Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Says You! Eating a Lot of Sugar Is Worse than a Lot of Saturated Fat

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey there and welcome to a new episode of Muscle for Life. I am your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for another installment of my Says You series of episodes where I address things that people disagree with me on. So what I do is every couple of months or so I post on Instagram asking people to share in the comments things that they disagree with me on. And then I pick ones that are interesting or topical or that I haven't already addressed many, many times before. And I take them over here to the podcast and talk about them. And so today's contention is regarding sugar intake. So Mark Shannon 357, that's his Instagram handle, he sucrose,

Starting point is 00:01:07 high fructose, corn syrup, and other highly processed forms of sugar or forms of sugar that are found in highly processed foods are not nearly as problematic as many people would have you believe, and that you have to consider the context of the entire diet and you have to consider energy balance and activity level and even genetics to some degree and that saturated fat if eaten in too large amounts too often can increase LDL levels of cholesterol which can then increase your risk of heart disease. So Mark Shannon 357 clearly disagrees with me on those things. And I appreciate him sharing that so I could record an episode of my podcast on it. And so that's what I will be talking about in today's episode. I'm going to

Starting point is 00:01:59 be focusing on sugar intake because one of the last, if not the last says you episode I did was on saturated fat in particular. If I remember correctly, I was talking about saturated fat that occurs naturally in foods versus saturated fat that is added to foods that doesn't occur naturally in it. But the discussion was generally about saturated fat and why my position still is that we should limit our saturated fat. We shouldn't eat unlimited saturated fat. And I do still think that no more than 10% of daily calories, total daily calories is a reasonable recommendation. I think that that is a good guideline based on the current weight of the evidence on saturated fat and how eating too much of it can increase your risk of heart disease.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Okay, so in case you skipped the intro, I'm going to be focusing today's episode on sugar intake rather than saturated fat because I already did a says you episode on saturated fat. If you want to listen to that, go back and find it. It was published in the first week of January of this year. Okay. So let's talk about sugar intake and health because sugar is one of the biggest boogeymen du jour in the nutrition space. You can find many experts who have written many books and written many studies and given many lectures on the many evils of sugar in all of its forms, naturally occurring sugar like what you find in fruit, as well as added sugar like what you find in cookies. And if we look at the scientific research on the matter, you can

Starting point is 00:03:48 find quite a few observational studies, as well as randomized controlled trials, that show that eating a lot of sugar is bad for you. Obesity is a big part of this discussion. And a lot of research shows that eating a lot of sugar is associated with an increased risk of obesity. But is that a correlation or a direct causation? Meaning, are there other factors in play that are driving the obesity aside from sugar? Or is it really the sugar itself that is directly causing excessive fat gain? Well, what research shows is that the risk of obesity remains the same when you substitute high sugar foods for low sugar foods, for other sources of carbs, so long as they contain the same number of calories. So in other words, what that body of evidence is showing is that there doesn't appear to be anything inherently fattening about sugar.

Starting point is 00:04:53 When people consistently consume more calories than they burn, regardless of where those calories come from, they gain weight. They get fatter. When they overeat sugar, they get fatter. When they overeat fruits and vegetables and whole grains. They get fatter. When they overeat sugar, they get fatter. When they overeat fruits and vegetables and whole grains, they get fatter. In fact, I was looking at a paper just a couple of days ago that showed that over a five-year period, women who were consistently overeating by just about 10 calories per day, they were consistently eating about 10 calories per day. They were consistently eating about 10 more calories than they burned every day over a five-year period. They gained about a pound of fat. And that's a very small

Starting point is 00:05:31 amount of fat gain. Of course, you could lose that in a few days if you want to diet aggressively, lose it in a week if you don't want to diet too aggressively. So it's nothing to be concerned about, but it just goes to show the unforgiving nature of energy balance. If we consistently overeat, even by a small amount, we are consistently getting fatter, even if we don't see it. Because of course, you are not going to notice a mere pound of fat gain over a five-year period. Now, coming back to high sugar foods, they are uniquely suited to promoting obesity because they're delicious. Many of them are very palatable. They're not very filling. They're very easy to overeat, which of course then contributes more, practically speaking, contributes more to weight gain than

