The Joe Rogan Experience - #1176 - Dom D'Agostino & Layne Norton

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

Dom D’Agostino, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology at the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine, and a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Layne Norton is a renowned prep/physique coach and pro-natural bodybuilder/powerlifter with a PhD in Nutritional Sciences.

Four, three, oh, two, one, and we're live. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Let everybody know who you are. Lane? I'm a meathead who likes science. Got into bodybuilding when I was young and then did a BS in biochemistry, PhD in nutritional science.

Kept lifting, did powerlifting, won two national championships, got silver medal at Worlds, set a then World Squat record, and did also bodybuilding and won a natural pro card. They actually have natural bodybuilding, believe it or not. And throughout that time, just, you know, when I first got into it, one magazine said one thing, and even in the same magazine, they have an article one month. Next month, it would contradict it. So I was like, I'm just going to try and figure this shit out for myself. Which is the place that a lot of people listening are at right now.

Yeah. And it's tough because it's kind of like, who do you trust? Because not everybody has the time or the energy to go and do a degree in this stuff. But that was me. I kind of got down the rabbit hole of, all right, let's try and figure this nutrition stuff out. And of course, the more I learned, the more I realized I didn't know. But yeah, it just became a passion for me to, and to this day, I'm still very, I love

this stuff. This is what gets me up, gets me going. Well, guys like you are very important. Guys who actually train very hard and really understand the science this is because it's usually one or the other absolutely yeah and i like when i was doing it i graduated my phd in 2010 when we started we actually both knew each other from the bodybuilding.com message boards so those back before social media trained together back in 2006 or seven seven and experimental biology so

this big there's a big symposium every year for science geeks and uh we were both going to it and we found out about each other on the forums and we went and trained together and he's a he's a beast uh and uh yeah we really hit it off and we've been friends since then so for everybody who's looking for a fight so sorry we We're probably going to be pretty friendly. Well, it's going to be a conversation. We don't need to have a fight. Dom, you've been on the podcast before, but for people who didn't listen to that one, please tell them who you are and what you do. Yeah.

Keep the sucker. Yeah, yeah, sure. I will – getting back, I majored in nutrition actually as an undergrad but didn't actually see a career in it that much. So I went into neuroscience. The 90s was a decade of the brain. And my, you know, formal training is in neuroscience, and it got steered towards basically changing the neuropharmacology of the brain with nutrition. And that's what the ketogenic diet does. And it has tremendous benefits, I think, for military personnel, which is funded by the Office of Navy Research and the Department of Defense to develop ketogenic strategies to enhance readiness, resilience, and performance and safety in military personnel. And why specifically does the ketogenic diet help military people?

I know there's a thing with Navy SEALs with preventing epilepsy. Oxygen, yeah. Yeah, so central nervous system oxygen toxicity, a limitation of that is, or a limitation of Navy SEAL diving is oxygen toxicity seizures. And anti-epileptic drugs are not really a viable option because they can, they're side effects. They can decrease cognitive, you know, resilience, physical resilience. Ketogenic strategy is something that's being studied now from a basic science mechanistic perspective to animal work to now human studies. So it's not, you know, out in the field yet, but some guys are actually doing it.

And I study the science of that. So for people who don't understand what we're saying, for some folks who have epilepsy, the ketogenic diet has been shown to stop seizures. Absolutely. Go Google the Charlie Foundation. So that's how I actually got linked in. And actually I met a natural drug-free bodybuilder. His name was Mike Dancer. And he had severe terminal epilepsy.

Google Mike Dancer ketogenic diet, and you'll find an amazing story about a guy who used nutrition to manage his epilepsy when drugs failed, and he used it to prep and win bodybuilding shows and compete in bodybuilding. And the rebreathers sometimes cause seizures with some of the soldiers. They can. So for example, just 50 feet of seawater using a closed circuit rebreather, like a Draeger rebreather, at 50 feet of seawater, your potential for getting oxygen toxicity seizure can occur in just 10 minutes. So that's a little bit of time and that's not very deep. So there's no way to predict that and there's no way as of now to prevent that. So we study physiological biomarkers that could warn people of an impending seizure. And we also develop countermeasures to mitigate oxygen toxicity seizures. I focus mostly on drugs. I'm in a pharmacology and physiology department. But I realized that people with epilepsy, the ketogenic diet was more effective than drugs. So I got steered into, you know, nutrition, which was my

undergrad. And then that kicked off about 10 years ago. And I've just been deep into probably a dozen or more different applications of nutritional ketosis. Awesome. And, Lane, I've been paying attention to you online for a long time. One of the things you do a great job with is just calling bullshit. I mean, you love to call bullshit, clearly. But whenever people are overstating claims or people get ridiculous, and I think this is one of the things that is a problem with any diet

where people get really enthusiastic about it. That becomes an ideology, whether it's the ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or the fill-in-the-blanks, vegan diet. People decide this is the end-all, be-all. It's going to cure cancer, make you smarter, the dick's going to grow a foot, all these things are going to happen. And you do a great job of calling bullshit on that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I I'm not anti keto. I'm not anti vegan. I'm anti bullshit. And one of the problems we have is nutrition is replacing religion for a lot of people. So you find something that you identify with. and then people start to try to say because they identify with that movement or like, for example, vegans, they identify with many of them protection of animals.

Not my job to judge their ethics on that sort of thing. But then they kind of try to backtrack to find the science to support them as well. And they pick and choose, and this is guilty of all groups, not just vegans. This is also a lot of ketogenic diet, zealots, carnivore diet, whatever have you. If it has the word diet, there's zealots out there who are going after it. And I will stick up for, I've stuck up at a scientific conference for the ketogenic diet. We were having a roundtable about something different. And somebody said, well, we know that the ketogenic diet

impairs exercise performance in endurance athletes. And I said, I don't think that's necessarily true. You know, it's pretty ambivalent or ambiguous as to whether or not it does. It seems to be kind of individual. But on the whole, on the average, it doesn't seem to impair exercise performance. So it's kind of what. But on the whole, on the average, it doesn't seem to impair exercise performance. So it's kind of what you like. But when you have people who, you know, like, like a Gary Taubes, who says, well, calories don't matter. It's all carbohydrates, that sort of thing, or the carbohydrate insulin model obesity. I mean, the research is,

you're able to do a lot of hand waving about insulin. And you know, when you burn so much fat when you're on a high fat diet, which is true, by the way, you you burn a lot of hand-waving about insulin and, you know, you burn so much fat when you're on a high-fat diet, which is true, by the way. You burn a lot of fat. But what they don't talk about is that it's overall fat balance, how much fat you store versus how much fat you burn. And when you're on a high-fat diet, you store a lot of fat. You also burn a lot of fat.

The overall caloric balance is what determines whether or not you will have net storage or net deposition. And the same thing for a high-carb diet as well. You know, this idea that with high insulin, it just completely shuts down all fat burning everywhere. That's just not true. Now, if you have high carbohydrate, you will burn less fat. But you're also storing less fat as well. And again, the net caloric balance is going to be what determines how much you store because you don't really store carbohydrate as fat for most people.

They did a study overfeeding women where they overfed them 50% above their caloric maintenance. And they found that of 282 grams of fat that they stored during a day in adipose, only four grams came from carbohydrate. 278 came from fat. So glucose, what about fructose? So fructose causes, we think, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So that could be, you know, de novo lipogenesis is higher with fructose. And think about people consuming it in liquid drinks, 100 to 200 grams a day, which is not uncommon, even for my wife, not uncommon. So fructose does seem to have a little bit of different hepatic metabolism. But I was actually across the hall from a professor who was doing a lot of the research

on fructose and obesity and fatty liver disease. And even he came to the conclusion that if you overfeed fructose and it creates a caloric surplus and you're overfeeding fructose, then you can have some wonky stuff start to go on. Relative to other macros. Try to keep this right next to your face. Sorry. Got it.

That's what she said. Because Lane is so powerful. I talk loud and a lot. It's good. So if you're doing that, if you're creating that caloric surplus, you're doing that, if you're creating that caloric surplus, what you find is when you're in net storage, when you're driving more nutrients into adipose and sometimes liver, depending on metabolism, but it takes a lot of fructose to do that and a caloric surplus, you start to create a lot of wonky stuff going on. The mitochondria start to become dysfunctional.

a lot of wonky stuff going on. The mitochondria starts to become dysfunctional. And people make a big deal about, oh, well, we have claimed now that everything causes obesity and type 2 diabetes. For first, it was fats, then carbohydrates. And there's actually professors out there who actually will claim that protein gives you diabetes. Can I stop you for a second?

What do you mean the mitochondria becomes dysfunctional? How does the mitochondrial, how does that happen? Okay, so I'm going to state for everybody that I'm going out on a limb. This is my opinion. Okay. If you look at the research on obesity and diabetes, what happens is you have everything start to elevate in the bloodstream. So if you measure like there was a professor who thought that branched chain amino acids were causing obesity because they were elevated in the bloodstream during, or sorry, during type two diabetes. Well, yeah, branched chain amino acids are elevated. So fatty acids, so triacylglycerides, so is glucose. So is it really those things causing it? Or is it possible that when you are overfeeding relative

to what you burn relative to that turnover, that mitochondria start to become dysfunctional, probably a lot due to inactivity. And the mitochondria is, as we call the powerhouse of the cell, as you probably learned in high school biology or whatever they taught it to you as that is where everything fluxes through. So that is where you're creating ATP. That's where you probably learned in high school biology or whatever they taught it to you as, that is where everything fluxes through. So that is where you're creating ATP. That's where you're burning through lipids, carbohydrates, that sort of thing. If that becomes dysfunctional and you're not getting enough flux, enough pull through that

mitochondria, what happens is you start to back up every part of metabolism. So all the metabolic byproducts, almost all of them, inhibit everything within the cell. There's a metabolomic signature for that. And an epiphenomenon, if you want to call it that, would be elevated branched-chain amino acids because of the consequence of that in some people. So these things start, these byproducts, these metabolic byproducts, because you're not fluxing enough through the cell, they start accumulating within the cell and start to inhibit the Krebs cycle, glycolysis. And so everything starts backing up to the point

where you also start inhibiting the insulin receptor. And now you have glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids also backing up to the point where they start to overspill into the bloodstream. And you see this accumulation of all of them in the bloodstream in type two diabetes and i actually think that again me going out on a limb that obesity doesn't cause type two diabetes and type two diabetes doesn't cause obesity that they develop in concert from the same problem which is overfeeding under activity so a lot of it is about how much nutrients you're fluxing into cells versus how much energy you're creating, fluxing them through the cell and out.

So when you're overfeeding, whether it be carbohydrate, fat, you're fluxing more energy in than you can dispose of. And now you have to do something with it. Well, when you run out of, when you do that much to it and mitochondria start to become dysfunctional, you start to not have enough places to put it away and it starts spilling into the bloodstream and now you cause all kinds of problems. So one of the things that we really wanted to talk about here is high carb versus low carb because this is just a giant point of contention today in nutrition, especially in terms of athletes with performance in mind.

It's a big factor, whether or not high carb or low carb is the way to go. And there's a lot of zealots on both sides, and there's a lot of bullshit, and there's a lot of online experts. And one of the great things about bringing you two guys in here is because you could really actually explain the science behind it. Now, you've been great, Lane, at pointing out that it's not a magic bullet. And so many people like to sort of stress it that way. They like to portray ketogenic diet as this is it.

This is the end-all, be-all. I figured out what to do. This is the way everyone should be eating. You don't think so? figured out what to do. This is the way everyone should be eating. You don't think so? I don't think so. Because if you look at the weight loss problem in our society, and I'm writing a book called Fat Loss Forever, where I talk about this in detail, we don't have a weight loss problem. Six out of every seven people are able to lose a significant amount of body weight in their life who are obese or overweight. The problem is the weight regain statistics are absolutely terrifying.

Within one year, 70% will put it all back on. Within two years, it's 85%. Within three years, it's 95%. So that means diets have a 95% failure rate. And of those people, one-third to two-thirds will add more than they originally lost. And this gets kind of into yo-yo dieting. And I talk about that as well. But the real problem is that people don't stick to pick something that's sustainable for them. All the research, if there's one bit of

research out there that we have, that shows how to create lasting weight loss, and you look at the people who are the 5% who actually keep it off, it's that they pick something that's sustainable, whether it be ketogenic, whether it be low-carb or low-fat, whatever it is, vegan, something that they can sustain and make a lifestyle. Because if you look at meta-analyses, for our listeners, meta-analyses are kind of a study of studies. So they take, researchers take studies that have similar parameters, and they kind of lump them together.

And they look at, okay, what's the consensus amongst these studies? And they have advanced statistics they use to run this. If you look at low carb versus low fat, there's no difference in adherence overall on the whole. There's no difference. And there's no difference in adherence overall on the whole. There's no difference. And there's no difference in weight loss. There's no difference in blood lipids, even glycemic control. So there was a study where they, a meta-analysis of, I think it was 23 studies over 3000 people, where they looked at, okay, if you control calories, so calories are equated, does low carb versus low fat make a difference on weight loss, glycemic control, those sorts of things?

Not necessarily the ketogenic diet. So by definition, we have an objective biomarker that defines the ketogenic diet. It's the only diet that actually has something that you can measure in your blood to say you're on this diet. And when your ketone levels are elevated, that confers many different benefits that I believe can enhance adherence to the diet. Before we get into the woods here, I want to clarify one thing. The difference between someone being on a diet and being able to sustain it and not being able to sustain it and gaining all that weight back,

isn't that a discipline issue? Well, partly, but we kind of have to start looking at, okay, if we go and – let me recircle. We have to find what requires the least amount of discipline for somebody to stick to because discipline is – while some people have more, some people have less. It is a finite resource. So when do we normally find that people like kind of drop off whatever they're doing? It's when they're stressed out, work stressing them out, they're going through a divorce, those kinds of things, right? That's where our discipline kind of wanes because we're trying to be so disciplined for this other thing and it's draining us.

kind of wanes because we're trying to be so disciplined for this other thing and it's draining us. So what happens with, with diet is in people who are busy, people who have a lot of stress in their life, that's where they really start overeating. So we have to find something that require, I look at it as let's find something that requires the minimal amount of, of discipline for a person so that when your life goes to absolute shit, you can still stick to it. And so for some people, that is a very, very individual thing. And they see this in the dietary studies, that what works for one person to create a deficit and sustainable isn't the

same way for another person. And Dom even commented on this about his wife, Chilla. She does much better on a higher ratio of carbohydrates to fat. Yeah. I mean, early on, it was obvious that she wasn't going to change her diet. The time that we met, like 10 years ago almost, I was really getting into this, and I really felt that, for me at least, but she would stop at Checkers and get a burger and sugary drink, and she's tremendously carb intolerant. She was very

skinny as a kid. And she tolerates carbohydrate. She's very carbohydrate tolerant. Did I say intolerant? Yeah. So and you know, if the diet low carb, I feel and maybe in ketogenic putting it under that umbrella works, I think for up to% to 30% of people, especially if they're carbohydrate intolerant. And I believe that it does that by virtue of elevating ketones, shifting the neuropharmacology of the brain. For example, it works through ghrelin. for example it works through ghrelin it works through there's new science emerging right now showing that appetite regulation is influenced uh positively by uh nutritional ketosis in ways that we're just starting to learn now well you can certainly feel it it's one of the weird things about the ketogenic diet when you're in that state all of a sudden you're just not hungry the same

there's not a an overwhelming need for food yeah i. I haven't had anything to eat today. I mean, when I was eating massive plates of pasta 25 years ago, and I went to this long without food, I would start getting shaky. I would have a hypoglycemic response. And I'm completely resilient to that. And that has major implications for military personnel being keto adapted, not just for performance, preventing seizures, and I think for cognitive function too. But it's very liberating. So meal frequency is not an issue. So if you're in austere environments where you have limited food availability, that becomes a major issue. And if you're working as a scientist and you can't, you know, you're working with animals, you're doing experiments, you don't have time to eat. I need to maintain that cognitive function. I need to be sharp, you know, with limited food. So it worked very good for me throughout my

professorship, you know, getting tenure and things like that, where I could just put more time and energy into my work without having to stop, prepare a meal, eat a meal, clean up. Like, I think I wasted a lot of time doing that when i was eating five to six meals a day he said something that i think you've called bullshit on before the phrase carb intolerant so yeah so that was actually going to be one of the things that's because hey we have something we can disagree about because carb tolerance carb carb would you would say depends on how we define that yes yes so i define it by a blood marker, your glucose response to a meal. Okay.

So a couple of things. I want to come right out and frame this whole discussion real quick. So we both agree that in terms of weight loss and body composition, that your total calorie intake per day is the most important thing. Correct? Yes. And I believe the ketogenic strategy is a way to regulate that. Right. So with carbon tolerance, if you look at the benefits of like on blood glucose, blood lipids,

it is almost 90 to 95% explained by weight loss. So you can take people, put them on a high carb, very low fat diet, their blood glucose and their blood lipids will drop even with like higher insulin levels than people who are on a low carb diet. If they're on a calorie restricted diet. Yes, if they're calorie restricted. Now, again, that becomes a very individual thing. If somebody says, hey, I like a ketogenic diet, because for me, it helps me to create a calorie deficit, I can stick to it. Hey, knock yourself out. That is no problem. But that is not always going to work. Some people don't feel that satiated on a ketogenic diet. There are people who do feel hungrier on that. So that is a very individual response. And again,

when we look at studies, we're looking at means, right? So we're talking about averages. And there are outliers, like if you look at any, we're looking at means, right? So we're talking about averages. And there are outliers. Like if you look at any Gaussian distribution chart, which is kind of how populations distribute based on a certain treatment, you have about 60% to 70% that fall into the average. Then you have another 10%, 20% that kind of do a little bit better one way versus the other. And then you have 5% on either end that are – sorry, 2.5% on either end that are out of do a little bit better one way versus the other. And then you have 5% on either end that are, sorry, 2.5% on either end that are outliers, right? So just to frame this again, let's take weightlifting. We know weightlifting makes you bigger and stronger, right?

