The Checkup with Doctor Mike - The Problem With Health Podcasts, Calories In/Out, & The Carnivore Diet | Layne Norton

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

Layne Norton is scientist, author, and record-setting weight lifter specializing in nutrition. One of my favorite things about Layne is his commitment to debunking misinformation, whether it come from snake oil salesman... or me, which is actually the basis of our relationship. Layne called me out for some comments I had made in the past, and despite our initial adversity, I assured him we had more in common than he realized. So, I invited Layne onto the show to dive deep into the ozempification of weight loss, snake oil salesman, and the problem with modern day health podcasts. Follow Layne Norton of Biolayne here: Website: https://biolayne.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@biolayne1 IG: https://www.instagram.com/biolayne/?hl=en Twitter: https://twitter.com/BioLayne?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@biolayne 00:00 Intro 00:50 Weight Loss Medications 21:00 Why Misinformation Sells 31:00 Where Are The Experts? 39:00 The Problem With Podcasts 43:40 Health “Fads” 51:00 Mass Media Hypocrisy 58:28 French Fries / Reading Studies 01:12:35 Gameifying Healthcare 01:20:50 Distrust In Science 01:26:00 Nobel Prize Syndrome 01:30:50 Number Needed To Treat 01:37:00 Researchers vs. Clinicians 01:54:00 Dana Whte / Gary Brecka / Recommendations Executive Producer and Host: Doctor Mike Varshavski Produced by Dan Owens and Sam Bowers Art by Caroline Weigum

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Eligibility restrictions apply. See Golden Nuggett Casino.com for details. Please play responsibly. Honestly, if people employed Hitchens Razor, it would end them getting duped 99% of the time, which is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Lane Norton is a scientist, record-setting bodybuilder, and author specializing in nutrition. He received his PhD in nutritional sciences from the University of Illinois and loves to dunk

on misinformation. Given we both have a passion for setting the medical record, rate, and we've had a few minor social media spats ourselves. I invited him on the podcast to debate the validity of health care gurus, how to spot BS in the nutritional space, and perhaps more importantly, what his take is on the ozempification of weight loss. Please welcome Lane Norton or BioLane to the checkup podcast. Well, look, the world is struggling because of the obesity pandemic. I would say it goes further than epidemic.

My patients are struggling with it. I've put on some weight, post my boxing match. And you seem to have the key to help us with all that. How are we solving it? We're going to solve it today. Yeah, man, I mean, we kind of know what to do. Really? Okay, because I not too long ago had an endocrinologist and obesity medicine specialist

who said that the world has changed so much so that her belief that almost everybody should be on a medication to aid in weight loss, like a GEOP. P.1 medication. Do you, what's your take on that stance? So I think the argument for that, if I had to make the devil's out of the argument for that, would be we definitely live in an obesitygenic environment, which is, you know, we don't have to be as active that most jobs are sedentary now. And we have very free access to hyper-palatable, cheap, tasty foods that are very energy-dense. Even entertainment has gotten less active. Right. Before, entertainment was like bowling roller skating dating out now it's virtual meta quest video games online

poker like nothing is travel inducing anymore exactly so i think you know that's that perspective is in order to appropriately regulate our appetite in this environment you need help but i i've seen enough examples of people who can but it probably does require some training and mindfulness this. Now, when we talk about, like, how do we solve the obesity crisis? From a X's and O standpoint, it's very simple. We've got to get people in a calorie deficit and sustain the calorie deficit. You know, it's people, there could be a whole other kind of four-hour interview about like why calories in calories out is absolutely valid. And has been, in my mind, you can never really prove anything in science, but there's enough convincing data to

support it that I feel very comfortable saying, I'd bet my life on it. So it's like a gravity thing. Right. Law of gravity, law of calories and calories. Correct. If you eat, if you ingest carbons into your body, they don't flutter off into oblivion. Your body has to do something with them. And if you are losing mass, your body has to do something with those carbons. If you are gaining mass, your body did not create carbons out of nowhere.

So they came from somewhere. And I think the thing that really kind of crosses people up when charlatans will talk about as I say, well, you know, calories aren't actually a thing. You know, it's the amount of energy it takes to raise one, you know, one gram of water, one degree. You don't understand. Calories are referring to the potential stored energy in the chemical bonds of food that through the process of digestion, absorption, and metabolism is what captures that energy. And since you cannot store a bunch of ATP, which is our body's energy currency,

you have to store it as something that is, you know, not highly reactive because ATP is a high-energy phosphate, not stable. So you store it as triglyceride. I mean, you can argue, yeah, you store some of the glycogen, but it's very, very limited. You know, triglyceride. Scalphal muscle, liver, et cetera. Right. Triglyceride has almost a limited storage capacity. So calories in calories out is valid.

But, I mean, just telling somebody, hey, you've got to burn more, you've got to expend more calories than you consume. I mean, that's like telling people, well, in order to save money, you've got to earn more than you spend. Well, and people say, well, some people are, you know, very low income. Fair enough. But there's plenty of people who make a really good income who are dead broke or really in debt. Sure. And so why is that? I mean, you have the knowledge.

Because knowledge in itself is not enough to precipitate change. There has to be a behavior modification, and that's very difficult. And I think people, when I was younger, I would say around age 22, I had just gotten into bodybuilding a few years prior. I was going to grad school. I just got accepted in the Ph.D. program in Illinois. And I was very much of the opinion. I wouldn't say like extreme, but definitely to the side of if you're obese, it's a choice,

and you're lazy. And I met so many people who are very successful, who are obese, who are extremely hardworking in one area of their life. And it's like, is it really laziness? I don't think so. And so you realize that the longer I've been in this, I started out very much, like, I can solve the obesity crisis. Here we go. Eat these macros, you know? And you, like, but I'm, like, I came into it.

I never struggled with my weight. in terms of like too much body fat. I never had those issues. And frankly, I'm kind of robotic when it comes to my nutrition. That was never difficult for me. But then I think about some other stuff that I've struggled with in other areas of life, that it wasn't me choosing to be that way. It wasn't like I was making a choice every time I did something wrong.

It took a lot of behavioral reprogramming in order to get me out of some of those things. And so I think we need to look at obesity the same way. So when I got to grad school, it's well, it's all X's and O's. It's all biochemical pathways. And now I'm very much more, we need to adjust behavior and focus on the art of behavior change because just, I mean, quite frankly, if I had to go back now, I would do research in psychology as opposed to, you know, nutritional biochemistry. Because I think biochemistry is cool. I love biochemistry. That was my undergrad.

But, like, learning that, you know, whatever stimulates mTOR or what activates ACOX-1 or whatnot, like, that doesn't change anybody's situation. It's about... Well, it's a starting point. We have to know that before getting to the level of psychology. It's like the next level of your progression of an education system. Sure.

And so there was a really interesting systematic review that got published in 2020 out of the U.K., but I think from Oxford, and lead author's name was Shrekly. And they did something that not a lot of studies do. You have all these cohorts on, you know, people who try to lose weight or these randomized control trials, people who do lose weight. and we know that most of them put it back on. So they were looking for specifically people who had lost a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for years.

So basically your unicorns because depending on the metrics you use, I mean... Single digit percentage. Yeah, it's very low percentage. The vast majority of people who lose weight will put it back on. And again, I always say,

like, we don't have a weight loss problem. We have a weight maintenance problem because six out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount of body weight in their life. The problem is virtually all of them put it back on. So they were looking at, okay, who are these kind of unicorns who keep it off? And there were, and they looked at what characteristics, both objective and subjective. And there were things you would expect. Like, they tend to weigh themselves more often, kind of like a self-monitoring sort of thing.

They practice some form of cognitive restraint. So when we say that, meaning like, I'm doing low carb, or I'm doing time restricted eating. Or I'm doing time restricted eating. Or I'm I'm counting my calories. So some form of cognitive restriction with food, which is kind of one of those. You go, duh. There was an exercise. They tended to exercise more than other people. But one thing that I thought was really interesting, and this came up in this

objective stuff, was they identified most of them that they felt like they had to form a new identity. That, and if you think about, and I don't, I don't, I don't, want to get in, like, food addiction is very controversial, and I don't think there's really great evidence to suggest that food is addictive in the same way that, like, drugs are addictive. I do think that it can be very hard for some people who use food as a coping mechanism to get past that. But if you listen to the way addicts talk, I mean, like, they would say I had to get new friends. I couldn't go to the same place. Some of them had to change jobs. Because all that stuff,

they built their life around the context of the addiction now and again it's not the same thing but now imagine you know being uh you know a drug addict and saying well you know these drugs are are bad for you been doing too much but you know you can't just stop doing them you got to do like you know one or two or three times a day like that's a that's a that's tough and that's why you know eating disorders are such a very difficult thing to get past so I, one of the things I really emphasize to people is, hey, I am not for any one particular diet. You know, you, you, the research shows that all diets are pretty much equally terrible at facilitating long-term weight loss. But in another meta-analysis where they were looking at 14 popular diets, they did show when they stratified based on adherence.

So, doesn't matter diet. And none of the diets were better than the others in keeping weight off long-term. but when they stratified it based on adherence, basically a linear effect. People who were less adherent had worse results of the people who were more adherent had better results regardless of dietype.

So really what that says to me is whatever sort of methodology you choose, any of it can work if you can stick to it long term. So if you're doing something, let me back up. You have to restrict somehow, but you should probably choose the form of restriction

that feels least restrictive to you and I'm sure you've heard people say man I did intermittent fasting and I didn't even feel hungry it felt like I wasn't even dieting and then you heard people say I did low carb I was eating more food or they felt like they were eating more food

they weren't actually eating more energy but or people who go plant based and they say you know I was so satiated you know so any of those things can work and so I think we people get focused on the wrong things and this is where I think misinformation is very dangerous and I'll always tell people I think having guidelines is a great idea but I think having rules is a really bad idea because let's take

like sugar as a guideline so if you say you know I'm going to try to you know reduce my sugar consumption good guideline but if you say I'm I'm never consuming sugar well then you're going to do dumb stuff like not eat fruit you know because there's sugar and fruit and chemically, it's the same as sugar that you get out of the sugar, you know, well, sucrose, but it breaks down to glucose and fructose. It all turns in the same thing in the body. So, you know, this is where you get into the nuance of stuff where we have to be very careful with the verbiage we use because you can create scenarios where people will start avoiding

things. They're actually pretty healthy for them based on these hard rules. And then they start doing even crazier stuff, and you see it, like, I'll give an example, um, watching the Game Changers documentary, you know, they're pushing so hard for plant-based, and there's some great things about plant-based, but then they're showing them eating like vegan mac and cheese and vegan chicken wings and it's like, there's, there's a good way, and I'm not saying you can never have any of that stuff, but there's a, there's a good way to do it and there's kind of the wrong way to do it. And the same thing for keto.

I mean, you're not getting anything magical out of being ketogenic. What you're doing is, is it's a less palatable diet, so you eat less. But now we have keto ice creams that are more calories than the regular ice creams, right? And it's like you're kind of missing the point. So I guess if I had to sum it up for people, it's, you know, whatever diet you're going to plan to be on, like try different stuff and see what feels easier for you. And getting back to the weight loss medications, you know, a lot of people in the fitness industry, are very anti, you know, GLP1 memetics.

And, you know, I'm not, I think it seems like a great tool. I mean, you know, it's the most compelling data set we have on long-term weight reduction. Now, are there drawbacks? Sure. Name something that doesn't. Any drug has a drawback. And it's just about, like, doesn't make sense for the individual. Now, I will say, if you're taking a GLP1 memetic just to lose like five or ten

pounds like come on like piss off you know what i mean like just come on well unless they're diabetic yeah that's that's different that's different um but i also have an issue with the companies that own these medications now starting telemedicine services have you seen this where they will now prescribe the medicine through a telehealth visit to make it more accessible to you which to me is kind of ridiculous that's never been done in the history where the company manufacturing the medicine is now running giving it to you and prescribing it to you. Yeah, that's more your area. That's very aggressive.

