#798 - Dr Layne Norton - Nutrition Scientist’s Diet Advice For Lean Muscle & Longevity

27:46Honestly, with as much quackeries as around nutrition, there's just as much around pain science. We think of pain management as stretching, getting massage, surgery. If you look at the actual evidence -based stuff, some of the strongest predictors of reducing pain and recovering from injuries are psychological in nature. So stress management, there's a very high correlation between chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, in fact most autoimmune diseases, and high stress and psychological stress and psychiatric disorders. When your body's like, when you're spun up all the time, it apparently increases your sensitivity to pain is one of the things it does.

28:37It opens, they call it like kind of a, sorry, they call it kind of like opening the gate of pain that as you get more stressed, your gate whitens and allows more things in. And interesting experiment, there was a while back where I think it was, I might butcher the specifics, but the, the, the crux of it will be accurate, which they took 300 people and they applied the same amount of pressure to their skin. And it standardized. So everybody's getting the same pressure. They asked them to rate it 0 through 100, 0 being absolutely no pain whatsoever, 100 being the most painful thing they ever felt.

29:14Most of the ratings were around 50 mark. So right in the middle. But there was somebody who rated as low as 4 and somebody who rated as high as 96. For one person, the same pressure was basically nothing and for another person it was one of those painful things they never felt. And so what that says is pain is an experience. It's almost like an emotion. And if you read the bio -cycle social model of pain, it just really opens your eyes. Another thing is sleep. So sleep deprivation can increase your risk of injury by up to 236 percent. So that looking at eight hours sleep versus four hours sleep a night.

29:53And then actually your beliefs about pain and recovery. So people who believe they need excellent form on exercises to not get injured or actually more likely to get injured. Then people who believe their bodies are strong and resilient. People who ruminate on pain, who think about it constantly, who like check it, like if I have a back niggle and I'm thinking about it all the time, and if I'm like messing with it all the time, the research shows that will make it worse. Whereas the people who are more like, Oh yeah, you know, I like great example complete total shift in my mind frame In 2016 I had a hip injury and training.

30:32I started out at one that one that bad But I kept beating on it trying to get through it and I kept thinking about it and ruminating on it and after like 12 weeks I couldn't even squat the bar below parallel without like nine out of 10 pain whereas a comparable tweak I did like six weeks ago prepping for nationals. I was squatting 590 pounds for three reps and on the third rep I felt my a doctor kind of tweak and it was sore after that probably like slightly strained it. And I backed off, I rested, I didn't ruminate about it. I just was like, you know what we've been here before. This will be okay in a few weeks.

31:12We'll just take it as it comes. As it stands three weeks, three weeks later, I couldn't even feel it. It's totally fine. And I mean, again, this is an end of one, right? But this is in line with the research. And so getting back to what you're saying about, can you focus and sacrifice all that's? So for me, my mental health became actually something I prioritize even more because it affected my training. It affected my recovery from training. So some people will say, well, you know, you post in your stories like you're having a bourbon watching the sunset. Nothing exists in isolation. Like in isolation is alcohol good for training.

31:51Hell no. But what if, and again, I don't have any date on this, but what if me really enjoying that sunset, having a bourbon, the relaxation effect of that actually is a net positive for me. I'm not saying other people should do that and I'm not promoting people drink alcohol if you can relax in other ways. But for whatever reason, I have been able to recover more, having more fun and sacrificing, I'm still sacrificing because I'm in the gym, you know, two, three hours a day pretty much. I think my weekly training load is like 12 to 13 hours. It's a lot of training. And I'm still being diligent with my nutrition, that sort of thing.

32:35But I won't go out and get hammered or anything like that, but I'll go all my friends on the weekend and I'll have a few drinks. And I think younger Lane would have been like, you're not pushing hard enough for this. You're not. And now being older, I'm like, I'm trying to run the marathon. You know what I mean? And I've just seen so many people burn out. So I think the answer is yes and no. So the answer is if you're talking about it, if you've got a sprint and a very narrow sliver of time, yes, the person who sacrificed more will be. will win out every single time. But if you're looking at like long success, you have to find a way to make that sustainable for you.

33:13And I think some people, and even people who maybe have that success, how many of them do we see? They look back and they go, man, I would, I probably didn't have to go do exactly what I did to get what I got. I probably could have enjoyed it a little bit more. And so I think there is a fine balance there. And then the one other thing I would say is People also give them stress over they try to do everything at the same time and one of the things I've really embraced now Is there are seasons of life right so part of the reason I say I'm probably not gonna make a hundred million dollars is because Even though I'm a entrepreneur I want to compete in power -offing and I want to train two three hours a day, but also have kids so If you want to be a good dad and a good athlete you can't be a hundred millionaire at the same time Yeah, and I'm cool with it.

34:01I'm cool. Triasya priority. Yeah, I'm cool making that sacrifice because I know I've had some epic moments that you couldn't pay me enough for setting that World's Cross Record back in 2015. There's not an amount of money you could pay me to give that back. Because what would I go spend it on? To do what? And so other things I enjoy, like I used to do competition tactical pistol shooting, I used to fish a lot more, go up my bottle up more. I don't do that as much anymore, but I'm cool with it because I know the kids are going to graduate one day and I'll get to do that stuff in the future. And I think if some people could just embrace that there are seasons of life, they'd feel differently about things.

34:39I think a lot of people give themselves a lot of unnecessary stress because they feel like I should go back to school. I should start a business. I should get my nutrition or I should, hey, if you're a single mom going back to school and you're working three jobs, maybe now is the time to try to drop 20 pounds. You know, like, you know, like, it's okay to embrace the seasonality of life. Yeah, Jujumufu wrote an article I think two decades ago talking about periodization for life, and it's so fucking, it's so true, man. All right, getting back to diet. Getting back to diet. I would roll better on you if you'd like.

35:13No, no, no, no, no, no. I think it's important. I think it's important for people to see how goals overall are sort of couched within a bigger ecosystem. That stuff's really important. Nothing exists in isolation. Is there such a thing as a best diet for fat loss and overall health? Okay, so if we look at the research, there are now two meta -analyses looking at various different diets and their effectiveness on long -term weight loss. And when I say meta -analysis, what we're talking about is essentially study of studies where they're using different inclusion criteria and they're trying to compile a bunch of similar studies to see if we can come hum du consensus, right?

35:55So one men analysis looked at four different popular diets. Another one looked at 14 and they ranged from low carb, high fat to low fat, high carb to everything in between. And when I say low carb, I mean ketogenic up to ornish diet, which I think is like 80 % carbohydrate. And what they found was over the long term, none of them were any better than the other ones for long -term weight loss. If we look at, now those are kind of free living studies. So people say, well, maybe people weren't sticking to those. There's another amount analysis done that's one of my favorite studies when we get in these arguments about low -car versus this.

36:40Look at equating calories and protein, varying carbohydrate and fat. It's important to equate calories and protein. Obviously, calories, if we don't equate energy, we're comparing apples to oranges. And then protein is thermogenic, so diets higher in protein tend to cause more lean mass retention and tend to be more energetically expensive. So if we don't equate for that, sometimes we can see differences in fat loss even with equal calories. But when they do that and they vary carbohydrate and fat, this meta -analysis used only studies where at minimum, all the meals were provided to participants.

37:18So very controlled feeding studies where adherence is very high Up to metabolic ward studies where they basically have them in food jail and Found that there was essentially no practical difference in fat loss between these diets In fact, it actually slightly favored the low fat diets But it was like 16 grams of extra fat loss per day was clinically irrelevant, right? Like I would never tell somebody do that diet because you might get like 16 grams more fat loss per day like do the one that you can stick to. So on a mechanistic level, we don't really see a difference in fat loss. And there doesn't appear to be like on the average differences in adherence.

38:02The only time we really see big differences in adherence, in studies, is when there's some kind of support. Like when they're talking to a dietician every month or every week, that sort of thing, that does increase adherence. But overall, no real difference in adherence rates, but when they stratify for adherence, so all these different diets don't produce differences in long -term weight loss. But when they stratify for adherence, regardless of diet type, it's like a linear effect. And so what that says is, the best diet for you as an individual is the one that you can adhere to consistently.

38:39And to lose weight, I like what Peter at T .S. says, he kind of puts weight, types of dietary strategies in three different buckets. You have tracking restriction, kind of where you're tracking your calories, your macros, and you're restricting that way. You have dietary restriction, where you're doing low fat, low carb, clean eating, paleo, insert, whatever type of diet. And then you have time restriction. So intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting, any sort of those buckets. And those are kind of your three strategies that you can use. You have to do some form of restriction. All those involve some form of restriction.

39:17I like tracking macros and calories because I am brutally, absurdly consistent when I can kind of eat the foods I like, but just track it. Some people hate that. Some people have a lot of anxiety around tracking. It feels very cumbersome to them. For me, it's like five minutes a day and it doesn't matter. Some people like time restriction. They do it and they go, it didn't even feel like I was dieting. You tried it, you didn't like it, right? Some people, they like the dietary restriction. Well, if I just eat these foods, I lose weight. Okay, cool. As long as any of those can be sustainable for you.

39:53You have to practice some form of restriction, but you should choose the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you and also don't assume that it will feel the same for everyone else because this is where we get into the diet wars, right? Where you have people have a diet that worked for them and now they're trying to evangelize everyone and get them on their team. and it's actually really, I've actually dug into the psychology of this a lot, because after I've had so many of these internet debates, I'm like, why do people get like this? Because I'm diagnostic. I mean, I pretty much, I don't want to take credit for flexible dieting and if it fits your macros, but I would say that no one would argue that I was one of the main people who popularized it.

40:35I don't have IAFYM or flexible dieting in my bio, like, because I'm, I don't, like, I recognize that that wasn't for everybody, but when I first started it, I was in bodybuilding, and I found that just I would try to eat clean, but then I was binging every time I got exposed like pizza or my friends would have a dessert or whatever I was like binge eating. And that was, that was a piffity. I'm like, you know, I'm pretty sure it's not like the, if I had one slice of pizza, that's probably not what's harming me. It's probably the fact I'm eating the whole pizza, right? And so I just started allowing myself kind of what I wanted, but tracking everything.

41:12And all of a sudden, I got brutally consistent and started getting results very consistently. So why do you think it is that people are so tribal about their diet of choice? So I foolishly believed, oh, this is the solution for everybody. This is why people can't be consistent. So it started out very innocently. And then I think there's an insecure element of it, of people insecure about what they're doing. They're trying to get people on their team so they can feel better about it. because there's an inherent uncertainty in any sort of diets. Right. Science. Yeah, okay. And people are tribal -wine nature.

41:48And it's a little bit of, I think what I like to call the Tim Tibo effect. So, do you remember when Tim Tibo was getting into the NFL? So, are you familiar with him at all? Okay, so Tim Tibo was a Heisman Trophy winner who played in the NFL for, I think, probably like seven eight seasons. And if you listen to the critics of him, it was he has a horrible release angle. His mechanics are terrible as a quarterback. He really should be a tight end. He doesn't belong playing quarterback. And he had low accuracy and all this kind of stuff. And the people who were on his side were like, well, he's the highest -metrophy winner and he's got a bunch of heart and he works hard and very positive guy.

