FoundMyFitness - #005 Dr. Bruce Ames Talks CHORI-Bar Weight Loss

Episode Date: June 22, 2015

Dr. Bruce Ames Dr. Rhonda Patrick speaks with Dr. Bruce Ames, about a micronutrient- and fiber-dense nutrition bar (referred to as the CHORI bar) that was developed in the Ames laboratory. The bar was formulated to be moderate in calories (107 kcal/≈25 g bar), but nutrient dense, with a polyphenolic-rich matrix of fruit, walnuts, and non-alkali-processed dark chocolate, supplemental vitamins, minerals, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), a blend of insoluble and soluble fibers, protein, and glutamine. Most vitamins and minerals are present in amounts representing 10 to 50% of their corresponding recommended daily allowance (RDA) per bar; with the exceptions of vitamin D and vitamin C (both added above 50% RDA). The goal was not to meet the RDA in every case but to complement standard dietary intakes by consumption of 2 bars each day. People that ate the bar were told not to change their diets but just to eat the bars on top of their normal diet. Lean people that ate the CHORI bar twice a day were able to raise HDL, lower homocysteine, and raise glutathione in just two weeks. Overweight/obese people with low inflammation that ate the bar showed weight loss after 8 weeks, raised their HDL, lowered triglycerides and small LDL particles, and improved insulin sensitivity. Overweight/obese people that had high inflammation were able to lower their inflammation after 2 weeks of eating the bar and raise their HDL after 8 weeks. If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/choribar-weight-loss Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor

Hi, guys. The podcast you're about to listen to is actually a continuation of the previous conversation I had with Dr. Bruce Ames. I had to wait a short period of time before sending this out because it included details that weren't published yet and therefore weren't quite ready for the public. But we're good to go, so please enjoy this brief interview I did with Dr. Ames about the micronutrient and fiber-dense bar that has positive benefits in both lean and obese individuals. I'm going to interview my colleagues that published this data, so more to come very soon. So, Bruce, let's go back to the obese eating a terrible diet.

Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about that. Well, there are lots of papers showing that if you define worse as ratio of calories to essential micronutrients, the beasts are eating the worst diet in the country. Beasts are eating empty calories and not eating the greens and they don't eat much fish and all of that. And again, it tends to be the poor who don't know, and they're just eating carbohydrate. And it may be comfort food, but it's aging and much faster. And every possible disease that's been looked at is higher in the abyss. More cancer, more brain

decay, more heart disease, you name it, and if it's been looked at, it's higher in the And I think a lot of that's due to the fact that they're starving for vitamins and minerals. That makes sense. And so how, and I think this is an easy solution to it. We invented something called the Kori Bar about 10 years ago, Mark Shiginaga and I, just, he was an expert in the gut and I wanted to get vitamins and minerals into the poor. So we came up with this bar. The local USDA was making a fruit bar and we added vitamins to it and plant phenolics were in there and a fiber, the three kinds of fiber you need

to keep your gut healthy. And we've done 15 human clinical trials. Joyce McCann's running the project so she should really talk about all of this. But she just sent off a fantastic paper which shows that this cori bar, if you know what you're doing, the obese can lose weight. So I suspect it might affect satiety, that whether you're hungry or not, fiber is known to fill you up, and the obese are short of fiber. And I think it's going to make them feel good. So you're basically giving this, the cori bar, which has, you know, some vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids and fiber. Yeah, the fiber. We were trying to mimic the Mediterranean diet for the things that the aspects of it that people don't get.

Right. Yeah. And you're giving it to them on top of their terrible diet. They're just... Oh yeah, we just tell... They just eat what you're eating, but take two Corey bars a day on top. It's just a small bar. And it raises their HDL and lowers their LDL and improves their insulin resistant and improves their inflammation. It does all these wonderful biomarkers. We measure that are linked to heart disease or cancer things, all improved. Cancer we haven't really done yet, but all improved. So I think most of the world could do better with this thing. So really, it's a really interesting finding that you can give someone that's so metabolically unhealthy, just a bar with a good amount of micronutrients and fiber, and they can still eat their terrible diet, and yet you can

make improvements in, you know, these things that are known to cause cardiovascular. disease, things that are known to lead to cancer like inflammation. But your diet is so messed up because they're disabling a lot of the metabolism because they're not getting essential vitamins and minerals. Right. So basically you're providing them with precursors so that their metabolism can work and so that they can repair a lot of this damage that they've already done. Yeah, it takes time. If we give it to lean people who are mostly eating pretty good diets, We can raise everybody's HDL or practically everybody's.

