Odd Lots - An Economist Explains Why Losing Weight Is Kind Of Like Defeating Inflation

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

A lot of people would probably agree that there's something wrong with much of the traditional advice in how to lose weight -- or at least how it's implemented. The economist Miles Kimball has lost weight using a different approach. He's increased his fat intake and gone for long stretches of time without eating anything at all. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, Kimball, a prolific blogger and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains what got him interested in fasting, obesity research, and the similarities between weight loss and fighting inflation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio. and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.

And I'm Tracy Allaway. So Tracy, we've been working together for a long time, a few years, maybe coming on three and a half years or something. And we've been doing... Three years. Yeah, three years. And we've been doing this podcast for a while. But do you think we really know each other well?

Like, do you think, I don't know? Do you think so? Well, the fact that you're asking me this question worries me a bit and makes me think that maybe you think that we don't know each other that well. But I also feel like you share a lot of yourself on social media. So I learn about you through that avenue. That's a good point. And we've like traveled together and stuff.

We've traveled to London together for work. We've traveled to Hong Kong. And we've gone out to eat in, you know, various night markets in Hong Kong. So I'd say we know each other pretty well. I hope so. I really do. But why are you asking me? Because one of, I sometimes I wonder if like,

I've always throughout my life, I've had this sort of very weird interest in unconventional dietary habits, extreme diets in one way or another. I was vegan for a long time. I was raised vegetarian. I've always just sort of been fascinated by people who take ideas to the extreme in one way. And I sort of wonder whether we've ever talked about that at all. Well, I was about to say that that I do know about. I know about your history as a vegan growing up. I know I think it wasn't until you were in college or something like that that you actually ate meat. Yeah, that's true. So you're probably... Crazy. Sorry, I can't imagine it. Yeah. Especially anyone who follows me on Instagram. Anyway, probably people who are listening are wondering where the heck we are going with this conversation, aren't they?

Yes. Has odd lots become a cooking show? Which we totally should do, by the way. I'd be totally fine with that in all seriousness. But today I think we are going to have a very nice crossover, between multiple topics because we're going to be talking to an economist who has been blogging for a long time and writing about various aspects of the economy and monetary policy and stuff like that, who also of late has been writing about diet and obesity and the research that he has done in this area. And much of what he talks about is of high interest to me. Today we are going to be talking to Miles Kimball. He is an economic. professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He has a great blog called Supply Side Liberal,

where he writes about all kinds of topics, including economics. But lately, he's been writing a lot about obesity and diet, and he has become a proponent of fasting, so going long intervals without eating anything at all, and why that is an important and feasible approach to losing weight. and I find his insights in this journey to be extremely interesting. So on that note, Miles, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks. That's great that you could have me. So, Miles, before we get into your interest in obesity and the merits of fasting

and the merits of eating high fat diets and all this stuff, which interests me a lot, I'm curious about your career. You're an economist. You're at the University of Colorado, Boulder. What's been your sort of primary focus of study throughout these years? Oh, I'm labeled a macroeconomist, but I'm interested in almost everything. In fact, just like people Google themselves, I look up my ranking on this research papers in economics site, REPC.

And, of course, you want to cherry pick the one that makes you rank the highest. And the thing I rank the highest in is that, diversity of citations across fields of economics. So I'm interested in almost everything. You have to search hard for something within economics that I'm not interested in and, you know, many things that are outside the traditional boundaries of economics. So does nutrition count as economics in this context, or I guess what I'm asking is how you got interested in that topic? Let me tell you my view on that, first of all, and what I'm saying is true of other disciplines as well, what defines economics to me is the training that economists get. And of course, that evolves over time, but very slowly.

