Mark Bell's Power Project - Healthy Diet Changes for Carnivores and Meat Eaters - Simon Hill || MBPP Ep. 961

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

In Episode 961, Simon Hill, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about the benefits of swapping animal proteins for plant proteins, easy ways to transition from a high saturation red meat diet, and why you should consider the switch even if you feel great right now. Sponsors mentioned on air: ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to recieve 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel! ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Simon on IG: https://www.instagram.com/simonhill/   New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   ➢ https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off Mind Bullet!   ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box   ➢ Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject   ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢ https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢ https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

What's a general recommendation? You know, shifting from diets that are rich in fatty cuts of red meat and butter to diets that are more emphasizing fatty fish, nuts and seeds. You can feel good and have cardiovascular disease brewing underneath the surface of the skin. Decades down the track, have a cardiovascular event that you could have otherwise avoided. An interesting thing to think about here is how much can dietary changes actually lower your cholesterol? Red meat at a certain exposure level is associated with certain types of cancer. People listening right now are probably like, man, what do I eat?

Our ancestors were eating to survive. I think it's fascinating that some people can be very fat and still be very healthy. A lot of people who do a carnivore diet, what should they be trying to pay attention to? What's your thoughts on seed oils? Are we really going here? They'll say, oh, plants are trying to kill you or, you know, you're not made to digest or eat those foods. There are compounds in plant foods that can provide a certain amount of stress at a cellular level, but so does exercise. No, I'm just kidding. I've been following your information for a while, and I dig it.

And I think there's a lot of common ground when it comes to this kind of stuff. And we had Stan Efferding on the show. He was commenting on some of the things that we showed him on the show, and he was able to kind of break it down in some of his terms and some of the things that he saw. But I think a lot of times when I meet people and when I, when I, when I get to know somebody a little bit better and I get to meet them and talk to them in person, I start to find out that there's more common ground than there is opposing ground. But the internet seems to love, you know,

taking a clip or a snippet of one thing and then having like this guy versus that guy kind of thing yeah right we we end up getting put into little boxes um which i understand because of the nature of social media and 60 90 second clips so you can lose a bit of context and nuance but i listened to your episode with stan and he's a super knowledgeable dude firstly and I was kind of nodding my head throughout that episode thinking had we had a sort of quote-unquote debate in person it may not have been a productive it would have been productive actually that's that's a poor choice of words it might not have been the debate people had expected because we would have agreed

on on 90 95% of things. It seems like a lot of times, especially when it comes to nutrition, that the answer seems to lie in the middle. You know, something like a keto diet comes along and okay, maybe the keto diet, maybe following this diet that is so high in fat isn't a good idea. But maybe for some people, maybe throwing away some carbohydrates wouldn't be a bad practice for them. Maybe for some people, maybe throwing away some carbohydrates wouldn't be a bad practice for them. When it comes to a plant-based diet, when it comes to a meat-based diet, maybe some of these ideas aren't necessarily bad per se.

Maybe the overall concept and idea of maybe people parting ways with the shitty diet that they might currently have would be the best thing for them. And when I hear some of your content, what I'm mainly hearing is like, you know what, Mark, you probably should eat a little bit more plants. You probably should eat a little bit more vegetables. You probably should introduce some of these things that Simon's talking about. And that's what I tend to like to look at the most because I think people need help and they need options when it comes to nutrition. Yeah, I think, I mean, that that's my philosophy which may get lost online. But if someone has read my book, for example, they'll understand that I don't put forward one specific diet as the diet that's most optimal. I speak about a theme, a sort of set of characteristics and there are a number of ways that you can get there and that could be low-carb. It could be high-carb.

It could be a diet that's featuring animal products or it could be diet without animal products. You can do an omnivorous diet very well. You can do a plant-based diet very well. You can do both of them poorly. And to your point at the start there, I think one of the reasons why it can become so confusing with lots of people kind of shouting about specific diets. So one of the ways that I think people fall into that trap is overlooking context. So many of these

studies, in order to properly interpret them and the overall body of literature and Stan spoke to some of these things, you have to understand the context. What is the dose that we're talking about when we're looking at a nutrient or a food, the sort of exposure of interest? If we're talking about saturated fats, what type of saturated fats? It's an umbrella term. There are so many different types that have different effects on physiology. Yeah, there's something like stearic acid, which isn't shown to raise LDL cholesterol quite the same way as other fatty acids, right?

And people love to hear that because that's the predominant saturated fat in chocolate. So we can keep some chocolate in the diet. But what are we comparing to? So if we're eating less of something, the effect that that has on your physiology and then the health outcome, which is really what we care about most, will be dictated not only by what you're removing, but what are you adding in? And then what's your genome like like what's your genetic makeup like and so that a lot of that ties back to stan's comments and he reiterated this a few times and it's something that i speak

to is you have to measure things at the beginning your your biomarkers to understand your biology and then when you go and intervene, whether it's for the purpose of disease risk reduction or it's the purpose of performance and some sort of goal in the gym, you have to measure first, intervene, and then come back and measure. And that's really the only way to act with intention. I have a question. You mentioned genetic testing. So we have Merrick Health that we work with and people get their blood work done. But when a lot of individuals are getting their blood work done, right, what are some things that you think they should be paying attention to

to maybe make adjustments to their diet? I know we did talk a bit about ApoB, but is there anything else that you think people should really be trying to pay attention to then they can start making changes to what they're eating? Yeah, there's a few. I'm not a big one in terms of going out and testing just for hundreds of different genetic markers. I think it's circumstantial and you need to be specific to the results that you're seeing on paper. That can be very confusing, yeah.

I think in your conversation, I think 10 eggs came up. Yeah. So this is a great example, right? Yeah. So this is a great example, right? If someone has very high cholesterol levels and you wanted to decipher, are they overproducing cholesterol and just not being able to clear it back into the liver through the LDL receptors or are they overabsorbing? And the reason this is important is, and in your episode, you spoke about dietary cholesterol. So for most people, dietary cholesterol affects their cholesterol to an extent but nowhere near as much as saturated fat. It's not negligible, but if you're going to focus on something in your diet to reduce your serum LDL cholesterol or ApoB,

it's going to be less saturated fat. That's the first place you would start. But for a certain percentage of the population, they're considered hyperabsorbers. And maybe that's 10%, 20% of people. So again, it's not a super small number of people. It could be one in five. How do you work out if that's you?

And what's happening there, firstly, is if you're a hyperabsorber, these people have genetic mutations where a receptor in their small intestine, the Neiman-Picc C1-like-1 receptor, complicated. Neiman-Picc C1-like-1. Complicated. We were talking about that this morning. What have you got here? Very complicated name.

I got a dollar for every time that came up. Right. Let's just simplify it and say there's a receptor there that's like a door and that's going to dictate how much dietary cholesterol, the cholesterol that you eat, is actually absorbed in through the small intestine into circulation. Some people have a variation where that's upregulated. That receptor is also the same receptor where phytosterols,

which are in plant foods, also come into circulation. And there's a test that you can do. So this is not specifically a genetic test. We're not testing that specific gene. We're looking at markers in the blood in this case, which would be representative of being a hyperabsorber and having a genetic variation that's causing increased absorption, you can actually measure these phytosterols in circulation. The reason why that's important is when you measure just blood cholesterol, you have no idea of knowing was that something that you absorbed in through the small intestine or

was it something your liver produced. But if we're measuring phytosterols in the blood, we know that the only way that got in was through that gate. So you can measure these as a company in PowerDX. I have no affiliation with them. Campesterol, cytosterol, and Dr. Thomas Dayspring talks about this a lot. If you measure those and you get your results back and they're in that high or off the charts high level, then you know you're a hyperabsorber. And what that means is you now might be one of those people that wants to keep a closer eye on the consumption of eggs or shrimp, for example,

that are very rich in dietary cholesterol. So that's a very quick and easy way for someone to rule out do they have a genetic variation that's causing them to increase the absorption of dietary cholesterol? Gotcha. Why the importance on saturated fat? What do you think is going on there? And in connection to saturated fat and potentially heart disease, I would imagine that it matters if you're overeating like in general. So if you overconsume calories, has that been, has there been any studies done with saturated fat,

somebody consuming what someone would consider to be a lot of saturated fat, but still controlling their calories to be, I guess, at like maintenance levels. Is there any evidence that shows that that could potentially cause damage to the heart? Yeah, things are usually much worse when you

have energy toxicity, whether we're talking about lipids or we're talking about accumulation of fat in the liver and insulin resistance. But certainly, if you dial up saturated fats and lower polyunsaturated fats in a eucaloric sort of weight maintenance context, you will still see increase in APOB, significant increase. And what happens is the mechanism there is relatively simple. Certain saturated fats, particularly the ones that are found in cuts of red meat and butter, they down-regulate the LDL receptor at the liver, which means you have less of these sort of gateways for ApoB containing lipoproteins in the blood to come back in the liver. As a result, they start to build up in the blood. I often use an analogy of shipping

cargo ships. So cargo ships are out in the ocean and they're carrying these containers on the top. And we can kind of think of that cargo ship as the ApoB. That is the protein. And on top of that ship is triglycerides and cholesterol. It's the protein that we need to carry those things because they're not fat soluble. So that allows us to transport, particularly transport triglycerides throughout the blood and get them to tissues where they'll oxidize and use them to produce energy ATP. When you have large amounts of saturated fat in the diet and the LDL receptor gets downregulated in the liver, you have more and more of these cargo ships in circulation.

So let's imagine we're at a port. We're looking at cranes that are clearing the containers off of these cargo ships. Ordinarily, that cargo ship will come in. Hopefully, there's not much of a delay. The crane drivers are quite quickly clearing the containers off and that cargo ship leaves. As you have elevated levels of ApoB containing lipoproteins, you're getting a backlog of these cargo ships in the port. And we can imagine here that the crane drivers are like the LDL receptor, okay? So let's say we eat more saturated fats. Some of these crane drivers are going on strike or they're taking a break.

