Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is dr. Lane Norton. Dr. Lane Norton did his training in Biochemistry and nutritional sciences. And it's one of the world's foremost experts in exercise and nutrition. He is also an expert in the topic of supplementation and other tools
Al's to augment Health today we discuss a large number of very important topics in these categories and we start the conversation by establishing. What dr. Norton's thresholds are for what he accepts as evidence in particular actionable evidence. So what follows is a description of what dr. Norton really believes is worth paying attention to versus what he believes is worth ignoring in the Realms of nutrition training and supplementation. So you can be certain that as we start to go through the topics of
Sugar glp-1 agonists things like goes empik artificial sweeteners, whether you should train to failure or not during your resistance training sessions how much volume of training you need to do cardiovascular training and its different forms in terms of how they benefit Health span and lifespan and body composition protein and it's different sources and on and on indeed we cover many Topics in this episode. You can be sure that all of the information you hear from. Dr. Norton is being filtered.
Through that extremely stringent filter that dr. Norton is so well known for and thus by the end of today's episode You Will Be armed not only with the latest information on nutrition training and supplementation, but you'll also be armed with your own filter to determine what sorts of Health Protocols are actionable for you before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science.
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E % off your membership or first order again. That's Maui Nui Venison.com hubermann, and now for my discussion with dr. Lane Norton, dr. Lane Norton, welcome back. Thanks for having me back before we jump in I want to get your stance on what constitutes evidence because I think a big reason why you are considered one of the if not the most trusted person in the realm of nutrition.
And training is that you set a very high bar for what you consider science-based fact that motivates action. So to just kind of break this down based on my read of the landscape online. It seems that there's a group of people. I don't know what to call them purists or something who unless there's a
Randomized controlled trial is that means in humans or several?
That points in a particular direction. They are very unlikely to adopt a new practice say removing a given food or nutrient adding a given food or nutrient training a certain way not training a certain way. Okay, that's one group. Then. There are the people who if they are told something could be a value they here it's worked very well for somebody maybe they see some before and afters and it gets mapped to a mechanism that exists in human.
Ins and animals like oh there's this molecule and if this molecule increases X Y and Z happens and training in this way reading this way increases that molecule for instance, but no randomized control trial.
Then they're willing to try it or adopt it and then there's a third probably a fourth category as well where people say, they don't trust science. Anyway science is flawed or the controls required to design a really good experiment are so constrained that they don't mimic the real world well enough and so they're really just interested in what works so they look to people that seem to have achieved the results they want
Feel free to add another group. But which group would you consider yourself in personally, and then where does your evidence that you put out online and today come from and I already know the answer to the last question, but I think it was important. I spell out the
landscape.
So everything you just mentioned would fall into the category of evidence. Everything that we can observe is evidence, but I think what people really struggle with is the idea of different levels of quality of evidence. And if I had to put myself into a group
I have definitely been on the side of well, there's a case study in this journal and we're going to try that now because it must work and or you know, my friend tried this and and they said it worked. So I'm going to try it and then I've also gone to the group of well, there's no human randomized control trials, so I don't believe it.
And I think now you know, I'm 42 now and I've been doing this for two decades. I think where I'd fall into is it really depends on how the individual is talking about the evidence? Okay. So as you can probably imagine I get sent a lot of stuff for people to like, oh debunk this and a lot of times people will send me things and I'll go hey this person said this is their opinion. That's fine. Like I may disagree with their opinion, but I am not going to like rake them over the coals.
I'm saying this is an opinion or this is my personal experience that's evidence its low-quality evidence, but it is evidence.
I think I kind of fall in a line of I ideally want to see human randomized control trials. But there's also as you mentioned practical limitations with how things are implemented and I think one of the things that gave me a very unique perspective was the fact that I was doing my PhD in nutrition after I did a bachelor's in Biochemistry.
So I had that mechanistic understanding and then I had an absolutely wonderful PhD advisor gone Layman who just shout out to him got a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of nutrition 20 years too late, but he was just incredible at being able to understand the small things but how they impacted the big things and what it looked like overall. It's like a conductor looking at a symphony right and understanding how the trumpet
Sounds effects everything else but then not getting so tied up in that that he can't hear all the music right? And he was so good at that and was so good at getting me to think that way.
And so I think where people out in the landscape trying to assimilate this really struggle is they don't really know this person side to study and they equate that as evidence that sequel with any other evidence, right? And as a researcher, you know, not all evidence is created equal not all Journal articles are created equal and I mean honestly people who don't have be research background. It's hard to unpack this stuff. So
what I would say is you have to be very careful with people who cite studies and one of the things I'll say to is there's nothing more dangerous than somebody who's right about chemistry book because they're going to see pathway biochemical pathway. There must be an outcome.
So outcomes are what we really care about right at the end of the day and when I say outcomes gaining muscle mass losing fat Mass risk of cardiovascular disease insulin sensitivity.
Cancer but these are hard outcomes. Right and those outcomes are the summation of dozens if not hundreds. If not thousands of biochemical Pathways all summing up to an outcome.
And just because something has a biochemical pathway doesn't mean it will create an outcome. But if there's an outcome, there's absolutely a mechanism to explain it. Now. Let me give you an example of why this stuff can be so complicated and why it's so easy for people to if you want to create a narrative you can always find a study to create a narrative.
Aspirin we would agree is an anticoagulant. There's a reason they give it to patients who are at risk for heart disease or heart attack because it reduces blood clots reduces clogging elation.
It also activates pro quo got Pathways, but the overall outcome is anticoagulation. But if I wanted to create a narrative that aspirin was bad for blood clots, I could say We'll look at these biochemical Pathways it activates and you see this like, for example, I could create a narrative that smoking is not bad for you. Okay. I remember reading a meta-analysis of the effect of smoking on the risk of adenocarcinoma, right and there's a forest plot with
Only about 50 studies and most of those studies are to the very far right of the line which is increases risk, and I think the overall effect was like three or four hundred percent increased risk of adenocarcinoma.
But there were two studies that were to the left of the line not by much and it wasn't statistically significant, but I could say hey look I could cite these two studies pmid, you know, they showed no increased risk of adenocarcinoma and actually might be slightly protective. And by the way, did you know that smoking decreases the risk of Parkinson's by 30 to 40 percent? And by the way, that's very consistent literature nature so I can start creating this narrative that smoking but we know smoking is not good for you. It's not
Not good for you, raise the risk of lung cancer all different kinds of cancers cardiovascular disease massive increase in Risk, right? But I could you I could thread the needle of science using these cherry-picked studies. And so what I'll tell people is if I go into a topic if I go into something what I'm looking for highest quality of evidence is first off.
Do we have some meta analyses on this topic? Right? You just explain for the general listener? What a meta-analysis sure is just think I've top Contour absolutely. So a meta-analysis is basically what you're trying to compile studies that ask similar questions and look at what is the overall effect? Do we have a consensus in the literature? And usually they are going to show some kind of force plot of all these studies and however far right or left of the center line is kind of giving you an idea of
How powerful the effect was in that study and then you can see the confidence intervals in terms of how much variability there was and then you can see the thickness of the dot on there which shows how much it contributed to the overall analysis by usually how many subjects were in it.
Right? It wasn't study with 10 subjects would have a very small dog compared to a subject with 500 subjects.
Exactly. And so you're trying to now you can do a bad man analysis based on inclusion criteria, you know, and that's where it's important to look at. But let me give you an example.
I am in Alice eyesight pretty frequently. The inclusion criteria is very important to make sure that you answer the question that you want to answer and I say this when you're reading scientific studies, I'm like listen.
Just because there's a headline in even a paper just because the conclusion says something that is the author's opinion. Okay. You need to check to see did they actually test what they're talking about and are the tests that use valid right? So this meta-analysis was looking at low lower carb diets versus higher carb diets or low-fat diets and the inclusion criteria. This is done by Kevin Hall of the NIH back in 2017. I want to say
And I thought he did a great job at the inclusion criteria, which was we're only going to include controlled feeding trials where the food is provided to participants because obviously we know the limitations of you know, free-living studies would nutrition
right self-report people sneak people forget.
We are going to make sure that these studies equated calories for the reasons we talked about you got to compare apples to apples. Right? So a lot of studies will come out saying fasting produce more fat loss.
Low carb fruits, but then they didn't control calories and it's very likely these people just ate less. So they controlled calories and they controlled protein which is also important because protein changes the composition of weight loss protein has a thermic effect protein increases lean mass retention so that can change how much fat you lose.
And I think that also had a requirement of like a minimum of four weeks, right and the outcome was looking at changes in fat Mass. Not fat oxidation, not energy expenditure. It actually looked at the outcome that they cared about and they showed no difference right? So I thought well that's a very well done meta-analysis because the inclusion criteria make a lot of sense for the question to they want to answer which is not is one diet easier to stick to not is
It you know more practical the question was mechanically do these diets produce differences when we're comparing Apples to Apples and actual fat loss and the answer was no right. So and then when you look at the other meta analyses that have been done they tend to kind of support that right. So the first thing I'm going to look as I write these meta-analyses tend to be looked at as kind of the highest form of evidence, right because you're compiling a bunch of different studies.
Which listen we know there are bad studies that get done. I think the amount of studies to get like just straight up faked. It's probably much lower than people think
but one hopes, but yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I think that people make errors. I do think that a lot of quote unquote bad papers or let's just say false conclusions arise from elimination of data that did not fit the person's desired outcome. And the reason I say that is I think it's
Control for so you've got the student or postdoc doing the experiment the results don't come out the way they would have preferred and then there let's just say I've observed before never in my laboratory fortunately but cases where people come up with reasons why that particular experiment was invalid because you know, the mice were initially sick or the drug the lot of drug that they used wasn't it was heading towards expiration. They come up with reasons to exclude. Hmm rather than outright data.
Ocean where people literally create results that aren't there. Yeah, and you know, there are a number of different examples throughout history that where people have done that but I like to think that those are more rare.
I think that's probably pretty small at my experience the same as you I didn't see much of that or I'd never saw it observed
usually end up reading about that in the form of retractions write in journals that come out nowadays more close to the Publications because of a eyes ability to scan images and things of that
sort. Yeah, I think you know
Usually if I see a paper and the conclusion like just straight up I go. Well, I don't know about that when I go in I read the methods and I read how they analyzed it and I read how they measure things 99% of the time I walk away I go. Okay, so I'm not surprised they found what they found right? Because again a lot of and this does happen and it shouldn't but a lot of studies are set up to kind of find what people want to find you can bias things.
In a certain
way well and what nobody talks about where it's not discussed enough is that a lot of times the way the paper is written poses a question after the results are in and this is a this is a really a not correct way to do science. I mean in clinical trials one has to wage a hypothesis. Excuse me wager a hypothesis from the outset you go test that hypothesis. You're not asking a question. I never seen what you're going to measure right exactly where as in more typical laboratory science people.
Will design an experiment they have hypotheses, but then depending on how the experiments work out or don't work out oftentimes. They'll change the question to modify the hypotheses and one would as a reader as a journal as a reviewer one will never know. And so that's a that's a slight of hand. That is I would say unfortunately is very common in better science,
but I will say like there's very rarely do I say this was a bad study often? What I'll say is, you know, I don't know.
Agree with the conclusion based on their data and their design but the data is the data, you know, I was just very fortunate again to my PhD advisor. I have so much gratitude because he just right away was like Hey, I'm going I'm if we're wrong about something that's fine, you know and I'll give you an example of how results can seem to conflict but you know how things are designed. We actually wanted to test this protein quality make a difference and we want to look at it at like not low, but like just kind of like RDA levels of
Protein and we saw that protein quality did make a difference at those levels of protein. But if you look at experiments where people are feeding like high levels of protein like 1.6 22 grams per kilogram of body weight. You don't really see much difference in you know, lean mass or protein synthesis with looking at different protein sources. Well, that's because it's much more regulatory on a low-end because you're closer to those thresholds that trigger that signaling and so, you know, we wanted to show at that level.
Ville that it made a difference but then we also acknowledge. Okay at this level it probably doesn't make as much of a difference but people can read those things and say well I don't believe studies because they're conflicting but know when you read how it was designed I can easily set like I remember there was a somebody sent me a statement. So how does this fit with your data which they were comparing Rice versus whey protein and found that both stimulated protein synthesis to the same degree. And I said, well, they used 40 grams of protein. If you get protein high enough, you can max out protein synthesis regardless of the of the form of protein you're
Oozing and so that's just like one of those examples right? So what I'm looking through this stuff, I'm looking at okay. Those are seemed to be a consensus and the data.
And then is it like in these meta-analyses does the inclusion criteria makes sense? And then if there's no real agreement along to the Coon meta-analyses then I'm looking at. Okay, what do the most tightly controlled studies show like in the randomized control trials and then I'm kind of like basic opinion off that but you know, you you know, the hierarchy of evidence the pyramid you have meta-analysis systematic reviews randomized control trials. You have cohort data.
Genealogy in animal studies tend to get kind of lumped in together and then you got like case studies and so on and so forth, right? And so all that stuff is valid. It's all valid. I think where I spent a lot of time on social media is for example, I'll give you a great example someone saying well, you don't want to eat cruciferous vegetables because they have isocyanate and then which can bind to iodine and that is going to impair your thyroid function lower your metabolic rate and cause you wait.
In and so that's a that's a pathway. That's a mechanism. Is it possible I suppose it is possible right that pathway does exist. Iodine is important for thyroid function isocyanates Dubai into iodine. You can take any food even organic food and you can find a compound in it that if you fed it in a high dose it would have weird effects. Right? And so the question is not if you eat something
Are there compounds in it that may be activate - biochemical Pathways. The question is what is the overall outcome? And so when these pathways are promoted versus let's see if we actually have randomized control trials in humans that measure what we actually care about and so we do have like in that particular case. We have randomized control trials looking at okay cruciferous vegetable intake and thyroid function and there's no difference in the outcome. And so what that says and then no difference in BMR, and then actually people who eat more
Cruciferous vegetables I should tend to be a little bit leaner, but that could be a little too healthy user bias and they probably just eat less calories because more satiated but it's certainly not going the opposite direction, right? And so
The point is again, if an outcome exist, there is absolutely a mechanism to explain it. But just because a mechanism exists does not mean you're going to produce an outcome and I got exposed to this very early because I cut my teeth on the bodybuilding message boards back in the day or it was a bunch of you know nerds arguing with each other mostly who had no background arguing but there were some actual like sports scientists and professors who would get on those every once in a while. This was before social media existed.
And and I remember I was in Biochemistry class. This is 2003 and they're talking about how caffeine inhibits glycogen phosphorylase which is a mechanism and it exists caffeine inhibits like Jen phosphorylase. And so I made this post where I on the forums and I said, well, we should be having caffeine after a workout then because it'll help with glycogen resynthesis because will keep you know, glycogen phosphorylase from breaking down glycogen and somebody came in and said you're really like zooming in on a blade of grass.
Instead of zooming out and looking at the Forest right and biochemists. I was guilty of this and bio chemist by trade we get very focused on pathways.
But if you think about what caffeine does overall activates the sympathetic nervous system its function is to like your liberating fuel like you and and some people when they take caffeine actually have a rise in blood glucose. So that is the outcome is actually counter to what that biochemical pathway is. And so we've got to be really careful with how we promote these biochemical Pathways. I mean, I did a really funny post on Twitter where myself and Joseph soon Del. I'm not sure if you're familiar with yeah, he's a cancer biologist great guy.
Yep, and we were joking back and forth. I said, you know what I bet I could like come up with a pathway to get people to eat poop. Like I can make a compelling argument for just eating poop and then he goes I'll bet he's like, I'll take that bet. I'm like, okay, let's give it a shot. So I'm like, what is the some of the most common compounds in human fecal matter and one of them is butyrate Right, which is a short chain fatty acid produced by fermentation butyrate.
So I did this post where I'm like here's why you should eat poop to lose fat butyrate increases fat oxidation. I think it activates Brown fat increases insulin sensitivity decreases inflammation. It's been shown to actually ameliorate the development of obesity in the in studies and I tried all these PubMed ideas. Now what I didn't tell people was those are all mostly in rodents, right and it's giving an amount of butyrate that you'd need to eat about 50 to 100 pounds of fecal matter a day in order to
get rights has on
I'm like a worse and worse idea by that
but that is very similar to a lot of the content that is out there which is find isolated compound.
Scare people or promote it to be the best thing ever and then link it to an outcome. And then sometimes you can tie in epidemiology with it as well to support whatever you want. But again, like I'm not saying I do things in my training in Mighty trician that don't have randomized control trials to support right? They don't really have anything to support. It's just it's how I've kind of fallen into doing things. So that's okay. But what I wouldn't do is come out and say
What I do is the best thing ever and here's why especially if there was human randomized control trials to the counter. That is the biggest thing right if we have human randomized control trials and they're going the opposite direction of a case study and observation. There's a reason human randomized control trials ice cream about them all the time and why they're considered the gold standard of evidence. We look at cohort data. You're just observing people. There's no inner maybe
explain what cohort data or when is it comparing two groups? Sure.
So coordinate.
Are you comparing groups but you're not having an intervention. So you're tracking them over the course of however what period of time a lot of cohort studies looking at cardiovascular disease case people
decided to be vegan. These people decided to be let's just say
omnivores. Yeah, those are some of the classic
experiments and then and there was they weren't assigned to this experiment. They agreed to join the experiment. They've been eating this way for a while, right? You ask them a bunch of questions
and you look at okay over 10 years over 20 years who gets whatever more often.
Or less often right and then we try to figure out and back calculate. Okay, what's the effect and is this real the problem is?
Your you have a lot of bias with those sorts of studies meaning people don't do single habits. They don't isolate habits. I was I actually prefer real the other day from my appearance on Stephen Bartlett's podcast where he said if I want to fix my diet I go to the gym because a lot of people do that if they're training in the gym. They don't want to waste their effort by having a subpar night. Now in reality eating a healthy diet is more important if you're not going to the gym, right because at least you're getting something but people do this.
Habit coupling and so it's really hard to disentangle those sorts of things. Now. The reason that human randomized control trials are important is if you're designing the experiment and you randomize what you are doing by randomly assigning people to groups your washing out that bias because
you can assume that whatever inherent characteristics that might be coupled to whatever you're going to try are going to be randomly distributed evenly distribute across the groups. Therefore we say human randomized control trials are kind of what's needed to establish causation because by randomizing you can assume whatever differences are observed between the groups are due to your treatment and not due to random chance or data artifacts now randomized control trials.
nutrition have very strong limitations, which is
You you can't do a randomized control trial for 30 years. You can't I mean, I think the longest randomized control trial heard about nutrition is like two years long, right and even then it's not going to be a very tightly controlled randomized control trial mean and if you're doing if you're talking about like the tightest level of control like a metabolic Ward study.
For six weeks maybe because you're keeping people in food. Gel. And I think where some of this confusion comes from as I think people think that they're just like this pool of people waiting around to be selected for experiments like yes, I'm ready. I've been waiting here know there are people like you like me like just the average person walking down the street who saw a flyer and goes. Okay, I'll volunteer for that and the more control you try to establish over their lives the less likely they are to do it and you probably got to pay them, you know, I don't know anybody who would do.
A metabolic word study without getting paid for it. I mean you're basically giving up for six weeks of your life to go do that. And so while I love human randomized control trials for some things do not always appropriate, for example, if you're trying to look at heart disease and you want to do a one your human randomized control trial.
Looking at say, you know saturated fat LDL cholesterol those sorts of things. Well how many people have heart attacks within one year after age 60 and it's gonna be a really you're going to look for really small. No differences between really small numbers. Right? And the problem with that is you have no idea about their diet 40 years leading up to that and we know based on now the mendelian randomization trials that the risk of LDL is more of like a lifetime exposure risk. It's not just in this narrow sliver of time. And so I love human randomized.
Trials, but it's also I try to tell people.
Never turn your brain off just because something gets published in a certain Journal just because a certain researcher said something just because it was a certain design. It doesn't make it infallible. Okay science is perfect science is perfect science is what is but it's done by humans and humans are fallible imperfect people with their own personal beliefs and biases and that's why I look at consensus of data first.
Because yeah, you could maybe some of experiments got faked or maybe they had but when it's done over let's take something like creatine monohydrate, right you have thousands of experiments done over Decades of time in hundreds of different Labs with many different funding sources and bunch of different countries under a bunch of different conditions. It works. Right like if you go to consensus and you type in does create and build muscle, it's like 92
Sent yes, right which is
crazy right consuming 5 to 10 grams of creatine monohydrate per day is going to benefit strength and muscle mass and likely cognition to some old guy. Yeah. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor a G1 by now many of you have heard me say that if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be a G1. The reason for that is a g 1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available. What that means is that it contains notches.
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For those listening like this is pure gold because never before certainly on this podcast or other podcasts anyone ever really spelled out how to discern differences in quality of evidence. Right and every it's mostly a free world most places and people can do what they want. But I think they need to decide what their thresholds are for
Quality. Yeah, and I think the one other thing I'll tell people is I saw this the other day I saw somebody post. I think it was a
Common, I want my post. I actually commented back. They said you know, I just I know I can trust you and I just whatever you say. I know it I can take it to the bank and I said I appreciate that but I am a flawed human like anybody else. Please don't turn your brain off like and one of the things I've really tried to do now in this stage of my career is I want to teach people how to think because if I just give you the information and I'm giving you a fish.
