Barbell Shrugged - How to Detect B.S. in the Nutrition Industry w/ Dr. Layne Norton, Dr. Andy Galpin, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #484

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Layne Norton aka (biolayne) is an entrepreneur, physique coach, bodybuilder, and powerlifter from Tampa, Florida. He holds the world record for squat in the IPF 93 kg weight class.   Alongside his success as a competitor, Layne is also an esteemed scientist and doctor; having a Ph.D. in Nutritional Science.   Dr. Andy Galpin is the Director of Education: Andy is a tenured Professor in the Center for Sport Performance at CSU Fullerton. He was born and raised in beautiful Rochester, WA and is a die-hard Seahawks, Huskies, & Mariner fan. RIP Sonics. As a youth, Andy played every sport at his disposal, excelling at Football, Basketball, Baseball, and Track & Field. While not playing, he worked at grocery stores, gas stations, hay fields, blueberry farms, and in the road construction business. It was during this time he discovered Strength & Conditioning.    In today’s episode the crew discusses:   Why calories are king in losing fat and gaining muscle. How the fitness industry sells lies. Understanding science and not falling for marketing. Protein synthesis and how much you need to build muscle. How to improve behavior that leads to long term success. How science can improve on the basics and the future of lab experiments. And more…   Dr. Layne Norton on Instagram   Dr. Andy Galpin on Instagram   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Shadow Creative Studios - Save $200 + Free Consult to start you podcast using code” “Shrugged” at podcast.shadowstud.io   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   www.magbreakthrough.com/shrugged - use coupon code SHRUGGED10 to save up to 40%   http://onelink.to/fittogether - Brand New Fitness Social Media App Fittogether   Purchase our favorite Supplements here and use code “Shrugged” to save 20% on your order: https://bit.ly/2K2Qlq4    Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://bit.ly/3b6GZFj Save 5% using the coupon code “Shrugged”

Shrugged family, sit back and enjoy. Today we've got Lane Norton, Dr. Andy Galpin, your boy Doug Larson, Travis Mash, and myself. And we just lay it down for two whole hours. This is actually one of those shows where I sit on my computer because we're all in captivity still. And I just smile ear to ear because this is the coolest part about being a part of Barbell Shrugged is that every once in a while, Lane Norton and Andy Galpin get on a podcast with you

and we just get to talk about everything nutrition and all the BS that we see in the fitness industry, how you can detect it and the show's absolutely phenomenal. Next week, we've got the EMOM Aesthetics Bundle, the program. The original program has been flying off the shelves. We created a higher volume one plus some targeting programs to go along with it, arms and abs, abs and glutes, and then a conditioning e-book as well.

We're putting all five of those together into a bundle, the EMOM Aesthetics Bundle, using the code HYPERTROPHY. Next week, you're going to be able to save over $380. We're selling it for $97 in the launch price. I'm really stoked about it. On top of that, you're going to get two free bonuses. You're going to get barbell shredded nutrition so you can lose fat, gain muscle. It's an awesome online course to teach you everything you need to know about nutrition as well as the behavioral changes that go along with it for long-term success and a macro nutrient calculator so you can get a very personalized approach to how much you

should be eating, what type of macros, and how much of each macro you should be eating throughout the day. So that goes live on Monday and I'm really stoked about it because this has been really my training program for the last five months. And Doug and I ended up both doing this training program together without even talking about it. We just kind of backed ourselves into this methodology, which is super rad. Before we get rolling, I want to thank our sponsors, our boy Yannick over at Shadow Creative Studios. Make sure you get over to podcast.shadowstude.io. They're taking your podcast from an idea to live in two weeks.

Setup includes branding, logos, cover art, and more. Easy process. All you have to do is record and upload, and they're even helping you turn your show profitable on day one because you probably don't know how to make a show profitable if it is your first show. So having somebody help you connect with companies that are advertising as well as just thinking about like selling programs or what your core offer is as a business and why you're creating an actual podcast. And you can use the code shrugged for a free consultation and to get $200 off by going to podcast.shadowstude.io. We're also going to thank our friends over at Organifi. Being back home has been so nice because

I have all of my resources with me. When I was on the road, I brought some of the go packs with me, some of the greens, but now I've got the green, the red, the gold. I've actually got the pumpkin spice Organifi. It's just so rad to have all the vitamins and minerals. They taste delicious. This is like the biggest thing that makes me so happy when I have Organifi by my side is that the stuff just tastes delicious. Most of the green drinks that you're going to get taste like hot dirt. I know you've heard me say that on here, but it really tastes like somebody just picked up dirt and threw it into a drink. Organifi's are so delicious. I have three of them a day. I have the green in the morning, the red in the middle of the day, and gold at night. That is the sunrise to sunset and the shrugged stack is what I

like to call it. You can have it as well by going over to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. That is where you get the sunrise to sunset, saving 20% on the green, the red, and the gold, the juices to help boost your immune system, help make sure all of your digestive processes are working appropriately, efficiently, optimally, and you're going to save 20%. Get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrug. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to the show. I'm Anders Varner.

Doug Larson, top left. This is like the Brady bunch of smart-ish people that we're getting to here. Travis Bass, smartest man, strongest man in the world. Yeah, not smartest in this group. Lane Norton, Andy Galpin, all the way in the world. Yeah. Not smartest in this group. Lane Norton, Andy Galpin all the way at the bottom. Um, we are going to crack into, I want to hear about the carnivore things.

Uh, we, we basically just, uh, kind of took off tomorrow as, as prominent as we can be are interviewing Mark Bell on the show. He was, he's probably the biggest, loudest proponent that I've come across.

And you clearly disagree with some of the methodologies behind it. But I would love to know, anytime we have one of these things that takes over social media, there's always some sort of PhD out there that is telling us this is the way. And how can people with high degrees like this continually disagree on the fundamentals of nutrition? So I think we have to be clear. The first thing is the two guys who are really pushing this are MDs, not PhDs. One has a background, and one's MD is actually psychiatry. So not really internal. So that's an important thing to talk about. MDs don't get really, I want to be clear,

there are some really good MDs out there with nutrition, like Spencer Nadolsky is fabulous. Some of the barbell medicine guys are great. But MDs, unless they do like a fellowship or something specific, don't really get, some don't get any nutrition training. Some just get a semester. And like I always say, you know, I've got a doctor in front of my name. Does that mean I should be able to go in and do heart surgery on somebody? Absolutely not. You're talking about kind of the same thing.

I mean, nutrition kind of has been – you know, people kind of look at it like, oh, it's just nutrition. So in fact, that was so pervasive in graduate schools that they actually renamed a lot of departments to metabolism and metabolomics and that sort of stuff, because it sounded fancier. As funny as it is, that's 100% true. That's just nutrition is what that is. So people kind of go, oh, you did a PhD in nutrition. What did they teach you, the food guide pyramid? And I'm like, yes, of course. That's exactly what they taught us.

It was two days. The first day was they taught me how to read. The second day was like, here's the food guide pyramid. Now go parrot it. So when it comes to carnivore, I'm going to give you kind of my opinions and then kind of what I think the scientific data sort of says. And I want to be clear, there's no studies directly examining the carnivore diet. So I can't make a claim that, hey, we know for sure that this is bad because of X, Y, Z,

but we can make some inferences based on the data that's out there. I think the carnivore diet kind of popped up just in opposition to veganism, if I'm being honest. Like vegans should have themselves to blame that are like super pushy with veganism because I think it literally popped up from people who were like – can I curse on this? I was so ready for that F-bomb right there. Okay, good. That was the cliffhanger already. Fuck these vegans. I'm just going to eat meat because i like meat and

listen if you so here's the the issue and i actually did a podcast the other day with sebastian orum um where i was kind of talking about some of this stuff what tends to happen is people find a diet that they like for themselves that they find results with and then they retroactively do fuckery with the science in order to validate whatever they're already doing right so they so somebody for example loses weight on a low carb diet for whatever reason they like it it's easy for them to stick to it's not enough for that person to go hey i really like this way of eating and it helps me control my calories now we can't can't have that. It has to be, insulin's the devil. You can't possibly lose fat if you eat any carbohydrate whatsoever. And they've kind of got to create these mental

gymnastics to make it so that what they're doing is the best thing ever. And I think a lot of that pops out of, we want to feel validated in our ideas. And I remember I was like this as a young scientist going into grad school. And then I got crushed so many times over and over when I would go to look at studies. And when they said these magic words, calories equated in the study, and then you just see that that 99 of shit doesn't make any difference when they equate calories now there is some stuff that does make a difference i don't want to i don't want to make a false dichotomy here so when you look at the carnivore people what are some of the claims that come up they kind of say well i lost weight well no shit you basically don't eat anything

other than meat right like i mean you can overeat on, but it's going to be tough. I mean, that's going to be a lot of, even if you're eating a really fatty kind of meat, you know, that's pretty filling food. So it doesn't surprise me that people can lose weight. And especially people lose weight pretty rapidly because, I mean, you're essentially doing kind of a modified ketogenic diet. If you're eating fattier cuts of meat, you're going to lose and we see this in studies new the studies from kevin hall's lab where they do metabolic ward studies they see massive water loss within the first few days so i'll hear this two people say well i tried eating really low calories i didn't lose weight and i switched to carnivore or even keto and i lost all

this weight you lost a bunch of water like you lost a bunch of water in the first couple weeks. And then if you lost weight after that, it was probably fat. So the problem becomes is that, all right, if you ask me, can the carnivore diet be healthy, we kind of have to put it up in a hierarchy of stuff. So if that is the only diet that someone's able to stick to, for whatever reason, it trips their what I call the compliance algorithm, where everybody's different, right? Some people, they count calories that works for them. Other people, they do the keto diet, it works for them.

