Harvard Professor: “I Tried Every Diet. This Is By Far The Worst.” - Daniel Lieberman - #1137

27:12Those are what I call hedgehog diets. They're single idea, big fix diets. Whereas foxes see nuance. They see trade-offs. They see complexity. They realize that every time you eat one thing, you don't eat something else. And we need to apply, I think that the hedgehog approach to diet is always the wrong way because it's complicated. People vary. The effects of foods are complicated. There are trade-offs. And when we start to oversimplify, we inevitably get things wrong. And that's true for even how we analyze the scientific record. If we decide, well, epidemiological data, it's just junk because you can't test cause and effect, you're missing important information.

27:52Just as if you decide, oh, you know, randomized control studies are really problematic because they're too short term and they don't involve variation or whatever, you're also missing something important. The best approach is to look at as much of the information as possible and put it together. And that's, I mean, if I can be a little self-promoting, that's why I wrote the book because I tried and fed up to take all that evidence and to digest it, put it into kind of plain English and make it, you know, help people understand that because I think all of us need to try to answer these questions.

28:23Let me put it another way. For millions of years, millions of years, our ancestors, they had to know an enormous amount to get their food, right? If you're a hunter-gatherer, you have to know how to hunt animals, right? You need to know where they are and how to track them and what environments they're going to be in and how to butcher them and all that kind of stuff to find plants. I mean, I've gone out foraging and hunting with hunter-gatherers. Finding plants is not a trivial matter, right? Finding where the plants are, knowing how to dig for them, and knowing where they are at different seasons.

28:54We had to be naturalists. We had to know a huge amount of information in order to survive. Now, you and I can walk into a Whole Foods or whatever, you know, whatever, Sainsbury or whatever it is, and we're confronted with 40 ,000 different kinds of food. We don't need to know how to get our food anymore. We now need to know how to choose our food. food. So we need a different kind of knowledge. And you can throw up your hands and just have somebody tell you what to do, or you can try to learn for yourself what you want, what you care about, what's important to you, what your trade-offs are. So I think all of us need to educate ourselves to figure out how to choose our food, because that's the challenge our modern world has set us.

29:38The question of what should I eat today, evolutionarily, is pretty novel. It's completely novel. Nobody ever asked that question. I will eat what is in front of me, because otherwise I die. Yeah. I mean, the people I work with in my fieldwork, so I've done a lot of work in Kenya, and I've been working recently in Rwanda. And occasionally people invite me for meals in the area where we work. We work in a very remote, we've worked for 15 years in a very remote part of Kenya, actually where a lot of the famous runners are from. And I don't even have to ask when I'm going to be served. It's always exactly the same meal.

30:11You have a dish called ugali, which is like a cornmeal kind of porridge with either sakumbu wiki, which is basically collard greens that have been chopped up and sauteed, or sometimes if you're lucky with beans or something like that. That's it. That's what you get. Nobody asks what's for dinner. They know what's, because they eat what they grow. That's all the food that they have available to them. Or I've gone out with hunter-gatherers. I've had the privilege of spending some time with hunter-gatherers. They don't like, well, gee, tonight I'm not going to have Italian or Chinese, or shall I have turtle or shall I have tortoise or shall I have kudu?

30:48They eat whatever they manage to hunt and whatever they manage to gather. That's it. Nobody asks what's for dinner. They eat what they have. And all of us, and farmers and hunter-gatherers, that's the way life was for most people, except the king of England or whatever. He got to choose what he wanted to eat. And now we're in this completely weird, bizarre, modern environment. And surprise, surprise, we have a hard time because not only do we not know what to eat, we're also confronted with a lot of really bad stuff. I mean, as I said before, the typical American supermarket has 40 ,000 different kinds of food.

31:2440 ,000. It's kind of amazing. And over 50 % of that is ultra-processed, designed to be highly appealing, addictive, convenient, inexpensive, although that's going up a bit. And how are we supposed to cope? We never evolved the mechanisms to handle that. Going back to the Mediterranean diet, what is it about that diet that seems to, what's the mechanistic reason for why it seems to outperform others? There's probably a number of reasons. Again, there's no one reason. So one is that it tends to be whole grain. So when you take flour and you refine it, you remove the outer layers and you remove the germ, you're removing a lot of the protein and you're removing a lot of the fiber.

32:17It has a healthy balance of fats. So of course, it's famous for olive oil, which is a monounsaturated fat. We can talk about that if you want. And monounsaturated fats are associated with a lot of health benefits. There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. Mediterranean diet often has fish in it, and fish has these omega-3 fatty acids. So it's the constellation of nutrients that are healthy, plus an absence of a lot of stuff like added sugar. What are the things that it eliminates most? Well, Mediterranean diet tends not to have a lot of added sugar, tends not to have that much proper Mediterranean.

32:57Because what you define as a Mediterranean diet It can be kind of all over the... What the Mediterranean with a capital M, capital D, right, which is what's been defined by the nutritionists, isn't necessarily what people always eat in the Mediterranean. I've had a lot of really carb-rich dinners in Italy, for example. But it tends not to have added sugar, tends not to have a lot of refined carbohydrates, tends not to have a lot of saturated fat, tends to be diverse and rich in phytochemicals that are healthy and have a lot of antioxidants and things like that, tends not to have too much red meat.

33:32So it's a mixture of things that have, in total, been shown to be reasonably healthy. Now, is it like an optimal diet? Is it perfect? It will guarantee perfect health? No. No diet is optimal. But has it been shown to be effective for preventing weight gain and for reducing your risk of a wide range of diseases? Absolutely. How much is it the lifestyle? I've heard about the importance of the sociality around the Mediterranean diet and stuff like that. Has that been separated out? You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. I mean, again, it's very hard to do that. But for example, that study I mentioned, the Spanish study, the PREDIMED study, I mean, that essentially by randomizing people who all presumably had similar lifestyles, they were prescribed - They're hanging out on the street corner, having a coffee at 9 p.m.

34:23at night with their friends. But both arms of the diet were probably the same. So that study, for example, controlled for that. But of course, there's more to health and longevity than just your diet. What about blue zone diets? Oh my God. Don't get me started on that one. I mean, blue zones are fun. I mean, look, there's a lot to say about blue zone diet. The first is, again, it's kind of like a Mediterranean diet, but with even less meat, if you look at what it prescribes. But it also prescribes skipping breakfast. It tells you to be social. It tells you to not finish your plate. There's some social aspects to it.

35:11But what I find, and if you look at the prescription of the diet, especially nutritionally, it's not far off from the Mediterranean diet. I don't know of any really good high-quality studies for the Blue Zones diet compared to, say, the Mediterranean diet. But what I find amusing about the Blue Zones diet is how it's been advertised. Because it's advertised and marketed as a diet that'll help you live to be 100. And that's where I begin to have some concerns. Because even if you look at the data for the Blue Zones, like these supposed blue zones. There's these five regions on the planet. Where are they?

35:49Let's see. One of them is in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. One's a little village in Sardinia. It's like a little area in Sardinia. One is an island in the Mediterranean. I've forgotten the name of the island. One is Okinawa, and the other is Loma Linda, California, right outside of LA. I didn't know that one was there. Those are the five blue zones. And the idea behind these are these are supposedly areas where twice as many people live to be centenarians. They live to be 100 years old. And so the idea is if you eat like the people in these areas, you too are going to live to be 100 years old.

36:25Now, there's some problems with this. The first is that even if you believe the data that these regions have a higher percentage of centenarians, it turns out that the percentage of centenarians is tiny. So it's like six people out of 10 ,000, as opposed to in the United States where it's three people out of 10 ,000. The base rate's so low that small changes are massive proportions. These are statistical outliers. So you basically have to, if you're not a statistical outlier, which most of us are not, it's irrelevant. It's not a very, it's statistical nonsense, basically. Secondly, there's a guy in Oxford, a demographer at Oxford, I'm trying to remember his name, Saul Newman, I think his name is.

37:05He's published this really fascinating paper. He did a deep dive onto these blue zones and found out that only 18 % of the people in these blue zones actually had birth certificates. So we don't even know who these people are. They just self-report their age. And these are areas. Are you telling me that a good chunk of the blue zone fervor could have been around the fact that people just didn't register how old they were? Correct. Or it could be insurance fraud. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, exactly. You can get online, you can read Saul Newman's paper. It's a hilarious paper to read. But also think about it this way.

37:47There's this little area in Sardinia. If you click on the Blue Zones map, there's this, think about Sardinia. It's an oval-shaped island, right? And there's this little area on the western side, there's a little blue zone on the map, right? In that little area, you have all these centenarians. Now, tell me that if you go like 30 miles north or 30 miles south, that people have totally different diets? And it's like, so why in this little spot are they all centenarians and just 20 miles north or 20 miles south, they're not? It's kind of suspicious. What is the blue zone proponent explanation for that?

38:25I think he's answered. I don't think he's... Is it a guy? Yes, a guy named... What's his name? Wettner? Wettner? I can't remember. He was a National Geographic reporter who got really excited by this and figured out how to market all this. But one of the most interesting blue zones is Loma Linda, California. Do you know who lives in Loma Linda, California? Why Loma Linda is a blue zone? Because obviously they're not little, you know, peasant-y, you know, farmers eating their traditional foods. No. they're Seventh-day Adventists. And the Seventh-day Adventists don't believe in smoking. They believe in exercise.

