Harvard Professor: “I Tried Every Diet. This Is By Far The Worst.” - Daniel Lieberman
CChris Williamson
Weight Loss/NutritionCold & Flu/Diseases
Transcript
00:00:00You've spent years researching every major diet and trying many of them yourself. I want to go
00:00:05through and review all of those. But first off, what was that journey like?
00:00:11Well, it was fun. I mean, I've been working for quite a few years on a book about the evolution
00:00:16of diet. And I thought rather than just simply studying them, which was the majority of the book,
00:00:22I thought I should try them as well. So kind of, you know, on and off as I was working on the book,
00:00:27my wife, who joined me for many of these diets, kept trying some of these diets, some of them,
00:00:32some of them better, some of them worse, but just kind of give a little, first of all,
00:00:36some participant observations. So I get a sense of what these diets are like,
00:00:40but also to kind of add context and experience them for myself.
00:00:43What did you start that journey believing about food that you no longer agree with?
00:00:51Gosh, I changed my opinions about so many things. I mean, the reason I started this book
00:00:57and this journey, as you say, is that my research is mostly on physical activity. I study the evolution
00:01:05of running and walking and throwing and various other physical activities, but I also teach nutrition
00:01:10and digestion and physiology and that kind of stuff. And I read the literature. And a few years ago,
00:01:15actually, with some colleagues, I taught a course on diet and exercise, and I've just been so confused
00:01:21by what I read, right? Because one, you can read it in the New England Journal of Medicine, you know,
00:01:26arguably the top journal in the world, articles in the same year that tell you that saturated fat
00:01:32is good for you. And then articles that tell you saturated fat is bad for you. You know,
00:01:36this much salt is too much for you. And this much salt is actually just perfect for you. I mean,
00:01:42you name it, there's controversy and confusion. And so
00:01:45I wanted to explore those problems myself. But as an evolutionary biologist, I wanted to
00:01:52integrate an evolutionary perspective, an evolutionary lens with hardcore biomedical data,
00:01:59cultural data, anthropological data, experiential information, all that together to think about it
00:02:06in whole. So I was really trying to do this in order to answer questions for myself.
00:02:11What use does an evolutionary lens give you that is typically missed when people make assessments
00:02:19about diet and nutrition? Oh gosh, it's hard to know where to start. There's a famous expression
00:02:23in my field that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It was written by a guy
00:02:27named Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1972. And what he meant was that we didn't, we weren't engineered,
00:02:33we weren't designed, we evolved. And if you want to understand why things are the way they are,
00:02:38you need to take an evolutionary perspective. So evolution answers a lot of why questions.
00:02:43And when you start addressing why questions, you begin to think differently also about how questions
00:02:49and what questions. So nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution and diet is no exception.
00:02:54It feels like nutrition and diet are a little bit like new religions.
00:03:00There's dogma, it's a super sensitive topic, people get tribal, it's often impossible to change their
00:03:05belief no matter how much evidence you give them. Why do you think that's the case? Why do people become
00:03:10so ardent? That's, I completely agree with you. And in fact, I think that one of my biggest takeaways
00:03:16from working on the book was just how tribal people are about their diet. And I don't know the answer,
00:03:23but I suspect it goes something along the lines of this, which is that for millions of years or thousands
00:03:29of years, depending on which timescale you want, people ate the way their culture dictated, right?
00:03:35If you lived in the Middle East, you'd eat like a Middle Easterner. And if you lived in Japan,
00:03:39you'd eat like a Japanese person. And now we live in a world where everybody kind of eats the same stuff.
00:03:45And a lot of institutions are sort of crumbling. And I think people are searching for identity. And I
00:03:52think one of the ways in which we define ourselves is by what we eat, or very often by what we don't
00:03:58eat, right? And that's been sort of the case all along. You know, if you're kosher, you don't eat
00:04:03this. If you're a Jain, you don't eat that, et cetera, et cetera. But I think people are searching
00:04:09for meaning and identity. And diet is a really important way of defining that. A lot of diet,
00:04:18I mean, some diets are kind of like cults. I mean, they're sort of online-
00:04:21Nutritional theology.
00:04:22They're kind of online cults, and everybody kind of agrees. It's kind of like groupthink.
00:04:26You know why I think, at least part of it, is because we all understand that the diet that
00:04:31we eat is related to longevity. What we are faced with when somebody says that they disagree with
00:04:38our, or they diverge from what it is that we're eating, it's kind of a threat against our own
00:04:44existence. But if this person is right, implicit in that, if I believe deeply about my diet and they
00:04:50believe deeply about theirs and we diverge in our opinions, that means maybe they're going to live
00:04:54longer than me. Or that means that maybe I'm going to die sooner. Or that means that I'm wrong in some
00:04:58sort of a way. It's not an abstract discussion. It's going to have real-world implications. It's
00:05:04going to come into land at some point.
00:05:05Yeah, but I think one of the key words you just said is belief, right? Because one of the real
00:05:10problems about diet is that it takes years, many years, for the effects of diets to manifest themselves
00:05:18in terms of our health. And so we all have to take leaps of faith when we pick our diet, right? I mean,
00:05:23right now, let's just say I follow the Mediterranean diet. I can read all the studies I want about how
00:05:29good the Mediterranean diet is for me, but I won't know for 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years if it's true,
00:05:37right? So we all have to take a leap of faith to some extent when we pick a diet. Some people take
00:05:43leaps of faith based on their friends, the group, the community. Others are a little bit more scientific.
00:05:49But no matter who you are, you have to figure out what you believe and what information you're going to use
00:05:56to credit.
00:05:56Okay, let's get into some of the religions. Maybe two of the most ardent groups are
00:06:01vegans and carnivores. Are plant-based diets superior?
00:06:05You know, I try not to be that judgmental about anything. I mean, if you look at the data,
00:06:14look, no matter what you, everybody who has a particular diet idea, and including the fad diets,
00:06:21almost all of them are based on some grain of truth, all of them, the carnivore diet included.
00:06:26However, when you look at the data and you look at like big meta-analyses, large-scale studies,
00:06:33I don't think there's much contest that, you know, plant-based diets of various sorts,
00:06:38and they're not all the same, tend to have better health outcomes in terms of meta-analyses,
00:06:43long-term studies. And there's also mechanistic data as well. So I think if you're going to err on the
00:06:48side of animals versus plants, I think that science is pretty clear, plants.
00:06:53- Why? - Gosh, there are a lot of reasons for that.
00:06:58Well, one is that plants, again, not all plants are the same. If you eat crap plants, right? If you
00:07:04eat sugar and, you know, highly refined grains and carbohydrates, you're not eating a very healthy
00:07:08diet. I mean, a lot of ultra-processed foods are mostly plant. The fact that they're plant-based
00:07:14doesn't make them healthy. So, you know, when we oversimplify, we can get ourselves into trouble.
00:07:25But there's evidence that meat, even though we evolved to eat meat, has played an important part
00:07:31in our evolutionary history. Meat is nutritious. There's no question about that. But for example,
00:07:37there are studies which show that there's a dose-response effect between how much meat you eat
00:07:41and your risk of cancer. I think it's one serving of meat, which I think they count as 85 grams,
00:07:50increases your risk of cancer over X years by, I think, 13%. And if you double that, you double
00:07:58the risk. So there's a dose-response effect. So that's epidemiological data. And there are quite
00:08:04a few studies which show that. Secondly, there are mechanistic studies. So we know, for example, that
00:08:09meat has a protein called carnitine. And carnitine, when it goes to your gut, is transformed into another
00:08:15molecule called TMAO. Don't ask me to give you the long form of the molecule. And TMAO is a known
00:08:26inflammatory molecule that causes inflammation and has been associated with risk of, actually, it's been
00:08:33shown to be mechanistically related to atherosclerosis, to hardening of the artery, so increased blood
00:08:38pressure. Another effect of meat is that red meat, not poultry or fish, has a glycoprotein. So a
00:08:47glycoprotein is a little, you know, every cell has these little kind of like forest of sugar protein
00:08:54molecules that stick off. And red meat has a particular kind of glycoprotein called NEU5GC. I mean,
00:09:02that doesn't really matter with the name. But it turns out that humans have an inflammatory response to
00:09:07that. All humans? All humans. There's a gene called CMAH, which causes us to transform one
00:09:16proteoglycanin into another kind. And that makes us have a response to any red meat. And that's also
00:09:24been argued to be another mechanistic reason for the data I mentioned earlier, that there's a
00:09:30relationship between dosage of meat eating and cancer risk. But again, it's not so simple because
00:09:37everything has trade-offs, right? There's no such food that doesn't have a trade-off. And meat is just one
00:09:42of them. And so the other, of course, the issue about meat is that meat tends, not always, but tends to
00:09:49have a higher amount of saturated fat. And saturated fat is one of the most controversial things on the
00:09:58planet, right? Especially when it comes to nutrition. And there's a lot of variation in how we respond to
00:10:07saturated fat. Some of us can eat as much saturated fat as we want, and it doesn't really have any
00:10:12negative effect. But others do have some genetic susceptibility to saturated fat. And it does
00:10:18raise the risk of, or raise the levels of lipoproteins, cholesterol molecules that cause
00:10:26heart disease. So it's complicated. There's never a simple answer for anything.
00:10:31It seems like maybe some of the reasons for plant-based diets having better outcomes, at least
00:10:39epidemiologically, is not maybe to do with what's in the plants, but what's not in the meat that isn't
00:10:45being eaten. It's like the elimination diet of meat as opposed to the inclusion diet of plants.
00:10:49Of course. I mean, that's part of the problem with studying nutrition, which is that every time you
00:10:52don't eat something, you're eating something else. Or every time you eat something, you're not eating
00:10:55something else. Or almost. So that's one of the reasons why you can't do a study. There's no one
00:11:02is ever going to do a study where they take a hundred sets of twins and have one group of twins
00:11:08eat an all-meat diet, and one group of twins eat an all-plant diet. And even if they did do that,
00:11:13how would you separate all the other effects? Because when the ones are eating the meat diet,
00:11:17what is it they're not eating? And the ones who are eating the plant diet, what is it they're not eating?
00:11:20And so on. And how do you correct for the effects of exercise and smoking and all those other factors?
00:11:27It's not possible to do that. Why is it that the carnivore movement has had such a boon recently,
00:11:33if some of the data seems to be skeptical about the kind of outcomes of a very heavy meat-based diet?
00:11:39You know, that's a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, I think part of it is, again, it's a bit tribal.
00:11:44I think meat is associated with manliness and masculinity. That explains, I think, some of it.
00:11:51In the book, I recount James Blunt, the English singer, went on an all-meat diet and ended up
00:11:59getting scurvy. But he describes that the reason he did is he thought it made it more manly.
00:12:07Now, I mean, that's probably not everybody. There are others who, you know, they hear
00:12:14podcasts or whatever that expound the benefits of a meat diet and they're attracted to it for one
00:12:24reason or another. And, you know, one other issue is that a lot of people are on really unhealthy diets.
00:12:31And if you pick pretty much any diet that's not a crap diet, for lack of a better term,
00:12:37you're going to do better. And so you might think, "Okay, wow, I'm eating all this meat. I'm feeling
00:12:42better than when I ate lots of McDonald's and drank, swilled lots of, you know, soda and whatever."
00:12:47It doesn't mean that you wouldn't do even better on, say, a Mediterranean diet or a DASH diet or a
00:12:53Blue Zones diet or, you know, fill in the blank diet.
00:12:56Are you saying that the best diet is the one that you're able to stick to?
00:12:59Well, it depends what your goals are. If you're trying to lose weight, absolutely. I mean,
00:13:03that's actually, there's something called the National Weight Loss Registry where they've actually
00:13:07analyzed, again, because you can't randomize huge numbers of people to different kinds of diets
00:13:11perfectly. So what this study has done is that they've looked at, they've tracked people who've
00:13:15managed to lose weight and keep it off for a long period of time. I think the average
00:13:20for the respondents is at least six years or something like that, 5.6 years or something like that.
00:13:25And people's diets are kind of all over the place, but what they all share is they're not junk food
00:13:31diets. They're tending not to a lot of sugar and a lot of, you know, added fat and things like that.
00:13:35And they're able to stick to them because, you know, a lot of people find diets hard, right?
00:13:43If you go for a low-fat diet, I mean, I tried a low-fat diet. Fat makes food tasty. You know,
00:13:49going on a low-fat diet is really hard. And a lot of major studies have failed to have very much
00:13:57effectiveness because people can't tolerate the diet. They just start eating more fat.
00:14:05What do you make of the current protein-maxing push? Given what sounds to me like a degree of skepticism
00:14:12around the importance of meat? Protein is the new hot girl in school. Everybody wants her. Everybody's
00:14:20having more of her. What do you make of the current world of protein consumption?
00:14:25I mean, I find it fascinating. I mean, protein's having its day. And you look, there's some truth to
00:14:31the interest in protein. Protein is important. You need protein. Every day you need protein. You can live
00:14:39without eating fat. You can live without eating carbohydrates, but you cannot live without eating
00:14:43protein. Is that true? Absolutely. Yeah. Your body can turn anything into fat, and your body can turn,
00:14:48and your body can transform fats and proteins into sugars. But you cannot, there are a bunch of amino
00:14:56acids that are essential. You have to have them in their diet or you'll die. There's actually two fatty
00:15:01acids that you need to eat a little bit of, omega-3 and omega-6. But apart from that, you do need to eat
00:15:08protein. Secondly, protein is filling. So people tend to be a little bit more sated on eating protein.
00:15:16Protein takes a little bit more energy to digest, and it's pretty nutritious. But here's the thing.
00:15:23And I think a lot of people, and if you're very physically active, if you're menstruating, if you're
00:15:31pregnant, you need extra protein. As people age, they also lose muscle mass, and it's really important for them to have protein.
00:15:37But here's the thing. The body can't store extra protein. If you eat more protein than your body can
00:15:44use, you can't store it. So what do you do? You turn it into fat. So eating massive amounts of protein
00:15:52is probably not that harmful, unless you get to ridiculous levels and you can do kidney damage. But
00:15:56you have to really eat a lot of protein for that. So eating huge amounts of protein is not going to have
00:16:01some massive benefit. And I've never seen any strong evidence to that to that state.
00:16:06One gram per pound of body weight is the rubric.
00:16:10That's what they say. Yeah.
00:16:11And where do you come in to land on one gram per pound of body weight for protein consumption?
00:16:15I don't have a strong opinion on that. I think we're all different. I mean, part of the problem with
00:16:19the way we think about diet is we medicalize it, right? You just gave a dose, right? But it doesn't
00:16:25work that way. It's complicated. It depends on what you're doing and how old you are and whether
00:16:29you're losing muscle and whether you're working out and whether you're 20 or when you're 80.
