Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 95 - Nutrition with Nuance (Breaking Down Fad Diets)

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

In this episode, Danny talks about everything related to nutrition! We tackle a wide range of fad diets with their pros and cons! From the ever so popular, “If It Fits Your Macros” diet, to going all in, protein style (AKA the Carnivore diet)!All training programs are on sale right now! Take advantage of this deal HERE!---Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING:Check out my programs and E-Books! Click HERE!I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE!Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!-----TIMESTAMPS:Routine Housekeeping Updates! 3:00Positives and Negatives of Different Diets 5:02Ketogenic Diet!  5:39If It Fits Your Macros, Tracking!  12:40Veganism!  16:29Carnivore!  21:01Intermittent Fasting!  25:08Support the Show.

Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I am your host, your one and only host, Danny Matranga here to talk to you about all things health and fitness. Today we're actually going to take a deep dive into fad diets. If you've been following the podcast for a while, you might remember the episode I did recently on training disciplines and trying to parse out what I liked about powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, bodybuilding, CrossFit, aerobic training, from what I don't like about each of those disciplines. Because one of the things that I think our space, that's the fitness and wellness space, as well as just kind of the world overall is lacking right now is nuance. And when I say nuance, I mean, I feel as though we are truly lacking the ability to look at

things in a less judgmental way and instead ask ourselves, we lack the ability to ask ourselves, what can I learn from this? What is good about this? What works here? What doesn't work here? Not painting things as black and white, not painting things in a polarized way, but instead saying, okay, keto's a thing. IIFYM's a thing. The vegan diet's a thing. The carnivore diet's a thing. Fasting's a thing. They're probably not going anywhere anytime soon. And while as a weight loss protocol, they don't entirely have a great track record of success, there are some things, some concepts, some principles that perhaps we can borrow from positively as well as negatively.

And I'm going to go through and try to talk through each one of those as respectfully as I can, because one of the things that I'm very much aware of is a lot of these nutritional protocols, diets, whatever you want to call them, are much more than just a way of eating for people. You know, we're at a place societally where I think people really want to belong. They want to be a part of something. And we can look at politics, you know, and I try to stay apolitical, but, you know, the amount of people that will believe something that is entirely untrue just so that they have something to believe in is crazy, right? And so just bear in mind that the human brain has a way of making sense of stuff. And so for some people where they're at nutritionally, you know, blaming carbohydrates as the reason they're overweight and seeing results with keto,

you know, that might be where they're at right now. And it might not be as far as nutritional science is concerned, the most complete picture, but you know, that's where people are at. So I'm hoping that this podcast is able to reach you, whether you're somebody who's a nutrition expert, or maybe you're somebody who's brand new to this, and you're considering using keto, fasting, veganism as a means to lose weight or to improve your health. And so I want to kind of break these down. But before we do, we're going to get into the obligatory dynamic dialogue podcast, housekeeping. So we are heading into April, which is insane. It is officially, we're officially past the one year mark of when the podcast was born. So happy birthday to the podcast.

We're also one year past the anniversary of when my county locked down, which was March 15th, 2021, or 2020, and now we're all the way to March 28th, almost into April. So a crazy wild year. But man, I'm kind of excited. I've got a bunch of clients on my schedule this week. I'm starting with a few new clients online. I do have, for anybody who's listening to the podcast, I do have two spots available for online coaching going into the month of April. If you're hearing this, this is now, you'll probably get this on Tuesday. If you want to apply Tuesday or Wednesday when you hear this, go for it. But I wouldn't apply on Thursday if you're hearing this late because those spots in all likelihood will be filled.