Great, but I'd rather you understand how I came to these conclusions. You can see my logic and how it tracks and then you can start applying elsewhere. One of the things I say to people as I'm like.
If you want a quick and dirty hack for knowing who to follow try not to listen so much to exactly the information people say but listen to how they say it. Okay. I was just telling you I was on a podcast Saturday where I said, you know, here's this study I might butcher the details and if I get the math wrong if experts out there with a comment and correct me, please do that like that is a way of talking about something where you're saying. Hey, I could get this wrong or hey, I'm
I be uncertain that's very different than saying, you know just hard pure, you know, real experts don't really talk like best worst always never like they don't really use words like that. And one of my favorite phrases that I tell people it's actually from an economist named Thomas Soul said there are no Solutions. There are only trade-offs and for example, you know, there's data out there that if you lower saturated fat, it may lower your testosterone.
But there's also data out there that saturated fat raises LDL, which is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Okay. Well, there's trade-offs there. Right? Like what do you value more? I would argue that probably the decline in testosterone isn't really physiologically meaningful for most people. But again, there's not a good or bad there's trade-offs and I think when people get talking about biochemical Pathways one of the things I really try to hone in on us like haters not have really good or bad biochemical pathways.
I either like all these things exist for a reason why people like one of the things popular is like well inflammation inflammation, like hey, you know, like inflammation does some things that we really need to like you just don't want like no inflammation. Like it's actually important physiological process right now. You don't want it to run away for sure. And so again, I just give my PhD advisor a lot of credit of he's like know what you know,
but always question everything even the things we feel most fundamentally are true because that is the job of a good scientist. I'll give you one more story now, we will move to another thing.
When I did my first experiment well, actually sorry. No, there's been like my 15th experiment was my first 14 blue and didn't work
a typical graduate
career. Yeah. Yes. And again very patient man, very supportive. I honestly cannot give him enough credit and if you look at the people that came out of that lab a lot of studs, so I did a experiment looking at whey protein or sorry complete meal with whey protein,
Ingestion and how long the duration of muscle protein synthesis was because we most people kind of measured at 60 or 90 minutes like the the snapshot postprandial e for protein synthesis looking for a peak and we're like is out really where the peak is. We don't know we're basing this is off of purified solution. So let's do a duration experiment, right?
And my hypothesis was well, however long leucine is elevated in the blood is going to be how long protein synthesis stays up and when we got the data back on protein synthesis protein synthesis had come up peaked at 90 minutes and by three hours of come back down to Baseline and I went to run the plasma amino acids, and I'm like, okay. Well, this is what we're going to see and that's not what we saw. So plasma amino acids not only were still elevated. They were like maxed out or plateaued at the highest.
They would level they would be at 3 hours where protein synthesis would back to Baseline. And so I said, okay. Well, it's got to be a signaling mtor signaling is going to be turning off or something's happening. Nope mtor signaling was still elevated. Right? And we saw this through phosphorylation of The Binding protein for you be P1, which is a proxy for mtor Activation. And then I said, okay well maybe leucine isn't getting into the cell. Maybe that's why so we looked at intracellular leucine.
Follow the exact path of plasma leucine. And so then I kept rerunning the plasma data over and over. I probably ran it five times, right and laymen finally calls me into his office one any go. So where do we stand with this duration experiment? And I said, yeah, it's almost done. I just I gotta run the data again because the plasmid has got to be wrong and he I saw his like little eyebrow go up, you know, and he goes, why do you think that let me see your data?
Because your standard error bars are good. This looks to be relatively tight data. How's your Technique and I'm going through like how I you know, all the steps of to analyze plasma to acids. It's not like CSI, by the way, everybody you don't just like take a pipette put something in a centrifuge and also you get back data. There's a there's many steps in here. And so I showed him all that and he goes, you know, it sounds like you are trying to
Get the data to fit your conclusion. And what you need to do is change your conclusion to fit the data and that one line again, it just opened my whole world up to 1 if I'm wrong. Okay, cool. Like I care more about getting the right answer than being right and that's why I we were talking earlier. I'm like, there's so much stuff that I just don't believe I want to see 1020 studies before I go. Yeah, you know and the other thing I tell people is hey,
hey.
I don't plant my flag real strong very often. So when you see me do it, I'm not saying I'm not fallible. But if you see me do it you probably should pay attention because I don't usually do
that. I love that description. But now my curiosity is piqued and you got to tell me so if 90 minutes after ingesting protein protein synthesis Peaks, and then it drops to Baseline at three hours, but leucine one of the key amino acids and mtor, which is in the pathway of cellular growth and protein.
They're still elevated three hours. What is the conclusion that explains the
discrepancy? Yeah, so we actually looked for this for years. So a few things there was some other studies that supported that we called it a refractory response. Actually. We didn't name it that there was another lab named it that basically that protein synthesis was becoming refractory to the signal for protein synthesis. So just for real quick, I'm going to try and explain this easily so protein synthesis, you know.
This sounds like probably a very abstract thing but it's how you make your body makes more protein and whether it's in skeletal muscle whether it's in the liver whatever you have your DNA, which is your genetic code, right and then that gets transcribed to an mRNA by the way. I'm leaving I lost up here. But just bear with me that mRNA gets translated by a ribosome into a polypeptide chain or a protein. So a ribosome is basically attaching to the MRNA and then based on the MRNA sequence is
Ringing amino acids to match that sequence all the proteins in your body are coded for in your DNA. Right? So when it comes to this process, there's a complex called Pi F 4 F which acts as a scaffold for the ribosome to hook onto the MRNA and Pi F 4 F. The formation of it is basically rate limited by the Association of two proteins called EI F 4E & EI F 4G and GIF for
e is bound by a binding protein for a BP 1 and when you stimulate when leucine stimulates mtor mtor stimulates the phosphorylation of for BP 1 which makes it unavailable for binding with the I f-4e it can bind to EI F 4G that EI F 4 F complex can be made brings the ribosome on to the MRNA and now it can read it can translate it. So there's a little cellular biology less if people didn't
follow that
Worry about it what links describing is that? The presence of a bunch of molecules involved in protein synthesis is necessary but not sufficient for the protein synthesis. Right a few other things have to happen current. Apparently those other things are not happening after 120 minutes.
So another lab called it the the muscle full effect. Basically the idea is like once you've initiated that signal it kind of runs and then it's done right and just pounding more amino acids into the system is not going to further stimulate.
Late, in fact, there was a there was a study done back and I think it was 2001 by want to say by Renny another very well-known protein lab and they infused essential amino acids for six hours and looked at skeletal muscle protein synthesis and they found it went up and then came back down by two hours and then never went back up right good experiment. Yeah, very interesting. So we looked at a bunch of different things. The only thing we found that perhaps explained in a little bit and I'm sure there's other labs that would argue with me on this and
and again, this is in Rat skeletal muscle which by the way is a good model for human protein metabolism, but still
We looked at 80 intracellular ATP levels and actually found that they were declining kind of in concert with the decline in muscle protein synthesis and muscle protein synthesis is an atp-dependent process, but the process of protein turnover is energetically expensive. It's one of the reasons that protein has a higher thermic effect of food. And so our hypothesis was
Perhaps by the effect of protein stimulating protein synthesis to start this Machinery is energetically expensive enough that eventually you kind of run out of steam and so you have the signal there.
But it just kind of ends right now. There have been other experiment like Jordan trauma and just published a paper a few months ago. They got a bunch of you know, you know feedback every 100 grams of protein after a meal after a resistance training exercise and saw, you know that it was basically like a lot more of it was used and we thought would be
used right because for many decades it has been purported believed and propagated that the maximum amount of protein that you can utilize after a meal is 30 grams again.
They got the holy number and this study essentially showed that more than 30 G can be used not just as energy but for the sake of protein synthesis in muscle, correct? Yeah, and it and how did that study land with you given that it's one study without going into all the details. I did that inspire you to change anything about your protein intake after training.
So what I tell people is I don't make big shifts in my opinions based on single studies. Yeah.
Is an answer pretty it Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy a little bit, right? So and what even before that study came out what I had said is I think protein distribution matters, but I think it matters much much less than total protein intake per day because all we need to do is look at some of these resistance training studies with intermittent fasting where people are eating all their protein and eight-hour window. And theoretically you would think they would get less muscle growth especially based on this refractory data because less time to stimulate
But at least in the studies on a grant Tinsley's lab, we I think there's two studies that were very well done where we don't see that now important to point out they trained during their feeding window and they had three they made sure they ate three high quality high protein meals during that eight hour time, right? So at least in that context, there was no difference in the amount of lean mass gained between intermittent fasting groups for continuous feeding group
now and in the continuous feeding groups that do recall what duration they were.
Their meals over was probably 12 hours or so.
I don't recall specifically but I don't recall an actual to find time and have to go back more than 8 hours for sure. You know,
I'm so glad we're Landing here because my first let's just call it sort of operational or actionable question which came from, you know asking on social media for questions for you was many many people if not in the thousands asked how to
Make sure that they're getting enough protein if they're doing something like intermittent fasting and I myself fall into this category. I don't do it for any specific purpose. This was long before Sachin Panda started doing his work on time restricted feeding AKA intermittent fasting, but I don't tend to want to eat any food until about 11:00 a.m. Right occasionally. I wake up hungry like this morning and I had some eggs is particularly hungry, but that's I think that's representative of a lot of people I want hydration and caffeine in the morning.
A train in the morning and then I want to eat pretty soon after I train but what that means is that I'm eating and during an eight to nine our right beating window and if I only managed two meals in there and a snack and I can only assimilate or excuse me, I can only put 30 grams of protein per meal toward protein synthesis. We have to be careful of not about using it for energy but short protein synthesis. Does that mean that I'm not going to hit my target of 1 gram of protein per pound of
Tired lean body mass, because I'm 100 kg I weigh about 220 pounds. I can easily eat 220 grams of protein in a nine hour period like give me three Ribeyes all eat all three right love ribeye steak. Right, but the question is can I use
that?
So I'm going to bring this back around to that particular experiment so over time and when I left grad school my position was that it matters protein distribution matters. So I'll give you the straight down the line scientific answer and then I'll give you a few inject me with truth serum. What I really think is right and in so we did an experiment again in rats. We fed them completely same diets same total calories protein carbs fats, but
In one group, they got that pretty much evenly across three meals and the other group 70 percent of the protein was coming at their last meal and then the other two meals were like 15% protein 15 percent of daily protein and 11 weeks again, 11 weeks out of a rat's life rodents live 18 to 24 months. That's a big chunk of their life. Right and we did see about a five to ten percent difference in the way to the hind limbs in terms of muscle mass. Okay One Direction favoring
Equal distribution right now again hard to repeat that study in humans. Right and for the duration it's done. So I came out saying you know what that's actually less than I thought we're going to I thought were going to find bigger differences than that, you know, because I mean if you're thinking about number of times you're stimulating protein, so this is mean one per day versus three per day. I mean shouldn't there be like a pretty significant difference there and it was I mean it reached a level of success.
Significance, but again, I thought the effect size was smaller than I thought.
And so I kind of walked out saying you know what total protein intake is the most important thing per day and then if you can distribute it relatively evenly that's maybe the last five to ten percent right and then you seen some human studies where it seems to matter most seem to show it doesn't really matter that much. Here's here's what I think if you're measuring an outcome like lean mass that doesn't change much in eight weeks. Unfortunately, very small differences. And so I think it's going to be hard to detect.
That but what I'll tell people is can't if you asking can you build muscle intermittent fasting absolutely. Can you build a lot of muscle probably?
If you are a bodybuilder specific population or if your goal is to be the most muscular strongest human being you can possibly become I think you're probably better off not doing intermittent fasting just because those last that last 5% may make a big difference and you're never going to be able to pick that out of the human randomized control trial in 8 weeks. At least. I don't think you will.
And so again, I don't have any human data to really back that up. But just based on what I know about signaling and the effects we saw an animal's that's kind of a recommendation, but most people don't fall in that category. Most people just worry about how I want to look good but a little muscle intermittent fasting perfectly fine tool for doing that. I will say, you know, obviously we haven't studied some of the more extreme forms of fasting in terms of building muscle, right like the 16:8 has been studied but like I'm thinking of a study that was done,
Done without resistance training alternate day fasting versus continuous kind of normal
feeding one day. No eating next day eat, right so they did brutal they did or at least for somebody like yeah, I can't think of anything worse. I'd rather fast for three days in a row and then eat for four days in a row simply because I know that by day two, it's probably going to get easier or not. Not a hard about on off fasting eating's got to be just
torturous. So the way they did it was they did The Continuous group was getting 75 percent of their maintenance calories per day. So in a deficit and then the
A group was doing 150 percent and then 0 right? So you're getting an average of 75 and they actually saw differences lean mass at the in that study. The continuous feeding group lost less lean mass than the altar day fasting groups. Well, that's only one study and it hadn't have resistance training. It's possible that resistance training could attenuate some of that stuff. But what I'll say is, you know, the more extreme forms of fasting probably aren't optimal for lean mass
right also, can you imagine training complete a day of commemoration?
Pleat fasting after three hours after that you're going to be dying and you can say well you could just train on the days when you eat within the ever train legs hard, which I know you do if anyone does and then the next day you're not going to eat anything right the day after training legs properly. I'm my appetites
increased. Yeah. So I think this is where the rubber kind of meets the road in terms of straight down the line the randomized control trials say this, but I still do something a little bit different right because the randomized control trials say approaching distribution, don't lie.
The matter right? But again you inject your truth serum. I think it probably does matter a little bit right now. It doesn't matter as much as total protein. Absolutely not that is by far the biggest lever. But again if my context is I want to become the most muscular strong as human being I can be which I do because that's where I compete. I'm going to distribute my protein probably over four to five meals per day, right
and so free for you just personally what what time of day do you wake up?
And when's your first meal
so well summer right now, so kids are off of school. So we're usually getting up around like 7:30 8:00 in the morning. And my first meal is usually within an hour and then I usually eat within an hour of going to bed and then I'll have two or three meals in between those. So I usually I have about four meals a day. Sometimes I'll have five if it's just a longer day or just how my timing kind of goes or whatever
and is each one of your meals include approximately 30 + G of
quality protein. Yeah, some starchy carbohydrate fiber is carbohydrate and and some
fat. I mean, sometimes they end up being like mostly protein or whatnot. But for the most part there's a mix in each one and usually around 50 grams of protein to the meal about 225 grams of protein a day. Some people would argue that that's more than you need. The research has shown that 1.6 grams per kg Max is not the response. Here's the thing.
And again, this is where like scientific experiments are big blunt instruments. Okay, the that will tell you what not to do more often than they will tell you what to do. Okay.
When it comes to protein my personal opinion and this is just I guess a little bit of intuition based off of 20 years of studying this stuff.
Is that I don't know if there's an actual amount of protein that maxes out the protein synthesis response I would bet if I was a betting man that it's kind of an atom taupe. You're familiar with. Yeah, so you're not everyone's watching. I just drew an asymptote, right? Well then asymptote plot, but for those aren't watching just think about a plot quickly Rising very very high and then essentially stay stable at the high level. Yeah, maybe with a slight bit of tape.
/ yeah, so it's so it's easier to explain if it's going towards zero. So an AB some top might be okay, you start out you have 10 then 5 then two and a half hours. You're running in the opposite direction, right Jill asymptotes going from high to low right now as I'm talking go from low to high can go from high to low, correct? So I'm trying to explain it just makes more sense when people kind of go this way you never reach zero but it keeps getting incrementally closer on the other end. I don't think protein synthesis ever maxes out. I just think the increment of increase becomes so small that practically there is no difference.
Friends and you wouldn't see a difference in outcome. Right? And so I think that you know one you know, there's debate over is it 1.6 grams per kg 2 .4 G per kg and there's even been a meta-regression that showed up to three point three grams per kg had benefits. I think a lot of this is with protein synthesis. You're looking before small differences between small numbers. It's not a very sensitive analysis to be quite honest with you and again,
We would never be able to pick out those differences. I don't think about there was a study by Stuart Phillips who if people don't know Stu Phillips is this is he's the best researcher going in protein metabolism right now, but one of the best so I don't want to take anybody off and he did a study probably 15 years ago where they gave people different levels of egg protein and it looked at 5 10 20 and 40 grams of egg protein and their conclusion was that 20 grams of egg protein maximize the protein synthesis.
response
But that's because straight down the line if there's a p-value of more than .05 you can't say there's a difference right? But if you looked at the absolute difference between 20 and 40 grams, I think it was like eleven percent and if you look at the graph, it almost looks like the start of an asymptote right. Now. This was one study wasn't a huge subject number, but that's kind of where my personal thoughts land on it that there's that kind of also support this. Okay 100 grams at a meal, you know could still be
Wised is I'm not sure if there's a max out. I think there's a practical max out where you get to a point where hey, you're like slamming down 50 grams more protein four point zero zero zero one percent more protein synthesis. It doesn't make sense. But yeah, we'll never be able to ride out. We'll be able to pick those numbers out and actual side of experiments and the other thing to keep in mind with this whole protein metabolism picture is we're only talking about one time side of this equation. So net gain or loss.
Loss of skeletal muscle mass is the balance between protein synthesis and protein degradation and most of us protein researchers. Just kind of stick our fingers in our ears and go to La when it comes to protein degradation because it's so incredibly hard to measure and so yeah, like when we start to put all that stuff together, it's like now this picture gets really complicated. So what I tell people when it comes to that kind of stuff is
listen
You could really get into the Weeds on this stuff. The big rocks are about a ground per pound of body weight. If you want to really for all intents and purposes max out the anabolic response. You're going to be fine one gram per pound of body weight. Yes.
What dr. Gabrielle lion also essentially recommended
right? I'm probably like, you know real sticklers might be like now it's actually more like point seven two point eight and then it's well, it's actually based on lean mass which I agree with but just for all intents and purposes you could say, you know your body
Wait ideal body weight, whatever it is. That number is going to be very sufficient for maxing out muscle building for the majority of
people and we should probably point out not just for muscle building unless you disagree and feel free to of course. Not that I need to tell you that dr. Gabrielle lion when she was here made a really key point, which is that ingesting sufficient quality protein each day isn't just about building muscle even for folks that don't want to build muscle.
On perhaps even particularly for women who assume that you know building muscle is it can be a runaway process that maybe they're going to build too much muscle that's a false false Assumption. Of course that ingesting 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight or ideal body weight is going to be beneficial because it's going to improve muscle quality one's own muscle quality the health of the muscular tissue and and then she did an excellent job of relating the health of muscular tissue skeletal muscle that is
to overall Health and Longevity. So I just raised that because I know that many people listening to this probably want to add a little bit of muscle here there some perhaps want to keep the muscle they've gotten loose fat and some of course want to add a lot of muscle but it sounds like the recommendation is always the same since we need to eat sooner or later one gram of quality protein per pound of lean body mass or current body weight or desired body weight. That's going to be a good starting Place.
Yeah for sure and I think
I would tend to agree with her, you know the process because when you eat protein, you're not just gonna start laying down slabs of lean tissue just from eating protein there has to be a stimulus which is resistance training or some people are you could stretch really hard and get the same thing which there may be some evidence of
that with weights and lift them in between stretches. Now, I'm just kidding. They would just the
weight lifting it actually are studies now where they like put people in like really kind of Hardcore stretching for you know several minutes and they actually see hypertrophy with it.
Yeah, very interesting. We can talk about those if you wanted but the the point is either way, it's mechanical tension, right? So that's the that's the stimulus to build muscle to lay down lean tissue. But the process of remodeling is probably beneficial for multiple reasons. So when you eat protein, like we said synthesis goes up degradation goes up, right because you're stimulating that process you're stimulating protein turnover one. That's that's relatively energetically expensive all things being equal. So that's where the thermic effect of protein comes from.
People say well it's the urea cycle and this and that most of those most of those atps you get back in different phase of that cycle. Really I and my opinion the thermic effect of protein is due to the kind of activation of this futile cycle of your building more protein, but then you're also breaking down more protein. And so part of that is you are remodeling you are making sure that that protein is higher quality in that tissue by continuously breaking it.
Down and building it back up. And so I would probably agree with that and then it's again, even if you're at a resistance training program where you're not really building much more muscle anymore. The process of remodeling is probably good for you, you know, and I would just say try to align some of these concerns from people who are concerned about getting too much muscle. So I have been lifting really hard consistently for 25 years. I am very comfortable saying I train harder than almost.
Anybody else you can possibly imagine and anybody who has trained around me will back that up back me up in the comments. I'm I trained very hard.
And in a shirt, I look like an athletic guy who lives I don't look like a monster, you know, like you might see pictures of me when I was a bodybuilding show and like very very lean and that looks you know over the top but for the most part I just looked kind of athletic and I spent my entire adult life trying to get too big right. So for most people unless you're on performance-enhancing drugs, or you just have incredible genetics, that's not going to
To happen and if it starts to happen just back off on your lifting easy fix. So yeah, I think most people's concern with that is is a little bit misplaced and the other thing I'll tell people is like hey some of these like Fitness like especially like for women Lolly's fitness models, you follow they they show you certain workouts. They do they built that physique by lifting weights, right? And
you're you're thinking that's a toned feet and all that person is actually pretty muscular. Right? And so again, especially for women there are exceptions some people some women have very great genetics for building muscle. They usually wind up and track and field that sort of thing, but it's very hard to get too muscular for a woman and what I'll say is like, you know typically muscle looks good and fat is what makes you kind of look bulky, you know.