But yeah, I mean, I've heard some people in like the medical field talk about how this stuff all goes down. And I'm like, yeah, that's above my pay grade. Well, the thing is the medicine is so good in the sense of effective and helping people lose weight, feel full. It's more of a behavioral modulator than it is. For sure. Like some kind of GI medicine. But in the end, how far do we go? on a more philosophical level

when it comes to medications because I do have certain patients and maybe in some cases they warrant these medications but they request an ozempic-like medication for weight loss. They request an attention medicine even though they don't have ADHD like Adderall

to perform better at work. They request testosterone even though their testosterone levels are normal. They request Xanax anytime they're anxious or to go to sleep at night to take Xanax. And then you have a person that's fully medicated And granted, not all those are the same and there are indications where they work.

But how far do we go until we say, well, look, there's a lot of things ruining our attention so everyone needs out of all now. And there's a lot of things working in our society against weight loss, so we need a weight loss medicine for all. Like, are we going too far in that wrong direction, or do you think I'm thinking about it incorrectly? I mean, I'll address the weight loss side of things.

I think, you know, I think for like very obese people have tried many different diets and this worked for them, I'm all for it, you know, and people, you know, the philosophical debate is like, well, should that be covered by insurance because, you know, they

did this to themselves, but then it's like, okay, well, what's the, what's the cost of them staying obese on the health care system, you know? Like, there's a lot of different. I mean, that's weird because if a smoker gets cancer, we still cover it. So, yeah, I don't know how that makes sense. Yeah, well, and the weird part is,

for years, people were like, when is the pharmaceutical industry going to come up with an effective obesity agent. And what's funny is, and supplement companies did this too, is they spent so much time focusing on the energy expenditure side of things. And then in the last five, ten years, we've realized no appetite is by far the biggest regulator of energy balance, by far. In fact, I always find it funny. Every once in a while I'll hear somebody say, well, I need to get on an Olympic or GLP1

moment because I have a slow metabolism. I'm like, well, then you're going to be really just. disappointed because it doesn't do anything to your metabolism. It's actually just causing you to eat less. I think what I would say and where I think it needs to go in this person's mentally educated opinion on this stuff is not just prescription, but also lifestyle modification in concert with it. Because here can become the real problem. It is a very powerful appetite suppressant. And so a lot of times, people just eat less of the stuff they're already eating.

And so that's not conducive for good nutrition either, because, I mean, are they going to pick, you know, lean proteins? Are they going to pick fruits and vegetables? You know, and so I think the problem becomes then what happens when they get off of it, if they ever get off of it, right? And so I think the goal should be, at least in my mind, hey, This is some training wheels to get you started. Let's just, you know, do you know Ethan Soupley?

So he's a Hollywood actor. He lost like 300 pounds. He was in, you'd probably know, he was in, remember the Titans, American History X, my name is Earl. Now he, like, he was very obese. Now he looks like just a jack dude. And he said, I love this quote.

He goes, you know, if the house is on fire, just get out of the house. We can argue about why the fire started later, but get out of the house. And I view like these medications as like, hey, that's going to help somebody like jumpstart getting out of that house, right? But eventually, I think the goal would be to lead that into like lifestyle modification and behavior modification because I don't think anybody wants to be on those sorts of medications long term. Maybe I'm wrong. I think it's an optimistic view.

Yeah. And I share your optimistic view. I'm not critiquing it. it's going to happen. I'm not saying it's going to happen. And the reason why I think if I was to be more realistic in this scenario is I would think we're giving someone a medication to help regulate their appetite, meaning that they're going to feel fuller, they're not going to eat as much, because we're saying that it's too difficult in our current society with everything currently going on, genetics, et cetera, they're struggling to lose weight. And then we're hoping that they will eat less. And it happens

because the medicine does that, it happens. But then at the same time, we're hoping that because they're going to meet with a nutritionist and a physical therapist or perhaps a personal trainer, that they're going to start working out. But they're not taking a medicine for those things. They're taking the medicine just to not eat as much. Right. And yes, we're going to have better results if they have a personal trainer, if they have a nutritionist and all those things.

But the question is, how long are we able to give people that level of support and how quickly will they pick it up? or do they need a medication for those things as well? Yeah. These are hard questions, difficult questions. I mean, you know, yeah, that's about my pay grade. It's above my pay grade too. I like theorizing on this kind of stuff.

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the uncomfortable truth is until, and again, people try to tie like fault and responsibility together and they're really they're not the same thing like if you're somebody who grew up with horrible parents and they were terrible to you like that's not your fault like you went through some horrible stuff that's not your fault um but if you're going off and now you're abusing other people that what happened to you is just a context like you have a responsibility the responsibility is going to be on you to fix it your parents aren't going to fix it Or if something happened to you, you can't undo, my friend John Deloney says, you can't, you can't edit sentences that already have periods at the end of them.

You know, all you can do is write better sentences in the future. And I think people really get uncomfortable with the idea of like personal responsibility. And that's why some of the stuff that's out there, and I'm not saying people who go on these drugs are not taking personal responsibility. Of course. but in the broader context you have like a fire hose of misinformation out there

of this food's doing this and this food ingredient and this and I put up a post the other day I'm like hey guys what do you think is actually making us sick okay seed oils it's not lectins? Yeah or lettins or you know this one

weird ingredient and your bananas are like blending your fruits you know or is it the fact that the average based on based on I think it's production data, I want to say. The average calorie intake in the United States is about 3,500 calories a day, and we do less than 20 minutes of physical activity per day. Like, I know where my money's at, right?

Like, sure, you can find an isolated nutrient that has... Every food, every nutrient has both good and bad things. Like, you can always find that. But like, let's not miss the broad picture here, right? but I think that sort of narrative doesn't get a lot of play the idea that like hey like it really is overconsumption and people not doing enough because people hear that and if you're obese or overweight or you know maybe you're just not where you want to be it feels like blame and shame in fact lustig on huberman's podcast the first thing he's one of the first claims he said was I'll paraphrase because I don't want to I'll probably butcher it something in effect of like calories in calories out was created by the food industry, it wasn't, to like basically shirk responsibility for what they're doing. And that, you know, it tells you if you don't, if you can't lose weight, you're a glutton, you're a sloth. That's not what that's saying. That's not what

that's saying. It's, it's, you aren't a glutton or a sloth just because you became overweight or obese. What it's saying is for your given level of energy expenditure, you were exceeding that in your intake. That's all it says. That's all it says. It's not a judgmental math problem. No. It's us as humans adding that to it. Right, right.

And, well, the funny thing is that, you know, this is like people who are like, it's actually sugar's fault. I'm like, so wait. Okay, so you're not lazy or glutton or sloth for eating too many calories. But how is this different if you're eating too much sugar? Please make this make sense. But again, I think it's kind of people want to blame the government or they want to blame the food companies.

or whatever. And I, you know, I kind of view that the way I view news, which is like, hey, they're just responding to demand.

This is basic economics to be quite frank with you. Like, of course food industry wants you to buy more of their stuff. Like, hey,

if you want them to make more healthier, lower calorie options, buy more of that. Like, if everybody's, and I say the same thing with social media content,

people like, man, you know, this click baity content, it's all track. I'm like, yeah, but that's what you guys consume.

They have. Like, that's why it's popular. If everybody tomorrow was like, we're not going to stand for these idiots in supermarkets with their shirts off screaming about individual food ingredients. If everybody stopped watching that,

guess what? They would change their content. And it's the same thing with these food companies. Like, they would change what they produce. But I feel like these health gurus have changed their spiel over the last five,

10 years. because they like to prey in areas where there's not perfect understanding and usually when there is the human psyche involved there's almost always imperfect understanding because the human mind is so complicated and difficult to manage so they like to throw their hat in those situations

but then as they see a medication like Ozempic comes out and it is functional they want to vilify it or move into a different space and then say okay well medicine hasn't tackled this so that's where we're going to play in the sandbox do you feel like that happens oh absolutely I mean, you just look at the buzzwords they're out there.

I mean, it's funny because when I did a post on this, and I was like, I'm not saying that these things themselves don't exist or are BS, but 99.9% of the claims made around these things are BS. If I hear inflammation,

if I, first off, most of y'all don't even know what inflammation really is because you're like, oh, my knee hurts. So that's the same thing as systemic implement. No, those are two different things,

by the way. I had somebody tell me, like, you hurt your back because you ate too much sugar and you were inflamed. And I'm like, boy, did you get the cart behind before the horse? Like, this isn't how that works. So inflammation, gut microbiome, pretty much anything, gut, if they use that word. And adrenal, you know, autophagy. These are things where it's like very emerging evidence. and because it's emerging,

it's easy to make claims about it. And it was interesting. Somebody sent me a video of Mindy Peltz, who's like, I don't know if you've seen her. I feel like I've heard the name. She's a chiropractor who's made a lot of claims about fasting. I think she did a video where she said fasting increases testosterone in 1,300%. Oh, wow.

I'm like, all these IFBBB pro bodybuilders, you know, not eating. Yeah, what are they doing? Yeah. Um, and it, was a study with injecting disaster at the same time? Well, so I, I, I looked up all the relevant studies on it. I'm like, ah, it shows it doesn't really have an effect of anything. It lowers it a little bit, you know. Um, she also sells a wand that you put in your water that makes water more absorbable.

That's my favorite. Oh, uh, so I asked the person, like, what, what made this so convincing? Like, I'm not, I'm not judging. Like, I want to know. The person who was impacted by it, you mean? Yes. Because they're like, it's so convincing. And I'm like, what was convincing about it?

They're like, well, she just spoke so confidently. Confident science words. Yeah. Some buzzwords. Concept that is accurate is happening there. But it's not exactly tied to the product or mechanism that they're talking about. Well, that's, you know, like a video I've reviewed of Gary Brecker. I'm like, he's literally just like randomly spewing out like mitochondria.

Ah! autophagy like like these don't even make sense the way he's putting him together right but because it sounds sciencey and he's speaking confidently people will buy into it and I think the very difficult problem people have I'll never forget Alan Levitovitz ironically he's a religious study scholar but he said um the reason people have difficulty identifying real experts is because real experts actually don't sound super sure of themselves because they understand that almost every question or subject that there's a lot of nuance. Like when people ask me, is this bad? I'm going to be like, well, I mean, for who, like, yeah, how much? You know, most things operate on like a Gaussian

distribution curve, you know, like we could go into that. Like, there's too little and too much. Like, the body, the body's like Goldilocks, like the three bears. You know, it likes it just right. You know, If you get too, like, inflammation is a great example. People think inflammation, bad, bad, bad. No, some inflammation good. Like, you need some inflammation. Like, you are supposed to have some inflammation. Like, I know it's a little bit different subject, but like even for building muscle,

there's like an optimal inflammation level. If you get too high, it impedes the ability to build lean tissue. If you get too low, same thing. And I would bet that there's probably a lot of things like that. Again, I'm just speculating, but things like cancer. absolutely i mean your immune system functions through inflammation right the way we rid ourselves of infections the reason we get fevers and everyone wants to lower their fever because fever is a sign of inflammation but that could be good why are we removing it right and we've seen that i've been

flow with even like musculoske skeletal stuff where it's like inject to put a steroid to remove inflammation now it's put in pro-inflammatory substances to create inflammation it's like we need to you know be confident in saying i don't know and celebrate those people who say i don't know And I tell every time I do a seminar, I'm like, you're going to hear me today, one of you ask me a question or more than one. And I'll say the three magic words, which is I don't know, which actually should give you more confidence in me, not less. I think when you go to a really good grad school and do like really legit research, if you're

with a good advisor and I was very fortunate out of fantastic advisor, a lot of that gets beaten out of you because you can't even breathe a claim before they go, where's your citation? Oh, nope, that study was in cows and that has not really... Where's the outcome data? Yeah, and part of our, like, the first thing we had to go through, we had a qualifying exam when you're about a year

or two in, which is a four-hour oral examination in front of four professors, and they're going to like, this is how it started for me. They go, let's talk vitamins. What's your favorite? Vitamin D?