But do yourself a favor, go to the website, www.coachedaniematranga.com, check out the coaching portion and don't be afraid to apply. I work with people across a variety of different disciplines. The trainer who I just most recently enrolled in online coaching has been coaching for years, CSCS. Seems like a really awesome dude. We're going to hit a hypertrophy goal. And then another client who I recently enrolled is working out from home and has never trained

with weights before. So all across the spectrum, trained a bunch of people. So I know what I'm doing here. I'm very excited to work with people who want to put in the work. No crazy huge events going through a lot of changes in my personal life, which have pulled me away from the mentorship. A lot of you guys have asked about the mentorship, but that is still in the pipeline. I'm just working on it slowly because I want to do it right. And working through some of these changes, but very excited as to what the future is going to hold. A lot of good things coming from me that I think will help you guys with your health, your fitness, your wellness, your fitness business, if you were a coach. Very excited to continue with

that. So without further ado, guys, we are going to dive into this now. We are going to take a look at what I think are some of the positives, as well as some of the associative negatives with each one of these fad diets that I have selected. And I've selected five. Keto, if it fits your macros, vegan, carnivore, and fasting. What I'd like to do is highlight what I think the diets have brought that could be described as positive in the sense of population level nutritional dialogue. So we'll start with keto. One of the positives is to stick to the ketogenic diet. You probably need to eat a lot of vegetables. You will almost always have to reduce your intake of hyperpalatable, highly processed carbohydrate, which can lead to overeating, as well as insulin sensitivity from

eating too much refined carbohydrate like sugar, or I should say insulin insensitivity. Protein, particularly animal protein, is a central piece of most ketogenic diets. And so I think that increasing our dialogue in the areas of eating more vegetables, potentially eating more nutrient-dense animal protein sourced from good places, those are really good things. And I think that keto has, in a lot of ways, really moved us away from being overly demonizing of dietary fat, which is a positive. And to do the diet right, you have to eat a lot of vegetables, which for like pretty much everybody is a fucking good idea. Pardon my French. I shouldn't pardon my French. I cuss all the time on the podcast. What am I doing? Okay.

But let's take a deep dive here into what I believe are some of the net negatives. And I've been really hard on keto because I think, oh, here comes Scoop right next to me in the studio. I have been really hard on keto. And I think that a lot of it is the prevalence, right? I think of these quote unquote fad diets, it's far and away the most popular. It's the one that people turn to the most for weight loss. And one of the things that I don't like about the ketogenic diet in particular is that it really, you can hear his little squeaks, it really scares people away from carbohydrates and it really circumvents the narrative that is so important for anybody looking to lose weight, which is

calories in, calories out, SECO, energy balance, our management of our caloric environment. That's how every single one of the diets we're going to talk about today works. And a lot of the zealotry and passion that comes out of the ketogenic space is in its demonization of carbohydrates, which for many people, if you're selecting whole foods, carbohydrates that have not been processed like potatoes and grains and things like that, that's where we get a lot of our nutrition from. It's where we get carbohydrate for energy and exercise. Carbohydrate is not inherently fattening and it's not inherently unhealthy. But if you listen to some of the louder voices in the keto space, they'll have you believe that that is the entire reason that people gain weight. And so that is a really net negative here.

Even though we've got people eating lots of vegetables and maybe lots of protein, the ketogenic narrative has scared a lot of people away from carbohydrate. It's also reignited the entirely debunked insulin hypothesis of obesity. Kevin Hall did a, I believe it was a meta-analysis a long time ago, where they looked at metabolic war data from people who were eating at net energy balance, or I shouldn't say net energy balance, in a net energy deficit, two groups that had equated caloric intake with equated nitrogen consumption or protein consumption, which is really big. You want to look at that. And what they found was that the amount of muscle lost and the amount of weight lost was almost

identical in both groups. If I'm not mistaken, I believe the group that ate keto actually lost more dietary or had more protein in the urine, which is indicative of more muscle loss because we know carbohydrate is protein sparing. If you're on a ketogenic diet, you're not getting a lot of dietary carbohydrates. So the problem here is this insulin model of obesity, which is to say that, oh, if you have insulin present at any point in time, you can't lose weight because insulin is a storage hormone. It just doesn't hold up. And then the last piece that I really detest is because keto is a like super sexy marketing term and not ketogenic, keto, K-E-T-O, you'll see that on a lot of supplements. So the supplement industry and the diet industry love to piggyback on one another. And we'll talk more about this in a minute.