So again, I want to play with too broad of a brush but I would say that you don't really have too much to worry about when it comes to getting too muscular.
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I can do the following. So okay, so somebody strives to get one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight per day and I realized that whether somebody follows a pseudo intermittent fasting thing where their first meal does it, you know around 11 and they and you know, they finish up eating around 8 p.m. Or a more traditional leading schedule really is just the addition of one more meal like in the morning. It's like whether or not you eat breakfast, of course, some people shift it the other way they start with breakfast and they don't need dinner, but
I would argue that in order to if you have kids or a social life of any kind the most people can deal with sitting across the table with someone just having a cup of coffee for breakfast, but it's sort of awkward you limit yourself a lot in life. If you can't eat dinner with other people. I don't know that least
and that's and that's again where the rubber meets the road with what is practically doable because there have been some of these like circadian rhythm studies that suggested well, maybe early time restricted feeding is better than late time restricted feeding the more high quality warm.
Obviously controlled randomized control trials are coming out now seems to show that it doesn't really make a big difference and some of the again the measurements you use matter, right? So there was actually a very recent study where they looked at 12 weeks. They provided all the food to participants equal and protein calories the whole deal. The only difference was one group was eating 80 percent of their calories before 1 p.m. And they had a 8 Hour feeding window in total the other group had a 12 hour feeding window.
Do and we're eating over fifty percent of their calories after 5 p.m. I want to say and so really like based on some of the Chrono nutrition stuff we've seen from some of the Lesser well controlled trials. We were there expecting to see differences in like glucose metabolism and whatnot. And they just didn't really see a difference in anything and the only the I think the only thing they saw a little bit of a difference was in fasting blood glucose and here's what I tell people.
When you see a difference in fasting blood glucose, but not hba1c you're looking at a transient difference and what I mean by that is hba1c is such a great measurement because it's a an area on hemoglobin that can be glycosylated. And so that is very dependent on what is your overall concentration of glucose in the blood over a 24-hour period of time because it's exposed entire time. It's in your blood stream. So whether you're getting it, you know glucose bikes at meals or you have higher
A fasting blood glucose it's going to be very reflective of the overall 24-hour area under the curve, right?
So why did they see why do some of these studies feel about better Improvement and lowering fasting blood glucose? Whereas hba1c doesn't show up? Well think about it. If somebody's early time restricted feeding and they finish most of their food intake before 1 p.m. They have an extra like six seven eight hours that they're not hardly eating anything. It doesn't surprise me that the next morning because they've technically fasted for a longer. You have a lower blood glucose. No, I can't I can't really back this up straight up some eggs.
And said measured it but that I think is a logical explanation why you see some of this stuff and that's why I tell people you know, the measurement you take really matters. I think fasting blood glucose is a useful measurement but I put much more value on something like home. I are you glycemic clamp or hba1c. So anyways, I think the early versus late time restricted is kind of doesn't matter
too much great. You answered a future question right there. See I've been your telepathic
That's what you didn't know about him the so that the scenario here is whether or not meals are distributed evenly through the awake day or stacked a little bit more toward the morning or stacked a little bit more toward the evening. If somebody gets that one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight, then they need to make up the rest of their calories with other stuff. Hmm, and we have broadly speaking starches fibrous you
Fruits and vegetables starches and of course fats and weight gain and weight loss. I think we both would agree is where weight maintenance is going to largely be dictated at this point by not you and consume more calories than you burn or not. So assuming somebody's getting that one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight. Is there any data that support or do you believe just by your own experience that there's some value in stacking the starchy?
Carbohydrates toward the earlier part of the day versus the later part of the day and this has been an ongoing debate. Like I for instance like a nearly pure protein and fat meal for the first meal plus maybe a salad some fibers carbohydrates and then as they get towards evening, I like more starches and I actually taper off the protein. I find personally that matches what I need to do with my brain. I'm more alert when I'm drinking caffeine and hydrating on a backdrop of slightly lowered carbohydrates, but then as I get towards evening taper off the caffeine of
First for me because I want to sleep. Well start ingesting some more starches. It's not starch heavy, but I sleep like a baby, but everyone would tell me and does tell me eating starches late in the day is going to make make me fat a eating starches late in the day is going to do all sorts of terrible things. I find the exact opposite for me. So is there any real evidence that where one places their starches throughout the day matters and let's just forget resistance training for the moment because there is this post-training window.
Where I'll if I train first thing in the morning, I will eat starches at that time a time. Let's just remove resistance training for the
moment. So again, we're about rubber meets the road in practicality versus what Hardline research says, so I am not real convinced at all that it really matters when you eat your carbohydrate
and thank you. Thank you. I think I knew I brought you here today for his no I brought your very many for many reasons, but
I realize I can leave now, so I really
Get people focused on the stuff that matters the most right? So this is if we're worried about carbohydrate timing, even if there are differences we are zoomed way in on the blade of grass, right? We're not zooming out all the way and I think hey if somebody likes to eat more carbohydrates in the morning and that fits their lifestyle and that is easy for them to continue to do that. I would say do
that and and could I add in terms of not focusing on a blade of grass but something that I consider a major lever,
Or if eating fewer carbohydrates in the afternoon and evening doesn't impede your sleep then you're okay, but I would argue if anything is interfering with your sleep on a consistent basis. You've got a serious
problem. Yeah, so there are no Solutions only trade-offs, right? And when it comes to carbohydrate intake you'll hear people say the date is all over the place. Okay in terms of like timing and how people feel so beautiful. I feel sleepy after I have carbs some people have and I feel right after have cards like I'm
To go lift. I'm I have a big car bill before I go left. You know, it seems to be all over the map. Now. Here's the thing what I'll tell people because people ask me how I eat people wanted me to do it no a full day of eating video and I've kind of put it off for a while because I'm like,
So much of the stuff I do I'm not going to give you guys a citation for you know, and I know you're going to want it and some of the stuff I do because I just like doing it that way right like I I grew up in the era of bodybuilding magazines where they said you got to have a big carbohydrate intake and a big meal before you go train in a big meal after you train. So guess what I did I got in the habit of eating like that and it still sticks to this day. I don't try to tell people it's better doing it. That way plenty of people have told me hey, I don't feel good.
With a lot of my stomach when I go train or I if I have a carb heavy meal in the morning. I feel tired.
The data doesn't really support that in terms of like, you know on an average response. But if you know that you feel that way then by all means avoid right like there's put I remember one time I am so I used to go to massage therapist in Tampa who would do cupping and there's really no data to back up the efficacy of cupping I was there, right? Yeah, not much but she did it. I like the way it felt and I'm like, okay whatever. So I posted a picture of me flexing one time, you know, and and there's the cup marks all over nearby.
Like going crazy. Like how can you do this? You're like, hey, wait a second. I never said this does this and I never made any claims about it. She does it and I like the way it feels. I'm not saying it does anything actually one of the things about being a scientist is like now, I'm impossible to Placebo which is really annoying because I would love to be able Placebo myself a little bit more because
we'll see what effect is Powers
powerful and it's one day. I was telling you earlier before we started filming like it's one of the reasons. I just don't believe a lot of stuff because I know how powerful the power of belief is, I mean,
You had sha Mackey on here your beliefs about pain change your pain like actually change how much pain you get it changes your pain experience. So one of the things that become big on recently is hey what happens in the mind affects the body what happens in the body affects the mind so just because I don't have a randomized control trial to support something if we know the rcts. Don't say it's worse right then you do whatever you like, right? And I think a lot of people get bent out of shape when I
Well, you know when they control the variables that need to be controlled, there's no difference between intermittent fasting or just regular old calorie restriction or there's no difference between low fat diets and high fat diets what people here is low carb sucks intermittent fasting sucks. He said they don't work. No. No, this is great. This is great news for everybody. It means you have all the tools at your disposal and you get to pick the one that fits in your lifestyle best because that is what makes the difference is what
Your overall lifestyle looks like and we have way too many people worrying about the minutiae who just don't even exercise on a consistent basis. So they don't sleep well on a consistent basis. So they don't manage her psychological stress. Well, or they try to be perfect with a nutrition and they fall off the deep end and what I'm saying is like no like be imperfect but be consistent with what you do, right? And so for you obviously carbs at night have not made you fat like I have eyeballs so we can just dispel that myth
right now, I would say
Eating eating the way I eat. Now. I'm leaner at 49 even then. I was 10 years ago or 10 years before that. I was pretty lean then and I don't put a ton of attention to tracking calories, although and I want to be very very clear this I was not paid to say this like, I I've purchased n use Lanes carbon app you happen to be wearing a shirt that says carbon today, but I've talked about this before on other people on other podcasts and social media and it's absolutely true that I there's no endorsement relationship.
I but I love the app because that was really the first time probably since college so I started lifting 2016 running and lifting is always been my thing since I was 16, but since college that I used a tool in this case carbon to you know, basically track what I'm eating like exactly what I'm eating and what I like about it is that I can just click on different boxes of things like it within the app and really, you know, it makes it very easy.
Easy say, oh like I hate this thing that you know white rice from this package and like and it generally knows products at knows Brands and it did a really good job of letting me check in and just see how many calories I was consuming how much protein how much fat and from what sources one of the major takeaways that at least I got from carbon was that you can arrange your diet any number of different ways. In fact has like a really nice little slider where you can put in, you know, you want to eat more carbohydrates than less protein even or you want to have a vegetarian.
Ian diet which I don't I'm an omnivore. I'm an omnivore. My dad's Argentina. I like I like me like me. I'm fine. I don't even really like fish that much or chicken. I just like I like eating meat and eggs like my preferred sources and whey protein okay fine, but you can arrange things within the context of different types of diets. And I think there's real value to tracking precisely what one eats for even short periods of time and then I confess I stopped using the app for a bit then I went back to it, you know and not
Because things weren't adrift. I think some people really need that consistent checking other people need to perhaps just kind of eyeball it for themselves. But for me, I found that knowing exactly what I'm doing for some period of time allows me to explore things in a way that's really effective. And so I just want to you know, I just want to you know, give a nod to carbon and I don't do product endorsements on this podcast and let you know I read I do ad reads and that kind of thing for things I love but I say that because I think it's
it lands squarely in the context of what we're talking about, which is that I know what works for me. I also know that some people really love like a giant carb meal in the morning. Some people don't like meet some people, you know, and I think what's so beautiful about the way that you've been talking about science and nutrition in particular over the last few years and still here now is that you don't really seem to care whether or not people are vegan vegetarian omnivore or even carnivore dare. I say, it's just a matter of how people are couching the
the advice for sure and the reason I keep coming back to this is that I really think that you this discussion but you in particular are best poised in this whole field of public facing Health nutrition advice to really change the way that the messaging occurs and the way that people hear that messaging and I say that with with the utmost like respect that means a lot to me thank you because most people are not going to go read the meta-analyses right and most people don't know how to parse data, but I think that
Paying attention to the words that are spoken right before the advice should be I we need to think come up with something like that's like the the Norton the Norton method pay attention to the words provided right before the advice.
Yeah, I think how you say it makes all the difference right? And even you know, take somebody I've had no conflict on social media with which to be pulse all Dino, which you know when he would say something like well I cut vegetables out of my diet and I felt like
my ex Emma got better. Okay, that's your expert. You can't go find on average that's definitely not reflected in the research, you know, but hey, if you know that you did this thing and you felt better, that's fine. But how we're over generalizing to the population is the problem right? And so I think I mean again, I'll say hey I Cal cycle a little bit which again you can do using the app, right? You can change your days and what I'll give you more calories some days more calories other days.
And I was I showed a screenshot of it one time and somebody goes so why do you why do you do it like that? Like I said because it's better this way for like muscle growth and fat loss and I go
No, because I had a get-together with friends on Saturday. And I knew I was gonna have a couple beers and I knew that there was gonna be some fatty food. So I put 4,000 calories on that day and less the rest of the week. No like that. That's it. That's your reasoning. Yeah, like compliance is the biggest one. I'll tell people unlike.
The reason that I and we talked about this earlier, like I've never used performance-enhancing drugs. I've never even even when Pro homeowners believable. I didn't use them. I've
known you're not on trt. Not only do we need to distinguish this because people nowadays like gonna put trt. Well, as long as it's keeping someone's testosterone in the normal reference range, which is somewhere between 300 and 200 nanograms per deciliter than they're like, they're not you've never injected a synthetic version of a hormone know and I like my testosterone
Our own even from like age 18 when the first time I had it measured up until like even a year ago the lowest it's been I think has been like 750 and the highest it's been was like 1050 and so obviously don't need it. You don't write your well you're on the upper. You're on your high normal, right? Yeah. So the reason that I've been able to have so much success and I get the skepticism. I really do so many people say I mean, look at how many people are out beating their chests saying their drug-free and then it comes out that they weren't right.
But I have been brutally consistent for 25 years in 25 years the longest I ever took off of resistance training was seven days and it was after I won World Championships in 2022 for m193. Kilo, you know, I so I've been able to be really consistent my training and I always give this comparison of I think it just really highlights how powerful consistency is and it relates back to my favorite quote I've ever heard
Heard the magic you're looking for is in the work. You keep attempting to avoid the work is the hack if people and I like what our friend Peter RTS said this when he was talking about by a hacks and wide and like the term box. You said I don't like that it occupies so much mind space right you get people really focused on the minutiae, which is fine if they're already doing the big stuff if they want to kind of level up a little bit cool for me minutiae is where I live because the difference between me winning a powerlifting meet me losing World Championship.
Oops is 1% right, but for most people we just got to get inconsistent.
If I said Andrew.
I want you to become the best three-point shooter. You possibly can be but you can't get any coaching. You can't even watch any tutorials, right? But all you did for 10 years was go out and shoot three-pointers for two hours a day. You probably won't go to the NBA but I bet you be pretty good at three pointers, right and I feel like if people could just get that message and internalized it more. No, it's not that you didn't have your carb to Fat ratio. Perfect. No, it's not that you ate your carbs at the wrong time know it's it's not that you didn't get exactly.
Exactly this much protein. It's you just stop being consistent. You stop doing it you yeah, you were really consistent Monday through Friday and then Saturday and Sunday came and you blew out right? Like if I'm consistent with my budget Monday through Friday, but then I blow it on the weekend. Hey, guess what that we could money still counts and calories are the same way
and you enjoy resistance training. I love it. I love it. Do you do cardiovascular defined as because people get I'm starting to catch Flack these days when I say car.
You believe it or not repetitive motion movement designed to elevate your heart rate for 12 minutes or
more. So I'll do usually do like a five-minute warm-up on the bike before I train and then I will I will also make sure I get at least 10,000 steps on average per day. I usually a verbal closer to like 11,000 but I don't do a lot of purposeful cardio. Now, what I will tell you is my average heart rate and lifting sessions is about 140 to
150 so if the definition of cardio is that then I'm getting cardio and actually when we when I've had you know, most my markers of metabolic Health assess. I'm very metabolically healthy. I've got good actually it was funny. I just competed at Nationals in late May and I go one by one and actually again very cool kind of Side Story you we
But the injuries I've dealt with and and so I'm 42 now. It's been an eight-year journey and I mean going from I've had back pain so bad. I couldn't even get off the floor needed a cortisone injection my spine at one point just be able to stand up and multiple hip injuries a lot of chronic pain I dealt with and I'm very proud of myself that I never gave up because in my heart of hearts, I felt like I haven't hit my last PR yet and at Nationals this past year. I actually set a national dead lift.
Good for my age and weight. Congratulations. It was actually unofficial world record and qualified for the World Championships. But the one of the Team USA coaches and name's Matt Gary him and his wife Suzy are like and evidence-based pile of thing. There are the goats and they are there is no better game day coach to pick attempts than Matt and Susie Gary of the maybe my coach Ben escrow shout out to Ben but they were at the meat and we've known each other.
15 years and the next day. I came down into the lobby and they're down eating breakfast and Matt's like your ears must be burning. We were just talking about you and I'm like, oh what he goes. You know what I'm impressed with he goes your cardiovascular fitness and you know balancing meets nine lifts, right you get three attempts on squat bench press dead lift. And so I kind of like looked at him where he goes. We were there between warm-ups and finishing. It was about four hours. You never sat down you were yelling the entire time you're
Talking the entire time because I'm a very extroverted active person than when I'm firing myself up. It comes out very extra. He's like you're yelling the entire time and you never were tired your and and I again I look at my part rate and I was at the meat. I think the average was like 150 or 160 and so, you know, some people would not consider that cardio but I would say my cardiovascular system does. All right.
So I would argue it might be related to your not getting sick very often. You know, it's
Very clear that activation of the sympathetic nervous system is one main driver of the immune system. This is why often people observe that they go through a very stressful period of life and then they go on vacation and they get sick or they're taking care of a loved one and you know that person either gets better or passed this way or you know, there's some ending to that caretaking and then they get sick.
I have observed that exact thing when I went through my first divorce. I was also getting I was also involved in a lawsuit with a company that I used to own a portion of it.
A very long story ended up having a good ending for me and all that stuff kind of resolved itself the divorce the lawsuit everything resolved itself and bought a six week time period as soon as it resolved, I got sicker than I ever had been in my entire life. I got actual influenza, you know, I tell people after that experience in 2018 I go here's words. I'll never use again. I think I might have the flu. No, you know after you've had it for sure, you know, and I mean it but it was
My body had just maybe it's a little bit of woo, but it was like my body. I dragged it across the finish line and said, okay. We'll see you in a couple weeks because we're taking a break, you
know, think about human evolution. I mean, these are just so stories any time people talk about human evolution by the way, like no one really knows but the idea that you know, if there was a famine or you need to take care of children and famine at the idea that you would be more vulnerable to disease at those moments sure, but it's also true that the catecholamines.
Dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine activate certain components of the immune system that protects you against things. I mean is that can protect you against everything but it's when you relax and rest finally that you are more vulnerable to incoming
infantry see this pain to write like, uh, uh Mackey on talking about this stuff where you know, I forget who was talking about this. I remember listen to a podcast with it wasn't him, but it was another pain expert and they said,
You know because your beliefs about pain your stress level your sleep like your psychological Maloo actually matter in terms of your pain experience. In fact the single biggest lie ever I've pulled to get me consistently training and pain-free was becoming more relaxed and less stressed out all the time at managing my psychological stress better, you know, you're not vibrating and spun up all the time your body has again. This is a little woozy, but I think you have more energy. I mean if you
Chance it makes sense. I mean those kind of coal means I mean there are other molecules involved too, but that you know dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine, you know cocktail is driving us forward in motion and thinking, you know all the time and if you're putting thoughts into one set of things they're not going elsewhere. Like you said, it's
all trade-offs. I read something from a PhD in Psychology said stop thinking about your problems. The problem is you're thinking about your problems too much thinking about it does
It solve them and just ruminating on the makes it worse actually again, if you look at like pain literature fibromyalgia chronic fatigue syndrome, very close ties to psychological stress, and we were talking earlier about like if you look at the the data on mortality cardiovascular disease cancer on with Aces scores, which is adverse childhood events scale. So zero being best you were loved as a child that sort of that you had no real big worries 10 being basically abuse.
aged
There's like a very wealthy very tight. But there's a dose-response of Aces scores on the risk of mortality. So what happens in the body affects the mind what happens in the mind affects the body and we were talking about with pain literature what happens in the mind affects the body in your pain experience and even just something like sleep there was a study done where they looked at military members and they had eight hours of sleep forces for
hours of sleep and they looked at the risk of acute injury two hundred thirty six percent increased risk in the people getting four hours of sleep versus eight hours. And now here's where people get this wrong people somebody reached out to me. So well, I got four hours sleep last night should I know no one bad night of sleep doesn't do that sleep is a cumulative effect. Just like if you have a weeks-long worth a bad sleep when you sleep 12 hours on the weekend. You're not making up that sleep debt. It's more about what you're doing.
Time over time just like nutrition just like training exactly. And so this actually brings me to I know we kind of have gone down the rabbit hole here. But when you look at Ben Carpenter did a great example of this he is good social media account. He had a jar of like blue marbles and a jar of green marbles. He said let's pretend that this is all junk food these blue these green marbles are all junk food ultra-processed.
This blue is minimally processed Whole Foods, right if my diet is mostly junk and I add one good meal. He puts a Blue Marble in the green. Did it change things? No, and everybody knows that right? Like if you eat a mostly junk diet, you have one good one solid or one, you know, good meal. It's not going to change things. So, why does everybody think if we take one from here and put it over here that it drastically changes things because it doesn't
it's about what you do consistently over the course of time.
And So speaking of we're talk about the Mind affecting the body but then the body also affects the mind and so there was just a study published. I just covered it on my on my channel where they took men with general anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder and they had them resistant strain two times a week for 25 minutes a session 50 minutes total eight weeks. It's not much training. I think it was like 6 hours and 40 minutes of total training over the entire two months now.
In statistics you're familiar with in effect size, which is basically how meaningful is in effect because you can have a significant effect. That isn't very meaningful if you have enough subject number.