Starting point is 00:06:22 other foods, other carbs that are not nearly as delicious and not nearly as easy to overeat like fruits and vegetables. And so that is why often people who eat a lot of sugar also are overweight because they are not meticulously managing their energy balance. They are eating as much as they want whenever they want within some boundaries of what they find reasonable. And because they are eating a lot of these delicious foods that are not very filling, they tend to overeat more often than undereat or the periods of overeating are more egregious than the periods of under eating. For example, research shows that many people tend to gain most of their weight over the weekends

Starting point is 00:07:11 and over the holidays. And so what many people do is they actually under eat slightly throughout the week. So they are more consistently in a calorie deficit throughout the week and then overeat on the weekends. But the amount of overeating on the weekends is much more just in a caloric sense than the amount of undereating during the week. So they're losing a little bit of fat. They're getting a little bit leaner throughout the week, not enough to make a difference in the mirror, of course, maybe not even noticeable on the scale because weight just fluctuates day to day for various reasons. But they're losing a little bit of fat throughout the week and then they gain fat on the weekends and what they gain on the weekends is greater than what they lose throughout the weeks. And so over

Starting point is 00:07:55 time they are getting fatter and fatter. And then you have the spikes of fat gain that occur during the holidays that just aggravate the problem further. So what's the practical takeaway here? Well, as far as your body composition goes, you don't have to worry about your sugar intake. You could eat a very high sugar diet and have a great body composition. You might not feel great and you might not have great health. I'm going to talk about those things. But as far as your body composition goes, you can look great on a poor diet that contains a lot of sugar if you understand energy balance and understanding a bit about macronutrient balance would help as well, at least making sure that you eat enough protein. And you are probably going to have to

Starting point is 00:08:42 be OK being hungry fairly often or just be very resistant to hunger or have a naturally small appetite. You know, some people, they just don't get hungry very often. They don't get hungry easily because with a high sugar diet, you are generally eating a smaller amount of food in absolute terms, like in volume and volume of food is one of the primary drivers of satiety, of fullness, how much food you are putting in your stomach, like the cubic volume of that food is a big factor in how full you feel after eating a meal. So when you're eating these high sugar, calorically dense, smaller meals, those are not going to fill you up as much as larger meals, even if they contain fewer calories. That's one of the reasons why eating a lot of relatively unprocessed foods is great when you

Starting point is 00:09:41 are cutting, in particular, eating a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, a lot of whole grains. That food fills you up a lot more than the types of foods that you might want to eat when you are lean bulking, especially when you are a couple of months into a lean bulk and you are sick of having to eat as much food as you're having to eat. And if you were to try to eat, let's say 4,000 calories per day of the same foods that you eat when you are cutting, you might throw up actually, and then give up. And so that's why many people who are good at this fitness thing will eat a bit less fruit and a bit less vegetables when they are lean bulking. I wouldn't recommend going down to nothing because those are nutritious foods that support your health and well-being, but you might not be eating the three servings of fruit per day and six servings of vegetables. You might go down to one serving of fruit per day or two, and you might go down to three or

Starting point is 00:10:39 four servings of vegetables and start incorporating some food that contains a lot of calories and is easier to eat like pasta or bread or certain types of grains that people can eat a lot of. For example, I can eat a lot of oatmeal in one sitting for some reason. I think a lot more than the average person. I can eat, let's just think of overnight oats, right? Where you just have some oats, you put some milk and what I do is I put some vanilla extract, I put some salt, I put some protein powder, some nuts, and I, in one sitting, can pretty easily eat two cups dry. Now, of course, it's not dry when I'm eating it because I prepare it the way I just explained, but two cups dry, that's 300 calories or so, you know, 55, 60 grams of carbs. And then you add in the calories of the milk, a couple of cups of whole milk. That's another 300 ish,

Starting point is 00:11:33 you know, 280, whatever it is, calories. You add in the nuts and you add in the protein powder. That's a pretty big meal. We're pushing a thousand calories now. And I'm not even that full after eating all of that. I'm just satisfied. I probably could eat another round of that before I would really feel full. And by the way, in case you're wondering if I am doing that right now, I am not because I'm not lean bulking, but I do eat half of that every day. I eat that at night, usually around 8.30 or 9. I like to have a snack before I go to bed. I go to bed between 9.45 and 10.15 usually. And so what I'm eating is one cup of oatmeal, dry, and then mixed with a cup of whole milk and again, some vanilla extract, some salt, some protein powder. I use my own, of course. I use my whey protein and my favorite flavor,

Starting point is 00:12:29 My own, of course, I use my whey protein and my favorite flavor, at least currently for this, is salted caramel. And if you want to check out my whey protein, just go to buylegion.com, B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com slash whey. We have a lot of flavors, but again, my current favorite is salted caramel. So that's what I'm eating. And there's some nuts too. I'm putting walnuts. And it's basically a generous handful of walnuts that goes into this container with two cups of oatmeal, two cups of milk.

