The Truth About Seed Oils, Protein & What’s Actually Making Us Sick | Simon Hill

25:31And that's what I encourage you to do is test, don't guess, and use your body as its own control group.

25:44I would kind of emphasize though that that doesn't mean that the guidelines and all of the science is not helpful because it gives us, it's like a compass. It points us into a direction where we see what the typical result is and then having the humility to understand, well, as an individual, we're not always representative of the typical person. Like where do we fall in that distribution? And that's where it gets fun and interesting. You can play around with it and then you can factor in other things. Like what are your goals? Is it just chronic disease prevention or are you an athlete? You're trying to build as much muscle as possible.

26:18And to me, that's what makes all this fun. but online it seems to cause a lot of arguments. It does. And beginning back to the omega-6s, whole foods that have them are good for you, like nuts and seeds and beans. They're good for you, right? So it's when you kind of extract them through sort of science projects and concentrate them and mix them in with all kinds of other junk, which is essentially how we eat them. I mean, most people are not pouring soybean all over their food, but it's 10 % of our calories. It's because it's in all the ultra-processed food, that 60 % of her calories. So that's the issue, right?

26:54Can I ask you a question? I'm interested in your opinion on this. So I think with the Kennedy administration, there's certainly a focus on seed oils. Do you think if you were to go out to the current food environment, maintain all the fast food, all the ultra processed foods, but you could click your finger and all the seed oils in all those foods was changed to butter or tallow, but they were still hyper palatable, high sodium, high sugar foods. would it make a difference to to help a tangible difference probably potentially would make it worse and and here's why i think you know when you look at the impact of fats any kind of fat you know when you have saturated fat or even polyunsaturated fats and you consume them in the context of a high starch and sugar diet which is what we'd have in america we you know out of almost a pound a day per person of sugar and starch, flour, basically.

27:51That's what causes the problem. You end up, whether it's saturated fat, so saturated fat, like butter on your broccoli, okay. Butter on your bread, not okay, right? Because the carbohydrate content, and not all carbohydrates are bad because broccoli is a carbohydrate, but starchy and sugary carbohydrates actually exacerbate the cardiovascular harm of these foods. And so because you raise insulin and because you're not just letting sugar in your cells, you're letting any kind of energy free fatty acids, those just pour into your cells, particularly around your belly fat. And it's like the insulin just opens the gate and everything goes in.

28:27So when you're eating sugar and starch, you get this high insulin. And then whatever fats you're eating, it just becomes doubly bad for weight gain and for inflammation and for everything else. So I think the guidelines should say that we shouldn't have a limit on saturated fat as long as, one, we consume a balance of polyunsaturated fats with them. So it should be probably like a two-to-one ratio of polyunsaturated fats to saturated fats. And it should be really limited when it comes to refined starch and sugar. So you can't eat saturated fat if you're eating a diet high in starch and sugar because it creates a disaster.

29:02I've been interested by some of these relatively short clinical trials, I was like 12-week studies looking at feeding people a lot of saturated fat or polyunsaturated fats. And these are in background diets of Western diets. So like you said, they're not amazing. But what's interesting to me is that when you dial up saturated fats, you seem to increase liver fat more than when you dial up polyunsaturated fats, which as we know, often precedes this kind of fatty liver disease type 2 diabetes. but yeah I was just interested in your view of because it seems like the Kennedy administration seems to think that if you eliminate seed oils the problem goes away but I would argue that if 60 % of calories are still coming from ultra processed foods that's the problem we still have a problem yeah it's like the ultra processed food is the issue whatever you're eating the food industry doesn't want to hear that no but they're going they're going to having to I think you know I think they're, it's like, what is that?

30:04Teddy Roosevelt, you know, this big stick, you know, I think I just read an article by Marty McCary and Mehmet Oz in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. And they were like, look, we've convened, which the government can do. We brought these companies to table and we said, change, get the crap out of your food, get the dyes out, et cetera, et cetera. And they're promising to do it. But if they don't, we've got a big stick, which is regulation and legislation. So you do it or else. And I think that's actually probably a good move because there's a lot of things that are going to interfere with regulation, legislation because there's so many billions of dollars spent on food lobbying, agrib lobbying and controlling the narrative.