And so they go through like a bunch of different questions and they push you on every subject until you don't know it. Like they will find your breaking point and you have to know when to say, I don't know. Like I remember they asked me a question about acid-based balance in the lung and I started like drawn on the wipe off board and after like 30 seconds, I turn around. I go, look, I'm on level with you guys. I don't know this one. And they're like, okay, move on. And they actually at the end of it, they said, you know, you're one of the best students we did the last few years because you knew what you knew, but you also knew when to say, I don't know. and, man, I just wish more people could do that.

I wish the opposite. I wish more people were able to identify the people who are saying, I don't know, and celebrate it. Well, that, and so I'll give people some quick tips on identifying experts. Very rarely will an expert use words like best, worst, always, never. You're not going to hear them say many superlatives. it's not going to be you know another red flag is if if whatever the person likes or is promoting if that's the answer to everything I'm sorry it's not going to be the answer to building muscle and losing fat and preventing cancer and like like you have to understand like I'm not saying

that there aren't diets that are good for a lot of things but the idea that there's just one best thing for everything like no probably not right and so i think there's you know a series of lifestyle habits and behaviors that we're pretty confident are are conducive for for health overall but yeah it's not going to be like the panacea like everybody wants and then i think the other thing i heard that um really made me go huh that is true is what's really difficult for people is if if you and i are having a conversation if a subject comes up it'll be pretty clear to each of us who is more knowledgeable on the subject pretty quickly right um but if you if somebody's watching

two people disagreeing both of whom are more knowledgeable on the subject than them it's almost impossible for them to identify who is more knowledgeable of the two and i think that is the struggle that we're in right now on social media because anybody can create a platform and so what i would say to people is real experts don't talk like used car salesman okay like that's not and and it's it seems weird because it seems counterintuitive because they actually sound unsure in certain ways but that is who you should look for usually a real expert if you ask them a question a lot of times they'll ask you questions back to get context or if they give you an answer it's very contextually dependent like when people ask me a question I'm like every question you ask me is probably going to be

at least a five-minute answer. One, because I like talking and I'm long-winded, but two, because I want to make sure that I cover the appropriate context so that you don't take something away from that or infer something that wasn't there. Because you're worried about how they're going to make use of that information. Right.

And what I get so often is people will, like when I call somebody out, like, well, isn't their message at the end of the day just to eat less crap? Isn't that what we should focus on? Like, you know, isn't that, aren't you guys on the same side. I'm like, listen, I'm sure, I don't think, I used to think, okay, anybody who's spewing BS that they're driven by money and it's just this evil like money grab, certainly that is out there, no question. I think most people, it's just because they're tribal, like people are

tribal by nature. Like, look how impassioned people get about politics. Most people aren't making money off politics. It's their identity that they've built around it. It's an identity, exactly. And I think even with diet, like somebody does a diet, they like it, then they try to get a bunch of their friends to do it. One, because they want to help their friends. And two, because people like to do stuff in groups, right? Like, are you drinking? Well, I'm not going to get a drink if you don't get a drink. We'd like to do stuff in groups, right? And so I think people are actually kind of insecure about their decisions and when they can get more of their friends to do it or people with them or identify a group that they're doing stuff with, it makes them feel better.

But then they go a step further. And it's like, well, I need to explain what I'm doing is actually the best thing and be self-righteous because go-home team, you know? And yeah, like I said, just look at how impassioned people get about sports teams, you know, just to see how tribal people can get. And there's no logic behind that the players get traded the next year. They're like, no, no, no, this is still the best team. And it's like, wait, you just had the players that were on the other team that you were

saying it's the worst team. but now because they're wearing a different jersey. Your favorite player is now playing on the team that you say you hate, right? Exactly. But yeah, that's a big struggle. And one of the things I spend a lot of time and my content on is really trying to talk about,

hey, here's how you identify these people because, you know, I'm, I want to say lucky because I didn't work hard for it, but I'm fortunate in that, like, I can, somebody makes a claim about a study cool all right let me find the study pull it up and like again like lustig

he made this claim about some study where they for six months either gave people a liter or cola leader of whole fat milk wasn't whole fat at the semi-skim water or you know artificially sweetened beverage and it was like artificial sweetening group

gained two kilos the sugar sweetened beverage group gained 10 kilos so I'm like man this is this is in six months. I'm like, man, that's a lot in six months, even for a liter of soda. So I went looked up to study because I, you know, I'm like, I want to see this for myself. And of course, it didn't say anything even close to that, right? It was like the, the soda group gained like a kilo and a half. The whole milk group gained about the same. The water group gained like

half a kilo and the diet soda group basically gained nothing. And it's like, but if you, if you don't know how to find study, you don't know how to look them up. But do you think that's the problem with podcasting these days? Because I have a huge problem with it, so I want to see if we see eye to eye with it. I think there's a couple problems. The first is, I do, at the end of the day,

I think there is some inherent responsibility on the individual to have a degree of skepticism. Which is missing. Yeah, I did a story series. I think, because people don't want to stay engaged. They don't want to keep their brain on. And so I said this, I'm like,

you can't turn your brain off. Yes, if somebody has a medical degree, we have a higher level of confidence they know what they're talking about. But I'm sure you know physicians who, you know, some turds don't flush. You know, like somebody's got to finish last in medical school, you know?

And medical school could have been 50 years ago. That too. Which is a very different medical school. And some people learn how to take tests. They memorize stuff. And then they, but they don't ever actually truly have a focus on learning, which there's a big difference. Because learning, in my opinion, is kind of a mindset,

whereas getting good grades is kind of conducive to memorization. Now, memorization can be useful. Like, you can pull stuff, but it's hard to, like, get good logical skills with just memorization. So when somebody makes claims, it's hard for you to be discerning. Even PhDs, in the exact fact, field being discussed, you can't turn your brain off because I've seen them, some of them make

insane claims. Even from, and I used to have a joke, I'm like, hey, behind every insane nutrition claim, there's somebody from Harvard, you know, supporting it. So even a PhD from Harvard, you can't turn your brain off. You have to have a little bit of, you know, skepticism. Yeah, of course. You do. And if, if it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Well, how do you think podcast hosts should handle themselves, I guess, in selecting their guests? For example, you saw Dr. Gundry in my podcast. The reason that he really came onto my radar was he wrote his book and some patients brought it up to me. And then I saw him on the Lewis Howe's podcast saying his line about grapes being equivalent of a sugar bomb and you might as well eat at a Hershey's bar. And I even message Lewis about that. I was like, hey, man, like, do you think it's great that you're having him on? you know, that sends the wrong message. And he goes, well, I asked some follow-up questions.

And, you know, some people gave me negative feedback when I had you on my show because you recommended childhood vaccines. I'm like, you've got to see the difference between that. Or if someone comes in and I'm not a medical person, or maybe they're out of the expertise that I practice in. Sure. And they say a claim that goes against the current body of understood science. I would approach it with skepticism that has nothing to do with what they're talking about.

Like if he made the claim that grapes are the equivalent of a Hershey bar, I would ask, but wouldn't, aren't there some things about grapes that are healthier than a chocolate bar? That doesn't require medical education to push back on that. But no podcast hosts are doing it these days and they're creating a field that they're giving space to create more pseudo experts. You know, a lot of people ask me this to, and full disclosure, I like Andrew. I like Andrew Huberman. because actually the way I got in his podcast

was I called him out on something and he actually changed his view on it and like said, oh, I wasn't aware of that data. Thank you for making it. And then we started a back and forth and then he wanted to have me out. So I do like him personally.

And I always say, if somebody's open to changing their mind, I'll give him a lot of leeway. Somebody like Thomas DeLauer, for example, who I used to call out a lot. And now I'm like, oh, you know what? He is a good dude who kind of got sucked

down the wrong path and just happen to get a platform like through working hard making good video content like in terms of quality but he's trying to get it right like he's changing his mind and so

if somebody's like intellectually honest like that I am going to give them a lot of leeway right so when it came to Lustig I do think there is some responsibility on the podcast hosts

yes but also like you know if all if people were like, why didn't, like, this person fact-checked all this? I'm like, do you know how long it takes me to back-check one of these podcasts? Like, but a lie gets halfway around the world, but the truth is still getting its shoes on. But then after the fact, like, I've not published multiple interviews because I've had experts come on that I either couldn't, not beat in a debate, but like they were just saying so many wild claims. I couldn't even begin to chase each one down because everyone that I challenged, they brought in four more that I didn't have.

had to chase, or they were saying things that were meaningful to them about their family, that if I started attacking their beliefs on it, it looked like I was attacking their family. So I just don't publish them. I take that loss. Yeah. But I mean, like, I look at someone like Dr. Huberman, and I'm like, look, I want people to get excited about science, and this is so good. We're missing this.

Yeah. And then we see these situations where misinformation starts putting itself in, the promise of hyper-optimization. I don't know what's your take on biohacking, but to me, it's presenting a dilemma that doesn't exist in real world. It's like it's not valuable information that people can make change around.

Do you feel that? I think... So my thing is, like, are there things that will optimize things? Probably, sure. I think the problem is people don't know how to weigh what's most important, you know?

like because you only got so much like mental space you know like there's only and if you're trying to change a bunch of little things to get a big impact you're going to be pretty disappointed right like hey if you want to do an ice bath and you want to like you know do some of this other stuff in infrared sauna whatever like hey cool I'm all for but like don't spend an hour in an ice bath in infrared sauna and meditating if it means you're not going to go exercise that you know No, no one does that, right? What's that?

No one does those things. Oh, meditating and doing... No one's doing the infrared, the ice bath. There's, you could count... Well, if they do, you know about it because they post about it on social media. The week, they do it. Right. Because we're putting on Apple Watchers to track steps in our heart rhythms, and then no one counts

them after two weeks. We're putting on fitness trackers that you said on previous podcast that are not really accurate when it comes to calorie burning during exercise. They're giving false alerts about cardiac things that they're then bringing into my office and I have no idea how to handle it. But yet we have experts that are saying these are the things. These are the miracle things. If you go into ice bath under this protocol and it's like, dude, take your protocol and shove it. Because it's like it's not real.

I practice real medicine. When I say real medicine, it's so imperfect and so shitty. And I see how hard people's lives are and what variables are in their lives from their mental health or social relationships, whether or not they wear it. seatbelt, how fast they drive, and then I'm saying I'm going to control everything in your life because you took a chilly bath in the morning? Do you know why it's chilly baths? This is my theory why people are doing the baths now? I think it's because it looks cool for social media to be real. Cryotherapy created too many problems and was too expensive for them to run and people are having too many effects because it was so extreme that this is the downgrade where they could

still make some money. Yeah. I mean, there are good randomized control trials that do show, well, sorry, you can't, the randomized controlled trials, but they're not placebo control because you can't placebo for cold water. But, like, there are some benefits, like, soreness reduction, inflammation, but for how long? Right. And when I say for how long, I don't mean how long in the moment. I mean, how long after you become cold adapted to this thing, does that affect stay?

I think what I tell people is, I kind of use the comparison of, like, let's say all this stuff is I want to pick up as much weight in boulders as I can get or much weight in rocks as I can get. I'm going to focus on picking up the boulders first, right? Because I can, like, I get a lot from my big bang for my buck by picking up a boulder. If I can get some pebbles after that, cool. I'll take them. But I'm not going to drop the boulder so I can pick up the pebbles.

