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

You've spent yours researching every major diet and trying many of them yourself. I want to go through and review all of those. But first off, what was that journey like? Well, it was fun. I mean, I've been working for quite a few years on a book about the evolution of diet. And I thought rather than just simply studying them, which was the majority of the book, I thought I should try them as well. So kind of, you know, on and off as I was working on the book, my wife joined me for many of these diets. I kept trying some of these, you know, diets. Some of them, some of them better, some of them worse. But just kind of give a little, first of all, some participant observations. So get a sense of what these diets are like, but also to kind of add context and experience them for myself. What did you start that journey believing about food that you no longer agree with? Gosh, that's, I changed my opinions about so many things. I mean, the reason I started this book and this, and this journey, as you say, is that I'm actually, my research is mostly on physical activity. I study the evolution of running and walking and throwing and various other physical activities, but I also teach nutrition and digestion and physiology and, you know, that kind of stuff. And I read the literature and a few years ago, actually, with some colleagues, I taught a course on diet and exercise. And I've just been so confused by what I read, right? Because one, you can read it in the New England Journal of Medicine, you know, they're arguably the top journal in the world, articles in the same year that tell you that saturated fat is good for you. And then articles that tell you saturate fat is bad for you. You know, this much salt is too much for you. And this much salt is actually just perfect for you. I mean, you name it. There's controversy and confusion. And so I wanted to explore those problems myself. But as an evolutionary biologist, I wanted to integrate an evolutionary perspective and evolutionary lens with hardcore biomedical data, cultural data, anthropological data, experiential information, all that together to think about it in whole. So so my, so I was really trying to do this in order to answer questions for myself. What use doesn't evolutionary lens give you that is typically missed when people make assessments about diet and nutrition? Oh gosh, it's hard to know where to start. There's a famous expression in my field that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It was written by a guy named Theodosius Dubgensky in 1972. And what he meant was that we didn't, we weren't engineered. We weren't designed. We evolved. And if you understand why things are the way they are, you need to take an evolutionary perspective. So evolution answers a lot of why questions. And when you start addressing why questions, you begin to think differently also about how questions and what questions. So so I mean, so nothing makes sense except in light of evolution and diet is no exception. Hmm. It feels like nutrition and diet a little bit like new religions. There's dogma. It's a super sensitive topic. People get tribal. It's often impossible to change their belief no matter how much evidence you give them. Why do you think that's the case? Why do people become so ardent? That's that's I completely agree with you. And in fact, I think that one of my biggest takeaways from working on the book was just how tribal people are about their diet. And I, and I, I don't know the answer, but I suspect it has to go something along the lines of this, which is that for, for millions of years or thousands of years, depending on which time scale you want, people ate the way their culture dictated, right? If you lived in the Middle East, you'd eat like a Middle Eastern or if you lived in Japan, you'd eat like a Japanese person. And now we live in a world where everybody kind of eats the same stuff. And, and a lot of institutions are sort of crumbling. And I think people are searching for identity. And I think one of the ways in which we define ourselves is by what we eat, or very often by what we don't eat, right? And that's been sort of the case all along, you know, if you're kosher, you don't eat this, if you're, if you're a Jane, you don't eat bad, et cetera, et cetera. But, but I think people are searching for, for meaning and identity and diet is really important way of defining it. A lot of that, a lot of diet, I mean, some diets are kind of like cults. I mean, they're sort of all- Nutrational theology. There are kind of online cults and everybody kind of agrees. It's kind of like groupthink. You know why I think at least part of it is because we all understand that the diet that we eat is related to longevity, what we are faced with when somebody says that they disagree with our, they diverge from what it is that we're eating, it's kind of a threat against our own existence, but if this person is right, implicit in that, if I believe deeply about my diet and they believe deeply about theirs and we diverge in our opinions, that means maybe they're going to live longer than me. Oh, that means that maybe I'm going to die soon. Oh, that means that I'm wrong in some sort of a way. It's not an abstract discussion. It's got, it's going to have real world implications. This is going to come into land at some point. Yeah, but I think one of the key words you just said is belief, right? Because one of the real problems about diet is that it takes years, many years for the effects of diets to manifest themselves in terms of our health. And so we all have to take leaps of faith when we pick our diet, right? I mean, right now I'm, you know, let's just say I follow the Mediterranean diet. You know, I can read all the studies I want about how good the Mediterranean diet is for me, but I won't know for 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years if it's true, right? So we all have to take a leap of faith to some extent when we pick a diet. Some people take leaps of faith based on their friends, their group, the community, others are a little bit more scientific. But no matter who you are, you have to figure out what you believe and how you're going to or what information you're going to use to credit. Okay, let's get into some of the religions, maybe two of the most ardent groups of vegans and carnivores. Plant based diets, superior. You know, I try not to be that judgmental about anything. I mean, if you look at the data, look, no matter what you, everybody who has a particular diet idea, including the fat diets, almost all of them are based on some grain of truth, all of them. The carnivore diet included, however, when you look at the data and you look at like big meta analyses, large scale studies, I don't think there's much contest that plant based diets, some very sorts and they're not all the same, tend to have better health outcomes in terms of meta analyses, long term studies, and there's also mechanistic data as well. So I think if you're going to err on the side of animals versus plants, I think that science is pretty clear plants. Why? Gosh, there are a lot of reasons for that. Well, one is that plants, again, not all plants are the same. If you eat crap plants, right? If you eat sugar and you know, highly refined grains and carbohydrates, you're not eating a very healthy diet. I mean, a lot of ultra processed foods are mostly plant. That doesn't make them the fact that their plant base doesn't make them healthy. But so, so, so you know, it's, we oversimplify, we can get ourselves into trouble. But, but there's evidence that that meat for even though we evolved to eat meat has been played an important part on revolution history, meat is nutritious. There's no question about that. But for example, there are studies which show that there's a dose response effect between how much meat you eat and your risk of cancer. I think it's like one serving of meat, which I think they count as 85 grams increases your, your risk of cancer over that over X years by I think 13% and if you double that, it's you double the risk. So there's a there's a dose response effect. So that's that's this epidemiological data. And there are quite a few studies which show that. Secondly, there are mechanistic studies, right? So we know, for example, that meat has a protein called carnitine and carnitine when you go to your gut is transformed into another molecule called TMAO. Don't ask me to give you the long form of the of the molecule. And TMAO is known inflammatory molecule that causes inflammation and has been associated with risk of actually has been shown to be mechanistically related to atherosclerosis to hardening the artery. So increased blood pressure. Another effective meat is that that red meat, not not poultry or fish has a has a glycoprotein. So a glycoprotein is a little, you know, every cell has these little kind of like forest of like sugar protein molecules that stick off. And red meat has a particular kind of glycoprotein called any U5 GC. I mean, that doesn't really matter with the name. But it turns out that humans have an inflammatory response to that. We all humans all humans. It was a gene called CMAH, which causes us to to transform one protein glycoprotein into another kind. And that makes us have a response to any red meat. And that's also been argued to be another mechanistic reason for the data I mentioned earlier that there's a relationship between dosage of meat eating and cancer risk. But again, it's not so simple because everything has trade-offs, right? There's no such food that doesn't have a trade-off. And meat is just one of them. And so the other, of course, the issue about meat is that meat tends not always, but tends to have a higher amount of saturated fat. And saturated fat is one of those two controversial things on the planet, right? when it comes to nutrition. And we all don't, we don't. There's a lot of variation in how we respond to saturated fat. Some of us can eat as much saturated fat as we want, and it doesn't really have any negative effect. But others do have some genetic susceptibility to saturated fat, and it does raise their risk of, if we raise the levels of lipoproteins, cholesterol molecules that cause heart disease. So it's complicated. There's never a simple answer for anything. It seems like maybe some of the reasons for plant-based diets, having better outcomes, at least epidemiologically, is not maybe to do with what's in the plants, but what's not in the meat that isn't being eaten. It's like the elimination diet of meat as opposed to the inclusion diet of plants. Of course, I mean, that's part of the problem with studying nutrition, which is that every time you don't eat something, you're reading something else. Sorry, every time you eat something, you're not eating something else. Or almost. So that's one of the reasons why you can't do a study. There's no one is ever going to do a study where they take 100 sets of twins and have one group of twins eat an all-meat diet. One group of twins eat an all-plant diet. And even if they did do that, how would you separate all the other effects? Because when the ones are eating the meat diet, what is it that they're not eating? And the ones are eating the plant diet. What is it that they're not eating? And so on and how do you correct the effects of exercise? And smoking and all those other factors. It's not possible to do that. Why is it that the carnival movement has had such a boon recently if some of the data seems to be skeptical about the kind of outcomes of a very heavy meat-based diet? You know, that's a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, I think part of it is, again, it's a bit tribal. I think meat is associated with manliness and masculinity. That explains, I think, some of it. In the book, I recount James Blunt, the English singer, went on an all-meat diet and ended up getting scurvy. But he describes that the reason he did is he thought it made it more manly. I mean, that's probably not everybody. There are others who, you know, they hear podcasts or whatever that expound the benefits of the diet. And they're attracted to it for one reason or another. And one other issue is that a lot of people are in really unhealthy diets. And if you pick pretty much any diet that's not a crap diet for lack of a better term, you're gonna do better. And so you might think, okay, wow, I'm eating all this meat. I'm feeling better than when I ate lots of McDonald's and drank swilled lots of soda and whatever. It doesn't mean that you wouldn't do it even better on say a Mediterranean diet or a dash diet or a blue zone's diet or, you know, fill in the blood. - You saying that the best diet is the one that you're able to stick to? - Well, it depends what your goals are. If you're trying to lose weight, absolutely. I mean, that's actually, there's something called the national weight loss registry where they've actually analyzed, again, 'cause you can't randomize huge numbers of people to different kinds of diets perfectly. So what this study has done is that they've looked at, they've tracked people who've managed to lose weight and keep it off for a long period of time. I think the average for the respondents is at least six years or something like that, 5.6 years or something like that. And people's diets are kind of all over the place, but what they all share is they're not junk food diets. They're turning naughty, a lot of sugar and a lot of added fat and things like that. And they're able to stick to them because, you know, a lot of people find diets hard, right? If you go for a low fat diet, I mean, I try to low fat diets. That makes food tasty. You know, going on a low fat diet is really hard. And a lot of major studies have failed to have very much effectiveness because people can't tolerate the diet. They just are eating more fat. What do you make of the current protein-maxing push? (laughs) Given what sounds to me like a degree of skepticism around the importance of meat, protein is the new hot girl in school, everybody wants her, everybody's having more of her. What do you make of the current world of protein-maxing? - I mean, I find it fascinating. I mean, protein's having its day. And you look, there's some truth to the interest in protein. Protein is important. You need protein. Every day, you need protein. You can live without eating fat and you can live without eating carbohydrates, but you cannot live without eating protein. - That's true. - Absolutely. - Your body can turn anything into fat, and your body can transform fats and proteins into sugars. But you cannot, there are a bunch of amino acids that are essential. You have to have them in their diet or you'll die. There's actually two fatty acids that you need to eat a little bit of, omega three and omega six. But apart from that, you do need to eat protein. Secondly, protein is filling. So people tend to be a little bit more salient on eating protein. Protein takes a little bit more energy to digest. And it's pretty nutritious, but here's the thing. And I think a lot of people, and if you're very physically active, if you're menstruating, if you're pregnant, you need extra protein as people age. They also lose muscle mass, and it's really important for them to have protein. But here's the thing, the body can't store extra protein. If you eat more protein, then your body can use, you can't store it. So what do you do? You turn it into fat. So eating massive amounts of protein, it's probably not that harmful unless you get to ridiculous levels and you can do kidney damage, but you have to really eat a lot of protein for that. So eating huge amounts of protein is not gonna have some