Other people do, you know, plant-based, it works for them. They're able to feel satiated, and they're able to be compliant. So for whatever reason, maybe for some people, it's the meat only diet, right? Well, if that's the only way that they're able to control their calories and they can lose weight on that, then they're probably healthier than them being overweight. Like I will say that much, right? Because if we look at the scientific studies, there was a meta-analysis done by Nd et al. 2014, and they looked at kind of isocaloric exchanges of carbohydrates and fats in various diets, and did it actually make a difference on health markers independent of weight loss? And what they found was basically 95 to 99%

of the health improvements were just completely due to the weight you lose. So when I see something like that, what that says to me is, hey, we can talk about micronutrients, and we can talk about all these other things. We can talk about meal timing. But at the end of the day, for most people, that's not why they fail a diet or why they're fat. They're fat and become obese because they just can't find something they can stick to. So let's start with what can we stick to? So bringing it back to the carnivore diet, if somebody says, hey, Lane, I tried everything. This is the only thing I can stick to. And they can sustain that. That's something they can make a lifestyle. Hey, I don't see how that's a lifestyle, but far be it for me to judge right i would argue that you know maybe throw some vegetables in if you can because that's good stuff now what's really interesting is when you look at the

carnivore people and especially guys like paul solidino um it's it's not enough for these guys to say i like this style of eating it's vegetables are bad for you and plants i so i was on a debate with him it blew my mind i actually probably looked like i was a little bit out of my depth because i was so shocked by what he said that i just didn't know how to respond to it and his kind of point was that uh yeah phytates from plants plants are basically slowly trying to poison us and it's their defense mechanism and i'm thinking they're doing a pretty fucking job then for millions of years and we still and people oh by the way people who eat more plants also live longer so now they'll pick out and they'll say well you know that's, that's healthy user bias, healthy user bias. Maybe if it was like one study or one meta-analysis, but when it's every single study, systematic review and meta-analysis

lines up, it's not a healthy user bias. That's just what the data says. So I feel like it's really interesting in that world too, because nobody's really coming at you and saying like, we need to eat a lot more organ meat. Like everybody really just wants to eat more cheese. Like that's really like, it's this heavy. It's like, well, we could pour cream cheese on this. Like, well, no, you still need vitamins and minerals. No, no, no, no. I would love it if they were like, look, I eat organ meat three times a day, but that never actually happens. It's always just kind of like a janky way to get around eating worse quality food. Well, I think that, again, I'm about as unjudgmental towards people's dietary choices as they come.

If somebody just likes eating a certain way, hey, cool. And I'm even so far as if somebody says, I know I eat like a pig. I don't mind being fat. Okay. I'm not going to try and talk you out of it. Right. Yeah. You can argue burden to the healthcare system and that kind of stuff, but all right, fine. Yeah. But you know, I'm, I'm, I'm raised that if you're, what you're doing doesn't bother me. I don't care. Now, when I'm going to come in is when you start doing mental gymnastics and doing fuckery with science in order to validate,

to make yourself feel smarter than everybody else. Then I'm going to come say something. So when it comes to the carnivore diet, can it be healthy? Maybe, you know, the kind of straw man argument that gets made from these people is, well, you know, if you stop eating fiber, is it going to kill you? Probably not tomorrow, probably not next week, not next month, probably not next year, but maybe, I mean, if you look at relative risk, you know,

if you look at avoidable causes of death in terms of heart disease and cancer, you know, fiber appears to have a protective effect on heart disease and cancer. Fiber appears to have a protective effect on heart disease and cancer. So what I would say is, hey, if you want to eat a primarily meat-based diet and throw some vegetables in on top of that, do I think it's the best thing in the world? Probably not because most times when you remove a bunch of foods out of your diet, you're actually doing yourself a disservice. But could it be relatively healthy? Sure, I think it could. But yeah, I just think these extreme diets, it's almost like a cult it creates. And it's very interesting. I've even seen like the political

ramifications now that you find, and people can disagree with me but i find that typically vegans tend to be more kind of liberal right carnivores more kind of right wing and you see it now with the comfort like even you know it so it bleeds into all these other things and it makes sense because left wing and right wingores, it's also like a religion. You can't talk sense to them, right? So it's just been very interesting to see these things develop. And for the most part, my favorite pastime is watching when vegans and carnivores get mad at each other and then just watch all the logical fallacies that start spewing forth.

That's usually – on Twitter, I'm just trying to line them up so that they all just start fighting with each other. Cause that's my, you know, cause I'm sick like that. I love to watch you just shred them in half. That's my, that's my past time. I literally spend Saturday sometime with a beer and just looking at your tweets and be like, Oh my God, Drew, come look at this. You wouldn't believe what Lane said. It's the best. Earlier you said that most of the health outcomes could be attributed simply to the weight loss regardless of the type of diet and the composition of the diet.

And then secondly, you said if you don't get fiber, there's a higher likelihood potentially that you could have heart disease and cancer. Were you – on the first concept, were you saying that mostly like the short-term health outcomes are attributed to the weight loss, but long-term you could have some other things to deal with. Is that what you meant there? Yeah. So this is where it's really difficult to pick some of this stuff apart because when you're looking at that, the data from the first meta-analysis I talked about, those are randomized control trials, right? Which by nature have to be a year usually at most. So what you can't do is you can't go, I think this thing causes cancer, so we're going to randomize this number of people to get this thing that we think causes cancer and this group of people to not get it.

You can do kind of shorter-term studies looking at like, okay, could we do lower fiber versus higher fiber? But you're mostly looking at surrogate markers and those kinds of stuff. And sometimes you just don't see things come up. So the unfortunate fact is that when it comes to getting high quality, really tightly controlled research, it's usually going to be really short term. And then when it comes to like large numbers of data that's over a long period of time, it's going to be epidemiology, which is where we're just looking at correlations. So that's why it's important if we're trying to pick apart, does something have validity versus something not having validity is one, okay, do we have pretty consistent correlations,

even when we control for confounding variables in epidemiology? So that's one thing. Then if we do randomized control trials, can we start to pick out some possible mechanisms and short-term things that we see start to change? And we can with fiber actually. So we can see that the gut microbiome becomes less healthy. Fiber also lowers, can lower blood cholesterol levels. It has, the satiating effect of fiber is actually kind of dicey if you look in the literature, but people who are more adherent to diet typically have higher levels of fiber. So what you see is you've got the epidemiology where you, okay, this appears to have a protective effect, and then you've got some randomized control trial data to support that that's pretty consistent.

So that's when we usually, and I'd like to hear Andy's opinion on this, that's where you start to feel relatively confident that we got something that we can build on. Yeah, you're going to have a hard time with any of these things. Well, you hear people say things like i don't understand how we got the moon 60 years ago but yet we don't even know what to eat and my answer is always it's way more complicated actually there are not very many variables up in space there's a whole lot down here when it comes to what people eat and so trying to tease out something like what did you? What supplement did you take over the course of your entire life? And what predicted how long you lived? There's too

many variables to account for. And so Elaine laid it out really well. We have this impasse, at least right now with our technology, where we simply can't make the jump from say one to three years to 50 years later. That spot in between is basically impossible until technology really, really changes. And so we have to use epidemiology and we have to use these, what we call shorter trials, even a year or two, it's still pretty short. And then you have to make your best guess.

So from there, you have to combine, and this is why, like Lane and I are certainly going to agree on things like what evidence means um but evidence doesn't necessarily come from one category epidemiology or randomized control trial molecular mechanism uh what do people in the world actually eat it's it's a combination so you're looking for stacks of points and so when something starts to stack up and really what's impressive is when you get it from multiple categories or types of evidence. And then that's kind of what Lane was just referring to, where you're like, all right, now we've got pretty tight correlations. We're seeing them from different labs. So different groups of scientists are seeing them. We're seeing them with

other variables unaccounted for or accounted for, and then you start to get a confidence. So you're never going to be able to be like, hey, this is 100% true, this is 100% false, but you just start moving the needle towards one end of that spectrum of truth, if you will, and you start to say, all right, I'm just pretty confident at this point this is what's happening. And that's certainly the case with fiber. If you looked across the breadth of fiber, you'd say, like, there's a pretty strong chance here that this is really good for your health.

Does that mean one person could take it? No, of course. But the evidence is pretty strong enough to where I'm like, all right, like you'd have to show me some pretty compelling evidence to not want it in your life. Yeah. So where's that? Yeah. So I think one of the things that's really important to touch on too, also trying to tease out single ingredients and single factors from impossible yeah so if we people who become overweight who have a high chance of mortality that sort of thing at a young age or at a younger age um it's you never you don't have these variables it's just one right it's it's they don't exercise they're a higher one, right? It's, it's, they don't exercise. They're higher risk of smoking. They're higher risk of alcohol consumption, lower mental health status.

They, they, they, they don't go outside as much. They don't eat as much fiber. They eat more fatty meats. Like all this stuff is intrinsically tied together, right? They eat more calories. And what I've found throughout the years, because, and again, I'll give you an example. When I got to grad school, I was kind of one of these people like high fructose corn syrup's the devil. It's the devil. It's, you know, this is why people are fat. And even calorie per calorie, it has to be more fattening because that was my bias. And then I remembered sitting down with my PhD advisor, Don Lehman, who always just, after being around Don for six years in the lab, whenever anybody makes a claim now, my immediate thought that goes through my head is, hmm, I wonder if that's bullshit. And that's my immediate first thought when anybody makes a claim from me making claims to him and him dismantling them.

So I said that to him. I said, you know, I think high fructose corn syrup is why we're obese. And he would always use these as teachable moments. And he said, well, I would like you to go out and find me a study where high fructose corn syrup produced fat gain independent of calories. And I was like, this would be easy. And then after about, you know, two weeks of looking, I was like, so there's nothing. And they were like, yes. And I said, well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but they lost the exact

same amount of fat. And oh, by the way, their health markers were exactly the same. So am I saying sugar is good? No, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is when we try to isolate health outcomes down to singular ingredients and become really... Biochemists do this. I'm a biochemist. That was my first degree. When I was a biochemist, I was extremely reductionist. Everything was trying to get everything down to one biochemical pathway that we could mess with to fix everything. That's just not how metabolism works. It like a symphony all the you can't just well the trumpets were out of tune and that's why no if the trumpets get out of tune everybody gets out of tune right because it's all together so i've just i've over the years and i think andy

will agree to be on this point too i've just seen so many things not work out when it comes to single ingredients, either fixing health or disrupting health. It's a, it's a overall, it's just an old, like an asshole exercise regularly, get enough sleep. Don't drink too much. Don't smoke and minimize your stress and if you do those six things you got 99 of it covered that would be my personal opinion based on the research i've seen and i'll say one more thing and i'll let andy uh weigh in is i also now i don't get excited over single studies anymore i i want to see it multiple times across various labs i've just seen way too many times something comes out and everybody throws their hands up and this is the latest, greatest thing. And it,

it fixes everything or it just, it's, it's the cause of everybody's problems. And then it never gets replicated and we forget about it. Can I ask you guys both, like, you know, the whole like sugar addicting thing, like, I already know the answer. I've seen you just murder people but where does that come from and like is there any validity whatsoever and like and there's a two-part question that's question one what constitutes something being a true addiction so that's the right questions travis so it that's the your second question is it's hard to even define what makes something addictive. I mean, it's basically a subjective opinion.

