Episode 510: Layne Norton, PhD: The Best Diet to Follow + Is Diet Coke Actually Bad For You

0:01Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it. Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up.

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1:53now if we look at does one diet stand out as better than the others so there's two studies i'm thinking of there was one looking at four different diets and one looking at 14 different diets both were systematic reviews and they looked at long-term weight loss and what they found was basically no diet performed better than another diet but in one of them they stratified people regardless of diet type, from least adherent to most adherent. And wouldn't you know it, from least adherent to most adherent, there was a linear reduction in body weight. So again, I know this sounds very much like a cop-out, but whatever you can stick to, whatever you can sustain is going to be the best diet for you.

2:34Now, that appears to be extremely individual. I've had people say to me, I did intermittent fasting and I didn't even feel like I was dieting. I've had people say, I did, I tried everything and I did low carb and it felt easy. I've had people say, I did a plant-based diet and I was so full all the time. It felt easy. If you're going to lose weight and keep it off, you have to follow some form of restriction, but you should choose the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive to you. And also don't assume that it'll be the same for everybody. So for me, I tried the whole eat clean 20 years ago when I was getting into bodybuilding, when I felt, when I found out was I was binging on the weekends.

3:14And I remember one day I just had like mowed down a whole pizza and I was like, you know, I feel like it's not the pizza itself that's, you know, screwing me up. It's the fact I'm eating the whole thing. So I'm going to try and hit these calories and protein and carbs and fats and let myself, if I feel like I want something, let myself have it. And wouldn't you know it, I had no problems after that. And you were able to stop at just a little amount? Yep. Now that's my personality, my psychology, right? So I'm somebody like, if I know I can have it, it makes me actually want it less. So I track my calories, I track my protein, I track my carbs, my fats.

3:52Now for some people that feels very overwhelming. It feels extremely restrictive. They just say, well, I'd rather just reduce my carbohydrate intake and not worry about it. Okay. You can do that. Yeah. Depends on who you are. But funny enough, when I got into coaching people, I thought, well, I've got the solution. I'll just have everybody do this flexible dieting thing, and this will solve all the problems. And of course, learned, hey, dumb, dumb, not everyone's like you. What did you find for the people that you've trained? Of all the people you've trained, what has worked the most in terms of what you've seen?

4:25Well, flexible dieting has worked the most, but that's a selection bias because people come to me because they know I'm a flexible dieting guy. Right. And so then they end up wanting to gravitate towards that. And I'll always tell people in low carb or fasting, they're like, look at all these people who've gotten all these results. I'm like, yeah, because they're coming to you. They're your people. They're already sold on that, right? Exactly. So what I would say is, listen, I think that this is great news, personally, because it means the world is your oyster. Whatever dietary strategy helps you be able to be consistent, just do that.

5:00I mean, we have like a nutritional coaching app that we designed. Right. It's an algorithm-based coaching app. What's it called? It's called Carbon Diet Coach. So it's like basically like one-on-one nutrition coaching, but for a fraction of the price. So$10 a month. That's great. And it's all algorithm-based, algorithm that I helped write. But we don't, when it comes to dietary preference, we give people options. Do you want to be plant-based? Do you want to be low-carb, ketogenic? Do you want to be balanced? Do you want to be low fat? And you can pick. And then even within those, we let you shimmy the numbers a little bit.

5:35So you can really get to something. And we don't say, hey, you've got to eat five meals a day or three meals a day or eight meals a day. You get to pick based on what you feel is most sustainable for you in terms of dietary strategy. Oh, that's great. So, you know, I really think that reframing this stuff is like we get into these diet wars. Everybody wants to be the winner and have their diet be best. And like, shouldn't the goal be to like, just figure out what works for people. And when people say, you can't lose fat eating carbohydrates. I'm like, how many millions of examples of people eating low-fat, higher-carb diets and losing fat and getting very lean do we need before we say, well, that's obviously not true.

6:14100 % true. I think people get so, and I'm guilty of this, it's like they find whatever worked for them and then try to justify why it's the best thing to do. It's almost like we're just like, it's like teams, right? Totally. It's like, it goes to politics, all the whole thing. It goes with everything, but it's also like, cause we want to, we don't, to change our minds is very difficult. Oh yeah. Right. And so if we have that in our brain, it takes a, is it cognitive dissonance? Is that what it's called? Yes. Cognitive dissonance. Yes. Great example of that. And this is an example of politics, but I think there was a study done like 10 years ago and they showed both Democrats and Republicans facts that would either support or refute, like directly refute a position they held, right?