00:16:36I don't think anybody's able to come up with a perfect dose of protein. I mean, it's, you know,
00:16:40the old definition of economical, you know, enough, but not too much. And I think that we all have to
00:16:45figure out that out, but, but it's not, you know, it's, it's really hard to come up with a very simple
00:16:53diagnosis for any human being. And that's, again, part of the problem with diet. We all, we all want
00:16:57to be told what to do. We all want to make it simple. We want a magic bullet. We want a quick fix.
00:17:02And the problem with diet and nutrition is that it doesn't work that way.
00:17:07I imagine we're only two religions in to our nutritional theology trip around the world.
00:17:14I imagine some people are already feeling a degree of maybe uncertainty or confusion.
00:17:19Why? Okay. So it's important for me to have protein that I need that. It's actually mandatory.
00:17:24It's one of the few things that I have to have, or else I'm going to die at some point.
00:17:28But also there's some pretty sort of negative effects, especially around red meat, it seems,
00:17:33over long-term populations. The plant-based thing appears to maybe went out a little bit,
00:17:38but the carnivore thing is missing some stuff.
00:17:40Well, what, but one of the weird things about the whole protein thing is that people seem to
00:17:44associate protein with meat. You know, when you got all those plants out of there, there's a lot of
00:17:50protein in those plants. Beans are filled with protein. Legumes are filled with protein.
00:17:55Whole grain foods have a lot of protein. You don't need meat in order to get protein. And in fact,
00:18:00you know, soy is a complete protein. You could actually live your life off soy. You don't actually
00:18:04need to eat meat in order to get protein. So the equation of meat with protein, I think, has been
00:18:10exaggerated. It's true. Meat is rich in protein and meat is a complete protein. But you can also get
00:18:16a lot of protein from quinoa and from, you know, from nuts and whatever, you know, it's not a,
00:18:22and you can certainly buy, and every culture on the planet has figured out, you know, every farming
00:18:26culture on the planet figured out how to get sufficient amounts of protein by combining a
00:18:31grain with a legume. So rice and beans or corn and beans, all of those are solutions that cultures
00:18:38worldwide figured out in order to help ensure that people got adequate amounts of protein.
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00:19:50Mediterranean diet is regarded as one of the most healthy on the planet. Is that right?
00:19:55It has probably more scientific evidence to support it than any other diet. And that's
00:20:02partly Eurocentric because, of course, Europeans do most of the research and Americans do most of the
00:20:08research, so there's a lot more data on it. I'm not sure that the Mediterranean diet is necessarily
00:20:13healthier than a traditional Asian diet or a traditional American diet or Meso-American diet
00:20:18or a traditional Asian diet, but absolutely, there's a ton. I mean, if you were to go purely
00:20:24on epidemiological data at the moment, you would pick a Mediterranean diet.
00:20:28Can you explain what epidemiological data in the world of diet and nutrition means?
00:20:34Excellent question. So there's a number of ways to figure out the effects of
00:20:39food and diet on health. I'm going to back up a little bit, if you don't mind.
00:20:47So one of them is to do a randomized control study. That's the gold standard, right?
00:20:50I give you and your twin two different diets and I follow you for X number of years. And then I can
00:20:56measure its effect on your cholesterol levels and your steroid levels and your nasal mucosa
00:21:06production, whatever. I can measure anything I want, right? But of course, it takes a long time
00:21:10to do that. And so, because we can't wait for you to die, we're going to then measure proxies,
00:21:17right? Rather than your actual health outcome. The other is to take large samples of people and then
00:21:24try to make associations between what they eat and their health outcomes. And that's an epidemiological
00:21:32study. So there are statistical associations within a population between, say, what people eat and their
00:21:40likelihood or their prevalence of getting heart disease or hypertension or cancer or arthritis or
00:21:47whatever it is. And so for the Mediterranean diet, there are both epidemiological studies,
00:21:54large-scale ones, huge. I mean, there are now meta-analyses involving hundreds of thousands
00:22:00of individuals. But there are also prospective studies. So that's the kind of the gold study
00:22:05is when you take a bunch of people and you, again, randomize them into two groups.
00:22:09So one of the biggest studies was one done in Spain, for example, where they had over 7,500 Spaniards.
00:22:15And they assigned some of them a Mediterranean diet where they had to have olive oil or walnuts.
00:22:21There were two arms to that versus Spaniards who were not eating a Mediterranean diet. And after,
00:22:27I think, after five years, they stopped the study. Because the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean
00:22:34diet were so high that they felt that it was unethical to continue the study and not get rid of it.
00:22:40– Deny the other group from the benefits of having a Mediterranean diet.
00:22:44– That's correct.
00:22:46– Wow, it was so good that a non-Mediterranean diet was essentially
00:22:51seen as kind of a toxic… – As unethical.
00:22:53– As unethical. – No way.
00:22:55– Yes, way. So that's just one study. – That is wild.
00:22:58– There's other studies in France, elsewhere. And again, these are prospective studies.
00:23:02So those are the best studies, right? Now, every study has its drawbacks and its problems and its
00:23:07flaws, right? Because you have to account for all the other things that people are eating,
00:23:13their smoking, their physical activity, whether or not they're lawyers or not, who knows what.
00:23:19But when you combine all those different… And then on top of that, there are studies
00:23:25where you can feed people a Mediterranean diet for just a few weeks in a lab, for example,
00:23:29and then measure its effects on aspects of your health that have an outcome, like a cholesterol
00:23:36level or so on, or markers of inflammation. And so you combine all those kinds of data together,
00:23:44the mechanistic studies, the epidemiological studies, the prospective studies,
00:23:48and the Mediterranean diet comes out as a very… I wouldn't say it's a clear winner, but it probably
00:23:57has the most evidence in its favor of any diet that's ever been studied.
00:24:00– I imagine when it comes to the epidemiological studies, people's dietary choices are idiosyncratic,
00:24:06they're informed by the culture that they're from and the job that they have. There's an entire
00:24:12industry of PTs that are probably overeating meat, which means that you have meat eaters that are
00:24:17disproportionately personal trainers, but that means that they have the lifestyle of a personal trainer.
00:24:21Or perhaps there's something cultural that red meat is eaten by dudes that like to barbecue from
00:24:27the deep south. Maybe they're doing other stuff with their health, maybe they're smoking or whatever.
00:24:30So the selection effect of what people eat, which diets, and what are the things that aren't under the study's
00:24:38purview, and what does that sort of… – Huge, huge effect. Vegetarians also tend not to smoke,
00:24:45right? And so how do you separate the fact of eating a vegetarian diet from the fact that you're much more
00:24:50likely to smoke? And people who tend to be more physically active also tend to eat a healthier diet.
00:24:57In fact, big studies where when you and I die, there's going to be a death certificate saying we
00:25:02died of such and such. And it might be cancer or a heart attack or whatever. But then what was it that
00:25:09caused the cancer? What caused the heart attack? There's a bunch of epidemiologists out there trying to
00:25:16try to figure that out. And many studies are unable to separate statistically the effects of exercise and
00:25:22diet because people who exercise tend to eat well and vice versa. So the co-variation… – It's a healthy
00:25:28user bias. – Exactly. So the co-variation is what we call co-variation is so strong,
00:25:32statistically it's very difficult to separate these things. – Does that make
00:25:36epidemiological studies in nutrition and diet largely useless then? – No. So that's the wrong way to
00:25:42think about it. Epidemiological studies cannot measure cause and effect. But they are one of many
00:25:48forms of information that we can and should use. Because again, the gold standard study for a true
00:25:55skeptic is a randomized control study. But as we had talked about before, you can't do a proper randomized
00:26:00control study and wait 50, 60 years for somebody to see the effects of the diet and control for everything
00:26:06else too. So we need to be… Do you know the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox? – No.
00:26:13– Okay. So there's a famous piece of paper from the 7th century BC by a guy named Archilogus of Paris,
00:26:21which he wrote… And it's like a fragment. He's a poet, like a boring poet. But apparently he wrote this
00:26:27bit of a poem that survived. And it says, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
00:26:35And what he meant by that was that when you chase a fox, it'll do anything to run away, right? It'll
00:26:40hide. It'll, you know… It'll… – Climatry. – Climatry. You do whatever, right?
00:26:46You chase a hedgehog, it just rolls into a ball, right? Hedgehogs just do one thing. And that analogy was
00:26:53used by a very famous English philosopher named Isaiah Berlin to kind of divide the world up into hedgehogs and
00:26:59foxes. So hedgehogs are big idea guys. Protein is your answer. You know, meat is your answer.
00:27:10Never eating meat is your answer, et cetera. Those are what I call hedgehog diets. They're single idea,
00:27:15big fix diets. Whereas foxes see nuance. They see trade-offs. They see complexity. They realize that
00:27:22every time you eat one thing, you don't eat something else. And we need to apply… I think that, you know,
00:27:29the hedgehog approach to diet is always the wrong way because it's complicated. People vary. The effects
00:27:35of foods are complicated. There are trade-offs. And when we start to oversimplify, we inevitably get
00:27:41things wrong. And that's true for even how we analyze the scientific record. If we decide, "Well,
00:27:46epidemiological data, it's just junk because you can't test cause and effect," you're missing important
00:27:51information. Just as if you decide, "Oh, you know, randomized control studies are really problematic
00:27:56because they're too short-term and they don't involve variation or whatever," you're also missing
00:28:00something important. The best approach is to look at as much of the information as possible
00:28:05and put it together. And that's… I mean, if I can be a little, you know, self-promoting, that's why I
00:28:09wrote the book because I tried and fed up to take all that evidence and to digest it, put it into kind of
00:28:15plain English and make it, you know, help people understand that. Because I think all of us need
00:28:21to try to answer these questions. Let me put it another way. For millions of years,
00:28:26millions of years, our ancestors, they had to know an enormous amount to get their food, right?
00:28:31If you're a hunter-gatherer, you have to know how to hunt animals, right? You need to know, you know,
00:28:36where they are and how to track them and how, you know, what's the right, you know, what environments
00:28:41they're going to be in and how to butcher them and all that kind of stuff to find
00:28:45plants. I mean, I've gone out foraging and hunting with hunter-gatherers. Finding plants is not a
00:28:49trivial matter, right? Finding where the plants are, knowing how to dig for them and knowing where
00:28:53they are at different seasons. We had to be naturalists. We had to know a huge amount of
00:28:56information in order to survive. Now you and I can walk into a Whole Foods or whatever, you know,
00:29:02whatever, Sainsbury or whatever, whatever it is, and we're confronted with 40,000 different kinds of
00:29:08food. 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
00:29:13choose our food. So we need a different kind of knowledge. And you can throw up your hands and
00:29:20just have somebody tell you what to do, or you can try to learn for yourself what you want, what you
00:29:27care about, what's important to you, what your trade-offs are. So I think all of us need to educate
00:29:33ourselves to figure out how to choose our food, because that's the challenge our modern world has set us.
00:29:38The question of what should I eat today evolutionarily is pretty novel.
00:29:43It's completely novel. Nobody ever asked that question. I mean, the people I work with-
00:29:47I will eat what is in front of me, because otherwise I die.
00:29:49Yeah. I mean, the people I work with in my field work, you know, so I've done a lot of work in Kenya,
00:29:54and I've been working recently in Rwanda. And, you know, occasionally people invite me for meals,
00:29:58right? In the, in the area where we work. We work in a very remote, we've worked for 15 years in a very remote
00:30:03part of Kenya, actually where a lot of the famous runners are from. And I don't even have to ask what
00:30:08I'm going to be served. It's always exactly the same meal. You have a dish called ugali,
00:30:12which is like a, like a cornmeal kind of porridge with, with either sakuma wiki, which is a,
00:30:18which is basically collard greens that have been chopped up and sauteed, or sometimes if you're
00:30:22lucky with beans or something like that. That's it. That's what you get. Nobody asks what's for dinner.
00:30:28They, they know what's because they eat what they grow. That's all the food that they have available
00:30:32to them. Or I've gone out, you know, with hunter gatherers. I've had the privilege of spending some
00:30:36time with hunter gatherers. They don't like, well, gee, tonight, am I going to have Italian or Chinese,
00:30:41or shall I have, you know, um, shall I have turtle or shall I have, you know, tortoise or shall I have,
00:30:46you know, kudu? They eat whatever they manage to hunt and whatever they manage to gather.
00:30:51That's it. There's no, nobody's asks what's for dinner. They, they eat what they have. And all of us and
00:30:56farmers and hunter gatherers, this is, that's the way life was for, for most people, except, you know,
00:31:01the king of England or whatever, he got to choose what he wanted to eat. And now we're in this
00:31:05completely weird, bizarre, modern environment. And, and surprise, surprise, we have a hard time
00:31:12because not only do we not know what to eat, we're also confronted with a lot of really bad stuff. I
00:31:18mean, typical, as I said before, the typical American supermarket has 40,000 different kinds of food,
00:31:2440,000. It's kind of amazing. Um, and over 50% of that is ultra processed, designed to be highly
00:31:31appealing, addictive, convenient, inexpensive, although that that's going up a bit. Um, and,
00:31:39and, and how are we supposed to, how are we supposed to cope? We're not, we're not,
00:31:43we never evolved the mechanisms, um, to handle that.
00:31:46Going back to the Mediterranean diet. What is it about that diet that seems to, what's the mechanistic
00:31:53reason for why it seems to outperform others? Um, there's probably a number of reasons. Um,
00:31:59there's, again, there's no one reason. Um, so one is that it tends to be whole grain, right? So you,
00:32:05so when you take, uh, flour and you refine it, right? You remove the, the outer layers and you remove the germ,
00:32:13you're removing a lot of the protein and you're removing a lot of the fiber. Um, it's, um, it's,
00:32:18it has a, um, a healthy balance of fat. So of course it's famous for olive oil,
00:32:23which is a monounsaturated fat. We can talk about that if you want. And monounsaturated
00:32:27fats are associated with a lot of health benefits. There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables.
00:32:32Mediterranean diet often has fish in it and fish has these omega-3 fatty acids. Um,
00:32:38so it's the constellation of, of nutrients that are healthy, plus an absence of a lot of stuff
00:32:45like added sugar and a lot of- You can say, what, what are the things that it eliminates most?