And I think that is the problem is when you say this is important and this is important and this is important, people don't know how to like what's the most important and so one of the things i'll tell people is i kind of boil it down into like i'm still working on this pitch so forgive me i like but there's i think there's kind of like six pillars that i would say hey this may not be perfect but it's going to get you 95% of the way there to optimal which is don't eat too much for your given amount of energy expenditure basically don't become obese stay at a healthy body weight um don't smoke don't consume or very much limit your alcohol consumption and same thing goes for drugs

exercise vigorously sleep try to be consistent with it too like not just the duration but also the times and then the last one I've added is managing your psychological stress I think that is the older I've gotten

the more I feel like I've seen that be very pervasive that affects it's kind of like it affects all the other ones tip of the pyramid that comes down right that's affecting sleep why do people do drugs I mean like I don't think many well adjusted I mean other the people who get addicted to opioids and then switch to heroin I don't think like a healthy well adjusted low stress person goes you know heroin I'd love me some of that you know this a lot of this stuff food problems a lot of the stuff stems from like unmanaged psychological stress and so

like I actually had somebody asked me on a podcast this is kind of a separate thing but they asked me what was the most unhealthy thing you did in your 20s and I'm trying to think because I didn't really drink I didn't go out and party

I was doing my PhD I was doing bodybuilding like I was I was like very consistent with nutrition and exercise I'm like what is the most I'm like gave too much time to people who didn't really care about me or people who

weren't good for me, you know, like, that was the most unhealthy thing I did. And I think we really undervalue that. Like, if you look at the metrics on stress and mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer, I think for a long time, people try to separate neck down. It's your brain is connected to your body and your body's basically a bag of meat. And if you punch the bag or poke the bag or cut the bag or burn the bag, your brain goes, owie, you know. And now we know that it goes both ways. This is bidirectional, you know, like what's happening in your body affects your mind, and what's happening in your mind affects your body.

And I think that's a big one that people really overlook. And I think the reason is because it's freaking hard to manage psychological stress. It is hard. And I'm somebody who am just now feeling like, I'm starting to get the point where I can actually, like, self-soothe without, like, something really bad happening and me having to text five people or, like, punch a pillow or, like, like, go outside and yell. Like, like, that's taken me a long time, you know, and I think there's a lot of people who it's, my friend John Deloney, again, he's like, alcohol is great at what it does. He's like, yeah, you'll know it up and you'll, you'll, it's great. He's like, and it trains people that like, hey, this is a, this is a great solution in the short term.

And then slowly it destroys your life, you know, and so like getting back to that, if people could just do those six things, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying what we need to do is actually pretty simple, but those things are. But simple doesn't mean easy. Simple doesn't mean easy. And people confuse the two. And it's the same thing with, well, it can't be just as simple as calories in calories out. It is. It is.

That doesn't mean it's easy to actually execute. It's very hard to execute, obviously. But it's also hard to make a simple message be sexy either. Exactly. And what do you sell from that? Right? I've had people tell me, like, why would I buy any of your stuff? You're just going to tell me to eat less calories.

Like, you know, I'm like, yeah, I guess I am. You know, like, I don't know what to tell you. Like, you know, people say, well, why would I take one of your courses or why would I use your app? Or why would, like, you've put all this information out there. I know, I know. But this is consolidated, you know, like, this is consolidated. you know like this is consolidated well you're you're taking the simple information and presenting it in a way that's accessible that people can access it in a way that is meaningful to them just because

something simple doesn't mean it's accessible either exactly just like we said it's not easy well and if you look at kind of the charlatan playbook of how do you get people one and marketing 101 will tell you this and i have to this day i've hired a couple marketing places and i've fired all of them because it was always the same we need to we need to like get something that really like makes people more afraid and i'm like yeah i'm not gonna do that there's there's enough of that stuff well that's trust hacking yeah yeah well they tell you don't sell the solution sell the problem you got to sell the problem and if you watch these guys all have the same playbook guys and gals sorry not i'm not sexist um these guys and gals all have the same playbook it's

create problem, find something scary, and then have solution. And the solution is what they're selling. Right, of course. And fear-based content, all you need to do is look at what does well in the media, what the media shows. It's like you would be convinced that we live in a cesspool that is the worst time. This is not going to be popular with people out there. I'm sorry.

we live by all objective standards in the best time period to be alive in history. Pre-COVID, violent crime was at its all-time lowest. You have people living longer than they've ever lived despite all the metabolic problems

and whatnot. Quality of life, even amongst, like, poor people is better than it's been. And, but if you watch the news, you'd be convinced, like, we are in the apocalypse. Like, this is a post-apocalyptic world.

but that's because that's what gets eyeballs and that's what gets eyeballs in social media. The media is just another form of a hedonic treadmill where we just adapt really quickly to the level of comfort we see ourselves in and that started with us being like oh, why are the Kardashians complaining? They have multi-million dollar houses.

What do you mean? You think their emotional stress is easier because they're wealthy than you? Maybe they have easier access to get a therapist. therapist. Maybe they have easier access to a doctor. But besides that, accounting for everything else, their emotional pain is just as real, even though it seems like a not serious problem to you. My first therapist, who was a close friend of mine, when I first went to therapy in 2016, she was describing me as having PTSD and saying I'd been through trauma. And I was like,

But that's like for soldiers and stuff. You know, like I would always try to diminish it because I kind of felt guilty. And she goes, Lane, your body doesn't know the difference. Yeah. Like, yes, if you went through those things, that would also be traumatic. But what you went through was traumatic for you. The body, like what do they say? The body keeps score, right?

And I think I'm not an anthropologist and I may be speaking. I'm speaking out of my area of expertise. could be wrong. But I think I heard somebody who is well versed in the area say the human brain is great at doing what it's supposed to do, which is constantly scanning the environment for threats. A thousand or five thousand years ago, your threat was can I eat today? Is something going to eat me today? Or is that tribe going to come kill me today, right? You didn't have time to worry about, you know, my spouse didn't validate my feelings earlier. You know, like, you just didn't have time for that kind of stuff.

Like, if you, if you complained about, you know, something that we complained about today, people would go, huh, what, you know? And I always say, like, whatever you're stressed about, if somebody walked through that door with a gun right now, you would not be stressed about it. Like, it would, and so people's minds, when they, when they reach a certain level of whether it be wealth or success or whatever it is, you know, there is no finish line.

There is no pot of gold where you just ride happily off of the sunset and there's no stress. Your mind is always going to find some threat. And that's why, again, you point out the Kardashians. It's like, oh my God, there's so much bickering and caddiness. And it's like, because, like, they don't have to worry about that basic stuff.

And so the mind is just going to go, well, Suzanne was said, mean things behind my back, right? Sure. And so even if you're like, if you're somebody who's working, like if you're a doctor and you're in the ER and you're working for 12, 14 hours a day

and you're like exhausted, you don't have time to deal with that kind of stuff. Like you just like your mind can't have that capacity for that kind of stuff. And so I think you're right. People feel like, well, if I just had that,

like the, no, you've got to retrain kind of the way your brain works, which is, I think we're always going to have the inclination to have these feelings again. I'm not a psychologist. A lot of this is coming from my friend John.

We're always going to have those sorts of inclinations. It's walking it back and kind of going, what do I know to be true, right? Like what is actually a threat? What has actually happened? And so when it comes to this stuff, when people will say, let's take one of the popular things,

oatmeal, right? So oatmeal, oatmeal's got glyphosate in it, And it's got, you know, it's got, um, and fruits and vegetables have glyphosate on them and all. And I go, okay. All right. Let's say, it's showcase true. All right. Fine.

Doseage makes the poison. But let's like, let's just forget all that stuff. If we look at the human, as I like to say on my channel, the human randomized control trials. If we feed people this stuff, do they get less healthy or do they get more healthy by objective measurements? Oh, they get more healthy. And then the cohort studies, the longitudinal data, they get more healthy and they live longer, have lower risk of heart disease,

all that kind of stuff, better metabolic health. Okay, so either there's one of two things here that's possible. Either the glyphosate in there, I'll say is, by the way, do you think that they're doing those studies with organic fruits and vegetables and oatmeal?

Because they're not, okay? So that either means... And it's not like organic means pesticide-free either. That's another great point. In fact, many of the pest, organic pests, it just means they use organic pesticides, many of which have a lower LD-50 than the inorganic ones. Well, it's like the whole thing of like no nitrates added, but we added celery root powder. That has a ton of nitrates in it. Right.

So, you know, there's other one or two things happening with this. Either it's just not in an amount of dosage that has a negative physiological impact or it does. and fruits and vegetables and oatmeal are so amazing that they completely not just offset it your health improves and so what I'll tell people is like hey I'm open to anything and I'm also open to the idea that like any food does have could have a negative effect

but when you focus on individual pathway and that's what these we were talking about this via DM that is the playbook for all these guys and gals it's whatever identify food or food group I don't like, or that doesn't fit my narrative, find individual ingredient in said food, show rodent studies. Don't tell you that they're rodent studies. And mechanisms, a mechanism would be like, this thing activates this pathway. Well, here, we can do this. We plan to do a back and forth. I'm going to play a podcast host who's allowing someone to speak on a

subject. And I'm going to kick it off here. Welcome to the Live Forever podcast. And, you know, I heard that there's a food that you find very unique to increase our lifespan. Tell us about that. Yeah. So, French fries. McDonald's French fries. But I've always heard French fries are bad. Oh, but that's because you just don't understand the biochemistry enough. Tell me, tell me. So McDonald's French fries are rich in an ingredient called TBHQ, which activates the NRF2 pathway, and that is involved in turning on genes that are involved in detoxification and eliminating reactive oxygen species, and it's been shown to increase autophagy, decrease fat. It also activates ACOx 1, which is the rate limiting enzyme and fat oxidation,

and it's been shown to extend lifespan and reduce the incidence of cancer. Wow, so TBHQ2, you said it was? TBH, TBHQ, TBHQ, can increase lifespan. Yeah. And it's not, in French fries. Yeah, McDonald's French fries. Wow. So this whole time I've been avoiding French fries. Now, what actually happened,

by the way, all that stuff, I'll send you the citation. That's true. So that's all true. What I didn't tell you was the dosage you would need you'd never get from eating French fries.

And these were all done in rodent studies, right? Okay, so you can activate a pathway, big deal, right? and I can do the opposite thing. I can make any food seem horrible. Sure. I can pick out, you know, like some product in meat and make it seem scary. I can pick out something in vegetables and make them seem to go, defense chemicals, you know. You can do that for anything.

In fact, I even did a post, I'm like, I'm going to explain how you should eat poop to lose fat. and the one of the richest short one of the one of the biggest components of human fecal matter is a short chain fatty acid called butyrate and buterate in research studies has been very clearly shown to improve insulin sensitivity decreased fat mass increased fat oxidation and increase metabolic rate and what I'm not telling you you'd have to eat 100 pounds of poop to get that much okay and that most of these were in lab rat studies and so the same thing, these guys all do the same thing, whether it's trying to pump up something or make it seem scary, pick out isolated ingredient, talk about a pathway it activates, and then scary with it. I mean, Paul Saladino did this other day with broccoli. I said, well, it has isosyothanates. I think I said that right. And that can block iodine absorption. And that is going to lead to reduction in thyroid function, slower metabolic rate, and weight gain.

Now, here's the problem with that. You are going from A to Z, and what you don't realize is the body is not just single pathways. Everything affects everything. And this is one thing my PhD advisor was great about. He's like, oh, because I'd say, well, what if we gave this thing

and it activate this? And he goes, yeah, but it also does this opposite thing over here, right? Like aspirin. Aspirin has both anti-coagulant and pro-coagulant qualities. But obviously, the anticoagulant qualities are a greater effect because mechanisms or individual pathways, when we're looking, those are just individual. But when we look at an outcome, like a human outcome data, like say weight loss or fat loss

or reduction in cancer, that is the summation of thousands of pathways. And maybe a good, maybe a good comparison would be like take a mutual fund. A mutual fund is hundreds or thousands of individual stocks. Now, I could say, Mike, see this mutual fund? Don't invest in this. Look at these two stocks who went down 50% this past year. While not telling you that overall the mutual fund is up 30%. What do you care more about?

The two stocks that went down or the overall mutual fund that's kicking ass? You care more about the overall mutual fund, right? But these guys and gals, this is what they do, which is, oh, be scared of this thing. while, again, oatmeal, fruits, and vegetables, like not telling you the human outcome data. So, like, the broccoli thing, back to that, okay. So when he makes these claims, I go, gee, I wonder if we have studies looking at cruciferous vegetable intake and thyroid function.

Oh, wait, we do. And it shows no effect. And I wonder if we have, okay, well, then he said, lead to weight gain. Okay, I wonder if we have studies on weight gain and, oh, wait, we do. and they don't show weight gain. If anything, they show weight loss. So what I'll tell people is if you do happen to be one of these select elites

who click on a citation, okay, or find a citation, and the reason I say that is because we fully cite, like everything on my website is fully cited and they are clickable links. Less than 1% of people will click a single link, okay? But if you do happen to do that, look and see the study, the click claim they're making, does the study directly support that?