So we're getting less clearance. We now have more of these cargo ships building up in circulation and they're just waiting. They're dropping their anchor and we're increasing the likelihood that they're going to enter the artery wall and they have been found to be the causal component of atherosclerosis. So APOB is our best marker of our risk of atherosclerosis. It's those lipoproteins that are dropping anchor in the artery wall and then kick-starting that inflammatory cascade, which ultimately leads to the development of fatty plaque and cholesterol being sort of deposited into the artery wall, which many decades down

the track can result in cardiovascular events. What's a general recommendation that you would have for somebody, you know, you say maybe, you know, watch your saturated fat and then how do you think someone has a way to like go home and actually utilize that in their day to day? So generally, I guess let's start with a high level food perspective. What are we talking about here in terms of swaps? It looks like, you know like shifting from diets that are rich in fatty cuts of red meat and butter to diets that are more emphasizing fatty fish, nuts and seeds, tofu, those sorts of foods. You can think about a Mediterranean style dietary pattern. Now, not everyone's going to get the exact same result because the genes will

play a role in those LDL receptors and how they're expressed. So you have to come back to blood work. So you make shifts to your diet. Maybe you're downshifting on some of the fatty cuts of red meat. And you might be swapping some of those with leaner cuts of red meat. And you might be swapping some of those with leaner cuts of red meat, but you might be swapping some of those serves with fatty fish, some of those serves with lentils, tempeh, tofu, and then you're retesting. And so I usually recommend people approach it like that and then titrate accordingly based on how your body's responding to that knowing that you you want to achieve an apob level that we know is associated with low risk of atherosclerosis depending on your overall risk profile stan spoke to this i'll reiterate it if you are healthy low risk of cardiovascular disease so you're not

someone with type 2 diabetes you haven't had a cardiovascular event, you don't smoke, you're healthy body weight, then you want to be south of 80 milligrams per deciliter for your ApoB. And if you're someone that's higher risk, let's say you've already had a cardiovascular event, you have type 2 diabetes, you have high blood pressure, which is a big risk factor for cardiovascular disease, maybe you have a history pressure, which is a big risk factor for cardiovascular disease, maybe you have a history of smoking, all of these things that can damage the endothelium, then you want to be 50 milligrams per deciliter or south of that. So it's really about understanding high level what kind of swaps are available to you. Make those in a way that you're able to still enjoy your diet and sustain it and then retest. And from there, you can either stick with that if your results are good and you're happy

with it or you can make further changes. And there's some discrepancy between the saturated fat that you might find in steak versus saturated fat that you may find in steak versus saturated fat that you may find in dairy yes and even within dairy it varies depending on the type of dairy so you know dairy foods contain a milk fat globule which affects the way that that saturated fat is absorbed and then the subsequent effect that it has on cholesterol and when i say cholesterol more specifically talking about ApoB here. The more refined that butter is, the more you break down that fat globule. And so butter is refined relative to the other forms of dairy

and it has a much more marked effect on your ApoB. Milk sort of sits in the middle and then the fermented dairy foods seem to be quite neutral. They're certainly superior when you look at studies comparing like red meat to forms of yogurt or milk. You'll see that the dairy foods are beneficial. They'll actually lower ApoB relative to red meat. But this brings us back to this important concept of compared to what. There's a meta-analysis by Chen et al that's looked at specifically at dairy fats and their effect on cholesterol relative to other foods.

And you see exactly that. Relative to fats in red meat or butter, other forms of dairy will lead to a reduction in cholesterol. in red meat or butter, other forms of dairy will lead to a reduction in cholesterol. But relative to plant sources of fats, polyunsaturated fats from plants, if you were to swap those dairy fats for polyunsaturated fats from plants, you'd see a further reduction. So it all comes back to what are we comparing to? And then we have to zoom back out and think about someone's overall dietary pattern and look at their blood work.

They can make changes based on what those results are. I was wondering this about ApoB. So outside of nutritional interventions, because we were talking to Stan about this and then we had another guy, it wasn't Gillette, Adam Hotchkiss, who he works with American, he was mentioning that even when some people make nutritional changes, sometimes their ApoB level still doesn't go down and they still need to, they need to go the medication route. So how would, how would you assume somebody like what, what do they need to do if they need to take that medication route as far as lowering their ApoB? And how do you know if like you're actually at risk? If like, for example, you feel as if you're in good health,

you've changed your nutrition, your ApoB isn't going down. Do you then, even if everything feels okay, would you still say that they should take some type of medication or lower their ApoB? Okay, firstly, I'm not a physician. So I'm speaking here as someone who has, I've done eight hours with Thomas Dayspring and interviewed a lot of physicians.

And my expertise, I have a master's in nutrition science, so let me just put that out there for what it's worth. But you're targeting the goal A per B level depending on your risk profile. So if you're low risk, we want you at 80 milligrams per deciliter or lower, even if you feel good because you can feel good and have cardiovascular disease brewing underneath the surface of the skin and decades down the track have a cardiovascular event that you could have otherwise avoided i saw that firsthand my dad had a heart attack at 41 and and i was with him i was the only person with him i saw that in person and

my dad is a professor of physiology researching cardiovascular disease risk factors so um ironic he didn't die so it ended well was he unhealthy before that or just uh no he was he was representative of a young sort of australian father eating the typical australian diet he was moderately active, pretty stressed I guess with work. He did have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. So we had a few risk factors in place. But back to your point, we have to think about this as it's not either or. Combination between your nutrition and pharmacology is really important.

What we're trying to get you to is to goal. So an interesting thing to think about here is how much can dietary changes actually lower your cholesterol by for the average person? And it depends on the extent of the changes that you make. If you look at someone like Dr. David Jenkins in Canada, he's known for the dietary portfolio. I did a whole episode with him on this and this was a diet

that has gone through quite rigorous randomized controlled trials, but it's very significant changes to the diet. People are essentially eating very low or no animal protein. They're eating lots of plant protein. They're taking phytosterol supplements, nuts and seeds and soy food emphasis because they will lower LDL cholesterol more so than other foods. And in that context of that dietary pattern, on average, people were getting about a 30% drop in their LDL cholesterol. What's that equivalent to? Sort of a low dose statin, right? So they were getting results equivalent to a low dose statin. Now, there's going to be

people out there where lowering their cholesterol by 30% is not enough to get them, say, below 50 milligrams per deciliter. So they're going to have to work with their physician and decide if they want to make some changes to their diet and retest. Where did they land? Do they need to add in some help with some different drugs, whether that's a PCSK9 inhibitor or a Zetamib or some type of statin or a new drug out now that acts very similar to statins called benpidoic acid. So now there is a number of different options for people to explore from a pharmaceutical point of view here to help lower

APOB and get them to target. So you're working out, you're working on nutrition, you're working on your feet, you're working on your sleep, and all these things are having benefit. But what's going on underneath the hood? What's going on with your hormones? That question is answered by working with Merrick Health. It's owned by DARE for more plates, more dates. And getting your blood work done by Merrick Health will help you understand what's going on under the hood.

They have different panels that you can do once every six months or every single month so you can understand how your sleep, all these different protocols that you can do once every six months or every single month so you can understand how your sleep, all these different protocols that you're adding into your routine are affecting your hormones. It's important to understand and it's also important to know if what you're doing is actually working. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yes, that's over at merichealth.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, enter promo code powerproject to save 10% off the Power Project panel, the checkup panel, or any individual lab that you select. Again, that's at MerrickHealth.com slash Power Project.

Promo code POWERPROJECT at checkout. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. What you got, Andrew? Well, I was the one that was eating 10 eggs a day. The Zaragoza diet. Yeah. I mean, I've been feeling fantastic um body comps changing and this is in conjunction with starting jiu-jitsu recently so cardio's gone up lifting has stayed about the

same dropped off a little bit if i'm being honest um but i did get my labs drawn at the beginning of the year and that's where like the big red you know thing comes out saying that my cholesterol, I can check, but it was somewhere around 200 for the... LDL? I'll check. How about that? That's pretty high for LDL. Yeah. And so I guess my question is first off with that receptor that you were explaining about earlier, how it could be that I am a hyper responder or whatever the case may be. Can you improve that receptor to kind of handle the dietary cholesterol better instead of it being one of those things that's like, okay, you get cholesterol. Now you're going to have higher cholesterol.

The way to, to kind of approach that, if you have been dealt a gene that sees you hyper absorbing cholesterol so that neman pick c1 like one is is allowing too much dietary cholesterol to be absorbed really is through either limiting dietary cholesterol in the diet or taking a drug like azetamib which acts directly on that receptor and will essentially close that gate so that you won't absorb as much cholesterol and it's it's not just absorption of dietary cholesterol through that receptor we have cholesterol in our small intestine that our liver has produced and pumped into the small intestine as bile it It's a key component of bile to help us absorb our fats.

And so if you're a hyperabsorber, you're absorbing a lot of the cholesterol in the food that you're eating, but you're also reabsorbing a lot of the cholesterol in the small intestine that the liver had pumped out. And so the reason why how this all connects back to elevated ApoB is if you're pulling in all of this cholesterol into circulation, now the liver can sense that and it doesn't need to produce as much cholesterol. To produce cholesterol, the liver sends a signal out to increase the LDL receptors to draw more back in from circulation.