00:32:50Well, it tends not, Mediterranean diet tends not to have a lot of added sugar, right? Tends not to have
00:32:54that much, uh, uh, proper Mediterranean. Because what you define as a Mediterranean diet is, you know,
00:32:59can be kind of go all over the, uh, what, what the, what the Mediterranean with a capital M,
00:33:04capital D, right? Which is what's been defined by, um, by the, by the nutritionists, isn't necessarily
00:33:10what people always eat in the Mediterranean. I spent, I had a lot of really carb-rich dinners in,
00:33:15in Italy, for example, but, um, but it, you know, it tends not to have added sugar, tends not to have
00:33:20a lot of refined carbohydrates, tends not to have a lot of saturated fat, tends to be diverse and rich
00:33:25in, in, in phytochemicals that are healthy and that have a lot of antioxidants and things like that,
00:33:30tends not to have too much red meat. Uh, so it's, it's, it's a mixture of things that have in toto
00:33:36been shown to, to be reasonably healthy. Now, is it a, is it a, is it like an optimal diet? Is it
00:33:41perfect and will guarantee perfect health? No, uh, no, no diet is optimal, but is it, does it,
00:33:48has it been shown to be effective for preventing weight gain and for reducing your risk of a wide
00:33:55range of diseases? Absolutely. How much is it the lifestyle? I've heard about the importance of the
00:34:02sociality around the Mediterranean diet and stuff like that. Has that been separated out? You know
00:34:06what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. I mean, that's, again, it's very hard to do that. Um, but,
00:34:11but for example, that, that study I mentioned, the Spanish study, the PREDIMED study,
00:34:15I mean, that, that essentially by randomizing people who all presumably had similar lifestyles,
00:34:20they were prescribed- They're hanging out on the street corner,
00:34:21having a coffee at 9:00 PM at night there with their friends-
00:34:24But both arms of the diet were probably the same. So, so that, so that study, for example,
00:34:28controlled for that. Uh, so, but of course there's more to, to health and longevity than just your diet.
00:34:35What about Blue Zone diets? Oh my God. Don't get me started on that one.
00:34:40I mean, Blue Zones are fun. I mean, look, there's a lot to say about Blue Zone diet. The first is,
00:34:49again, you know, if you, it's kind of like a Mediterranean diet, but with even less meat.
00:34:55If you look at what they prescribes, you know, and, but it also prescribes, um, skipping breakfast.
00:35:02Um, it tells you to be social. Um, it tells you to, uh, not finish your plate. Um, you know,
00:35:09there's some social aspects to it, but, but what I find, and, you know, if you look at the, the, the,
00:35:16the, the, the, the sort of prescription of the diet, especially nutritionally, it's kind of what
00:35:22a lot of, you know, it's not far off from the Mediterranean diet. Um, I don't know of any really
00:35:26good high quality studies for those Blue Zones diet compared to say the Mediterranean diet. But
00:35:31what I find amusing about the Blue Zones diet is how it's been advertised because it's advertised and
00:35:36marketed as a diet that'll help you live to be a hundred. And that's where I begin to have some
00:35:41concerns because even if you look at the data for the Blue Zones, like if you, there's these supposed
00:35:45Blue Zones, there's these five regions on the planet. Where are they? Let's see. One of them is in
00:35:50the Nicoya peninsula of Costa Rica. One's a little kind of little village in Sardinia. It's like a
00:35:56little area in Sardinia. One is, uh, an island in the Mediterranean. I've forgotten the name of the
00:36:01island. Um, one is, uh, Okinawa. And the other is Loma Linda, California, right outside of LA.
00:36:09I didn't know that one. Those are the five Blue Zones. And, and the idea behind
00:36:13these are, these are supposedly areas where a hot, twice as many people live to be centenarians. They
00:36:18live to be a hundred years old. And so the idea is if you eat like the people in these areas, you too
00:36:23are going to live to be a hundred years old. Now there's some problems with this. The first is
00:36:28that even if you believe the data that, that these, these regions have a high, have a higher
00:36:35percentage of centenarians, that turns out that the percentage of centenarians is tiny.
00:36:39So it's like, it's like six people out of 10,000, as opposed to in the United States where it's
00:36:44three people out of 10,000. The base rate's so low that small changes are massive proportions.
00:36:48These are statistical outliers. So you basically have to, if you, if you're not a statistical outlier,
00:36:52which most of us are not, it's irrelevant. It's not a very, it's statistical nonsense, basically.
00:36:58Secondly, there's a guy in Oxford, isn't a demographer at Oxford. I'm trying to remember
00:37:03his name, Saul Newman, I think his name is. He's published this really fascinating paper.
00:37:07He did a deep dive onto these blue zones and found out that only 18% of the people
00:37:11in these blue zones actually had birth certificates. So we don't even know who these people are.
00:37:18They just self-report their age. Are you telling me that a good chunk of the blue zone
00:37:28fervor could have been around the fact that people just didn't register how old they were?
00:37:32Correct. Or it could be insurance fraud. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, exactly.
00:37:37I'm sorry. You can get online, you can read Saul Newman's paper. It's a hilarious paper to read.
00:37:45But also think about it this way. There's this like little area in Sardinia. If you go on,
00:37:50if you click on the blue zones map, there's this like, you know, think about Sardinia. It's like,
00:37:53you know, it's an oval shaped island, right? And there's this little area on the, on the western side,
00:37:58there's a little blue, you know, zone on the map, right? And in that little area, you have all these
00:38:05centenarians. Now tell me that if you go like 30 miles north or 30 miles south, that people have
00:38:11totally different diets. And it's like, so why in this little spot are they all centenarians and just
00:38:1720 miles north or 20 miles south, they're not. It's kind of suspicious.
00:38:20What is the blue zone proponent explanation for that?
00:38:24I don't think he's answered. I don't think he's-
00:38:27Is it a guy?
00:38:28Yes. A guy named, what's his name? Wettner? I can't remember. He was a, he was a,
00:38:34he was a National Geographic reporter who, who got really excited by this and figured out how to
00:38:38market all this. But one of the most interesting blue zones is Loma Linda, California. Do you know
00:38:44who lives in Loma Linda, California? Why Loma Linda is a blue zone? Because obviously they're not
00:38:48little, you know, peasant team, you know, farmers eating their traditional foods.
00:38:52No.
00:38:53They're Seventh-day Adventists. And the Seventh-day Adventists don't believe in smoking.
00:38:58They believe in exercise. They're, you know, they believe that many of them are vegetarians. They
00:39:03believe that- They don't believe in exercise.
00:39:05No, they do believe in it. They believe that God gave us our bodies. Our body is a sacred thing and that
00:39:12it's our responsibility as Christians to take good care of our God-given body.
00:39:20That's interesting. Physiological theology. Very good.
00:39:23It is. It is. And, and so, you know, they don't smoke, they exercise. Many of them are vegetarians.
00:39:30They have, they do all these sorts of things that the, you know, most doctors will tell you is what
00:39:34you should do. And guess what? They have a high percentage of people who live-
00:39:37Do they eat the same thing as the people in Sardinia?
00:39:40No, of course not. They're eating-
00:39:42Right. So what's going on with this Blue Zones thing? Is it fair to say that the Blue Zone diet
00:39:48isn't a diet? It doesn't, it's, it doesn't do what it says it does?
00:39:52Well, I mean, it does. If you read the Blue Zones book, it tells you what to eat. It tells you to
00:39:57at least a half a cup of beans a day. It tells you lots of vegetables. It tells you not to eat too
00:40:01much of this and not too much of that. So there, it's got some, it's got some parameters,
00:40:05you know, um, but it's not a, it's not a, it's not a rigidly defined diet. Um, and you know,
00:40:11the, the suggestions aren't totally crazy. Um, but they're, again, it's, it's kind of oversold.
00:40:17I mean, like one of the, one of my, you know, the, one of the refrains from, and I, you know,
00:40:22that I keep going back to in my book is that there are a lot of people telling,
00:40:26selling us optimal diets, you know, and I have come to hate the word optimal. If you want to
00:40:33piss me off. That's your trigger word. It's my trigger word. Tell me your diet is optimal.
00:40:38First of all, is it optimal for you or optimal for me? Because you and I are not the same,
00:40:42right? We have different genetics. We have different backgrounds. You're young and strong.
00:40:45You have a lot more muscle, you know, but I'm probably faster than you. Who knows?
00:40:48Not probably, certainly. But, um, um, I'm 62. You're probably a lot younger.
00:40:53Um, um, um, you know, um, is, is, uh, are you, are you more worried about heart disease or
00:40:58Alzheimer's or, or arthritis or this or that or the other? Are you, are you, do you care more about
00:41:04the environment, et cetera? There's, uh, you, there's no such thing as optimal. Um, uh, and,
00:41:11um, and it's, it's kind of a, it's just marketing and, and we, and I, and so I, I now react against
00:41:17people who claim their diet is optimal because it's just marketing. It's salesmanship. It's not science.
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00:42:18Okay, let's piss off some more people. What about low carb, high fat?
00:42:23Oh boy, am I going to get in serious trouble after this one?
00:42:25Yes, yes, yes. We both are. It's fine. Low carb, high fat.
00:42:28Well, again, there were-
00:42:29Used to be Atkins, now it's keto.
00:42:31Yeah, I mean, look, both depends what your goals are, right? It turns out if your goal is to lose weight,
00:42:37for example. You can lose weight on a low carb diet, and you can lose weight on a low fat diet.
00:42:43It is true that people tend to lose a little bit more weight on low carb diets than low fat diets.
00:42:51And in fact, I'm one of the co-authors of the carbohydrate insulin model
00:42:55big paper that was recently in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
00:42:58So I've signed my name in blood. I believe in the biology behind the low carb diet.
00:43:05So we can-
00:43:06Can you explain that in layman's terms?
00:43:08We can, but before we do, let me just get to this, which is that
00:43:14pretty much any non-crap diet can help somebody lose weight.
00:43:18And the hard part is to sustain it. And so you need to make a distinction between efficacy
00:43:24and effectiveness. So efficacy is basically how well a diet works in the perfect world, right? When
00:43:30there's no cheating, and you eat exactly what you're told, and you can do it for a long time,
00:43:34and it's perfect. Effectiveness is how it works in the real world. And it turns out that low carb diets
00:43:41have this higher efficacy for weight loss than low fat diets.
00:43:46This is for weight loss, but their effectiveness, because people have a hard time sustaining them,
00:43:52is only slightly larger.
00:43:53Right. If you could do it, you might perform very well. But being able to do it,
00:43:59the difficulty is somewhat harder. It's hard.
00:44:02Which means that it mitigates some of those gains.
00:44:03I mean, I tried it. I mean, I tried it.
00:44:05I've tried every single one of these. By the way, I have done
00:44:09a much more bro science equivalent of what you did in the research for this book.
00:44:12Yeah. I mean, I tried an Atkins diet, and it was hard because I had intense carbohydrate cravings.
00:44:20And I'm a runner, and it's hard to be a runner and not eat carbs.
00:44:23The hunger is rough.
00:44:24Yeah. I mean, I didn't like it that much. But I didn't like a lot of the diets that much.
00:44:30But let's go into the biology behind low carb diets, because it's really interesting.
00:44:35So when you eat food, some of that food, of course, is carbohydrate. And carbohydrates,
00:44:44your body breaks down into some of it into glucose, which is one of the two major kinds of sugar.
00:44:50There's fructose and glucose. Fructose is what you get from fruit. It's kind of, it's sweeter.
00:44:55Glucose is the kind of more starchy, you know, less sweet form of sugar. And so that goes straight
00:45:01into your bloodstream. Glucose is, your body can only handle a very, very small range of glucose,
00:45:10because too much is toxic. In fact, I think average human being has about a teaspoon and a
00:45:17half of glucose in their entire bloodstream. And if it goes above that, you're in trouble.
00:45:21You become hyperglycemic, and you can go into, you can have serious medical problems. So our body is
00:45:27super sensitive to glucose. So when you eat a meal and it has glucose in it, your blood sugar level
00:45:32goes up. And because the body has to maintain a very tight range of glucose, your pancreas releases
00:45:41a hormone called insulin. And insulin is your growth hormone. It's the hormone that causes you to store
00:45:47stuff. So insulin causes your cells to take up that glucose so the levels go down.
00:45:56Now, insulin also tells your cells to hold on to energy, so to prevent your cells from releasing fat,
00:46:05because you store that energy as fat. Your cells turn the glucose into fat.
00:46:09So when you are on a low-carb diet, you keep your insulin levels low. And that means that you're
00:46:19storing less, and also you're not holding on to that fat, and that helps you. So the biology is
00:46:26pretty simple. And I guess I'm pretty clear, though it gets more complicated, because there's another
00:46:30hormone called glucagon, which makes it more complicated. Physical activity affects things.
00:46:35You know, nothing is ever simple, and the carbohydrate-insulin model is no exception.
00:46:42So there's real basic logic behind the carbohydrate-insulin model. The problem is that
00:46:49when people go on these low-carb diets, they're hard to sustain, and a lot of people can't maintain
00:46:55them for that long, and their carbohydrate levels creep up, and that's the end of the diet.
00:47:02But you can also lose weight on a low-fat diet, and plenty of people have.
00:47:06I didn't even know that low-fat, high-carb diets were a thing. That's one that I haven't tried.
00:47:11Oh, so there are plenty. I mean, some of the biggest diets in the country were,
00:47:17you know, the Pritikin diet, the Ornish diet. There's a whole bunch of…
00:47:20These sound like fantasy races from a Lord of the Rings novel.
00:47:25DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. It was originally developed for blood
00:47:33pressure, but it turns out to be a low-fat diet, and it's actually probably the second most studied
00:47:37diet after Mediterranean. It's very well studied. It was developed by NIH, and there are a lot of
00:47:43randomized control studies for the DASH diet. And people who stick to the DASH diet, which by the way,
00:47:48try it in the book, do lose weight. Absolutely, they can and do.
00:47:51Surely, somebody that's on a low-fat, higher-carb diet is going to be ripping their insulin levels
00:47:59around more. No, no, because it depends on the kind of carb you eat. Because there are good carbs,
00:48:03and there are bad carbs. So if you eat refined carbs and, you know, lots of stuff with lots of
00:48:09sugar, lots of crap, your insulin levels are going to go sky high. But if you eat unrefined carbs,
00:48:14right? If you eat… I mean, if I eat lots of kale and, you know, whatever, is that my glucose
00:48:20level's going to go sky high? Of course not, because all the fiber in that kale is going to slow the
00:48:25rate of digestion. There's not… So there are plenty of foods that have carbohydrate that are not
00:48:31high-glycemic. So the idea that all carbs are poisonous and cause you to raise your blood sugar
00:48:39levels ridiculously is just not true. I mean, if that were the case, because think about it, for most of
00:48:45human existence, people have eaten mostly carbs. All those farming diets in the Mediterranean and Asia,
00:48:51elsewhere, are mostly carbs. They're eating corn, they're eating rice, they're eating wheat, etc.