42:32Like he was also very religious and he was very outspoken about his religiousness. He became very polarizing, not really for the things he said, but I looked at this with fascination because he had, he had won a playoff game as an NFL quarterback, and he kind of had these games where he just had horrible, horrible games, and then somehow at the end he would will himself to victory, find a way to get to victory, and when the chips were down it just seemed like that guy found a way to pull it out. So I kind of became a little bit of a fan. He seemed like a very positive guy. When you knew people who knew him though like he's legit.

43:08He's a legitimately nice guy And so I kind of was like, oh, I kind of like this guy But then I would read the things that people would say that were negative towards him and I would get kind of defensive I like, hey, how many how many playoff games is your quarterback one, right? But if you were somebody who was on the other side and Maybe you're not that invested in it. You're like, yeah, I mean this guy in that great. He's got good players around him like You know, look at his arm, mechanics. He's horrible, you know, it's really bad. But then you got this whole group of people who are, he's the best quarterback of all time.

43:38He should be the NFL MVP and you go, are you insane? And so I think we drive each other apart with the strongest, like we do this in politics, religion, whatever we take. The most straw man interpretation of the other person's argument and argue against that. And it drives us further apart. I mean, I can, I have so many examples of this when I'll put up a, just talk about what we're just talking about saying, you know, I've done a little like fat losses, different when you quit calories, protein, and somebody will say, oh, so we can just eat pop -tarts all day and lose weight. And I'm like, I don't know wherever said that, like eating pop -tarts all day was a good strategy for me to lose.

44:20No, picking, yeah. We'll get back to talking to Laney in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Marik Health. I wanted to get my blood work done in America, and after I asked around, I found out that Marik Health is the most sophisticated and comprehensive service out there. I loved it so much that I actually reached out to the owner to partner with them because that's how much I believe in what they do. You might have heard that I took my testosterone from 495 to a thousand and six last year and that was done with the guidance of Marik Health without putting me on TRT. Best of all, they walked me through my entire lab report and gave me actionable recommendations to improve my health and my longevity.

44:52They gave me suggestions for diet, for training, for supplementation, and if I needed them, pharmaceuticals. Basically, it's like having a super well -resourced blood expert in your corner at all times. Right now, you can get the exact same panel and medical oversight I got by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to marichelf .com slash modern wisdom, using the code modern wisdom, a checkout for 10 % off. That's m -a -r -e -k -health .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. So two things that come to mind for that. There's an idea from evolutionary psychology called a failure of cross -sex mind reading and it explains how men and women don't understand what the other is thinking from a mating perspective.

45:34So there's something called the over perception and under perception bias. On average, men seem to think that women are more interested in them than they are. And on average... It's shocking! Yeah, I know. And on average, women seem to think that men are less interested than they are. So when in a relationship, you say, even though that your boss fancies you, Right to your wife and life goes, no, you're being stupid. It's like fucking yes He does right and I I know that he does Either of you could be wrong, but I would bet on the guy being right The woman that says like you know that your girlfriend that say something like I don't think that carolines that into you And you're like no, you've seen the way that she like looks at me and stuff And she's like she's just being friendly.

46:16It's like no, no, no, no, no, you don't get you like you don't get it I would rely on the woman with regards to that. So the way that you see the world, because of your biases, the person that you are, your unique constitution, you use that theory of mind and port it onto other people as well, failure of cross -sex mind reading. Now this is like a failure of cross -diet mind reading, because your diet worked for you, you assumed that it is the thing that will work for everybody else. Second point, I think that one of the big reasons why diet is such a breeding ground for very vehement aggravating adversarial conversation is because implicit in your choice of diet is your health and downstream from your health is your longevity and downstream from that is when you're going to die.

47:01So I think that a attack on your diet is an implicit attack that you're going to die sooner. I think it reminds people, it's like a denial of death, protection strategy, right? that no, no, no, no, no, no. My thing is right. And if you attack that, you're saying basically, I've got it wrong. And I'm close at moving myself closer to death, or I could be moving myself more slowly to death if I changed it. Therefore, I'm, there's a lot of existential passion that's tied up in that. And then that kind of gets folded into a broader conversation of if you, if I think that you're getting it wrong and you're popularizing a particular approach that this has a blast radius where other people might do your thing, which is going to kill them more quickly.

47:47So I think that that, from a psychological standpoint, there's definitely two elements in the failure of cross -diet mind reading and this sort of denial of death approach. I think that both of those are interesting. Another interesting element, I just had a conversation with Johann Hari, who's written the book Magic Pill about the dangers of ozampic and where that might end up. give me your opinion on these new GLP1 agonists like ozempic. I think I have a very balanced take on this. If you look at the research data, I mean they work. They work. They're very powerful appetite suppressants and people on average lose about 15 -20 % of their body weight.

48:30People have concerns about thyroid cancer. Those studies are in rodents. we know that less than 50 % of those studies can translate to humans. I think rodents also have a very special kind of receptor on their thyroid that humans don't have. And I think that the dosages that they're being given to the rats are also very high. Yes. Well, and this is what we could do a whole other, like section of how people cite studies and people have no way of knowing like whether it was even a relevant study versus something that was like a very relevant study that was done in humans. But there so there's that and then there's that well people lose more lean mass.

49:11We have to worry about that If you look at the amount of lean mass that people lose while on a zimpyk or GLP1 mimetics It's very similar to the amount of lean mass that people lose when they just do diet with no resistance training or exercise and So these studies so far really haven't combined those and looked at by the Zimpyk's loss resistance training correct There was a study looking at exercise, post -ozympic, and then people getting off ozympic that showed that exercise basically helped people maintain their weight loss from ozympic much better than people who didn't do exercise. Because there's a rebound effect in many of the studies about ozympic when people get Yeah, and not probably for the reasons that people think.

49:58Exercise is good for weight loss, but not because of the calories burned, because you really have to do a lot of exercise to get a big calorie burn. But what exercise tends to do is actually sensitize your brain to satiety signals. So there was a very classic study in Bengali workers done in 1950s. And again, I may butcher the specifics, but the the crux will be right. They looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, and heavily active, like heavy labor jobs. And then looked at how much do people eat? So there was no intervention. They were just looking at how much did they eat. They found from lightly active to heavily active.

50:35They pretty much perfectly compensated their for increased energy expenditure by eating more. But sedentary was dysregulated. Sedentary ate more than lightly active and I think more than moderately active. And so you have this J -shaped curve. So when you are sedentary, the research indicates that it may actually dysregulate your appetite signals. And so since many people are sedentary now, one of the things that GLP1 does, if you listen anecdotally to people, is they say, it took the food noise out of my brain. I stopped thinking about food so much. And I think it may be having like kind of that effect that, you know, sensitizing us to society's signals.

51:18And GLP1 is a satiety signal in and of itself. In the brain, and also it slows down GI motility, which makes you feel more full. What are you about. So I think for obese people, I mean, honestly, for a long time, we have been waiting for this. We'll be like, when is the pharmaceutical industry going to come up with something that helps solve the obesity crisis? It looks like they got it. Everybody's pissed off about it. I mean, I think my concerns are the following.

51:53It still needs to be done with lifestyle intervention as well. especially if people don't want to be on it indefinitely. So, if people, and listen, I'm not making a judgment towards people who decide that they're going to be on it, indefinitely, that's, that is their choice. And honestly, like, despite the cost of it, if it gets people to lose the weight, that it's been getting people to lose in the studies, it will save us tons of money. Now, the government will probably go blow it somewhere else, but it will save us tons of money on healthcare.

52:26I'm more worried on an individual level that if we are not instituting good eating behaviors and lifestyle change facilitated along with this, that people will go from eating a lot of crappy food to eating a little crappy food. And still not getting enough dietary fiber, still not getting enough protein. And I think one of the things that happens is when you're not hungry, protein is probably one of the last things you're actually reaching for. And fiber is one of the last things you're reaching for. So I am on board with people, especially obese people using GLP1 mimetics Because it works and it will save us a lot of money and Everybody's some people were like oh these things have all these side effects.

53:09Honestly the side effects are pretty mild when you look at some of the other pharmaceutical drugs out there that have approval. I mean I mean if the thyroid things ends up being a thing okay, but we have no indication of that in humans yet The worst thing we're worried about is some people get nausea, maybe have gastroparesis, there's some people who have reported that. But name me one really effective drug that doesn't have side effects. I mean, this is, for every give me, there's a gotcha. One of the big pushbacks that Johan got in the episode that I did with him was basically, There's sort of a, kind of like a naturalistic fallacy, I think, or like a naturalistic assumption.

53:52We are offering people an easy way out. Why can't they just eat less and move more? These fat fucks, like you're supplementing, sublimating willpower with this, you know, external thing, which is helping them to suppress satiety. And almost like, kind of almost like they don't deserve to be thin. They don't deserve to lose the weight because they're not putting the work in. What do you say to those sorts of criticisms? Why are you so lazy that you need a car to go to work? Just walk there, just take longer. So I think let me go back 20 years when I got to graduate school. I was very much of the opinion at that time that if you were obese, it was because you chose to be and you're lazy and obesity is a choice.

54:44I think there is personal responsibility to change if you want to change. But there is a lot more that goes into food than just this is a choice. This is food is a pervasive theme throughout our entire society. It's not just, oh I'm choosing this or this. This is how I connect with people. When was the last time you went to an event that didn't have food. When was it like do you just like go out randomly if your friends and sit around? No, you go out and have a meal, you know. And so one of the other things where that breaks down as well when people go well they just don't have enough willpower is I've met some really successful really smart people who were obese.

55:31You're telling me they don't have willpower? I mean, maybe in that one area, there's also a lot of really in shape shredded people who are in tons of debt. But what happened with the willpower? Why isn't it translating? Because this stuff is more complicated than just a very black and white, just one at more. And if we look like a great example where I started to kind of change my mind on things is We all cope in trauma with different ways some people become drug addicts Some people become work addicts. In fact, I heard something once that I thought was interesting that that work addiction is the only thing that you can only Kind of addiction you can have that you will be praised for right which actually makes it one of the most dangerous Kind of addiction because you can just justify it in perpetuity Maybe the gym too.

56:28Yeah, some people get addicted to porn, some people, whatever have you, right? Some people, they find comfort in food. And if you look at a study, they did a study where they looked at obese women and found that obese women were 50 % more likely to have some sort of sexual assault trauma in their past. They use the food as a protection strategy. If I'm less attractive to the opposite sex, it's less like you're the... Or even just bigger. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to be as frail and fragile. Yeah, man, it's very interesting. I think very timely for Johann to release this book. There was definitely one other thing I was quite surprised about was, I think some people accused him of basically doing an infomercial for a Zem Pick.

57:13but he spends 12 different sections of the book, 12 different risks that he's concerned about. So I think there's, I was, I've cultivated an audience of people that are very agentic and like high sort of in personal sovereignty. And I think that maybe this pushes back against a little bit of that narrative. So that, it's not exactly a fully representative sample, but I was surprised by that, you know, we know that obesity is a big problem, lots of people, like no one has no person in their life. that wouldn't do from doing what my dad. My dad would benefit from losing, you know, like 20 pounds.