So the kind of pathway by which this works on is if you're a hyper absorber what it does is it ends up down regulating the ldl receptor and again we get that backlog of those those ships in circulation so it's a simple swap as you were mentioning earlier might be something like if you're going to have an omelet, maybe it's half with egg yolks and half egg whites. Maybe if you're going to have red meat, maybe you try to – we're sponsored by a company called Piedmontese. And the cows in general are just leaner. And so a ribeye from Piedmontese will have half the amount of fat. Is there anything else that we're missing from some of these foods, eggs or red meat,

that might make them things that we need to pay attention to or watch out for? Or is it mainly the fact that they can be super calorically dense? I do know that like steak has like iron and maybe men need to pay a little more attention to that. But is there any other drivers of heart disease within red meat or is it mainly just the fact that it's accompanied by a large chunk of saturated fat? I think saturated fat is considered the primary mechanism. But heme iron, certainly there are associations with increased heme iron intake and higher risk of cardiovascular disease. And we're just talking about cardiovascular disease here. There are mechanisms outside of saturated fat, for example example where red meat at a certain exposure level is associated with certain types of cancer

and that could be that could be heme iron that is implicated there or it could be other compounds that are produced if you're barbecuing or charring meat nitrates and nitrites so i think we have to be careful not being super, super reductionist and saying it's just all about the saturated fat. This is important and it helps us get one biomarker to go. But we also have to zoom out and look at epidemiology studies that are longer term, looking at health outcomes, looking at substitution analyses, when we're comparing the consumption of unprocessed red meat versus other foods, what are the typical outcomes that people are experiencing?

And in that, appreciating the exposure amount because the dose seems to make a really or play a really big role here. And Alan Flanagan, have you had him on the show yeah so he he has a blog on sigma nutrition called red meat and health i think it's the the best clearest breakdown on this topic that essentially goes through like why is there all these different camps some saying that red meat's not a problem and then others saying that red meat you know a little tiny bit of red meat's going to kill you and and really it comes down to the exposure and when you're comparing high and low what are you actually comparing so there are plenty of studies looking in asian populations

for example where high and low because their high intake's not actually that high. High and low, you might be comparing 80 grams a day versus 40. And both of these are beneath the sort of threshold that we would say is associated with risk if you're talking about unprocessed red meat. But then when you start looking at some of the US cohorts and you're comparing intakes sort of north of 100, 130 grams a day with people at 40 grams a day, you do see increased risk.

So understanding the contrast exposure in studies when you're looking at high versus low is really important in terms of making sense of this literature. Otherwise, you can just be led to believe it's kind of all over the place. So I just wanted to correct. So's kind of all over the place. So I just wanted to correct. So it was my total cholesterol was 197. My LDL cholesterol was 134. Are these things I should still be concerned with if I'm not gaining weight, I'm not overeating, and I am still active and I feel good?

Yes. Let me read out a quote from Lauren Cordainain have you heard of him i have not he wrote i think he wrote the first paleo diet book so he's a paleo dude uh big proponent of of the paleo diet obviously and this kind of speaks directly to your question so the average total cholesterol level in american adults today is 208 milligrams per deciliter it's pretty close to yours corresponding to an ldl of approximately 130 milligrams per deciliter i think they just ran the test on me we didn't this is not set up we didn't discuss this in this case average is not normal because atherosclerosis is present in up to 40 to 50 percent of women and men by age 50 atherosclerosis is endemic in our population in part because the average person's ldl level is approximately twice

the normal physiologic level and there's a i'll show you that graph there that's from a study called the piece of study and so this group of researchers went out and looked at 1400 people with low cardiovascular disease risk profiles, but varying LDL cholesterols. So they wanted to see in the sort of quote unquote healthy population, if you have these other things in range, blood glucose, inflammation, you're not insulin resistant, you don't have diabetes, do we see different amounts of plaque in arteries based on imaging at different levels of LDL cholesterol exposure? And they specifically actually wanted to look at what happens at quote-unquote normal LDL

cholesterol, which people may say is 100 to 120 milligrams per deciliter, or some people may say 130 milligrams per deciliter, which is around where you are. And at that level, people without other cardiovascular disease risk factors, over 50% of them had subclinical atherosclerosis. So you're laying down plaque. That's the key point here. If you're above 70 milligrams per deciliter of LDL, which is about 80 milligrams per deciliter ApoB, then you will be laying down plaque. Now, how much that raises your risk? Sure, if you're someone with diabetes or you have systemic inflammation, that's kind of pouring fuel on the flame. But it's the LDL cholesterol, the ApoB, that's sparking that flame in the first place.

So you certainly at 120, 130, I would want to act on that and push that down more towards goal. Maybe your first starting point is going and measuring campesterol and those phytosterols to see if you're a hyperabsorber. your first starting point is going and measuring campesterol and uh cytosterol these those phytosterols to see if you're a hyper absorber and you even if you're not you can then just rule that out and know that okay i should focus more on lowering saturated fat i should eat more poly unsaturated fats because they do the opposite of of saturated fat they actually up regulate those ldl receptors so they're going out and recruiting those crane drivers and sending more of them to work and you're clearing it better and then more fiber

so fiber will actually help bind up some of that bile um this is actually speaks to your earlier question what what else can you do about it fiber will bind up bile and helps you excrete it through when you go to the bathroom and so the response to that is the liver says hey we need more bile if it needs more bile it up regulates the ldl receptor pulls that cholesterol in and the net result is apob comes down that's why adding more fiber to the diet is beneficial from a lipid point of view interesting yeah i don't consume pretty much like any fiber, at least on purpose of any kind. So that's definitely something I could easily do.

You mentioned polyunsaturated fats. Can you please just give some examples of some like easy things that people can consume? Fatty fish. So let's say salmon or mackerel or sardines if people eat seafood. Outside of that, there's nuts and seeds, tofu. Olive oil. Olive oil has a little bit but it has a lot of monounsaturated fats.

It's a great oil. And monounsaturated fats are a step in the right direction from saturated fat for sure. But the biggest effect that you get is swapping saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats and there was a huge meta-analysis back in 1997 that looked at 395 clinical trials metabolic ward where you lock people up and feed them different fats and see the effect it has on their cholesterol levels and that's where we get a lot of that information and sort of understanding from. And we know that from those studies, we know that saturated fat raises ApoB or LDL cholesterol twice as much on a per gram basis as polyunsaturated fat lowers it.

But certainly, that's the most impactful swap that someone can make is swapping that type of fat that they're eating. I don't really care about total fat too much. I think this discussion around low-fat diets is problematic. It's a distraction from what matters. What matters is the quality of the fat that you're eating. And if anything, you don't really want a low total fat diet. People who have good cardiovascular health, they're really want a low total fat diet. People who have good cardiovascular health, they're not adopting a low total fat diet. They have plenty of fat in their diet. It's just that they have a bias to these polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats

and there is always saturated fats in the diet. It's not poison but the dose matters and when you're getting it sort of usually for the average person below 10% of calories person below 10 of calories eight percent of calories eight to ten depending on the person you'll get apob more towards that level that we want to i have a quick question about the epidemiology studies that you were talking about before and i'm curious how i guess you go about interpreting some of it because you know a lot of people have talked recently about how they've taken out or they've been able to take out some of the factors like,

you know, much of these red meat eaters end up being like smokers. They're not as active. They live sedentary lifestyles. And these factors weren't necessarily added into that increased fat cancer risk. You know, it could be the aspect of the lifestyle factors and the eating of processed and unprocessed red meat in this group of people versus this group of people who doesn't tend to eat red meat. They eat more vegetables. They eat more fiber. And they also tend to be more active, et cetera. When people talk about those things, they say, okay, red meat causes colorectal cancer, increased risk or or increased risk of cancer in general, without removing those factors.

But when those factors are removed, you see that if there is an increase, it's potentially negligible. How should people kind of look at that? Because there seems to be a lot of people that are still putting forward that red meat equals increased cancer risk. I would like to see the studies where that people would point to saying

that there was no adjustment. So any of the studies that I'm speaking about and when I referred to Alan Flanagan's piece, those cohort studies do use what's called a multivariate analysis. And nutrition scientists that are working in epidemiology are aware that that is one of, there's limitations of all different types of study designs and that's certainly a limitation of observational research. Are there other factors at play here that might be impacting or explaining that association? So they know that and they work really, really hard to collect information on other aspects of these people's lives, whether it is smoking or how much exercise they do or alcohol consumption. And the good studies are not just looking at yes, no.

They're actually looking at how much alcohol, how much exercise in minutes, what number of serves of fruits and vegetables is someone having, how much fiber, et cetera, and then using a multivariate analysis to adjust for that. Now, it's not going to be perfect, but when we see results that are replicated across different cohorts, looking at the same thing, and then when we look at meta-analyses, and these studies have used multivariate analyses and adjusted for the things that we think that matter, I don't think that we can simply ignore that and sort of say, well, that's a healthy user bias. It's an important piece of information. But also

remember, we're not just looking at that and saying, okay, red meat's off the menu. We're looking at bench science, mechanistic studies, preclinical studies. We're looking at those observational studies studies which allow us to look at things over a much longer drawn out time it's very hard to look at hard health outcomes like cancer and cardiovascular disease in a short-term trial and then we look at the short-term trials what are the kind of more acute changes to biomarkers that we might care about and we're looking for converging lines of evidence. And that's how like the dietary guidelines and the American Heart Association guidelines

are coming to their recommendations. And I think Stan, he brought up the guidelines. I wanted to read out one important sort of sentence in the 2021 dietary guidance to improve cardiovascular health and this was a scientific statement from the american heart association it's had frank sacks and a number of other really reputable nutrition scientists involved in the committee and they they specifically say which comes back to kind of the start of this conversation, and I guess the video that I made, which you played in the last episode, they say to choose healthy sources of protein, mostly protein from plants, legumes, and nuts. And that's kind of what my core message is for people,

that when you shift from animal protein to plant protein, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing. Right now, the average person is getting 75% of their protein from animal foods. And the average person in this country's LDL cholesterol is at 120 to 130. They're laying down plaque in their arteries. We have a proven method to help them shift that potent risk factor in the right direction and reduce that plaque so that they have lower risk of having a cardiovascular event. So I think that instead of having 75% of your protein coming from animal foods,

if you can shift that and go 50-50 or 25-75, you're going to start to see improvements in your lipid profile and your overall cardiovascular disease risk. I like this topic because we're very fortunate to live in a country where we have an opportunity to talk about something so ridiculous in a way because we're really nitpicking like nutrition. But in areas of the world where they simply don't have access to this much food, they don't have so much abundance, I would imagine that this is less of an issue where they don't have like bread everywhere and Starbucks and McDonald's and so forth. Context is so important. In some of those populations, they need to increase their animal protein if that's all that's available to them.