So when we say things like an effect size point two is considered small point five. It considered moderate and .8 is considered large anything about 0.8 ssris are typically in the point 32.5 range. I think in like best case scenarios. I get up around a point eight point seven point eight the effect size for resistance training two times a week 25 minutes a day for eight weeks was a 1.7.
One major depressive disorder. Wow, anybody who's a scientist out there if they hear effect size of 1.7. They do exactly what you did their eyebrows go up and they go where they you know, they show that's right. You don't see effect sizes like that very often and I want to be very clear. I'm not saying do resistance training in place of ssris. That's a very these are these individuals had not trained. They hadn't tried previously. Yeah, they were they were healthy are
actually don't know the specific characteristics, but I knew they were coming from like not training right now. Hey, like listen both these things can be true. Maybe somebody needs to get an SSRI because like depressed people don't even want to get out of bed a lot of times right? So getting them to the gym, even if they know it's going to help them is a hard it's a hard swing so maybe coupling that but
That's just resistance training and that affects this right. So I think one of the biggest revolutions we're going to see in science is the broad application of biopsychosocial across a bunch of different disciplines and stop thinking about well your body's a bag of meat and it's attached to your brain. And if you poke the bag punch the bag burn the bag cut the bag brain goes out we and I think we're going to start.
Thinking about things much differently and I think it's going to open up a lot more in science. And in fact, honestly if I had to go back and do a PhD again, it would be in some sort of like psychology or whatnot because I just think there's so much untapped in that realm and I was actually talking about this with some of the other day and it's pure anecdote. I'm completely speculating.
I have yet to see an interview with somebody who's in their 90's or hundreds who sounds really stressed out.
They're mostly like dgaf right and when you ask them what they did, like most of them say I drink wine every night. All right, the one thing I remember she was like 110. So yeah, I drink Dr. Pepper every day or whatever. It strikes me that and again genetics matter their lifestyle Max. I'm not saying that stuff doesn't matter.
I don't see at least in my experience people who make it old age.
They're not usually very spun up all the time. I just I haven't observed that. I don't know if you've seen similar observations or
they seem to enjoy life. I have a grandfather on one side that died earlier but a grandfather on the other side who lived into his 90s and he ate a steak every day. He smoke till pretty late in life before he eventually quit. He had ice cream dessert after every dinner. He's Argentine so they they stack their meals toward the end of the day definitely.
Like walking I guess the point is that he was always interested in what was in the newspapers, but he wouldn't get riled up about it. He liked walking. He really enjoyed life. Like if there's one, you know key characteristic to describe him as he really enjoyed life now, he didn't take the best care of himself in the in the sense that had he perhaps never smoked or quit earlier or you know dropped the excess calories. He might have lived an additional two or three years, but he was really happy until the end and that's the lesson there is we're not saying that
Stuff doesn't matter he would have gotten better results if he hadn't smoked if he had, you know paid more attention is to Tricia and that sort of thing.
But we have to keep in mind like what is the the hierarchy of importance in the power here? Right and so I'll give you an example. It's a it's we're going to zoom in on the blade of grass. But I believe it relates back to this this conversation. We're having so we know creatine works because we've got thousands of double-blind placebo-controlled Trials showing that creatine works. Right but there was a study where they gave people creates it or didn't give them creates in and then randomly told them if they got it or not.
Meaning you had people who didn't get create in got creatine who didn't get it told they didn't get it people who got it told they got it and people who got it told they didn't get it and what they found was the results and I forget what they actually specifically measured but the results basically were like not what they got what they told them. Okay. Now people will misinterpret that as well see creates and doesn't work. No. No, it works. It just means your beliefs about what creatine does or more.
Powerful than what it actually does just like actually there's a similar trial with caffeine and I'm thinking about there was a study but I don't have the specific citation, but they had two groups of men trained drug-free one group. They told they were getting steroids that group gained significantly more strength and muscle mass.
Now I would argue that's probably because they're going into training sessions believing that they can train harder believing that they will recover better. But that goes to show the power of placebo and the power of belief when I say Placebo people think what I'm saying is you're lying about your experience. That is not what I'm saying at all. I think your experience is probably quite valid what I'm saying is it may not be due to the thing you think it's due to
but your beliefs about the thing and so where I get really focused is let's do the big stuff right because so many people are so worried about little stuff and one of the things I'll tell them is
Hey, I have no data to back this up. But my intuition tells me that the amount of stress you're spending on these small variables is probably killing you faster than if you got those variables wrong.
And if we could just focus on the big rocks first, and and if we can pick up some Pebbles after we get the big rocks great, but don't drop the big rocks trying to pick up Pebbles. I love it. And I love this example of the creatine experiment because just to repeat the conclusion because I want to make sure that people don't take away the wrong conclusion.
Creating Works. Absolutely, but your belief about creatine Works more in this case. Yeah, so two things can work one more than the other and the placebo AK belief effects are very very powerful exactly and pletely agree with you there. Wonderful way to set the stage for some of the specific questions that were asked when it's it on social media. I'm gonna sit down with Lane Norton again.
And I'm very curious about some of these as well. So yeah, I'll inject some of my own experience and questions training to failure and Reps in reserve. We should Define these a little bit and before we get into it. It's fun to have these kinds of conversations nowadays about resistance training knowing that both men and women should resistance training people who want bigger muscles and who don't it should resistant strain because in the past it was always about like bodybuilding and preseason football and people go into the military. I think thanks to the
Great work that you've done but I'll just give a particular shout out to some of the women in the nutrition and fitness space namely doctor Gabrielle Lion in terms of menopause perimenopause. Dr. Mary Claire Haver and women in that sector really emphasizing the key need for resistance training their other names as well, but really championing the importance of resistance training training to failure in my book means when you can't move the weight by whatever means
Any more in good form in proper form that's failure. So we're not talking about four straps. We're not talking about swinging the upper body or using momentum when so trained to failure. You can't move for the resistance anymore in good form and Reps in reserve. My understanding is one's own subjective understanding about how close they are to that point of failure. Do I have that? Right? Yeah. So
you Define failure the way I Define failure, which is you cannot take the way through another concentric repetition.
Breaking form reps and Reserve would be an r i are of one means you stopped one rep shy of failure are our of to you stop to rep shy of failure and so on and so forth, right and so I would define those that way.
Okay. So with those definitions in mind is training to failure more effective at generating strength and hypertrophy increases then if one keeps a few reps in reserve and of course we have to balance
Us against all the factors related to recovery Etc, but assuming that one follows a program of doing and I'm really just trying to cut right through the middle here. Let's say two or three exercises per muscle group and does after sufficient warm up.
Let's say two to five sets, but we're going to call work sets.
You could imagine an extreme scenario where every single work set is taken to failure. You could imagine taking only the last set of each exercise to failure. You can imagine taking none of them to failure. Assuming adequate volume is achieved across the week. My understanding is this is 10 to 20 sets per muscle group across the week. It could be distributed across different workouts or all done in one workout is training to failure going to generate more.
Strength and hypertrophy then leaving some repetitions and Reserve. So let's start with extreme scenario. I go to failure on every single set and I do what I need you to recover.
Doesn't matter if it's a one, you know, only doing that muscle group once per week or spread out multiple times per week. I'm doing what I need to to recover in between my genetics my hormone status my sleep my nutrition on and on.
Is going to failure more effective than not going to failure.
This is going to generate a lot of discussion in the comments. I can't wait to see it. So I'm going to cite quite a bit of work from my powerlifting coach Zach Robinson because he is at FAU just finished his Ph.D. And did a lot of metal Russians and meta-analyses on this exact topic. So I'll give you the answers first that are straight down the line scientific answers and then I'll explain things for muscular hypertrophy.
You need to get close to failure, but you probably don't need to train to failure to maximize hypertrophy, but you got to get pretty close.
You can be stronger but to maximize strength, you're probably better off not touching failure very often. So there are a few studies now looking at this showing that I think there was one study recently and I can't remember the exact details, but that I remember it being pretty well-designed and the takeaway was hypertrophy was similar between the groups, but the group that went to failure or state a few reps. Shy of failure actually got stronger compared to the group that was taking
Sets to
failure and did they control for total volume of work? So it because I can imagine not going to failure you can do more sets because you've got and that's exactly more quote unquote gas in the
tank and practically that may be a benefit of stopping shy of failure, right? But yeah, they controlled for those variables. So when we talk about volume the way we defined that is essentially number of hard sets, which a hard set would be a set close to failure. The general consensus is within five reps of failures considered a hard set. Now what I
Tell people is that may not sound like much most people have never truly pushed themselves to failure. Okay, and I'll I'll give some practical examples of me. So my best set of squats ever. I did five 34:10. This is long time ago likes I when I finished that set I actually somebody had to come save me because I couldn't fully lockout my Lumbar and I couldn't get the bar on my right side all the way back up something to run over in the gym and help me after that set. I
laid down and I physically hardly couldn't move for about 15
minutes. So this is you know gun to the
Head. Yes, I do as many as you can your family's been kidnapped. If you don't get these ten Rapture, you're all those mental game that that sort of thing and I mean I was done, you know what I mean? And so one of the things I'll tell people is
The first five reps of that set were still hard. They still felt hard, right? And so people who say all you stop a rapper Too Shy failure you your train like a like so you're telling me if I stop to rep shy on that one that that's an easy set because it's not I can tell you that and the reason I'm giving this background is because in research studies where they have people who are like
Beginners are intermediates and they asked them to rate their rir. They tend to underestimate their rir, right? So they they'll say, you know during a set say your rir and they might say to and what they find is when the researchers push them to True failure yell at them crank the music get them really psyched up.
They get five more reps than they think they'll get on average. Right? So most people if you've never actually taken things too true failure, you actually probably don't know what it is. So I do think it's useful to train to failure at times.
I think you make a very important point, which is that occasionally training to failure gives you a sense of what failure really is for you and and no one can really tell you that only you can tell you that and experience that but if I understand correctly earlier you said once you know what?
Failure is for you. Then if strength gains are your goal and I think more and more people by the way are training for strength who don't want hypertrophy at least not across every muscle group. Think when I talk to the general public which I do a lot I get the sense that men and women are like, yeah, I'll I'll lift weights. I can see the value of that would love a little bit more muscle here a little bit more muscle there, but they don't want to be generally larger and yet they can understand and appreciate the value of getting stronger.
Everywhere, but because being strong across your whole body is one of the core definitions of
Health being strong is fun. So again for hypertrophy doesn't seem to matter for take every set to fail you or stop a couple reps. Shy I would argue that probably you you'd want to leave most reps roast sets shy of failure. And if you're going to take one to failure take the last set of an exercise to failure because then you can get whatever benefits might be there.
But if you take the first step to failure, I mean imagine if I did that like set of 10 with you know, 5:30 on squats as my first set to what am I going to get the next set of I try to do 5:30. I can tell you based on how I felt maybe three reps maybe you know, and so your performance is just going to really drop off a cliff if you're going to True failure on like a compound exercise isolations a little bit different and so I would say whereas if you probably could have done like sets with you know, six seven Reps for a
multiple sets and then have gone to failure on your last one right now. It may seem a little bit counterintuitive. Why would be the same for hypertrophy but different for strength? Well a strength. You also have to think about stimulus for to fatigue ratio because fatigue will Mass strength, right and I know this because I've like when I overreach for powerlifting competitions, which is basically like we're taking me a little bit past my point of what I can recover from
I mean I've had literally before Nationals in 2017. I was warming up on deadlift my last heavy deadlifts session like 10 days before the meet and I went to pull my final warm-up which is 585 and I couldn't budge it off the ground. I was so tired sore. I couldn't get it was like I couldn't get my body to do what I wanted it to do.
10 days later I pulled 7:16.
Right. It's amazing. What fatigue will mask and so
If you're always training to failure, you're going to be training under pretty high fatigue circumstances. Does it really matter for muscle growth? Because it's really just about doing enough hard sets and putting that mechanical tension on the muscle.
With strength, you also have to think about like what is the most pure form of strength its Force production, right and force is mass times acceleration. So you have a you have a mass component. You have a you have a speed component.
And so this is actually exact Robinson and his company David data-driven strength who I've been coaching with for three years. I heard them on a podcast and he was giving his like hypothesis of how to optimize strength in a powerlifter and I remember thinking I really like the way this guy is thinking he's thinking outside the box and it makes a lot of sense. So one of his thing's was if you're training close to fatigue all the time in the goal is strength. Think about what that means in terms.
Terms of your Force production. So let's let's say you do a set of eight reps, right your first few are pretty fast and then by the end, they're pretty slow the load hasn't changed. So what happened to your Force production your Force production is going pretty far down. He said I don't really want my athletes grinding reps and training. I want them to hit some heavy singles and doubles and triples because they need that because that's a skill. You have to have those neurological everybody's done this whenever I hit this for 10
Laughs and here's what my run rep max should be and then they go and get stapled with it. Right because it doesn't necessarily translate because a one rep max or the purest form of strength is a very specific skill. If you've never trained it. It's very difficult to get accustomed to
So we want to hit some his idea was you know in workouts were going to hit a heavy top set heavy single double or triple or whatever it is and then are back off sets instead of taking those close to failure instead of doing say well we'll do you know, 75% of your your training max four sets of Aid and have you getting pretty close to failure and seventy three sets of eight. Why don't we just do like six sets of four with that weight because now
You're doing those first four reps, which you can move that weight faster, you're having greater force production and creating the same good stimulus, but with less fatigue and so again that was kind of hypothesis and he did a meta-analysis bit of aggression that supported us and now some of the randomized control trials have come out and shown something similar and in my experience. I was honestly shocked at because he had all kinds of
Stuff to deal with when he first started training me because I still was dealing with a lot of back pain hip pain. I hadn't really gotten that under control yet. And when I got ready for worlds in 2022, which I think we did our first podcast like the week after I had won worlds.
I worked up to being able to do like two or three heart sets of squats a week and deadlifts. And that was all I could do. That was all my body could tolerate before I get pain? And so we did a lot of low load relatively low low for me, you know, 60 70 % 1rm for low rep number sets. But trying to move it as fast as possible to keep that pain under control for me, but to get the stimulus and I was shocked at how strong I
I got because before in 2014-15 when I was winning open national titles, I mean I was doing 1520 hard sets of squats and deadlifts so weak and way more for bench press and so I always thought well, that's how much I need to get to that level of strength and even now like so we've been able to keep progressing it now. I'm doing probably more like 67 harder sets of those exercises per week. And I'm basically back to the strongest I've ever been doing weight loss. That's it.
A lot of it is we have learned to find The Sweet Spot with managing that stimulus to fatigue ratio. So all that to say if your goal is building strength. It's mostly about no doing enough like heavy lifting that you actually do get stronger. And then if you want to train closer to failure you can because again most of my audience isn't trying to be a powerlifter,
right? No, but I think a lot of the audience would like to be stronger and not necessarily grow their muscles.
Bigger except in a few specific places on the body.
And so this would be the protocol here we go protocols will plug this would be a protocol for probably not necessarily like growing the most muscle mass but getting stronger because you're not training so close to failure. But you know, obviously you're trying to move as Zach says you whatever the given load is you want to move it as quickly as possible. And so there's actually also data to show that like if you train slower
Precisely that it's not as good for strength. So they actually there was a mint I think a meta-analysis recently where they looked at either concentric repetition of slower than two sets of more than two seconds or less than two seconds and saw strength outcomes were better and people taking less than two seconds to complete a rep interesting. So that's the concentric phase now the lowering phase The Eccentric phase. So we're not sure about that yet enter so it so I mean we do use some Tempo training in my training but it's mostly because like me doing this
Slower Tempo squat if my back starts acting up I can do some squatting and not really pit that pain trigger as much so but I'm still trying to move the concentric as quickly as possible. And so I don't know about that doesn't matter how slowly move the concentric versus how fast you move it. But yeah, what I would say is, you know, when it comes to building muscle really the world is your oyster the the the research really shows.
Machines versus free weights low reps are we going low reps High Reps going to failure stopping a few reps shot. It all builds the same amount of muscle for the most part. You have to work hard, but you got to work hard. Yeah, you got to be consistent with it. Obviously like the theme of this podcast right? But you can do it. Anyway, if we look at the I mean obviously anecdotal, but if we look at the history of the mr. Olympia as they all trained very differently, you know, I mean Ronnie Coleman, I mean, I'm sure you remember when the unbelievable came out.
He has DVD back in like 2001 where he's tossing around 200 pound dumbbells, and he's doing seven eight hundred pounds squats 600-pound front squats and everybody's just looking at this like my God and you watch somebody like Phil Heath train who again one of the greatest? Mr. Olympia is of all time Phil mostly did machines, but he built obviously a great about a month. Now people will say Well, they're on steroids all those guys. It's all controlled. That's just me. It's an equal playing field.
Because they're all doing they're all doing it.
Right and the research shows anywhere from whatever, you know, like five to 30 repetitions can generate hypertrophy as long as the final few repetitions are really hard and correct, you know and volume is adjusted. I really
like there is no hypertrophy rep range, like people used to think lies. Oh, it's like 6 to 15 reps is hypertrophy. Now, I think practically it makes sense to do a lot of your sets in that range because you know, if you're trying to do 30 reps getting close to failure. I mean gosh, I'm going to run out of breath
If
I'm going to work at work out in a you know, waiting for me. Yes, and if you work out in a gym where there are other people like be kind, you know, like the other people going to need the space in the equipment. So it could take forever, you know, you know, you know ten sets of 30 like that salsa that's impolite. So only half kidding. They're one of the more common questions is about training for people 50 years old and older and
I love the fact that we're talking so much about strength the seems to be one of the key Evolutions in this field. And again in my opinion the people have come through this podcast as guess. Dr. Gabrielle. Lion yourself Andy Galpin who now has his own podcast the perform podcast like more and more discussions about strength and training for strength for the general public. Not just people want to be powerlifter. So I think there's a lot of carry over there and I think the more that people here
Let's say that resistance training can be really powerful for Health and Longevity and getting strong as one of the best things you can do for your Health and Longevity injury protection Etc. Peter T has talked about this and it's not just about building muscle want to know.
How they should adjust their training if at all if they are 50 and older so obviously one of the key things to getting and staying in great shape over time. I always say is you avoid getting hurt could we say? Okay, don't try anything to novel and crazy without easing into it. Could we also
perhaps I would say that goes for
anybody. Okay. Bye Franklin. Okay, could we also say perhaps find the movements that you can do without injury and just keep doing those over and over is there is there any evidence that that
Mixing up the exercises is important meaning doing new movements or if you find two or three movements that work well for you. Can you just stick with those and just work on Progressive
overload? I think you can stick with those I think, you know muscle the whole concept of muscle confusion muscle most tension and how long it's under that tension. And for how many sets is under that it doesn't it's not like well, this is a I can tell that this is an incline bench press versus an incline dumbbell up. I mean, you know, you might move through different ranges of motion and whatnot.
But the tension on the muscle is the tension on the muscle. So what I'd say to people is I think most people probably change up things too much because there is like a neurological adaptation to doing a specific exercise where you get stronger at it. And so now you're using more load you can create more mechanical tension, but if you're always changing things up, you might not take advantage of that full, you know, kind of neurological adaptation.
But if you're always doing the same exercises, it's too easy to get comfortable and fall into well today. I do 3 sets of 10 and I always do 3 sets of 10 and I use this wait. That's why do it now. You're no longer progressively overloading. So I think there has to be a balance between enough changing of exercises to kind of promote some novelty because as you know novelty there's a reward center in the brain for that just changing something and think about any time you've going to try a new workout you get a
Excited about it. You know when I was going to try Zach's way of training, you know, three years ago. I was very very excited about it, you know, so I think there is a place for that but I think people tend to fall into a little bit too much of doing the same thing over and over or constantly changing things because they're always chasing that novelty and I think that the reality is probably somewhere in the middle but specifically for older over 50
I think whatever you can do with low pain level and be consistent with that you enjoy.
That's what's best for you. I mean, I always tell the story. I had a client who they love CrossFit the love doing CrossFit and they said I want to but I want to build muscle and I know it's not the best workout for building muscle. I said it might be for you because if you hate bodybuilding training and you're not motivated to go do it and you don't enjoy it. You're probably not going to work hard at it. And so maybe for you a crossfit workout is the best muscle building workout because I try to get you to do something else.
You'd hate it would lose motivation, right and feeds back to that consistency principle that you talked about before exactly. So when we look at like I think this is might be interesting for some of your listeners, so
When we look at how much muscle you can build after certain age?
You can build the same amount of muscle as a percentage of your starting skeletal muscle mass. Okay. So what I mean by that is once you're 50 60, you've usually lost some muscle. Okay, and if you've never lifted before if you go in to lift as a percentage basis, it appears that you will still gain the same amount of lean mass. But for example, if somebody has 80 kilos of starting Lamar most your podcast listener, sir USM. So let's say somebody has 150 pounds of lean mass.
When they start just throwing around a number and they gain 10% over a couple of years. Now, they've 165 pounds of lean mass. They've gained 15 pounds, but they the percentage is 10 if somebody starts in they have 100 and say 20 pounds of lean mass 10% of that is 12 pounds. They gained an absolute less amount. But as a percentage it was similar or same. We actually see that with women to women actually develop as a percentage of their starting lean mass.