So he's saying, okay, broccoli is going to cause you to gain weight. Like, that was the end that he's kind of scaring you with. Do the studies he's citing support that? And if there are studies examining that, does it actually support what he's saying? And most times when it's like a really, you know, elaborate, crazy claim, it almost never. It almost never supports. You know, if you need to read the study, you can just read the results and the conclusion, and you'll still see that it doesn't match up.

Well, and then you get into the acute stuff, too, like people say, well, you know, you don't want to have, you don't want to have carbs because they activate this pathway and insulin goes up. And this, I'm like, listen, I could scare you about any macronutrient that way because fats impede flow mediated dilation. Flow mediated dilation is a risk factor for heart disease. Protein activates mTOR. So, okay, can't eat protein, can't eat carbs, can't eat fats. All right. Everybody just sit there and photosynthesize and hope for the best. Yeah, it's really messy.

Who do you find, as you mentioned Saladino, you mentioned Gary Breck, are there any other examples of you that comes to mind? I mean, Gundry is one of them, who's very, you know, focused on, I mean, again, grapes versus Hershey bars, I mean, we just need to go to human randomized control trials. Do people who eat more grapes gain weight? Oh, wait, no, they don't. Do people who eat more processed chocolate bars gain weight? Yeah, they do.

Okay, so these two things are obviously not the same. just because they share an equal component sugar does not make it the same right so look i'm going to be a person who's watching this and is not aware of the differences between two experts arguing who i am not smarter then i'm watching dr gondry i'm watching dr valardo and i can't tell who's right what do you do in that scenario if you're a regular person what advice you have for them i would say less on what they're saying and more about how they're saying it um you know again i didn't watch all of the interview um but i know dr ballardo is probably going to be providing a lot of context and nuance and probably not making super strong statements about various things and that's what

you look for i'll also say who stays focused on the actual claim and who kind of like tries to move the goalposts around and move the goalposts exactly right um because there's so many times where i'll be in this stuff like the seed oil thing's a great example right so i did a post this is going to get me in trouble because people the anticidal yeah tell us about the seed oil oh my god they're like the craziest brain dead group of people i've ever come across and like listen like yes you again you can find studies where oh they fed polyunsaturated fats and increased lipid oxidation, what do the outcomes show? The outcomes show that if you overfeed polyunsaturated fats, there's negative outcomes. That goes for almost anything, though. What happens when you trade it out

one-to-one, energy-wise, with saturated fat? Because if we're going to compare apples to apples, it has to be substitution in nutrition. Because if you overfeed anything, there can be, other than maybe vegetables. There can be negative consequences. Just very hard to overfeed vegetables, to be honest. I mean, water. Right. There you go. Potatoes, maybe, you know. So, well, when you exchange

them one per one, I haven't seen a study yet with hard outcomes that shows that polyunsaturated fats are worse than saturated fats. If anything, it's a neutral or positive effect. But what will happen

is they'll pull up like a randomized control trial or something like that, And here's the other thing is like, I love randomized control trials, but for some things, they're not necessarily appropriate or the best evidence because when you look at something like cardiovascular disease, this is a lifetime exposure risk. If you're looking at a two-year randomized control trial, which is a really long randomized control trial, that's a snapshot. Like it takes decades for cardiovascular disease to develop unless somebody has some kind of like genetic defect. You know, cardio like, you know, having really high LDL, it's not the difference between dying at 50 and dying at 80. It's a difference between dying at 80 and dying at 73, you know? And so people don't realize this stuff.

And so they'll pull up one of these studies. They'll say, well, there was no difference. But you just moved the goalposts. Because before it was seed oils are horrible for you. And now you're just, well, okay, they're equivalent at worst based on this, right? But because people aren't following the actual claim, they go, oh, that person made a good point because it's this like political polarization of it doesn't matter whatever thing I believe in I'm going to argue it's the best thing possible right so you got the like the carnivore pro saturated

fat camp and then you do have people who are like on the side of like there's no downsides to polyunsaturated fats I'm like hey like I hold open the possibility there can be downsides to anything right but there's also probably upsized to anything like saturated fat we know that it can increase testosterone like if you increase your saturated fat and intake. Okay. I mean, you could argue maybe testosterone is a negative in some context, but okay, well, there's a checkmark in the, in the positive direction, right? But then how about the negatives over here? And so I think the problem is people have a really hard time holding two seemingly opposing things at the same time, right? Which is like with polyunsaturated fats, I don't think

they're innocuous because added oils are the biggest source of calorie increase in the last few decades so they're not innocuous but it's not because there's something inherent about polyunsaturated fats that makes them horrible it's the fact that okay i got a salad but you put like five tablespoons of oil on it right like it's just easy energy to over consume but i think people again they want to have a bad guy they want to have something to villainize right and i'll even say like listen i think you probably should try to minimize saturated fat but i'm not saying like don't eat any saturated fat like that's not a really reasonable expectation for most people and at the end of the day like okay like sometimes there's also like mental health of like people like why don't you abstain

from alcohol i'm like because sometimes i want to have a beer of my buddies you know like it's like okay one of the other things i'll say is like the stress that you put yourself under from agonizing about all these details is probably killing you faster than if you just didn't get this stuff just right you know but again you know it's either getting back to your original point sorry i scrolled they kind of move the goalpost or then they appeal to anecdote which is look at my shredded six pack or look at my um you know my my um my calcium score or you know whatever and it's like listen we know people who smoke every day till the 90 okay i think people have a very they don't understand

how risk works and so this causes a lot of confusion as well risk doesn't mean it can never go the other way okay I'll never forget my favorite example

of cherry picking is I was looking at a meta-analysis of the risk of smoking on adenocarcinoma and you know force plot so you got your line in the middle which is basically no effect either way

to the right was a negative effect of smoking on end of carcinoma to the left was a positive, right? Almost all the studies, far right of the line. Like, I think the overall effect was like a 700% increase in the risk of adenocarcinoma. But there were two studies

that were to the left of the line. If I just pick those two, and then I present them and like, hey, here's these citations. Smoking is actually good for it inocarsinoma, right? So when it comes to risk, it is a probability game. I'm not saying that you,

You can eat low-saturated fat and never have a heart attack. People eat low-saturated fat all the time and have heart attacks. I'm not saying you can exercise great. You can eat right. And you may die of something like cancer or heart disease or whatever when you're 40 or 50. Which is why I think those ice baths and continuous glucomacemeter's if you're not done, make no sense to me. Right. Yeah.

Well, you're majoring the minors, you know? Yeah. like it just we're really nitpicking there things that don't matter in the grand scheme of things unless it's for entertainment or because you genuinely enjoy it i mean like some people enjoy the tracking aspect of it and doing well that's great peter attia actually made a good point in this to me he's like you know for some people the cgm he's i don't want to butcher what he said so peter if i get it wrong i apologize um he's like you know it kind of gamifies it for some people you know and And if you're keeping your blood sugar under control, you're probably, for the most part, controlling

calories by default. Now, you can hack your way around that, right? Like, if you're pouring bacon grease in your coffee, like, yeah, you know, you may not be spiking your insulin, but you still may not lose body fat, you may still be metabolically unhealthy. And it's an extreme way to do it because it costs more money. Right. It's invasive because you're creating an open, not that it's super invasive, but it's just

like, it creates a lot of false promises to people where they're like, if I only had access to the CGM, I'd be so healthy. Right. No, and that's, and I think that's the thing is we've, because things are so good, because we know what to do, people want the secret, you know, like, what's, I'll people all the time, like, hey, can you, can you, what do you do for diet? I'm like, uh, exactly what I'm talking about. What do you, well, like, oh, hang on, let me get you the ace that's up my sleeve, right? Like, what do you do for training? I'm like, uh, you've seen it. Like, I post my stuff, you know?

Like, this is, I don't have, like, some elaborate thing that I'm keeping from everybody else. Like, you know, this is the stuff I do. And, but I think that that is so appealing to people because it plays on that, like, oh, if somebody has something, I don't, it's because they know some secret knowledge or whatever, which is why the easiest thing in the world of fake, well, the first easiest thing in the world of fake is a success coach or business coach. That's the easiest thing. The second easiest thing is being a fitness expert because if you just look the part, if I take somebody with absolutely no nutritional knowledge and I put them up against somebody

who actually has a degree but doesn't look the part, I bet you 90% of people will go with the person who looks the part. Probably. And it's kind of sad. Now, listen, I'm all for practicing what you preach. I think that instead of one of the things I've told to people in social media like, you know, behind close doors is like, hey, if you want to reach people, like,

looking the part would help you. You know, like, I'm not saying it's fair. You have credentials and whatnot, but. It's practical. Hey, if you can't, if you can't beat them, beat them at their own game, you know. But, you know, if it comes down to it, would I rather have somebody with straight teeth who's never been to dental school or the dentist with crooked teeth operating on my mouth? I'll take the guy who went to dental school.

Thank you very much, you know. Would you rather have the heart surgeon who's had a heart attack before or the 70-year-old who never went to med school, but he's got a zero calcium score, right? Like I know which one I'm going to take, but I think with fitness, people just look at it differently. You know, it's very strange. Well, because it's usually people that are not very well-versed in the space and they want quick answers. And anytime, like, I have friends in the boxing world that perhaps, you know, don't get a Ph.D. in nutrition that ask me questions. And then I don't give them a firm answer. Like, man, you don't know what you're talking about.

I wish you were like that chiropractor on YouTube that gives me all the answers. Right. And I'm like, if I was, I would be giving you the wrong answers. Because it's a context. But they don't believe that. They're like, no, it just, you, you guys are always wrong. The medical system has failed me so much. You're the problem. that's that is a big part of it and I listen I do think the medical system has failed a lot of people um in so far as and I'm like I'm not saying I have the answers either because I don't

but we've created kind of the system where not good doctors but just guys who kind of want to get their paycheck just try to see as many patients as they can sure and it's you know they're not really hearing the complaints they're not really hearing the patient you know even i did a like i have ADHD and i was doing a telemedicine call because i had to like i i was off medication for a long time i took it till i was 25 and then i felt like i could manage it and then when i had kids and my more businesses and my life got hectic um it was like ah and it really has helped but like the phone call i went on i got charged 300 bucks for it and the person spent literally five minutes with me and I pretty much directed the whole thing.

And I'm like, well, what is this? You know, like, you didn't really ask me any relevant questions. Like, I pretty much, they're like, they pretty much were like, what do you want to take? And I'm just like, okay, you know? And so, like, I do see that side of it. And so people like this, and you did a great video on this, pray on this. Because if you felt unheard, now there's somebody saying, I hear you. I see you.

Screw these guys. All they care about is money, while also not disclosing that you're a multi-multi-millionaire based off selling nonsense. You know, that's like when people go on and on about big pharma or the weight loss medications, I'm like, you're a fitness influencer

who has a 15% discount code to a fat burner in your bio that doesn't work, by the way. And somehow you're better? than Big Pharma? Like, how does this work? You know, like, yes, do I think Big Pharma has done some crappy things

and, like, is in it for profit? You'll get no disagreement for me. Yeah. Also, I think a lot of people who sell crap do shitty stuff. Yeah. And by the way, way less effective, right? So, but it's just, it speaks to that.

It's the new communication model because if you look at, we're using, health care as a proxy for this conversation. But you could insert any industry here. Government, distrust is all time high. Police, distrust all time high. Health care.