So we are speaking to people in Western countries that have an abundance of food options and are looking to improve their long-term health. So I think that's a good point that you raised there. And it's an interesting one because I often see people who are sort of trying to put forward some evidence to support meat consumption pointing to studies out of Kenya, for example, where you add meat to the diet. But how translatable or generalizable is that type of evidence to us in Western countries? Howard Project family, if you're trying to increase your muscle mass, if you're trying to lose body fat, if you're trying to stick to a nutrition plan, if you're trying to get fit, pretty much if there's anything you're trying to do for your health, we know that sleep is the biggest determining factor to help you get from point A to point B. That's why we've been sleeping on 8C mattresses for probably more than two years now. And the main reason is the technology behind the Pod Pro. Now, the Pod Pro

is like the Tesla of beds. It will change its temperature based off of how you're sleeping during the night. And if you have a partner that's sleeping on the other side, they can have their own temperature settings. We all sleep hot here. And I used to wake up in a puddle of my own sweat. That doesn't happen anymore because of the Eight Sleep mattress. And I've been getting the best sleep of my life. Now, if you don't want to replace your mattress, you can just get the Pod Pro cover and you can put that over your current mattress to get all the benefits of Eight Sleep. But if you also need to replace your old nasty mattress, you can get the Pod Pro cover and the Eight Sleep mattress. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you guys got to head over to eightsleep.com slash power project and you guys will automatically receive $150 off

of your order. Again, eightsleep.com slash power project links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I don't think you're asking for too much um i do think that people listening right now are probably like what the fuck you're probably thinking like man what do i what do i eat you know what what do i get my hands on and uh maybe for some people listening uh the idea of like eating beans the idea of uh eating more plants and more vegetables, maybe that's not really catching their ear. But I do think that people increasing some plants, I think sounds like a reasonable idea to at least try. Why not investigate that? Why not get some blood work done? And why not see if you can improve some of those markers? And then also what's wrong with swapping out meat and trying some different meat

for a little while? I don't see any, I don't see why that would be so difficult especially for the people that already care yeah there's there's a a finnish study and i wrote a blog on this i'll send you all these studies you can perhaps put them in the show notes but it's a neat study because it actually looked at a randomized controlled trial a group of people who had 75% of their protein from animal, 25 plant, and then 50-50, and then 25-75. So exactly what we're talking about. And you see improvements as you downshift on animal protein to plant protein. Even if it's 50-50, you see significant improvements in the lipid profile.

You see further improvements the more you go along that spectrum. And ultimately, I think a lot of this is going to come back to two things. What is someone's overall cardiovascular disease risk profile? Where is their ApoB currently at? Maybe three things. Are they wanting to do this initially through diet to see where they can get to? Or if they're going straight to drugs, there might be some people who just go, look, I like my diet the way it is. I'm going to keep eating it, but I'm going to take ezetimibe and PCSK9 inhibitor and get my ApoB to go. If that's someone's choice, then I think that that's for them, that's a good decision to make because they're optimizing that biomarker.

I think there are other benefits up for grabs with those dietary changes outside of ApoB, but certainly if someone wasn't going to change their diet and that was the only thing they were prepared to do, then that's going to be a good decision. And then, you know, the last thing that I think matters here is adherence. You know, if someone's going to make these changes, really isn't going to affect their cardiovascular disease risk profile if they only do it for a month. It has to be something that they can sustain long term, which back to where we started this conversation, that's why I think the fact there's not one single diet as most optimal is actually a good thing

because it gives people choice. So if they just remember the theme of low saturated fat, high fiber, low in ultra processed foods and increasing plant protein, you can do that in a number of ways. That can be a ketogenic diet, that can be pescetarian, it can be Mediterranean, it can be a completely plant-based diet. And so it leaves people with a number of different avenues to find something that they can actually sustain.

You know, I think the big thing here though is like, because you can find people on both eating multiple types of different diets and their blood work comes back extremely healthy. And the reason why I mentioned this and the reason why I think it is important again for people to get that work done is because if you are eating a diet high in red meat and high in saturated fat, I'm doing that. But my HDL, my, and this is an N of one, this is an individual thing. Everything is perfect in that way. For me, I'm not going to

change my diet. I'm going to continue getting tested. I'm going to continue making sure that everything's in the right place, but there's no reason necessarily to change it because everything's literally where it needs to be. But if you are a person who has problems with your Apo, like an elevated Apo B or potentially elevated HDL, and they're both in that place, there are maybe certain changes that you need to make, but you need to get those things checked first rather than being like scared of saturated fat potentially.

Yeah. And there will be some genetic variability, but you could also be a bit of an outlier. I mean, of course. So I think like with saturated fat on average most people who are getting sort of north of 12 of their calories and and that's where the american average intake is right now sort of 11 to 12 of of calories um as you're getting to that level and going up most people will see an elevation in their apob

and i think we do see that um given that the average LDL cholesterol is about 120, 130. So there will always be people in the bell curve who respond differently because the study is just giving us the average. You're not average, I'm not average. So we might fall somewhere else. And outliers are possible, but they're not probable. But the only way to know is to go and do the test. That's exact. That's exactly what I'm saying. Like you can, again, it's good to pay attention to this stuff. So you know what on average people are dealing with, but if you want to get yourself to that next level, you need to figure out where you're at and then adjust for you. You know, you need to, instead of saying, I'm just going to do the carnivore diet, or I'm

just going to do this specific diet, figure out where you're at and then make those changes for you as an individual. Because if I made changes for myself based off of just everything I hear, potentially, who knows what would happen? the things that we talked about on the show are these cascade of habits from your nutrition to your sleep, to your exercise, to all these different things that you do that culminate into you being a healthier individual. And that's important. Yeah, I agree. I think we also, we do need to remember that here, at least in the context of cholesterol, we're talking about a biomarker, which gives us a window into cardiovascular disease risk we don't have as good of a window into risk of cancer for example so it's not necessarily something that people can go and test and look at a certain biomarker and get a really good feel for of course we know things like being overweight and having inflammation are going to dramatically raise your risk of of cancer but there's not a marker like apob for for cancer so if i was thinking about red meat within the context

of cancer i would personally still be coming back to the research looking at overall dietary pattern and the exposure level and trying to keep the red meat consumption to a level that is below where we see increased risk, which typically lands at about 100 grams a day, 130 grams a day if you're exceeding that. Why do you suppose that any of this makes sense? Like from an evolutionary standpoint to try to have access to beans and try to have access to different types of fish and various types of meats like is that something that we would have been able to do years ago or are we in this predicament because of mainly just like abundance well i i would flip it on on its head i think the predicament is in years gone by now we're fortunate because we have choice our ancestors were we're eating to

survive so you know evolution cares about their survival are they able to get to an age to procreate um it's not so much interested in your longevity and how good you feel at 50 60 70 so i think today we we can make different choices to our ancestors based on the food that is available to us and then the research that's looking at those different foods and how they impact your health. How's the way that you eat changed over the years with everything that you've continued to learn about nutrition? Like did you used to eat more meat when you were younger and then you learned a lot and then you adjusted? What did your journey look like? Early 20s, i would say i ate a sort of paleo-esque style diet i was in in the kind of uh football locker room fitness scene and

you know exposed to a lot of that information around high animal protein um my carbohydrate sources were like sweet potato and rice, you know, bodybuilder style eating. And, you know, if I'm honest, I felt good. I felt great. And my results from a performance point of view were great. My blood work wasn't amazing, wasn't ideal. And I think knowing my dad's history with cardiovascular disease that obviously sort of inspired me, motivated me to look a little bit deeper at my diet. It was my brother actually. Initially, he started making changes to his diet and eating less meat for cardiovascular disease risk reduction.

Did you think he was a pussy when he did that? I did. Like you fucking pussy. What are you doing? Listen to this story. So he's coming up with his fiancée at the time, now his wife, to stay with me in Sydney and he's in Melbourne. And he called me up and he said, bro, I need to tell you something.

You sat down and you're like, oh, my God. He's like, we're eating differently. And at that stage, he had sort of um he eats fish and and so he had just started reducing his red meat and eating more fish and and he was just giving me the heads up so that if i was doing any shopping or booking restaurants or whatever not that it's that hard to cater for someone that's eating fish right uh and so yeah he came up and and he kind of planted a little bit of a seed with me that maybe the amount of red meat that i was eating at the time wasn't that great um i was eating a lot of different cuts of beef and lamb is is very popular in australia um a lot of butter

a lot of eggs and i actually wanted to prove him wrong. I loved eating those foods. They were tasty. As I said, my health was, you know, from how I felt, my health was in order. It was my early 20s. And the more I read about different foods and the way that they were affecting our health, the more I saw merit in the idea of downshifting on some of those foods

and I was able to dramatically improve my lipid profile. affecting our health the more i saw merit and the idea of downshifting on some of those foods and i was able to dramatically improve my lipid profile my apob now is high 60s that's unmedicated not everyone's going to get to that level through diet again it's going to depend on their their genes but you know i went through a sort of process over years where i had a lot of doubt in terms of removing these. Is my performance going to change? And I had to unlearn some things and make some errors and then improve on things and land in a place where I felt good and could perform and then had my blood work looking good.