57:48Maybe 40 pounds, he would benefit from losing that way. So I'm like, I don't know, I think it's to be seen. Side effects, long -term use, long -age, unil studies, how can we tie this in as this dependency? Is this big farmer owning people's health? But it's the same as the artificial sweetness thing. Like, look at what you are gaining versus what you are losing. And to me, your hands got this nice, like a taxonomy, I suppose. He says, under 27 BMI, he thinks probably no real reason to use it. 27 to 35. Gray area, you need to sort of think about it carefully. 35 are over. I think on balance, I'm not your doctor, but this is probably something which will benefit your health rather than hurting it.

58:32And I was like, that seems like a really well balanced approach. Well, really well balanced means that both extreme sides hate you. Unfortunately, which is which he managed to do successfully you just mentioned there about the importance of dietary fiber What do you think about carnival as a diet? Speaking of extremes that hate you so I will give a devil's advocate argument for it that any diet that is going to get people to eat less processed foods and and more filling, satiating foods is going to be a diet that does better than the standard American diet. So I have no doubt that there are people who go on carnivore and they get healthier.

59:17The question really becomes, why did you need to do that? Could you do that and still have some dietary fiber and get the benefits of that? And so, I have had carnivorous carnivorous, and karnas push back against me and say, well, dietary fiber is just, it's just filler. You don't even absorb it. In fact, in carnivore, I don't even poop as much because, you know, I'm absorbing so many more nutrients and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I always find these really like Olympic level mental gymnastics interesting because it's not like we don't just have tons of studies in humans looking at this with actual hard to human health outcomes.

1:00:04And what the criticism of a lot of these studies is, because one of the downsizing nutritional studies is, it's hard to do multi -year randomized control trials. You're gonna lock someone in diet jail for three years at a time. Yeah, I mean, I think people have this misunderstanding that there's just like this random pool of people that are test subjects for different studies that just sit there waiting patiently for the researchers to come get them and that's their life's purpose. And it's like, no, there are people like you and me who see a flyer and go, I'll try that. And, you know, a lot of them drop out.

1:00:38Why? Because the more controlled you try to make it, the less likely people are to do it. I mean, a great example is people like, why didn't they do more studies in bodybuilders? And I'm like, because they suck his test subjects. Because what happens when you're a bodybuilder who gets randomized to the low protein arm of a protein study? You're immediately dropping out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you've got a bias, if maybe you think a low carb diet's really good, and you get randomized to a high carb diet, see ya. You know, so it's hard to do these for long periods of time and keep a level of control.

1:01:11So we have to rely on a lot of times shorter term randomized control trials, looking at markers of health that are hopefully predicting longer term health outcomes and long term cohort studies. Now cohort studies are kind of an army epidemiology. you have your cross -sectional studies, which are, we look at this population and this population, who has a greater rate of x -disease and what differences do they have? Well, those are difficult because there's a lot of confounding variables. Cohort studies are a little bit better because what you're doing is you're tracking the same people over say 20, 30 years.

1:01:49You're not doing any intervention, but you're seeing, okay, these people ate more fiber versus these people and had this outcome. Now what I'll say is the reason I became quite convinced of the healthfulness of dietary fiber is because, if you're familiar with a forest plot, so a forest plot, this became famous because James Wilkes was on Joe Rogan debating the game changers a long time ago and kept bringing up a forest plot because the person he was debating didn't know what it was. Essentially, if you have a meta -analysis of studies and and you have a center line, which means no effect, no overall effect of treatment.

1:02:29And then on one side of the line, you'll have favors, x treatment, other side of the line favors y treatment. And then you plot each of the studies where they land. So if you have like this side is, favors dietary fiber for decreasing cardiovascular disease, mortality, cancer, literally every study is on this side. Positive. Yes, right. You might have something that like didn't show a significant effect or not a huge effect, but they're all on this side. I am not aware of any cohort study that showed fiber or fruits and vegetables did not have at least a neutral or most of them show a very positive dose response effect on mortality, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

1:03:10What's dose response? Meaning if they do what's called a meta regression. So they look at the different levels of dietary fiber intakes in these cohorts, then try to compare that to their risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, they can basically say, for example, in one meta -analysis that was recent, I think it was with over a million subjects. For every 10 gram increase in dietary fiber, there was a corresponding 10 % decrease in the relative risk of mortality, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Now, before anybody goes, Well, I'm just gonna eat a hundred grams of fiber a live forever.

1:03:50We are talking about relative risk And it's important to point out the difference which a lot of people don't get when they hear these things reported on the news So when I say a 10 % Decrease in the risk of mortality if we're looking at say and I'm just making up numbers here But if we're looking at say a 60 -year -old person and their risk of mortality in the next 10 years is 20 % right? It's probably not it's probably different than that. Let's say it's 20 % A 10 % relative risk reduction is an absolute reduction of 2 % because 2 % is 10 % of 20%. So for every 10 gram increment of increased fiber, they showed a 10 % decrease in the risk of these different diseases and mortality.

1:04:35If there are other things that there are claims about, like for example, people on Cardboard it's so funny, they'll be like, why are you trying to, you know, discourage high quality animal protein consumption? I'm like, sorry, not to sound current, but do you know who I am? Like, have you done any like background on me? My research was funded. My lab was funded by the National Dairy Council, the Agnitrition Center, and the National Accountable's Beef Association. If anybody has a bias towards high quality animal protein, it's me. I'm just not crazy. And And when we look at, say, a great example is red meat.

1:05:13So even the WHO has categorized red meat as probably carcinogenic. I don't necessarily believe it's carcinogenic based on the research that's out there. And the reason is a lot of studies don't show that it's carcinogenic. A lot of these cohort studies don't see it. Why is the WHO getting it from? Well, I would say the over half of them do, but some of them don't. And if you look at the confounding variables of people who are high red meat consumption, it's not like we're talking about bodybuilders eating sirloin. You know, most of them are getting it from like processed sources of red meat. And red meat, one of the problems with these studies as well is if you are eating more of one thing you're typically eating less of another thing.

1:06:03And actually red meat intake is actually quite a good proxy for poor diet quality. So there was a really good study from I think Maximova in Canada, Alberta, Canada in 2020. And they looked at trying to control for diet quality. So they did basically turtile. So three different levels of red meat intake with three different levels of fruit and vegetable intake and looking at the incidence of cancer. And what they found was that at low intakes a fruit and vegetable intake, yes, there was an association of high meat, red meat intake with cancer, but at high levels of fruit and vegetable intake and high levels of red meat consumption, the risk of cancer was actually lower than low red meat consumption with high fruit and vegetable consumption because people people who are eating a lot of meat and a lot of fruit and vegetables, they're probably not eating a lot of low -quality foods because you just don't have a bunch left in your diet.

1:07:00Yeah, for that. We'll get back to talking to Laney in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Maui Newi. Maui Newi Venison brings the healthiest red meat on the planet direct to your door. No one accidentally hits their protein goals and if you're in a constant state of travel or being busy, their venison sticks make it unbelievably easy and tasty to hit your protein target every day. Not only do they provide the most nutrient dense and protein dense red meat available, they are the only stress -free 100 % wild harvested red meat on the market. It's an operation that is one of its kind in the world.

1:07:33It's actively combating the environmental destruction caused by Maui's Axis -Dereova population, which literally looks like wildfire from a helicopter. So by eating meat, you are helping the environment. How about that? Get the healthiest red meat on the planet, delivered direct to your door and get 20 % off your first order by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Maui new evenison .com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom. A checkout that's M -A -U -I -N -U -I venison .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. So is the primary concern or the biggest risk that you're worried about from carnivore low dietary fiber.

1:08:16That's one. And then a lot of them are choosing very fatty cuts of meat that are high insaturated fat. And there is a big debate amongst diet tribes about the whether saturated fat is bad for you because it raises LDL cholesterol. And there's a debate around LDL cholesterol. And I will give you the devil's advocate argument for that. And then I will give you what the research says. So in 2005 when I was in In grad school, I was in the camp of LDL doesn't really matter. It's more about the ratio of HDL to LDL, the good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. And if you look at the research studies, there was a lot of kind of disagreement in the research literature.

1:09:01And a lot of the randomized control trials didn't really show an effect of lowering saturated fat on the risk of heart disease. But here's the problem with randomized control trials is they're very short. heart. Heart disease is not something that develops in two years. It develops in 40 years. Heart disease is not the difference between you dying at age 40 and age 80. It's a difference between you dying at age 80 and age 72. And so a lot of these randomized control trials are using, I mean, the Minnesota coronary experiment is one that gets cited by carnivore people a lot, uh, pulse, all the no sites a lot.

1:09:34And it was an in pain and the big, the The strengths of it were it was inpatient, they were psychiatric patients, and they either fed them high polyunsaturated fats or high saturated fat diets and looked at the differences in heart attack rates or heart disease. Now what they don't tell you about that experiment is those people were not housed consecutively. The average duration of each of the subjects in that study, which was two years. And they were like, I think the average age was like mid 40s. It's not super common for people in their 40s to get heart attacks, even those who are inclined to get it.

1:10:11And they were in and out of these psychiatric wards. They weren't consecutively there. And the polyunsaturated fat group included trans fats, which at the time now are largely out of the food supply. But back then we're a big part of the food supply. So it's not really an experiment that carries a lot of weight. And again, it's only two years. It's hard to see differences. If you and I invest in a mutual fund, so with LDL cholesterol, you're looking at a lifetime exposure risk. Really, how much are courses through your arteries over the course of your life? I like to compare it to investing. If you and I invest in, if you invest in a mutual fund that gets 8%, and I invest in one that gets 9%, if we look out in two years, I mean, I'll have a little bit more money, but practically you'll go, it's no difference.

1:10:59But if we look at it in 40 years, I'm going to have a lot more money than you, right? And so heart disease is kind of the same. It takes time to really see these differences. And people all kind of all say, well, I feel great. You can feel great right up until you have a heart attack. Like heart disease is not something you feel. Now, so looking at LDL cholesterol, what really changed my mind on it because again, I was in that camp was what we're called the Mendelian randomization trials that started coming out around 2008, 2009. Now Mendelian randomization is where they look at your body, people's bodies naturally have like polymorphisms on genes.

1:11:43So you'll have people who secrete naturally more or less LDL, but these polymorphisms don't affect other areas of metabolism. So what you have essentially is a great lifelong randomized control trial of people exposed to more LDL cholesterol versus people exposed to less LDL cholesterol. And when you look at that, the exposure to lifetime LDL cholesterol, you can basically draw a straight line through it between that and the incidence of heart disease. And if we look at a mechanistic level, LDL cholesterol, they have shown mechanistically penetrates the endothelium. It's actually not the LDL necessarily.

1:12:25It's the fact that it contains a protein called apoliproprotein B, which apoliproprotein D is what actually damages the endothelium and allows it to penetrate and then deposit the cholesterol there. Now, some people have said, well, it's not LDL. You have to worry about the large LDL. Go over about the small oxidized LDL. I don't know if you've ever heard this argument. It's a very popular argument. And so what is true is that small oxidized LDL can more easily penetrate the endothelium, but it deposits less total cholesterol. Large LDL does not penetrate it as easily, but it still penetrates it.