00:48:56But until recently, none of those people, or very few of them, were obese or overweight. So these diets,
00:49:04you can eat a high-carb diet if it's high in fiber and not high in sugar and not highly refined. These are
00:49:10not high-glycemic diets. The area in Rwanda where I work, and the area in Kenya where I work,
00:49:17people are getting at least 65% of their diet from carbs. At least 65%. That's a high-carb diet.
00:49:23And I dare you to find somebody with overweight or obesity in the area. They don't exist. There's
00:49:28none of them. They're not around. How much of that is because of the type of carbs, and how much of
00:49:34that is just because of the number of calories? Well, they're eating a lot of calories. It's a
00:49:40combination. It's the kind of foods they're eating. So they're eating, for example, when I have that
00:49:46meal I described earlier in the Nandi Hills, where we have some Magali, but we also have Sukumawiki,
00:49:50and we have beans. These are all highly fibrous, low-glycemic foods. It's a generally healthy diet.
00:49:57They're also very physically active, and that helps. And when you're physically active—so
00:50:01one of the reasons physical activity helps people prevent weight gain—it's not just how many
00:50:06calories are going in versus out—but when people are very physically active, it changes the insulin
00:50:11sensitivity of their muscles so that you actually produce less insulin for a given amount of carbohydrate.
00:50:22So again, nothing is simple. And when we try to oversimplify, we get into trouble. And I wish it
00:50:32were simple, but again, one of the major arguments that I'm trying to make is that it's a plea to stop
00:50:39oversimplifying complex, multifactorial things. We just all need to educate ourselves a little bit so
00:50:45that we can help make sense of all the diversity out there and all the different people out there trying
00:50:50to make money off of us with their various different diets. It just doesn't work the way we've been told
00:50:56it does. I understand that people shouldn't be trying to overcomplicate or oversimplify things,
00:51:03but even just so far, we've done like five diets or something, and all of them kind of feel like
00:51:11they're pointing in the opposite direction. You say, well, low-fat can work because of what it doesn't do to
00:51:17insulin in terms of spiking insulin, but high carb can work as long as you eat the right kinds of carbs
00:51:22and the plant-based stuff that works, but you do need to get some protein, but it doesn't matter
00:51:26where it's from. And some people feel good on the carnivore thing, but so it's, I understand why people
00:51:31feel this like malaise, this degree of overwhelm. They're like, okay, we shouldn't be oversimplifying
00:51:37it. Optimal is your Russian sleeper agent activation code word, but at the same time,
00:51:44if I'm so burdened, I don't know what to do.
00:51:48I have a solution for you, which is that, again, there are kernels, even larger than kernels,
00:51:56there are whole cobs of truth to all of these diets. And why do we have to pick between low-fat
00:52:03versus low-carb versus low-calorie? I mean, we talked about low-calorie, right? Why do we have to pick?
00:52:08You can actually take the best of all of them, right? So you can take the best of the low-carb diet
00:52:14by eliminating or removing or not eating too much of refined carbs that raise your insulin levels.
00:52:21You can take the best of the low-fat diet by not eating too much highly caloric saturated fat,
00:52:27which does, according to a lot of studies, either increases your risk of cardiovascular disease or
00:52:34doesn't lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. We can talk about that later on. So polyunsaturate
00:52:38and monounsaturate fats are risk-lowering fats. And also, you know, calories do matter. How many
00:52:44calories you eat do matter. We need to talk… And so not eating too much is also helpful. So why not
00:52:52combine the best of all these various kinds of diets without going down the kind of…
00:52:57But as soon as you combine the best of all of those kinds of diets, you now have a new diet.
00:53:01No, you have the… You know what you have? You have the Mediterranean diet.
00:53:04That's the diet! That is a new diet!
00:53:06Or you have essentially any traditional farming diet.
00:53:09Okay, okay.
00:53:10So I would say that a traditional Asian diet, a traditional African diet, a traditional Mesoamerican
00:53:16diet, a traditional Mediterranean diet, all share the same basic characteristics that we just talked
00:53:22about. A lack of highly refined carbohydrates that raise your insulin levels, not too much saturated fat,
00:53:28not too much food, not too… You know, a diversity of foods, a mixture of whole grain cereals combined
00:53:36with legumes that give you complementary protein. People have been eating these for thousands and
00:53:40thousands of years. Now, are they optimal diets that are going to guarantee you to live to be 100? No.
00:53:45But are these diets that have over the course of time, plus in recent studies, been shown to be
00:53:52generally healthy and prevent weight gain? The answer is yes.
00:53:55Okay.
00:53:55So in a way, it's not that complicated.
00:53:57That we've started to simplify. What about calorie restriction? I've been told
00:54:02that it's the only reliable intervention that actually works for extending lifespan.
00:54:07If you're a mouse.
00:54:11Are you saying that the rodent studies don't come across into humans when it comes to calorie
00:54:15restriction for lifespan?
00:54:16There's no evidence yet in humans. In fact, not even in primates. So,
00:54:18do you know, there was a big study that was done in Wisconsin, where they took a whole bunch of
00:54:24macaques, right? And they gave one group of macaques calorie-restricted diet and another group of
00:54:30macaques. And this is a 20-year-long study. Imagine how much time it took.
00:54:34Two decades of calorie restriction, if you're in the wrong group of macaques.
00:54:38And guess what? The group of macaques that were in the calorie-restriction diet were
00:54:41way healthier than the ones that were not in the calorie. And so there were these papers published
00:54:45saying, ta-da, calorie restriction works in primates, which means it probably works in humans.
00:54:50But guess what? When people looked at the data, the non-calorie-restricted macaques were
00:54:55basically being fed a crap food diet. They were getting lots of sugary foods. They were getting obese.
00:55:01They were not healthy normal macaque diets. They were fed an ad-liminum crap diet. So the NIH,
00:55:07at vast expense, I mean, we're talking millions of taxpayer dollars, redid the experiment.
00:55:14For another two decades.
00:55:15For another two decades.
00:55:16Fuck me. If you're the guy, if you're the guy that fed those macaques fries for two decades,
00:55:22you really should be out of a job.
00:55:24It's very shameful. But anyway, so the NIH redid the experiment. And this time they had them on the
00:55:30same monkey chow diet.
00:55:31Just chopped one in half or whatever.
00:55:32And one had 30% less food than the other. And guess what? No difference.
00:55:37Zilch. In terms of health and longevity.
00:55:40Why do you think it does show up in mice?
00:55:41Zilch. Because mice have totally different life histories. So life history is the series of stages
00:55:46that you go through, how you use energy to grow up, reproduce, and whatever. And a typical mouse is
00:55:53ready to reproduce after three months, and it has a series of babies, et cetera, et cetera. Mice have
00:55:58totally different metabolisms and different growth trajectories and different microbiomes than humans.
00:56:05Zilch. So yes, it is true that for some species, for some mouse lines, but not all,
00:56:14choleric restriction has been shown to improve their lifespan. But not all of them, by the way.
00:56:18Certainly true for yeast. Certainly true for fruit flies. But the evidence for humans is so far mixed.
00:56:24Now, I should also say that it's not based totally on hooey, right? I mean, there are reasons to
00:56:30believe that choleric restriction can be very beneficial. And again, I try to explain the
00:56:35biology carefully in the book. But one of them is that it causes what's called metabolic switching.
00:56:41So after a meal, your body's got all this nutrients and energy, et cetera. He wants to use it,
00:56:46and so you're going to growth mode. And there's a famous gene called mTOR. You've probably heard of
00:56:50it. Vemalian target of rapamycin. And mTOR is like an on gene, right? It's like a growth gene. It
00:56:58causes you to grow muscle and grow this and grow that and produce proteins and do all kinds of good stuff.
00:57:05But the consequence of that is that it also causes damage, right? When you get your muscles
00:57:12producing more proteins, you produce what's called reactive oxygen species that can cause damage.
00:57:17You get misfolded proteins, right? So there's another pathway that's turned on by another big gene called
00:57:30AMPK. And AMPK is like your repair gene. And what happens when you go through intermittent fasting or
00:57:40calorie restriction is that you turn down or turn off the mTOR and turn up the AMPK. So you're turning off growth,
00:57:46and you're turning up repair. And that's obviously good, right? But you can't repair all the time.
00:57:51Sometimes you have to grow. And so this kind of metabolic switching between the two is really good.
00:57:56The problem, I think, is that a lot of Americans and Europeans and people in high-income countries,
00:58:01we're constantly in growth mode. I mean, how often are we hungry anymore?
00:58:05Right? There's-
00:58:05Permanently grazing.
00:58:06We're probably hungry. In my building, if anybody gets hungry, you just go down one flight of stairs
00:58:14and there's these snack machines, and you never have to be hungry. So that means that some people
00:58:19are just constantly in this on mode, and they're not turning on the repair mode. But we obviously evolved
00:58:27to have this mixture of repair and growth. And of course, when you go into intermittent fasting or
00:58:35calorie restriction, you are turning on that repair mode, and that's good. So I'm not saying that it
00:58:41isn't necessarily beneficial, or that it might not lead to increased longevity. It's just that the
00:58:47evidence, so far, doesn't exist. So you're taking another leap of faith. I'm sure it's generally healthy.
00:58:56Whether it'll help you live to be 100, anybody who tells you that's the case is going beyond the
00:59:02evidence. It's not a bad strategy, but there's no strong evidence to that effect.
00:59:09- That's crazy. I didn't know that there was no strong evidence. I mean, look, the
00:59:14hormetic stressor... - Well, that's how people make money.
00:59:17You know, if they told you, like what I just told you, that, you know, this is how it might work,
00:59:22but we're not really sure. - It's highly unsexy.
00:59:24- You're not going to buy the product. - Many of your arguments are highly unsexy,
00:59:29is a way, like unmarketable... - Completely unsexy, sorry.
00:59:32- Yeah, yeah. - But because we want quick fixes.
00:59:36Wouldn't it be great if I just, by skipping breakfast, I could live to 100?
00:59:39- I wish that were the case, but I can't promise you that.
00:59:42- If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place
00:59:47to start. I've been in the gym for two decades, and it wasn't until this last year that I had some
00:59:52of the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this
00:59:58thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed
01:00:03effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights,
01:00:09everything. So all you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP Strength app could wipe your ass for
01:00:13you, it probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing.
01:00:19For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference, and if you're serious
01:00:23about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training
01:00:27plan that I use, and get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description
01:00:32below. I'm heading to rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout.
01:00:38That's rpstrength.com/modernwisdom at checkout. The reason that I think people are not only drawn
01:00:46to it because simplicity is seductive, but also just think about how many different choices you
01:00:53need to make now. Again, what am I going to eat today is an evolutionarily novel question
01:00:57that humans have never had to ask before. Yeah. I've never had to answer before.
01:01:02And if somebody comes along with something that feels like a relatively tight set of guardrails,
01:01:07it's why I think constrictive diets, generally, whatever they are, just help. I'll speak for
01:01:14myself, right? A couple of years ago, I lived in a house with toxic mold. One of the byproducts that
01:01:21comes out of that an awful lot of inflammation and brain fog and TGF-beta and C4A and MMP9,
01:01:27all this stuff. One of the often cited diets that seem to help people with some of the brain fog is
01:01:34going carnivore to get rid of anything that spikes blood sugar. I felt remotely human for the first
01:01:40time in six months. Yeah, I'm sure you did. I also had LDL in the 400s and I then had to unwind that.
01:01:48Everything is a trade-off. So looking at my bloods versus looking at how I felt, I'm like, well,
01:01:54it was so good because it was restricting something. It made it very easy for me to follow. It's a super
01:01:58simple set of rules. Is it meat or blueberries or raspberries? If not, don't fucking eat it. But what
01:02:04it did to, and it made me feel good and it made me look, I was shredded out in my mind, look,
01:02:09fucking fantastic, finally hitting my protein goals for a bodybuilding diet. But also, what's this
01:02:14going to do to my arteries over if I keep doing this for only a couple of years? Even on a clearly scan,
01:02:22I could see a little bit of progression just from a short space of time, plaque progression
01:02:27in the space of nine months that we've done this clearly scan, 18-month intervals. So I understand
01:02:34why people want that simplicity. What is interesting to me around the calorie restriction thing is the
01:02:42super magical source that's inside of the intermittent fasting. It's the 16-8, right?
01:02:495-2.
01:02:49Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:02:50Or there's the, what's it called, the warrior diet.
01:02:54Is that OMAD?
01:02:56I can't remember. The warrior diet is you eat like only once a day.
01:02:59Yeah, OMAD, one meal a day. Is there something special about intermittent fasting?
01:03:04Well, again, intermittent fasting moves your body in and out of what we call positive and negative
01:03:09energy balance, therefore turning on and off mTOR and MPKs, calling metabolic switching.
01:03:14But you could imagine-
01:03:15But there's no one way to do it.
01:03:16You could imagine a world in which you did calorie restriction. Let's say maintenance for me is 2400.
01:03:22I could calorie restrict even down to like a significant amount, like 1800 or 1500 or something.
01:03:27But I could do that by consuming 100 calories every hour for each waking hour that I was,
01:03:33this would be kind of a highly inefficient diet to have. But you understand what I mean,
01:03:36right? There's a difference between grazing your way to calorie restriction or fasting your way to
01:03:41calorie restriction. If you were to take, have you seen any evidence that if you were to take two
01:03:45populations, one of whom was doing OMAD and another of whom was grazing to a similar kind of calorie
01:03:50restriction, that they would have different outcomes?
01:03:52In terms of weight or in terms of inflammation or whatever. So, if those studies exist, I don't know
01:04:00them because I'm-
01:04:01It'd be a cool study to do.
01:04:02Well, I don't-
01:04:04Yeah, maybe, but-
01:04:06Don't maybe my suggestion. That's a cool study, okay?
01:04:09Well, I'm just-
01:04:09Says the guy that's not in your industry at all.
01:04:11I'm just thinking about the hypothesis that we're trying to test.
01:04:15So, the mechanism by which intermittent fasting or low calorie, you know, calorie restriction is
01:04:22supposed to work is by putting the body into a negative energy balance. And as you say,
01:04:28there's two ways of doing it. One is to fast or the other is just not eat very much. Certainly,
01:04:33there's a lot of data on not eating very much. That's just called the diet, right? And the problem
01:04:40with diets is that people get hungry and they're really, really, really hard to maintain. And they're
01:04:46not very useful for most people because you're tired, you're exhausted, you're cranky, you're hangry,
01:04:51you're whatever, right? Intermittent fasting, and one of the reasons people love intermittent
01:04:55fasting is that you just, you know, basically skip breakfast, for example, by one form of intermittent
01:05:00fasting. And so you can- it's much more tolerable. And plus, the other benefit of intermittent fasting,
01:05:05again, is the metabolic switching, going from one to the other. Because nobody in their right
01:05:10mind would think that being in a constant state of negative energy balance is a good thing.
