Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 513 - Kevin Bass - Calling Out Nutrition Gurus

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Kevin Bass is an MD/PhD student. He has a bachelor’s degrees in medical anthropology and biology from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a master’s degree in immunology. Kevin’s motivation stems from his experiences as a child. He had a bad brush with modern medicine when I was a child, which resulted in him becoming bitter and angry towards medicine and science. He has stated it’s strange to find himself where he is now —the exact opposite of where he would expect: in an MD/PhD program studying both medicine and science. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Bruh, Encima, what do you plan on having for dinner tonight, man? I'm going to have a center cut ribeye and a flat iron times two from Piedmontese. Wait, how many steaks is that? It's three steaks. Oh my gosh. Three steaks, two flat irons, one center cut ribeye. And the great thing about these steaks is that they have a decent amount of fat, but it's not so much that if you had three steaks, you're going to be,

you know, eating a massive amount of calories. So that's why it's called the diet steak. Yeah. So for myself, it's Friday. I'm like kind of, you know, a whole day or a whole week, I should say of like some pretty solid eating. Like I'm in on my game. So it's like today I just want to go like, I just want to go crazy on the big old steak. So I'm going to have a bovet. I know. And the funny thing is, it's like I'm still going to be 100% on my plan because that whole thing has 100 grams of protein. I think only like 16 grams of fat. So I'm going to have that, probably some potatoes. Just, oh, my gosh, I can't wait, dude.

I'm going to. So if you guys want to enjoy some of these amazing steaks, higher protein, less fat, which just means more jackedness, less fatness, head over to pbontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout. Enter promo code PowerProject for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Head over there right now. What up, PowerProject crew? This is Josh Settleage aka SettleGate here to introduce you to our next guest Kevin Bass. Kevin Bass is a PhD student. He has a bachelor's degree in medical anthropology and biology from the University of Texas Austin, as well as a master's degree in immunology. Kevin's motivation stems from his experiences as a child in which he had a bad brush with modern medicine that resulted in him becoming bitter and angry towards medicine and science. He has stated it's

strange to find himself where he is today, the exact opposite of what he would expect in a PhD program studying both medicine and science. Kevin states that he has two professional identities, one as a doctor and another as a scientist, while still being suspicious of both. Early on in his career, he believed nutrition would solve the world's problems. If only people could adopt the proper lifestyle, nutrition, and food system, they could prevent many diseases and solve many of modern society's problems. He would later come to understand that things were not just that simple. Addressing root causes can make a big impact, but so can clever solutions. On his website, he has what is famously known as the quack list, a list of popular health and nutrition experts who spread false, misinterpreted,

or non-evidence-supported claims about health and nutrition. And he's also currently debunking all the major health claims made by guests on the Joe Rogan experience. But that is a different story. Please enjoy this conversation with our next guest, Kevin Bass. And we are rolling. What? Yep. I'm not even ready yet.

Did you? But I think this, so Kevin is, he set the world record for giving us notes. I don't think any, really anyone else has been been this courteous. Yeah, that's amazing. I was so surprised about that, too, because I thought I wasn't sending you guys enough notes. I wanted to say that because I'm like, no, dude, you're overachieving right now. He wrote today's show. So take it away, Kevin. Did you get the script? Yes, we did. We actually got it. Yeah, we sure did.

Anyway, great to have you on the show. Thanks for flying out. I understand it was an ordeal and a half for you to get here, so appreciate your time. Thank you. 14-hour trip. Should have been four hours, but don't fly. Can I say don't fly that airplane? Yeah.

Yeah, don't fly United. I was going to think he was like a spirit or something united united well everybody talked to after this like before i even like mentioned united everybody was like uh yeah i've had the worst like worst experiences with united then i was like oh yeah i flew united so it sounds like it sounds pretty common i don't know i'm i am going to fly United again. I'm super excited to have you here on the show today. And I think whenever you have an opportunity to talk like longer format with people, it's a lot easier to get a better understanding of somebody. And I know that you're deep into the science, but you're also deep into what's practical. And I think that maybe when people see you on Twitter,

making certain statements, they might think that you're only into the science. They are only into like, what's already been researched and how it's been researched in this latest study and so forth. But what I see from you and just from following you a little bit more than just seeing a tweet, I'm like,

ah, okay. Once I get to know this guy, now I understand like his point of view, where he's coming from. You're speaking about the scientific literature. You're talking about some of the research that's happened in the past, some of the current research that's going on. And then you're out there really just from what I can see is, I guess, poking holes in people overstating what they think to be true or what they have adopted as a belief,

like the ketogenic diet is going to solve all your problems or that intermittent fasting or some sort of fasting is going to solve problems. Or even like sometimes we hear with keto that it could help with dementia and Alzheimer's, cancer, you know, all these different things. And what I like about what you're doing is, hey, you know what? Is this really true? Or are we starting to spread around some stuff that could potentially be dangerous? all these different things. And what I like about what you're doing is, Hey, you know what? Is this really true? Or are we starting to spread around some stuff that could potentially be dangerous?

Yeah, absolutely. I have a, I like to focus on the science a lot because science is, science can tell us with more confidence, what, what we actually know and we don't know. So if we can know with great

confidence that we know something, and if we can know, um, also what we don't know with great clarity, then we can very easily put that into practice. And so, um, if you know what the science is, then you can know for sure which things will definitely work and which things are less certain to work that you can potentially try but you aren't sure that they're going to work and whenever you overstate the science whenever you start saying you know things that we don't actually know then you get into a situation where you can be doing things that may not work. And what we know from the scientific literature, if you look at people who have plausible hypotheses, things that make a whole lot of sense,

and we've seen this over the last hundred years, but probably we could even go back thousands of years, back to bloodletting and humoral theory of disease, and there's so much we could even talk about from the history of medicine, all sorts of crazy ideas that everybody believed that everybody practiced for these thousands of years um we can see that most of the time the things that are very plausible that haven't yet been tested by science most of the time these things end up not being true because there's almost an infinite number of plausible things that

one can say about how the body works about how athletic performance works about how weight loss works about how health works there's almost an infinite number of plausible things that somebody can say so whenever you start so if you just take all of those things most of those things are not going to be true because health and the body is not infinite right it's actually very finite there's actually a limited number of things that can be true a huge number of things that could be true most of the things that could be true are not true so i like to focus on the science because um since most things are not likely to be true are unlikely to be true and we know that we know that empirically this isn't just me saying this this isn't just me like having rhetoric like plausible rhetoric we people have actually done

studies looked at the failure rate of different treatment interventions surgery a lot of times surgery uh people think search some surgeries work they actually don't work any better than placebo they've done uh they've done analyses of the things that look like they could be true in randomized controlled trials and found out pretty much systematically 80-90% or even more depending upon the paper that we're looking at they're not true. And that even goes for modern medical treatment as well. So if you look at things that we thought say 30 years ago we just assumed that they were true before we had what's called evidence-based medicine which mainly leans on randomized control trials to

to determine whether something's true or not which is the gold standard now which is what i mean whenever i say uh whether something's true or not whether it's true according to a randomized control trial we know it for sure from a randomized control trial if you look at the last um 30 or 40 years of medical treatment the analyses the randomized control trials that have been done on the medical treatments over the last 30 or 40 years the medical treatments that we took for granted that we thought were true up to say 40 or 50 percent in the analyses the papers that we have uh have been shown not to be effective so this is even modern medical treatment. So, and so then you ask yourself,

well, if some random person on like the internet is going to think something's true and doctors are missing it all the time too. Doctors are really well trained and you know, they, they know their science pretty well. Like what is the likelihood that people are going to randomly guess whether something's true, um, without, without randomized control trials.

So I focus on the science, focus on randomized control trials, because that's what we can actually lean on. You know, what are, what are some things that are maybe reasonable for us to say? Because, you know,

it's my understanding of just the world in general is that we don't know much, you know, that's kind of my general understanding is that it seems like the more that we research stuff, the more that we kick up things, the more dust and the more particles that get kicked up. And then we're like, I didn't even know these particles existed.

I didn't even know, like, it's more than just dirt that we kicked up. There's also other sediment in there. And you just, you'd learn a lot about how you don't really know a whole lot. So what are some things when it comes specifically to nutrition, what are some things that you feel that we can say with clarity and have a plausible hypothesis about? So this is one of the interesting things is you're right. We don't know much about nutrition at all. And there's only a few things that we really know really well, which is why people like to say things that are maybe things that we don't necessarily know and act as if we do know them because once they say those

things, everybody's very interested. Oh, we actually know this. And then you have some guys saying, Oh yes, we do know it. So we're going to go follow you.

The things that we know in nutrition are very, not very much, right? We know about calorie balance, right? We know that if you want to lose weight, you want to have negative calorie balance. We have some idea of a good idea, a pretty solid idea. Calorie balance, right? We know that if you want to lose weight, you want to have negative calorie balance.

We have some idea of, a good idea, a pretty solid idea. Let's pause that just for a second. What's a calorie? Do we know that? See, this is where I think we're fucked up. I don't think we know what a calorie is. Well, we know, as you know, we know what a calorie is from the experiments. You know, you put, you burn things.

I think there's like calorimeters, you burn things, you see how much energy that they release whenever you burn them. Right. And of course, probably my guess is what you're alluding to is like the way that they interact with the body is not the same as the way they interact in these. And maybe the way they interact in your body might be slightly different than mine. Sure. But we still have some sort of, it is our measure, I guess. Right.

Yeah. It's what we have to go off of. So I guess for the sake of the podcast, whenever we're talking about any of this shit, we're just talking about trying to get closer to the truth and we're not talking in absolutes necessarily. Yes. Yes. But yes, we, yes. Um, yes. But I do think that we should, if there are areas like for example, the calorie that you think that, you know, it's whatever, whatever, whatever anybody has any issues with, like, like we should, we can even just discuss it because I think that I do think that a lot of times when people say that we don't know anything, there's some people who say that we don't know anything a lot of times.

who say that we don't know anything a lot of times and then they point out things about any aspect of of human health calories is one of them and they say oh well we have this problem with it therefore maybe we don't know anything i think it is helpful sometimes to go into detail about um because i think that what you said is like super important and super true and it's also hard to understand like what a calorie even is and so that's a whole long discussion but it is a discussion i think that you can have and then you can come out at the end of it with something in your hand and you can say even though at the beginning uh we know that a calorie interacts with the body different than it does with the scientific instrument it still can be useful for this reason for this very solid reason that we come out with at the end.

So like, there's no reason to go around being stupid because we can at least have some information that we have some measure of energy that we expend and energy that we consume. Much like if I was to walk off the top of this building, while I can't say for certain, I can't say with 100% absolute truth that a tsunami doesn't happen or something weird doesn't happen. There's a buck and plate tectonics going on and the earth moves up towards me and I'm totally safe. But for the most part, we can just say, hey, if you fall off the top of this building, you're probably going to get hurt really bad and maybe even die. Yes.

and maybe even die yes but about but about calorie balance it is something that um it is the case that you must expend more energy than you um then you take in now what does it mean to take in energy and i think that's what you're getting at but and so we don't know as much about that we don't know how much of calories are actually always necessarily absorbed and how they're absorbed. Like, does it interact with your microbiome? They process it so you don't actually absorb those calories. And we don't know how often. And there's a lot of genetic differences and interpersonal differences between how people's energy expenditure will go up or not go up, depending on dieting or overeating. And that's a whole really interesting thing.

will go up or not go up depending on dieting or overeating um and that's a whole really interesting thing like some there's some like mouse studies where you actually deprive them of calories and they'll actually continue to to gain weight like they'll they'll down regulate feel that yeah seriously damn so so so we know that energy balance is real but the nuances i guess of it yeah the nuances are where we get start getting the grayer. So when we start saying in like black and white terms, Oh, energy balance is the only important thing we do actually need to talk about the nuances and those nuances will be a little bit more. Yeah. Uh, gray, gray also might be kind of small though. Right. I mean, like, so if we talk about like protein leveraging or we talk about fiber, um,

just maybe not being, uh, maybe fiber not being the equivalent of four calories per gram or something like that. It's it's it's still very minor in the grand scheme of things. We can assist people if we talk about getting a hold of the amount of energy that they consume every day. Right. Yeah. I mean, and it's a very practical thing, right? Because you can say, OK, calories in, calories out. And you guys do this all the time. I'm sure you guys are jacked. So you guys know how this works. Let's say you think that you expend 2,500 calories, right?

And maybe you're wrong, right? And you expend less than that or more than that. You can always adjust the calories. And eventually, you'll figure out what your actual calorie balance is. Whether or not you know what's determining that precisely. So you don't even yeah and which is where practical things come in yeah so okay what else like what other things are do you feel that we are sure of at this moment in time as far as nutrition is concerned protein

like protein and muscle muscle mass and probably i would say with i personally i'm confident and it may be the case that science is confident that protein is also going to improve your metabolic function as well. So it's going to like reduce your visceral fat, et cetera, that in addition to improving your muscle mass. So I think that protein is like one thing we know for sure. What's the upper end of protein? I think that's that's that's a question. Of course, you can go talk to like the international sports, whatever the organizations will tell you. sure how what's the upper end of protein i think that's that's that's a question and of course you can go talk to like the the international sports whatever the the organizations they'll tell you

one thing but like bodybuilders and people who are practical will sometimes swear that it's actually maybe even a little bit higher the the protein what protein is great and i i noticed like that more protein i add on beyond the recommendations like it it really works but yeah we do know that a lot like we do know that protein is King. Not one is not King, but training is King, but protein is. If you're going to eat something, maybe eating protein might be a wise choice because it might keep your overall energy intake modest.

So you can continue to be healthy, I guess. Yeah. And it's going to help you get jacked. Okay. All right. A question off of that is, uh, cause we'll probably come back to what we're talking about here.

But with that being said about like protein, what makes a quack on the quack list? Because like, for example, we're talking about protein right now and Ted on this list, Ted and humans all about this, right? Yeah.

Um, but he is also on your quack list. And I'm also curious, like what makes them a quack and then also you know when you look at what a lot of these individuals talk about is it that potentially they talk to black and white you know because we're talking a lot here about truth so are they stating certain things that in your opinion these are not absolute truths and they're stating them as truths is that why because i feel as if a lot of these people speak with nuance like they

can understand that okay this is my hypothesis on why maybe potentially like rob wolf our ancestors ate this way maybe this is a good idea but i haven't necessarily heard rob say that this is absolute fact like he talks about it and he was even on our podcast but he was also like you know this might not work for others. Right. So he understands that this is a hypothesis. So I'm just curious, like what makes some of these individuals quacks? So we can talk about, we can start with Ted Naiman.

So, well, the first thing that I want to emphasize is that that was, so there's like several versions of like the quack list. The first version was just, I love it. The first version was just me. Well, so I thought that there's a lot of really bad information on the internet and I was frustrated by it. And I thought that it would be a good idea to have like a list. I didn't think anybody would care that much, but I just thought. would be a good idea to have like a list i didn't think anybody would care that much but i just thought i didn't think people would care that much and then so i just like one day just started making a list and releasing it and then like everything blew up on twitter about this

i'm just picturing the affleck duck they actually like like actually like half a dozen people were emailing like the deans and faculty at my med school telling them how terrible i was and how they needed to kick me out of my med school what yes like a lot of like low like especially like a lot of the low carbers they were you know they were really upset oh wow they're trying to cancel you they were trying to cancel me wow yeah unfortunately like the unfortunately for them fortunately for me like my uh the administration was pretty cool and they were just like yeah um make sure you you tone it down and focus on people's statements so for the next versions of the quack list especially like the the recent one that i'm going to do now it's it's

more focused on specific statements to actually justify exactly but but what i will say like looking back um for especially in terms of the way and also the quack list has evolved in terms of how i think about things in order to for exactly the reasons that you're talking about i want to be fair and i want to make sure that every decision is transparent and justified by some sort of rationale so what is what are the rationale now and why would maybe some of Ted's stuff, uh, and we'd have to actually talk about some specific, uh,

Ted's of Ted's statements, but why would some of Ted's stuff be, uh, on the quote unquote quack list? And I, and he's not on the quack list right now. So he, on the new version right now,

he's not because the old version. Yeah. The old version. How do you get off the list? So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So the way the list, the way the list works now. And so the old version was just my intuitions, and I could defend those in those terms, but the way the list works now, and probably some of his statements would qualify. And so they would actually, but I just haven't had time to add those. But the way it works now is just what you guys have been saying. to add those but the way it works now is just what you guys have been saying um if if so my criterion for truth or my criterion for saying we know something is true is a randomized control

trial on a well-conducted randomized control trial so a randomized control trial is um you basically just take a group of people and if you have two groups that you're comparing like one treatment that you're if you're looking at one treatment right you take two groups that you're comparing, like one treatment that you're, if you're looking at one treatment, right? You take two groups, you take one group of people, you randomly put some of the people in this group of people into one of two groups, right? You give one of those groups of those two groups, the treatment,

and then you give the other group a placebo, right? And a placebo is just like a sugar pill. And we use placebos because just giving people a treatment itself can actually cause them to think that they an effect is happening because the mind is very powerful yeah is it really a sugar pill or is it nothing uh because a sugar pill would not have yeah that don't make no sense this is a really good you're gonna end up on my quack list feeding people sugar pills this is a really good point that you're making, too, because you're joking. But actually, the choice of placebo, what you use as a placebo can radically impact the results.

So there's this randomized control trial in fish oil that was recently done called Reduce It. And for their placebo, they didn't give a sugar pill because they're giving people fish oil in the treatment group, right? So for the placebo, they're giving them not a sugar pill, but like an oil. So they want to give like fish oil, but're giving people fish oil in the treatment group right so for the placebo they're giving them not a sugar pill but like an oil so they want to give like fish oil but they give them mineral oil well the thing is is if you give people mineral oil who are taking like statins or maybe even just mineral oil in general it can actually reduce drug absorption of the statin so the people who got the mineral oil actually weren't weren't um absorbing their statins as well so they're so their heart disease risk went up so it made it made the the fish oil look better than it actually was because the

placebo actually hurt people's health so yeah i know that you're joking but like it is actually super important what placebo i mean it's an incredibly important thing like a lot of stuff has been written on this yeah uh so i don't i don't think you should i don't think you should change the way you are for other people because criticizing ideas is not as fun as criticizing people and so i think you should stick with you keeping that you know i understand i understand like you're shifting like you said you might shift to like just criticizing like something they said but i think it's i think like questioning the things that are brought up by dave asprey i think are great because i think it's i think like questioning the things that are brought up by dave asprey i think are great because i think somebody like dave asprey is

very forward thinking he does he's done a lot for the low carb in the keto community um the bulletproof coffee concept i think uh has some merit he's assisted people with like losing weight but can you poke holes in some of the things that he says yeah i'm sure you can and i'm sure that any of these guys that are on the quack list, whether it be me or my brother or whoever else is on it, I think I might have actually been on. Was I ever on the list? I think you were on like the first version. How did I get on? I want to be I want to stay on that list.