Literally, any industry has had these same problems. It's just we kind of all need health care. So we are all involved in it's a touch point for all of us. You know, if you ask people, I go to the library, I'm sure they have problems with the library as well. It's just most of us don't go to the library. You know, I think, and I've had. this people say this like it's so hard to know what to trust one study studies says one thing one

studies says nothing funding funding all I'll say is like hey if you actually read the studies they're very rarely rarely have I read a study and I read the full study and I don't go I understand why they saw what they saw right a great example it's like everybody's asking for my opinion on the you are what you eat a Netflix documentary so I read the study this reference the twin study i think it was a great study cool design but i understand why they found what they found it was it because meat has well short term but also it's not because meat has some inherent like property and the atoms that make it bad it's the omnibore group was eating significantly more saturated fat significantly less fiber and significantly less polyunsaturated fats

and calories too didn't they say that they were like 200 calories more per day now people would be like well they should have control more of it listen you can't control all the variables all right And that wasn't the question they were asking. They were like, if we give people access to this food, how do they behave, right? Totally reasonable question. But it's not, the study is not the problem. It's the claims that are made around those kinds of studies that are the problem, right? Because I even said, this is a cool study.

I like the concept. Like twin studies, they eliminate a lot of bias, right? But I understand what they found what they found, right? And so it wasn't, that study wasn't saying, at least to me, the results, the data in that study doesn't say, He doesn't say meat, bad, plant, good. It says more saturated fat, less polyunsaturated fat, less fiber, not optimal, right? Or not good for LDL cholesterol, right? And metabolic health.

So, unfortunately, COVID was like the perfect stage to create a lot of distrust in science. And again, people have very difficult time holding, you know, two seemingly, opposing things in both hands, which is, the vaccine appears to not be completely innocuous for some people. Some people appear to get myocarditis. There's some side effects. True. Also true. The vaccine drastically reduces your risk of being hospitalized if you get COVID. And unfortunately, again, the prospect of risk. If you're playing a betting game, you're probably getting the vaccine. But you may get really sick.

And people who are pro-vaccine don't want to talk about that because they don't want to steer... They're like, well, you know, we have to look at, like, it's kind of Machiavellian. The ends justify the means. We want to get more people vaccinated, more herd immunity, et cetera.

And then the anti-vaccine people, they don't want to admit the data. I mean, I think it was on Rogan's podcast, where, I forget who it was, but he was like, well, like, yeah, there's a risk of myocarditis, but the risk is way more if you get COVID. And he's like, that's not true. He's like, sure it is. Here's data, you know?

I think that was Sanjay Gupta. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, again, people don't understand the concept of risk. And what they, the problem is with the entire thing is we were trying with science, when we look back decades later, we'll be able to say, this is what we should have done. We were trying to build the ship while we were sailing the ship. Nobody knew what they were doing.

And I did not agree with many things the government did. I didn't agree with the lockdowns, especially the extended lockdowns once we had widespread testing and vaccines. It didn't make sense to me. But I do understand the perspective of everyone's scared. How do we protect the most vulnerable people? I get that. And I think what people really don't want to admit, God, this is going to get me in so much trouble.

What people really don't want to admit is, hey, no matter what decision got made, some group of people is getting screwed. Small businesses got screwed by extent of lockdowns. But high-risk populations got screwed, right? Like, we know that. It's just, unfortunately, you saw, recommendations and then those recommendations change very quickly and I think that created a lot

of distrust and also again the polarization of people on one side pro vaccine not wanting to admit any possible downside to the vaccine because they're scared that oh if we give an inch then people will like the pro the anti-vaccers will be right and the people on the anti-vaccine inside, not wanting to admit there could be any positives to the vaccine because then it takes their identity away. And it's just, this is why everyone hates me because I'll do all this stuff, right? But I don't think anyone would hate you for this. This is the transparency.

I think it's important. They will. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the outliers have the loudest voices. Yeah, I've literally seen people say, I would never trust anything you say because you got the jam. Yeah, but who's saying that? Yeah, you know who's saying that? Because I don't, like, and I say this as someone who's also very impacted by this.

It's something you mentioned earlier about us being on the frontier and being afraid of something eating us or where we're going to get our next meal 5,000 years ago. That negativity bias that you're talking about in our minds is absolutely real. There's a great book called The Power of Negativity that talks about this because we as humans are so much more impacted by negativity because that is what is going to end our lives. The positive stuff is nice, but it's not what's going to decide whether or not we live or die. So we're much more worried about the negative stuff. In fact, if you want to have a good relationship with your partner,

it's not about doing nice things for them buying them flowers, taking them somewhere. It's avoiding the bad things. It's been studied. The less negative, horrible things you have happened in a relationship, the more likely you're staying together. You could do all the amazing things. It takes one really bad thing to destroy the whole thing.

That's just how the human mind works. So when someone writes a negative comment to you that you got the jab, screw you, it's easy for our minds to say, that's the way the majority feels. And you bring up a great point, which is this is why no one is immune from cognitive distance or blind spots. It's a human thing.

Here I am talking about that very thing and here I am getting focused on a negative comment when probably the overwhelming majority are very positive. And you're right. It's so funny how that works, right? And that's why I tell people, here's another really big one.

just because you're really smart in one area does not mean even in like very related fields of science all you need to do everybody out there go look up Nobel Prize syndrome and you will be absolutely floored it's like almost half of Nobel Prize winners

brilliant people the smartest minds on the planet believed in absolute buffoonery in some other area of science like crystals, alchemy, eugenics, like the problem isn't that being smart stops you from being cognitively dissonant. It actually, people who have the worst cognitive dissonance are really smart people. Because they can convince themselves.

Because they'll use their own intelligence as like a, well, I wouldn't believe in bullshit. That wouldn't get me. And again, thank God I had a really good PhD advisor who just beat that out of me. repeatedly of like yeah of course you would believe in BS like everybody does right and so i mean think about like you probably cringe at some of the stuff you believed five or 10 years ago right and same thing here right and so that's why i i tell people like get focused on asking the right questions on being skeptical. Like I think just, I think just having a high degree of skepticism.

Like, honestly, if people employed Hitchens Razor, they would get, they would end them getting duped 99% of the time, which is, um, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And though, that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And another one, I'm going to adapt it from economics. Thomas Soul once said, whenever somebody makes a claim, it's compared to what

at what cost and what hard evidence do you have. So if somebody's saying, carnivore diet, look how many people are thriving on carnivore diet. Compared to what? They were eating garbage before, the standard American diet.

Yeah, they got healthier. Cool. That doesn't mean that that's optimal. Like if you tell me, hey, the only diet I've ever been able to stick to is the carnivore diet I'm down 50 pounds. If that really is the truth, okay, well, then you're probably better off in the carnivore diet.

But do I think it's better than a comparative diet on energy balance? It also includes fruits and vegetables and fiber. No, of course not, right? But people can't connect those two, right? And like when you talk about at what cost, well, people don't eat individual nutrients. They eat foods. And when you're eating one thing, it's usually because you're not eating something else, right? So everything is a cost.

And so that's why these cohort studies are helpful to see, like, if you look at these studies, because, you know, people say this, the research is so divergent, but it's really not. There are some common threads, which is eating enough fruits and vegetables and fiber, lean proteins. You see protein intake in healthy and unhealthy kind of all over the place. To me, it's more about, like, the overall energy and what's their sources of protein, because if you look at Mediterranean, like, you know, that's. That's one of the, I mean, you could argue Mediterranean diets, the healthiest diet that we've identified. And that's not low protein. That's like modest to maybe moderately high. But, you know, people will say, well, you know, Western American diets, they get too much protein.

Yeah, but look where they're getting it from, right? They're getting it from a lot of processed meats, a lot of high energy foods. So what are the common themes that we see? Well, it's people who eat mostly unprocessed food. And again, not because there's anything. inherently evil about processing, it just makes food super tasty and energy dense, right? People who eat minimally processed foods, lean proteins, roots and vegetables, those are kind of the commonalities we tend to see.

And then there's some other, like, obviously, healthy lifestyle behaviors. But, like, that stuff counts for a lot. But any variation of that, right? So if you go from eating a bunch of processed foods on a Western diet and you can, you just start eating, you know, meat, again, I think there's some significant downsides there, but it's probably better than what you were doing before. Yeah. No, it's very true. It's also why I like to highlight for people the need to give up control, the sense of control, because the idea that you can control everything within your diet and your outcomes and all that is so flawed. Like,

even my control over what I recommend to a patient about what impact I can have is so, so little. Like when I introduced the concept of number needed to treat to my patients, are you familiar with that medical? I'm actually not, no. So it's something interesting where in every study that we do when we find out something quote-unquote works, it has the, you know, a P value of knowing how statistically significant it is, which is not the same as clinical significance, which news, yeah, news is going to totally mess that up. And for people at home, a quick explanation of that is if something is statistically significant, that means like it's probably true whatever it is that they're doing but it doesn't mean that it's

actually very valuable clinically significant clinically significant like an example would be I can really lower someone's weight clinically significantly would be you know 5% of their body weight 10% of their body weight statistically significant I can lower someone's weight by one ounce and it could be statistically significant if your variance is low enough yeah exactly but it's not going to be clinically significant it's important to note that because news articles will write this new drug statistically significantly lowers. It's like, but it's useless. I would never use this thing.

Right, right. So that concept introduces number needed to treat. So how many people do we need to treat in order to prevent one case of cancer or one death with this drug? Oh, interesting. Okay, that makes sense. And when we look at number needed to treat,

it's actually quite sad. I'll bet. Where you, in most cases, like treating someone's blood pressure, treating someone's cholesterol, switching them to a vegan diet to prevent one case of colorectal cancer. 5,000? Think about how hard it would be for me to change 5,000 of my patient's diet from omnivore

to full-on vegan to prevent one case of... And then people yell at me, why are you not mass recommending that to all your patient? I've lost my patient. 5,000 of them are not going to switch over. I've lost their trust. I've lost their communication to push that one thing. And that comes the difference between population medicine and science versus individual what we're going to do with our patients.

And that's why the carnivore diet individually could be great. But population-wise, it's not what we're going to recommend. And that's where all of the science is kind of lost, because that transition from population, general evidence to individual is going to be very, very different. Well, I think one of the biggest problems is the over-generalizing results and over-generalizing recommendations. And I'll say, hey, listen, your anecdote is absolutely valid for you, okay?

And when we say this, people think what we're saying is, oh, everybody's metabolism is different and genetics. No, no, me and you are 99.9% identical genetically. Like, there really isn't that much different. Like, glycolysis is still glycolysis, right? Beta-oxidation is still beta-oxidation.

There can be subtle polymorphisms, and in rare cases, big time differences but those are very very much exceptions okay what we're saying is what actually clicks to get people to make behavior change is very different from person to person right so if for whatever reason the carnivore diet was the thing that got it to click for you hey I'm not saying it was bad because if you're down 50 pounds and overall your metabolic health better is it the best thing you, best thing you could have done? No, but who cares about the best thing if it, if you couldn't stick to it. Exactly. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And so like my thing

will be like again, getting back to you, choose the form of restriction that feels least restrictive to you. I don't know how carnivore feels least restrictive. Like I don't get that mindset, but, but if it worked for somebody, hey, more power to them. But what I'll say is don't assume that what worked for you what trip that compliance algorithm is going to work for somebody else right like a great example is i track my macros i track my calories and i pretty much eat whatever i want like i i make sure i get enough fiber in and i limit my saturated fat but within those contexts like i have some ice cream every day for the most part you know like i'll sweat it like i also expend a ton of energy because i train two or three hours a day but like i don't sweat it like i'm not going to get bent out of shape

about a piece of pizza or something like that. Like, it's not a big deal. You know, because 99% of my diet is great. But, you know, for me, I would rather have the restriction of, okay, I'm going to track. And a lot of times I'll weigh my food if I have access to a scale. If I don't, I don't get real bent on a shape out of it. I just estimate. But I don't, like, I don't sweat it, right?

And that tracking doesn't seem, like, that doesn't seem like a big mental pull for me. Right. but some people that tracking feels really restrictive and it like it makes them anxious they don't like it and then they do intermittent fasting and they go why did nobody tell me about this miracle diet you know and then they look at somebody who's doing tracking and going why are you do why are you torturing yourself with that but it's different like yeah someone might like it doesn't it doesn't torture me like people all the time I had a um somebody who's close to me It's like, oh, don't you hate my tracking that much?

Isn't it just like, ain't, I'm like, no, it doesn't bother me at all. Like, well, like, I know, like, if you can't track it, it drives you crazy. I'm like, not really. I just estimate. Who cares? I'm pretty good at estimating. And if I'm off a little bit, I don't care, you know? Again, for me, that form of restriction felt the least restrictive.