01:05:14It's called starvation.
01:05:15It's called starvation, right? And here's another thing.
01:05:20In addition to the fact that there are trade-offs, every time you do one thing,
01:05:24every food, every diet, everything, there are benefits and there are costs. There's nothing,
01:05:28find me one that doesn't have a trade-off and I'll be really interested, but I have yet to find one.
01:05:34But remember this also, that we are adapted. We're not adapted to be healthy.
01:05:39We- natural selection didn't put us on this earth to live to be 100. We evolved for one thing and one
01:05:46thing only as far as natural selection is concerned, that's to have babies. So we evolved to maximize
01:05:53our reproductive success and not to be long-lived and healthy. And so a lot of the adaptations that we
01:06:00have are there not to improve our health, they're to improve our reproductive success.
01:06:06And that makes things complicated and that adds to the trade-offs.
01:06:11Get me to puberty and hope for the best. What about the sort of world of the modern paleo movement?
01:06:19Because what it sounds like, paleo is in one of the titles that you have for the world that you come
01:06:24from, looking at a more ancestrally aligned, natural, without falling into a naturalistic fallacy type
01:06:36diet. You could assume, hey, well, if we just eat like hunter-gatherers did, and the paleo movement
01:06:41kind of promised this from a dietary perspective, is it right to say that there is an ancestral diet that
01:06:48we can recreate? Has the paleo movement got it right? I wish they had, but again, I'm going to
01:06:57sound like a Birkin record, but they got some things right and they got some things wrong. So it is true
01:07:03that some aspects of the paleo diet make a lot of sense, right? You know, don't eat a lot of sugar,
01:07:07don't eat a lot of saturated fat. That's the original paleo diet is don't eat a lot of saturated
01:07:11fat. Some paleo dieters dispute that. But the paleo diet also says you should never eat legumes.
01:07:18And you should never eat grains. And you should never eat dairy. And the argument for that is that
01:07:23our ancestors didn't eat legumes and grains. And then we only had dairy until we stopped nursing.
01:07:30And then, you know, after we stopped drinking our mother's breast milk, that was it.
01:07:36Well, several problems. First is, it's not true that hunter-gatherers don't eat legumes and grains.
01:07:43Don't or didn't?
01:07:45Don't and didn't. Both. We have paleontological evidence. We have
01:07:48Neanderthals with grain starch thing on their teeth. We have…
01:07:52Oh, that sounds like reliable evidence.
01:07:54We have very reliable… You know, we have this kind of cartoon character of the Neanderthals eating
01:07:58like all meat, like, you know, Inuit in Greenland. But, you know, 125,000 years ago,
01:08:03there were hippos frolicking in the Thames when the Neanderthals were hanging out in southern England.
01:08:08The Neanderthals were not living in Arctic conditions all the time. There were times when
01:08:12there was plenty of plants available, and they were eating plenty of plants. We have
01:08:15archaeological evidence for that. In addition, for example, hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari,
01:08:20the second most consumed food is a kind of bean. It's called the marama bean. It's their number two
01:08:25food. So don't tell me they don't eat legumes. They do. We evolved to eat almost everything. And so,
01:08:31actually, we did a study on this a few years ago. It was actually during COVID when,
01:08:35you know, it was a lockdown. And I had an undergraduate who was going to do an experimental
01:08:39project in the lab that involved, you know, putting people on treadmills and that kind of stuff.
01:08:42And of course, she couldn't do it because the lab was closed. So we decided, since she was stuck at
01:08:47home, to go through the literature on all the high-quality data on hunter-gatherer diets from the
01:08:53tropics and just analyze the hell out of the data. And compare that to what the paleo diet prescribes.
01:08:59Because the paleo diet says you should have, I can't remember, it's like 35% protein and
01:09:04X% carbohydrate. And I can't remember the exact formula.
01:09:08There are 12 hunter-gatherer groups for which we have really good data, excellent data, where people
01:09:14actually measured carefully what they eat. And they're all over the place. Some of them are eating
01:09:20pretty much all plants, almost no animal food. Some are eating tons of animal food, everything in between.
01:09:26We evolved to eat anything. We are the animal kingdom's ultimate omnivores. We evolved through
01:09:31cooking and fermentation and various other techniques. Because again, remember, the equation
01:09:36of life is food in equals babies out. And that's all that natural selection cares about. If you can eat
01:09:43it and it can help you make babies, you should. So the idea that we evolved to eat some particular diet
01:09:50is just not true. We evolved to eat incredible diversity of diets. And remember that we didn't
01:09:57evolve to eat them to be healthy and to live to be 70, 80, 90, although hunter-gatherers do
01:10:02end up being relatively healthy. We evolved them to maximize their reproductive success. So the paleo
01:10:08diet is based on kind of a naturalistic fallacy that if our ancestors ate it, it must be good.
01:10:13And by that token, maybe we shouldn't brush our teeth or sleep on mattresses or whatever.
01:10:23And it's also based on this idea that these legumes and cereals are filled with these
01:10:32"anti-nutrients." So anti-nutrients are compounds that bind to vitamins and minerals
01:10:37and prevent us from absorbing them. But guess what? If you cook your food or you ferment your food,
01:10:44you get rid of the anti-nutrients. Otherwise, all those people in Japan who have the greatest
01:10:49longevity, they'd be dying of malnutrition. They're clearly not. So again, a lot of these diets are
01:10:57based on elimination and they're based on stoking certain kinds of fears. And that's problematic.
01:11:08So the paleo diet's not completely wrong, but it's not completely right. Sorry to long answer to your
01:11:12simple question. I'd never heard of anti-nutrients before, but I knew that people get worried about
01:11:18lectins and phytates and oxalates. Those are anti-nutrients.
01:11:22What's the truth about the danger of lectins and oxalates and phytates?
01:11:26Well, if you ate raw beans, you'd be in trouble, right? Because they're filled with these lectins
01:11:31and they would, you know, they could cause all kinds of problems. But guess what? If you cook
01:11:34your beans, you're just fine. So these are compounds that we eat. That's why we can't eat raw beans and
01:11:43raw grains because of those compounds. What do they do to us?
01:11:47Again, they bind to minerals and vitamins so that you can't absorb them in your gut. So you'd have
01:11:52malnutrition. You'd eat it, but you wouldn't absorb it.
01:11:55Correct. But obviously that's not the case, right? I mean, I know plenty of
01:11:59healthy vegetarians who are clearly not malnourished.
01:12:02Despite eating lots of beans.
01:12:04Yeah, because they cook their beans. Paracelsus, remember Paracelsus, the famous
01:12:09alchemist from the 15th or 14th century? He famously said, "It's the dose that makes the poison."
01:12:16Right. And these compounds, by the time you cook them and ferment them, they're in such harmless doses,
01:12:23there's absolutely no reason to do that. Even the oxalate thing, I've heard even cooked spinach,
01:12:27that's a concern for some people. You're taking, come on, what's going on?
01:12:31Maybe for some people, but not for most of us. Right. These aren't anti-nutrients aren't a
01:12:35concern as long as things are well cooked for you. I mean, I think there are some people with certain
01:12:37kidney issues that have problems with spinach, but for the rest of us, I think spinach is a delicious,
01:12:43healthy food. Well, you've activated another trap card now, which is the raw food diet.
01:12:47You know? Oh my God. I have to tell you, of all the diets I tried,
01:12:53by far the worst. What was a typical day for you eating the raw food diet?
01:12:57Oh, I mean, we gave it up because it was so hard. I mean, look, first of all, I was eating because,
01:13:05look, cooking increases how much energy you get from food. Actually, cooking releases nutrients
01:13:11from food. So on a raw food diet, you have to eat ridiculous amounts of food just to get enough food.
01:13:17I mean, I was just eating constantly. I was always hungry, and I spent huge amounts of time thinking
01:13:23about food. What were you eating? What's a typical day?
01:13:25Oh, we were like, well, I mean, it was difficult because so much of what we eat requires cooking.
01:13:31Humans evolved to cook. The only people on the planet who don't cook are raw foodists in places
01:13:36like Berkeley and Cambridge and stuff like that, right? And they're-
01:13:40The most developed places in the world, not the least developed places.
01:13:42You cannot possibly survive on a raw food diet without a really high quality diet. And even then,
01:13:47it's difficult to thrive because cooking releases energy. Cooking releases nutrients. You get more
01:13:54energy from cooked foods than from that. So we were eating zoodles, zucchini noodles. And we were eating
01:14:02smoothies, and we were eating- Fish? Do you eat any raw fish?
01:14:08I ate raw fish, absolutely. I love sushi, but you can't have it with the rice,
01:14:12because the rice is cooked, right? So it was really hard. I mean, I was just constantly hungry. My wife got
01:14:19depressed. I describe it in the book. After three days, she disappeared and came back
01:14:27and became really happy. She went out and got a bagel, and that was it for her.
01:14:31She broke containment. I made it another day. I mean-
01:14:35You lasted four days on the raw food diet. I lasted four days. It was really hard, yeah.
01:14:40And look, again, it's a naturalistic fallacy. Because animals don't get these various diseases
01:14:50because they eat raw food, that somehow it must be really good for us. But our species started cooking
01:14:57maybe a million years ago. Certainly by 400,000 years ago, cooking became extremely common among our
01:15:03ancestors to the point that it's changed our digestive systems and enabled us to have these big brains and
01:15:09big bodies and high metabolisms that we cannot support without cooking.
01:15:13How important was cooking to human development?
01:15:16Crucial. I don't think we would be the species that we are without cooking. We wouldn't have our big
01:15:21brains. We wouldn't have the levels of body fat that we have. Cooking enabled us to have the kind of
01:15:27reproductive rate that we have. Cooking gave us more energy and we are an energetically extravagant
01:15:33species. And cooking is one of those key elements. Food sharing is another. Meat was part of it as well.
01:15:42Cooking is an incredibly important part of the human evolutionary story that made us who we are.
01:15:48What does cooking do to digestion?
01:15:50Cooking breaks down cell walls, most importantly. So that when you eat a cooked-
01:15:55cooked, like if you eat cooked corn versus raw corn, and then you look in the toilet the next day,
01:16:02what do you see, right? I think that experiment is pretty easy to do. You digest a lot more of your
01:16:10food when it's cooked because you break down the cell walls, you release the nutrients. Cooking also
01:16:17makes food safer. So if you eat raw meat versus cooked meat, which is more likely to make you sick.
01:16:23And when you're sick, if you survive it, you just have to spend a huge amount of energy
01:16:28fighting that, right?
01:16:29- Speaking with somebody that got Salmonella in Rwanda, yes.
01:16:32- Oh dear, I'm so sorry.
01:16:34- It's okay, I survived, I survived. But I did get a call from the UK, it's like food and safety
01:16:44people that they go around and they, if you go to your GP, I felt horrible, obviously, and went in,
01:16:51did some stool sample thing. And I got a call from environmental health before my doctor called
01:16:58me to tell me what happened. And they said, "Mr. Williamson, we understand that you were part of
01:17:02a Salmonella outbreak." I'm like, "Okay, well, thank you for telling me what's wrong with me."
01:17:06But they wanted to work out where I'd been. They wanted to know, "Hey, what restaurants have you
01:17:10been?" I'm like, "Unless you're going to fly out to Rwanda, this is not in your purview, I don't
01:17:15think." But that took a long time to recover from, like fully recover digestion from. It is gnarly.
01:17:21- I've had Salmonella once. It's tough. Yeah, it's really hard. I got at the cafeteria in my medical
01:17:29school in Eldoret, Kenya. My entire team got sick from that.
01:17:34- Well, at least it was something that you could bond over.
01:17:36- Bonding is one word for that.
01:17:39- Yeah, you can be in the stalls next to each other, all hating your life.
01:17:43Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a
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01:18:46I got a question. Have we ever seen any other animals using temperature to moderate
01:18:52food in any way? Does anything leave something out, put something away? Is there any kind of
01:18:59like mediation with regards to temperature for us? Not on a regular basis. But it's interesting though,
01:19:03if you, there are these fun experiments where they give chimpanzees, give them the opportunity to choose
01:19:09between cooked food and raw food. And even though chimpanzees don't cook their food, they always, they not always,
01:19:15they usually prefer the cooked food. And it has been observed that sometimes after a brush fire,
01:19:20the chimpanzees will eat the burnt stuff. Oh, barbecue.
01:19:24Yeah. It's like a natural barbecue, but they're taking advantage of a natural brush fire. They're not
01:19:30cooking it themselves. If there are animals that, that I don't know of.
01:19:36We're unique. Would you say that farming was a healthy human development?
01:19:42Oh my God. That's an interesting topic. I mean, it's how many hours?
01:19:47I'm just throwing grenades at you here.
01:19:49Remember the equation of life, right? Food in equals babies out.
01:19:56Yep.
01:19:56So some people say that farming was the biggest mistake that humans ever made.
01:20:01Because once people ate farming diets, they had less nutritional diversity and they ate more grains and
01:20:06cereals and blah, blah, blah, blah. And if you look in the archaeological record, once farming starts,
01:20:11people's health declined. But the reason for most of those declines in health was because of infectious
01:20:18disease. Because we started several things. First is we started living with animals, right?
01:20:22So we were living with our sheep and our cows and whatever. And we started getting diseases from
01:20:26those animals. So infectious- As opposed to only having the animals with us that we could kind of
01:20:31kill or use to maybe pack, like carry packs and shit.
01:20:35Yeah, exactly. We didn't get many animal diseases.
01:20:39Just this exposure of human to animals was so low.
01:20:41Exactly. So that's one. The other is that with farming, you produce way more food. I mean,
01:20:45hunter-gatherers struggle to get, you know, a few thousand calories a day, but farmers can,
01:20:50even, you know, Neolithic kind of farmers, you know, with simple non- without machines and all that.
01:20:55A shit farmer can get more calories than he needs.
01:20:57Way more, right? So they have much larger families. So, and with farming, not only did
01:21:02populations start to increase, but we also became sedentary and started living permanently in villages.
01:21:07So now you have higher population densities, higher populations living with animals. Now you're
01:21:14surrounded by your own shit because you don't have, you don't have sanity, you don't have toilets,
01:21:18and you don't have sewers and all that kind of stuff. And so now you get the perfect mix of factors to
01:21:27increase infectious disease and infectious disease transmission. And so with the advent of farming,
01:21:33you had more people, but you also had a lot more disease. And so on the one hand, farming was great
01:21:40from an evolutionary perspective because we had more babies. I mean, the population of the world by the end of
01:21:45the farming era was up to about a billion people from probably about, you know, just a few million
01:21:50from before farming was invented, which is only about 600 generations ago. So in 590 generations,
01:21:57the world got up from about a few million to a billion people. So from that perspective,
01:22:03from a natural selection perspective, farming was a great idea.
