Modern Wisdom - Harvard Professor: “I Tried Every Diet. This Is By Far The Worst.” - Daniel Lieberman - #1137

Starting point is 00:00:00 You've spent years researching every major diet and trying many of them yourself. I want to go through and review all of those. But first off, what was that journey like? Well, it was fun. I mean, I've been working for quite a few years on a book about the evolution of diet. And I thought, rather than just simply studying them, which was the majority of the book, I thought I should try them as well. So kind of, you know, on and off as I was working on the book, my wife joined me for many of these diets.

Starting point is 00:00:30 kept trying some of these diets. Some of them better, some of them worse, but just kind of give a little, first of all, some participant observations. So I got a sense of what these diets are like, but also to kind of add context and experience them for myself. What did you start that journey believing about food that you no longer agree with? Gosh, I changed my opinions about so many things. I mean, the reason I started this book and this journey, as you say, is, that I'm actually, my research is mostly on physical activity. I study the evolution of running and walking and throwing and various other physical activities, but I also teach nutrition and digestion and physiology and that kind of stuff. And I read the literature. And a few years ago, actually,

Starting point is 00:01:16 with some colleagues, I taught a course on diet and exercise. And I've just been so confused by what I read, right? Because one, you can read in the New England Journal of Medicine, you know, arguably the top journal in the world, articles in the same year. that tell you that saturated fat is good for you, and then articles that tell you a saturated fat is bad for you, you know, this much salt is too much for you, and this much salt is actually just perfect for you. I mean, you name it, there's controversy and confusion.

Starting point is 00:01:44 And so I wanted to explore those problems myself, but as an evolutionary biologist, I wanted to integrate an evolutionary perspective, an evolutionary lens with hardcore biomedical data, cultural data, anthropological data, experiential information, all that together to think about it in whole. So I was really trying to do this in order to answer questions for myself. What use does an evolutionary lens give you that is typically missed when people make assessments about diet and nutrition? Oh gosh, it's hard to know where to start. There's a famous expression

Starting point is 00:02:23 in my field that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It was written by a guy named Theodosius Dobjansky in 1972. And what he meant was that we weren't engineered, we weren't designed, we evolved. And if you understand why things are the way they are, you need to take an evolutionary perspective. So evolution answers a lot of why questions. And when you start addressing why questions, you begin to think differently also about how questions and what questions. So nothing makes sense in the light of evolution and diet is no exception.

Starting point is 00:02:54 It feels like nutrition and diet are a little bit like new religions. There's dogma. It's a super sensitive topic. People get tribal. It's often impossible to change their belief no matter how much evidence you give them. Why do you think that's the case? Why do people become so ardent? That's, I completely agree with you. And in fact, I think that one of my biggest takeaways from working on the book was just how tribal people are about their diet. And I don't know the answer, but I suspect it has. goes something along the lines of this, which is that for millions of years or thousands of years, depending on which time scale you want, people ate the way their culture dictated, right? If you lived in the Middle East, you'd eat like a Middle Easterner, and if you lived in Japan, you'd eat like a Japanese person. And now we live in a world where everybody kind of eats the same stuff. And a lot of institutions are sort of crumbling. And I think people are searching for identity. And I think one of the ways in which we

Starting point is 00:03:54 define ourselves is by what we eat or very often by what we don't eat, right? And that's been sort of the case all along, you know, if you're kosher, you don't eat this, if you're, if you're Jane, you don't eat that, et cetera, et cetera. But I think people are searching for meaning and identity and diet is a really important way of defining that. A lot of diet, I mean, some diets are kind of like cults. I mean, they're sort of online. They're kind of online cults. And everybody kind of agrees. It's kind of like group think. You know why I think, at least part of it, is because we all understand that the diet that we eat is related to longevity, what we are faced with when somebody says that they disagree with our, they diverge from what it is that we're eating,

Starting point is 00:04:42 it's kind of a threat against our own existence that if this person is right, implicit in that, if I believe deeply about my diet and they believe deeply about theirs and we diverge in our opinions, that means maybe they're going to live longer than me. That means that maybe I'm going to die sooner. That means that I'm wrong in some sort of a way. It's not an abstract discussion. It's going to have real world implications. This is going to come into land at some point.

Starting point is 00:05:06 Yeah, but I think one of the key words you just said is belief, right? Because one of the real problems about diet is that it takes years, many years, for the effects of diets to manifest themselves in terms of our health. And so we all have to take leaps of faith when we pick our diet, right? I mean, right now, let's just say I follow the Mediterranean diet. You know, I can read all the studies I want about how good the Mediterranean diet is for me, but I won't know for 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years, if it's true, right? So we all have to take a leap of faith to some extent when we pick a diet.

Starting point is 00:05:42 Some people take leaps of faith based on their friends, the group, the community, others are a little bit more scientific, but no matter who you are, You have to figure out what you believe and what information you're going to use to credit. Okay, let's get into some of the religions. Maybe two of the most ardent groups are vegans and carnivores. Are plant-based diets superior? You know, I try not to be that judgmental about anything. I mean, if you look at the data, look, no matter what you, everybody who has a particular diet idea,

Starting point is 00:06:19 and including the fad diets, almost all of them are based on some grain of truth, all of them. The carnivore diet included. However, when you look at the data and you look at big meta-analyses, large-scale studies, I don't think there's much contest that plant-based diets of various sorts, and they're not all the same,

Starting point is 00:06:39 tend to have better health outcomes in terms of meta-analysis, long-term studies. And there's also mechanistic data as well. So I think if you're going to err on the side of an animal, versus plants, I think that science is pretty clear, plants. Why? Gosh, there are a lot of reasons for that. Well, one is that plants, again, not all plants are the same. If you eat crap plants, right?

Starting point is 00:07:04 If you eat sugar and highly refined grains and carbohydrates, you're not eating a very healthy diet. I mean, a lot of ultra-processed foods are mostly plant. That doesn't make them, the fact that they're plant-based doesn't make them healthy. But so, so, so, so, you know, it's, when we oversimplify, we can get ourselves into trouble. But, but there's evidence that, that meat for, even though we evolved to eat meat, meat has been played an important part in our evolutionary history, meat is nutritious. There's no question about that.

Starting point is 00:07:36 But for example, there are studies which show that there's a dose response effect between how much meat you eat and your risk of cancer. I think it's like one serving of meat, which I think they count as 85 grams, increases your risk of cancer over X years by, I think, 13%. And if you double that, you double the risk. So there's a dose response effect. So that's this epidemiological data. And there are quite a few studies which show that. Secondly, there are mechanistic studies, right? So we know, for example, that meat has a protein called carnitine.

Starting point is 00:08:11 And carnitine, when it goes to your gut, is transformed into another molecule called TMAO. Don't ask me to give you the long form of the molecule. and TMAO is a known inflammatory molecule that causes inflammation and has been associated with risk of, actually, it's been shown to be mechanistically related to atherosclerosis to hardening of the arteries, so increased blood pressure. Another effect of meat is that red meat, not poultry or fish, has a glycoprotein. So a glycoprotein is a little, you know, every cell has these little kind of like four, of like sugar protein molecules that stick off. And red meat has a particular kind of glycoprotein called N-EU-5GC. I mean, that doesn't really matter with the name.

Starting point is 00:09:04 But it turns out that humans have an inflammatory response to that. All humans? All humans. It was a gene called CMAH, which causes us to transform one proteoglycine into another kind. and that makes us have a response to any red meat. And that's also been argued to be another mechanistic reason for the data I mentioned earlier that there's a relationship between dosage of meat eating

Starting point is 00:09:33 and cancer risk. But again, it's not so simple because everything has tradeoffs, right? There's no such food that doesn't have a trade-off. And meat is just one of them. And so the other, of course, the issue about meat is that meat tends to have a higher amount of saturated fat. And saturated fat is one of the most controversial things on the planet, right, especially when it comes to nutrition. And we all don't, we don't, there's a lot of variation in how we respond to saturated fat. Some of us can eat

Starting point is 00:10:09 as much saturated fat as we want, and it doesn't really have any negative effect. But others do have some genetic susceptibility to saturated fat, and it does raise the risk of it. If it were raised the levels of lipoproteins, cholesterol molecules that cause heart disease. So it's complicated. There's never a simple answer for anything. It seems like maybe some of the reasons for plant-based diets

Starting point is 00:10:36 having better outcomes, at least epidemiologically, is not maybe to do with what's in the plants, but what's not in the meat that isn't being eaten? It's like the elimination diet of meat as opposed to the inclusion diet of plants. Of course. I mean, that's part of the problem with studying nutrition, which is that every time you don't eat something,

Starting point is 00:10:53 you're eating something else. Or every time you eat something, you're not eating something else. Or almost. So that's one of the reasons why, you know, you can't do a study, right? I can't, there's no one is ever going to do a study where they take, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:04 100 sets of twins and have one group of twins eat an all meat diet. And one group of twins eat an all plant diet. And even if they did do that, how would you separate all the other effects, right? Because when the ones are eating the meat diet, what is it they're not eating? And the ones are eating the plant diet, what is it they're not eating? And so on, and how do you are correct for the effects of exercise and smoking and, you know, all those other factors?

Starting point is 00:11:28 It's not possible to do that. Why is it that the carnivore movement has had such a boon recently if some of the data seems to be skeptical about the kind of outcomes of a very heavy meat-based diet? You know, that's a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, I think part of it is, again, it's a bit tribal. I think meat is associated with manliness and masculinity. That explains, I think, some of it. In the book, I recount, you know, James Blunt, the English singer, went on an all-meat diet and ended up getting scurvy. But he describes that the reason he did is he thought it made it more manly.

Starting point is 00:12:08 Now, I mean, that's probably not everybody. there are others who, you know, they hear podcasts or whatever that expound the benefits of meat diet, and they're attracted to it for one reason or another. And, you know, one other issues that a lot of people are on really unhealthy diets. And if you pick pretty much any diet that's not a crap diet, for lack of a better term, you're going to do better. And so you might think, okay, wow, I'm eating all this meat, I'm feeling better than when I ate lots of McDonald's and drank swilled lots of soda and whatever. It doesn't mean that you wouldn't do even better on, say, a Mediterranean diet or a dash diet or a blue zones diet or, you know, fill in the blank diet. Are you saying that the best diet is the one that you're able to stick to?

Starting point is 00:12:59 Well, it depends what your goals are. If you're trying to lose weight, absolutely. I mean, that's actually, there's something called the National Weight Loss Registry where they've actually analyzed again, because you can't randomize huge numbers of people to different kinds of diets perfectly. So what this study has done is that they've looked at, they've tracked people who've managed to lose weight and keep it off for a long period of time.

Starting point is 00:13:18 I think the average for the respondents is at least six years or something like that, 5.6 years or something like that. And people's diets are kind of all over the place, but what they all share is they're not junk food diets. They're tending not a lot of sugar and a lot of added fat and things like that. And they're able to stick to them.

Starting point is 00:13:37 because a lot of people find diets hard, right? If you go for a low-fat diet, I mean, I try to low-fat diet. Fat makes food tasty, you know. Going on a low-fat diet is really hard, and a lot of major studies have failed to have very much effectiveness because people can't tolerate the diet. They just start eating more fat. what do you make of the current protein maxing push given what sounds to me like a degree of skepticism around the importance of meat

Starting point is 00:14:14 protein is the new hot girl in school everybody wants her everybody's having more of her what do you make of the current world of protein consumption i mean i find it fascinating i mean protein's having its day and you look there's some truth to the interest in protein protein is important You need protein. Every day, you need protein. You can live without eating fat, you can live without eating carbohydrates, but you cannot live without eating proteins.

Starting point is 00:14:43 Is that true? Absolutely. Yeah, your body can turn anything into fat, and your body can turn, your body can transform fats and proteins into sugars, but you cannot, there are a bunch of amino acids that are essential. You have to have them in their diet, or you'll die.

Starting point is 00:15:00 There's actually two fatty acids that you need to eat a little bit of omega-3 and amacic. But apart from that, you do need to eat protein. Secondly, protein is filling. So people tend to be a little bit more sated on eating protein. Protein takes a little bit more energy to digest, and it's pretty nutritious. But here's the thing. And I think a lot of people, and if you're very physically active, if you're menstruating,

Starting point is 00:15:29 if you're pregnant, you need extra protein as people age, they all. also lose muscle mass, and it's really important for them to have protein. But here's the thing, the body can't store extra protein. If you eat more protein, then your body can use, you can't store it. So what do you do? You turn it into fat. So eating massive amounts of protein is probably not that harmful unless you get to ridiculous levels and you can do kidney damage, but you have to really eat a lot of protein for that. So eating huge amounts of protein is not going to have some massive benefit. And there's no, I don't, I've never seen any strong evidence to that say. One gram per pound of body weight is the rubric. That's what they say, yeah. And where do you,

Starting point is 00:16:12 where do you come into land on one gram per pound of body weight for protein consumption? I don't have a strong opinion on that. I mean, I think, you know, we're all different. I mean, part of the problem with the way we think about diet is we, we medicalize it, right? You know, you just gave a dose, right? But it doesn't work that way. It's, it's complicated. It depends on what you're doing and how old you are and whether you're losing muscle and whether you're working out, and whether you're 20 or when you're 80, I don't think anybody's able to come up with a perfect dose of protein. I mean, it's, you know, the old definition of economical, you know, enough but not too much. And I think that, and we all have to figure out that out,

Starting point is 00:16:46 but it's not, you know, it's really hard to come up with a very simple diagnosis for any human being. And that's, again, part of the problem with diet. We all want to be told what to do. We all want to make it simple. We want a magic bullet. We want a quick, fix. And the problem with diet and nutrition is that it doesn't work that way. I imagine we're only two religions in to our nutritional theology to trip around the world. I imagine some people are already feeling a degree of maybe uncertainty or confusion. Okay, so it's important for me to have protein. I need that. It's actually mandatory. It's one of the few things that I have to have, or else I'm going to die at some point. But also, there's some pretty sort of negative effect.