And so given the training that economists have, I think that economists should go out and address every scientific question that they are well prepared to address that they have in economists' terms of comparative advantage at addressing. The other thing, I think, is that any important scientific question, you can't trust one discipline to do it. Every important scientific question, you need at least two different scientific disciplines with different traditions to look at it because every individual scientific discipline, including economics, gets to have an orthodoxy, and it gets blind spots. So if you don't have two different scientific disciplines looking at every important question,

you're going to get in big trouble. So obviously obesity, you know, just jump right into the topic at hand. Obesity is a issue that intuitively spans many different disciplines and questions about obesity, because obviously there is health, within that, there's nutrition, public policy, sociology, certain aspects of behavioral stuff, why people eat what they eat or live a certain lifestyle the way they do. you know, I think it's pretty intuitive that there are many ways to attack it. But before we get to sort of some of your research on it, what is the conventional story about how people become obese, the mainstream view that is perhaps riddled with some blind spots?

Eat too much and exercise too little. That's the conventional view. And what's wrong with that view? Oh, it doesn't ask why people eat too much. I mean, I guess the exercise too little is easier to understand. But even that, is more affected by what you eat than you might think. You know, if you eat things that give you a lot of energy or that leave you with a lot of energy, then you'll tend to move around more. But it matters what you eat and when you eat, because that will determine your energy levels. It'll determine how many calories you feel like eating. So the blind spot is acting as if we just consciously choose the amount we eat and consciously choose the amount we move around. That's not true at all. You have all kinds of

things below the conscious level that are, and sometimes literally metabolic things that are determining how much energy you burn and how many calories you eat. Wait, but isn't the conventional wisdom that when it comes to how much we want to eat, we are biologically programmed to get basically as many calories and fat into our system as possible, right? Like, we evolved from cavemen that had to harvest things and they tried to save up energy for the lean times, the lean winters, and that continues today. Well, that, I think, is a myth. I mean, the way to see that it's a myth is that there are many, many other types of animals that had a similar kind of issue with, you know, being able to survive the winter or lean times as humans did.

And animals don't get obese like humans do. Obviously, if you're a hibernating animal and you've got to sleep through the winter, you've got to get fat before you go and sleep through the winter or you wouldn't make it through the winter. But other than seasonal things like that, animals don't get very fat. And evolutionarily, the reason is there's a real cost to being fat. I mean, you can't run away from predators as well if you get too fat. That matters for our ancestors, too.

You can't move as fast in order to catch wild game either if you're too fat. So there are plenty of evolutionary disadvantages to being too fat. This argument just doesn't hold water, though it's widely believed. So what made you, before we get into your own endeavors in the area and some of your thoughts on the subject, what made you interested in this topic other than the fact that you're a polymath who is interested in everything? How did this become an area of focus and you thought it would be worth putting time into it? It's because I've been interested in losing weight myself. And I've never been dramatically overweight. and the averages in our society have gone up enough so that I don't think I've ever stood out

as being as being fat, but I felt overweight and wanted to lose weight. And so it's exploring over time what would work. You know, back in the, I think it must have been the 80s, I listened to the advice that was out there to eat low fat. And so I did that with, I mean, I tend to pursue things fairly thoroughly. So I ate a lot of gim milk and grandfakes, and I gained quite a few pounds on that. So I've been interested just for personal reasons in trying to keep my weight under control or like many, many people. And so that sparks the intellectual interest.

So, Miles, what was it that you found in your research? I'm guessing it's going to be something that contradicted the popular 1980s advice to eat a low-fat diet. And Joe, I know that partly by watching your Instagram and your Twitter feeds where you're eating a lot of fatty foods. Well, Joe has oversold my research a little bit. So I am indeed involved in research projects involving obesity, but they have begun very, very recently since, you know, not that long before. I started blogging about this issue, what I have done is identified some really great books on the subject. So I'm a big fan of Jason Funn, who wrote the book, The Obesity Code, and then the complete

guide to fasting. He's a doctor who started out as a kidney doctor, but then, you know, a lot of kidney problems come from diabetes, and diabetes is associated with people being overweight. So pretty soon Jason Fung got involved in trying to help his patients lose weight. And he then started with putting them on a low-carb diet. And he found that was actually a little hard for them. And that worked, but it was hard for them to understand. He would tell them to not eat bread.

