How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner

26:47I can't wait till somebody dies or goes to the hospital. I won't be able to publish my paper and I won't be able to keep my job at Stanford after published quicker. So most of my career has been very cardiomatabolic oriented. So I can move somebody's blood cholesterol, blood glucose, inflammatory markers, insulin, and weeks. And sometimes say, oh my God, how come you didn't do this for years? Well, because most of the effect happened in the first two weeks. I did it for eight weeks or I did it for six months, but really the effect plateaued in weeks if it was the cardiometabolic risk factor here.

27:22So if you want to ask me what a die does, I'd have to randomize people to sort of get the exposure or not so the same food with or without the die. And I would have to have an outcome. And there's really not many outcomes. Your cholesterol wouldn't move. Your blood glucose wouldn't move. If it was the same for everything except the dye, those measures would not move. So the idea is you give it to a rat in a huge dose and you see if they get cancer. And it makes metabolic sense that creates a plausibility that this is a carcinogen. But it's really hard to test and think of. you just said you couldn't keep track of how many red dyes there were or blue dyes or yellow dyes combined with the mulsifiers and jelling agents and colorants and anti or glazing agents.

28:13There's a list so this Nova classification put together by Carlos Montera from Brazil is like the hot topic in the world of ultra -processed food. So for the last decade if you will look papers coming out every month, talking about ultra -processed, and if you look at that paper, it's the Nova classification. So an interesting thing just to make this clear, and we can stop if this is too far down the rabbit hole, but the Nova classification is agnostic to nutrition. He doesn't care how much fat or cholesterol or fiber is in there. His whole point in making this was, there's something beyond that.

28:49I know we're worried about lack of fiber, too much saturated fat, something else, but isn't there something to the colorants and the flavorants and the jelling agents, etc. that could be separate from all this, and he, in his analysis, said, if I parsed that out in the data that I'm looking at, that has an additive effect to all these other things. And he's made a big case for it. And people are publishing papers on it all the time. The American Heart Association has a scientific advisory on this. And I've seen the table. It's in our advisory. There's 150 different molecules in this list that come into the different categories.

29:30And if you look through the whole list, you would be a little shocked. So for one thing, turmeric is in the list of colorants. So technically, turmeric could move you into the ultra -processed category. But turmeric is full of curcumin and people are really excited about the possible health benefits of turmeric. Pectin is in there. People have used pectin for years to make jams and jellies and things like that. And there's some horrific names that you can't even pronounce in this thing, which I've looked for in foods and I can't find many of the horrifically named things in any real foods that people eat.

30:02Anyway, there's a hundred and fifty chemicals in this list. And it's really intuitively appealing. It's like there must be something beyond just these nutrients. Oh my God, the food industry is out of whack here. And if we could pull in one other term, it's grass, generally recognized as safe. And so decades and decades ago, the FDA said, wow, there's a lot of these things that the food industry is putting in foods. To do an appropriate task to see if this would harm humans is really not feasible. Plus, in my world, I can't really do studies where I'm going to harm people. I need you to sign up and your staff, and I'm going to randomize you to see who I hurt first.

30:47And once I know who I hurt, I'll know if I need to remove this from the food. So they'll do it in mice, so they'll do it in rats, so they'll do it in a petri dish to see if it's plausible. And at one point, there were 800 of these grass items. And I think it's grown to 10 ,000. There's a whole bunch of ingredients that the food industry can put into foods because of this grass sort of by this option that's certainly problematic. So we have the novel list of these additives. He calls them cosmetic additives. So let's pause just for a minute to think of that name. So the cosmetic means it's to make the food look good.

31:26If you're going to go buy it on the shelf, I mean think just for a minute of an emulsifier. If you went to buy something and it was separated on the shelf. And he thought, wow, I don't really want that. It looks like it's half this and half the other thing. Let's say it was a salad dressing. I would want the salad dressing to look all homogenized. Like somebody shook it up, and I don't want to buy the parts on my salad. I want to put the salad dressing. So the cosmetic additives are to make it look good. And that's why we have dyes. Oh, I don't think I want to buy that gray thing, but I would buy the red or the yellow or the whatever color it is.

32:01So those different additives are going in to make it look more appealing or feel more appealing or smell more appealing instead of just being food. So it does make sense that this is sort of we've gone too far. We have this incredible food system that makes inexpensive food very a bit available for a lot of people 24 -7. And we just went too far. It's too available. It's too inexpensive. It's too stable on the grocery shelf place there so that like three months from now, no bugs have eaten it. It hasn't gone bad. Isn't that good economically that it hasn't gone bad, but isn't a little scary that the bugs don't even want to eat it because they can tell there's no nutrition in here.

32:48So yeah, the processed food issue is very interesting. It's fasting the RFK junior is wants to handle this. And a lot of us are really excited that somebody would like to take a real firm stance here, because it is out of whack. That's super informative. And I appreciate it for several reasons. One that I'd like to highlight in particular is how now several times you've described that to do a proper study, you need to manipulate variables one at a time. You just can't do the sorts of studies that one would like to do where you manipulate 10, 20, 40, 100 variables of dies and colors in people and do that in a reasonable amount of time.

33:34As you mentioned, either people would all be dead or there'd be no more funding for the government for any purpose for a study after a study like that was done. It's just too expensive, too time consuming. The other thing is, given what you just told us about these additives, wouldn't it just make the most sense to just ban them all? Yep, it sure would. And that would wipe out 60 % of what's in a grocery store right now. And if somebody went into buy food for their family and 60 % of the food was gone, and we hadn't replaced it with food that is more nutritious, but meets their budget and is accessible, that would be criminal.

34:13to be perfectly honest. And that's why the health community is trying to figure out how to react to this. So part of this is, I'll just take an example, several examples of things that fall into the line of these ultiprocess foods. There's actually quite a few whole wheat breads, yogurts, salad dressings, and things like tomato sauces. So picture a very inexpensive quick meal for a family where the parents have three jobs they're trying to make ends meet. It should be great if they could be home growing their garden and scratch cooking all day, but they can't, so they come home. They cook some pasta, they heat up some red tomato sauce, and they pour it on top.

34:50More nutritious than let's say a fast food, something or other. So if you take that tomato sauce away and they whip together a little salad, and the kids don't want to eat the raw vegetables that are just plain. They want some salad dressing on it. You picked up some salad dressing. and for breakfast, they were gonna have some yogurt or whole wheat bread. So they're gonna make some toast and put some avocado on it and have some avocado toast and it was said whole wheat bread. All four of those things could have met the criteria for ultra -process food. So you take those off, they can't have the salad, they can't have the pasta, they can't have the yogurt, and they can't have the avocado toast because you took those all away.

35:29Unless we had seen that and said, yes, we know these should be replaced with more nutritious food that don't have the cosmetic additives. And until we get to that place, you can't get rid of them all. That's just cool. Yeah, now that's a wonderful, sad but important, excuse me, example of the challenges that people face in terms of how to feed a family. And at the same time, we could wage the argument that people in Europe have families. They work very hard. And their grocery stores include a lot of ultra -process foods and processed foods, but also a lot of fruits and vegetables. And as we talked about before, maybe more variety of grains, etc.

36:19So we don't I don't want to paint a picture of the French countryside where everything is grown and harvested and searching for truffles during the morning. I spent some time in the South of France and they actually do this. People there spend an immense amount of time and energy thinking about what they're going to eat, preparing that food, eating it and talking about other great meals they've had while they eat it. And even people with without large budgets, at least at that time, ate exceptionally high quality food in reasonable amounts and it was incredibly delicious. So there are areas of the world where people do this, but northern Europe, there's a lot of processed food.

36:56And at the same time, we don't see the same sorts of issues with obesity, at least not to the same degree that we do in the United States, the same chronic health and metabolic issues that we see here. So what if we were to compare and contrast just because they're closest at northern European grocery store and family and the North American grocery store and family, which you just described, illustrated for us, I think a fairly representative example. What's different? What are the eating for dinner that's different is that the tomato sauce doesn't contain these dyes, that doesn't contain sugar.

37:32And what are they replacing those foods with if they're replacing them at all? So probably at least two answers and one of them is going to be, I can't tell you how many Europeans or other folks from other countries have said, I bought the same product that I by in my home country here and it has twice as many ingredients. It's the same company. It's the same food. It could be, what's the hazelnut spread? Nutella. Nutella. Nutella. Like here's the Nutella you sell here and here's the Nutella I buy there. I've had multiple people bring those up to me and show me the different ingredients. And so it can be made the other country way.

38:10But in the U .S., it's made another way for Americans. So if we could even just make that move, if we could say, okay, you already make this in another country, another way. Can you just make it the same way in the US? That would be a start right there. Why is it that there's this discrepancy and ingredients? This became very much in the media recently with fruit loops. It was argued, I don't know if this is true, but it was argued that fruit loops in Canada are colored with carrot juice and beet juice and fruit loops in the United States use artificial dyes. And I can't verify that. I don't know that to be true, but I think a number of examples pointed to that possibly being true.

38:51Why would you have a system like ours if other people can do it presumably for same or lesser cost? I agree. I can't back up that one statement either. But I think that is true for reasons that I can't explain. And that's why it would be helpful to talk more to the food industry. I think there are some challenges with this reaction against ultra -process foods. I think there are some problems with NOVA that I brought up earlier. You'd have to make those foods accessible, but some of them you could fairly quickly. If you took advantage of some of the other ways that people are making it and the rules are just too loose in the US.

39:27So I think that's important. And the level at which this could be impactful is not educating the public to look at the back and find the ultra -processed cosmetic additive and removing it. It's to say that we're going to do this and the food industry will say, I'm going to have to reformulate. If somebody's going to buy my product, if they're going to call me out on this, not only am I going to have to reformulate, it won't be hard because I do it in another country. And I could reformulate and so that ingredient will be gone. I should ask directly, for your research, do you take funding from companies in the food industry?

40:05So several times, so I've got avocado money, I took soy money. Most recently I took Beyond Meat money. Let me talk about the Beyond Meat, which was the most recent one I pitted Beyond Meat versus Red Meat for cardio metabolic outcomes. And the Beyond Meat won in several categories over the Red Meat. And I got a lot of grief for that. People love their Red Meat, including me. Yeah, yeah. I'll go easy, but I'm not gonna go completely easy. Oh my God, gardeners in industry, shill, all he does is take, no, most of my money does not come from there, but I actually couldn't get NIH funding to do that because they would say, wait a second, Beyond Meat makes it crap ton of money.

40:41They just sold their IPO. Why would we fund that research? Let the food industry fund that. That actually happens all the time. And we could get into how problematic that is or isn't. It's certainly at least somewhat problematic that the company is funding the research that will test their product. But more interesting to me was that this was sort of Beyond Meat 1 .0. And Beyond Meat actually did better than the Red Meat. And they actually, after that, took out the coconut oil, took out some other ingredients, added some more benign ingredients, and they've actually reformulated multiple times.

41:18And so by reformulating, even though the study we did show they had a benefit, I totally respect that. They're like, they are listening, they're looking at the health concerns, they're trying to be responsive. And I think if the food industry as a whole did this and we could work more closely with them, that would be the way to improve the US food supply. As opposed to we have a new thing, it's Nova, get rid of them all. That won't really work. So I'm hearing two things. One, we need to pressure the food industry to reformulate, get rid of these additives, dies, what you call cosmetic additives, that may or may not be deadly, certainly not the short term, but that in the long term could very well be problematic.

42:04We just, we need to do something to make sure that that stuff's removed. It just doesn't make sense to hedge on that one. And we can look to Europe in other places that don't clearly, that if nothing else, they've proved that you don't need these things in the foods for them to have a stable shelf life, etc. Okay. So that's one. The other is this issue of food industry funding of studies because, is, you know, a non -nexpertine nutrition, but I pay a lot of attention to the way that nutrition and health is discussed online. I mean, that's my business more or less. And every time somebody hears that a researcher took money from a company to run a study, they assume that there's bias.

42:49In fairness to you and to the process, I'll just ask, are they able to influence the question? Certainly not the collection of data. I mean, you know, the data are the data. Your graduate students and postdocs who are the ones who actually run these experiments, presumably have a hypothesis at the beginning. They ask a question and they try and disprove that hypothesis. But does the company say we want you to test a given hypothesis? Or is it funding for you to test a hypothesis that you select? In other words, is there a good separation of concept? Clearly, the money issue gets people inflamed.

43:26but it's a very different thing when a company says, hey, can you test whether or not our product outperforms in terms of cardiometabolic markers compared to red meat versus, hey, listen, you want to study cardiometabolic markers and people that consume beyond meat versus cow meat? Okay, we'll fund that. There's, it seems subtle, but it's not so subtle, because in one case, they have an endpoint that they're interested in. In another, in the other case, you have an endpoint that you're interested in, yeah. It's not a simple answer that because it's not a yes -no question. It's a total continuum.