Mass the same percentage increase in lean mass as men when they do the same level of hard training. So what I tell people who are I'll have people say, well, you know, I'm too old to start resisting. No, no now is the perfect time to start right now and honestly, it doesn't take a huge dose. I mean if you want to be like, you know, go getting the powerlifting and like competed competent. Yeah. Now it takes a bigger dose, right but what it takes to get and I'm just gonna throw a number out 80%
Majority of the benefits for health strength resistance training, you can probably get in 34 sessions of 30 to 40 minutes, you know, you don't have to have a huge input of time and just look at the depression study we talked about obviously that's not like muscle and strength but two sessions of 25 minutes. I mean it is a absurdly low dose that you require and I think a lot of people I try to be careful about this too. We'll see how I train which
is 23 hours a day for five days a week and think that's what's needed. No. No, that's what I want to go win a world championship. That's what's needed for that. It's not needed for you to build muscle and get stronger. And even when I was a grad school across the street, they did a study in frail elderly where they had them. Basically they had trouble like standing up from a seated position by the end of the 12-week study of them like progressively overloading them, which was basically like them just lowering the seat at first right and then
Maybe adding a little little bit of weight. They saw these people built muscle don't bone got healthier better quality of life. And these are people in their 70s and there was a study in Australia actually got on the news Peter T at talked about it with elderly women who I think they were above age 70 and there's some of them and they're dead lifting like 150 like like upper hundreds in deadlift, you know, it's incredible how
ow, I took a class called skeletal muscle structure function and plasticity. Your skeletal muscle is so adaptable. It is such an adaptable tissue. It's amazing the same thing that can allow somebody to squat Jesus Oliveira shout-out squat over a thousand pounds is the same tissue that can allow somebody to run 100 miles like David Goggins. Think about that. That's really incredibly adaptable.
Div, and so what I'll tell the people regardless of your age your sex whatever demographic you are in resistance training for just a couple times a week for a short period of time will drastically improve the prospects of your quality of life your longevity. I mean if we look at hand grip strength, we look at lean master all inversely associated with mortality, especially the older you get becomes a stronger Association and
always tell people I'm like, it's not about to hand grip strength. This is a proxy for just strength over. All right, there was a study where they looked at push-ups and found push-ups where inversely associated with mortality. It's not that doing push-ups is Magic. It's that that is a proxy for that person being strong and we focus so much of our attention, especially like on falls in the elderly right of well, if they had more bone mass, they wouldn't break their bones. What if they didn't fall in the first place because they were strong enough and had good enough gait and balance to catch themselves.
And oh, by the way, nothing better for increasing bone mass than resistance training. So I am a huge fan of and then we already talked about like the metabolic like skeletal muscle Gabrielle touched on it was one of the first things Don Lemon so when I came in his lab, he goes skeletal muscle fits every definition of an organ and we don't talk about it like an organ we talked about like it's this inner tissue that just sits there and it is not it sends out signals to other tissues integrate signals from other tissues. It is an
an organ and so many people have unhealthy skeletal muscle and if we treat and what happens when you resistant strain what happens when you build muscle muscle is a metabolic sink. It is greedy, right? It's sucking up. It's incredible. You can take people who are type 2 diabetic and if you get them on a slight calorie deficit you get them to start exercising it is incredible how fast their blood markers will start to resolve like they can still be 0
obese and you'll see their blood markers start to resolve within like you'll see improvements in weeks Layman did a want to say a 16-week study and other diabetic or pre-diabetic women back in like 2003. I want to say and he said within four weeks. He said we already saw these blood markers start to resolve like your hba1c as it resolved, but a lot of these other markers are resolved because at a fundamental level at least in my opinion and other metabolism people may disagree.
I'm a big fan of Occam's razor, which is plainly stated the simple all things being equal. The simplest explanation is typically true. The the the actual hardcore scientific definition is the the hypothesis that requires the least amount of assumptions is usually true.
You're putting in so much energy into a system and you're running out of places to put it. So you have skeletal muscle mass you have liver these other tissues and the periphery and then you have adipose tissue and did you know they actually show people who have more adipocytes are actually more resistant to type 2 diabetes. So they have more smaller fat cells that can soak up more of this stuff. And since type 2 diabetes is basically too much glucose in the blood.
Right and a lack of insulin sensitivity small adipocytes are more insulin sensitive. And so what happens is we at least in adipocyte physiology.
We stink of Adipose is also an inert tissue and now we know that's not true
either and lots of different cell types. Yes to just think that there was you know, Gina Brown beige and white fat cells and La subcutaneous and intra visceral now they've done you know, sequencing of different white fat cells and like 25 probably Now 50 different. I mean different genetics among those cells that respond differently to insulin. I mean fat is a very interesting and heterogeneous tissue tissue.
Shoo.
Yeah, but most fat cells at least based on the literature I've read and again, I'm happy to have somebody correct me who's an expert in this but they can expand to a certain point where they really becomes difficult for them to get bigger the Integrity of the cell because you still got a cell wall plasma membrane everything and you have an extracellular Matrix that is scaffolding this fat tissue onto your body. And so at a certain size of adipocyte it basically becomes the you just can't pack anymore in there. Okay, and so
If you can't put any more in muscle because muscle isn't you're not active and muscles not moving and turning through substrate and you can't pack anymore in adipose. Where is it wind up? It's in your blood you can't get and now when your blood levels of it's interesting because there are some people have all these theories but like one person a researcher was like, well, I think branched-chain amino acids actually cause insulin resistance because we see them elevated in the blood in type 2 diabetes and I was actually in a was I
I was in a I was a grad student watching this person present. I put my hand up. I said isn't everything elevated the blood type 2 diabetes. You know, why are we why are you picking on branched chain amino acids? So you do have some people who are too can become type 2 diabetic who are no Bees.
They tend to have not as many fat cells which sounds like it'd be an advantage and if you're lean or sorry if you are not over eating right and getting enough exercise in it. Probably is an advantage because you have less overall fat Mass. But you were going to reach that critical mass of an adipocyte about 100 microns. I think it is faster because your overall fat cell number. So at the same fat, Mass.
Your fat cells are bigger and bigger fat cells are less insulin sensitive. In fact, one of the treatment for type 2 diabetes. So finally Ria's I think they're called there are people are gamma agonists. They actually increase the production of fat cells. They create new small fat cells. Now you have a place to put stuff and you lower your blood glucose. So very Reservoir exactly and I'm over generalizing to be sure and again, I hope if I've butchered
chert anything someone who come in and correct me no will but what's amazing is this stuff in the blood? You just got to get stuff moving like because you start doing our size start controlling your calories a little bit. Guess what your oxidizing things to the Krebs cycle your oxidant you going through glycolysis. You can now start to pull things in right you're using this substrate you start to pull things in and because you're pulling things in now add,
Pause can start to release some of its free fatty acids into the blood so much try try. So glycerides into free fatty acids in the bloodstream, which can also facilitate this this month. So using muscle you are is a partitioning effect and it doesn't take long to start lowering this glucose blood lipids these things in the blood. It can actually resolve, you know, at least those markers can start resolving themselves pretty quickly.
It is why you know when we look at Weight Loss what level of weight loss they say is clinically relevant. It's only five percent right which you will have obese people and they'll say well 5% weight loss. You see these big benefits in like blood lipids and metabolic Health. You wouldn't think which is 5% weight loss you would get that but you do because just you're just giving a little bit of space to get that stuff in the blood out. Now again, this is my I want to be very
Clear this is not a proven thing. I feel pretty strongly that this explains a lot. But again, this is my personal opinion about how these diseases develop and what not but it is I think it's relatively simple.
Yeah using thinking about muscle as an organ thinking about feeding muscle. We talked about that earlier thinking about moving muscle and in particular training for strength resistance training of different kinds of hypertrophy. Yes, and but I you know, I'm kind of given a
a little bit of a biased vote for more strength training out there across the population for really for the longevity reasons. I mean Peter T has pointed out that the percentage of people who died after a fall not because of the Fall itself, but because of a hip injury or risk injury and then there they go in Mobile not or they're just not exercising as much anymore than they get an infection and then it Cascades. In fact, I had a conversation with one of my parents recently on their 79th birthday. I said, you know
In the next 5-10 years your biggest risk is probably going to be going downstairs or stepping off a curb not going up. But as Peter's point out going down so that that eccentric movement break, you know being able to sustain a fall being able to not fall to catch yourself. So to
speak on practically you fall farther going downstairs and you didn't go up
stuff exactly and that's and that pattern of falling while going down precedes a lot of infections and that end up deadly right? So, yep.
And you know hats off to Peter for really pointing out the relationship between those things and to you for encouraging people to strength train. Also, I love the idea that I don't have to go to failure if I'm in strength training because I like training heavy but the the training to the point where the muscles are quaking. Yeah, even though that's how I initially started training because I came up in the Mike men sir. Yeah Camp. I actually find that it eats into my recovery in a way that yeah, maybe a little more subtle but meaningful and nonetheless, which is that I feel fatigued later in the day.
Whereas if I complete a training session where I can complete every rep I noticed I don't get into that quaking thing. I actually have a lot of mental and physical energy later in the day
and it's psychologically emotionally fatiguing as well.
Maybe this one could be a guide of a brief answer or maybe not I don't know are there true age-related changes in metabolism that are independent of decline in muscle mass. You know, I saw a paper I think was published in science a few years ago that said that metabolism actually doesn't slow that much as we age
Of course total
muscle mass mean bmrb, Mr. Okay. So
metabolic rate in general, you know, I well I should just say up until that paper came out. I thought okay as we get older our quote unquote metabolism slows then of course, we have to remember that puberty and and childhood is sort of like being on performance-enhancing drugs in the sense that protein synthesis is just massive and ongoing but in a let's just say from age 30 onward. Let's say between 30 and 80 assuming that somebody's doing things to maintain
Muscle mass. Is there any reason to believe that they're mature their basal metabolic rate actually goes down just as a function of age.
You're citing the work from Herman pots are and really great lab looking energy expenditure that he does a lot of great stuff. And so that study was looking at several thousand people. I think looking at their total daily energy expenditure and really found it's pretty flat from like age 22 age 70 and then it kind of starts to go down, but you can tie it to the loss of lean mass.
And same thing for basal metabolic rate when they do into indirect limit re if you look at and this goes for so older people also women versus men and then also type 2 diabetics versus non type 2 diabetics obese versus not obese 80. I think the number is like over 80 percent of the variance in BMR is completely explained by the lean mass by the amount of lean mass. Somebody has and by
The last 20% probably is explained by where that lean mass occurs because liver for example is more metabolically active tissue grant program than pretty much any other tissue skeletal muscle is more metabolically active than like the fat tissue, but for a lean tissue is actually somewhat like metabolically slow because it's turnover rate is only 12 percent per day. You just have a lot of it. Yeah, right, right, but it on an absolute amount of calories you burn you burn a lot in muscle because you have so much of it rick great point.
So things like got liver tissues per gram of tissue are very active. So yeah, the just doesn't seem to be a for a long time. We spent so much time focused on the metabolism side of things when we're looking at aging we're looking at obesity and we just didn't really find impressive stuff even so obese people don't have slow metabolisms on average the the research shows that actually on an absolute basis. They're faster than people who are
We'll wait when you standardize for lean mass. It ends up being about the same people who are type 2 diabetic same thing when you standardize for lean mass. If anything to have a little bit faster BMR, and so if you think about it, it actually kind of makes a little bit of sense in a biochemical level because of your insulin resistant. You're also insulin resistant in fat tissue, right? So like okay, so it makes sense that maybe you like waste some more energy because you're not able to put it where you want to put it right?
so
the people get upset about this because although it's got to be metabolism metabolism and then glp-1 mimetics have a really kind of shown know the answer to this question is very much on the appetite side of things. It's like we tried to make a bunch of different drugs that would increase metabolism. We try to do all these things increase metabolism and nothing seemed to really make a big difference and then we came out with the most powerful appetite suppressants in the history of mankind.
Kind and people are losing large amounts of weight and keeping it off. So I think you know people got to focus on that metabolism side or or what I hear a lot of is from like like postmenopausal women. I'll hear somebody say my metabolism dropped.
What probably happened you're sleeping less? You're more stressed. You don't feel as good because the hormonal changes you don't feel as good. And so you spontaneously became less physically active and didn't realize it because our neat like are not exercise activity. Thermogenesis are non purposeful physical activity that we do fidgeting pacing is actually a large portion of our daily energy expenditure and people get this wrong. You can't make yourself do more neat because then it's just extra.
Sighs if you're purposely doing its exercise, it's all summer day. So all subconscious right? But if you're not sleeping as well and you're feeling worse spontaneously, you just not move as much and I know that people like that feels like there's a lot of judgment shame associated with that but it's it is the truth. It is a practical limitation and it may not be metabolism. I guess. I'm a little bit pedantic with that but it's still contributes to your overall energy expenditure. And so again, they've looked at this and
I mean there there is some evidence that like if your estrogen drops and you replace that with supplemental estrogen that that can like help out with like maybe 50 to 100 calorie energy expenditure per day. So if you're replacing something that's like now clinically low,
but my guess is that it would also drive more activity feeling better more activities exactly more
activity. And that's where it's hard to disconnect that right. So yeah, I think metabolism wise the results ended up being pretty underwhelming for all this stuff that we just assume. Well if somebody's
Or wait it's because they're slow metabolism. The research didn't pan that out. But I still think it is very interesting. And again, it speaks to like the power of the mind and the connection in the mind of how some of these drugs act but I do tell people when they say we do I you know calorie deficit didn't work for me and I you know, obviously my metabolism was messed up because you know, I had to get on those impact to lose weight. I'm like, it doesn't really do anything to metabolism like the speed of your
What happened is you just you no longer mindlessly snack you feel you are now in touch with your satiety signals, and that's why you're losing weight. And that's why these drugs they work.
Alright, so speaking of ozen Pikmin jarrow and similar. Let's talk about these drugs that are reducing appetite and you know In fairness
Have allowed millions of people to lose substantial amounts of weight and keep it off this topic tends to get people a little bit riled up on social media because I think for some reason people believe that if one gives these drugs the nod you're essentially saying you don't need to exercise but I didn't see anywhere or here or anywhere that the use of any compound drug or otherwise is mutually exclusive with taking good care of oneself in other ways, too.
What are your thoughts on these compounds and what you're seeing out
there? I think my take is pretty balanced on this which is I think they appear to be great tools for people reducing their intake and reducing body fat and it functions through appetite. I mean, these drugs are glp-1 mimetics and so glp-1 is a hormone secreted by the gut and response to feeding and it acts on the gut as well as the brain to reduce appetite.
You know slow motility. So it's a it's a satiety hormone. Essentially now, it has a very short half-life in the body. So the reason a lot of people will come out so well, there's things you can do naturally to increase your glp-1. This is like talking about I mean, yes a BB gun fires a projectile and a tank fires a projectile, but there's a pretty big difference, right? So with glp-1 memetics what's happening is they are taking that protein and changing out some of the amino acids.
It's in that protein and basically just gives it a much longer Half-Life. That's why people can take it, you know once a week or whatever it is because it just stays around much longer. And so if you think about the food environment we live in which is free access to cheap hyper palatable Foods.
Our brains for the most part are probably not equipped to regulate appetite in that environment and it really actually is kind of incredible how resilient the human body is because if you look at when the Obesity crisis started we already had ultra-processed Foods available. We had cakes cookies all these sorts of things, but the difference was
You had to go to the bakery and get it. You had there had to be some small barrier, right? And then you know, I think kind of the the barrier of the got flipped was basically now, you know in the last 30 years you can go anywhere and get access to cheap ultra-processed hyper palatable chemically dense foods.
And they just don't have the same effect on society that normal food does we're like and Kevin Hall study at NIH where they took people from a minimally processed diet and switch them to an ultra process diet and they spontaneously increase their caloric intake by 500 calories a day like overnight that may sound like not a big deal to some people listening. That is a very big deal.
It's about a pound of wheat per week of increase in body
weight. Yeah. I mean, I'm assuming assuming that there's no
oh increase energy expenditure which we know happens over time. But with these glp-1 memetics, they're slowing down motility. They're acting on the hypothalamus. They're reducing appetite and it's a very powerful effect. Now some of the side effects are like nausea some people reported kind of like a not freezing but like to slow motility essentially, so there's some GI side effects which are kind of to be expected with something like this and and you know on one side you've got
It's so funny how think everything gets politicize these days. But on one side you got people saying oh these part drugs have no side effects whatsoever. And you know, I think everybody should be on glp ones because there were not made to live in this food environment and then the other side you got people saying,
Well, this just obliterates the need for hard work and these people don't take accountability and I don't really think either of those messages are really useful. I think there's a lot of nuance here and I mean it's a drug and every drug is going to have side effects some worse than others for different people. And so for some people it's not going to make sense to take it based on their lifestyle and side effects that get but for other people, I did a post on this where you like talked about how much weight people lose on average and so many people in the
It said, you know, I've lost 100 pounds. I've lost 80 pounds or whatever. It is taking one jar or so. Yeah, one of these glp-1 memetics and again going back to our conversation of big rocks people worry about lean mass loss. They worry about there was a study and I think rodents were they saw an increase in thyroid I once they thyroid cancer or something like that, but it was at a not really a physiological dose. And again, it's it's rodents.
People say we don't know what the long-term effects of these drugs are. Well, they've actually been around for diabetes treatment for a couple of decades now.
But I mean do we know what they do in 50 years, I guess not but we do want to be CD does well, so I'm going to take Ron White's line, which is shoot the alligator closest to the boat. I think if somebody's very overweight or obese and they've tried a bunch of different methods and they just people say well they just haven't been consistent. Okay, so we can live in fantasy land or we can live in the real world, which is maybe some people just need some more training wheels. In other people okay, if we could stop putting like an ethical
Judgment on how easy or hard it is for certain people to do certain things. I mean it's easy for me to say just be consistent because nutrition has never been a problem for me. I've never struggled with my weight, but I struggled in other areas of my life that why can't I just be more consistent. Why can't I just do the things I know I need to do. I'm sure you would feel the same way about certain things in your life where it's like, well I know logically what to do, but
for me to do it, right and so
If we look at the burden on the Healthcare System of obesity and these disease type 2 diabetes and then all the metabolic diseases associated with them.
It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where this is not a big net positive to be quite Frank. Now. I want to this is as my friend. John Delaney says it's both and okay some people this is really going to help them and it should be done in concert with lifestyle changes and lifestyle education because we don't want people to go from eating a lot of a crappy diet to a little of a crappy diet, right? We want them to make better choices overall.
But sometimes again habit coupling people don't get motivated and then get results people start getting results and then get motivated. Right and so a lot of times people will start losing weight and now they're motivated to go to the gym. They're motivated to eat better. It's it is it doesn't happen in a linear path. These things are kind of like
You know like the opposite of vicious cycle where this is a you're getting into a good cycle, right and a lot of people tend to fall into these categories where when things go bad. They go really bad because it's a vicious cycle when things go. Well, they go really well because it's a good cycle. And so what I would say is with the concerns about GOP one's the one I hear most is loss of lean mass. So in studies people who use glp-1 Medics, they lose like 30 to 40 percent of the weight from lean mass, which is
A concern but by the way, that is similar to the amount of weight from lean mass people use who diet without resistance training or exercise. So I don't think that it's a unique problem to glp ones and my guess is when we start getting studies that combine exercise with GOP ones and look at lean mass retention will probably see pretty similar results. So I'm not I'm not super worried about that on a practical level. I can see some concern with it because if you don't have much appetite
you're usually not selecting protein. It's kind of your first, you know line of what you're going to pick.
and additionally fiber you're not usually going to select is your first so I think again
These are great kind of like if we think about like training wheels. I think there's a great training wheels for people and through natural just having less appetite people start controlling their intake better and then all these other habits start to fall into place for some people and I talked to a friend who she's a nurse practitioner and she tried a glp-1 a medic just because she's like, I'm a nurse. I want to see what the stuff.
was like for me and then she talked to a lot of our clients and the the anecdotal feedback that popped up a lot was
it stopped the food noise in my head. I wasn't thinking about food all the time. I just stopped thinking about it so much and if you look at obesity, I mean again, it really is on the appetite side. We know that obese people have lower sensitivity to satiety signals thinking of Greater reward from food. Like I just posted about a study that a day where they gave a milkshake to people and they didn't really see a dopamine response and but in people with binge eating disorder,
They give something like that. They do see a dopamine response. So a lot of it is contextual right? And so I think a lot of his contextual around obesity of okay. These are people who get a greater reward from food on average. They're thinking about food more often. They've probably also dealt with people telling them their entire life or however long that they need to lose weight. And so food is always on their mind and one thing or another it's kind of like in Ghostbusters where they say, you know, don't think about anything bad.
That was the first thing you're going to do you think about something bad, right? And so trying to calm down food noise while knowing that you need to eat less food is probably pretty difficult. So on the whole I think these drugs are positives. I think it's going to lower the healthcare burden and I think it's going to help a lot of people on the other thing. I'll say is like there's been a lot of pushback in the fitness industry by Fitness
influencers. Why do you think that is
Like it is if it's going to take their jobs way, it's like the same way that people fear a I like it somehow get like like this stuff is here to stay. It benefits many many people. I feel this way about these glp-1 memetics and I memetics excuse me, and I feel the same way about AI it's like these things could be yes potentially used for evil. But but but you know also for good if I think back about when I might have had that sort of reaction I was in my early 20s, and that's what I thought obesity was a choice.