1:13:02But it deposits more LDL, sorry, deposits more cholesterol per LDL particle. The net effect is both are equally atherogenic. And so if it's funny, I tell people, when something aligns with our personal beliefs, our level of skepticism is basically nothing. When something opposes our personal beliefs, it's like this, right? Are we just are so skeptical? And so I tell carnivores all the time, if red meat had the data that fiber has behind it to support it being a health food, you all would lose your freaking minds anytime anyone even suggested that it might be bad for you. But because it doesn't align with your personal belief system, you won't hear a bar of it.

1:13:51What do you make of the meat and fruit trajectory? That seems to be Paul Saladino's new thing that he's landed on. Meat and fruit and honey is another thing that I'm seeing and hearing a lot more. What do you make of this? I mean, listen, like I think fruits and vegetables are great. like meat and fruit. Not fruit. Yeah, well, yeah, because vegetables have toxins in them. By the way, you can find toxins in fruit too. This is like the the influencer diet fear template to find an isolated chemical in a food and scare people with it. Um, I mean, I think it's I think it's better than just meat by itself.

1:14:33But I think what's interesting is when he, um, when he said he went to fruit, he said he felt better because of an electrolyte perspective. You felt better because you're eating carbohydrate now, Paul. And you have some muscle glycogen and liver glycogen and you're feeling better doing exercise. There's not a ton of electrolytes in fruit or honey. Yes, the sodium transporter in the gut is co -transport with glucose. So yes, maybe you're a little bit more sodium transport, but like you're getting plenty of sodium. Like that's not a, you're not feeling better from a lecture like perspective. So I did think it was, I applaud him for changing his view.

1:15:15I also find it kind of after you've told people repeatedly for years that this is the optimal diet for human health while you were feeling bad. So I struggle with giving credit for that. I, you know, I've interacted with Paul quite a bit. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice guy, and I think he probably is trying to help. I think the way he goes about it is relatively unhelpful. But yeah, I think if you go from eating just meat to actually including some carbohydrate, I'm sure you'll feel better. But I just find this entire trope around toxins and food to be ridiculous. What is someone's listening and says, oh, I quite like eating meat.

1:16:04It's something that seems to work for me. Bodybuilder, I struggle to take my protein, whatever. Dietary fiber sounds useful and important. What are the easiest best sources of dietary fiber that people can add into their diet right now? I mean, the day on fruits and vegetables is great. Are there some fruits and vegetables that are better? Yeah, I mean, you know, I kind of like saying better or best or things like that. But I would say like berries are much more fiber dense than say like bananas. They tend to be also like lower carbohydrate berries are. Apple's pretty good source, especially if you're, you know, eating the skin, that contains a lot of the pectin.

1:16:48Vegetables, of course, cruciferous vegetables are very fiber dense. So like broccoli, cauliflower, those sorts of things. But I mean, honestly, I think the average American gets 13 grams of fiber intake per day. And I mean, if you look at the drop -off in mortality, from going from like 10 grams of fiber a day to like 20 or 30 grams of fiber a day, you'd be getting your fiber up. I mean, there are some kind of sources that you wouldn't necessarily think about that are good sources of fiber. I mean, I mean, this is gonna get me in trouble because people are gonna say, I'm just a food show for the diet industry.

1:17:25But, I mean, whole grains. They're good sources of fiber. And if you look at the data on whole grains, mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer, again, you won't find any studies showing that they're negative for those things. Now, people will say, while you say people got, eat lucky charms. Not, I'm, you know, I'm saying like oatmeal, you know, some cereals that are like more intact sources of fiber. But again, I'm somebody who's like, let's not let the enemy of good or better be perfection, right? And there's so much like diet evangelism out there. Hey, if somebody eats a cereal that's fortified with fiber or some bread that's fortified with fiber.

1:18:19Maybe not the best possible thing they could do. I'd rather them get fruits and vegetables, but if that's what they can do, then that's what they can do. What about beans? Yeah, legumes, great source of fiber as well, they come with some protein as well. Yeah, all those are great sources of fiber. I mean, one that I use that is kind of non -traditional is air pop popcorn. I love popcorn, and it's actually very, very high in fiber. No way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like you get a, I don't know what's it, cup, but like a serving which might have like 50 grams of carbohydrate, we'll have anywhere, depending on the particular brand and source, like six to 10 grams of fiber in it.

1:18:56And it's nice in that it takes a while to eat, you know, like, Super high volume for low weight. Yeah, you can have, you know, you can have 50 grams of carbs from popcorn must be a fuck ton of popcorn. That's a big ol' bowl, right? Whereas like 50 grams of carbs from a sweet potato, I mean, you can eat that in three minutes. from Haribo, you can eat that in a minute. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get back to talking to Laney in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. 90 % of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. We know that food is always first.

1:19:24Many of us eat well. Some days, even on most days, no one has the perfect diet and signs keep showing us that our bodies need more nutrients and that they need the support consistently every day to build a truly healthy body and get your whole body operating in a higher healthy baseline. The average supplement is tested for 10 contaminants. AG1 is tested for 950 plus it's NSF certified for sports, meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it. Best of all, there is a 90 -day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and use it for 90 days, a full three months every single day, and if you do not like it, they will give you the entirety of your money back.

1:20:00That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can try AG1 and get a free years supply of Vitamin D3 and K2 plus 5 free AG1 travel packs, and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinkag1 .com slash wisdom. That's drinkag1 .com slash wisdom. So I mean, again, like I'm all for like those non -traditional sources, but I would say like, there's probably something to mother nature's kitchen of. Talk to me about some of the sleep of foods that you think, you know, you like eating this. Most people listening are probably going to eat some blend of, we go out for dinner or I get a combination of carbs, fats and proteins in one form or another.

1:20:45What are some of the things where you go, if you were able to switch this out for that on a typical sort of meal plate for someone that's remotely healthy, relatively healthy, trying to watch their diet, here are a couple of little adjustments that you can make that I think have got a lot of bang for their buck. What are some of the top foods? Absolutely. I like what this is going. The first thing is, you know, if you can ask the waiter to just use less oil when they cook. Like, that is one of the biggest sources of added calories. I mean, I was out at a restaurant last night that lists their calories on there.

1:21:17I'm like, was it cheesecake factory? No, no, but it was Goddammit Lane. Twin peaks, twin peaks. Okay. Don't go to cheesecake factory. Women don't like it if you take them on dates there, apparently. Have you seen that hold up? Incorrect. But well, well, there's like a whole like a TikTok thing going around of like a What's saying it's a red flag? It's a red flag if a woman doesn't want to go to I agree with you. God damn it. So but like last oil. Yeah, I'm looking at the the menu and it's like 1200 calories for a salad and then you look down. Well, it's got bacon, cheese, nuts, it's got oil in it and then it's got the dressing, right?

1:21:58So, okay, maybe say, hey, could you do a half portion of cheese? Or could you do a half portion of nuts? Could you leave off the bacon? Could you put the dressing on the side? Because a lot of times, you don't, like, it gets doused in dressing, right? Like, you just do a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I do that for almost anything. Like, I have a burger that has, like, I love garlic -alie. I love that. But I always ask for it on the side, right? Because I just need a little smear to get the taste. I don't need to be drenched in it. Okay, so looking at stuff like oils, dressings, reducing that. What else?

1:22:30What are some of the other things? And then like when you're picking your cuts of meat, you know, if you want to get a steak, I mean things like filet, sirloin, tenderloin, those are going to be much leaner than say your rib eye, your t -bone, your strip steak, those sorts of things. And then when your white fish is going to be a very lean, typically if it's grilled, chicken, typically very lean, unless it's fried, And again, just asking them like, hey, could you use a little bit less oil? And when it comes to carbohydrates sources, this is one of the ones where it's... If you put rice on a plate, the view of 50 grams of carbs from rice versus 100 grams of carbs, it's very tough to tell the difference, right?

1:23:19So what I'd tell people is this is where eating in food order can help you. So each of your proteins and vegetables first leave your starches for the last so that you're a little bit more full. So then you can rely a little bit more on your satiety signals, right? And when it comes to vegetables, you can ask for them steamed instead of having them cooked in oil or fried or whatever it may be. So you can do some simple switches and usually most restaurants at least in America, if you can all strive your up in New Man, I'll be as accommodating. But America they're usually pretty accommodating. And so you can make those small switches and it will make a big difference.

1:24:00And even just like I think being a little bit mindful, like if you're somebody who's trying to lose weight, like if you know you're going somewhere for dinner, do a little bit of recon. Look at the venue beforehand. If you're curious about like, okay, what is a fatty or kind of meat, look up those different cuts of meat and see what the macros look like on it. Look at, okay, well, what do I think might be something I want to try here? And if you're, I think a good heuristic is, if you want to have an alcoholic beverage, don't have dessert. You know? You get to pick one of the two. Yeah, if you want to have dessert, don't have alcohol.

1:24:37Or the other thing I tell people is, if you could just stay engaged with your own satiety signals. Are you eating because you're still hungry or are you eating because you feel like you need to finish it? Because I can promise you the you're not paying for the food when you go out to eat. You're paying for the experience because if you were just paying for the food, I mean you can go out and make Donald's and get some stuff to taste great for five bucks. You know what I mean? You're paying for an experience. So value the experience and If you're full, don't feel the need to finish everything. Like be in tune with your own satiety signals.

1:25:15I think that is something that's really lost on a lot of people is just asking themselves, am I eating this because I feel like I should finish it because I paid for it? Or am I eating this because I'm actually hungry? I think that's very important. And this is one of the things that I like the evidence -based movement. I like Menno, you, Dr. Mike, you know, it's a cool movement. Yeah, okay. No, they're right. But one of the things that I think is really important, especially when we're talking about diet, diet mechanisms, conversations online, is how to get things tactically down, like that. You can throw studies at me all day about legumes and dietary fiber and fucking LDL cholesterol, but hey, okay, cool, Mr.

1:26:03Science, man. What do I do when I go to Cheesecake Factory? What do I do when I go to Dean's Italian, downtown in Austin? Like just tell me what, like what's a good way to take all of this research into something that's applicable. And I like that. Presumably, just being like, we don't need the bread this evening. We'll just start with the meal. It's a good idea because that bread, that bread, I don't know where it goes. It doesn't go to my stomach because it takes up no room. It just, it's like a Harry Potter's fucking closet. And it just disappears out of the out somewhere. Well, another thing is like, sharp, not super hungry.

1:26:37You know, like make sure you've had some filling foods throughout the day. This is a good one. So when you go shopping, if you go shopping in a supermarket as opposed to ordering it online and you're absolutely starving hungry when you go, at the front of pretty much every supermarket there will be sort of a to go fridge, sandwiches and other bits and pieces. Grab yourself a four dollar sandwich that's got a good set of macros on it and seems to relatively well balanced. Eat that before you go shopping. Your shopping bill is now just been shopped in half. That's the best $4 investment that you can do because you're not, you're hungry and you're working around.

1:27:16Oh, of course I want that. No one does, no have that. Ooh, I'll get that. Oh, I just doubled all of the bullshit that I have in my cup. It's and I didn't really need to. I'm a big fan of ordering online now just because I have like, I just go back and I just reorder the same things every week. It's so good. It's so good. All right, so going to the other side of the fence we've spoken about carnivore, is it possible to build muscle on a vegan diet? Great question. The answer is yes. Yes, you can build muscle on a vegan diet. It's If you're goal, so I always have to like Unframed out of my mind frame, which is I want to be the most muscular strongest human being I possibly can and remember that not everybody is like that In fact, most people aren't like that.