I want to stay on the top. What happened? How did I get off of it? Well, so the so nobody. So technically nobody's on the I know you're I know you're joking, but nobody's on the, the, the newest list yet. Cause there's like different. Yeah. Don't change it. Let's keep this thing rolling.

I would probably. Um, okay. I think it's good. I mean, a hundred percent serious. I think it's good to have people, even for myself to have a little bit of a bullseye on me because yeah, I do talk to a lot of people. And so if you bring something up and I'm like kind of second guessing it, I think that I should be second guessing.

Sure. Yeah. No, I, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just think that a lot of people took things personally and that was the issue. Of course, here's the issue. And I agree with you a hundred percent. So for that reason, like, even though I'm focusing on statements, they're going to be attached to specific people and specific people's freaking names are going to be on the list. And so even though specific people are going to be on the list, it is going to focus on the statements because that way nobody can tell me oh it's just your

opinion you're just defaming people you don't like that guy you don't like that guy so i have to i have to justify i think but yeah i think going hard at individual people for for for spreading like bs is like really it's it is a good thing putting people on a target because then they're like oh well people are saying bad bad things about me and if it's justifiable then maybe i should think about not not uh spreading misinformation for example like what you're talking about it's not necessarily saying anything bad about anyone it's it's more like you're just saying hey i think this is kind of foolish to share information in absolutes when we don't really know that for sure yes and it's just fun to call people quacks so so even though it is really about preventing misinformation it's also there's also a theater to it so you also want to have fun calling people quacks and people

saying this or that's bullshit but in the end it's nothing's personal i don't have any personal problems i do think some people have like something wrong with their brains like how can they like like behave the way that they do? But like example, something's got to come to mind. It's, it's a lot of people, like a lot of people. Oh man. Do you want me to give an example? Yes.

Oh gosh. We can't say people. Yeah. Okay. So like, so like, for example, okay. So let me, so now that we're talking about a specific person, let me tone that down a little bit. What's their name rhyme with? Mary Hobbs, you know?

Oh! Okay, Mary Hobbs. So how can this person, like, say, mean they just they're just like a repeating record they just keep saying the same thing over and over again and they don't whenever somebody says like they're never like they're never like oh well maybe i could be wrong but like um but like maybe there's this other way that it could be right and so we don't really know no this person's like an advocate for their ideas and they know that that's not how science works that's like activism that's like political activism why are you advocating for an idea you should be advocating for the facts like you should be advocating for what we know and then

just be honest with what we don't know and for whatever reason mary hobbs is not interested he's not interested in that approach to things and i guess it's not for whatever reason. The reason is probably in my opinion, this is my opinion. It's like his livelihood, her, her, her livelihood, her livelihood is, is determined by like how much press that their statements get and also their

sense of meaning. So he's been doing this for like, what, 20 years. So his sense of meaning, his sense of purpose, his sense of identity also, it been doing this for like what 20 years so his sense of meaning his sense of purpose his sense of identity also it's all wrapped up into that so that's probably one of the reasons why it's like whenever he says she says carbohydrate insulin model is is right she's almost saying that like i'm a good person right i've been advocating for this i'm a good

person so that that sense of identity and personal goodness is tied up in that yeah that's why it's like a human thing it's ego and power money that's why people do it what is this hypothesis this carb insulin hypothesis so here's the idea is like it's really basic so people taking carbohydrate they release insulin insulin causes um the carbohydrate and whatever other energy substrate to be put into, in the case of carbohydrate, mostly into muscle and to liver, and in the case of fat, into fat tissue. And so the idea is whenever you eat a lot of carbohydrates, it causes all the energy substrate in your blood to be put into all those tissues. You now no longer have any energy substrate in the blood. You now need more energy energy so you eat more food because you need more energy and then you put that into the to the liver and the muscle and

then into the fat so you start overeating because insulin is driving you to overeat yeah you guys is that fair is that true uh like there's no good there's no evidence like there's no every time you test it in a randomized control trial it doesn't it turns out that um that other factors are uh more important than that and so maybe it's it partly true it could be like it could be that especially in the case of refined carbohydrates i don't know about you guys but have you ever had like even like some crackers by themselves and then like like an hour out because you didn't have any time to do anything else like an hour afterward you're like you're like almost like shaking and then you almost like want to pass out like have you ever had that happen before

personally no but i do know some people that that has a blood sugar issue perhaps yeah yeah and so then you and this so then in order to get that to go away you eat right so like there's some situations in which that might be the case and there's some recent data suggesting that there's some validity to that but that explains such a tiny tiny portion of of energy balance and why people really actually overeat so the carbogenesis model of obesity is way overstated to the point it's absurd and it's for all intents and purposes like wrong yeah i think uh you know people think like carbs are going to make me fat and they're not necessarily there. Just sit there on the shelf. You have to actually consume them.

And then at some point you need some sort of responsibility to stop at some point. Sometimes some of the issue with stopping is that the processed foods taste really good. And so you tend to, you know, rather than eating, you know, one granola bar that has chocolate chips in it, you eat seven of them. And then that drives you to want to eat everything else in your pantry and freezer and, and everything else that you have going on. And then plus people don't really factor in fat. Like there's a good amount of fat in a lot of these things too. So you're taking in a good amount of calories and you're not really probably consuming much in terms of protein. Even if you were to eat like and some of them had dairy like ice cream or pizza like there's really just not that much protein so you're pretty

much just serving yourself up some carbs and fat is there any truth to eating carbohydrates and or like spiking your insulin and perhaps making yourself a little bit more hungry by by by spiking your insulin after you eat carbohydrates um well okay so whenever you actually look at the the all of the animal studies because you have to do this in animals because you can't do this in humans uh if you change the expression of like insulin receptors in the brain like you reduce them then uh the animals actually eat more so insulin is actually a satiety hormone it causes you to want to eat less um that's the way insulin works is so so as far on the brain level no uh maybe on the body level there's some possibility especially in terms of like the the dips in blood sugar at the end there's some

possibility that that could drive it but again if you're eating like protein and other things along with it which you should be um and higher quality foods then you shouldn't then then the release of carbohydrates will be much slower so then you might not have that problem so more fiber more protein basically what you're talking about yeah but as far as like maybe carbohydrates by themselves could could be responsible for that um but like besides that i don't i don't think there's much evidence especially when you mix it with fat like what you're talking about like in like donuts or whatever when you're mixing with fat you're not getting a whole lot of that like hypoglycemia afterward so you're not necessarily maybe like overly hungry you just enjoyed that food so much

you just want to eat more of it yeah yeah yeah it's like it is like it is like um it's like it's like any behavior that's pleasurable right you want to keep doing it over and over again and and the more you do it the more you're going to want to keep doing it because it's great you know so yeah it does work that's the bad thing about like drugs or uh or food is like it fucking like you're craving pizza you eat pizza it totally works. It makes you feel great. So, I mean this, the,

you know, Mary Hobbs, the individual who's, you know, going off about the carbohydrate insulin model. Okay. So as far as the research goes, the research is weak,

but as far as the anecdotes go on the general population that talks about that experience, we can obviously see that a lot of people feel that that happens to them when eating massive amounts of processed carbohydrates so my question to you is what type of importance do you put on anecdotes from large populations especially like if these anecdotes a lot of these anecdotes kind of not like can't use the word proof, but they back up what some of these individuals are saying. Yeah. Um,

let me think a moment about how to answer that because that's actually, uh, that's actually a root. That's actually a deceptively. It would be very easy to answer that in a very glib and superficial way because, but that actually is kind of a deep, that's like kind of a,

that's even like, that's kind of at that's even like that's kind of at the heart of everything we're talking about so um so i think with anecdotes we can say what works and what doesn't work right like if somebody's losing weight by like changing their diet from say like whatever diet they're having to whatever other diet it doesn't matter in any case then it's working we know something about that's working but we what we don't know is is why that's working exactly why it's working right and that's important it's not important just for academic reasons like oh i just want to know why because i'm curious no it's because if carbohydrate insulin model is true, it means that you must restrict your

carbohydrates in order to lose weight. But if it's not true and something else is driving that effect, whenever people stop eating carbs, something besides carbohydrate, then there's more options available to lose weight and people have more freedom to do other things besides just restricting carbohydrates. And that's why, practically speaking, understanding why, the theoretical reasons why, it's not just epidemic, it's very practical, is important. But yes, of course, you have to accept that these anecdotes, and if they help people, they help people. And it's important to recognize that too.

That was an awesome answer, by the way. I think that that makes a lot of sense. I think what people are when they're talking about like carbs, I think the carbs get mentioned so much because they're in a lot of our snacks and processed foods. processed foods, like overly processed foods. Almost, I'm trying to even consider or think of, I think they all have stuff in them that we don't really, that we can potentially overeat on, you know, whether it be, almost no matter what it is. I mean, it could be a keto snack, for example, like the keto cookies, and it could be a vegan cookie or brownie. It could be potato chips.

It could be low-fat this, low-fat that, or it could just be regular snacks. But in general, none of those seem like great options. What I see a lot of people, not that you can't eat them, but what I see a lot of people doing is they're replacing the real estate in their stomach for better choices with worse choices. And the worst choices that you continue to make, you continue to make them over and over again. Your palate is like heading in one direction and it's hard to kind of flip your palate the other way. That's why a lot of times once a, once you mess up in a day and you eat a donut,

you're like, I might as well just kind of keep going because you're, you're already enticed by that. Your mind already went that way with the receptors in your brain, whatever the fuck's going on scientifically, but you're just heading in that direction like a juggernaut, and you feel like you can't stop, and you don't even want to stop. You want to continue to enjoy that pleasure, so you're like,

I'll get to it tomorrow. And then sometimes that rolls into, I'll get to it on Monday. I'll wait until Monday to start doing it. But I think a lot of times we're looking at the carbs or somebody like myself would say war on carbs just to have a quick, simple message of, hey, you know what? You should probably back off of all those processed foods is really my main message that I try to share with people. And the war on carbs is just an enticing clickbait type of thing to get people to pay attention

in the first place. Yeah. And so that gets to another really interesting thing that we've also been alluding to this whole time and i struggle with this constantly also but how do we message in such a way that first off it's easy it's it can be turned into a meme it's easy for people to start talking about like no carbs right that's easy for people and it's also provocative like oh no carbs like people have been eating cars forever so like why do you need no like it it's it's it's a little bit novel and marketable marketable and yes it's totally so how do we message things in a way that pays attention

pays attention to the nuance and conveys the nuance and doesn't mislead people but also be fun about it and that's even at the heart of the quack list, right? If I'm calling people quacks, but I really mean like a little bit, quite a bit more nuance. A lot of people aren't necessarily going to catch that nuance. And they're going to think, oh, well, you're calling David Sinclair quack. Like, why are you so, but it's a really important question. I think for us to keep asking about how much we do simplify our message because we can end up misleading people and then the discussion can become distorted another really good example right it's the whole low fat movement from like the 1970s and 80s right

this whole low carb movement is in many ways like a response to that but the reason the low fat movement happened was for the same reasons now i would criticize the low carb movement right it's because people were exaggerating and they weren't conveying the nuance and the real reasons that they thought that fat fat was bad and because of that uh we got this whole fat movement now we got the pendulum swinging a little car movement when are we going to actually start like being reasonable and we and we're and and it's so that's that's that's my concern but i also understand the other side like you got to market things one other one other um interesting thing i noticed by

listening to your podcast is i've listened i've seen sean baker a lot on on twitter and on instagram he's like the king of this right he he his this his social media is so terrible it's like the most it's like really outrageous this stuff that he says but then whenever you actually get him on he's like he's like he's pretty good he was like what i'm since i'm going to keep dropping names he was like way better than paul saladino like paul saladino i don't know he's just as bad on his twitter as in as in person but um but like sean baker uh he's two different people in that respect and he plays that game and so there's a game to be played there but how much do we play that game and so that's i can't answer that question because we need to educate people right that's the fundamental problem and if they're not educated

then then then then we can just we can just say i need distorted message and until they're educated they're going to need distorted messages and to listen but i think that's the thing it's like with sean for example you know like you mentioned on his social media he's a different way but the thing is is like that gets people in the door once people are in the door and they see what sean's actually putting forward and the things that he has on meet rx etc um it's reasonable like he he doesn't seem like when you're inside you can then see like okay there's a lot of nuance going on here that's what happens with sean's work a majority of these people yeah you know but the thing is is like what's going to grab the attention to get the person to step into my world and that's i feel like that's where it's

just like if you if you if you make things too nuanced and almost too complicated you're not going to get their attention i i'm i completely agree with you about that and not going to say, oh, well, you still need to make things nuanced. And then you just like nobody ever listens to you. I'm not going to say that. But what I will say is that even though it gets more nuanced once you get into Sean Baker's stuff, when you actually listen to his followers and people who like mob you on social media, they sound like the kind of sound bites that he gives out on social media. The message that most people usually discuss and talk about is the simplified message.

It's not, so they're not really imbibing and taking in and internalizing the nuance. So that's the thing is like the public conversation becomes defined by the soundbites, even among the people who listen to it. That's the problem. Not to say you can solve it easily. Some of the dangerous things that happen is no one can ever share a message. It doesn't matter where it comes from, but no one can ever share a message and have it be understood the same way as the person that delivered the message in the first place, which is a theory of

Karl Popper's who just kind of eviscerated science altogether and had talked about pseudoscience and things like that. But I think that that is kind of at the heart of everything is that, you know, if I say, hey, like, you can't do any damage by being on a carnivore diet. Somebody else will take exception to that or somebody else might have their own interpretation of how they're going to do a carnivore diet. Let's just say your average person reads that and they're like, OK, I'm just going to only eat meat. And they go three days down the road. They only eat meat. They do lose a little bit of weight.

They feel a little bit better. But then they cheat on their diet. Then they go three days down the road, they only eat meat. They do lose a little bit of weight. They feel a little bit better, but then they cheat on their diet. Then they go three days down the road. They cheated on their diet. They go two days and so forth. They keep going back and forth. We don't know what the ramifications of that diet is because now you're starting to mix eating tremendous amounts of fat, tremendous amounts of food overall, probably over-consuming calories,

and you're on these days where you're falling off the wagon, you're maybe drinking alcohol and eating and just probably not being very responsible for your nutrition. So I think that's a thing that's not really talked about when people talk specifically about a keto diet, or they talk about a carnivore diet. I hear people oftentimes talking about the sustainability and how long you can do it. I hear people on the other side saying, hey, look, a carnivore diet, there's nothing safe about it. But I think that they're looking at it under a microscope saying, like, if you did a carnivore

diet only for like years on end, which very rarely can someone follow it, but some people can. I mean, we just end up with like this. We end up with like just within the confines of a carnivore diet. We end up with one guy who can do it every day for 10 years and we end up with like just within the confines of a carnivore diet. We end up with one guy who can do it every day for 10 years. And we end up with another guy who is on it just about every other day and can't stay confined to it. So it's hard to gather information on what's really working.

And it's hard to know what are the ramifications of any of those different styles of diets, even within one diet alone. So I'm going to say something really impractical here, but I feel like it's true. So I'm just going to say it, even though it's really impractical. So, um, I, I agree with you. I think that's a really, really good point is that a lot of times I think that a lot of the keto and the carnivore discussion, even though I think Sean Baker and Paul, you know, whatever, all these carnivore guys and you guys you guys mostly eat meat as well right correct okay i'm not carnivore yeah not carnivore but like yeah eat a lot of meat so so i think that um among people who tend to promote that they're varied here and

then the people who are listening to them many of them might be a lot less so and in fact maybe a lot of the reason that the people who listen to them like that message is because it like gives them license to almost eat what they want it's like oh yeah you're saying i can actually eat okay great now i'm going to keep eating the meat that i wanted to eat and then they're still going to eat a lot of the other french fries like that um and then like lie to themselves like oh i i actually like am carnivore but then then much of the time they're not, so it's not really much of a change. So then the question is, how much are we helping people?

And I actually ask this all the time. I was asking this, I was talking to a friend last night about me coming on here and talking to you guys. It's like, I know we share very different perspectives, and I was thinking, what kind of impact am i going to make and all this other stuff and i do think asking what kind of impact we're making is should be at the forefront of the way that we're thinking um but most people most of us aren't doing that

most people are getting out there we're saying something and we're not really even sure what we're doing so i think people need to this is I'm saying, this is impractical, but I think diet gurus, health experts, et cetera, it would be nice if we step back a little bit and started, this is totally, we started promoting research. his own trial. So that's good. We should start trying to start our own trials, do our own studies rather than assuming that this or that is actually going to work based on our personal anecdotes. So that's what I would like to see more of. Instead of like saying vitamin D is going to be the panacea for everything, it's going to cure everything and telling people to take their vitamin C, those people should be spending a little bit more of their time talking to scientists, talking to policymakers, talking to people in government being like, hey, we need more research for vitamin D so we can actually answer these questions. So, you know, I get what you're saying there.

First off, on the impact side of things. OK, let's just use since we're going Saladino and Baker, let's see. Let's use Paul Saladino and Sean Baker as our two examples here. As far as impact is concerned, you were mentioning that we just had the example of the individuals that they'll take some things that some people say, and it'll give them the reason to still eat meat, but they're eating a lot of trash, right? So they're not even applying a lot of the things that these people are talking about, Sean and Paul.

But then if we look at the individuals who actually take what they're talking about, apply into their lives, they start having positive health benefits. A lot of their potential autoimmune disorders go away. They lose weight, they become healthier. That is a positive impact. And they've had that.

This has had a positive impact on thousands of people at this point. So I do get the idea of promoting and trying to get your own studies done, which Sean's doing right now. But they're also having a massive positive impact. There are the people, again, that aren't really applying it well. So it's not helping those individuals much. But there are thousands of people who it's impacted positively. So like let's on that side of things.

What's your take on that? Because they are impacting, like you mentioned, like they, if I can imagine that Paul and Sean have asked themselves, what kind of impact am I making? And they've seen that positive impact, which is why they may continue going down that road. So then what in lies, what is the problem there? I think, I think that's good. I think, I think we should be getting out there and just doing our best and then making the impact that we're making. And I think they are making a positive impact and I think that's fantastic. Yeah. I think we should also be asking, what is our goal? So for Paul Saldino and Sean Baker, for example, they are promoting, say, a carnivore diet. If you go carnivore, you can reverse your autoimmunity, etc., etc.

They are promoting, say, a carnivore diet. If you go carnivore, you can reverse your autoimmunity, et cetera, et cetera. But is what they're doing, and I'm not going to say that I'm, no, it's important. So is what they're doing actually going to reverse the obesity epidemic? So are we actually, see, the obesity keeps increasing. Atkins wrote his books in the 1970s, right? Gary Taubes in like 2002, 2003. Neal Teichel's like 2008, 2010. And the whole proliferation of low-carb books, right?