But like when not having gluten in everything was a big deal, if you remember the gluten free craze of about three to four years ago, you'll see water bottles that say gluten free. You'll see milk that says gluten free. And it's like, duh, this stuff doesn't have gluten. But marketers are very intelligent. They understand that if they put a label on something that says there's nothing, insert potentially negative harmful ingredient here, no blank in here. People go, oh, well, this must be healthier. And it's like, no, there's no gluten in any water and there's no gluten in any of your milk. But supplement labels will do stuff like this too,

where they'll say keto friendly. And it's like, well, if it doesn't have carbohydrates in it, it's probably keto friendly or even worse, the actual, uh, sale of keto genic supplements in the form of like keto salts, beta hydroxybutyrate things that supposedly, if you just take them, you immediately go into keto or they enhance your fat loss. And that stuff by and large is totally bullshit. So to circle the wagons, what we like about or what I think the ketogenic diet has contributed positively, more people are eating vegetables, more people are eating dietary protein, they're less afraid of dietary fat. What has keto contributed to the nutritional narrative that I think is a net negative? It's terrified a lot of people around

carbohydrate. It's by far the most popular diet right now. So a lot of this narrative is quite leaky. It's really spreading quite quickly. It's reignited the insulin hypothesis of obesity, and we have these keto supplements kind of running rampant. So the next approach we're going to look at is if it fits your macros, calorie tracking, the utilization of MyFitnessPal. I would call this less of a diet and more of a way of eating, but we'll start with the positives. So what I like about this diet, and in full transparency, I don't tell my clients we're doing if it fits your macros because there's a negative connotation with counting macros versus the actual phrase or diet of if it fits your macros, we'll break down the difference.

But essentially, we're giving people the ability to have freedom around food selection and saying, hey, taking a look at your activity level, taking a look at your fitness goals, this is about how many carbohydrates you'll need. This is about how much protein you'll need. This is about how much dietary fat you'll need. We'll keep protein pretty constant and we can adjust fat and carbohydrate based on eating preference. This gives people the largest amount of freedom around food. Now, in this framework, please select foods from an 80-20 spectrum of 80% of the foods you like coming from whole, minimally processed sources, and 20% coming from foods you enjoy. The goal here is to give your body a lot of nutrition and also give your mind and your

psychology a break from rigorous, rigid dieting. There are no hard and fast rules about the food you can and can't eat, right? But there's also an understanding that you'll try to select for nutrient-dense, whole, minimally processed food. That's what I try to do with my clients. That's what we talk a lot about during our coaching intake calls. This is what we talk a lot about during our weekly check-ins, constantly working on improving food selection so you have the freedom you need to not just reach your goals, but also to enjoy the way in which you go about it. Now, IIFYM is a movement. It's almost a subculture within counting calories that really, really exploded early on the bodybuilding.com forums as a way of losing weight without following what many people called the quote unquote bro dieting, which is quite awful. Bro dieting was basically eating

six to eight meals a day of, you know, you could eat chicken, turkey, tilapia. Those were like your proteins. You could eat white rice, brown rice, um, and like broccoli and green beans and asparagus. Like those were, that was like the bro diet. And you'd eat that eight times a day and you get shredded, you know, lots of small meals to boost your metabolism. And so IAFYM came out and said, no, as long as you hit your fucking macros, you're going to get your goal and you can eat whatever food you want, which is true with regards to body composition, because we know that calories in calories out is our primary driver there. However, again, and these are some of the net negatives I've already shared what I believe to be the net

positives, right? Um, I, I, F Y M as a subculture within the calorie counting culture kind of shifted the focus away from food quality and almost gamified. How can I hit my macros with some of the worst foods like ever? And a lot of YouTube videos came out like, Oh, hitting my macros, only eating fast food. Those type of videos were really big in the fitness blogging space when I was getting into personal training and watching personalities like Christian Guzman, Max Tuning. I don't even know if these guys are still making videos. I'm sure they are. I don't spend any time on fitness YouTube anymore because when you actually become educated about how fitness works, you go, wait a