01:22:06Yeah, scale of goods, individual, from disease and misery, it was terrible. Also with farming,
01:22:12you get famines, right? If you're a hunter gatherer, and the weather is bad, and you have a drought or
01:22:18whatever, you just move, right? You're in enormous territories at extremely low population density,
01:22:24there's a lot of variations. So you go to where the food is. Now doesn't mean it's easy, or you're
01:22:28necessarily going to live in the lap of luxury. But if you're a farmer, and you're living in a village,
01:22:34and you can't go anywhere else, because the next folks over are going to kill you, and you have a
01:22:39drought or say two years of drought and famine, you die, right? So farmers are much more vulnerable to
01:22:45famine and disease. Also with farming, you also have the rise of complex civilizations and armies and,
01:22:52you know, Napoleon's going to come and, you know, burn your fields. And, you know, I mean,
01:22:58so you have more of this kind of organized violence. It's not that hunter gatherers don't
01:23:02kill each other, they do. But with farming, you have, and civilization, you begin to get more
01:23:08large scale warfare, which of course, who suffers? It's the peasants. So farming brought a lot of
01:23:14misery and problems, although it did provide more food and more energy. So how's that for a-
01:23:21Yet another mixed bag. I'm sorry, I'm an academic.
01:23:25Not at all. I think it's so wonderful, like the understanding the fifth order effects
01:23:33of something like that, what happens downstream, I think is so cool.
01:23:36But if I could say something more about farming diets, so a lot of people
01:23:40mistake farming diets with modern diets, because when farmers were eating their grains and cereal,
01:23:45like, think of a typical, like, let's go back to the Mediterranean diet, think a typical farmer from
01:23:50somewhere along the Mediterranean. They're growing barley or wheat, and they're having their
01:23:54lentils and their whatever, and they're, you know, they're having their chickpeas and whatever,
01:23:58they're having their legume and their cereal, etc. And they're making bread, but it's going to be
01:24:04sourdough, whole grain, whole wheat, you know, sourdough bread with lentils.
01:24:09These are healthy diets in the general. These are not insulin spiking diets. These are effective diets.
01:24:17And it wasn't until the late 19th century, actually it was in Hungary, that in the industrial
01:24:24revolution, that we figured out how to mill flour to get rid of the germ and the sperm. And now all of a
01:24:30sudden, when we think of high cereal diets, we think of white flour, not brown flour, and that's a very
01:24:37different thing. I mean, there's actually a fair amount of nutrition in whole grains. They're not
01:24:42the kind of poison that some people think they are. They're not, and especially when you combine them
01:24:47with legumes. So I think people have a kind of a funny conception of what a traditional farming diet
01:24:52has been a bit warped by modern cereal diets. What's going on with modern gluten intolerances?
01:25:00It's gone sky high. I mean, but so have peanut allergies. And I mean, we have all these autoimmune
01:25:06diseases where our immune systems have start essentially erupt when we eat certain foods. And gluten,
01:25:13which is a protein in wheat, is one of them. But I would…
01:25:19What do you think is going on with gluten?
01:25:22I think it's… Have you heard of the hygiene hypothesis?
01:25:27Yes. Yes. Where if you live in a house that's got a dishwasher, there's an increased chance of
01:25:32asthma. If you live in a house that… Is that as you make…
01:25:34That's part of it. Yeah. So the hygiene hypothesis is this idea that we have immune systems that evolved
01:25:42to be very active, right? The world was full of germs and worms, basically, until modern sanitation.
01:25:49But you and I still have the same immune system that our great-great-great-grandparents had,
01:25:52with the same kinds of cells and all that, waiting to defend us against all the pathogens out there.
01:25:59Now, we have dishwashers, and we have bleach, and we have… We clean everything, right? And the result is
01:26:09that we have much less… We have fewer… I mean, how many worms have you had to deal with recently in
01:26:16your food? Probably very few. Yes. But until recently, and in many parts of the world,
01:26:19everybody is dealing with worms. You're saying that worms are
01:26:21an important hormetic stressor for the immune system? They are.
01:26:25But you still have the same immune system. And now, your immune system is still waiting to do its job.
01:26:31It becomes hypersensitized. Well, it could be hypersensitized.
01:26:34Or the other analogy I use is… It's like bored teenagers. They have all these cells waiting around
01:26:41to do stuff, and there's nothing for them to do. And they're more likely to get into trouble,
01:26:45because they now are more likely to attack self versus non-self, because there's no non-self to attack.
01:26:50Have you seen the data around children that grow up in houses that have got dogs?
01:26:55Yeah, exactly. And they're much less likely to get autoimmune diseases.
01:26:58Yeah. Any excuse to make dogs great against them?
01:27:00But there's another factor, too. So that's one possibility, which is all the sterile
01:27:07environments that we're in. But another important factor could be antibiotics. I mean,
01:27:12we now have so many antibiotics that we are constantly taking. And even if you don't take them,
01:27:18it's in your food, because the antibiotics are given to animals. We are in an antibiotic zone.
01:27:26Milieu. Milieu.
01:27:27Thank you. That's a much better word. And of course, those antibiotics are affecting our gut microbiome
01:27:32in all kinds of ways. And they're breaking down the mucus barriers. They're affecting bile. They're
01:27:36affecting all kinds of aspects in ways that we do not understand. And I think they're
01:27:42there's a lot of people trying to study how those antibiotics may also predispose us to having
01:27:49things like celiac. So, farming, mixed bag, probably good overall for having more humans on the planet.
01:27:58We wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be here.
01:27:59Good. Cooking, same thing. I'm interested. Over time, typically, things get better. Obesity is now
01:28:06a bigger global health issue than malnutrition. How come so many people are overweight?
01:28:12Well, there's no one answer. But if there is any one dominant factor, it's obviously processed food.
01:28:22I think you'd be hard-pressed not to... I mean, we are surrounded by... You walk into a supermarket and
01:28:29you're just surrounded by foods that are engineered for us to be hyperpalatable, that are loaded with sugar and
01:28:42fat and they're hitting our bliss point so that we keep eating more and more and more and more.
01:28:48And you add to that physical inactivity. Although exercise is not that great for losing weight,
01:28:56it is extremely important for preventing weight gain. And then you add antibiotics and you add various other
01:29:04factors. And of course, some people have genetic proclivity, although that doesn't explain the recent
01:29:08rise. We are surrounded by food that makes us gain weight. And then the difficult thing is that once,
01:29:19because of natural selection, we never evolved to lose weight. So we have these adaptations to hold on
01:29:26to fat because we never evolved to lose weight. Once you create fat cells, you can't get rid of the fat
01:29:33cells. They only empty themselves. Is that correct? That's correct, for the most part. Yeah, the fat
01:29:37cells swell. And so what you're doing is reducing. But each cell is its own little kind of, you know,
01:29:43metabolic powerhouse. And it's producing hormones. But if the fat cells get sufficiently big, then they
01:29:47split. And you now have two fat cells, which means that getting fat in future becomes easier. When I
01:29:53first learned this, I'm not off with the science, right? No, you're not off. And furthermore,
01:29:57when you have more fat cells, remember, we talked about the carbohydrate insulin model,
01:30:00when you have more fat cells, those fat cells are signaling, sucking up all that stuff. So you eat
01:30:05the same food, but now your body thinks you're starving because you've sucked up all that glucose,
01:30:11you become hypoglycemic. So gaining weight actually makes you eat more. Yeah. I mean, it blows this,
01:30:17this learning this when I, this was in uni when I was thinking about bodybuilding and wanting to be,
01:30:23you know, lean and jack and stuff. And hearing that if you get sufficiently fat,
01:30:30fat cells grow and grow and grow. And then when they grow big enough, they split into two. And then
01:30:35maybe you lose fat. Maybe you're going through the classic sort of bulk cut seesaw. But when you
01:30:41lose fat, those two now, what used to be one, two fat cells, they shrink down and they become
01:30:48smaller or more empty or whatever, but there's still two. And, and they're also,
01:30:53they're also, they're producing less of a hormone called leptin, which is now telling your brain,
01:30:59shit, we're losing energy. You need to eat more to replace us. So, so it's this called,
01:31:04we called it the leptinostat. So the fat cells, when you lose fat, you're, you're, you're,
01:31:08the fat cells send a signal to your body to eat more. So, so, so it's-
01:31:13Becoming fat at one point in your life makes not being fat for the rest of your life harder.
01:31:18Correct. Yeah. So that's the problem. So if we are going to tackle this problem,
01:31:24A, we need to help people lose weight, but B, we need to spend more energy and more effort to help
01:31:30prevent people from gaining weight in the first place. And one of the scariest statistics I know is
01:31:35the percentage of young people who are having or overweight or obese. It, those numbers are going
01:31:41up and up and up and up. How many young people are overweight?
01:31:44I think in the United States, something like 30% of, of, of American teenagers, um,
01:31:51are now classified or 25% are classified as, as being obese. Yeah. And that's a really scary number
01:31:59because those kids for the rest of their lives are going to be fighting their weight. Yeah. And, and,
01:32:04and of course now we have GLP-1s, which we haven't started talking about, which, which may be very
01:32:08helpful for them, but, but that's, that's not the necessarily going to be the magic bullet either.
01:32:15You mentioned before about, um, the particular combinations of, of flavors, flavors representing,
01:32:24uh, macronutrients and what's inside of this and, uh, some of the texture as well. I learned about
01:32:29orification, about the design of the texture of food and how that's used to kind of bypass our,
01:32:35our usual levels of, of satiety and stuff. Can you just explain to, let's say that somebody didn't
01:32:43understand why particular combinations of flavors and textures are seductive and attractive to our
01:32:50system? What, what are they and why is, why does that work in that, in that way? I've seen these
01:32:56videos of hunter gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time, and it looks like they've taken MDMA.
01:33:01Well, you know, we, we, um, I describe in, in, in, in the book, actually one, one in the last day we
01:33:06were with, with a group of hunter gatherers and we, and we cooked for them and I've never seen anybody
01:33:12that much food as these, at these hunter gatherers. I mean, they, they were just like, they were like
01:33:17complete non-paleo diet nightmares you can possibly imagine because humans are humans. We like, we like,
01:33:24we like sugar. We like fat. We like energy rich food.
01:33:27But we don't just like sugar on its own, right? We don't just like fat on its own.
01:33:31You mix the two. Yeah. So, so, so much fat is greasy, right? Too much sugar is cloying,
01:33:37but it turns out that if you have a, if you balance them, it turns our brains on like crazy.
01:33:43Like, can you name, uh, here's a, here's a quiz for you. Can you name a natural food
01:33:48that's high in both sugar and fat that you can get without, you know, stores?
01:33:53Fuck. I was, the fat thing. There's only one, there's only one.
01:34:00It's not going to be, it's not going to be honey because that's just the sugar. It's not going to be
01:34:03avocado because that's just the fat. It's not going to be some sort of mushroom. It's not going to be a
01:34:09kind of berry because again, that's going to be too much in the sugar.
01:34:12I'll give you a hint. It's the first food you ever ate. Milk. Yeah.
01:34:18Wow. Milk is rich in fat and it's rich in sugars, right? And, and, but after you wean,
01:34:25you know, that's it unless, unless you have a supermarket or, you know, from food factory near
01:34:30you. Now we're able, and think about the foods we love. They combine fat and sugar. They, there's
01:34:36something Freudian about it for sure. Right. And you can have, and if you balance high amounts of fat
01:34:41and high amounts of sugar that on their own, wouldn't be pleasurable together, they balance
01:34:45each other out. Now add some salt. Your brain is on fire. And then if you can do the texture
01:34:51development, if you can get fluffy with crunchy, again, hot and cold. I mean, think about a
01:34:56McDonald's Big Mac. I describe it in the book, right? I actually, you know, a Big Mac has,
01:35:03I think every flavor pretty much, except for spicy, that you can possibly think of. It's got,
01:35:08it's got hot and cold. It's got crunchy and smooth. It's got sweet. It's got salty. It's got everything.
01:35:14There's a reason that people love that stuff, right? It lights everything up, right? Doritos.
01:35:20Doritos have more than, go, go, go buy, go get a package of Doritos. Don't necessarily eat them,
01:35:24but there are 30 ingredients in Doritos, the last time I counted. And they have, you know, garlic and,
01:35:30I mean, there's all these different flavors, but they're all balanced. So your brain doesn't think
01:35:35anyone is too high. So there's a book by a guy named Michael Moss called Salt, Sugar, Fat, which
01:35:41is really worth reading, where he's an investigative journalist. And he studied and, you know, collected
01:35:48information on how the big food companies, you know, through serious testing. These are not accidental
01:35:54foods. These are carefully formulated foods to keep us- Precision engineered.
01:35:59Keep us reaching for more. Another example I got from his book is M&M's. You know why M&M's have all
01:36:04these different colors? No.
01:36:06To turn our brains on. Because, you know, I think, oh, I have a red one. Now I'll have a green one. Now
01:36:10I'll have a brown one, whatever. Even though they all taste exactly the same, it gets you to eat more,
01:36:16right? So we've been subjected to foods, or we have to cope now with an environment,
01:36:24with all these foods that have been literally engineered to get us to eat a lot of them. And,
01:36:30of course, and then you add all the chemicals to them, which are probably not very good. And you end
01:36:38up with what we have today, which is that 40% of American adults are classified as having obesity,
01:36:44and another 35% are classified as being overweight. So only one in four Americans today is actually,
01:36:53by BMI classification, which has its own problems, is considered normal weight. One in four.
01:37:00And there's probably other factors too. Exercise is probably one of them. But obviously,
01:37:08our food environment is unquestionably, is the main reason.
01:37:13If there was a pie chart contributing to weight gain, and some of it was calories in and some of it was
01:37:19calories out, how much of it would be diet consumption increased, and how much of it would be sedentary
01:37:25movement increased, or lack of movement decreased. What do you think is the sort of proportion?
01:37:30Because obviously, we've had this big change in terms of obesity over the last few decades.
01:37:34That's a hard number to come up with. But obviously, the vast majority has to be with calories in.
01:37:39You think it's mostly on diet?