Yeah. And vegan books, of course, like plant-based books, whatever, all sorts of diet books. Yeah. But they don't actually, people are people are like overall the obesity rate's still going up it's like almost 40 percent now obesity not just overweight overweight it's like it's almost like 80 percent of people are overweight or obese it's incredible so um is is is us just promoting these things to people who like to hear this message is it gonna really you know but i do think it's good to help as many people as you can and do what you can. But we also need to ask,

like, if we're actually talking about the obesity epidemic, which is a lot, what a lot of people are actually kind of, many of us are interested in where many of us are idealistic. We really want to make a difference. Are we actually going to make a difference as like diet gurus? And,

and I don't think we are. And so I think we need to do something a little bit different to, to make a difference in that respect. So that's maybe not, maybe not have a free country. You might be our only way. I think that would be the truth of it, because you look a lot of other countries where there is an obesity. It's either like a third world country. You know, people think it's like better, you know, in some of these other places.

But, you know, America is interesting. And I think I think I think the standard American diet, actually, I think it's great. I love that there's people that are 600 pounds. I love that there's people that are 800 pounds. I love that there's people that are all over. Well, we figured out how to get canceled. Can we believe everything right now? I love it because that is what human beings are about.

Human beings are supposed to be different. We're made to our own devices, you know, then we might, we might squander off and end up heading in the wrong direction and end up being an alcoholic or end up being a drug addict or end up being addicted to pornography or end up in jail or end up being successful or end up doing whatever. So I think the diversity is, is good in a lot of ways. I,

I don't like the fact that people have gotten themselves to be so heavy that they're sick. You know, that's, that's some of my concern is like, don't like the fact that people have gotten themselves to be so heavy that they're sick. You know, that's some of my concern is like, how do we rein these people in to be healthier? How can we assist them to be healthier? And what we see in America is that people have been fat here for so long, it almost seems like there's some sort of adaptation going on here because the maximum fat threshold is higher than it is in other countries, which is really interesting. I don't know if that's in our genetics or where that came from, but people can seemingly

be 50 pounds overweight, 60 pounds overweight and not really have a ton of negative side effects, which is really interesting. I wonder how far can that get pushed? Even our message to lose weight, is it even a good message? Like what you're saying about impact? Yeah. Losing weight from an aesthetic standpoint, of course. Yeah. You look better. That's great. But does it really matter a lot? Like, I think if we were to do a lot of blood work of a lot of people just kind of walk in the streets, um, yeah, we're going to find some people that are unhealthy, but we're going to find a ton of people that are healthy and overweight as well so it's it's hard to identify what our messages are uh what the messages of anybody else is in

terms of diet and what this kind of average person is doing and the impact that it's having in in any way yeah um so so let me ask you this question would you be happy with the rate of like would you be happy with the rate of obesity and overweight staying at like 80 percent or um maybe not maybe they're not um so it's going to continue to get higher and people don't seem to care that much and then also the the link to type 2 diabetes and potentially now what they're calling type 3 diabetes dementia and alzheimer's i don't know how much science is behind that, but it seems that there's some connection there. People don't seem to care. People seem to keep on going on with their normal day-to-day lives,

and there's a lot of disease and there's a lot of things that are rearing their ugly head. And even with our message from the three of us or four of us and the messages of hundreds of other people, no one seems to care. So, okay. So what if there was like an epidemic of like drugs and then nobody, they just enjoyed the drugs and they didn't seem to care? I mean, should we just let that happen? Right. I mean, I like what you're saying.

That's already here. Yeah. Well, I like... Okay, so it happened in China, right? Pharmaceutical companies. Yeah, yeah. And everyone's on a drug, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's here. Obesity is already here. Even cigarettes. Like, there's the label shows like, hey, this is going to kill you, and people still don't care. Well, okay, but cigarettes is actually a great example, right? We actually have dramatically reduced cigarette smoking and we didn't. But by what? I mean, we use taxes, right?

We made sure that there's laws. Yes, laws. So do we want laws on food? Well, let me ask you this. Do we like the laws on cigarettes? Are they OK? I think it seems like people are OK with that. Let me ask you this. Do we like the laws on cigarettes? Are they okay? I think it seems like people are okay with that. But people are not going to. You take away someone's candy, they're going to fucking kill you. You tax their sugar. So they're trying that in other countries.

I don't know how effective it's going so far, but they're doing that in the UK and stuff because America is so fat, we've helped the other countries get fat too. Apparently there's some data from Portugal suggesting that some of those interventions are actually working. So the rate of childhood obesity is actually going down in Portugal, which is really cool. It's Portugal, but, like, you know, we could use some of those ideas. I think that if, just like with smoking, right, we, the public health establishment convinced everybody that smoking was, was bad. Yeah.

Right. And then so that people were more willing to accept policies, limiting smoking in restaurants and, and in different places and also taxing smoking that became more acceptable. So the idea would be that if we could persuade other people, we persuade people that the processed food food isn't good then that could become more acceptable you'd have policies which is which actually relates to everything that we've been talking about in this way including the quack list in order to do that we have to have a message

that they'll understand that they know that the processed food is the problem right which is which is why the part like one of the original motivations of the quack list is like many different gurus focus on like carbs or fats or animal products or whatever the heck it heck they want to focus on and that gets a really confusing message to the people when what we really just need is to tell them that it's about processed food and the reason we say it's about carbs reason we say it's about fat reason to say it's about animal products whatever we want to say it's about is because we want to get we want to get attention to ourselves right and so the attention that we're pulling to ourselves is actually

undermining uh a kind of broader message that the public needs which is just processed foods about and everybody needs to be saying that and everybody that means it may message everybody the reason they're not saying that is because of their own self-interest and our own self-interest because we want to or because, yeah, it's our own self-interest. So that's that's part of the reason for the quick list is if we could have a uniform message from all of us. Then we could maybe even start to I don't know if you agree. Do you agree with taxes on cigarettes, though? Like, do you think that's OK? I don't know.

You know, in this country, you start making laws on food, you know, that, but what if people believed that, that what if people believe that eating donuts every day, which is bad cigarettes.

So I don't agree with it because who's to say what's bad. Well, you know that eating donuts is bad. Do we? I was going to make you fat. It's not what we're here for. I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know. Well, you know that eating donuts is bad. Do we? It's not what we're here for? I don't know. But there's going to be a line, though. Do you understand what I'm saying? Someone's going to say, hey, beef is bad for you, too. They already said that, right? So now you're going to tax me more on my meat? I'm not happy about that. But everyone's like, hey, it's even, Stephen, because we've

taxed all the bad food. Well well who's to say what's bad and i don't want mc like i don't i don't want free enterprise to go away i don't want like i want mcdonald's on every corner i want starbucks on every that's what america is about and the people that get left behind are the people that just aren't paying attention that where i feel badly is that our kids get addicted to quote unquote addicted to foods at a very early age and a very young age. And then it's hard as an adult once you start saying, oh, man, wow, it's been the processed foods the whole time. I didn't even really realize it. Now it's hard to make a change because you've already been doing that for 20 years.

Yeah. But what if we could come up with an agreement about what we all agree is bad we can all pretty much agree right that like hyper processed foods like donuts like a lot of sugar a lot of like refined you know uh grains and a lot of like oils like all into one thing that tastes really really good yeah of course we enjoy it too um but like people can still enjoy cigarettes. I can still buy cigarettes. Right. Um, so, so make a donut like eight bucks. What do you mean? I mean, I mean, I'm down with it. I'm just poking holes at what you're saying.

I, I, I'm just playing deadvilles advocate. I agree a hundred percent. I don't want people to be fat. The only reason why I said that I'm in favor of it is just because it's part of our diversity. It's part of being human there's there's no fat zebras there's no fat lions there's no fat polar bears they just are what they are you know the only thing that that's fat are are mainly americans human human beings and and our pets you know that we we feed them you know yeah and another thing that is that's really

interesting about this discussion is like all three of us and pretty much everybody in this room right we're all very internally driven right we're all like we all have a lot of discipline and a sense that the decisions that we make um will will determine our destiny and we're in control of our destiny right we have i think all of us in this room believe that and that's probably why we are where we are, is because of that sense. I can improve myself. I can become better. I can, through discipline, through practice, through intelligent application of effort, I can become great.

We all kind of believe that. But not everybody believes that. Not everybody has that. And I think some of that is a personality thing. Some people believe so strongly in what they're currently doing that, that if we were to, if we were to propose any particular diet, they'd say,

they would say, I can never do that. Yeah. Yeah. I can never, I could not make it through one day without carbs. I can't even make it through one meal. I it's not for me.

That's for people that are in shape. I can't do that. That's kind of what we're up against. And then we're up against billions and billions of dollars from the top. I think there's 10 major food companies in the United States. You would think there would be a lot of them, but there's really just 10 major food companies that have billions and billions and billions of dollars to continue to advertise to us, to continue to kind of be everywhere. And I don't know if like taxing them or,

or any of those things, I don't know if they make sense, but it does appear that we're at a point where like something needs to do something. Something has to happen. And I don't, I don't like regulations either, but like,

what do we do? What do we do? I mean, so that's all. And so that's, that's, that's, that's all I get.

That's another thing. That's one of the things. I think teaching young kids would be a major factor. I don't know how to get that done. Education. Yeah, yeah. Like policies even just to improve education. Like so in Japan, there's something called Shokuiku where throughout K through 12, they get taught.

They have like a special class where they learn about where their food comes from. They learn how to cook. It's a lot like home economics, which has gotten rid of here for whatever stupid reason i don't know why we've done that a lot of people can't even cook now right a lot of people can't even cook they can't even prepare their own food and so how are you supposed to take processed foods away from them i mean like you're not like they have to have it so yeah i think that we have to start that has but that could be a part of policy too anyway we're just we're just talking at this point i want to i want to go back to something that you mentioned before, though, when we were talking about Sean and Paul.

You asked the question, but will this deal with the obesity epidemic? And then we got to this point where every single individual has their free choice to do what they want. But let's say we took that choice away, and let's just say that we were to impose the diet protocols from sean and paul on all of the obese individuals more likely than not they wouldn't be obese so then what does that have to do with this because like i mean obviously everybody i believe a majority of people on this list we we just mentioned that the big problem is the processed foods we know that a majority of the people on this list also believe that the big problem is processed foods, but then they have their own personal protocol of how you should do, like, okay, processed foods are bad, let's go paleo.

Processed foods are bad, let's go keto. Let's go carnivore, right? If you took those, if you did, that would deal with the obesity epidemic for a majority of people. If you did take away that choice and force these diets on them, it would. So then, then what's next? Like then,

then what, what else is there? Uh, like, like, you know, you said that was the thing you said, is this going to deal with the obesity epidemic?

Oh yeah. What they're, yeah. Okay. Yeah. What the, yeah. The people advocating and giving people free choice. Exactly.

Okay. You know, like that was the big thing that you were saying. Well, I mean, okay, cool. We're having impact, but how are we going to deal with the obesity epidemic? Yeah. I mean, it could if we took away individuals choice and we just told them to do, let's just say the carnivore diet. They'd probably not be.

Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure it's so much about that we need to take away their choice we just need to sort of education is better educate is good but like change the defaults a little bit so that um people have first off people need to have the option of cooking people have to have that time to cook right and let's be honest though this is how i think about it i think most people

are not like us most people are not like driven like we are most people are gonna and i know that i know that we want to encourage people to be more driven but some people are just never going to be that way i've been in like i've had long friendships and relationships with people who you just can't they're not going to change like there's some people who just that's just their nature they're not they're not go-getters you know and so for those people and then they're not happy being fat but they're just sort of like they're just sort of like they just that's what they do and this is what i think maybe i have like a too negative opinion but i just i try to be. This is my experience is that some people are just,

we call it like, I don't want to call it like a lazy, but like, they're just not sort of like internally driven to change anything. They're just kind of accept what the environment gives them. And I think that's a lot of people. I think we're exceptional, right?

People are gonna call me like arrogant or something. Probably like everybody's going to call me. All the comments are going to be like this arrogant arrogant fucker he just thinks science is the best and everybody's lazy and so like they need for for to listen to him and he's gonna take care of everybody right but what i'm saying is like i'm not i'm saying there's a large proportion of people like that and that maybe they need a little bit more help yeah and instead of forcing people we educate people and then we make it a little less easy to like to like to to buy processed foods instead of like go home and cook. We make it more.

We make it more difficult to the point that people are like, oh, shit, fine, I'll fucking go home and cook like they're never going to want to do it. You know, yeah. Make the barrier of entry into getting shit that's bad for you. Make that higher. That's it. And make it easier to have foods that are better for you. Yeah. So we can still be gluttons and eat a bunch of donuts, you know, during our cheat days

or whenever we've just like, we just have given up for like a couple of days or whatever. We can still do that. It's just like, it'll maybe be a little more expensive for us. And then like, um, it'll be a little bit more hard to do. And so we'll probably be disincentivized to do it. We'll probably be like, oh shit, like I don't want to fucking have a cheat day now because it's too much of a pain in the ass Yeah point that's all like not force anybody to do anything It's like a little bit of taxes on soft drinks they it seems this the soft drink taxes work. That's all I don't know

I know I know people's gonna think this is elitist. I'm arrogant all this stuff, but I Don't see how else to change unless we make everybody super educated and then like super internally driven like us it would give everybody a bunch of drugs or something or whatever they're going to need to do that right that's i feel like some regulations got to be a part of it i think uh teaching people is fair yeah like uh teaching our kids and and things like that and um you know i've heard so many people over the years say, Hey, this should be taught in school.

And while I do agree with some of those statements, I think if you're a parent, then you should just take it upon yourself to teach all the things that you feel are going to be really, really important because, uh, our government's not going to just, you can't,

uh, expect them to step in for everything. And so with my own children, I've been communicating with them about nutrition for a long time. Another one of them is, you know, any, they don't do anything crazy with nutrition, but my daughter, every time we eat, she always just drinks water. You know, it's like, that's a great decision. She, she never has orange juice and never has apple juice, never has soda. My son, he'll go 50, 50, he'll have a diet Pepsi here and there, has soda. My son, he'll go 50-50. He'll have a diet Pepsi here and there or Coke or whatever. He'll go back and forth on those

things. And probably the last maybe three or four months, I've noticed that he's snacking less. He's lost some weight and it's just under his own will. He was kind of asking more questions more recently. And so I've been teaching them from the time they were very young. I was never, well, I don't feel I was ever like abrasive with anything. I just said, hey, some of these foods, if you eat a lot of them, can, you know, make you heavy. And I can say, hey, you know, so-and-so in our family, you know, this person, my mom died from obesity.

My mom died from being fat, from not being able to control the food that she ate. And so I can point to people in the family and say, hey, you know, you could end up on a walker towards the end of your life and end up dying early, you know, like my mom did. If you make poor food choices all the time, you can end up going down that same path. And I'd hate to see you go down that same path. So maybe you want to make different choices. And I just would kind of repeat those things, you know, from the time they were five years old, I would talk to him about stuff like that. I'd talk to him just like they're adults. And it's been really awesome to watch them make better choices.

They still are kids. They still have McDonald's. They still get their McFlurries and stuff like that here and there. But for the most part, they make pretty good choices. So we should have a Mark Bell in every classroom. That's right. Just pull me out of the corner of the room where I was facing the corner with a dunce cap. I think that would be great. I think that's what we need.

We need that in every kid's life. If that's the one thing that we can agree on, and I think that's a really good thing. I think that's the start. We should do that. And I don't understand why we don't. And so maybe what a lot of us should be doing in this space, and I welcome anybody to drop into my DMs or send me an email or whatever. Maybe we should get together and we should start talking to policymakers about how to get something like that or what are the barriers to changing elementary school curriculum in such a way we could get something like that. and telling everybody what our diet is great and getting more clients. We should maybe spend some of our time getting together, even people who disagree on some things, to actually try to make these kinds of changes happen.

I mean, talking about it's good, like on a podcast is good, but we should actually really start trying to make these changes happen. To actually do something. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So just, you know, let's do it. What about maybe more accurate food labels? Or in this case, somebody on the uh the live stream j rose just pointed out like have more of a warning sign not the the healthy heart symbol

to try to trick people into thinking like oh these Cheerios are good for you what about the small things like that is that like an issue where the food labels are always like what five percent here there is that making people obese or is it just the fact that they're still just having an overabundance of said misinterpreted label? I think it's 20%. Yeah, whatever it is. I don't know. I'll go with 5% so that way. I'll go with 26%.

I'll go 5% so that way my macros are clean. I think the food labels are worthless. They're not telling people at all what's healthy. They don't help people at all like they're not totally irrelevant um of course you can use them to count calories if that's what you do that might be helpful but a lot of those things like does anybody ever look at like how much vitamin b is in your freaking food like nobody looks at that nope like nobody uh none of those numbers matter at all what people really need is like is like something like a uh like a uh there are in some countries there's like a um like a stoplight system like green yellow red

but another thing people we could do is like have like sort of just energy density right energy that's what uh ted nieman does he's got his protein to energy ratio. That seems to be pretty good. Do you agree with that? I think, okay, so I think that in foods, protein is highly associated with the more protein you have the less energy in whole foods so in that sense yes and it tends to be those foods are also not calorie dense so there's a lot of volume in those foods but what i actually think is okay so here's a really good study that they did. And I knew I was going to review this before I, before I came here, but I, but I know the,

I knew who it is and I'll, and I'll, I'll send out a tweet about it. So Barbara rolls did this study where she gave people, I think there was like six different casseroles and different groups of people. She had a go, go eat them.

I think maybe even the same person ate each different casserole on a different day. They're blinded to what the casseroles were but they had very different protein contents but they were all otherwise completely identical completely identical and i think the protein was from processed protein okay and then she looked at how satisfied they were and how much energy they ate afterwards so an indicator of how satiating that the casseroles were she found there's no difference for the protein okay so no matter how much protein what percentage protein like very low or very high no difference in satiety so what what this means is and and the interpretation i get from there's

a guy named chris gardner he's like a professor at stanford or whatever and i've talked to him a little bit about this what and then also from other stuff that i know i think my takeaway from this is that protein rich foods tend to be very calorie uh not calorie dense right but it's not the protein that's driving i agree with what you're saying okay cool i totally understand your point is that like uh it's not necessarily the grant it's not only the grams of protein that are in a chicken breast it's the act of chewing a fucking chicken breast and taking all the moisture out of your mouth and you know consuming it and digesting it and stuff like that that makes it makes it satiating it's the it's the texture it's the makeup of it it's not necessarily just the protein although the protein

could be another factor that's in there yeah so so so the protein energy ratio could be like a marker for something like this or you could just write calorie density energy density either one would be okay either one would be way better than these freaking labels that we have now which are useless i can't believe that we have still who like who thought that was a good idea you know and some people do they think that putting calories on the freaking menus at starbucks when i see calories the menus at Starbucks Or like wherever I like buy the thing that has the most calories

I'm like this is going to hit the spot I'm going to buy the most calories This is a pretty big I know right if you were a caveman that's what you would do You'd be like hey it's got 10,000 calories It sounds perfect Live off that the next couple days Pretty big statement that was made by Rob Wolf

Was not to buy things that have food labels. Yeah. You know, it's it's an understandable point. It's like, OK, well, that means you're going to like what the butcher and you're buying you're buying vegetables and you're buying fruit. Yeah. Yeah. But that seems like a great way. Like if so, I believe that if you were to eat like that, if you eat kind of, you know, quote unquote whole foods, that it's very difficult to go wrong with those foods.