It's a little bit more easy to define like a physical addiction because obviously if you've got something like alcohol or heroin or cocaine where you have actual physical withdrawal symptoms, that's a little bit easier to define but when it comes to like psychological addiction and people say well put me on a stand it's cool so i think very little data suggests sugar in of itself is addictive. I think there is better data. I wouldn't say conclusive data, but better data to suggest that highly processed, hyperpalatable foods containing sugar, salt, and fats may have some form of um addiction addictive profile so and think about

when people say i'm addicted to sugar and then they tell you the foods that they can't stop eating they say things like cookies cakes you know that's that sort of stuff those have just as many if not more calories from fat than they do sugar sugar by itself is not that palatable go go just try to suck down some sucrose like it yeah it tastes sweet but it's not like you're not like oh wow give me some of that you know not until you melt the butter with it when you melt the butter with it so exciting a great example of that ah shit shit. How palatable is a plain baked potato? It's not very palatable.

It's very filling. But, you know, a couple servings of butter and some salt on that bad boy and now all of a sudden it tastes amazing. Sour cream. Keep going. Hot sauce. Cheese. Keep going.

Chili. Maybe a snake. I think, I don't know Andy's opinion on this, but I think he's probably going to agree that I think that I would be pretty confident in saying that we, that sugar is probably not addictive. I would be relatively confident in saying ultra processed

hyper palatable foods may have some psychological addictions for some people I mean where is habit the shit tastes good and I just want to keep doing it and I'm forming a habit like you know what I mean this is a really misunderstood point of physiology

I actually just put this up on I don't remember something like a week ago. But people don't understand how this habit is driven in terms of hunger. So you say, oh, I'm starving in the morning or I can't eat in the morning. Either way you go, you can change that shit in a week, less than a week. I guarantee it. So if you were like, oh, man, I'm never hungry in the morning. Okay, that can easily be fixed. And all of a sudden you'll start waking up by just changing

how you eat, right? You'll start growling and start changing. Lapsing will start changing. You'll start getting hungry or the opposite, right? Oh, I'm starving in the morning. Okay, great. Have a giant meal right before bed and then push your breakfast back by an hour, two hours. Do that over a couple of days, weeks. And all of a sudden you can go from having to eat at seven in the morning to not being hungry till noon. And that is not, has nothing to do really with your physiology changing that much with the exception of your, you being ramped up to anticipate hunger, right? And so patterns are very, very easy to change. So if you're used to Travis eating this meal all the time, if you're used to having cake this is so easy to do i actually challenge

people do this one so have dessert after breakfast and lunch every day for a week just whatever you want like something sweet every single day by day eight now we're talking this is the challenge right here as soon as you start making lunch on day eight you're gonna be like oh and all you haven start making lunch on day eight, you're going to be like, oh, and you haven't even ate lunch yet, and all you're going to be thinking about is dessert. Birthday cake. And it has nothing to do with the fact that all the sugar in there is addictive.

It has simply to do with the fact that you're patterning now like a taste comes to you every year, right? Because you can do the same thing with fat. You can do it with anything. It's not the sugar in it. And there's just no evidence to support that it's actually physically. Andy, how long did it take for people in your intermittent fasting study? I know you guys didn't get to finish it, but how long did it take before people started to actually have those

behavior patterns where it just became normal for them to not eat until 1 o'clock? I can't say. I know, but I can't tell you because we're not. It's part of the results. Gotcha. Oh, dang it. but I can't tell you because we're not. It's part of the results. Gotcha. But I can guess and then Andy can choose to

refute it or not. Usually I would say it's like a week or two. People kind of get in a rhythm. And it's so funny when you kind of look at these dietary zealots and how inflexible they would like metabolism to be,

when in reality, human metabolism, the reason you're here now, and not just from your descendants of humanity, but also every other species that came before you, the reason you're here is because you're incredibly adaptable and flexible. If you weren't, your species would have just died. Like if we were that, like if we, you know, people say, well, you know, insulin and carbs, and if they caused that much havoc to us, we would have died out a long time ago. Like it just, you're not that inflexible. And oh, by the way, why did the body develop all these elaborate systems to handle glucose and runoff glucose. If glucose was so awful, right? Yeah.

It seemed like the brain went through a whole lot of shit just to have something that's toxic, right? Yeah. There's, there's three macronutrients in the entire realm of known biological life. And yet we're not supposed to eat one of those three. Yeah.

Sounds good. Uh, Lane, did you see there was a new actually, i think this was in science um on nature but there was a new paper out on how we actually the i'd say the brain connection to sugar processing i haven't actually seen that no so oh man i didn't i'm going i'm diving here a little bit but effectively what they're trying to tease out is actually because people like to say this thing all uh it was dopamine related

right like you eat sugar and you get this dopamine thing yeah which is completely misinterpreted yeah and so what they showed is clearly that's not that's not what happens oh cool and they found it was something related to the gut where i think it was something like oh i did see this paper because they fed artificial sweeteners so so basically so basically the paper was in, it's in rodents. So, um, you know, let's, well, we'll just put, we'll pump the brakes a little bit, but the rat model is actually quite good for when it comes to particularly glucose and protein metabolism, rat model tends to get validated in humans. Um, and here, I'll just do a real quick disclaimer about animal research, because all my research was in animals. If you want highly controlled, if you want highly controlled research that is in humans, it's going to be low subject number and short. If you want high subject number

in humans, it's going to be, and you want it long, it's going to be very uncontrolled. If you want highly controlled over a long period of time, it's going to be very uncontrolled. If you want highly controlled over a long period of time, it's going to be in animals. That's how it works. So that's why I did mine in animals because I was more interested in kind of not proving but figuring out a mechanism is kind of why I did it. So what they did was they took these rats and they had – oh, no, sorry, it might have been mice.

They had them either self-select a artificially sweetened drink or a sugar drink. And they found that over 24 hours, the rodents almost exclusively went to the sugar sweetened drink. And so they thought, okay, you know, maybe there's, they can, you know, taste this sweetness somehow, taste the difference. And so they actually took, correct me if I'm wrong, Andy, they took mice that had knocked out the receptor for sweetness. And they found the rodents still exclusively drank from the actual glucose drink. And their hypothesis was there has to be some kind of glucose receptor in the gut that senses that and causes them to drink from that exclusively. So now what's funny

is I put this up to kind of also show why artificial sweeteners aren't going to make you hungry as support for that. And people said, well, doesn't this show that sugar is addictive? And it's like, no, they had two fucking choices. One provided calories and one didn't. And actually, animals are extremely intuitive. We actually saw this not in my research, but the person who came before me in Dr. Lehman's lab, her name was Tracy Anthony. She's at Rutgers now, a really highly respected professor in cancer research now, they actually showed that if you create an imbalance just in the amino acid profile, that the animals will stop eating because they don't want to create some kind of deficiency or toxicity. So animals are incredibly

intuitive when it comes to like knowing what to eat from, you know, humans are much messier because food is tied up in our entire gestalt, right? We've all formed opinions about how we eat. Whereas a rat doesn't give a fuck how he eats. He's just trying to get sustenance however he can, right? So what's really cool is they're not just drawn to this via taste. There has, there, the hypothesis is there must be some kind of glucose sensing element in the gut, which is pretty cool. We're going to take a step out of this phenomenal show to talk about our friends over at Bioptimizers.

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out of our store, which is super rad. I'm super excited. So make sure you get over to FitTogether. Download the app today. And that is how you are going to win. We'll get back to the show. Did I get that about right, Andy? Yes. And I'm looking up something right now because there was a follow-up to that. And I'm trying to remember exactly what they did.

But I'm going to have to come back to you. So you guys are going to have to change topics and talk about it. I don't know what else you want. Well, one thing I'm really interested in because, I mean, we interview a lot of people. And we always have to have, like, the digestion person on. You have to have somebody from this world on, the keto world. You have to bring the full picture

of what's going on in nutrition. And if I just called you every single Thursday to put out the next show next Wednesday, like we probably wouldn't have a full understanding of where everyone's at and how to decipher it and the options to get people where they want to go. Do you view a lot of that stuff when it comes to maybe like digestion? Because now we get into a lot of the nervous system and getting people parasympathetic and actually using the food

that they're eating. Is that all kind of like tier two stuff to you? Because if you ask those people, like macros are tier one or they're not tier one it's like we need to focus on digestion and then we can use even a fewer amount of calories to actually get amino acids into our muscles or they all have a story that kind of dis disputes what is tier one and what is actually needed oh yeah so i i think this is, I really do feel, I think Andy's probably the same way. I feel bad for the average person that doesn't kind of have a scientific background because it's really, what humans are really good at is when they speak to someone, we're really good at knowing if they know more than us. What we're really bad at doing is figuring out if two

people are more knowledgeable than us, which one is the more knowledgeable of the two. We're really bad at doing is figuring out if two people are more knowledgeable than us which one is the more knowledgeable of the two we're really bad at that so i think that's why people a lot of these people can create a lot of confusion and as a scientist i always come down i always go back to outcomes you can cherry pick studies you can show me okay well maybe this thing has a better effect on and i don't know andrews i'll be honest i don't know what the claims that some of those people were making as far as digestibility. But I mean, if you look at something like, I would take something like, okay, well, let's look at, you know, the proteins people are eating, you know, animal, you know, if we look at animal proteins or whey protein or whatever, I mean, digestibility is about 95 to 100% for a lot of these things. I mean, you're talking about 90,

it's usually the lowest in terms of bioavailability. So I would say, where's the evidence that what you're going to do is somehow going to increase that significantly, right? Like, I mean, maybe there's something that can, but I mean, if you're already at 90 to 95 bioavailability okay uh maybe you get three percent more amino acids going to the muscle but i've seen no evidence of that right so i like um one of my i like to relate things back to economics because i think it makes people more sense to some people one of my favorite uh economics people is thomas soul and he he said something to the effect of whenever somebody makes a claim, it should be what hard evidence do you have and compared to what, right? So that's a huge thing that people don't do.