44:00So they could say, we'll give you this money if you'll do that. They could say, we'll give you this money to do anything you want, but tell us about it as you go. You could write up the results. I'll give you the most interesting personal experience that I had in this. So everything was pretty benign all the way up till when we got the study done. And this had to do with cognitive impairment. And so, not going to even talk about the product, I'll just set this up because I think you'll find it interesting. So, it turns out that people who were recruited had pretty high cognitive ability. There's a cognitive, there's a survey you can take.

44:33I think 50 was the top and everybody who signed up was a 45. And we were kind of looking to see if this supplement could increase cognitive ability, but we should have realized in the beginning that there wasn't much room to increase. They were 45 out of 50 to begin with. And it failed to show that the product increased cognitive ability. So we shared it with the company and they said, well, I can see you're saying there's an all -finding here, but could you also say there was no dilaturious effect? And I said, we weren't looking for a dilaturious effect. We were looking for an improvement. They said, yeah, but isn't it also true that it didn't make it worse?

45:11I thought, that's actually true. It didn't make it worse. Could I to make these guys happy and to maybe get more money later? Should we say it didn't make it worse? So that would be a really subtle influence that they could have Later on in theory they could market with this supplement maintains high levels of cognitive performance Something like that truthful, but not giving the whole picture and at the end of the day really the important thing is to look the study design So let me I think I can flip this to something that's way more practical than that. It's not even industry influence it's the investigator influence.

45:48So in my world of nutrition, and this is gonna go back to the parking lot of not doing one thing at one time but doing multiple things at one time, let's say I wanna study vegan or paleo or keto or something like that. I can have diet A versus diet B and make a kick ass diet A and a crappy diet B. So it's really unlikely that B will win. And then I publish that and there's a headline on it and then there's someone else who actually favors a competing diet. But they start a study, they make a kick -ass diet B, and a crappy diet A. And the diet B wins because they set it up that way. No industry influence at all here.

46:23This is investigator influence. And then the public comes and says, what the hell? It said diet A is better one day, and it said diet B is better than it. My God, your nutrition scientists never agree on anything. I was going to go have a burger. I was like, ah, if you had looked at the design. So one of my favorite new words in nutrition is Equipoys. I've been trying to set up studies where it's the best diet A that you could be and the best diet B. So if I can just riff off a couple things one of my most famous studies is diet fits It had to do with a low carb low fat diet 600 people for a year.

47:02This is an eight million dollar study. This is the 2018 study. Yeah, uh -huh. And And I told the dietitians, I said, I don't really care which one wins. We actually think there's some genetic predisposition or metabolic predisposition. It'd be great if everybody won. But just to test this fairly, I want all the dietitians to be advising the 600 people in this study. You have to teach both low fat and low carb. You get assigned to different groups and teach the best low carb you can and the best low fat you can. So if one wins at the end, we can say we gave both of them a fair shot. When we did swap meat, this is our study with appetizing plant food, meat eating alternative trial.

47:44Swap meat trial with Beyond Meat. What should we pick for the red meat? Should we pick fast food? Should we pick? We went to San Francisco and got good eggs which prides itself on getting organic, regeneratively farm, pasture raised. So we wanted to get a good quality red meat. We did a study with a vegan diet versus an omnivorous diet. And so for the omnivorous diet, we went to a company that makes really good food and we have it delivered versus vegan. We did ketogenic versus Mediterranean and we made a good Mediterranean diet and we did Jeff Follick and Steve Finney's well -formulated ketogenic diet as the comparison.

48:26So in all these, our group has been having fun trying to address your comment separate from industry influence just to try to make the two arms as fairly competing against one another as you can. Going back to the industry one, there's no way to pull it off 100 % clean. There's just no way. There's so many subtle things that could happen. So the thing that does help these days is you have to register your trial on clinicaltrails .gov to start with. You have to name the primary outcome ahead of time and the whole study design for the world to see. So if it gets to the end of the study and you switched it, somebody will say calling you out on BS, that wasn't your primary outcome.

49:11You can have a third party analyze your data. You can lock down the data at the end. You can make the data publicly available. There's a couple more of these steps that you get, this is as transparent as I can be. So you can make the chance of industry influence lower, but you can never eliminate it. So if I find a positive result, maybe they'll fund me again later for something else. Even though they didn't, some of this industry folks, like I often get gifts. If it's a gift, they can't demand to see anything, but I can offer to show them what happened. And if I, if I show them and they say, hey, would you consider doing this, I'd be pretty stupid to say, no, you gave me a gift.

49:56And I'm not going to consider the thing you said. I would say, yeah, I'll consider it. I will look at it and I want to present objective data. But it's, I don't think it's the industry as much as the investigator and how they handle it. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily for more than 13 years. However, I've now found an even better vitamin mineral probiotic drink. That new and better drink is the new improved AG1, which just launched this month. This next -gen formula from AG1 is a more advanced clinically backed version of the product that I've been taking daily for years. It includes new bio -available nutrients and enhanced probiotics.

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51:47Again, go to drinkag1 .com slash huberman to claim the special welcome kit with 5 free travel packs and a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for over 30 years. Initially I didn't have a choice, it was a condition of being allowed to stay in school, But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular weekly therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, which of course I also do every week.

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52:54With better help, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist you resonate with, and they can provide you these benefits that come through effective therapy. If you'd like to try better help, go to betterhelp .com slash huberman to get 10 % off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp .com slash Huberman. When it comes to, well, let's just close the hash on the industry funding part because I know that's gonna get some people's hair standing up a little bit. Is there a world where you don't have to rely on industry funding to do these studies? I mean, my first response is like, why go there?

53:33why not just, I mean, we have a national institutes of health. They fund studies on everything from developing novel molecules for the treatment of Parkinson's to studying the effects of breath work on cancer outcomes. I mean, it's a, nowadays it's a very wide range of topics that the NIH embraces. But I think most people don't realize this. But there's an everything in between. So why not just go to NIH for the money? Historically, the proportion of the NIH budget that goes to nutrition stays is infinitesimally small. There's been many requests to create an institute of nutrition. Personally, that would be pretty selfish.

54:16I'm all in. I wish they would have more resources for me to do those kinds of studies with objective money. I guess his Robert Kennedy would be a fan of that sort of thing. I'm not speaking about this with any political affiliation, but he seems to care a lot about getting guys and additives out of food and cares a lot about the food supply at least he stated that. And NIH is currently in a state of massive revision right now, pause slash revision.

54:46And I would imagine they would allocate more funding for studies of nutrition given who's in charge now. The bigger challenges, how many nutrition questions there are. So I just serve for two years on the We had two years to consider 60 different questions. Each one of the questions generated subquestions. The vast majority of questions resulted in a conclusion that's either not enough data available, or only enough data available to generate a limited strength response. To get a moderate or a strong, more data are needed. This was almost mind -numbingly repetitive through the whole two -year process.

55:32More data needed, more data needed, more data needed. And this had to do with snacks, skipping meals, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, pregnancy, infancy, processed foods, seed oils, meat and protein. The questions are pretty endless. So even if you opened up the NIH and said, yeah, we're going to move 25 % of our budget to studying nutrition, you wouldn't even come close to answering all the questions that the public has right now. Yeah, that's an important point, and I would say that the public is also doing these experiments. You know, the health and wellness community catches a lot of flack from the standard scientific community.

56:14They'll say, you know, supplements aren't regulated. They are regulated. There is variety of qualities across brands, and you've probably even supplements within brand. But the experiments are ongoing. You have people who are carnivory, you have people who are vegan, you have people finding what works for them. They eliminate this or they add that and they're becoming scientists for themselves. And we've really decentralized nutrition science in my opinion. That's just my editorializing. You mentioned this 2018 study and I'm so glad that you mentioned your efforts to remove investigator bias by making the vegan diet not like crap vegan food and not making the meat diet all processed meats because that's happened in a lot of studies and then that's why the headlines are so confusing over the year so even within a year.

57:02So could you just share with us the major results of that study what the key takeaway was so that people who have heard oh I heard paleo vegan vegetarian you know Mediterranean and omnivore which diet was best if any and for what purpose. Yeah, at the end of the day, my take, if you put all of my studies together, it's a whole food plant -based diet, which does not mean vegan and doesn't mean vegetarian, but could. Plant -based, but includes meat. Yeah, so I don't like this new thing about plant -based being vegan. Sorry. We're not... It's a terrible name. So let's just do this for 60 seconds.

57:42So, pescatarian, lacto -ovabeditorian, lacto -veditorian, ovoveditorian, vegan, flexetarian, reducitarian. Oh, my goodness. There's all kinds of words out there. And clearly, one of the ones that doesn't go over well is vegan. Vegan is very polarizing. And a lot of that is because the vegan community, an important reason many of them are vegan, is animal rights and welfare. And it becomes sort of a condescending thing. Oh my god, you're so unethical and immoral. You slaughter animals and eat them. I am holier than now. I don't. Well, then it gets into issues whether or not a vegan is wearing leather shoes or not wearing leather shoes.

58:19And the vegan community historically was very closely tied to the animal rights community, some of which were radical animal rights activists. It blew up buildings and worse. I know people have been targeted by those explosions. I have been plant -based vegan for many, many years. And I haven't blown up any buildings and I haven't heard any red paint. I believe you. On anybody wearing a fur. But because that was so polarizing, recently, I think this is going to have a backlash and it's going to be failed. People have been using plant -based as a different word for vegan. Just like, oh, we're not the polarizing group.

58:58We're the plant -based, which is not polarizing. So I've been doing this for 30 years. When I said plant -based for the last 20 years, I met most of its plants and some of its dairy and some of its meat. So I actually use it differently than what it is just morphed into recently. So when I say whole -food plant -based diet, that could be 25 % animal products, it could be 30 % animal products, it could be 10 % it could be zero animal products, it could be mostly plants. This is sort of Michael Pollan's old eat food, not too much mostly plants. So that's what my research would suggest. The vegans did better than the omnivores in our twin study that was featured on Netflix.

59:43The Mediterranean versus the keto diet, it's a little more subtle, we might have to get into that. The low carb versus low fat was very specifically for weight loss. So another issue here is, you know, what's the goal? Is it a weight loss thing? Is population. So the diet fits study, my most famous study with the 600 people is really fun to where we had sort of unlimited funds mostly from NIH, but from some from the nutrition science initiative that Peter, Atia, and Gary Tobslad, it's okay if I go here just for a minute. I had done another study before that called the A to Z study, and A was Atkins, and T was a traditional health professionals' approach, and O was Ornish and Z was Zone, and these were three of of those were popular books that were bestsellers, and they were wildly different in carbs and fats.

1:00:32Hattens was super low carb, Ornish was super high carb, zone was kind of in the middle. And the traditional health professionals approach was sort of the control. It had 311 women who did it for a year, and it was a weight loss study. And at the end of the day, when we published a paper in JAMA, there were a few pounds different. The only statistically significant difference was between Hattens and Zone, which was weird, because those were the two low carb diets. You would have thought maybe it's Atkins versus Ornish, the two extreme diets, but those weren't different. When I looked at that study published in 2007, what really struck me was not the small differences between groups, but the within group differences, which were massive in every one of the groups, 75 women in a group.

1:01:16Somebody had lost 30, 40, and 50 pounds, and somebody had gained five or 10. And I thought, oh my god, the difference within the diets is way cooler than the difference, the average difference between the diets. I'm starting to learn about insulin resistance. I'm starting to learn about genetic predisposition, which is sort of where our conversation started today. Ah, you know, maybe I should be looking at these personal factors, these predisposing factors, so I could help see if somebody was better on one versus another. And as we look through our data and the rest of the literature, the two things that arose were insulin resistance, maybe better on low carb, because folks who are insulin resistant have a hard time putting away carbs.

1:01:59So the low fat is problematic if it's high carb. A genetic predisposition, there was a group called interleukin genetics that came and looked at some of our data and said, oh my god, we actually have three SNP single nucleotide polymorphism, a three SNP, multi -locus genotype pattern that we hypothesize predicts who's low fat and low car. And we said, NAH, would you fund this? And they did. And we got this extra money from the nutrition science initiative. We got 600 people. We randomized them for a year. Everybody was into it. It's like the best, highest rigor, highest generalizability study I've ever done.

1:02:37And importantly, there was no average difference at the end of the year in the two groups, which is actually exactly what we wanted. If we had a high quality of low -carb and low fat, we assumed that the average difference would be negligible based on our past work, but we would get this range and we did. This time, somebody had lost 60 pounds and somebody had gained 20 in both groups. And it was a continuum. It's like, this is perfect. We are going to have a chance to explain this variability with a glucose, oral glucose tolerance test, which is sort of state of the art other than the steady state plasma glucose thing, Jerry Riven does, which is too intense and too expensive or glucose tolerance test much better than a fastened glucose.

1:03:22And we'll genotype them.

1:03:27And neither of them predicted the variability. That just means it was the wrong probe. You're using the wrong test to try and address this correlation. So a postdoc looked at me afterward and said there are like 50 single nucleotide polymorphisms that have been linked to obesity and you tested one set of three of them. So that does mean there's 999 ,999 other genetic probes or tests that you could use. And you've just proved one of them. And I said, yeah. But the insulin resistance one was very popular. There were a bunch of studies that had done this. And I have to share a really funny comment that Gary Tobes made while we were doing this, because Gary Tobes was involved in Newsy.