But for somebody else, it may feel like a really, really high degree of restriction. And so again, individualized, but do not generalize what worked for you to everybody else because it's not going to be. I think it's fine to talk about what worked for you, but saying people should do this or this is the best or like that's where we get. I think that's where me and these other folks, that's where we're going to have problems, right? No, I completely agree. And what I have to applaud you on, obviously your knowledge of nutrition is amazing

and the evidence that you provide to the general public is amazing. Like, amazing even for me, I get a lot of value from it. But what's even more amazing and is rare is that despite not being a clinician, although I guess with coaching, you're I guess somewhat of a clinician, meaning for those who are at home are wondering the difference between a clinician and researchers, clinician interacts with patients and actually sees the outcomes of what they're doing with the patient versus a researcher is doing lab work, bench work, research work. for lack of a better word and we're doing the recommendations that the clinicians are

basically are executing yes you're thinking a lot like a clinician and i worry that the people who do really well on podcasts these days and the people who have the loudest voices on social media are all researchers or their clinicians that cater to the ultra rich where they give them unlimited attention charge them 200,000 dollars a year for their care and that's not realistic right So I am glad to see someone in the space who understands that when they say something, it has a very big impact on someone's life, could be positive, could be negative, and that's why at the end, it depends. So I applaud you for thinking in that way because most people don't.

And I can, you know, all the big names, the Hubermans, the Peter Ortiz of the world, I do not feel like they function in that practical real world setting because on social media, it's hard to stand out in and get an. audience with saying it depends and there's new ones you know I do think Peter does a pretty good job of that I think you know with I think it's less about that and more about like just selection bias which is like the people you're seeing right so yeah when I was a biochemistry student I was very focused on pathways I'm like you know like I can remember um I used to talk on the message boards and there was this this is I'm going to date myself this is like back in the early

thousands, right? And there was this message board in the fitness industry called mind and muscle.net and a lot of really bright people were on it. And I remember I found out in my biochemistry class, caffeine inhibits glycogen phosphorylase. So I'm like, we should be taking caffeine after a workout to help with glycogen replenishment. And somebody on there was like,

hey, you're missing that caffeine activates the sympathetic nervous system and whatever effect on glycogen phosphorylase could be way offset by the activation of the central nervous system like breaking stuff down. I was like, oh, you know, because I was so focused on a mechanism, right? And then, you know what really made a big difference for me? It wasn't doing my PhD.

I like, people ask me like, do you, did you need your PhD to be able to do what you do? I think when it comes like looking at research studies and really objectively breaking them down, yeah, I do feel like that was, if you haven't done research studies, it's hard to really know some of this stuff. like a perfect example is like some of these studies like this meta-analysis that was done a while back by David Ludwig that kind of showed like, oh, short-term low-carb does not increase energy expenditure, but after 17 days, there's a switch and energy expenditure increases. And when you look through the methodology, you start to realize, oh, well, it's because all the studies after 17 days are using doubly labeled water, which overestimates energy expenditure for low-carb diets, right?

So, like, but if you don't know that method, like, you have no way to vet that, right? So I do think there was parts of it, but the most I learned was working with people. And I got to that just like by accident, you know, so I was writing articles for bodybuilding.com.

I posted on their message board, like, started in 2002, started writing articles for them that year, not knowing what the hell I was doing, right? I cringe at some of the advice I gave. But people started like asking me for nutritional advice. And so, like, in 2005, I took on my first online client.

And, like, after, I don't know, three years, it was a full-time business, basically while I was doing my PhD. And actually, looking back, it was the absolute best thing I could have done because over time, I realized, oh, crap, I can give them the best thing to do. And it doesn't matter. I got to figure out how to get him to do it. You know? And so it really made me much more practical about stuff.

And what's funny is so many times if I call it like Jason Fung or I call it like any of these physicians or MDs. I said, well, you know, this person has, you know, seen this many patients and blah, blah. I'm like, okay, guys, I worked with 2,000 people over the last 15 years, one on one. And my team, like my team byline coaching team, has worked with over, I think, like, 5,000 people now. And then our app, Carbon Diet Coach, I don't have the exact numbers, but I know, like, overall has probably had well over 100,000 users. Like, I've seen a lot of actual clinical, like, clinical outcomes, right? And it's why I modified my recommendations on so many things because it realized, like, oh, this works on paper. I can't get people to stick to it, you know?

And so you have to be more practical about stuff. And I'm like, yeah, I've got plenty of before and afters and plenty of like stuff like that I could beat my chest about. But I'm not doing that because what you're doing is you're basically saying, how dare you question me? Look at these people I've helped. Yeah. I don't care how many people you've helped. If you say something that's false, like, and if I say something that's false, somebody call me out on it, you know? and gosh, I forget what it was recently.

I can't remember what it was, but I said something and a researcher in the comments actually called me, oh, I said the average fiber intake in the U.S. is six grams. And she was like, that's actually incorrect. It's 13 grams.

Here's the citation. And I pinned the comment. I was like, you're right. I had that one wrong. I'm sorry. Thank you for correcting me. Like, hey, if you show me, I'm wrong. I'm going to change my tune, right? Because like, I don't want to be the like delusional

person who's still running around saying the thing. You want to get down to the bottom of it. Well, here's the other thing. Here's the other part that ties this together. People forget, I'm an athlete too. Like, I want a world championship in powerlifting and I competed as a pro bodybuilder. I want to do the best thing. Like, I want to like, like, if I'm not holding out of you guys, like, I want this information, too. Like, if I'm wrong about something in nutrition or whatever, I'm actually thrilled about it because if you're, consider this. If you're right about everything, you can't improve.

There's no room for improvement. So, listen, I'm not going to pretend I don't like being right. I like being right. I'll do cartwheels in my office when I'm right, you know? But if I'm wrong, then that's cool too because now I have the opportunity to improve. And so, like, listen, there are some things that I've changed my mind on, and it depends on, like, how convinced I was, how strong I felt the evidence was, versus this new evidence that's opposing, you know, I don't get really excited about single studies. But, like, for example, I'll just do this one. I was of the opinion that LDL cholesterol didn't really matter, circa 2005 to 2012, I would say, even, like, 14.

I was like, you know, it's more about the LDL to HDL ratio. It's more about the overall LDL HDL triglycerides, like this whole thing together. And then all the Mendelian randomization trials came out. I'm like, oh, this is like a lifelong randomized control trial. And not only does it show it's an effect, it's like a straight line through LDL and risk of, you know, cardiovascular event.

And I'm like, I got to change my opinion on this, you know? and yeah, even like when I got to grad school, this is a funny story you might appreciate. I was like, yeah, high fructose corn syrup, worst thing you put in your body. Absolutely. Poison. In fact, it is definitely more lipogenic.

Like, look at these studies in lab rats, showing like that they get way fatter than these other rats. And I was at a nutritional sciences mixer. I had just gotten there. And the guy who was doing a lot of that research, his name was Nakamura. Mani Nakamura, he was having a conversation with another professor and the other professor was like, yeah, well, we know high fructose corn syrup is, you know, like very causative for obesity. And mani goes, yeah, because it's, it's easy to overconsume. It's calorie dense. And he goes, but your research, he goes, yeah, we just, we showed like when, like, we just wanted to prove a concept, you know, yeah, we fed them 70% of their calories from pure fructose. There is not a single, even if you, you, ate nothing but soda, drank nothing but soda, got no other. You would get 50% or 55%

fructose. It's not physiological, right? And he was like, yeah, I don't think there's anything magical about fructose, like at least in like a human context of what you can actually consume, right? And the other thing I'll tell people is like, do you really think the human body is this fragile? Like, is this fragile? And then when it comes to some of these advocates for these different diets and they said when they like gary tombs is a great example well every randomized control trial that comes out well they just didn't do it the right way it just didn't do it this it wasn't longer none of people and i go i want to be like if your hypothesis is so fragile that it requires these very very very very defined circumstances to be true good luck

generalizing it. Do you really think it's true? Like, okay, well, maybe low carb is better in space. Like, okay, maybe, but like, we're not in space, right? Yeah. Yeah, and I just think that's, that's, that's the thing that happens so often is like, you know, you post about studying and they go, well, it was this, it was that, it was that. At the end of the day, if I wanted to be that way, man, I could find holes in any study, right?

But I'm like, that's why you look at that. the consensus of the data. That's the most important thing. Yeah. Wow. We got through a lot. I feel like my blood pressure is a little higher. I feel like I only answered probably like three questions because I run off so much. No, because we're very passionate both about the same thing. And again, it's great to see someone in the research side also take into account the clinical side and understand the selection of it all. Like even Dr. Gundry sitting there was saying, you know, all my patients follow my diet to the T. And I'm like, do you think if I gave that to my random group of people that comes in

because they're having an issue would follow that. He goes, try it, see if it works. I'm like, I can tell you it's not going to work because there is the world that he practices and or anyone that pre-selects their patients where the patients come to see them and are very passionate about what they're doing. It's like saying someone that hires

a personal trainer works out more than someone who doesn't. Yeah, they just signed up for a class. Of course. So, Mike, I'll give you an example of my own select. bias driving my recommendations and realizing that I was victim to it too so I would talk about flexible dieting a lot because again like there were so many claims that were getting made about all these different nutrients sugar's bad fructose bad yeah and again I wasn't saying that they they were good for you or anything like that but I'm like hey based on the data like this isn't

more fat storage promoting than anything else like just look at these this data because I originally thought that and then I tried to prove it I couldn't prove it you know Um, and so I started talking about if it fits your macros, flexible dieting, because this worked for me. And then I'm like, but, and I thought this was going to be the fix for everybody, not because it was metabolically better, but just like, it can be so much easier for adherence for everybody. You can eat whatever you want, right?

And of course, people who came to me were already sold on this. Yeah. So my dumbass thought that everybody would be like that, right? And that's selection bias. So like, again, we're getting back to like, Andrew and Peter, like, well, those are the clients are seeing. So, of course, that's going to be their experience, right? And that's, of course, going to be kind of the recommendation.

And so same thing for me. So when people say that, well, look at all the lives that I've changed. Look at all the patient. Yeah, the low carb doc, they came to you, already sold on low carb. They're in the honeymoon phase that they have, of course, right? Or they were already doing low carb and they were a fan of your stuff and wanted to work with you. You know, like that's another thing. I had so many people come to me, like when I was still doing a lot of one

on coaching. By the end, I'm like, why would anyone pay this? This is, and now, like, I still do take on rare clients. And I will, okay, here's the hack, everybody. I'm not worth it. I'm not worth 20 grand a year. I'm sorry. But some people, they just have a certain level of trust. They've seen you over the years. And they just want to work with the person they've been following. That's cool. Some people want to drive a lexas even though they know a toyota's the same car you know but like just saying oh my patients have gotten this and using it as a shield yeah that's nothing who cares yeah that's why we it's the trust hack it's the trust hack that they use sounding confident look at my patients for example um i fix this in so many people but you know that that's not real and i could say

that that's not real not because i did residency 10 years ago but because i saw patients last Thursday and I'm seeing them at a community health center where they're uninsured or underinsured and they're like, oh my God, my cholesterol is 300 and I'm about to have a heart attack. I'm feeling angina. What do I do, Doc? I want to get empowered now. And it's like that patient versus the patient that dials up Dr. Peter Attia and says, I want to be a part of your concierge practice, two drastically different worlds.

And when we compare how many people in the world exist like this person versus the concierge patient, it's not even close. And even me, like, again, I come from the perspective of my own personal biases. I want to be the most jacked strong human being I possibly can, right? Like, I want to be the most muscular, jacked, like, without steroids that I possibly can be. And so my prism, my filter that I filter everything through when it originally comes in is that filter and then I have to back up and go, oh, dumb, dumb, hey, not everybody wants to be like you, right? So, like, I would talk about. But that's okay that you, I mean, it's good that you know and you're aware of it. But you should have your own place. For sure. Because some people want to do that and you can

guide them through it. You're relatable. And that's part of the thing that works well for it. So everything that I'm pointing out here is not bad things. They're just important to know that those biases exist. But the fact that you have a bias towards wanting to be strong, that's not a bad thing. Everyone has some kind of thing about them that's unique. For sure. And I think, again, people were like, you know, I just follow you because you're the only unbiased public. I'm not, Jesus, all right? Like, I have my biases, all right? Like, I have my biases, but I'll tell you them.