Like that is not up for debate. We agree on that. There are studies that have shown that some people who are beginners, where you should be gaining a lot of muscle very quickly, some people will go from the first time they walk in the gym, squat 95, 12 weeks later, they're squatting 400 pounds. Some people don't get stronger. There've actually been studies where over 12 weeks, there's a few individuals who did not get stronger. So those are your outliers right there. So if we circle this back to ketogenic

diet, I'm not sitting here and saying that somebody may actually physiologically do better on a ketogenic diet versus a lower fat diet. That's a very individual response. But when we start making recommendations for people, what we should start with is, okay, create a calorie deficit that allows you to lose some weight. Because if we look at the studies and we look at, if we equate for protein, because that's a big thing. So if you look at some of the studies where Volick did, where he compared like your kind of food guide pyramid type diet to a ketogenic diet, the ketogenic diets were a little bit higher protein. That protein has a thermogenic effect and also an appetite suppression effect. When you equate for those, and there's been 32 studies, there was a recent meta-analysis done of 32 studies that equated for calories and protein. Absolutely no difference in fat loss when you equate for those two, calories and protein. Because protein's a big one.

Because protein has a big benefit on thermogenesis and weight loss. Also, lean body mass retention, which is huge because one of the reasons people regain weight is because when they lose weight, they tend to lose fat and muscle. And when they regain it, it's almost all fat in the initial phase. That data may not have included data with the ketogenic diet. So I know, you know, when I did the diet, I've seen a lot of blood work. So for example, my hemoglobin H1C, triglycerides, HSCRP goes down, insulin goes down, blood pressure goes down. And all those changes happened without my body weight changing. So that would kind of argue against that you needed a calorie deficit. And I've seen it many times. But I could be eating

80% to 90% carbs and reduce my body weight and get changes in all that. I could actually increase my carbs. And if I create a calorie deficit, my hemoglobin H1C will go down, my sugar will go down, things like that. So that is really the – that's like – that trumps everything, that calorie deficit. So that's an important thing. So that's what – and that's what I think a lot of people miss. OK. And I think that – what I'll say is – sorry.

Well, I'm just saying – so like I think that's very powerful too that these changes that I just mentioned can occur without changing your body weight. So they are just – you're fundamentally changing your metabolism when you do that from –. And that has pretty wide ranging implications. So I think that what I'm going to say is that if you, if we're going to talk about people getting healthier, the first thing we need to start with is let's not lose 50% are getting about 5%, right? So if I tell somebody, Hey, find a diet you can stick to that's sustainable. And if you can lose 10%, you can lose 10% of your body weight,

even for obese people, they get almost all the health benefits in the first 10%. Now, maybe some people like you or people who respond really well to a ketogenic diet, I'm not, again, there's outliers or people on the other sides of the Gaussian curve. If you do a little bit better on there, then great. But if you find a ketogenic diet is completely unsustainable for you and you're not able to stick to it,

but you're trying to do it because you're trying to get a little bit better blood glucose regulation, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot because if you could stick to it, like let's say for the individual, a higher carb diet was easier for them to stick to. They could lose weight on that. Then that's the bulk of their health benefits they're going to get from it i'm having a hard time with these terms easier because i don't know exactly why it would be easier or wouldn't be easier and i always wonder again is this a discipline issue because that's that's your experience yeah it comes down to

for sure food preference but i believe that by when you follow low-carb, not even ketogenic diet, the variability of the fluctuations in your insulin and blood glucose, the postprandial dip in blood glucose that you get after you eat, that's virtually abolished or significantly attenuated. And then you have ketones are working through ghrelin, for example. You could just, you could eat a normal diet and drink ketones and it's actually suppressing your appetite through ghrelin. So we know that these changes. Through reductions in ghrelin, you're saying? Yeah. Okay. So these changes sort of are happening.

And my sister, for example, followed the ketogenic diet and found it easy to follow, but she gained weight because she was eating all these fat bombs that she was making. So I think a lot of people don't necessarily need a nutritionist to tell them what to do, but they need like a nutritional psychotherapist or something. You know, their relationship with food is really, and I think that's what Lane has a firm grasp on. There's no substitute for experience. And Lane has worked with so many different clients and knows that, you know, you could probably follow the QJ diet. Your listeners are probably fans of the QJ diet. I can do it. I love fatty food, you know, high fat food, low carb food. carb food. But generally speaking, it's, you know, you have to approach it from the perspective sort of eating behavior. And I think that's, that's really people want to go off the diet. It's just a natural human trait. Yeah. It's a weird psychological trait, right? You just want to cheat. You want to just stuff your face with cupcakes every now and then. And then you just, you feel like it's too much torture to keep yourself on this narrow path of high fat, low carb, moderate protein. But, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, that was the case. But now there's ketogenic brownies, there's ketogenic cookies, there's many different

food companies. They all taste like shit. Check out. Well, check it. Well, go to. I've tried. I've tried so hard. Go to keto.

You have a real one and a keto cookie and that fucking real cookie gets eaten every time. Yeah. Well, they are evolving. Food technology is evolving. I'm kidding. Some of them. No foods make some good stuff. Go to ketonutrition.org, and there's some things there that are – I would say about 10% or 20% pass the test, meaning that they taste okay and they actually do what they say.

They actually elevate ketones or don't cause a glycemic response some of those keto cookies seem like they have no foundation like you bite in they like they go away like as you're eating them it's like they dissolve you know they're not like you have like a good tollhouse cookie a good real chocolate chip cookie and you bite into that sucker you know it's bad for you, but god damn it feels good while it's being bad. Did you try the Quest protein cookies? Yes, they're pretty good. They're pretty good. Some of them are pretty good.

They can't fuck with real cookies. Well, I dip them in sour cream, right? And then I eat them or coconut cream, so then it becomes ketogenic. Sour cream, Jesus Christ, man. Don't knock it till you die. Wow, that's a commitment to high fat. You bring that up.

Interesting, though. If you look at people that think they're addicted to sugar or that sugar is a lot, if you look at things like cookies and cakes, it's actually they have more calories from fats than they do sugars. It's sugar and fat together is hyper palatable, right? One of the things I was going to bring up is um you know this idea that the sugar is so inherently bad and you said that the cookie you know we view that as an inherently bad thing but what if i told you that there were certain people not everybody everybody's different but there are certain people who if you tell them hey you can have that cookie every once in a while if you track it work it into your macronutrient intake that that's fine that that actually improved their adherence to diet so because you give them a reward

no not a reward system you're not a dog don't reward yourself for food okay because because increased flexibility uh actually usually improves adherence so we see this actually with training too uh athletes are when you do a flexible training model where they have to get in a certain amount of training, but they kind of can pick and choose theirself which days are hard and which days are a little bit, they actually do better. Diet is very similar to that. So now you always have to sacrifice something in order to, if you want to lose weight, right? So if you're doing a ketogenic diet, what you're sacrificing is saying, well, I like the spontaneous reductions in appetite, so I don't mind eating not these foods so I can get that. If you're doing like kind of what, I don't want to say I popularized it,

but myself and some other people on the message boards popularized something called flexible dieting, where you can eat essentially whatever you want, as long as you hit your protein, carbohydrate, and fat targets. Now what you're sacrificing is, okay, you you're tracking every day do you do that through an app through what an app uh no i'm old school i actually just do it through excel i've i've my girlfriend holly she has an app on her phone and like she she has me like if she's driving she's like oh you put in what i just ate i'm like babe i don't even i know i have no idea how to work this thing you know so because when i went to do my graduate studies i mean i wanted to find magic foods i wanted to find something that would because how else can you make a living you have to set yourself apart i mean if i'm over here saying it's hard for me to sell what i what

i do because i'm saying well, everything in moderation and you got to be diligent and you got to have these behaviors. And that doesn't sound sexy when there's another guy over here saying, nah, bro, it's just carbs. I know metabolism is complicated and everything, but it's just carbs. You know, when I started working with people and I've worked with over 1500 people coaching in nutrition online over the past 13 years, which actually probably taught me more than my PhD did, what I found was is that people were so different individually

in terms of what made them tick. Now I feel like I should probably go back and get some kind of – What makes them tick? Biologically what makes them tick or psychologically? Both. Both. So I can't sit here and say by the research that carbohydrate versus fat makes a difference on fat loss. But what I can tell you is that some people just seem to do better on lower carb, higher fat.

But also some people I worked with just seem to do better with higher carb, lower fat. Now, whether that's a psychological thing or a physiological thing, it's hard to tease out. Genetically, too, I think. I mean, we all have different SNPs. Some people have suppressed fatty acid oxidation pathways. Others are like screaming fat metabolizers or sugar metabolizers. Yeah. I remember I had a conversation with the researcher, Dr. Nakamura at Illinois, who was doing some of that fructose stuff. When I was a first-year grad student, I said, well, it's this high fructose corn syrup.

This is what's causing obesity, right? And he's like, well, it's easy to overconsume. You know, like if you take a soda and you drink it, you're not less hungry than you were. It's not very satiating. Like if you take a soda and you drink it, you're not less hungry than you were. It's not very satiating. He said, but if you're controlling your calories, it doesn't seem to be more lipogenic than comparable carbohydrate. And I remember thinking, well, that can't be right.

All these people say that high fructose corn syrup is like the worst thing in the world for you. There was a few studies that really changed my opinion on sugar. Now, the listeners are going to hear this and think that I'm advocating for sugar. I'm not. You're not talking about in the context of a calorie surplus, a surplus amount of fructose, which is kind of explains the state of the United States, you know. Partly. So if you look at sugar intake, so this kind of gets back to the carbohydrate insulin obesity model. If you look at sugar intake over the last 50 years or last 100 years, it went up very steadily with obesity until around the mid-90s, and then it took a sharp dip while obesity continued to climb.

Now, again, that's just correlation data. But if you do look at the overall calorie intake versus obesity rates, it's like an R-squ squared of like 0.94, which is really, really close. Does sugar include high fructose corn syrup? Is that lumped into sugar? So this was added sugars. This was added sugars. But there was a study done by a metabolic ward study.

So again- Can I stop you there? Are you saying that this is added sugars, not high fructose corn syrup? So when you talk about the graph of consumption, that sugar dropped off, but high fructose corn syrup did not. Is that accurate? Because that took over many of the products. So if there is an increase in obesity, but a decrease in sugar consumption, but you're

not saying a decrease in high fructose corn syrup consumption. So I don't know that. I'd have to look that up. So here's me being a scientist and saying the three magic words. I don't know. One of the last conferences I went't know that I'd have to look that up. So here's here's me being a scientist and saying the three magic words I don't know one of the last conferences I went to showed that like the rise of the last 10 to 15 years Like skyrocketing with high fructose corn syrup and because sugar was taken out high fructose corn syrup is subsidized But farmers a lot cheaper and would you agree that it's essentially your body?

The way processes it is essentially the same? Sugar versus high fructose corn syrup calorie for calorie? Well, so sugar, sucrose, is 50% glucose, 50% fructose. High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose, 45% glucose. But if you're saying that that 5% is what's creating obesity, now, again, psychologically, some people just down sodas like it's their job. And if you're doing that, especially as children,

that's a big, big no-no. Whether it's the Mexican kind with the cane sugar. We have kids now with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and that did not exist. But I would say that... Like 20 years ago,

we got little kids. And you think that's from corn syrup? I think it's due to an excess surplus calories, and those surplus calories being high-fructose corn syrup. So if you're used to eating a certain amount of calories, and back when we were actually maintaining our weight back in the, before

the 60s, we were eating about 2,200 calories a day. That was the average. And now it's like 2,800 is the average consumption in the United States amongst adults. I think I eat a lot more than that. But you train. But you train and you have a higher lean body mass.

So that's fine. Now, some people, yeah, that's a whole other rabbit hole. If you start adding sodas in, which aren't satiating at all, they don't positively affect your hunger hormones. But you continue your same normal food intake, boom. I mean, you can start to store, right? But I can't tell somebody, hey, there's no way you can lose weight and drink a soda because that's not true. There was a study done by Surwit

and they looked at high glycemic diet versus low glycemic. And I mean extreme. They did – one group had over 100 grams of sugar a day. Another group had 10 grams or less per day – or sorry, it was 11 grams or less per day. And they looked at the differences in weight loss, blood lipids, all that kind of stuff. Did they adjust for carbohydrates? So the group that ate 10 grams of sugar or less a day, did they eat the same amount of total carbohydrates?

Same amount of total carbs. Okay. So low glycemic versus high glycemic. Yeah. And processed carbs can spike your glucose more than sugar. Right. So they did have a higher fiber intake. But what they did find that they had higher insulin responses to the meal, the high sugar group did.

But no differences in weight loss. So both groups lost weight. The only real difference was the lower glycemic group had a little bit better. Both groups improved cholesterol. The lower glycemic group had just a little bit better improvement, probably because they were eating higher fiber, which combined cholesterol and you excreted. I would like to see what happened if they equated. fiber, which can bind cholesterol and you excrete it. I would like to see what happened if they equated. So again, it's creating that calorie deficit. Both groups lost weight. Now, is it more difficult to create a calorie deficit if you're eating a lot of sugar? Yes. Okay. So I always tell people your diet is like a budget if you're practicing something like flexible dieting,

right? So if I've got somebody like myself who has above average muscle mass, hopefully I can say that and people on the internet are probably going to knock me. Oh, you fucking dick. Look at him. He's wearing a shirt with his name on it. Okay, I'll say it. You have above average muscle mass. Thank you.

You're welcome. So if you have above average muscle mass, you train hard. You have a faster metabolism naturally. I mean, I've seen people who could maintain their body weight on 6, you train hard, you have a faster metabolism naturally. I mean, I've seen people who could maintain their body weight on 6,000, 7,000 calories a day. You have a higher metabolic rate. You have a really big budget. So if you make $100 million a year, is it a big deal for you to go out and buy a $500,000 sports car if you can still pay your mortgage and pay all the other requirements that you have?

No, it's fine. But if you make $80,000 a year, should you go out and buy a $500,000 you have? No, it's fine. But if you make 80 grand a year, should you go out and buy a $500,000 sports car? Probably not, right? And if you make 30, you should be on the keto diet. So if you, well, you'd have increased food efficiency. So it's the same thing. So Pop-Tarts somehow became the model

of the flexible dieting movement because people were, here's why. it's kind of like counterculture it's like a pop tart zealots out there it's like so whenever you have so clean eating became a thing amongst body buildings we we say you eat clean even though there's no objective chicken baby there's no objective definition of that um so people were like oh yeah well i'm getting shredded and i did pop tart every day right so a lot of your followers do that they do now now but i don't i actually created i don't even like pop tarts did you do this did you start this no no it's it's more i don't know who else you know hang on let me let me put some context to this so it's more about people saying hey i can

still eat these foods i enjoy and i'm still losing weight because I'm in a calorie deficit and I'm hitting my protein, carb, and fat targets. But if you're somebody with a slow metabolism and you're not exercising very much and maybe all you're eating is 100 grams of carbs a day, should you spend 75 grams of those carbs on two Pop-Tarts? Hell no. That's a terrible idea because you're not going to be able to hit your other micronutrients and those sorts of things. But if you're eating 4,000 calories like an Alberto Nunez, a friend of ours, if you're eating 4,000 calories a day and losing weight, is it a big deal if he has two Pop-Tarts? Not really because I actually had one competitor, again, a competitor, who had such a fast metabolism that he was actually having a lot of GI dysfunction because he was eating like 700 grams of carbs and 200 grams of fat per day just to maintain his weight. And he said, I feel bloated all the time. And I said, well, what are you

eating? Like, what are your foods? And it was chicken, rice, and broccoli. And I said, and some peanut butter for fats. And I'm like, well, like well no wonder dude you're having 150 grams of fiber a day you're you're literally full of shit like your shit is like literally backed up to your esophagus okay so i said do me a favor eat some pizza eat some pop tarts eat some more calorically dense foods and see how you feel after three days he emailed me after three days he's like man i feel so much better. I dropped like three pounds. I feel amazing. That doesn't make any sense. Lane inspired the Pop-Tart generation. He also inspired, and I watched this play out online.

This makes me sound really bad. Well, Lane actually inspired a generation of drug-free bodybuilders to go and do their PhDs. Actually, one's in my lab right now. Andrew. Andrew Kutnick. I coached him for a little while. Yeah. Amazing student.

And I think he learned a lot just from watching Lane. So, but I think, you know, that it was amazing to see these guys eating that amount of Pop-Tarts and junk foods and be able, and I learned a lot from that, but I think they could do it with better carbohydrates so so what works for performance what works for bodybuilding may not be is probably not optimal for longevity and health so that that's an important point you know lane winst i i yeah i the audio list okay so i i know i know where he's coming from, but I'd like to hear his opinion. Yeah. So before you do that, why do you think that it would be an issue? What would be the issue with sugar and with pop tarts and junk food? What would be the negative effects biologically?

I think the accumulation of the postprandial spikes in glucose and insulin over time, especially in the context of a calorie surplus, could be a bad thing. If you are doing a calorie surplus, for example, to gain weight and mass over time, which bodybuilders do following contests in the off-season, I think it's even more important almost to actually stick with foods, carbohydrate sources that are lower glycemic. You can only tolerate so much fiber. But I think if you are running a calorie – if you are doing a ketogenic diet and you have a calorie surplus, that could be a bad thing. Your triglycerides will go up. So you are putting too much fat in the system and that – But it would go up on a higher carb diet.

It would go up on a higher carb diet. It would go up on a higher carb diet too. So, I mean, I kind of would stay along the lines of maybe protein. But you just – you titrate it in in a reasonable amount. But I just think that the negative that could come out of that is that you're – I'm following a blood glucose curve, right, an insulin curve. And I see this very dramatically, for example, in my student who's a type 1 diabetic, Andrew Kutnick, and he wears a Dexcom, a continuous blood glucose monitoring system. And his insulin requirements dramatically dropped with low carb and his glucose fluctuations dramatically improved. And that's going to pay big dividends. Probably if you have type 1 diabetes, you know, the 10 top things on how humans die,

you have a greater risk for every one of those, you know, dramatic. You know, it cuts 10 years off your life. If the tighter you can keep your glucose levels, your blood glucose and your insulin levels, that in the long run I feel it's going to pay. The science still has to show that, I think. It's not totally clear. But I think we can, for type 1 diabetics, which I think we can apply that data to the population, if they control their glucose levels, that pays big dividends in the long run. Lane? So a couple things. You actually? So a couple of things.