1:04:08What's he best known for? Could you just... Low carb. Low carb. Low carb. Low carb. Low carb. Low carb. He was excellent talks. He can riff on and on about data and data and data. But I have to tell you a funny comment that he made as we got to the end of this study said, I realized now that you're at the end and you're about to publish it, that you screwed up the study. I said, how did I screw up the study? And he said, well, for the low fat group, you told them not to have added sugar or a refined grain. Even though those are low fat. And I said, well, yeah, actually we told both groups to have a really healthy diet and added sugar and refined grains aren't healthy.

1:04:47And he said, well, that's going to diminish the chance to see a difference because most people who are eating low carb versus the traditional low fat do better because the low fatters eating high carb are eating added sugar and refined grain. I thought, that's not screwing this study up. That's doing the equipoids thing. I saw a lot of literature showing that insulin resistance did suggest that there was a subset of the population that would do better on low carb than low fat. And we've actually now followed up on that study with the ketogenic versus the meditrainian diet study. And in that particular study, the way we set it up is both groups would get a lot of above ground vegetables, which Keto says is okay, avoid added sugar and or fine grain.

1:05:31And Keto would have no beans, no fruits, no whole grains. And meditrainian would embrace beans and whole grains and fruits. And so they didn't have a glycosylated hemoglobin difference. That was a primary outcome listed on clinicaltrails .gov. The keto diet raised LDL. The keto diet did actually a better job lowering triglycerides than metatranian. The keto diet did better at lowering triglycerides than metatranian. Yes. That surprises me. No, because they did better at wiping out carbs. When they wipe, when you wipe out all your carbs, then those extra carbs don't go into your liver to make triglycerides.

1:06:07Not surprised. And the keto diet was higher in saturated fat, so it raised the LDL. But the Mediterranean diet carbs generally are pretty quote unquote healthy carbs. Yes, and that's the point. So can we go back there for a minute? So to me, that is the point of sort of looking at this equipoids. So when we made the low carb and the low fat both healthy, our primary predictive outcomes, the genotype thing and the insulin resistance didn't work. And what we took home from that message is you could do either one, If you do them in a healthy way, it would be okay. And when we took it to ketogenic and metatranian, they both lowered glycosylated hemoglobin.

1:06:44One had, the keto had a worse effect on LEL, but a better effect on triglycerides. But as we tracked the adherence, people couldn't adhere to the keto. They couldn't maintain that really low level of carb and the really low level of fat. And so as you're working through these questions, those are the subtle nuances in nutrition that you just said the poor public and I agree, looks at so many of you says, oh my God, you guys can't agree. Can I go back to the fact that I've actually helped American diabetes with their guidelines? I work a lot with American Heart Association. I just rotated off the dietary guidelines advisory committee.

1:07:22When there are scientists looking at nutrition data, we almost always agree. Nutrition scientists don't really disagree. We're almost boringly more in agreement than most people think. And what's fun for me, personally, what I get up in the morning and stay up late at night, is the way you do science around food is fascinating and complicated. And the reason I'm on your show today is because I think if we had more of an opportunity to explain some of these subtle nuances, people would understand that the extremes probably aren't going to help you. There's really some middle of the road stuff, like a whole food plant based diet where you could be vegan, you could be vegetarian.

1:08:05If you were vegan, you could be a crappy vegan. You could have Coke, French fries, and Oreos. Those are all vegan. If you were keto, you could be eating a whole bunch of meat, which is super low carb, but a keto diet is all fat. It's really not a lot of protein and meat. So it's fun to come on your show and have the chance to dive a little deeper and talk to the listeners about some of the important facts that get a little obscured when the social influencers or the headline is just capturing an overall message without seeing some of the rest of this. How do we communicate this in a fun way? And the personal way I've been doing this, actually, my career has shifted now.

1:08:48I now work a lot with the CIA. I am on the scientific advisory board of the CIA. not the Pentagon won the Culinary Institute of America. And what's really been fun about them is how much they appreciate taste, energy, taste, like the things that people really care about, not some of my p -values and my statistics and my equipoids. They want the aesthetic, they want to look good personally, they want the food to look good, taste good, be accessible. So I've been doing some new fun studies where chefs are sort of leading the way. So I'm pretty much against this whole protein -craised thing that's going on.

1:09:27And the culinary in suit America has introduced this concept called a protein flip, or instead of having a massive piece of flesh in the middle of the plate, with maybe some vegetables and starch on the side. It's vegetables and grains and beans in the middle of the plate, with an African Asian Mediterranean, Latin American emphasis. And the meat is two ounces, or it's a condiment, or it's a side dish. It's like making the aesthetics look good, making it taste great. So the phrase I use is from Greg Drescher, from the CIA, unapologetically delicious. So I'm hoping to have the science in my back pocket.

1:10:05I'm a card carrying PhD nutrition scientist. I got the science. We'll probably go there later. I got the environment in my back pocket too. But don't beat people over the head with that. Beat people over the head with, oh, this is going to blow your friggin' taste buds away. This is so good. Well, that's a good incentive. Working with chefs has been very fun. Yeah, that's a good incentive. I would like to just offer the opportunity. You don't have to take it. But offer the opportunity to finally at least start to do away with this ridiculous naming which is plant -based. I mean, I have to say that again, I've spent a good amount of time in the public health sphere and public education sphere.

1:10:47How things are named means everything. If there's ever a hope to get people eating more, let's just say fiber from vegetables and maybe fruit also, that sooner or later this plant -based naming, I'm going to say has got to go. It just is never going to work because people hear that and they hear vegan. It's just been too long. It's been too long. It's just, it sort of defies any kind of logic to think that the public will eventually think that plant -based includes meat. I think there just needs to be a new name. So I don't expect you to come up with one on the fly, but can we call it plant biased, perhaps?

1:11:26So just omnivore. What's wrong with healthy omnivore? Omnivore is fine. Plant forward, people have used, plant centric, people have used. Because as long as it's just plant forward, it just sounds like no meat. So let me tell you a funny story. So I participate in something called the Google Food Lab, which is a whole bunch of people that come together for Googley casual collisions twice a year. And at one of these twice a year events, probably a decade ago. It's usually a two -day event and they have all kinds of different talks and sometimes breakout groups. They had for a whole hour and a half, two hours, we separated in a 10 tables and the challenge was with a hundred really bright people all from the food industry to come up with options for plant -based and they failed.

1:12:11New names, two hours, two hours, a hundred people couldn't come up with a name that everybody agreed on. So it's a problem. It's going to, it sounds like a psychological problem. We need more marketers and we need more infographic people to help with this thing. But these were all really bright people. So I agree the naming is problematic. Instead of naming it something, let's just point out that Americans eat more meat than anyone else in the world. It is if you see these WHO World Health Organization graphics of who eats how much meat. It is the US and Canada and some European countries that eat the most.

1:12:53And there are countries to eat the least and they have limited access to foods. And some of those countries would benefit from more meat per person, because really they're eating cereal. They're eating dry cereal -based foods that honestly just don't have the full nutrition. They're just trying to get enough calories for the day, and it's not just about calories. And part of that isn't just access to food. A lot of those are countries where there's political issues, where somebody's actually withholding food or making the distribution of food problematic. So there's something called the Lancet report that came out in 2019 published in Lansett, the Eat and Lansett Commission, and came up with a healthy transformative diet for the planet that was the intersection of human and planetary health.

1:13:37And it was very little meat. It wasn't vegan. It was very little meat open to the idea that some of these countries that ate the least meat should probably eat more. But what was obscene was how much meat is eaten in America compared to the rest of the world. And to eat that much meat and be affordable has led to the concentrated animal feeding operations, which if they had glass walls, probably most of the country would go vegan. If you saw what was happening, not just to the animals, the way that they raised and the speed, the line speed, part of this is the way the humans are treated who are in the meat packing industry.

1:14:17So it's a very repetitive job. There's a lot of injuries in that situation. And it's part of the reason we have a very inexpensive meat that's very inaccessible. There's a guy named Timothy Peshawat, who for his doctoral thesis, went and worked in a slaughterhouse for a year under cover and published a whole book on this. And the title of the book is Every 12 Seconds. And the reason it's titled that is because a new cow came through the slaughter line. Every 12 seconds, every day, all day, every year. And that the ability to protect the animal rights and welfare, the ability to protect the rights of humans, to have some dignity, like people peeing in bottles because they can't leave the line, they can't even take a bathroom break.

1:15:03It's a messed up food system. So I had an interesting debate with Mark Hyman the other day, who's all into regenerative meat. You mean like regenerative farms, like regenerative farming? Yeah. Yeah. on regenerative ranches and said, you know, if he's all against the K -Fos, the concentrated animal feeding operations, if we could just move all those off to pasture. And he said, yeah, we could just do that. And I said, do you know how much pasture that would take? That would take like three planets of agricultural land to move them millions and billions of cattle out of the K -Fos into there. So I would like to move in your direction where some meat would be fine.

1:15:44If it was raised in a way that didn't require hormones, didn't require antibiotics, didn't require feeding cows, corn and soy. They're supposed to graze on grasses and that corn and soy give them health issues. And so they have to be treated prophylactically for the problems they'll have digestively with that. If we could go back to sort of the old animal husbandry of the day when the cattle and the pigs and the chickens were on pasture, we would eat a lot less meat. but we would eat meat that was raised appropriately and would be more healthy and that would be that middle of the road where we were having multiple types of wheat, not just the one grain that grows right, we wouldn't be monocropin corn, we wouldn't be monocropin soy which is mostly going to livestock feed or fuel, very little corn or soy that we grow in the US is eaten directly by humans as corn or soy.

1:16:39I would be all for that. If we spread out that the meats that way, it would be basically less meat, better meat would work fine. That would be part of a healthier diet for people in the planet. That meat would cost more raising it that way, would certainly cost more. But if you ate less of it, it wouldn't be that big of a hit on your budget. So if you had less meat, better quality meat might be spending the same amount, but then you could also have more fiber for your microbiome, more other vitamins and minerals, less saturated, fat, less hormone, less antibiotics. I love hearing that. I completely agree, by the way.

1:17:16And I think that there is a theory, right? I forget the name of this theory that one of the reasons why people in Europe, especially southern Europe, can eat all these foods that we consider kind of bad for us. They'll have a dessert, they have bread, they have butter, they have olive oil, they eat meat. In fact, they have a fairly pork rich diet in certain parts of southern Europe that on average, the obesity rates are much lower. And the argument, I think, is that the nutrient density is so high in these well -raised, appropriately raised informed foods that people end up eating less of them.

1:17:51It's not just that portion sizes are small. It's that the food tastes really good and it's satiating at a level that's different from volume or caloric intake. I think so much of what people people think tastes good actually is just relative to the fact that they've never tasted like a real strawberry. And I think so what we're talking about here is revising the entire food supply. And I'm all for it. I really am. I'm all for it because addressing this from the level of following this diet or that diet, at least according to your work, doesn't really seem to be the best approach assuming that what people really are after is the experience of food.

1:18:29right? And that's why it's so fun now working with chefs. So really our emphasis for right now. Think about educating the population. That usually doesn't work. Like this is a big shift, potentially, that we're talking about. If you tied this to the environment, we're kind of on a horrific path to not having enough air and land and whatever water to do this. But in the US, at least 50 % of food is eaten outside of the home. And if you think of a group like the culinary into the America that trains chefs. You might think chefs, I bet their goals to be in a three -star Michelin restaurant. Apparently, they've trained 55 ,000 chefs to date and very few of them run Michelin three -star restaurants.

1:19:13They're in hospitals, they're in the Marriott Hotel, they're in universities, they're in schools. More of them could be in schools and really, their gift, their superpower, is taking different food sources is in putting them together in flavorful ways that people enjoy. And so my current interest, actually in working with the new door school of sustainability at Stanford, is to bring the chefs in and to think of these institutional food settings where so many people are eating at the work site, at the school while they're visiting the hospital, whatever. And their choices are different and they taste good and they look good.

1:19:52And in the back pocket, they're actually good for you nutritionally and they're actually good for the environment. We don't have to teach any about this. We work with the chefs, chefs and scientists and business people. This group that I worked with at the Culinary Institute of America about 12 years ago, I was invited to something that's now called the Menus of Change. And for the Menus of Change, the background to this was the chefs were getting very frustrated that it was gluten -free one day and then vegan and then keto and then paleo and They sort of were getting this popular demand to change their menu design and to change some of the equipment that they had and they were getting a Little frustrated at the leadership level thinking why are we being so Reactive couldn't we be more proactive like where the chefs can't we help with food demand because we can make it taste good So they got a science board together to say okay a science doesn't really change these things are healthy They got a business board together.