Although there's still a lot of things within the confines of that that you can go haywire on because you could put like, you could use condiments or you could use butter, you know, and start putting butter and rice and meat. Yes. Things like that. And then you can still be in the same boat as you'd be in if you were eating Doritos. It'd be a little tougher though. It would. Yeah. It could be a lot harder. I thought it was very easy to do that and i've done that

before i got quite quite um you can fool yourself like i used to have this rice with um eggs and oil and i would add lots of oil because it's good tastes good eggs rice and oil and i just like mix it all up and i had vegetables too too. I'm having vegetables, right? And this is gigantic meal. And you can eat a couple of those a day, man. You'll get big that way and not in a good way. Like sesame oil or something? Yeah, something like that.

Sounds awesome. What do you think? What do you feel about the fasting community? The people that are like, because I saw Jason Fung on your list. I saw Walter Longo on your list, right? jason fung on your list i saw valter long go on your list right so what what what about that that community kind of uh gets to you in terms of their statements of what is true i mean my the first thing i wanted to say and then i was like holding myself back but then i'm like okay i'm not gonna hold myself i'm gonna say it like it's crazy there people are crazy and these

fasting people it's it's all like all this Popular health stuff Is nuts in my opinion Right I mean First off Fung Fung is an interesting guy I shouldn't say too much He'll probably like Email my professors

Because he does that To people He did that to like He did that to Alistair McAlpine And he did that to Yoni Friedhoff He tried to get them fired

Or at least His assistant Tried to get alistair fired off of an article he wrote on medical brief and of course alistair should have been more careful about like he he went a little hard but whatever like um and then what for yoni yoni like was pointing out anyway it's not important but yeah about those guys so fung fung fung has a really weird way of going about evidence he's brilliant he's brilliant but in like a really bad way like okay like he he he he he's very creative with how he reads the medical literature but he reads it in an extremely biased way in order to show that

he's right and um he's really good at making these really good stories and they're also really rhetorically compelling like you can listen to him like damn like screw the you know screw the medical establishment screw but the stuff he says the way he does it is not uh appropriate and he ignores a lot of evidence anyway it's not about fun like the community though about fasting is fasting is fasting helpful yeah if you adhere to it right if you like adhere to it and you reduce your calorie intake and if some people can adhere to it and reduce their calorie that's great is it better than other approaches on average uh so a friend of mine so ethan weiss he he did this trial called treat right you guys have probably seen it it's it was published last

year okay where um i think there was like 200 people or maybe 60 people. It was a few people. They put them in two different groups. Some people, they said, only eat at consistent times, right? So 8 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 6 o'clock, right? Only those specific times, you're good to go. And then the other group, they said, time-restrict like 8-hour window or four-hour window or whatever it was he did. He did that, and, like, there's no differences in the two.

But the reason he's found no differences is because he had a control group, right? He had a group that actually did something. And he also found more muscle loss in the fasting group. So compared to the—even though there wasn't a significant difference in weight loss, there's actually significant difference in appendicular lean mass loss. Even though calories were the same and protein was the same. They didn't control for protein and calories. He just, it was just dietary advice. Like, here's the window that you need to eat.

Well, that can make sense. I mean, that makes total sense because when you look at the average individual, if they're not intaking the same amount of calories, you will tend to eat less food in a shorter window you will just eat less food it's harder so i mean but it was it was both groups both groups had a similar weight loss but more lean mass loss in the fasting group yeah right so uh it's probably similar calorie deficit but then more more mass like loss maybe and maybe that's because whenever you do fasting right uh you're trying to fit all those calories in a tiny window you don't have time to go eat that chicken breast along with the yeah trying to eat that amount of protein in a small amount

of time is more difficult yeah it's just not pleasurable too like it's you have to go out of your way to do it you do but the really interesting thing about that study is that most of these fasting studies don't do something like they don't have a good control group like that where they actually um they'll compare like fasting to somebody like nobody doing anything right and of course like the fasting group's going to do better but like if you have a really good control group that leaves loses a similar amount of weight what happens then yeah and so that's what that's what he showed so my thing about fasting and so okay so that's actually consistent with some of the literature late day fasting like where you eat more your calories later in the days you guys

know about this is probably worse than early day fasting which who wants to do early day fasting though i i don't want to eat most of my calories at the beginning and then like eat nothing in the afternoon i'm gonna freaking eat so there is a little bit of truth to like circadian rhythm type stuff that seems to be like the effect yeah yeah it's like a it's a small effect and it's like a small effect it's not like it's not going to change your life like somebody like uh what's his name it's such in panda he's gonna change everything no the reason everybody in his studies does better is because they're like paying attention to like how they're eating and not eating too much that's why they're doing better it's not because they're his approach is better you have a modest improvement for like a

tiny tiny tiny improvement you can barely detect in terms of metabolic outcomes by eating more earlier in the day but it is something but like if you want to optimize you want to eat more earlier in the day and less later in the day and so there's something to that but it's a small small small difference um but overall this community fault let's talk about uh so jason fong like and then he'll like often give these anecdotes about how um his his uh his patients like lost a lot of weight they reversed their diabetes etc well there will always be one thing i'll say is there will always be people who like follow a dietary intervention right here especially if it's extreme like if you if you throw extreme

interventions at like a lot of people you're going to find someone who's ready for that change at that moment you're going to find somebody's ready that change in a moment and you hit on that person that person's going to have like it's going to be like bam it's going to be like a huge difference and so if you tell them to fast for like three days you're like just keep fasting of course they're going to do well if they're really motivated they're going to do great um so so so then so then you can say, oh well everybody else who quit and left or everybody else who didn't want to fast because the people who are going to want to fast

are going to be a tiny select proportion of the population they're all going to leave, everybody else is going to leave and you're going to have all these success stories around you but that doesn't mean that telling everybody to fast is going to cure everything because it's about motivation it's about whether people are going to actually make that change adherence and so and so the difference between fasting or any other thing it's no different it's just there's no difference

and then okay let's talk about longo then so longo has the whole fasting mimicking diet thing and he also big on like restricting protein right because mtor and like igf1 and all this and he's like the the he has these studies that he's done he He's, he's been a part of publishing. I mean, he had a really good, he had a really prestigious career in like longevity research. There is some truth to IGF-1 or there appears to be some sort of link between IGF-1 and cancer potentially because of pot, like there's people that have polymorphisms, right? That, uh, they don't produce any IGF-1 and, and the whole community doesn't have cancer. Is that correct?

Yeah. Um, I think if you have also like four feet tall i think yeah they're like four feet tall uh apparently like have psychological problems as well which is really weird they like but maybe they maybe they do because they're four feet tall i don't know but uh yeah so there's evidence from that and then there's also animal studies where if you like knock out the receptor and then you you have like spontaneous cancer models they won't grow as fast the cancer won't grow as fast and then you have like i think you have observational evidence showing that people with high igf1 like have a higher rate of cancer and stuff but it doesn't

necessarily mean a person that eats some protein that produces more igf1 is going to end up with cancer right right yeah especially yeah especially from the observational literature right like what is causing that higher igf1 is it because they're eating more protein than my igf1 or is it a lot of other things and so if you're eating a lot of protein but then like restricting your calories and you're like lean like does that make as much a difference so if you look at the mouse studies about this like the old mouse studies like way back from like the 1970s if you give them a bunch of protein they don't eat as much um and then and then if you i think if you then adjust so that the body weights are the same so they're eating the same amount of calories

there's like a but then you keep them lean like you keep them they're not the the rate of uh the longevity of these animals is like there's just such a tiny tiny difference so there's a lot of confounders in the mouse studies uh and and and it's unclear whether in humans this will actually make a positive impact so he's extrapolating from a lot of really indirect evidence without looking at more direct evidence so what we would really need for walter longo especially with regard to the protein we would need like a five-year study where you like give some people like 150 grams of protein or like like 150 grams might be reasonable and then you give the other group like 50 grams

and you look at like heart attacks and stuff like nothing has ever been done like that so he's just speculating based on on some basic science evidence and it may not be true and again as we see with the with the literature on what plausible mechanisms all this stuff most of the time things end up not being true even like very compelling and interesting hypotheses like this so he he ends up then saying okay protein is really important everybody restricts your protein well so there's some freaking downsides to restricting your protein too there's some theoretical advantages that might be extremely small or neck or like nothing yeah and then there's like massive downsides to like not eating enough protein which is like higher visceral fat probably a higher rate of like especially if you're if you stay lean higher rate of like diabetes like worse metabolic function. There's a whole bunch of really bad things you don't want from eating,

from eliminating your protein. So what I would wonder is, why is he assuming that his speculation is right, but then all these other possible downsides are not a big deal, and then he's just promoting it without having the randomized controlled trials? I feel like that's really irresponsible. He might've been a really great cell biologist and really he might be a really brilliant person but it doesn't mean that that it doesn't mean that he's right to be doing this kind of like protein restriction stuff based on like a really a bunch of really weak evidence and so i think it's really i think it's terrible and fasting mimicking diet i mean what do you get from fasting mimicking diet it's basically just like you're restricting calories for a while, for like five days or whatever, however long it is that they do it.

Like you do 1,200 at first and then you do 800 like subsequently, right? And then, of course, your health markers are going to get better. They're going to get like way better because you're like, you know, when you restrict calories, your health markers get better. So like it doesn't mean that. And then he has these studies on the cancer cells like or start the the immune cells so your immune cells then die off and then they come back and then so like they're refreshed and they're um i want to say that the outcomes that he had with respect to that in his studies like we're not i need to double check this and i'll put out a tweet to make sure but i'm 99 sure like that wasn't statistically significant. And also that's theoretical. He hasn't done like autoimmunity reversal in humans.

It's just theoretical based on like some animal models of autoimmunity, which may have nothing to do with humans. So he's just making all these recommendations because probably my guess is he thinks he's brilliant and he is, right? He thinks he's brilliant. He's had a lot of success in his life. He's done really well in science. People listen to him. He has a really good idea. And then he thinks that means that he should just recommend it to everybody. But just because you're smart and you have a good idea and you've been successful, I mean, you're just going to follow the same footsteps of most of the other people who think the same thing and then end up being wrong.

So that's what I mean. And then also potentially causing harm so that's what i think for both and you you know you research a tremendous amount so you know we could have the science kind of say like anything we want kind of like since you're since you've uh dug so deep into these things we could take a protein powder that i sell and we can run a six week study on me and my brother and SEMA and Andrew in here, you know, taking the protein, you know, three times a day, but versus us like we had, we cannot share the previous information that we're on some sort of crap diet beforehand where we weren't consuming much protein. You say, look, each guy gained six pounds.

It's this percentage of their body weight. And this is what happened. And you could even share the fact that like maybe my brother didn't gain any muscle in in the trial because you want to just leave that fact out and say, look at, you know, these guys all gained tons of tons of muscle. That's that's how it is. That's that's what people do. They take studies like this, especially if you have like your special protocol and they and they do that kind of stuff. And it's terrible. And that's what that's what makes me so mad. And, you know, so, yeah, 100 percent.

Why, you know, why are you so frustrated with a lot of this information? Does it have to do with I've heard on a previous podcast you talking about your past when you were young? I think you said from the time you were like eight, even kind of trailing into like your 20s, that you were very negatively affected by some medical conditions and some just kind of hurdles that you had with some medical issues and stuff like that. So is that why you're so passionate about like, you know, really, really trying to come to the forefront and explain to people, you know, some of the bullshit that's out there? For sure. Yeah. So, so yeah i had i had medical i had like medical problems but they were like misdiagnosed and then they gave me drugs that caused more problems and then it's just like there's more and more problems until i was eventually i was like i can't i can't live like this anymore right i can't live like this on these drugs and like my quality of life is terrible right and so i just like i went off of them and then i was like oh oh wow like all all of these things that were were said that i had were are not actually the case um what was the problem if i can ask if you

don't want to so okay so whenever i was okay so uh whenever i was uh like eight they diagnosed me with like adhd or add um because like i was a really good kid but like in class in school i would just like talk too much so it's like you know and i still i still talk too much um so so then they were like oh he has you know he has a problem he's doing really well in his classes he's like not having any functioning issues but he like he's disruptive right so then they put like they put me on Ritalin. I did really terrible on Ritalin. Like I was like just awful.

And, uh, and then they put me on Adderall and I think things even got worse. Like I would like, I think the way that I think about it is like at the end of the day, I would, um, I think the Adderall was keeping me from, uh, like it was suppressing my appetite, but I wasn't aware of it. So I'd be like hangry at the end of the day. And then I would like scream at my parents. Right. Because like, I would be playing video games and I was like hangry.

I was like focused on the video games. It probably was like on Adderall or something. And then like, they'd like bother me and I'd like scream at them. And then they're like, oh, well, not only does he have ADHD, like he has bipolar disorder now. And then, so they were like, oh, we need to get him something else. Right. And then so they added something on top of that.

And then and then like the problems keep keep happening with like being on the Adderall and like yelling at my parents and like all that stuff. So they added on more stuff like maybe he's depressed also. So we'll give him an SSRI. Right. So then I was on that. And then I was like, I can't sleep anymore. And they're like, oh, you can't sleep anymore. So now you're going to get on something.

I can't gain weight. So now I got something for gaining weight. I've got anxiety. Got something for anxiety. Got like propranolol for anxiety. You've got like clonidine for, I want to say it's for gaining weight. You've got like, there's like five or six different drugs. Right.

And then at that, and then, and then, and then like things got worse. Right. We kept trying to find things and then we like tried to like lithium. And I think I had either had like a toxic reaction to it. Like,

like literally with my, the levels were wrong. So like screwed up something in my brain. So I like had like a, like a delirium. Right. So I'd like hallucinate and things like that. And then I,

and then they said, Oh, you're, you're, you're, you're bipolar. You have man mania you have like a psychotic episode from your mental illness so they the things that the drugs were causing that they said they said it was like a mental illness jeez and then uh and then after that and then they put me on like antipsychotics right like stuff that you give like schizophrenic people who like hear voices in their heads and all that kind of stuff and then i was on that and then like being on anesthetized is the worst and at

some point i was just like i can't do this and so i was just like we're not gonna do this anymore so i started like cheeking everything you know like not taking my meds yeah yeah yeah and then showing my parents like trying and showing my parents like i'm not i'm not gonna like cause problems and then and then i did that and so like that was at about 16 years old, whenever that ended. And then I was like, it's sort of like, I was like living again for the first time,

like after, you know, all that, all that time, uh, cut, cut. Yeah,

it was, it was, it was terrible. And then, so then after, after that, I started thinking like, I hated modern,

I hated medicine. Cause I thought doctors were, um, were morons. i thought that like they didn't know what they're talking about and um maybe they even cause people a lot of problems they don't get they don't care about the root causes of disease yeah so then i got really into like alternative stuff right like um like a lot of the stuff that we're talking about i've been really excited about i've been really excited about like keto and a lot a lot of stuff and i

thought that, um, this is the real way to health. I was actually thinking about being a doctor because I was like thinking I wanted to change the system with respect to psychiatry. Cause I thought like people need to be helped and it's terrible what this did in my case. So, uh,

but then along the way I got into food and all these other things. And then I thought that doctors were wrong about all those other things in the same way that they were wrong about psychiatry so they're wrong about like diabetes they're wrong about heart disease all these so i was always going after like the alternative explanations for everything because i thought doctors were just wrong about everything and i was just opposed to everything and then through that and that was actually uh all the way through like the early part of med school and then i started getting more into science and i started thinking more about also i was just so familiar with it and i was like learning about all the different approaches and stuff i started thinking about like how do we actually make sense of everything in a way that

in a way that's systematic and like what is actually correct in this area and then i started criticizing more of the alternative stuff and then what i've what i've come to believe now is like the alternative stuff a lot of alternative stuff is just as bad like mercola and stuff whatever like mercola mercola like joseph mercola he's like uh he's probably like one of the biggest uh alternative med people he has like stuff like he has stuff on his website like like quantum healing and there's there's all sorts of other stuff like that but there's also it's like semi-legitimate stuff there's like whether it's like legitimate whatever you want to think but like vitamin d but like i started to think these guys were just as bad because they're peddling a lot of stuff that's just as much bullshit and

that's going to hurt people too and so that that yeah it all ties back to that i'm really concerned about what's actually true and what's not and And I don't want people to get hurt. And I want people to be able to make good decisions and be empowered to make good decisions and not basically be hurt by somebody who has their own self-interest as the priority. So, yeah. Yes. And all these diets, they can help if you're able to follow them, right? And they can, but we don't really know all the health implications of each diet. Like we don't know necessarily, you know, if like a keto diet might work great for one person, uh, but potentially it might cause some harm to maybe another, even if

they are following it correctly. Do you kind of believe that? Like, do you believe that there's maybe some, you know, different diets different diets um that could potentially help people with their with their health and things like that and there's some that could be harmful to people even if they don't overeat yeah for sure i think there's trade-offs in in a lot of these diets that i think different individuals will fit better with so for example uh keto uh i've done keto a few times i'm like doing keto now um was it like are you doing a plant-based keto right now i'm like eating like a bird yeah i'm eating nuts and almonds and stuff yeah and then uh like taking some protein powder as well and then also some fish as well um but uh

in general i don't need like a whole lot of like red meat or whatever um we could talk about that later if you want to but yeah for now i'm doing like a plant-based keto uh chris is sending me uh some of the piedmontese though i'm gonna i'm gonna try that out um so oh yeah so i'm doing mostly a plant-based keto and um what i've noticed from keto like the first time i did like a carnivore style keto and then I did a plant-based and then I'm doing plant-based again, partly because I was going on this podcast and I was so nervous.

I was so freaking, I know you're looking at me and you're like, why would you be nervous? I don't know. It's like, because I see you guys in person, you guys flew me out here. I felt obligated to try to give you the best information possible and I really wanted to do that. I didn't want to screw it up. So I was really nervous and uh and also have like a committee phd committee

meeting coming up in a little bit i was nervous about that so um so like i always notice that whenever i go on keto and as you guys have talked about before like it levels you off a lot it like things smooth things get a lot things get smoother you know uh? And I've noticed that before, and I'm noticing it again, right? So I was trying to see if maybe the anxiety would help. I made a joke to one of my friends. I was like, you know, I'll just solve my problems with keto, you know? And then she laughed, and then I was like, oh, maybe I'm going to do that. So then I'm going to solve my problems with keto.