01:37:40Yeah. But remember, our metabolism isn't just calories in versus calories out, because
01:37:46that's important. But remember that when you exercise,
01:37:49I got up at some ungodly hour this morning to get the airplane to come here. I have not had a chance
01:37:56to go running today. I'm a bit of an exercise addict. But had I gone running this morning,
01:38:01and I just had lunch, the amount of insulin I would have produced from the taco that I had in the airport
01:38:09would have been less than the fact that I didn't go running this morning. So physical activity doesn't
01:38:15just affect your calorie balance. It also affects your metabolism. So that's one of the reasons why
01:38:22physical activity, although it's not the best way to lose weight, it's very hard to diet just by
01:38:26exercising. You can lose, but you have to do a lot. But physical activity has been shown, even moderate
01:38:32amounts of physical activity have been shown to help prevent weight gain. And part of that,
01:38:36it's not just the calories spent, but part of that is the fact that it changes our metabolism.
01:38:40Why are the calories on a label, not the calories that you absorb?
01:38:44Oy, oy, oy. That's an interesting question. Because the calories on the label are kind of an idea,
01:38:53it's a formula. Actually, it's over a hundred years old, this formula was created by a guy named Wilbur
01:38:59Atwater, who analyzed more poop than you can imagine. But anyway, Wilbur Atwater was a professor in
01:39:08Connecticut who came up with these. And what they do is that you take some food and you separate up
01:39:14the carbohydrates, the fats, and the protein, and then you use a formula: 4.1 calories per gram of
01:39:22carb, 4.1 calories per gram of protein, and 9 point something for the fat. And that's the number on
01:39:33your canned food. But that's what's available to you, that an average person would get. But it's not
01:39:40actually, because you're not a bomb calorimeter in Atwater's lab, you're a human being. And so,
01:39:50for example, if you take peanuts, and you measure the content of the energy in your peanuts, and now
01:39:58you grind those peanuts up into peanut butter, which by the way is the world's greatest food, you get
01:40:03way more energy, about 25% more energy than if you ate the peanuts whole. Because the food processing,
01:40:08even though it's the same stuff, the food processing gives you access to more of those nutrients.
01:40:14Because you don't have to work as hard?
01:40:16That's right, because you break the food down to tiny little particles, right?
01:40:19And your enzymes, surface area to volume ratio, your enzymes can break that food down.
01:40:24If you take a banana and you blend a banana, you get more energy from that banana than if you just eat
01:40:30the banana whole. People have done that experiment. Another example…
01:40:32Imagine if you were to just swallow the banana as well without chewing it, that would also help.
01:40:36Good luck doing that. But one of my favorite experiments, there's a guy named Stephen Secor
01:40:41at the University of Alabama who studies what's called diet and reduce thermogenesis, the energy
01:40:45it takes to break down food. Because food takes energy to digest a lot, actually. And he used BoA
01:40:51constrictors, because BoA constrictors, they cannot eat for weeks, and then you can give it a rat,
01:40:56and then you can measure how much energy the BoA constrictor spends eating, digesting the rat. And he would
01:41:00give the BoA constrictor a rat, and then he'd wait a few months and measure how much energy the BoA
01:41:05constrictor spent. You could do that by just measuring how much the BoA constrictor heats up.
01:41:10And then you wait a few months, BoA constrictor is very happy. You give it the same rat or exactly
01:41:15the same size rat, but this time he grinds it up. Same rat, same amount of calories.
01:41:20So ground rat, and the BoA constrictor slips right through his digestive system. It doesn't heat up
01:41:25at all, or much less so, because the BoA constrictor is getting way more energy from that rat. So when
01:41:30we pulverize our food, we grind it up, et cetera, et cetera. When you make a smoothie, for example,
01:41:34you're getting more energy from a smoothie than if you ate the same amount of fruit whole.
01:41:39Does that mean that people should or shouldn't eat smoothies?
01:41:41Well, it depends if you're trying to lose weight or not. I mean, I like smoothies. Smoothies are great,
01:41:46I eat them all the time, but I'm not trying to lose weight. But if I was on a diet,
01:41:49I would probably cut down on my smoothies. I've heard that celery is net calorie negative.
01:41:56Yeah, I've heard that too. I don't believe that. I'm sure you don't get a lot.
01:41:59The energy needed to digest the celery because of how rough and fibrous it is,
01:42:05is greater than the amount of calories. You know, fiber doesn't take a lot of energy
01:42:08to digest, actually. Fiber is just what you send to your microbiome. And by the way, when we measure
01:42:13the calories from food, we're not taking into account the contribution from our microbiome. So all those
01:42:18bacteria that are, once the celery passes through your, you know, the fiber from the celery passes
01:42:23into your colon, there are all these happy bacteria. And they're delighted that you had the celery,
01:42:29and they're breaking that celery down into what's called short chain fatty acids,
01:42:33of which you, which you then take up into your bloodstream and then you use.
01:42:37So we think actually that for some people, maybe about 10% of the energy that they get from their food
01:42:43is not even measured on those nutrition fats labels because it comes from our microbiome. We have no
01:42:49idea really. When you have studies that tell you how much energy somebody's eating, they're making it up.
01:42:54Or not making up, they're estimating it. And it's actually extremely inaccurate, which is another
01:42:59problem with our studies of calories in versus calories in because nobody really knows how many calories go in.
01:43:04Modern food environment, novel, calorie dense, hyperpalatable, processed, etc. But as soon as you create
01:43:13a problem, solutions come out for that too. And we have modern technology and people can design new foods.
01:43:21What are some of the foods that people are eating every day that they think are healthy, but it's actually
01:43:25making them worse? I don't know. I worry about some of the ultra processed foods that, like meal replacements,
01:43:41for lack of, I hope I don't get in trouble, but like Huel and Soylent. I mean, you could, and I
01:43:48actually tried them for a few weeks. I didn't eat dinner, but I had all my lunches and breakfasts.
01:43:54How was that? It was awful, actually, because it got so boring and I got to really fear, you know,
01:44:00I mean, at first they thought, okay, it's a milkshake. It's not so bad, etc. But after a few days, it was like,
01:44:04I really missed food. But there's like emulsifiers in there. There's all kinds of stuff in there that
01:44:11we don't know what they're doing. We're just guessing. And, you know, over months, weeks,
01:44:19years, you have no idea. Or another example would be a lot of people eat a lot of soy products because
01:44:24they think, you know, they're trying to be very vegetarian. That's fine. Nothing wrong with being
01:44:28a vegetarian. They're eating a lot of soy. But some soy products are made through solvents. They use
01:44:38hexane. You don't want hexane in your food. It sounds like some shit that I'd put in my barbecue.
01:44:44Yeah, or in your car, right? It's a flammable solvent. And then you try to wash the hexane out.
01:44:52But hexane is a toxin. It's a neurotoxin. And studies have shown that you can actually measure
01:44:59people's urine, and people who are not in the petroleum industry, and they have hexane in their
01:45:05urine. And it's probably coming from soy or from non-expeller pressed seed oils. So like when I get
01:45:12canola oil, I only get expeller pressed canola oil because I don't want my canola beans, you know,
01:45:19dissolved with hexane in order to get my oil.
01:45:22I thought seed oils were bad for you.
01:45:25Oh no. That's another one of those myths, I'm sorry to say. But we'll get to that in a second.
01:45:33So I think there are some foods that people think are healthy, but the way in which they're processed
01:45:38might be unhealthy. And again, as Paris also said, it's the dose that makes the poison. We don't yet
01:45:45know. It's very hard to do the studies. You can give huge amounts of like these foods to rats and
01:45:50they get cancer, but we just don't know about humans. So it depends on what your null hypothesis.
01:45:54So right now the government's null hypothesis is that this hexane that we get in our food
01:45:58is okay. It's generally recognized as safe.
01:46:02Others think, well, unless you can prove it's safe, I don't want anything to do with this.
01:46:08Seed oils.
01:46:09Seed oils. Okay. So the idea behind seed oils, there are different kinds of
01:46:13little jargon here. There are different kinds of polyunsaturated fats. So a polyunsaturated fat,
01:46:20so fats are these long chains of carbon, lots and lots of carbons. And if the carbons have single
01:46:27bonds between them, remember single bonds from chemistry, that means that they can have two
01:46:31hydrogens, one on each side that bind to them. So a saturated fat is all single bond carbons,
01:46:38and that each carbon has two hydrogens. So that's saturated with
01:46:42hydrogen. That's why it's called a saturated fat. If you make one of the carbons a double bond,
01:46:50now you don't have the hydrogen on it, and that creates a kink in the fatty acid. So that's why
01:46:58fatty acids that have a double bond are either mono or polyunsaturated. So mono is one double bond.
01:47:05Poly means there's more than one. That's why they're liquid at room temperature. They have kinks,
01:47:08so they fold up. So it turns out that—and we label polyunsaturated fats by where those double bonds
01:47:17are. So remember in the Greek alphabet, alpha, omega. Alpha is the beginning, omega is the end. So
01:47:24omega-3 means that the double bond is three carbons away from the end. I don't know if this is too much
01:47:29information. So omega-3 fatty acid is the double bonds three carbons from the end, and omega-6 fatty
01:47:38acid is six bonds from the end. And so fish are really rich in omega-3s. Omega-3s are great for you.
01:47:46Nobody disputes that. Eat a shit ton of omega-3s. It's good for your brain, good for your nervous system,
01:47:53good for your immune system, etc. Omega-6 fatty acids used to be much more rare in our diet. And
01:47:59so the paleo diet—I think it started with the paleo diet—the paleo diet said, "Well, look,
01:48:03we didn't evolve to eat that many omega-6 fatty acids because we didn't have seed oils,
01:48:07and so we should try to have a hunter-gatherer kind of omega-3 ratio." So trying to have more than
01:48:12twice as many omega-6s to omega-3s. And the argument behind that is that the omega-6 fatty acids can be
01:48:20turned by your digestive system into another thing called a rachidonic acid, which can then be turned
01:48:25into an inflammatory compound, like a prostaglandin that gives you a headache, right? So there is a
01:48:32biochemical pathway by which these fatty acids can become inflammatory. So that's the concern.
01:48:39However, people have done studies. They give people like you and me—they go sit in a lab—they give
01:48:46people omega-6 fatty acids and then measure whether their metabolism does that. It turns out that it
01:48:51doesn't. There's no evidence—and there are quite a few studies—my book cites them, you can go look
01:48:57them up—where increasing the amount of omega-6 fatty acids actually increases inflammation. It was a fear,
01:49:05but the fear turns out not to be the case. Furthermore, there's—so that's mechanistic study—there's now
01:49:10epidemiological studies as well, which show that people who eat a lot of omega-6 fatty acids, do
01:49:15really well. In fact, people eat—in fact, omega-6 fatty acids have been shown to be more preventive,
01:49:22like the Nurses' Health Study and various other big huge studies. We're talking hundreds of thousands
01:49:27of people. Prospective studies over decades actually have lower risks of heart disease, cancers, etc.,
01:49:33than people who don't eat them. So, although there were concerns about them, the evidence—if you're
01:49:39just purely evidence-based, the evidence suggests you should stop worrying about omega-6 fatty acids.
01:49:45— If you walked through the average healthy person's cupboard, kitchen, what do you think would concern
01:49:53you most? — The average healthy person's? — Yeah. Someone that considers, "I'm eating a modern,
01:49:57healthy diet. I'm the sort of person that shops at Whole Foods. I try and make sure that I'm
01:50:02remotely paleo, naturalistic, informed when it comes to my diet. I'm a healthy person.
01:50:08You're going through my kitchen. What are the common things you think would concern you most?"
01:50:14— That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I think the more I study diet, the more I realize
01:50:20that there's an incredible variety of foods that we're able to eat. So, you're asking,
01:50:24like, what's an unhealthy food that people think that's healthy that they tend to eat a lot of?
01:50:29— I need to think about that. I'm not sure. Good question. — Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:50:39— You stumped me there. — I guess—
01:50:42— I'm not a very judgmental person, actually. So, that's part—maybe that's one of the reasons—
01:50:46— Healthy versus unhealthy is not necessarily a judgment, right? We can say, "Hey,
01:50:49that would be—you think that this thing is sort of net positive for your health, but I would be a little
01:50:54bit more concerned about it," or whatever. For instance, I'll give you one. I think maybe dried
01:51:00fruit might be one of those things where people think, "Oh, well, you know, this is—it's a fruit,
01:51:04it's a little bit of a snack," but you go, "That is some really fucking refined sugar in there."
01:51:08— All right. Okay. That's a good one. Thank you. You win.
01:51:11— That wasn't a competition. — You get an A. You get an A. You get an A.
01:51:14Another one would be fruit juice. — Right.
01:51:16— Because fruit juice is basically soda. I mean, it's, you know, you're not getting a lot of nutrients
01:51:20from fruit juice. You're just getting a lot of sugar. So I would think that would be another one.
01:51:23— Okay. — Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, look,
01:51:26I like dried fruit too, but I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that.
01:51:31— But you're right. — Dried pineapple chunks,
01:51:33dried mango strips. — Good stuff.
01:51:36— Yeah. But just straight sugar. — It's a candy.
01:51:39— Yeah. Why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working?
01:51:44— Do they? I mean, there are some that keep working. I mean—
01:51:49— When you look at people longitudinally over time and somebody does a diet,
01:51:54how many of them that lose weight maintain that weight loss?
01:51:56— Well, again, various studies have shown that a lot of the standard traditional diets,
01:52:04people do fall off them. And the numbers run all over the place. But yeah, I would say that probably
01:52:09a reasonable estimate is about 75% of people fall off their diet. And why? Because they can't sustain them.
01:52:16Again, going back to the natural weight loss registry that we mentioned earlier,
01:52:20the people who manage to lose weight and keep it off are the ones who manage to keep the diet going.
01:52:26And what's interesting is that many of them don't follow an actual prescribed diet. They just
01:52:32avoid junk food. They avoid foods with a lot of sugar. They avoid foods with a lot of added fat.
01:52:37They cook most of their meals at home. They tend to exercise. They tend to weigh themselves on a regular
01:52:42basis. So they're keeping track of how they're doing. But very few of them actually are following
01:52:47an Atkins diet or this diet or that diet. They're just trying to eat reasonably sensibly. That's the
01:52:53evidence. The old joke is that the worst part about diet is the second day in the diet,
01:53:01because that's when you stop the diet. Remember the difference between efficacy and effectiveness.
01:53:09Most diets are effective.
01:53:11In vitro. Wonderful.
01:53:13I mean, most diets have high efficacy, but they have low effectiveness. And low effectiveness is
01:53:18generally because we have a hard time maintaining them. And that's because of our food environment.
01:53:22Does the body fight weight loss very aggressively?