1:20:52Like they have to stay in business. The customers have to come back and they have to pay so we can stay in business. And they had a chef board who said, this is our craft, this is what we want to do for our life. We want to help people eat. And they sort of put all three of these groups together with their recommendations and they came up with what's called the 24 principles of the menus of change. Twelve of the principles are food and nutrition oriented and twelve of them are operationally oriented. choose locally when you can, celebrate diversity, source local. A whole bunch of different principles.

1:21:25And the idea was there, they would take the set of principles to these institutional food settings, where they order palettes of food every day. They don't just go to the grocery store, and I'm gonna buy the organic one instead of the conventional one. I'm gonna buy the regenerative meat instead of the other meat. They're gonna order crap tons of food for everybody. And the idea was that if you could do that across these different institutions, you could change the palette. You could show people, here's some great tasting things that really hit the intersection of taste and health and the environment all at once.

1:22:02So personally, this is what I'm most excited about, is keeping my PhD in nutrition in my back pocket, doing podcasts with somebody like you, working with these chefs in these different institutional settings because there's a lot of different ways to eat. There's a lot of delicious ways to eat and it would be not too hard to eat more nutritionally, beneficially than we do now. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios but no sugar.

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1:23:14I also drink element dissolved in water, drink any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of element, they have watermelon, citrus, etc. Frankly, I love them all. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement .com slash Hubertman to claim a free element sample pack with a purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement .com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack. I didn't think we were going to land where we happen to be now, but I'm excited that we are because I came into this conversation wanting to talk to you about, and we will talk about, for instance, protein recommendations or food additives, which we touched on.

1:23:56What I'm hearing now is really surprising and exciting, but very practical. And here's what I'm hearing, that we can talk about macronutrients, micronutrients, food supply environment, long -term and short -term health, until the end of time. And ultimately, people are going to try different things, or not try different things, and go with what works for them. However, if we want to create a wholesale change in everything from the food supply to what people consider appetizing and what they consume, we need to focus on taste. as you were describing this thing with chefs, what I heard in my head was, well, that's great for me because I'm near Stanford, at least part of the time, and I can benefit from all this great tasting food, but I could also hear the many millions of people listening to this who are going to say, yeah, that's great for Stanford, but how do I access this delicious food?

1:24:47Like kind of like FU. So, but then I came to the clarity, and I think this is what you're getting at, which is if you can cook really well, healthy, great tasting food that's great for the environment, et cetera, for a big group of people, hundreds or thousands of people five days a week, then certainly there's a version of that for a family that's affordable. And what it takes us to is less a focus on like one form of diet versus another, but to the kind of return to, or maybe It's never good to talk about going back to something to look toward people Getting more involved in preparing their food again.

1:25:30Yeah, absolutely. Right. It's really about you know It's sort of like a discussion about health where you have to tell people listen I can't take away the need for you to get your heart rate up You gotta do cardiovascular exercise. There is no peptide or even hormone that we can give you in pillar injection form That's gonna offset the sarcopena you have to do something. It's called do resistance training of some sort I tell my 80 -year -old mother this, like she lifts weights. And I'm so grateful she does, right? That 30 years ago, I should point out, you and I know this, but for a lot of the audience, the idea that a woman would lift weights much less at a 80 -year -old woman in service to her health, it would just be outrageous.

1:26:07It would be all like, just thoughts about bodybuilding and like football players. And it was just no one went to gyms besides those guys. So what I'm hearing is we need to get back to interacting with our food differently, and that the convenience of ultra -processed food is really what was the entry to this whole thing. And maybe what we need to do is figure out how preparation of quality food, acquisition and preparation of quality food, can be more accessible and can be commoditized in a positive way, in a positive sense of the word. Yeah, absolutely. Going back to the Stanford only thing, I mean, part of this argument was so the central campus of the Culinarians to the Americas, Hyde Park, New York, in the Hudson Valley, and most of the 55 ,000 chefs that have graduated from their program are all over the country and the world.

1:27:04It could be in a, in a Marriott hotel, in one place, and in a school district, in another place. Let me take a quick run at this. 2010, Michelle Obama thought maybe much like R .F .K. Jr. that, wow, the school food that we're giving kids is setting them up with habits that they're going to carry forward in life where they're going to want chisos and pizzas and burgers all day long. We really have to do something there. And in 2010, they passed the Healthy Hunger -Free Kid Act, which was to improve school food. And they gave schools four years to prepare for it. So 2014, It was required. By 2015 and 2016, all kinds of people were complaining that the kids were throwing the food away.

1:27:47It wasn't working. We're going to have to go back to pizza and chizos and wizos and crappy food, because we don't want the kids throwing the food away. There were a couple people who put chefs in schools and said, okay, you can't just say eat better. If they were eating this way for the last however many years they were in school. And you just took the pizza away and put in the hummus. They're not going to try that. But what if you brought a chef in that worked with not just the kids, but the teachers, the administrators, were thinking about attendance and kids who go to detention and test scores and things like that.

1:28:26The teachers are complaining that kids are either hungry or they're not paying attention in class. food many times, if you pay more attention to it, can have an impact on all those things, many of which you were just talking about a minute ago. And school food is a great place to do that and to put a chef in a rural school district in different places is amazing. I now work with another amazing partner named Norletor who has a company called, or a nonprofit called Eat Real. And EatReal goes in and certifies K to 12 schools and school districts for meeting 10 different parameters, some of which are nutritious, but some of which have to do with sourcing locally and sustainably and things like this.

1:29:08And she was just on a Zoom call with her with a pitch yesterday for some funding to do some more work. She's already serving a million kids in school with this new thing and she's getting demands from school districts, can you please come look at our school, certify it, schools are buying new equipment, they're redesigning some menus, they're talking to the staff and they have happier staff, they're talking to the kids, the kids like the food. If you put some effort into this, you can make it taste good and be healthier and be affordable in rural, in red states, Blue States. This can happen anywhere.

1:29:49It's really not, certainly not just went to Stanford and got good tasting food. I like this idea about chefs in schools. I never thought about that. Mostly because it seems reasonable to have one or two per several hundred students because the issue is always scalability. I love the small farm thing. But there's only so many Napa counties and there's only so many, I mean, Montana's got beautiful areas to for cattle, to graze and things like that. But we just don't have the land as you pointed out. And we don't, it's hard to do it at, do things properly at scale. That's I think the fundamental issue here.

1:30:28But this sounds like it's scalable. And I would push back on small farms to middle size farms. So really what we've got is gigantic mega farms. And this isn't my area. So I'm speaking completely out of my wheelhouse right now. But if you look at the amount of corn and soy or potatoes or the way things are grown, they're really inexpensive because they're so huge. If you look at dairy in the US, dairy farms have been in number, have been going down and down and down. And the mega -dare farms are huge. So we have suicides in the dairy farmer community because of losing their family business. We have all kinds of, I'm sure you've heard this.

1:31:02This isn't any mystery, but a lot of farming families are having a hard time getting their kids to take over. We have a lot of really old farmers in the US. I didn't know this. It may make sense that now that you're out. Yeah, so we got a brain drain because of sort of the get bigger, big out we used to have diverse agro ecology going on on farms and they would have some livestock and they would have some produce. And if there was any blight that happened, it didn't wipe out the farm because they had other crops or other livestock to back that up. And at one point, this guy named Earl Butts who said, ah, the military, the men are too weak to be in the military.

1:31:38We're not getting enough calories. This goes back like more than 50 years. Plant corn or soy, fensurote fensurote, buy more land, buy the huge combine machinery to plant this. Don't be so diverse. And I know of one particular person at Stanford, whose family had a farm. And the dad said, I don't even want you to take over the farm. I ruined the land. The biodiversity was great, but this monocropping thing has ruined it. But please go get another job. And so what my sense was is small farms aren't enough to make a decent living and farmers should make a decent living. Absolutely. The farmers and ranchers and fishers should make a decent living.

1:32:23So again, out of my wheelhouse, but you mentioned small farms, I think the problem is mega farms. I think there's something in the middle where you could make a respectable living, but So it would have to be a more diverse agricultural system than just corn or just soy or just a concentrated animal feeding operation. It had to be multiple crops, multiple livestock working together. Yeah, I know these are new concepts to me in the sense that I've not heard before what the sort of tractable model is. But certainly these issues have been on my mind for a long time as you know it's become clear that you know mega farms and factory meat.

1:33:08I mean I don't think anyone in the world would say that factory -farmed meat like these you know cattle houses are good. I don't think anyone would accept maybe even the people who own them. It just seems that what to do become instead becomes excessively challenging. So I'm really grateful to hear about this chef's program. I'm hoping that folks in the new administration will pay attention to this, they claim to be very interested in these sorts of issues and they wield a lot of power to be able to make this kind of change possible. So were they to ask you to advise or help, would you be willing to do that?

1:33:48Things would become so partisan now. I'm just curious, like are you willing to work with the new administration? If they said, hey, listen, like Gardiner, like we need your input, would you? Yeah. Absolutely, and it wouldn't just be mine. I'm having a blast at Stanford right now just because this new school of sustainability is interested in this very much thinking of the farmers and the ranchers and the fishers. I mean, the school of sustainability sort of grew out of the Earth Science school. And so a lot of those people have been working with land and water and air. They're always looking for that win -win across all sectors.

1:34:23So that's one of them. Yeah. Let's talk about protein. Okay, do we have six more hours or just four? No, but we're gonna make it simple. Okay. I'll try. I'll just start off by saying that I, and I would say, essentially, every guest that's touched on nutrition, Peter Atia, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Stacey Sims, Lane Norton, who is degreeed in biochemistry and nutrition. So he probably, of those people, had the most formal training in nutrition and biochemistry. And several others have made a, what I consider a reasonable argument for and try not to gasp here, Christopher. Yeah. One gram of quality protein.

1:35:12So high bioavailability, high protein to calorie ratio. One gram of that per lean pound of body weight. Not kilogram per pound. Per pound. Oh, and of lean body weight. Yeah, of lean body weight. Dr. Gabrielle Line is very precise about this. Sometimes her words get twisted when the media, the mainstream media, which is now no longer mainstream, talks about it, but they've contorted her words a little bit. It's per pound of lean or desired body weight. Because that adjusts for this, you know, for body fat percentage, right? If you're carrying a lot of muscle, it's very different than if you're carrying less muscle under a lot of fat.

1:35:57Even so that those numbers are pretty high compared to the numbers that you've written about. And It's not per kilogram. It's per pound, right? So I weighed 210 pounds. I loosely aim for somewhere between 175 and 215 grams of quality protein per day. So So what are your thoughts about those recommendations and then we'll kind of go back and forth and hopefully come to some sort of conclusion that people can make their own decision about? Yeah. Okay. So a super important fact is to dive in right off the bat is how much protein do you store if you ate an excess today for tomorrow? Like if you were just hedging your bats, how much of that 175 grams of protein do you think you applied to muscle?

1:36:45So very little. You're not gaining muscle right now. I'm going to gas your stable weight, stable muscle. Pretty much. I mean, maybe a little muscle here and there. But yes, stable weight, stable muscle. So I would say very little is going to go into, there's sort of maintenance levels of protein synthesis, anything that I stimulated by exercise, still very little. I'm perfectly fine with the idea that much of that protein intake is used as energy. In fact, I'm delighted with it because the conversion of that protein to energy is metabolic costly in a way that conversion of other chloric forms is less costly.

1:37:20And I'm also happy with it because it tastes good. The meat I eat is very dense. It meat eggs, et cetera, that I eat is very dense in other nutrients like healthy fats, especially for fish or for things of that sort. And I have to eat something. I have a caloric need. And if I eat too many starches, I get sleepy. I feel lousy. I don't tolerate dairy. I love fruits and vegetables, but if I eat too many fruits and vegetables, I feel lousy because my gut can only take so much fiber. So that's what's worked for me because it basically establishes all the things that I'm looking for, right? I want enough fiber, but not so much that I'm bloated or gassy or not feeling well, right?

1:38:02I have to run to the restroom all the time. I wanted a protein synthesis and to cover any exercise induced needs, but I also like the way it tastes. And I like what it brings with it. And I source it from quality sources. So it's hard for me to punch a hole in that argument. And I like rice as much as the next person. But if I eat two big bowls of rice, I feel like garbage. If I eat one bowl of rice with a nice little piece of grass -fed meat and a big salad and some vegetables and some berries for dessert, I feel like a king. So that's pretty good. Yeah, where am I going wrong with one gram? Because the recommendations that I've seen and your papers and others are much, much lower.

1:38:44So I'm not sure if they've been my recommendations. Part of is just sort of pointing out protein 101. There's some myths here that are pretty ridiculous. Okay. So if we were to start at the beginning, and if I go too far down the rabbit hole, feel free to stop me, I got my PhD at Berkeley. Part of the dietary recommendations for protein were established by Doris Calaway and Shelley Morgan at Berkeley. in Morgan Hall, the fifth floor is called the Penthouse. And in the days of the Vietnam War, conscientious war objectives were allowed out of the war if they would be study participants and go up in the Penthouse, where they put on blue zootsuits every single day.