So I decided to do that. I'm not going to solve my problems keto. So that's what, so I decided to do that. Um, but, uh, but the thing,

the interesting thing about it is though, is that whenever I go on keto for like a long period of time, even though it mellows me out, um, if I go on it long enough, like three months, I start to get like, I start to like lose motivation. I start to become like,

I don't know if you ever heard something like that before, but I start to become maybe too mellowed out, you know, like I like, don't want to, I like, don't want to do anything, you know, I ever heard something like that before, but I start to become maybe too mellowed out. You know, like I like don't want to I like don't want to do anything. You know, I think, you know, switching to any is switching from one intervention to another. I think you always end up with like that honeymoon period. So like I've noticed myself anytime I go back to a ketogenic diet, I love it. And I'm like, why don't I just always stay on this?

Yeah. Like you said, you know, it starts to kind of just maybe not have the same impact after a little while. What I've noticed from carnivore and keto is sometimes you go in so hard that you're like on the diet so much and you don't allow for anything else. You don't allow for any like fun or, you know, entertaining foods.

It just gets to be boring and monotonous. And you kind of get depressed from it. You're like, man, this kind of sucks. Because it's a little maybe too forced. And I think that's where over the years I've recognized like, hey, man, if you're just craving something, just go eat it. Like get it over with. Just get it out of the way. Because for me personally, like I can't just shift the craving off and and it will completely

pass like it'll it'll be there for a while so now i'm like okay well let's just kind of pick a day to like go eat that crap and i'll just get it over with and now i i eat a lot less of what i you know you i used to like really go way overboard and now i'm a lot more reasonable with it you know i can just eat a couple slices of pizza and be okay rather than eating like, you know, three giant pizzas or something like that. So you're becoming like a flexible dieting like Lane Norton fan, huh? Very much so. You know, we've had Lane on the show a bunch of times and we always like going back and forth with him on stuff, but

I have kind of mentioned before that if people are going to track anything, they should track when they eat, when they go off, when they go off plan, you know, rather than tracking so diligently when they're on plan, I think. But most of the time, people just that's the time where they want to relax and they want to kind of, you know, ease off and back way off. But they're not accounting for the fact that they just consumed, you know, 3000 calories or something like that. That's so true. Like it's when you go off plan, that's when, when the problems happen, like why track the chicken and broccoli? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, yes. So, so yeah, I think that diets have their advantages and disadvantages. I think some people might like that restriction more though, right? Some people might like that discipline that they have. Some people might like dig dig it some people might be into it like they like restricting themselves like they're that kind of person which is i i see the appeal of that sometimes and for sure i think we're all just

something to that kind of person but there's some people are like more really that kind of person and um and then some people who are not and so like and i think that there's there might be psychological effects there's certainly even immune effects of different diets they immunomodulate you differently um and then so maybe your individual differences like the way that you are the way that modulates you uh works for you and then for other people it doesn't and i think that's certainly the case i do think that that there are some aspects of like dietary physiology nutrition physiology that are like pretty universal and i think that's probably calorie density is one of them a lot of protein staying in calorie balance i mean that's just like an obvious thing but getting enough sleep is good those are and those and you guys asked me at the beginning like what

i thought those are basically the only things i think are we really super solid about for uh for nutrition but um yeah i think those things are roughly universal um and then the rest there might be some individual differences that uh that might affect like how well or not well you respond to the diet but i also think people are can be close-minded too like they can say oh individual differences i tried this diet right and it solved my problems and i'm not gonna like switch to some other different thing to like question and see if maybe that could also play an impact so i heard i think it was uh joe joe rogan was with maybe like elon musk he's

talking about elon musk he's talking about rob wolf how he was like was he reintroducing like milk and then he was like he's like okay with milk now right uh milk proteins down and then i think the explanation i don't know what this is with elon musk i'm not sure but the explanation given was like the microbiome might have changed elon musk i can't remember but um yeah and so and so a lot of people think oh this is just me but they sometimes if you try something else and you can actually see especially if you're like advocating for something, you know, like you should try everything to see. Yeah, Rob Wolf has changed his observations and his information a lot over the years. And I think that's the most important thing is that you do have a little bit of a bend

in there somewhere because even from a scientific standpoint to just push off anything that's not scientific, that doesn't really make sense either because part of the reason people are in science is to even disprove their own beliefs, right? And to try to come to better explanations and to try to get closer to the truth all the time. That's really what the goal is. And I admire Rob Wolf. I think him and a few others have done a decent job

of at least admitting like, hey, I said all this stuff. I was very anti-carb. And now he was anti-carb because he was sick. He had a lot of medical issues. And for him personally at the time, he wasn't really able to eat those things. Now he's adapted, he's healthier, and he's able to eat those things now. Were you about to say something? I was going to ask this. Lane Norton, he comes up all the time, and people will on the internet, people will at him a lot, and they'll say like, oh, wait till Lane gets gets ahold of this, you know, why,

why do you think lane Norton has become a, uh, an authority figure in that sense? Like when somebody says something about like keto or somebody says something about carnivore, somebody just says something in particular that might be maybe, uh, maybe almost a little bit too much of like an absolute. Why do you think they look to lane Norton for that? Well,

I think first off lane is like, he always looks jacked in his photos. So I think like that all, all, especially like young people. Like, I remember when I first started like learning about this stuff, anybody who was like not jacked and like a little bit skinny or like maybe a

little bit like fat, I would think, Oh no, they don't know what they're talking about. Like if they can't figure it out for themselves, like'm i'm not i'm gonna listen to the jacked dude he like at least i know he knows what he's doing so that's that's part of it of course has nothing i mean when you see somebody who's got who's a high performer of course you know like they know how to apply it of course at least for themselves or they could just be a freak

it could just be genetically i think genetics make a big difference in that too you know so like it's a little unfair with with uh with that but anyway like at least you know whenever somebody's like jacked but you don't know if somebody who's like not in shape you don't know if they're necessarily don't know what they're talking about you could and even somebody who is in shape they could know what to do but not know what they're talking about. Okay. But anyway, so lane, he looks big. That's the first thing he's loud. So everybody knows he's gonna,

he's gonna push back. He's very compassionate. Yeah. He gets fired up for sure. And he has a PhD, right? And then, so he, and then he plays that role.

He's like, I'm the one who's gonna like, he's the moderation guy. That's like his brand. Right. So like, that's why, you know, and I and i've and i and i i think lane's pretty cool that's why like uh um yeah lane lane lane is awesome uh and i yeah you connected his message pretty well like you agree with a lot of what he says um yeah uh yeah and he tries to be science-based he tries to like criticize himself he tries to like not he tries to be science-based he tries to like criticize himself

he tries to like not he tries to like boil things down to the bare essentials of of the facts rather than adding a bunch of extra theories on top of it so in that sense like me and him are very similar that's the thing though it's like um when i was just like first getting into a lot of this stuff my early 20s i was lane was one of the main people that I paid attention to. Lane, Lyle McDonald, all of their stuff. But I found that I was being very, very close-minded to a lot of other protocols because of it. And then when I started trying things that were in direct, I guess, competition to what like helms and all those guys were saying. And it worked.

Then it started getting me like wondering, I wonder what else could like, yeah, what else that, you know, they say this like fasting or whatever, what else could be pretty beneficial for myself? You know what I mean?

That's why I think that like, I, I like what Lane puts forward because it's gonna work for a lot of people but I also I'm not a fan of it that much just because a lot of it just does seem very close okay did yeah that's the problem I have nowadays like I'm now like open to a lot of different things and even if it kind of sounds kind of wild I'm just like well let's give that shit a shot.

See what happens. Right. Yeah. If I see some benefit to it, like for like for me personally, for what I see from a lot of people that apply fasting with a lot of other good protocols, like eating enough protein, enough food. Yeah. It changes their personal habits towards food. It's not like there's fasting magic, but like it changes their actions. It changes the way they look at food and the way they act in response to hunger, etc. Because they learn certain habits as far as that. Right. So that's the main issue that I have with a lot of one. Me. I was someone who could eat a lot. And even when, because I've done bodybuilding shows and I've tracked my macros, I've had certain numbers, I ate whole food. For me, it was just difficult at the end of the day, even though my numbers were hit. When I got another wave of hunger, it was just hard for me with my personality at the time to say no. One of the big things that has helped me in terms of utilizing some fasting was getting used to feeling hungry and not responding to it by having to go grab food because I did that so often. Like most people, when they get hungry, they're like, okay, I got to grab something to eat.

I got to get something to eat. I got to get something to eat. I don't do that anymore. Nor do I even feel the need, but I still have, I make sure I have a certain amount of protein I hit in my day. I don't fast every single day, but I fast for quite a few days of the week. I still have a certain amount of food I eat, certain amount of protein I eat. My performance isn't affected. I feel pretty great. And it's not like doing a fasted weight training workout or going into jujitsu fasted years ago before I started doing it. I think that's absolutely insane that I wouldn't be able to perform. Performing at a very high level.

And again, it's in total contrast to what I would have thought would have worked. If someone told me that this could work for me or anybody back in 2015, I'd be like, you're fucking insane. That makes absolutely no sense. But in terms of applying it, I was able to see these personal benefits and I've been able to see other people that it's had those benefits too. So I'm just like, okay, it depends on the individual

maybe and how they apply it. It's not as black and white as some people are putting it. But you still fast regularly. Yes. Does it like to give you the discipline back or to restrict the calories again? Does that make it easier for me?

If I were to every single day eat throughout the day, I will put away a lot of food. Yeah. Start guiding. Like when, when I start eating, um, it's like,

if I have a breakfast a few hours later, I'm going to get another way and I'm going to feel hungrier. Sure. It's going to be harder for me if I actually wanted to restrict. It's not as easy to restrict. Got it. I can put down a lot of food, but it's harder for me if I actually wanted to restrict. It's not as easy to restrict because I can put down a lot of food. But it's harder for me to do that in a window. And again, I don't fast every single day. If a friend wants to get breakfast, I'll get breakfast and whatever, eat throughout the day.

But I found that it has given me more control from a mental aspect over my own feelings of hunger. I don't feel that like for some individuals, a lot of people aren't necessarily, I guess they're not used to not responding to feelings of hunger. Most people, that's a big issue. And that's why sometimes just tracking eating throughout the day and having multiple small meals doesn't work.

It does, but it's hard because like they're going through their day, they're eating these small meals and they want to just eat more and more as the day goes by. I've seen that happen for some individuals. Not that fasting is the answer for them. Like, but that has happened to me that that happens to people.

That's super interesting. It's almost like, um, I forgot what I was gonna say um i utilize similar protocol like i think both of us have kind of learned some similar things um maybe it's because of our like bias towards certain styles of nutrition but we've had particular guests on the show that have kind of led us to a little bit of intermittent fasting a little bit more of a meat-based uh diet but um i'm definitely open to the fact that like you can you can do whatever is going to get you

through the day as long as you're not going to overeat and i think you're not going to overeat if you have the same amount of calories same amount of protein what you don't like there's no need to fast it's not going to do something crazy. But for me, I just noticed that on the habit side of things on the, like, I like what you said about training too. Like you're not, it changed for him. It changed his mindset.

And it changed my mindset too, of like thinking like I have to eat these particular pre-workout foods. Oh yeah. My workout's going to suck. And then when you did work out fasted, like the workout did suck. Cause you're like, I knew it was going to suck. And you were just all up in your own head that you didn't have enough energy or strength for the workout did suck because you're like i knew it was going to suck

and you were just all up in your own head that you didn't have enough energy or strength for the workout uh-huh yeah which wasn't the case but you're about to say something oh yeah so i just wonder maybe if if you look at the studies maybe if the issue i'm sure a lot of people already know this but like i wonder if the issue is like that fasting is easier and maybe it achieves similar weight loss but like fasting is an easier way to do it. And if that's the case, like that's important to know. So it's, it's a really interesting hearing your story because maybe even though the studies show similar weight loss, it could just be like the people who are doing continuous restriction

were just like white knuckling it and miserable. So, but that's the thing I've done both. Like, yeah, I've done multiple meals. I've cut. I've gotten very, very low. Yeah, yeah. I've done the same thing. And I hear you.

I hear you. I know exactly what you're talking about. Sometimes fasting is you just don't eat. And then you're not like, whenever you eat, you're not like, oh, I can only eat like two eggs. And you're like depressed about it. You know? You just don't eat. And then you just go about your day.

And then you eat. And then you eat enough. And you're like not depressed it you know you just don't eat and then you just go about your day and then you eat and then you eat enough and you're like not depressed when you eat you know there are some there is some research on decision making and cutting down your choices and how important that can be in a particular day because you only have so many good choices that you're going to probably make in a given day and the day will wear you down and so if food is not really i guess eating like not eating is the choice too, in some sense, but it does simplify things. Like, what are you going to eat at work today? You're going to be at work for eight hours. What are you going to eat? I'm not going to eat anything. I'm going to

wait till I get home. Like that's a simpler message. And then when you get home, yeah, maybe you can eat a little bit more in those one or two meals that you have. And you're not going to, you're still not going to be over your overall energy intake for the day. You'll still be at maintenance or slightly under where you should be, and you can continue to be healthy or continue to lose a little bit of weight. So this whole discussion is super interesting because maybe somebody like Lane, he might look at these continuous calorie restriction studies or whatever compared to intermittent fasting and say

oh well there's no difference but if we actually have these nuances at play and we actually like maybe if we design studies see that's the thing is like sometimes the studies are designed in a very unintelligent way so that you can't actually pull out some of these effects that we're talking about so that's one reason why it's one reason why you need to be skeptical of me and Lane Norton. You just can't listen to all that we say because sometimes we're just too dependent on science. That's great.

You know, one of the things that we've been super happy about in sharing messages with people is a lot of times someone will come to us, they're super excited. They lost 20 pounds or 80 pounds or a hundred pounds. Almost every single time they come to us and say, Hey, you know, I lost this weight and it wasn't that hard. And I think that that's the most important thing in trying to get these messages out there. Like what are some, what's some simple shit we can get people to do? I don't know what the science shows about like walking, but I do know it's movement.

I do know it's exercise. I do know that pretty much anybody can participate in it. So I'm going to tell you to walk a couple times a day because I think that's effective. Who possesses the ability to not eat? Everybody, right? It's inclusive. Everyone can do it. It's not a choice to eat meat.

It's not a religious thing. It's not anything against animals or anything. It's just you just don't eat. And even just sharing with somebody like, hey, you know, it appears, you know, you're 100 pounds overweight. It appears that you've had an issue with overeating for a long time. long time. Let's figure out a way for you to introduce some under eating in some sense. And let's just maybe skip breakfast and let's maybe have your meat, have your food for the day, be done about two or three hours before bed. And by the time you eat at 11 or 12 o'clock every day, you'll have fasted for a good amount of hours. Let's not really worry about how many hours it is because I don't think there's anything inherently great about that necessarily. Let's have you go from eating five times a day. I think there was some information I saw a while back where it said the average American ate like 11 times a day,

consumed calories 11 times a day, which is crazy. So what if you were just, I don't know, just how about just let's just be reasonable and let's not like try to kill your life. But can we cut that in half? You know, can we knock that down to five times or four times and just come up with some, what are just some more reasonable things we can do? Can we, you know, and then we know what lifting weights can do. And I don't want to always push people into lifting weights. I understand not everyone loves it, but building up some muscle mass can really be beneficial.

And so if we can walk and we can do a little bit of fasting, if we can eat a gram of protein per pound of body weight in whatever style of protein that you can, maybe we'll find some ways for you to eat less each day and get through every day without just the message for me is just don't be fat. You know, just don't be fucking fat, like figure out a way to get through every single day without overeating.

Yep. Try to keep it that simple. Yep. That's going to be like the main thing. Thank me. Thing. One of the interesting things that I think I've taken away from this is that maybe,

uh, maybe there might be different effects of fasting versus continuous restriction or whatever else in people who are more motivated so like people are super motivated who really want it and they're trying things and like maybe they're just miserable doing the eating like five times a day but then they try fasting and because they're motivated they can do fasting but um but whereas if you take everybody maybe a lot of people are just not going to want to do fasting oh you know so maybe that's why you might see like less strong effects of some of these other, because maybe if you could have like a study that only included people who are really motivated or more motivated. I agree with you, but I would also say that everyone intermittently eats.

You know, like we all have pauses from the day. And that's why I think, again, like walking or lifting or great things or jujitsu. Yeah. Like you're not eating a sandwich when you're doing jujitsu, I would imagine, right? Like these are more opportunities for you to not eat. You know, these are more, whereas like sitting down at the end of the day and watching a movie or something like that, these are opportunities to over consume calories. And so how do we just kind of continue to push things in front of people that add to their life that also make it more difficult for them to keep stuff in their face? Probably more people would be doing jujitsu if you could eat a sandwich.

Yeah, it would be great. It's actually a really good sandwich shop idea. Like a grilled cheese sandwich or something? Come do jujitsu and get a free sandwich. But I think what you were mentioning about those nuances, right? And how like they're not mentioned in the research. Because when I talk to a lot of people, a lot of people that do that practice

do notice those change in their daily habits. You know what I mean? They notice those changes in their decision making when it does come to food and how strong of an urge that they feel.

Like when you do get the feeling of hunger, that's one big thing that I've noticed with a lot of individuals, not myself. It's like, I don't feel that I actually have to respond to that feeling of hunger anymore. Now imagine if everybody could kind of feel that way when it comes to dieting,

right? Where they're hungry, but they're like, I don't want to eat. I don't have to eat right now. So let's just not eat. Right. That would make it easier for some people.

And you could you don't need to fast to maybe see that benefit some people don't need to go as far as fasting to get that benefit from dieting right maybe it is just having just a time that you're going to eat during the day i'm going to be breakfast i'm going to eat lunch i'm going to be dinner these are the only times during the day i'm going to eat maybe they could control themselves in that way it would have very similar effect but i think people are just also in different places in their life too. And so for Nsema or for myself or some other people that have been able to incorporate some fasting, like you're mentioning, like, man, like maybe not everyone,

like a lot of people would think that would be really, really challenging to implement any sort of fasting. And so maybe you do need to be like kind of far along in your dieting career to be able to implement some of these protocols. But I do think like just messing with it just for a day, just to see what it's like. And then also too, I don't really know the information on this, but it does appear that if you can get yourself away from some of the sugary stuff from the carbohydrates and some of the processed foods, I should say, that fasting seems to be a little easier operating mainly, you know, eating fat and protein. It just seems to be because now the conversation isn't necessarily just fasting.