Starting point is 00:17:31 especially around red meat, it seems, of long-term populations. The plant-based thing appears to maybe went out a little bit, but the carnivore thing is missing some stuff. Well, one of the weird things about the whole protein thing is that people seem to associate protein with meat. You know, when you go out all those plants out of there, there's a lot of protein in those plants. Beans are filled with protein.

Starting point is 00:17:53 Legumes are filled with protein. Whole grain foods have a lot of protein. You don't need meat in order to get protein. And in fact, soy is a complete protein. You could actually live your life off soy. You don't actually need to eat meat in order to get protein. So the equation of meat with protein, I think, has been exaggerated. It's true.

Starting point is 00:18:12 Meat is rich in protein, and meat is a complete protein. But you can also get a lot of protein from quinoa and from nuts and whatever. You know, it's not a – and you can certainly buy – and every culture on the planet has figured out, you know, every farming culture on the planet, figured out to get sufficient amounts of protein by combining a grain with a legume. So rice and beans or corn and beans. All of those are solutions that cultures worldwide figured out in order to ensure that people got adequate amounts of protein. 95% of people don't get enough fiber, which is why Momentus built fiber plus, because

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Starting point is 00:19:50 Mediterranean diet is regarded as one of the most healthy on the planet. Is that right? it has probably more scientific evidence to support it than any other diet. And that's partly Eurocentric because, of course, you know, Europeans do most of the research and Americans do most of the research. So there's a lot of, there's a lot more data on it. I'm not sure that the Mediterranean diet is necessarily healthy than a traditional Asian diet or traditional American diet or, you know, Mesoamerican diet or traditional Asian diet.

Starting point is 00:20:20 But absolutely, there's a ton. I mean, if you were going to go purely on epidemiological, data at the moment you would pick a Mediterranean diet. Can you explain what epidemiological data in the world of diet and nutrition means? Excellent question. So there's a number of ways to figure out the effects of food and diet on health. And so one is to do, I'm going to back up a little bit, if you don't mind. So one of those do a randomized control study. That's the gold standard, right? I give you and your twin two different diets, and I follow you for X number of years, right? And then I can measure its effect on your cholesterol levels and your steroid levels and your, you know, your nasal mucosum production, whatever.

Starting point is 00:21:07 You know, I can measure anything I want, right? But of course, it takes a long time to do that. And so because we can't wait for you to die, we're going to lend measure proxies, right, rather than your actual health outcome. The other is to take large samples of people and then try to make associations between what they eat and their health outcomes. And that's an epidemiological study. So there are statistical associations within a population between, say, what people eat and their likelihood or their prevalence of getting heart disease or hypertension or cancer or arthritis or whatever it is. And so for the Mediterranean diet, there are both epidemiological studies, large-scale ones, huge. I mean, they're now meta-analyses involving hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Starting point is 00:22:01 But they're also prospective studies. So that's the kind of the gold study is when you take a bunch of people and you, again, randomize them into two groups. So one of the biggest studies was one done in Spain, for example, where they had over 7,500 Spaniards. And they assigned some of them a Mediterranean, diet where they had to have olive oil or walnuts. There were two arms to that versus Spaniards who were not eating a Mediterranean diet. And after, I think after five years, they stopped the

Starting point is 00:22:30 study because the benefits, the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet were so high that they felt that it was unethical to continue the study and not get rid of-deny the other group for the benefits of having a Mediterranean diet. That's correct. Wow. It was so good that a predi-med study. non-Mediterranean diet was essentially seen as kind of a toxic. As unethical. As unethical. No way. Yes, way.

Starting point is 00:22:56 So that's just one study. There's other studies in France elsewhere. So these are, again, these are prospective studies. So those are the best studies, right? Now, every study has its drawbacks and its problems and its flaws, right? You can't, you know, because you have to account for, for, you know, all the other things that people are eating, they're smoking, their physical activity, you know, whether or not they're, you know, whether they're lawyers or not, who knows what.

Starting point is 00:23:19 But when you combine all those different, and then on top of that, there are studies where you can feed people a Mediterranean diet for just a few weeks in a lab, for example, and then measure its effects on aspects of your health that have an outcome, like a cholesterol level, or so on, or markers of inflammation. And so you combine all those kinds of data together,

Starting point is 00:23:44 the mechanistic studies, the epidemiological studies, the prospective studies, and the Mediterranean diet comes out as a very, you know, probably, I wouldn't say it's a clear winner, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's ever been study. I imagine when it comes to the epidemiological studies, people's dietary choices are idiosyncratic, they're informed by the culture that they're from, and the, the job that they have, you know, if you're, there's an entire industry of PTs that are probably over-eating meat, which means that you have meat to eaters,

Starting point is 00:24:17 that are disproportionately personal trainers, but that means that they have the lifestyle of a personal trainer, or perhaps there's something cultural, that red meat is eaten by dudes that like to barbecue from the deep south. Maybe they're doing other stuff with their health, maybe they're smoking or whatever. So the selection effect of what people eat which diets and what are the things that aren't under the studies purview,

Starting point is 00:24:39 and what does that sort of... Huge, huge effect. Like, you know, vegetarians also tend not to smoke, right? And so how do you separate the fact of eating a vegetarian diet but the fact that you're much more likely to smoke? And people who tend to be more physically active also tend to eat a healthier diet. In fact, you know, big studies where they get like when you and I die,

Starting point is 00:25:00 there's going to be a death certificate, right, saying we die to such and such. And it might be, you know, cancer or a heart attack or whatever. But then what was it that caused the cancer? What caused the heart attack? And that's, there's a, there's a bunch of epidemiologists out there trying to try to figure that out. And many studies are unable to separate statistically the effects of exercise and diet because people who exercise tend to eat well and vice versa.

Starting point is 00:25:27 So the co-variation. Exactly. So the co-variation is what we call co-varyation is so strong. Statistically, it's very difficult to separate these things. Does that make epidemiological studies in nutrition and diet largely useless then? No. So that's the wrong way to think about it. Epidemiological studies cannot measure cause and effect. But they are one of many forms of information that we can and should use. Because again, you can't, I mean, again, the gold standard study for a true skeptic is a randomized control study. But as we talked about before, you can't do a proper randomized control study in wait 50, 60 years for somebody to see the effects of the diet and control for

Starting point is 00:26:06 everything else, too. So we need to be, do you know the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox? No. Okay, so there's a famous piece of paper from the 7th century BC by a guy named Archelagos of Paris, which he wrote, he wrote, and it's like a fragment, he's like a boring poet, but apparently he wrote this like bit of a poem that survived, and it says, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. And when he meant by that was that when you chase a fox, it'll do anything to run away, right? It'll hide.

Starting point is 00:26:40 It'll, you know, it'll, it'll, it'll... Climatery. Climatery. You don't do whatever, right? You chase a hedgehog, it just rolls into a ball, right? Hedgehogs just do one thing. And that analogy was used by a very famous English philosopher named Isaiah Berlin to think, to kind of divide the world up into hedgehogs and foxes.

Starting point is 00:26:59 So hedgehogs are big idea guys. Like, protein is your answer. You know, meat is your answer. never eating meat is your answer, et cetera. Those are what I call hedgehog diets. They're single idea, big fix diets. Whereas foxes see nuance. They see tradeoffs.

Starting point is 00:27:20 They see complexity. They realize that every time you eat one thing, you don't eat something else. And we need to apply. I think that the hedgehog approach to diet is always the wrong way because it's complicated. People vary. The effects of foods are complicated. There are tradeoffs. and when we start to oversimplify,

Starting point is 00:27:40 we inevitably get things wrong, and that's true for even how we analyze the scientific record. If we decide, well, epidemiological data, it's just junk because you can't test cause and effect, you're missing important information, just as if you decide, oh, you know, randomized control studies are really problematic because they're too short term

Starting point is 00:27:58 and they don't involve variation and whatever. You're also missing something important. The best approach is to look at as much of the information as possible and put it together, and that's, I mean, if I'm, I can be a little self-promoting. That's why I wrote the book, because I tried and fed up to take all that evidence and to digest it, put it into kind of plain English and make it, you know, help people understand

Starting point is 00:28:19 that because I think all of us need to try to answer these questions. Let me put it another way. For millions of years, millions of years, our ancestors, they had to know an enormous amount to get their food, right? If you're a hunter-gatherer, you have to know how to hunt animals, right? You need to know where they are and how to track them and how, you know, what's the right, you know, what environments they're going to be in and how to butcher them and all that kind of stuff to find plants. I mean, I've gone out foraging and hunting with hunter-gathers. Finding plants is not a trivial matter, right?

Starting point is 00:28:50 Finding where the plants are, knowing how to dig for them and knowing where they are at different seas. We had to be naturalist. We had to know a huge amount of information in order to survive. Now, you and I can walk into a Whole Foods or whatever, you know, whatever, Sainsbury or whatever. whatever it is, and we're confronted with 40,000 different kinds of food. We don't need to know how to get our food anymore. We now need to know how to choose our food. So we need a different kind of knowledge. And you can throw up your hands and just have somebody tell you what to do, or you can try to learn for yourself what you want, what you care about, what's important to you,

Starting point is 00:29:29 what your tradeoffs are. So I think all of us need to educate ourselves to figure out how to choose our food, because that's the challenge our modern world has set us. The question of what should I eat today evolutionarily is pretty novel. It's completely novel. Nobody ever asked that question. I mean, the people I will eat what is in front of me because otherwise I die. Yeah, I mean, the people I work with in my field work, you know, so I've done a lot of work in Kenya. I've been working recently in Rwanda. And, you know, occasionally people invite me for meals, right, in the area where we work. We've worked in a very remote. We've worked for 15 years in a very remote part of Kenya, actually where a lot of the

Starting point is 00:30:05 famous runners are from. And I don't even have to ask what I'm going to be served. It's always exactly the same meal. You have a dish called Ugali, which is like a cord meal kind of porridge, with either Sukumabuki, which is basically colored greens that have been chopped up and sauteed, or sometimes if you're lucky with beans or something like that. That's it. That's what you get. Nobody asks what's for dinner. They know what's, because they eat what they grow. That's all the food that they have available to them. Or I've gone out with hunter-gatherers. I've had the privilege of spending some time with hunter-gatherers.

Starting point is 00:30:38 They don't like, well, gee, tonight, am I going to have Italian or Chinese, or shall I have, you know, shall I have turtle or shall I have, you know, tortoise or shall I have, you know, kudu? They eat whenever they manage to hunt and whenever they manage to gather. That's it. There's no, nobody asks what's for dinner. They eat what they have. And all of us, and farmers and hunter-gathers, this is the way life was for most people.

Starting point is 00:31:01 Except, you know, the king of England or whatever. He got to choose what he wanted to eat. And now we're in this completely weird, bizarre, modern environment. And surprise, surprise, we have a hard time. Because not only do we not know what to eat, we're also confronted with a lot of really bad stuff. I mean, typical, as I said before, the typical American supermarket has 40,000 different kinds of food.

Starting point is 00:31:24 40,000. It's kind of amazing. And over 50% of that is ultra-processed, designed to be highly appealing, addictive, convenient, inexpensive, although that's going up a bit, and how are we supposed to cope? We're not, we never evolved the mechanisms to handle that. Going back to the Mediterranean diet, what is it about that diet that seems to, what's the mechanistic reason for why it seems to outperform others? but there's probably a number of reasons.

Starting point is 00:31:59 Again, there's no one reason. So one is that it tends to be whole grain, right? So when you take flour and you refine it, right, you remove the outer layers and you remove the germ, you're removing a lot of the protein and you're moving a lot of the fiber. It has a healthy balance of fat, so, of course, it's famous for olive oil, which is a mono-unsaturated fat.

Starting point is 00:32:25 We can talk about that if you want. And mono-uncaturid fats are associated with a lot of health benefits. There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. Mediterranean diet often has fish in it, and fish has these omega-3 fatty acids. So it's the constellation of nutrients that are healthy, plus an absence of a lot of stuff like added sugar and a lot of... What are the things that it eliminates most? Well, it tends not...