30:46And so I think we're in an interesting moment. I think we're going to have some progress. And I think I've seen some of the early renditions of the dietary guidelines and I think it's moving in the right direction. less dogmatic, more around dietary patterns, around whole foods, around getting rid of the ultra-processed foods, which no dietary guidelines has ever said before, which is quite amazing. It's like, you can only say eat more of, you can't say eat less of, unless it's an ingredient, because then that's easily manipulated. And if it's salt or sugar or fat, then you can dial up and down in the ultra-processed food and just make different styles of frankenfood that aren't really food.

31:22Yeah, because it seems to me that right now to be healthy in this country, it takes a lot of intentionality and a lot of discipline. But the goal should be to create an environment where the convenient and affordable option just happens to be the healthy option as well. That's going to take a lot of effort because we subsidize the crap and that's the problem. We make it artificially cheap. cheap and the Rockefeller Foundation um came up with a report a few years ago called the true cost of food and they basically say for every dollar we spend on food at the checkout counter it costs three dollars to society in terms of chronic disease and environmental degradation you know all the we call externalities they're not really externalities if you eat crap you're going to get sick it's not it's not it's just we call it side effects if you don't like it in a drug but it's not a side effect it's just the effect we don't like and and so I think I think the cat's out of the bag.

32:15People are awake now. People are talking about it. Politicians are talking about it. Congressmen, senators, the White House, all the agencies. It's kind of stunning to see. I've been working at this for decades and I've been screaming about this forever. I mean, I wrote 15 years ago, most in my book, The Blood Sugar Association, about the toxic triad of big food, big ag and big pharma and how they're co-opting our health and undermining you know, the environment and everything you could possibly think of. And, and, uh, I wrote a book called food fix about this and I am coming out with a new version.

32:47It's a updated called food fix uncensored about an updated kind of thing that's happening, but it's this whole mega six thing is sort of, I think, and the CTO thing got kind of steam somehow. And, and it's, I think a little bit misguided. I think, you know, for people listening that all the science-y stuff that Simon and I have been talking about, the bottom line is try to eat your sources from whole foods. Don't get these oils in processed food and have plenty of omega-3s and you'll be okay. Yeah, and do your lab work. And do your lab work, yeah. If you're super sensitive to saturated fat more than the next person and you get your lab work done and the lab work includes ApoB, which a lot of tests don't, but now you can get that, you can order that uh in some places if it's high then reducing saturated fat for more polyunsaturated fats for you as an individual might be even more meaningful but only you will know that by doing the testing that's right there are now companies that do lipid genetics i did mine because i have a genetic lipid disorder i had most of my um grandfather's brothers and sisters i think nine of them all had heart attacks or bypasses in their 50s and uh he he was a laborer.

34:00So he actually did a lot of physical activity and walked every night after dinner. So he didn't start to get it until he was later in his seventies, but they all are in their fifties. And, and so I have, I have genetic lipid disorder that makes me hyper absorb cholesterol that, you know, affects my triglycerides that affects different biological parameters. So it's interesting to look at your genetics too. And all right. So, so that's the bottom line, not so much the boogeyman, but you know, one last point I want to talk about with this is, is what a lot of people talk about, which is the idea that they're processed in a way that's bad.

34:33So they're extracted from soybeans, for example, with hexane, which is a toxin. They're sprayed with glyphosate, Roundup. They're deodorized, they're bleached, and they're chemically highly altered. And they can be easily oxidized. And so this is kind of a theoretical reason they should be bad, but I haven't seen enough data to kind of prove that that's concerning, or maybe we haven't actually learned about it yet. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, right? True. So I agree with you in that I think all of those things are worth looking into. But what I would say is what should our current hypothesis be?

35:15And the way that I think about this is the food that we eat affects a myriad of pathways in our body. We know that, right? It could affect blood pressure. It could affect blood lipids. It could affect oxidative stress. It could affect blood glucose control. And then thousands of others that we probably haven't even identified. And so we can speculate on individual mechanisms, like maybe this is oxidized or contains hexane, and maybe that increases risk of something. What matters is the net effect of that food on all of the pathways, so all the different ways it's interacting when you consume it.

35:53And how do we measure that? Well, it's the end health outcome. Yeah. And when I look at the linoleic acid seed oil consumption data, again, coming back to red blood cell content and also adipose tissue, they have people with higher linoleic acid in their tissue have lower risk of heart disease, cancer mortality, and total mortality. So while there could be individual constituents in seed oil that are harmful, the net effect seems to be positive. Yeah, and that's what it seems like. Even despite my protests, it seems like that's true. And can I just say, I not only empathize, I understand the logic behind, hey, look at how this is manufactured and what goes into it.