You actually touched on a couple of the points I was going to bring up. But I want to address one thing first, which is the higher postprandial insulin and the negative effects on health. So if you have – they've done studies on this on BMI versus insulin. Now, BMI is a – we can debate about how useful of a measure it is. But in general, it reflects body fat in the average population. Not in lifters but in the average. BMI, by the way, for people who are listening, is a ratio of your height versus your weight that generally reflects obesity. And you're obese.

I'm obese. And I'm obese. Yes, yeah. So if you lift weights – Lane and I are both obese. Yeah, I'm morbidly obese. It seems so silly. It is.

But if you look at the general population who doesn't exercise, it's actually pretty darn accurate. It gets factored into your insurance though, which is not – Is it really yours? It can. That's hilarious. It does. It sucks. They look at you and say you're obese.

Some insurances will do like a waist to chest measurement, which helps. But anyway, so postprandial insulin, they've looked at the relationship between people who have their BMIs and postprandial insulin. They find that people with higher BMI have higher postprandial insulin, but the opposite relationship does not hold true. People who have higher insulin do not necessarily have higher BMI, and they've done this in meta-analysis. So what that says is, again, that if you are obese, type 2 diabetic metabolic syndrome profile, that you will have elevated levels of insulin because your body is becoming insensitive to it because of all the dysfunction that we talked about. But just because you secrete higher insulin doesn't mean that you're going to have more body fat. And there was a study done actually by one of the proponents of the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis that looked at what's called Mendelian randomization, where basically the idea is you have different gene variants, like we were talking about. And if, for example, like they've

done this with LDL cholesterol, or sorry, yes, LD cholesterol. We believe, most people believe that LDL cholesterol has some contribution towards heart disease. It's a pretty, I would say it's a pretty strong, now people can over- Very controversial. Very context dependent and individual. When they look at these gene variants, people who have gene variants where they run lower LDL

have lower rates of heart disease. People who are higher, higher rates of heart disease. If you look at that with insulin, at best, insulin explains 10% of obesity, at absolute best. And that study actually showed a high level of bias. It was between 1% to 10%. So I'm not putting out the idea that maybe insulin has some effect. You're talking about fasting insulin or postprandial insulin? Overall. Overall.

I'm guessing probably more so fasting. How do they measure insulin? I mean, we have hemoglobin H1C for like a, you know, that's a cumulative. There was another meta-analysis where they looked at higher carb versus lower versus lower-carb diets, equating calories, looking at HbA1c and saw that – so the differences in weight loss were no different, like we've discussed, when calories are equated. But also the differences in HbA1c reduction weren't different. They were the same. Now, you asked about health and consuming some of these quote quote-unquote, bad foods if you do it in the – but you said in the context of a caloric surplus, right, which is the important thing because they help to create a surplus. who are not ketogenic necessarily, but proponents of quote unquote clean eating, which again has no real objective definition.

When you say, okay, well, a Pop-Tart, maybe you can lose weight on it, but it can't be good for you. Okay, well, then we have to have some objective measurement to show this by, right? Because otherwise it's, do you believe in magic? Okay. So if you look at processed foods, what they have found with processed foods is that you have a lower energy expenditure from them. So you have a certain amount of what we call TEF, thermic effect of food.

Higher protein has a higher TEF than carbohydrate and fat. So we know that higher protein diets actually cause more weight loss and better lean body mass retention. Part of that is through the increased thermogenesis of the TEF, thermic effect of food. Well, with processed foods, you have a lower tef okay but that doesn't mean you can't eat any processed foods and and lose weight you can it just means you might have to eat a little bit lower calories overall does that make sense if there was a ketogenic pop tart and it was made with uh with almond flour we know that if we eat almonds or other nuts or things, just giving an example, we don't fully digest, assimilate, and utilize those calories. They pass through us.

So with a Pop-Tart, I think it's pretty high with raw, like a salad with nuts and things like that. It becomes significant over time. And with nuts and things like that, like it becomes significant over time. With a Pop-Tart, like you can basically 100% of that is going into your system and it's causing a hormonal response. So the food that we eat creates is not only calories, but creates a hormonal response. And also from the brain perspective can change the neuropharmacology of your brain. I mean, that's how I got into the ketogenic diet because it fundamentally changes neurotransmitter systems and reward systems and things like that. Right. But hormones, people get so hung up on hormones. And if you look at the research data, it just doesn't support it like with insulin and whatnot. Now, in terms of like losing weight and what happens with leptin and ghrelin and all those kinds of things, that is a huge... One of the things we talked about before the podcast started, we had about a 30-minute podcast before we actually... Yeah, we did a podcast outside.

Yeah. People say things like... One of the reasons people are really mistrustful of kind of the calories in, calories out model is because it is viewed as two isolated variables. Calories in and calories out are separate. That's not true. Calories in affects calories out. Okay? They are a moving target. So people will say, well, I ate in a calorie deficit and I didn't lose weight.

No, you ate in what you thought was a calorie deficit and you didn't lose weight. But if you didn't lose weight, it was not a calorie deficit by definition okay so you're retaining water or something yeah when we look at um dieting like just dieting in general over time lowers your metabolic rate right so if you take somebody they actually did a rat study again rats but rats tend to respond pretty similar to humans in terms would you agree with that in terms of blood glucose? I mean, you do a lot of rat studies. I do a lot of rats and mouse studies. Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap there.

They're a good model. So, again, but we have to put that out there because we don't want to oversell it. They did a— Depends on the context of what you're studying. Of course. Yeah. It can answer some questions. Other questions it can't.

Animal studies can be helpful, but you don't want to do like an insulin study in cows because cows are ruminants and they don't care about insulin. Anyway, they took rats. They took them through two diet cycles. Okay. So this is kind of back to the yo-yo dieting thing. And they looked at – okay. And they took obese rats, dieted them down to a kind of normal level. When they took obese rats, dieted them down to a kind of normal level, then they basically gave them as much food as they wanted, let them eat back to their original obese level, dieted them down again to the previous level, and then let them re-eat back up.

What they found was absolutely astonishing. Their food efficiency went so far up because their metabolic rate became suppressed every time they dieted down. Your body has this self-defense system that you activate every time you diet. I talk about this in my shameless plug book. So the first time they dieted, if that's the kind of one times rate that they lost fat at, when they let them regain it, they regained it twice as fast as they lost it. Then the second time they tried to lose it, they lost it at half the original rate. Then when they regained it the second time, they regained it three times as fast. Their food efficiency went way up.

Did their ability to lose it get fast as well? What's that? Did their ability to lose it get exponentially faster as well? No. No, it took them twice as long to lose the same amount of weight. Sorry, I probably didn't explain it very well. Yeah, it took them twice as long to lose the same amount of weight. Sorry, I probably didn't explain it very well. Yeah, it took them twice as long to lose the same amount of weight, and they regained it in a third the time of the original. So your body's getting accustomed to famine. Exactly.

Because every time you diet, and we see this with yo-yo dieters who spend – how many people do you know that seem to be perpetually on a diet? Yeah. But they just have that short overfeeding period in between diets. It fucks them. It really does because every time you diet you're activating your body's self-defense system how many fighters do you know that every time they diet it gets harder and harder for them to make weight well they're doing more than that they're they're cutting weight the cutting weight is ruthless they're essentially almost dying right but the part of that is they're they're having

to crash diet super low. So what is the signal you're telling your body? Because you have to always think about things from an evolutionary perspective. My PhD advisor was great about this. He'd always ask – his name was Dr. Don Lehman, brilliant guy. And he would say, why do you think the body did this? Well, if you think about what are the regulatory mechanisms on becoming fat versus becoming too thin, right? So one danger is you starve to death. The other danger is you get so fat that a predator can come

get you. Which is more dangerous in the last 20,000 years? It's famine. It's famine. So your body creates much tighter self-defense system there. So when you diet, your metabolic rate slows way down. I mean, if you've ever – these guys who cut weight, so by the time they're ready to get a fight, for example, their metabolic rate is really slow. Then what happens after they fight? They eat a crap ton of food because their ghrelin is way up, leptin is way down, insulin is way down, and they regain it really fast. I think it's safe to assume, just to interject, that if you diet for 16 weeks for a show, for example, or a contest, that what you actually educated me in like 10 years ago, and I thought there was this like post-contest rebound, and in two weeks there would be this anabolic window or whatever.

You're anabolic for fat. it's like post-contest rebound and in two weeks there'd be this anabolic window or whatever. You're anabolic for fat. It actually, if you diet hard for 16 weeks to make weight, it takes an equal amount of time to get your metabolism back up to that level again. So Lane coined the term, right, reverse dieting? I don't know if I coined it. I probably didn't coin it. We want to study this with metabolic chambers in rats and use a variety of different approaches

to determine how fast it actually takes to bring your metabolism back up and if different strategies can be used to ramp up your metabolism. Well, because when you regain it, you regain fat really quickly, but your metabolic rate is more sluggish to return. So they actually did a study with the biggest loser participants. And this is why I'm so big on what what is sustainable yeah it has to be sustainable they looked at um so they lost on average like uh quite a bit of weight i can't remember the exact numbers but they lost a bunch of weight over the 30 weeks because they starve them and they exercise the crap out of them and they saw that their metabolic rate um dropped 500 calories more than you would predict just by the amount of body fat and lean body mass they lose this is what's called metabolic adaptation when you define metabolic rate dropping what do you mean by that

what's the so so you have so we can calculate all this stuff so your overall total daily energy expenditure your tdee is made up of your basal metabolic rate, which is what you burn, like what we're doing right now, just sitting around doing nothing. Oxygen consumption, CO2 production. Actually, to be real, it's just laying down doing nothing. So basically the energy you burn keeping the lights on, right? That's one component. It's about 50% to 60% in most people. Then you have your neat,

which is like this, like I'm moving my hands. I'm ambulatory movement, non-voluntary movement. This stuff will actually go down when you diet. Like if you've ever been around people, it'll go down. Yes. You stop fidgeting. Spontaneous movement goes down. It's a huge modifier. So like, if you look at, I did a DVD when I was prepping for a show back in 2010, fire so like if you look at i did a dvd when i was prepping for a show back in 2010 i blink slower i'm not kidding you and i talk slower yeah like your mind you were like on valium it looked like you're you're right now i'm all hyped up on you know in the life of lane with that series oh absolutely like you're you're so your body this is your body genetic diet would help you so so when you think about so there's neat that's that then your exercise, this is your body. Ketogenic diet would help you. So when you think about, so there's NEAT, that's that.

Then your exercise activity, which is intuitive. That's how many calories you burn exercising. And then there's what's called the thermic effect of food, which we already discussed. How much energy required to get energy out of food. Okay. And all those add up to your total daily energy expenditure. And we can predict based on equations how, what your metabolic rate should be. So these people, their metabolic rate was 500 calories a day lower than it should have been just based off the weight they lost.

Because if you lose muscle and you lose fat, you have less weight to carry around, right? So your metabolic rate goes down just from that. But it goes down way more than it should. That is the first prong of your body's self-defense system to stop you from starving yourself is to become more efficient. We hear the word efficiency and we think, wow, that's a good thing. Think about if your body fat levels were a gas tank and you had a car, okay? You would not want to be efficient, right? You wouldn't have one of the old Suburbans that was like half a mile per gallon, right? You don't want the Prius because you can

go way longer. So going back to that study on rats, they became so much more efficient with their food. And this is the second prong of your body's self-defense system is to not only slow down your metabolic rate while you're dieting, but to start activating systems that deal with restorage once you actually start overeating again. Have you ever done a long diet or known somebody who did it and then they start eating again, it's like everything sticks to you. It's like you just it's like you like, how did I gain five pounds from one day and people like, oh, it's water. Well, water doesn't stay around for six months. So it's not water. That is your body preparing all these systems. So even like enzymes that deal with fat storage,

while you're dieting actually go up because it's preparing your body for restorage. And then even probably the most interesting thing is. So this all falls back on the importance of tracking macros, which is completely ignored with guys coming off of a fight or fitness competitors. You don't just want to let yourself blow up really quickly. It's a myth that your body is set up to be anabolic or to gain muscle. You're set up for fat. But the point I'm trying to make is that the way most people diet, which is this kind of, I mean, you know,

you've probably been around people who do this yo-yo stuff. It's a lot of people. They pick the next fad diet, whatever's popular. They do it, they lose some weight, and then they regain it. my dad lost 30 pounds on the ketogenic diet regain 50 right now the real problem is in the track his macros now he does but the real problem and he's down 30 pounds again but the real problem is if we used to think adipose tissue was like a sponge right so if you ate too much you just threw more in there, right? Soaked up extra nutrients. And then if you started, if you're in a caloric deficit,

you were losing weight. It just gave up some of its nutrients, you know, like the guy who fasted for 365 days and didn't die because he had so much fat. We now know that body fat fits every definition in the endocrine system. It's a tissue. It is an actual organ because it sends out hormonal signals. It integrates hormonal signals. It talks to the brain, the hindbrain, the arcuate nucleus. It is integrated in all of metabolism in a big way.

And typically, you have – the way we gain fat or lose fat is based on the fat cell size. So you have a set number of fat cells and they either expand or they shrink pretty intuitive unless now you can create more fat cells if you become so obese that the you literally can't stuff any more fat in there right so obese people have fat cell hyperplasia a lot of times what's really interesting is people at the end of a diet, when your thyroid hormone is lower, your sympathetic nervous system tone is lower, this unique hormonal milieu, if you overfeed too rapidly, there's a researcher named McLean out of Colorado that showed that you can actually increase your fat cell number if you overfeed too rapidly right after a diet.

Now, this was in rats, full disclosure. But it was some fascinating stuff. You're increasing the total. Now you're increasing your body's, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Your body's like, shit, we had this famine. We don't want to deal with this shit again. We want to make sure that we can store

as much stuff as possible. So we're going to create some new, this dude is rapidly overfeeding. We're going to create some new fat cells to make sure we're not going to miss any of this energy. We're going to capture every single bit of it. I like what you're saying. And it makes a lot of sense.

You're talking about weight loss and weight gain, but you were specifically discussing hormonal changes in the body due to the ketogenic diet that are beneficial and that these hormonal changes and the changes to the way that the brain functions would be a benefit of following that diet versus just working on calories. Yeah, I mean it's that book I gave you, The Complete Book of Ketones by Dr. Mary Newberry. So I don't think it's actually out yet. I want to get jacked. Look at that.

So ketones are – Handsome man on there. They are sort of by definition have a metabolic superiority as a fuel source. And they readily cross the blood-brain barrier. They can largely replace glucose as a primary energy source in your brain under periods of fasting or ketogenic diet. So that, that offers a lot of advantages to someone dieting because it makes you resilient. Like the guy that fasted 382 days, his glucose was, was like 30 and dipped down to 20. That would be universally fatal for most people, but his ketones were elevated. So he did not feel hunger.

So that is true. Like the Cahill studies, George Cahill studies at Harvard Medical School where they fasted subjects for 40 days. They injected insulin to increase. What IRB did that get passed? I remember presenting this at Lane's camp a while back. And when I read this study, I had to call him on the phone. He passed away in 2012, but we had a number of conversations before he passed away. And I was amazed that he got ethics approval to do that because it's basically like killing someone, injecting 20 IUs of insulin. But what was fascinating that they were asymptomatic

for hypoglycemia at a level of hypoglycemia that's typically universally fatal. And they were also very cognitively lucid. And that was a dramatic demonstration at the time. It was thought that, you know, the brain could only use glucose. So this is a paradigm shift in the way we understand sort of fuel utilization, particularly in the brain. So that has major, and I can go kind of on and talking about the different applications of the ketogenic diet, which I did on the first podcast, but from a perspective of someone dieting to lose weight, dieting as a lifestyle, doing intermittent fasting, the ketogenic diet makes intermittent fasting much

easier because your brain's adapted to it. That for me had tremendous practical applications that allowed me, I feel, to excel through academia. I was able to do a lot more work, not get hungry. And, you know, we haven't trained in a while, but when we train, we did deadlifts. I mean, we were both deadlifting 675 for reps. And I was on, actually, I was on the classical ketogenic diet then. That's when I was just doing it. Classical versus? Like 80 to 90% fat. Super high fat. I was doing that for about a year. And, you know, deadlifting like three times my body weight for reps, you know, and it didn't hurt me. I can't say that

would be the case for everyone. But I also titrated the calories in that I wasn't really at a calorie deficit. I lost a little bit of weight. So I guess by definition, I was at a calorie deficit. Now for people that are thinking about gains, trying to gain weight, they would think that the ketogenic diet, that 80-90% fat would not be enough protein. I believe that the ketogenic diet shines when you are in a calorie deficit. My mentor for the cancer work, Tom Seyfried, had published a study showing an unrestricted ketogenic diet can actually promote cancer growth in a brain tumor model. Unrestricted, meaning too much calories? Yeah, they were feeding mice a sugary ketogenic formula that was on the market at the time.

Well, it was a sweetened. I'm sorry. It was a sweetened ketogenic formula with hydrogenated fats and other things. Yeah, it was sweetened maybe with aspartame or something like that. So mice tend to overeat it. And when they overeat it, it creates a plethora of metabolic abnormalities. But you also get those same abnormalities when you overeat carbs. You do.

See, here's me being. Just as a side note, how much does it drive you guys crazy when you hear about this fat acceptance thing or fat is healthy? To be fat? Yeah, there's so much of this going around today. Do you want to hear my. We see massively obese people and they're trying to say it's okay. It's fine.

You're healthy. Well, there's football players, right? I mean, by definition, they're pretty healthy. I mean, they lift. They train. Metabolically, their blood work kind of looks okay. Well, they have guts, but they're not morbidly obese. I might surprise you with my answer.

Okay. So we talked about this earlier. I'll take the heat. I'm a libertarian. So if somebody says, I'm fat and i'm happy and i like my life and i know what the risks are then i say knock yourself out i'm not me for the judge what makes somebody else happy but now the problem is if you complain about being fat then you got to do something about it otherwise you're not going to have any patience and it goes back to the

discipline right but you can be fit but fat yes. Because you have morbidly obese people. Like I said, if you lose 10% of your body weight, there's overweight people who run marathons. Oh, yeah. Bert Kreischer. Yeah. You can't tell me they're not in shape. Yeah. Oh, no.

For sure. You're just carrying extra weight. I mean, look at Daniel Cormier. He's not obese. He's not obese. But he has some- He's fat. Don't come get me, Dan.