Compared to what? Like that's something you should always ask when somebody is making a claim is compared to what, right? So he says, well, let me give you an example, Anders, of people mixing up tier one and tier two and confusing the public. I'm going to – I don't know the exact thing. It's not only just confusing the public. At times it's very confusing to me because I don't have time to sit there

and go to the research in the middle of a podcast and say, wait a second, that doesn't sound right. And I'm probably not the person to come at them because I like conversations and interesting ones. And I can't read all the research five times a week. Yeah. So, and like, I am, again, I want to, so I'll give this example. So, this is kind of more in line with the ketogenic diet. People say, well, when you're on a ketogenic diet, you burn so much more fat and you're burning all this fat. And they show studies where you burn a lot of fat. Like you're mostly using fatty acids as fuel. That is 100% correct. People conflate that with, oh, I'm burning a lot of fat. It means I'm going to lose a lot of fat. Those are not the same

outcomes. So fat loss and fat oxidation are actually different. Fat oxidation is part of the equation that leads to body fat loss, but it's only one part of the equation. So in the adipocyte, we're always storing and oxidizing fat at the same time. The balance of which is going to produce net fat gain or fat loss. So on a ketogenic diet, let's say you were in a surplus on a ketogenic diet. You're eating more calories than you were burning. Some keto people will tell you that you won't gain fat. Well, you're burning a lot of fat. You're also storing

a lot of fat because if we look at the scientific literature, we know that de novo lipogenesis, which is the conversion of carbohydrates to fats and adipose only accounts for about one to 2% of the fat you actually store. So carbohydrates for the most part, don't get stored as body fat. So now if you go, sorry, can you restate that in the exact same words that you just said, maybe one more time in case somebody didn't really hear that? Just literally say that exactly. So carbohydrates themselves as substrates are typically not stored as body fat. Only about one to 2% of the fat that winds up in your fat cells is from carbohydrate. Now, if we go to the extreme where we go super low on fat

and we take carbohydrates crazy high, we can start to change that. But for the most part, in a balanced normal diet or even a high-fat diet, most of what is stored is dietary fat. Now, carbohydrates act as a calorie cushion to make fats available for storage in adipose because when you eat carbohydrates, you will preferentially oxidize carbohydrates, which means fats can be preferentially stirred. But here's how the equation works. Let's take two diets completely equal in calories, and let's assume they're both in the calorie deficit. High-fat, low-carb diet, you're going to store a lot of fat,

you're going to burn a lot of fat. High-carb, low-fat diet, you're going to burn a lot of carbs, you're not going to burn much fat, you're also not going to store very much fat. The balance, which fat balance, whether you lose or gain fat, it's a little more complicated than this, but essentially is fat stored minus fat oxidized. That balance is determined by energy balance because we have 30 plus studies now where protein and calories are equated, but carbohydrates and fats are varied, and we see no difference in fat loss. If you want to get technical, there is a small, small, small favoritism towards a low-fat diet for fat loss.

But we're talking about grams of fat loss difference per day. It's not a practical difference. Certainly not above, you know, what would, certainly not more important than what one prefers in terms of diet and can adhere to. So Anders, getting back to your point, that's an example of somebody taking kind of a tier two thing, which is how much fat are you oxidizing? What are you using for fuel? I'm actually doing my, I don't know if you guys ever watch my What the Fitness videos. They're kind of like making fun of stuff in the fitness industry my video today is going to be about that lumen that i'm sure is popping up on everybody's social media about how you can breathe into it it tells you if you're burning fat or carbs i posted about it there

like two weeks ago it was great yeah so a lot of people got excited about it. Yeah, exactly. So that's example of conflating tier one with tier two, right? So what's really important, the most important is energy balance. But you know, I think my question really comes from like, look, there's there's really complex systems, right? And gut bacteria, like that's your gut biome. that could be like this super hot topic of like do you have enough digestive enzymes to to make everything work like that that's been a recent exciting topic and then you have like the nervous system like being parasympathetic enough so that you can actually digest food and and calm, rest, digest. This is really important. And if all of those things are important, how close are, I think a lot of the conversation where people start to maybe

put tier two things as tier one, because that's their main topic that they talk about in their lives. And that's where it gets really confusing for people. It's like, well, this expert over here that has some sort of degree and some sort of product, like they're telling me that I have to meditate five minutes after I work out, or I won't be parasympathetic enough to grow muscle. And I won't be able to digest food enough to get the proper, you know, in that message, it's maybe not be wrong, but it's probably the difference between it. I guess maybe my, after I'm speaking and thinking out loud with you is that the tier one and tier two, how far away is tier two really from the most important thing, which is the tier one macro

energy balance? Pretty damn far. That's what I'm, that's, that's, that's probably the, what I'm trying to get at the most. A lot of tier two people say it's really close and it's super important. But it's really far away. Pretty damn far. I think two things with that. What I'm saying isn't really sexy. It's hard to sell stuff with that, right?

It's exactly right. It's hard to sell. What's that, Travis? That's exactly right. That's the problem right there. I mean, you guys, as strength coaches, let's put it this way, right? Like, Travis, you've coached, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of really high-level athletes, right?

Yeah. When you're explaining your stuff, is it – are you always telling somebody, you've always got to do this this way, and this is the secret to getting – the first thing you tell them is you've got to work really hard and you've got to be really consistent, right? You've got to work really hard and you got to be really consistent right you got to do this thing over and over and get really good at it and that's it what works what works is pretty fucking boring to be honest yeah it's really boring in fact sometimes it's so boring that you actually have to kind of white lie to your athletes to spice things up just so they think they're getting

something special and they get more. Like that's a hundred percent, you know? So diet is the same way. It's very hard to sell. Well, you need to be consistent. Protein is important. Distribution of protein is probably important as well. And calories are important and make sure you get enough fiber and be consistent with that. I mean, that's not a whole lot of stuff with that. So I think that's the first thing, Anders. This is why these two dudes are my only two go. These are the only two dudes I've ever asked outside of my little circle.

When I have an athlete who I have questions about, I've only ever gone to these two gentlemen. I don't ever, and I will never, ever. So go to some expert. I've got these two dudes. This is why. The second point I would make is that gets back to, let's take the parasympathetic thing, right? And I haven't really looked into much of that, but I can, just based on logic, I think I can kind of dismantle this a little bit. That is kind of viewing, again, metabolism in the human body being extremely rigid and inflexible, right? You're not gonna be able to grow muscle very well if you're not

parasympathetic after you get done with your exercise. Do I think that maybe meditating after a straight training session could be good? Sure. But I think it's probably from the, the, the overall effect of de-stressing and allowing somebody to, you know, cause that's just healthy overall. But do I think it's from digestion? Again, it's kind of like, well, I like this. So now I'm going to do mental gymnastics to get to work. If that was the case, there are – Andy, how many athletes would you have growing muscle, college athletes, if they had to meditate afterwards? No, they'd get done with their workout. They don't even – we know this isn't true because we've seen –

and this is like when people say, oh, you can't lose fat doing this or you can't lose it doing that. We know that's bullshit because we've seen people do it every which way. That's exactly right. We've seen people do it every which way, right? Yes. It's the same thing with strength training. People say, well, you can't – like remember when –

and I'm not trying to hate on Westside, but remember when Westside was – everybody did Westside, right? And people started – I remember when I started kind of training with a more high-frequency style. I was squatting like four times a week getting ready for the action. People were like, you can't do that. You can't recover from that. There's no way you can do that.

Oh, wait, you won, huh? Yeah, I'm like, no. I'm not trying to say that what I did was necessarily better or the best thing that I could have done. What I'm saying is it's obvious that you can do that and still do well. You did it. Right. Exactly.

And a lot of it probably boils back to what makes sense for the individual based on their given circumstance and what they prefer. Right? Yeah. Right. Like when Wes, I would say, you can't do linear periodization. Ed Cohen's pretty good. I mean. Right. Exactly. in west i would say you can't do linear periodization uh ed co is pretty good i mean right exactly exactly now that we can go a little bit too far with that in in terms of selection

bias and and say well this person did this and they won this so that means that thing is the best thing to do well that's tough because then you're dealing with genetics and all that kind of stuff the argument could be made that maybe they outlier and xyz but i think and again nutrition is the same way travis andy i want you to weigh in on this and and maybe doug and anders too because you guys coach sometimes what's more important is just getting the athlete to enjoy what they're doing so they cut so they're excited about it they train hard because you can have the best programming in the world, but if somebody fucking hates their program. They're quitting.

Right, exactly. Or they're not going to be enthusiastic about their sessions. I remember when I was getting ready for IPF Worlds back in 2015, my coach was Ben Eskrow. And probably wasn't the most wise thing in the world to do. But I've been feeling really beat up in my squat sessions. I just didn't have a lot of confidence. I was kind of coming off an injury. And he said, you know what, we're going to go ahead. We're a week out for the meet. He's like, we're going to work up to a heavy single. We're going to go

like RPE nine and a half, you know, and I and and I ended up hitting six 40 in the gym and it was a grinder, but I also knew how good I am in competition compared to the gym and what that did for my confidence. Did it impact my recovery a little bit and all that kind of stuff? Sure. It wasn't ideal physiologically, maybe not, but what that did for my confidence, I knew going to Finland, I was going to set that world record. I had no doubt in my mind, you know? Well, argument can be made physiologically. That was a good thing then, because if now you're feeling confident, you have way less stress. So physiologically, I'd say pretty good. Exactly. So we cannot disconnect psychology from physiology. We try to do that so much, and that's why things need to be tailored to the individual

and not necessarily even physiologically, but just psychologically and what works for the person. It's all a balance. People can debunk keto or vegan. I only debunk because they make insane claims. Yeah, outrageous claims. Anybody that has ever said,

and I mean, I was on Rogan's podcast with my friend Dom D'Agostino. Yeah, I saw it. There was no argument because Dom's not making any crazy claims. He's like, yeah, calories are important. I like eating this way. And some people like it.

What's there to argue about that? What's there to argue about yeah my best friend is a vegan and like he started down the road of like oh you should do it it'll cure his cancer you know bigger penis all that stuff and i'm like bro i'm like and so i'm like i turned him on to you i'm like look i don't because're best friends. I don't want to argue with you. Just go read Lane's stuff. If you want to be vegan, I'm all for it. You know, you love animals.

I love animals. I'm still going to kill them and eat them because I love meat more than I love animals. You don't. You love the animal more. So, like, by all means, I love that you're convicted about it. Congrats. Awesome. But, like, daggone, don't make these claims of like, you know, like if you eat, you know,

if you're a vegan, you'll grow taller at 50. You won't. Go ahead, Eddie. Andrew, there's a thing you're bringing up, which kind of started us down this road. And you're like, wow, there's gut and there's all this other stuff. And what you're kind of getting at is like there's so many things to consider under the human umbrella or human performance um so one tip i have for that is understanding the concept of what we generally call the fallacy fallacy so your example of okay i meditate i need to meditate after i work out or else i can't digest my food, whatever. So that's the claim.