1:27:59They just want to build some muscle and look a little bit better and feel stronger Sure, you can absolutely build muscle on a vegan diet. Now, will it take a little bit more wear with all? Probably. Is it the absolute best diet for muscle building? It can be, but you have to be more targeted with it in terms of making sure you're getting enough total protein and probably trying to pump your protein quality up a little bit. For most people who are like if they're vegans in their body, but I'll say you're probably going to want to use some kind of isolated source of protein. It can be vegan protein, but you're going to want to probably use an isolated source of protein.

1:28:36And the reason being that not only is vegan sources of protein typically lower in amino acids that are anabolic promoting like lucine, which is the amino acid that's been shown to increase muscle protein synthesis. They also, in intact sources of plant protein, it's not as bioavailable as an isolated source of protein, like a protein powder, for example, because some of the protein is bound up in the fibrous material of the plant. Now, cooking can make it more bioavailable, but typically not nearly as much as like an animal protein or an isolated source of protein. But I mean, really the big thing is if you're getting enough total protein, you know, say two grams per kilogram of body weight, I mean, the research says that you're going to build as much muscle.

1:29:26So you can, what I would say is it's just maybe a little bit more difficult, especially like a calorie deficit because if you're, especially if you're trying to do all intact sources of protein, like whole food sources of protein, because now you're getting the calories from protein, along with calories from carbohydrate. Yes, because they come along for the ride. You can't isolate them as effectively as a steak or a set of eggs or whatever. That's correct. What are your main concerns about somebody that's on a vegan diet? I think the main concern is I have about pretty much any diet is if you If you do vegan the right way it can be very healthy Just like if you do keto the right way it can be very healthy Where you're using mostly unprocessed sources of food But when you become a diet evangelist it can become very unhealthy because You tie the identity to the vegan portion of that and so I remember watching the game changers and they're talking about all the health promoting effects of the vegan diet.

1:30:24And then they're showing a scene where they're like having them vegan chicken wings and vegan mac and cheese. And I'm like, you missed at the point here. And by the way, like, why are you trying to have it both ways here? It's either health promoting or now I'm not saying you can never have fun foods like that or anything like that. Of course, like nobody should be worried about being 100 % all the time. but just like without any nuance to that. Well, if the ideology is based around whole foods from nature, natural, et cetera, et cetera, and then you try to recreate your version of the very food that you're trying to run away from or disparage, that seems to sort of turn the bar stool upside down.

1:31:12Well, and Keto does the same thing. Like, as we've seen where the ketogenic diet is not superior for fat loss if you're equating calories and protein. We have really tightly specific studies looking at that, like metabolic ward trials looking at that. Now there's keto ice creams that have more calories than regular ice creams. It's like, you're missing the point here. Like the whole point is if you do keto where you're eating like a lot of filling, say, she eating foods, you're going to eat less calories and you'll lose body fat. Do you really think a keto ice cream is going to help you facilitate that?

1:31:45No, if you want a treat, but just get the regular ice cream if you want a treat. It seems to me with the vegan diet that it is practically a little bit more complex to eat it well than most other diets. I have a bunch of friends who have gone vegan for a variety of reasons and were evangelists for that. But said in retrospect after stopping, look, I'm sure that a well -balanced vegan diet can give you everything that you need. But the level of hurdles that I needed to overcome in order to be able to hit the macro nutrients that I wanted to get to, it was so restrictive that I really found that quite hard.

1:32:26I'm not sure if the same would be said for other diets. Yeah, I mean, I think like retro and I actually had this kind of like discussion where he was kind of like Well, couldn't you make that argument for getting the dietary fiber on saying I'm the poor diet because you're eating more meat If you're eating less fiber by default. I think any diet needs to have some mindfulness behind it I think the thing with veganism is if you are being really strict with it There are things that might show up that are just more apparent which like so for example I'm on the board diet maybe not eating as much fiber but you're not going to feel that difference really quickly If you're not getting enough vitamin B12 or iron you're gonna feel that pretty quick You know like well in a few months right because you're gonna have way less energy You're not gonna feel great But again, I think one of the tropes that I've really tried to get away from with people is like Hey, you can supplement.

1:33:22It's okay You know like just like round out like if you're worried, you know, and it's like Like it's funny because I had a carnivore kind of argue like, well you couldn't eat just this food and get everything you get from steak. I'm like, why do I need to pick one food or one food group to just eat that, to justify a diet? That seems like a false dichotomy to me, right? And that's what you find with a lot of these diet tribes is they have to like force these really like black and white scenarios to make their argument work. And, you know, one of the things in science is like, it's not really Occam's razor, but, you know, Occam's razor is basically like, all things being equal, the hypothesis that requires at least amount of assumptions is usually true, which layman translated is the simplest answer is usually true.

1:34:15Also, the hypothesis that requires the most stringent protocols to prove it to be true is the flimsiest hypothesis and usually not. because you're making arbitrary rules that fit your particular priors, right? Okay. Bingo. What about soy? To soy make you soy? Should we be? Yeah, should we should we be worried about soy? So there was actually like, I think two meta analyses done now in men looking at testosterone showing that at least with a few servings of soy per day, no effect on testosterone or estrogen. So at least in men, it doesn't appear to do much. Now, and I don't want to get this wrong.

1:34:54My scientific friends, if I butcher it, please feel free to comment on this. In, I believe premenopausal women, it has been shown to have an effect on some sex hormones. But I don't know if it's a good, bad or neutral. So it's so you go that we actually need to be worried about not so boy. Apparently, but in men, doesn't seem to have an effect, at least in the, you know, two to three servings per day range. You've mentioned it a couple of times today. I hear this word thrown around on the internet all the time. What the fuck's bio availability?

1:35:32So basically, if you ingest a certain amount of a certain food, how much of that of the nutrients from that wind up in circulation, which nutrient are you talking about? Is it as big of a deal as everyone makes out? So let's take protein, for example. right? So if I'm looking at protein bioavailability and I take in 25 grams of say a protein source, how much of that 25 grams actually hits circulation? How much gets absorbed through the intestinal lumen? That's really what we're talking about when it comes to bioavailability. And so it does matter. I mean, again, like we're looking at like if you look at certain plant sources of protein, they could be 50, 60, 70 % bioavailable in the intact platform.

1:36:15Like I said, cooking may take that up a little bit more. Whereas if you're looking at animal sources of protein, they're usually like 90 % and up. Egg stay. Eggs are very absorbable when they're cooked. Way protein, very bioavailable, I believe it's almost 100%. If you looked at BLG protein, beta lacto -globulin, This stuff's so cool, dude. So soccer players in Europe are using this at the moment. It allows you to get 20 grams of protein in a hundred mill shot. So it must be very soluble. Ultra, ultra concentrated. And the reason that they're giving it to athletes that are doing, I guess, power endurance are like intermittent.

1:37:03Audio issues. Precisely. Yeah. You are training for four hours a day, but you don't want to have to sink 400ml of liquid to get your protein in. You can put 200ml and get twice as much protein as you would have done. Really interesting. I think it's just an area that I'm keeping an eye on a little bit. That beta -lactyl globulin stuff seems to be really interesting. So, related to bioavailability, another sort of hot buzzword that's being thrown around at the moment is the gut microbiome. How much should people be focused on it? Is it really the beginning and end of all disease, the gut brain access?

1:37:40Is it causing all of our autoimmune disorder? What do you make of the current fuel error around the microbiome? I think the microbiome is super interesting. We have more bacterial cells in our body than we do eukaryotic cells. But if you talk to microbiome experts, and there was a gal in the lab where I did my PhD who's doing her master's at the time, who's now a PhD in her, especially the microbiome, she's considered one of the foremost experts on it, named Suzanne Devkota, when you actually talk to gut microbiome experts, they're basically like, yeah, we got a lot of data, we don't really have a good idea of what it all means.

1:38:20And so basically when you talk to them, when you read the scientific research, we seem to know a few things. The first is that fiber is good for the got microbiome. It's the main fuel for what we think the beneficial species of bacteria are. And diverse array of fibers and a diverse diet seem to be beneficial for the gut microbiome. Eating too many calories appears to be not beneficial for the gut microbiome. Now we don't know, again, this is where it is at the cart or the horse. What I think is likely, and again, and I am tenuously speculating. But when you have excess adiposity and metabolic dysfunction, you know, large adipocytes secrete more adipocines, which are inflammatory cytokines secrete by the adipose tissue, they seem to screw up a lot of stuff.

1:39:16Perhaps that's having an effect on the gut microbiome. Just being fat does lots of things downstream that you don't want to do to your body. But also the diet that makes you become obese is probably not a high quality diet. And so that may negatively impact the gut microbiome. How much is overeating contributing to that quicker gut mortality that you're sort of running things through the gut very quickly? I actually don't really answer that. So this is one of the things I have a friend who's on to Zapotide, which is the second gen of the GLP ones. And he always struggled with Sebo, with gut microbiome things.

1:39:55and his current working theory is that because he's basically eating less and moving food through his system less quickly, that it's giving his gut more time. Possible. Hard to know. That's like I said, I always tell people, if you want to know who really actually knows what they're talking about, know somebody who's willing to say they don't know when it comes to something. What else, microbiome? What else have we covered? So, diverse array of fibers exercise, apparently appears to be very good for the gut microbiome. So they think it has something to do with the lactate production from exercise, that that appears to have a beneficial effect on the gut microbiome.

1:40:34And then maybe saturated fat may have a negative effect on the gut microbiome, not necessarily because of the saturated fat itself, but because of the end bioproducts that are from saturated fat consumption. Those appear to possibly be toxic to some, sorry, toxic, to some species of beneficial bacteria in the cut microbiome. But that's kind of what we know. And people have run, I mean, it is so, when I see gut microbiome in someone's Instagram bio, usually my first thought is this person's full of shit. Yeah. Vaginal health expert. Yeah. Often one that, that, and there was someone who I met a couple of months ago in Austin who uses like astral tapping into the fifth dimension to inform her crypto investments.

1:41:30Oh boy. That was a particularly interesting day. Well, this is what people struggle, like going kind of meta real quick. This is one of the things people really struggle with online is there's so many experts that have credentials. And I'll tell people, I'm like, usually if you go and like, okay, this person's been coming to my diet, they're a chiropractor in naturopath, they're, you know, psychiatrists, what an, like, expertise does not translate across disciplines. I don't know. Listen to your idea about how to fix the Ukraine, or the border. Yeah, yeah, like, like, somebody was like, are you gonna comment on Israel and Palestine?

1:42:04I'm like, absolutely not. Why, what are they eating? Yeah, like, like, no, this is not right. in a particular nutrient. Yeah, this is not my area of expertise. I know that they don't like each other and if not like each other for a long time, that's about the extent of what I know about it. I think war is bad. I'll say that, you know. Spicy, spicy. But all you need to do is go to, this is another question I've asked myself a lot. Why do really smart people believe really dumb shit sometimes? because people have come to me and said, well, Lane, this person does this and look like, or Elon Musk does this or like, people who are intelligent, very intelligent people.