1:39:25And there was a kitchen facility up there and there were beds and they were not allowed to leave for months at a time to do this study. And they did what are called nitrogen balance studies, which today the protein community despises and says this is a horrific way to determine protein needs. But in the day, it was super clever. So picture that you're 50, 60, 70 years ago. However long ago was now. Protein is the main source of nitrogen in your body. If you were to do one of these bomb calorimeter things that blew up and burned your whole body, minerals would be left. You can't get rid of minerals.

1:40:02And nitrogen is in that list. And so you can actually do a nitrogen analysis of food that you're eating, and it'll tell you how much protein is in the food. And if you were to be in a blue -suit suit all day and collect your poop, your pee, your nasal blowings, the hair that came off, the skin sloughing, the fingernail. If you captured everything that left your body, you would know how much protein you had eliminated during the day. So, somebody came up with this idea for a nitrogen -balanced study, and they took these conscientious were objectors and put them in these suits for months and they lowered their protein to zero.

1:40:40At which point they realized, wow, this is fascinating. The losses that you have from protein decrease as you lower your protein to zero because your body realizes you need to be more efficient with what you had. And then they raised the dietary protein level back up until they were in balance. So the amount of protein leaving the body was the same as a amount going in. And they said, this is the protein requirement. It's the amount that will replace your losses in this group of people. And it wasn't just Morgan Hall and the penthouse at Berkeley. It was multiple other groups were doing this. In other places and they pulled all their data and said, this is, and there's a range.

1:41:22And some people need more and some people need less. And let's pretend it's a normal distribution. It They came up with what would be an estimated average requirement for this population that we've studied, and this bizarre prison incarceration, food manipulation thing, with this clever idea focusing on nitrogen, just because it's so unique to protein. And they came up with 0 .66 grams of protein per kilogram body weight per day. Not the. Yeah. And this is the estimated average requirement. Okay, now let's do some super simple math. Let's say if you told the American public, now they've done this bizarre disgusting task.

1:42:07This is how much everybody requires. This estimated average requirement. And they're in after everybody got exactly that much protein. What proportion of the population would be deficient at that level if they pick the average requirement? Half. by definition, that's only the average, half of the people who are above average. So the recommended daily allowance of protein is set at two standard deviations above the value determined by this disgusting nitrogen -balanced test decades and decades ago. And I understand that the community of protein fanatics doesn't like that. That's not an optimal protein.

1:42:47It's like a minimal protein requirement. So I totally buy that argument. But I think the first thing that people get wrong is they think that that old method is recommending the average requirement. And it's not. It's got a safety buffer. It's got two standard deviations built on top of it so that if everybody got that point eight grams per kilogram body weight per day, two and a half percent of the population would be deficient. And not only would 97 and a half percent of the population meet their requirement, they would exceed it. If you drew the graph, right, you're seeing the line, this whole group would exceed it, and this group would not meet it, and this group would get just a small sliver would get what they needed.

1:43:30Thank you for that clarification. I have a couple of questions I know are popping up for people. I just would like to tick off if we can. Who were these subjects? Was it men and women? These were conscientious objectors, so I would presume at that time we He weren't sending women to Vietnam, so it would be just a man. So this is just at Berkeley. So other people were doing this to it. It wasn't just this one group, but I don't know who the others were. I just remember that I got my PhD at Berkeley, and it's like, as soon as I got there, people said, do you wanna see the Penthouse? I said, what the F is the Penthouse?

1:44:02Ah, the Penthouse is where Doris Cowley and Shilly Morgan figured this out, and like, this is a famous thing. So, you know, they took great pride, that part of that came from their work at Berkeley. And they call it the penthouse to get people up there because what happened in there sounds anything but pleasant Yeah, it was unpleasant. Yeah, at least for the Berkeley study These guys are up there guys the girls are up there. They're in these suits. They're collecting everything They're not exercising. They're not breathing fresh air presumably They're not are they walking around are they getting even like a couple thousand steps a day?

1:44:37I mean my concern is that oh Yeah, they're concerns my concerns that they turn them into mice essentially And as somebody, listen, I've published work on mice rats. I no longer do this, but non -human primates, something that I have no interest in doing anymore. And the other primates us humans. And I know how hard it is to do a well -controlled study is extremely difficult. So I understand why they did this, but then it becomes a very artificial circumstance. Now the buffering with two standard deviations above this nitrogen balance amount, I think that's something really important to double click on for people because most people here Oh, it was just a minimum amount required to maintain nitrogen balance But in reality, it's much higher than that.

1:45:23So that was the first one I feel like that's a misperception that that was the average requirement Okay, all the points you made are dead on critical important. Okay Then the second one is Where do you store it if you've eaten an excess because the the fact is right after that I had a I had a debate with Stu Phillips at one point on Simon Hill's podcast because we had exchange some Twitter things and said, oh my god, they disagree they should have a debate. Is Stu Phillips a carnivore guy? So no, Stu Phillips, I'm sorry, is an exercise, he's super great at exercise studies at McMaster University.

1:45:57Okay. And after we actually emailed one another, not just tweeting however many characters you get on Twitter, said, oh my god, we actually agree on most things. and the reason we agreed is we have national data on what the protein intake is of Americans. So, forget the protein bars and the protein powders and everything else. The average American doesn't do that. And the average intake is like 1 .2 grams per kilogram body weight per day. Or higher. Of quality protein? Just food. So, just food. So, let's stop here. Just food. So, So the fun thing was, as Stu and I got together, I said, you know, Stu, you hate that point eight grams per kilogram body weight.

1:46:42And you're saying people should have one gram per kilogram body weight, or maybe even 1 .2, which would be 1 .2 would be 50 percent higher than 0 .8. That's the average American intake. And he said, well, that's true too. So he hates the 0 .8, but he realized it's almost an irrelevant number, because most people get more than that. I just served on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, and we looked at those same data, and it's still true. Americans eat more protein than the RDA on a general basis. Without trying, without knowing about it, it's just in more foods than you think. So the second issue is, well, if so many people are eating more, is there anything bad about the extra?

1:47:25Like, what do you do with the extra? And so there's sort of infinite capacity to store fat in your body. You probably know this in your belly and your butt and your underarms everywhere. Limited capacity for carbohydrate store. You can store, actually heard Gabrielle Lyons talk about how much is in your liver and how much is in your skeletal muscle. But if you are a marathon runner in four hours after 20 miles or so, you bonk because you've exhausted all your carburetors. You can exhaust all your carbstores in four hours, where it would take days and days and days with fat. But there is no storage depot for protein.

1:48:03At the end of the day, if you ate more than you needed, you're not storing any for the next day. It's not in your big toe, it's not in your spleen, it's not in your liver. It's nowhere after you made all the enzymes, hormones, hair, fingernails, and muscle tissue that you wanted, you break off the nitrogen. You have to eliminate that as ammonia in your kidney and you turn the carbon skeleton into carbs, which if we do get back to the keto diet, is throwing the meat eaters on the keto diet out of ketosis because you just turned the protein you're eating to avoid the carbs into the carbs that you're avoiding.

1:48:38But we won't go there. For the moment, we'll just say there's no place to store it. So you're not really getting any benefit about. I was very interested to hear you just say you're fine eating the protein for the calories that the energy. Well, because I need a certain amount of calories, I would also, and I'm not just playing devil's advocate here, I feel, first of all, lucky that at a very young age, I started paying attention to what I ate for not in a neurotic way. I've just did that. And I will say that when you have a certain amount of caloric need, everyone does. You ask, where is it going to come from?

1:49:16and you know, you eat enough vegetables, great, but it's hard to get your ration of calories. Fruits, quality protein. So I'm referring to that as, you know, let's just put the, tastes good to you. So, you know, beef, fish, chicken, eggs, and I guess for the vegetarian, some combination of like beans and rice, that type of thing, where you get enough loosing this sort of thing. But the key thing I believe is that you can, that one, I'll just speak from my own experience, I can eat those and feel satiated. Most starches on their own don't taste good enough. I mean, I like a meal with some salt and some cinnamon, but most starches don't taste good on their own unless you add lipids, you add fats.

1:50:05And so I would argue that most people are struggling with too much body fat because they overeat starches combined with fats. Not because they overeat steak or they're overeating. It's not the hamburger. It's the hamburger bun that includes sugar, the cheese, and then we don't even need to talk about sugary soda. It's just kind of a duh now. It just is loaded with all sorts of things that aren't nutritious. So I think that the key issue with this, you pointed to this idea, and I'm not trying to protect the protein crowd, but I think that one of the reasons that they are proponents of one gram per pound of body weight, roughly or lean body weight is that we need to eat something.

1:50:43We ideally should eat something that tastes good that provides some nutrition for us and that is not, is not something that requires a bunch of other things in order to make it palatable. And, and, you know, I love fruit, but you can't just live on fruit, you know, and I love vegetables in their raw form, but they taste better with some olive oil on them. It doesn't take much to make a vegetable taste really good because I love vegetables. Same for fruit, I'll eat them on their own all day. But the starches are a problem because of the quote unquote requirements and preferences they bring with them.

1:51:21The problem is in a loaf of sourdough bread. The problem is the immense amount of butter and olive oil gets soft up and brought down with it. Most people would argue are overweight not because they eat too much protein. That's the point I'm trying to make. Okay, fair. But okay, so weight is a little separate issue. And if you're getting that for meat, you're getting more saturated fat and not fiber. And we're destroying the planet with the amount of meat and the kind of meat that we're getting right now. But parking lot for now, unless it's sustainably sourced, which is such a small proportion of meat grown in the U .S.

1:51:52It takes attention. It takes attention. Most people cannot access that right now. Unfortunately, I completely agree with you there. So that is a great comment. I would love it if we went there. Okay, but let me move on. So one was the two standard two is there's no place to store it, you're gonna convert it to something else. And three is your quality thing. So here's another myth that we need to bust. So the myth part is that plants are missing amino acids. They're not complete. I'm sure everybody listening today has heard quinoa, the only plant, with all nine essential amino acids. Bullshit.

1:52:32So I don't know if you can look at my paper and your podcast or show it. And I have it on my computer. We can write links on the show note captions. So we wrote a paper in 2019. And this actually was pretty fun for me. It came from working with the chefs. The chefs were working on that protein flip idea that I mentioned earlier, and they were a little worried. They said, what is the thing about the plants missing the amino acids are being incomplete? And so I knew a lot about this, but to make a slideshow for them that day, I did something I had never done before, and I got a whole bunch of foods and I plotted out the amounts of every single amino acid in the food and the portions they were in.

1:53:12If you looked at that point eight grams per kilogram bodyweight per day, and if you thought that exceeded the needs of some people, it's plausible that a lot of people by that calculation need 40 grams of protein a day, which sounds I'm sure very little. And I'm only bringing that up because there's 20 amino acids, And I would assume the average person would think, well, if I needed 40 and there's 20 amino acids, I would need two grams of every amino acid. And that is totally not the way it works. It actually works more like the board game of Scrabble. So when you're drawing, there's 100 Scrabble letters in the bag and there's 26 letters in the alphabet and almost seems like there would be four of each letter in the bag.

1:53:52But y 'all know there's only one z and one y and one x and it is two y's. but there's a crap ton of ease and ends and ours. And your amino acids are just like that. So you need a crap ton of lysine and lucine, and you need very little methanein or cysteine. So it was really fun in putting these graphics together. I said, here's eggs, here's beef, here's salmon, here's pork. Get ready, because I'm gonna show you beans and rice and grains and fruit. And I'm focusing on proportion. I will say per calorie meat has more protein than plants in just in terms of calories. But proportion wise, one of them miss the missing amino acids or the incomplete ones.

1:54:32Because if you make a graphic out of this, you will see all plants have all god damn 20 amino acids. They all have lacy. They all have methionine and cystine. And the idea that they're missing is wrong. The idea that you have to complement your beans and grains is wrong. Unless you're getting very little protein at that point, it is important to complement them. But it's really not hard to get a lot of amino acids. You mentioned the quality of your protein. You're getting 175 grams of protein a day. Quality doesn't matter. Who? You match your needs at 60 or 70 grams and I think you're converting the rest to carbs.

1:55:14So the... Sorry to interrupt you, but I'm going to do it intentionally. The idea is to get, when I say quality, is to get the protein that one seeks without overdoing caloric intake. That gets tough with starches. Very tough. I mean, a half a bowl of rice is not very satiating, at least for me. I'll take a quarter of a bowl of steak over two bowls of rice to survive on, now and forever. Yeah, and I wouldn't go with the grains. So the grains are only like 10 % protein. Beans are 20%. Soy beans are like 40%. And actually the amino acid profile of soy is better than any other beans. So the Asians who were doing soy milk, tempeh tofu for so long, pretty smart.

1:56:00But actually there's an interesting issue in the US compared to other countries in the world that have few beans we eat. And beans are super versatile. So you've got red, red, and ganna. And you've got hummus in the Mediterranean. You've got tacos and burritos and things in Latin America. Well, it's an Indian. You've got dolls and lentils and things like that. That whole lagoon family is the best source of quality protein for the plant eaters. And so it's really a shame that the sort of the quality thing is like, oh, plant foods don't have quality protein. They're missing amino acids. So if I can add that to the pool so the two standard deviations, no place to store it.