minute, these guys don't really know shit about shit. They know like the basics, you know, they understand the fundamentals of how to manipulate their energy balance and energy intake to get themselves on stage or to perform or whatever. But you know, this isn't entirely helpful advice and it's not necessarily what somebody who's working with general population clients should be taking in most of the time. So that I didn't like, which was this shift away from food quality and a big focus on pretty much body composition exclusively with the IFYM. There's very little discussion about micronutrients. And I mean, like even some hardcore micronutrient or sorry, IFYM zealots will be like, you know, fuck it, just take greens, powder and a vitamin and you're good. And I think we know that nutrition has more dimensions than just macros. And while I do think of all the

diets we're going to talk about today, being aware of your calories and tracking your macronutrients is, in my opinion, the most balanced, the most effective and gives people the most freedom with the least rigidity. I am committed to giving you guys a nuanced take here. And I do think that the sub diet within counting your calories of vehement in your face, I FYM, eat whatever you want and have great body composition is kind of dumb. And I will say, I think that that has become proportionately smaller over the years. As many of the people who used to believe that myself included have matured, have under, have begun to understand the importance of selecting for nutritious food as often as possible. So that's really how we'll wrap up

IIFYM before we move on to what I believe will without a doubt be the most polarizing choice here, and that is veganism. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. A quote that I often say is, of all the diets, only one ends in ism. And if you go down a list of religions, you'll find that they almost all end in ism. Buddhism, Catholicism, right? Those "-isms often are clubs. They are often

communal groups. And I think that veganism is equal parts religion and equal parts a diet. And the positives that I like about veganism are it really promotes eating, of course, a lot of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. I love that. Two, it actually opens the dialogue, a very important dialogue, I think, quite frankly, about the role that our nutrition and our food selection plays on the planet and the environment. And I think that that is really, really important. I think we need to have an honest discussion about this and an honest discussion about the ways in which factory farming and our current agriculture and livestock practices are impacting the health of the planet. I don't think we can say, oh, well, look, veganism has some clear nutritional shortcomings. Therefore, there's absolutely no reason to talk about any of the

systemic impact of our food choice. Bullshit. These are very legitimate arguments, at least to be had. I'm not saying that there aren't, you know, there isn't a balance on both sides here, but I think that that's a very positive thing for us to discuss that has been, that has come out of veganism, making more ethical, more conscientious decisions around food. I love all that. Here are some of the knocks, in my opinion. I do find that it has become a little bit religious, if you will, in that when people take on a vegan diet, they often take on some of the other vegan behaviors. on some of the other vegan behaviors. Like, you know, I have noticed on the internet that the loudest voices in the nutrition space are vegan dieters and carnivore dieters. And we'll talk about that in a minute. And there are a lot of things said on the internet that are quite crass

by people, to me and to other folks in the nutrition space, about the vegan diet being superior and how if you don't follow it, you're a murderer and you're a killer. And, you know, I think, again, that shows that there is a lack of nuance in how we approach topics like nutrition. And I don't think that's the best long term. I'm not saying either, right, that all vegans are this way. That would be a pretty lazy blanket statement. Instead, what I'm saying is, of the people on the internet who I have had interactions with that have a dedication or an allegiance to a particular way of eating, vegans tend to be the most abrasive in my experience. Okay? That's all I'm saying. There are a few common micronutrient deficiencies. If you were to just be like, I've never tried eating a plant-based diet before, and I'm just going to start,

right? B12 is a very common one, as is iron. You can supplement with those. So I would certainly say that you can eat a vegan diet and be very nourished if you take the right supplements. But one problem that I think people will tend to find is getting adequate dietary protein from plant-based sources can be quite hard without eating a lot of associative carbohydrate, which can elevate your caloric intake. So to kind of circle the wagons here on veganism, it does seem like it is certainly a little bit more than just a diet, right? It encompasses kind of a greater narrative about how we're going to approach our food production, our treatment of animals, much more, which I think

is a net positive. Some of the net negatives are, I do think that many people like to virtue signal, quote unquote, and that's a term that gets thrown around, I think, a little bit too much. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to virtue signal, but I do think it's a term that gets thrown around, I think, a little bit too much. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to virtue signal. But I do think it's a little bit abrasive to put people down who are not following this style of eating without first trying to educate them in a concise, polite, and kind way. Which, and again, this is, again, purely from my experience, because I can only speak to this anecdotally. I doubt anybody's researched, you know, what dietary proponents are the most abrasive on the internet? Meta-analysis, right?