And that's the kind of how I look at longevity. The art of longevity for me is, you know, I've interviewed people like Don Lehman, who's interested in how protein affects muscle. And then I've interviewed people who are protein and cardiovascular disease, protein and cancer. I've interviewed Thomas Dayspring just around the lipid transport system and ApoB. And I kind of combine all that information in a way where I'm myself and the information that I'm putting forward for people is such that it can give them good health today. They can still perform whether it's building muscle endurance, strength, and also protect them from the disease long term. Many people just need to lose weight, especially here in the US and we're starting to see it cascade out to some other countries. But weight loss probably doesn't really ensure health per se. But I do believe that there are studies that show when people lose,

I believe it's like 10% of their body weight, that they get some really extra great benefits in terms of their like long-term health. But again, we wouldn't really know what's going on on the inside. We wouldn't know what's going on with your heart and your cardiovascular unless we were getting blood work done. You need to get blood work done routinely. Big, big advocate of that. The weight loss kind of conversation is super interesting because you can improve your health by losing weight on a number of different diets

and there's a bunch of research looking at that. Roy Taylor in the UK who's probably the kind of one of the leading researchers looking at type 2 diabetes and poor metabolic health and he has some seminal studies looking at how does weight loss affect metabolic health. One's called the direct trial and this is where that 10% to 15% of body weight figure really comes from, his research. If you take people with type 2 diabetes, so they have very poor metabolic health,

they have a lot of fat being stored in their organs, ectopic fat, very poor metabolic health they have a lot of fat being stored in their organs ectopic fat and you get them to lose about 10 to 15 percent of their body weight providing they haven't had type 2 diabetes for too long such that their pancreas is completely burned out they still have some function in their beta cells in their in the pancreas if they lose 10 percent of their body weight a large percentage of them can go into remission. So they can get the fat out of the liver and the pancreas and also the muscle tissue. Which might be heart protective as well.

Yeah, there will be huge cardiovascular benefits here because when you have excessive fat building up in the liver, you start to get increased fats being transported through circulation. It has to go somewhere and how do we do that? We increase VLDL production in the liver which is an ApoB containing lipoprotein. So this is why one of the main reasons why people with diabetes, they don't die of diabetes, they die of cardiovascular disease. When these people lose 10% to 15% of their overall body weight, they're able to lower their

fat in those organs to what he describes as below their personal fat threshold. And this is a really important concept for people to understand. It's super interesting. I think it's fascinating that some people can be very fat and still be very healthy. Right. So how does that make sense? You can have two people in front of you and one lucky bugger, as we'd say in Australia, he has escaped insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. And the next person has significant elevations in blood glucose, uncontrolled diabetes, ends up requiring all sorts of medications. So his research was able to elucidate what this is. And it comes

back to personal fat threshold, which speaks to the capability of your subcutaneous fat stores to accept fat. Subcutaneous fat, complex name, just means the fat underneath your skin. So we have like three main fat depots, subcutaneous fat under the skin, visceral fat, which is between organs, and ectopic fat inside, intro. Some people have a greater capacity, it's genetic, to store fat subcutaneously. These people at a given body weight are protected from metabolic disease because it's the fat that gets inside the organs that is really damaging. That's what drives insulin resistance. And whereas the next person at the same level of body fatness

has less subcutaneous fat, it starts to spill over. And it spills over and starts getting stored. Initially, it actually shows up in skeletal muscle. Then it's in the liver, which is really the master regulator of metabolic health. And then after the liver, it ends up spilling back into circulation and winding up in the pancreas, and it starts to cause those beta cells to become dysfunctional. Eventually, that person ends up with an elevated HbA1c above 6.5%

and they get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Coming back to your original point, these metabolic conditions are conditions of energy toxicity. It's energy toxicity beyond your personal fat threshold. And so the only way to get those into remission is to lose weight that gets you below your personal fat threshold. And so the only way to get those into remission is to lose weight that gets you below your personal fat threshold. And people often wonder, well, how do I work out my personal fat threshold? Don't work it out. Just do blood work. So if you're doing your blood work

and your fasting glucose is elevated, HbA1c is elevated, your triglycerides are elevated. These are all signs of poor metabolic health. And you have an increased waist circumference, which is better than BMI for getting a sort of window into the fat that you're depositing around the organs. If you're getting that feedback from your blood work and you're overweight, you're probably above your personal fat threshold. So find a way to lose weight and we could discuss what are the different options if you want. But find a way to drop that 10% of body weight.

And when those things that you're measuring through your blood work start to normalize, then that's a sign that you're starting to get that fat out of those organs and then your metabolic health is better and you see that through improved blood glucose control, for example. What about muscle mass? Muscle mass must help a little bit because it helps chew up some energy? Yes, and it also helps you better utilize glucose. So the more muscle mass you have, the higher your glycogen storage is so you have it's like muscles like a sponge so when we when we eat food if we have more muscle mass we have a greater way

to kind of dispose of that glucose and and because glucose is balanced it's it's it's a homeostatic system it's like extra storage uh area that's not one of our organs right so you can think about i often use a bathtub analogy here so if you think about a bathtub you're running the water okay the tap is the liver and what's coming out of the tap the water let's just imagine that that's glucose So one of the primary roles of the liver is to produce glucose and pump it into the blood because often we're fasting overnight. We don't want our blood glucose to drop too low. So the liver's on, glucose is going into the bath.

Let's imagine the bath is circulation and there's a drain at the bottom. That drain is your skeletal muscle. and there's a drain at the bottom. That drain is your skeletal muscle. So we run into problems when either we can't turn off the tap, so you're insulin resistant at the liver, which happens when that fat builds up in the liver. So now the liver is just pumping glucose out, can't turn it off. That's the role of insulin at the liver is to turn the glucose production off. liver is to turn the glucose production off. Or if we have insulin resistance at the muscle, that drain is blocked. Worst case, you have both. So you have drain blocked, taps on, bathtubs filling up and up and up and up and up. So as we improve our lean mass and have more skeletal muscle, we're sort of opening up that drain.

We have a greater capacity to clear excess glucose. And certainly another kind of quote-unquote hack, I'm not a huge fan of that term, but it comes up a lot in discussions about glucose, is if you have poor blood glucose control, one of the best things you can do after you eat is move your body because you will get immediate increase in insulin sensitivity you'll get up regulation of different transporter proteins that help pulling glucose out of the blood and get it into the muscle and

it can be metabolized or stored i'm curious because there's probably a lot of people that are listening who do a carnivore diet and they found for themselves, oh, I did a carnivore diet, maybe certain things as far as their autoimmune issues went away or they're feeling okay, right? What should they be trying to pay attention to even though they may be feeling okay from your perspective? Is it again, pay attention to your amount of saturated fat intake, get your blood work done, check your ApoB, what else? This is a great question and conversation for us to have. your amount of saturated fat intake, get your blood work done, check your ApoB. What else? This is a great question and conversation for us to have. I think the benefits that these people are experiencing are explainable. One of those is from potentially removing certain foods that are irritating them. The other is a big one would be if they are losing weight. So they're going to see markers like blood glucose and different markers of insulin resistance shift into a more favorable direction.

And often they see improvements across the board but their ApoB goes up and they think, what do I do here? The carnivore diet is an extreme form of an elimination diet. These diets are not new. Like we've known for a long time that certain plant foods people can have intolerances to and when you take them out, their symptoms subside. And so I would ask people to consider it as more of an elimination style dietary pattern and it's giving them some information to start with.

But usually these people have removed a whole host of foods. They might have removed 20, 30 different plant foods at once. It's hard to know what was the culprit, what was causing those symptoms. You get some initial information that it was something that was in there. And then the evidence that we have suggests that long term, if they want to really reduce their risk of chronic disease, then they do want to be thinking about their APOB level. And that could be pharmacology or it could be the types of meats that they're eating, eating leaner cuts of meat and trying to get the saturated fat down in the diet. It could be, if they're open to it, adding

in things like fiber supplements or certain plant foods that they tolerate. And that's where I would really be going is you've eliminated 20, 30 plant foods, but they might not all be a problem for you. And you can work with someone. Usually it will help to work with a dietician, but there is a lot of information online as well where you can start to go through a reintroduction phase very systematically to find what are your triggers. And then perhaps you move the triggers to the side or you work out the dose that's causing those triggers and work through that in a very systematic fashion to get back towards a dietary pattern that is more favorable from a long-term disease risk point of view.

But I completely understand why people are being drawn to this style of diet and and if they have an autoimmune condition and then start eating eating a carnivore diet and feel great you know i understand that and and my role is to kind of just help people and i want people to feel better so when i hear those stories i'm like that's amazing but let's then take in some extra information and just make sure that you're aware of maybe some other options that you could explore that leave you still feeling great today, but we can perhaps work on some of those weaknesses. Like you would in the gym if you had a weakness

and you wanted to be an all-round athlete and feel your best physically, you don't just ignore those weaknesses. Let's come back to a level where we're not causing injury and pain, but then let's work, you know, in a systematic way to have a more robust, well-rounded workout plan that actually brings those weaknesses up to strength. Yeah, I think this is not really talked about enough. People building up – people being able to adjust to eating different food. I think sometimes people just think I can't eat those foods or maybe in the past, maybe some people have tried – maybe they have kind of tried elimination diets to some extent or maybe they tried like their version of being vegan or something. But maybe they were actually eating like a lot of processed foods or they went the gluten-free route but then they made gluten-free brownies or they went the keto route and they ate

keto bombs and yeah all these different things that uh kind of almost mess up the whole point of going on these particular diets which normally i would say again people have a goal of like losing losing weight usually and we can't like overlook the the fact that we live in this this modern world where there are many things that have can be damaging our microbiome from over use of antibiotics not that antibiotics are a problem across the board but they have their time and place and i know when i was a kid i was getting prescriptions for those things all the time and i probably didn't need them every single time um you know c-section and um formula versus breastfeeding not that all of

that's in someone's control all the time but uh over sanitization in everyday life all of these things are thought to be leading to a damaged microbiome which is then less equipped to break down these microbiota accessible carbohydrates that's what justin sonnenberg at stanford he's a microbiologist he calls them microbiota accessible carbohydrates. So they're the indigestible carbohydrates that our small intestine doesn't absorb, they pass through, and they're meant to feed, act as food for bacteria, which we have a symbiotic relationship with. And when that's working well, they can break those down and produce these postbiotics, these metabolites that then have a beneficial effect on our physiology.