1:56:41and plants are better sources of protein than most people think. And so that's why there are vegan bodybuilders. You can win a gold medal in a bodybuilding competition strictly on plant proteins because they're not missing. So if I could just help dispel that myth, they're not missing, they're not absent. There is something to the proportions of proteins. So if you were to see the grid of the heat map of amino acids, is it I'll share with you later. I looked at this prior to this, and I will say that the proportions of let's just concentrate on loosing, perhaps since most listeners will be familiar with loosing as kind of the critical one for muscle building.

1:57:21I've got that in air quotes for those just listening. What, how does, how do the different sources for protein play out in that case? Almost identical, all the way down the list of foods that I have. Loosing is not a problem in plant food. The problem in plant food is it's low in lysine four grains and it's low in methionine for beans. They're actually called limiting amino acids because they would run out. If you only ate grains or you only ate beans, they would run out first and then you'd be screwed. You can't actually substitute another amino acid for a hormone or an enzyme. You have to have all the amino acids in the proportions you want and that's where the complementary thing came in because grains, although they're low in lysine, are a little high in methionine and beans which are low in methionine are a little high in Licing.

1:58:08If you ate them together, it would be closer to their proportions in meat. It's still meat would still be better. It has like because animals are animals and were animals. The proportions are perfect in animals. But what most people in this conference where I presented to the chefs, they're like jaws run the floor. Like seriously, the proportions are that similar? God, that is mind -boggling that they're that similar. I realize they're not perfect. It was just made equivalent for calories. Was it a hundred calories of beans versus... No, this is proportion. This is proportion. Proportion. But if I took, let's just say a hundred calories, which just for sake of example, and we took your chart on which shows, and again, I looked at this prior to our conversation today and it did hit me square in the face that like all these plant sources have a lot of, they have all the different amino acids that beef does in different proportions, but they have them.

1:59:03But if we said, okay, now we're gonna make that chart, but for 100 calories of food. So it's either 100 calories of ribeye, or 100 calories of red beans, or 100 calories of quinoa, you get the idea. Absolutely, and that's why for the next slide, when I give these presentations, my next slide is 100 calories of 20 foods. We didn't plan that, folks. So it shows like for black beans, two and a half cups would be four grams of protein. For soy beans, two cups would be four grams of protein. For rice, like 20 cups of rice would be four grams of protein. But if you put the different plant sources together broccoli is actually oddly a good source of protein.

1:59:46Can we use that protein? Or this is just what? All of it. Oh yeah. Okay. Because bioavailability gets lumped into quality protein. Like this, so there are these charts right that say that, you know, the egg is the near perfect protein. Or beef is the near perfect protein because of the bioavailability. Our ability to use the amino acids as opposed to the amino acids being bound up by fiber or somehow not accessible. Yeah, so that in my field that term would really mean digestibility and absorbability. And so at the level of protein and carbs and fats, humans get like 80 to 85 to 90 percent of everything.

2:00:24It's not like 20 % and 80%. Even if it's plants bound in fiber, you're getting 80 % of the protein absorbed. And then it's the question if the proportions are correct. So if you're losing a little bit from not absorbing it all and if the proportions aren't perfect, that's where meat comes out on top, absolutely. So some colleagues in I wrote a paper called Modernizing the Definition of Protein Quality, which is technically always been on amino acid proportions and availability of digestion and absorption. And me it always wins. And we said, that's fine, but nobody in the U .S. is deficient in protein.

2:01:07I go on talk at conferences all the time and I say, oh, you're all physicians. How many of you have a vegan or vegetarian in your practice? All their hands go up. They have some. Does it have any of you ever in your entire career treated anyone for protein deficiency? And no one's hand has been up to this day. No one has treated them for protein deficiency. Short of caloric deficiency or other things that are going on, and it's not an isolated protein deficiency because they're vegetarians or vegans. And so our definition included environmental impact and the other nutrients that come with meat that don't come with plants.

2:01:42And so when we created a scaryl that said chemical amino -asked composition and bioavailability and impact on the planet and the other nutrients that come with it or absent, plants and animals were the same. We sort of neutralized it. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real -time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. Another one of the most important factors in both short and long term health is your body's ability to manage glucose. This is something I've discussed in depth on this podcast with experts such as Dr.

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2:03:28In fact these days I'll say this for anyone listening one of the great things about getting older is I actually eat less, but I just try and focus on eating quality food. And I just find that I don't need to eat as much food to maintain my body weight and feel good and have energy. In fact, I'm eating less and less each year. Once I start eating, I like to eat, but I think one of the markers of health, in my opinion, is the ability to wait to eat or to, you know, to eat a slightly larger meal and not have that crater your sleep or something like that, or to have some, you know, eat less one day and more the next day.

2:04:07And maybe we don't need as much protein every day. I've played with this idea before of, you know, limiting the amount of protein I eat for a few days and then eating, you know, going to a barbecue and eating like two ribbons, you know, and enjoying that more. I think we think of things in this very static way, like best thing to eat each day. And you also illuminate for us that, you know, there's a lot of nutrition in beans and legumes and other plants. And again, I'm starting to explore this more and more because I'm not a great cook, but I love to eat when I do eat. And I do think there's a real dearth of variety in the American diet that we can all work on.

2:04:46As long as we're talking about meat, I'm gonna pick on beyond meat a little bit. I think it's the child of a Stanford professor that started this company, right? No, that's impossible. Impossible. Then I'm gonna pick on them both. Pathground. I'm gonna pick on them both. I don't know these people. I have nothing against them, but I will say that I saw some pretty convincing arguments against these Black of a better word artificial meats fake meats. Yeah You put up the list of ingredients for beyond meat or impossible meat and then you compare it to the ingredients in beef and You don't have to be a nutrition expert to say there's a lot of ingredients.

2:05:25I mean it reads like an encyclopedia of ingredients in the fake meat, which aligns with processed, which aligns with people's notions of fake and bad for us. So that kind of hits any potential consumer square in the face. So just because there are a lot of ingredients doesn't mean they're all bad for you. But you mentioned earlier in the context of dyes and cosmetic additives, you know, a lot of things that can't be pronounced that we've never heard of. I mean, I have informal training and science and half of the ingredients in that in beyond impossible meat are completely foreign to me. No, not today.

2:05:58Go to the website right now and look at the ingredient list. Well initially it was overwhelming. Yes, it was stir -alarmated. It was overwhelming, and they have reformulated because of that. It's quite clean. And let me go back to your meat. So in the ingredients in the meat, is there antibiotics, are there hormones? Is there corn? Is there soy? So it's a really easy argument to make when you slaughtered the beef and you took the And here it is, it is only beef. That is not everything that went into it. So I actually am writing a book, and I have a chapter where I got some guy who had done this whole assessment of meat, and the list is longer than beyond meats of all the things that went into the beef that you would find at the store to get that thing to market.

2:06:45So it's an artificial argument. But just because the cow was fed something, how much of that is making it into the meat? because the issue is how much am I consuming. Right, but you would be concerned with all the things that went into making that meat. Unless it was sourced the way I would like, which is grass -fed pasture -raised. Which is only 1 % of the meat. Right. So that's the point where I personally make an effort to eat grass -fed meat whenever possible. I do. But the average person can't. But they can't. Not accessible. So is the argument that beyond an impossible or the better option, let's set aside the cardio -metabolic metrics, You know, that's very important, that it's better in terms of quality of what you're consuming, in terms of, I don't know, sort of health status of the animal versus health status of what came out of the beyond or impossible factory.

2:07:42My contention here is to my favorite saying is instead of what and with what. And so the instead of what we did a study of beyond meat versus red meat, a bunch of people people said, I can't believe you're saying, beyond meat is healthy. Don't you want them to eat the beans and the lentils and the other things? Said, I sure sell do for 30 years. I've been asking people to eat more beans and lentils and they're not. They're still having fast food hamburgers. We didn't even use fast food hamburgers. We used regenerative meat stuff and we got cardio metabolic benefits. I'm just saying, sort of, for the average American who has access to the meat that's out there, beyond meat is healthier.

2:08:19If you had, so again, when I do a study, I have to have a preset number of outcomes and I have to have a defined exposure. So at the same dose, LDL cholesterol went down, TMAO went down, weight went down, blood pressure didn't go up. So here's sort of a funny little sideline. A lot of people were trashing them for being processed foods with high sodium. And what we found in this study was when we delivered raw meat and raw ground beef and and patties, the participants salted them. I definitely salt my food. And so when we did it, the sodium was identical and the blood pressure was identical in the two groups in the study.

2:08:59So the sodium comment is fair that they have more sodium than red meat, but when you take this to people that are eating food, they salt it and it ended up being the same level of salt. So it's not a fair criticism of the way people actually eat it. Yeah, I would agree. You swept their knees on that one. I'd like to talk about this study that you did. I think it's called the twin study. Uh -huh. Yes. Where Cretney for any errors here, but you basically gave twins identical twins the opportunity follow. One diet or was it a pure vegan diet? Vegan totally vegan. Totally vegan diet. I'm going to tell you at the outset what my takeaway from that study was.

2:09:42Okay. And then I'm going to let you tell us what actually happened. I'm doing it in this order on purpose. My takeaway was, wow, what a cool study, you know, having studied rodents for years that are on the same genetic background. You'd love to be able to do this in humans, you study humans with the same genetic, essentially the same genes as close to it as possible. Identical twins, awesome study. And the takeaway, and forgive me, I'm not trying to pick pick on you or the study. What I grabbed from the news articles about this was, at the end of the study, the group that followed the vegan diet said, great, a bunch of things improved.

2:10:24And, you know, but I don't think I can stick to this. I'm not gonna stick to it going forward. It was, this was reported by Stanford media that the takeaway was that they thought it was great, but that they didn't see themselves sticking with it, that it's too hard to stay with. Okay. So that was my takeaway. It's this adherence issue. like, you know, if people, you can give people the ideal circumstance, but the question is, will they follow it in the real world? And that's a tough one because we're, but a critical question, because what we're talking about here is how to scale health. I mean, that's why we're here, right?

2:10:57We're not here. Our UB versus Vedgedwells. Frank, I don't care what you eat as long as it works for you. I know it works for me, but I'm willing to modify it based on the evidence. So the reason we sit down as to try and help people make better decisions on their health. And that was my takeaway. Now tell me what the study was with a bit more detail. And if I'm completely wrong about this, like I like to think like any good scientist, I'm happy to be completely wrong. So let's talk about the study, but let me address that up front. So none of those metrics were part of the study. There's no follow up in the study.

2:11:30No, this was interviews. This was interviews with the participants. So that's not scientific? No, but that's anecdotal. So I'll tell you anecdotal. I mean it was eight twins how many twins were in there? 22 pairs of twins and so each each one was assigned to either Omniverse versus vegan. They get randomized. Okay, so I will tell you that there there was a Stanford media report on three pairs of twins and one pair said no, we back went back to our other diet one pair said yeah, we're both vegetarian now and one pair was sort of in the middle of that. There's another two of the featured twins in the movie, Michael and Charlie contacted us afterward, and the one who is omnivore said, we're both trying to be more vegetarian.

2:12:13Can you give us more resources? So they shifted. Yeah, okay. So two of the pairs that I know of that we had anecdotal follow up with shifted more toward it, and one was intermediate, and one just completely blew it off. That's an end of four pairs out of 22, not science. I'm only gonna answer it that way. My anecdotal evidence said some, yes, some know. Great. No, and you would know you ran the study. Yeah, and not part of the study. So let's go back to the design because we can have some fun with this. And there's a really fun part. I would love to have the chance to address a critique that we've received that's part of the challenge of communicating this to the public.

2:12:53And it has to with lean mass and dexis, dual energy x -ray absorb geometry. So the story starts with, this is all funded by a producer who comes to see us in 2021 and asked Justin, Sonnenberg, the microbiome expert that you've had on your show and I. If we would consider doing a study, the parameters being, it had to be identical twins and one arm of the study has to be vegan. His name is Louis Seihoyos. He got an Academy Award a decade ago for the cove, which was a a documentary about dolphin slaughter in Japan, Mercury, Laden, dolphins who were being fed the school children. He also did game changers, which was elite athletes on plant -based diets.

2:13:42And he wanted to do another one to test out like the health of the diet, not in elite athletes, but in the general population. And he said, I have a donor who has the money and I have a contract with Netflix. They like my idea. And it would have to be identical twins for the science of it and it would and one diet has to be vegan. Can you design a study? What would it cost? How long would it take? Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. And he said, wow, that's fascinating. The identical twins is going to be a bitch. And he said, oh no, no, I'm really going to, I'm totally going to help you. So I'm not going to hold you to the recruitment.

2:14:16We've already found a whole bunch of identical twins for you. And I said, well, wow, recruiting's the hardest thing. Okay. So we're going to make a good vegan diet and we're going to make a good, I'm never a stiit and we're gonna randomize each pair of twins one at a time to one versus the other. And going to have enough money to do this for a long time, we budgeted it out and you have enough for like eight weeks of doing this study and it would be important that people catch onto the vegan part quickly. The I'm never a thing they already do. So what about the other group? Ah, we'll deliver food for the first four weeks and then for the last four weeks we'll have from cook on their own, now that they have enough ideas from having been fed for four weeks.