39:00They believe that many of them are vegetarians. They believe that... They don't believe in exercise. No, they do believe in exercise. They believe that God gave us our bodies. Our body is a sacred thing and that it's our responsibility as Christians to take good care of our God-given body. That's interesting. The physiological theology, very good. It is, it is. And so, you know, they don't smoke, they exercise. Many of them are vegetarians. They do all these sorts of things that, you know, most doctors will tell you is what you should do. And guess what? They have a high percentage of people who - Do they eat the same thing as the people in Sardinia?

39:40No, of course not. They're eating - Right, so what's going on with this Blue Zones thing? Is it fair to say that the Blue Zone diet isn't a diet? It doesn't do what it says it does. Well, I mean, it does. If you read the Blue Zones book, it tells you what to eat. It tells you at least a half a cup of beans a day. It tells you lots of vegetables. It tells you not to eat too much of this and not too much of that. So it's got some parameters, you know, but it's not a rigidly defined diet. And, you know, the suggestions aren't totally crazy. But again, it's kind of oversold. I mean, like, one of the refrains that I keep going back to in my book is that there are a lot of people telling us optimal diets, you know?

40:29And I have come to hate the word optimal. If you want to piss me off, say your diet - That's your trigger word. It's my trigger word. Tell me your diet is optimal. First of all, is it optimal for you or optimal for me? Because you and I are not the same, right? We have different genetics. We have different background. You're young and strong. and you have a lot more muscle, but I'm probably faster than you. Who knows? Not probably, certainly. But I'm 62. You're probably a lot younger. Are you more worried about heart disease or Alzheimer's or arthritis or this or that or the other? Do you care more about the environment, et cetera?

41:06There's no such thing as optimal. And it's just marketing. And so I now react against people who claim their diet is optimal because it's just marketing. It's salesmanship. It's not science. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. Aren't you younger than me? Yeah, but my dad got a DUI. Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if your setup is messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10 % of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Gymshark, Skims, Allo, and Nutonic.

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42:26We both are. It's fine. Low carb, high fat. Well, again, there were - Used to be Atkins, now it's keto. Yeah, I mean, look, both depends what your goals are, right? it turns out if you want to if your goal is to lose weight for example you can lose weight on a low carb diet and you can lose weight on a low fat diet it is true that people tend to lose a little bit more weight on low carb diets than low fat diets but but and in fact i'm one of the co-authors of the carbohydrate insulin model big paper that was recently american journal of clinical nutrition so i've got i've put my i've signed my name in blood on that and i believe in the biology behind the low-carb diet.

43:06Can you explain that in layman's terms? We can. But before we do it, let me just get to this, which is that pretty much any non-crap diet can help somebody lose weight. And the hard part is to sustain it. And so you need to make a distinction between efficacy and effectiveness. So efficacy is basically how well a diet works in the perfect world, right? when there's no cheating and you eat exactly what you're told and you can do it for a long time and it's perfect. Effectiveness is how it works in the real world. And it turns out that low-carb diets have this higher efficacy for weight loss than low-fat diets.

43:46This is for weight loss. But their effectiveness, because people have a hard time sustaining them, is only slightly larger. If you could do it, you might perform very well. but being able to do it, the difficulty is somewhat harder. It's hard. Which means that it mitigates some of those gains. I mean, I tried it. I mean, I tried it. I've tried every single one of these. By the way, I have done a much more bro science equivalent of what you did in the research for this book. Yeah. I've tried all of these. Yeah, I mean, I tried an Atkins diet and it was hard because I had intense carbohydrate cravings and I'm a runner and, you know, it's hard to be a runner and not eat carbs.

44:23The hunger is rough. Yeah. I mean, I just, I didn't like it that much. but I didn't like a lot of the diets that much. But let's go into the biology behind low-carb diets because it's really interesting. So when you eat food,

44:40some of that food, of course, is carbohydrate. And carbohydrates, your body breaks down into, some of it into glucose, which is one of the two major kinds of sugar. There's fructose and glucose. Fructose is what you get from fruit. It's sweeter. glucose is the kind of more starchy, less sweet form of sugar. And so that goes straight into your bloodstream. Glucose is, your body can only handle a very, very small range of glucose because too much is toxic. In fact, I think average human being has about a teaspoon and a half of glucose in their entire bloodstream. And if it goes above that, you're in trouble.

45:21You become hyperglycemic and you can have serious medical problems. So our body is super sensitive to glucose. So when you eat a meal and it has glucose in it, your blood sugar level goes up. And because the body has to maintain a very tight range of glucose, your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. And insulin is basically your growth hormone. It's the hormone that causes you to store stuff. So insulin causes your cells to take up that glucose so the levels go down.

45:57Now, insulin also tells your cells to hold on to energy, so to prevent your cells from releasing fat because you store that energy as fat. Your cells turn the glucose into fat. Excuse me. So when you are on a low-carb diet, you keep your insulin levels low, and that means that you're storing less and also you're not holding on to that fat and that helps you. So the biology is pretty simple and I guess pretty clear, though it gets more complicated because there's another hormone called glucagon which makes it more complicated. Physical activity affects things. Nothing is ever simple and the carbohydrate insulin model is no exception.

46:42So there's real basic logic behind the carbohydrate insulin model. The problem is that when people go on these low-carb diets, they're hard to sustain. And a lot of people can't maintain them for that long and their carbohydrate levels creep up. And that's the end of the diet. But you can also lose weight on a low-fat diet. Plenty of people have. I didn't even know that low-fat, high-carb diets were a thing. That's one that I haven't tried. Oh, so there are plenty. I mean, some of the biggest diets in the country were the Pritikin diet, the Ornish diet. There's a whole bunch of... These sound like fantasy races from a Lord of the Rings novel.

47:27DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. So it was originally developed for blood pressure, but it turns out to be a low-fat diet. And it's actually probably the second most studied diet after Mediterranean. It's very well studied. It was developed by NIH. And there's a lot of scientific, there are a lot of randomized control studies for the DASH diet. And people who stick to the DASH diet, which by the way, tried in the book, do lose weight. Absolutely. They can and do. Surely somebody that's on a low-fat, higher-carb diet is going to be ripping their insulin levels around more.

48:00No, because it depends on the kind of carb you eat. Because there are good carbs and there are bad carbs. So if you eat refined carbs and lots of stuff with lots of sugar, lots of crap, your insulin levels are going to go sky high. But if you eat unrefined carbs, right? If you eat, I mean, if I eat lots of kale and, you know, whatever, is that my glucose level is going to go sky high? Of course not, because all the fiber in that kale is going to slow the rate of digestion. So there are plenty of foods that have carbohydrate that are not high glycemic. So the idea that all carbs are poisonous and cause you to raise your blood sugar levels ridiculously is just not true.

48:41I mean, if that were the case, because think about it, for most of human existence, people have eaten mostly carbs. All those farming diets in the Mediterranean and Asia, elsewhere, are mostly carbs. They're eating corn, they're eating rice, they're eating wheat, etc. But until recently, none of those people, or very few of them, were obese or overweight. So these diets, you can eat a high-carb diet if it's high in fiber and not high in sugar and not highly refined, these are not high-glycemic diets. The area in Rwanda where I work, and the area in Kenya where I work, people are getting at least 65 % of their diet from carbs.

49:20That's a high-carb diet. And I dare you to find somebody with overweight or obesity in the area. They don't exist. There's none of them. They're not around. How much of that is because of the type of carbs, and how much of that is just because of the number of calories? Well, they're eating a lot of calories. It's a combination. It's the kind of foods they're eating. So they're eating, for example, and I have that meal I described earlier in the Nandi Hills, right, where we have some Magali, but we also have Sukumawiki, we have beans. These are all highly fibrous, low-glycemic foods. It's a generally healthy diet.

49:57They're also very physically active, and that helps. And when you're physically active, so one of the physical activity helps people prevent weight gain. It's not just how many calories are going in versus out, but when people are very physically active, it changes the insulin sensitivity of their muscles so that you actually produce less insulin for a given amount of carbohydrate. So again, nothing is simple. And when we try to oversimplify, we get into trouble. And I wish it were simple. But again, one of the major arguments that I'm trying to make is that it's a plea to stop oversimplifying complex multifactorial things.

50:43We just all need to educate ourselves a little bit so that we can help make sense of all the diversity out there and all the different people out there trying to make money off of us with their various different diets. It just doesn't work the way we've been told it does. I understand that people shouldn't be trying to overcomplicate or oversimplify things, but the degree of, even just so far, we've done like five diets or something, and all of them kind of feel like they're pointing in the opposite direction. You said, well, low fat can work because of what it doesn't do to insulin in terms of spiking insulin, but high carb can work as long as you eat the right kinds of carbs.

51:22And the plant-based stuff, If that works, you do need to get some protein, but it doesn't matter where it's from. And some people feel good on the carnivore thing. So I understand why people feel this malaise, this degree of overwhelm. They're like, okay, we shouldn't be oversimplifying it. Optimal is your Russian sleeper agent activation code word. But at the same time, if I'm so burdened, I don't know what to do. I have a solution for you, which is that, again, there are kernels, even larger than kernels, there are whole cobs of truth to all of these diets. And why do we have to pick between low fat versus low carb versus low calorie?

52:05I haven't talked about low calorie, right? Why do we have to pick? You can actually take the best of all of them, right? So you can take the best of the low-carb diet by eliminating or removing or not eating too much of refined carbs that raise your insulin levels. You can take the best of the low-fat diet by not eating too much highly caloric saturated fat, which does, according to a lot of studies, either increases your risk of cardiovascular disease or doesn't lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. We can talk about that later on. So polyunsaturate and monounsaturate fats are risk-lowering fats.