massive benefit. And there's no, I've never seen any strong evidence to that say. - One gram per pound of body weight. It's the rubric. That's what they say. - And what do you come into land on one gram per pound of body weight for protein consumption? - I don't have a strong opinion on that. I mean, I think we're all different. I mean, part of the problem with the way we think about diet is we medicalize it, right? That you just gave a dose, right? But it doesn't work that way. It's complicated. It depends on what you're doing and how old you are, whether you're losing muscle and whether you're working out and whether you're 20 or when you're 80. I don't think anybody's able to come up with a perfect dose of protein. I mean, they all definition of economical enough, but not too much. And I think that, and we all have to figure out that out. But it's not, it's really hard to come up with a very simple diagnosis for any human being. And that's again, part of the problem with diet. We all wanna be told what to do. We all wanna make it simple. We wanna magic bullet. We want a quick fix. And the problem with diet and nutrition is that it doesn't work that way. I imagine we're only two religions in to our nutritional theology to trip around the world. I imagine some people are already feeling a degree of, maybe uncertainty or confusion. Well, okay, so it's important for me to have protein. I need that. It's actually mandatory. It's one of the few things that I have to have or I'm gonna die at some point. But also there's some pretty sort of negative effect especially around red meat, it seems, other long term populations. The plant-based thing appears to maybe win out a little bit but the kind of all thing is missing some stuff. - Well, one of the weird things about the whole protein thing is that people seem to associate protein with meat. You know, when you go out, all those plants out of there, there's a lot of protein in those plants. Beans are filled with protein. Legumes are filled with protein. Whole grain foods have a lot of protein. You don't need meat in order to get protein. And in fact, you know, soy is a complete protein. You could actually live your life off soy. You don't actually need to eat meat in order to get protein. So the equation of meat with protein, I think has been exaggerated. It's true, meat is rich in protein and meat is a complete protein. But you can also get a lot of protein from quinoa and from nuts and whatever. You know, it's not a, and you can certainly buy, and every culture on the planet has figured out every farming culture on the planet, figured out how to get sufficient amounts of protein by combining a grain with a legume. So rice and beans or corn and beans. All of those are solutions that cultures worldwide figured out in order to ensure that people got adequate amounts of protein. 95% of people don't get enough fiber, which is why Mementus built fiber plus because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually kind of hard, even harder than the last toilet trip. 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Mediterranean diet is regarded as one of the most healthy on the planet. Is that right? It has probably more scientific evidence to support you. than any other diet because, and that's partly Eurocentric because, of course, Europeans and do most of the research and Americans do most of the research. So there's a lot more data on it. I'm not sure that the Mediterranean diet is necessarily healthy, even though a traditional Asian diet or a traditional American diet or, you know, Mesoamerican diet or traditional Asian diet, but absolutely there's a ton. If you were going to go purely on epidemiological data at the moment, you would pick a Mediterranean diet. What epidemiological data in the world of diet and nutrition means? Excellent question. So there's a number of ways to figure out the effects of food and diet on health. And so one is to do, I'm going to back up a little bit if you don't mind. So one of those do a randomized control study. That's the gold standard, right? I give you and your twin two different diets and I follow you for X number of years, right? And then I can measure its effect on your cholesterol levels and your steroid levels and your nasal mucosum production, whatever. I can measure anything I want, right? But of course, it takes a long time to do that. And so because we can't wait for you to die, we're going to then measure proxies, right, rather than your actual health outcome. The other is to take large samples of people and then try to make associations between what they eat and their health outcomes. And that's an epidemiological study. So there are statistical associations within a population between say what people eat and their likelihood or their prevalence of getting heart disease or hypertension or cancer or arthritis or whatever it is. And so for the Mediterranean diet, there are both epidemiological studies, large scale ones, huge. I mean, they're now metanalyses involving hundreds of thousands of individuals. But they're also prospective studies. So that's the kind of gold study is when you take a bunch of people and you again, randomize them into two groups. So one of the biggest studies was one done in Spain, for example, where they had over 7,500 vineyards and they assigned some of them a Mediterranean diet where they had to have olive oil or walnuts. There were two arms to that versus spaniards who were not eating a Mediterranean diet. And after I think after five years, they stopped the study because the effects, the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet were so high that they felt that it was unethical to continue the study and not get rid of it. By the other group, the benefits of having a Mediterranean diet. That's correct. Wow. It was so good. A non-meditarian diet was essentially seen as kind of a toxic. As unethical. As unethical. No way. Yes, way. So that's one study. That is wild. There's other studies in France elsewhere. So these are, again, these are prospective studies. So those are the best studies, right? Now, every study has its drawbacks and its problems and its flaws, right? You can't, because you have to count for all the other things that people are eating. They're smoking. They're physical activity. Whether they're lawyers or not, who knows what? But when you combine all those different, and then on top of that, there are studies where you can feed people a Mediterranean diet for just a few weeks in a lab, for example. And then measure its effects on aspects of your health that have an outcome like cholesterol level, or so on, or net markers of inflammation. And so you combine all those kinds of data together, the mechanistic studies, the epidemiological studies, the prospective studies, and the Mediterranean diet comes out as a very, you know, probably, I wouldn't say it's a clear winner, but it's probably has the most evidence in its favor of any diet that's ever been studied. I imagine when it comes to the epidemiological studies, people's dietary choices are idiosyncratic that are informed by the culture that they're from, and the job that they have. You know, if you're, there's an entire industry of PT's that are probably overeating meat, which means that you have meat to eaters that are disproportionately personal trainers, but that means that they have the lifestyle of a personal trainer, or perhaps there's something cultural that, you know, red meat is eaten by dudes who like to barbecue from the deep south. Maybe they do another stuff with their health and maybe they're smoking it, whatever. So the selection effect of what people eat, which diets, and what are the things that aren't under the studies per view, and what does that sort of huge, huge effect, like, you know, vegetarians also tend not to smoke, right? And so how do you separate the effect of eating a vegetarian diet, but the fact that you you're much more likely to smoke, and people who tend to be more physically active also tend to eat a healthier diet. In fact, you know, big studies where they get like, when you and I die, right, there's going to be a death certificate, right, saying we die to such and such. And it might be, you know, cancer or heart attack or whatever. But then what was it that caused the cancer, what caused the heart attack? And that's, there's a bunch of epidemiologists out there trying to try to figure that out. And many studies are unable to separate statistically the effects of exercise and diet, because people who exercise tend to eat well and vice versa. So the covariation is a bias. Exactly. So the covariation is what we call covariation is so strong. So statistically, it's very difficult to separate these things. Does that make epidemiological studies in nutrition and diet largely useless then? No, they're, they're so, that's the wrong way to think about it. Epidemiological studies cannot measure cause and effect, but there are one of many forms of information that we can and should use. Because again, you can't, I mean, again, the gold standard study for a true skeptic is a randomized control study. But as we talked about before, you can't do a proper randomized control study in weight 50, 60 years for somebody to see the effects of the diet and control for everything else too. So we, we need to be, do you know the, the, the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox? No. Okay. So there's a famous piece of paper from the seventh century BC by a guy named Arquiligus of Paris, which wrote, he wrote, and it's like a fragment. He's a, like a boring poet, but, but apparently he wrote this, like bit of a poem that survived. And it says, um, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. And when he meant by that was that when you chase a fox, it'll do anything to run away, right? It'll hide. It'll, you know, it'll, it'll climb a tree. Climb a tree. You do whatever, right? You chase a hedgehog. It just rolls into a ball, right? Dogs just do one thing. And that analogy was used by very famous English philosopher named Isaiah Berlin to think up, to kind of divide the world up into hedgehogs and foxes. So, so hedgehogs are big idea guys like they protein is your answer. You know, meat is your answer. Never eating meat is your answer, et cetera. Those are what I call hedgehog diets. They're single idea big fix diets, whereas foxes are the, see nuance. They see trade offs. They see complexity. They realize that every time you eat one thing, you don't eat something else. And, and, and, and we need to apply, I think that, you know, the hedgehog approach to diet is always the wrong way because it's complicated. People vary. The effects of foods are complicated. There are trade offs. And when we start to oversimplify, we inevitably get things wrong. And that's true for even how we analyze the scientific record. If we decide, well, epidemiological data, it's just junk because you can't test cause and effect, you're missing important information. Just as if you decide, oh, you know, randomized control studies are really problematic because they're too short term and they don't involve variation or whatever, you're also missing something important. The best approach is to look at as much of the information as possible and put it together. And that's, I mean, if I can be a little self-promoting, that's why I wrote the book. I tried and fed up to take all that evidence and to digest it, put it into kind of plain English and make it, you know, help people understand that because I think all of us need to try to answer these questions. Let me put it in another way. For millions of years, millions of years, our ancestors, they had to know a enormous amount to get their food, right? If you're a hunter-gatherer, you have to know how to hunt animals, right? You need to know, you know, where they are and how to track them and how, you know, what's the right, you know, what environments they're going to be in and how to butcher them and all that kind of stuff to find plants. I mean, I've gone out foraging and hunting with hunter-gatherers. Finding plants is not a trivial matter, right? Finding where the plants are, knowing how to dig for them and knowing where they are, differences. We had to be naturalists. We had to know a huge amount of information and order to survive. Now, you and I can walk into a whole foods or whatever, you know, whatever, you know, whatever, you know, sayings, burial, whatever, whatever it is, and we're confronted with 40,000 different kinds of food. We don't know how to, we don't need to know how to get our food anymore. We now need to know how to choose our food. So we need a different kind of knowledge and you can, you can throw up your hands and just have somebody tell you what to do or you can try to learn for yourself what you, what you want, what you care about, what's important to you, what your trade-offs are. So I think all of us need to educate ourselves to figure out how to choose our food because that's the challenge our modern world has set us. The question of what should I eat today, evolutionarily is pretty novel. It's completely novel. Nobody ever asked that question. I mean, the people I eat, what is in front of me because otherwise I die. Yeah, I mean, the people I work with in my field work, you know, so I've done a lot of work in Kenya. I've been working recently in Rwanda and you know, occasionally people invite me for meals, right? where we work. We work in a very remote, we've worked for 15 years in a very remote part of Kenya. Actually, where a lot of the famous runners are from. And I don't even have to ask what I'm going to be served. It's always exactly the same meal. You have a dish called Ugali, which is like a, like a card meal kind of porridge with, with either a sakuuma wiki, which is a, which is basically colored greens that have been chopped up in the sauteed, or sometimes if you're lucky with beans or something like that. That's it. That's what you get. Nobody asks what's for dinner. They know what's, because they eat what they grow. That's all the food that they have available to them. Or I've gone out, you know, with hunter-gatherers. I've had the privilege of spending some time with hunter-gatherers. They don't like, well, gee, tonight I'm going to have Italian or Chinese or shall I have, you know, shall I have turtle or shall I have, you know, tortoise or shall I have, you know, kudu. They eat, whenever they manage to hunt and whenever they manage to gather. That's it. There's no, nobody's asks what's for dinner. They eat what they have. And all of us and farmers and hunter-gatherers, that's the way life was for most people. Except, you know, the king of England or whatever. He got to choose what he wanted to eat. And now we're in this completely weird, bizarre, modern environment. And surprise, surprise, we have a hard time. Because not only do we not know what to eat, we're also confronted with a lot of really bad stuff. I mean, typical, as I said before, the typical American supermarket has 40,000 different kinds of food. 40,000. It's kind of amazing. And over 50% of that is ultra-processed designed to be highly appealing, addictive, convenient, inexpensive, although that's going up a bit. And how are we supposed to cope? We're not, we never evolved the mechanisms to handle that. Going back to the Mediterranean diet, what is it about that diet that seems to, what's the mechanistic reason for why it seems to outperform others? There's probably a number of reasons. Again, there's no one reason. So one is that it tends to be whole grain. So when you take flour and you refine it, remove the outer layers and you remove the germ, you're moving a lot of the protein and you're moving a