And then they would come back and said, oh, I didn't eat any bread. I only ate PETA. And so he found that, and they didn't have times and everything. And so he found that fasting, that is periods of time with eating essentially no food, you know, drinking water or drinking coffee, drinking tea, but not eating any food, was actually easier for people to do than to change in a complicated way the things they were eating. And he had, you know, great success. with that. It's also something where not my research, but many people's research is starting to

verify the idea that fasting for periods of time is really, really helpful. And, you know, sometimes, you know, the research isn't quite as on point as I'd like, but it definitely reinforces. In other words, they're not doing it exactly the way I would do it, but still it suggests that fasting is really, really helpful. So, Miles, not to bang on about the conventional wisdom, but isn't the response to fasting usually that you put your body in starvation mode and your metabolism ends up slowing? I'll tell you what puts you in starvation mode. If you restrict your calories, but spread them out throughout the day, every day, that will put your body in starvation mode. That's a big mistake.

What you don't want to do is just cut back on the amount you eat, but spread it out through every day in the kind of timing. that people normally do. That's a huge mistake, puts you in starvation mode. Fasting doesn't because what happens is if you have no food at all, then for anyone, your insulin levels and other associated hormones will get low enough so that your body starts burning its own fat. And once you burn your own fat, you've got energy flowing through your bloodstream, and you're going to be fine.

There's plenty of nutrition for yourselves because we're designed for periods of no food. If not, our ancestors wouldn't have survived. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information. and data to keep you informed.

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journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. So this is a really important distinction that we need to clarify. The goal of going for periods in your view and in the work of some of these researchers is not to reduce calories. It's not to, say, take a typical American diet and then drop the amount of calories by 25%. it's to lengthen the window of time when you're getting no calories, but during the periods when you are eating to eat sort of a normal amount of food.

Absolutely. Yeah. So what happens during that window? Why is it important to sort of restrict your eating to a narrow window, even if you end up eating the same amount of calories as someone who doesn't fast? Well, you know, thinking about it as a window is really a convenient way to think about it. but what actually matters is the length of the periods of time with no food. You know, if you're eating at least once a day,

then the length of the eating window is by arithmetic. That's going to be closely related to the periods of time with no food. But it's really the length of periods of time with no food that matters. And if you skip a whole day of eating, obviously, that then gets to be different from just the length of the window. But what happens is most of us are to some degree insulin resistance. And actually what that means is your body then produces extra insulin. And what that means is if we eat even a little bit of food, we're going to hang on to the fat.

And so if you really have to get very, very low on your body's hormonal signals of insulin and related hormones before you're going to burn your fat. And for most of us, you know, if you ate well all your life, this might not be true. But for most of us, we've already messed our system up enough that the only way to get to where you're really burning a lot of fat is by substantial periods without food. It's just things less than that just won't cut it very well. They might work a little bit. but in the tough cases, let's put it that way.

In the tough cases, it's the periods without food that really matter. So on your blog, you talk about insulin and you liken it to money supply or velocity of money supply. And then you talk about inflation and you liken that to body weight. Can you walk us through that parallel? How do you see the connection? Absolutely. One thing I can bring that's new to it is comparison to eat economic. and obesity. So let's think about it. So what happened in the 70s? This is something that,

by the way, is burned into the brains as central bankers and why I don't think we're going to have a lot of inflation in the future, because the way people are trained in economics, PhD programs, and the way people come out of financial backgrounds, feeling about inflation, it's like that was a big, bad example in the 70s when we increased the money supply too much for a variety of reasons. And we got this double-digit inflation in the 70s. And then how did that end? It ended when Paul Volcker decided, you know what, I'm willing to have a recession to bring down inflation.