Listen. He's not obese. But he has some... He's fat. Don't come get me, Dan. Listen, when Daniel fought Stipe Miocic, he was more than 40 pounds over his fighting weight as a light heavyweight champion. And he was actually heavier than Stipe. And it serves a practical function.

He's a good friend of mine. Yeah, but performance is not the same thing as aesthetics. Let me tell you what. He's in tremendous shape. When I looked like that, I looked amazing. You felt like shit. You felt like shit. I felt like shit. You were ready to pass out, right?

Literally, for me to stand up was, I remember being on the couch, and there was a stupid some show on, get on bioline.com. There was a stupid show on TV, and the remote was like, this goes back to neat. There was a remote over there, like five feet away. I sat and watched the whole show

because I just didn't feel like getting the fucking remote. Isn't it ironic because you look so good? Like when you jacked like that, you look like you just fucking run forever, break through walls. Now there is a threshold, like Ray Williams, who is the world's best powerlifter. I mean, he looks obese.

Dude squats legit 1,080 pounds. Isn't that an issue though with powerlifters though? A good percentage of them carry around a lot of body fat. It's not as much as you would think anymore. Like in the super heavyweights, yes, because like for example the IPF, which is kind of the IOC-recognized powerlifting federation that I compete in, they're cut off for super heavyweights 265 so if you're going to be a super heavyweight you might as well just be 350 you know who's that dude jamie that's ray that's ray ray look at the look at the bar bending dude that's he's a beast he's a beast gentlemen super nice guy uh blaine sumner another one but like when i hit my squat record of 668 at 205 pounds i mean

i was in pretty good shape for that but for me to get to like eight percent body fat no problem for me to get from eight percent and i'm calipering so for me to get to from eight percent to three percent it's a fucking nightmare your body again you really get down to three on calipers yeah so you think that would be if you floated? There are no actual accurate measures of body fat. What? Not really. Relatively within themselves, they're accurate.

Because it's dependent upon hydration and a bunch of other factors. Yes. So people, not to make too much of a side tangent, but people look at DEXA, dual x-ray absorption technology, and they say, oh, that's the gold standard. DEXA is actually really finicky. Like I remember DEXAing rats in studies. We do it in duplicate. So we do it twice. And sometimes you have like differences just DEXAing the same rat twice.

It depends on the machine, your hydration status, because water. If you want to gain – you know what the best way to gain eight pounds of lean body mass within five minutes go do a dexa then drink a gallon of water go back to another dexa you'll be eight pounds lean body mass heavier you can impress your friends because it's a two compartment model more lean body mass it's a two compartment model same thing with calipers it's only measuring your amount of fat tissue so anything that's not fat is lean body mass so if you guys are using that to track progress, if anybody uses that to track progress, it's only accurate relative to the measurement. So your calipers mean nothing for what your DEXA measurement is going to be and vice versa.

I see. But the change, like if I'm calipering consistently at 10% and then it drops to 8% and then 7%, I can be relatively confident that I'm losing body fat. Same thing for Dexa, but you have to do it the same time of day, same hydration status, all that kind of stuff. And I don't really use Dexa because people, in order to get it accurate, you'd have to use it like every day for it to be actual relative. You use pictures, right? So when he was dieting and got to a certain point, actual relative you use pictures right so when he was dieting and got to a certain way off tangent here but like i looked at him i was okay yeah like stop there but then he would go for another

and and get to a level where i he looked very gaunt i mean you looked yeah what looks good there like seeing him in person like i knew his personality was changing i mean it was kind of freaky disgusting looking towards the end. And many people who maybe follow the sport, but don't compete, don't really realize what the difference between 5% or 6% and 3% is. So that separates the competitors from the bros online. You're really fighting evolution at that point. Cause your body is trying to, you're close to starvation, literally your body's trying to keep you from doing that. So like you think about food all the time.

You actually become, so a friend of mine, Chris Foss, he's a professor now. He was doing his PhD at the same time as me. And him, my other friend, Dr. Jeremy Lineke and Dr. Lindy Rousseau, Chris's wife, Chris was doing a contest prep and I prepped him for the show. And it was a six month study of, he's a natural bodybuilder, so drug-free. And they looked at the hormonal responses, his weight, his body fat, and even like measures of mood.

Chris is like the most – This guy was a beast too, like 260 or something. I mean natural drug-free bodybuilder. 220 in the off-season, about 190 on contest. Okay. He did look like he was 260. Yeah, he's a big guy. But he's like a very mellow

dude by the end his mood measurements were measuring like that of a psychopath yeah it just changes your mood that much but you've probably been around fighters who like they get when they get that lean it's just like they can barely talk to you yeah yeah and think about think about like they're actually like trying to peak for a fight at the same time they feel the most like shit it's ridiculous they're so focused on cardio they can't i'm not a one to make to send to a they're focused on just dehydration yeah and and making that weight i've seen some of the the protocols i've there's some good ones out there but some of the stuff i've seen i'm like god i wish i could talk to somebody in that in that realm because it's so it's so much bro science

it's so dangerous too and it's it's really you can only do it three or four times and then your body starts to reject it. And these guys have to go up and wait. Like you were talking about. We explained to you why. Yeah. And guess what happens when they go up and wait sometimes? Yeah.

They start crushing it. Yeah. They do. They do much better. His testosterone, right, went plummeted, but his basal requirements, his caloric requirements was like 1200. The crazy thing is, so there have been some critics of my, my kind of view of metabolic adaptation, the body's self-defense system, full, full disclosure. Some people criticize me about that.

They say, well, if you look at metabolic adaptation, it only explains, it's only a 15% adaptation relative to the whole adaptation. And, but if you look at Chris's numbers, I think on average, that's probably right. On an average diet with an average person, you take somebody trying to get really lean or somebody who yo-yo diets or somebody who crash diets. And now, again, it's proportionate.

If you challenge your body with something extreme, it's going to respond in an extreme fashion. So every case study we have on natural bodybuilders, and there's about 10 of them now who look at their contest preparation and coming out of it and i use them just because this is the realm i grew up in shows that they're hypogonadal by the time that they're at stage so hypogonadal mean their testosterone no their testosterone is clinically low yeah naturally and these are guys like me i actually run i actually like have a pretty

naturally high testosterone level like when every every time ever since i'm 16 years old when i've got tested i've been like over 800 if i'm eating enough when i was at contest i was under 300 this is part of how your body fights you your body does not want you to be that lean but if you're kind of reining this back into the discussion this is why i talk about why it's so important to pick something that's sustainable for you as an individual. Because if you do this shit where you yo-yo diet or you don't come out of it appropriately, it will fuck you up. I mean, we've all – I think females especially and you have a lot of track records.

I've worked with a lot of females now because especially in physique sports, there's a lot of really bad coaching, starvation diets. For women, it just messes with the reproductive cycle too, right? Yeah. Stop having periods. Yeah. Which amenorrhea in of itself doesn't seem to have necessarily. What is that?

No menstrual cycle. Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't necessarily in of itself seem to be a, um, have negative health consequences in terms of longevity or disease or anything like that. But yeah, I mean if you can't get pregnant, I mean that's a big deal for some women. But what the women don't want to hear is you may have to gain some body fat to get that back. They don't want to hear that. But this is why like I really start with sustainability.

And then from there, I go to, OK, what – so if we got what's sustainable for you, now can we get a little bit better? Can we do a little bit more fiber? Like I think in general, you know, I criticize paleo diets because I think their validation for their model is absolutely fucking stupid. What validation is that? Oh, kind of the evolutionary validation and the fact that we didn't drink milk and we didn't eat beans and this kind of thing but coffee but but the question shouldn't be what we were doing the question should be what makes sense and what is healthy now like if you look at studies on dairy almost all studies show people who take in dairy are healthier better bone density more lean body mass lower body fat but isn't there are there a lot of people that think that dairy is bad for you?

Yeah. Dairy causes inflammation. Mostly vegans. Is that really? Some like clean eaters too think that dairy somehow causes. The research did actually. Yeah. Well, there's protein in dairy, various proteins that alpha-lactalbumin or beta-albumin.

That can basically initiate an immune response in the body. So I know when I'm okay with dairy fat, I can get like, you know, 100 grams a day of dairy fat. But if I drink a whey protein shake, especially at night, I wake up all congested and, you know, like I have an allergy or something. Is that a pure whey concentrate? Whey, yeah, whey concentrate. Or just like yogurt or – and I think it's a spectrum, right?

So it's not like you have it or you don't. I think there's this spectrum and bovine protein is kind of viewed foreign to the body. I mean once it enters the bloodstream, it can. It's only if it enters the bloodstream because if digestion is working properly, you're not going to get any once it enters the bloodstream, it can. It's only if it enters the bloodstream. Because if digestion is working properly, you're not going to get any of that in the bloodstream. It's all going to be chewed up into monodi and tripeptides. Some of it makes, I mean, like, insulin's a 50 amino acid.

And if you take enough insulin, like, you can basically go hypoglycemic. If you orally consume it. That's why you inject. I think it's 81. 81? I thought it was. Well, it doesn't matter. Short.

I teach on it. Yeah. So even something that's 50 amino acids or more can get through. So this term lactose intolerance, what do you think that is? That's actually an enzyme. That's actually an enzyme. That's a sugar. Yeah.

So this is an issue with people's individual dietary systems? So some people have alpha-lactalbumin sensitivity where if they've got some kind of leaky gut – so normally your injunctions are tight. Okay. So your small intestines or your intestines are like kind of fingers and they pick up nutrients. I'm really generalizing. The epithelial cells. The tight junction is a little anchor that holds them. If something's dysfunctional with that, that can allow certain nutrients through the wall. And that will initiate a body's immune response. Holly is celiac. And so if she has gluten, you will know it because she will have a huge inflammatory response.

But in people who have normal digestion, that just doesn't happen. because she will have a huge inflammatory response. But in people who have normal digestion, that just doesn't happen. Going back to the paleo thing, what I was going to say is, even though I disagree with their relevance, if you told me, okay, you take their general recommendations, eat limit sugar, eat more whole foods, eat higher protein, I think in general that's pretty good recommendations for most people.

I just, as you said, I'm anti-bullshit, so I'm not going to let you make claims about why something works when that's not why it works, right? So when we look at the differences in diets, I think what I would say generally to people is, here's the great news. As far as fat loss goes and health markers. If you want to lose weight, if you eat, if you control your calories, so you eat in the calorie deficit, you eat enough protein because protein helps spare lean body mass and is thermogenic. So it increases your energy output.

Um, then you can kind of do whatever you want with carbs and fats and whatever you prefer, and you'll still lose the same amount of weight and get about all the health benefits. But it has to be something that you can sustain because if you can't sustain it, you're going to put all that weight back on. That's what the research data shows. Sustaining it meaning having a balanced diet that you can stick with versus some sort of calorie deficit that's really only a temporary thing to lose weight. Right.

So now obviously you can't eat a deficit, because then you would starve yourself to death. Right. But the body corrects that. As you drop body weight, your metabolic rate slows down. You're not in a calorie deficit forever. When we talk about losing weight and then maintaining it, right, so eating in a maintenance. So eating – basically the behavior you use and the style of dieting you use you have to continue that if you want to maintain it so if you like ketogenic like you like ketogenic

you like ketogenic most and i think you're a big fan of meat if you can sustain that you know like people out there say oh my god people probably tell you're going to get cancer and you're going to do this and you're going to do that. Most of those health benefits are just from not having excess body fat. Excess body fat and the metabolic dysregulations of a metabolic type syndrome. That's what caused 90% of these problems. Okay. Which is why I get crazy when people say that fat is healthy.

Well, here's the problem. It's like we have like reactionary culture. So we have – Depends where your set point is too though. Right. We have reactionary culture. So you see this all the time. So we had, okay, you got to eliminate saturated fat. You got to eliminate dietary fat and just eat grains and limit your proteins.

And we got fatter. And so the reaction to that was, don't eat any carbs. Saturated fat isn't bad for you. In fact, eat as much saturated fat as you can. It's great. Put butter in your coffee. Like, no, there's good data to show that. The research data that I've seen, in my opinion, shows that saturated fat absolutely was demonized.

It's not as bad as we thought. But if you eat too much of it, it's not great either. Especially with carbohydrates. Oh, absolutely. Because now you're increasing your liver production of saturated fats as well. Right. When your body gets to a fat-burning stage, and then on top of that you pile on carbohydrates,

then your body wants to store those carbohydrates as well. With a calorie surplus. Well, technically you you store the fats you store the fat yeah because carbohydrate you burn the carbohydrates right so carbohydrate if you say well why does if you don't store carbon so i talk about this in my book because people will go too far to each direction to say well you said you don't you only said you hardly store any carbohydrate as actual fat. Why don't we eat zero fat and mostly carbohydrate? Well, then your body's not dumb. You didn't get here today and get through evolution and tens of thousand years of hard

living by your body being stupid. So your body can ramp up de novo lipogenesis so that you can create fat from carbohydrate if fat gets low and carbohydrate intake gets high enough. Essential fatty acid you need from your diet. There was a research study or a meta-analysis done by Kevin Hall, who's an NIH researcher. And they showed that if you equate calories, you get a small extra benefit from fat restriction versus carb restriction on fat loss. So you get about 26 grams extra fat loss per day, calories equated, protein equated, if you restrict fat versus carb. Now, before everybody goes crazy, that's probably due to a little bit of inefficiencies in ramping up de novo lipogenesis because there's, it takes energy to move that system. But 26 grams of fat loss per day to me is not a physiological, like I don't care about that.

That's nothing compared to, okay, if you like low carb better, don't worry about losing an extra 26 grams of fat. If you like low carb better and you can sustain that, then do low carb. One of the things that we seem to be getting into here is the difference between losing weight and optimal performance. And then optimal performance mentally and hormonally versus optimal performance physically in terms of like athletic pursuits. So here's something I'll- And the type of person, whether it's, you know, you don't want to put a teenager that's,

you know, playing football on a ketogenic diet necessarily. Why would that be? Well, maybe if they're overweight, that could be beneficial. But I think it would decrease his performance unless he goes through the keto adaptation phase. But there's a lot of – when you're a teenager, you're – I would say your carbohydrate tolerance is very high. I want to address this after you're done. Mine was very high. I could eat huge plates of pasta that I could not eat now.

I just simply couldn't. So I think as we age, I would say our carbohydrate tolerance decreases with age because our metabolic machinery is not as hungry for glucose. I mean we're set up – and hormonally. Our insulin sensitivity is not as high. Glycolytic pathways are reduced, things like that. That happens as a consequence of age. So it makes sense that as we transition into age for longevity and for health span, maybe not lifespan but health span, carbohydrate restriction makes sense.

And even in some cases, the ketogenic diet makes sense. But if you look at the – OK. So I have two pushbacks on that. And I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I kind of am. But if you look at longevity data, the actual longevity data, people who restrict fat versus carb live longer. Like that's what a new study that came out showed.

But again, there's a lot. I'm describing it as also a means of – because people put on weight as they age with a low carb and with a ketogenic diet. That becomes a practical strategy to create a sustainable calorie deficit for losing weight, sustaining that. For losing weight, sustaining that, and also if you elevate ketones over time, a lot of the new research that's coming out over the last five years, ketones is not just a superior source of energy metabolically, but it also has epigenetic effects on the body. It activates gene pathways that can confer resistance against oxidative stress, longevity pathways, anti-inflammatory pathways. But in the context of a deficit? No, not in the context of deficit. You could feed ketones, take a ketone supplement, and it activates just simply elevating beta-hydroxybutyrate functions as a histone deacetylase inhibitor and can activate, if you will, gene programs

that can confer resistance against many different things, oxidative stress pathways, and also activate or suppress an inflammatory pathway that's linked with many age-related chronic diseases and autoimmune pathways. It decreases the activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome. When you're talking about people living longer, you're talking about that epidemiology study that was like a questionnaire of people, what they ate over a long period of time. Highly criticized study. Absolutely. And there's a lot of co-founders, which is why I'm not a big fan of epidemiology.

It's hard to say that the study shows that if you eat carbs versus fat, that you live longer. I didn't say one was cause and effect. Yeah, but you sort of cited it as a piece of evidence. Because I don't cherry pick. Because if we're going to give the argument, I want to give the whole argument. I was playing devil's advocate. I don't think that necessarily if you eat a low-carb diet, it's going to cause you to live a shorter life. I don't believe that.

Okay. But I think it's important to put all the data out there because what I see a lot of is people just cherry picking. And I hate that. The problem with those studies, they become clickbait. There's tons of co-founders. And everybody wants to say, eat carbs, you'll live longer. Low-fat diets are going to kill you. And then it just gets crazier and crazier. Some of the animal work, I mean, Lane and I both did animal work. I think some of the animal work is almost more reliable because you have an inbred strain of animal and you have very tight control. They're genetically identical. Freely living human, you know, he's doing many different things and there's genetic variability. But with animals that it may not always be predictive,

it's informative, but not always predictive. And I think some of the data, I read some of the human studies and become more confused. But going back to the animal data, I'm almost more comfortable with some of these outcomes for animal studies. So one thing I want to bring up that I think is really important is we have – I think we're all getting to this point. People out there think that there's like this perfect diet that's going to cure everything and all of our ails. to this point and people out there think that there's like this perfect diet that's going to cure everything and all of our ales. The fact, the uncomfortable truth and the fact of the matter is that if one diet is, and I don't know this specifically, but my guess is if one diet is better for cancer, it might be worse for heart disease. Or if one diet is better for insulin

resistance, maybe it's worse for cancer. One diet is better for cognitive performance. It might be worse for athletic performance. We don't know. It's kind of where is your space at? And this is why I go back to those big picture things of most of the health benefits just come from having more muscle, lift weights. People out there,

lift weights. If you're debating about diets and you're not lifting weights, you are fucking missing the point. Because that is, sorry, I curse. The internet, you're allowed so that, yeah, I do it on Twitter. You've seen me. So, uh, it's very good at emphasizing your point. So, um, I'm a fan of it. Awesome. Fucking awesome. So, uh, somebody criticized me for one day. I was like, you know, what's great about my job. I can say fuck as much as I want and nobody's going to fire me. So that is great.