1:42:51Look up Google Nobel Prize syndrome and you will find a laundry list of unequivocally some of the smartest people in the history of mankind who changed, like, one of the people who discovered DNA and a laundry list of these people believed in things like astrology and eugenics, healing crystals. No, what Newton did for like the last three decades of his life. No. Alchemy. The adamant that Alchemy was a person. And we're talking about the guy who invented calculus on a dare before age 26. Like invented a whole field of mathematics because somebody was like, no, you can't prove that and he was like, watch this bitch.

1:43:35Yeah. So some of the smartest people expertise does not translate across disciplines. Speaking of expertise, what's your thoughts on Gary Brecker?

1:43:47I'm sure he's a perfectly nice person. His claims are pretty wild. Which ones do you disagree with mostly? Well, I've seen him say a video of like 82 % of acids from way protein are converted to carbohydrate or fat. I don't know where he got that number. I don't know where it comes from and there is nothing to back that up. It would not be, I mean that, that, you can't even make that claim without understanding somebody's diet on a holistic level because 82 % in what context? Like, if I give them 100 grams of way protein, 82 % is going to get converted or the carbohydrate or fat, how are you measuring that?

1:44:29What isotopic labeling study are you doing to support this? Because you would need that. Over what period of time, because that label would be recycled as amino acids are broken down and recycled between various processes in the body. What he's saying, it would be almost impossible to even measure that. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you would be measuring in a very specific framework of this much protein in this period of time looking at these tissues using these isotopic labels. He did manage to get Dana White to lose a load of weight, though, right? Well, and I think so Dana actually commented on one of my posts and got really mad.

1:45:07And I actually like Dana. Like I've watched the UFC for a long time. I think he's a smart guy. I think Dana's interpretation of what I said was that I was saying his results weren't real. That's not what I'm saying. They know why, obviously, did a great job change his lifestyle. But he got healthier because he lost 30, 40 pounds. He adjusted his lifestyle. He exercised consistently. Probably stopped drinking if he was drinking before. I don't know about his habits there. But like, he should be getting the credit for that, not from like grounding with electric like rugs and red light therapy, which there may be some benefits to red light therapy.

1:45:53I didn't look at the proposed or the protocol that's, magician's, Dana White's weight loss. What was it? I'm not super familiar with the complete protocol, but I mean, I know there was like infrared light and cold plunging. And again, I think one of the, like he's, some of the cold Plunge claims have been pretty extreme. Like he said, there's nothing on the surface of the earth that will burn faster than cold water. This is Gary. Yeah, it's simply not true. It's just demonstrably not true. Like if we look at the studies where people do cold water, they, the, the, most of them show no effect on energy expenditure, none of them show an effect on fat loss that I've seen.

1:46:37And the absolute best that you see is like an increase of like a hundred calories in energy expenditure today for like an hour or two of exposure in pretty cold water like okay okay and people will say well well see it okay but that's not that's not the fastest way to burn fat okay fastest way to burn fat is to get the gym or eat less and the other thing is actually one thing that exercising cold water so I know but he talked about Michael Phelps and eating so many calories. First off, I don't believe that Michael Phelps was eating 10 ,000 calories a day, no disrespect to Michael, but he's in the pool for like eight hours.

1:47:19When would he have this time to eat 10 ,000 calories? 10 ,000 calories for nobody who's never done it, that is a unbelievable amount of food. Have you ever tried to do a 10 ,000 calorie challenge? No, I've gotten to like 6 ,000 calories in a day and that, like, it was insane. I was insane. And, But one thing that exercise in cold water will reliably do in studies is significantly increased appetite So there's actually quite a few studies to show that it raises appetite So it may not be a great fat loss tool actually now again people will say Well, I like cold plunging By all means do it. I mean there do seem to be some benefits for inflammatory markers and some people say they feel more better more cognitive of cool, but like why do why can't we just say I like doing this thing instead of like creating this whole narrative around it and what you're also doing is people will view this and it makes fitness feel really inaccessible to them because like why I don't have a cold plunge.

1:48:20I don't have a cold plunge. I don't have red light therapy. No, no, just like adjust your dietary habits and lifestyle because that's what caused me to get healthy. Like And again, full credit to Dana, he should get full credit. He looks fucking awesome. Yeah, it looks great. And as somebody who probably has a very, very demanding hectic lifestyle, that's not an easy thing to achieve. So my thing is, no, he deserves more of the credit than this other stuff. The magic from that. And then some of the other things he said was like, you know, you only store, you only have 20 minutes of glycogen and then you're out of energy and what happens when you have no, I think he said, what happens when you have no glucose in your bloodstream and I did a video response and I'm like, you're dead when you have no glucose in your bloodstream.

1:49:11I think he means probably like a baseline level of glucose but still. There's just some things that are said that I'm like, there's no real great understanding of some of these, some of this biochemistry here. Would you debate them? For sure. For sure. I think like, nothing you said is you start to, you start to liquefy lean muscle in three minutes. So I think based on nitrogen balance studies as well as actual like studies looking at loss, progressive loss of lean mass from detraining and things like that, at best you start to to see a loss of nitrogen from the body in a day or two, but that's not necessarily showing lean mass loss.

1:50:00You really need days and weeks to start seeing loss of lean mass. So the idea that we're just like, you know, 20 minutes or so, all your glycogen and now your body's just chopping away at your muscle, that's not super accurate. Similar to that, how big of a deal is insulin? and more people, continuous glucose monitors, you know, it doesn't matter if you're a mum of three, you've got to wear out the thing and check and all the rest of it, how much of a vector for health is into it? Baseline levels of insulin and measures of insulin sensitivity, like Homa IR and HBA1C, HBA1C is probably the, for like long term, looking at long term metabolic health and blood glucose regulation, HBA1C is probably one of the best metrics.

1:50:52And the reason is HBA1C is like, isolated hemoglobin. So certain positions of hemoglobin can be like, isolated. So a glucose molecule can get added to it. And so I think it's something like, you know, the actual percentage is like six, less than six percent is what you want. And probably closer to like five. But what's nice about that is red blood cells take about 90 to 120 days to turn over. I think that's it. It's several months. And so you can see like short -term changes in basal levels of glucose or like glucose responses to things. But HPA1C is going to actually give you a really good idea of what like your long -term exposure to glucose is and how sensitive you are to insulin because it doesn't turn over very quickly and because it's sensitive to how much concentration is in the bloodstream over time.

1:51:52So insulin in response to normal feeding is not something we need to be worried about in my opinion. Long term basal elevations in insulin are what we should be worried about. What would that be due to typically? Usually from insulin insensitivity that's usually caused by excess body fat and obesity. Now people will say, well glucose is toxic in the bloodstream and you're going to clear it out and whatnot. The problem with looking at these short -term glucose post responses and trying to equate them to long -term health is if we're going to play that game, I can make a compelling argument that you shouldn't eat fat or protein.

1:52:38Because you don't want to eat fat because fat and pleads, in pleads, flow mediated dilation, which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. So a high fat meal will impede flow mediated dilation. You can go look up these studies. Go eat protein because protein stimulates intor and intor is elevated in many cancers. So what are we supposed to do? Eat ice cubes in photosynthesize. So you're looking at the difference between state and trait. So this is something that a lot of scientists don't even distinguish between. There is a massive difference between acute, truncated, short -term, normal responses versus long -term dysregulation.

1:53:17Let's just take an example of exercise. If I told you, if you didn't know about exercise, let's say exercise that didn't exist. You have all the other, you have all the other knowledge that you have about the body. But you don't know anything about exercise. And I said, Chris, I'm going to make you do something that is going to raise your heart rate, raise your blood pressure, raise your inflammatory markers, raise your reactive oxygen species, and raise your cortisol. What would you tell me? No. Exactly. Exercise does all those things in the short term. What happens in the long term? the opposite actually happens.

1:53:56So that means we can't use short -term measures to predict long -term outcomes. We have to look at long -term outcomes and see what the difference is. So when we look at insulin, okay? I'm thinking of a few different studies here. First of all, let's just take fat loss, right? Some people will say the low -carb trope is well you can't lose body fat if insulin's high. This is usually the, they've like read one page out of a biochemistry book and closed it and said, no, got, got all I need, which is insulin inhibits liposis and decreases fat oxidation. So liposis is the process of liberating stored body fat from adipose so that it can be available for fat oxidation.

1:54:41Insulin inhibits both those processes because when carbohydrate is high, you have to burn carbohydrate. This is part of the Randall cycle and that's you're going to be preferably oxidizing carbohydrate and not dietary fat. When insulin is low, you're going to be not oxidizing a lot of dietary carbohydrate because it's not available. We'll be oxidizing a lot of dietary fat. So shouldn't that mean that low carb diets cause more fat loss? And I just talked about how they didn't. Well, how is that possible? Because you're only looking at one side of the equation. So much like protein metabolism, the net gain or loss of protein mass is the balance between protein synthesis and degradation.

1:55:24So you have to have synthesis running at a greater rate, relative rate than degradation to accumulate lean mass. Body fat loss or gain is the balance between the amount of fat you store versus the amount fat you burn. So let's look at these different diets. On a high carb low fat diet, you will not burn much fat, but you also don't store much fat because if we look at metabolic tracer studies where they give labeled carbohydrate and look at where that label winds up, less than 2 % of dietary carbohydrate is stored in antipose tissue as body fat. Over 98 % comes from fat. So if you were eating a low fat high carb diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're also not storing much fat.

1:56:23If you're eating a low carb high fat diet, you're burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. What is going to determine the net deposition in either case will be energy balance, good old calories in versus calories out. That sounds like an argument for low carb low fat high protein. Yes, but that's just typically called low calorie, right? Because like it's hard to over consume a lot of protein, but then the downsides are for fat loss. Okay, if you're not eating much carbohydrate or fat, you are going to have a lot of protein oxidation and you don't want to lose weight probably too quickly because it could tap into your fat store, your lean mass stores.

1:57:08And we also know that the benefits of protein kind of tap out at a certain level. So you're also, if you're resistance training for your own performance benefits, you probably want some carbohydrate as well. And carbohydrate is protein -sparing as well. But again, it really boils down to like which do you prefer and can execute on a long -term basis. Now, in terms of overall health, there have been a few studies looking at, you know, kind of lower carb versus lower fat and whatnot. And essentially, in the long term, they show that if you lose similar amounts of weights, similar, if you lose similar amount of weight on low carb versus low fat, your improvements of metabolic health are very similar.

1:57:52They showed this, the diet fit study. They showed this in meta analysis. In 2014, I believe the citation is now at all where they looked at like cardiometabolic risk factors in basically balanced diets versus low carb diets that were equated in calories and basically saw that they were equally good at improving metabolic health. So I'm not really worried about insulin and even on a more granular level, they have done studies looking at where they've actually measured insulin or like CPEPTide, which is a proxy for 24 hour insulin and seen like even 50 % greater overall insulin, it still loses the same amount of fat when calories are equated.