Okay. You could try to bring down inflation without, from double digits to, you know, 4% without a recession, but good luck. The success rate of trying to bring down inflation without a long way, like, you know, eight percentage points or something, without a serious recession or some kind of recession is not so great. So the analogy is, if you're significantly overweight, good luck trying to bring down your weight without the equivalent of a recession, which here is a period of time with no eating. The big difference I've got to say is recessions are horrible, but fasting is not. Fasting is remarkably easy if you do it right. Well, let's talk about that aspect, because I wonder if there's a behavioral economics sort of

sub-story within this or just a behavioral story at all because people are sort of familiar with various adjacent diet ideas. So people have obviously been pitched the low-carb idea for a long time. That's pretty well known in popular culture. The keto diet, which is pretty similar ideas. Also, people have heard that buzzword a lot. But one of the persistent problems with almost any scheme via which people lose weight is the ability to stick to the plan. And so people come up with all kinds of personal tricks to stick to it. But in the end, that proves to be very difficult. So maybe some diet will work for three months and then people revert. So what is it about the fasting approach that you say is easy and which, in your view, creates a higher degree of durability, show you say?

Well, first of all, I want to say that it's proven that this is durable. Jason Fung has good experience with this particularly. But why is it? So first of all, the great secret is that a low-carb diet and fasting go brilliantly together. That fasting is really hard if you're eating a lot of sugar and breast. and potatoes and stuff in your normal diet, and then you try to go straight over to fasting. And so most people's experience of having a period with no food is pretty unpleasant because they're going straight from their usual diet with the sugar and the processed food and the bread and the potatoes and the rice and everything to fasting. That is tough. That is tough. That is painful.

but if you're eating low carb you know no you know you basically stay away from bread and potatoes and rice and sugar and you know if you stay away from sugar you're going to pretty much have to stay away from most processed foods too so sometimes people talk about processed foods as the big bad but but you can't really distinguish processed foods from foods with sugar very well there you know almost all processed foods have sugar in them so who knows whether whether it's processed foods that are bad or foods with sugar in them because they're almost the same thing. But if you stay away from sugar and bread and potatoes and rice, and then you can fast, and here's what I'll say, it's not like you're not going to be hungry at all, but it's a mild form of hunger.

It's not insistent hunger. So what do I mean by a mild form of hunger? I mean that you can distract yourself. If you have a good TV show, you're not going to feel it while you're watching the TV show. If you're busy with work, you're not going to feel it. In fact, I time my fast to be my big busy work days. You know, you don't have to do a regimen. The funny thing about these fasting books, including Jason Fung, is they have all these systems for the timing of the fast.

But the beautiful thing about fasting is you do it whenever the heck you feel like it. It doesn't have to be on any schedule, any substantial period of time. time with no food is going to help you lose weight and help, you know, improve your body system in a variety of other ways, too. So you don't have to do it in any regular way. You need to have enough discipline to do a certain total amount of fasting of periods with no food. But any old schedule you want, substantial periods of time with no food, make sure you're, you can, you've got a lot of stuff going so you can be distracted. You know, even then I'm, you know, if you...

So real quickly, when you talk about a substantial period of time, what are you talking about, 24 hours, 16 hours? Well, so you experiment on yourself and see what works. So one of the simple facts about losing weight, and there's some interesting science behind this, but it's a lot easier when your weight is high to begin with, than as you, as you you get closer to go away. And so at the beginning, just going off sugar is going to do a ton for you in terms of losing weight. And if you go off sugar and bread and potatoes and rice, you're going to lose a lot of weight, typically.