36:40I completely understand that. Right. And all I'm saying is that what challenges me on that is looking at the data of these health outcomes, particularly at tissue levels. and I find that data really hard to argue with. Yeah, it is, yeah. So I can kind of, I can see all opinions and views and empathize with all of them here. Now I want to sort of zoom out another big topic because, you know, we went through the era of low fat. Then recently we've gone through this era of keto and low carb. And there's only one macronutrient left. There's carbs, there's fat, and there's protein. And we're going to argue about all of them, aren't we?

37:18As a community. And so protein is the latest darling of the nutrition world. And now everywhere you go, you're like protein this, protein that, protein bars, protein shakes, protein sticks, protein. And it's like, wow, okay, somehow everybody's sticking protein in everything. Is that good? Is that bad? And what do we know about protein and what should we be thinking about it? because I think there's a whole conversation going on that we should be eating two or even three times sometimes what is the RDA recommendation for protein. And there's controversy about whether plant protein is as good as animal protein and what that does to muscle as we age.

37:56And this is an area of expertise for you. So now we covered the CTO thing. I want to kind of get into the protein thing and then dive right in. That's good. Difficult subjects, which is why I like talking to you. Yeah. And these things are interconnected in some ways, which is what I realized. So I'd begun my career as a physiotherapist and I was splitting my time up between working. I was very lucky to get a job working with professional athletes in Melbourne and Australia, but it was on the provision that I would also work out in a community center, completely different demographic, less affluent, not on private health insurance, a lot of chronic disease, a lot of chronic back pain.

38:36And it didn't take long for me to notice that a lot of folks with chronic back pain who were also overweight were coming in with fatty liver disease, diabetes. They were under-muscled. And these things are very, very related. Is it over-fat or under-lead or both? And what we're seeing is increasingly we're seeing both. We're seeing over-nutrition and we see increased body fatness coupled with sarcopenia, loss of muscle size and function and quality. I would say excess calories, not over nutrition, because nutrition I think of as food. And I often said this, but if you actually look up the definition of food in various places, it's somewhat worded differently.

39:15But the essence of it is food is something that supports the health and growth and development of an organism. And by definition, ultra processed food technically isn't actually even food. So excess calories and still malnourished just in another way. Yeah. And very vitamin deficient. So I was observing that these things are interconnected. And what we see is from the age of about 30 onwards, we see a reduction in muscle mass, about half to 1 % per year. And then by the age of 50, that can ramp up. So you can be losing 1 % to 2 % of your muscle mass per year. So you could be losing 10%, 14 % of your muscle mass per decade after the age of 50.

39:56From age 50, you're losing more strength per year than you are muscle mass, which is also really important, strength and power. And we can maybe come back to that. Yeah, because I don't think people understand the difference between muscle mass and strength and power. And there is an association, but you're actually losing more strength relative to the amount of muscle that you're losing as you age and power, which becomes really, really important when we look at risk of falls. Let's come back to that. But primarily, if we're trying to maintain and build muscle mass throughout our adult life and maintain the quality and function of that muscle mass, it comes down to the movement that we're doing or not doing and our nutrition, which is where protein becomes really important, among other things.

40:41right and from a a if we were to look at this like our society right now like what is driving a lot of the sarcopenia i think protein is important to a degree the average protein intake is at about 1.2 grams per kilogram at the moment in in america um which could be a little bit further optimized but what's really the problem is the sedentary lifestyle and the lack of the stimulus, right? If you don't use it, you lose it. And unfortunately, what happens is that when you're not stimulating the muscle, the kind of motor units, the nerves that go into the muscle that innovate them, that allow us to contract and control, they die off.

41:29And so something that I think is often not appreciated is that as we're aging, we're not just losing muscle mass, but the quality. We're losing quality muscle. And we get a shift from type 2 kind of fast twitch fibers. And the fast twitch, fast twitch means fast to fatigue. But we can produce power really quickly, produce force really quickly. A hundred yard dash. Right. And react really quickly. Whereas the slow twitch are more slower to fatigue, more endurance kind of muscle fibers. And as we age, we get this reduction in the fast twitch and relative increase in slow twitch. and that is what leads to us having less power and being more at risk of falls because when you fall and you have to catch yourself, you have to produce force really quickly through the knee, through the hip.