But the big picture things, lift weights, create more lean body mass, be active. That's a huge thing. Even if you're overweight, if you're active, you're going to live fine. On the whole, you're going to live longer than the person who's inactive. And then control your weight. So if you can get to a normal weight and maintain it, or sorry, normal body fat and maintain it, or if you're a high body fat, if you can get to a lower body fat and maintain it, that's 95% of the battle. All this other stuff is 5% that we're worrying about, that we're going back and forth about. And that's why I don't want to miss the

context because when people like, I'll pick on him because he was who I asked for, it was Gary Taubes, but I'm happier we got Dom for this. I'm going to interject. Hang on. Okay. Wait, wait. So when people like Gary Taubes say things like carbs are causing obesity, just carbs. You create this problem where if people don't like eating a high fat diet or a low carb diet and they can't sustain it, they just feel like they're a big failure and they just quit. Because what's the point? If carbs are causing fat and I can't stop eating carbs, what am I going to do? I have a real hard problem with that. I know what you're saying. Discipline. It's important. It just sounds like nonsense.

But I think my point is that if you give people flexibility it usually improves adherence right and you're talking about from the standpoint of you coaching people right and what i would like to see is i would like to see a diet that's protein and calorie a study protein calorie controlled if anybody knows of one that has done this let me know protein and calorie control and then let people self-select higher carb or higher fat. What do you prefer? Let them self-select and see how well they do.

And I bet you would see improvements in adherence in both groups. Dom, you were going to... Well, I think a diet strategy that controls your appetite and does not have your appetite controlling you, which I think is accomplished with the ketogenic diet. That's also, you know, one that's a well-formulated one that's

controls, you know, that has fiber and adequate protein is a strategy that allows you to be far less fixated on food because you're not as hungry and you could decrease your meal frequency. So if there's, I know there's people out there that are probably busy people, CEOs of companies, students or whatever, that simply do not have time to prepare and eat meals to when they get hungry. So by reducing meal frequency, you can increase your productivity. And I think you're kind of coaching your body to be a better fat burning. I think there's definitely benefits. So when you are on a ketogenic diet, you are storing more fat, but you are burning more fat. So think about your adipose tissue as little bags, which have fat coming into them and fat leaving them.

And the fat oxidation pathways are elevated. coming into them and fat leaving them. And the fat oxidation pathways are elevated. And when I eat a ton of fat at night before I go to bed, I am like some people carb load. I'm like fat loading at night. And I'm pulling off those fat stores during the day through my adiposes. You do this purposely? I think about it like that. So instead of just, you know, carving up at nighttime, I tend to, I would wake up hungry. I would probably dump insulin and then wake up with hypoglycemic cravings in the middle of the night if I did that. Do you do time-restricted eating? Yeah, like today. I'm fasting.

And most days that I want to be as productive as possible, I will not have my first meal, which will be typically a ketogenic meal around 4 p.m. And so what time do you eat at night? meal around 4 p.m. And so what time do you eat at night? I will start, I'll do a small meal like at work and then I'll eat my big meal at about seven o'clock, maybe seven o'clock and then snack throughout the night and maybe eat within, you know, I start eating at 4 p.m. and I finish eating at about 10 p.m. So you basically start eating at the end of your day. Yeah. So, and that's very liberating for me. So, and I didn't even know this was possible but that's like back 10 years ago i didn't know it was possible to have that amount of control over my appetite and actually feel as lucid and as energetic and be able to you know uh get with

lane and do deadlifts with him and actually maintain my performance and my strength in the gym. I don't feel like I'm an outlier either. I think it's possible. So I think that anecdotes are good because anecdotes cause us to look at things. But I can tell you like, so for example, I eat usually four times a day and I eat protein. Right now, I'm in a gaining phase. So I'm trying to purposely gain weight, hopefully some lean body mass. I'm coming back from an injury, so trying to regain some of my lean body mass. I'm eating about 400 to 450 grams of carbohydrate a day. There are times when I'll go seven, eight hours, I won't eat, and I don't really get hungry. So, I mean, there's— About 16 hours.

I don't know. I don't know, but I don't think I would. I go—some nights I'll sleep, and I'll'll wake up and I'll go 12, 13 hours. Like I'll go in sometimes and I don't usually get hungry. Why do you think that is? Well, if you look at some of the things that I'll disagree with are the idea that insulin has these big fluctuations and you become hypoglycemic and that causes overfeeding. has these big fluctuations and you become hypoglycemic and that causes overfeeding. In some people, that's the case. But most people, if they're eating, especially with a higher protein diet, that doesn't usually happen. I want to add that the population, most people

are not bodybuilders. And the population of people that Lane mostly communicates with are on the border of being metabolically elite and also have a very high carb tolerance. If you're a bodybuilder with a large amount of lean body mass, you are pretty much metabolically set up to have a high carb tolerance. The general population is not like that. So let's talk about carb tolerance because that's one thing that we'll disagree on. I don't think that people are more or less carb-tolerant. I think that people have slower and faster metabolic rates. So if you have a faster metabolic rate, you'll be more carb-tolerant by default because you can just tolerate more calories.

I agree. And a bodybuilder that's 220 pounds. Sure. On average. On average. Yeah. Now, if you look at somebody who's on a ketogenic diet, they're actually, by definition of carb tolerance, they're carbohydrate intolerant. Because if you challenge them with a bolus of glucose, they can't clear it. But that's just because of what they're adapted to, right?

But they're fat adapted, yeah. Agreed, agreed. So I actually, the first experimental biology we ever went to this is why you know even scientists get this shit so wrong sometimes because they get so in their echo chamber they don't bother to look outside of it going to the gym when we first met and went lane stopped and had a huge meal which to me i was like you feel like crap doing we're gonna stop and eat before i go squat it's a really heavy fatty meal on the way to the bathroom about five've got to visit the bathroom about five times, but you know. I didn't, I forget.

I think I did eat, but it was very abnormal for me to go eat a big meal, heavy meal on the way to the gym. Holly's like you. She hates training fed. She wants to be fasted. She feels better that way. But that's the individual differences, right? That's the individual differences.

Part of it may be you're just adapted to that as well on what you're used to. So it may be a psychological thing, but some people may just do better that way. Your blood is diverted to your digestive system and processes, and that's less blood for the muscles. So you're expending energy to digest, break down, and assimilate food. That theory has been pretty debunked. Really? Yeah. But something happens, right? I mean, it's just a fundamental

physiological concept that you are diverting blood flow to, yeah, blood flow in particular. The job of a scientist is to question even those theories we hold most to be true. That's what Neil deGrasse Tyson said. Yeah. So I think a small meal actually can be beneficial.

But it's not like you're using those carbohydrates during the meal. You're not using the protein. Can not using the protein for a second how has it been debunked uh that they see that performance isn't worse and that you don't like is there's no performance specifically like there's not a box there's not a limitation of blood flow because you've eaten something to the muscle there's not a limitation of blood flow to the muscle. Okay. But again, some people just do better if they're faster or have small meals. Again, it may be a psychological thing, but I like to feel like I've had a lot of food and I'm fully fueled for a long training session. But some people don't feel that way.

What kind of training though? Like if you're doing something like squats in a very controlled environment. But if you were doing something like- Might be different. Yeah, if you were doing jujitsu. But I don't know. You would probably throw up. Maybe. I don't know. I did it very briefly. Awesome sport. I did it very briefly, informally.

Awesome sport. You really can't have a big meal and then go train. You'd get fucked up. I'd probably have to run to the bathroom every few minutes. I can't work on a grant. I can't... We're not supposed to talk about guns, but if I go to the range and I'm a fasted... You're not supposed to talk about guns. But if I go to the range and I'm fasted – You're not supposed to talk about guns? Let's talk about guns.

Well, we talked a lot before. My groups are tighter. I have better control. If I go in in a fed state, I'm just not as focused. But is that a – My vision. My vision is not as acute right after a big meal as if I'm fasted 16 hours. But this is the hard thing with anecdote because we can't tease out whether or not

that is an actual physiological thing or whether you just feel better and you think you'll do better, so you do better. Because the brain is unbelievably powerful. There was a study, and I may butcher it because I can't remember exactly, but they took people who had legit allergy problems and they gave them a sugar pill.

And they said, this will improve your allergies. It should not have done anything. Over half the people reported their symptoms got better and 30 percent actually physiologically got better because their brain was telling them get better. Like it's pretty crazy. So that's part of probably the best diet for you might be the diet you can stick to and just feel real positive about right because you feel like this might be some what's going on with a lot of this low carb stuff that people say they feel so fantastic because there's some sort of a placebo effect that's possible i think part of it is too is that's why animal studies are

give me more confidence when i can look at rats or mice on a ketogenic diet and see an objective increase or decrease in a parameter, then I gain confidence. But here's the thing. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. If you feel good about it, that's great. But just don't try to get on Twitter and tell everybody, oh, you're going to gain fat and a deficit because you're eating carbs. Shut up. If you go to a witch doctor and you really believe it might actually help you. Yes.

One of the number one characteristics of cancer survivors is that they're actually – they have a belief in God. They believe that they're going to make it through. Now, some people – cause or effect. Some people may argue, religious people may argue, well well they believe in god and so god is helping them the other argument to that is they believe that they are going to make it through there and so they have a more better likelihood of doing it so your brain is very powerful believe in the ketogenic diet and believe in god and i think that's a great thing and they fly they fly they they have remarkable i i believe that – well, I'm a person of faith, but I also believe that if you have faith in the methodology too, the patients that have communicated with me that actually believe that this approach is going to work and then they reach that actual therapeutic state of ketogenic diet have results that kind of defy what you would expect scientifically. So I believe it's working physiologically and also psychologically. There's immunopsychotherapy, right? Or immunology.

So our brain can actually control many different physiological processes, including our immune system. And that is something that's underappreciated and understudied. And that really needs to be studied. Now, in terms of eating a large meal before training, surely your body has to use up some of the resources to digest. You don't think that it's blood flow to the muscle? You think that's been debunked? They show that the blood flow to the muscle is not limiting if you've had a meal before you train. OK. Now, the thing is – but some people don't like that.

It's a very individual thing. It may be a psychological thing with me. I'm not – I understand that I'm an idiot like everybody else out there, right? So I'm subject to bias and psychological influence like anybody else. But I just use that to my advantage. If I feel good about it, why would I not do it? If you train in the morning, do you do that? Like heading to the gym first thing in the morning?

Holly tries to stop me because then I usually end up going to the bathroom for like five times. But I'll eat a little bit less in the morning if I'm going to go straight in and train. I'll eat a little bit less in the morning if I'm going to go straight in and train. But one of the things that going back that so many scientists miss is that context. Like most people miss context, but scientists even miss context. So the first experimental biology study or first experimental biology symposium we ever went to, there was a poster where they fed people a ketogenic diet or they fed them a high carb diet. had people a ketogenic diet or they fed them a high carb diet. And then at the end of six weeks, they challenged them with a hundred grams of glucose and looked how long it took for them to clear that glucose. The ketogenic diet people would have been worse than like type two diabetics at clearing glucose. Okay. Whereas people eating a high carb diet cleared it just fine.

Right? Now, if you, if you just looked at these numbers as a doctor, you'd be like, Oh my God, you're diabetic. No, that's what they were adapted to. And I challenged the person with the poster. I said, and for all you ketogenic diet people who hate me on Twitter, I defend the ketogenic diet when it is time to be defended. I said to the girl, if you had fed a high fat meal to these people, you would have seen the same thing in reverse. If you would have fed a high-fat meal to people who were on the ketogenic diet and then a high-carb diet, you would have seen really elevated triacylglycerides, LDL cholesterol, VLDL cholesterol, chylomicrons, and people who were carbon-acted because it wasn't being cleared because that's not what you're adapted to. But people miss that whole context. Lane has a good analogy in his book, that book, where if you have a factory, a military factory that's making planes, and then it has to switch over to making ships, right? So it takes a lot of time to change sort of all the processes that take place.

And the same thing is sort of happening. I mean, you're giving your body a different fuel source. So it has to ramp up the enzymatic machinery, the pathways, the regulatory pathways, and the transporters even to basically use those fuels. Yeah, and a misunderstanding of that, or at least an ignorance, is one of the more frustrating things online when I hear like nonsense people, these internet air quote experts talking about the negative aspects of the ketogenic diet that they tried it and they felt weak. Like, what do you mean you tried it? You tried it for a day.

Did you try it for three days? You tried it for a month. Like, get the fuck out of here. Keto adaptation. Yeah. It's so important. Like when you review a study and I think you have a study in your book actually that shows in the gym you basically say the ketogenic diet can hurt your performance in the gym. And you reference a race walking study where I think they did the ketogenic diet for like three weeks or something like that. I think we came back around and said that it's probably fine once you're adapted to it.

Once you're adapted to it. What's the time period you're adapted to it yeah what's the time period we're talking about for me I did not feel myself after it took me about three to four months but then you got to realize that there's a learning curve to doing the ketogenic diet right so if I go back to my notes I mean my performance in the gym and just general well-being took about three to four months do you use an app to chart your meals or anything? I did MyFitnessPal and stuff, but I just know I'm a creature of habit,

so we basically just buy the same food all the time. And I measure things on scales and stuff just as a scientist, so I can look at some powder on a scale and do 250 milligrams plus or minus, you know, 10 milligrams. So I've measured things out to where I can look at a plate and basically give you the macro is pretty tight. And that's, I don't know if you do that. Have you ever done keto for long periods of time? I've done it before. Yeah. And he hasn't been keto adapted though. I would argue I had ketones in my, in my, but, but I just, how long did you do it for about eight weeks so you could argue that i

didn't do it long enough but my thing is like all my blood markers are healthy um i didn't see so i did keto at maintenance and i didn't see really much improvement in anything everything kind of stayed the same now what what did different energy when when was this what year was this this would have been probably after my bodybuilding show but before i got back into powerlifting so it would have been sometime in like 2012 ish did you like post about it and stuff i want to go not really because i didn't i didn't want to really like get the wrath of anybody on me at the time now i'm trying it now i'm old and cantankerous i just don't care that much anymore but um i didn't my performance didn't go down that – in the first few weeks it did.

But then it was fine. I just like the flexibility of having some carbs. I liked having that flexibility because if you're going to – They like popcorn. I remember eating it. Yes, I do. You know, popcorn is great though because it actually has higher protein and higher fiber. But if I was going to commit to it as a lifestyle, then that would be fine.

But unless you're willing to, again, if that's not something you're willing to stick to for life, you have to rethink if you want to do it or not. But there is some benefit in going on and off ketogenic diets, correct? I, so if you do a ketogenic diet and you want to stay in a state of ketosis, the days that I do intermittent fasting now, which I didn't do like five years ago, I don't necessarily do the ketogenic. I do a higher protein, low carb, but my macros are not ketogenic. Typically, not all the time. Sometimes they are. But there are different, like you could do intermittent fasting with a carb based diet and still get ketones, you know, by the end of your, your fast, you could do low carb, you could do ketogenic. I actually think it's, it's a little bit better to be metabolically flexible. So I'll

throw in, I tend to eat a lot of vegetables and then throw in some fruits to a few, a few days a week where, uh, it may kick me out of ketosis, but during the middle of the day when I need to be at my best, I pretty much always am running low to moderate ketones during the day. And I can do that with different strategies now with my body. How much does that kick you out of ketosis though? I can't imagine. At nighttime? Yeah. What are you eating specifically? of dark chocolate, one or two things of dark chocolate, which is maybe 15, 20 grams of carbs,

and maybe a half cup of blueberries, and then a big salad and some vegetables, typically green vegetables. So when you say it kicks you out of ketosis, so if you measure your blood, your ketones drop below what level? 0.5. And I typically don't even measure at night, but I wake up in the morning and it might be about 0.5. And then that goes up throughout the day. So middle part of the day, I'm typically running one between one to two, sometimes three millimoles. If I take a ketone supplement. The urine strips are only effective in the early stages of ketosis. Is that correct? Yeah. Because in the beginning you spill out a lot of ketones in your urine. But as you increase ketone transport and utilization over time, less of them end up in your urine.

How much time is that? Depends on the person. But after about two or three weeks, you may see less of a color change on the urine strips, even if you didn't change your diet. Is there another effective method other than the pricking the finger? Yeah. Well, I think the blood, uh, you know, Abbott labs makes the, uh, precision extra there's the keto mojo, which I also use, we use in the lab. I mean, a keto mojo is a blood measurement and glucose measurement device.

That's essentially, uh, cause Abbott corner of the market. They, uh, they basically allow you to check your ketones for a dollar a strip instead of, you know, three or four dollars or five dollars. But it's still pricking your finger. It's pricking your finger. I don't use the device. I actually use a syringe and just take a running start and jab my finger now because it doesn't, I got calluses like you do on your fingers. It's annoying. Yeah, I'm kind of used to it. But the urine strip is actually a pretty good relative marker. And the Siemens Multistick SG will measure ketones and then nine other things like that measure kidney function and your blood glucose and things like that. So I recommend it's 25 cents a strip. And then there's the breath ketonics meter. You blow into it and it measures breath acetone. And the level is also another breath acetone measurement system. I was going to ask about that.

So, yeah. And, you know, breath acetone highly correlates to fat oxidation. So if your breath acetone is high, you are burning a lot of fat. Isn't there an issue with people that are in the state of ketosis if they get pulled over for drunk driving? A couple of lawyers contacted me. There's some cases going on right now and they wanted me to weigh in on that. Breathalyzers. Yeah.

The breathalyzers because of the, what did you say? Acetone with the suit of breath? It uses the same technology, breath acetone. And if you, I know that if you drink alcohol and do a breath ketone meter, you can kind of pin it depending on what meter you're using. If you're using a breath, that's for a breath ketone meter. If you have a breath alcohol measurement and you're in a state of ketosis, I have not seen that depending on the device that you'll have a false positive, if that's your question. Some devices can. It depends on the device.

So one thing I'll bring up because you said, well, you work with these kind of metabolically elite people. So one of the problems – I say what you're doing where you kind of take yourself up to the point where you're sort of getting out of ketosis and then going back in, that's probably fine. But most people aren't going to do it that way. They're going to be like, oh, I had a cheesecake or, oh, I couldn't take any more and I had some pizza or whatever. That's really bad. So you see probably people who intermittent fast decrease that window time and over consume. Yeah.