That might take you, let's say that takes you 10 pounds. Then you plateau. Then you can maybe get another 15 just from eating, But for a while, anyway, while you're an active weight loss, eating just once a day. So you eat once a day for, when I say once a day, you might have a four-hour eating window. And basically within the realm of low-carb, you basically eat whatever you want, as much as you want within a four-hour window. And that 20-hour period of fasting before the next day, you're going to lose a lot of weight from that. then, you know, if you plateau and you still, or maybe you plateau and you're creeping up a little bit,

then, you know, you can skip a whole day of eating. And the thing is, if you do it gradually like this, if you do it in those three steps, you'll find it isn't so hard, you know, because you've gone off sugar and, you know, some other carbs first, you don't even start trying to do the fasting until you've done that. And then because the fasting is associated with the low carb, it's easier. And then, you know, if you've been fasting for 20 hours for many, many days, you kind of have the tricks down and you've figured out how to distract yourself and everything. And it's not insistent hunger. So going a whole day without food when it's a busy day at work just isn't that hard.

So, Miles, at the beginning of this conversation, you drew a bit of an analogy between economic, as a topic and nutritional theory as a topic. And one parallel I see between these two things is that different economic theories or schools fall in and out of fashion in the same way that different nutritional theories fall in and out of fashion throughout the years. So we used to be told that cholesterol was bad, for instance, and now there's a general recognition that maybe it's not as terrible for us as we once thought it was. I guess I'm just wondering, like, what confidence can we have in this theory that you're talking about that this is the correct one if previous theories have been discredited at various times?

Well, you should only have a modest degree of confidence in it. I mean, definitely try it, but we've got to do research on all these things. So they're really, you know, this stuff is worth so much money for the federal budget. it is pennywise and pound foolish that the government is not spending a huge amount extra money on doing the kinds of trials on all kinds of variations on this theme to see whether they work or not. Basically, if you have only a limited amount of government funding for the kinds of trials where you have some people try one theory and some people try another and monitor them carefully and collect the data, if you only have a limited amount of government money, you're only going to test the orthodoxy. And so, you know, every once in a while,

a study that's testing something other than the orthodoxy manages to get funded, and we learn a lot from that. But, I mean, one of the best ways to keep from an exploding federal budget deficit in the future as the population ages is for us to actually spend more money on obesity research now. You shouldn't have confidence in what anybody's saying, including what I'm saying, without a lot more research. What I'm saying is I have enough confidence in this to know it ought to be carefully researched. Miles, final question here. So speaking of study design, You say, okay, there should be more research. You also hinted earlier in the discussion that in all the studies you've read on the topic,

you haven't totally been satisfied with the approach. So let's say the National Institute of Health were to come to you and say, Miles Kimball, please design the gold standard study that would help us determine whether a fasting regimen was truly a healthy and sustainable way for people to lose weight. What is the dream study that you would design? Okay, first of all, I'd love to do 10 studies. No one study can do it. But I mean, we can do this because I've had a little email exchange with the leader of the diet fit study. And he'd be happy to do this. He says, you know, if you can get the funding for me, and it doesn't have to be government funding. If there's if there's someone who has a substantial amount of their own money willing to fund this study, we will get it done. But what I would do would be, I would, First of all, rather than focus on low carb versus low fat, which is a way some of the debate has been framed, I would talk about having things low on the insulin index.

So the insulin index is a little bit like the glycemic index, but it's much more directly focused on the amount of insulin your body produces when you eat different foods. And that matters because insulin is a signal among many other things for your body to store fat and low levels of insulin and associated hormones are a signal for your body to burn fat. So I would focus it not on low carb, low fat, although those are related. I would focus it on a low insulin index. And of course, then the second thing you'd want to study is to really do fasting the way I would recommend, which is also the way Jason Fung recommends, where you have substantial

periods without food. So you've had several different arms of the study where people were trying different things. I'd try to see how much you get from the low insulin index. And so this is, it's not so easy to find data on the insulin index. And the easiest place to find it is actually on my blog, because I've organized it well. But, you know, take a look. And on the fasting, I mean, you know, Jason Fung is great, except that they get a little silly about. to have these different specific schedules, any old schedule will work. So anyway, we could get this study done, looking at fasting, looking at low insulin index. Let me, let me say one of, can I say one other thing about studies?