1:58:40I want to get tactical for a second. We mentioned a few things and I would like tangible tacit takeaways that people can have stuff like this. Are there any things small additions to lifestyle, the way that people eat, the way that they heat or store food, any of these different bits and pieces, where you think these have a lot of bang for their buck. What are the best nutrition -sized sort of diet hacks that you think this has been a high return to me? Okay, so life, can I say lifestyle hacks? Whatever you want. Activity, even like if people knew they're disgustingly small amount of exercise you needed to get health benefits from it, they would not be so worried about starting.

1:59:30I think a lot of people will look at somebody like me and you, I think I don't want to go to the gym for an hour or two hours every day, you don't have to. There was actually a study done when they looked at four minutes of vigorous activity per day, okay? And it didn't even have to be consecutive. It could be broken up into like a little bit Four minutes Decrease the risk of cancer incidence by 20 % And I think when they got up to like 10 minutes It was something like 30 or 40 % decrease in the risk of cancer. What's vigorous exercise? basically like I actually don't recall the actual specific of that study But I think it was like getting your heart rate above like 150 for like that period of time.

2:00:09So pretty high. Yeah, pretty high Steps like if you look at like when you're doing stuff like if you're listening to a podcast or watching a show Just walk or gonna like if you don't have a treadmill like if you can go outside go outside One we've already talked about activity sensitize you to the tiniety signal. So your diet's gonna work better if you're active, okay? and steps are so easy to get in through a lot of Dick Fint mechanisms. Now, if you're somebody who sits at the desk job and you really can't move, okay, then maybe you're somebody who needs to incorporate some of that more short bursts of physical activity when you're off work to get the benefits from it.

2:00:51But for a lot of us, you know, we work from home, you can get a standing treadmill where you're just kind of like walking in a half mile per hour per day. Or just like while you're listening to something or like what I do, for example, like when I go do my social media content for the day, today I went out, went down by the river, walked for an hour. Well, I'm posting my social media content. I'm getting work done and I'm getting some activity and the drop off in mortality from going for like 2000, which is like sedentary steps per day to 8000. It is like a linear reduction in the risk immortality.

2:01:27I don't think there's anything magic to steps. I think it's just a proxy for activity, right? Okay, so get more steps in and also get active in terms of vigorous exercise because of the benefits of it and the effects on satiety. Now, diet wise, one big one, I shall give you two. One big one, stop stacking. In the studies where people lose weight and keep it off, one thing that commonly pops up is they do not snack. And it's one of the reasons that in dietary recall studies, people routinely under report the nutritional intake. Because people remember their meals, they don't remember their snacks.

2:02:09And they've shown that snacking has less impact on satiety than meals, even calorie per calorie. And a lot of it is around mindfulness. Because when you're sitting down to a meal, you're sitting, and you're more engaged with that meal, They've shown that people who think about the food they're eating and enjoying each bite that they get a greater level of satiety from that food This might sound weird but like smaller dinner plates people eat less with smaller dinner plates because it looks bigger Chopsticks Keep with chopsticks. You'll slow down. You'll feel more satiated because a lot of times a different small of folk Yeah, yeah, I don't know the studies specifically, but I bet it would But a lot of times, it just takes time for our satiety signals to catch up with what we're actually doing.

2:03:00But if you're shoveling down a bunch of food in five minutes, I mean, do you really think your satiety signals have had a chance to hit you to let, you know, hey, we're full. Well, that's what competitive eaters actually try and do, right? They put the food in so quickly that it hasn't got to the point where, whoa, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah. And again, snacks are typically something we're doing when we're watching TV or we're like grabbing something is we're walking out the door, we're being unmindful. I mean, and the other thing is, if you've never done it, just for one week, I'm not saying do this again for the rest of your life.

2:03:35For one week, way out every single thing you put in your mouth. Just weigh it out and track the calories. And I think for a lot of people, it'd be like the first time you did your budget and look where your expenses are going. You're like, wait, what the, But I'm spending how much on eating out every week. It's the same as when you track your sleep for the first time. Yeah. It's the exact same. And what's crazy is a lot of times, this happens on a particle level. If we monitor something, it changes behavior, right? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We found that when we monitor particles, they change their behavior.

2:04:13When you monitor people, guess what happens? They change their behavior. But a very classic study in nutrition because you'll everybody says why low calories and I can't lose weight. I think a lot of people think they eat localities and really believe it. A classic study in nutrition from 1992, they had people who were self -reported, weight loss resistant, who were reportedly eating 1200 calories a day, going to a metabolic ward and they gave them a double -labeled water, I believe, which basically the researchers were going to be able to track how much energy they were expanding and how much they were consuming.

2:04:54And I think they even told the participants, we'll know if you're not telling the truth. And I think I heard a story somewhere from one of the researchers, I couldn't have butchered it, but I think they actually said some of the people argued with them afterwards words about what they're eating, even though they were monitored. And they reported they were eating 1200 calories a day. The average under reporting in the study was 50%. They under reported by over 50%. Their calories they were consuming. And they over reported their physical activity by 47%. And I think a lot of people will interpret that as an attack and saying that people are lying.

2:05:35I don't think that people in a cell like I think that most people have a very poor understanding of what a true serving size looks like. And if you ever want to be depressed, go away out a serving size of peanut butter or a serving size of ice cream or a serving size of cereal. And you will realize that, oh, I was having a bowl of ice cream, which is actually four servings. I was having a scoop of peanut butter. That's three servings. I was having a bowl of cereal that That was three and a half four servings. And so you think you're eating low calories. When in reality, you're not. And so I think that could be really instructive for people.

2:06:22Again, I'm not saying, listen, I still weigh my food. I have a food scale at home. It's not a big deal for me. I'm used to doing it. I do it when I have access to it. I don't have access to it. I don't really worry about it. And the one thing it did by doing that for so long is I know serving sizes. Yeah. You know, for the most part, I can eyeball stuff. I have essentially maintained my body weight, which I walk around about 208 pounds and I compete at 205 in powerlifting and we have two hour weigh -ins. So you got to weigh in and then you're lifting in two hours. So you can't really cut a bunch of weight and maintain your performance.

2:06:58I'm pretty lean at this body weight and it does require like some work for me to maintain it, but I'd maintained it for almost like over four years now. And it's not difficult for me. And I would say I'm only weighing probably half the time because a lot of times I travel. I'm not taking my food to a better place. But what you've done is you've spent so much time being specific with the weighing that that's now become your new baseline for intuitive. Well, and also I stayed with some friends who were influencers a while back and she was doing her degree in psychology and she was very focused on food behaviors and she was like, I thought it was she's like lanes really interesting because when he was in control of his meals like at breakfast she's like he ate egg whites you know it was very very low calorie but when we went out and people got dessert he still ate dessert with everybody he like you know had some fun foods, whatever.

2:07:55And just through, I didn't even realize I was doing it, but just through sheer kind of force of habit, I've gotten to the point where, especially when I'm traveling, the meals I can control by default, I make them low calorie and high protein because it's more satiating and it gives me room that like when I go out to dinner tonight, I have a bread. Yeah, or I can have a burger or I can have something that's a little bit more, and I have room on my budget for that. But a lot of people wake up and they have, you know, pastries and then for lunch, they have a big foot long sandwich that's, you know, another thousand calories.

2:08:34And then for dinner, they're having, you know, whatever else they're having that's usually loaded in oil and starchy carbohydrate. And, you know, I put this up one time. I was like, you know, the average amount of physical activity in this country is less than 20 minutes per day. And the average caloric intake is 3 ,500 calories. And we think we're worried about seed oils and artificial sweeteners. Like, you guys are focused on some pebbles when we need to be worried about the really big rocks. You know what I mean? Like so many people get hung up on little stuff and don't even think about the really large rocks that they need to be paying attention to.

2:09:19I saw a study last week that says American adults spend on average eight hours and 15 minutes a day on screens and six hours and 30 minutes a sleep. I saw that. I saw you post about that. Wild. Final element of the tactical stuff. What are supplements that everybody should have in their stack on average? Do you think? What are the supplements that really work? Okay. So I kind of like branch these into like tears, right? So my mount rush more of supplements would be Created model hydrate will be number one dosage frequency five grams a day There's maybe evidence like 10 or even maybe a little bit more has cognitive benefits.

2:10:03Tim Faras being talking about that. Yeah, so It's very safe. I mean there are people who have been hand -reaching about creating for a long time And the worst thing that you can say about it is people say, well, it causes hair loss. No, there was a single study in 2009 that showed creatinine supplementation increased DHT. That is not the same thing as showing hair loss. DHT is a marker and that is a mechanism. Now, that's never been replicated and they did show a viable mechanism by which it does it. because their testosterone levels didn't change, which is the precursor, and then the product after DHT didn't change.

2:10:48So either Crayington is having some direct effect on this enzyme, or this is a data artifact that has not been replicated. I tend to lean towards the latter. So Crayington model hydrate increases lean mass, improved strength, improved performance, improved cognitive performance. It has been shown to have a similar effect on depression as SSRIs. I'm not saying for people to do, come off your SSRIs and switch it out for creativity. I'm just saying that this seems to have some really ubiquitous benefits. And even like some of the more disease states, we're starting to see some benefits for creating supplementation.

2:11:31So I'm not saying everybody should be on it, but it is a low cost high yield supplement that is very safe. And we're not talking about a couple studies. We are talking about thousands of studies done over decades. It labs all over the world. I am very confident. Now caffeine is the original, neutropic. It is the original performance enhancer. And if you look at the benefits of caffeine, increases cognitive performance, increases exercise performance, downsides, negatively impact sleep. So if you're going to take it, do it early in the day, preferably, unless you've got a podcast. Yeah. You know what, one of the wildest things is a whoop release a aggregated set of their data at the end of each year, and on whoop you can track behaviors and it will correlate those behaviors with outcomes that you get, HIV, resting heart rate, sleep, sleep quality duration, blah, blah, blah.

2:12:31One of the best predictors of good recovery and sleep was caffeine. Interesting. Yeah. And that's like tens of thousands of people. That's interesting. So this could be a case where, you know, there's confounding variables of perhaps people who are taking in more caffeine or exercising harder and that's helping them get better sleep, right? That's interesting. So there's obviously like, I mean, we know based on the mechanistic human randomized control trials, like caffeine negatively impacts sleep. I wonder what about, is there a potential that you've got kind of like a healthy user bias here with people that doing whoop?

2:13:06They probably know that you've got a nine hour half life for caffeine. So maybe that pump in a couple in a morning. And then by the time that they get to an evening time, that adenosine is, yeah, I mean, I think what's probably the most likely outcome is some sort of healthy user bias, with people who are using wearables, also taking a lot of caffeine, probably more likely to exercise and have other healthy lifestyle behaviors. But why would all of the people that are using whoop are using whoop? Like, it's interesting. It's something I might try and reach out to the guys and get a little bit more data and I can send that to you.

2:13:39All right, so, creatine, caffeine for caffeine, couple of questions, first off, there's no real like optimal dosage, but what do you think about when it comes to dosage, what do you think about when it comes to timing, and what do you think about when it comes to dependency? So obviously early in the day is going to be better for sleep based on what we know. As far as dosage, I mean, you get some anti fatigue benefits like 50, 100 milligrams. You get, start to get the performance benefits once you get around 200, 300 milligrams of caffeine like for exercise. Strength benefits like acute strength benefits are more like three to 600 milligrams of caffeine.