42:20And this is critical. And it comes back - It's just falling over like a building and the tree in the forest, boom. That's what kills people. In order for us to combat this, and we see this, Mark, if you look at masters athletes, there's some studies - I mean, older athletes. Older athletes, right? So athletes that are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, sometimes early 80s, that have been physically active throughout their life, they can attenuate a lot of that muscle loss. So this is not just a normal part of aging, right? It is from living a sedentary lifestyle and not having that stimulus there. I was sick this year and I had back surgery and long story short, I had an infection in my back.

43:05I was in bed for six weeks. I lost 20 pounds of muscle because I didn't have much fat on me to start with. That was about 10, 12 % body fat. And I was scared because I was 65 and I didn't know if I could actually gain the weight back. But being very disciplined about my protein intake, the quality of the protein and being in the gym every day with a physical therapist and trainer, I gained back 25 pounds of muscle. and I was like wow at 65 like I'm sort of shocked because I was like I'm just going to be a frail old man after this thing and I was like if you actually give the right inputs to the body even when you're older it wants to adapt so what we understand is that the age-related muscle loss that we've kind of normalized in society because it's so pervasive and we see it it's actually not normal yeah and we can we can intervene and we have a lot more say and the earlier we intervene the better, but it's also never too late, like you just said.

44:02But you know what's so crazy, Simon, is that I'm a doctor and I never learned how to evaluate sarcopenia. Then I went to work at Kenya Ranch in 1996 and they had a Dexam machine. And it was the first time I'd seen actually a body composition scan or knew really what it was about or learned about it or understood the difference between visceral fat or belly fat and your butt fat or your Android or gynecoid fat levels. And I was like seeing these things And I'm just sort of like, wow, this is like a black hole in medicine. And there's some interesting now biological tests like blood work that you can get that helps indicate sarcopenia that are derivative calculations from other biomarkers.

44:39And so those things are going to be added to function. And we just added Ezra, which is a scanning company. And you can do an MRI body composition, which is extremely accurate. And you can find out what's going on. But you've got to measure your muscle mass and your body fat. because if you don't have a good sense of what that is, you're kind of flying blind. And I think it's really motivating to measure and then to intervene and see these science-based interventions really work to see the improvement and know that you are moving in the right direction or if they're not working, to know that you get to iterate and change what you're doing.

45:13But the two most important things there to combat this loss of muscle function and quality is A, the training we're doing. So having resistance training in place and also ideally having some type of power training like plyometric, like box jumps or squat jumps or skater kind of lateral bounds, that type of movement. What else can we throw in there? We can throw in kind of broad jumps, burpees, if you can do them. And even if you can run like earlier in life, sprinting is a great power movement, which will help you maintain, preserve, look after all of those fast switch motor units, which is really important.

45:55And then when it comes to our diet, protein is super important. And as you said, this has been heavily debated. So how much do we need? What source is best? And then I'd say kind of below those two is like, does the timing matter? And over the last 10 years, we've had an abundance of research that's helped us, I think, piece this together with much more confidence. Although, you know, in science, we always have to have a degree of humility and understand we don't know everything yet. So there still are some things to learn. But overall, when it comes to, and I've changed my view on this over the years, but when it comes to the outcomes of muscle mass and strength, it looks like you want to be consuming at least 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram.

46:45And currently the RDA, which is 0.8, is low. And can you explain how they come up with that? What is 0.8? They do these nitrogen balance studies and they were done a long, long time ago. But I'd say just at a very high level to explain that those studies are more looking at a requirement of protein. Like preventing protein deficiency. Not an optimization of protein. Yeah, right. And these are two different things. So how much you need to be a healthy 75-year-old versus how much you need so you don't get protein malnutrition, right? Which is not... Yeah, so I mentioned before that after the age of 50, you could be losing 1 % or 2 % of your muscle mass per year.

47:22Yeah. Those studies done back in the day, they were not looking at how do you attenuate that? How do you slow that down? So I just want to make that abundantly clear. The research suggests that you need a little bit more protein than the RDA at 0.8 if you want to do that.

47:44Yeah, I mean, it's interesting it's how much protein is out there. Yesterday I went to work out at Equinox and I did a pretty hard workout. and then I went down and they had a little smoothie bar and they had a whey protein smoothie with all this healthy stuff and it was like 54 grams of protein and I was like wow and then when I do my calculation based on the 0.8 it's I need 67 for the whole day so the question is how much should I be really getting at a 65 year old guy to not just not lose muscle but actually to build muscle and you're saying it's more like 1.2 to 1.6 or yeah when you look at there's a beautiful study that looked at strength and protein intake at two different contexts.