52:42And also, you know, calories do matter. How many calories you eat do matter. We need to talk. And so, you know, not eating too much is also helpful. So why not combine the best of all these various kinds of diets without going down the kind of... But as soon as you combine the best of all of those kinds of diets, you now have a new diet. No, you have the... You know what you have? You have the Mediterranean diet. That's the diet. That is a new diet. Or you have essentially any traditional farming diet. So I would say that a traditional Asian diet, a traditional African diet, a traditional Mesoamerican diet, a traditional Mediterranean diet, all share the same basic characteristics that we just talked about.

53:22a lack of highly refined carbohydrates that raise your insulin levels, not too much saturated fat, not too much food, a diversity of foods, a mixture of whole grain cereals combined with legumes that give you complementary protein. People have been eating these for thousands and thousands of years. Now, are they optimal diets that are going to guarantee you to live to be 100? No. But are these diets that have over the course of time, plus in recent studies, been shown to be generally healthy and prevent weight gain? The answer is yes. Okay. So in a way, it's not that complicated. That we've started to simplify.

54:00What about calorie restriction? I've been told that it's the only reliable intervention that actually works for extending lifespan. If you're a mouse. Are you saying that the rodent studies don't come across into humans when it comes to calorie restriction for lifespan? There's no evidence yet in humans. In fact, not even in primates. So do you know there was a big study that was done in Wisconsin, where they took a whole bunch of macaques, right? And they gave one group of macaques a calorie-restricted diet and another group of macaques. And this is a 20-year long study. Imagine how much time it took.

54:34Two decades of calorie restriction if you're in the wrong group of macaques. And guess what? The group of macaques that were in the calorie restriction diet were way healthier than the ones that were not in the calorie. So there were these papers published saying, ta-da, calorie restriction works in primates, which means it probably works in humans. But guess what? When people looked at the data, the non-calorie restricted macaques were basically being fed a crap food diet. They were getting lots of sugary foods. They were getting obese. They were not healthy, normal macaque diets. They were fed an ad-liminum crap diet.

55:06So the NIH, at vast expense, I mean, we're talking millions of taxpayer dollars, redid the experiment. Another two decades. For another two decades. Fuck me. If you're the guy, if you're the guy that fed those macaques fries for two decades, you really should be out of a job. It's very shameful. But anyway, so the NIH redid the experiment and this time they had them on the same monkey chow diet. Just chopped one in half or whatever. And one had a third, 30 % less food than the other. And guess what? No difference. Zilch. In terms of health and longevity. Why do you think it does show up in mice?

55:41because mice have totally different life histories. So life history is the series of stages that you go through, how you use energy to grow up, reproduce, and whatever. And a typical mouse is ready to reproduce after three months, and it has a series of babies, et cetera, et cetera. Mice have totally different metabolisms and different growth trajectories and different microbiomes than humans. So yes, it is true that for some species, for some mouse lines, but not all. Caloric restriction has been shown to improve their lifespan, but not all of them, by the way. Certainly true for yeast, certainly true for fruit flies, but the evidence for humans is so far mixed.

56:24Now, I should also say that it's not based totally on hooey, right? I mean, there are reasons to believe that caloric restriction can be very beneficial. And again, I try to explain the biology kind of carefully in the book. But one of them is that it causes what's called metabolic switching. So after a meal, your body's got all this nutrients and energy, et cetera, and wants to use it. And so you're going to growth mode. And there's a famous gene called mTOR. You've probably heard of it. Vemalian target of rapamycin. And mTOR is like an on gene, right? It's like a growth gene. It causes you to grow muscle and grow this and grow that and produce proteins and do all kinds of good stuff.

57:04but the consequence of that is that it also causes damage right when you get your muscles producing more proteins you produce what's called reactive oxygen species that can cause damage you you get you get you get you get you know misfolded proteins you get all these problems right but you but but so there's another pathway that's turned on by another big gene called AMPK and AMPK is like your repair gene. And what happens when you go through intermittent fasting or calorie restriction is that you turn down or turn off the mTOR and turn up the AMPK. So you're turning off growth and you're turning up repair.

57:48And that's obviously good, right? But you can't repair all the time. Sometimes you have to grow. And so this kind of metabolic switching between the two is really good. The problem I think is that a lot of Americans and Europeans and people in high-income countries, we're constantly in growth mode. I mean, how often are we hungry anymore, right? Permanently grazing. We're permanently grazing. In my building, if anybody gets hungry, you just go down one flight of stairs and there's these snack machines and you never have to be hungry. So that means that some people are just constantly in this on mode and they're not turning on the repair mode.

58:25But we obviously evolved to have these mixture of repair and growth. And so there is, and of course, when you go into intermittent fasting or calorie restriction, you are turning on that repair mode, and that's good. So I'm not saying that it isn't necessarily beneficial or that it might not lead to increased longevity. It's just that the evidence so far doesn't exist. So you're taking another leap of faith. I'm sure it's generally healthy, whether it'll help you live to be 100 anybody who tells you that's the case is is is going beyond the evidence it might it might it's not a bad strategy but it's not there there's no strong evidence to that effect that's crazy i didn't know that there was no strong evidence i mean look the hormetic stressor that's how people make money you know if they told you if they told you like what i just told you that you know this is how it might work but we're not really sure highly unsexy.

59:25You're not going to buy the product. Many of your arguments are highly unsexy, is a way. Unmarketable. Completely unsexy. Sorry. But because we want quick fixes. Wouldn't it be great if I just by skipping breakfast, I could live to 100? I wish that were the case, but I can't promise you that. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades, and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain.

1:00:05It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So all you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP Strength app could wipe your ass for you, probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to$50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below, heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout.

1:00:38That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. The reason that I think people are not only drawn to it because simplicity is seductive, but also just think about how many different choices you need to make. Now, again, what am I going to eat today is an evolutionarily novel question that humans have never had to ask before. Yeah. I've never had to answer before. And if somebody comes along with something that feels like a relatively tight set of guardrails, it's why I think constrictive diets, generally, whatever they are, just help. Like I'll speak for myself, right?

1:01:14So a couple of years ago, lived in a house with toxic mold. One of the byproducts that comes out of that an awful lot of inflammation and brain fog and TGF beta and C4A and MMP9, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. One of the often cited diets that seem to help people with some of the brain fog is going carnival. Get rid of anything that spikes blood sugar. I felt remotely human for the first time in six months. Yeah, I'm sure you did. I also had LDL in the 400s. And I then had to unwind that. Everything is a trade-off. So looking at my bloods versus looking at how I felt, I'm like, well, it was so good because it was restricting something.

1:01:57It made it very easy for me to follow. It's a super simple set of rules. Is it meat or blueberries or raspberries? If not, don't fucking eat it. But what it did to, and it made me feel good. And it made me look, I was shredded out in my mind, look fucking fantastic. finally hitting my protein goals for a bodybuilding diet. But also, what's this going to do to my arteries over if I keep doing this for only a couple of years? Even on a clearly scan, I could see a little bit of progression just from a short space of time, plaque progression in the space of nine months that we've done this clearly scan, 18-month intervals.

1:02:33So I understand why people want that simplicity. What is interesting to me around the calorie restriction thing is the There's a super magical source that's inside of the intermittent fasting. It's the 16-8, right? 5-2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or there's the, what's it called, the warrior diet. Is that OMAD? I can't remember. The warrior diet is you eat like only once a day. Yeah, OMAD, one meal a day. Is there something special about intermittent fasting? Well, again, intermittent fasting moves your body in and out of what we call positive and negative energy balance. therefore turning on and off mTOR and mPKs, calling metabolic switching.

1:03:14But you could imagine - But there's no one way to do it. You could imagine a world in which you did calorie restriction. Let's say maintenance for me is 2 ,400. I could calorie restrict even down to like a significant amount, like 1 ,800 or 1 ,500 or something. But I could do that by consuming 100 calories every hour for each waking hour that I was - This would be kind of a highly inefficient diet to have. But you understand what I mean, right? There's a difference between grazing your way to calorie restriction or fasting your way to calorie restriction, if you were to take, have you seen any evidence that if you were to take two populations, one of whom was doing OMAD and another of whom was grazing to a similar kind of calorie restriction, that they would have different outcomes?

1:03:53In terms of weight or in terms of inflammation or whatever. So if those studies exist, I don't know them because they're - Be a cool study to do. Well, I don't, yeah, maybe, but - Don't maybe my suggestion. That's a cool study, okay? says the guy that's not in your industry at all. I'm just thinking about the hypothesis that we're trying to test. So the mechanism by which intermittent fasting or low calorie restriction is supposed to work is by putting the body into a negative energy balance. And as you say, there's two ways of doing it. One is to fast, or the other is just not eat very much. Certainly, there's a lot of data on not eating very much.

1:04:36That's just called the diet, right? And the problem with diets is that people get hungry, and they're really, really, really hard to maintain. And they're not very useful for most people because you're tired, you're exhausted, you're cranky, you're hangry, you're whatever, right? Intermittent fasting, one of the reasons people love intermittent fasting is that you just basically skip breakfast, for example, by one form of intermittent fasting. And so it's much more tolerable. and plus the other benefit of intermittent fasting again is the metabolic switching, going from one to the other. Because nobody in their right mind would think that being in a constant state of negative energy balance is a good thing.