So that's a big problem. So actually, I wanted to bring up intermittent fasting too because I think, again, like if you – so the studies on intermittent fasting show that you lose the same – if calories are the same, you lose the same amount of weight, same amount of fat. Maybe you might be at risk for a little bit more lean body mass loss just because you're triggering protein synthesis less often. But you do have a little bit lower insulin levels, it seems like. Now, whether or not that's, again, beneficial based on the research that we talked about. Unlikely insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity was a little bit better. Again, so there's some techniques you can do, but people bring up things like autophagy and inflammation. And again, I kind of get...

The science... and inflammation. And again, I kind of get... So if you just calorically restrict, you increase autophagy and you decrease inflammation. Yeah, but you don't get... And autophagy is dependent upon the decrease in certain amino acids, glucose and insulin. And you achieve those biomarker states

at a more significant level doing intermittent fasting than you would. And they are the autophagy regulators. Can you send me the research? Okay. Amp tour, amp kinase, you know, leucine. So if you are eating various meals throughout the day, three times a day, like, you know, your blood leucine levels will be... But you've always got to keep it in context of 24 hours. So people do this with fat storage and oxidation as well. They say, well, if you're fasting all this time, you're burning so much body fat. Well, yeah, but then by definition, if you're eating less at these times, you have to eat more at this time if you're keeping calories the same.

And so during that time post-meal, you're going to store a lot more fat. You're going to have much higher insulin. Now, maybe not, maybe lower overall. And if you have a fast metabolism, you're overshooting and those calories have to go somewhere. So the point being over 24 hours, you don't see differences in fat loss or fat gain, intermittent fasting versus non. I would be interested in the inflammation stuff and the autophagy stuff.

Because again, caloric restriction in and of itself decreases inflammation, increases autophagy. Interestingly enough, one of the sugar studies they did with higher sugar, with still calorically restricted, they showed decreases in inflammation. So it's inflammation is largely an issue of caloric restriction or the reduction of inflammation. Or excess. Do you guys think that that's what's going on with this carnivore diet?

Yeah. The people – it's hard now. I think it's a calorie restriction effect probably. It's hard to overeat meat. And an elimination diet effect. Like look at – if I give you a plate of French fries, like 200 grams of French fries, you can get a lot of calories from that. If I give you 200 grams of meat, even a real fatty meat, it's not nearly the same.

Like you're going to be much more satiated from the protein. Like you can only eat so much meat, you know? And again, like if you, I don't want to go too far down the carnivore diet hole, but the stuff I see with people, yeah. Do I think you can eat meat and improve your blood markers absolutely absolutely of course you could eat pop tars yeah but but the point is is like when we get into this kind of zealot of only eat meat you don't need vegetables you're not gonna there's there's i mean again it's epidemiology but there's some really tight meta-analyses that have been done looking at colorectal cancer and low fiber intake.

And I would not be comfortable recommending people not eat enough vegetables and fiber. I feel uncomfortable eating a steak or a burger without something like broccoli or a salad. I think you negate many of the potentially carcinogenic compounds that are in red meat. And that's a whole nother debate. But I think essentially, yeah, heme iron and polyamide hydrocarbons. Yeah. Chris Kresser actually brought that up yesterday. We're talking about meat consumption with vegetables.

Yeah. Like with cruciferous vegetables, broccolis and salads. Like I don't personally would not eat red meat. So full disclosure, I mean, I was, because I get accused on Twitter of being a carb guy and I'm not. I was, my research was funded by the egg board, the beef, or beef national beef something or another. Sorry guys.

And then the national dairy council. So, you know, full disclosure, by the way, all you guys out there who, again, you're just taking my word for it, but who think that like industry is this evil thing that comes in and controls everything. I met one person, my entire PhD from the funding sources, and I met them for literally 30 seconds. They were at a, it was at Experimental Biology. And they said, hi, thank you for the grant. Oh, great, great, great job. Thank you. That was it. Now, I'm not saying that there isn't nefarious things that can happen. But like when I heard – like the show with Nina, everything was about who funded it and this and that.

But that's why they have to disclose those things on papers. And also, this is why science is self-regulating because somebody is going to repeat your study. And if they don't find the same thing you found, you're going to be in trouble. So I get criticized for conflict of interest. I've seen it on social media and things. So I should probably say I am not a medical doctor or even a registered dietitian. I'm a PhD scientist. So don't take my word as medical or nutrition advice. Our research is funded not only by the Department of Defense

and Office of Navy Research, but also by companies that actually develop ketone food products and also exogenous ketone supplements. And our university owns the rights to those patents. I don't have any products myself. We have a company, Ketone Technologies, and Ketone Nutrition is the information website. But at this time, we have no products. But the university licenses our intellectual property and products are made out of that. And I get patent royalties. And I put the patent royalties back into our research.

patent royalties and I put the patent royalties back into our research. So buying various exogenous ketones, uh, products that are on the market can come back and help support the science and the application of this. I'm just going to vouch for him. I don't, I, you know, I tend not to state that, but I get called out for not stating that. So I think it's important. I'm going to vouch for him because he's actually writing a chapter in my new book. So we're going to have a chapter about the ketogenic diet. If you're going to do it, this is how to do it right. So the new book, Fat Loss Forever, shameless plug. And he said, I just want all the money that I make from the book to go back into the lab. Nice.

Like that's – And Walter Longo has a similar with Prolon with his line, too. I know his profits, you know, the profits that he takes, he puts back into nobody's unbiased. Anybody that says there are is full of crap. We all have our biases. We all have things that we think work better than others. But I think the fundamental if you if you meet a scientist and hopefully I equip myself well in this. And I think Dom does as well, is that one, you have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. And two, you care more about getting the right answer

than being right. When I went to do my PhD, I was eating eight meals a day. I was eating 300 grams of protein a day. I was looking for more reasons to eat more protein and eat it more frequently. When I left my PhD, I ate four meals a day and I ate a little bit less protein and less frequently. And you're becoming refractory to the amino acids. Yeah, refractory phenomenon we came across. I was eating 500 grams of protein a day. I was eating like two or three two-pound London broils and washing it down with a product

Metrix with HMB in it, like in between meals, like back in the mid, early 90s. Your fart smell was insane. That was brutal. And that was the coolest thing. I digested it well, actually. That was the coolest thing about my research was it changed the way I ate. I actually changed the way I ate and responded to it. But that was my bias coming in.

But I looked at the research data and I'm like, either I believe this or I don't. And if I believe this, I can't justify X, Y, Z. Right. Can I go back to the epidemiology studies in regards to colon and rectal cancer? There really haven't been any studies on people that just eat meat, though, right? You're talking about people who eat meat on a regular basis, and that usually is the standard American diet, a lot of other bullshit in there, sugar, buns. And there's tons of the co-founders.

Trans fats. Absolutely. Right. buns and there's tons of co-founders trans fats absolutely right the i would be fascinated to see some sort of long-term studies on someone who's on a very strict carnivore diet i'm really fascinated by this because i'm seeing all these people have all these benefits but i am i've got skeptical hippo face every step of the way i'm like i'm not now again if it's allowing them to create a caloric restriction yes right and And somebody says, you know what? I've tried every other diet out there.

I've tried to eat high fiber and I've tried to eat enough vegetables. I can't, but I can stick to this. Right. And I can create, and I can lose some fat. Then I'm going to say, okay, well, maybe that's the best diet for you. Well, I just know so many people that are benefiting from it. Like, you know, and not just the people that have been on the podcast before. I know a lot of other people.

And if they're followed by a doctor in collecting blood work along the way, I mean, those doctors can write case reports. So I'd be glad to assist in a case report if people are tracking all their blood markers and doing their blood work. Most of the people aren't, though. That's what's going on. Most of these knuckleheads are just eating meat and saying they feel great and there's a war on vegetables. It's fucking very strange remember that people don't discount psychology people are feeling very positively about it because it's the flavor of the month yeah right like and i'm no hate towards carnivore i don't know who the i think uh dr baker sean baker is the one big guy um

but you know like if i even dogs eat grass i mean my dogs go out and eat around the gray you know to get some uh cats are obligate carnivores yeah so cats interestingly are one thing that yeah they don't there is a carb tolerance with them they don't tolerate them well they become obese yeah but the vegan cat so the, I think the thing is that I'm not, I don't believe in any one diet. I'm not trying to sell anyone. I would like to sell you on a ketogenic diet. I really want to see you do it for like four or five months just to see if

you're experiencing the same benefits as him. It seems pretty obvious that you really haven't done it like whole hog. I agree with that. Totally. And I think I could probably put together a meal plan with keto cookies and things like that. Oh, just fucking cookies. But I like my cookies.

Food technology. Hang on, hang on. See, I did a ketogenic diet and it was fine. I felt fine. My performance didn't suffer that much. What was your blood markers? They didn't really change a whole lot. Like I i think some i would consider them insignificant changes i maintained um what about your millimolars my millimolar did you do urine ketones or blood ketones or did you

oh i didn't look at my blood i didn't i didn't measure those i didn't even know if you were really in okay i did some urine sticks um and what stage were you in from moderate to high in terms of ketones? I would have been the modified ketogenic diet. So I would have been not super, but I would have been above 0.5. So you barely made it into ketosis. I would have been above 0.5. Don, what do you think? You barely made it into ketosis?

So he's eight weeks into it, and that's about the point I was kind of feeling crummy and stuff. So I actually felt – Really about three – well, not crummy, but cognitive so uh so i actually felt about three well not crummy but i cognitively it was kicking in yeah uh but i was a little bit flat in the gym yeah and then uh started to fill out and then it's a learning curve too right but see my thing was if i can get the same if i can get the same benefits just by restricting my calories and keeping higher protein and i love the same benefits in terms of cognitive function, in terms of science. I would say, I mean, we study, you could look at PubMed, everything from polycystic ovary syndrome

to acne, you know, type two diabetes, type one diabetes. Now that's a little bit controversial. Genetic metabolic migraines, you know, a whole host of neurological disorders simply because beta-hydroxybutyrate is, I believe, sort of from, there's an objective truth that it's a superior metabolic fuel. And if you have millimolar levels in your blood, that's a significant amount of energy in your blood that your tissues can use. How are you defining superior metabolic fuel? What's the objective measure? The delta G of ATP hydrolysis in the heart is enhanced so

essentially you're making more atp for a given amount of oxygen which actually means your metabolic rate could be slower uh maybe you are more metabolically efficient yeah so you're more metabolically efficient potentially but i don't think in the context of fat loss, but it's also enhancing insulin sensitivity and simply feeding ketones independent of carbohydrate restriction increases fat oxidation in the muscle. This has been published. There's been studies to look at like a ketogenic diet versus a non-ketogenic higher carb diet. And they show that basically by going ketogenic, you reduce overall insulin area under the curve by 20%. That was the number they got. Now, if I was type 1 diabetic, I would 100% do the ketogenic diet.

100%. Absolutely. And that's very controversial. This is not medical advice. This is me personally. I actually, when I used to give talks, I would say for these things, but if you're type 1 diabetic, talks, I would say for these things, but if you're type one diabetic, you want to avoid the ketogenic diet as much as possible because there's diabetic, something called diabetic ketoacidosis. But like my student, Andrew Kutnick at USF. That's if you've also got a lot of insulin.

He has a blog on ketonutrition.org. Go to it. And it's a very detailed description about carbohydrate restriction and managing your blood glucose. And it goes into really into the weeds if you want to read that. So can I stop you there though? Can you elaborate on that? So you used to say that if you were type one diabetic, you wouldn't. I did because it was very controversial territory. Describe what diabetic ketoacidosis is. Yeah. So if you're type one diabetic, you make little or no insulin at all, right? And I guess maybe just going back to a normal person, when they fast or they do the ketogenic diet, it increases fat oxidation in the liver and that fat oxidation actually accumulates acetyl-CoA and that

creates ketones, acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate. And it occurs in the context of insulin suppression, but you still have normal insulin, but it's very low, right? And then when your ketones get elevated, you spill some out in the urine and that's how you eliminate them. Your muscles, your brain burns them. And if they get really high, you have a small increase in insulin release when your ketones get real high. And that insulin ramps down fat oxidation in the liver and decreases ketone production. So, and there's other things too, but I don't want to get too much into the weeds, but you're a very, a normal person is finely tuned to create, to maintain physiological ketones within a certain range with nutritional ketosis. With diabetic, type one diabetes,

that's completely thrown out the window. So without insulin being there, the absence of insulin essentially creates runaway ketogenesis and your ketones become very, very high in the context of very high glucose. Exactly. So you have high glucose and high ketones. It creates a metabolic disruption. It creates an acidotic state and electrolyte imbalances and coma and death. Which is not going to happen in people who are healthy, who are just doing a ketogenic diet. Right. But with type 1 diabetes, if you, for example, my student using his example, because I think maybe he was using 20 or 30 IUs of insulin a day, right, and then starts carbohydrate restriction and even a modified ketogenic diet and can reduce that insulin requirement to four, five, six IUs a day. So literally knocking it down, you know, to 20% of what he was taking before.

So what has changed in your perception when you did not recommend it? Well, there's a Harvard study that basically looked at a group called Type 1 Grit on Facebook. There's a group called Type 1 Grit, and it's got thousands of people who use a low-carbohydrate approach, not necessarily a ketogenic diet approach. Some are, but it's very carbohydrate-restricted in terms of what a doctor, an endocrinologist would prescribe for a type 1 diabetic. It would almost maybe look like suicide to some people. And low carbohydrate dramatically decreases your insulin requirements. And if you look at your continuous blood glucose recordings over the course of a week,

those numbers are much, much tighter. And that's going to pay huge dividends in the long run when it comes to longevity and health span and, you know, the potential for going blind or decreasing your kidney function, you know, by these huge postprandial spikes. Essentially, if you're type 1 diet, you're always chasing your glucose with insulin injections, right, or an insulin pump. If you're carbohydrate restricted, you're basically not, it's very liberating because you're not, your dependence on insulin is far, far less. You know, some controversially, some people have gotten completely off of insulin. I would not recommend that, but some people are actually doing that. So the, the, I think highly not recommended. I hear this from critics, critics of the ketogenic diet, and this is a BS criticism.

Again, here's me defending the ketogenic diet. Well, you'll become people who are healthy. You have ketoacidosis. That is not going to happen because by definition, if your ketones are high and you're relatively healthy, not type 1 diabetic, your blood glucose is low. It's when both are elevated that it's dangerous okay and if you're a type 1 diabetic like andrew who you're just using a little bit of insulin to get that baseline to get your glucose levels down to a baseline level and then you're using a carb restricted diet that creates ketones while your blood glucose is at a normal basal level that again not a doctor not medical advice that should not be dangerous.

Right now over the years, because he's a power lifter and he's a super big dude, he's like 250 pounds. Like when he goes to the gym, he has learned that he can pulse a little bit of insulin and maybe ramp up his protein or maybe even take a little bit of carbohydrates. But you know, the next day he's still doing low carb throughout the day, but he's learned to leverage, you know, as a type one diabetic, you, uh, you have that advantage, right? Cause you can manipulate insulin for body composition alterations and things like that. So he, uh, he has learned to adjust his protein to maximize his sort of gains and performance in the gym. And, uh, but nonetheless, he goes from a, he went from a strategy, he transitioned to a strategy that would be, would look to be almost suicidal from the

perspective of an endocrinologist doctor managing type 1 to do that level of carbohydrate restriction would be, and now we actually have hard science to show that that not only can be done, that dramatically decreases the variability of your blood glucose fluctuation throughout the day from a weekly perspective and your requirements for insulin. Whenever you could use less insulin to manage your blood glucose, that's a good thing. It's very hard for a doctor to argue against using less insulin and keeping tighter numbers. There's no way to argue against that. So if you can follow the diet so that this gets back to adherence again. Again, so it's one of those things that you said, I'd like to see you try it and do it and whatnot. And you know what?

I would probably be fine. But I enjoy having a variety of foods and I enjoy having a variety of fuels as well. No, I'm sure you do, but I'd still like to see you try it. Like those two are mutually exclusive. No, you're right. But I like, I have a chapter in his book that's coming out that we worked, you know, together and just took some of the concepts that I've... Don't you find that your preferences change as well, like in terms of your hunger pangs? You're not. You don't crave sugary foods, carbohydrates.

Yeah, but you do. You like them. Look at you. Oh, I like them for... Yeah, I like them. He's getting hungry. He's got to leave. He's thinking about it.

To get in the amount of, oh my God, give me the sugar. Where's the pizza? No, I don't... What did you have for breakfast this morning? What did I have for breakfast tomorrow what did i have for breakfast i had uh steak and eggs whoa there you go and a piece of keto oh and some toast oh you son of a bitch with your bread stab him in the face what is wrong with you don't you know spike

my hands i had a big serving of nothing i feel lots of energy but again it's it's it's it's individual and i want to to point out that if somebody likes a ketogenic i've had people do a ketogenic diet i've had people you know get ready for shows on a ketogenic diet that like why did you put them on a ketogenic because that's what they liked they were they had that preference for that and it got to a point where for some people their calories get so low if they have slow metabolic rates that the level of fat restriction it would take them to is probably not great for hormone levels. So I tended to pull a little bit more carb relative to fat. And so we didn't start out targeting them as ketogenic, but by the end they were. So you had to resort to something that actually works.

Oh, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Because metabolic rate declines, you get to a point, especially to get that lean. I mean, I'm somebody who's, again, more average muscle mass and pretty fast metabolism usually. I had to get down to like under 2,000 calories a day to get ready for a show. get down to like under 2000 calories a day to get, to get ready for a show. So for me, I was, I had my carbohydrates for briefly under a hundred grams of carbs per day in that show prep.

I don't know if you remember, but I was, remember I was sticking your fingers and measuring your glucose in the bathroom. I forget where, yeah. My theory is that when you do that and you carb restrict and you, well, you, you calorie restrict rather and get down to eat. Once that shit's over, you just want to reward yourself as often as possible. So when someone comes along with something like a ketogenic diet and go, no bread, no pot, fuck you.

You just don't want to do it. But you get the same, the adherence and the relapse is the same whether it's ketogenic or another diet. Relapse. Like regaining weight. Yeah, but is it bread? It's again, is it disciplination? Is that your fixation, like pasta and bread?

What I like. But is it – There's no – no foods actually creates. Yeah. They've sent – They've got great stuff. Their waffles are excellent. They have like hamburger buns now, I think.