The conversation is also like, OK, I'm not going to eat throughout the day. And my first meal of the day is going to be some steak, you know, that's going to be the, and when you have that opportunity to actually eat, you're eating something that you feel, at least it's like kind of my belief that is very nutritious for yourself. And it's an actual like full meal. And so for, I think for, for Nsema and I, when we see like snacks and we see little things we're enticed by them just like everybody else but i think a lot of times we're just like not like around two or three o'clock or whenever you get home from jiu-jitsu or however you do it uh i'm gonna have an opportunity to like sit down and actually just like maul a bunch of food and

that's going to be amazing and so i will that for now, even though it seems great to like eat this protein bar or engage in what everyone else is doing. But I'm willing to sacrifice it now for the payoff later on, because fasting, while fasting is kind of great in some sense and feels good in some sense, it's not so much the fasting. It's the first meal that you get when you're done fasting um yeah anything that people can do to reduce their calorie intake is good and fat if fasting helps them that's that's good yeah for sure one thing that i've heard uh lane norton go absolute bonkers and uh he calls out thomas de la it a lot when it comes to fasting but at any time he thomas says the word autophagy lane goes fucking ape shit uh your your your your thoughts i got some serious autophagy going on right now i'm gonna that grows on your foot? Or that's something else. Um, yeah,

I have some notes here. Um, I, I hate autophagy so much. Like, it's like, I feel like he's going to like freestyle or rap about it right now. Like Eminem and drop the mic.

I will play it. Okay, what does Thomas DeLauer say about autophagy? It seems like you've got to help me out here. Well, pretty much it's just like cell recycling. So pretty much old cells just like cell recycling so pretty much you'll you know old cells are gonna kind of rejuvenate that's the whole essence and he says that when fasting like he like autophagy happens all day long every single day but if you do prolonged fasts that that process speeds up that's that's the only message that he has about autophagy

um not that you you know it only happens when fasting is just a faster that's what he says that's what i think a lot of these individuals say so cool so i think one way that we're starting to see eye to eye on some things or at least we can see each other or i can see like i can see that's like science doesn't we we are starting to have some consensus about um when things work you know use them and of course i've always said that but a lot of things that you guys say about how fasting helps you i'm gonna i'm gonna listen of course like yeah i believe i believe that it's like of course here's the thing though about autophagy autophagy isn't something that um before i talk about it i'm just going to introduce autophagy is not something that's just working for you you don't know how much autophagy

you're you're having so it's not like i can't be like oh well it's working for you so i i accept it it's like autophagy is this whole other thing that people are kind of making up so first thing calorie restricting versus fasting what reduces autophagy more like overall what reduces autophagy more what induce i guess it induces autophagy more okay and and and and the answer to that is i don't think we know we know that calorie restriction causes autophagy to go up also yeah what about after you're done fasting and you start eating does autophagy go down again like back down so what's the overall amount of autophagy that you're getting in fasting versus calorie restriction do we even know we don't even have we don't have any animal studies even telling us that yeah um or we might have like a couple and

then some of the ones that i'm familiar with like i've been familiar with is like suggest that maybe calorie restriction caused more autophagy but it might be the case that um like compared to fasting it might be the case that like the the mice weren't eating equal calories so even though the fasted mouse was fasting it was still eating more overall calories it could have been i haven't looked at these studies but i know that there's no firm understanding and if anything maybe there's more for for for calorie restriction although that's really weak evidence so like that's the first thing is like why do you need to fast to have autophagy because i don't think we even know that and so why are you promoting fasting for autophagy that's like the first the first thing second thing is like, we don't know that like autophagy is the reason you're having these benefits

from fasting. Like if you knock out autophagy in animal models and in like the lab, yeah, you're going to lose benefit from fasting, but that might be because you're, first off, you're screwing up a lot of other things because autophagy is essential for like just normal functioning.

If you knock out autophagy in the brain, you don't have autophagy. You have like, you get, you knock out autophagy in the brain you have autophagy you have like you get uh dementia like the bird the mice will the brains will uh deteriorate quickly and they'll their brain aging will be much faster even if they're just fed normally right yeah um the other thing is is that autophagy just might be one essential ingredient ingredient among like 20 different essential ingredients so just because you're increasing autophagy doesn't mean that you're, not that you even know that you're increasing autophagy, doesn't mean that you're increasing longevity.

So why are you even talking about like, you want to increase your autophagy by fasting, but you don't even know that it's causing more autophagy than calorie restriction and other forms of calorie restriction. And we don't even know that that's really the reason you're getting longevity benefits from fasting. Real quick. So then where are some of these people that are saying that when you're

fasting you're increasing your rate of autophagy in that segment where are they getting their information for that you they are increasing the rate of autophagy when you're when you fast right compared to like compared to just eating ad lib if you're a mouse and you're just eating chow all the time all day long and you fast and you acute you'll see an acute increase in autophagy got it right so that's where they're getting it from but like we don't know that as as far as i know we don't know that that that's better than it caused more autophagy overall than just restricting those mice's calories i think a lot of times we don't even know like somebody might have made autophagy sound fancy sound like a good idea but then what are the repercussions of like there's always like a give and take of

the human body and so uh us you know having more new cells or something i'm sure maybe it's great for the moment but maybe it's not great to do that often and who really knows yeah no totally it could and yeah it could be that even if you do increase autophagy exactly as you even if you if you do increase autophagy, this is give me this other idea, like, you might also be causing other things bad to happen. So you might get more autophagy. Well, the other thing about autophagy is autophagy, cancer upregulates autophagy. So maybe you're like, you're probably not helping cancer cells, but maybe you're helping cancer cells, or maybe you're killing good cells, some good cells that you don't even, you know, that you don't want to kill. Well, of course, you're going to probably lose some muscle. Like there's downsides, too. The other thing is, is when you calorie restrict mice, a large, a substantial portion of mouse strains, they actually like live less long. They die earlier. die earlier like so just because you're increasing your topogy and just because you're maybe increasing your chances of living longer doesn't mean you're necessarily increasing your longevity

and if you go really extreme like there's some people who are like jacked and they're like ripped and like they're in great shape they're a great cardiovascular shape then they're adding like long fat like five day fasts onto that like i don't even know if that's necessarily necessarily even doing them good just because a mouse study of a fat mouse that you that you you take the food away for 24 hours which by the way taking the food away from a mouse for 24 hours is like taking a food away from like a human for like two weeks so it's like you're almost killing this mouse and then you're saying oh like it's going to be like it's going to be the same for me it's like totally different in so many different ways sorry totally different so many ways so like that so yes it's basically some dude's like oh a

Nobel Prize was won with this word autophagy autophagy sounds cool as hell right self-eating that's like it's like sounds like a metal band right it sounds like a really it's like really cool and so of course you use that and that and then and then you can make a you can make a you can make a religion out of it. And that's what they're doing, right? It's like autophagy is like the fasting God, right? Autophagy is the fasting God. I came here to heal you.

Yes, exactly. God is entering you and healing you from within. So that's that. It's the fasting God. And it's just as religious and just as not, it's totally, yeah, it's in, it is, it's, it's like their God. So can we, uh, can we fight off insulin resistance through fasting? Like, I think that's Jason Fung's, uh, drum that he beats all the time is that fasting can kind of, uh, almost almost reverse diabetes do you think there's

any truth or any evidence of that awesome um so so what we know from a study called direct and it was published like 2018 they gave people um and i promise this is going to be relevant. They gave people 800 calorie shakes. They were diabetics, obese diabetics. They gave them 800 calorie shakes and they gave them like coaching and stuff. They helped them. And this is kind of along the lines of what you're talking about. Like once you're given like, I'm only allowed to eat this, you know, it's very black and white. They adhered really well.

Among the people who, I think it was like, they lost like 10 kilograms or maybe 15 kilograms among those people. And that's not even that much, right? If you're obese, like 15 kilograms, like 30 pounds, it's not,

you know, there was like an 86% remission in diabetes. Right. And so what they looked at is they looked at the liver fat. They looked at the pancreatic fat. And those are basically the idea is idea is that fat in those organs, those are organs that regulate your blood glucose and a lot of other things, but that's what's causing the diabetes, or according to some of the main theories, that's one of the main centers of what's causing diabetes. one of the main centers of what's causing diabetes they're losing fat quickly especially at the beginning of that process the beginning of weight loss they're losing fat from those organs and that causes the reversal of their diabetes the idea is and and it correlated with how much weight

so the people who lost like 15 kilograms had like an 80 remission people lost like 10 kilograms had like 50 60 and then it was like dose response so like down to like five kilograms had like an 80% remission. People lost like 10 kilograms had like 50, 60. And then it was like dose response. So like down to like five kilograms is like 30%. So the more weight you lose, the better. Yeah.

And so that's really the thing. It's like, he's fasting people and he's causing them to lose weight. And because he's causing them to lose weight, um, they're losing their visceral fat and they're reversing their diabetes. And you can do that on any diet. Most, yeah.

So most likely if you were to fast and you reach this magical number of 16 or 18 hours of fasting every day, if you still overate, you most likely wouldn't be reversing anything. If you fast for 16 or 18 hours. And you still overeat. Yeah, still on a surplus calorie. Can you do that? Yeah. Yeah, you probably can with like, yeah.

Oh, you can. Yeah. Oh, if you eat junk food, yeah, you can figure it out real quick yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but it's possible i've done it yeah if you're not losing weight uh you're not going to reverse your diabetes it's the weight loss that's doing it uh sugar doesn't cause diabetes i think is something i've seen you talk about before what what is the madness behind that this is this is so i i was um because i uh because my plane my all that plane stuff it was a six 14 hour flight that should have been four hours i didn't have chance to like i was just listening to your guys podcast and so we're gonna call some more names out and he can correct me if he thinks i'm wrong here i've looked into this

over and over i can never find anything on. I don't know where people get this. Benjamin Bickman said like he said that he said that if you eat carbs by causing insulin to go up, then you then you over time cause your cells to become less responsive to insulin. responsive to insulin cool i think there is some evidence to support this idea that hyperinsulinemia can cause insulin resistance uh there's a really famous there's a really famous paper by barbara corkey it's not that important but like still the main the main consensus is that that's one thing so so maybe genetically that's the case that that's the case and maybe in some experimental models that's the case and maybe even overall that's the case but whenever you look at humans even uh and you keep them in a caloric isochlorically they're not gaining weight um whenever you feed them high carbs over and over again, it actually increases their insulin sensitivity.

It's like fuel switching. So whenever you go on a ketogenic diet, you actually become less able to process the carbohydrate. Your blood glucose spikes are much higher whenever you cheat. That's because you actually fuel switch. Your body's become more accustomed to burning carbohydrate or more accustomed to burning fat. So your body actually gets better at burning glucose. You actually become more insulin sensitive as you actually decrease the amount of fat.

It depends upon how you're measuring insulin sensitivity, and this gets a little technical. But if we just talk about it in terms of eating a meal with carbohydrate in it. Whenever you eat more carbohydrate, you're better able to handle that and you need less insulin to get the glucose into your body. That's one thing. So basics of that principle would be that if you discontinue eating carbohydrates for a long time, you may be a little more inefficient at processing them, perhaps. I think it's not even perhaps. It's absolutely the case. But that'll come back in like a week or two. I gotta just eat carbs a little bit for a week or two. It comes back. And a lot of times, people that are on low-carb diets, their fasted blood glucose will be higher

than somebody that is just fasted regular that eats carbohydrates just just under normal healthy conditions right i i've heard this and i've seen people talk about this i haven't been able to find any evidence for this but i've heard this all the time i don't know exactly um uh about so so so you want to avoid gaining weight and if you avoid gaining weight especially if you're gaining visceral fat so you want to you want to maintain your physical activity you want to maintain your protein intake you keep the same weight you can eat a lot of carbs you're not going to cause insulin resistance and diabetes in yourself unless you have some sort of metabolic

fat processing thing that's going on it's not related to your cells becoming more or less insulin sensitive it's related to what's going on in the liver maybe even in the muscle the fat that's in those tissues that's what's going to cause your insulin resistance not having more insulin there is some evidence along those lines and that that's interesting but it's not um in the human studies the actual human, I don't know if anybody's ever shown, I don't think anybody's ever shown that like feeding people a lot of carbs for a long period of time, keeping the same weight. And then you look at their visceral fat.

I don't think anybody's ever shown if like, if everything remains the same, that you're going to get diabetes. Now, if you get more visceral fat, so if you're eating a lot of processed, especially like sugar, right? Sugar is especially like sugar right sugar is um especially free sugar so so so not just sugar in like an apple or whatever but like sugar in like a soft drink is the worst that can cause fatty liver or contribute to fatty liver without you getting fat i believe so um there are people and I thought this was a close, I thought this was a definite thing for sure.

And I've seen several studies that have shown this, in my opinion, very clearly. But there's a couple other people who I respect who think differently, but I need to talk that out with them. I believe that is the case, certainly. But I could be wrong like nine like one but i've seen many i don't know so there's some people who believe different uh i think those people are wrong i think that's a scientific discussion to have but i um so so so so i will say that not gaining weight and eating a bunch of sugar free like soft drink stuff you can actually but it has nothing to do with what the cells are doing it has to do with what's going on

in your liver and your pancreas yeah and And it also causes a whole bunch of other things. Refined sugars, like soft drinks, are terrible for you. Before we, you know, I guess found sugar and processed it, you know, sugar is a plant, so I'm sure in some regards it's not necessarily all bad, but did diabetes even exist? Type 2 diabetes? Do we even know if it was around or like when was it discovered? And like, I'd imagine without processed foods like type two diabetes just really wouldn't. Just from my understanding of it and my understanding could be way off, but I would just not really know why it would be a thing if uh people were eating foods that weren't processed yeah um so i think i think diabetes was first reported in like the the western medical literature not like not like uh there's different kinds of diabetes there's another kind of diabetes called

like diabetes insipidus which is not related to to insulin and all that stuff it's a different uh cause now it's reported a long time ago i want to say that i want to say that diabetes like i want to say that type 2 diabetes was like first reported like in like only about like 500 years ago in the west but it was reported like thousands of years ago like in india um but uh yeah i don't know is sugar causing diabetes there is some there is some correlation i don't think it's like the cause of diabetes for sure i think overweight is the cause of diabetes i think okay here's here's how i think it's i think it's fair what you're saying like basically if sugar was wiped off the planet there would still be people that would probably end up with diabetes

although it'd be a lot less so yeah so here and then okay the other thing is is like sugar can actually maybe even cause you to gain weight itself so there's there's two factors and whether or not you get diabetes two factors first factors is your um your overall weight and as you gain weight your visceral fat will increase and this is the main factor if you look at the if you look at the there's actually been studied by kevin hall he looked at the correlation between total fat body fat and then visceral fat and it was like it's not super tight but it's somewhat tight and that looseness and that correlation between the two may be in part

these are the other things that modulate it so you can be uh you can gain a lot of fat but then also still maybe not have diabetes or genetics is a big thing of course yeah but then the other the other things are physical activity because that burns off visceral fat things like sugar intake like high sugar intake high processed carbohydrate intake so those two things interact together the total body fat and the and the uh the uh the composition of the diet one thing that also may reduce visceral fat is like the opposite of sugar and people don't want to hear this this is like the truth it's like it's been shown over and over again it's like it's like vegetable oils vegetable oils on if you

isocalorically you don't overeat them of course you might want to overuse that to ask you about right then your actual visceral fat will go down and you might be improving your metabolic function kind of the opposite of sugar so two things dietary composition and total body fatness is going to determine and then plus your genetics genetics is enormous it's going to determine your diabetes uh risk because some okay so the last thing genetics so body fatness determines your visceral fat can be modulated by diet genetics determines uh two things um well it determines a lot of things but like how basically how susceptible you are to visceral fat we'll leave it there yeah so so vegetable oils are demonized massively through a lot of the low carb community, keto, et cetera. A lot of the individuals on this quack list, I'm not a big fan of vegetable oils, right? Seed oils, et cetera. So, um, what, what is your take on that in terms of like their negativity or their bias towards being negative on it? Um um do they even have a reason to actually really have any negativity towards i feel like this is more autophagy type stuff um in my opinion i mean

i think the reason to be okay so let's take it from their point of view like why i mean why they why what they say makes sense according to how i understand i can understand it yeah of course there's either they have other arguments but like the most reasonable way to understand it in my opinion would be that adding oils causes more energy intake so it's just like what we're talking about like you can have like the sesame oil in the whole foods and you're gonna you're gonna it's not gonna be good and then what might happen is you might like start your your joints might start hurting you have these autoimmune stuff but that's like being driven by your weight gain okay so that's like that thing but then if you look at the actual literature on like inflammation if you look at like cholesterol if you look at

freaking everything we know about vegetables if you look at fatty liver you look at everything we know about vegetable oils in terms of what we know about and then you look at the epidemiology right okay uh and then i need to actually say something about that real quick but then if you look at the epidemiology the epidemiology is uh people who consume more vegetable oils even though vegetables are a proxy for almost processed food their their heart their heart outcomes are better they have low rate of heart attacks and stuff it's not like healthy people are i don't think healthy people generally like add a lot of vegetable oils to things i think it's like marker of processed food i don't think it's a healthy user bias type thing so like all that evidence okay so but some

people could say to me like oh what about the randomized control trials well nutrition is different than other like supplements and all that stuff because nutrition you have to you have to decide what you're going to eat um so if you just look at the available evidence there's nothing now there's some animal studies that suggest that if you feed vegetable animals oils to, like, mice and stuff, you can cause cancer, like corn oil. But mice's immune systems are very different from human immune systems. They don't even like omegas. Like, they get inflammation from, like, a lot of stuff, vegetables. We don't get any inflammation.

We've seen this in random animals. We don't have any inflammation. We might even have a reduction in inflammation yeah so there's no there's no reason in the studies and there's okay so benjamin bickman says like he has these studies where he shows these byproducts of vegetables like in the brain and stuff or something like that i needed to look at that but like that's like a that's like one biomarker for something and we don't even know what that means uh if we knew that robustly correlated with health outcomes, then maybe, but he's just like assuming that that makes a difference.

So everything that we know, and even LDL, like there's so many different ways that vegetables are better than like a lot of other things, especially vegetables that have like, or have like a lot of antioxidants in them. Like canola oil might have some oil olive oil is good right um i know it's not a vegetable oil but like i don't think there's any like basis at all i think this is crazy i think it's just totally crazy like uh nina tyshaw really likes to talk to talk stuff about vegetables i don't think she knows where she gets it from i do think that if you like fry like burgers and stuff in vegetable oils like you do it for like 10 hours straight of course you're going to oxidize those oils and make you know you don't want to you don't

want to eat those i mean maybe you do but are even antioxidants a thing like i've heard those kind of even be dispelled a little bit before so there's something called like the free radical theory of aging it goes back to like 1960s 70s it's like not considered true anymore it's not considered like the main thing and people thought that like you got free radicals so you need to reduce the free radicals by quenching them with antioxidants but then people have done just tons and tons of randomized control trials vitamin e is a really great example they thought that would do it and then like no like there's no like there's like literally like 30 or 40 different randomized control trials for like heart disease and antioxidants. And like, there's nothing, there's no signal, no effect whatsoever.