Starting point is 00:32:51 Mediterranean diet tends not to have a lot of added sugar, right? tends not to have that much proper Mediterranean. What you define as a Mediterranean line is, you can be kind of go all over the, what the Mediterranean with capital M, capital D, right, which is what's been defined by the nutritionists, isn't necessarily what people always eat in the Mediterranean. I've spent a lot of really carb-riched dinners in Italy, for example. But it tends not to have added sugar,

Starting point is 00:33:19 tends not to have a lot of refined carbohydrates, tends not to have a lot of saturated fat, tends to be diverse and rich in phytochemicals that are healthy and that have a lot of antioxidants and things like that, tends not to have too much red meat. So it's a mixture of things that have, in toto, been shown to be reasonably healthy. Now, is it like an optimal diet?

Starting point is 00:33:41 Is it perfect? It will guarantee perfect health? No. No diet is optimal. But has it been shown to be effective for preventing weight gain and for reducing your risk of a wide range of diseases, absolutely. How much is it the lifestyle? I've heard about the importance of the sociality around the Mediterranean diet and stuff like that. Has that been separated out? You know what I'm talking about, right?

Starting point is 00:34:08 I mean, again, it's very hard to do that. But for example, that study I mentioned, the Spanish study, the predomed study, I mean, that essentially by randomizing people who all presumably had similar lifestyles, they were, they were, on the street corner, having a coffee at 9 p.m. at night, with their friends. But both arms of the diet were probably the same. So that study, for example, controlled for that. But of course, there's more to health and longevity than just your diet. What about bluesone diets? Oh, my God. Don't get me started on that one. I mean, blue zones are fun. I mean, look, there's a lot to say about blue zone diet. The first is, again, you know, if you, if you

Starting point is 00:34:51 it's kind of like a Mediterranean diet, but with even less meat. If you look at what it prescribes. But it also prescribes skipping breakfast. It tells you to be social. It tells you to not finish your plate. There's some social aspects to it.

Starting point is 00:35:11 But what's, I find, and if you look at the the sort of prescription of the diet, especially nutritionally. It's quite a lot of, you know, it's not far off from the Mediterranean diet. I don't know of any really good high-quality studies

Starting point is 00:35:28 for the Blue Zones diet compared to, say, the Mediterranean Diet. But what I find amusing about the Blue Zones diet is how it's been advertised. Because it's advertised and marketed as a diet that'll help you live to be 100. And that's where I begin to have some concerns. Because even if you look at the data for the Blue Zones,

Starting point is 00:35:44 like these supposed Blue Zones, these five regions on the planet. Where are they? Let's see. One of them is in, the Nacoia Peninsula of Costa Rica. One's a little kind of little village in Sardinia. It's like a little area of Sardinia.

Starting point is 00:35:57 One is an island in the Mediterranean. I've forgotten the name of the island. One is Okinawa. And the other is Loma Linda, California. Right outside of L.A. Okay. I didn't know that one was. Those are the five blue zones. And the idea behind these are, these are supposedly areas

Starting point is 00:36:15 where twice as many people live to be centenarians. They live to be 100 years old. And so the idea is if you eat like the people in these areas, you too are going to live to be 100 years old. Now, there's some problems with this. The first is that even if you believe the data, that these regions have a higher percentage of centenarians, that turns out of the percentage of centenarians is tiny. So it's like six people out of 10,000, as opposed to in the United States where it's three people out of 10,000. The base rate is so low that small changes are massive proportions.

Starting point is 00:36:48 These are statistical outlaw. So you basically have to, if you're not a statistical outlier, which most of us are not, it's irrelevant. It's not a very, it's statistical nonsense, basically. Secondly, there's a guy in Oxford, is a demographer at Oxford. I'm trying to remember his name, Saul Newman, I think his name is. He's published this really fascinating paper. He did a deep dive onto these blue zones and found out that only 18% of the people in these blue zones actually had birth certificates. So we don't even know all these people are.

Starting point is 00:37:18 They just self-report their age. And these are areas. Are you telling me that a good chunk of the Blue Zone fervor could have been around the fact that people just didn't register how old they were? Correct. Or it could be insurance fraud. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:37:39 You can get online. You can read Saul Newman's paper. It's hilarious paper to read. But also think about it this way. There's this little area in Sardinia. If you go on, if you click on the blue zones map, there's this like, you know, think about Sardinia. It likes, you know, to an oval-shaped island, right? And there's this little area on the western side.

Starting point is 00:37:58 There's a little blue, you know, zone on the map, right? In that little area, you have all these centenarians. Now tell me that if you go like 30 miles north or 30 miles south, that people have totally different diets. And it's like, so why in this little spot are they all sentinaries? And just 20 miles north or 20 miles south, they're not. It's kind of suspicious. What is the Blue Zone proponent explanation for that? I think he's answered.

Starting point is 00:38:26 I don't think he's... Is it a guy? Yeah, this guy named, what's his name? Wettner, butner? I can't remember. He was a national geographic reporter who got really excited by this and figured how to market all this. But one of the most interesting blue zones is Loma Linda, California.

Starting point is 00:38:44 Do you know who lives in Loma Linda, California? Why Loma Linda is a blue zone? Because obviously they're not little, you know, peasant-y farmers eating their traditional foods. No. They're Seventh-day Adventists. And the Seventh-day Adventists don't believe in smoking. They believe in exercise.

Starting point is 00:39:00 They're, you know, they believe that many of them are vegetarians. They believe that... They don't believe in exercise. No, they do believe in exercise. They do believe that God gave us our bodies. Their body is a sacred thing and that it's our responsibility as, as Christians to take good care of our God-given body. That's interesting.

Starting point is 00:39:21 Physiological theology. Very good. It is. It is. And so, you know, they don't smoke. They exercise. Many of them are vegetarians. They do all these sorts of things that most doctors will tell you is what you should do.

Starting point is 00:39:35 And guess what? They have a high percentage of people who live. Do they eat the same thing as the people in Sardinia? No, of course not. They're eating. Right. So what's going on with this blues on this thing? Is it fair to say that the Blue Zone diet isn't a diet?

Starting point is 00:39:49 It doesn't do what it says it does. Well, I mean, it does. If you read the Blue Zone's book, it tells you what to eat. It tells you eat at least a half a cup of beans a day. It tells you eat lots of vegetables. It tells you not to eat too much of this, not too much of that. So it's got some parameters, you know. But it's not a rigidly defined diet.

Starting point is 00:40:10 And, you know, the suggestions aren't totally crazy. But they're, again, it's kind of oversawed. Like, one of my, you know, one of the refrains from, you know, that I keep going back to in my book is that there are a lot of people telling us optimal diets, you know. And I have come to hate the word optimal. If you want to piss me off, say your diet. That's your trigger word. It's my trigger word. Tell me your diet is optimal.

Starting point is 00:40:38 First of all, is it optimal for you or optimal for me? Because you and I are not the same, right? We have different genetics. We have different background. you're young and strong, you're a lot more muscle, you know, but I'm probably faster than you. Who knows? Not probably, suddenly. But I'm 62.

Starting point is 00:40:52 You're probably a lot younger. You know, is, are you more worried about heart disease or Alzheimer's or arthritis or this or that or the other? Are you, do you care more about the environment, et cetera? There's no such thing as optimal. And it's kind of a, it's just marketing. And so I now react against people who claim their diet is optimal because it's just marketing. It's salesmanship. It's not science.

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Starting point is 00:42:12 or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Okay, let's piss off some more people. What about low-carb, high-fat? Oh, boy, am I going to get in serious trouble after this one? Yes, yes, yes, we both are. It's fine. Low-carb, high-fat.

Starting point is 00:42:29 Used to be Atkins, now it's keto. Yeah, I mean, look, both depends what your goals are, right? It turns out if your goal is to lose weight, for example, you can lose weight on a low-carb diet, and you can lose weight on a low-fat diet. It is true that people tend to lose a little bit more weight on low-carb diets than low-fat diets. But, in fact, I'm one of the co-authors of the Carbohyte insulin model big paper that was

Starting point is 00:42:56 recently American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. So I've signed my name in blood on the, I believe in the biology behind the low-carb diet. Can you explain that in layman's terms? We can. But before we do it, let me just get. to this, which is that pretty much any non-crap diet can help somebody lose weight. And the hard part is to sustain it. And so you need to make a distinction between efficacy and effectiveness. So efficacy is basically how well a diet works in the perfect world, right? When there's no cheating and you eat

Starting point is 00:43:32 exactly what you're told and you can do it for a long time and it's perfect, effectiveness is how it works in the real world. And it turns out that low-carb diets, have higher efficacy for weight loss than low-fat diets. This is for weight loss. But their effectiveness, because people have a hard time, sustaining them, is only slightly larger. If you could do it, you might perform very well. But being able to do it, the difficulty is somewhat harder.

Starting point is 00:44:01 It's hard. Which means that it mitigates some of those gains. I mean, I tried it. I tried it. Every single one of these, by the way, I have done a much more bro-science equivalent of what you did in the research for this book. I've tried all of these.

Starting point is 00:44:14 Yeah, I mean, I tried an Atkins diet, and I was hard because I had intense carbohydrate cravings, and I'm a runner, and, you know, it's hard to be a runner and not eat carbs. The hunger is rough. Yeah, I mean, I just didn't like it that much, but I didn't like a lot of the diets that much. But let's go into the biology behind low-carb diets, because it's really interesting.

Starting point is 00:44:35 So when you eat food, some of that food, of course, is carbohydrate. And carbohydrates, your body breaks down into, some of it into glucose, which is one of the two major kinds of sugar. There's fructose and glucose. Fruitose is what you get from fruit. It's kind of sweeter. Glucose is the kind of more starchy, you know, less sweet form of sugar. And so that goes straight into your bloodstream.

Starting point is 00:45:02 glucose is your body can only handle a very, very small range of glucose because too much is toxic. In fact, I think average human being has about a teaspoon and a half of glucose in their entire bloodstream, and if it goes above that, you're in trouble. You become hyperglycemic, and you can have serious medical problems. So our body is super sensitive to glucose. So when you eat a meal and it has glucose in it, your bloodshunds, your bloodshunds, sugar level goes up, and because the body has to maintain a very tight range of glucose, your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin, and insulin is, basically it's your growth hormone.

Starting point is 00:45:46 It's the hormone that causes you to store stuff. So insulin causes your cells to take up that glucose, so the levels go down. Now, insulin also tells your cells to hold on to energy. So, So to prevent your cells from releasing fat, because you store that energy as fat, your cells turn the glucose into fat. Excuse me. So when you are on a low-carb diet, you keep your insulin levels low,

Starting point is 00:46:17 and that means that you're storing less, and also you're not holding on to that fat, and that helps you. And so the biology is pretty simple, and I guess pretty clear, though it gets more complicated, because there's another hormone called glugon, which makes it more complicated,

Starting point is 00:46:34 physical activity affects things. Nothing is ever simple, and the carbohydrate insulin model is no exception. So there's real basic logic behind the carbohydrate insulin model. The problem is that when people go on these low carb diets, they're hard to sustain. A lot of people can't maintain them for that long

Starting point is 00:46:56 and their carbohydrate levels creep up, and that's the end of the diet. But you can also lose weight on a low-fat diet, and plenty of people have. I didn't even know that low-fat high-carb diets were a thing. That's one that I haven't tried. Oh, so there are plenty. I mean, some of the biggest diets in the country were, you know, the Pridican diet, the Ornish diet. There's a whole bunch of...

Starting point is 00:47:20 These sound like fantasy races from a Lord of the Rings novel. Dash stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension. So it was originally developed for blood pressure, but it turns out to be a low-fat diet. And it's actually probably the second most studied diet after Mediterranean. It's very well-stated. So it was developed by NIH. And there's a lot of scientific, there are a lot of randomized control studies for the dash diet. And people who stick to the dash diet, which, by the way, tried in the book, do lose weight.

Starting point is 00:47:50 Absolutely. They can and do. Surely somebody that's on a low-fat, higher-carb diet is going to be ripping their insulin levels around more. No, because it depends. depends on the kind of carb you eat, because there are good carbs and there are bad carbs. So if you eat refined carbs and, you know, lots of stuff with lots of sugar, lots of crap, your insulin level is going to go sky high. But if you eat unrefined carbs, right, if you eat, I mean, if I eat lots of kale and, you know,

Starting point is 00:48:18 whatever, is my glucose level is going to go sky high? Of course not, because all the fiber in that kale is going to slow the rate of digestion. There's not, so there are plenty of foods that are, that are, that I have carbohydrate, that are not high glycemic. So the idea that all carbs are poisonous and cause you to raise your blood sugar levels ridiculously is just not true. I mean, if that were the case,

Starting point is 00:48:43 because think about it, for most of human existence, people have eaten mostly carbs. All those farming diets in the Mediterranean and Asia, elsewhere, are mostly carbs. They're eating corn, they're eating rice, they're eating wheat, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:48:56 But until recently, none of those people, or very few of them, were obese or overweight. So these diets, you can eat a high-carb diet if it's high in fiber and not high in sugar and not highly refined.