Like, I will tell you them. I like protein. I like fiber. I'm biased towards, like, for example, I'll give you an example of something that I do personally that has no real evidence to back it up, right? So I'll eat more calories on days I train harder. Um, and I eat more carbohydrates pre and post exercise. Now, if you look at the research data resistance training, carb timing, I mean, if you're

depleted, it probably makes a difference. But if you're getting enough overall carbohydrate, it doesn't make a difference. But I grew up in the Flex magazine era where they were like, you know, you're more insulin sensitive before and after. I just got used to doing that. And so people like, oh, yeah, so you do more carbs before and after because I'm like, no, I just kind of have always done it. You know, I just kind of have it now.

You know, and I just, I ate more on days. I train harder even though it doesn't show like a real difference in strength or muscle mass because I just like it, you know? And people will look at me and like, wait, wait, so there's not like a, like some elaborate biochemical reason. Like, no, I just like it, you know. And they're kind of like, that. That is a biochemical reason, though.

Because you like it. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. No, so I just think, you know, again, it's not that, you know, people, again, people will get it twisted because they'll be like, well, you're saying these guys like Fung or Saladino or Gondry haven't helped anybody,

no, you're saying it has a great example, Gary Brecker and Dana White, right? So Dana White actually came on my Instagram and commented, which I was pretty geeked about, to be honest. You know, I was actually a pretty big Dana White fan, and he called me a juice monkey and said,

I'm like, I'm very flatter that you think I'm on steroids. And he was upset Because I think what he thought I was saying Is his results weren't real That's not what I'm saying Obviously his results were real But they weren't because he was fasting

For a crazy long period of time He had a red light baths or red light there He lost like 30, 40 pounds And increased his exercise And got way healthier lifestyle That's why he improved Which he should be commended for That's fantastic

And I'm happy that whatever Gary did got him there but the problem is I'll just tell people I'm like it's not the outcome it's the claims

around the outcome right like let's just be honest about why something worked but yeah there's so many people offering these tests that are like

oh my God we could scan your body we could find this what are you gonna do with that information well tell them to eat healthy I'm like I could tell them to eat healthy for free

it's kind of like a good example is like pain because after having like a lot of back pain from powerlifting and whatnot, diving into the pain literature and realizing, like, oh, like, MRIs are, like, not worthless, but, like, it provides no context because 60% of Americans over the age of 40 have asymptomatic herniated disc that cause them no pain.

So you're having the same conversation right now that I have with every patient in my practice right now. And I've gotten complaints that some patients are like, you didn't order the MRI. I'm like, well, I still offered it to you. I just don't think it was valuable. You're telling me my back hurts. Okay. So if we pull up the treatment for that doesn't change if we pull up your MRI and you have a herniated disc or you don't.

Okay? Only if you have an extenuating circumstances, some, you know, impingement, caudicina syndrome. Yeah. But even then, like, if it's choking off a nerve, you're going to have different symptoms than what you're having right now. Exactly. Localized versus radiating, all that kind of. this stuff. And again, we're kind of generalizing and I'm not a pain expert. But, you know, again, it's like you can get really into the, the identification or it's like you have the symptoms.

Practical. Let's just fix it. Let's get rid of the symptoms. Let's treat this, right? Like people like now, I mean, I, I would, I, since we're on the pain thing, I had such bad back pain like circa 2017. This, like I said, a world squat record back in 2015. I squatted 668 pounds at a 205 pound body weight class. Um, finished second in the world, got a silver medal, all this stuff. And then I started having back pain and by 2017, I had, there was a 48 hour period where I couldn't stand up, you know, like was that bad.

Had to get a cordadone injection in my spine just so I could stand up to like work and stuff, you know? And now I'm back to not as quite. as strong as I was back then, but pretty darn close. And won the Masters World Tile my weight class, and people go, so how did you heal your herniated disc? I'm like, I don't know.

If you took an MRI, they'd probably still be there. Of course, they're still there. But I don't have pain. I don't have pain. Like, it flares up sometimes. But like, I know how to treat that. Back off my intensity. I back on my volume.

Give myself some time to recover. Focus on my sleep. You know, focus on the overall, like, stress management. Stress, by the way, big trigger for pain. And that works. It's worked every time. And this has gone through multiple pain triggers.

And so you're right. I think people, they want to think symptom. Answer. Root cause. Yeah. And then fix that. Right. And it's like some of these things are, your experience, your symptom is the downstream outcome of a lot of stuff.

Okay. So just treating one thing, getting a disfusion or something like that, that doesn't mean it's going to solve that problem. In fact, if you look at the research, literature, Just like, don't look at that. You won't like that. I mean, I think I even saw something on like meniscus tears where basically they looked at treatment versus sham treatment. And they basically saw no difference in outcomes.

There's a lot of things that are done, injection-wise, surgery-wise, that are necessary. Right, right. So, you know, and when it comes to specifically these genetic tests, listen, there are some things we know. We do know if you have certain polymorphisms, that you're more prone to certain things, that you should probably. but it's not like it reverses your nutrition like you need low carb but you need low fat like that's not there yet

like you know some people like I'm one of them I have a I have a polymorphic gene that causes me to secrete more LDL cholesterol right so but I already knew that fiber is your het or is I guess FH? I believe so yeah okay so like my even with eating like 50 plus grams

of fiber a day even with keeping my saturated fat under 10% my LDL will be like 150 so I do take a low statin, which has knocked it down to 80, and I've been fortunate enough not have any, I've had no side effects from the statin. Cool. So, you know, again, the idea that we can do a genetic test, and there's the specific tailored diet just for you.

Not here. No, we, like maybe one day we'll get to that level. I kind of doubt it. I kind of doubt it. With AI and algorithms. Yeah. What I'm hoping happens. I know pharma's not happy about this remember that number needed to treat thing that I was telling

you right because like imagine out of those 5,000 people that I can recommend veganism to I can isolate the 100 people instead of 5,000 yeah that I would recommend it to that I would lower their cholera because I don't know which of the 5,000 the 1 is right but if I could narrow it down with an algorithm I can now recommend it and have it be way more efficient of a treatment but pharma doesn't like that kind of stuff because then we're prescribing less medications. So that's the one place where I'm like this is where pharma like really

we need to put pressure on them to narrow down who this medicate. Who should we be controlling blood pressure tightly to 120 versus 130 versus 140? That's the stuff that I want to see AI do. But even within those recommendations, again, it's not like we still won't have the perfect answer.

It's not like there's going to be some genetic person who it's like, well, for you you actually need a lot of high fructose corn syrup, you know, like, no, no, you don't, you shouldn't be taking in fiber, you know, I think that's, and that's another, so many people like, well, I did my broccoli post, like, well, I know it's bad for me and my inflammation because when I take it, um, you know, I just get so gassy and bloated, it hurts. And I'm like, oh, back to this inflammation that people don't understand. No, that is not inflammation. Yet you, so when people tell me about their

inflammation, I go, so you had your HSCRP measured and your IL-6 and your IL-1? Yeah. Oh, you didn't. Okay, cool. So, no, very consistently in the literature, fiber and vegetables reduce that. What you're experiencing is some sort of food sensitivity or probably for a lot of people, a FODMAP sensitivity where they overproduce gas and that gas causes pain. Also, it's probably tied in with IBS, which is a normal amount of gas production in a regular person who doesn't have IBS is not painful. Maybe make you feel a little bloated. But somebody who has IBS, way more painful. And I think they actually showed this in a study like, I don't want to butcher it, but basically apply the same amount of pressure to like the GI

and showed that at the same pressure, people with IBS, way more high, like a way higher pain rating, right? And they also find, this is interesting, back to the psychological stress thing, IBS and psychological disorders,

that there's a lot of cross talk between the two of those, right? So you could argue that people are stressing themselves into some of these autoimmune things. Well, it's hard to say. That's like a correlation thing. And then we can figure out causative agents. I was about to say, I am tenuously like saying that.

Introducing that. Yeah. But the point being is like, okay, you have vegetables and you have a tummy ache. You did a carnivore diet and that stopped. That's not because the carnivore diet is magic or vegetables are bad for you. it's because there was some vegetable you did an elimination diet and you felt better now just try adding things in one at a time other than meat and see what negatively affects you versus what does it and now you'll know and some of those things are time related meaning maybe after two

weeks that goes away right yeah because when there's redistribution of different microbes in the gut you might start seeing changes like that and we see that with medication stuff all the time I start patients on metformin, and they have diarrhea. Two weeks later, it's gone. And they're like, oh, yeah, I just had to start slow and work my way up. And that changes with a lot of things. That's why a lot of the benefits that we see, like, again, I'm going to bring back ice baths. It's like, if you measure people doing it their first time, they're going to see miraculous benefits.

But then if we measure those same things five years later, they're not going to be that miraculous anymore. Well, I think people think a lot of times, like, that initial boost you get from the treatment. That is a linear effect. Yeah, exactly. No, no, that just resets your baseline. Well, because we're so good at balancing. The body is like the master at homeostasis. Well, I mean, people go, well, I took creatine to work for a couple weeks and stop working.

No, it was still working. You just forgot. It's just that's your new baseline now. Caffeine. Yeah, like the first time you take caffeine, because you're coming from where you were to the caffeine. And they're like, oh, man, this is great, right? Well, if you keep taking it, that's now your new baseline, right? Just like we were talking about earlier.

If somebody tomorrow gave you $100 million, initially you'd be like, this is awesome, you know, you're going around doing all the stuff you ever wanted to do. And after a couple of years, oh, damn, I've done everything I wanted to do. And now this is my new baseline.

I don't feel any happier. I need $5 billion, though. Right, right, right, right. Which is why people get addicted to chasing that sort of thing. So, yeah, like you said, everything is, the body is trying to drive towards homeostasis.

It's like Goldilocks and three bears. It likes it a certain way, you know, too much of anything. Actually, interestingly, like we were joking about the McDonald's fries and TBHQ as I read those research studies. Yes, it can, in lab rats, it prevents cancer. It also causes cancer or increases cancer proliferation when it's too high or in certain context, right? And you know this from medicine. Like, there's a curve on a lot of stuff, right? Like too little, not effective or bad, right?

dose, good effect. And right dose for some people versus not everybody with this condition, with this much kidney function, with this age, with this much fat tissue, oh, it's so messy. Well, and I think that's where the genetic testing is really going to help out, actually, because you're finding, oh, this person does not metabolize drugs that, you know, are, like, cytocrone P450 metabolizes, like it's slower or faster or whatever. So we need to change the dosage or we need to be careful about giving it with this other drug. Yeah. Well, we fixed science. We just did it right now. Sam, what do you think? Do you think we fixed it?

I think we set out to end the obesity epidemic. Oh, epidemic. Yeah, that's right. Did we get there? Yeah, I think so. I think we'll look outside. Oh, Zimik for everybody. Hopefully we fixed. Well, thank you. I appreciate you coming on. And hopefully we continue crushing and figuring out how to silence the people spreading misinformation. Yeah, well, I want to also say thank you to you because I think our first interaction, I actually like kind of went after you a little bit. I was artificial sweeteners. Yep. Yeah. So, you know, I appreciate people, because I know I can be a lot sometimes.

I mean, I get it. It's like social media. Right, right. But I appreciate anybody who can like, you know, reach across the aisle. But, you know, when it comes to that, like, obviously you and I are aligned on 99% of things. And I think if you get most legitimate scientists and clinicians, we argue in the margins. Of course. You know, like we argue in the words.

We argue semantics, definitions, more than anything else. Yeah. And that's where I feel like, you know, if you can sit down with a person and talk to them, a person is smart and people in groups are really stupid. And that's where the problem arises. But thanks for having me on. Of course, I appreciate it. I appreciate it.