1:05:14It's called starvation. It's called starvation, right? And here's another thing. In addition to the fact that there are trade-offs, every time you do one thing, you don't do something else. Every food, every diet, everything, there are benefits and there are costs. There's nothing, Find me one that doesn't have a trade-off, and I'll be really interested, but I have yet to find one. But remember this also, that we are adapted. We're not adapted to be healthy. Natural selection didn't put us on this earth to live to be 100. We evolved for one thing and one thing only, as far as natural selection is concerned, that's to have babies.

1:05:50So we evolved to maximize the reproductive success and not to be long-lived and healthy. And so a lot of the adaptations that we have are there not to improve our health, they're to improve our reproductive success. And that makes things complicated. And that adds to the trade-offs. get me to puberty and hope for the best. What about the sort of world of the modern paleo movement? Because what it sounds like, paleo is in one of the titles that you have for the world that you come from. Looking at a more ancestrally aligned, natural, without falling into a naturalistic fallacy type diet, you could assume, hey, well, if we just eat like hunter-gatherers did, and the paleo movement kind of promised this from a dietary perspective.

1:06:45Is it right to say that there is an ancestral diet that we can recreate? Has the paleo movement got it right? I wish they had, but they, again, I'm going to sound like a Birkin record, but they got some things right and they got some things wrong. So it is true that some aspects of the pale diet make a lot of sense, right? You know, don't eat a lot of sugar, don't eat a lot of saturated fat. That's the original paleo diet. It's the only lot of saturated fat. Some paleo dieters dispute that. But the paleo diet also says you should never eat legumes, and you should never eat grains, and you should never eat dairy.

1:07:21And the argument for that is that our ancestors didn't eat legumes and grains, and then we only had dairy until we stopped nursing. And then after we stopped drinking our mother's breast milk, that was it. um well several problems first is it's not true that hunter-gatherers don't eat legumes and grains uh it's absolutely just just don't or didn't don't and didn't both we have paleontological evidence we have neanderthals with grain starch thing on their teeth we have oh that sounds like reliable evidence we have very reliable you know that we have this kind of cartoon character of the neanderthals eating like all meat like you know inuit in like in greenland but you know you You know, 125 ,000 years ago, there were hippos frolicking in the Thames when the Neanderthals were hanging out in southern England.

1:08:08The Neanderthals were not living in Arctic conditions all the time. There were times when there was plenty of plants available, and they were eating plenty of plants. We have archaeological evidence for that. In addition, for example, hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, the second most consumed food is a kind of bean. It's called the marama bean. It's their number two food. So don't tell me they don't eat legumes. They do. We evolved to eat almost everything. And so actually, we did a study on this a few years ago. It was actually during COVID when it was lockdown. And I had an undergraduate who was going to do an experimental project in the lab that involved putting people on treadmills and that kind of stuff.

1:08:42And of course, she couldn't do it because the lab was closed. So we decided, since she was stuck at home, to go through the literature on all the high quality data on hunter-gatherer diets from the tropics and just analyze the hell out of the data and compare that to what the paleo diet prescribes. because the paleo diet says you should have, oh, I can't remember, it's like 35 % protein and X % carbohydrate, and I can't remember the exact formula. There are 12 hunter-gatherer groups for which we have really good data, excellent data, where people actually measure carefully what they eat, and they're all over the place.

1:09:19Some of them are eating pretty much all plants, almost no animal food. Some are eating tons of animal food, everything in between. We evolved to eat anything. We are the animal kingdom's ultimate omnivores. We evolved through cooking and fermentation and various other techniques. Because again, remember the equation of life is food in equals babies out. And that's all that natural selection cares about. If you can eat it and it can help you make babies, you should. So the idea that we evolved to eat some particular diet is just not true. We evolved to eat incredible diversity of diets. and remember that we didn't evolve to eat them to be healthy and to live to be 70, 80, 90, although hunter-gatherers do end up being relatively healthy.

1:10:04We evolve them to maximize their reproductive success. So the paleo diet is based on kind of a naturalistic fallacy that if our ancestors ate, it must be good. By that token, maybe we shouldn't brush our teeth or sleep on mattresses or whatever, right? And it's also based on this idea that these legumes and cereals are filled with these quote-unquote anti-nutrients. So anti-nutrients are compounds that bind to vitamins and minerals and prevent us from absorbing them. But guess what? If you cook your food or you ferment your food, you get rid of the anti-nutrients. Otherwise, all those people in Japan who have the greatest longevity, they'd be dying of malnutrition.

1:10:51They're clearly not. So again, a lot of these diets are based on elimination, and they're based on stoking certain kinds of fears, and that's problematic. So the paleo diet's not completely wrong, but it's not completely right. Sorry to long answer to your simple question. I'd never heard of anti-nutrients before, but I knew that people get worried about lectins and phytates and oxalates. Those are anti-nutrients. What's the truth about the danger of lectins and oxalates and phytates? Well, if you ate raw beans, you'd be in trouble, right? Because they're filled with these lectins and they would, you know, they could cause all kinds of problems.

1:11:34But guess what? If you cook your beans, you're just fine. um uh so these are compounds that um that are that we that's why we can't eat raw beans and raw grains because of those those those compounds what do they do to us they again they bind to to minerals and vitamins so that you can't absorb them in your gut so you'd have malnutrition you'd have you'd eat it but you wouldn't absorb it correct but obviously that's not the case right i mean i know plenty of healthy vegetarians who are clearly not malnourished despite eating lots of beans because they cook their beans in paracelsus remember paracelsus famous alchemist from chemist from from the 15th or 14th century he famously said it's the dose that makes the poison right and and these these compounds by the time you cook them and ferment them they're in such harmless doses there's absolutely no reason even the oxalate thing i've heard even cooked spinach that's a concern for some people you're taking come on maybe for some people but not for most of us.

1:12:33Right. These aren't anti-nutrients, aren't a concern as long as things are well cooked for you. I think there are some people with certain kidney issues that have problems with spinach, but for the rest of us, I think spinach is a delicious, healthy food. You've activated another trap card now, which is the raw food diet. Oh my God. I have to tell you, of all the diets I tried, by far the worst. What was a typical day for you eating the raw food diet? Oh, I mean, we gave it up because it was so hard. I mean, look, first of all, I was eating because, look, cooking increases how much energy you get from food.

1:13:09It actually, cooking releases nutrients from food. So on a raw food diet, you have to eat ridiculous amounts of food just to get enough food. I mean, I was just eating constantly. I was always hungry, and I spent huge amounts of time thinking about food. What were you eating? What's a typical day? Oh, we were like, well, I mean, it was difficult because so much of what we eat requires cooking. Humans evolved to cook. The only people on the planet who don't cook are raw foodists in places like Berkeley and Cambridge and stuff like that, right? The most developed places in the world, not the least developed places.

1:13:43You cannot possibly survive on a raw food diet without a really high quality diet. And even then, it's difficult to thrive because cooking releases energy. Cooking releases nutrients. You get more energy from cooked foods than from that. So we were eating like, you know, zoodles, you know, zucchini noodles. And we were eating, you know, smoothies. And we were eating… Fish? Do you eat any raw fish? I ate raw fish, absolutely. I love sushi, but you can't have it with the rice, because the rice is cooked, right? So it was really hard to... I mean, I was just constantly hungry. My wife got depressed.

1:14:22I describe it in the book. After three days, she disappeared and came back really happy. She went out and got a bagel, and that was it for her. She broke containment. I made it another day. You lasted four days on the raw food diet. It lasted four days. It was really hard. And look, it's based on, again, it's a naturalistic fallacy that somehow, because animals don't get these various diseases because they eat raw food, that somehow it must be really good for us. But we, our species, started cooking maybe a million years ago. Certainly by 400 ,000 years ago, cooking became extremely common among our ancestors to the point that it's changed our digestive systems and enabled us to have these big brains and big bodies and high metabolisms that we cannot support without cooking.

1:15:13How important was cooking to human development? Crucial. I don't think we would be the species that we are without cooking. We wouldn't have our big brains. We wouldn't have the levels of body fat that we have. Cooking enabled us to have the kind of reproductive rate that we have. cooking, cooking gave us more energy and, you know, we are an energetically extravagant species and, and, and cooking is one of those key elements. Food sharing is another, meat was part of it as well. Um, cooking is incredibly important part of the, of the human evolutionary story that gave, they made us who we are.

1:15:48What does cooking do to digestion? Cooking, cooking breaks down cell walls, most importantly, so that, you know, when you eat a cooked, cooked, like if you eat cooked corn versus raw corn, and then you look in the toilet the next day, what do you see? I think that experiment is pretty easy to do. You digest a lot more of your food when it's cooked because you break down the cell walls, you release the nutrients. Cooking also makes food safer. So if you eat raw meat versus cooked meat, which is more likely to make you sick, and when you're sick, if you survive it, you just have to spend a huge amount of energy fighting that, right?

1:16:29Speaking of somebody that got Salmonella in Rwanda, yes. Oh dear, I'm so sorry. It's okay, I survived, I survived. But I did get a call from the UK, it's like food and safety people, that they go around and if you go to your GP, I felt horrible, obviously, and went in, did some stool sample thing, and I got a call from environmental health before my doctor called me to tell me what happened. And they said, Mr. Williamson, we understand that you were part of a salmonella outbreak. I'm like, okay, well, thank you for telling me what's wrong with me. But they wanted to work out where I'd been. They wanted to know, hey, what restaurants have you been?