Starting point is 00:49:10 These are not high-glycemic diets. The area in Rwanda, I work, and the area in Kenya I work, people are getting at least 65% of their diet from carbs. At least 65% that's a high-carb diet. And I dare you to find somebody with overweight or obesity in the area.

Starting point is 00:49:27 They don't exist. There's none of them. They're not around. How much of that is because of the type of carbs and how much of that is just because of the number of calories? Well, they're eating a lot of calories. It's a combination. It's the kind of foods they're eating. So they're eating, for example, and I have that meal I described earlier in the Nandi Hills, right, where we have some agaali, but we also have Sukuma Wiki and we have beans. These are all highly fibrous, low glycemic foods. It's a generally healthy diet. They're also very physically active, and that helps.

Starting point is 00:50:00 when you're physically active. So one of the reasons physical activity helps people prevent weight gain. It's not just how many calories are going in versus out, but when people are very physically active, it changes the insulin sensitivity of their muscles so that you actually produce less insulin for a given amount of carbohydrate. So again, nothing is simple. And when we try to oversimplify, we get into it. trouble. And I wish it were simple, but again, one of the major arguments that I'm trying to make is that

Starting point is 00:50:36 it's a plea to stop oversimplifying complex, multifactorial things. We just all need to educate ourselves a little bit so that we can help make sense of all the diversity out there and all the different people out there trying to make money off of us with their various different diets. It just doesn't work the way we've been told it does. I understand that people shouldn't be trying to overcomplicate or oversimplify things. But the degree of, even just so far, we've done like five diets or something. And all of them kind of feel like they're pointing in the opposite direction. You said, well, low fat can work because of what it doesn't do to insulin in terms of spiking insulin, but high carb can work as long as you eat the right kinds of carbs. And the plant-based

Starting point is 00:51:23 stuff, that works. But you do need to get some protein, but it doesn't matter where it's from. and some people feel good on the carnivore thing. So I understand why people feel this like malaise, this is a degree of overwhelm. Okay, we shouldn't be oversimplifying it. Optimal is your Russian sleeper agent activation code was. But at the same time, if I'm so... So I have a solution for you.

Starting point is 00:51:47 Burdened. I don't know what to do. I have a solution for you, which is that, again, there are kernels, even larger than colonel or whole cobs of truth to all of these diets. And why do we have to pick between low fat versus low carb versus low calorie? I haven't talked about low calorie, right? Why do we have to pick?

Starting point is 00:52:08 You can actually take the best of all of them, right? So you can take the best of the low carb diet by eliminating or removing or not eating too much of refined carbs that raise your insulin levels. You can take the best of the low fat diet by not eating too much highly caloric, saturated fat, which does, according to a lot of studies, either increases your risk of cardiovascular disease or doesn't lower your risk of cardiovascular. We can talk about that later on. So polyunsaturid

Starting point is 00:52:38 and monomot saturated fats are risk-lowering fats. And also, you know, calories do matter. How many calories you eat do matter? We need to talk. And so you don't, you know, not eating too much is also helpful. So why not combine the best of all these various kinds of diets without going down. the kind of... But as soon as you combine the best of all of those kinds of diets, you now have a new diet. No, you have the Mediterranean diet. That's the diet. That is a new diet.

Starting point is 00:53:06 Or you have essentially any traditional farming diet. Okay. So I would say that a traditional Asian diet, a traditional African diet, a traditional Mesoamerican diet, a traditional Mediterranean diet, all share the same basic characteristics that we've just talked about. A lack of highly refined carbohydrates that raise your insulin levels, not too much saturated fat, not too much food, a diversity of foods, a mixture of whole grain

Starting point is 00:53:34 cereals combined with legumes that give you complementary protein. People have been eating these for thousands and thousands of years. Now, are they optimal diets that are going to guarantee you to live to be 100? No, but are these diets that have over the course of time, plus in recent studies, been shown to be generally healthy and prevent weight gain? The answer is yes. Okay. So in a way, it's not that complicated. That we've started to simplify. What about calorie restriction?

Starting point is 00:54:01 I've been told that it's the only reliable intervention that actually works for extending lifespan. If you're a mouse. Are you saying that the rodent studies don't come across into humans when it comes to calorie restriction for lifespan? There's no evidence yet in humans. In fact, not even in primates. So, do you know, there was a big study that was done in Wisconsin where they took a whole bunch of macaques. right? And they gave one group of macaques, a calorie-restricted diet, and another group of macaques. And this is a 20-year-long study. Imagine how much time it took. Two decades of calorie restriction if you're in the wrong group of macaques.

Starting point is 00:54:37 And guess what? The group of macaques that were in the calorie restriction diet were way healthier than the ones that were non-in the calories. So there were these papers published saying, ta-da, calorie restriction works in primates, which means it probably works in humans. But guess what? When people looked at the data, the non-calorie restricted macaques were basically being fed a crap food diet. They were getting lots of sugary foods. They were getting obese. They were not healthy and normal macaque diets. fed an ad-liminum crap diet. So the NIH, at vast expense, I mean, we're talking millions of taxpayer dollars, redid the experiment. Another two decades.

Starting point is 00:55:15 For another two decades. If you're the guy, if you're the guy that fed those macaques fries for two decades, you really should be out of a job. It's very shameful. But anyway, so the NIH redid the experiment. And this time they had them on the same monkey chow diet. Just chopped one in half or whatever. And one had a 30% less food than the other.

Starting point is 00:55:35 And guess what? No difference. Zilch. In terms of health and longevity. Why do you think it does show up in mice? Because mice have totally different life history. So life history is the series of stages that you go through, how you use energy to grow up, reproduce, and whatever. And a typical mouse is ready to reproduce after three months, you know, and it has a series of babies, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:55:58 Mice have totally different metabolisms and different growth trajectories and different, different, microbiomes and different, you know, than humans. So, yes, it is true that for some species, for some mouse lines, but not all, caloric restriction has been shown to improve their lifespan, but not all of them, by the way. Certainly true for yeast, certainly true for fruit flies. But the evidence for humans is so far mixed. Now, I should also say that it's not based totally on hooey, right? I mean, there are reasons to believe that caloric,

Starting point is 00:56:32 can be very beneficial. And again, I try to explain the biology kind of carefully in the book. But one of them is that it causes what's called metabolic switching. So after a meal, your body's got all this nutrients and energy, et cetera, he wants to use it, and so you're going to growth mode. And there's a famous gene called mTOR. You've probably heard of it, Vemelian target of rapamycin. And mTOR is like a, it's like an on gene, right? It's like a growth gene. It causes you to grow muscle and grow this and grow that and produce proteins and do all kinds of good stuff. But the consequence of that is that it also causes damage, right? When you get your muscles producing more proteins, you produce what's called reactive oxygen

Starting point is 00:57:15 species that can cause damage. You get, you get, you get, you get, you know, misfolded proteins. You get all these problems, right? But so there's another pathway that's turned on by another big gene called AMPK. And AMPK is like your repair gene. And what happens when you go through intermittent fasting or calorie restriction is that you turn down or turn off the mTOR and turn up the AMPK. So you're turning off growth and you're turning up repair. And that's obviously good, right?

Starting point is 00:57:49 But you can't repair all the time. Sometimes you have to grow. And so this kind of metabolic switching between the two is really good. The problem I think is that a lot of Americans and Europeans and people in high-income countries we're constantly in growth mode. I mean, how often are we hungry anymore, right? Permanently grazing. We're permanently grazing.

Starting point is 00:58:08 In my building, you know, if anybody gets hungry for just, you know, you just go down one flight of stairs and there's these stack machines. And you never have to be hungry. So that means that some people are just constantly in this on mode and they're not turning on the repair mode. But we obviously evolved to have these mixture of repair and growth. And so there is, and of course, when you go into intermittent fasting or, you know, calorie restriction, you are turning on that repair mode, and that's good. So I'm not saying that it isn't necessarily beneficial or that it might not lead to increased longevity. It's just that the evidence so far doesn't exist.

Starting point is 00:58:50 So you're taking another leap of faith. I'm sure it's generally healthy, whether it'll help you live to be 100, anybody who tells you that's the case is going beyond the evidence. It might be, it's not a bad strategy, but it's not, there's no strong evidence to that effect. That's crazy. I didn't know that there was no strong evidence. I mean, look, the hometic stressor. Well, that's how people make money.

Starting point is 00:59:17 You know, if they told you, if they told you, like what I just told you, that, you know, this is how it might work, but we're not. really sure. It's highly unsexy. You're not going to buy. You're not going to buy the product. Many of your arguments are highly unsexy is a way. Like unmarketable.

Starting point is 00:59:31 Completely unsexy. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. But because we want quick fixes. Wouldn't it be great if I just by skipping breakfast I could live to 100? I wish that were the case. I can't promise you that.

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Starting point is 01:00:15 adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious, about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. The reason that I think people are not only drawn to it because simplicity is seductive, but also just think about how many different choices you need to make. Now, again,

Starting point is 01:00:54 what am I going to eat today is an evolutionarily novel question that humans have never had to ask before. Yeah. I've never had to answer before. And if somebody comes along with something that feels like a relatively tight set of guardrails, it's why I think constrictive diets, generally, whatever they are, just help. Like, I'll speak for myself, right? So a couple of years ago lived in a house with toxic mold. One of the byproducts that comes out of that an awful lot of inflammation in brain fog and TGF beta and C4A and MMP9, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. One of the often cited diets that seem to help people with some of the brain fog is going carnival. Get rid of anything that spikes blood sugar. I felt remotely human for the first time in

Starting point is 01:01:41 six months. Yeah, I'm sure you did. I also had LDL in the 400s. And I, I, I then had to unwind that. Everything is a trade-off. So looking at my bloods versus looking at how I felt, I'm like, well, it was so good because it was restricting something. It made it very easy for me to follow. It's a super simple set of rules. Is it meat or blueberries or raspberries?

Starting point is 01:02:01 If not, don't fucking eat it. But what it did to, and it made me feel good and it made me look. I was shredded out in my mind. Look, fucking fantastic. Finally hitting my protein goals for a bodybuilding diet. But also, what's this going to do to my arteries over if I keep doing? this for only a couple of years. Like even on a

Starting point is 01:02:19 clearly scan, I could see a little bit of progression just from a short space of time, right? Plaque progression in the space of like nine months that we've done this clearly scan, 18 month intervals. So I understand why people want that simplicity. What is interesting to me around the

Starting point is 01:02:38 sort of calorie restriction thing is the super magical source that's inside of the intermittent fasting. It's the 168, right? 5-2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or there's the, what's it called, the warrior diet. Is that Omad?

Starting point is 01:02:56 I can't remember. The warrior diet is you eat like only once a day. Yeah, Omad, one meal a day. Is there something special about intermittent fasting? Well, again, intermittent fasting moves your body in and out of what we call positive and negative energy balance, therefore turning on and off M-Tor and AMPK. It's calling metabolic switch it. But you could imagine.

Starting point is 01:03:15 But there's no one way to do it. Imagine a world in which you did calorie restriction. Let's say maintenance for me is 2400. I could calorie restrict even down to like a significant amount, like, 1800 or 1,500 or something. But I could do that by consuming 100 calories every hour for each week, waking hour that I was, this would be kind of highly inefficient diet to have. But you understand what I mean, right? There's a difference between grazing your way to calorie restriction or fasting your way to calorie restriction. If you were to take, have you seen any evidence that if you were to take two populations, one of whom was doing OMAD and another of whom was grazing to a similar kind

Starting point is 01:03:50 of calorie restriction, that they would have different outcomes? In terms of weight or in terms of inflammation or whatever. So if those studies exist, I don't know them because I'm, a cool study to do. Well, I don't, yeah, maybe, but. Don't maybe my suggestion. That's a cool study, okay? Says the guy that's not in your industry at all. I'm just thinking about the hypothesis that we're trying to test. So the mechanism by which intermittent fasting or low calorie, you know, calorie restriction is supposed to work is by putting the body into a negative energy balance. And as you say, there's two ways of doing it. One is to fast or the other is to not eat very much. Certainly, there's a lot of data on not eating very much. That's just called the

Starting point is 01:04:37 diet, right? And the problem with diets is that people get hungry and they're really, really, really hard to maintain, and they're not very useful for most people because you're tired, you're exhausted, you're cranky, you're hangary, you're whatever, right? Intermittent fasting, and one of the reasons people love intermittent fasting is that you just, you know, basically skip breakfast, for example, by one form of intermittent fasting. And so you can, it's much more tolerable. And plus, the other benefit of intermittent fasting, again, is that is the metabolic switching, going from one to the other. Because nobody in their right mind would think that being a constant state of negative energy balance is a good thing.