01:53:25Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the biggest one is hunger, right? When you lose weight,
01:53:29your body sends all kinds of signals. There are leptin and there are peptides, PYY, et cetera,
01:53:36that tell your body you are losing weight and turn on your appetite. And that's why-
01:53:40Ghrelin in the stomach.
01:53:42Yeah, ghrelin, exactly. I mean, it's very hard to fight all those deep and fundamental adaptations.
01:53:49And so the best diets are the ones that kind of trick your body, but also require,
01:53:57you know, they're hard. And that's why GLP-1s have been so incredibly successful because GLP-1s,
01:54:04for many people, just turn off that appetite and enable them to eat less.
01:54:08What do you think about GLP-1s?
01:54:09Well, I mean, they're game changers for many people. I mean, they've been incredibly successful.
01:54:14Some people lose 25% of their body weight and there are new ones being formulated that maybe even
01:54:20they've been more powerful. So for, I mean, that can be really huge for somebody to really
01:54:26lose that kind of weight and turn off those cravings. But there are some concerns. So we published,
01:54:32my colleagues and I published a paper in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association,
01:54:35recently. One of the big concerns about GLP-1s is that people not only lose fat, they also lose muscle.
01:54:42And they, and they seem to lose a lot of muscle. It's a bit like bariatric surgery too. Like when
01:54:47you lose a lot of weight really fast, people lose a lot of muscle and that can put you at serious risk
01:54:53of frailty and you get older. Because when you lose muscle as you age, you get, you can get what's
01:54:58called sarcopenia. Sarco is the Greek word for flesh and penia is loss of flesh loss. Sounds bad,
01:55:03doesn't it? And sarcopenia is really debilitating because as it becomes a vicious cycle,
01:55:08because as you become less strong, you know, just get, doing acts of daily living become harder,
01:55:13getting up from a toilet, you know, shopping and doing stuff. And then you become less physically
01:55:17active and you become, get into this vicious cycle and things get worse and worse. Basically my,
01:55:22you know, my, my mother, for lack of better, you know, she, she died essentially of sarcopenia.
01:55:27She got more and more frail as she got older. I tried to get her to eat anything, you know,
01:55:34ice cream, this, yeah, you know, no, whatever. She tried to put on some weight and she just
01:55:37couldn't. It was really hard to watch. Some people are kind of self-enforcing
01:55:42that inability to eat food through GLPs. Right. And, and, and so, so the, so the,
01:55:48one of the big concerns about GLP-1s is that if, if you're taking them, do strength training, please,
01:55:53because that can help reverse or help you maintain your muscle as you lose those GLP-1s. So that's one
01:56:00concern about GLP-1s. Another is that a lot of people quit them. The last study I saw,
01:56:08and again, things may change because they're now oral versions of the pill. They're now,
01:56:12there's now a pill versions. You don't have to inject it, but something like 60% of people
01:56:17who've tried GLP-1s have quit them after a year or two, 60%. And the problem is that when you quit
01:56:23them, your body just still, your appetite comes roaring back and you want to go back to your previous
01:56:29weight for, for reasons that we do not understand. So most people who use GLPs take them for a period
01:56:37of time that they can lose an appreciable amount of weight and then stop, don't maintain the weight
01:56:41loss. Exactly. So it's a lifetime contract. So exactly. So that's, that's what we're currently
01:56:47seeing at the moment. Um, so that's, that's a concern because then when they regain the weight,
01:56:53they tend to gain it almost completely as fat, not as muscle. And so then away they're worse off.
01:56:58Oh, so they've lost muscle on the way down and gained fat on the way back.
01:57:02Yeah. So that's one of the concerns. Look, we're still conducting this experiment in real time
01:57:07without knowing the results. And then a final concern about GLP-1s is that look, nobody likes taking
01:57:13medications, right? At least most people don't like taking medications. And, and it doesn't solve the
01:57:19problem of what you should eat in the first place. And it doesn't prevent obesity in the first place.
01:57:23So it's great for people to lose weight, but we also need to focus on helping the people not
01:57:28have to take those GLP-1s in the first place. I'm a little worried that we're going to take our eye
01:57:31off the ball. And even if you're on a GLP-1, you still have to figure out like what to eat.
01:57:37What do I eat? And, and the GLP-1 might help you with your cravings for, you know,
01:57:41really fatty, sugary foods, but it might not. We just still haven't done those studies very well.
01:57:47So, so look, they, I think they're a useful tool for a lot of people, but I think we have a lot to
01:57:54learn and we have to figure out how to use them better. They're not going away, but, um, but I think
01:57:59they're, you know, again, they're not the magic bullet that some people think they are, but they
01:58:03may be very, very helpful for some folks. It feels like an artificial solution to an
01:58:07artificial problem. We have this novel food environment, which like we shouldn't be in,
01:58:12right? In an ideal world of food to design things better. And we now have this thing which kind of
01:58:19solves it. We solve the calorie dense, hyperpalatable food world with this thing that comes in and puts the
01:58:25kibosh on our ability to either eat or gut mortality, you know, level of hunger and stuff like that.
01:58:31Yeah. So I, I, I, a few, about 13 years ago, I wrote a book called The Story of the Human Body.
01:58:36And in the, in the end of that book, I propose an idea called disevolution.
01:58:42Disevolution is when we treat the symptoms, not the causes of a mismatched disease. So we're talking
01:58:46about mismatched diseases. These are, these are illnesses that are caused by not being adapted to
01:58:51our modern world, right? But when we treat the symptoms, not the causes, we keep the system going,
01:58:56right? And, and I think GLP-1s might be an example of a kind of a disevolutionary process. We can still
01:59:02have our, you know, frozen pizzas and our, you know, fried chicken and our, you know, donuts and all
01:59:10that kind of stuff. Now we get, get, get obesity, take the GLP-1s, but we still have that same food system.
01:59:16I'll just eat 1700 calories of the frozen pizza and the donuts.
01:59:20We still have that food system that's going to keep going, right? We need to solve our food system
01:59:26problems if we're going to help prevent people from getting, and, and, and, and right now we're not
01:59:31doing enough to help each other eat, eat sensibly so that we don't gain weight.
01:59:38It seems to me when you get to kind of that point of the conversation, the food environment is predatory,
01:59:47engineered, capitalistic, uh, uh, uh, designed to hook people. Um, people tend to split in one of two
01:59:56ways. One is they go towards systemic change. Um, we need grass to be, uh, changed. We need to look at
02:00:04what can snap payments be spent on. We need to kind of step in and there should be a
02:00:10additive restriction. We can't have these food dyes and some of that regulation. Yeah. Yeah. A degree of top
02:00:15down sort of bureaucracy that will come in and fix it. And then the other side is aggressive agency.
02:00:20It's, you need to take control of this. No, one's coming to save you, uh, you know,
02:00:24constrain yourself only to the outer aisles in the supermarket or shop in one that, that doesn't have
02:00:29any of the hyperpalatable stuff. Like across all of this research and self-experimentation,
02:00:37what are the most robust principles that you think people should take away when it comes to having a
02:00:43good diet, nutritionally complete and evolutionarily, at least not totally, uh, deranged?
02:00:49Uh, avoid processed foods. I mean, and by processed, I would include foods that are refined. So white flour,
02:01:00um, I would include, you know, foods that have a lot of added sugar, foods that have a lot of added
02:01:04fat. You know, fat's not your, as bad as maybe some people think, but filling your food with fat and
02:01:09sugar is certainly not great for you. Um, avoid foods that have, I avoid foods that have really weird
02:01:15ingredients that I have no idea what the hell they are. Um, you know, things like maltodextrin.
02:01:21If you see maltodextrin in your food, run away. Why?
02:01:23Maltodextrin is a kind of sugar that your body can't actually detect as sugar. It's used as an
02:01:29emulsifier. So it keeps food from particles from breaking apart. So foods have a long shelf life.
02:01:34It makes things creamier and smoother, but it's wreaks havoc with your metabolism. So it's, it's a,
02:01:40it's a food you'd never eat on your own. It's a chemical additive. It's a chemical additive to,
02:01:44to me is like a, like a canary kind of the coal mine kind of evidence that this is a
02:01:49ultra processed food. I don't want anything to do with it. So I see maltodextrin on a food.
02:01:53I do not touch it. Right. Um, we need, so we need to educate ourselves again. You know,
02:01:58our ancestors needed to know a lot how to get their food. Now, unfortunately, like it or not,
02:02:04we need to know how to choose our food and we don't teach this in school. They don't even teach it to
02:02:08medical students. You know, medical schools, you know, uh, RFK junior is right on this regard that,
02:02:14you know, most physicians are given very little training in nutrition. I teach my undergraduates
02:02:19more nutrition. I tell them in my, their lectures, you're going to get more from me than you're going
02:02:23to get in medical school. That's crazy, right? Why we teach kids in school, we teach them geometry.
02:02:29We teach them American history. We teach them, I mean, there's nothing wrong with geometry and American
02:02:33history. Why don't we teach, we teach them chemistry, but why don't we teach them when we teach them
02:02:38chemistry, let's teach them the chemistry of food so that they, they learn about when you learn about
02:02:42chemistry, you know, chem, you know, carbon bonds and hydrogen bonds, et cetera. Why not teach them
02:02:46that chemistry in the form of, so that they understand saturated fats versus unsaturated fats. Why,
02:02:51why don't we teach this stuff so that we can all, because it's right now, all this stuff I'm,
02:02:57I'm talking about is, is some of it's considered arcane knowledge, but it's actually not that
02:03:02complicated. And I, and I think most of us can learn this. And I tried to put it in the book so that,
02:03:08you know, anybody can learn it, but, but, you know, unfortunately that that's, that's part of the
02:03:13puzzle. But the, the fact of the matter is a lot of us aren't going to learn that stuff. And so we need
02:03:18to help helping ourselves, because I think most people would not want to get obese. Most people want
02:03:24to eat a healthy diet, but they're stressed. They're, they're, they're, you know, their finances are
02:03:30limited. They don't have a lot of time. Imagine you have a, you commute, you have kids, you rush
02:03:35to the supermarket. You don't have a lot of time to be, you know, whatever. We can't get rid of
02:03:40processed foods, but if we could help have processed foods that are more healthy, I think that's the
02:03:46solution. And so like in England, for example, like when you go to the supermarket in England,
02:03:50there are the green, yellow, and red labels, right? They're super easy, right? And the, you know,
02:03:54I mean, you can debate the fine points about whether they've got the labels, right? But for the most part,
02:03:59they're pretty sensible and they're a quick way for somebody to see, oh, you know, this is good for
02:04:04my kids and this is less good for my kids. Why can't we do that? It's so simple, right? It's green,
02:04:10yellow, red, and red. So, and then you're not forcing anybody. You can still buy the red label.
02:04:14Just informed choice.
02:04:15Yeah. Just give people more information. And so we can, we, we could do more.
02:04:20Another, another opportunity is to tax. We tax cigarettes, cigarettes. We all,
02:04:25everybody agrees cigarettes are bad for you, right? Everybody agrees that cigarettes,
02:04:28we don't prevent people from smoking and I, I'm not going to prevent somebody from smoking if they want
02:04:32to, but we, we, we, we, but we've agreed as a society that cigarettes should be taxed.
02:04:38Why don't we tax junk food? I mean, they're, they cause probably, you know,
02:04:42Is there no additional tax on sugary or hyper process?
02:04:46No. And in fact, in Mexico, when they tried to put a tax on, on, on soda, uh,
02:04:51it got fought by the big, uh, by the Coca-Cola and, and, and, and, and the, and the tax was reversed.
02:04:58So no, we don't. Uh, so I, again, I'm not saying we should, but, but we should be having a public
02:05:03discussion about this because it's a, it's a, it's a problem that's larger than any one of us. It's a
02:05:07public health issue that we all pay for. Um, um, um, because it's, it's, it's, and it's, you know,
02:05:14there's never going to be one solution. I'm a bit of more of a libertarian paternalist. I think that,
02:05:19and I'm not into pretending, you know, telling people what they should do, but I think we should
02:05:23have, we need help helping us do what we would actually like to do. And, and often we don't know
02:05:28what's in our food or we don't know what the effects of the foods are. So, or for example,
02:05:32fruit rollups, you go to the supermarket and you buy fruit rollups and they says made with real fruit
02:05:38filled with vitamin C while very few kids are vitamin C deficient. And yes, it's made with
02:05:42real fruit, but they've removed all the fiber. So a fruit rollup is basically like a form of candy.
02:05:46Right. Um, but, but the advertising allows, you know, advertisers are allowed to basically misinform.
02:05:56So that might be another one of the, I think it's healthy, but in reality, it's not.
02:06:00It's not. And it's in a healthy person's kitchen. It deserves a red label. Now,
02:06:03if you want to get a fruit rollup, fine, but you should know that it's not a healthy food.
02:06:10Scary stuff. I mean, look, it doesn't surprise me that America is kind of the battleground for this.
02:06:14I think French fries from McDonald's in the U S have got 18 ingredients. And in the UK,
02:06:20they've got three and one of them salt, and that one's optional. So this really is, you know,
02:06:25patient zero as a country in wonderful, uh, meritocracy, free market, American dream thing.
02:06:34But if you take those reins off, you, there's going to be some pretty negative consequences.
02:06:40And the only way that you can step in is to reconstrain yourself through your own choices,
02:06:44or then have some bureaucracy come in to start to restrict optionality for people.
02:06:49I think, I think most people would like help because we, because we are, we are,
02:06:53we are not completely free agents in this system. And, um, it's certainly an unfair battle when you
02:07:00think I've got the biggest companies on the planet trying to attack the fundamental drive to not die
02:07:07from starvation. Oh. And what I love also is that you have on one aisle of the supermarket, you have
02:07:12the companies that are selling you foods that are really unhealthy. And then you go to the health
02:07:17food section where you can buy like, you know, Weight Watchers, you know, kind of foods owned by the
02:07:23same companies. So they're, they're, they're, they're on both sides of the equation. They're on the,
02:07:29on the, on the, um, on the weight loss side and on the weight gain side. They're, they're making money
02:07:33on both sides. Daniel Liebman, ladies and gentlemen, Daniel, you're great. Your work's awesome.
02:07:37Where should people go to check out the book and everything else that you got?
02:07:40Uh, well, Fed Up comes out August 11th and I tried to make it fun and, and, and readable and
02:07:47with the information that I think all of us, uh, need and it's filled with references. So you can
02:07:52find, you know, EndNote, so you can find the data yourself.
02:07:54Heck yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you.
02:07:56Thank you.
02:07:57All right. Goodbye, my beauties.
02:07:58Dude.
02:07:59Yes.
02:08:00So fun.
02:08:01Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are
02:08:06deeply. It thinks you're going to like this one even more.
02:08:10Go on, press it.
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