I still think there is personal responsibility involved in obesity. But I think my feelings about obesity at that time were.
When some if somebody's obese, they are making the choice. They don't care about the stuff. They eat that mindfully. They are choosing to eat these Foods knowing this is going to be the outcome like self-inflicted. Yeah, and that I don't think that's the case at all. I think a lot of people's habits and behaviors are on autopilot. You know, I can remember very clearly. I drop my kids off at school one day and stopped at 7-Eleven to fill up with gas.
And like grab something from the store or drink and there was somebody there was an obese woman in front of me and she was getting two slices of pizza at 8:00 a.m. And at first I kind of had that knee-jerk response of so lazy, of course you're over and then I thought you know what this is probably something she's done for a long time. This is probably a very habit where she goes to 7-Eleven. She gets pizza or on Tuesday morning at 8:00 a.m. She's around this area and she goes 7-Eleven gets Pizza.
And maybe not but I think a lot of people out there like that with our habits and behaviors are very much on autopilot. It's not this mindful mindfulness that we think they're doing and that translates into other areas. And the other thing I realized I'm like, it can't be laziness like all of it because there's all these people who are very successful in other areas of their life, so they don't work hard and so
At least not for everybody that can't be the explanation and I think with Fitness influencers are people who have you know, actually they've worked hard they've built a good physique. It's almost like how dare you get results with that with that with without doing it yourself without I did this without any help, you know, and the reality is you might have had help because you are upbringing might have not been food Focus you might not have had a mother who was always on you about food or
Or you might not have parents who shamed you if you didn't clean your plate, you might have had genetics that made you more sensitive to satiety signals. You might have had a phenotype where if you overeat you tend to just become spontaneously more active that's part of the obese resistant phenotype. And so you might have had an advantage and you just didn't realize it. So I think if we could just get away from the Judgment of stuff and look at
Take the Judgment all that stuff out of it. Does this seem to help people? And is it going to be a net positive on society Thomas all said in order to have made compassionate policy. You have to have dispassionate analysis of the data and the data says there's gonna be massive for our society and it's a huge benefit. So regardless of my personal feelings of ice somebody should be able to look at Ethan suply lost 300 pounds doing it with they're all hard work and exercise.
I'm pretty sure I've talked to you soon about this and he said I think this is great, you know because
it's hard to get people to believe if people believe what they can see and so if they start seeing results, then they can buy in and yeah, I think overall it's a net positive. So I mean maybe studies will come out in 10 years and people are falling over dead from this stuff and we'll say a whoopsies but I mean, you have to shoot the alligator closest the boat and right now the biggest burden on our Healthcare System.
Think I'm correct in saying this and the biggest threat in a lot of ways is how metabolically unhealthy our society is
getting. Yeah, I think also when people hear about these drugs they think about the person who's slightly overweight or who is already fit who wants to be even thinner. Yeah, and that's not what we're talking about here. And I have a good friend who is an air traffic controller. It works very very hard. Very stressful job, obviously. Hi.
High consequence job and he's very overweight. He's got to be more than 300 pounds by a by a significant margin and he's really struggled over the years and for years. He talked about getting his you know, quote-unquote stomach stapled, you know, those are sometimes referred to that way couldn't afford the surgery this sort of thing and I asked him about I was like, you know, what's that about? He's like, I just need something that's going to allow me to move without pain or a little bit less pain every time he tries exercising. He injures himself. Yeah, and he's probably going about that.
We beat that he doesn't have a lot of time and he literally has lives in his hands. He's married. Now, you know, he may have kids soon. So I haven't spoken to him recently about these drugs. But to me, it seems like that's like the perfect candidate for these drugs if he could eat less with more ease and lose some weight and then also start exercising. I think that'd be a significant win for him. So scenarios like that or what I think of and then also, you know, it's a mostly free world in many places. Not all
So if people can afford these things and they want to take them like who am I to say? They shouldn't take them, you know, I just like I feel like the amount of judgment involved to say that somebody should or should not use a drug is that's safe and potentially helpful for them is like kind of I mean, that's that's almost offensive
in a way, you know, if you had something that like if we came out with a drug and it's like it looks like for a lot of people this can fix opioid addiction right now you'd give them that
With these shouting from the rooftops and celebrate right? We wouldn't say. Oh, you just got to gut it out and work harder, you know, he's kind of you just kind of want it more. It's like no like there's some there's yeah, there is some personal responsibility there and there are choices and things that can be made but why are we trying to make this barrier so high for people like let's lower this barrier.
I love that on the other side of the coin. You've been pretty vocal elsewhere about the fact that sugar is not
Not a drug. Yeah, you know because sometimes people will say, you know, sugar is a drug. I would sort of put in the soft argument for my side soft argument that highly processed foods. Well, let's just call them high density of taste Foods, right? They combine, you know processed carbohydrates and fats that you know at high Heats that can be consumed in you know, where you can easily consumed several thousand calories that you know almost unconsciously right? I mean unless you're asleep. We're in a
My you can just pop these things in your mouth and keep going. They don't even know if they taste that good but people just keep going that there's a there's a bit of kind of lack of awareness and compulsivity to them very different than addiction, of course because people aren't necessarily going out and robbing robbing people, but maybe just touch on your view of sugar as a substance. We're not talking about the sugar in fruit. We're talking about candy ice creams desserts quote-unquote. Hidden sugars. Yeah, what are the real risks of these things?
If people are consuming them still within the confines of their daily caloric needs so they're not eating excess calories. What's the deal with sugar?
Okay. So this is where it's very important to give the appropriate context and Nuance. I'm glad you set it up the way you did. So I always tell people when it comes to almost anything have guidelines not hard rules because hard rules will get you to do things that are kind of dumb, right?
For example, if you say I'm never going to eat processed foods, well, whey protein is processed. But if you look at the data on whey protein and improves metabolic Health that increases lean mass body composition even lowers inflammation. So I mean if we're just going to say all processed foods are bad will isn't than way bad so guidelines in that nature same thing for sugar because obviously, okay well added sugar is it's not it doesn't have a big satiety benefit its calorically dense.
It makes food very palatable. I'm going to come back to that because it's contextual.
But fruit has sugar and biochemically not really that different. I mean if you're talking about sucrose, okay, it's a molecule of glucose and fructose.
Okay, a lot of fruits have glucose and fructose in them, right? So if sugar has some inherent lipo genic bio chemical toxicity addictive quality, whatever we should see similar effects across different sources of sugar and we don't see that right and even when it comes to some of the processed foods people don't realize what goes into creating.
Making something hyper palatable is complex. It's not just sugar. It's not just fat. It's not just sodium its texture mouthfeel. You mentioned temperature all these things matter. And in fact, there was actually a study a while back that suggested that texture might actually make a bigger impact on the palatability of a food than even the sugar content and let's take it more.
Um a mechanistic level from your example, if you're in the confines of your calories what happens I would say a high sugar diet is still not ideal because it's going to be hard to get enough fiber in high sugar diet, but I long time ago being a grad school. I was under the opinion that sugar and high fructose corn syrup were
calorie per calorie more fattening metabolically unhealthy now, is that a graduate mixer with a professor named Manny Nakamura? Who was it Illinois and he had done some of the feeding studies in rats with fructose and seen these weird metabolic effects. Right and I've overheard him having a conversation with other professor and I was shocked by what he said because he's the one that did this some of this research and the other professor said so, you know high fructose corn syrup is bad and fructose is
He goes, no, it's really just the calories that are in it. It's easy to over-consume people consume it through soda and you know, they just eat too much and and the guy was like, well, you showed all these things in the in these mice he goes we found them like over 50 percent of their calories for from Pure fructose. That's pretty much impossible to get through the diet. Unless like you're literally doing nothing but drinking soda.
And he said, you know, we showed a pathway but that's not practical in terms of like the application to humans. And so I got curious. I really started going down the literature on sugar trying to say, okay, is he? Okay? Is he right about this? Is it is it really not, you know calorie per calorie more damaging than non-sugar carbohydrate.
When you look at sugar intake it is associated with increased levels of inflammation It's associated with obesity. But there are what we call confounding variables, which is people who eat a lot of sugar tend to eat a lot of calories. So if we look at here's my favorite human randomized control trials where we control total calorie intake and sugar intake. What do we see and probably the best example of this was a study from sir?
It back in I won't say 1997. And the reason I'm going to pick out this studies because it had the best controls in it. So they provided all the food to participants the protein carbohydrates and fats were all the same. It was a I think it was a 1200 calorie diet and they provide all these meals for six weeks and looked at fat loss and some blood lipids and those sorts of things.
And they found that so one group was getting over 100 grams of sugar a day. I think it was around. I mean it was based on some like body weight energy expenditure stuff, but it was I think it was around like 110 grams of washer sucrose per day right? I'm sure other group like around 10. So 10 times different sugar.
And at the end of the study there was no difference in Fat Loss. There was no difference in lean mass retention. There was no difference in almost any marker. They looked at the only difference they saw all the blood markers improved. The only difference they saw was that LDL cholesterol improved a little bit better in the low sugar group and that is probably a function of the fact that the low sugar group had more fiber. We do fiber can bind to L2 cholesterol and lower LDL cholesterol in the blood.
So when I saw that I was like cool man, and then when I look through all these other studies with similar kind of controls, they pretty much do the same thing across the board on metabolic Health on inflammation, like inflammation really isn't different if calories are controlled with high sugar versus low sugar as long as you're getting enough
fiber. What about feelings of satiety because
well, that's the that is the real downside if you're eating a lot. Like if you're eating a 1200 calorie diet and 400 calories are coming from pure sugar. I
and you're probably going to be kind of hungry,
right? Yeah, I'd be extremely hungry. I mean, I consume artificial sweeteners for the record, right but there are enough data and I have enough experience with them to know that
Sometimes they will curb my appetite like they'll get me over the bump. Hmm But I've come to associate it's probably just pure paired Placebo Association for surgery thing. Where if I drink a Diet Coke pretty soon after that. I want to eat something now. I've challenged that by not eating something because I have pretty good discipline. Hmm and it passes but I think I've come to associate that sweet taste with wanting to eat something and nothing to me is more delicious. Well, there are many things are like a Diet Coke and a slice of pizza. I'm in New York or a
Token a burger or you know, they're these a food associations, but I don't think for instance that sweet taste necessarily stimulates appetite but I could imagine if I only had as you said 1,200 calories a day to eat and I'm getting you know 400 of those calories from sugar like you said, there's not going to be much better be eating a lot of broccoli now as well or else I'm going to be pretty hungry just based on my learned relationships between sweet taste and
food consumption. Well, I tell people
Liz I would focus Less on like sugar intake. I mean if you want to focus on added sugars, that's fine focus on calories protein and your fiber content, right? Because if you if you're getting enough fiber, it's going to be hard to eat a lot of junk doing that right and when we look at
The sugar intake and calorie levels all that kind of stuff. Actually a great example would be the case of dr. Mark. How are you familiar with him? He's a Kansas state has nutrition professor in 2011. He got the name the twinkie diet Professor. I'm not sure if you saw this, but I know about the the twinkie defense, right? So he he asked his students what they thought mattered more for.
For fat loss the calories you eat or the food choices you make and they said most of them said food choices and he said, okay, let's do an experiment. Do you think if I do an 1800 calorie diet from ultra-processed Foods exclusively that I will lose weight and get healthier and most of the students said no and so for 12 weeks he 1800 calories. He called originally the 7-Eleven Diet. He basically like if I couldn't go to the 7-Eleven, I didn't eat it. He now the caveat is he had a multivitamin
and he had some whey protein so they was getting enough protein because it's hard to get protein from some of those ultra-processed Foods.
And but a 1800 calories and he lost 27 pounds and all of his blood markers improve and is insulin sensitivity improved.
Now that seems crazy to a lot of people but for those people who have worked and looked at blood work with weight loss and what not. I mean, it's not that surprising that is the one of the biggest levers for metabolic health. And so when they asked him afterwards, we that what like what a great diet like you could eat all the all this junk food goes. Well, not really like it's 1,800 calories or junk food. It goes really fast. I was pretty hungry and on.
Sleep like first week. It was like, oh this is kind of nice. And then after that I was like, you know, I really like just a really big salad, you know, just something satiating. So again, no Solutions only trade-offs. There is a benefit to being able to go. Well I can if I can fit into my calories, it's okay, as long as I get enough fiber and protein. Yeah, the trade-off is
it's a high budget cost right? Same thing with people's, you know, the data on like moderate alcohol consumption shows that it doesn't impede fat loss. It doesn't if you come for the calories in it, but I'll tell people like hey, do you really like if you have like two craft beers, do you really want to spend four or five hundred calories on like 24 ounces of fluid that's not going to impact your satiety at all.
And so I think a lot of people view this very black-and-white lens right where it's like, oh Lane says or this person says I can eat sugar and lose fat so I can eat as much sugar as I want. No. No because there are practical limits to this, right but take somebody like me right if my calorie intake is my budget.
I trained 23 hours a day. My maintenance calories are anywhere from 33 to 34 hundred calories a day, which is a not crazy about but a healthy amount for somebody of my size. I have a decent sized budget, right if I if I can still get my protein in get my fiber hit my micronutrient targets and I've calories left over for energy filler. Sure just like if somebody makes a million dollars a year and they want to go buy a sports car. It's not a great investment. It's not a good investment at all.
All why when they just Bank every single Cent they make well because maybe for them having that little reward motivates them to keep doing what they're doing and making that level of money right? But if you were making in a let's take a loans out of it, right if you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Does it make sense to spend ninety thousand dollars on a sports car if it means you can't pay your mortgage and you can't save money for retirement. You can't meet your obligations. No, it's it doesn't make sense. Right? And so if you're a small
Old woman small lean mass wise who is trying to lose some weight. Does it make sense? If you're eating 1200 calories a day to lose weight to spend 300 calories of that on some Ultra processed junk food. I don't think it does. But if you're an Olympic athlete who's burning for 5,000 calories a day good luck eating that level of calories from good minimally processed.
Foods you're going to feel full all the
time. There does seem to be a kind of a requirement in books in sometimes even in podcast or to take a stance like to be anti something. Yeah, because saying, you know what I personally believe based on my read of the data is that most people should strive to get anywhere from 70 to 90% of their food from non-processed minimally processed Quality Foods and then allow some space for the you know,
Some processed food highly processed foods and sweets and things like that, but mostly to get the macros right as we've described him earlier and what the range will depend on age will depend on activity level will depend on prior health history. I mean, there's some people who have enough issues that relate to diet and lack of exercise that when I've seen them get it right and undergo such incredible Transformations that like, I also know these peoples
Capacity to fall off the train right but and you want to say, you know, maybe make that number 100 percent so you never go back because I've seen them slip before and then the guilt and then they come back scuse me. So there are two ways to look at it one is used tell people. Listen, you don't have to be perfect. Right? Because if Perfection is the goal you're going to fall off but then there are those individuals like severe alcoholics who quit drinking you don't say like hey, like you can have a beer on Christmas
you don't say that right? It's all or none.
But anyway here we're getting into the
psychology of it, but I think that that's what you're
Being right there is that's where the individualization comes in right? Like it's it's it's contextually dependent and it depends on the individual and what makes sense for them. And I think we as people if we find something that works for us. We're a little bit too quick to want to evangelize everyone else around us because we want we do want to help we do have good intentions for the most part and we over
paralyzed and I've you know for me again like counting macros flexible dieting when I I dealt with a little bit of binge eating when I was young when I first got into bodybuilding because I was trying to you know, eat clean and I would end I was in college so my buddies order pizza or whatever that and it'd be like an entire Pizza by myself, right? And so once I allowed myself to just have that the foods I wanted moderation. I just got brutally consistent, right so that for me.
That was the switch that flipped but other people that may not be the right solution. And I think we make a bunch of that diet worked for me. We assume physiology when actually I think it's much more psychology and just trips that compliance algorithm and somebody's head and it makes sense and if we could just if we could just be willing to say more often. Hey, this is what I do, but I like this and you don't have to do it. Maybe try it. Yeah.
And and everyone struggles with different things in everyone find certain things easier. Like I am not an alcoholic. I'm an adult so I can have a drink or two. I just don't like it. So everyone assumes because I did this episode on alcohol that I'm like anti-alcohol. Like I'm like if you're an adult you're non-alcoholic you don't have issues with, you know, alcohol use disorder or something like you might guess like just know the data, right but there are certain things like steak. I'm never giving up you could tell me it takes ten years off my life, and I'm not going to
Get up, I'll do other things to offset whatever and that, you know decrease in longevity might be I don't think that that's a real thing, but I'm just not gonna give it up. It's Central to my enjoyment of Life period Speaking of which when if one really wants to wade into the Waters of strong opinions and conflicting data we cover this a bit last time you were on the podcast, but the questions were replete with requests to discuss seed oil.
I'm sure
seed oils and I must say this whole thing about seed oils has really gotten in my head even though even though I'm a scientist like the other day. I went to my sister's for dinner and she made a really nice dinner as from our mom's birthday. And then she made a really nice salad and I love fruits and vegetables as like salad and I look sounds like she's made this how with like grape seed oil and I was like, why do you use grapeseed oil instead of olive oil? And she's like, well, I ran out of olive oil and I found myself like looking at the at the salad like is this safe to eat? Like I heard your
voice in my ear. I also heard Paul's voice in my ear. Saladin has always run. I thought well, I ate the salad by the way, I really enjoyed it was good grapeseed oil doesn't taste as good to me as olive oil General like try and use olive oil butter things like that when I when I cook but what's the deal with seed oils? I understand that they are calorically dense. So I was that last time I understand people tend to over consume them and then blame them for a bunch of things that are not related to their seed oil Miss rather than their calorie content.
Evening Miss. These aren't real words, of course, but you get the idea. But are there any data out there that have your you know ears kind of picked up to the possibility that assuming equal equal calories that there might be something bad about seed oils or is there 0 and there's no pressure here to answer one way or not that you would respond to pressure for me. Anyway,
so I think it's all about making the appropriate apples-to-apples comparison, right?
Because if we're looking at addition studies of you know adding something to a diet adding Omega sixes limit no luck acid linoleic acid, whatever.
Well, if you're adding those you're adding calories, which is a confounding variable, right? So ideally what what the real question is because the debate tends to be the people who are anti seed oil to be very Pro saturated fat. And so the question really is okay if we swap out these things in a one-to-one ratio. What is the outcome right? So not like when how come I mean my moloch health inflammation those sorts of things.
So in the studies, I have yet to find a good human randomized control trial where they give polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat exchange it a one-to-one ratio.
And see - like actual
outcomes. What about swapping with mono? Unsaturated fats? Like why? Why are we talking about seed oils versus lard and butter? Why aren't we talking about seed oils versus
olive oil? Yeah, that's I've looked less than that. Just because people ask that question yet less but it seems like both poof has and mufas are better than saturated fat in terms of metabolic health and risk of cardiovascular disease those sorts of things does anyone
I have a problem with olive oil. I'm sure you could find somebody. Okay?
Well, I'm sure right never paid or not.
Terrible terrible way for me to pose the question. Is there any reason to think like for the person who isn't sure about seed oils because they just heard enough - things even if there's no basis for it like me who's like I like butter and I also assume that eating too much butter might not be good for me just because I'm a rational human being based on my read of the day anyway, so I have some butter. Yes.
But I like olive oil all those tasty. I'm told it's good for me. Is there any knowledge about anything in olive oil that says listen, even if you consume it?
In concert with your clerk thresholds meaning you're not eating too many calories everything bad in olive oil.
I'm not aware of anything but I will say like if you extend the logic of the seed oils crowd or anti seed oils crowd, which actually I'm going to make a new logical fallacy, which is just appeal to seed oils because I so many times and I've laid out this data have people go basically like have a freak out and go but seed oils how dare you defend seed oils and I'm like, I'm not defending them. I'm just talking about date.
Do
people on X when I put out questions for your coming on this episode literally there were multiple people that claim that you are paid off by this buy them by big seed oil and I was just like I have to laugh out loud. I was like there might be a lot of companies that are large that makes you boils but I guarantee they're not paying laying Norton. Yes a what are you
saying? So I find this actually very funny as somebody whose research was funded by the national Dairy Council the egg nutrition center and the national Cattlemen's beef.
For Association that somehow I would be the person who would be you know different and all these things act in opposition to it's like well you think I'm proceed oil but then over here I've been defending meet with this thing, right? And then over here. I've been defending not sorry to finding is the wrong word discussing the data on sugar which by the way those would be in opposition to each other because you're and you're very Pro fiber, right, right. Yeah.
So anyway when I talk about saturated fat, I don't like sets toxic and it's going to I say, hey, it raises LDL cholesterol, which is independent risk factor for heart disease. I'm just discussing it. Right. So I'll say what I said online, which is I don't defend nutrients. They don't need defending there's not ethical considerations here. If you want to eat them. I don't think you're less of a person I find it curious that some people get so emotionally and just
Like ethically entrenched around certain nutrients. So the the logic goes something like well you have these multiple double bonds and so they can be oxidized. And so that oxidation is going to cause an increase in inflammation which is going to cause heart disease and cancer. Okay. Well olive oil is a monounsaturated fat is still has a double bond. So by that logic it would still be worse than saturated fat.