Well, that person's instruction, in other words, meditate post-exercise could be correct. It's simply that their claim of why it's working is wrong. And that's a really important distinction. So when someone like Lane jumps on Twitter and says, that's horseshit, your digestibility, and he can give you all the studies about the rate, he's not actually saying that the claim of meditating post-exercise isn't right he's simply saying that your explanation of why it's working how it's working is not correct and so you just need to be very careful where most of us uh the scientists on this field say is i don't really care what you're claiming in other words strabs like eat big eat whatever want. Just don't misrepresent the science. If you don't know how it's working, fine. If you say, hey, it feels like it makes me less stressed and that's probably a good thing. And I feel like it makes my stomach better. Totally great. Just don't either lie about

the science or misrepresent it or intentionally deceive us with that. And so the way to go around that is when you're looking for information with people or to getting information from people, just really pay attention to their identity. In other words, if this is coming from Meditation Sarah and she has Meditation Sarah products and everything is about her, the old saying of if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, of course, everything she sees, the answer will be meditation. If you go to Mobility Dave his answer everything will be mobility like and so i'm not saying these people are incorrect but you can go okay like all right why they're probably super into meditation is because this is really an important part of their life yeah hey cool well this person's really important to this and so again it doesn't make their claim invalid or anything like that but you can start to understand why they get really excited about this.

This is clearly something that they either have a business or just a really interesting personal thing with. So that's where you can understand like, oh, okay, like maybe this is not like everything has to do this thing, but maybe it's an important piece of my human performance. Lane, one thing you were talking about, about how it's, it just needs to be fun. I'm like 23 years into lifting weights right now. And sometimes with all of the programs that you can do and all of the ways that

you can get stronger and maybe in the first four years doing X program is better than Y program. But I have a hard time sometimes. And what's beautiful about the show is to be able to explain all the ways that we have gotten strong in the past and lifted weights in the past and currently still lift weights and why we do it. But the bottom line is you just got to go pick up some heavy stuff. And that part gets really difficult for, depending upon where you're at in your training journey or in your nutrition journey to say like eat a little bit less. Or hey, maybe you should just do this for like two more decades because the program you're on right now, if that's the most fun program, it's definitely the best one for you yeah if you're the most stoked to do travis's program

or doug's program like that's definitely the best program it's not maybe the one that was written in the magazine 15 years ago because that's why we all started doing those programs in the magazine because we looked at those monsters on the back pages we were like i need that and if i do that arm program i'm gonna look like Ronnie Coleman. Watch out gangsters. Here I come. And it never worked. So I had to keep looking and I'd keep lifting weights.

I still don't look like Ronnie Coleman. Picking on me. Hey, I gotta go. But I want to say something before I leave is that, uh, both of you have inspired me a lot, but I have to say,

Andy, like the whole, me going back to school for my PhD, the moment I met you in Memphis that day, I was, when I went home, I told my wife, I'm like,

I have to get my PhD. I want to be like Andy. So I just want to say thank you for inspiring me. You know, if I shoot myself, it's your fault, but, but, but thank you both very much

uh no hey i saw rock lifting yesterday you like that technique huh yeah how to jump and catch a barbell he's coming boys he's only got like 30 years ahead of him. Congratulations Rock. You already peaked. Now it just gets heavier. The part of me is like, what have I done? What have I done? If he grabs it the next time and he's like, now we know.

My three-year-old is all, when he grabs the bar, he's like, I'm like, bro, you're three. Alright. I'll see you guys later um one thing i really uh i kind of maybe and this is a tier two thing like it's it's in the pyramid of getting into non-exercise activity thermogenesis and i think that that if you know it kind of going off of my last comment of like what's the right program for losing fat and and things like is lifting weights really that important i've built an entire life out of lifting weights and i there's a piece of me when i think about my own calories in calories out how am i you know balancing energy i don't even think about working

out it's just what happens like there's no there's no day where i'm like oh that workout was really hard i should probably up my calories 250 because that was really strenuous i just i have a hard time getting myself to believe that story at all anymore. So I think when we look at energy balance, the methodologies that we have to use are not precise enough to be able to know exactly what we're, especially when we talk about something like this, like these guys, these wrist-worn devices. So shameless plug incoming, but we have designed a nutrition app called Carbon Diet Coach, which kind of gives customized nutrition recommendations based on somebody's goals and inputs and that kind of stuff,

and then adjust them based on how they're progressing. Well, people asked us, are you going to make it so that we can, you know, input our my man's, my man's. He's got it right there. My man's. I have it on my phone. So. It says renew now, though, which means you haven't bought it so

congratulations you've used a lot of storage on your phone great job where's the link on here where i hit hate mail you know what's great about our hate mail on my site and somebody says we have an option for i want to complain if they press it all that happens is a picture of me with sunglasses coming down saying um so we so on my fitness pal for example you can eat back your calories so if you have a hard workout if you put in how many calories you burn my fitness pal will move up your calorie targets so you eat them back that's a really terrible idea because, and we don't use it.

Great if you never use weight ever. A lot of our users have been like, why don't you do this? Because these wrist-worn devices overestimate energy expenditure by anywhere from 30 to 98%. So what you can probably be relatively confident of is, Anders,

is if your watch usually says that your workout burns 400 calories, if you had a workout where it says 600, you probably did burn more. You're just not going to know exactly how much more you burned. So what I tell people is just eat. Just eat and watch what happens with your weight. And if you don't lose enough, then lower your calories or up your activity. If you're losing enough and you're, you're going at the right pace, then don't make changes. If you're losing too fast, then up your calories a little bit, right?

Like your weight over the longterm. And we always, we encourage people to weigh in daily and our system will average their weights because you know that if you weigh in one day, you could be – and that's a totally normal fluctuation. So we take that into account. We estimate weekly averages. But if you're looking at your weekly average, your weight on a weekly average is going to mostly tell you what's happening with your energy expenditure. Because if you're basically eating the same amount of calories, if your weight starts going up and down, and again, not talking about fluid fluctuation,

but over the long term, if your weight's going up or down, then you know what's happening with your energy expenditure. But I agree with you. Don't like try to game it and be like, Oh, I think I burned an extra 217 calories. Like that's, you're going to drive yourself nuts with that sort of thing. So what I will tell people is if you want to be a little bit extra consistency with your expenditure, if you have a step tracker, try to make sure that, you know, just don't change anything, but just track your steps for a week and figure out what your daily average is and just try to hit that every day. Right. And if you need, and so what I'll tell people is, okay, if you get to the end of the day and you're short by a thousand

steps, maybe you need to go do some purposeful cardio. That's fine. You know, if you hit all those steps without having to do purposeful cardio, cool. Right. Yeah. I think like a lot of the thought process to me is really just the longer you go in anything the more you try and dial it into the pure essentials so that you're not just wasting your time spinning your wheels thinking you need to go and do every program known to man and you got to every accessory known to man and try every diet you go oh well that matches here that kind of lines up with that let's just get rid of all the junk and keep the essentials and now i've gotten

really to the point where it's like yo i just need to be in my garage hit it hard for 20 minutes and get the hell out of there because i'm going to keep all my muscle mass of the last two decades i'm gonna stay lean and if i don't eat like an asshole for the majority of the week, should be pretty good. But I want more than that. You know, so I think the, that you brought up a really good point with that. And that is one, you don't need to do, once you've built it, the amount you need to do to maintain it is ridiculously small like basically a couple sets a week of close to failure and you'll maintain your muscle like it doesn't take that much that's my favorite party trick for the instagram i haven't snatched in three months haha watch me snatch 225 done yeah

because it's just there and you brought up a great point about not wasting your time right can you imagine if every single diet tribe that tells you or, you know, fitness tribe that tells you all these things are important, if you did all of the things, you'd actually need 57 hours in the day to do them all, right? You got to meditate after your meal. You got to make sure you're standing up when you drink your water. You got to, like, you just wouldn't have time to do all this stuff. Yeah, totally. And again, it just boils

back to, there's a theory and it's called Occam's razor. And this is a little bit simplistic interpretation of that. The actual definition of Occam's razor is the theory, if all things are equal, the hypothesis that requires the least amount of assumptions is probably true. Plainly interpreted, it can be when all things are equal, the simplest hypothesis is probably true. So when you look at some of these sort of diatribes that kind of come up with these new ways of looking at things or what's important, and you look at it and you say, man, for that to be true, all this other stuff has to also be true, right?

Like for that to be, like, let's take the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity, which has been thoroughly debunked. But essentially the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity states that we don't get fat because we overeat. We overeat because we get fat. Because insulin from carbohydrates traps fat in fat cells, which makes the rest of the body sense that it's starving and we overeat in response, right? So that's kind of the crux of the theory. I might

have screwed up a little bit, but that's essentially what it is. Andy says I'm good. So every study that comes out that debunks this hypothesis, the low-card people just say, well, they didn't do this thing. Well, they just needed to do this. Well, they didn't match fiber. Well, they didn't do that. If your hypothesis requires so many things to be true, that even the last 30 studies have not been able to capture it, then it's probably likely that, like, let's say it is true, then it's a pretty flimsy hypothesis to begin with. It's not very robust, right?

So that's another thing to keep in mind is, like, how many assumptions, when somebody's making a claim to you, for theirs to be true, for their claim to be true, how many other assumptions does that require? Right? And again, when we can just use our eyeballs and look, and I think a lot of this boils down to as well as people don't, I'm going to kind of go off on a tangent, but you'll understand where I'm going with it. People don't appreciate the power of suggestion. And this is also why I don't believe single studies. And when I say that, I don't necessarily mean that I think people fabricated data. I think the power of suggestion, the power of placebo is so powerful, people cannot begin to understand how powerful it is. And I'll give you two studies that highlight

this. There was a study recently where they looked at caffeine intake and they gave, they had four groups. They either gave caffeine, told the athletes they gave them caffeine, gave caffeine, told them they didn't get caffeine, didn't give caffeine, told them they didn't get caffeine, and didn't give caffeine, told them they gave caffeine. Their performance was completely 100% dependent on what they told them. The people who were told they got caffeine, but didn't perform the same as the people who got caffeine. The people who got caffeine, but were told they didn't perform the same as those who didn't get it, were told they didn't get it. Now, people will misinterpret this as caffeine. That must mean caffeine doesn't work.

