B the more subjective things are the more bias you introduce so I hold open the idea that supplemental collagen could help with skin hair nails I'm not convinced by the data and I'm not going to tell people to spend their money on it just yet but I'm going to stop short of saying that I think it's BS uh and I I've actually changed my tune slightly on that uh from looking in this dat a little bit further thank you for that very thorough answer and very clear answer if nothing else it tells us that collagen protein is going to be least ideal for post-workout protein because of the fact that it's you know it lacks significant amounts of Lucine Etc so might be good might be good for skin um definitely not a great protein for dietary protein reasons no it's very very low in the branch amino acids like the lowest in lucing of any protein Source I'm aware of I think it's like 2% locing which is like most even like the worst plant-based sources of Lucine are like 6.5% Lucine so like the worst sources of protein in the diet are still like three times more Lucine than you get in collagen protein so in quality weight protein would be the highest Lucine avable be 11 12 133% yeah eggs whey protein eggs are going to be around 9% Lucine um you know beef chicken most your animal sources are around 8% and and then most of your plant sources are 8% and under great well Dr Lane Norton thank you for coming back here for the second time on the podcast I I must say it's a true pleasure to sit down with you and discuss training nutrition supplementation recovery pain management stress life advice uh and for so many reasons a you're a you know a serious scientist you know in our business of science um that that that really means something you're serious about the science and you're a light-hearted guy in the right context and you're but you're you're a serious scientist you you believe in the process and you provide the Nuance even though that might not be convenient to what what somebody wants or convenient to the discussion like by the way not convenient for me either I'd rather this stuff be so simple you know right sure sure you're like the rest of us and at the same time I I really appreciate it because we are now also colleagues in the public health public facing uh landscape social media it sometimes called but a lot of Landscapes podcast YouTube Etc and it's required it's needed uh that people like you exist and I will go so far to say that you know and I'm not alone in this right because I've talked about this with with Rogan and with Gabrielle lion Dr Gabriel Li excuse me and others you know in an ocean of noise some of which has validity right um but in an ocean of noise about nutrition and training and all these different things and how to evidence-based blank and science-based that uh you re really clearly are pure signal like you're you're going to take as much time and as much effort to communicate the real signal and you today have really defined for us for you what is real versus not real which versus a maybe and I just want people to hear that loud and clear because I think sometimes people pay attention to how spirited you are and they miss the fact that in that spirited nature and in the nuance and in the look we're both long-winded at times like I know because I know this for myself but I certainly know it for you that that's comes from a place of respect for the science and respect for your audience that is not being dismissive that's actually respect for them it would be disrespectful to just give them the answer they want or give them a quick answer with without the explanation so I just really want to extend like a a real voice of gratitude for you for what you did for us today just far too much to list off um it's all so valuable uh just so so valuable and also what you do on social media and the way you do it and look I also really love and respect your um your fighting spirit because you're fighting you're fighting for truth you're fighting for good and I also love the posts and the the pictures of your kids they're delightful and it's great to see that the balance in your life you've created so I could go on and on but I'm going to cut this short by just saying a a giant thank you for being the signal among all the noise well uh speak for yourself of being longwinded because I'm not but I honestly I I I appreciate that that means a lot to me um you know I I recognize how you know valuable your platform is and how many people want to be on it and the fact that I've been asked to come on again I really appreciate it and uh to be able to have the opportunity to disseminate this information and not just talk about the studies but talk about hey here's a here's a method of thinking here's a way to approach this stuff and I mean you kind of pointed out like I would love to be able to say yeah seed oils are bad like I'd love to give you that answer I can't I can't do it I can't make myself do it because I look at the evidence and I'm glad you said spirited I I do feel like I I do have some fighting Spirit but uh at the end of the day I I tell people you know you know I'm human I've got my own biases my own beliefs um and I like making money like anybody but I and I like to be right but at the end of the day I I want to help and I believe that if I continue to execute on that mission that you know Financial stuff will take care of itself and at the end of the day I just want to be want to be a net positive on the world so thank you for giving me that chance oh it's been a true pleasure and you're absolutely more than net positive on the world um and we'll just have to have you come back and uh talk to us again before long thank you so much anytime thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Lane Norton to learn more about his work please see the links in our show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please be sure to follow the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a fstar review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram Twitter now known as X threads Facebook and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlap with the contents of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the contents of the hubman Lab podcast again that's huberman lab on all social media platforms if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter letter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes what we call protocols which are brief 1 to three page PDFs that cover things such as neuroplasticity and learning dopamine optimization how to get better sleep things like deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol we have a protocol all about habit forming and much more to sign up again at completely zero cost you simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu function in the corner scroll down to newsletter and you provide your email I should point point out that we do not share your email with anybody thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Lane Norton and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]