You're probably not going to find that. But I have found that of the people on the internet talking about their nutritional protocol, vegans are the most abrasive. Followed by the next diet we're going to talk about, which is the carnivore diet. And I'll say this, I have almost nothing positive to say about this diet because objectively and truthfully, I think it is quite fucking stupid. And like at its face, like for all the shit that I just gave vegans, and it wasn't really shit, I tried to be nuanced and polite there. Like part of me feels like the carnivore diet was exclusively born from like dudes sitting out front on their Traeger grill, firing up two tri-tips, arguing with vegans on Instagram and going,

oh, you hate these guys. I'm going to start my own diet. And all we're going to eat is meat. Like I really like deep down in my heart, believe that this diet is stupid. And I understand that it does have a positive impact on certain people's health compared to the standard way of eating. I think every single one of these diets, keto, if it fits your macros, vegan, carnivore, fasting, which we'll talk about in a second, probably all represent a better way of eating compared to the SAD diet. SAD is the standard American diet. That's about as bad as you can get. Very nutrient devoid, not a lot of fiber, not a lot of vegetables, a lot of processed

foods, very limited protein, you know, a lot of hyperpalatable foods. That's not the best. Can eating only animal products be net healthier than that? Quite possibly. Is getting dietary advice from Jordan Peterson like the best thing in the world? I don't fucking know. I'll be honest. I like Jordan Peterson. I think he's somewhat interesting. I think that he speaks to a section of the population that feels like they don't get, you know, a lot of love. You know, I think Jordan Peterson has a very niche audience. It just so happens that that's a lot of dudes. And here's another thing. Dudes love to eat meat. So if you say, hey, you can do this diet and you can only eat animal products, you'll probably

get kind of a cult following there. And it's been quite interesting to watch people go from, usually they start keto, to then being full-blown carnivore. And I struggle to find net positives here outside of the fact that it probably reduces some of the stigma around eating meat in our culture, because I do think you can eat meat in an ethical way if you get it from the right places. Some people would argue with that and they disagree with that, and I can totally respect that. But I do think that eating animal protein can be a part of a very nutritious diet. I think that a lot of animal

proteins have a lot of associative nutrition, not just the actual protein itself. But what I don't like is I literally feel, I can't get away from the fact that I feel like this was literally a diet that was invented with the spirit of being contrarian. Like that at its face right there. And yes, you can sell a lot of books. Yes, you can sell a lot of diets. But we've got an obesity crisis here in America that I think is quite reasonable to say. And I think it is quite reasonable to say.

One of the best ways we can combat this is by having people eat, or I should say encouraging people to eat vegetables and fruits that are low calorie, highly satiating, very nutritious, very high in fiber. And we've got a diet that's like, no, those will kill you. They're bad for you. And that's just not entirely true. And it's very devoid of nuance and context. And so I'm not a huge fan of that. And like I said, while I think the focus on protein is nice, I just can't think of almost any scenario outside of somebody having some incredibly sensitive issues with vegetables that I would recommend this diet.

So I'm not saying that we throw it out in its entirety, but I reserve the right to maintain my highly skeptical analysis of this diet. And at face value, I think that it is quite silly. And yes, I do believe that some people can do this diet very intelligently, be very healthy, very athletic, have a great physique. I don't think that most people can do that. And the last one we're going to talk about today is fasting. We will talk about intermittent fasting particularly because I think that that is the most common form of fasting dieting that people are doing. We have alternate day fasting. We have water fasting. We have prolonged fasting, right? We have protein sparing, modified fasting, which I've done with clients before.