That's not true. It just means that your beliefs about what caffeine does are way more powerful than what it actually does. Does that make sense? So one more study to point out, this is actually an insanely cool study. I'm just going to use one thing they looked at because they looked at a bunch of stuff. But one of the things they looked at was the hunger hormone ghrelin. So they tested people and their polymorphisms on their genes for people to be either high ghrelin secretors or low ghrelin secretors based on their genetics. And then they randomized them and they told them one or the other, right? So you had people, again, same, who were high ghrelin genetics told they had high ghrelin genetics. High ghrelin genetics

told they had low ghrelin genetics. Low ghrelin genetics told they had high ghrelin genetics, and low ghrelin genetics told they had low ghrelin genetics. They found pretty much the same thing they found in the caffeine study. It didn't matter what their genetics were. It mattered what they told them. In fact, they saw people who had low ghrelin who got told they had high ghrelin. Their ghrelin levels actually went up. And that's not something where it's – when we say placebo, a lot of people get offended because they think what we're saying is they're making it up. But your mind is so powerful. We used to think that your mind was just separate from this bag of meat. And now we know that that is not the case. So just telling someone something

changes how things work. And we can't get past that. When people like, for example, I tried every other diet and the ketogenic diet worked, for example. They read all these articles about the ketogenic diet. They were fired up about the ketogenic diet worked, for example. They read all these articles about the ketogenic diet. They were fired up about the ketogenic diet. They already had the power of suggestion for that diet. And then they went and did it. And lo and behold, oh my God, it worked, right? So I do this with myself. I tell people, like a few months ago, my training was kind of going rough. And I've had times like this. And my wife goes, my wife is Australian. She's a savage.

She's like, well, have you ever thought that maybe you're just getting old? But actually said it's serious to me. And I just looked at her and I go, don't you nocebo me. Right? Because maybe that's true. Maybe I've hit my athletic peak already. But if I start believing that, then I've got no fucking chance, right? So the same thing works in reverse.

You can placebo yourself. And this is, again, it's an N of 1. But last year at Nationals, I had an all-time PR for my total. I got shit sleep the night before. Absolutely shit sleep the night before absolutely shit sleep and i know what the research about sleep and performance says right so i'm i'm like telling myself don't know cb yourself don't know it matters more what you believe right and i i said to myself for one day it's not going to matter it's more about what the cumulative effect is. And I have been caffeine free for a week.

I'm about to hit 600 milligrams of caffeine and I'm going to be good to go. And you know what? I didn't even feel fatigued when I got on the platform, right? But that's an example of how you can use placebo to your effect. And I'm sure for athletes, you need to placebo them, right? I placebo people I work with all the time. I do some stupid little adjustment to their nutrition that I know isn't going to physiologically make a difference, but I'll tell them this is going to work. This is going to get us over this

plateau. And lo and behold, probably 78% of the time it works. Now, if they ask me about it directly, I will tell them, yeah, I just placeboed you, right? But they usually don't ask because they don't care as long as it works, right? So what I'll tell people is like, when I say placebo, I'm not even saying that that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying, let's be honest about, you know, like, does it actually work, right? Is it actually better compared to what? So one more example, I injured

my back really badly in 2017 to the point where I couldn't even walk for several days. And I rehabbed it. I worked with Stu McGill. I did the big three. Stu McGill has recently come under some criticism from people who adopt the biopsychosocial model of pain. And people have asked me, hey, this is where, you know, if I was an influencer, I would have come up with my three easy steps to heal your back, you know, my ebook, download it for $9.99. Write that down, Doug. People is, hey, listen, I did this and I got better, but I have no way of knowing if that was the best thing I could have done. It might've actually been the second worst thing I could have done. I might've gotten better just by not doing anything.

You know what I mean? I don't know. I'm an N of one. I know I did these things and I got better. I don't know if it was the best thing to do. And I think that's how anecdote needs to be presented to people you know I and it just shows how crazy people are because people ask me about back pain I'm like dude I don't know yeah it's not like you can go back to that place and redo the injury in

the exact same way and then do a completely separate study on yourself you can't just like split test your life to find out which way is best but it's also really important to have stew mcgill in your corner because then you're like this guy's the wizard he knows everything there's no way that oh you want to talk to the smartest people in the world look at him um she's got birthday coming up up. Awesome. National Women's Day in Strength and Conditioning coming up June 28th. That's Galpin's birthday too. That's your birthday? That's my son's birthday.

No, no, no. His daughter. Well, your kid is born on June 28th, my son's birthday. Look at that. Maybe just National Strength and Conditioning Day. That's wild. That's wild. Hey, Luke, have I –

My kid totally freaking ruined me right there. I had an awesome point. She came in and galpin snipes the mic. Look at that. My kid's screaming. It's fine. I don't know if it came across yet, but I have basically a new approach to randomization in terms of all of our studies going forward to which I don't think I'll ever do it again. I see almost no futility in randomization for the vast majority of sports science studies. Say it again, Andy. I see almost no futility in randomization for sports science

studies. So you're saying you think everything needs to be randomized? Opposite. Oh, really? I'm a hundred percent for group selection. In other i see what you're saying for group selection in other words so you're going to do a study and you want to look at um if you're going to look at pharmaceuticals which drug works i know where you're going with this totally fine right but for this stuff it's like you think squatting this way works better you think we're going to do an eight-week training study right i'm so on board with what you're saying. I actually think randomization is a massive disservice because people in real life don't get randomized into what diet they do, what workout they do, et cetera, right? So if their belief is so powerful, none of that fucking shit matters until we equate for belief. And so let's put the groups and the groups that they

think works the best. So if we're both in groups and everyone thinks they're in the best possible one, if there is truly an effect of one being better, then we'll see it. If not, it'll wash out. And then what's the sports science? Like, why did it matter? It didn't because all that mattered was people chose one.

So I don't think I'm ever doing randomization ever again. I just fucking blew my mind right there. That's, I can't believe I never thought of that. That's brilliant. No, you're right. You're right. Stupid, right? It's totally useless.

It's more important to equate for belief than randomize. That's, yeah, I'd have to agree with you. And I think I'd probably have to agree with you. You're right. So I'll give you an example. Bill Campbell's lab's here in Tampa. Bill's a good friend of mine, a really good scientist. And he was going to do kind of a recovery diet study after contest prep, either a slow recovery or a quick recovery. My wife was going to participate in it. I'm like, well, you realize you might get put in the quick recovery group, which is where you're going to regain your weight a little bit quicker.

And she was like, oh, shit, I don't think I'd want to do that. And that's why I tell people when they say, why didn't you do more studies on bodybuilders i'm like do you realize how difficult it is to get even like advanced lifters to do your studies they don't want to do your study because they're going to look at your programs because by nature it has to be bland it has to be bland because you're trying to tease out one variable or two at most they're going to look at your programming as an athlete and go, this is trash. I can't do this. I'm going to get weak, right? Or in a dietary phase,

can you imagine like trying to look at protein intake and bodybuilders and be like, okay, well, you bodybuilders, we're going to put the low protein group and these bodybuilders, every single one of them bodybuilders is dropping out of that study immediately. So you get one of two issues, right? You get people who sign up that are either totally fine with both thing, or most likely they go, cool, I want to do this group. If I get in the other group, I'm dropping out. Yep. And then what you have in your groups,

you have now massively selection bias towards people who wanted that particular intervention and you have, you don't actually see what occurs is I think the only way around that is to, if you're doing a study design like this, right, where you here's we want to compare this to that intervention uh it doesn't work with maybe acute studies or other things it doesn't work but for most of them i think it should be hey here's reasonably reasonable belief these are equally effective which group do you like more there you go ahead i didn't say it as eloquently as you, Andy, but I kind of thought about that for like long-term dietary studies that people should be able to self-select what kind of diet they want to do,

because then you're going to have the compliance issue become much less of a factor rather than trying to force somebody into, you know, taking the Italian mom and telling her you're going on a low-carb diet. Good luck with that. And then what's the scientific criticism of those studies? Well, we don't know what they actually ate. They said they did it, right? And so this is when you can question the quality of food diet recalls.

Well, you don't have to do that as much if you're like, well, they picked. They're probably more likely to do the diet that they picked rather than the one we put them on. I agree. I think that's a really good insight. And it's interesting when you get people like me and Andy on here, or you get some other experts that we agree with, people like Bill Campbell and this sort of thing. I think what you guys, because Anders, you made the good point. It's hard to figure out who knows

what they're talking about. So if I could give the listeners a quick and dirty 30-second guide on how to know if somebody's completely full of shit. First off, do they have some kind of diet or training listed in their social media profile? If they do, then they are unable to think logically because their cognitive dissonance will not allow it, right? They have identified, like, if you think about how powerful this is, you go to Instagram,

you've got like four or five lines to tell people who you are, right? And you use one of those on keto or vegan, or like, that's part of your identity. That's part of your identity. You're not going to think logically. You're not going to, I mean, they did a study a while back where, um, this is with politics, but it applies to this other stuff too. They showed Republicans and Democrats, hard, hardliners, um, information that would either support or refute, uh the facts of their party. And they found that both were equal in just making them even more resolute in what they believed. It doesn't even matter if you show people facts. It matters what they believe. The old saying, people believe what they want. So that's one thing is if somebody's made that part of their identity, a training or a nutrition strategy, part of their

identity, you got to be really careful. Two, obviously if they're selling stuff that's related to that, you got to be very careful as well. Now that's not to say that people got to make money. I get that. I sell stuff. I want people's dollars, but you also notice I'm not selling any particular intervention either. And then three, if somebody uses words like best, worst, never, always, lots of superlatives, you can almost be sure that they're full of shit. Because if you listen to people who are really smart or people who are experts in the field, they very, very, very rarely make really strong statements. You hear like Andy and I talking, we're kind of like, well, you know, we think this thing is important, but we're not real sure. Like we have this kind of confidence. We're, we're kind of confident in this. We're really confident in that. That's not the way,

that's the way people who really know what they're talking about talk because they've gone through the full Dunning-Kruger curve, right? Like they've been at the peak of Mount Stupid and they've also been in the Valley of Despair where they felt like they knew nothing, which is about year two in grad school. And yeah, so that's, you know, I think one of my favorite quotes is from Bertrand Russell. He said that the problem with this world is only fools and zealots are sure of themselves, and wise people are filled with doubts. So I think just when you're following people online, if somebody's – like Andy said, if they're a hammer and everything's a nail, if you've always, like I've done a couple of memes that I'll probably put up in a few months of different doctors that are really, you know, nutritional zealots. And it's got a picture of one of them that says, if there is a question, the answer is keto. Or if there is a question, the answer is vegan, right?