But we can lose the capacity to do that and instead of those foods rewarding us through that process, they're revving up inflammation. And we have clinical studies that have been able to show that. In fact, his study, his very study that he set up comparing fiber to fermented foods, 10-week study. And their hypothesis was, okay, if you take people and increase their fiber from 20 grams a day to 40, and there was a ramp-up phase,

and then compare them to people that are eating six serves of fermented foods a day, kimchi and different types of yogurt, kefir, kombucha. Their hypothesis was that the fiber, the increasing fiber, would result in a reduction in inflammation. Okay. And they weren't just measuring CRP. They went all out. They measured 200 different markers of inflammation

what they found was super interesting the this and each subject got to do both diets was a crossover so you're you're your own control those that across the board when people were eating fermented foods dramatic reductions in inflammation and an increase in microbiome diversity which is associated with better health. So that's like a huge tick for everyone eating fermented foods, even carnivores if they can find some. There's dairy versions of fermented foods in our diet. The fiber side which comes back to what we're speaking about here and maybe in part helps explain why you see different responses when someone increases plant foods in their diet.

One person says I feel great and the next person says it revved up my symptoms of some sort of inflammatory disorder. It was a very personalized response. disorder. It was a very personalized response. So some people, when they increased their fiber from 20 to 40, had a reduction in inflammation. And others had an increase in inflammation. And they thought, that's interesting. What might explain that? And so they went back and looked at the baseline diversity of these subjects, their microbiome. People who had disrupted microbiomes with low baseline diversity, so they had lost species, microbes, they were not equipped to handle this increase in fiber. And so they struggled. That's what that study showed us. And now they're going on and doing more studies to look at, okay, well, if you take someone with low baseline diversity, is there a protocol that you can do first?

Before we say increasing all these plant foods, can we give you a probiotic? Should you have fermented foods maybe for a couple of months first that help build diversity and then increase? diversity and then increase. So I think over the next handful of years, because there's a lot of different research groups looking at this, there will be more protocols for people following diets like the carnivore diet that are wanting to come back to a more diverse diet. And I think there are people out there, I've spoken to them myself, who say, I want to eat more plant foods. They're just looking for some solid direction and some sort of protocol that they can go through. And it's also like a double whammy because if you did choose to go carnivore because

you maybe did have some of those issues and you're feeling better now you haven't eaten a lot of those foods for a long time so it's going to be even harder for you to try to go back to that and then you might just feel like if you start eating some of these foods that do give you a few issues you're like oh I'm just not supposed to eat them because it feels like shit

cook them and stuff like that right like if you know carrots and things like that broccoli cook them soak them uh with seeds and nuts same thing right legumes yeah yeah got it you need to cook those which uh is an important point if we were ever to talk about protein bioavailability because most of those studies look at raw legumes so some of those differences that get quoted are often overstated but yeah you need to properly prepare these foods and it can make them more digestible for sure i know we're going to see a comment of someone mentioning the bioavailability like you just mentioned of like amino acids from red meat or meat versus nuts, seeds, beans, right? So how do we close that gap?

Because there is a difference in terms of absorption, but there are certain things you can do to get more of those amino acids from those plant foods. It really comes back to how much total protein that someone's consuming. Okay. So this question of bioavailability becomes more important in the context of a low-protein diet. So very important in a developing country where someone's just consuming grains.

But also in a developed country like here, if someone's consuming around the RDA, I would say that the quality of that protein in terms of the amino acid makeup and also the bioavailability becomes more important as you get up to 1.5, 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. We, the evidence that we have, and there's two now pretty robust clinical trials that have looked at this. Quick question. 1.6, is that, I mean, cause the RDA is pretty low. It's 0.8, right? So 1.6, that's double our current RDA. And the average intake in this country, depending on the data set you look at, is between 1.1 and 1.3 grams per kilo. So the average intake's not at what we'd say is optimal for hypertrophy or strength,

like kind of where we see, we don't see a whole lot of extra benefit above that unless you're in a really big calorie deficit from a hypertrophy point of view. But in these studies that we have that have compared a completely plant-based, so all the protein coming from plants versus an omnivorous diet, so a mix of plant and animal protein, when you get to 1.6 grams per kilogram, we don't see a difference in the outcomes that we would care about. Strength, hypertrophy, cross-sectional size of muscle,

et cetera. And one of those was Hamilton Rochelle out of Brazil who I interviewed and the other is Alistair Montaigne. I think that's how you pronounce his name. So I think Stan mentioned that you would need to eat a little bit more plant protein. I don't think that's the case if you're getting to 1.6 grams per kilogram. Those studies show that. And if we're talking about those outcomes, strength, hypertrophy, size of muscle, there is an argument to be made that if you're not at that level let's say you're at 1.1 1.2 grams per kilogram that this becomes more important that said and it might surprise people there's no studies that have looked at a completely plant-based diet versus an omnivorous diet at a protein intake

at 1.2 1.3 which i think and i've been encouraging researchers to do it let's get that done because that's the average intake right now yeah so let's see at that level because in that circumstance if the results showed that people eating the animal protein had greater improvements in strength and hypertrophy that could be a clear context where if you're getting all of your protein from plants you need to eat more or you need to supplement it with some type of amino acids that, you know, for example, contain leucine and help you hit the leucine threshold. So at the moment, we don't have that kind of outcome data at protein intakes below 1.5, 1.6 grams. What we do have is single meal studies. So when you compare certain animal proteins to plant proteins looking

at muscle protein synthesis and hypertrophy and animal studies and so we can extrapolate from those and that's usually what's done to say that there may be benefit from from animal protein when you're not at a certain level and this is what stewart phillips or don layman this is where you know as far as what I'm hearing from them and I've interviewed both is that that's where they've landed. Once you consume enough and you get to that 1.5, 1.6 grams, probably doesn't matter. It may matter below that and it may also matter in the elderly.

So as you get older and you develop more anabolic resistance, this might become more of an issue again. So I'm kind of just open-minded to that saying there's jury out. I see how someone might say let's take the precautionary principle in those contexts and animal protein could be superior. But I'd like to see some outcome studies in all that space, which will give us more direction. Gotcha. Power Project Family, we talk about beef and meat all the time on the podcast. That's why we partnered with Certified Piedmontese Beef.

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is made in the u.s of a america america fuck yeah so go ahead and get some of the best tasting some of the leanest some of the best beef from piedmontese andrew how can they get it absolutely uh so you guys can head over to cpbeef.com and check out enter promo code power to save 25 off your entire order and if your order is 150 or more you get free two-day shipping again cpbeef.com links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes fuck yeah it does seem like no matter what diet someone selects if they just go from what is currently the standard american diet of 11 to 12 protein if they can just increase the percentage of protein that it will assist with a lot of health outcomes. What I wanted to touch on there was Barbara Roll's work.

She wrote a book called Volumetrics. And it's looking at satiety. So often protein comes up in the satiety discussion. And forever I had always thought that protein was you know crucial to satiety but i've changed my view a little bit she did this really interesting study where she had people consume five different um there was five different meals with varying amounts of protein from five percent up to 30 but they were indistinguishable in terms of texture and taste they use casseroles and and whatnot okay yeah we've heard about the study before you've heard about it yeah and the the

calorie density was the same it was matched in that study so five percent was the lowest protein containing meal and up to 30 percent it didn't affect the total amount of calories that people were consuming, whether they were given the 5% protein meals or the 30%. These were ad libitum studies. So basically given these things with snacks as well, eat as much as you want. And the hypothesis was, well, if you're having people eat these meals

that contain 30% protein for lunch and dinner, they're going to eat less calories over the day. But they didn't. And I think that this comes back to calorie density. So they matched calorie density. I think the reason why we see protein as satiating is most protein-containing foods relative to a lot of the ultra-processed foods that are out there are low-calorie density foods.

And so I think that the kind of obesity and weight researchers out there that are now really trying to work out what are the characteristics of food that are driving over consumption, zooming in more so on calorie density and the eating rate, how quickly you can eat a given food. And a lot of that's coming out of Kevin Hall's work. I think a lot of that has to do with how the food's prepared as well, like a casserole. It's pretty easy to, you know, pretty easy to eat as opposed to like a chicken breast or something like that. I think, and even something like,

I think if you stay on the more savory side and you don't get too many flavors mixing together, my own personal experience, I've found that it does seem to keep me fuller for longer and it does seem to redirect my focus away from cravings. I start to mix too many things in there, then it kind of gets my mind drifting about all other kinds of foods. Yeah, I think there's texture, there's something about texture that's playing a role here and the speed because a 30 or 40 gram protein shake is not as satiating as 30 40 grams from chicken no they're not even comparable i think it's one of

the reason why people get so hungry after they eat sushi is because you're able to eat sushi very quickly you're able to you're able to like almost inhale it you know you can absolutely yeah when i make um like so the the ninja creamy ice, my daughter cannot finish like not even about maybe half of it. And the last time I gave it to her, she was like, you put protein in here, didn't you? I was like, why are you saying that? She's like, because I cannot finish it. But I think that's just because maybe it did have more calories versus the one when I didn't have protein in it. Maybe it's a little thicker and stuff.

Yeah, yeah. What's your thoughts on seed oils? Because I cook everything in butter, but now that you're mentioning, well, shit, hey, maybe that saturated fat's going to be messing with your cholesterol. And you said nuts and seeds. And so my brain just is like,

well, maybe I swap out butter for seed oil. I want to see what you have to say about that. Those are saturated fats, right? Are we really going here? There's another one of those questions. Trying to get me killed. Oh, the comments

are going to be good. First of all, I'm not paid by Big Canola. Are you sure? Let me just check the pocket. Do I have to check in there? I wish I was. Yeah, Big canola. My website's theproof.com and there's a contact page on there. I had a four-hour debate on the show I hosted

with Dr. Matthew Nagra and Tucker Goodrich. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and that was interesting. I moderated that. And then following that and even prior to that to prepare, I've kind of deep-dived a lot of this research. The large meta-analyses that we have, so Cochrane Review, which looks at pulling together different clinical trials that are comparing

the consumption of saturated fats to polyunsaturated fats and in these trials, this polyunsaturated fats are typically are seed oils. These meta-analyses, this Cochrane one in particular shows a 20 odd, 21% reduction in cardiovascular disease risk when you swap calories from saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats. And I think the LA Veterans study within that is probably the strongest study in terms of study design, and they showed significant reductions in cardiovascular disease risk. We see the same thing play out in observational studies, whether it's studies like the Nurses' Health Study

that Walter Willett heads up. Again, swapping calories from saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats that are mostly linoleic acid, which is the omega-6 rich in seed oils. We see reduction in cardiovascular events. And then some really damning evidence to kind of put the nail in the coffin here is there are observational studies that are not just relying on a dietary survey. They certainly do a food frequency questionnaire, but they also will look at blood work from

a percentage of their subjects to make sure that the questionnaires are lining up with what they're saying. And you can look at the omega-6 content in your blood and also stored in adipose tissue. And you can see how do people with higher levels of omega-6 in circulation and in their adipose tissue, how do they fare long-term with regards to cardiovascular disease risk compared to people with low levels of linoleic acid?