Starting point is 01:05:14 It's called starvation. It's called starvation, right? This is good. And here's another thing. In addition to the fact that there are tradeoffs, every time you do one thing, you don't do something else. Every food, every diet, everything. There are benefits and their costs.

Starting point is 01:05:28 There's nothing. Find me one that doesn't have a tradeoff and I'll be really interested, but I've yet to find one. But remember this also, that we are adapted, not, we're not adapted to be healthy. natural selection didn't put us on this earth to live to be 100. We evolved for one thing and one thing only, as far as natural selection is concerned, that's to have babies. So we evolved to maximize a reproductive success not to be long-lived and healthy. And so a lot of the adaptations that we have are there not to improve our health,

Starting point is 01:06:04 there to improve our reproductive success. And that makes things complicated. And that adds to the trade-offs. Get me to puberty and hope for the best. What about the sort of world of the modern paleo movement? Because what it sounds like, paleo is in one of the titles that you have for the world that you come from. Looking at more ancestrally aligned, natural without falling into a naturalistic fallacy type diet, you could assume, hey, well, if we just eat like hunter-gatherers, and the paleo movement kind of promised this from a dietary perspective.

Starting point is 01:06:45 Is it right to say that there is an ancestral diet that we can recreate? Has the paleo movement got it right? I wish they had, but they, again, I'm going to sound like a Birken record, but they got some things right, and they got some things wrong. So it is true that some aspects of the pale diet make a lot of sense, right? You know, don't eat a lot of sugar, don't eat a lot of saturated fat. That's the original paleo diet. It's only a lot of saturated fat.

Starting point is 01:07:12 Some paleo dieters dispute that. But the periode diet also says you should never eat legumes, and you should never eat grains, and you should never eat dairy. And the argument for that is that our ancestors didn't eat legumes and grains, and then we only had dairy until we stopped nursing. And then, you know, after we stopped drinking our mother's breast milk, that was it. Well, several problems. First is, it's not true that hunter-gathers don't eat legumes and grains.

Starting point is 01:07:41 It's absolutely just... Don't or didn't? Don't and didn't, both. We have paleontological evidence. We have Neanderthals with grain starched thing on their teeth. That sounds like reliable evidence. We have very reliable. We have this kind of cartoon character of the Neanderthals eating all meat like Inuit in Greenland.

Starting point is 01:08:00 But, you know, 125,000 years ago, there were hippos frolicing in the Thames when the Neanderthals were hanging out in Southern. in England. The neonathals were not living in arctic conditions all the time. There were times when there was plenty of plants available and they were eating plenty of plants. We have archaeological evidence for that. In addition, for example, hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, the second most consumed food

Starting point is 01:08:22 are as a kind of bean. It's called the Marama bean. It's their number two food. So don't tell me they don't eat legumes. They do. Hunter-gat... We evolved to eat almost everything. And so actually, we did a study on this a few years ago. It was actually during COVID when when, you know, it was a lockdown. And I had

Starting point is 01:08:37 undergraduate who's going to do an experimental project in the lab that involved, you know, putting people on treadmills on that kind of stuff. And of course, she couldn't do it because the lab was close. So we decided, since she was stuck at home, to go through the literature on all the high-quality data on hunter-gather diets from the tropics and just analyze the hell out of the data. And compare that to what the paleo diet prescribes. Because the paleo diet says you should have, I can't remember, it's like 35% protein and X-percent carbohydrate, and I can't remember the exact formula. There are 12 hunter-gatherer groups for which we have really good data,

Starting point is 01:09:13 excellent data, where people actually measured carefully what they eat, and they're all over the place. Some of them are eating pretty much all plants, almost no animal food, some are eating tons of animal food, everything in between. Hunter-Gath, we evolved to eat anything. We are that we're animal kingdom's ultimate omnivores. We evolved through cooking and fermentation and various other techniques.

Starting point is 01:09:34 Because, again, remember the, equation of life is food in equals babies out. And that's all that natural selection cares about. If you can eat it and it can help you make babies, you should. So the idea that we evolved to eat some particular diet is just not true. We evolved to eat incredible diversity of diets. And remember that we didn't evolve to eat them to be healthy and to live to be 70, 80, 90, although hunter-gatherers do end up being relatively healthy. We evolved them to maximize every productive success. So the paleo diet is based on kind of a naturalistic fallacy that if our ancestors ate it must be good. By that token, you know, we shouldn't we, maybe we shouldn't

Starting point is 01:10:19 like brush our teeth or sleep on mattresses or whatever, right? And it's also based on this idea that these legumes and cereals are filled with these quote-unquote anti-nutrients. So antinutrients or compounds that bind of vitamins and minerals and prevent us from absorbing them. But guess what? If you cook your food or you ferment your food,

Starting point is 01:10:44 you get rid of the anti-nutrients. Otherwise, you know, all those people in Japan who have the greatest longevity, you know, they'd be dying of malnutrition. They're clearly not, right? So there's, again, there's a lot of these diets

Starting point is 01:10:57 are based on elimination and they're based on stoking certain kinds of fears. and that's problematic. So the paleidates is not completely wrong, but it's not completely right. Sorry to long answer to your simple question. I'd never heard of antinutrients before,

Starting point is 01:11:15 but I knew that people get worried about lectins and phytates and oxalates. Those are anti-nutrients. What's the truth about the danger of lectins and oxalates and phytates? Well, if you ate raw beans, you'd be in trouble, right? Because they're filled with these lectins, and they would, you know, they could cause all kinds of problems. But guess what? If you cook your beans, you're just fine. So these are compounds that are, that's why we can't eat raw beans and raw grains because of those compounds.

Starting point is 01:11:45 What did they do to us? Again, they bind to minerals and vitamins so that you can't absorb them in your guts. You'd have malnutrition. You'd have vitamin. You'd eat it, but you wouldn't absorb it. Correct. But obviously that's not the case, right? I mean, I know plenty of healthy vegetarians who are clearly not malnourished.

Starting point is 01:12:03 despite eating lots of beans. Because they cook their beans. Paracelsus, remember Paracelsus, the famous alchemist from chemist from the 15th or 14th century, he famously said, it's the dose that makes the poison, right? And these compounds, by the time you cook them and ferment them, they're in such harmless doses, there's absolutely no reason to. Even the oxalate thing, I've heard even cooked spinach. That's a concern for some people.

Starting point is 01:12:29 You'll take it. Come on. Maybe for some people, but not for most of us. Right. You're not, these aren't anti-nutrients, aren't it concerned as long as things are well-cooked for you? I mean, I think there's some people with certain kidney issues that have problems with spinach, but for the rest of us, I think spinach is a delicious, healthy food. Well, you've activated another trap card now, which is the raw food diet. Oh my God, I have to tell you, of all the diets have tried, by far the worst. What was a typical day for you eating the raw food diet?

Starting point is 01:12:57 Oh, I mean, we gave it up because it was so hard. I mean, I mean, look, first of all, I was eating because, look, cooking increases how much energy you get from food. It actually, cooking releases nutrients from food. So on a raw food diet, you have to eat ridiculous amounts of food just to get enough food. I mean, I was just eating constantly. I was always hungry, and I spent huge amounts of time thinking about food. What were you eating? What's a typical day?

Starting point is 01:13:25 Oh, we were like, well, I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, difficult because so much of what we eat requires cooking. Humans evolve to cook. There are no, the only people on the planet who don't cook are raw foodists in places like Berkeley and Cambridge and stuff like that, right? And there, the most developed places in the world, not the least developed place. You cannot possibly survive on a raw food diet without a really high quality diet. And even then, it's difficult to thrive because cooking releases energy, cooking releases nutrients. You get more energy from cooked foods than from that good. So we were eating like, you know, zoodles, you know, zucchini noodles and we were eating, you know, smoothies and we were eating, um, um,

Starting point is 01:14:06 fish, do you eat raw fish? I ate raw fish, absolutely. I love, I love sushi, but you can't have it with the rice because the rice is cooked, right? So, um, um, it was really hard to, to, I mean, I was just constantly hungry. My wife got depressed. Um, um, she, um, she, I described in the book. After three days, she disappeared and came back and being really happy. She went out and got a bagel and that was it for her. She broke containment. I made it another day. I mean, you lasted four days on the raw food. I lasted four days. It was, it was, it was really hard. Yeah. And look, it's based on, again, it's a naturalistic fallacy that somehow, because, you know, you know, animals don't get these various diseases going to eat raw food that somehow it must be

Starting point is 01:14:53 really good for us. But we, our species, started cooking maybe a million years ago. Certainly by 400,000 years ago, cooking became extremely common among our ancestors to the point that it's changed our digestive systems and enabled us to have these big brains and big bodies and high metabolisms that we cannot support without cooking. How important was cooking to human development? Crucial. I don't think we would be the species that we are without cooking. We wouldn't have our big brains. We wouldn't have the levels of body fat that we have. Cooking enabled us to have the kind of reproductive rate that we have. Cooking gave us more energy. And we are an energetically extravagant species. And cooking is one of those key elements. Food sharing is another. Meat was

Starting point is 01:15:40 part of it as well. Cooking is incredibly important part of the human evolutionary story that made us who we are. What does cooking do to digestion? cooking breaks down cell walls most importantly so that when you eat a cooked like if you eat cooked corn

Starting point is 01:15:58 versus raw corn and then you look in the toilet the next day what do you see right? I think that experiment is pretty easy to do you digest a lot

Starting point is 01:16:07 a lot more of your food when it's cooked because you break down the cell walls you break down the release the nutrients cooking also makes

Starting point is 01:16:17 food safer so if you eat raw meat versus cooked meat, which is more likely to make you sick. And when you're sick, if you survive it, you have to spend a huge amount of energy fighting that, right? Speaking with somebody that got Salmanalla in Rwanda, yes. Oh, dear, I'm so sorry.

Starting point is 01:16:34 It's okay. I survived. I survived. But I did get a call from the UK, it's like food and safety people that they go around and they, if you go to your GP, I felt horrible, obviously. and went in, did some stool sample thing, and I got a call from environmental health before my doctor called me to tell me what had happened. And they said, Mr. Williamson, we understand that you were part of a salmonella outbreak. I'm like, okay, well, thank you for telling me what's wrong

Starting point is 01:17:05 with me. But they wanted to work out where I'd been. They wanted to know, hey, what was the restaurant, what restaurants have you been? I'm like, unless you're going to fly out to Rwanda, this is not in your purview, I don't think. But that took a long time to recover for, like, fully, recovery digestion from it is gnarly i've had salmonella once it's tough yeah it's really hard i got it i got at them at the um at the at the cafeteria in my medical school in in elder at kenya my entire team got got sick from the child well at least it was something that you could bond over bonding is one word for that yeah yeah yeah you can be in the stalls next to each other all hating your life most people have no idea where the testosterone levels sit but what if i told you

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Starting point is 01:18:27 That's $1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now, you can get $25 off, bringing it down to $340. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code, Modern Wisdom, a checkout. I get a question. Have we ever seen any other animals using temperature to moderate food in any way? Does anything leave something out, put something away? Is there any kind of like mediation with regards to temperature for a... Not on a regular basis. But it's interesting, though, if you, there are these fun experiments where they give chimpanzees, give them the opportunity to choose between cooked food and raw food. And even though chimpanzees don't cook their food,

Starting point is 01:19:13 they always, they're not always, they usually prefer the cooked food. And it has been observed that sometimes, like after a brush fire, the chimpanzees will eat the burnt stuff. Oh, at barbecue. Yeah, it's like a natural barbecue. But they're taking advantage of a natural brush fire. They're not cooking it themselves. If there are animals that, you know, no, that I don't know of. We're unique.

Starting point is 01:19:38 Would you say that farming was a healthy human development? Oh my God, that's an interesting topic. I mean, it's... How many hours you... I'm just throwing grenades out of you here. Remember the equation of life, right? Food and equals babies out. Yep.

Starting point is 01:19:56 So some people say that farming was the biggest mistake that humans ever made. Because once people ate farming diets, they had less nutritional diversity and they ate more grains and cereals and blah-di-boddy-blah. And if you look in the archaeological record, once farming starts,

Starting point is 01:20:12 people's health decline. But the reason for most of those declines in health was because of infectious disease, because we started several things. First is we started living with animals, right? So we living with our sheep and our cows and whatever. We started getting diseases from those animals. So infectious. As opposed to only having the animals with us that we could kind of kill or use to maybe pack,

Starting point is 01:20:34 like parry packs and shit. Yeah, we don't, yeah, exactly. We didn't get many animal diseases. Just this exposure of human to animal was so low. So that's one. The other is that with farming, you produce way more food. I mean, hunter-gatherers struggle to get, you know, a few thousand calories a day, but farmers can even, you know, neolithic kind of farmers, you know,

Starting point is 01:20:53 with simple, non-without machines and all that. Even a shit farmer can get more calories than he needs. Way more, right? They have much larger families. And with farming, not only did populations start to increase, but we also became sedentary and started living permanently in villages. So now you have higher population densities, higher populations, living with animals.