1:17:10I'm like, unless you're going to fly out to Rwanda, this is not in your purview, I don't think. But that took a long time to recover from, like fully, fully recover digestion from. It is gnarly. I've had salmonella once. It's tough. Yeah, it's really hard. I got it at the cafeteria in my medical school in Eldoret, Kenya. My entire team got sick from that. Well, at least it was something that you could bond over. Bonding is one word for that. Yeah, you can be in the stalls next to each other all hating your life. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution.

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1:18:22Normally, this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with function, it's$365 a year. That's$1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now, you can get$25 off, bringing it down to$340. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save$25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. I got a question. Have we ever seen any other animals using temperature to moderate food in any way? Does anything leave something out, put something away? Is there any kind of like mediation with regards to temperature?

1:19:01Not on a regular basis. But it's interesting though, if you, there are these fun experiments where they give chimpanzees, give them the opportunity to choose between cooked food and raw food. And even though chimpanzees don't cook their food, they usually prefer the cooked food. And it has been observed that sometimes after a brush fire, the chimpanzees will eat the burnt stuff. Oh, barbecue. Yeah, it's like a natural barbecue. But they're taking advantage of a natural brush fire. They're not cooking it themselves. If there are animals that I don't know of. We're unique. Would you say that farming was a healthy human development?

1:19:43Oh my God, that's an interesting topic. I mean, it's... How many hours... I'm just throwing grenades at you here too. Remember the equation of life, right? Food in equals babies out. So some people say that farming was the biggest mistake that humans ever made. Because once people ate farming diets, They had less nutritional diversity, and they ate more grains and cereals and blah, blah, blah. And if you look in the archaeological record, once farming starts, people's health declined. But the reason for most of those declines in health was because of infectious disease. Because we started several things.

1:20:20First is, we started living with animals, right? So we're living with our sheep and our cows and whatever. We started getting diseases from those animals. so so as opposed to only having the animals with us that we could kind of kill or use to maybe pack like yeah we don't packs and shit yeah we don't yeah exactly we don't we didn't get many animal animal diseases exposure a human to animal was so low so that's one the other is that with farming you produce way more food i mean hunter-gatherers struggle to get you know a few thousand calories a day but farmers can even you know neolithic kind of farmers you know with simple, without machines and all that.

1:20:55A shit farmer can get more calories than he needs. Way more, right? They have much larger families. And with farming, not only did populations start to increase, but we also became sedentary and started living permanently in villages. So now you have higher population densities, higher populations living with animals. Now you're surrounded by your own shit because you don't have toilets and you don't have sewers and all that kind of stuff. And so now you get the perfect mix of factors to increase infectious disease and infectious disease transmission. And so with the advent of farming, you had more people, but you also had a lot more disease.

1:21:36And so on the one hand, farming was great from an evolutionary perspective because we had more babies. I mean, the population of the world by the end of the farming era was up to about a billion people from probably about just a few million from before farming was invented. which is only about 600 generations ago. So in 590 generations, the world got up from about a few million to a billion people. So from that perspective, from a natural selection perspective, farming was a great idea. Scale of goods, individual. But from disease and misery, it was terrible. Also with farming, you get famines, right?

1:22:13If you're a hunter-gatherer and the weather is bad and you have a drought or whatever, you just move, right? You're in enormous territories at extremely low population density. There's a lot of variation. So you go to where the food is. Now, it doesn't mean it's easy or you're necessarily going to live in the lap of luxury. But if you're a farmer and you're living in a village and you can't go anywhere else because the next folks are going to kill you and you have a drought or, say, two years of drought and famine, you die, right? So farmers are much more vulnerable to famine and disease. Also with farming, you also have the rise of complex civilizations and armies and Napoleon's going to come and burn your fields.

1:22:58So you have more of this kind of organized violence. It's not that hunter-gatherers don't kill each other. They do. But with farming and civilization, you begin to get more large-scale warfare, which of course, who suffers? It's the peasants. so farming brought a lot of misery and and and and problems although it did provide more food and more energy so how's that for yet another mixed bag i mean like it's just it's so sorry i'm an academic not at all i i think it's so it's so wonderful like the the understanding the fifth order effects of something like that what happens downstream i think is so cool but if i could say something more about farming diets so a lot of people mistake farming diets with modern diets.

1:23:42Because when farmers were eating their grains and cereal, like think of a typical, like let's go back to the Mediterranean diet. Think a typical farmer from somewhere along the Mediterranean. They're growing barley or wheat and they're having their lentils and their whatever, and their chickpeas and whatever. They're having their legume and their cereal, et cetera. And they're making bread, but it's going to be sourdough, whole grain, whole wheat, sourdough bread with lentils. These are healthy diets in the genre. These are not insulin-spiking diets. These are effective diets. And it wasn't until the late 19th century, actually it was in Hungary, in the Industrial Revolution, that we figured out how to mill flour to get rid of the germ and the sperm.

1:24:29And now all of a sudden, when we think of high cereal diets, we think of white flour, not brown flour. And that's a very different thing. I mean, there's actually a fair amount of nutrition in whole grains. They're not the kind of poison that some people think they are. They're not, and especially when you combine them with legumes. So I think people have a kind of a funny conception of what a traditional farming diet is. It's been a bit warped by modern cereal diets. What's going on with modern gluten intolerances? It's gone sky high. But so have peanut allergies. We have all these autoimmune diseases where our immune systems essentially erupt when we eat certain foods.

1:25:12And gluten, which is a protein in wheat, is one of them. What do you think's going on with gluten? Have you heard of the hygiene hypothesis? Yes, yes. Where if you live in a house that's got a dishwasher, there's an increased chance of asthma. If you live in a house, is that as you make - That's part of it. Yeah. So the hydrogen hypothesis is this idea that we have immune systems that evolved to be very active, right? The world was full of germs and worms basically until modern sanitation. But you and I still have the same immune system that our great, great, great grandparents had with the same kinds of cells and all that waiting to defend us against all the pathogens out there.

1:25:59Now, we have dishwashers, and we have bleach, and we have, you know, we clean everything, right? And the result is that we have much less, we have fewer, I mean, how many worms have you had to deal with recently in your food? Probably very few. But until recently, and in many parts of the world, everybody is dealing with worms. You're saying that worms are an important hormetic stressor for the immune system? They are. But you still have the same immune system. And now your immune system is still waiting to do its job. And the analogy - It becomes hypersensitized. Well, it could be hypersensitized.

1:26:34Or the other analogy I use is it's like bored teenagers. Like, you know, they have all these cells waiting around to do stuff and there's nothing for them to do. And they're more likely to get into trouble because they now are more likely to attack self versus non-self because there's no non-self to attack. Have you seen the data around children that grow up in houses that have got dogs in? Yeah, exactly. And they're much less likely to get autoimmune diseases. Any excuse to make dogs great against them? But there's another factor too. So that's one possibility, which is all the sterile environments that we're in.

1:27:08But another important factor could be antibiotics. I mean, we now have so many antibiotics that we are constantly taking. and even if you don't take them, it's in your food because the antibiotics are given to animals. We are in an antibiotic zone. Milieu. Milieu, thank you. That's a much better word. And of course, those antibiotics are affecting our gut microbiome in all kinds of ways. And they're breaking down the mucus barriers, they're affecting bile, they're affecting all kinds of aspects in ways that we do not understand. And I think there's a lot of people trying to study how those antibiotics may also predispose us to having things like celiac.

1:27:51So farming, mixed bag, probably good overall for having more humans on the planet, but for individual humans. We wouldn't be here. Cooking, same thing. I'm interested. Over time, typically things get better. Obesity is now a bigger global health issue than malnutrition. how come so many people are overweight? Well, there's no one answer. But if there's any one dominant factor, it's obviously processed food. I mean, I think you'd be hard-pressed not to... I mean, we are surrounded by... You walk into a supermarket and you're just surrounded by foods that are engineered for us to be hyperpalatable, that are loaded with sugar and fat and hitting our bliss point so that we keep eating more and more and more and more.

1:28:48And you add to that physical inactivity, although exercise is not that great for losing weight, it is extremely important for preventing weight gain. And then you add antibiotics and you add various other factors. And of course, some people have genetic proclivity, although that doesn't explain the recent rise. Yeah, we are surrounded by food that makes us gain weight. And then the difficult thing is that once, because of natural selection, we never evolved to lose weight. So we have these adaptations to hold on to fat because we never evolved to lose it. Once you create fat cells, you can't get rid of the fat cells.

1:29:34They only empty themselves. Is that correct? That's correct. For the most part. Yeah, the fat cells swell. And so what you're doing is reducing. But each cell is its own little kind of metabolic powerhouse. And it's producing hormones. But if the fat cells get sufficiently big, then they split. And you now have two fat cells, which means that getting fat in future becomes easier. When I first learned this, I'm not off with the science, right? No, you're not off. And furthermore, when you have more fat cells, remember we talked about the carbohydrate insulin model. When you have more fat cells, those fat cells are sucking up all that stuff.

1:30:05So you eat the same food, but now your body thinks you're starving because you've sucked up all that glucose. You become hypoglycemic. So gaining weight actually makes you eat more. Yeah. I mean, learning this when I, this was in uni when I was thinking about bodybuilding and wanting to be lean and jacked and stuff. And hearing that if you get sufficiently fat, fat cells grow and grow and grow. And then when they grow big enough, they split into two. And then maybe you lose fat. Maybe you're going through the classic sort of bulk cut seesaw. But when you lose fat, those two now, what used to be one, two fat cells, they shrink down and they become smaller or more empty or whatever.