Yeah. It's good stuff. It is good. I really like – I've made sandwiches with their stuff. What knocks me out more than anything of ketosis is just too much meat. Yeah. Yeah. Leukogenesis?

Yeah. That's the one that gets me. Again, I kind of go back to that the data is very mixed. Again, if we look at the overall data set, very mixed. And all diets have terrible adherence, right? But again, that's discipline. Yeah, but we also...

That drives me crazy. I don't want to talk about people who aren't disciplined. I really have a giant hard problem with that because I know so many disciplined people and I just feel their momentum and vibration and I'm like, I just want to concentrate on what they're doing. Because all these people that can't do it, I feel like momentum and vibration. And I'm like, I just want to concentrate on what they're doing. Because all these people that can't do it, I feel like that's contagious.

You start thinking about people that can't adhere to diets and fall. I get it for you because it's something that you do professionally. But I'm going to make a – so for you, the ketogenic diet clicks or eating more meat clicks. That's something that you really enjoy. You like the state. You like the state. You like the state. Dude, I love pasta. It makes discipline easier because it regulates your appetite.

But the data doesn't support that. I think so, too. The data doesn't support that it makes discipline easier in terms of your adherence or in terms of your long-term adherence. Both. Both. So, but hang on. Hang on. For some people, this works better because they feel better.

They have better adherence. For other people, if you say, now you've got some people, if you say, hey, you can have a cookie, it would screw them because they would just go crazy. But for other people, if you allow them more flexibility, their adherence improves. if you allow them more flexibility, their adherence improves. What I'm saying is we need to give people all the options on the table, not demonize any one diet and say, hey, maybe you try to figure out what works, for lack of sounding bro, what works for you and what you can sustain. Go from there. I'm totally in agreement.

I am as well, but you keep saying can sustain. You definitely can sustain more than you do. The real problem is a giant percentage of the people are weak. Oh, I would agree with that. It's in the 30%, 40% people just quit, give up, don't do what they're supposed to do, don't do as many reps as they're supposed to do, don't work out, take days off just because they're lazy. And those are the people that get off the diet.

It's a discipline issue more than anything. The market for that is really big. So I think various foods that are emerging on the market right now, app-based systems, Virta Health actually has a great app-based system that actually coaches you through that. And I think that's very helpful. So I think new technologies, foods, and we'll make it, we'll increase will increase adherence also when you have a person who knows and understands all the health benefits associated with nutritional ketosis or just low carb i think that can be a motivating factor to make them stick to the diet yeah but for a guy like you who's rational and disciplined but people they're self-destructive and weak they're gonna i can't do this anymore i need a burger I need fries I need a shake that's their choice

but then kind of what's the point of the whole conversation then though well the point of the conversation is to avoid those motherfuckers

because they're gonna drag you down to their mediocre level dangerous people I think you need to sympathize with them a little bit because I think

the market and I think this is a fruitful area for entrepreneurs to create technologies and foods that can actually enhance adherence to eating strategies we know about. That too.

So it's a combination of things. I feel like so much of it is what you're willing to accept from yourself. If you're willing to accept this seesaw obesity thing that so many people get on, on and off, this yo-yo effect. If you're willing to accept that, that's fine. But I just feel like it's a mental state. I really do. I see once you achieve a certain amount of success, people start sabotaging themselves. They start dwelling on the fact that they're doing well, but how long can they sustain this?

It starts being a big fat mind fuck. And that's when you say, like, what's sustainable? What's sustainable? A lot more than you're willing to do. What's sustainable is stop being a bitch. Not you, the person out there that's listening to this. But you know what I mean? It's like there's a thing like we're giving people these fucking escape clauses.

We're giving them these parachutes they can pull. Don't pull the parachute, motherfucker. Just have a cheat day. That's fine. But don't get off your diet. Have a cheat meal. Eat a fucking giant sundae. Throw some syrup on that bitch.

Get that whipped cream going. Do it once. But don't live your life like that. That's nonsense. And I think that for... Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with anything you said. That's what people need to hear. Not this like, well, you can't sustain it.

The keto diet is not sustainable. You sustain it. I know a lot of people sustain it. They're not confident with their control. If you do intermittent fasting, if you fast for three days, that will give you a lot of confidence that you have control over food. Fasting for three days. You can't say no diet is sustainable.

It's not sustainable. If you look at the general population and you get a bunch of weak bitches and you get them together, how many of them are going to keep it together? How many of them are going to run every day? How many of them are going to work out every day? Very, very, very few. You're dealing with outliers in particular just by virtue of what you do. How many people are willing to

put the work in to achieve this? Not many. How many people are going to achieve this physique? Very, very few, right? Thank you. So we're talking about outliers. We're talking about outliers. That's what I like. I like outliers.

I don't like people who are like, it's too hard. I can't hear that. I'm not, that's dangerous. I feel like that shit is worse than carbs. That's why we talk a lot in the book about behaviors, because if you change your behavior, that's what we, I think there's not enough research focused on is let's look at the people who actually achieve weight loss. And if you look at people who achieve it and keep it off,

they do it through many different methods, whether it's low carb, low fat, whatever it is. But let's look at the behaviors that they make. And those behaviors can tell us a lot about people. One thing we know is they practice, they weigh themselves very often. So they're accountable. They practice some form of cognitive restraint, whether it's weighing food, recording macros, ketogenic, fat restriction, whatever it is. And also they exercise regularly. And one, there's physiological benefits to that. Exercise lowers the body fat set point that your body will defend so it actually has a physiological benefit but also just mentally like you said i mean i never if you took me back 30 years ago and you told me hey like or when i was 10 years

old you said hey when i was like bullied and picked on had no self-esteem, you're going to fucking squat 668 pounds one day on your back at 201 pounds and set a, it's been broken since then, but a world record. I would have been like, there's no fucking way. There's no way. But when you have discipline, like you said, and you, that doesn't just, people say you should have more confidence. That's a, that's fucking horseshit advice. Confidence is built through, you set a goal and you is built through you set a goal and you achieve it.

Yes. You set a goal and you achieve it. And you don't start out to say, I'm going to set a world record, and that's your first goal. Right. I like what Will Smith said. He said, you lay a brick as perfectly as you can lay it. You do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again.

And you talk to anybody who's successful in anything. They didn't start out saying, I'm going to do this earth-shattering thing. They started out and built that confidence over years and years of achieving small goals, which then led them to their big goals. Now we're on to something, because I think that the mental state in which you approach anything, a workout routine, a lifestyle, the way you decide to live your life, that is critical. And here's one of the things that people are cynical about that's probably one of the best sources of fuel is inspiration from other motivated people. Go to David Goggins' Instagram page every day. Watch that fucking savage.

Watch what he does. And, yeah, he's awesome. But go to people like him, Cameron Haynes. Go to people like The Rock. These fucking people just do it there's no escape there's no i can't sustain that that's not i don't want to hear that shit that's nonsense and failing is good it's okay if you fail like if you don't fail you're not gonna go anywhere get back on the horse you're not pushing yourself hard enough well i think

when i say sustainability i mean if it's if it... Because everybody has stuff that they find... Again, you find a carb-restricted diet to be easier to stick to for you. It just feels better for me. It feels better for you. And that's fine. But if somebody is over here and says, you know what? I'm eating a low-fat diet. I feel great. My blood markers are good. I have plenty of energy.

What's wrong with that? Nothing's wrong with that. Exactly. There's my libertarian. Unquestionably, it exists. There's my libertarian. Unquestionably exists, right? There's a giant difference between all of this. Some people eat peanuts and they die, right? We all know that. The body is just very, very different.

They vary. Exactly. The caloric requirements, the nutritional requirements, that's what's hard about this, right? Is finding this one thing that is best for you yes and objectively and you know and being really analyzing your your actual physical performance which very people very few people do they kind of say well i feel pretty good but by what marker right are you what's your personal best what are you trying to accomplish are you monitoring your heart rate are you monitoring your work output like what are you doing to show that this diet is optimal for you? Yeah. Well, and part of that is like, you know, it's hard to get, that's a lot

of money that's going to be spent to get that data, you know, for an individual. So part of it is going to have to be, what do you feel good on? And what do you feel like is, again, most sustainable for you? Because no matter what, that people want to diet, what people really want is they want, I don't want to have to track and I don't want to have to sacrifice anything. And I want to get to my goal. Well, tough shit. That's not going to happen. You have to pick what you're going to sacrifice, right? So if you say, I hate tracking calories, so I'm just not going to eat carbs because I can regulate my body weight that way. Fuck yeah, do that. I had a post on Twitter that was like one of my most popular Twitter posts. I said, you know, health improvements are largely driven by

caloric restriction and weight loss. But if, if you like vegan, if you like keto, if you like carnivore, if you, and I just listed a bunch of different diets and they help you create a restriction and it keeps you at a healthy weight, then fuck yeah. Hell yeah. Like if somebody says, I like eating a vegan diet. I'm not interested in losing weight, but ketogenic intermittent fasting is very, very easy for me. I love the food and I feel better.

And I think all my health biomarkers are improving. You don't need any other reasoning for why you should do it. With him it works. Now can I ask you this? When you say diets aren't sustainable, the data doesn't show that. Were you talking about calorie restricted diets, that overall weight loss diets? Are you talking about dietary choices in terms of like ketogenic diet? Excellent question. So it's that if you lose weight, we cannot keep it off. That is the big problem is that most people are able to lose weight and they cannot keep it off because one, the self-defense system that we talked about is really- To lose weight too quickly, their body gets into this state where it's always trying to

regain that weight back. Part of it, yeah. Losing it more quickly, there's debate about this, but I would say that you have to create a more extreme deficit to do that. And so you are activating your body's self-defense system more intensely, if I had to say it that way. So the rebound is usually bigger as well. So it's trying to find a way, okay, can we get this weight off? And then let's really emphasize to people that the diet after the diet, nobody talks about this, except for us in the book. Nobody talks about this.

My co-writer for the book, Peter Baker, and I, we spent chapters talking about when you go in transition into, okay, we've lost the weight we want to lose. We're healthier. You have to have the same amount of discipline and intensity to then maintain that loss. Because if you let up, if you let your foot off the gas, now you don't necessarily have to be at the same caloric restriction level. But if you just let yourself go, well, I'm going on vacation. I'm going to eat what I want. Boom, gain 10 pounds.

And everybody knows people like this who they go and they do this. And you've just you've literally just undid months of hard work in one week. If you could maintain that for a set amount of time, say six months. So I think that if someone can maintain that weight loss

for six months, that's like sort of the tipping point where they can go on. Got my wheelhouse right here. Go ahead. So that's a great point. So leptin is a hard, I'm sure you've heard of people talk about leptin. So when you lose fat, leptin secretion goes down because fat cells secrete it. And it's kind of like your body's thermostat and body fat.

Everybody has like a set point their body likes to be at. So if you lose body fat, you secrete less leptin, hunger goes up, metabolic rate goes down. And ghrelin. Yes, and ghrelin is in opposition to leptin. So this is your body like a thermostat. So if you're on a thermostat, if you set it at 75, goes too low, kick the heat on, bump it back up,

goes too high, kick the cooling on, go back down. Leptin acts that way with your metabolic rate and your hunger. When you get down to a low body fat, leptin's low. Your body, you have a drive to regain that weight. Your hunger is higher. Your metabolic rate is lower. Leptin still stays low even years after a diet in people who have kept the weight off.

So you would think there'd still be a biological drive to regain the weight. That said, and I'm going to go out on a limb here. So any of my scientists who are listening on this, feel free to call me out on the carpet if you think I'm wrong. But just like obese people, obese people actually have high levels of leptin. They have high levels of leptin, but they become leptin resistant. Leptin insensitive. Right. If you stay at a, there is evidence that if you stay at a reduced body weight for one or two years, that that can become your new set point that your body defense.

I think what can happen is even if your leptin doesn't go up. So one or two years, not six months. Yeah, it's a little bit longer. It's a little bit longer. So what is the mechanism? What's up. So one or two years, not six months. Yeah, it's a little bit longer. It's a little bit longer. So what is the mechanism? What's happening over those one or two years? Well, I think it's probably multifaceted because your body is so redundant.

Usually nothing is ever one thing, typically. Adjusting your set point. I think one of the things that happens is probably your body becomes more sensitive to the leptin you have because you're leaner. Now, I want to talk about performance because this is a big thing with athletes and particularly in my field with fighters. Many of them are reluctant to try

a ketogenic diet initially because of the first few weeks are pretty rough and it really inhibits training and you get that keto flu feeling and I've experienced that too. But overall, is the ketogenic diet a good strategy for someone that's involved in some sort of a brutal athletic pursuit like football or wrestling? It can be, absolutely. And it will be dependent upon being keto adapted over time and actually training in a state of ketosis. So you force those adaptations over time. We know the ketogenic diet is glycogen sparing over time. Glycolytic pathways will be decreased over time. So that may impair anaerobic power output initially. But I think that some, most people, some, I think that some most people, some I think a good amount of people could adapt back to especially if they're taking things like creatine, monohydrate and taking various supplements that can kind of fill that gap to meet the glycolytic anaerobic energy demands. Backbitter who holds the American record for the fastest 24-hour run or the fastest 100-mile run. He did it in 11 hours and 40 minutes.

Insane. Yeah, he ran 100 miles. It's fucking just nonsense. I actually corresponded with him on Twitter one time. Not a zealot, by the way. No, not a zealot at all. Very smart guy. Jeff Bollick, I think, brought him to my attention.

Not a zealot at all. Very smart guy. Jeff Bollick, I think, brought him to my attention. And actually, we're looking at some of the muscle biopsies from various athletes that are doing similar things. Yeah, he's on a ketogenic diet, essentially. But when he does these long races, he takes in a considerable amount of glucose. Yep. Yeah. He uses those gels and takes hundreds and hundreds.

Probably relatively sparingly compared to a person that's already like very carb-adapted. So you just want to – especially a 100-mile race, you titrate in small – instead of drinking 50 or 100 grams of carbs, 20 grams of carbs every hour or two may be more than enough. But say – Zach, tweet us if you need to correct us. Yeah. Well, Zach has a podcast that he also does with Sean Baker. And he basically eats mostly meat. I mean, Zach's diet consists of mostly like ribeyes.

So he's fully keto and he's using glucose. I think glucose, and this may aggravate some of the keto people out there, I think glucose is one of the most powerful performance-enhancing substances out there. Really? And I'll go on the record for that. Especially in the context of that, where your glycogen levels are being depleted over time. And even from a training perspective, very small amounts of glucose are anti-catabolic,

maybe, argue, anabolic in the context of certain scenarios. Floyd Mayweather drinks a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi right after he trains. Is there any benefit to that? Well, I mean, you're going to get glycogen replenishment. Right. And actually there's research out of Lehman's lab years ago that showed that actually sucrose replenishes glycogen in muscle faster than pure glucose, which is interesting. Probably because the fructose gets taken up by the liver. So the glucose you do eat, the liver doesn't steal any of it and it goes – your glucose is going to muscle.

I would say ketones too. So if the science is very new, but exogenous ketones, uh, especially in the, in the context of aerobic performance, like ketonics or like a ketone ester, uh, ketonics products is great. Ketone esters, most of the science of behind ketone esters. Uh, but there are, you know, valid applications for the ketone salts that are emerging on the market too like ketonics uh i think that the science just over the last couple years has been incredible emerging on that and i think it's something to watch over time it's a new fuel source it's like the fourth macronutrient right we have carbs have carbs, proteins. No, that's alcohol. And fats and alcohol.

Yeah, arguably a competing. So I view ketones as they are a calorie-containing energy source. So they are a fourth macronutrient. Now, let me ask you this. If you were to do a nutritional consultant for, say, someone who's a UFC champion, and they said, you know, I want to get on the optimal diet for performance, you don't think that a ketogenic diet is the optimal diet for performance. Is that safe to say? Or you would have to experiment with them for a long period of time?

I think, one, it's going to be individual. You certainly wouldn't do it in the midst of a camp, right? No. A two-month camp. Oh, man, that's such a nuanced question. It's an off-season thing. It's such a nuanced question. But the problem is you don't necessarily get an off-season because if they call you with a fight, it's not looked nicely upon if you turn it down.

So I think based on the research I've seen, I think you're hard-pressed to convince me that a ketogenic diet is worse than a non-ketogenic diet on endurance. I think that's pretty clear. And there may actually be some benefits depending on the individual. As far as repeated sprints or things where you need that anaerobic system, I am not ready to say that a ketogenic diet is going to be as good. I think that a non-ketogenic diet offers you – now, this is where ketone supplements may be actually the best thing possible because you could be using glucose, so you're getting that fuel source, and taking a ketone supplement where you're getting that fuel as well. So not on a ketogenic diet, but taking ketone supplements.

Well, again, I don't – I'd like – I think the more fuel – I want to see more research. I want to see more research. I want to see more research. Fats, carbohydrates, maybe amino acids, creatine. I mean, you know, just basically trying to leverage all the various substrates that your body can use, especially under – if we're talking about anaerobic power output. Now people are going to call me a ketogenic supplement show. We're talking about anaerobic power output. You want to have a suite of different fuel sources and not rely – like the term metabolic flexibility, which is kind of used quite often.

But I think if you train and get your body fat and keto adapted, that provides benefits for recovery. It provides benefits if you're getting – What are the benefits for recovery? Enhanced lower inflammation, lower chronic inflammation over time. Chronic inflammation can contribute to insulin resistance, poor neuroinflammation. If you're getting concussions or even sub-concussive events over time can actually cause a lot of damage. What is the mechanism that decreases inflammation with the ketogenic diet as opposed to a non? A number of mechanisms. I mean, just simply lowering insulin spikes and glucose, but the NLRP3 inflammasome is something that we looked at. There was a study where actually we used the ketone ester and it was published in the Journal of Nature Medicine

showing that in response to LPS, which is kind of like a very powerful inflammatory stimulant, that it reduces that and suppresses inflammatory pathways for a particular pathway. Compared to? Compared to, you mean? Well, when you're studying, you're always comparing two things. Yeah. So what was the control group? Well, when you're studying, you're always comparing two things.

Yeah. So what was the control group? The control group for the inflammation? Or it was just compared to no. Oh, compared to no. Yeah, nothing. So it's just like a placebo. Did you give a placebo? Okay.