The body doesn't make linoleic acid. It's an essential fatty acid. So if there's omega-6 in your fat cells, you ate it. You can't lie about this. So this is the perfect lie detector. Let's just actually look in their body and see how much omega-6 is there. People with higher levels of linoleic acid in adipose tissue and in circulation have lower risk of cardiovascular mortality and total mortality.

So we step through all of those different types of evidence, and I find it hard to demonize seed oils. I think the confusion arises simply because seed oil consumption has gone up and people see obesity has gone up and health has deteriorated from a metabolic health point of view. But the consumption of ultra-processed foods has gone up at the same time. So it's hard to kind of say, okay, people are eating more cookies and cakes and biscuits

and all these packaged foods. It must be linoleic acid. It might be that linoleic acid is found in those foods but they're also rich in added sugars. They're low fiber, low water, low protein. They have all sorts of other additives in them. So I find it incredibly hard with all of that research to kind of say linoleic acid or cedars are a poison i understand that when people

look at the manufacturing process they might think well that's not natural but then that should create a hypothesis which is that's not natural that's got to be bad for us and then when we step in and look at the research and it's telling us the opposite, I think we have to kind of take notice of that. What about when it's cooked? Does that change it quite a bit? Like don't we have trans fats, things like that? Certainly reheating. So if you're in a deep fryer and you're heating it over and over and over. But I would say that the vast majority of the omega-6 that ends up in these people's fat cells is from cooking.

They're cooking with it. So I'm not concerned by cooking at routine temperatures with these oils, but I wouldn't reheat them. I definitely think deep frying is just a bad idea across the board. And when you are reheating them, you will increase trans fat formation, which I think everyone agrees is not a great idea. One of the things I find a little tough sometimes when recommending like a nutritional protocol, when I do suggest vegetables,

I'm just thinking like how do most people in the U.S. know how to consume vegetables? They just get like a salad and then they dump ranch dressing on it. And if you dump like ranch dressing or you have something like a Caesar salad, you're looking at like 20 or 30 grams of fat a lot of times unless you're really paying attention to kind of how much you're using. And so the value of vegetables, in my opinion, one of the major values of vegetables, in my opinion, has been the fact that they are low in macronutrients. But they have volume to them.

And so I think sometimes we ruin the whole point of eating those vegetables because they're accompanied by so many calories. A lot of times it's also a meal. A salad is before you eat your steak. So then it messes things up even further. I think it's a great point given that that we live in an obesogenic environment and a large percentage of people are conscious of their body weight and wanting to improve that we have to be wary that these are very calorically dense one tablespoon is 120 calories and when you free pour get it around every piece of lettuce

has to have that on there and this comes back to what we were talking about before with satiety calorie density matters a lot so you know I completely agree with that I think that we don't have to demonize these seed oils

or any oils but we should also just be conscious of their place in our diet depending on our goals. And if our goal is weight gain, we might want to lean into them more. But if our goal is weight loss, then we should certainly not be dousing our food in them. How do you usually recommend people kind of start out and prepare some foods and what do you usually suggest as a starter? kind of start out and prepare some foods and what do you usually suggest as a starter in terms of like cooking like uh there's people that are listening right now that i think are like these two guys they don't eat vegetables at all uh don't add me into that group don't necessarily add me in there i buy my shit from sprouts i don. I would probably try not to make this too complicated. I think one of

the problems people run into is they think, wow, I've got to get all these cookbooks and these really long new recipes. And that can be overwhelming. There's a time and a place for trying to cook like a chef. And maybe you do that once a month with your partner on the weekend or something. But for most of us, you want to do something quick that tastes good, it's convenient, it's cost-effective. So what are the current meals that you're having for lunch and dinner? And I would be looking specifically at swapping some of the animal protein for plant protein. So let's say, for example, you make a lasagna and that's beef mince. Well, why not use 50% of that as beef mince, 50% as lentils?

There's a quick win for someone. You're making a chicken stir-fry, same thing. Half the amount of chicken you're putting in there and you're putting in tofu or tempeh with it or chickpeas. And then across all of your meals, just finding ways to sneak more vegetables in or fruits if you're finding that difficult. That's something that everyone should be focusing on.

But I would be approaching it like that. Take your existing recipes, meals that you're cooking and try and de-emphasize the plant, the animal protein and increase the plant protein. And that's going to be the least complicated way for you to kind of start changing the composition of your diet and shifting some of these biomarkers in the right direction without over-complicating things. What is the list of some high fiber plants?

Like what? Brussels sprouts? What else you got? Broccoli, all of the legumes are really rich in soluble fiber in particular. You'll get a little bit in whole grains. So having variety of different whole grains if you eat those foods. Nuts and seeds are a great source of fiber.

Of course, fruits. if you eat those foods. Nuts and seeds are a great source of fiber. Of course, fruits. So you're getting fiber from all plant foods. It's like the skeleton for the plants. And the real thing to leave people here with is it's not so much about one food is the fiber superfood. It's the diversity that matters. So each of those foods is providing slightly different fiber superfood. It's the diversity that matters. So each of those foods is providing slightly different fiber substrates. And when I spoke before about you have digestible carbohydrates

that are absorbed in the small intestine, then you have the indigestible components and they pass through to the large intestine. And often we kind of umbrella them as prebiotics. they pass through to the large intestine and often we kind of umbrella them as prebiotics prebiotics is soluble fiber it's your polyphenols and resistant starch and all three of those are found in plants and there's many many varieties so when you eat with diversity you're providing different types of prebiotic fiber polyphenols and resistant starch that are selectively feeding different bacteria. So you're creating more resilience and more diversity within the microbiome and each of those different species is sort of playing a different role in terms of your local gut health and then the compounds that they're producing which are having an effect systemically when you have diversity like that uh it's my understanding i could be wrong that you might use energy more efficiently i don't know if you've ever heard that before i haven't heard that uh joel we have we've had joel green on the podcast many times i don't know if you're

familiar with any of his work but he's talked about you know having this gut diversity and being able to break down foods uh more could potentially have you utilize that energy slightly differently from somebody who's getting you know gassy and all these other things from some of these foods yeah i'd love to read that i'll send you over some of his info so all the information you've given us today has been super valuable if somebody wanted to follow up and maybe check out your blog or where to find you online, where can they do so? Website is theproof.com. I have a book that I wrote called The Proof is in the Plants. I think Stan mentioned, he might have even read some of my book. I think he read the whole book. That made me think there's a website called Red Pen Reviews. Have you heard of that?

No. So Red Pen Reviews is a great resource for people who are just wanting to kind of understand how scientifically accurate a given book is. And it was created by Stefan Giene, a nutrition scientist. He wrote Hungry Brain. Really, really smart guy. He focuses a lot on obesity.

And Mario Kratz and Kevin Klatt, all of these very highly regarded, reputable guys in nutrition science are involved in Red Pen Reviews and they'll review different books. So Stephen Gundry's books on there, The Plant Paradox, there's Saladino's book, Walter Willett, who's not vegan, by the way, on the record. Yeah, I think Stan said he was vegan. Just to correct that, I interviewed him and I'm 99% sure he eats dairy food. There's reviews of Jason Fung's book, my book's on there, so people can kind of go through that and see how a nutrition scientist PhD

would review some of these books that people are reading. My podcast is The Proof. People can come and join us there if they're not sick of my voice. And on Instagram, at Simon Hill. Got it. And so this question, I don't know how much it could potentially stir the pot

but um when whenever i ask a carnivore this question about why is it that on somebody on the plant-based side is so heavy on cholesterol versus the carnivore side where they're like ah that's that's all shit information because of ansel keys and the Seven Countries Study. So what's your take on that study? Do you have four hours? We got time. Look, I think if you jump online and you search Ansel Keys, you can be led to believe that he ignored various science, he left things out,

and he already had a kind of preconceived outcome and he wanted to show that through science, he left things out and he already had a kind of preconceived outcome and he wanted to show that through science, which is the opposite of how science is done. You have a hypothesis, you conduct the science and then you are able to evaluate that hypothesis and you might be able to falsify it or you can build on it. His research was really important research at the time. He was the first person that put together this multi-country nutritional epidemiology study that was able to show that populations who are eating more saturated fat tended to have higher cholesterol

and higher risk of cardiovascular disease. People say he cherry-picked countries and they often show the two graphs and there's a 6 and a 22. Even on the 22 studies, if those 22 studies were included, that relationship still exists. It didn't go away. More saturated fat, high cholesterol, high cardiovascular disease. So the kind of lipid heart hypothesis very much stems from that research. But we have to remember

that was back in the 60s and that research has been corroborated and only been strengthened over time by study after study after study after study. So I think it's unfair to 60 years later go back and say his study wasn't perfect. Nutrition science has a vaholt. This guy was conducting cutting-edge science in the 1960s. Of course, in hindsight, there's little things that he could have maybe done differently, but we've learned that along the way. And it's not reason to discard his findings it's reason to to say you know let's let's not accept his what he found as

fact let's look at that and then look at the entire body of evidence and when you do that, it's clear that his hypothesis has been proven. It was right. And so I think sometimes we can flippantly kind of just discard someone because we've chosen a particular diet, we've had an N equals one experience, we feel better and it can make us feel better to to take the position that that science is flawed and you've probably also talked about this quite a bit but also when you hear some carnivores talk about like plants or eating vegetables they'll say oh plants are trying to kill you or you know you're not made to digest or eat those foods and i know you definitely have

something for that so what is your typical response to those types of beliefs or claims? Your thoughts? There are compounds in plant foods that can provide a certain amount of stress at a cellular level, but so does exercise. So does getting in sauna. So does eating food in general an ice bath um so i i think you know pointing to something and saying hey that contains a compound which in an animal study was shown to be carcinogenic therefore you can't eat that i think we have to be very careful with that because i could connect mark up to pure oxygen. I'm not going to do this. And have him breathe in, inhale pure oxygen and he'll eventually pass out and die. Does that mean that oxygen is toxic?