1:30:50But there's still two. And they're also producing less of a hormone called leptin, which is now telling your brain, shit, we're losing energy. You need to eat more to replace us. So we called it the leptinostat. So the fat cells, when you lose fat, the fat cells send a signal to your body to eat more. Becoming fat at one point in your life makes not being fat for the rest of your life harder. Correct. Yeah, so that's the problem. So if we are going to tackle this problem, A, we need to help people lose weight. But B, we need to spend more energy and more effort to help prevent people from gaining weight in the first place.

1:31:33And one of the scariest statistics I know is the percentage of young people who are overweight or obese. Those numbers are going up and up and up and up. How many young people are overweight? I think in the United States, something like 30 % of American teenagers are now classified, or 25 % are classified as being obese. Yeah. And that's a really scary number, because those kids, for the rest of their lives, are going to be fighting their weight. And of course, now we have GLP-1s, which we haven't started talking about, which may be very helpful for them. But that's not necessarily going to be the magic bullet either.

1:32:15You mentioned before about the particular combinations of flavors, flavors representing macronutrients and what's inside of this and some of the texture as well. I learned about orification, about the design of the texture of food and how that's used to kind of bypass our usual levels of satiety and stuff. can you just explain to let's say that somebody didn't understand why particular combinations of flavors and textures are seductive and attractive to our system what what are they and why is why does that work in that in that way i've seen these videos of hunter-gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time and it looks like they've taken mdma well you know we we um i describe in in in in the book, actually, when in the last day we were with a group of hunter-gatherers and we cooked for them.

1:33:10And I've never seen anybody eat that much food at these hunter-gatherers. I mean, they were just like, they were like a complete non-paleo diet nightmare, as you can possibly imagine. Because humans are humans. We like sugar, we like fat, we like energy-rich food. But we don't just like sugar on its own, right? We don't just like fat on its own. You mix the two, yeah. So too much fat is greasy, right? Too much sugar is cloying. But it turns out that if you balance them, it turns our brains on like crazy. Like, can you name, here's a quiz for you. Can you name a natural food that's high in both sugar and fat that you can get without stores?

1:33:54Fuck. I was, the fat thing is - There's only one, there's only one. it's not going to be it's not going to be honey because that's just the sugar it's not going to be avocado because that's just the fat it's not going to be some sort of mushroom it's not going to be a kind of berry because again that's going to be too much in the sugar i'll give you a hint it's the first food you ever ate milk yeah wow milk is rich in fat and it's rich in sugars right and and but after you wean you know that's it unless unless you have a supermarket or you know food factory now we're able and think about the foods we love they combine fat and sugar they there's something freudian about it for sure right um and you can and if you balance high amounts of fat and high amounts of sugar that on their own wouldn't be pleasurable together they balance each other out now add some salt your brain is on fire and then if you can do the texture development if you can get fluffy with crunchy again hot and cold i mean think about a mcdonald's big mac i describe it in the book right i actually uh you know a big mac has i think every flavor pretty much except for spicy that you can possibly think of it's got it's got hot and cold it's got crunchy and smooth it's got sweet it's got salty it's got everything there's a reason that people love that stuff, right?

1:35:17It lights everything up, right? Doritos. Doritos have more than... Go get a package of Doritos. Don't necessarily eat them. But there are 30 ingredients in Doritos, the last time I counted. And they have garlic, and there's all these different flavors, but they're all balanced. So your brain doesn't think any one is too high. So there's a book by a guy named Michael Moss called Salt, Sugar, Fat, which is really worth reading, where he's an investigative journalist, and he studied and collected information on how the big food companies, through serious testing, these are not accidental foods. These are carefully formulated foods to keep us - Precision engineered.

1:35:59Keep us reaching for more. Another example I got from his book is M &Ms. You know why M &Ms have all these different colors? No. To turn our brains on. Because, you know, I think, oh, I'll have a red one. Now I'll have a green one. Now I'll have a brown one, whatever. Even though they all taste exactly the same, it gets you to eat more, right? Wow. So we've been subjected to foods, or we have to cope now with an environment with all these foods that have been literally engineered to get us to eat a lot of them. And of course, and you add all the chemicals to them, which are probably not very good, and you end up with what we have today, which is that 40 % of American adults are classified as having obesity, and another 35 % are classified as being overweight.

1:36:48So only one in four Americans today is actually by BMI classification, which has its own problems, is considered normal weight. One in four. And there's probably other factors too. Exercise is probably one of them. But obviously our food environment is unquestionably is the main reason. If there was a pie chart contributing to weight gain and some of it was calories in and some of it was calories out, how much of it would be diet consumption increased and how much of it would be sedentary movement increased or lack of movement decreased? What do you think is the sort of proportion? Because obviously we've had this big change in terms of obesity over the last few decades.

1:37:35It's a hard number to come up with, but obviously the vast majority has to be with calories in. You think it's mostly on diet. Yeah, but remember, our metabolism isn't just calories in versus calories out, because that's important. But remember that when you exercise, so I didn't get, because I got up at some ungodly hour this morning to get the airplane to come here. I have not had a chance to go running today. I'm a bit of an exercise addict. But had I gone running this morning and I just had lunch, the amount of insulin I would have produced from the taco that I had in the airport would have been less than the fact that I didn't go running this morning.

1:38:14So physical activity doesn't just affect your calorie balance. It also affects your metabolism. So that's one of the reasons why physical activity, although it's not the best way to lose weight, it's very hard to diet just by exercising. You can lose, but you have to do a lot. But physical activity has been shown, even moderate amounts of physical activity have been shown to help prevent weight gain. And part of that, it's not just the calories spent, but part of that is the fact that it changes our metabolism. Why are the calories on a label not the calories that you absorb? Oy, oy, oy, that's an interesting question.

1:38:46So, because the calories on the label are kind of an idea, it's a formula. Actually, it's over 100 years old, this formula was created by a guy named Wilbur Atwater, who analyzed more poop than you can imagine. But anyway, Wilbur Atwater was a professor in Connecticut who came up with these. And what they do is you take some food and you separate up the carbohydrates, the fats, in the protein. And then you use a formula. 4.1 calories per gram of protein and 9 point something for the fat. And that's the number on your canned food. But that's what's available to you that an average person would get.

1:39:39But it's not actually what you... Because you're not a You're not a bomb calorimeter in Atwater's lab. You're a human being, right? And so, for example, if you take peanuts, right, and you measure the content of the energy in your peanuts, and now you grind those peanuts up into peanut butter, which, by the way, is the world's greatest food, you get way more energy, about 25 % more energy than if you ate the peanuts whole. Because the food processing, even though it's the same stuff, the food processing gives you access to more of those nutrients. Because you don't have to work as hard? That's right, because you break the food down to tiny little particles, right?

1:40:19And your enzymes, surface area to volume ratio, your enzymes can break that food down. If you take a banana and you blend a banana, you get more energy from that banana than if you just eat the banana whole. People have done that experiment. Another example. Imagine if you were to just swallow the banana as well without chewing it. That would also help. Good luck doing that. But one of my favorite experiments is a guy named Stephen Secor at the University of Alabama who studies what's called diet and just thermogenesis, the energy it takes to break down food. Because food takes energy to digest a lot, actually.

1:40:50And he used boa constrictors because boa constrictors, they cannot eat for weeks, and then you can give it a rat. And then you can measure how much energy the boa constrictor spends eating, digesting the rat. And he would give the boa constrictor a rat, and then he'd wait a few months and measure how much energy the boa constrictor spent. You could do that by just measuring how much the boa constrictor heats up. And then you wait a few months. Boa constrictor is very happy. You give it the same rat or exactly the same size rat. But this time he grinds it up. Same rat, same amount of calories. Ground rat.

1:41:21And the boa constrictor slips right through his digestive system. It doesn't heat up at all or much less so because the boa constrictor is getting way more energy from that rat. So when we pulverize our food, we grind it up, et cetera. When you make a smoothie, for example, you're getting more energy from a smoothie than if you eat the same amount of fruit whole. Does that mean that people should or shouldn't eat smoothies? Well, it depends if you're trying to lose weight or not. I mean, I like smoothies. Smoothies are great. I eat them all the time, but I'm not trying to lose weight. But if I was on a diet, I would probably cut down on my smoothies.

1:41:51I've heard that celery is net calorie negative. Yeah, I've heard that too. I don't believe that. I'm sure you don't get a lot. The energy needed to digest the celery because of how rough and fibrous it is, is greater than the amount of calories. You know, fiber doesn't take a lot of energy to digest, actually. Fiber is just what you send to your microbiome. And by the way, we don't. When we measure the calories from food, we're not taking into account the contribution from our microbiome. So all those bacteria that are, once the celery passes through your, you know, the fiber from the celery passes into your colon, there are all these happy bacteria in there.

1:42:27Lighted that you had the celery, and they're breaking that celery down into what's called short-chain fatty acids, of which you then take up into your bloodstream and then you use. So we think actually that for some people, maybe about 10 % of the energy that they get from their food is not even measured on those nutrition fats labels because it comes from our microbiome. We have no idea really. When you have studies that tell you how much energy somebody's eating, they're making it up. We're not making it up, they're estimating it and it's actually extremely inaccurate. Which is another problem with our studies of calories in versus calories in because nobody really knows how many calories go in.

1:43:06Modern food environment, novel, calorie-dense, hyperpalatable, processed, etc. But as soon as you create a problem, solutions come out for that too. And we have modern technology and people can design new foods. What are some of the foods that people are eating every day that they think are healthy, but it's actually making them worse? I don't know. I worry about some of the ultra-processed foods that—like meal replacements, for lack of—I hope I don't get in trouble, but like Huel and Soylent. I mean, there's all—I mean, you could—and I actually tried them for a few weeks. I didn't eat dinner, but I had all my lunches and breakfasts.