Starting point is 00:12:56 And so I'm eating half of it one night and then the other half the following night. And in case you're wondering if that disrupts sleep, because some people have asked me if eating before bed or close to bedtime can mess up sleep. Yes, it can. Research shows that large meals before we go to bed, at least an hour or two before we go to bed, can reduce the quality of our sleep. But a smaller meal does not have that effect. And other research actually shows that eating some carbs, eating a portion of does not have that effect. And other research actually shows

Starting point is 00:13:25 that eating some carbs, eating a portion of carbs, call it anywhere from 30 to 50 grams of carbs in the hour or two preceding bedtime can improve sleep quality. How many calories should you eat to reach your fitness goals faster? What about your macros? What types of food should you eat? And how many meals should you eat every day? Well, I created a free 60-second diet quiz that'll answer those questions for you and others, including how much alcohol you should drink, whether you should eat more fatty fish to get enough omega-3 fatty acids, what supplements are worth taking and why, and more. To take the quiz and get your free personalized diet plan, go to muscleforlife.show slash diet quiz, muscleforlife.show slash diet quiz now, answer the questions and learn what you need to do in the kitchen to lose fat,

Starting point is 00:14:23 build muscle and get healthy. Okay, so coming back to sugar intake, let's talk a little bit about health. Let's talk about heart health because there is animal research that links sugar intake with poor heart health, but we can't simply extrapolate rat studies to humans even though we do share a lot of DNA and animal research does have its place in the hierarchy of evidence, I guess you could say. And so you got to look at human research. And if we look at the human research on the link between sugar intake and heart health, there are some studies that show that consuming foods that are high in the glycemic index, which sugar is, of

Starting point is 00:15:05 course, is associated with poor heart health. But the best indication of how sugar intake can affect our cardiovascular health, I think, comes from a 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis that was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And what researchers found is that replacing the calories that people usually consume with sugar, with calories from other complex carbs, which tend to be more nutritious, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and so forth, that that does not appear to lower cardiovascular disease risk

Starting point is 00:15:40 or blood lipid levels associated with cardiovascular disease. And so what they found is that sugar doesn't appear to hinder heart health so long as the calories you consume from the sugar are accounted for. So again, we're coming back to body composition because being overweight, that increases your risk of heart disease. The evidence is clear. And if you are eating a lot of high sugar foods and that is contributing to weight gain or that is contributing to the maintenance of an unhealthy body composition, too much body fat, then in an indirect way, in an individual, eating sugar is contributing to heart disease, but not A to B. It's going through this mechanism of body

Starting point is 00:16:27 composition. Now, if we took that same person and we brought them into a healthy body composition, which to keep it simple in men, let's say that is a body fat level under 20%. Let's just say between 10 and 20%, because if you get too low, if guys are too shredded, that's unhealthy. So let's say in men, a body fat level of 10 to 20% is a healthy range. And in women, 20 to 30% is a healthy range. Now that isn't to say that 8% body fat in men is unhealthy or that 18% in women is unhealthy. But 10 to 20 in men and 20 to 30 in women are simple evidence-based rules of thumb for healthy body composition. So if we took somebody who's overweight, who eats, let's say 20 or 30% of their daily calories from sugar, that's quite a bit.