So even people who think they're eating good diets are an optimum. Wow. And you can deconstruct it, leave out one item, and we know there are at least three different items in there that are important. And so Joyce McCann's running this project. And it's, I think this bar is like a super vitamin pill. So basically, if you're already, you know, metabolically healthy, healthy, you know, as measured by being lean, then you can do good things like raising your

HDL even higher quicker than the obese can. But the obese eventually can raise their HDL if they take these vitamins and minerals, suggesting that it, they have, first, the vitamins and minerals are probably going to, you know, repair all this damage to those, you know, energy requirements that are repairing the damage and then, you know, then you can move on to the other good things. And if they're inflate, see, when you're, uh, if you don't get your fiber and other important things for your gut, the gut, the more bacteria in your gut than cells in your body. And the gut barrier function is the cells have very tight junctions, so bacteria can't get into your bloodstream.

And if endotoxin, or it's also called lipopolisaccharide, is the outside of bacteria, get into the body, it rings all the alarm bells in the body. I'm invaded and that's, they're getting inflamed, and that takes over because the body has to deal with an invasion first before it can do anything else. And so that, so we can get obese people who are not all inflamed to lose weight, but if they're inflamed, you blunt all. But I think the Corriba will lower inflammation eventually, and so it's just a matter of, it doesn't help if people just drink sugary soft drinks and eat white bread or donuts. I mean, that's not a healthy diet. But we didn't tell them to change the diet.

We just put the curry bar on top. But eventually, they'll have to transition, and this may be a good way to do it, to a healthier diet. It may even be that once they start getting these vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids and fiber that their dietary patterns change just because they feel better just because they're realizing, you know, they like to feel good and it may even be as simple as their brain are, you know, brain functions a little different. I mean, you mentioned endotoxin.

I found this study that was very interesting where they injected people with endotoxin caused inflammation and it caused depressive symptoms. Yeah, no. And so, you know, you're talking about affecting brain function, cravings, things like that. may actually be that their dietary habits will change as a function of getting the right micronutrient so that the brain is right I was in Denmark for a meeting in early spring I think it was and Denmark's always raining or cloudy it's just terrible weather and or by California standards and there were three beautiful days where there wasn't a cloud in the sky it was just like

California. And every day they'd taken off most of their clothes and they were lying in the sun. Just everywhere, you saw all these half-naked bodies. And I queried a few Danes. How come? They said, well, we feel good when there's sun and we sunbathe. It's built into us because we get so little sun and they're getting the vitamin D. Serotonin. Serotonin makes you feel good. That's right. So that's, it makes perfect. sense that people would be out there laying in the sun. But the Cori Bar is very interesting and is it something that is going to be available to the public? Yeah, Joyce Buchan just got a beautiful paper out, a second paper on the Cori Bar,

which shows all these things. And, you know, statins is a $35 billion industry, but there's side effects. Most drugs are blunderbusses and there are some side effects. And nutrition is what's getting at the essence, and I don't think he expect a lot of side effects. So I think that's the way to go. So maybe the Corey Bar can replace statins. Well, we'll see. And end podcast. That's it for today.

Thank you for listening, guys. If you're interested in learning more about the Corey Bar, you can visit Bruce Ames.org. That's B-R-U-C-E-A-M-E-S.org. And if you haven't already, please also take a minute and go to my website, foundmyfitness.com, and sign up for my newsletter. I send out one email update every week or so, often containing exclusive content that is just for my newsletter subscribers. Thanks again, and I'll talk to you guys soon.