1:43:54How was that? It was awful, actually, because it got so boring, and I got to really fear. I mean, at first, okay, it's a milkshake. It's not so bad, et cetera. But after a few days, it was like, I really missed food. But there's emulsifiers in there. There's all kinds of stuff in there that we don't know what they're doing. We're just guessing. And over months, weeks, years, you have no idea. Or another example would be a lot of people eat a lot of soy products because they think they're trying to be a vegetarian. That's fine. Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian. They're eating a lot of soy.

1:44:30But some soy products are made through solvents. They use hexane. You don't want hexane in your food. hexane is sounds like some shit that i'd put in my barbecue yeah or you're in your car right you know it's a it's a solvent it's a flammable solvent and and and then you try to wash the hexane out but hexane is a toxin it's a neurotoxin and um and and studies have shown that you can actually measure people's urine and people who who who are not in the petroleum industry and they have hexane in their urine and it's probably coming from soy or from a non-expeller pressed seed oils. So when I get canola oil, I only get expeller pressed canola oil because I don't want my canola beans dissolved with hexane in order to get my oil.

1:45:23I thought seed oils were bad for you. Oh, no. That's another one of those myths, I'm sorry to say. But we'll get to that in a second. So I think there are some foods that people think are healthy, but the way in which they're processed might be unhealthy. And again, as Paracelsus said, it's the dose that makes the poison. We don't yet know. It's very hard to do the studies. You can give huge amounts of these foods to rats and they get cancer, but we just don't know about humans. So it depends on your null hypothesis. So right now the government's null hypothesis is that this hexane that we get in our food is okay.

1:45:59It's generally recognized as safe. Others think, well, unless you can prove it's safe, I don't want anything to do with this. Seed oils. Seed oils. Okay, so the idea behind seed oils, there are different kinds of, a little jargon here, there are different kinds of polyunsaturated fats. So a polyunsaturated fat, so fats are these long chains of carbon, lots and lots of carbons, and if the carbons have single bonds between them, remember single bonds from chemistry, that means that they can have two hydrogens, one on each side, that bind to them. So a saturated fat is all single bond carbons, and that each carbon has two hydrogens, so that's saturated with hydrogen.

1:46:43That's why it's called a saturated fat. If you make one of the carbons a double bond, now you don't have the hydrogen on it, and that creates a kink in the fatty acid. So that's why fatty acids that have a double bond are either mono or polyunsaturated. So mono is one double bond. Poly means there's more than one. That's why they're liquid at room temperature. They have kink, so they fold up. So it turns out that—and we label polyunsaturated fats by where those double bonds are. So remember in the Greek alphabet, alpha, omega. Alpha is the beginning. Omega is the end. So omega-3 means that the double bond is three carbons away from the end.

1:47:28I don't know if this is too much information. So omega-3 fatty acid is the double bond's three carbons from the end, and omega-6 fatty acid is six bonds from the end. And so fish are really rich in omega-3s. Omega-3s are great for you. Nobody disputes that. Eat a shit ton of omega-3s. good for your brain, good for your nervous system, good for your immune system, etc. Omega-6 fatty acids used to be much more rare in our diet. And so the paleo diet, I think it started with the paleo diet. Paleo diet said, well, look, we didn't evolve to eat that many omega-6 fatty acids because we didn't have seed oils.

1:48:07And so we should try to have a hunter-gatherer kind of omega-3 ratio. So trying to have more than twice as many omega-6s to omega-3s. And the argument behind that is that the omega-6 fatty acids can be turned by your digestive system into another thing called a rachidonic acid, which can then be turned into an inflammatory compound, like a prostaglandin that gives you a headache. So there is a biochemical pathway by which these fatty acids can become inflammatory. So that's the concern. However, people have done studies. They give people like you and me, they go sit in a lab, they give people omega-6 fatty acids, and then measure whether their metabolism does that.

1:48:51It turns out that it doesn't. There's no evidence, and there are quite a few studies, my book cites them, you can go look them up, where increasing the amount of omega-6 fatty acids actually increases inflammation. It was a fear, but the fear turns out not to be the case. Furthermore, so that's a mechanistic study. There's now epidemiological studies as well, which show that people who eat a lot of omega-6 fatty acids do really well. In fact, people eat, in fact, omega-6 fatty acids have been shown to be more preventive, like the Nurses Health Study and various other big, huge studies. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people, prospective studies over decades, actually have lower risks of heart disease, cancers, etc., than people who don't eat them.

1:49:34So although there were concerns about them, the evidence, if you're just purely evidence-based, the evidence suggests you should stop worrying about omega-6 fatty acids. If you walked through the average healthy person's cupboard, kitchen, what do you think would concern you most? The average healthy person's? Yeah, someone that considers I'm eating a modern healthy diet. I'm the sort of person that shops at Whole Foods. I try and make sure that I'm remotely paleo and naturalistic. informed when it comes to my diet? I'm a healthy person. You're going through my kitchen. What are the common things you think would concern you most?

1:50:14That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I think the more I study diet, the more I realize that there's an incredible variety of foods that we're able to eat. So you're asking, what's an unhealthy food that people think that's healthy that they tend to eat a lot of i need to think about that i'm not sure good question yeah you stumped me there i guess i'm not a very judgmental person actually so that's part maybe that's one of the healthy versus unhealthy is not necessarily a judgment right we can say hey that would be you think that this thing is sort of net positive for your health but i would be a little bit more concerned about it or whatever uh for instance i'll give you one uh i think maybe dried fruit might be one of those things where people think oh well you know this is it's a fruit it's a little bit of a snack but you go that is some really fucking refined sugar in there all right okay that's a good one thank you you win that wasn't a competition you get an a you get an a another one would be fruit juice right um because fruit juice is basically soda i mean it's you know you're not getting a lot of nutrients from fruit juice you're just getting a lot of sugar so i would think that would be another one okay yeah so yeah i mean i look i like dried fruit too but i i um um i i love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that but but pineapple chunks dried mango strips good stuff yeah but just straight sugar it's it's it's it's a candy yeah why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working do they i mean there are some that keep working.

1:51:49I mean, when you look at people longitudinally over time and somebody does a diet, how many of them that lose weight maintain that weight loss? Well, again, there are, you know, various studies have shown that a lot of the standard traditional diets, people do fall off them. And the numbers run all over the place. But yeah, I would say that probably a reasonable estimate is about 75 % of people fall off their diet. And why? Because they can't sustain them. again going back to the natural weight loss registry that we mentioned earlier the people who manage to to keep lose weight and keep it off are the ones who manage to keep the diet going and what's interesting is that many of them don't follow an actual prescribed diet they just avoid junk food they avoid foods with a lot of sugar they avoid foods with a lot of added fat they cook most of their meals at home they tend to exercise they tend to weigh themselves on a regular basis, so they're keeping track of how they're doing.

1:52:45But very few of them actually are following an Atkins diet or this diet or that diet. They're just trying to eat reasonably sensibly. That's the evidence. So I think it's, you know, the old joke is, you know, the worst part about diet is the second day in the diet, because you stop, you know, that's when you stop the diet, right? Many diets, remember the difference between efficacy and effectiveness. Most diets are effective. In vitro, wonderful. I mean, most diets have high efficacy, but they have low effectiveness because, and low effectiveness is generally because we have a hard time maintaining them.

1:53:20And that's because of our food environment. Does the body fight weight loss very aggressively? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the biggest one is hunger, right? When you lose weight, your body sends all kinds of signals. There are leptin and there are peptides, PYY, et cetera, that tell your body you are losing weight and turn on your appetite. And that's why - Ghrelin in the stomach. Yeah, ghrelin, exactly. I mean, it's very hard to fight all those deep and fundamental adaptations. And so the best diets are the ones that kind of trick your body, but also require, you know, they're hard. And that's why GLP-1s have been so incredibly successful because GLP-1s, for many people, just turn off that appetite and enable them to eat less.

1:54:08What do you think about GLP-1s? Well, I mean, they're game changers for many people. I mean, they've been incredibly successful. Some people lose 25 % of their body weight and there are new ones being formulated that may be even more powerful. So that can be really huge for somebody to really lose that kind of weight and turn off those cravings. But there are some concerns. So we published, my colleagues and I published a paper in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, recently. One of the big concerns about GLP-1s is that people not only lose fat, they also lose muscle. And they seem to lose a lot of muscle.

1:54:44It's a bit like bariatric surgery, too. When you lose a lot of weight really fast, people lose a lot of muscle. and that can put you at serious risk of frailty when you get older. Because when you lose muscle as you age, you can get what's called sarcopenia. Sarco is the Greek word for flesh and penia is loss, so flesh loss. Sounds bad, doesn't it? And sarcopenia is really debilitating because it becomes a vicious cycle. Because as you become less strong, doing acts of daily living become harder. Getting up from a toilet, shopping and doing stuff, and then you become less physically active and you get into this vicious cycle and things get worse and worse.

1:55:21Basically, my mother, for lack of better, she died essentially of sarcopenia. She got more and more frail as she got older. I tried to get her to eat anything, ice cream, this, whatever, she tried to put on some weight and she just couldn't. It was really hard to watch. Some people are kind of self-enforcing that inability to eat food through GLPs. Right. And so one of the big concerns about GLP-1s is that if you're taking them, do strength training, please, because that can help reverse or help you maintain your muscle as you lose those GLP-1s. So that's one concern about GLP-1s. Another is that a lot of people quit them.