6:57What they found is that whether it refuted or supported their position, both things were equally as effective as causing the person to become more entrenched in their beliefs. So when they presented facts to these people, and it didn't matter if it Democrats or Republicans, this is a people problem. This is not a party problem. When they presented facts to Democrats and Republicans that refuted a position they held, people did not take the other side. They did not admit they were wrong. It actually caused them to double down. Yeah. And that's what's called cognitive dissonance. That's so true.

7:32I totally agree with that.

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9:28Okay. I didn't ask you about artificial sweeteners like stevia versus aspirin because I think you did something on diet Coke. Like everyone, because if you, if you are at, If you hold a Diet Coke around these days, you might as well just hold like a machete and like, you know what I mean? Like it's unbelievable. Like God forbid you have a Diet Coke. I'm like that's my biggest weakness is, you know, whatever. You don't think it's as bad as people think it is. Like it's like, right? I mean, I'll tell people, do you want to discuss feelings or do you want to discuss what the data actually says? I want the data.

10:01So if we look at the effects on type 2 diabetes, on weight loss, so if you look at correlation data, which is basically what characteristics do people who drink more diet sodas have, well, you can find a correlation between obesity and diet soda. And so they've gone, aha, see, it's causing people to be fat. Well, that's like saying basketball is causing people to be tall. Right, yeah. Right? But if we actually look at the randomized control trials where they substitute diet sodas instead of regular soda, they see significant loss of body weight. And actually, people say, well, it's not better than water.

10:43There was a recent network meta-analysis done where they compared diet soda versus regular soda, water versus regular soda, and water versus diet soda. The people drinking diet soda lost a little bit more weight than the people drinking water. Stop it. Now, diet soda is not a fat burner, okay? They're just eating less. So what that suggests is people are, if they're substituting with water, they're still seeking out that sweet taste somewhere else. So now people will say, well, that's just weight loss. Like it can't be healthy for your gut microbiome and whatnot. So there's only a couple studies in humans on the gut microbiome.

11:20Most of it's been in Petri dishes and high-dose rodent studies. It does appear that some of these artificial sweeteners do change the gut microflora. However, what we don't know is, is it a bad change, good change, or neutral? We don't know those things? We don't know those things, no. And I've talked to several, one of my colleagues who did her master's at Illinois when I was doing my PhD in my lab, Suzanne Defkoda, is one of the world's leading researchers on the gut microbiome. And I asked her about diet soda, and she said, when it comes to gut health, it's one of the last things I'm worried about.

11:55Really? Yeah. So, for example, so there was a study done where they showed that, you know, artificial sweeteners, I don't know if it was aspartame. I think it was sucralose. Which is Splenda? Yeah. Yeah, Splenda. They showed that, and it does appear to be artificial sweetener dependent. I don't know if aspartame changes the gut microbiome. There was a study looking at it. I can't remember exactly which one it was. I know sucralose did. But if you look at the microflora that it changed in terms of reducing and increasing, they did note an increase in the production of things like butyrate and propionate.

12:30So if you go and look at the literature on butyrate and propionate, guess what? They actually appear to have health benefits. So now I'm not saying that artificial sweeteners are necessarily good for your gut. What I'm saying is we don't know. But what I'll tell you is this. if I can get somebody to stop drinking regular soda and drink diet soda and they lose 50 pounds. And every time I post about this, there'll be multiple people say, all I did was cut out regular soda and drank diet soda. And I lost 50 pounds, 70 pounds, a hundred pounds. You're going to have a hard time convincing me regardless of whatever is happening with the gut microbiome, which we don't know that that person is not healthier now for having lost 50 pounds.

13:08That is amazing. So where did this all come from? It's the naturalistic fallacy, which is if something is artificial, it must be bad for us. But if you look at what aspartame breaks down into, it's aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and then it breaks down into methanol. Oh gosh, methanol. Let me get to that. Aspartic acid and phenylalanine are amino acids. You get 20 times the aspartic acid and phenylalanine in a steak that you do in a diet soda. So let's just take those out of it. The methanol, it's such a small amount, your body can easily metabolize it. And I believe you get more methanol in like a glass of tomato juice than you do in diet soda.

13:49Really? So because you have to understand, while a Coke is like 40 grams of sugar, artificial sweeteners are hundreds of times sweeter than regular sugar. So aspartame, I think, is 200 times sweeter than sugar. And sucralose is like 600 times sweeter. So you're talking about milligrams of this stuff. It's a very, very small amount, which is why, again, when they cite these rodent studies where they're giving a thousand times the dose of what they would normally give humans, I kind of go, who cares? It doesn't matter. I'm not saying people should drink diet soda. I'm not encouraging it as a weight loss tool.

14:27What I'm saying is right now, if somebody wants me to say that it's bad for you, I don't think you can objectively say that. Do I think it warrants further investigation? Of course. But again, if it's a tool that helps people lose significant body weight and keep it off, then I think it's a net win.