2:14:57And so that's how it started to be designed. And we got blood and poop in the microbiome. And we got epigenetic data until a mere length and things like this. And adherence, and we have a whole new paper on adherence coming out. And so we randomized them. And as part of this, the producer kept asking for more and more things. And eventually he said, OK, we're measuring a lot of stuff. We have blood and poop and jeans and but we can't measure anything. I says I want decks. I want body composition I said it I don't have enough money and he said well, we're gonna go ahead There's four featured pairs that are gonna be in the documentary that we selected ahead of time and that means there's 18 pairs that aren't involved in the documentary and We have this super studly Neymai Delgado who is a metal -winning vegan bodybuilder and he will train them And so, Neymye had access to the four pairs, the eight twins, and nobody else did it, and I actually never got those decks of data.

2:15:58It's not even part of the study. Jumping to the end when we finished the study, the vegans lost a little weight more than the other group, and they lowered their LDL cholesterol and they lowered their fasting insulin in the main paper that got published in JAMA Network Open. On the side, because we measured a ton of crap, and now this has to be anecdotal with an exploratory, because it wasn't the main outcome LDL, it was the main outcome on clinicaltrials .gov. A group that does telemural length and epigenetic clocks published a whole separate paper and the vegans, according to the biological clocks, were younger than their omnivorous twins, just eight weeks later, by epigenetic clocks.

2:16:40Not my specialty. How much younger? It wasn't even, so you can't even statistically significant. It's not like in eight weeks you've got four years younger. It's more like statistically significant. And they're telling me our caps were longer in just eight weeks. Just remind people what that means. Sure, sure, sure. So on all our chromosomes, there's sort of a hot new topic, which is there's these protective caps on the ends of our chromosomes. And as we age, they shorten. And some people are sort of looking at biological age versus chronological age. And it would be a good thing to have a longer telemere cap on the end of your chromosomes.

2:17:18And I said, no way in eight weeks. They were. So both of those were statistically significant. And just as a side note, that's a little bit fun. How familiar are you with altmetrics scores? I mean, in terms of paper recognition. Yes. So the altmetrics score for the listeners is, my currency in yours is an academic. because how many people cite or work, if no one cited it, who cares? And it takes a while, it can take like five or ten years for people to cite your work. The altmetrics score is all based on social and traditional media. So it appears the week that your paper comes out. And there's some correlation if you've got a lot of media coverage, it maybe we'll get cited later on.

2:17:58So the funny thing is, a good altmetrics score if you Google it is 20. The Jomin Network Open Paper had an altmetric score of 2000, the main paper, the biological clock, epigenetic data, and the Tilla Mirror Link had an altmetric score of 3000. It was more widely broadcast than the main paper. The Saunenbergs have another paper under review right now, and I can say this because it's already been published preprint, the vegans had better microbiome results. And so now we've got cardiometabolic benefits, biological clock, telomere length, microbiome benefits, on the twins who did this for eight weeks.

2:18:41So those are the scientific results. And that was a strict vegan diet. Strict vegan versus... Not a single egg. Yeah, versus omnivore. Okay. Now, part of this is, think, is my message I want the whole world to go vegan? No. my idea is if I only have eight weeks, I need to make a big difference in these diets so that if I get a signal, I can see it in eight weeks. Would there be disadvantages or advantages to doing this? And part of the fun of this is the producer approached us in 2021. He said, my contract with Netflix is, I'm going to release this on New Year's Day when people are making their resolutions, not knowing the results ahead of time, 2024.

2:19:23And that means we would have to do this study in the first six months of 2022, analyze them all in the second half of 2022, let the producer film the participants in the study and give them a year to edit it. So we did all this fastest study we've ever run actually and he filmed a lot of other things and we weren't actually sure how much we would be in the docu series and it's like holiday time 2023 at the end of the year And he says, there's a showing of the Netflix thing. Come, and I say, I can't come. I'm not even available. So I never actually even sought before it was released. And so I wake up in Hawaii in the first week of January.

2:20:06And my wife says, holy shit, your number three on Netflix. 50 million people watch the docu -series in January alone. It's a lot of people. Biggest impact, anything I've ever done, I can't tell you how many people said they changed their diet for marching the movie, but it also elicited criticisms. Anytime you get that many eyes on something you're going to get critique, it's also a beautiful demonstration of how science and new form media are starting to intersect. And so this is really, I've actually been asked to do a whole bunch of talks now on health science communication. And when I get the chance to describe it, it's pretty fun to look into such as in the the docu -series, the producer made a big deal of the Dexodata.

2:20:52And it seems odd that he made a big deal of it because the vegans that were featured, in particular Michael and Charlie, one of them lost lean mass, the vegan lost lean mass. And who wants to lose muscle? That sucks. But that wasn't even an average data point. That was one data point. Turns out Charlie moved three times during the eight weeks of the study. and he didn't follow Neymai's advice anyway. And he was having a hard time eating. So that's why you have more than one person in a study of lots. People never saw those data. People saw it featured on Netflix, and the reason it was featured on Netflix, because then he got to show off Neymai, who's this totally ripped buff vegan dude on there.

2:21:36But people saw that, ah, I saw the Charlie data. He lost lean muscle. Gardener, you are so unethical. You left that out of the drama paper. You are, you're manipulative. I can't believe you left data out of the paper to only show the things that were positive. And my response was, I wish you could have said, it was like only in the eight people. I never saw the data. I didn't have them. I reported all the data that I said I would report. So that's sort of one. Yeah, that's the challenge with merging with forms of media where there aren't a preset criteria. Yeah, this is true of social media. I mean, we've decentralized public health discussion.

2:22:16People no longer look to what's coming, no longer just look to what's coming from universities. The word expert doesn't mean anything anymore because no one knows who to call an expert and who's the better expert, the experts don't agree. As soon as people heard the experts don't agree, enough times, they basically, that went from capital E expert to lowercase E to a tallisize, to inquotes, to what's an expert. Now I'm not saying science doesn't matter, I'm a scientist that care about science obviously, but I think that new form media can be leveraged in both directions. And I will say that game changers did something very clever.

2:22:57I disagree with the conclusion, but you know what most people took away from game changers? The penis thing. The penis thing. The penis thing. The penis thing. I know. Right. Which is horrible science. Right. Which is not even science. It's not even science. And anyone that knows anything about their relationship between nutrition and testosterone, testosterone and erections, by the way, it's also important that estrogen levels be sufficiently high and men as well for libido. You know, it's like there's so many misconceptions about all of that. But what did they take away? They took away the penis stuff.

2:23:29Which just speaks to the slippery slope of any kind of public health discussion. I would say you're doing awesome given that people here vegan and it's going to make 90 % of people kind of brace because they think they're going to get an ear full of a bunch of things that they should be doing and about how they're evil because of all the animals that are being tortured. And look again, in fact, re farms terrible. I just want to just say before I forget earlier used the term protein flip. I actually think that's a great way to describe the diet because It includes, and you notice there's nothing about plants in there.

2:24:07And it has protein there. So I don't know how many Google employees it takes to come up with a discussion where everyone can agree, but I'm putting in a vote for the protein flip diet because it also has a kind of a, it sets a conceptual idea of what you're trying to do. You put the meat on the outside as opposed to central. So I'm voting for protein flip. I'm not sure I'm going to do it, but I like protein flip. Okay. That sounds really good. Okay, so we were never pushing the vegan diet as a whole thing. It was just like this is the study design you have to do this. So now there the critiques comes from Peter Atia.

2:24:40And this is going to go back to a parking lot item from the beginning of our discussion when we were talking about ultra -process foods and the need in science to isolate a variable. Are you going to make me defend my good friend Peter Atia? Sure. Yeah. Okay, so interestingly when it came to those ultra -process foods that was an important point because there's 150 chemicals. And in so many ultra -process foods, they're in combination. So it's really hard to call out one of them or identify one and then put them all together. So you're right, at one level science needs to be isolationist and reductionist.

2:25:14In the nutrition world, we've actually moved from nutrients to foods to food patterns. So one of the things that the dietary guidelines for Americans actually did 10 years ago was they said, God, you know, we've been praising fiber and we've been slamming saturated fat forever. And so if you say, hey, patient of mine, go get fiber and avoid saturated fat. It's like, that's not helpful. I go to the grocery store to buy food. And they say, ah, okay, go buy avocados and stop buying lunch and meats. Okay, that's a little more helpful. And then what we would find is people heard about the Mediterranean diet and I'm going to be ridiculous here, but they'd have their egg -mink muffin for breakfast and their whopper for lunch and a big mac for dinner and by their nightstand they put a little jigger of olive oil and they chugged that before they went to bed and said, I'm Mediterranean.

2:26:03I don't know if it was that extreme. But my point is then they said, ah, so you know, some people are gaming this sort of identifying a food. Maybe what we need to talk about is patterns. So there's been a shift in the public health community in nutrition about dealing with patterns. So Peter called me out and he said that vegan study is so stupid. He didn't say so stupid. He said it's violated the principles of science. They not only manipulated this saturated fat, they manipulated the fiber, they didn't isolate this. You have failed the basics of science 101. The header of the critique for me was that I had compromised science 101 by failing to isolate a single variable.

2:26:47Was this on YouTube or something? It's in his post that he does wherever, I don't know, it is a LinkedIn or is this letter? And the response is if you are going to test a vegan diet versus an omnivore diet, it would have to be different in saturated fat and fiber, B12 and cholesterol, eggs and lentils. It would have to be different in many, many categories. And so to circle back to your original comment, good science has to isolate the variable. It depends. If the question is the vegan diet versus an alternative pattern, then the variable you're isolating is the diet pattern. And so it would have to be absent in meat and eggs and chicken and everything.

2:27:34And that doesn't undermine the science. So I got crap for not publishing the Dexidata, which I didn't have. Peter gave me crap for that. And I got one other piece of crap that I really addressed really well on Twitter, and I'm super proud of this somebody went to the supplement where many of the tables were because they didn't fit in the main paper and they saw the caloric distribution in the two arms during the feeding period and when they were eating on their own What they noticed was during the phase where we were feeding people and delivering food to them the vegans were eating fewer calories And the criticism on Twitter was, when you fed them, you game the study by delivering less food to the vegans.

2:28:20They lost weight because you delivered, you under -delivered calories to them and maybe all the differences they were seeing are just a caloric difference. They're not the diet type. That would undermine the whole study. And it was great. I had the chance to respond. So I used to do a lot more on it. I don't anymore, but I did tutorials back when it was Twitter. And I said, that is a great catch that you saw. Thanks for going to the supplement. That's pretty cool. So let me explain something else. So for the food company that delivered the food, we absolutely matched the caloric intake that we were delivering.

2:28:54But in a nutrition study, it doesn't come with a gavage. You can't cram the food down their throats. You have to let them eat what they want of what. So we didn't actually publish what we delivered. We published what they said they ate and they ate slightly fewer calories and they lost a small amount of weight on the side. So good for you for catching that, but let me have the chance to show you this. And there's actually another Twitter person named Dr. Trow who trolls me and gives me grief for some of my studies. And he wasn't the one who critiqued me. It was someone else. And apparently he did critique me and I didn't see it.

2:29:31And the next day I got a Twitter video apology from Dr. Trow. He said, I read your response to the criticism. I admit I'm wrong. I retract my critique. This is one of the great things about social media. And if it could be more civil like that, it wasn't even just a message. It was a video retraction. And I've been to be fair. He said something the year before where I wrote back and said, this is so cool. We agree on this. I'm sure we don't disagree on everything. Thanks for calling this out and I want to call out you and agree that what you said, I think, is true. Let's try to make the social media discourse more civil and more complete.

2:30:16So that was almost better than doing the study for me was to see this social media exchange, where we said, oh, I sort of misunderstood that point. Thanks for clarifying. Wow, now we can move on and deal with some of the real substantive differences that we have. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back.

2:30:54Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock .com -podcast for 40 % off terms apply? Yeah, having been involved in various online points of friction and subsequent relief resolution, I should say. It's a very satisfying feeling when that happens. In fact, that's how Lane Norton and I got to know one another. He critiqued something I said and we disagreed about it. I wrote back. I invited him on the podcast. This happened in a discussion around cannabis. I didn't episode on cannabis that I still hold to, you know, what's in there. There were some critique from the cannabis research community.

2:31:32I invited the guy on. He came on here. We debated those things. Turns out that the discrepancy in interpretation turned out to be relatively minor overall. That's how science is done. And social media has that opportunity, but it has far more opportunity to just kind of, you know, cast stones over walls and that kind of thing. I'm glad you highlighted those points of rebuttal and resolution. I want to make sure that we talk about fermented food, but in the context of fiber also. I think by now everyone knows fiber is super important. Anyone that disagrees with that to me should see an neurologist because it's just so very clear that if you follow the protein flip diet or the more meat less vegetables, whatever, you need fiber.