1:56:06The last study I saw, and again, things may change because there are now oral versions of the pill. There's now pill versions. You don't have to inject it. But something like 60 % of people who've tried GLP-1s have quit them after a year or two, 60%. And the problem is that when you quit them, your body just still, your appetite comes roaring back and you want to go back to your previous weight for reasons that we do not understand. So most people who use GLPs take them for a period of time that they can lose an appreciable amount of weight and then stop, don't maintain the weight loss. Exactly.

1:56:43So it's a lifetime contract. So exactly. So that's what we're currently seeing at the moment. So that's a concern because then when they regain the weight, they tend to regain it almost completely as fat, not as muscle. And so then in a way, they're worse off. Oh, so they've lost muscle on the way down and gained fat on the way back. Yeah, so that's one of the concerns. Look, we're conducting this experiment in real time without knowing the results. And then a final concern about GLP-1 is that, look, nobody likes taking medications, right? At least most people don't like taking medications. And it doesn't solve the problem of what you should eat in the first place.

1:57:20And it doesn't prevent obesity in the first place. So it's great for people to lose weight. but we also need to focus on helping the people not have to take those glp1s in the first place i'm a little worried that we're going to take our eye off the ball and even if you're on a glp1 you still have to figure out like what to eat what do i eat and and the glp1 might help you with your cravings for you know really fatty sugary foods but it might not we just still haven't done those studies very well so so look i think they're a useful tool for a lot of people but i think we have a lot to learn and we have to figure out how to use them better.

1:57:57They're not going away, but I think they're, again, they're not the magic bullet that some people think they are, but they may be very, very helpful for some folks. It feels like an artificial solution to an artificial problem. We have this novel food environment, which we shouldn't be in, right? In an ideal world if we were to design things better. And we now have this thing, which kind of solves it. We solve the calorie dense, hyperpalatable food world with this thing that comes in and puts the kibosh on our ability to either eat or gut motility, level of hunger, stuff like that. Yeah. So about 13 years ago, I wrote a book called The Story of the Human Body.

1:58:36And in the end of that book, I proposed an idea called disevolution. Disevolution is when we treat the symptoms, not the causes of a mismatched disease. So we're talking about mismatched diseases. These are illnesses that are caused by not being adapted to our modern world, right? But when we treat the symptoms, not the causes, we keep the system going, right? And I think GLP-1s might be an example of a kind of a disevolutionary process. We can still have our, you know, frozen pizzas and our, you know, fried chicken and our, you know, donuts and all that kind of stuff. Now we get obesity, take the GLP-1s, but we still have that same food system.

1:59:171 ,700 calories of the frozen pizza and the donuts. We still have that food system that's going to keep going, right? We need to solve our food system problems if we're going to help prevent people from getting... And right now, we're not doing enough to help each other eat sensibly so that we don't gain weight. It seems to me when you get to kind of that point of the conversation, the food environment is predatory, engineered, capitalistic, designed to hook people. People tend to split in one of two ways. One is they go towards systemic change. We need grass to be changed. We need to look at what can snap payments be spent on.

2:00:06we need to kind of step in and there should be a additive restriction we can't have these food dyes and some of that regulation yeah yeah a degree of top-down sort of bureaucracy that'll come in and fix it and then the other side is aggressive agency it's you need to take control of this no one's coming to save you uh you know constrain yourself only to the outer aisles in the supermarket or shopping one that that doesn't have any of the hyperpalatable stuff like Thank you. Across all of this research and self-experimentation, what are the most robust principles that you think people should take away when it comes to having a good diet, nutritionally complete and evolutionarily at least not totally deranged?

2:00:53avoid processed foods i mean and by processed i would include foods that are refined so white flour um i would include you know foods that have a lot of added sugar foods that have a lot of added fat you know fat's not your as bad as maybe some people think but filling your food with fat and sugar is certainly not great for you um avoid foods that have i avoid foods that have really weird ingredients that I have no idea what the hell they are. Things like maltodextrin. If you see maltodextrin in your food, run away. Why? Maltodextrin is a kind of sugar that your body can't actually detect as sugar.

2:01:28It's used as an emulsifier, so it keeps food from particles from breaking apart. So if foods have a long shelf life, it makes things creamier and smoother, but it wreaks havoc with your metabolism. So it's a food you'd never eat on your own. It's a chemical additive. It's a chemical additive to me is like a canary kind of in the coal mine kind of evidence that this is a ultra processed food. I don't want anything to do with it. So I see maltodextrin on a food. I do not touch it. So we need to educate ourselves. Again, our ancestors needed to know a lot how to get their food. Now, unfortunately, like it or not, we need to know how to choose our food.

2:02:06And we don't teach this in school. They don't even teach it to medical students. medical schools, RFK Jr. is right on this regard, that most physicians are given very little training in nutrition. I teach my undergraduates more nutrition. I tell them in their lectures, you're going to get more from me than you're going to get in medical school. That's crazy, right? We teach kids in school, we teach them geometry, we teach them American history. I mean, there's nothing wrong with geometry in American history. We teach them chemistry, but when we teach them chemistry, let's teach them the chemistry of food so that they learn about, when they learn about carbon bonds and hydrogen bonds, et cetera, why not teach them that chemistry in the form of so that they understand saturated fats versus unsaturated fats?

2:02:51Why don't we teach this stuff so that we can all learn? Because right now, all this stuff I'm talking about, some of it's considered arcane knowledge, but it's actually not that complicated. and I think most of us can learn this and I tried to put it in the book so that anybody can learn it but unfortunately that's part of the puzzle but the fact of the matter is a lot of us aren't going to learn that stuff and so we need to help helping ourselves because I think most people would not want to get obese most people want to eat a healthy diet but they're stressed

2:03:29their finances are limited they don't have a lot of time imagine you commute, you have kids, you rush to the supermarket, you don't have a lot of time to be, you know, whatever. We can't get rid of processed foods, but if we could help have processed foods that are more healthy, I think that's the solution. And so like in England, for example, like when you go to the supermarket in England, there are the green, yellow, and red labels, right? They're super easy, right? And the, you know, I mean, you can debate the fine points about whether they've got the labels right, but for the most part, they're pretty sensible and they're a quick way for somebody to see, oh, you know, this is good for my kids and this is less good for my kids.

2:04:07Why can't we do that? It's so simple, right? It's green, red, and red. So, and then you're not forcing anybody. You can still buy the red label. Just inform choice. Yeah, just give people more information. And so we could do more. Another opportunity is to tax. We tax cigarettes. Cigarettes, we all, everybody agrees cigarettes are bad for you, right? Everybody agrees that cigarettes, we don't prevent people from smoking and I'm not going to prevent somebody from smoking if they want to, but we've agreed as a society that cigarettes should be taxed. Why don't we tax junk food? I mean, they cause probably, you know - Is there no additional tax on sugary or hyperprocess?

2:04:46No, and in fact, in Mexico, when they tried to put a tax on soda, it got fought by the big, by the Coca-Cola. Big soda. Yeah, and the tax was reversed. So no, we don't. So, again, I'm not saying we should, but we should be having a public discussion about this because it's a problem that's larger than any one of us. It's a public health issue that we all pay for because there's never going to be one solution. I'm a bit more of a libertarian paternalist. I think that, and I'm not into pretending, telling people what they should do, but I think we should have, we need help helping us do what we would actually like to do.

2:05:27And often we don't know what's in our food or we don't know what the effects of the foods are. Or for example, fruit roll-ups. You go to the supermarket and you buy fruit roll-ups and they says, made with real fruit, filled with vitamin C. Well, very few kids are vitamin C deficient. And yes, it's made with real fruit, but they've removed all the fiber. So a fruit roll-up is basically like a form of candy, right? But the advertising allows, you know, advertisers are allowed to basically misinform. So that might be another one of the, I think it's healthy, but in reality, it's not. And it's in a healthy person's kitchen.

2:06:02It deserves a red label. Now, if you want to get a fruit roll-up, fine. But you should know that it's not a healthy food. Scary stuff. I mean, look, it doesn't surprise me that America is kind of the battleground for this. I think French fries from McDonald's in the US have got 18 ingredients. And in the UK, they've got three and one of them salt, and that one's optional. So this really is, you know, patient zero as a country in wonderful meritocracy, free market, American dream thing. But if you take those reins off, there's going to be some pretty negative consequences. And the only way that you can step in is to reconstrain yourself through your own choices, or then have some bureaucracy come in to start to restrict optionality for people.

2:06:49I think most people would like help because we are not completely free agents in this system. It's certainly an unfair battle when you think I've got the biggest companies on the planet trying to attack the fundamental drive to not die from starvation. Oh, and what I love also is that you have on one aisle of the supermarket, you have companies that are selling you foods that are really unhealthy. And then you go to the health food section where you can buy weight watchers kind of foods owned by the same companies. So they're on both sides of the equation. They're on the weight loss side and on the weight gain side.

2:07:32They're making money on both sides. Daniel Liebman, ladies and gentlemen. Daniel, you're great. Your work's awesome. Where should people go to check out the book and everything else that you got uh well fed up comes out august 11th and i tried to make it fun and and and readable and with the information that i think all of us need and it's filled with references so you can find you know end note so you can find the data yourself heck yeah i appreciate you thank you thank you all right goodbye my beauties dude yes so fun hi ryan reynolds here for mint mobile are you looking for a beach read this summer may i suggest your big wireless bill it's got suspense mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time.

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