lot of the fiber. It has a healthy balance of fat. So of course, it's famous for olive oil, which is a mono-unsaturated fat. We can talk about that, if you want. And mono-unsaturated fats are associated with a lot of health benefits. There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. Mediterranean diet often has fish in it and fish has these omega-3 fatty acids. So it's the constellation of nutrients that are healthy plus an absence of a lot of stuff like added sugar and a lot of-- You said what are the things that it eliminates most? Well, it tends not, Mediterranean diet tends not to have a lot of added sugar. It tends not to have that much proper Mediterranean. Because what you define as a Mediterranean, it can be-- Neomeditronous. Mediterranean with the capital M capital D, which is what's been defined by the nutritionists isn't necessarily what people always eat in the Mediterranean. I've spent a lot of really car-rich dinners in Italy, for example. But it tends not to have added sugar, tends not to have a lot of refined carbohydrates, tends not to have a lot of saturated fat, tends to be diverse and rich in phytochemicals that are healthy and that have a lot of antioxidants and things like that, tends not to have too much red meat. So it's a mixture of things that have in total been shown to be reasonably healthy. Now, is it like an optimal diet? Is it perfect and will guarantee perfect health? No. No diet is optimal. But has it been shown to be effective for preventing weight gain and for reducing your risk of a wide range of diseases? Absolutely. How much is it the lifestyle I've heard about the importance of the sociality around the Mediterranean diet and stuff like that? Has that been separated out? You know what I'm talking about, right? I mean, it's very hard to do that. But for example, that study I mentioned, the Spanish study, the Predamed study, that essentially by randomizing people who all presumably had similar lifestyles, they were there in our street corner having a coffee at 9 pm at night. But both arms of the diet were probably the same. So that study, for example, controlled for that. But of course, there's more to health and longevity than just your diet. What about blue zone diets? Oh my God, don't you be started on that one. I mean, blue zones are fun. I mean, look, there's a lot to say about blue zone diet. The first is, again, you know, it's kind of like a Mediterranean diet, but with even less meat in a few, if you look at what the prescribes, you know, and but it also prescribes skipping breakfast. It tells you to be social. It tells you to not finish your plate. There's some social aspects to it. But what's I find, and you know, if you look at the prescription of the diet, especially nutritionally, it's kind of what a lot of, you know, it's not far off from the Mediterranean diet. I don't know of any really good high quality studies for those blue zones diet compared to say the Mediterranean diet. But what I find amusing about the blue zones diet is how it's been advertised because it's advertised and marketed as a diet that'll help you live to be 100. And that's where I begin to have some concerns because even if you look at the data for the blue zones, like if you, the supposed blue zones, see these five regions on the planet, where are they? Let's see. One of them is in the Nikolai Peninsula of Costa Rica. One's a little kind of little village in Sardinia. It's like a little area in Sardinia. One is an island in the Mediterranean, forgot my name of the island. One is Okinawa, and the other is Loma Linda, California. Right outside of LA. I didn't know that one. Those are the five blue zones. And the idea behind these are these are supposedly areas where a hot, twice as many people live to be centenarians. They live to be a 100 years old. And so the idea is if you eat like the people in these areas, you too are going to live to be a 100 years old. Now there's some problems with this. The first is that even if you believe the data that these, these regions have a higher percentage of centenarians, the turns out that the percentage of centenarians is tiny. So it's like, it's like six people out of 10,000 as opposed to in the United States where it's three people out of 10,000. The base rates so low that small changes are massive proportions. These are statistical outliers. So you're basically, you have to, if you're not a statistical outlier, which most of us are not, it's irrelevant. It's not a very, it's statistical nonsense, basically. Secondly, there's a guy in Oxford, isn't a demographer at Oxford. I'm trying to remember his name, Saul Newman, I think his name is. He's published this really fascinating paper. He did a deep dive onto these blue zones and found out that only 18% of the people in these blue zones actually had birth certificates. So we don't even know all these people are. They just self-report their age and these are areas. Are you telling me that a good chunk of the blue zone further could have been around the fact that people just didn't register how old they were? Correct. Or it could be insurance fraud. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah. Sorry, it's just, you can get online, you can read Saul Newman's paper, it's a hilarious paper to read. But also think about it this way. There's this little area in Sardinia. If you go on, if you go on the blue zones map, there's this like, think about Sardinia, it's like an oval shaped island, right? And there's this little area on the western side, there's a little blue zone on the map, right? In that little area, you have all these centenarians. Now tell me that if you go like, go like 30 miles north or 30 miles south, that people have totally different diets. And it's like, so why in this little spot are they all centenarians and just 20 miles north or 20 miles south, they're not. It's kind of suspicious. What is the blue zone proponent explanation for that? I think he's answered. I don't think he's, is it a guy? Yes, guy named, what's his name? Wetner, butner, I can't remember. He was a, he was a, he was a, he was a national geographic reporter who who got really excited by this and figured out how to market all this. But one of the most interesting blue zones is Loma Linda, California. Do you know who lives in Loma Linda, California? What? Why Loma Linda is a blue zone? Because obviously they're not little, you know, peasant team, you know, farmers eating their traditional foods. No. There are seventh day Adventists. And the seventh day Adventists don't believe in smoking. They believe in exercise. They're, you know, they believe that many of them are vegetarians. They believe that they don't believe in exercise. No, they do believe in the dooblava. They believe that God gave us our bodies, our body is a sacred thing and that it's our responsibility as, as, as, as, as Christians to take good care of our God-given body. That's interesting. That's a physiological theology. Very good. It is. It is. And, and so, you know, they don't smoke. They exercise. They're many of them are vegetarians. They have, they do all these sorts of things that the, you know, most doctors will tell you is what you should do. And guess what? They have a high percentage of people who live there. Do they eat the same things that people in Sardinia? No, of course not. They're eating their. Right. So what's going on with this blue zone thing? Is it fair to say that the blue zone diet isn't a diet? It doesn't, it doesn't do what it says it does. Well, I mean, it does. If you read the blue zone's book, it tells you what it tells you to at least a half a cup of beans a day. It tells you lots of. vegetables, it tells you not to eat too much of this, not too much of that. So it's got some parameters, you know, but it's not a rigidly defined diet. And the suggestions aren't totally crazy. But again, it's kind of oversolving. One of the, one of my, one of the refrains from, you know, that I keep going back to in my book is that there are a lot of people telling us optimal diets, you know. And I have come to hate the word optimal. If you want to piss me off, say you're a trigger word. It's my trigger word. Tell me your diet is optimal. First of all, is it optimal for you or optimal for me? Because you and I are not the same, right? We have two different genetics. We have different background, you're young and strong, you know, a lot more muscle, you know, but I'm probably faster than you and who knows what probably suddenly. But I'm 62. You're probably a lot younger. You know, is, are you more worried about heart disease or Alzheimer's or arthritis or this or that or the other? Are you, do you care more about the environment, etc? There's no such thing as optimal. And it's kind of a, it's just marketing. And we, and so I have now react against people who claim their diet is optimal because it's just marketing. It's salesmanship. It's not science. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. I'm younger than me. Yeah, but my dad got a DUI. Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if you're set up as messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Gymshark, Gymshalo and Utonic. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. They check out 36% better on average compared to other platforms and with shop pay, can boost conversions by 50%. So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Utonic with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modernwisdom. That's shopify.com/modernwisdom. Okay, let's piss off some more people. What about low-carb hi-fat? I'm not quite sure. Why are we getting serious trouble after this one? Yes. Yes, we both are. It's fine. Low-carb hi-fat. Again, there used to be atkins now. It's keto. Yeah, I mean, look, both depends what your goals are, right? It turns out if you want to, if your goal is to lose weight, for example, you can lose weight on a low-carb diet and you can lose weight on a low-fat diet. It is true that people tend to lose a little bit more weight on low-carb diets than low-fat diets. But, in fact, I'm one of the co-authors of the carbohydrate insulin model, big paper, that was recently American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Congratulations. I've signed my name and blood on that. I believe in the biology behind the low-carb diet. Can you explain that in layman's terms? We can. Before we do it, let me just get to this. Which is that pretty much any non-crap diet can help somebody lose weight. The hard part is to sustain it. You need to make a distinction between efficacy and effectiveness. Efficacy is basically how well a diet works in the perfect world, right? When there's no cheating and you eat exactly what you're told and you can do it for a long time and it's perfect. Effectiveness is how it works in the real world. It turns out that low-carb diets have this higher efficacy for weight loss than low-fat diets. This is for weight loss. Their effectiveness, because people have a hard time sustaining them, is only slightly larger. Right. So if you could do it, you might perform very well. But being able to do it, the difficulty is somewhat harder. It's hard. Which means that it mitigates some of those gains. I mean, I tried it. I mean, I tried it. I tried everything one of these. By the way, I have done a much more broad science equivalent of what you did in the research for this book. I've tried all of these. Yeah. I mean, I tried the. I tried an Atkins diet and I was hard. Because I had intense carbohydrate cravings and I'm a runner and it's hard to be a runner and not eat carbs. The hunger is rough. Yeah. I mean, I just. I didn't like it that much, but I didn't like a lot of the diets that much. But let's go into the biology behind low-carb diets because it's really interesting. So when you eat food, some of that food, of course, is carbohydrate. But it's. your body breaks down into. some of it into glucose, which is one of the two major kinds of sugar. There's fructose and glucose. Fructose is what you get from fruit. It's kind of. It's sweeter. Glucose is the kind of more starchy, less sweet form of sugar. And so that goes straight into your bloodstream. Glucose is. Your body can only handle a very, very small range of glucose because it too much is toxic. In fact, I think average human being has about a teaspoon and a half of glucose in their entire bloodstream. And if it goes above that, you're in trouble. You become hyperglycemic and you can go into. you can have serious medical problems. So our body is super sensitive to glucose. So when you eat a meal and it has glucose in it, your blood sugar level goes up. And because the body has to maintain a very tight range of glucose, your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. And insulin is. You're basically at your growth hormone. It's the hormone that causes you to store stuff. So insulin causes your cells to take up that glucose so the levels go down. Now insulin also tells your cells to hold on to energy. So to prevent your cells from releasing fat because you store that energy as fat, your cells turn the glucose into fat. Excuse me. So when you are on a low carb diet, you keep your insulin levels low. And that means that you're storing less and also you're not holding on to that fat and that helps you. And that can. So the bile is just pretty simple. And I guess pretty clear. Though it gets more complicated because there's another hormone called glucagon, which makes it more complicated. It's just got activity effects things. You know, nothing is ever simple and the carbohydrate insulin model is no exception. So there's a real basic logic behind the carbohydrate insulin model. The problem is that when people go on these low carb diets, they're hard to sustain. And a lot of people can't maintain them for that long and their carbohydrate levels creep up. And that's the end of the diet. But you can also lose weight on a low fat diet, plenty of people haven't. I didn't even know that low fat high carb diets were a thing. That's one that I haven't tried. Oh, so they're plenty. I mean, they were the. Some of the biggest diets in the country were the prittikin diet, the ornish diet. There's a whole bunch of. These deaths sound like fantasy races from a Lord of the Rings level. Dash stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension. That was originally developed for blood pressure, but it turns out to be a low fat diet. And it's actually probably the second most studied diet after Mediterranean. It's very well-stated. So it was developed by NIH. And there's a lot of scientists. There are a lot of randomized control studies for the dash diet. People who stick to the dash diet, which by the way, tried in the book, do lose weight. Absolutely. They can and do. Sure. Surely somebody that's on a low fat higher carb diet is going to be ripping the insulin levels around more. No, because it depends on the kind of carb you eat. Because there are good carbs and there are bad carbs. So if you eat refined carbs and lots of stuff with lots of sugar, lots of crap, your engine level is going to go sky high. But if you eat unrefined carbs, right? If you. I mean, if I eat lots of kale and whatever, my glucose level is going to go sky high, of course not. Because all the fiber in that kale is going to slow the rate of digestion or so. So there are plenty of foods that have carbohydrate that are not high glycemic. So the idea that all carbs are poisonous and cause you to raise your blood sugar levels ridiculously is just not true. I mean, if that were the case, because think about it, for most of human existence, people have eaten mostly carbs. All those farming diets in the Mediterranean and Asia elsewhere are mostly