So when we look at trading out and movers would fall in this to I believe if you look at the cohort data polyunsaturated fats substituted for saturated fats have a stronger effect on reducing heart disease than monounsaturated fats, but monounsaturated fats do still tend to have an effect of reducing the risk of heart disease compared to compared to saturated
fat. Okay, so that would be trading out butter and lard.
On meat fats for
more olive oil, right and just to add some Nuance to it not all saturated fat is created equal there. I like to stearic acid. I believe doesn't raise LDL cholesterol like it but in general saturated fat is going to be something that raises cholesterol more it also again in I'm thinking of several randomized control trials where they feed the same calories. They feed the same amount of fat and they just have people either a you know, saturated fat or polyunsaturated fats you see either
Neutral or positive effects on inflammation. You see neutral positive effects on liver fat, you see neutral positive effects on basically overall metabolic health and insulin sensitivity. So again and Paul actually counted this one time and he decided to study looking at I think it was I don't want to say it wrong. It was like giving Omega sixes and they saw an increase in lipid peroxidation. I don't think they were comparing it to saturated fat I could be wrong. But again, this is an example of a mechanism.
Right, so lipid peroxidation mechanism.
We can try to project what that might mean down the road. But when we look at actual levels of inflammation actual risk for cardiovascular disease actual insulin sensitivity actual levels of liver fat, these are outcomes. We can actually if we're worried about those we can actually measure them and again some studies show. No difference some studies some of the some of the studies I've seen on like inflammation between polyunsaturated fats and liver and unsaturated fats don't
Only show a difference in inflammation, but I'm not aware of any that show it going in the opposite direction. We're substituting in polyunsaturated fats actually raises inflammatory markers like CRP and il-6 those sorts of things and actually one things I tell people when they're worried about, you know, fructose activates the Nova lipogenesis in the liver and I'm like, well, here's this study where they overfed fructose and saturated fat by the same amount and saturated fat increased liver fat by 70% more than fructose. So if you're worried about fructose you better
A really be worried about saturated fat now again both that's an over feeding study. They were eating excess calories. But again calorie per calorie saturated fat was worse for liver fat, so
That's kind of where I land on it. I just you know, maybe I'm missing some data. But when you're when you're looking at these studies again, I'm looking at not one study not to studies. I'm looking at 50 studies or however many studies are as on the topic and I go on this Forest plot. Where do they land and when they're almost all on one side or neutral? I feel pretty confident that
That that's something not to worry about right. So let's let's take another discussion to tie this in I think this will help people understand how I come to a conclusion about this sort of stuff. So I do not necessarily think red meat is carcinogenic even though the IRC has classified it as probably caution agentic right? Because when you look at the studies, you can find studies that associate red meat with cancer and you can find studies that show no Associated of red meat with cancer and so
Kind of all over the place now, there's probably more that show the association then don't but when you look at like studies where they control for overall diet quality, so I'm thinking of a study out of Canada back in 2020. I think the author was Maxim over I want to say they looked at different levels of red meat intake and incidence of cancer, but also with different levels of fruit and vegetable intake and so what they found was at low levels of fruit and vegetable intake.
Lower red meat consumption reduce the risk of cancer relative to higher red meat consumption, but at high levels of fruits and vegetable consumption, I don't think there was a significant difference but actually the high level of red meat consumption was lower risk than low red meat high fruit and vegetables. I believe I believe I have that correct in terms of the absolute risk, and I don't know if it was statistically significant, but what that says to me is red meat is more of a proxy of poor overall diet quality.
And if you control for that with some Diet proxy of fruit and vegetable intake, you know, if you're eating a lot of red meat and a lot of fruit and vegetables, there's not really a whole lot of room in your diet for a bunch of crap. You just described the way that I eat and that any time A friend of mine and this happens a lot comes to me and as you know, 20 to 50 pounds to lose. Yeah, well make it as easy on yourself as possible. You can eat meat eggs vegetables and fruit and that's all you're going to do for two months and most
Those guys in this case. They were guys lost a substantial amount of weight and kept it off. They all exercised as well. And of course is caloric restriction related right over here. Yeah, but they're but they're not touching pasta. They're not touching bread. They asked me all the things that you can I do this and I just said listen if it wasn't in the list, I just gave you your not eating it sounds restrictive the good news about something like that. Is that the fruit generally taste good and steak is very satiating Mmm. Delicious. Yeah, if you don't like me, I suppose this wouldn't work but
Right, but I don't think there's anything magic about that diet. It just gets people below their maintenance calories with relative
ease. Well, it's simple you could probably still do it in a restaurant right? Because you just ask for meat and vegetables, right OSHA socially compatible. So there's there is some beauty and simplicity there's Beauty and what I do, which is I track everything and I can have whatever I want you're gonna have to have some form of restriction to lose weight. You pick the kind of restriction that you can stick to right so
Bring that all back. So you have this data that's all scattered on me. Right and then let's look at something like dietary fiber. Okay, because people say we you you can't establish causation. This is some people I'd say. Well the the carnivores might say, well, it's all healthy user bias. If it was healthy user bias, there'd be some disagreement in the data and there's no disagreement in the data. I am not aware of any study looking at dietary fiber intake or fruit and vegetable intake that doesn't show reduce risk of cancer reduce risk of cardiovascular disease.
Reduce risk of mortality usually in a dose response and it is very consistent. Now some studies might show more of a risk reduction versus other studies. But if we're doing a line of a forest plot and this is risk reduction. This is increased risk. Everything is on this
side, right eating more fruits and vegetables can only be good
for you. Right so and there's like kind of a dose-response. So that's what I become even without randomized control trials necessarily. That's when I
Pretty confident. Okay. This is a very consistent effect. And there's a dose response and we're seeing in a bunch of different populations across a bunch of different countries in a bunch of different Labs. Okay, I feel confident and so for somebody make the claim that seed oils or toxic or that they're bad for you independent of the calories. I mean, you're basically relegated to using animal studies in vitro mechanisms and then epidemiology which trying to like
tie those all together. I mean that's not really high quality evidence really high quality evidence is the you have the mechanisms. Okay, there's a mechanism right? Because if there's now come there's a mechanism the animal data agrees with it. There's a dose-response the human randomized controlled trials supported and then the epidemiology supports it like in order for something to really truly be strong evidence. We need that now, let's take our example of fiber again, right epidemiology supports it we have met
Mechanisms in terms of short chain fatty acid production in terms of like insoluble fiber moving like getting food through the gut faster might be actually better because there's some some don't want to use this word lightly but like some so I toxic in products of like metabolism in the gut that if they stay around too long, it might have negative interactions with some of the the colorectal cells and that may be one of the reasons that insoluble fiber helps decrease the risk of colorectal cancer. So we have the mechanisms.
The animal studies show it when we do the human randomized control trials looking at shorter-term surrogate markers. They show it move in the right direction and the epidemiology is in the right direction. That's when I become very confident about something so I'm not ready to say like hey seed oils are really really good for you and you should have a bunch of them. I'm not saying that and obviously their calorically dense right people had oil to stuff and it adds calories.
But anybody trying to claim that there's strong evidence that they're bad for you it we have very different definitions of what strong evidence is and you have to apply your logic symmetrically. If you were going to use a certain level of logic for one thing you have to apply it to another thing right and I'll give you an example of this like the the when we were talking about the cruciferous vegetables and isocyanate introduces iodine. I said, well, you know
No, this person was advocating for meat-based diet and I'm like, okay. Well, there's n UE 5 GC and meat which by the way human they found antibodies for that inhuman thyroid now, I'm not saying that meets going to mess up your thyroid. But if you're worried about this stuff and cruciferous vegetables, don't you have to worry about it and meet to because if you're applying that logic symmetrically, I would actually argue that they're stronger evidence that the you're worried about the Nu e 5 G's
In meat since you actually see those antibodies show up. So with the the seed oil stuff, I'm like, okay, let's apply this logic to saturated fat for a moment. All right. So do we have a mechanism? We do saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol. Well LDL cholesterol can penetrate the endothelium. We know this so there's their goods to be this debate about small oxidized versus large fluffy both.
Can penetrate the endothelium even large LDL can penetrate penetrate the endothelium now small oxidized penetrates more easily but it carries less total cholesterol deposits less cholesterol in the endothelial large doesn't penetrate as easily but per unit of LDL cholesterol. It's depositing more cholesterol because it's bigger the net effect is both are equally atherogenic in the end. So we have the
ISM right. Now. Let's look at the epidemiology. Well, the epidemiology tends to support it as well. And then if we look at the the really what for me change my mind because I used to be somebody who is on the side of a snot LDL don't really matter. It's HDL to LDL ratio and was when I saw the mendelian randomization studies, which for those who aren't familiar you're basically looking at
Natural polymorphisms on genes that cause differences in secretion of LDL, right? And since LDL is a lifetime exposure risk meaning if you're doing a two-year randomized control trial looking at LDL levels.
It says nothing about what they ate before and you know in that timeframe, what's the likelihood people are going to have heart attacks or some sort of myocardial infarction. It's pretty low. Now that we have all these like databanks of you know, blood samples and whatnot from people from all these old studies. They go back and do these analyses and when they look at LDL cholesterol and plotted so lifetime exposure to LDL cholesterol and plot it against the risk of heart disease. I mean, you can pretty much draw a straight line through it.
It and so to me that's pretty strong evidence. If you're if you want to apply the same logic of what we have this, you know and LDL by the way can cause inflammation in the endothelium. So you have that damage to it because the a polo pony protein that attracts inflammatory marker. So people are getting some of this cart before the horse and then the other thing that sealed it for me was again like HDL they looked at the same thing at HDL turns out HDL is just kind of a marker of metabolic Health. It's good to have
HDL but it hates deal itself doesn't appear to be protective because if they raise it with drugs or look at people's secrete more or less. It doesn't seem to independently modulate risk of cardiovascular disease. So all that to say saturated fat is really only an issue. I would say for the LDL the fact that it can raise LDL.
And there is some evidence it's not necessarily good for the gut microbiome because the bile salt in products from emulsifying saturated fat because it requires more bile that those might be toxic to some beneficial species of bacteria. But here's what I'm not saying. I'm not saying don't eat any saturated fat what I'm saying is again your overall diet quality is what matters
I think it's fine to have some saturated fat. I think probably try to keep it below seven to ten percent of your daily calorie intake what also matters is there's no Solutions only trade-offs. And so if somebody says to me, you know, I was able to lose 50 pounds on low carb and everything got better but my LDL went up a little bit and they felt like that was the only thing they were able to be consistent with I'd say on balance. They're probably better off with that slightly elevated LDL then they
Would be if they kept the 50 pounds on now I would argue if they had lost the 50 pounds and lower their LDL. Their overall risk would be lower than it is now. But again, we have to look at what can somebody consistently execute so all that to say I'm not saying you should consume seed oils. I'm not saying that there's no - downsides but if we look at comparing it to a comparable molecule of saturated fat, there's a much more compelling argument that saturated fat is bad for you versus seed oils.
Thank you for that very thorough and very clear answer and I just will highlight that you ate a steak last night. So you are by no means anti-meat or saturated
fat a the steak right in front of a vegan. OK it was
not to not to aggravate them just because they they they stuck to their principles you stuck to
yours. I was originally going to order fish and they said it's okay if you want to go snake and I so okay if you say so now they did make a couple of comments ingest during the during the
meal fair enough fair enough.
Let's talk about artificial sweeteners
sweet. I saw that that was the other people that pay
me. That's right. He's kidding folks good. We got into a little disagreement about this years ago. So long ago that it's probably not even worth mentioning that you know, I was somewhat enticed by the data from Dana Smalls laboratory. Then at Yale, I think now she's up at McGill looking at some kind of pavlovian conditioning.
Auditioning of artificial sweeteners. So basically children children in that case consuming a high amount of I think it was either sucralose or saccharin. Mmm in combination with a meal kind of standard meal and look at the insulin response and then removing the food component sometime later and what they essentially observed was a conditioned insulin response, so that you
And have these kids just have the sweet tasting non-caloric drink - the food and they still sell and they then saw an elevated insulin response. In other words the same way that Pavlov got dogs to salivate in response to a bell that was paired with food. Then you remove the food and then they just simply salivating response to the Bell. The idea was well, maybe you can create a conditioned pavlovian like response to artificial sweeteners. Okay. I thought was kind of cool study looking back. I probably wouldn't have covered it the way I did.
It because it's not a typical scenario. I think the more important questions are is there any evidence that artificial and low calorie or zero calorie sweeteners like Stevia we have to be very careful. Yeah, no official that they are somehow dangerous in any of the following ways one. Do they alone increase insulin to levels that are problematic to do they stimulate appetite in a
Way that's problematic independent of insulin or maybe as a consequence of insulin. And then three, what's the story with their potential effect on the gut microbiome? Okay. I think those are the three categories that come to mind are probably other categories and I just want to say for the record it then and now I'll could assume some aspartame every once in a while in the form of a Diet Coke Stevia seems to be in a lot of the things that I consume and I don't have a problem with that. So I'm not anti artificial or low calorie sweetener. Although for reasons that are entirely personal and have no scientific.
Vic basis whatsoever. I avoid things with sucralose in them. I don't really like the taste of it and I have a kind of a an aversion to it for an interesting
reason and that's a great way to catch that of I don't have data for this up this partially I don't do
it. Yeah, if I see something reserved, I'm only at no aspartame fine. Stevia gets the Thumbs Up by me and I will choose low calorie or zero-calorie sodas or drinks or energy drinks.
When I have the option to have something with sugar it's just kind of but I'm not anti sugar either. I just have developed this as a habit. Yeah. Well, I prefer to get my calories from food.
Yeah, you'd prefer to have a steak right as opposed to having the cola
right steak. Strawberries blueberries oatmeal rice. Yeah butter olive oil and all the other delicious wonderful things as opposed to a Coke. I'd rather just have a Diet Coke and eat a bit more steak. So let's take the
insulin thing first. So interesting mechanism that they're showing their
what I would say is there's been a couple meta-analyses now looking at different non-nutritive sweeteners and their effects on insulin and they don't show an effect. So there's no there's no real effect in it. Let's just kind of play it out logically a little bit if there was a significant effect on insulin one or two things is going to happen. You're going to see a drop in blood sugar because you're not eating anything, right? So most of us if we eat if we take drink a diet soda, we don't then go hypoglycemic.
Right or if there is an increase in insulin.
If blood glucose isn't dropping then it must be a corresponding increase in glucagon, which is basically offsetting all of insulins issues. I don't think either those things happen. I think it's it's inert and that the research the meta-analyses tend to show this there was a I'm thinking of two meta-analyses where they looked at these they looked at glycemia. They looked at insulin sensitivity in those insulin release and they just didn't see any effect.
Now when it comes to was the second point
so we have insulin we have does it stimulate appetite and ways that may or may not be related to insulin you ruled out insulin increase. So yeah, like could there be a pairing of like, okay every time I eat I have a diet soda then if I have a diet soda on my on its own does it stimulate the desire to eat all of the Dana small study by and by the way, that study was halted they have this is the problem with that study as it was being done in kids.
The increases in insulin that they saw in a subset of the kids were so dramatic. This is way she described it and I talk so I feel comfortable saying this maybe she's changed her tune. But in this online talk and academic talk the increases in insulin were so dramatic that they were concerned about the kids becoming pre-diabetic. So they halted the study which means the totality of the data never came in means that was it's hard to draw a conclusion.
OK when we talk about studies. We're always talking about means and averages right? I leave open the idea that there could be subsets of
Galatians that the could be individual responses I leave all that open so on average if that's true.
In there is a conditioned response. We're worried about well one is their effect on appetite where their people going to eat more even if those things don't have calories. They're not going to make you fat. There's no insulin release. Okay, they stimulating you to eat more. Well, if we look at the randomized control trials where they tell people hey instead of regular Cola drink diet cola if that was true and actual an actual outcome. We would see people on diet soda either not lose weight or gain weight death.
Only compared to water and probably similar compared to a regular Cola maybe a little bit less, but we would expect to see weight gain. We actually see the exact opposite thing. So we have several randomized control trials. Now where people like comparing not just diet soda. I don't you say diet soda a lot of merlot. No calorie beverages is kind of the what they talk about because not everything is technically diet soda, but I think people know diet drinks in particular.
Where they're comparing them, they tell people either switch out other have Cola either have diet soda or sorry diet drink or just use water.
Now they absolutely every single one of these trials. They lose weight going to diet drinks. Usually a pretty significant amount of
weight. Yeah, and usually as I recall pretty significant significant amount of diet drink like a 2 liters a day even like the person will carry around a leader or two liter of diet drink and sip on it whenever they get thirsty or
hungry. Yep. Yeah. So then what's really interesting is they they've done direct comparisons to water and some
buddies don't really show a difference but several studies and several meta-analyses now have shown that when people if they have them use water in place of regular soda or diet drinks in place of regular so that people actually lose a little bit more weight and it's statistically significant with the diet drinks now,
I don't think diet drinks are fat burners. Okay, they're not causing you to have increase energy expenditure. But if you are somebody who is used to a sweet taste if you switch to water, perhaps you're seeking out that sweetness elsewhere. And so maybe those people are consuming a little bit more sweet food or whatnot. Whereas in the diet drink group. Maybe that's filled that sweet taste for them. So I don't get into the van again. This gets it like people get very like ethically charged about the hole.
Total drinking water. There's nothing wrong with drinking. What if you can drink water you feel satiated and you maintain your but I'm
just struggling because of drinking water becomes an issue online. Then I would already had quit that nobody has all right. I'm not quitting but that's that's that's ridiculous. Yeah. Well,
so again perhaps that mechanism exists, but at least on average it's obviously washed out by the fact that for whatever reason for most people who do this they get
A little bit more satiety out of consuming a diet beverage as opposed to substituting water for a beverage now again, if you're somebody who you can drink water and you don't have an inclination for diet drinks want then don't do it. It's you don't need it. But again, I look at that as we need to lower the barriers for people to start getting healthy. And unfortunately a lot of people with the message of just drink water and they'll say well die.
Look, it's just our diet. So it's just bad for use regular soda or its worst it for you the regular soda their intention might be I just want people to drink water but the outcome is people go. I can't actually get my soda some I'm just gonna drink regular soda then right? And so while your intention was positive the outcome is actually kind of disastrous, right? And so we have to disconnect with the intentions of the message are from what the what it actually produces. And so that's why I say hey if we're moving levers
If somebody if somebody is obese and they came to me and they're like, well, you know, I drank five Cole has a day. I'm like fantastic because I'm thinking 5 diet sodas instead and now we have just saved 750 calories and you're going to start losing weight just by doing that right? Which again people say well, what about 100 years down the road or whatever. I'm like, well most of these sweeteners have been around for decades now, we do have quite a bit of data on them.
But let's say that there is something I don't again. I'm shooting the alligator closest to the boat. Right? Like we know what obesity does so and people who do these diet drinks lose weight. They get more metabolically healthy. So again if it comes down to soda or diet soda
By all means let's do the diet soda, and if there's some small negative effects to it, we'll deal with them. So that brings me to the gut microbiome most of the research studies in humans where they use reasonable doses don't really show much effect on the gut microbiome. However, there are a few with particular sweeteners like sucralose that do show an effect. Now there was one that got a lot of play and you and I actually talked about this. I think we actually talked on the phone about this and it was an interesting study. I thought it was well done, but I
I want to be careful about how over-generalized it was. So the first part is in this study. They selected for people who basically they did a very very like intense selection process where I think there was over 1,500 people who were like originally included in the study and they whittled them down to like a hundred something because they wanted people who had really hardly ever used artificial sweeteners in their life. And that's
A pretty small percentage population what they found was a lot of people submitted saying I don't use them. I've never used them and then when they did dietary recall logs like oh actually using it here and you're using it here. So they select all these people out and they found that when they gave them sucralose that the composition of their not microbiome changed and they called it dysbiosis and I'll come back to that because that's a scary sounding word first off. What's interesting is
If you are somebody that population that they're selecting those are probably people who have been specifically trying to avoid them because if you're not even if you don't try to consume them, they're everywhere. So if you haven't been consuming them, it's likely that you're specifically trying to avoid them which probably means that you have negative thoughts and beliefs around artificial sweeteners. And again, we've discussed the power of belief before I'm not saying it was a bad study because of that. I'm just saying we have to be careful about how much
much we over-interpret This research data.
Are you saying that the potential that those subjects had to believe that something hero calorie sweeteners or low-calorie sweeteners could be bad for their microbiome might have actually made their gut microbiome more dysbiotic.
Maybe I mean again we've talked about the power of belief is very powerful. No, I have I've no way to support that right? I'm just saying be careful before you overgeneralize plus it was a two-week study and just two weeks.