So, again, just be very careful about who you listen to. If you, if you're listening, probably a large portion of this audience probably doesn't like me for what I'm about to say. If you're listening and you actually care about getting information and not just confirming what you already believe to be true, this is important stuff to hear. For the rest of you, there is no hope unless you can recognize your own cognitive bias one day. But hopefully, since you listen to a lot of smart people, you don't have that much cognitive bias or cognitive dissonance. Andy, didn't you put out something recently, like a big video on detecting BS in the fitness industry? I didn't actually watch that whole thing. What was the general theme there? I know, right? It's just totally offended.

I haven't watched. I'm not watching that. Just call them up. I was going to bring it. I was going to bring it on, do a whole show about it. A quarter of a penny so that you get your ad revenue on YouTube. No way. You actually texted me about this.

And I said, sure, Doug, I'd love to come on your show and talk all about it. And you said, great. I'll put, have Anders put in contact. Anders vetoed the whole thing. And Anders said, no, boring. Lane's going to come on here and crush it anyways. Yeah. I put a, a side cut, just a full group text. If you want to, if anyone out there looking to find a way to drive social media,

you want more likes and clicks, definitely follow how I put stuff up. I put an hour-long video on how to detect bullshit. That's going to get a lot of views. But yeah, I got a five-minute and a 55-minute version up there for some of the same stuff. It's everywhere, YouTube. Somewhere. But these people also aren't

they're not trying to deceive most of the time they maybe they are oh i think you're gonna get a hard no for us i got two hard no's on instant reactions but aren't they aren't they going down? They chose a thing. Call it keto. They got results first. It worked for them. Became easy. They created all the habits. Then they got good at it. And they got the social credit.

And then they created a product. And now it's their life. And they're just telling you the story. And if you were to go in a specific direction, they're not they're not lying they're trying to help people they're they're just choosing this tiny little arm in the bigger it would be you talk about identity that's a massive piece of it so jumping out of that identity and having the personal development to be able to step back and go, Whoa, I, I, I may not be as deep as some of the nutrition people, but I can, I bet I went 12 years deep, hardcore into the CrossFit thing. The first time I walked into a perform better, like summit was like, I was like, Oh my God, other people talk about fitness.

Holy shit. I have so much to learn. Where did all these people come from? No wonder Mike Boyle's always been right because I was an idiot. Like I just wasn't old enough and experienced enough. I just didn't know. And I feel like a lot of times that's, they're not trying to do harm. Some of them are, obviously, but most people are just connected to a story. So you make a really good point, and I think I know where you're going with it, Anders. So that's what we call kind of an echo chamber, right? So if you never pop up and look at the other side, then you can kind of get – it makes it easier to get entrenched, right? And especially when you do something and you say, wow, that worked.

Then you believe, again, it's not compared to what, right? It's, oh, that worked for me, so it must be the best thing. And hey, I'm guilty of this, right? I've had to check my own cognitive bias at certain times in my life. So the problem becomes when I think you cross over from you're just trying to help to when you're selling things or services or whatnot, and you refuse to acknowledge contrary data, that's a big one, or any contrary data, you just completely dismiss it. And you find some way to be dismissive towards it. Now we're all biased, right? Like I'm biased. I've got my own biases, a hundred percent. But I'll give you an example of something that

I've changed my mind on over the years that the way I presented it, I'll just tell the story real quick. So I'm a big fan of leucine, right? Like leucine was what my PhD thesis was on. It's my favorite amino acid. I spent a lot of time studying it. I used to recommend people supplement with branched amino acids, but I never did it from the perspective. I didn't recommend it necessarily. I never said, hey, this is going to make you jacked.

This is more important than protein. If you don't have this, you're leaving gains on the table. What I said was something of the following, some version of it. I think that this might help a little bit if you got everything else dialed in. And especially in this particular instance where we have this phenomenon called muscle full effect or protein synthetic refractoriness. It was something that we uncovered during my graduate school work. And there was some evidence that maybe branched amino acids could get you a little bit more. Now, years down the road, lots of research has come out and I go, eh, yeah, probably doesn't do anything, right? But I never pitched it as, hey, you need this, or this is the one secret, or this is

the one thing you've just been missing. So I think, and Andy can hopefully give his opinion, I think it's a lot of it's the way you present it, right? And if you're intellectually honest with it, and I'll give you one more example of that. I personally calorie cycle in terms of, I put more calories on days I have harder training sessions. And so people will come to me and they'll be like, oh, is that like, that's the best thing to do, right? I'm like, I don't know. I just like doing it. Like I, like my bias, my bias is from the late nineties, early two thousands bodybuilding magazines where nutrient timing was very much emphasized and you were supposed to have high carbohydrate, you know, a lot of food before

you went in and trained and that sort of stuff. The re the research studies, the randomized control trials just aren't that impressive when it comes to nutrient timing. Does it matter? It could matter a little bit and maybe we just can't pick it out because our methods aren't sensitive enough, but you can't say things like, Oh man, it's, it's, it's just as important as how much you're eating during the day. No, it's not. It's not, right? But I just like doing that because probably because that's how I got into the sport and grew up and that was my bias coming forward. But when I, I just tell people what I do and I say, I like this, but I would never tell you that you need to do it. And so that's the difference, right? If I had said, no, this is the best thing to do because

you need to make sure that your amino acids are high in your blood when you're going into train. Otherwise, you're not going to make as much gains as you possibly could. Now I've crossed over to where I am misrepresenting it only to validate my own personal preference. Yeah. I actually have a question about leucine, actually. Here's the backstory on it. Maybe eight or 10 years ago, I did a presentation. And as part of that, I was looking at the quote that you need a gram protein per pound of body weight. That's kind of a general recommendation.

But then also there's people that say that you don't have to get all of your protein from meat. You can get the vegan and vegetarian crowd. You can, you can use complimentary proteins, beans and rice or whatever else. And so from a, from a practical, practical standpoint, I looked at how many, how many calories and carbohydrates you would have to consume in order to actually get the equivalent of 200 grams of protein from beans and rice. And it was like just beans and rice just to get your protein handled.

It was some, you know, some large number. It was, it was three or three or 4,000 calories of just beans and rice just to get your protein handled. It was some, you know, some large number. It was, it was three or three or 4,000 calories of just beans and rice. Yeah. And you have barely any fat in your diet at that point, et cetera, et cetera. And so I took it further and I looked at the amino acid breakdown of, of steak versus beans and rice. And one of the, one of the key things that I saw there was that the, the amount of leucine that was present in the steak was about three times as high as the amount of leucine from the beans and rice granted

this is not like real resources me just googling around and finding numbers and piecing it together but since you said that you you dug into leucine pretty deep do you think is that is that a running theme throughout just the the general category of of um meat versus non-meat? Yeah. In general, you've got some random vegan proteins that are a little bit higher in leucine, like potato protein actually is pretty high in leucine. It's like 10%. Corn is actually a silly high, like 13%.

But for the most part, when you look at your standard proteins that are thought of as vegan proteins, like soy, pea, wheat, those sorts of things, they're generally anywhere from 25% to 50% lower in leucine compared to animal sources. So there is that. They're also a little bit less digestible, so you're not getting quite as many of the amino acids. And then the other thing to keep in mind is there was actually a really neat study that just came out recently. I'm not sure how much it actually means, but they equated for the amount of leucine and the amount of essential amino acids by combining different vegan protein sources, isolated vegan protein sources. so without carbohydrate, basically, compared to whey. And they also made sure that the PD-Cas was the same. And PD-Cas is kind of

an amino acid score that's also corrected for digestibility. So essentially, on paper, these proteins were the same in terms of quality. And they fed them, and they found that whey still elicited about a 20 to 30% greater rise in plasma amino acids compared to the vegan proteins. So now what does that mean? I think that if you're a vegan, you can get enough protein to maximize muscle building, but you're going to have to probably take an isolated supplement. Like you're going to have to take probably multiple, you know, shakes per day from vegan sources. It's just going to be really difficult to get enough from whole food for the reason that you talked about, Doug, because also just the calorie content from whole food, vegan protein sources. And that kind of like, you guys remember the strong man

that was in the, the game changers. One of the things i found completely disingenuous about this was they never showed his diet his diet has over 400 grams of protein per day in it and four protein shakes right but they kind of lead you to believe that oh he just ate a bunch of broccoli and got jacked right yeah and like 17 pounds of raffinose i mean that'd be amazing in your belly. Jesus. Goodbye, sweet gut bacteria having a party with fermentation. You'd have quite a bit of gas. When you put out a paper or when you put out an article debunking that, I hope you meditated like nine times in the middle of that to fully calm yourself down, the amount of frustration.

I did. Coming out of your pores actually i'll be honest i was giggling most of the time i was just like oh this is gonna piss off so many people it's gonna be great like i don't i don't set out to piss off people that's not like my goal but if it happens you know i'm to enjoy it along the way. You know, it's funny. I have a lot of academics actually who message me privately and are like, we fucking love you because you say everything we wish we could say and not get fired, you know. So I feel pretty good about that.

But it's just – it's very difficult. You know, it's – we're in the age of information, And so there's so much information available, but there's so much bad information available, you know? And like you said, Anders, I think one of the, the really difficult things is we just have trouble figuring out who to go to. Now, obviously I'd like to think that I, you know, like people like me and Andy know what we're talking about. But even then, I mean, you've got PhDs who have also made really stupid claims as well. I think one of the things to keep in mind is people also don't realize just because somebody is good in one science means fuck all for another one.