carbs. They're eating corn, they're eating rice, they're eating wheat, etc. But until recently, none of those people, or very few of them, were obese or overweight. So these diets, you can eat a high carb, if it's high in fiber and not high in sugar and not highly refined, these are not high glycemic diets. The area in Rwanda, why I work, right? In the area in Kenya, why I work? People are getting at least 65% of their diet from carbs, at least 65%. That's a high carb diet. And dare you to find somebody with overweight or obesity in the area, they don't exist, there's none of that. They're not around. How much of that is because of the type of carbs and how much of that is just because of the number of calories? Well, they're eating a lot of calories. It's a combination. It's the kind of foods they're eating. So they're eating, for example, and I have that meal I described earlier in the 90 hills where we have some agali, but we also have saku mawiki, we have beans. These are all high, highly fibrous low glycemic foods. It's a generally healthy diet. They're also very physically active and that helps. And when you're physically active, so one of the reasons physical activity helps people prevent weight gain, it's not just how many calories are going in versus out, but when people are very physically active, it changes the insulin sensitivity of their muscles so that they're, so that you actually produce less insulin for a given amount of carbohydrate. So again, nothing is simple. And when we try to oversimplify, we get into trouble. And I wish it were simple, but again, one of the major arguments that I'm trying to make is that it's pleased, it's a plea to stop oversimplifying complex, multi-factorial things. We just all need to educate ourselves a little bit so that we can help make sense of all the diversity out there and all the different people out there trying to make money off of us with their various distance diets. It just doesn't work the way we've been told it does. I understand that people shouldn't be trying to overcomplicate or oversimplify things, but the degree of, even just so far, we've done like five diets or something. And all of them kind of feel like they're pointing in the opposite direction. You said, well, low fat can work because of what it doesn't do to insulin in terms of spiking insulin, but high carb can work as long as you eat the right kinds of carbs. And the plant-based stuff that works, what you do need to get some protein, but it doesn't matter where it's from. Some people feel good on the carnival thing, but so I understand why people feel this malaise, this degree of overwhelm. They're like, okay, we shouldn't be oversimplifying it. Optimal is your Russian sleeper agent activation code word, but at the same time, if I'm so. So I have a solution for you. Burdened. I don't know what to do. But I have a solution for you, which is that, again, there are kernels even larger than kernels, are whole cobs of truth to all of these diets. And why do we have to pick between low fat versus low carb versus low calorie? I haven't talked about low calorie, right? Why do we have to pick? You can actually take the best of all of that, right? So you can take the best of the low carb diet by eliminating or removing or not eating too much of refined carbs that raise your insulin levels. You can take the best of the low fat diet by not eating too much highly caloric saturated fat, which does, according to a lot of studies, either increases your risk of cardiovascular disease or doesn't lower your risk of cardiovascular. We can talk about that later on. So polyunsaturated mononetatred fats are risk-lowering fats. And also, calories do matter. How many calories do you eat? Do you do matter? We need to talk. And so you don't, not eating too much is also helpful. So why not combine the best of all these various kinds of diets without going down the kind of-- But as soon as you combine the best of all of those kinds of diets, you now have a new diet. No, you have the med, you have the Mediterranean diet. That's the diet. That isn't your diet. Or, or, or you have essentially any traditional farming diet. Okay. Okay. So, so I would say that a traditional Asian diet, a traditional African diet, a traditional Mesoamerican diet, a traditional Mediterranean, all share the same basic characteristics that we just talked about. A lack of highly refined carbohydrates that raise your insulin levels. Not too much saturated fat. Not too much food. Not too, you know, a diversity of foods, a mixture of whole grain cereals combined with legumes that give you complimentary protein. People have been eating these for thousands and thousands of years. Now, are they optimal diets that are going to guarantee you to live to be 100? No, but are these diets that have over the time, of course, of time, plus in recent studies, been shown to be generally healthy and prevent weight gain? The answer is yes. Okay. So, in a way, it's not that complicated. That we've started to simplify. What about calorie restriction? I've been told that it's the only reliable intervention that actually works for extending lifespan. How would you-- If you're a mouse. Are you saying that the rodent studies don't come across into humans when it comes to calorie restriction? There's a lot of fun. No evidence yet in humans. In fact, not even in primates. So, you know, there was a big study that was done in Wisconsin where they took a whole bunch of macaques, right? And they gave one group of macaques, a calorie restriction to diet, and another group of macaques. And this is a 20-year-long study. Imagine how much time it took. Two decades of calorie restriction if you were in the wrong group of macaques. And guess what? The group of macaques that were in the calorie restriction diet were way healthier than the ones that were not in the calorie. So, there were these papers published saying, ta-da, calorie restriction works in primates, which means it probably works in humans. But guess what? When people looked at the data, the non-calorie restricted macaques were basically being fed a crap food diet. They were getting lots of sugary foods. They were getting obese. They were, you know, they were not healthy and normal macaque diets. They were fed an ad-lemonum crap diet. So, the NIH, at vast expense-- I mean, we're talking millions of taxpayer dollars, re-de the experiment. We're in the-- Another two decades. For another two decades. Fuck me. If you're the guy that fed those macaques fries for two decades, you really should be out of a job. It's very shameful, but anyway. So, the NIH re-de the experiment. And this time, they had them on the same monkey-chow diet. Just chopped one in half a way. And one had a 30% less food than the other. And guess what? No difference. Zilch. In terms of health and longevity. Why do you think it does show up in mice? Because mice have totally different life histories. So, life history is the series of stages that you go through. How you use energy to grow up, reproduce, and whatever. And, you know, a typical mouse is ready to reproduce after three months, you know. And it has series of babies, et cetera, et cetera. Mice have totally different metabolism and different growth trajectories and different microbiomes and different, you know, than humans. So, yes, it is true that for some species, for some mouse, it's not all, but not all. Chalerec restriction has been shown to improve their lifespan, but not all of them, by the way. Certainly true for yeast, certainly true for fruit flies. But the evidence for humans is so far mixed. Now, I should also say that it's not based in totally unholy, right? I mean, there are reasons to believe that chalerec restriction can be very beneficial. And again, I try to explain the biology carefully in the book. But one of them is that it causes what's called metabolic switching. So after a meal, your body's got all this nutrients and energy, et cetera. You want to use it. And so you're going to growth mode. And there's a famous gene called mTOR. You've probably heard of it. A merion, targeted rapamycin. And mTOR is like, it's like an on-chain, right? It's like a growth gene. It causes you to grow muscle and grow this and grow that and produce proteins and do all kinds of good stuff. But the consequence of that is that it also causes damage, right? And you get your muscles producing more proteins. You produce what's called reactive oxygen species that can cause damage. You get you get you get you get you know, misfolded proteins. You get all these problems, right? But so there's another pathway that's turned on by another big gene called AMPK. And AMPK is like your repair gene. And what happens when you go through intermittent fasting or calorie restriction is that you turn down or turn off the mTOR and turn up the AMPK. So you're turning off growth and you're turning up repair. Well, that's obviously good, right? But you can't repair all the time. Sometimes you have to grow. And so this kind of metabolic switching between the two is really good. The problem I think is that a lot of Americans and Europeans and people in high-income countries were constantly in growth mode. Poundly grazing. We're currently grazing. You know, in my building, if anybody gets hungry for just, you just go down one flight of stairs and there's these stack machines and you never have to be hungry. So that means that some people are just constantly in this on mode and they're not turning on the repair mode. But we obviously evolved to have these mixture of repair and growth. And so there is, and of course when you're going to intermittent fasting or calorie restriction, you are turning on that repair mode and that's good. So I'm not saying that it isn't necessarily beneficial or that it might not lead to increased longevity. It's just that the evidence so far doesn't exist. So you're taking another leap of faith. I'm sure it's generally healthy. Or it will help you live to be a hundred. Anybody who tells you that's the case is going beyond the evidence. It's not a bad strategy, but there's no strong evidence to that effect. That's crazy. I didn't know that there was no strong evidence. I mean, the heumatic stressor. I'm just helping people make money. You know, if they told you, if they told you, like what I just told you, that you know, this might work, but we're not really sure. It's highly effective. You're not going to buy the product. Many of your arguments are highly unsexy is a way like unmarketable. I completely unsexy. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. But because we want quick fixes, we want, yeah, wouldn't it be great if I just by skipping breakfast, I could live to a hundred. I wish that were the case, but I can't promise you that. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life. This RP was a massive part of that actual scientist built this thing around the obsession to be beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective paths to maximising muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So all you have to do is show up and lift. The RP strength app could wipe your ass for you. Probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference, and if you're serious about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below, heading to RPstrength.com/modernwistim and using the code "modernwistim". A checkout. That's RPstrength.com/modernwistim and modernwistim. A checkout. The reason that I think people are not only drawn to it because simplicity is seductive, but also just think about how many different choices you need to make now. And what am I going to eat today is an evolutionarily novel question that humans have never had to ask before. Yeah. I've never had to answer before. And if somebody comes along with something that feels like a relatively tight set of guardrails, it's why I think constrictive diets, generally, whatever they are, just help. Like, I'll speak for myself. Right? So, a couple of years ago, I lived in a house with toxic mold, one of the byproducts that comes out of that normal inflammation and brain fog and TGF beta and C4A and MMP, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. One of the often cited diets that seem to help people with some of the brain fog is going carnival. Get rid of anything that spikes blood sugar. I felt remotely human for the first time in six months. Yeah, I'm sure you did. I also had LDL in the 400s. And I then had to unwind that. Everything is a trade off. So, you're looking at my bloods versus looking at how I felt. I'm like, well, it was so good because it was restricting something. It made it very easy for me to follow. It's a super simple set of rules. Is it meat or blueberries or raspberries? If not, don't fucking eat it. But what it did to and it made me feel good and it made me look. I was shredded out in my mind. Look, fucking fantastic. Finally hitting my protein goals for a bodybuilding diet. But also, what's this going to do to my arteries over if I keep doing this for only a couple of years? Like, even on a clearly scan, I could see a little bit of progression just from a short space of time, right? Plack progression in the space of like nine months that we've done this clearly scan 18 month intervals. So, I understand why people want that simplicity. What is interesting to me around the sort of calorie restriction thing is the super magical source that's inside of the intermittent fasting. It's the 16.8, right? 