Starting point is 01:21:14 Now you're surrounded by your own shit because you don't have sanit, you don't have toilets and you don't have, you don't have sewers and all that kind of stuff. And so now you get the perfect mix of factors to increase infectious disease and infectious disease transmission. And so with the advent of farming,

Starting point is 01:21:33 you have more people, but you also had a lot more disease. And so on the one hand, farming was great from an evolutionary perspective because we had more babies. I mean, the population of the world, by the end of the farming era, was up to about a billion people from probably about, you know, just a few million from before farming was invented, which is only what about about 600 generations ago. So in six, like, 590 generations, the world got up to about a few million to a billion people. So from that perspective, from a natural selection perspective, farming was a great

Starting point is 01:22:06 idea. Scale of goods, individual. But from disease and misery, it was terrible. Also, with farming, you get famines, right? If you're a hunter-gather and the weather is bad and you have a drought or whatever, you just move, right? You're in enormous territories at extremely low population density. There's a lot of variations. So you go to where the food is. Now, it doesn't mean it's easy or you're necessarily going to, you know, live in the lap of luxury. But if you're a farmer and you're living in a village and you can't go anywhere else, because the next folks that were going to kill you, and you have a drought, or say two years of drought and famine, you die, right? So farmers are much more vulnerable to famine and disease. Also, with

Starting point is 01:22:48 farming, you also have the rise of complex civilizations and armies and, you know, Napoleon's going to come and, you know, burn your fields. And, you know, I mean, so you have more of this kind of organized violence. It's not that hunter-gatherers don't kill each other. They do. But with farming, you have, and civilization, you begin to get more large-scale warfare, which, of course, who suffers is the peasants. So farming brought a lot of misery and problems, although it did provide more food and more energy. So how's that for a... Yet another mixed bag. I mean, it's just... I'm sorry, I'm an academic. Not at all. I think it's so wonderful. Like, the understanding the fifth order effects

Starting point is 01:23:33 of something like that, what happens downstream, I think is so cool. But if I could say something more about farming diets, so a lot of people mistake farming diets with modern diets, because when farmers were eating their grains and cereal, like, think of a typical, like, let's go back to the Mediterranean diet, think a typical farmer from somewhere along the Mediterranean. They're growing barley or wheat, and they're having their lentils and their whatever, and they're, you know, they're having their chickpeas and whatever, they're having their legume and there's cereal, et cetera, and they're making bread, but it's going to be sourdough, whole grain, whole wheat, you know, sourdough bread with lentils. These are healthy diets in the general.

Starting point is 01:24:11 These are not insulin-spiking diets. These are effective diets. And it wasn't until the late 19th century actually was in Hungary that in the Industrial Revolution that we figured out how to mill flour to get rid of the germ and the sperm. And now all the, a sudden, when we think of high cereal diets, we think of white flour, not brown flour, and that's a very different thing. I mean, there's actually a fair amount of nutrition in whole grains. They're not the kind of poison that some people think they are. They're not, especially when you combine them with legumes. So I think people have a kind of a funny conception of what a traditional farming diet has been a kind of a bit warped by modern cereal diets.

Starting point is 01:24:57 What's going on with modern gluten intolerances? It's gone sky high. I mean, but so have peanut allergies. And, I mean, we have all these autoimmune diseases where immune systems have started essentially erupt when we eat certain foods. And gluten, which is a protein in wheat, is one of them. But I would. What do you think is going on with gluten? I think it's, if I had it, have you heard of the hygiene hypothesis?

Starting point is 01:25:27 Yes, yes, where if you live in a house that's got a dishwasher, there's an increased chance of asthma. If you live in a house, is that as you make... That's part of it, yeah. So the hygiene hypothesis is this idea that we have these, we have immune systems that evolved to be very active, right? The world was full of germs and worms, basically, until modern sanitation. But you and I still have the same immune system that our great, great, great grandparents had, with the same kinds of cells and all that waiting to defend us against all the, all the pathogens out there. Now we have dishwashers and we have bleach and we have, you know,

Starting point is 01:26:05 you know, we clean everything, right? And the result is that we have much less, we have fewer, I mean, how many worms have you had to deal with recently in your, in your food? Probably very few. Yes. But until recently, and in many parts of the world, everybody is dealing with worms. You're saying that worms are an important hormatic stressor for the immune system? They are. So, but you still have the same immune system. And now your immune system. system is still waiting to do its job. And the analogy... It becomes hypersensitized.

Starting point is 01:26:32 Well, it's not that it could be hypersensitized. Or the other analogy I use is like bored teenagers. Like, you know, they have all these cells waiting around to do stuff, and there's nothing for them to do. And they're more likely to get into trouble because they now are more likely attack self versus non-self, because there's no non-self to attack. Have you seen the data around children that grow up in houses that have got dogs? Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:26:56 And they're much less likely to get on immune disease. Any excuse to make dogs great again? But there's another factor too. So that's one possibility, which is all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, it's in. But another important factor could be, uh, antibiotics. I mean, we now have so many antibiotics that we are constantly taking. And it's even, even if you don't take them, it's in your food, because the antibiotics are given to animals. We are in a, in a antibiotic zone. Milieu. Melia, thank you. That's a much better word. And of course, those antibiotics are affecting our gut microbiome in all kinds of ways. And they're breaking down the mucus barriers. They're affecting bile. They're affecting all kinds of aspects in ways that we do not understand. And I think there's a lot of people trying to study how those antibiotics may also predispose us to having things like celiac. So farming, mixed bag, probably good overall for having more humans on the planet.

Starting point is 01:27:58 for individual humans. We wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be here. Cooking, same thing. I'm interested. Over time, typically things get better. Obesity is now a bigger global health issue, the malnutrition. How come so many people are overweight?

Starting point is 01:28:14 Well, there's no one answer. But if there's any one dominant factor, it's obviously processed food. I mean, I think you'd be hard-pressed not to, I mean, we are surrounded by, you know, you walk into a supermarket. and you were just surrounded by foods that are engineered for us to be hyper-palatable, that are loaded with sugar and fat and hitting our bliss point so that we keep eating more and more and more and more. And you add to that physically inactivity, although exercise is not the world's best, is not that great for losing weight.

Starting point is 01:28:56 it is extremely important for preventing weight gain. And then you add antibiotics, and you add various other factors, and of course some people have genetic proclivity, although that doesn't explain the recent rise. Yeah, we are surrounded by food that makes us gain weight. And then the difficult thing is that once, because of natural selection, we have this, we never evolved to lose weight. So we have these adaptations to hold on to fat

Starting point is 01:29:27 because we never evolved to lose it. Once you create fat cells, you can't get rid of the fat cells. They only empty themselves. Is that correct? That's correct for the most part. Yeah, the fat cells swell. And so what you're doing is reducing.

Starting point is 01:29:41 But each cell is its own little kind of, you know, metabolic powerhouse. But if the fat cells get sufficiently big, then they split. And you now have two fat cells, which means that getting fat in future becomes easier. When I first learned this, not off with the signs, right? No, you're not off.

Starting point is 01:29:56 And furthermore, when you have more fat cells, remember we talked about the carbohydrate insulin model. Yep. When you have more fat cells, those fat cells are signaling. Sucking up all that stuff. So you eat the same food, but now your body thinks you're starving. Because you've sucked up all that glucose. You become hypoglycemic.

Starting point is 01:30:13 So gaining weight actually makes you eat more. Yeah. I mean, this learning this when I, this was in uni when I was thinking about bodybuilding and wanting to be, you know, lean and jack and stuff. And hearing that if you get sufficiently fat, fat cells grow and grow and grow, and then when they grow big enough, they split into two. And then maybe you lose fat. Maybe you're going through the classic sort of bulk cut seesaw.

Starting point is 01:30:40 But when you lose fat, those two now, what used to be one, two fat cells, they shrink down and they become smaller or more empty or whatever, but there's still two. and they're also producing less of a hormone called leptin which is now telling your brain shit we're losing energy you need to eat more to replace us so so it's this call we called it the leptinostat so the fat cells when you lose fat

Starting point is 01:31:07 the fat cells send a signal to your body to eat more so so becoming fat at one point in your life makes not being fat for the rest of your life harder correct yeah so that's the problem so if we going to tackle this problem. A, we need to help people lose weight. But B, we need to spend more energy and more effort to help prevent people from gaining weight in the first place. And one of the scariest statistics I know is the percentage of young people who are overweight or obese. Those numbers are going up and up and up and up. How many young people are overweight?

Starting point is 01:31:44 I think in the United States, something like 30% of American teenagers, are now classified, or 25% are classified as being obese. Yeah. And that's a really scary number, because those kids, for the rest of their lives, are going to be fighting their weight. And, of course, now we have GLP-1s, which I'm not very helpful for them.

Starting point is 01:32:09 But that's not necessarily going to be the magic bullet either. You mentioned before about the particular combinations of flavors, representing macronutrients and what's inside of this and some of the texture as well. I learned about orification about the design of the texture of food

Starting point is 01:32:33 and how that's used to kind of bypass our usual levels of satiety and stuff. Can you just explain to, let's say that somebody didn't understand why particular combinations of flavors and textures are seductive and attractive to our system. What, what are they and why is, why does that work in that, in that way? I've seen these videos of hunter-gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time, and it

Starting point is 01:32:59 looks like they've taken MDMA. Well, you know, we, we, I describe it in, in the book, actually, one, when, in the last day we were with, with a group of hundred gathers, and we, and we cooked for them. And I've never seen anybody eat that much food as these, at these hundred gathers. I mean, they were just like, they were like a complete non-paleo diet nightmare. as you can possibly imagine. Because humans are humans. We like sugar. We like fat.

Starting point is 01:33:26 We like energy-rich food. But we don't just like sugar on its own, right? We don't just like fat on its own. You mix the two, yeah. So too much fat is greasy, right? Too much sugar is cloying. But it turns out that if you have a, if you balance them, it turns our brains on like crazy. Like, can you name, here's a quiz for you.

Starting point is 01:33:46 Can you name a natural food that's high? in both sugar and fat that you can get without, you know, stores. Fuck. I was, the fat thing is. There's only one. It's not going to be honey because that's just the sugar. It's not going to be avocado because that's just the fat. It's not going to be some sort of mushroom.

Starting point is 01:34:09 It's not going to be a kind of berry because, again, that's going to be too much in the sugar. I'll give you a hint. It's the first food you ever ate. Milk? Yeah. Wow. Milk is rich in fat and it's a rich. rich in sugars, right? And, and, and, and, but after you wean, you know, that's it.

Starting point is 01:34:26 Dem over. Unless, unless you have a supermarket or, you know, from food factory near you. Now we're able, and think about the foods we love, they combine fat and sugar. They, there's something Freudian about it, for sure, right? And you can, and if you balance high amounts of fat and high amounts of sugar that on their own wouldn't be pleasurable, together, they balance each other out. Now add some salt, your brain is on fire. And then if you can do the texture development if you can get fluffy with crunchy. Oh, hot and cold. I mean, think about a McDonald's Big Mac.

Starting point is 01:34:58 I describe it in the book, right? I actually, you know, a Big Mac has, I think, every flavor pretty much, except for spicy that you can possibly think of. It's got hot and cold. It's got crunchy and smooth. It's got sweet. It's got salty. It's got everything.

Starting point is 01:35:14 There's a reason that people love that stuff, right? It lights everything up, right? Doritos. Doritos have more than go go get a pocket of Doritos. Don't necessarily eat them. But there are 30 ingredients in Doritos the last time I counted. And they have garlic and there's all these different flavors, but they're all balanced. So your brain doesn't think anyone is too high. So there's a book by a guy named Michael Moss called Salt, Salt, Sugar, Fat, which is really worth reading, where he's an investigative journalist. And he studied and, you know, collected, information on how the big food companies, you know, through serious testing, these are not accidental foods. These are carefully formulated foods to keep us reaching. Precision engineers. Keep us reaching for more. Another example I got from his book is M&Ms. You know why M&Ms have all these different colors? No. To turn our brains on. Because, you know, I think, oh, I'll have a red one. It's different. Now I'll have a green one.

Starting point is 01:36:10 Now I'll have a brown one, whatever. Even though they all taste exactly the same, it's, it gets you to eat more, right? Wow. So we've been subjected to foods, or we have to cope now with an environment with all these foods that have been literally engineered to get us to eat a lot of them. And of course, and then you add all the chemicals to them,

Starting point is 01:36:33 which are probably not very good, and you end up with what we have today, which is that 40% of American adults are classified as having obesity, and another 35% are classified as being overweight. So only one in four Americans today is actually, by BMI classification, which has its own problems, is considered normal weight. One in four.