It really does. I mean, I have seen usually if a PhD, and this isn't always, but if a PhD is making a stupid, silly claim, they're usually outside their area of expertise, right? And like for me, like I'll tell you my area of expertise I consider is body composition, you know, protein and fat loss. Like that's my wheelhouse, baby. If you come in there, I feel very comfortable. I can hold my own with just about anybody. Right. But if you want to start talking about vitamin D metabolism, I'm going to be like, I, I'm going to head out. Cause I just don't know that much about that stuff. Like I know the basics, you know? Yeah. I don't like, I'm not going to have

a debate with somebody who's a vitamin D expert, but this is what you'll see is somebody will be, you know, a PhD in, you know, something kind of sort of related or what's more common is the doctors, MDs, they speak outside their area of expertise. But usually if you've got a PhD and he's in his or her wheelhouse, usually they don't make asinine claims, usually. But there are exceptions to that. It's one of the hardest things about this specific job and having the podcast is you get to talk to so many people that are so good at what they do in this one specific thing. And then somebody on Instagram sends me a message that's a very specific question i go

well i'm not the guy i may have talked to the guy that knows the thing but i'm definitely not the guy to give you the full 100 answer on that and you should i at the same time i'm telling them like you should buy my program like i don't know i'm not really like the best programmer i'm like the fun guy in the gym that wants to hang out and talk to everybody and facilitate cool conversations like i just like being you know like i probably know more than an overwhelming majority of the people but if you ran in the circle that we run in i don't know that much at all because everyone we talk to is so good at their specific thing so if you ask me a question, I'm like,

I know you think I know a lot, but that guy over there knows so much about your question that you just, you got to go. It's hard to feel like you're an expert at anything because it's like you end up talking to so many experts. Well, just to give you an example of how out of your depth you can get. So I had Andy on my podcast. It has not yet aired because we're just trying to get this damn podcast off the ground uh it's it's archived andy it will it will come out i promise wasn't that like a

over a year ago 2024 it was timeless it was time it was timeless trash so this goes i'm waiting to pick up those new six Instagram followers from that, and I didn't get it. Andy, this means that you don't listen to my podcast, by the way. But just to give you an idea, I consider myself very competent in exercise physiology. I don't consider myself an expert. And that was very apparent when I started discussing fiber type stuff with Andy. Cause I'm like, yeah, we learned this in grad school. And Andy's like, eh, it's probably wrong. And then we went into it and I'm like, oh shit, I had that wrong, you know, or we think it might be wrong. So it's like, you really got to be careful just if you're talking to somebody and like same thing

like i feel like i probably know more than the average person about the biopsychosocial model of pain based on what i've heard from other really smart people i typically don't feel comfortable discussing that right and if i do here are the words that come out of my mouth. First thing, I am not an expert in this and you should talk to an expert. When I've heard other experts talk about this, this is what I think they've said. And I think that it's so frowned upon now. People are so afraid to say, I don't know. That's the other thing. If you want to know somebody knows what they're talking about, they'll say the three magic words. I don't know. That's the other thing. If you want to know somebody knows what they're talking about, they'll say the three magic words.

I don't know. They'll say them. Like, because you just typically through a, and again, there are higher academics who say dumb shit. But having somebody having gone through higher academics gives me more confidence that they're probably not going to say dumb shit. Only from the perspective that for you to go through that full sort of course at some point, and usually repeatedly you get destroyed. Either when it's,

they're reviewing your papers or you're at my first academic conference I ever went to, you know, I was giving it like a 12 minute presentation. When I got done, there was a professor there. This is like 2008. I think I was second year in my, my PhD. And I got crushed by this guy. In fact, so bad that when I went and sat back down, my advisor was like, I'm actually kind of pissed because you're not supposed to do that to a grad student. Like you're not actually supposed to sit out there and beat on a grad student. You kind of make your point and walk off. But it was good for me because I was like, oh, boy, I didn't know as much as I thought I should.

And I need to really be able to back this up. And I didn't make big sweeping claims as much because I'm like, do I really know that? You know, so I think, you know, being able to say, I don't know, it's actually a beautiful thing. Like, and being wrong is a beautiful thing in science too, because if you were wrong, it means that you weren't doing the best thing ever, right? Like you weren't doing everything you possibly could. Think about it from this perspective, like for the lifters out there, if you're right about everything, then this is the best you can possibly get. It'd be good if you're wrong.

Like if you're wrong and you find out, it means you can get better. So being wrong is actually beautiful. Well, that gets into, I guess, kind of the, we can wrap after this, but like what else is there to learn in it if we have to just boil it down to the essentials of energy balance?

Like those two words, that sucks. Nobody wants that. Like in a way, like what are you studying in the lab that matters? Well, I think that there's, I think there's a lot of things to learn about compliance. I think that that's, that's where the science really needs to, to spend time in is, okay, what actually makes it so this person and their makeup keto click for them, or this person and their makeup, low fat click for them, or this person, their makeup, the calorie counting click for them. I think that's stuff that's really important to try and figure out because then we can start looking at people and say, Hey, maybe this would work better for you based on

your particular circumstance. Right. Um, and as far as energy balance goes yes we know a lot i don't want to say a lot of stuff but we know the the principles that that hold up everything but it'd still be cool knowing more is never a bad thing so like learning more like you talked about the gut microbiome right so we know very little about the gut microbiome by the way anybody who's selling gut microbiome. By the way, anybody who's selling gut microbiome products, just I'm going to put that, put this out there, big sweeping claim, probably full of shit. So you're telling me

that some YouTube guy sitting in his mom's basement figured out how to, how to tap the gut microbiome while all these researchers with the most like high tech cutting edge stuff haven't figured it out.

What if he's not in his mom's basement and he's in like Carl's bed with like, like SoCal vibe. That's awesome. Yeah. He's like trespassing and taking pictures at the same time. But they got microbiome. So let me just, I'll do this as an example, right? So people say, well, energy balance doesn't take into account the gut microbiome, so let me just, I'll do this as an example, right? So people say,

well, energy balance doesn't take into account the gut microbiome. But yes, it does. It actually does. Because if you are, like, let's say that something happened with the gut microbiome that caused people to be more prone to gain fat. It would do so by reducing energy expenditure, or maybe, and there's some evidence of this, that some people can extract more calories from say fiber than other people based on their gut microbiome, right? But that's still an energy input and output thing, right? Yes, so the problem is that energy input and output sounds very simple and in theory it is, but the actual practical input and output sounds very simple. And in theory it is, but the actual practical input and output is very complicated, which is why we say, we don't really know how

many calories you burn, right, Anders? So that technology will probably get better over time, one would hope, right? So that gives us more tools, right? But yes, I think that there's a lot more stuff to learn, but I think we've learned a lot of the stuff that we need in terms of the big stuff that we need to get things done. I think what we need to learn more of is strategies on how to implement that because just telling an obese person, hey, you should probably eat less and move more. Yeah, I'm sure they've never heard that before, right? Like thanks for the revelation, right? So I think looking into, okay, what are ways that we can implement that to their lifestyle

that they can adhere to that works for them? I think that's where the research really needs to go in terms of obesity, you know? And then there's a lot of still other specific diseases that may have, may gain value from us just understanding overall metabolism more. So I think that that's kind of where it goes, but it, you know, it's kind of like telling somebody who's poor, well, you should probably spend less than you make, right?

It's like, well, that's not just, and it's not just an income thing because it's a behavior thing too. It's a habit thing too, right? It's the same thing with food, right? You know, people who make plenty of money that their income is plenty high and they can't seem to get ahead in life, right? They've got poor spending habits.

Well, just telling them, hey, spend less money. It's pretty unhelpful, right? You got to go into actually where their habits and how this is occurring and figure out how to rewire some of that stuff. And I think that's where the? You got to go into actually where their habits and how this is occurring and figure out how to rewire some of that stuff. And I think that's where the research really needs to go in terms of obesity. How do we rewire those habits? Yeah. Well, and a lot of that probably gets out of the scope of a nutritionist very quickly because it's behavioral health. It's not really dialed into what you do. You know, and as I actually think

the best coaches in the world are actually just really intuitive people in terms of understanding what the individual is going to prefer and what they need, what they need at that time and what they need to hear. Like, do you really like, let's, let's take just real quick, like some NFL coaches or, or like baseball coaches with, with rare exceptions. Most of these guys are smart people, right. Who know what they're doing for the most part. There may be some exceptions. I'm sure there is, but sometimes they just know how to talk to players. They know what that player needs at a certain time, right? That is such a big part of being a coach. I always tell people, scientific studies are big blunt instruments. If you're waiting for a scientific study to tell you

how to coach somebody, you're going to just be waiting for the rest of your life. Coaching is an art form. And I think that coaches, good coaches are just really intuitive and understanding what an athlete needs less physiologically, but more psychologically at the time that they need it. I think that's probably what makes coaches great. Yeah. The athlete or that person needs to, you know, want to put in the work for the coach almost in a way and and i i often wonder when we talk about obesity and how you reach those people like how do you get into that in a way that demographic or make that much of a change and we don't really have to go into because that that's such a relationship thing to know somebody that well, or to,

to create the impact on that large of a problem. And there almost has to become some sort of figurehead that that's able to influence how many people it's a very, very challenging. Well, it's, it's tough. I mean, we,

we, we, there's a lot of stuff we don't know. So there's still a lot of stuff to uncover. And like I said, if I, I wish I would have done more, uh,

stuff in psychology and behavioral science now, um, knowing what I know now. Yeah. Um, dude, thanks for coming on. This is fantastic.

Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. Um, where can people find you? Sure. So I'm bio lane on all social media. Um, and then, uh, my website,olane.com and as i mentioned before we have so we my company offers uh one-on-one coaching as well as for people who can't afford one-on-one coaching we have our nutrition coaching app which is called

carbon diet coach which is available on ios and android and it's basically you know automated custom nutrition recommendations for nine dollars and 99 cents per month and it's basically automated custom nutrition recommendations for $9.99 per month and it's been killing it so far. So we're super excited about that. Go watch my videos. Go yell at me on Twitter. Go ask me some questions. I do enjoy interacting with people. So for those of you out there who may not know me, go look me up and if you follow me long enough i'll probably step on your bias and piss you off but i'll give you it'll be worth it it'll totally be worth it andy galvin how are we celebrating uh national women's strength conditioning day in a month yeah we're gonna have to plot man figure something out i might be in central oregon

middle of a desert off the grid but we'll see. What are you going to do up there? I'm going to go shoot very long-range guns and drive ATVs while my wife watches our children. Wow. That's a man right there. Speaking of which, download Andy Galpin's new e-book on being a dad. How to be husband of the year. Just leave your wife with the two toddlers that's awesome during birthday season wow there's a point zero zero zero percent chance i get away with that but i'm gonna keep that story in my head till the day all right big guns out of the desert let's go

yeah thanks uh would you like people to find you anywhere? No. I agree. I got too many followers. Doug Larson. I got too many followers. He's saturated. You can find me on Instagram

at Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we're Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. We will see you guys next week. That's a wrap, friends. EMOM Aesthetics Bundle coming to you next Monday.

We're going to have a show breaking down everything in it. Doug and I talk about how we both stumbled upon this program and methodology, why we love it so much, as well as how you can save over $380 for 97 bucks. You're going to get five programs, nutrition course, as well as a macronutrient calculator for the most personalized, badass program. It's been super fun. I love EMOM Aesthetics.

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