So anybody says, oh, it's high in antioxidants. You just know that's like, that's another autophagy. So autophagy, seed oils, antioxidants, those are all like the same. It's like, there's no, it's not where the science is today. Yeah. So. So you don't think people need to be going out of their way to get rid of vegetable oils? Just obviously don't have an insane amount where you're going in a surplus

of calories. Look, I don't need vegetable oils. So to be like honest about it, like I don't need vegetable oils. Um, is there a reason or you just don't? Yeah.

Why would I add those calories? Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm, why would I have a salad and then like four calories on a salad? Like,

why am I going to do that to myself? It's like, I don't hate myself. Um, but a large portion of the food It's like, I don't hate myself. But a large portion of the food that's in the grocery store has vegetable in it. So you probably get some in right here and there just by eating a snack or whatever. Yeah.

I mean, sometimes once I learned about laying stuff and tracking calories, I started getting really excited about, like, I could eat whatever I wanted. That was so awesome. I started eating really excited about like I could eat whatever I wanted. That was so awesome. I started eating pop tarts all the time. I was like, yeah, I've done it.

Just kidding. But like. I don't want to add calories, but I will say this, if I have a choice to what to cook with. Right. to what to cook with right am i going to cook with um butter or am i going to cook with olive oil or avocado oil or even canola oil of course you want to cook a long time but if i want to cook choose i would always choose the oils over the butter because um so in those cases yes in those cases where i where i kind of have to do it, yes, I would definitely choose those. But in general, I would not advise people to eat a lot of refined foods at all.

You're just going to get fat. So like in that sense, but then people make all this ideology. Again, it's like autophagy. It's like they make all this ideology around it because they want to have like kind of a religion and a theology. And they're like, they have all these rules and all these ideas about why this does it no it's just you don't eat too many calories but if you tell people that they don't want they can't follow their religion and they and the person who the guru can't be like the priest so the priest has to make up a bunch of things around this that has nothing to do with anything at all to to to persuade people to to to not eat seed oils just i don't know i don't want

to be a priest i'm just telling you just don't eat too many calories. Seed oils are calories. That's all. They can't follow their religion to the point where they're telling you that sugar is bad, processed foods are bad, but then they're telling you to use olive oil on your salad. And you're like, well, that's a processed food as well. And that might lead me to end up... And people think that olives have some sort of magic powers or that avocados have some sort of I don't really. That's interesting. I don't really believe there's any sort of magical component to any foods necessarily.

I actually think that just figuring out a way to get through each and every day without overeating is is the main thing that's going to assist us the best and even with that there's no guarantees because of our genetics and maybe just the way that we respond to even certain foods within the confines of keeping our calories in check yeah yeah and and of course there's probably so many different things about individual differences and even just seed oils and anything in general that we're talking about that we don't know. So that's the caveat here. We don't know a lot of things, but at least I can tell you what we do and don't know. And as far as we don't know, we don't know all these weird things people say about seed oils. Is there seem to be some sort of major benefit of vegetables to any degree or even fiber?

I would say, you know, I'm almost converted to like the carnivore point of view on this. If there is a benefit of vegetables, especially like the green vegetables, especially like sulforaphane or whatever, that's scary. I don't think that that's like a good thing. Like imagine you have like a compound that like extends your life and like prevents cancer, does all these things. And we have no idea like what the long-term effects are or whatever. Like, and it doesn't even necessarily prevent cancer like we don't like say you have something like drug like a food that's drug like and and in order to get it you have to like find broccoli sprouts and grow them at the exact right time and like mass and eat them every day nobody ever in nature ever did that ever to eat them and then get these drug-like effects i would say like

be really careful about that i feel like that's like not good so anything that any kind of like phytochemical and new phytonutrient that people say that is good from like from like vegetables i would be i would be like oh like i wouldn't want to eat a vegetable from that you know for the same reason saladino says um because even if yeah because for for every drug there's always a downside and if you have a drug like effects you have a potential downside so the five but i don't think if you eat vegetables in moderation it's a problem right and then also um because we have detoxification systems right and can i rant a little bit about the saladadino argument about like why you shouldn't eat plants? Okay.

So Saladino says like, he says like plants have poisons, right? And therefore, since they're going to poison us, we shouldn't eat them. And then also like animals have everything we need, right? Okay, cool. But then how do you propose that all the animals in the animal kingdom should eat? Should they all be eating steak? that all the animals in the animal kingdom should eat should they all be eating steak should even the herbivores who are obligate like obligate herbivores who don't eat anything except for plants who eat toxic plants all the time should they eating steak because the plants are toxic it doesn't make any sense because actually if you do feed those animals just steak like they

will they'll die they'll like get deformities and stuff and they'll die so the question is like yes they have toxins in them the question is can humans detoxify them or not if we can good if not that's not good we need to know that when you think and ask that question but we can't assume just because they're toxins they're going to poison us right you guys you guys look like you already know all this stuff so um now i was going to say is that um so i don't know for example i think they say that spinach has like oxalates in it or something like that. And then I think people look at that as being bad. Yeah.

It's like this oxalate is something really awful for our bodies. We hear all the time that it causes inflammation and we hear it just, it's just a lot of it just seems to be nonsense. And I don't think anyone really knows like oxalates could potentially be bad. They could potentially be harmful, but maybe there's probably a good side to them it seems like there's like a yin and a yang of every fucking thing that's on this planet and for some reason we never seem to like hold that message and understand that that there's like a good and bad to every single situation and so just because your body might have to fight off something that's potentially in a plant that doesn't mean that it's bad.

Yeah. If it's causing, obviously if it's causing health issues, if you're eating it and you're like, you're like getting crippling, you know, joint pain, you're not like going to be like,

Oh, I should keep eating this because it's supposed to be good for me. Like, yeah, obviously stop eating it and try it. If you think that you have these autoimmune issues, try, try like,

I don't try. I have said to my friend who has ankylosing spondylitis i said try carnivore diet right because it's not actually a perfect elimination diet because actually uh bread meat does have antigens too and it can cause autoimmune flare-ups just like other things can but it does eliminate almost everything yeah and then and then you have a night so it's it's great and so if you do that it works awesome super awesome for you and then make sure you have a night so it's it's great and so if you do that it works awesome super awesome for you and then make sure like after you've gained your like if you've lost a bunch of weight after that you can actually try some plants and see if it causes it to come back

if it does stay off of it that's cool but like um for most people there's no evidence whatsoever that that like oxalates is a problem and you mentioned about fiber fiber is great right bulky foods have fiber and low calories they're going to fill you up. That's what caught, that energy density thing, that means it's going to help with weight loss. And there's evidence for that. And we know it, of course. You eat a big salad before, you know. You yourself, you said that you were doing this plant-based keto, but in general, do you avoid red, like do you not eat much red meat? Because I think I heard you say something like that as we were talking.

I was just curious what like your diet generally looks like. Are there things you avoid things that you don't? Yeah. Um, Hmm. So, so for red meat, uh,

so there's a few things. First, the first thing is like, I'm not a vegan. I don't care about. And we and I don't care about. I don't think there's this whole thing of like we shouldn't we should avoid. Killing animals because it's like it's like mean and they have like I mean, of course, like it's not a nice thing to do to kill an animal, but like they kill themselves to kill.

Yeah, we get it. You're good. Right. Right right i don't have to defend it to you guys okay um the one thing maybe so there's a few aspects of red meat that bother me a little bit about the science the first thing is the saturated fat and the ldo cholesterol there's an association between that and cardiovascular disease of course there's some recent reviews that suggest that you know whatever and that's a whole other discussion we could do that if you want but that that's a concern to me the other thing is maybe the heme

iron in the the red meat and of course that's cause oxidation all the other thing maybe increase your colon cancer risk maybe if you get too much heme iron in the blood then you over time increase your cardiovascular disease risk so those are the those are like the health reasons um and then i guess like the environmental reason would be like uh well like emissions and all that stuff i'm not against eating red meat i'm not it's not something that i um it's not something that i'll eat a steak but and i don't think about it a lot i don't worry about it like and i will i will occasionally eat some red meat but i just don't tend to do it and you think there's like a potential problem with over consumption of it um yeah maybe maybe uh i think maybe the saturated fat content maybe the heme iron content is is uh

has maybe detrimental effects and there's some evidence in the epidemiological literature that that's the case i don't think that's that's that's one motivation for me not not doing it although you know there's a lot of course like a lot of nutrients and all this stuff and i eat like liver like carnivore really sent me some beef liver that i i don't like it it tastes like crap who wants to eat that it's terrible it's pretty good. He likes it because he likes doing things that feel terrible.

I've eaten liver since I was a kid, man. I'm used to it. I'm used to that shit. But if a carnivore diet can assist someone to drop some LBs, then maybe it's healthy. For sure. 100%. 100%. Yeah. For sure. sure then maybe yeah for sure maybe it's healthy for sure 100 um 100 yeah yeah for sure especially

okay so i will say this like if you have slightly higher ldl from saturated fat let's say but then you're like really improving your health in every other way you're probably going to be like way more healthy and way less risk of disease and way better off so if that's the way you do it cool the only thing i would say is like and if you're going to do the red meat approach, like try to mitigate some of the risks. So one of the things that I think is really cool, and I was telling Chris, like I think a couple of days ago, I was like, I'm going to be a Piedmontese beef shill on the podcast. And so give me my $100 after this is over.

I guess I'm cheap. But one of the really cool things about that though is like it is low in fat yeah it is low in saturated fat it's like almost pure protein and that's like really good not only is that good for like the whole saturated fat thing but that's also really good for like weight loss that's awesome because it's just pure protein it's pure bulk it's like it's like a meat salad you know so that's awesome the one thing about i like that yeah that's that was good that's awesome. The one thing about, I like that. Yeah, that's, that was good. That's, that's like a meat salad. Noted.

Um, the one thing I would say is the heme iron though. So if you're going to eat it, maybe eat it with like, uh, like people always, okay. People say stuff about beans.

They're like, Oh, the beans, like they're going to, they're, they have, uh, like lectins and,

and, uh, what are the, what is the phytates and stuff? And they're going to, it's going to sequester all the, all the minerals and you're not going to absorb lectins and and uh what are the what is the phytates and stuff and they're gonna it's gonna sequester all the all the minerals and you're not gonna absorb your minerals and you're gonna have you're being nutrient deficient like you guys heard that kind of thing before yeah i haven't that's cool okay um but one of the interesting things is maybe sometimes that's good right like let's say if you're getting too much iron right if and you don't you don't need too much

iron right there's too much such a thing as too much of everything maybe you could eat like beans along with your uh with your uh with your with your meat and that actually will take up some of the heme iron and reduce maybe some of the effects of that so i would say you know uh maybe couple it with some plants and that might be helpful unless you have like an autoimmune problem don't worry about it but that's that would be the one thing yeah about red meat and uh yeah okay yeah i would just add um pete montes.com promo code power project for 25 off and if your order is 99 a more you get free two-day shipping and and i want to be like completely like straightforward about this of course if you do a carnivore you're probably gonna it's probably gonna be great like you're probably gonna lose a lot of weight like i'm not gonna say you you it doesn't work i'm just saying like

there's potential health things and um there's other ways to do it and um but it's like a really straightforward way to do it you don't have to know anything you just like do it yeah and you just kind of cheer to it and then you're like it's great so really straightforward way to do it. You don't have to know anything. You just like do it. Yeah. And you just can hear to it. And then you're like, it's great. So it's hard to argue with that. And that's one of the things that's like almost makes me feel a little guilty with arguing with people sometimes because if they are helping people, if that does help and you know, I just want people are going against the carnivore diet. We've heard carnivores mention that maybe we're putting too much weight on it. But I would really like to hear your take on whether or not they are putting too much weight on it or not enough. And also, can you also maybe talk about that in context with individuals who are healthy, who have high levels? Sure. in that in context with individuals who are healthy who have high levels sure um so let me let me ask you guys like an anecdotal question before i talk about this have you guys ever been on a statin anybody have you no no no i was thinking about like trying it like just to see like how it feels because a lot of people say that when they go on statins like they feel terrible

or they feel muscle pain and there's a whole discussion there um but uh yeah i was just just curious because i want to know where people are coming from and then i like if somebody had then i would like to hear that but okay turns out no but like okay so as far as cholesterol um the main thing as people know is like ldl cholesterol is like the main thing um dietary cholesterol is not as much of a problem if you already eat a lot of dietary cholesterol then basically most of the cholesterol increases come from just starting to eat cholesterol so if you're a vegan you start to eat some cholesterol it's your it's going to spike your ldl up substantially but if you're already eating a lot it's not going to change anything so or if you're just an omnivore it's not going to change so you don't

have to worry about dietary cholesterol so saturated fat's really the driver and then not even just that but like an overall dietary pattern like the lean mass hyper responder so say your cholesterol spiking like 500 that's like the that's like the question or even just substantially higher than the recommendation the guidelines yeah okay so, above 160 or 100 if you have a risk. Yeah, it causes heart disease. So, LDL cholesterol is causal in heart disease. If you have higher levels of LDL cholesterol, there's a dose-response relationship between that and heart disease.

Now, if you only have LDL cholesterol elevation, you have no family history, no diabetes, no high blood pressure. Your other lipids check out pretty okay, like your triglycerides and things like that. Everything, yeah, you're lean, no obesity, no smoking, all that stuff. Everything's tight. Like, according to the evidence that we have, you have a modest increase maybe like twofold increase but what does that mean twofold increase twofold compared to everything being perfect what is perfect perfect is like less than one percent chance it's like really tiny and i need to go take out a calculator look at this there's a there are calculators but it's like a minuscule

chance of getting a heart attack in like the next 10 years or five or 10 years or whatever and then you double that to like i don't know from 0.2 to 0.5 or something percent or something like that so that's what you're dealing with whenever you have all these other things each risk factor synergizes with the other risk factors so let's say it increases your chance of having a heart attack by three times that high blood cholesterol right and let's say that you have uh smoking which also increases it by threefold to have high blood cholesterol right and let's say that you have uh smoking which also increases it by threefold you're not adding them together and getting a six-fold increase you're adding them together and getting a nine-fold increase they multiply

so you have nothing wrong and you're starting from baseline you barely increase it by much but each additional risk factor causes more of a problem so you have a family history i would be worried yeah if you have and if you have like one or two other metabolic problems i'd be worried if you don't have anything at all you have to make the you have to ask yourself the question um no family history none of these other problems um do i want to like do something slightly different to to to some to really make a tiny decrease in risk if you already have by the way just to let people know because i read this all the time i have like some of my i have i have like many friends who are like kind of moles in the low carb mailing groups so i know what these people talk about look like if your patient has super high cholesterol and like they have heart disease history like you should be really

worried about that like be like be cautious if you don't have a history of heart disease if you haven't had a heart attack or something it's a totally different story and yeah the risk is low but if you have like a history and then you're doing all these things and then you have like high cac scan all this stuff you should be seriously worried about that so please if you have like other risk factors and you have some concern like you should be cautious and take that seriously and statins aren't as bad as people say they are we could talk about that but yeah anyway yeah it's it's important to talk about so we uh need vitamin d3 to be healthy healthy and to have a strong powerful immune system so so this is

really cool because i was going to come on here and trash vitamin d completely, but I like looked into it even more. So, all right, let's feel up for this one. That was perfect. I'll drink to that. Um, we have shots for you to do, right? We need shots. Yeah. We, by the end, that would be, that would be hilarious. I think we've done it before.

We have 500. Yeah, once. So vitamin D, do you need to be healthy? I won't. Do you want me to like, I'll just. Yeah, let's just talk about supplemental vitamin D and maybe even just like how this came to be. And do you think there's any dangers to utilizing D3? Because I think there's a lot of people doing it.

We've promoted it on this show. We talk about it on this show, and I may have misspoken. I don't really know what the research says. So it's actually like the whole vitamin D field is super interesting. So it's produced in the skin originally. It's transformed into the, by the liver into its storage form. So you may have heard of 25 hydroxy vitamin D. That's what circulates in the blood. It's bound to these proteins called vitamin D binding proteins. And that's like the source form. That's what they're testing in the lab. That thing that's

been converted by the liver into that. And then it's activated in the kidneys and this thing that gets activated in the kidneys is like two it's like 125 uh like hydroxy vitamin d or whatever it's like two anyway it's not important but it's like transforming the kidneys and then it that goes to the bone and then it helps to mineralize the bone um originally it was discovered in the context of rickets so people would get rickets right like when you're growing uh like like your bones don't form properly you get like bow-legged and it's not good so you're um so they had to figure out what caused that so they figured out there's like it's vitamin d it's the original discovery and so that's what all the recommendations are based on how to prevent rickets and so what the controversy is about is over, I think, especially started in like the 2000s with this guy named Holick.

He's a scientist from Boston University. He was in the Department of Dermatology. But anyway, he was he wrote some articles in the 2000s. And actually, there's a lot of people who are running our even like people at Harvard, like Walter Willett. Many people on this podcast might hate Walter Willett because he likes vegetable oils. But there was a lot of really cool stuff, like a really cool observational evidence, really cool animal studies, cell culture studies,

and some suggestion that vitamin D might be useful for all sorts of other things like heart disease, cancer, depression, of course, fractures in old age. And so there was this whole idea that maybe the old lower deficiency levels, which is about 10 nanograms per milliliter, maybe up to 20. I think maybe it was 20 at the time. Maybe those need to be modified. Actually, I think it's 10 even now.

And 20 is adequacy from from the institute of medicine but okay but that needed to be changed and so what the endocrine society did is holick published a bunch of papers and he was writing books like popular books about why you need to get tested and have vitamin d and they're very hypey popular books and so he chaired the the task force in the endocrine society in 2011 and then he had the the guidelines changed from the endocrine society and now adequacy is like 30 nanograms per milliliter it's based on that and then still and then not only that is like we've done a whole bunch of research since then randomized control trials because we want to test whether in randomized control trials you give

people vitamin d give people placebo what is what happens to their outcomes and over like the last 10 years especially we've done a lot and we're still doing a few more that are some big trials that are coming out um to test these things and so there's a lot of promise but then we actually have to test it so um so there's been a lot of really inconsistent findings in the randomized control trials but it might be because of how often they're dosing vitamin d there been a lot of really inconsistent findings in the randomized control trials, but it might be because of how often they're dosing vitamin D. There's a lot of other design issues that might explain some of that. Yeah. However, there's a recent trial called vital.

And I think that's, I want to say that that comes from Harvard. I think so. Anyway, it's called vital and they do it the right way. They gave 2000 international units of vitamin d to everybody uh they also like analyze people for their like what are their outcomes if they're low at the beginning and all that other stuff and they look at they looked at everything they looked at heart disease look at cancer they looked at depression they looked at a lot of different things fracture risk what they found is they found no impact on heart disease risk. They found no impact on depression. They found no impact on overall.