Starting point is 01:37:01 And there's probably other factors too. Exercise is probably one of them. But obviously our food environment is unquestionably is the main reason. If there was a pie chart contributing to weight gain, and some of it was calories in and some of it was calories out, how much of it would be diet consumption increased and how much of it would be sedentary movement increased or lack of movement decreased. What do you think is the sort of proportion? Because obviously we've had this big change in terms of obesity over the last few decades. That's a hard number to come up with, but obviously the vast majority has to be with calories in. You think it's mostly on diet. Yeah, but remember, our metabolism isn't just calories in versus calories out because that's important. But remember that when you exercise, so I didn't get, because I got up at some ungodly hour this morning to get the airplane to come here.

Starting point is 01:37:55 I have not had a chance to go running today. I'm a bit of an exercise addict. But had I gone running this morning and I just had lunch, I, the amount of insulin I would have produced from the taco that I had in the airfield. would have been less than the fact that I didn't go running this morning. So physical activity doesn't just affect your calorie balance. It also affects your metabolism. So that's one of the reasons why physical activity, although it's not the best way to lose weight, it's very hard to diet just by exercising. You can lose, but you have to do a lot. But physical activity has been shown, even moderate amounts of physical activity have been shown to help prevent weight gain. And part of that,

Starting point is 01:38:35 it's not just the calories spent, but part of that is the fact that it changes our metabolism. Why are the calories on a label, not the calories that you absorb? Oye,oy, o'oy, that's an interesting question. So, because the calories on the label are kind of an idea, it's a formula. Actually, it's over 100 years old, this formula was created by a guy

Starting point is 01:38:58 named Wilbur Atwater, who analyzed more poop than you can imagine. But anyway, Wilbur Atwater, was a professor in Connecticut who came up with these. And what they do is you take some food and you separate up the carbohydrates, the fats, and the protein, and then you use a formula. 4.1 calories per gram of carb, 4.1 calories per gram of protein, and 9. Something for the fat.

Starting point is 01:39:31 And that's the number on your canned food. that's what's available to you that an average person would get, but it's not actually what you because you're not a participant, you're not a, you're not a bomb calerimeter in Atwater's lab, you're a human being, right? And so, for example, if you take

Starting point is 01:39:51 peanuts, right, and you measure the content of the energy in your peanuts, and now you grind those peanuts up into peanut butter, which, by the way, is the world's greatest food, you get way more energy, about 25% more energy than if you ate the peanuts hole. Because the food processing, even though it's the same stuff, the food processing gives you access to more of those nutrients. Because you don't have to work as hard. Yes, right, because you break the food down to tiny little particles, right? And your enzymes,

Starting point is 01:40:20 surface area to volume ratio, your enzymes can break that food down. If you take a banana and you blend a banana, you get more energy from that banana than if you just eat the banana hole. People have done that experiment. Another example. Imagine if you were to just swallow the banana as well without chewing it, that would also help. Good luck for doing that. But one of my favorite experiments is a guy named Steven Seekore, the University of Alabama, who studies what's called diet anders thermogenesis,

Starting point is 01:40:45 the energy it takes to break down food. Because food takes energy to digest. It's a lot, actually. And he used boa constrictors, because boa constrictors, they cannot eat for like weeks, and then you can give it a rat, and then you can measure how much energy the boa constrictor spends eating, digesting the rat.

Starting point is 01:41:00 And he would give the boa constrictor a rat, and then he'd give the, wait a few months, and measure how much energy the boa constrictor is spent, you could do that by just measuring how much the bow constricture heats up. And then you wait a few months, baroque constriction is very happy. You give it the same rat, or exactly the same size rat, but this time he grinds it up.

Starting point is 01:41:18 Same rat, same amount calories. Ground rat, and the boa constrictor slips right through his suggestive system. It doesn't heat up at all, or much less so, because the boa constrictor is getting way more energy from that rat. So when we pulverize our food, we grind it up, et cetera. When you make a smoothie, for example, You're getting more energy from a smoothie than if you eat the same amount of fruit whole. Do that mean that people should or shouldn't eat smoothies?

Starting point is 01:41:41 Well, it depends if you're trying to lose weight or not. I mean, I like smoothies. Smoothies are great. I eat them all the time, but I'm not trying to lose weight. But if I was on a diet, I would probably cut down on my smoothies. I've heard that celery is net calorie negative. Yeah, I've heard that too. I don't believe that.

Starting point is 01:41:58 I'm sure you don't get a lot. The energy needed to digest the celery because of how rough and fiber. it is, is greater than the amount of calories. Fiber doesn't take a lot of energy to digest, actually. Fiber is just what you extend to your microbiome. And by the way, we don't. When we measure the calories from food, we're not taking into account the contribution

Starting point is 01:42:17 from our microbiome. So all those bacteria that are, once the celery passes through your, the fiber from the celery passes into your colon, there are all these happy bacteria in there. Delighted that you had the celery, and they're breaking that celery down into what's called short-chain fatty acids

Starting point is 01:42:32 of which you then take up into your bloodstream and then you use. So we think actually that for some people, maybe about 10% of the energy that they get from their food, is not even measured on those nutrition fats labels because it comes from a microbiome. We have no idea, really. When you have studies that tell you how much energy somebody's eating, they're making it up.

Starting point is 01:42:54 We're not making up. They're estimating it, and it's actually extremely inaccurate. Which is another problem with our studies of calories-in versus calories. nobody really knows how many calories go in. Modern food environment novel, calorie dense, hyper-palatable, processed, etc. But as soon as you create a problem, solutions come out for that too. And we have modern technology and people can design new foods. What are some of the foods that people are eating every day that they think are healthy,

Starting point is 01:43:25 but it's actually making them worse? I don't know. I worry about some of the ultra-processed foods that, like meal replacements for lack of, I hope I don't get in trouble, but like Hewle and Soylent. I mean, there's all, I mean, you could, and I actually tried them for a few weeks. I didn't eat dinner, but I had all my lunches and breakfasts. How was that? It was awful, actually, because it got so boring and I got to really feel.

Starting point is 01:43:59 year, you know, I mean, at first they thought, okay, it's a milkshake, it's not so bad, et cetera, but after a few days, it's like I've really missed food. But there's like emulsifiers in there, there's all kinds of stuff in there that we don't know what they're doing. We're just guessing. And, and, you know, over months, weeks, years, you have no idea. Or another example would be a lot of people eat a lot of soy products because they think, you know, they're trying to be a vegetarian. That's fine. Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian. They're eating a lot of soy, but some soy products are made by through solvents. They use hexane. You don't want hexane in your food. Hexane is...

Starting point is 01:44:42 Sounds like some shit that I'd put in my barbecue. Yeah, or you're in your car, right? You know, it's a solvent. It's a flammable solvent. And then you try to wash the hexane out. But hexane is a toxin. It's a neurotoxin. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and Studies have shown that you can actually measure people's urine and people who are not in the petroleum industry, and they have hexane in their urine. And it's probably coming from soy or from non-expeller-pressed seed oils. So like when I get canola oil, I only get expelled pressed canola oil because I don't want my canola beans, you know, dissolve with hexane in order to get my oil. And so. I thought seed oils were bad for you.

Starting point is 01:45:26 Oh, no. that's another one of those myths, I'm sorry to say. But let's go, we'll get to that in a second. So I think there are some foods that people think are healthy, but the way in which they're processed might be unhealthy. And again, as Parasolsa said, it's the dose that makes the poison. We don't yet know. It's very hard to do the studies.

Starting point is 01:45:47 You can give huge amounts of like these foods to rats and they get cancer, but we just don't know about humans. So it depends on what you're null hypothesis. So right now the government's no hypothesis is, that this hexane that we get in our food is okay. It generally recognizes safe. Others think, well, unless you can prove it's safe, I don't want anything to do with this.

Starting point is 01:46:08 Seed oils. Seed oils, okay, so the idea behind seed oils, there are different kinds of, little jargon here, there are different kinds of polyunsaturated fats. So a polyunsaturated fat, so fats are these long chains of carbon, lots and lots of carbons, and if the carbons have,

Starting point is 01:46:26 single bonds between them, remember single bonds from chemistry? That means that they can have two hydrogens, one on each side, that bind to them. So a saturated fat is all single bond carbons, and that each carbon has two hydrogen, so that's saturated with hydrogen. That's why it's called a saturated fat. If you make one of the carbons a double bond, now you don't have the hydrogen X on it, and that creates a kink in the fatty acid. So that's why fatty acids that have a double bond are either mono or polyunsaturated. So mono is one double bond. Poly means there's more than one.

Starting point is 01:47:06 That's why they're liquid at room temperature. They have kink, so they fold up. So it turns out that, and we label polyunsaturated fats by where those double bonds are. So remember in the Greek alphabet, alpha omega, alpha is the beginning, omega is the N. So omega three means that the double bond is three. carbons away from the end. I don't know if this is too much information. So omega-3 fatty acid is the double bonds three carbons from the end. And omega-6 fatty acid is six bonds from the end. And so fish are really rich in omega-3s. Omega-3s are great for you. Nobody disputes that.

Starting point is 01:47:48 Omega-eat-eat-a-tete a shit-ton omega-3s. Good for your brain, good for your nervous system, good for your immune system, et cetera. six fatty acids used to be much more rare in our diet. And so the paleo diet, I think it started with the paleo diet, paleo diet said, well, look, we didn't evolve to eat that many omega-6 fatty acids because we didn't have seed oils. And so we should try to have like a hunter-gatherer kind of omega-3 ratio. So trying to have more than twice as many omega-6s to mega-3s. And the argument behind that is that the omega-6 fatty acids can be turned into a biodegessive system to another thing called a racadonic acid, which can then be turned into an inflammatory compound, like a

Starting point is 01:48:27 prostate gland and that gives you like a headache, right? So there is a biochemical pathway by which these fatty acids can become inflammatory. So that's the concern. However, people have done studies. They give people like you and me, they go sit in a lab, they give people omega-6 fatty acids, and then measure whether their metabolism does that. Turns out that doesn't. There's no evidence, and there are quite a few studies. My book cites them. You can go look them up, where increasing the amount of omega-6 fatty acids actually increases inflammation. It was a, it's a fear, but the fear turns out not to be the case. Furthermore, there's epit, so that's mechanistic study. There's now epidemiological studies as well, which show that people eat a lot of

Starting point is 01:49:14 omega-6 fatty acids do really well. In fact, people eat, in fact, omega-6 fatty acids have been shown to be more preventive, like the nurse's health study and various other big, huge studies. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people, prospective studies over decades, actually have lower risks of heart disease, cancers, et cetera, than people who don't eat them. So although there were concerns about them, the evidence, if you're just purely evidence-based, the evidence suggests you should stop worrying about omega-6 fatty acids. If you walked through the average healthy person's cupboard, a kitchen, what do you think would concern you most? The average healthy persons?

Starting point is 01:49:55 Yeah, someone that considers I'm eating a modern healthy diet. I'm the sort of person that shops at Whole Foods. I try and make sure that I'm remotely paleo, naturalistic, informed when it comes to my diet. I'm a healthy person. You're going through my kitchen. What are the common things you think would concern you most? That's a good question. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:50:16 I mean, I think the more I studied diet, the more I realized that there's an incredible variety of foods that we're able to eat. So you're asking, like, what's an unhealthy food that people think that's healthy that they tend to eat a lot of? I need to think about that. I'm not sure. Good question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He stumped me there. I guess I'm not a very judgmental person, actually.

Starting point is 01:50:44 So that's part, maybe that's one of the most of the best thing. Healthy versus unhealthy is not necessarily a judgment, right? We can say, hey, that would be, you think that this thing is sort of net positive for your health, but I would be a little bit more concerned about it or whatever. For instance, I could give you one. I think maybe dried fruit might be one of those things where people think, oh, well, you know, it's a fruit, it's a little bit of a snack that you go, that is some really fucking refined sugar in there. All right, okay, that's a good one.

Starting point is 01:51:10 Thank you. You win. That wasn't a competition. You get an A, you get an A. Another one would be fruit juice. Right. Because fruit juice is basically soda. I mean, it's, you know, you're not getting a lot of nutrients from fruit juice.

Starting point is 01:51:21 You're just getting a lot of sugar. So I would think that would be another one. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, look, I like dried fruit too, but I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that. But you're right. Tried pineapple chunks, dried mango strips. Good stuff.