Sure. One of the things you've got to realize is many people who are counted as nutrition experts are relying heavily on, in the way they think about things, on mouse and rat studies. So I actually question that. Jason Fung, by the way, doesn't trust the mouse and rat studies either. But my logic is this. So take mice and rats that have been hanging around humans.

So, you know, 10,000 years ago, I don't know, I forget exactly how long we had the agricultural revolution and human beings started eating brain. And the mice started eating brain. and he started eating brain along with us. And so mouse generations are only a few years and rat generations. So mice and rats have had many, many, many more generations to evolve to be well adapted to a high-carb diet than humans have.

And so if high-carb is okay for mice and rats, I don't really trust that. Now, there are other problems like the rats that are used in studies are actually genetically weird strains of rats. So there's a whole other problem there. But even if you just take the general category of mice and rats that have been hanging around humans for 10,000 years, I worry that mice and rats are way, way better adapted to high-carb diets than humans are. And so if you say, oh, high-carb diet is fine for a mouse or a rat, that doesn't, I don't trust that as telling me it's okay for humans. That's interesting. I never thought about this idea that there have been so many more mouse and rat generations than there have been human generations since.

the advent of grains. Miles Kimball, fascinating discussion. I hope that you continue on this work and we get to read about it in your blog. I love hearing about new ideas and all kinds of categories and we really appreciate you coming up. Thank you so much. So Tracy, you know why I really like that conversation? Um, because you're fasting? No, it's not because it plays to my biases at all. I would never, that's never why I would like something. Of course not. I like the idea. Of course. No, I like this idea of, I feel like we're living in a golden age in which people with unconventional ideas on something could sort of plug away and make progress towards becoming more mainstream.

Like I'm thinking about the different economic ideologies that we see emerging, whether it's modern monetary theory and rethinking of deficits or people advocating things like NGDP targeting and rethinking the Fed. I kind of see an analogy here. It's like all around the world and probably thanks to the internet, there are people who say, you know what? I think that the current dominant ideology is wrong. And it feels like we're in a moment where they can make progress

in overturning conventional wisdom. Joe, this plays into your love of extremism in general, I guess. That sounds bad, doesn't it? But I guess I have to wonder, is this a good thing? Is it a good thing that we're talking about different sides of an argument, different extreme sides of an argument, rather than trying to come to a more moderate consensus? I don't have an answer, but it seems worth questioning. I guess in the end, maybe I just restated another way of saying it flattered my biases. Before we go, I mean, I have to mention my all-time favorite of food and economic story, which I think I've told you before, Joe. Go on.

Okay, so we talked about cholesterol, right, and how people used to think cholesterol was bad. Yeah. So in the late 1960s, the U.S. had an inflation problem, and the government was desperately trying to bring down inflation in all sorts of ways. And one of the problems where price increases were actually showing up or one of the things where price increases were actually showing up was in egg prices. And so, according to... to Robert Samuelson's The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, which is a really good book that everyone should read. The president at the time actually told the Agriculture Secretary that the Surgeon General should issue alerts about the hazards of cholesterol in eggs and try to get people to stop buying them in order to bring down the price. I remember you telling that story. It's so good. It's also so depressing because you just think about how many things in modern life.

have origins like that. Right. It's like you almost don't want to even go there because when you start peeling it back, you'll probably just be depressed left and right at how much conventional wisdom has such a cynical origin like that. Right. And for the rest of the century,

we all thought that eggs were full of cholesterol and they were terrible to eat. And nowadays, they're actually considered healthy. And there are people who still eat egg whites without the yolks. There are still people who won't eat the yolk, which just seems completely crazy to me. That's exactly right. All right.

Shall we call it for the Odd Lots Nutritional Hour? Yes, let's wrap it up. All right. This has been another edition of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall.

You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you can follow our guest on Twitter, Miles Kimball. He's at Miles Kimball. And you should follow our producer, Tofer Forges. He is on Twitter at Forges Tea, along with the Bloomberg head of podcasts, Francesca Levy at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. This is Tom Keane inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about making you smarter every business day.

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