Yes, it was two weeks. Now again, these two weeks is two weeks is enough time to show differences in the gut microbiome. Actually a few days is typically enough time
and only for sucralose. So Stevia
no change. This is another there was another sweetener that I think had a change it might have been saccharin
saccharin and Sucralose are the ones that seem to always show the biggest effects quote unquote and I don't know how often those are used in diet drinks these days. I mean less and less. I mean, it's usually aspartame
mmmmm Stevia more in the kind of Wellness Health Fitness crowd drinks
sucralose is pretty ubiquitous a lot of diet products and whatnot. But I like like being cranked my whey protein powder without working attrition is sweetened with sucralose. I mean, it's a great sweetener. And so some people will take that as well. Of course, he's going to defend sucralose because in this protein, but if I thought it was really bad, I would just use a different sweetener. So what I will say is well is gut dysbiosis sounds bad.
But it simply means that the gut microbiome changed and I have several friends who are gut microbiome experts and they'll when we sit down and talk about this stuff. They're like, I mean, they're takeaway is yeah like 50 years. We'll we'll probably have a really good idea of the stuff. But right now we like we just know that certain things change it we don't really know like if it's a good change bad change, so I'll give an example in there was another study that did show a gut microbiome shift with sucralose.
And they showed some of the species of bacteria that were increased or decreased and one of the species that was increased. I believe I'm going to butcher this so badly. I think it was Blau diaco coitus was was the name of it or at least how I tried to read it, right? Because these are very like strange Latin
word. Yeah. The name is of bacteria are really difficult. Yeah to pronounce
now. What's interesting is this species of bacteria was associated with better metabolic Health lower.
Scum obesity better insulin sensitivity and so I kind of walked away saying well couldn't you make the argument that sucralose actually changed the gut microbiome for the better based on some of this data and so I'm not saying that what I'm saying is the following.
We don't really know if that change the gut microbiome is a good change bad change or neutral. We just know that it changes. So if you want to avoid fine, but if you're somebody who really struggles with moderating your intake and a sucralose is or an aspartame or whatever. Have you?
Helps you moderate that intake then again, you're shooting the alligator closest to the boat. Let's let's focus on the big stuff. Right and that's kind of where I land. And again, I'll hold open that perhaps my mind will change and adjust but sucralose been around a long time the other thing people bring up as cancer. They'll bring up cancer with artificial sweeteners and I'll give you an example why I'm not worried about this first off.
You have to keep in mind that negativity bias in the news. All right things that are negative are much more likely to get play than things that are positive. Okay. Think about how much you hear about this causes cancer. This causes heart disease has versus this protects against this this protects against this it's also safer to when the media warns people off things as opposed to towards things because if I push people towards things there's more liability right? Push me go away from things where rarely are
They responsible for the opportunity cost there or the trade-off as you referred to it,
right? So you hear a lot people are all man. All these studies say that these cause cancer. So again, I'm going to give a shout out to consensus because it's a great AI tool that basically will give you like if you ask a question and there's some filters that help with that it will give you kind of like this percentage of studies say, yes, this percentage saying possibly in this percentage say no have used a little bit Yeah, Terry tool.
And if you type in does aspartame cause cancer for example, 80% say no and then like I think the split is like thirteen percent say possibly in seven percent say yes, right, but you would never know that from like listening to Social Media watching the news, but I want to point out one study in particular that did show an association of aspartame intake with cancer and it was from the nutria Santi cohort. I think that was on a France like 100,000 people and they looked at like people who didn't use it forces people.
Who were like low moderate users and the people who are like high users they categorize them to Turtles and between the no non-users and the low moderate users. There was like a believe it was like a 15 ish percent relative risk increase in cancer incidents.
And that's what got reported in the news and then that drop to like a six percent increased risk in the High group. So it did this which I'm not aware of any carcinogens that they actually decrease in terms of the risks that like can't carcinogenesis as they go up in like the concentration and so to me, you know, one of the things
I've got to realize my PhD advisor used to say if you torture the data enough, it will confess what you want it to say. Hmm. And so if you go through a large group of people and you start trying to associate things with other things, you'll find things but you got to be very careful with how strongly you interpret it and so for me again, if I'm if I'm feeling strongly about for me to feel song about something there has to be some kind of dose-response or at least like if there's a bell curve sometimes you see that but
Very rarely, especially with with cancer stuff. Usually this is kind of a linear effect. And so again, that's where I land right now artificial sweeteners. I land on them as a useful tool for a lot of people. I don't think they're magic. I think they occupy that sweet taste for a lot of people and if you can completely avoid them in abstain from them and you're perfectly happy then by all means do that, but if they help you maintain a healthy body weight then by all means do that.
Love it.
You've dealt with some injuries. You've dealt with pain. You talked a little bit about how reducing your stress and interpretation of the pain could help. I want to talk about pain and pain management. But before we do that a more general question that relates is about recovery tools many many people want to know okay, if we were to create the Pyramid of the hierarchy of tools for recovery after training and here let's change out or let's use resistance.
It's training and cardiovascular training interchangeably some people run hard other people lift hard or do both from the moment that session ends. What do you have in your in your kit of things to maximize recovery over the shortest possible amount of time and I can immediately think of sleep as critical but what are the things that you can do starting from that final repetition? So I think it's not so time dependent and like I said, it's more about what you do over the course of
flowers and you know and your day-to-day lifestyle but sleep as you said also your nutrition so being consistent with your nutrition and you don't have to get in, you know, Ultra fast digesting carbohydrate and you know, 50 grams of whey isolate right after you you know, but it's probably a good idea within a couple hours of finishing your workout that you have, you know a meal with high quality protein and that you're just eating an overall healthy diet throughout the course of a day and we've kind of discussed that at and
at
length you could do it immediately
after yeah, you can absolutely
quick. I'm going to layer in an additional question. Is there any evidence that fruit is not good at replenishing glycogen as compared to starch because the reason I ask this is that like if I finish a workout and I have some like a whey protein shake with a bunch of berries in it and a couple bananas assuming equal calories. Is that going to replenish glycogen the same way as if I have a couple scoops of whey protein
and a bowl of oatmeal or rice. This is going to circle back to our mechanism versus outcome. And this is one where I changed my mind because of seeing outcomes. So the reason this comes up is fructose your muscles and other tissues lack the enzyme to turn fructose into muscle glycogen your liver has that enzyme so your liver can take four dose and turn it into liver glycogen.
So that is Led. Some people in sports science or research to say well don't have fructose after a workout actually fructose is kind of a dead carbohydrate, right because it's not going to replenish muscle glycogen. And then I was reading a study from Tracy and Josh Anthony, which were they came out of Layman's lab and they actually are responsible for really flushing out a lot of the mtor pathway a lot of the translation initiation pathway, very very brilliant people.
Glad I got to see them a few weeks ago my advisor got his award.
Tracy personally taught me how to Western blot. So thank you Tracy. They did a study where they looked at glycogen replenishment after exercise giving either sucrose which is 50% glucose 50% fructose or pure glucose. And actually if I recall correctly the actually got a little bit better muscle glycogen replenishment with sucrose now this
How do you explain it? Let's seems completely counterintuitive and there I believe again. It's been some time since I read this paper, but I believe the explanation was by providing some fructose. What you're doing is you're kind of satiating the livers need for glucose. And so that glucose that does come in from sucrose can then kind of just bypass the liver and be available for muscle whereas if you're getting pure glucose the liver is going to start picking things off.
Now wasn't a if I recall correctly wasn't a big difference in the rate of glycogen replenishment, but nothing is people don't realize well, even though fructose can't be used to replenish muscle glycogen directly you forget about how the body operates in terms of whole body metabolism and you can store fructose as glucose to glycogen in the liver. And then the liver can release that glycogen at some point into the bloodstream and then that can be taken up by the muscle and
It turned into muscle glycogen. So again when it really boils down to its what are you doing on a 24-hour basis? And I and what I will say to is the rate of glycogen replenishment gets really tossed around a lot as something really important.
For the most part the rate isn't so important. If you're eating enough total carbohydrate on a total daily basis and enough calories. You replenish your muscle glycogen and most people always say dude you your weight training for an hour. You're going to do it again in 23 hours. You got plenty of time to replace that glycogen. You don't need cyclic destron or dextrose or whatever and so I'm not really worried about that. I think where the rate of glycogen replenishment really matters is when you're dealing with athletes who have multiple events in a
A right where it is, they're going to perform and then they need to replenish quickly before they go to their next event or you know, people obviously doing like endurance exercise. We're like Ironman triathlons and that sort of thing where you know getting in that replenishment and keeping it going is very important, but I think for the average person is just exercising once a day not really a big deal. Just make sure eating enough total carbohydrates. So for you
The berries and the fruits in the in the Whey Protein afterwards,
excellent. Okay, and then perhaps and then typically I'll do a meal that includes some starch little bit later in the day. Yeah, great. So nutrition post workout or in the eight hour or two post-workout making sure you eat enough in the following hours. Do you include any kind of stress down-regulation? Are you do you do anything else besides nutrition and sleep to accelerate? Sure.
So Stress Management like you said,
So I am blessed enough that I currently live in a home on Tampa Bay and I get to watch the sunset over the water every night. And that might say that might seem like a weird thing but I really feel like that has helped with my stress level
viewing Horizons. We know just to in the panoramic Vision. We know this from stuff while I is your wheelhouse, right? Yeah panoramic vision is a will, you know, come off the the accelerator of the of the sympathetic armor the auto
Atomic nervous system, which is just nerd speak to say enjoy those sunrises and sunsets. They are very
calm. I was talking to a friend of mine were sitting out I said, well, you know Andrew to approve of the sunset viewing he might not approve of the bourbon. I'm having with it, but you don't need my approval anymore. So whatever could you just slow down a little bit, you know and just decompress and feel better. And so I mean another thing I'll do is I'll you know, once the if I had the kids once I go to bed, I'll go downstairs and I'll lay on the couch with my cat. No play a video game nice, you know, just relax it do.
Decompress compressed, you
know things you enjoy. Yeah, I think
things you enjoy like obviously like can't drink a 12 pack of beer and have that be conducive to to that sort of thing. But the other thing I will say is I think a lot of people focus
Too much, especially resistance training. There's some evidence that being just overall active lifestyle like going out like I remember when I was first getting into lifting like back in the early 2000 guys, like I go in and I left and I lay down the rest of the day right because I gotta I gotta I gotta recover right? I think the research actually suggests that you're better off like having kind of an overall active lifestyle, you know that yeah, it's important to rest and recover but it's probably important to move your body throughout the day, you know active active recovery.
He does have some good data on it. Awesome.
Earlier, we were talking about protein actually several times. We talked about protein and I neglected to ask a question. That is very timely because I just did an episode a solo episode of this podcast recently about skin health and appearance and I looked at the data on ingesting collagen could be from bone broth or other sources of collagen. Typically, it's powdered College ins anywhere from five to 30 grams of collagen and I was kind of surprised at the results also talked to some dermatologists. Basically the results say in these
Papers that he's met an out the meta-analysis. I looked at and in speaking with these dermatologists that the conclusion was that regular consumption of collagen on the order of anywhere from five to 30 grams per day with a little bit of vitamin C a couple hundred milligrams of vitamin C for whatever pathway related reason seemed to improve skin appearance now fewer wrinkles reduction in wrinkles more skin tautness appearance of moisture. It's out of these are subjective measures, right? I don't think they were caliper in the skin.
In and looking at tensile strength and things like that, but people felt they look younger Etc and I was surprised really surprised because without making this too long a question or story a few years back there were some claims by not to be named individuals on Instagram saying well, if you want to improve the function of your Livery liver, if you want to improve the function of your heart beat heart if you want and and you and I were just like no
nothing you're the
nutrition biochemistry is a science guy have a little bit of a background in cold.
Physiology that I rarely talk about but in any case but you know physiology. Yeah, I mean there is we both agreed. There's like zero evidence that ingesting a protein which of course is broken down into its amino acid constituents in the got would somehow lead to selectively shuttling of those amino acids from liver that you ingest to your liver. That just is like a there's only one word for that. It's like a crazy unsubstantiated right claim and then some papers were sent my way which were in a different language and like I was trying to anyway,
Zero minus one evidence is I would say yeah and yet the whole notion that consuming collagen protein, which doctor Gabrielle lion told me is actually a pretty low quality protein on the kind of protein quality skin lowest. Yeah, it's like tendon and toenails and all the stuff gross. But yeah, that's what it is. Somehow leads to improvements in actual collagen which is of course is a native protein of the body, right? So I went digging I just want to update before I get your your answer I went digging and I found again a not to be named.
As this kind of wild story on the internet that ah, well this is because it's broken down into the dipeptides and tripeptides in the gut that somehow inform the body that there's an injury in the collagen and we have quote-unquote breakdown of collagen AKA injury. I don't know breakdown of collagen and elastin in the skin all the time and then the body recognizes the presence of those dipeptides and tripeptides a little groups of twos are three peptides. Not just one.
And sends those selectively to the skin and so it's like once again, it's like it makes sense as a mechanism if it were true, but I just had to like roll my eyes. I was like, oh no, ok. I'm going to pitch this over to Lane as I am right now. So lame take it away. What's the story does ingesting collagen improve skin appearance and does it do we have any idea what the mechanism might be? Okay, so I have a long answer question folks, but had to set the
stage. Well first off I will never make somebody apologize for giving a long-winded.
And Preamble right? Because you know how long I'm about to go. We're both scientist. So I will tell you I actually like after I commented on that post. I went looked up some more research and I've actually changed my mind a little bit. Okay, which which probably wouldn't surprise you haven't completely changed my mind, but I've shifted a little bit. So first off my first thought was exactly what your thought was. This is all getting broken down to constituent me no assets. It's not like you're taking college and just like putting it in the place. You want it like just you know,
Built like that sort of thing. So my in my skepticism was also because one of the highest quality protein metabolism Labs out there where joint Romulan is is Luc Van Loon Luc van loons lab is one of the best protein metabolism labs in the world and they were publishing research back when I was in graduate school. In fact, I think Jordan I were actually in graduate school at the same time. So they did a study where they looked at.
tat
After exercise giving either way protein or collagen protein and they looked at skeletal muscle protein to this and they looked at connective tissue protein synthesis, right and they saw no difference between whey protein and collagen protein and connective tissue synthesis after exercise.
And so but by the way collagen did not stimulate muscle protein synthesis, even like 25 grams. I think it was which most protein sources even like plant protein sources will stimulate muscle protein synthesis had like 25 grams. So it's very low quality. It's low quality in terms of skeletal muscle anybody who's telling you like you're like collagen is good for building muscle. I mean, it's better than no amino acids, but it's one of the worst you can get in terms of all protein sources.
So that study again since I know this lab I have a lot of trust of the data that comes out of there. Right and it was a well-designed studies well-executed study, but then there's these men analysis out there looking at skin looking at, you know, even like some we're trying to make associations with connective tissue injuries and whatnot. And again, I'm always a little bit have the heebie-jeebies when we
We jump straight to we have an outcome, but we don't know what the mechanism is. Right? And then I started reading a review by Luc Van Loon actually and was talking about like the so that collagen is 3 Alpha helixes. So if you think about DNA right, it's a double helix, right? So think about three helixes and an alpha Helix just refers to the way a protein is shaped.
and
They are they have a very large amount of placing so glycine is a non-essential amino acid and every third residue in collagen in the 3 Alpha helixes every third residue is a glycine molecule. So 33% of collagen is glycine. And then I want to say 10% is Proline and then another like 10% issues hydroxyproline.
So Proline the Ted a hydroxyl molecule out of to it and that's done. Apparently the hydro. Nobody needs to know this but just for fun stuff the hydroxyproline helps stabilize the structure because the hydrogen bonding with hydroxyl molecules, which I found interesting. So you have these three amino acids and amino acid derivatives that make up over half the amino acids in the collagen protein.
And well, my next thing was well a lot of non-essential amino acids. If you give them in the diet They Don't Really raise non-essential amino acids in the plasma because the got liver extract a bunch of them glycine is different. If you give there was a study looking at giving just one gram of pure Glycine and looking at the rise and plasma Glycine and I think it went up like I think the like native level of glycine in the plasma something like 250 micro molar and
After giving a gram of it went up to like 400 micromolar. I'm I'm giving my best estimate based on the graph I saw.
And so then I got to thinking.
Okay, that's I guess possible if you have morgue lysine and Proline, I didn't look I didn't see the proline data, but you have morgue lysine and Proline that's winding up in the plasma.
Not that they're being directed to those tissues. But since those tissues use so much of that amino acid, perhaps it does help and then if you look at like whey protein versus collagen and the content of glycine and Proline, I think collagen has like three to ten times the amount of Lysine and proline in it compared to whey protein so am I ready to say collagen helps?
Of skin and connective tissue and what I'm not because I'm still you know, this study looking at connective tissue synthesis doesn't show anything. So the mechanism is incomplete, but there is a plausible at least they've shown that glycine can go up in the plasma from taking it in and it is a big component of collagen. So why are we just suggesting that people take glycine instead? Well that solution that well, I think what they
I would say is like there's because you're getting hydroxyproline in the collagen in the collagen that you're taking that probably don't know how much hydroxyproline is typically in the diet, you know, but I would say again I am a little bit nervous about like a lot of these subjective measurements of skin appearance and skin tightness. I mean, I'm not saying faking data. I'm just saying that data is easy to get wrong because it is subjective right? It's less the the more by the more so
objective things are the more bias you introduce. So I hope open the idea that supplemental collagen could help with skin hair nails. I'm not convinced by the data and I'm not going to tell people to spend their money on it just yet, but I'm going to stop short of saying that I think it's BS and I've actually changed my tune slightly on that from looking in the state a little bit further.
Thank you for that very thorough answer and very clear answer if nothing else it tells us that
Collagen protein is going to be least ideal for post workout protein because of the fact that it's you know, it lacks some varying amounts of leucine Etc. So very might be good might be good for skin definitely not a great protein for dietary protein
reasons. No, it's very very low in the branched amino acids like the lowest in leucine of any protein Source. I'm aware of I think it's like 2% loosing which is like most
In like the worst plant-based sources of Lucy know like 6.5% loosing. So like the worst source is approaching the diet are still like three times more loosing than you get in collagen
proteins and and a quality. Whey protein would be the highest
Lucy 11 12 13 % Yeah
eggs. Whey protein eggs
are going to be around 9% leucine, you know beef chicken most your animal sources are out eight percent. And then most of your plant sources are eight percent in under great.
Well, dr. Lee Norton. Thank you for coming back here for the second time on the podcast. I I must say it's a true pleasure to sit down with you and discuss training nutrition supplementation recovery pain management stress life advice and for so many reasons a you're a you know, a serious scientist, you know in our business of science.
That that really means something you're serious about the science and you're a light hearted guy in the right context and you're but you're a serious scientist. You you believe in the process and you provide the Nuance even though that might not be convenient to what somebody wants or convenient to the discussion like by
the way not convenient for me either. I don't know this stuff be so simple, you know, right
sure sure. You're like the rest of us and at the same time. I really appreciate it because we are now also
so colleagues in the public health public facing landscape social media at sometimes called but a lot of Landscapes podcasts YouTube Etc and it's required. It's needed that people like you exist and I will go so far to say that, you know, and I'm not alone in this right because I've talked about this with with Rogan and with Gabrielle lion, dr. Gabriela, excuse me and others, you know in an ocean of noise.
Some of which has validity right but in an ocean of noise about nutrition and training and all these different things and how to evidence-based blank and science-based that you re really clearly are pure signal like you're going to take as much time and as much effort to communicate the real signal and you today have really defined for us for you. What is real versus not real which versus a maybe and I just want people to hear
Out loud and clear because I think sometimes people pay attention how spirited you are and they miss the fact that in that spirited nature and in the nuance and in the look, we're both long-winded times, like I know because I know this for myself, but I certainly know it for you that that's comes from a place of respect for the science and respect for your audience that is not being dismissive that's actually respect for them. It would be disrespectful to just give them the answer they want or give them a quick.
A cancer without the explanation. So I just really want to extend like a real voice of gratitude for you for what you did for us today. Just far too much to list off. It's also valuable just so so valuable. And also what you do on social media and the way you do it and look I also really love and respect your your fighting spirit because you're fighting you're fighting for truth. You're fighting for good and I also love the posts and the pictures of your kids. They're delightful and it's great to see that the balance in your life you've created so I could go on
On but I'm going to cut this short by just saying a giant thank you for being the signal among all the noise.
Well speak for yourself of being long-winded because I'm not honestly, I appreciate that. That means a lot to me, you know, I recognize how you know valuable your platform is and how many people want to be on it? And the fact that I've been asked to come on again. I really appreciate it and to be able to have the opportunity to disseminate this information.
Formation and not just talk about the studies, but talk about hey, here's a here's a method of thinking here's a way to approach this stuff. And I mean you kind of pointed out like I would love to be able to say yeah see those are bad. Like, I'd love to give you that answer. I can't I can't do it. I can't make myself do it because I look at the evidence and I'm glad you said spirited. I do feel like I do have some fighting Spirit, but at the end of the day I
I tell people you know, I'm human. I've got my own biases my own beliefs and I like making money like anybody but I and I like to be right but at the end of the day I want to help and I believe that if I continue to execute on that mission that you know, Financial stuff will take care of itself and at the end of the day, I just want to be want to be that positive on the world. So thank you for giving me that chance.
It's been a true pleasure, and you're absolutely more than net positive on the world, and we'll just have to have you come back and talk to us again before long. Thank you so much anytime. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr. Lane Norton to learn more about his work. Please see the links in our show no captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition. Please be sure to follow the
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