But intermittent fasting, particularly with regards to weight loss, what I think this has done positively is it has kind of shifted our narrative away from you need to eat certain meals at certain times of the day because we said so. That's just not true. And I quite like that. I think it is a nutritional approach that works very well for people who are quite busy. If you are somebody who says, hey, in the morning, I have a cup of black coffee. And then I go, you know, get to work for like four or five hours, and then I have a nice lunch. And then I have a nice dinner. And then I go to bed, you know, that might work very well for you instead of feeling like you need to force

meals or eat when you're not hungry or work against your schedule, if you will, where there's a lot of friction. So that is a positive. Another thing that fasting has done is it has really opened a dialogue about how we can utilize food or breaks from food to, you know, potentially increase our health and longevity through things like reducing our insulin or increasing our insulin sensitivity. or increasing our insulin sensitivity. It's also opened the door for the discussion about autophagy, which is a very interesting thing that we're not going to dive too much into, but fasting and autophagy tend to get talked about in the same sentences. How much intermittent fasting allows for autophagy is still very much up for debate, but I think it's a very, very, I think there's a lot of net positives with regards to nutrition's

ability to influence our health that have come from the fasting discussion in particular. And so those are the positives. The negatives that I don't like, you have to be really, really careful with this if you've had a history of disordered eating, because I have found that this can just be a very slippery slope. And at its base, intermittent fasting is basically just skipping a couple of meals. It's not super magic. It's not going to sensitize you to carbohydrate so much that you're just like this insulin producing machine. And the minute carbohydrate enters your blood, you get an insulin response. You pull it

all out and you're just autophagizing your way to living forever. I don't think it does that. autophagizing your way to, you know, living forever. I don't think it does that. I do think of all of the diets here outside of counting your calories, it has the least restriction. I understand that the literal name of fasting, like the scientific way we would describe this is time-restricted feeding. That's the name for it. And it's like, did that guy just say time-restricted feeding is less restrictive than other diets? And I do actually believe that to be the case because, like I said, outside of counting calories, fasting doesn't technically tell you what you can and can't eat in the way that keto, vegan, and carnivore all do. So, you know, some net positives here from each of these. There's also some net negatives. And I think a lot of that is pervasive because of diet culture and the supplement industry's obsession with selling us stuff and trying to pigeonhole people into eating a certain way because you can sell them a book that'll say, oh, the keto cure, the carnivore cure,

you know, the vegan cure, the fasting way to live forever. All of this shit is out there and it's very pervasive. And if you actually look quite closely, you'll see that a lot of the books that kind of popularized these styles of eating weren't written by nutritional authorities. A lot of them were written by chiropractors. A lot of them were written by psychologists. A lot of them were written by medical doctors, people who have limited to no formal nutrition training, which isn't to say they couldn't become an expert on the side. If you know me, you know, I like Nassim Taleb's work. You know, I'm a big fan of quote unquote, putting skin in the game. And I think that we put a little bit too much stock into academia and intelligentsia's input into this crap, right? The, uh, for those of you who aren't familiar

with the term intelligentsia, I think it's just a Taleb term that he throws around. It's like a club, right? The members of the intelligentsia, like the academics, those in the ivory tower. I don't think that's the only way to learn. Do I think a lot of the people that write these books have found some pretty interesting stuff that's worth sharing? Absolutely. But I do think it's always important to take stock as to where people got the knowledge they got and ask yourself the honest question, do I believe that these people have my best

interest in mind or are they trying to sell me a diet book? So that's my two cents, guys. A little bit of a, hopefully a nuanced look at these diets, what they have contributed to the greater nutritional narrative. This isn't like my way of saying you should eat this way, you shouldn't eat this way. It's more of my look at, hey, let's take a objective, hopefully nuanced look at what these diets are contributing to the greater nutritional discourse as a whole. So if you guys enjoyed the episode, which I hope you do, do give me a follow on Instagram, leave me a five-star rating and review on iTunes, share this to your story, find a way to get it out there, help more people get a more nuanced look at nutrition. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Stay safe out there. I'm so done staying safe. That's so 2020. Get your shot, wear your mask,

whatever you got to do. Hopefully we're done staying safe and we're going to get back to staying and having a good time. So stay having a good time guys and we'll chat soon. you