5, 2, yeah, yeah. There's the, what's it called? The warrior diet. Is that a man? I can't remember. The warrior diet is you eat like like only once a day. Yeah, oh man, one meal a day. Is there something special about intermittent fasting? Well, again, intermittent fasting moves your body in and out of what's going to be called positive and negative energy balance. And for turning on and off M-Toron M.PK is calling metabolic switch. You could imagine, but there's no one way to do it. You could imagine a world in which you did calorie restriction. Let's say maintenance for me is 2400. I could calorie restrict even down to like a significant amount. It's 1800 or 1500 or something, but I could do that by consuming 100 calories every hour for each week, waking hour that I was, this would be kind of a highly inefficient diet to have. But you understand what I mean, right? Between grazing your way to calorie restriction or fasting your way to calorie restriction, if you were to take, have you seen any evidence that if you were to take two populations, one of whom was doing oh, mad, and another of whom was grazing to a similar kind of calorie restriction that they would have different outcomes? In terms of weight or in terms of inflammation or whatever. So if those studies exist, I don't know them because I'm, they're, they're, they're cool study to do. Well, I don't, yeah, maybe, but don't maybe my suggestion. That's a cool study. Okay. Says the guy that's not in your industry at all. I'm just thinking about the hypothesis that we're trying to test. So the, the, the mechanism by which intermittent fasting or low calorie, you know, calorie restriction is supposed to work is by, by putting the body into negative energy balance. And as you say, there's two ways of doing it. One is to fast or the other is just not eat very much. Certainly there's a lot of data on not eating very much. That's just called the diet, right? And, and, and the problem with diets is that people get hungry and they're really, really, really hard to maintain. And they're not very useful for most people because you're tired, you're exhausted, you're cranky, you're hungry, you're whatever, right? Intermittent fasting. One of the reasons people love intermittent fasting is that you just, you know, basically skip breakfast, for example, by one, one form of intermittent fasting. And so you can, it's much more tolerable. And plus the other benefit of intermittent fasting again is that is the metabolic switching, going from one to the other. Because nobody in their right mind would think that being a constant state of negative energy balance is a good thing. It's called starvation. It's called starvation, right? This is good. And here's another thing. In addition to the fact that there are trade-offs, every time you do one thing, you don't do something else. Every, every food, every diet, everything. There are benefits in their costs. There's nothing, find me one that doesn't have a trade-off and I'll be, I'll be really interested, but I've yet to find one. But remember this also, that we are adapted, not, we're not adapted to be healthy. We, natural selection didn't put us on this earth to live to be a hundred. We evolved for one thing and one thing only as far as natural selection is concerned. That's to have babies. So we evolved to maximize our reproductive success and not to be long-lived and healthy. So a lot of the adaptations that we have are there not to improve our health, they're to improve our reproductive success. That makes things complicated and that adds to the trade-offs. Get me to puberty and hope for the best. What about the sort of world of the modern paleo movement? That's what it sounds like. Paleo is in one of the titles that you have for the world that you come from. Looking at more ancestrally aligned natural without falling into a naturalistic fallacy type diet, you could assume, hey, well, if we just eat like hunter-gatherers did and the paleo movement kind of promised this from a dietary perspective, is it right to say that there is an ancestral diet that we can recreate? Has the paleo movement got it right? I wish they had, but they again, I'm going to sound like a broken record, but they got somethings right and they got somethings wrong. So it is true that some of the aspects of the paleo diet make a lot of sense, right? You know, don't eat a lot of sugar. Don't eat a lot of saturated fat. That's the original paleo diet. It's don't eat a lot of saturated fat. There's some paleo dieters dispute that. But the paleo diet also says you should never eat legumes and you should never eat grains and you should never eat dairy. And the argument for that is that our ancestors didn't eat legumes and grains and then we only had dairy until we stopped nursing. And then after we stopped drinking our mother's breast milk, that was it. Well, several problems. First is, it's not true that hunter-gatherers don't eat legumes and grains. It's absolutely just the obsessive. Don't or didn't. We have paleontological evidence. We have Neanderthals with grains starched thing on their teeth. Oh, that sounds like reliable evidence. We have that. You know, we have this kind of cartoon character of the Neanderthals eating like all meat, like you know, inuit in Greenland. But you know, you know, 125,000 years ago, there were hippos frallicking in the Thames when the Neanderthals were hanging out in southern England. The Neanderthals were not living in architect conditions all the time. There were times when there was plenty of plants available and there were plenty of plants. We have archeological evidence for that. In addition, for example, hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, the second most consumed food are the kind of bean. It's called the Mirama bean. It's their number two food. So don't tell me they don't eat legumes. They do. Hunter-gatherer, we evolved to eat almost everything. And so, actually, we did a study on this a few years ago. It was actually during COVID when, you know, it was locked down and I had an undergraduate who's going to do an experimental project in the lab that involved, you know, putting people in treadmills on that kind of stuff. And of course, you couldn't do it because the lab was closed. So we decided, since she was stuck at home, to go through the literature on all the high quality data on hunter-gatherer diets from the tropics and just analyze the hell out of the data. And compare that to what the paleo diet prescribes. Because the paleo diet says you should have, I can't remember, it's like 35% protein and X percent carbohydrate. And I can't remember the exact formula. The, there are 12 hunter-gatherer groups for which we have really good data, excellent data where people actually measured carefully what they, and they're all over the place. Some of them are eating pretty much all plants, almost no animal food, some are eating tons of animal food, everything in between. Hunter-gatherer, we evolved to eat anything. We are that animal kingdoms ultimate omnivores. We evolved through cooking and fermentation and various other techniques to, because again, remember the equation of life is food in equals babies out. And that's all that natural selection cares about you. If you can eat it and it can help you make babies, you should. So the idea that we evolved to eat some particular diet is just not true. We evolved to eat incredible diversity of diets. And remember that we didn't evolve to eat them to be healthy and to live to be 70, 80, 90, although hunter-gatherers do end up being relatively healthy, we evolve them to maximize every productive success. So the paleo diet is based on kind of a naturalistic fallacy that if our ancestors ate it must be good. By that token, maybe we shouldn't like brush our teeth or sleep on mattresses or whatever, right? And it's also based on this idea that these legumes and cereals are filled with these quote unquote anti-nutrients. So anti-nutrients are compounds that bind vitamins and minerals and prevent us from absorbing them. But guess what? If you cook your food or you ferment your food, you get rid of the anti-nutrients. Otherwise, all those people in Japan who have the greatest longevity, they'd be dying of malnutrition. They're clearly not, right? So there's, again, there's a lot of these diets are based on elimination and they're based on stoking certain kinds of fears and that's problematic. So the paleo diet's not completely wrong, but it's not completely right. Sorry to long answer to your simple question. I'd never heard of anti-nutrients before, but I knew that people get worried about lectins and fight hates and oxalides. Those are anti-nutrients. What's the truth about the danger of lectins and oxalates and fight hates? Well, if you ate raw beans, you'd be in trouble, right? Because they're filled with these lectins and they would, you know, they could cause all kinds of problems. But guess what? If you cook your beans, you're just fine. So these are compounds that are, that's why we can't eat raw beans and raw grains because of those compounds. What did they do to us? They, again, they bind to minerals and vitamins so that you can't absorb them in your guts. You'd have malnutrition. You'd have, you'd eat it, but you wouldn't absorb it. It correct. But obviously that's not the case, right? I mean, I know plenty of healthy vegetarians who are clearly not malnourished. They're just by dating lots of beans because they cook their beans in paracelsis. Remember paracelsis, the famous alchemist from chemist from the 15th or 14th century, he famously said, it's the dose that makes the poison, right? And these compounds, by the time you cook them and prevent them, they're in such harmless doses, there's absolutely no reason to do that. Even the oxalate thing, I've heard it even cooked spinach. Spent, that's a concern for some people. You're taking, come on. I mean, maybe for some people, but not for most of us. You're not, these aren't anti-nutrient, anti-concern as long as things are worth. I mean, I think there are some people with certain kidney issues that have problems with spinach, but for the rest of us, I think spinach is a delicious, healthy fruit. Well, you've activated another trap card now, which is the raw food diet. Oh my God, I have to tell you, all the diets are tried by far the worst. What was the typical day for you eating the raw food diet? I mean, we gave it up because it was so hard. I mean, look, first of all, I was eating because, like, cooking increases how much energy you get from food. It actually, cooking releases nutrients from food. So on a raw food diet, you have to eat ridiculous amounts of food just to get enough food. I mean, I was just eating constantly. I was always hungry, and I spent huge amounts of time thinking about food. What were you eating? What's the typical day? Oh, we were. Well, I mean, it was difficult because so much of what we eat requires cooking. Humans evolved to cook. There are the only people on the planet who don't cook our raw foodists and places like Berkeley and Cambridge and stuff like that, right? And there. Most developed places in the world, not the least developed. You cannot possibly survive on a raw food diet without a really high quality diet. And even then, it's difficult to thrive because cooking releases energy, cooking releases nutrients. You get more energy from cooked foods than from that good. So we were eating like, you know, zoodles, you know, zucchini noodles, and we were eating, you know, smoothies and we were eating fish to eat any raw fish. I ate raw fish. Absolutely. I mean, I was just, I mean, I was just constantly hungry. My wife got depressed. She, I described it in the book. She, after three days, she disappeared and came back and became really happy. She went out and got a bagel. And so I was, I was it for her. She broke containment. I, I, I made it another day. I mean, you lasted four days on the raw food diet. I lasted four days. It was, it was, it was really hard. Yeah. And look, it's based on, again, it's a naturalistic fallacy that somehow, because, you know, animals don't get these various diseases, go eat raw food that somehow it must be really good for us. But, but we are species started cooking. Maybe a million years ago, certainly by 400,000 years ago, cooking became extremely common among our ancestors to the point that it's changed our digestive systems and enabled us to have these big brains and big bodies and high metabolism that, that we cannot support without cooking. How important was cooking to human development? Crucial. I don't think we would be the species that we are without cooking. We would not, we wouldn't have our big brains. We wouldn't have the levels of body fat that we have. Cooking enabled us to have the kind of reproductive rate that we have. Cooking, cooking gave us more energy. You know, we are an energetically extravagant species and cooking is one of those key elements. Food sharing is another. Meat was part of it as well. Cooking is an incredibly important part of the human evolutionary story that made us who we are. What does cooking do to digestion? Cooking breaks down cell walls, most importantly, so that, you know, when you eat it cooked, cooked, like, if you eat cooked corn versus raw corn and then you look in the toilet the next day, what do you see? I think that experiment is pretty easy to do. You digest a lot more of your food when it's cooked because you break down the cell walls, you break down the, down the, down the, you release the nutrients. Cooking also makes food safer. So if you eat raw meat versus cooked meat, which is likely to make you sick and when you're sick, you have to survive it. You have to spend a huge amount of energy fighting that, right? Speaking of somebody that got Salmon Aller and Rwanda, yes. Oh, dear, I'm so sorry. It's okay. I survived. But I did get a call from the UK, it's like food and safety. People that they go around and they, if you go to your GP, I felt horrible, obviously, when I went in did some stool sample thing and I got a call from environmental health before my doctor called me to tell me what happened. And they said, Mr. Williamson, we understand that you were part of a Salmon Aller outbreak. I'm like, okay, well, thank you for telling me what's wrong with me. But they wanted to work out where I'd been. They wanted to know, hey, what was the restaurant, what restaurant have you been? I'm like, unless you're going to fly out to Rwanda, this is not in your purview, I don't think. But that took a long time to recover, let fully, fully recover. Digestion from it is Nali. I've had Salmon all the way. It's tough. Yeah, it's really hard. I got it at the cafeteria in my medical school in, in, in El Dorat, Kenya. My entire team got, got sick from the, just, oh, it was at least it was something that you could bond over. Abondia is one word for that. Yeah, yeah, you can be in the stalls next to each other or all hating your life. Most people have no idea whether testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution, something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where function comes in. Give you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone paddle. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged. You get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. Whether you just need to go to the gym or you need to play Creed louder in your car, functional tell you exactly where your test starts to run and everything else stands. Normally this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with function it's $365 a year. That's $1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get $25 off bringing it down to $340. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health.com/modemistam using the code modemistam. A checkout. I got a question. Have we ever seen any other animals using temperature to moderate food in any way? Does anything leave something out put something away? Is there any kind of like mediation with regards to temperature for a regular basis? But it's interesting though, if you, there are these fun experiments where they give chimpanzees them the opportunity to choose between cooked food and raw food and even though chimpanzees don't cook their food, they always, they not always, they usually prefer the cooked food. And it has been observed that sometimes like after a brush fire, the chimpanzees will eat the burnt stuff. Oh, a barbecue. Yeah, it's like a natural barbecue, but they're taking advantage of a natural brush fire. They're not, they're not cooking it themselves. If there are animals that, that, you know, no, that, that, that I don't know of. What do you, would you say that farming was a healthy human development? Oh my god, that's an interesting topic. I mean, it's how many hours you, I'm just throwing grenades at the hips. Remember the equation of life, right? Food and equals babies out. Yep. So some people say that farming was the biggest mistake that human ever made. Because once we people ate farming diets, they had less nutritional diversity, and they ate more grains and cereals and body body block. And if you look in the archaeological record, once farming starts, people's health declined. But the reason for most of those declines in health was because of infectious disease. Because we started several things. First is we started living with animals, right? So we had we living with our sheep and our cows and whatever. We started getting diseases from those animals. So, so, so, as opposed to only having the animals with us that we could kind of kill or use to maybe pack like, like, carry packs and shit. Yeah, we don't. Yeah, exactly. We don't. We didn't get many animal animals. Just exposure to human to animal with solo. So that's one. The other is that with farming, you produce way more food. I mean, hunter-gatherer is struggle to get, you know, a few thousand calories a day, but farmers can even, you know, neolithic kind of farmers, you know, with simple, non without machines and all that shit farmer can get more calories than they need. Way more, right? This is a much larger family. So, and with farming, not only did populations start to increase, but we also became sedentary and started living permanently in villages. So now, you have higher population densities, higher populations, living with animals. Now you're surrounded by your own shit because you don't have, you don't have Santa, you don't have toilets and you don't have, you don't have sewers and all that kind of stuff. And so now you get the perfect mix of factors to increase infectious disease and infectious disease transmission. And so with the advent of farming, you have more people, but you also had a lot more disease. And so, so on the one hand, farming was great from an evolutionary perspective because we had more babies. I mean, the population of the world by the end of the farming era was up to about a billion people from probably about, you know, just a few million from before farming was invented, which is only about 600 generations ago. So, six, like 590 generations, the world went up to about a from about a few million to a billion people. So from that perspective, from a natural selection perspective, farming was a great idea. Scale goods individual. But from the from from from disease and misery, it was terrible. Also, with farming, you get famines, right? If you're hunter-gathering and the weather is bad and you have a, you know, drought or whatever, you just move, right? You you're enormous territories, it's extremely low population density. There's a lot of variation. So, you go to where the food is. Now, doesn't mean it's easy or you're necessarily going to, you know, you know, live in the lap of luxury, but if you're a farmer and you're living in a village and you can't go anywhere else because the next folks are going to kill you and you'd you have a drought or say two years of drought and famine, you die, right? So, so farmers are much more vulnerable to famine and disease. Also, with farming, you also have the rise of complex civilizations and armies and, and, you know, the, you know, Napoleon's going to come and, you know, burn your fields and, you know, I mean, so you have more of this kind of organized violence. It's not that hunter-gatherers don't kill each other. They do, but with farming, you have, you have, and civilization, you begin to get more large-scale warfare, which of course, who suffers? It's the peasants. So, farming brought a lot of misery and, and, and problems, although it did provide more food and more energy. So, how's that for? Yeah, another mixed bag. I mean, it's just, it's so, I'm sorry, I'm an academic. Not at all. I think it's so, it's so wonderful, like the, understanding the fifth-order effects of something like that. What happens downstream, I think, is so cool. But if I could say something more about farming diets, so a lot of people mistake farming diets with modern diets, because when farmers were eating their grains and cereal, like, take a think of a typical, like, let's go back to the Mediterranean diet, think of typical farmer from somewhere along the Mediterranean. They're growing barley or wheat, and they're having their lentils, and their whatever, and they're, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, and they're chickpeas, and whatever. They're having their legume, and they're cereal, et cetera. When they're, and they're making bread, but they're, it's going to be sourdough, whole grain, whole wheat, you know, sourdough, bread with lentils. These are healthy diets in the general. They're not, these are not insulin spiking diets. These are, these are effective diets. And it wasn't until the late 19th century, actually was in Hungary that, that in the industrial revolution that we figured out had a mill flour to get rid of the, the, the German, the sperm, and then now all of a sudden, we, when we think of, like, high cereal diets, we think of white flour, not brown flour, and that's a very different thing. I mean, there's actually a firm out of nutrition and whole grains. They're not, they're not the kind of poison that some people think they are. They're not, and especially when you combine them with legumes. So, so I think people have a kind of a funny conception of what a traditional farming diet has been a kind of bit warped by modern, by modern cereal diets. What's going on with modern gluten intolerances? It's gone sky high. I mean, but so have peanut allergies and I mean, that we have all these autoimmune diseases where immune systems have start essentially erupt when we eat certain foods and gluten, which is a protein in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in wheat is one of the, but I wouldn't. And what do you think's going on with gluten? I think it's, if I had, I, have you heard of the hygiene hypothesis? Yes, yes. Well, if you live in a house that's got a dishwasher, there's an increased chance of asthma. If you live in a house that is that, as you make, that's, that's, that's, that's part of it. Yeah. So the hygiene hypothesis is this idea that we have these, we have immune systems that are evolved to be very active, right? The world was full of germs and worms, basically, until, until, until modern sanitation. But you and I still have the same immune system that are great, great, great, great grandparents had with the same kinds of cells and all that waiting, waiting to defend us against all the, all the, all the pathogens out there. Now we have dishwashers and we have bleach and we have, you know, you know, we clean everything, right? And, and the result is is that we have much less, I mean how many worms have you had to deal with recently in your food. Probably very few. But until recently, and in many parts of the world, everybody's dealing with worms. Worms are an important, uh, a holistic stressor of the immune system. They are. So, but you still have the same immune system. And now your immune system is, is still waiting to do its job. And the, because hypersensitized. Well, it could be hypersensitized or the, or the other analogy I use is, is, is like bored teenagers like, you know, they, they have all these cells waiting around to do stuff. And there's nothing for them to do. And they're more likely to get into trouble because they now are more likely attack self versus non self, because there's no non self to attack. Have you seen the data around children that grow up in houses that have got dogs in? Yeah, exactly. And they're much less likely to get on immune diseases. Yeah. Any, any excuse to make dogs grading it. But there's another factor too. So, so one, so that's one possibility, which is all the, all the, all the, all the sterile environments that we're in. But another important factor could be antibiotics. I mean, we now have so many antibiotics that we are constantly taking. And it's even, even if you don't take them, it's in your food because the antibiotics are given to animals. We are in a, in an antibiotic zone. Mill you. Mill you. Thank you. That's a much better word. And, and of course, those antibiotics are affecting our gut microbiome and all kinds of weights. And they're breaking down the mucus barriers. They're affecting bile. They're affecting all kinds of aspect in ways that we do not understand. And I think, I think there's, there's a lot of people's trying to study how those antibiotics may also predispose us to, to having things like celiac. So, farming makes bag probably good overall for having more humans on the planet, but for individual humans. We wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be here. Cooking. Same thing. I'm, I'm interested. Over time, typically things get better. Obesity is now a bigger global health issue than malnutrition. How come so many people are overweight? Well, there's no one answer. But if there's any one dominant factor, it's obviously processed food. I mean, I think you'd be hard pressed not to, I mean, we are surrounded by, you know, you walk into a supermarket and you're just surrounded by foods that are engineered for us to be, they'll be hyper palatable that are loaded with, with, with sugar and fat and they're, and they're hitting our bliss point so that we keep eating more and more and more and more. And, and you add, and you add to that physical inactivity, although exercise is not the world's best, is not that great for losing weight. It is extremely important for rebelling weight gain. And then, and then you add antibiotics, and you add various other factors. And, and of course, some people have genetic proclivity, although that doesn't explain the, the recent rise. Yeah, we are, we are, we are, we are, we are surrounded by food that makes us, makes us gain weight. And then, then, then the, the difficult thing is that once, because of natural selection, we have this, we never evolved to lose weight. So we have these adaptations to hold on to fat because we are, we never evolved to, to lose it. Once you, once you create fat cells, you can't get rid of the fat cells, they only empty themselves. Is that correct? That's correct. For the most part, yeah, the fat cells swell. And so you're, you're doing is reducing, but each cell is its own little kind of, you know, metabolic powerhouse. But if you, if the fat cells get sufficiently big, then they split. And you now have two fat cells, which means that getting fat in future becomes easier. When I first learned this, I'm not off with the signs, right? Like this is, you're not off and furthermore, when you have more fat cells, remember we talked about the carbohydrate density? - Yeah. - When you have more fat cells, those fat cells are-- - Signaling. - Sucking up all that stuff. So you eat the same food, but now your body thinks you're starving. Because you've sucked up all that glucose, you become hypoglycemic. So gaining weight actually makes you eat more. - Yeah, I mean, this learning this, when I, this was in uni when I was thinking about bodybuilding and wanting to be lean and jacking stuff. And hearing that if you get sufficiently fat, fat cells grow and grow and grow, and then when they grow big enough, they split into two. And then maybe you lose fat. Maybe you're going through the classic sort of bulk cut, C-cell. But when you lose fat, those two, now, what used to be one, two fat cells, they shrink down, and they become smaller or more empty, or whatever. But there's still two. And they're also, they're also producing less of a hormone called leptin, which is now telling your brain, shit, we're losing energy, you need to eat more to replace us. So it's this called, we call it the leptinostate. So the fat cells, when you lose fat, you're the fat cell send a signal to your body to eat more. So, so. - Becoming fat at one point in your life makes not being fat for the rest of your life harder. - Correct. - Yeah, so that's the problem. So if we are going to tackle this problem, A, we need to help people figure, whose way? But B, we need to spend more energy and more effort to help prevent people from gaining weight in the first place. And one of the scariest statistics I know is the percentage of young people who are overweight or obese. Those numbers are going up and up and up. - What, what, how many young people are, oh boy? - I think in the United States, something like 30% of American teenagers are now classified or 25% are classified as being obese. Yeah. And that's a really scary number because those kids from the rest of their lives are going to be fighting in their weight. - Yep. - And of course, now we have GLP ones, we haven't started talking about, which may be very helpful for them. But that's not necessarily going to be the magic bullet either. You mentioned before about the particular combinations of flavors representing macronutrients and what's inside of this and some of the textures. While I learned about orification, about the design of the texture of food and how that's used to kind of bypass our usual levels of satiety and stuff. Can you just explain to, let's say that somebody didn't understand why particular combinations of flavors and textures are seductive and attractive to our system. What are they and why does that work in that way? I've seen these videos of hunter gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time and it looks like they've taken MDMA. - Well, you know, I describe them in the book actually. One, in the last day, we were with a group of hunter gatherers and we cooked for them. And I've never seen anybody eat that much food as these hunter gatherers. I mean, they were just like, they were like complete non-pilier diet nightmares you can possibly imagine. Because humans are humans. We like sugar, we like fat, we like energy rich food. - But we don't just like sugar on its own, right? We don't just like fat on its own. - You mix the two, yeah. So so so much fat is greasy, right? Too much sugar is cloying, but it turns out that if you have a, if you balance them, it turns our brains on like crazy. Like, can you name, here's a quiz for you. Can you name a natural food that's high in both sugar and fat that you can get without, you know, stores? - Fuck. The only one. - The only one. - There's only one. - It's not gonna be, it's not gonna be honey 'cause that's just the sugar. It's not gonna be avocado because that's just the fat. It's not gonna be some sort of mushroom. It's not gonna be a kind of berry because again, that's gonna be too much in the sugar. - I'll give you a hint. It's the first food you ever ate. - Milk? - Yeah. - Wow. - Milk is rich in fat and it's rich in sugar, it's right? And but after you ween, you know, that's it. - Get another one. - Unless you have a supermarket or, you know, from food factory in New York. Now we're able, and think about the foods we love. They combine fat and sugar. They, there's something Freudian about it for sure, right? And if you balance high amounts of fat and high amounts of sugar that on their own wouldn't be pleasurable, together they balance each other out. Now add some salt, your brain is on fire. - And then if you can do the texture development, if you can get fluffy with crunchy, again. - Oh, hot and cold. I mean, think about it McDonald's Big Mac. I describe it in the book, right? I actually, you know, a Big Mac has, I think every flavor pretty much, except for spicy, that you can possibly think of. It's got hot and cold, it's got crunchy and smooth. It's got sweet, it's got salty, it's got everything. There's a reason that people love that stuff, right? It lights everything up, right? Doritos. Doritos have more than, go, go, go, go, go, go, go get a pocket of Doritos. Don't necessarily eat them. But there are 30 ingredients in Doritos. I'll last time I counted. And they have, you know, garlic and, I mean, there's all these different flavors, but they're all balanced. So your brain doesn't think anyone is too high. So there's a book by, by a guy named Michael Moss, called Salt Sugar Fat, which is really worth reading, where he's an investigative journalist, and he studied and, you know, collected information on how the big food companies, you know, through serious testing. These are not accidental foods. These are carefully formulated foods to keep us, precision engineers. Keep us reaching for more. Another example I got from his book is M&Ms. You know why M&Ms, how are these different colors? No. To turn our brains on, because, you know, I think, oh, I've already got this. It's different. Now I'll have a green one. Now I'll have a brown one, whatever. Your brain, even though it all tastes the same, it gets you to eat more, right? So we've been subjected to foods, or we have to