Should we stop breathing? Absolutely not. Oxygen in the concentration that it's found in air, which is at 21%, is very healthy for us. It sustains our life. We rely upon it. So we can kind of create this argument that a certain compound is toxic in a particular context and create, generate fear. And that's been done with several of these compounds, like whether it's lectins or types of polyphenols

where you take them out, isolate them, and feed them into a rodent at doses that we would never be exposed to and look at what happens to inflammation or leaky gut, for example. But I think you have to come back to how do the foods as a whole, so not isolating these things, foods as a whole, in the dose that we would be exposed to, how are they affecting our health? And when you look at fruit and vegetable consumption, you see reductions in risk of cancer across the board. When you look at the consumption of beans, which are rich in lectins,

you see people living longer. They have lower risk of cardiovascular mortality, and in short-term studies, they have lower inflammation. So a lot of this, I think, comes back to dose and the fact that fear sells, so we can generate a lot of hype over it if we take that narrative. When we exercise, there's all kinds of different things that are going on. Sometimes if someone is to go for a run or if someone is to do some sort of exercise and it's hot out, that person potentially might need more electrolytes. They might need more sodium or potassium and things like that. But things get even way more complicated than that in terms of like how much vitamin D someone needs or how much calcium somebody needs.

It could largely be associated with how much exercising somebody needs it could largely um be associated with how much exercising they're doing and iron iron and iron is actually something that would uh can kind of get suppressed through something like running because of the pressure and the contact and there's just like just a wild amount of things that go on when we start to try to cross over that line between kind of exercise and uh and nutrition and we sometimes forget we talk a lot about protein synthesis and we're saying you know leucine and and these meals and these different things and we forget that the majority of that would come from resistance training as the stimulus right yeah yeah and there's there's a meta-analysis, Tengawa,

which was a couple of years ago now, and it's super interesting because it kind of was able to separate protein intake to resistance training, looking at strength as the outcome. And they had two different contexts. So they were looking at what happens to strength as you increase protein in context to one where there's no resistance training.

Say that again. So we just take sedentary people and we look at increasing protein from the RDA of say 0.8 up to 2 grams. What happens to their strength levels? There's no stimulus there. There's no training. That's representative of 70 of the united states yeah and then let's look at context b uh increasing protein within the context of these people doing resistance training what happens to strength so in the first context you

basically see no increase in strength if you're sedary, you don't have the primary anabolic stimulus that is required. Structure reflects function. The body is going to respond to some type of stress. And you need that resistance training stress there in the first place for the protein to be utilized in that way. We'll use protein elsewhere in the body for other things to create hormones and other proteins like collagen or lipoproteins. But you're not just going to increase protein and magically become strong.

And this is an important study because strength really is the better predictor of longevity than muscle mass, even though muscle mass still does correlate. And then in the other context with the resistance training in place, And then in the other context with the resistance training in place, you saw a 20% to 25% increase in strength and then it tapered off at about 1.5, 1.6 grams of protein. So above that, you weren't getting continued increases in strength. But what's super interesting is that at 1.1 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram, you achieved about 80% of those strength benefits.

So if we think about it right now, the average person in this country, let's say they're getting 1.2 grams per kilogram. The reason that they are developing psychopenia in their week is not because they're eating insufficient amounts of protein they could actually develop quite a lot of strength but it's because 70 of them are not moving their body against resistance so i think that's a really good point that you raise yeah i i just uh i wish more people would build the habit of of lifting but i recognize it's a hard thing you know if you have never but I recognize it's a hard thing.

You know, if you have never done it before, it's a hard thing to just kind of come out of nowhere and start weight training. It is. And, you know, I guess we kind of have to remember, though, there are lots of different modalities. It doesn't necessarily have to be traditional bodybuilding. Yeah, it does.

Kettlebell workouts. And you can find a form of resistance training hopefully that you enjoy again this is another one of those things where it's about consistency you got to do this over over the long long term damn do you guys see that that video that 70 year old guy since both of you oh yeah all he does is calisthenics i i wish we could pull it up right here but there's this guy who's 70 years old he He has the body of like a 30-year-old. All he does is bodyweight work, and he's just been consistent with that since his 40s. But he looks better than a majority of people just because he keeps the habit.

Bodyweight work, sprinting. I mean, all kinds of stuff he can do, right? Yeah, this dude. Okay, the guy on the left is 70. Wow. Andrews, just skip into, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a 70-year-old body right there. And I pay attention to stuff like that

and pay attention to what these types of people are doing because he's muscular. He definitely has mTOR going on. You see a lot of people who are saying, oh, minimize mTOR or whatever. But keep the habit. And with sarcopenia this loss of muscle uh size function and strength it's primarily driven by a loss of type 2 muscle fibers yeah so the fast switch and that is what resistance training is going to help attenuate what why

do you think people lose it because they start to get into pain and things like that as they get older, like they had it for a little bit and then they're losing it as they're gaining, as they're getting older, they're maybe potentially gaining some body weight and their strength to weight ratio is kind of getting thrown off. And then getting off the couch is just a tougher thing for them to do. Yeah, probably life getting in the way in midlife. And then the habit drops off. It takes work to build that habit and to show up consistently. And your muscle mass when you're 60 or 70 really is a product of what you've been doing for the last 30, 40 years.

So it's not like they just kind of get to 60 or 70 and stop training and lose all of their muscle. They probably just haven't built that habit early enough in life. That's not to say that if you're 60 or 70, you can't go from doing nothing to building muscle because there's actually some really good clinical studies that have shown that. That surprised the hell out of me. They took people – one study took people in their 80s, got them into resistance training and they were still able to generate

a good amount of muscle protein synthesis and build muscle so the body is pretty resilient and incredible from from that perspective it's never too late to to kind of start to stress it and send that signal and it will adapt and grow stronger even if you're in your 70s or 80s there's a dex scan place here in sacramento um and they consistently have these people that are coming in and getting dexas done maybe they're're just starting off or they're just trying to do a transformation, but they routinely see people in their fifties and sixties who they start building the habit of exercise, their muscle mass goes up and their bone density increases. Like that's one thing that a lot of people are beginning to focus on. But even your fifties and sixties, if you hadn't

built the habit, you can increase your muscle mass, you can increase your bone density. It's not a straight downhill from that point. That's a really big one for women in particular. Post-menopausal women, when estrogen kind of goes off the cliff, the resistance training provides the kind of mechanical stress that stress is passed from the contraction of the muscle through the tendon into the bone and the body will convert that mechanical signal into a chemical signal which then results in the formation of new bone and it's estrogen that helps mediate

that so if you're low in estrogen then that entire pathway starts to drop off and you end up with less bone formation and you can see a drop in bone mineral density which is one of the reasons why it's quite typical for women who are postmenopausal, particularly if they're not doing resistance training and have a family history of osteopenia, osteoporosis, they go and do a DEXA scan and their T-score shows them that they're either in osteopenic range or osteoporosis, they go and do a DEXA scan and their T-score shows them that they're

either in osteopenic range or osteoporotic. Yeah. You had an interesting way of people getting iodine in their diet. And I do think that this is something that's maybe a little more absent from people's diet than they might realize. Can you share some of that with us? So there's a few different ways. One is if you're eating seafood, then you'll get iodine through various types of fish and also bivalves like oysters and mussels have quite a bit of iodine in them. If you're not eating seafood, and you will actually get a little bit through dairy as well. And that usually comes from the iodine solution that's used to clean the machinery used during the production of dairy.

But if you're not eating dairy foods regularly or seafood regularly, there are a few different ways to get enough iodine. You need about 150 micrograms per day. It's 220 to 270 if you're breastfeeding or pregnant. Number one is dulse flakes or nori flakes. These are types of seaweed. And a little bit goes a long way. So it's usually a teaspoon or so of that.

You can read the packet and see how much iodine is in a teaspoon or a serve, again aiming for about 150 micrograms of that per day. The next is iodized salt. So you can find iodized salt out there. That typically is dosed at a level which will help you get to 150 micrograms if you have sort of a quarter of a teaspoon. And if you have high blood pressure and you've been told to take it easy on salt um which a number of people with high risk of cardiovascular disease will have been told by

their physician you can find a brand called low salt l-o salt and i know that's sold here in the States and they have an iodine fortified version of that. So that's available. Or potassium iodine supplement, 150 micrograms a day. Either of those are good options. And the one thing with iodine is if you want to test your iodine levels, the most accurate, reliable way to do that is through a urine test, not through blood. Yeah, I just found it to be interesting because i think people's iodine is lower than they think because you know they're a lot of people have pushed back about salt for a few years and then and you need it for your thyroid to produce adequate amounts of of t3 and t4 which is really important for your metabolism and so if you're low in iodine intake,

some of the symptoms might be you're feeling lethargic, you're low in energy, even like brittle nails, brittle hair. These are all signs and symptoms that maybe you're not consuming enough. Well, I think that's it, right? We've asked this guy a lot of freaking questions today. I appreciate it so much for you coming on the show, and thank you so much for your time. Strength is never weak. This weakness is never strength. Andrew, take us on out of here.