Okay, so there's basically no impact on most of the outcomes. And I'll also talk about respiratory illness in a second because that's another interesting area. But what they did find an impact on is cancer. But what they did find an impact on is cancer. Some of the other trials dosed vitamin D differently, and that might have been why they didn't find an effect of cancer. And the reason is this. The reason that they don't know how to design the trials the right way is we don't really understand the biology that well. While we're doing the trials, we're actually learning about the biology of how vitamin D works.

So there is a signal in that trial vital there's a really really really strong signal for anti-cancer anti-cancer death risk like a 40 decreased risk over like i think it's either i think it's five years could be five or ten years i think it's a five-year trial about 40 decreased risk among people who have a low bmi so if you're lean and it doesn't depend on baseline risk or sorry baseline vitamin d levels so if you're normal vitamin d doesn't depend on baseline risk or sorry baseline vitamin d levels so if you're normal vitamin d 30 nanograms per milliliter um you take a 2000 iu per day supplement you have a decrease in in uh in risk if you're if you're lean if you're obese there's no signal and if you're overweight it's in between okay okay uh and the reason might be because of just how vitamin d is metabolized and that's currently there's research that's currently ongoing

to try to try to tease that out but if it's true and i'm assuming it's true so for myself for myself personally i i i was like anti-vitamin d up to like like up to a couple days ago of reading of reading going really deep into the to the vital study um i personally would take like 2000 like almost no matter what 2000 international units per day no matter what that that said like for most outcomes there's like nothing there's no signal anywhere for for most outcomes respiratory illness like covid all right so there is an old meta-analysis that was done on this that suggested that there could be an effect but it was really poor quality studies they had another meta-analysis where they add like 20 more studies it was published like last year it's not yet

published it's in pre-print and it's by a guy who's really a big a big guy in the field uh and it showed again a robust effect on respiratory illness and so now there's like about 50 trials going on for for uh vitamin d and covid like big ones like prevention trials like 4 000 5 000 people think there's one at harvard is called vivid it's called it's for like 3600 people and basically what they do is they dose people's relatives who've gotten covid or are about to get something like that so they try to prevent people from getting COVID and they, they're trying to see if that works. And then there's a bunch of other designs that to like,

see that. So we'll have a good idea about how that works this year, whether it prevents COVID and with really good designs. So, but so far there's no signal for COVID, all the, the, the studies that people have tweeted about online on the internet,

on Twitter, all this stuff. It's, uh, it's, those studies have been terrible. And so like, um,

the ones that shouldn't have real positive effect, they're just not, they're not good studies. So they're not, I don't think we can say anything yet about COVID, but there's some potential promise there. Um, so I would,

I think vitamin D is not bad. I don't think you need to take it to your, to like, I don't need, you think you need a 50 nanograms per millions per milliliter you need 60 i think if you have a normal vitamin d level uh supplementing like 2000 i use is good okay so let's talk about the potential risks the obvious most most obvious risk is most vitamin d supplements do not contain the amount of vitamin d you think it does they don't like the majority uh like in India it's like none like in India like none of the supplements contain the right amount of vitamin D and like here it's like I want to say it's like it's either 30 or 60 don't contain that

amount of vitamin D I think there's some brands that are good like Thorne research or whatever like which franta Patrick likes but um I would be careful about like a store brand uh it's probably gonna be like super different okay but that said like that's that's one issue yeah you could mess up whatever let's talk about like if you don't mess up so there's this one study that looked at bone mineral density uh i think it was like they weren't elderly i think they were healthy people they looked they gave them 4 000 sorry 400 4 000 and 10 000 i use. Okay. They looked at, they did bone density. They looked at their bone density and they found a dose response relationship between vitamin D dosing and less bone density.

They reduced their bone density. This is a short-term trial. So there was a, sorry, there was a robust dose response relationship. And it didn't depend on, I want to say it didn't depend on BMI. It didn't depend on anything. It was just, or baseline, baseline nothing you got a dose so um they then measured strength the strength of the bones they have like a test um like a tibia strength test or whatever they didn't find any difference so maybe it's not a big deal but maybe over time like over 15 20 years you'd start to see a

difference the thing is is that it does take it does. Vitamin D does pull calcium from the bones. Sometimes it's a really complicated hormone. And but it does pull calcium from the bones and it can. And so in these higher doses, like 4000 I use, you might have a decrease in bone mineral density that might over time add up to a problem. So that would be why I would say personally, why I would be like, I'm a little more hesitant about 4,000 IUs and a little more bullish about like 2,000 or 1,000 for myself, because I don't know what, I don't know which way things are going to go uh so that's that's sort

of the trade-off there it's kind of tough issue i would i wouldn't do 4 000 or more personally the but but i will say this so since you guys and since many people listening to podcasts like do weight training right that in itself might completely like obviate that so like that might be such a stimulus that it doesn't matter so and that's it like i because i know i've i've got these have dead dexas i know when i had dexas like it's super dense it's not gonna so this small dose of vitamin d might not affect you so that would be the one cavity so maybe you shouldn't worry as much about too much for in your case in that in that particular instance the last thing i'll say is this vitamin d is profoundly immunomodulatory so it changes uh how the immune system functions in maybe a really important way.

And that's why it's a little promising, some of these studies. And that's why cancer and infectious disease might be two of the areas that could help the most because immune systems involved. That said, ask yourself this question. Why should your immune function depend on how much sunlight you're getting? Ask yourself this question. Why should your immune function depend on how much sunlight you're getting? Like that's, that's me to me, like one of the big,

really weird questions about vitamin D. Why is more necessarily, but maybe you're getting lower vitamin D and the, your immune system is changing for a reason. Maybe in situations in the past, whenever there wasn't as much sunlight, maybe you're adapting and, and your

immune system is adapting to different kinds of uh pathogens maybe like during the winter you're going to experience different pathogens than during the summer and so during the winter you want your immune system to behave one way and during the summer you want your immune system to behave a different way and so what i'm suggesting is there might be and we don't know at all what this is but there might be some downsides of having high vitamin d all the time all year long yeah there might be some kinds of pathogens that could be made worse we have absolutely zero data but i would be very but it's like the one thing that bothers me like if it's this hormone that's responsive to the sun the sun changes seasonally and it changes with

all this other stuff like is it necessarily good to have it up all the time and and we just have zero data about about that but it doesn't seem it doesn't seem there's too bad the only thing we know that's bad about it so far is like maybe a loss of bone marrow density the consequence of which we still aren't even sure what that would be but there's also some really great promise so that would be my vitamin d uh thing it's uh you know i wonder it's it seems like uh you know when they test people's vitamin D levels and they say, you know, this person has low vitamin D, a lot of times it's a person that maybe is a little bit unhealthy. But that doesn't necessarily mean taking the supplement is going to all of a sudden make them a healthy person. Whereas somebody else that goes to a doctor that has decent vitamin D levels that is healthy, you know, maybe trying to get the

response naturally is the best way to try to go about doing things in terms of like ketones and any other things like, you know, drinking a bottle of ketones is one thing, but having your body go through the actual act of producing ketones is a very natural thing for your body to go through. And it most certainly has benefits. Our body does it all the time, even when you're not on a ketogenic diet. So I think just trying to maybe get people to get proper amounts of rest and sleep and to get out in the sunlight and whatever else can help promote just natural vitamin D seems to make a lot of sense. a sense whereas just upping it and having your uh your blood vitamin d levels at 80 because you took it artificially probably doesn't necessarily really mean anything or at least we

just don't know yet yeah it might it might not mean anything might be harmful um i yes and that's the problem with epidemiological research observation research you guys have had people on here all the time it's like sometimes the people um the reason vitamin d is this might be associated with good outcomes is just because of people who are healthier are going to do better so people with low vitamin d may be unhealthy so they're dying from covet more that might be the link it's not yeah completely 100 what type of um supplementation do you see being put forward do you think just like along with like maybe vitamin d is there anything else that you've seen that you're just like uh maybe fish oil more recently right i like fish oil um there the

evidence is like mixed and there's still controversy about fish oil but it's like one of those things like vitamin d that might be that might have a benefit and i would say yeah fish oil is not bad maybe whole fish might be better um uh of course like creatine right and that's even good maybe even for your brain not necessarily even just for your muscles for like for everything i told you 20 grams a day right that's it yeah you guys do 20 grams a day yeah i don't even i i i do 10 because because well okay what am i getting myself you're not, no, no. We were being silly on another video and people didn't think we were being silly. Yeah.

There's just some claims that we've made that we're not sure are true or not. But we can't go too deep into it. Yeah. Yeah. 10 grams is good if you're bigger. Okay. Any other supplements? I like, because I'm superstitious, I take like half a multivitamin a day like i don't know if it's making any difference i know

that it doesn't affect mortality or anything but yeah maybe it'll make me feel better i don't know when you've seen like you know when you talked about how like most of these studies should be done as rcts yeah when you when you see like a lot of the nutritional epidemiology that goes on, right? You see Paul Saladino talk about how a lot of it's kind of BS. What do you feel about how a majority of nutrition research is done? Because even people that are not on the quack list still use a lot of these studies as part of proof for what they're talking about, right? So do you believe that a lot of studies just need to be thrown out and redone or what like what's your take on that cool so um i think epidemiology has a place and it's the places is to give us more information and give us an idea of how to run

a randomized control trial there is an exception to this though so let me explain real quick ram i've already explained why randomized control trials are necessary um there are situations in which even in like medicine and maybe even it might be a little less black and white in this respect, but it's in general as a principle. The only time you want, you want to not care if there's an RCT or not. And you go by epidemiology, by mechanistic um thinking whatever the only time you'd ever want to do that is if the situation is dire so let's say somebody's has like a kid has a congenital heart defect right and the kid's getting like he's blue he comes out blue uh uh he's just been born and you got to decide what to do there's no randomized controlled trial and on repairing this

congenital heart defect but you know what the heart defect is you know how the heart works and you know how to do a surgery to repair it and to close it up and so now this kid's going to live like what do you do i'm no rct you know so you go ahead and fix the heart right so if a situation is dire that's one thing or if um or if the risk is zero, like there's zero risk, but it may be good. In most cases, there's not a zero risk or if, um,

or if, and, and also maybe if it's inexpensive, if there's zero risk and it's inexpensive as well. So like, I don't know what you guys think about masks for COVID. Like, are you,

is this a third rail topic? We don't want to talk about this. Um, we can go for it. What are your thoughts? Yeah. What are your thoughts? Well,

I don't think they, I don't think they work. I actually think that COVID is way overblown. That's just my own personal thing. I don't talk about it much anymore because people get very inflamed about it. But those are my thoughts. Yeah. I don't think a mask does anything.

Okay, cool. Well, do you think a mask hurts? No. No, I don't think it hurts. So in that case, that's like a kind of intervention we're talking about. You don't know if it helps, you don't know if it hurts, but it could help. So you know it's not going to hurt. I just wear it when I go in places.

Yeah, same here. I'm like, okay. Cool. So that's the example. Okay, so nutrition science then. We don't have RCT like, okay, cool. So that's, yeah, that's the example. Okay. So nutrition science, then you should, we don't have RCTs, right.

For ethical, logistical, financial, whatever. So therefore we still have to make a decision because the situation is dire, right? We talked about heart, heart disease,

congenital heart defects, but like it's the same thing with eating. We have to eat. We have to make one choice or the other. You got to eat something. You got to eat something. So are you going to inform yourself with the best evidence or no evidence? You could go with no evidence. You could go with just like how you feel, right? And how you feel is good and how you perform is really good. That's really good.

And that's something you can figure out really quick in the short term. But the long term stuff with rare events, things are going to happen really rarely, like heart attacks, cancer, etc. And it's going to happen over a really long period of time where you can't really observe that cause and effect relationship and you can't give get enough data points in your life to do it that's where stuff like epidemiology it is epidemiology is basically a collection of anecdotes which you control for different factors that's all epidemiology is so if paul saldino goes on and says i like anecdotes i don't like epidemiology epidemiology is just anecdotes done systematically

so that anyway so that's what i'll say so you have to you have to use something for nutrition so you have to use epidemiology for nutrition but you want to be unbiased you want to be unbiased so to be scientific means you're not favoring any hypothesis or the other. You're favoring just what the data says. What does the data say? So to be unbiased, you have to use epidemiology in a consistent manner. What Paul does is he sometimes says, I hate epidemiology. Any other time he uses epidemiology, he does it all the time.

I'm trying to think of a recent example. He does it all the time i'm just trying to think of like a recent example um he does it all the time uh so you what you want to do is you want to have a place for epidemiology that no matter what it tells you whether you like it or not if if you know uh that if it was done a certain way the right way and the other studies also done a certain way you have to accept both of those studies you can't just reject one except the other that is also done a certain way. You have to accept both of those studies. You can't just reject one and accept the other. That's it. That's all. So once you decide in nutrition, we also have to include epidemiology, animal studies, all these other things that are weak evidence because we have to eat. You have to consistently apply each piece of evidence. And that's the other thing.

That's the thing that also bothers me, this cherry-picking stuff. So, yes, that would be sorry the question was question um just how you feel about nutritional epidemiology since that's how majority of those studies were done okay but the the other thing about nutritional epidemiology is like i think something like 70 of epidemiological studies are at least not inconsistent with the randomized control trial findings that they end up testing those things later on okay so if you have to eat you have a 70 chance that you're right then um i would go with that's why you can actually side with epidemiology whereas there's an asymmetry with supplements and other things okay so this is really important with drugs supplements surgeries

other things like that they they almost never work. Or they don't work often, like 10% or 15% of the time. This is the asymmetry. If you take any new idea at all, you just take any new idea, you ask whether it's going to work. By default, historically speaking, we know it's not likely to work. Cool. But with nutrition, there's only two ways to do it. More food or less food right and

is so like more yes you know but so it's like it's like a 50 50 chance if you choose at random yeah that's already better and then if you choose in in and then if you choose consistent with epidemiology then it's like a 70% chance. So in those cases, it's really weird. So in the case of epidemiology, say for hydroxychloroquine, they had the hydroxychloroquine epidemiology. Everybody would rage on Twitter, like, why don't you understand that hydroxychloroquine works? They don't understand these are epidemiological studies. These are not randomized controlled trials.

We find out like a week ago that hydroxychloroquine in the randomized controlled trials probably increased the mortality. find out like a week ago that hydroxychloroquine in the randomized control trials probably increased the mortality so so they thought because the epidemiology said this so whenever you talk about drugs epidemiology is good to give you information it's not good to make decisions when you talk about i people aren't going to accept this but i would like some arguments why this is not true but you talk about nutrition because of these studies i'm actually going to to just make a webpage to just document all the studies that I've talked about here. But because these studies suggest that epidemiology tends to be right 70% of the time, it's a good bet to go with epidemiology unless you have a really good reason otherwise.

We've covered a lot of ground here today on a lot of different things from a nutritional perspective. It just seems to me that it just makes the most sense just to be reasonable with your food consumption. And when you're starting to think about, okay, overeating seems to be problematic, then you can maybe start to think, what are some ways that I could just not overeat? You know are how can i go about doing this and i think you know if you stick to kind of the natural foods you know uh berries and nuts and uh fruits vegetables meats things like that uh i think it simplifies things

a lot it makes everything a little bit a little bit easier but like for me personally i don't necessarily think that like blueberries are you are super beneficial or that spinach is super beneficial. I think the benefit of some of those foods and even like a sweet potato or some rice or something is simply that it's just not more meat. And it could maybe potentially assist you in eating a little bit less food and also maybe give you a little bit of diversity. Maybe we're supposed to have some diversity. If I'm being reasonable and I'm being rational, I could say, well, I don't know. I don't think it makes sense to eat only meat all the time. I mean, we probably ate some different things.

We probably didn't only eat cows. We probably, you know, and who knows what we were evolved into being or being able to do. I have no idea. But it just from a rational standpoint of eating some of the things that are available, some of the things that are nutritious, and occasionally eating some of the things that taste way better than that, all that seems very reasonable and rational way of going about doing things. And then also just saying like, okay, well, I, we live in a society where there's an abundance

of food. Most people have not only a refrigerator full of food, but a freezer full of food, maybe even potentially another refrigerator and also like a pantry full of a bunch of shit that we really don't need, which a pantry probably shouldn't exist in the first place. Uh, then you start to say,

okay, well maybe I should be moving around exercising a little bit because our ancestors probably moved around a lot. And so I should find a way to move because I mainly sit on my ass all day if I'm being honest and I'm being reasonable. And so that's some of the conclusions that I've come to over the years after, you know, listening to many people that have been on the show and just kind of rubbing elbows with people that are really studying it a lot like yourself.

And I really actually appreciate and love the fact that there are people like you trying to poke holes in some of the theories that we're seeing shared by other people. But I also like the people that are the quacks because the quacks are the ones that are going to get us to results the fastest. The people that are the most extreme, they take high-level bodybuilding, for example. There's just so much to be learned from high-level bodybuilding in terms of them using insulin and growth hormone and testosterone and all these other things that it has kind of a top-down approach, and it can assist a lot of regular folks to make better decisions

or to just have better understanding of everything in general. The same thing has happened in NASCAR or some of these things where certain protective devices have come from those vehicles and then ended up in our vehicles. And we kind of see that. So I kind of like that we have guys like yourself. And I like that we have guys like Dave Asprey and Mark Sisson and some of these other guys that may occasionally say something that's a little off or even potentially way off or even myself saying something that's way off, but I think it gives us good conversation and can help us all maybe recognize that we could all do a better job being a little bit more reasonable.

I agree with that. 100%. I just think that people should not overstate what the science does and doesn't say they should just be like they should be humble about it which i like i try to be you know um that's all i like that it's so fun when they do say things that it is so fun right yeah the absolutes it's like like it or like like him or not like trump was really entertaining especially whenever so fun oh i'm probably gonna get in like big trouble with my friends i think they're not gonna look at me the same way after this but like um especially leading up to the election 2016 election that was so good it was so good you wanted to vote for him just because he was so funny you know even though even though he was terrible he's he's a he's so terrible i'm so happy that

he's gone like i'm so happy that he's gone but but there's one thing about him though he was terrible, he's a, he's so terrible. I'm so happy that he's gone. Like, I'm so happy that he's gone. But, but there's one thing about him, like he was entertaining as hell, you know? And, and, and Twitter is not the place it used to be anymore. You know, the Trump news cycle was definitely the funnest news cycle I've ever experienced in my lifetime. It was, yeah. But terrifying too.

Cause eventually the Capitol was going to get taken over and sacked. And then did like literally to get sacked. it was going to get blown up at some point. But yeah. We need that to happen again in like 20 years. Every once in a while, we need something like that to entertain us. Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. I will, and I can't change the camera because my camera died. But thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode.

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