Yeah. So in the context of being in a state of ketosis, it reduces an inflammatory pathway. Think of it as a hub. produces an inflammatory pathway, think of it as a hub. And when that's activated, you have a host of inflammatory cytokines that flow throughout your body and your brain and cause this persistent low-grade neuroinflammation, inflammation in the body that can impede recovery processes over time. And I think that really contributes to brain health too. So I might be getting a little far ahead of myself because that is – it's animal work, but it's convincing animal work looking at a particular pathway that's pretty well defined.

And before you get to this, is there one – is there a variation between low carb versus ketosis? An elevation of ketone levels in your blood. Right, but I mean in terms of – is there a benefit to the ketogenic, to being in a state of ketosis with this reduction of inflammation versus low carb? I believe there is just by elevating the metabolite beta-hydroxybutyrate, but I do think even low carb has some anti-inflammatory effects. But optimal would be ketosis? has some anti-inflammatory effects. But optimal would be ketosis.

Like I said, I don't think it's going to be optimal for everybody, but I know there's going to be benefits to maintaining low to moderate levels of ketones for neurological health and also for recovery and maybe performance. Lane, you were wincing at the mention of inflammation. More so that, so we mentioned recovery from exercise inflammation and calorie deficit is a very powerful anti-inflammatory. So, I mean,

lane lane addresses that. Thank you for the context. My fellow scientists, non-zealot appreciate that. So one thing I want to, because, because people get, it's easy to get into black and white thinking we hear inflammation and we

think, Oh, that's bad. That's bad. So there's some studies that tell us quite a bit about inflammation. Your body actually has an optimal level of inflammation. Too little inflammation is actually bad as well. So if you look –

Acute versus chronic. I was talking about chronic. Yes. This is a thing a lot of scientists miss too is acute. We can talk about mTOR and cancer and people acute versus chronic and how scientists even mess this stuff up but you so if you if you look at studies of recovery from exercise and muscle growth i'm focusing on this but i'll i'll bring it back around if you give ibuprofen to healthy people who have normal levels of inflammation, ibuprofen inhibits muscle growth. If you give it to elderly people with high levels of inflammation, they grow more muscle.

So this means that the body, for recovery, has an optimal level of inflammation it likes to be in. There is a kind of a curve here. It's a COX-2 inhibitor, and beta-hydroxybutyrate is also a COX-2 inhibitor. Right. And so the part of growing muscle and recovery is actually inflammation. Macrophages and all these sorts of things are involved in that process. Now, if it gets run away, if it's too much, it's not a good thing. But if it's too little, it's also not a good thing. Andy Galpin did a great job on your show of talking about recovery versus adaptation, right? So one of the things he said, if you do ice baths, you do these sorts of things, you're in the short term allowing yourself to recover

faster, but you're also limiting how much adaptation you're going to incur. And I love that because people miss this. They say, if you're somebody in the off season, if you're trying to grow, get more lean body mass or trying to get better at something, it's probably good to let your body like, for lack of a better term, have some inflammation and not in the longterm, but in response to that training session. But then if you're in a camp, again, this is where it's context dependent or like I'm a powerlifter getting ready for a meet and I'm supposed to be squatting four times a week. I've done that before. And I'm so sore that I can't squat my fourth session. Then an ice bath or something.

I'm not worried about growing muscle in that time. I'm worried about getting recovered enough that I can go do my next training session because that is a lot more important for my competition coming up than having that little bit of extra muscle. So in camp, probably a good idea. Post-season, not a good idea. Yeah. I mean, unless, again, it's all contextual dependent, right? Like if you start getting so sore that you can only train like twice a week, then maybe a certain level.

But that points back to that there's an optimal range of inflammation that your body probably should be in that's optimal for health as well. Now, I don't think like doing a ketogenic diet for somebody, it's going to take them out of that necessarily. But I always want to give context because people hear these things and they always think it's as a positive, like in terms of recovery. I believe that it can enhance the adaptive process associated with recovery. And I also believe that being in a ketogenic state will enhance your readiness, your resilience and your recovery. So from a military perspective, too, I believe that. And that needs to be validated and studied. But it's something that

that we study. When you I'm sorry to interrupt you. But when you advise this to the military, do they do you put them on a specific meal plan too or do they have consultants that know how to do that? It's more like grants where this is being studied at a very fundamental, very controlled level from cells to animal models to human clinical trials going on and where the data is being collected now. And some of it is taken empirically and anecdotally from the field or just from various exclusive channels, I guess I would say. So that I am coming at it as a bias and I'm kind of speaking ahead of the science. But I do think that science already exists showing that you have a greater adaptive effect just by virtue of lowering inflammation over time in athletes, especially this probably pertains more to endurance athletes. So it really needs to be studied in resistance and MMA fighters and things like that.

So there was a recent study, and I can't remember the researcher's name. I'll send it to you. I had a lot of criticisms of it, but they did show that ketogenic versus non-ketogenic diet in people who were lifting weights, trying to get bigger, that there was actually slightly less muscle mass using the ketogenic diet. Would you think that would be because of the less protein? No, they equated protein. I'm pretty sure. I want to say they equated protein.

Now, I don't know for sure, so I don't want to say authoritatively, but I believe that. But to stay in ketosis, you're going to have. Did they adjust for calories? I believe they did. So again, I could be wrong. And so I'll go back and look and I'll send it to you if you want it. But it is possible. Like, again, for every give me, there's a gotcha in certain things, right? So like these things that activate different pathways.

Well, part of what ketones may signal is a deficit because usually you don't have them in a surplus, right? So, you know, we don't know if you can, like, for example, like autophagy, right? Like if we're talking about performance and muscle, everybody hears autophagy and that's a very, by the way, that's such a weird way to pronounce that because it's auto and phagocytosis. So it shouldn't be autophagy. But anyway. It's a very rapidly emerging science. And Naomi Wittel wrote a book about this. And it's just like a New York Times.

And that really covers the science. So it's two or three years. Yeah. Lysosomal remodeling and degradation of proteins. But what gets me is like people who are big on intermittent fasting. They'll say, well, it increases autophagy, but you also, they're also saying you can grow all this muscle and it's going to be best for, you know, building muscle. But that's not true because autophagy is part of protein degradation. So if you're increasing that system by definition, that's

less muscle. So you're, there's always a give me and a gotcha for one benefit. There might be a drawback. Now, depending on your individual situation, maybe it makes more sense, right? Like having the most muscle mass possible may not be the best thing for health. Now, we know that having more muscle mass than normal is good for health,

but maybe having like absolute peak muscle mass may not be the best thing for health. So it's like, that's why I was trying to say earlier, there's never going to be one diet that just fixes all of our problems. It depends on the individual and what they're trying to get out of it. Just like if I went to, and again, I'm not, I have much, I watched MMA for years, loved your commentary. That's where I learned a lot of stuff about MMA.

But if I went to a Brazilian jujitsu instructor and I and i said what's the best technique he's going to look at me like i'm an idiot right because you're not just he's not just going to say yeah uh armbar every time that's the best technique for jiu-jitsu and that's when people say what's the best diet it's the same thing right it's completely contextual dependent right depends on you and in the case of ma depends on your opponent as well. What your goals are and your strategies and your tactics. I think what we were trying to really emphasize is that individuality dependent. But also, I really want to emphasize what they show is calories matter.

You know, calories matter. Even if you're eating low carb, you can't just eat as much as you want. And low carb is a very viable option to induce and sustain a calorie deficit that can contribute to body composition. But even like you brought up Floyd Mayweather earlier, which I thought was great because you said he drinks a Coke after training. training well it's hard to argue with his results but then again sometimes elite athletes can get away with a lot of really dumb shit because they're so genetically superior that they were going to do well no matter what didn't michael jordan eat a big mac before every game no not true steak and baked potato steak and baked potato yeah where's the big mac myth myth come from sponsored by mcdon Motherfuckers.

Steak and baked potatoes sounds like a good meal. My wife can eat two or three Big Macs in a sitting and wash it down with a full sugar Coke and still gain nothing. I know. I cringe, but some people can do that. Some people can do that. This is on Floyd's personal show. So it's did he become this great because he ate this way or can he eat this way because he's this great athlete? It's probably the latter, right? So we wouldn't recommend like somebody – like if somebody is sitting at home and they want to become the greatest boxer ever, don't go – probably drinking Coke isn't the first step, right?

But this is what we do with nutrition because we pick out people that we follow and we go, oh, I'm just going to do that. And it's so individual dependent. It's on the sidelines of marathons. Like they'll hand off Cokes to people. Is that because Coke sponsors it or because people just want it for fuel? People just want it for fuel. Is it not a bad idea when you're doing something that's as grueling as a marathon? See, I don't want to say it's a bad idea.

I'm not against it either. If you're a car burner, it makes sense. You're dense, right? Yeah, but you want calorie dense's a bad idea. I'm not against it either. If you're a carb burner, it makes sense. Calorie-dense, right? Yeah, but you want calorie-dense stuff. That's what I'm saying. It wouldn't be a bad thing. Again, context is so important because we say, well, don't ever drink a Coke. Well, if you were starving to death, I promise you, you'd drink a Coke.

Right. You know? So it's – and if you need quick energy, it's probably not the worst thing that Floyd Mayweather could possibly do post-training. Sufficient but not optimal. A lot of people eat those honey waffles, you know, like when they're doing hikes and stuff. But again, at the end of the day, if his carbohydrate intake, and I don't know what it is, but if he's eating 500, 600 grams of carbohydrate a day, is it really hurting him to have 40 grams of sugar from a Coke? If he's maintaining his body weight, performing optimallyally probably probably not especially when you think about the kind of grueling workouts that guy puts his body and maybe maybe that's the only way he can maybe

i don't know again i'm i am theorizing maybe that's the only way he can get enough food in is to eat really energy dense sources of food to maintain his body weight and if you started saying well we need you to eat chicken breast and broccoli and you know, this organic rice and all this kind of, he, he might start dropping weight like a stone and his performance go in the tank. So this is why context is so important. And again, like when we talk about people think how many times have you seen two guys in the octagon and just looked at their bodies and gone, this one guy is going to smash this other guy? Like just in the primal part of your brain because he was built like a tank. And then the other guy who looks like nothing just goes out and completely obliterates him.

Happens all the time. All the time. All the time. Right? So it's completely context dependent. The biggest thing is to make sure that you don't run out of fuel during these things. Or whatever. And your your sport is i mean again i'm known as a carb guy and i had this powerlifter one time telling me he's like don't you think you should carb load the night before powerlifting me i was like dude you're doing nine reps like you're you're doing so you get three

attempts on each lift squat bench press and deadlift you're not depleting you're not carb limited so that you're not like that's what really amazed me even like you can fast for a week which i did in deadlift and it's not a significant uh inhibitor of your of your performance where it's like running would be oh yeah running hills or something like that or doing you know prolonged you know resistance training two or three three hours, something like that. But even then, it's probably not optimal to go in fasted to go do a strength and athletic event. But you have to pick the context, the individual. And honestly, people probably aren't going to want to hear this from a scientist, but we don't know enough about this stuff yet to really say for each individual person what's best for them.

And that's why we kind of got to go by feel we know you don't have to go drinking gatorade throughout your one hour workout in the gym typically you know i'm i'm drinking ketones but it's you don't it's not going to offer you any advantage it's not and i did that for many years actually and i think guys still do it now of course we see it all the time but i mean you know you got to make your your shake in the gym and drink it intro work one thing that one of the things that drove me nuts was i kind of got a little bit back and forth with tim noakes on twitter and uh he kind of made it out to seem that you know people were dismissing some of his research because people in academia or that peer review is broken. Who's Tim Noakes? Oh, sorry.

He's a big low-carb proponent. He's a professor in South Africa, I want to say. Yeah, yeah. Very knowledgeable. Opinionated, but very knowledgeable. He said to me, he's like, well, that's because you've never challenged convention. And Dom knows I have challenged every convention

in the fitness industry that there ever was. But it's just, you know when when people ask me he's vocal about it yeah assertive but you're also open-minded yeah i'm very open-minded i just don't like if you can't show me a hard evidence you know like there was a great quote from thomas soul uh that i saw the other day he said you could ask these in science and go a long way in terms of sorting out bullshit. Compared to what, where's your hard evidence? You know, and what is the cost, right? So it's, well, low carb is better compared to what?

And what's the cost on performance or any of these other things? And then where's your hard evidence, right? So this is why, like I said, science over time. Yes, you can have industry influences. You can have muddled data and some scientists fake data. We've we've both come across this scientist who have fake data. How frustrating is that?

Oh, it makes me so incensed. In fact, I won't say anybody by name, but I used to be in business with somebody who I found out that I had no hard evidence, but I had a lot of circumstantial evidence that they were faking data. This even happens in cancer research. It's a huge problem, even in cancer research. And I took this person out to dinner and I told them, I was like, we're done. Like this thing we're doing is done. And thank goodness I did because it came out later. People started replicating, trying to replicate this data and nobody could replicate this data. And they still had a pretty big following even now.

But, you know, it's one of those things. It makes me so mad because then people get so frustrated because they feel like if they feel like scientists are just an industry's pocket why are they going to believe anything any of us say you know it's so frustrating and that's why motivation money power uh ego if the labs it's a company's funding you for a particular supplement and you come out with consistently with negative data what's the you know incentive for them to keep funding you but if you if you're always showing positive results on supplement studies supplements companies will want to fund you of course now of course but you know it's so seems like it's so dangerous but i also want people to keep in mind that that it's got to be done in a very controlled blinded

fashion that's the only way around it i keep reminding people like people who say things like we found the cure for cancer and the government is suppressing it and like and all the scientists are just in the pot. What you're saying is you're saying that every scientist on the planet who does cancer research is an immoral, unethical piece of shit. That's what you're saying, because you're telling me they don't have friends and family who are dealing with cancer and they're suppressing this research? Come on now. And that's the other big – I'm a small government guy and I'm, like I said, a libertarian. But one of the things that makes me cringe about libertarians sometimes is these big,

elaborate conspiracy theories that come up around science and whatnot. You realize a senator can't even text a dick pic to his his side chick without like it winding up all over twitter you think they constructed these big elaborate theories they can't even tie their shoes in the morning without spending ten thousand dollars you know so the idea that like all this research is being suppressed by the government i'm not saying it's never happened but i think it's pretty darn rare well gentlemen we just did three plus hours. Thank you.

Really? It felt like six. It flew by. Appreciate you giving us. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for illuminating this stuff, which is still, it's so complex. It's part of the problem. And I think we could do a hundred of these shows

and we'd never cover all the topics or all the issues or all the details. And I think it's so incredibly difficult for people to find the right diet and program that works for them. I'd like to add one thing that the science is rapidly emerging and the metabolic health summit, which is happening in the end of January, beginning of February next year, 2019, will be bringing in the leading scientists that are talking about all the different topics right now, including weight loss. And that's going to be in LA. It's actually, there's a flyer in your book there. If you look inside there, giving you a flyer. All right.

LA, January 31st to February 3rd in Long Beach. Metabolichealthsummit.com. to February 3rd in Long Beach? Metabolichealthsummit.com. It's going to be a very comprehensive group of basic scientists, clinical scientists, entrepreneurs, and people, everyday people that are just interested in this space. Are you going to this?

And I will be at it. I'm helping to sort of organize and promote it, but also moderating some of the things. We're going to hit on basically every topic that was discussed in my last podcast and this podcast, The Leading Scientist. I'm going to show up and heckle. So we definitely went laying there, too, and I think it would be great to have a panel discussion that addresses this with a couple more experts and personalities in that. It's amazing how much information you have to absorb. It's really,

I mean, I've done so many diet podcasts and I'm still a moron. Well, that's why like, you'll, I always tell, say people, you know, it's hard because if you're not going to do a degree yourself or do research yourself, it's so hard to know who, like you kind of have to pick people that you trust. Yeah. Right. And it's so hard to know who to trust because there was something that Greg Knuckles, really smart guy said that I think kind of ties things together nicely. He said, people are really good at knowing when somebody has more knowledge than them about a subject. Like you talk to somebody for a little bit and you really can get an impression pretty quickly if they know more or less than you are about the same. What they're really bad at doing is figuring out amongst two people who know more than them,

who is the more knowledgeable of the two. They are very bad at picking that out. So you kind of got to pick people who you trust. Now, if you're looking for people to trust, notice the three magic words that me and him both said on here today. At one point, I don't know. Usually, experts, they don't make broad claims. They don't use superlatives. They don't say things like best, worst, never, always. They're usually putting context to everything, and they're providing you with information that helps illuminate you that everything is nuanced. And that's why, like, I'm sure, again, I'll relate it to MMA.

And that's why like I'm sure – again, I'll relate it to MMA. If you talk to anybody who's an expert in any different discipline and you ask them a broad question, you're going to get a really broad answer. And if you ask them a specific question and give them a lot of context, then they'll give you a specific answer. Would you agree with that? Yes, definitely. So I think – If someone is really strong on one side, dig kind of deep and look for conflicts of interest too. So I think that's kind of an important thing. I try to be transparent as much as possible on sort of things we're involved in.

So I think that's super important. Yeah. And I'm not, I'm not without bias too. I mean, I sell stuff. I've got a book out. I've got another book coming out. I have a website, you know, so it's. Yeah, but you're not actually, well, you're not advocating any particular approach. You're kind of approaching it from a global perspective. Right, what I'm selling isn't really sexy. The Complete Contest Prep Guide, and this is available on Amazon, all those places. BioLane.com. BioLane.com, and your Twitter, BioLane.

Instagram. Instagram, BioLane, and Dom. Yeah, ketonutrition.org, and Ketone Technologies is our company. It's an information website. I don't have any products per se, at least not yet, but I put products on there that I personally use and kind of vetted out that I think could be helpful. And just a lot of information, like your prior podcast with me is on there. Awesome. And Tim Ferriss and Rhonda Patrick too. So I have right on the front page. Um,

your Twitter and Instagram. Yeah. Uh, Dominic dot D'Agostino dot KT I think is Instagram. Not a huge Instagram back, but, uh, D'Agostino D A G O S T I two, uh,

is my Twitter handle. Uh, and Dominic D'Agostino for Facebook too. So there are three. Thank you gentlemen. I think we got a lot accomplished today. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

We appreciate it. Thanks, Joe.