Starting point is 01:51:36 Yeah, but just straight sugar. It's a candy. Yeah. Why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working? Do they? I mean, there are some. keep working. I mean... When you look at people longitudinally over time and somebody does a diet, how many of them

Starting point is 01:51:54 that lose weight, maintain that weight loss? Well, again, there are, you know, various studies have shown that a lot of the standard traditional diets, people do fall off them, and the numbers run all over the place, but, you know, I would say that probably a reasonable estimate is about 75% of people fall off their diet. And why? Because they can't sustain them. Again, going back to natural weight loss registry that I mentioned earlier, the people who managed to lose weight and keep it off are the ones who manage to keep the diet going. And what's interesting is that many of them don't follow an actual prescribed diet. They just avoid junk food. They avoid foods with a lot of sugar. They avoid foods with a lot of added fat. They cook most of their meals

Starting point is 01:52:39 at home. They tend to exercise. They tend to weigh themselves on a regular basis. So they're keeping track of how they're doing. But very few of them actually are following an Atkins diet or this diet or that diet, they're just trying to eat reasonably sensibly. That's the evidence. So I think it's, you know, the old joke is, you know, the worst part about diet is the second day in the diet

Starting point is 01:53:02 because you stop, you know, that's when you stop the diet, right? Many diets, remember, the difference between efficacy and effectiveness. Most diets are effective. In vitro, wonderful. I mean, most diets have high efficacy, but they have low effectiveness

Starting point is 01:53:16 because, and the low effectiveness is generally because we have a hard time maintaining them. And that's because of our food environment. Does the body fight weight loss very aggressively? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the biggest one is hunger, right? When you lose weight, your body sends all kinds of signals. There are leptin and there are peptides, PY, etc. that tell your body you are losing weight and turn on your appetite. And that's why Grelin in the stomach. Yeah, graylin, exactly. I mean, it's very hard to fight all those deep and fundamental adaptations. And so the best diets are the ones that kind of trick your body,

Starting point is 01:53:54 but also require, you know, they're hard. And that's why GLP-1s have been so incredibly successful because GLP-1s, for many people, just turn off that appetite and enable them to eat less. What do you think about GLP-1s? Well, I mean, they're game changes for many people. I mean, they've been incredibly successful. Some people lose 25% of their body weight,

Starting point is 01:54:17 new ones being formulated that maybe even they'd be more powerful. So, I mean, that can be really huge for somebody to really lose that kind of weight and turn off those cravings. But there are some concerns. So we published, my colleagues and I published a paper

Starting point is 01:54:33 in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association recently. One of the big concerns about GLP ones is that people not only lose fat, they also lose muscle. And they seem to lose a lot of muscle. It's a bit like bariatric surgery, too. When you lose a lot of weight really fast, people lose a lot of muscle, and that can put you at serious risk of frail to you, and you get older.

Starting point is 01:54:54 Because when you lose muscle as you age, you can get what's called sarcopenia. Sarko is the Greek word for flesh and penia's loss. So flesh loss. Sounds bad, doesn't it? And sarcopenia is really debilitating because it becomes a vicious cycle, because as you become less strong, you know, just doing acts of daily living become harder, getting up from a toilet, you know, shopping and doing stuff. And then you become less physically active and you become, get into this vicious,

Starting point is 01:55:20 something's getting worse and worse. Basically, my, you know, my mother, for lack of better, you know, she died essentially of sarcopenia. She got more and more frail as she got older. I tried to get her to eat anything, you know, ice cream, this, yeah, you never know, whatever, you try to put on some weight and she just couldn't. It was really hard to watch. Some people are kind of self-enforcing that inability to eat food through GLPs.

Starting point is 01:55:46 Right. And so one of the big concerns about GLP-1s is that if you're taking them, do strength training, please, because that can help reverse or help you maintain your muscle as you lose those GLP-1s. So that's one concern about GLP-1s. Another is that a lot of people quit them. The last study I saw, and again, things may change because there are now oral versions of the pill. There's now pill versions. You don't have to inject it. But something like six, 60% of people who've tried GLP1s have quit them after a year or two, 60%. And the problem is that when you quit them, your body just still will, your appetite comes roaring back and you want to go back to your previous weight for reasons that we do not understand. So most people who use GLP's take them for a period of time that they can lose an appreciable amount of weight and then stop. Don't maintain the weight loss. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:56:43 So it's a lifetime contract. So exactly. So that's what we're currently seeing at the moment. So that's a concern, because then when they regain the weight, they tend to gain it almost completely as fat, not as muscle. And so then in a way, they're worse off. Oh, so they've lost muscle on the way down and gain fat on the way back. Yeah, so that's one of the concerns.

Starting point is 01:57:04 Look, we're still conducting this experiment in real time without knowing the results. And then a final concern about GOP-1 is that, look, nobody likes taking medications, right, at least most people don't like taking medications. And it doesn't solve the problem of what you should eat in the first place. And it doesn't prevent obesity in the first place. So it's great for people to lose weight. But we also need to focus on helping people not have to take those GLP ones in the first place. So I'm a little worried that we're going to take our eye off the ball.

Starting point is 01:57:33 And even if you're on a GLP1, you still have to figure out what to eat. What do I eat? And the GLP1 might help you with your cravings for, you know, really fatty, sugary foods, but it might not. We just still haven't done those studies very well. So, look, I think they're a useful tool for a lot of people, but I think we have a lot to learn and we have to figure how to use them better. They're not going away, but I think they're, again, they're not the magic bullet that some people think they are, but they may be very, very helpful for some folks. It feels like an artificial solution to an artificial problem. We have this novel food

Starting point is 01:58:09 environment, which we shouldn't be in, right, in an ideal world if we're to design things better. And we now have this thing, which kind of solves it. We solve the calorie-dense, hyper-palatable food world with this thing that comes in and puts the kibosh on our ability to either eat or gut mortality, you know, level of hunger, stuff like that. Yeah. So a few, about 13 years ago, I wrote a book called The Story of the Human Body. And in the end of that book, I propose an idea called disevolution. Disevolution is when we treat the symptoms, not the causes of a mismatch disease. So we're talking about mismatched diseases. These are illnesses that are caused by not being adapted to our modern world, right? But when we treat the symptoms, not the causes,

Starting point is 01:58:55 we keep the system going, right? And I think GLP-1s might be an example of a kind of a dis-evolutionary process. We can still have our, you know, frozen pizzas and our, you know, fried chicken and our, you know, donuts and all that kind of stuff. Now we get obesity, take the GLP-1s, but we still have that sound food system. So just eat 1,700 calories of the frozen pizza and the donuts.

Starting point is 01:59:20 We still have that food system that's going to keep going, right? We need to solve our food system problems if we're going to help prevent people from getting and right now, we're not doing enough to help each other eat sensibly so that we don't gain weight.

Starting point is 01:59:38 It seems to me when you get to kind of that point of the conversation, the food environment is predatory, engineered, capitalistic, designed to hook people. People tend to split in one of two ways. One is they go towards systemic change. We need grass to be changed. We need to look at what can snap payments be spent on. We need to kind of step in and there should be an additive restriction. We can't have these food dyes. Regulation.

Starting point is 02:00:14 Yeah, a degree of top-down sort of bureaucracy that will come in and fix it. And then the other side is aggressive agency. It's you need to take control of this. No one's coming to save you. You know, constrain yourself only to the outer aisles in the supermarket or shop in one that doesn't have any of the hyper-palatable stuff. Like, across all of this research and self-experimentation, What are the most robust principles that you think people should take away when it comes to having a good diet,

Starting point is 02:00:44 nutritionally complete and evolutionarily, at least not totally deranged? Avoid processed foods. I mean, and by processed, I would include foods that are refined, so white flour. I would include foods that have a lot of added sugar, foods that have a lot of added fat. You know, fat's not as bad as maybe some people think, but filling your food with fat and sugar is certainly not great for you. Avoid foods that have, I avoid foods that have really weird ingredients that I have no idea what the hell they are.

Starting point is 02:01:18 Things like maltodextrin. If you see maltodextrin in your food, run away. Why? Maltodextrin is a kind of sugar that your body can't actually detect as sugar. It's used as an emulsifier, so it keeps food from particles from breaking apart. So foods have long shuffle life. makes things creamier and smoother, but it roots havoc with your metabolism. So it's a, it's a food you'd never eat on your own. It's a chemical additive. It's a chemical additive to, to me is like

Starting point is 02:01:45 a canary kind of in the coal mine kind of evidence that this is a ultra-processed food. I don't want anything to do with. So I see multidextron on a food, I do not touch it. Right. We need, so we need to educate ourselves. Again, you know, our ancestors needed to know a lot how to get their food. Now, unfortunately, like it or not, we need to know how to choose our food. And we don't teach this in school. They don't even teach it to medical students. You know, medical schools, you know, RFK Jr. is right on this regard. That, you know, most physicians are given very little training and nutrition. I teach my undergraduates more nutrition. I tell them in my lectures, you're going to get more from me than you're going to get in medical school. That's crazy, right?

Starting point is 02:02:26 Why, we teach kids in school, we teach them geometry, we teach them American history. We teach them American I mean, there's nothing wrong with German history. Why don't we teach, we teach them chemistry, but why don't we teach them when we teach them chemistry, let's teach them the chemistry of food so that they learn about, when you learn about carbon bonds and hydrogen bonds, et cetera, why not teach them that chemistry in the form of,

Starting point is 02:02:48 so that they understand saturated fats versus unsaturated fats? Why don't we teach this stuff so that we can all learn? Because it's, right now, all this stuff I'm talking about, is some of it's considered arcane knowledge, but it's actually not that complicated. And I think most of us can learn this. I tried to put it in the book so that anybody can learn it. But unfortunately, that's part of the puzzle.

Starting point is 02:03:14 But the fact of the matter is a lot of us aren't going to learn that stuff. And so we need to help helping ourselves, because I think most people would not want to get obese. Most people want to eat a healthy diet, but they're stressed. Their finances are limited. They don't have a lot of time. Imagine you commute. You have kids.

Starting point is 02:03:35 You rush to the supermarket. You don't have a lot of time to be, you know, whatever. We can't get rid of processed foods, but if we could help have processed foods that are more healthy, I think that's a solution. And so, like in England, for example, like when you go to the supermarket in England, they're the green, yellow, and red labels, right? They're super easy, right? And, you know, I mean, you can debate the fine points about whether they've got the labels

Starting point is 02:03:58 right. But for the most part, they're pretty sensible. And they're a quick way for somebody to see, oh, you know, this is good for my kids and this is less good for my kids. Why can't we do that? It's so simple, right? It's not simple. And then you're not forcing anybody. You can still buy the red label.

Starting point is 02:04:14 Just informed choice. Yeah, just give people more information. And so we could do more. Another opportunity is to tax. We tax cigarettes. We all, everybody agrees cigarettes are bad for you, right? Everybody agrees that cigarettes. We don't prevent people from smoking.

Starting point is 02:04:29 and I'm not going to prevent somebody from smoking if they want to. But we've agreed as a society that cigarettes should be taxed. Why don't we tax junk food? I mean, they're, they cause probably, you know. Is there no additional tax on chuggery or hyper-process? No, and in fact, in Mexico, when they tried to put a tax on soda, it got fought by the big, by the Coca-Cola. Big soda.

Starting point is 02:04:55 And the tax was reversed. So no, we don't. So, again, I'm not saying we should, but we should be having a public discussion about this, because it's a problem that's larger than any one of us. It's a public health issue that we all pay for because it's, you know, there's never going to be one solution. I'm a bit more of a libertarian paternalist. I think that, and I'm not into pretending, telling people what they should do, but I think we should have, we need help, helping us do what we would actually like to do. and often we don't know what's in our food

Starting point is 02:05:29 or we don't know what the effects of the foods are. Or, for example, fruit roll-ups. You go to the supermarket, you buy fruit roll-ups, and they says, made with real fruit filled with vitamin C. Well, very few kids are vitamin C deficient. And yes, it's made with real fruit, but they've removed all the fiber. So a fruit roll-up is basically like a form of candy, right?

Starting point is 02:05:47 But the advertising allows, you know, advertisers are allowed to basically misinform. So that might be another one of the, I think it's healthy, but in reality, it's not, and it's in a healthy person's kitchen. It deserves a red label. Now, if you want to get a fruit rolloop, fine, but you should know that it's not a healthy food. Scary stuff. I mean, look, it doesn't surprise me that America is kind of the battleground for this. I think French fries from McDonald's in the U.S. have got 18 ingredients, and in the UK, they've got three and one of them salt, and that one's optional. So this really is, you know, patient zero as a country. wonderful meritocracy, free market, American dream thing. But if you take those reins off, there's going to be some pretty negative consequences. And the only way that you can step in is to re-constraign yourself through your own choices

Starting point is 02:06:44 or then have some bureaucracy come in to start to restrict optionality for people. I think most people would like help because we are not completely free agents in this system. It's certainly an unfair battle when you think I've got the biggest companies on the planet trying to attack the fundamental drive to not die from starvation. Oh, and what I love also is that you have in one aisle of the supermarket, you have the companies that are selling your foods that are really unhealthy. And then you go to the health food section where you can buy like, you know, Weight Watchers, you know, kind of foods owned by the same companies. So they're on both sides. They're on the weight loss side and on the weight gain side. They're making money on both sides.

Starting point is 02:07:35 Daniel, you're great. Your work's awesome. Where should people go to check out the book and everything else that you got? Well, Fed Up comes out August 11th, and I tried to make it fun and readable and with the information that I think all of us need. And it's filled with references so you can find, end note, so you can find the data yourself. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.

Starting point is 02:07:57 All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes. So fun. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfar. With Wayfair, there's no what if.

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Modern Wisdom - Harvard Professor: “I Tried Every Diet. This Is By Far The Worst.” - Daniel Lieberman - #1137

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