2:14:19So I mean, I'm, I'm a pretty big fan of caffeine. and before the meat on Saturday, I'll probably have about a nice 500, 600 milligram shot right at the beginning, and I'll probably have a 200 milligram boost, which I'm lifting in prime time at 6 p .m. So I probably won't be sleeping real great that night, but that's okay, it's just one night. So yeah, for the more like standout kind of performance benefits, you gotta get a little bit higher dosage. Dependency? Yeah, I mean, you can definitely get, I mean, there are absolutely caffeine withdrawal symptoms. I go through them whenever I start tapering off for a meat because I'll usually taper down to, I used to completely cut it cold turkey and I just found that that was intolerable.

2:15:01So I go down to about 100 milligrams a day because actually the other thing people don't realize and I found them, like, when I cut out caffeine completely, I started like feeling like aches and pains and stuff. It's actually a slight analgesic. It has a slight analgesic effect. And I started getting all these like feeling, why am I like having like back pain that I haven't had before, there's other things. And when I just went down to kind of like 100 milligrams a day to kind of just maintain, I noticed that that stuff went away. All right, creating caffeine. One other thing to add, you can completely reset your caffeine tolerance in about a week if you go cold turkey, but you're gonna feel pretty miserable for a couple days.

2:15:42It's, I mean, I thought it was a placebo thing and then I did it and I was like, Why does my head hurt and why am I so freaking tired? And then Max was like, you haven't had caffeine in two days. Duh. I'm like, oh yeah, duh. Creating caffeine, way protein, way protein, tasty, relatively cheap, soluble, been shown to improve body composition numerous times. It's a magic. It's just a very tasty kind of ubiquitous form of protein that's highly bioavailable. So I put it on my mouth, Rush. isolate, concentrate. Concentrates perfectly fine. In fact, there may be some benefits to concentrate in that it has some of the some of the components that positively influence glutathione and antioxidant status.

2:16:32But a lot of people don't tolerate a pure concentrate well, because there's lacto, there's quite a bit of lactose in it. And some people have sensitivity to the lactobumins in way. A weight isolate is going to basically eliminate the lactose. So if you have any kind of lactose sensitivity, most people tolerate weight isolate. My company outward nutrition, the protein we sell is the way I slit people like is that because it's more antibiotic than concentrated. I'm like, no, we just want to make sure that almost anybody could use our protein. It is more expensive, typically mixes better too. So there's just, there's trade offs.

2:17:09We concentrate cheaper, but there's more carbs and fats and more lactose. If you don't tolerate either of those well, then a way hydrolyzate will probably work for you, which is basically pre -digested way. So they've chopped up the lactobumins. It does not taste very good and it's expensive. But it will work well for somebody who can't tolerate the lactobumins in a way. And then we go down to my tier two, which is stuff that I feel strongly is beneficial, but I just want to see more research done over a greater period of time. in those would be things like rodeo or rosea, things like beta aline, citrally malate, Jinxing actually has quite a bit of good research on it.

2:17:52It's naming the ingredient profile of newtonic here. Just, there we are, yeah, there it is. That's what we're here for, baby. That's what we're here for. Beta aline. Ashwagana, another one. So Beta aline, everyone went crazy for that when Matt Fraser said on Rogan that that was, maybe it was Rogan or something else. He basically retired from CrossFit and said that I think he was taking like some absurd amount of beta -aligning and Attributed a lot of his sort of increased work capacity acutely to that Was citrally in malate and that was that one of the ones you just said. Yeah, yeah, why? fatigue resistance it also seems to There's some studies suggesting it may simulate mTORs that maybe a small Animalic effect we don't know if that's like independent of other things to simulate mTOR but it seems to improve performance and improve fatigue resistance.

2:18:44Just going through what we went through there, the rodeola, the gin sang, the citrulline, bedralline, and the ashwagandha have you got dosages that you prefer for yourself with those? Yeah, so rodeola seems like anywhere from like 150 milligrams to 450 milligrams, and then after that it actually seems to be like a kind of tapering off of it. in shape, Kov? Yeah. You know, we, actually even as low as 50 milligrams, there might be some benefits as well, but if you want like the, like there's some studies that show like actual decrease fatigue and actually decrease perception of fatigue as well, as well as like cognition benefits.

2:19:25And it seems to be like a very, we call it adaptogen. Ashford got to kind of like that as well. So it kind of puts you back to center for lack of a better term. But yeah, some good data on fatigue resistance for that. Ashwaganda. Oh, man, dosage. Why did it escape my mind just now? I think that's actually about 150 to 300 milligrams, or sorry, 300 to 600 milligrams for Ashwaganda. That's in a recovery product and downside to that is doesn't mix super well when you mix up our recovery product. It tastes great, but it kind of looks like beach water a little bit because of the sediment but Ashwagandha, it's interesting because I'm convinced, pretty convinced because there've been quite a few studies now showing reliably, it increases strength, lean mass and decreases cortisol, and honestly elevates testosterone.

2:20:23But the effects on cortisol and testosterone would not be enough to show those lean mass benefits. So my one hesitation is, I kind of want to know what the fucking mechanism is. Yeah, what the mechanism is for that, Because whenever I see an outcome, but we don't know the mechanism, I kind of get the Hebe Gb's. But it seems to do that. There's been several labs that have tested it, you know, across different, you know, that's why I tell people is, you know, science is self -correcting, right? Like, people will say, well, I don't trust science. They speak about it like this very, I don't know, science is what is.

2:20:59People are the ones that screw it up. Like people in perfect humans are doing it. Science is perfect and the scientific method is about as close to perfect as you can get But since people are doing it we screw it up now where it's the reason that I don't Go crazy over individual studies Is because I the reason that Criotin is on my mount Rushmore because there are thousands of studies over decades of research Across thousands of different labs if this was all a hoax It is a very elaborate hoax, you know what I mean? But can one study be faked or done in a way where the participants and the way it's set up or massaged in such a way to get a certain, of course.

2:21:45Not a thousand times though. Yeah, but it's hard to do over decades and across a bunch of different labs in a bunch of different countries. Jinsing. Yeah, Jinsing. I have to go back. I think it depends on the extraction method. But I think somewhere in that like 100 to 500 milligram dosage, I have to go back and look at the specifics. I could have butchered that a little bit. And you know the citralline number as well? Yeah, so the minimum appears to be about six grams and then up to like eight grams. And so actually that's one thing to look for in pre workouts. If they don't list, if it's a proprietary blend that has citralline, I mean, you can almost be assured that you're not getting enough.

2:22:25It's expensive. So of our pre -workout, which has Citroën Malay in it, as well as Rodeola and caffeine. There's five ingredients. Citroën is, I think, 40 % of the cost of our pre -workout. Rodeola is 10 % of the cost of Nutonic. Yeah. It's so - It's so - Yeah. So it's those things are, you know, I feel pretty confident about them. And then there's other thing like fish oil, melatonin, I think would be on that list. You're not concerned about long term use of melatonin? I mean, I think we would show up in the human outcome data. I mean, I just, I mean, I think the worry is like with caffeine, the dependence, right?

2:23:11You know, the best thing for that, which I found for me, when there is something that has a risk of behavioral or maybe even like, without a pharmacological dependence on usage, just never take it two days in a row. If you set yourself that rule of, if I took it yesterday, I can't take it today, and if I take it today, I can't take it tomorrow. You become so much more mindful about your use of these things, especially caffeine. And you're like, right, okay, I didn't have caffeine yesterday, so I could have it today. How much do I need it today? Well, tomorrow I've got legs, first thing in the morning, and I've got dinner on the evening time.

2:23:49Fuck, I really think I might need, all right. You've just gone two days without caffeine. How spectacular. And I think that for me was the, I did 500 days without caffeine. So, wow. Yeah. I'm sure after the first couple weeks it got easier though. To be honest, dude, I never felt the withdrawal thing. I know people get absolutely brutalized by it, but I never felt it. And yet my reintroduction of caffeine was, just not to do it two days in a row, because I wanted to hold on to those sort of realized recents, even though according to you and Mano, like between three days and seven days, I could have done it in that time at all.

2:24:24But it was more like a, can I do it thing? And yeah, just don't do it two days in a row. And I think the same for Melaton and too. You're definitely an optimizer because I have another friend who actually lives in Austin who's very much an optimizer. And whenever we talk, I go, okay, what kick are we on this time? Because whenever I come to visit him, it's always something. It's always something. He's doing this every day or he's not doing this at all for a period of time. and I'm always like, what kick are we on now? It's the way it works. Lane Norton, ladies and gentlemen, Lane, I appreciate the hell out of you.

2:24:54I love your nails. Good luck with the meat this weekend. Where should people go? Don't wanna keep up to date with the things you do. Yeah, so I mean, Instagram is kind of my digital business card now, which is at Biolane and my website'sbiolane .com. And I've created a whole host of stuff to try and help people from every different level from, you know, our team of coaches to do one -on -one coaching to our app, carbon diet coach, which is less than $10 a month, that's an algorithm based coaching app that basically, it tracks like my fitness pal, but then it actually adjusts your nutrition based on your individual metabolism, based on how you're responding, based on your goals.

2:25:33It works extremely well. We've had tens of thousands of users and like a 4 .8 rating in the app store. And so that's been nice because I've always felt like, you know, one of my coaching can only helps so many people and so that has been something that's allowed to reach a lot more people. And then the supplement company we talked about, Outwork Nutrition. I have a research review where I try to simplify research. We kind of break down studies every single month. It's called reps and that's on my website by LA .com. And then I also like really, what I was thinking about, how do I affect the largest amount of change?

2:26:06I also feel like it was mentoring coaches. And so I started something with Professor Bill Campbell called Physique Coaching Academy where anybody who has a goal of basically helping people transform their bodies who wants to be a coach, this is essentially like we've set out to make it the equivalent of a college level education in physique transformations. So like if you want to get deep into the science behind how to like build muscle, lose fat on a biochemical level but then also like relate it to actual practical coaching, we do a great job of that. I didn't know you had all of this stuff going on.

2:26:42Yeah, I got a lot of stuff rattle around. You know what I mean? Yeah, well this week you've got to lift some heavy weights. That's the only thing you need to do. Yeah, and I'm very excited. I think I might be set up to have... I got a chance at possibly hitting my biggest total of all time, which after all the injuries I've been through and everything, that would... You'd probably see me lose my mind if I did. I would be because you always seem so calm when you're lifting typically when I see you on Instagram Well, I tell people I'm like when you see me on Instagram and you think I'm fired up That's like 70 80 % lane when you get meet day lane.

2:27:14That's a hundred percent which is Basically a berserker. What it allows me to I get to do my my Superman and Clark Kent thing You know what I mean? I get to be the nerdy Clark Kent kind of guy and then I get to go out and and rage and You know do some crazy stuff. Oh, yeah. I appreciate you man. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me man Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze, talk about refreshing. You know what else is refreshing this summer? I'll bring a new phone with Verizon. Yep, get a new phone on any plan with select phone trade -in in my plan and lock down a low price for three years on any plan with my plan.

2:27:50This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer. Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals. Three -year price guarantee applies to then -current -based monthly rate only additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.