2:32:25It's anti -cancer, it's pro digestion, it's all sorts of great things. But you did the study with our colleague Justin Sonnenberg. I love, love, love this study. And there's some interesting footnotes about fiber in there, but maybe you could just highlight like the top contour of the study for people. And I will say this study convinced me to eat low sugar fermented foods every single day. Nice. And I have been ever since, and I recommend that as to everyone who asks me for health advice, I think it's extremely important and effective. Okay, cool. Love this, love the son of works. Justin and Erica are two of the greatest scientists that I've ever worked with there.

2:33:10Practical, they're very rigorous scientists. So we, there's a little backstory that's kind of fun. Much as this is the first time I've met you, even though you're at Stanford, Justin and I had never met at Stanford, and we went to a conference in Seattle and met one another because we were presenting after one another. And he said, oh my God, Christopher, I just saw your presentation where you showed how much you changed people's diets. I have colleagues who told me never to go near humans. like only do mice because humans are a pain in the ass and I'm terrified of humans. I was only going to do mice, but all the stuff I find in mice looks like it's diet related.

2:33:47And I said, oh, poop is icky. I do not want to do poop, but I fear poop. If you fear humans and I have fear poop, we could get together. And he said, great, let's do some stuff together. What should we do? And he really found fiber to be the big deal for his mice. And he said, let's do a fiber study with humans. And I said, ah, it seems like the public is really confused about probiotic and prebiotic, probiotic being live bacteria and prebiotic being the fibers that feed them. And I heard him say this on your show. So if anybody saw this show, he, uh, your podcast with him, he said, all right, we're just going to humor you and we're going to have a fermented food arm, not just a fiber arm.

2:34:26So we've got 18 people feed as much fiber as humanly possible, and 18 people, feed as much fermented food as humanly possible. And so we didn't actually set an upper limit on these. We just said more. You need to, we're only going to do this study for four weeks of ramp up so you can get accustomed to this new stuff in your diet, and then six weeks of maintenance. And then we'll even go back four weeks later after the study ends and see how you're doing. And we will look at the microbiome to see if we can change the diversity of the microbiome, the characteristics of the microbes that are in there.

2:34:59And we'll go to this human immune monitoring center that Mark Davis and immunologist runs at Stanford. And we'll look at multiple measures of inflammation. So we did it. We got the people randomized of fermented food who previously had been eating less than half a serving a day to get six servings a day on average. And I will pause just for a moment there in case that seems obscene. So a picture that one bottle of kombucha that I have right under the table here is two servings. It's only 50 calories. And a serving of sauerkraut or kimchi is likewise very few calories. It's mostly just cabbage.

2:35:38So actually six servings a day was about 300 calories a day. It's not like most of their food was fermented. But given that they hadn't eaten any fermented food hardly at all before, six servings a day was a lot. Yogurt, kefir, kombucha, kimchi, and sauerkraut. Those are the five main things. Low sugar fermented foods. Yeah. I tacked low sugar onto it because when people hear fermented, they go, oh, yogurt, yum, cherry, sugar flavored, you know. Plain yogurt. Plain yogurt. So we actually looked at 90 different inflammatory markers because that's where the field is. And we could go to inflammation as a whole separate topic if you want.

2:36:1820 of the inflammatory markers dropped and got better in the fermented food group. When we went to the fiber group, oh, plus, I'm sorry, wait, this is super important, their microbial diversity increased. Which is a good thing. Not always, but if it's the good microbes that are increasing, that's a good thing. But the other funny thing is the Sonnenberg Lab was concerned that the only thing that was increasing, or they wanted to characterize it, are the microbes coming from the foods they're eating? So they went and bought all the different foods that people were eating and characterized them.

2:36:47And the majority of microbes contributing to the increased diversity were not in the foods that they were buying. So this is a little side statement that they made in the paper. Wow, this is super cool. When you changed the milieu of the environment of the gut microbiome, you might actually see some microbes appear that you weren't even feeding them. They might have been in such small concentrations that when you change that gut environment, some of them bloom that you didn't even know were there. So it's very fascinating that the microbial diversity increased. The markers of inflammation decreased, like a clinical outcome benefit.

2:37:22And on the fiber side, the microbiome diversity didn't increase, and as a whole, the inflammatory markers didn't change. And in some cases, as I recall, they even increased. But. So, part of that was fascinating, because what they did is they said, ah, God, this is all that mouse studies stuff. We thought the fiber was going to be the only one who won. Christopher, we were only humoring you, that the fermented foods would have an impact. We thought it was going to be all fiber. Now we got our scratch in our heads here. Let's see what we can figure out. And they actually separated the 18 people into roughly three groups of six.

2:37:59And they said, let's look at the data in a little more detail. And let's see if we can see anything like there's a range of response in the inflammatory markers. Some got worse, but some did get better. But that's why you do multiple people. You see if it cancels out in the study. We wanted to see the average difference. But they looked at what might be predictors of those differences. And the key factor that came out was the baseline microbial diversity. And so the idea here was that people who had low diversity, like a compromised Western diet depleted diversity, when they stuffed all that fiber down their gallet, they actually had an adverse reaction to it.

2:38:34It's like firehose of fiber. Can't handle this. Gonna actually have more of an inflammatory response to that, not less. But the people with the highest microbial diversity at baseline were more like the fermented food folks, and they had a benefit. And so this is where I thought they were brilliant in writing this paper, is that what they said was sort of from a general population standpoint, from antifoods are good, like, no matter whether they're eating the yogurt or the kimchi or the sauerkraut, because not everybody ate the same proportions of the different things. It was like across the whole group, the benefits were clear.

2:39:10The fiber was much more nuanced, and this is more like a personalized nutrition thing. So one was a general health recommendation and one was if you're going to go for more fiber you might need to make sure your microbial diversity is up first. That might be part of what we have to figure out or warn the people with a compromised or depleted microbial diversity that you won't do well right now with more microbes. Super fun paper to work on. A geeky science thing because I know you're a data science guy that's fun. And the primary outcome for that study was the cytokine response score. So in the world of inflammation, nobody has a single thing that they all like, not C -reactive protein, not interleukin six, not trimethylamine oxide.

2:39:54There's all kinds of things floating out there, but there isn't one that clinicians agree on and measure in the clinic. So Mark Davis had found a sort of cluster of 14 different things in a paper that they found looking within that population. and they said, maybe people should be looking at the cytokine response score. And then on clinicaltrails .gov, we said, that's our primary outcome. And we're going to look at all this other stuff. And in the cell paper, cytokine response score didn't change. And since then, Mark Davis is kind of abandoned this score, because it hasn't been reproduced in other populations.

2:40:29But I think it's really interesting from a paper publishing point of view that the reviewers caught it. They said, look, in this paper, your primary outcome didn't change. All the changes you're seeing are secondary and exploratory. But we kind of admit that you have 90 markers and 20 get better and nothing gets worse. That's probably worth talking about. So this is how nuanced that is. And the fiber story is nuanced. It wasn't 100 people. It was 18 people. I mean, divide them into groups of six. Very exploratory. And yet, that paper's now been cited a thousand times. It's a really influential paper.

2:41:08I mean, I talk about it as often as I get the opportunity. I think a few papers have changed my behavior so radically. We should probably talk about the six servings per day. Do you think people can benefit from a couple spoonfuls of kimchi or sour crout? By the way, it's got to be the stuff that you need to keep refrigerated. Yes. Because you can find many things like sour crout and kimchi on the probably more sour or a crowd and pickles on the shelf, not refrigerate, that's not gonna benefit free anyone. There's no live cultures in there. And they're often paired with sugar and the stuff that's kept it in time.

2:41:46I'm a fan of salt. I like salt, I drink enough water, my blood pressure is low. So I benefit from having salt. I have a lot of family members that, unless they get enough salt, they feel a little light -headed. I think maybe a little blood pressure runs in our family a little bit. So I'm a fan of salt, but you make a good point for people with hypertension. They should be cautious about that. I gotta look out for that. So an interesting part of the studies, again because it's a six -week maintenance phase of this thing. We had to make a big difference, so if there's a signal, you don't want to miss a small signal.

2:42:17So in some of our studies, we kind of exaggerate, we go vegan, even though we're not expecting the world to go vegan, we just want them to eat more plants. We went to six servings because they were eating a half a serving before. And to just say, why don't you double that to one? It's like, okay, we're not going to get a perturbation of metabolism with one. Let's go to six. The interesting thing was, four weeks after the study ended, this group of 18 that were eating basically no fermented food at first, we're still eating three servings a day. They taste great. I love low sugar fermented foods.

2:42:49They're a little bit costly for many people. I'm fortunate that I can afford them like a really good Bulgarian or Greek yogurt. Kombucha can be expensive. I would say that because many of the listeners have a, there's a range of disposable income. But I will say that most processed foods are actually pretty expensive when you look at what's going into, you know, like a latte that you purchase or something like that. Anyway, people love their lattes. I'm not trying to take away anyone's lattes. But I will say that eating low sugar fermented food, I strive to do every day. You ate some before I talked today.

2:43:23I did. I gulp down some scoops of kimchi at it with breakfast sometimes. I have found it has made me feel from a level at a digestion, just sort of general feelings of like gut feeling nice and happy after a meal, but also, and this is correlation. This isn't causation, of course, but just overall levels of energy and immune function. I mean, I haven't been sick and ages. I do a bunch of other things, but I see significant improvements in my health when I travel. So I have this rule that when I travel, I double down on my health practices. My team knows when we arrive in the city for the first time, I will eat in a restaurant.

2:44:00I'm finding a whole foods and I'm just eating raw foods in my room. If you always think it's crazy, it's kind of anti -social, but then I can go through an entire meeting or week feeling really, really good. I never miss workouts when I travel ever. I believe that when you're at home, you have all these conditions that make sleepies or when you travel, some of the things are outside of your control, so control what you can. Anyway, I love the low sugar fermented food thing, and thank you and thank Justin for doing that study. Justin and Erica actually did look at that weight loss study that diet fits and saw some microbial diversity changes at six months that disappeared at 12.

2:44:35The term that they use that I probably can't explain effectively is resident. So if you eat yogurt every day, then that microbe is there because you ate it every day. But if you stopped, the benefit would probably come if the microbe took up residents and was there without you eating it again Which isn't always the case so sometimes you might have to actually eat the yogurt every day the cooler thing Like a fecal transplant would be somehow you got somebody to adopt that microbe and take it up regardless of what you eat and it changed the environment for good That's another place where the field is Is still exploring how to help people the most I would love for you guys to do a study about low sugar fermented food intake, my microbial diversity and mental health depression.

2:45:24Because everyone here is like 90 % of the serotonin is in your gut. You know, the gut is influencing neurotransmitter levels, but I've never seen a quality study. Maybe I just didn't find it. A quality study of, okay, you eat some low sugar kimchi or you drink some kombucha and Heifer and you do that five, six servings a day for six weeks and look at depressive symptoms. I would love for that study to be done. Love it. Yeah, we're always looking for new ideas. Thanks. We'll make you a co -investigator. All right. Well, or consultant. We have a philanthropy arm of this podcast that funds science, where we've collection of donors through our premium channel that we could talk about offline.

2:46:01Right. Christopher. This was awesome. I confess I was a little braced for the vegan versus son of an Argentine who likes steak conflict, but we didn't do that. Actually, I credit you for navigating this really difficult space that used to be called nutrition that is now called food patterns with incredible grace and incredible dedication to figuring out what people can do to make themselves healthier. It's so clear from today's discussion that you're not trying to ram veganism down people's throats. Nor are you disparaging of people's food choices. I you've really highlighted how the food supply and these kind of systemic issues are problematic, but they you pointed to some real potential solutions.

2:46:48And I'll be amplifying all of those solutions as broadly as I can because I agree with them. I also love this notion of the protein flip, if I may. Plant basis got to go. Protein flip is coming in. And I think it's really important that people think not just about what they eat in terms of calories, but in terms of everything from sourcing to how they interact with food. And as you highlighted, so beautifully taste is vital. So if this conversation and others that are sure to stem from it, get people thinking about interacting with their food differently, and thereby eating more healthily, they'll be great.

2:47:28So thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule, tackling the hardest issue in science in my opinion to get your arms around. And coming down here and having a conversation, I really enjoyed it. It was great fun. I just love nutrition. It's really complicated, but it doesn't have to be. There can really be a lot more consensus than controversy if you can have this kind of exchange and explain some of the nuance behind it. And it really is a lot that we don't know. And so there's a room for a lot of different diets out there. And you should find the one that works best for you. But I hope we can help people with some of the foundational principles.

2:48:04And there are many of them that don't change. There are some basics to nutrition. And many people don't follow the basics to eat too much crappy food. So let's aspire to eat a healthful, environmentally sound, tasty diet. Amen to that. Thanks, Christopher. Pleasure. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Christopher Gardner. To learn more about Dr. Gardner's work and to find links to the various resources we discussed, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from Endor and join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

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