cope now with an environment, with all these foods that have been literally engineered to get us to eat a lot of them. And, of course, and then, and you add all the chemicals to them, which are probably not very good. And you end up with what we have today, which is that 40% of American adults are classified as having obesity. And another 35% are classified as having, as being overweight. So only one in four Americans today is actually by, you know, by B.I. classification, which has its own problems, is considered normal weight. One in four. And look, you got to, and there's probably other factors too. Exercise is probably one of them. But, obviously, our food environment is unquestionably is the main reason. If there was a pie chart contributing to weight gain, and some of it was calories in, and some of it was calories out, how much of it would be diet, consumption, increased, and how much of it would be sedentary movement, increased, or lack of movement decrease. What do you think is the sort of proportion? I think we've had this big change in terms of obesity over the last few decades. That's a hard number to come up with, but obviously the vast majority has to be with calories in. You think it's mostly on diet. Yeah, but remember, our metabolism isn't just calories in versus calories out, because that's important. But remember that when you exercise, so I didn't get, 'cause I got up at some ungodly hour this morning to get the airplane to come here, I have not had a chance to go running today. I'm a bit of an exercise addict. But had I gone running this morning, and I just had lunch, the amount of insulin I would have produced from the taco that I had in the airport would have been less than the fact that I didn't go running this morning. So physical activity doesn't just affect your calorie balance. It also affects your metabolism. So that's one of the reasons why physical activity, although it's not the best way to lose weight, it's very hard to diet just by exercising. You can lose, but you have to do a lot. But physical activity has been shown. Even moderate amounts of physical activity have been shown to help prevent weight gain. And part of that, it's not just the calories spent, but part of that is the fact that it changes our metabolism. Why are the calories on a label, not the calories that you absorb? Oh, yeah, yeah, that's an interesting question. So because the calories on the label are kind of an idea, it's a formula. Actually, it's over 100 years old this formula was created by a guy named Wilbur Atwater, who analyzed more poop than you can imagine. But anyway, Wilbur Atwater was a professor in Connecticut who came up with these, and what they do is you take some food and you separate up the carbohydrates, the fats, and the protein, and then you use a formula. 4.1 calories per gram of carbs for 4.1 calories per gram of protein and nine point something for the fat. And that's the number on your can food. But that's what's available to you and that an average person would get. But it's not actually what you, because you're not a participant, you're not a bomb calorimeter and at water's lab, you're a human being, right? And so for example, if you take a peanuts, right? And you measure the content of the energy in your peanuts. And now you're growing those peanuts up into peanut. which by the way is the world's greatest food. You get way more energy, about 25% more energy than if you ate the peanuts whole. Because the food processing, even though it's the same stuff, the food processing gives you access to more of those nutrients. - Because you don't have to work as hard? - Yes, right, because you break the food down to tiny little particles, right? And your enzymes. - That's what happens. - Right, the surface area of the volume ratio, your enzymes can break that food down. If you take a banana and you blend a banana, you get more energy from that banana than if you just eat the banana whole. People have done that experiment. Another example, why am I- - Actually if you were to just swallow the banana as well without chewing it, that would also help. Good luck doing that. But some of my favorite experiments, there's a guy named Steven C. Quarer, at the University of Alabama, who studies what's called, "Dietenders Thermogenesis." You know, the energy it takes to break down food, 'cause food takes energy to digest a lot actually. And he used boa constrictors, 'cause boa constrictors, you know, they can not eat for like weeks, and then you can give it a rat, and then you can measure how much energy the boa constrictor spends eating, to justing the rat. And he would give the boa constrictor a rat, and then he'd give the, wait a few months, and measure how much energy the boa constrictor spent. You could do that by just measuring how much the boa constrictor heats up. And then you wait a few months, boa constrictor is very happy. You give it the same rat, or exactly the same size rat, but this time he grinds it up. Same rat, same amount of cars. Ground rat, and the boa constrictor slips right through as to just, it doesn't heat up at all, or much less so, because the boa constrictor is getting way more energy from that rat. So when we pulverize our food, we grind it up, et cetera. It's like, when you're gonna make a smoothie, for example, you're getting more energy from a smoothie than if you ate the same amount of fruit. Oh. - Does that mean that people should or shouldn't eat smoothies? - Well, if it depends if you're trying to lose weight or not. I mean, if you know, if you, I mean, I like smoothies, smoothies are great. I eat them all the time, but I'm not trying to lose weight. But if I was on a diet, I would probably cut down on my smoothie. - I've heard that celery is net calorie negative. - Yeah, I've heard that too. I don't believe that. I'm sure you don't get what I'm saying. - The energy needed to digest the celery because of how rough and fibrous it is is greater than the amount of calories. - Yeah, the fiber doesn't take a lot of energy to digest, actually. Fibrous just what you sent to your microbiome. And by the way, we don't. When we measure the calories from food, we're not taking into account the contribution from our microbiome. So all those bacteria that are, once the celery passes through your, you know, the fiber from the celery passes into your colon, they're all these happy bacteria in there. Delighted that you had the celery, and they're breaking that celery down into what's called short chain fatty acids, of which you then take up into your bloodstream, and then you use. So we think actually that for some people, maybe about 10% of the energy that they get from their food is not even measured on those nutrition fat labels because it comes from a microbiome. We have no idea really. When you have studies that tell you how much energy somebody's eating, they're making it up. I'm not making up. They're estimating it, and it's actually extremely inaccurate, which is another problem with our studies of calories and versus calories. That 'cause nobody really knows how many calories go in. Modern food environment, novel, calorie dense, hyper-palatable, processed, et cetera. But as soon as you create a problem, solutions come out for that too, and we have modern technology and people can design new foods. What are some of the foods that people are eating every day that they think are healthy, but it's actually making them worse? - I don't know. I worry about some of the ultra-processed foods that meal replacements for lack of, I hope I don't get in trouble, but like, fuel and soil and, I mean, there's all. I mean, you could, and I actually tried them for a few weeks. I didn't eat dinner, but I had all my lunches and breakfasts. - It was awful, actually, 'cause I got so boring and I got to really fear, you know. I mean, at first, okay, it's a milkshake, it's not so bad, et cetera. But after a few days, it was like, I really missed food. But there's like emulsifiers in there. There's all kinds of stuff in there that we don't know what they're doing. We're just guessing. And over months, weeks, years, you have no idea. Another example would be a lot of people eat a lot of soy products because they think they're trying to be very vegetarian. And that's fine. Nothing wrong with being vegetarian. They're eating a lot of soy, but some soy products are made by through solvents. They use hexane. - You don't want hexane in your food. Hexane is-- - It sounds like some shit that I'd put in my barbecue. - Yeah, or you're in your car, right? It's a solvent. It's a flammable solvent. And then you try to wash the hexane out. But hexane is a toxin. It's a neurotoxin. And studies have shown that you can actually measure people's urine and people who are not in the petroleum industry. And they have hexane in their urine. And it's probably coming from soy or from non-expeller-press-seed oils. So when I get canola oil, I only get an expeller-press-canola oil because I don't want my canola being dissolved with hexane in order to get my oil. And so-- - I thought seed oils were bad for you. - Oh no. That's another one of those myths I'm sorry to say. But let's get to that in a second. So I think there are some foods that people think are healthy, but the way in which they're processed might be unhealthy. And again, as Paris also said, it's the dose that makes the poison. We don't yet know. It's very hard to do the studies. You can give huge amounts of these foods to rats and they get cancer, but we just don't know about humans. So it depends on what you're not a hypothesis. So right now, the government's not a hypothesis is that this hexane that we get in our food is OK. Generally recognizes safe. Others think, well, unless you can prove it's safe, I don't want anything to do with this. - Seed oils. - Seed oils. OK, so that idea behind seed oils, so there are different kinds of little jargon here. There are different kinds of polyunsaturated fats. So a polyunsaturated fat. So fats are these long chains of carbon, lots and also carbons. And if the carbons have single bonds between them, remember single bonds from chemistry, that means that they can have two hydrogens, one on each side that bind to them. So a saturated fat is all single bond carbons and that each carbon has two hydrogens. So that's saturated with hydrogen. That's why it's called a saturated fat. If you make one of the carbons a double bond, now you don't have the hydrogen hex on it. And that creates a kink in the fatty acid. So that's why fatty acids that have a double bond are either mono or polyunsaturated. So mono is one double bond. Poly means there's more than one. That's why they're liquid at room temperature. They have kinks, so they fold up. So it turns out that, and we label polyunsaturated fats by where those double bonds are. So an omega, so remember in the Greek alphabet, alpha omega, alpha is the beginning, omega is the end. So omega three means that the double bond is three carbons away from the end. I don't know if this is too much information. So omega three fatty acid is the double bonds three carbons from the end, and omega six fatty acid is six bonds from the end. And so fish are really rich in omega three. Omega three is a great field. Nobody disputes that. Omega, it is shit ton of omega three is good for your brain, good for your neuro system, good for your immune system, et cetera. Omega six fatty acids used to be much more rare in our diet. And so the paleo diet, I think it started with the paleo diet. Paleo diet said, well look, we didn't evolve to eat that many omega six fatty acids, because we didn't have seed oils. And so we should try to have like a hunter gather kind of omega three ratio. So trying to have more than twice as many omega sixes to omega three. And the argument behind that is that the omega six fatty acids can be turned into a biodeogestive system into another thing called a racodonic acid, which can then be turned into an inflammatory compound, like a prostagland and it gives you like a headache, right? So there is a biochemical pathway by which these fatty acids can become inflammatory. So that's the concern. However, people have done studies. They give people like you and me, they go sit in a lab, they give people omega six fatty acids and then measure whether their metabolism does that, turns out that doesn't. There's no evidence. And there are quite a few studies. My book cites them. You can go look them up where the increasing the amount of omega six fatty acids actually increases inflammation. It was a fear, but the fear turns out not to be the case. Furthermore, there's a epidemiological studies as well, which show that people eat a lot of omega six fatty acids do really well. In fact, omega six fatty acids have been shown to be more preventive like the versus health study and various other big huge studies. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people, prospective studies over decades actually have lower risks of heart disease, cancer, etc. than people who don't eat them. So although there were concerns about them, the evidence, if you're just purely evidence-based, the evidence suggests you should stop worrying about omega six fatty acids. - If you walked through the average healthy persons covered a kitchen, what do you think would concern you most? - The average healthy persons. - Yeah, someone that considers I'm eating a modern healthy diet, I'm the sort of person that's, shops at Whole Foods, I try and make sure that I'm remotely paleo and naturalistic informed when it comes to my diet. I'm a healthy person. You're going through my kitchen. What are the common things you think would concern you most? That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I think the more I study diet, the more I realize that there's incredible variety of foods that we're able to eat. So you're asking, what's an unhealthy food that people think that's healthy that they tend to eat a lot of? I need to think about that. I'm not sure. Good question. Yeah, yeah. He stumped me there. I guess. I'm not a very judgmental person, actually. So that's part, maybe that's one of the most healthy. A healthy versus unhealthy is not necessarily a judgment, right? We can say, hey, that would be, you think that this thing is sort of net positive for your health, but I would be a little bit more concerned about it or whatever. But for instance, I'll give you one. I think maybe dried fruit might be one of those things where people say, oh, well, you know, it's a fruit. It's a little bit of a snack that you go, that is some really fucking refined sugar in that. Okay. That's a good one. Thank you. You win. That wasn't a competition. You get in there. You get in there. I'm another one would be fruit juice, right? Because fruit juice is basically soda. I mean, it's, you know, you're not getting a lot of nutrients from fruit juice. You're just getting a lot of sugar. So I would think that would be another one. Okay. Yeah. I dried fruit too, but I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that. But dry pineapple chunks, dried mango strips. Good stuff. Yeah. But just straight sugar. It's a candy. Yeah. Why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working? Do they? I mean, there are some that keep working. I mean, when you look at people longitudinally over time and somebody does a diet, how many of them to lose weight maintain that weight loss? Well, again, there are various studies have shown that a lot of the standard traditional diets, people do fall off them. And the numbers run all over the place. But yeah, I would say that probably a reasonable estimate is about 75% of people fall off their diet. And why? Because they can't sustain them. Again, going back to the natural weight loss registry that I mentioned earlier, the people who manage to keep lose weight and keep it off are the ones who manage to keep the diet going. And what's interesting is that many of them don't follow an actual prescribed diet. They just avoid junk food. They avoid foods with a lot of sugar. They avoid foods with a lot of added fat. They cook most of their meals at home. They tend to exercise. They tend to weigh themselves on a regular basis, so they're keeping track of how they're doing. But very few of them actually are following an Atkins diet or this diet or that diet. They're just trying to eat reasonably sensibly. That's the evidence. So I think it's, you know, the old joke is the best worst part about diet is the second day on the diet. Because you stop, you know, that's when you stop the diet, right? Many diets, remember, the difference between efficacy and effectiveness. Most diets are effective. In vitro, wonderful. I mean, most diets have high efficacy, but they have low effectiveness because, and if low effectiveness is generally because we have hard time maintaining them. And that's because of our food environment. Does the body fight weight loss very aggressively? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the biggest one is hunger, right? When you lose weight, your body sends all kinds of signals. They're leptin and there are peptides, pyy, etc. That tell your body you are losing weight and turn on your appetite. And that's why we're. Drellin in the stomach. Yeah. I mean, it's very hard to fight all those deep and fundamental adaptations. And so the best diets are the ones that kind of trick your body, but also require, you know, they're hard. And that's why GLP ones have been so incredibly successful because GLP ones, for many people, just turn off that appetite and enable them to eat less. What do you think about GLP ones? Well, I mean, their game changes for many people. I mean, they've been incredibly successful. Some people lose 25% of their body weight and their new ones being formulated that maybe even they've been more powerful. So that can be really huge for somebody to really lose that kind of weight and turn off those cravings. But there are some concerns. So we published my colleagues and I published a paper in JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association recently. One of the big concerns about GLP ones is that people not only lose fat, they also lose muscle and they seem to lose a lot of muscle. It's a bit like bariatric surgery too. When you lose a lot of weight really fast, people lose a lot of muscle and that can put you at serious risk of frail to you and you get older because when you lose muscle as you age, you can get what's called sarco-pinia. Sarco is the Greek word for flesh and pinia's loss of flesh loss. It sounds bad, doesn't it? And sarco-pinia is really debilitating because it becomes a vicious cycle because as you become less strong, just doing acts of daily living become harder, getting up from a toilet, shopping and doing stuff. And then you become less physically active and you become get into those vicious things get worse and worse. Basically my mother, for lack of better, she died essentially of sarco-pinia. She got more and more frail as she got older. I tried to get her to eat anything. Ice cream, this. You know, no, whatever, try to put on some weight and she just couldn't. It was really hard to watch. And some people are kind of self-enforcing that inability to eat food through GLPs. Right. And so the one of the big concerns about GLP ones is that if you're taking them, do strength training, please, because that can help reverse or help you maintain your muscle as you lose those GLP ones. So that's one concern about GLP ones. Another is that a lot of people quit them. The last study I saw, and again, things may change because they're now oral versions of the pill. They're now, there's now a pill version, so you don't have to inject it. But some of like 60% of people who've tried GLP ones have quit them after a year or two, 60%. And the problem is that when you quit them, your body just still will, your appetite comes roaring back and you want to go back to your previous weight. And for reasons that we do not understand. Most people who use GLPs take them for a period of time that they can lose an appreciable amount of weight and then stop, don't maintain the weight loss. Exactly. So it's a lifetime contract. So exactly. So that's what we're currently seeing at the moment. So that's a concern because then when they regain the weight, they tend to regain it almost completely as fat, not as muscle, and so then their weight are worse off. So they've lost muscle on the way down and gained fat on the way back there. So that's one of the concerns. Look, we're still conducting this experiment in real time without knowing the results. And then a final concern about GLP ones is that nobody likes taking medications, right? At least most people don't like taking medications. And it doesn't solve the problem of what you should eat in the first place. And it doesn't prevent obesity in the first place. So it's great for people to lose weight. But we also need to focus on helping people not have to take those GLP ones in the first place. I'm a little worried that we're going to take our eye off the ball. And even if you're on a GLP one, you still have to figure out what to eat. What do I eat? And the GLP one might help you with your cravings for really fatty, sugary foods, but it might not. We just still haven't done those studies very well. So look, I think they're a useful tool for a lot of people, but I think we have a lot to learn and we need to figure out how to use them better. They're not going away. But I think they're, again, they're not the magic bullet that some people think they are. But they may be very, very helpful for some folks. It feels like an artificial solution to an artificial problem. We have this novel food environment, which we shouldn't be in, right, in an ideal world of food to design things better. And we now have this thing, which kind of solves it. We solve the calorie-dentiped palatable food world with this thing that comes in and puts the kibosh on our ability to either eat or gut mortality, you know, level of hunger and stuff like that. Yeah. So I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, about 13 years ago, I wrote a book called The Story of the Human Body. And in the, in the end of that book, I proposed an idea called disevolution. Disevolution is when we treat the symptoms, not the causes of a mismatched disease. So we're talking about mismatched diseases. These are illnesses that are caused by not being adapted to our modern world, right? But when we treat the symptoms, not the causes, we keep the system going, right? And, and I think GLP ones might be example of a kind of a disevolutionary process. We can still have our, you know, frozen pizzas and our, you know, fried chicken and our, you know, donuts and all that kind of stuff. Now we get, get, get obesity, take the GLP ones, but we still have that same food system. We still have that food system that's going to keep going, right? We need to solve our food system problems if we're going to help prevent people from getting the, and then, and, and right now we're not doing enough to help each other eat, eat, eat sensibly so that we don't gain weight. It seems to me when you get to kind of that point of the conversation, the food environment is predatory, engineered, capitalistic, designed to hook people. People tend to split in one of two ways. One is they go towards systemic change. We need grass to be changed. We need to look at what can snap payments be spent on. We need to kind of step in and there should be a additive restriction. We can't have these food dies in some of the subsequent. Yeah, a degree of top down sort of bureaucracy that will come in and fix it. Then the other side is aggressive agency. It's you need to take control of this. No one's coming to save you, you know, constrain yourself only to the outer aisles in the supermarket or shop in one that doesn't have any of the hyper-poweredable stuff. Like across all of this research and self experimentation, what are the most robust principles that you think people should take away when it comes to having a good diet, nutritionally complete and evolutionarily, at least not totally deranged? Avoid processed foods. I mean, and by processed, I would include foods that are refined. So white flour, I would include foods that have a lot of added sugar, foods that have a lot of added fat. Fat's not as bad as maybe some people think, but filling your food with fat and sugar is certainly not great for you. Avoid foods that have, I avoid foods that have really weird ingredients that I have no idea what they are. Things like maltodextrin. If you see maltodextrin in your food runaway, why? maltodextrin is a kind of sugar that your body can't actually detect a sugar. It's used as an emulsifier, so it keeps food from particles, from breaking apart. So foods have a long shelf life. It makes things creamier and smoother, but it's roots have it with your metabolism. So it's a food you'd never eat on your own. It's a chemical additive. It's a chemical additive to me is like a canary, kind of the coal mine kind of evidence that this is a ultra-processed food. I don't want anything to do with it. So I see maltodextrin on a food. I do not touch it. We need to educate ourselves. Again, our ancestors needed to know a lot how to get their food. Now, unfortunately, like it or not, we need to know how to choose our food. We don't teach this in school. They don't even teach it to medical students. Medical schools, RFK Jr. is right on this work guard. Most physicians are given very little training and nutrition. I teach my undergraduates more nutrition. I tell them in my lectures, you're going to get more from me than you're going to get in medical school. That's crazy, right? Why we teach kids in school, we teach them geometry. We teach them American history. We teach them, there is nothing wrong with geometry in American history. Why don't we teach them chemistry? But why don't we teach them, when we teach them chemistry, let's teach them the chemistry of food, so that they learn about, when they learn about carbon bonds and hydrogen bonds, et cetera. Why don't we teach them that chemistry in the form of so that they understand saturated fats versus unsaturated fats? Why don't we teach this stuff so that we can all, because right now all this stuff I'm, I'm didn't talk about, is some of it's considered arcane knowledge, but it's actually not that complicated. And I think most of us can learn this. I tried to put it in the book so that anybody can learn it. But unfortunately, that's part of the puzzle. But the fact of the matter is a lot of us aren't going to learn that stuff. And so we need to help helping ourselves, because I think most people would not want to get obese. Most people want to eat a healthy diet, but they're stressed, they're, they're, you know, their finances are limited, they don't have a lot of time. Imagine you have a, you commute, you have kids, you rush to the supermarket, you don't have a lot of time, they'd be, you know, whatever. We can't get rid of processed foods, but if we could help have processed foods that are more healthy, I think that's the solution. And so like in England, for example, like when you go to the supermarket in England, they're the green, yellow and red labels, right? They're super easy, right? And you know, I mean, you can debate the fine points about whether they've got the labels, right? But for the most part, they're pretty sensible, and they're a quick way for somebody to see, oh, you know, this is good for my kids, and this is less good for my kids. Why can't we do that? It's so simple, right? It's not so simple. So and then you're not forcing anybody, you can still buy the red label from choice. Yeah, just give people more information. And so we could do more another opportunity is to tax, but we tax cigarettes. Sigarettes, we all, everybody agrees cigarettes are bad for you, right? Everybody agrees that cigarettes, we don't prevent people from smoking, and I'm not gonna prevent somebody from smoking if they want to, but we have agreed as a society that cigarettes should be taxed. Why don't we tax junk food? I mean, they cause probably, you know, - Is there no additional tax on sugary or type of process? - No, and in fact in Mexico, when they tried to put a tax on soda, it got fought by the big, by the like Coca-Cola. - Big soda. - And the tax was reversed. So no, we don't. So again, I'm not saying we should, but we should be having a public discussion about this, 'cause it's a problem that's larger than any one of us. It's a public health issue that we all pay for, because it's, and it's, you know, there's never gonna be one solution. I'm a bit of a more of a libertarian paternalist. I think that, and I'm not into pretending, telling people what they should do, but I think we should have, we need help helping us do what we would actually like to do. And often we don't know what's in our food, or we don't know what the effects of their foods are. Or for example, fruit roll ups. You go to the supermarket and you buy fruit roll ups, and they says, "Made with real fruit filled with vitamin C." Well, very few kids are vitamin C deficient. And yes, it's made with real fruit, but they've removed all the fiber. So a fruit roll up is basically like a form of candy, right? But the advertising allows, you know, advertisers are allowed to basically misinform. So that might be another one of the, I think it's healthy, but in reality, it's not, and it's not a healthy person's kitchen. So it deserves a red label. Now if you wanna get a fruit roll up, fine, but you should know that it's not a healthy food. Hmm. Scary stuff. I mean, like, it doesn't surprise me that America is kind of the battleground for this. You'd think French fries from McDonald's in the US have got 18 ingredients, and in the UK, they've got three and one of them salt, and that one's optional. So this really is, you know, patient zero as a country. In wonderful, meritocracy, free market, American dream thing. But if you take those reins off, there's gonna be some pretty negative consequences. And the only way that you can step in is to reconstruct yourself through your own choices or then have some bureaucracy come into start to restrict our humanity for people. I think most people would like help, because we are not completely free agents in this system. And it's certainly an unfair battle when you think I've got the biggest companies on the planet trying to attack the fundamental drive to not die from starvation. Oh, and what I love also is that you have, and one aisle of the supermarket, you have the companies that are selling your foods that are really unhealthy. And then you go to the health food section where you can buy like, you know, weight watchers, you know, kind of foods owned by the same companies. So they're on both sides of the equation. They're on the weight loss side and on the weight gain side. They're making money on both sides. Daniel Liebman, ladies and gentlemen, Daniel, you're great, you're a work soul. So why should people go to check out the book and everything else that you go to? Well, FedUp comes out August 11th, and I tried to make it fun and readable, and with the information that I think all of us need, and it's filled with references, so you can find, you know, end notes so you can find the data yourself. - I appreciate you. Thank you. - Thank you. - All right, bye, my beauty. - Dude, yes. So fun.