Starting point is 00:17:18 If you just do the math and we help them lose fat to be in that healthy body composition range. And especially if we get them to consistently exercise, eating 20 to 30% of daily calories from sugar won't necessarily be a problem. It may, again, we have to now look more closely at the rest of their diet and how their body responds to that. But that elevated risk of cardiovascular disease has now come down or maybe disappeared altogether. Now, if we look at the link between sugar intake and type 2 diabetes, it's more of the same. Yes, several studies have shown that sugar consumption is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, but that's not to say that high sugar foods directly cause type 2 diabetes. If you are

Starting point is 00:18:06 a healthy individual, you have a healthy body composition, you exercise regularly, you eat plenty of nutritious foods, and you eat a fair amount of high sugar foods, you are not necessarily increasing your risk of type 2 diabetes. Because again, we have to go back to the diet as a whole and how that affects body composition, because what definitely does increase the risk of type 2 diabetes is getting too fat. And eating too many high sugar foods and definitely drinking too many high sugar beverages is a very effective way for anyone to get fat, especially if they are not meticulously counting calories, which almost nobody does when they are also eating a lot of sugar and drinking a lot of

Starting point is 00:18:52 sugar. And so then if we circle back to the beginning of this episode and what prompted this episode, the claim that high sugar intake is worse for your health than high saturated fat, or specifically more than 10% of daily calories and that a lot of people are blaming saturated fat for what sugar is doing. I would say that practically speaking, both of those options contribute to health problems, maybe not perfectly equally, but both are a problem. Eating too much sugar is a problem because unless you are an athlete, unless you are training intensely 10, 15 plus hours a week, you are simply not going to be burning enough energy to be able to eat a lot of sugar and eat a lot of nutritious foods. It's

Starting point is 00:19:40 going to be one or the other. So in 99% of people I've come across over the years who are eating a lot of sugar, they are not eating a healthy diet. They are not eating enough nutritious foods. They are often overeating. They are overweight and they are getting fatter as time goes on. That's what happens practically when most people eat a high sugar diet. And similarly, with saturated fat, research shows that some people, partially due to just genetic factors, can eat a lot of saturated fat and see no change in their LDL cholesterol levels and thus no change, no likely change in their risk of cardiovascular disease. But in most people, that is not the case. In most people, eating a

Starting point is 00:20:25 lot of saturated fat is going to significantly increase LDL cholesterol levels. And if LDL levels get too high, the risk of cardiovascular disease goes up. Also, practically speaking, most people I've come across over the years who eat a lot of saturated fat are not super fit carnivore dieters. They are kind of standard American diet dieters. They are eating a lot of fast food, hamburgers and bacon, maybe on the hamburgers and sausage and so on. And they are also often overweight and not very physically active. They don't exercise regularly. And so to leave you with a very practical takeaway recommendation for sugar intake, so long as you get most of your daily

Starting point is 00:21:11 calories from relatively unprocessed nutritious foods, those are going to be foods that do not have sugar added to them ever, basically fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, legumes, lean protein, and so forth. So long as you do that, and to just put an arbitrary number that works, let's just say 80% or so of your daily calories comes from that stuff. If you want to give over 20% of your daily calories or up to 20% of daily calories to high sugar foods, relatively non-nutritious foods, that is a healthy diet. Scientifically speaking, that would qualify as a healthy diet, certainly healthy enough to not just survive, but to thrive, especially if you do a few other things right, like you exercise regularly and you spend a lot of that time training your muscles.

Starting point is 00:22:01 You regularly do strength training. It's not just cardiovascular training. And you get enough sleep and you drink enough water and you manage stress correctly. And given the weight of the scientific evidence behind those recommendations and the real world workability of them, I really don't see that paradigm being upended ever. I would be very surprised if we were to see a seismic shift in that paradigm. It's going to change, of course, over time as scientists learn more and more about what may constitute the optimal human diet, which nobody knows, by the way. Anybody who claims they know what the optimal human diet is, they are full of beans, my friend. But scientists are working on that and they may never know truly what is, because we're talking now about perfection. What is the perfect, the absolute perfect human diet?

Starting point is 00:22:56 We may never know, but we can know what is closer to perfect, what is closer to 100% optimal. Maybe right now, what I just shared with you is only 75% optimal. And in 10 years, we are going to be able to know what 80 or 85% optimal is. I expect that to happen. I expect the recommendations to change. But I'm going to say at this point, based on my understanding of things, that it is impossible for the evidence of the optimal human diet to point in the direction of fewer plant foods or no plant foods, get rid of the fruit and vegetables and seeds and legumes and whole grains, or eat a lot less of that stuff and just eat more animal products, eat more meat,

Starting point is 00:23:43 eat more saturated fat. It's not going to happen. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about

Starting point is 00:24:27 maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Says You! Eating a Lot of Sugar Is Worse than a Lot of Saturated Fat

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