48:22So one was looking at as you dial up protein in the context of someone who's doing resistance training. And then the other is if you dial up protein and they're sedentary, what happens to strength? What you see is increasing protein without resistance training. Doesn't do anything. Basically does nothing. It's like putting the ingredients for soup in a pot, but not putting on the heat. Right. So, and if you like 80 or 90%, I think of the US population are not meeting the resistance training guidelines. So that's like the number one thing. Yeah, that could be generous, but that's like the number one thing to address.

48:54Let's make that clear. Yeah. And you mean resistance, meaning strength training. Yes. And ideally, I think in the, you know, there's a lot of debate around what's the best rep range. personally i think that that 8 to 12 rep range is a good rep range because it's not the load's not too heavy where you increase risk of of injury for people where the load's super heavy in that kind of four rep range where you need to be a much more experienced lifter to avoid injury also at the 8 to 12 you get the added benefit of loading the skeleton so you get the bone mineral density benefits that you you don't get as much if you're doing a lightweight and doing 30 reps so I do like the 8 to 12 as a general kind of heuristic particularly for healthy aging 8 to 12 to fatigue where like the 12th one it's like you can't do one more yeah and then and that's a great point so it's you should be within an effective set if you're doing 12 reps of a five pound weight that's not yeah so so an effective set of 8 to 12 would be that those those last two reps are within failure.

49:57You're getting a couple reps within failure, right? So if you were to continue the set, you would only be able to maybe lift it one or two more times and you'd be losing form. Yeah, right. Is a good way of kind of looking at that. And in terms of an intensity, you might describe that as like an eight out of 10 in terms of intensity of 10 is all out. Yeah. Right? But in this study, if you look at the context of resistance training and strength as you dial up protein. Most of the benefit is driven once you get to 1.2. There is a little bit further getting going from 1.2 to 1.6 grams. It's kind of like squeezing the last few drops out of the towel, right?

50:36So in terms of our priorities, number one is have regular resistance training in place. Ideally, each muscle group in your body, the main muscle groups, you're getting at least 10 effective sets in a week in the way that we just described is a minimum kind of stimulus to promote strength. What are they like, three times a week? Yeah, you could split that easily across three workouts. And when I say muscle groups, a simple way would be thinking of movement patterns. So 10 kind of pushing, which could be overhead or horizontal pushing, 10 sets of pulling in the two different planes. And then obviously lower body, You're going to have 10 sets of some type of squatting pattern, 10 sets of some type of hinging pattern, like a deadlift, but over a week.

51:24And if you split that across three workouts with a personal trainer, you can split that up. And that's enough volume to promote muscle hypertrophy growth and also strength. And then depending on how much time you want to invest in this, you can build that up to 20 sets per muscle group if you have enough time. And you'll get some extra benefits. Well, I find it interesting that I asked you about protein and we ended up talking about string training. Well - I think that's really important. And it's intentional because we spend so much time talking about protein. And honestly, the studies show that existing protein intake is already at a level where people would be building and maintaining a lot of muscle if they just added the stimulus.

52:04Now we get into the actual protein source and there's so much debate around the source of that, particularly animal versus plant protein, which is more anabolic. And this is where my views have changed a little bit over the years. And even in the last 12 months, there's been a couple of clinical trials, Hamilton Rochelle out of Brazil, and then Alistair Montaigne and his group with Benjamin Wall that have actually looked at comparing omnivorous diets to vegan diets where all of the protein comes from plants. And these are novel studies because most of the studies kind of 10, 15 years ago just looked at the addition of like a pea protein versus whey, but in the background of an omnivorous diet, which is not really helping us fully answer this question.

52:50So these diets are interesting because you look at a completely plant-based diet where all the protein comes from plants versus an omnivorous diet where about 60 % of the protein is from animal. and in these two studies that go for 10 and 12 weeks long where they're doing resistance training in healthy adults and they put the protein intake at 1.6 grams per kilo or in Alistair Montaigne's it was more about 2 grams per kilo which is pretty high you do not see a difference in muscle size or strength gains throughout that 10 to 12 week period regardless of its animal or plant regardless of the two diets and that I definitely think that challenged a lot of the protein research world And a lot of the main researchers like Stuart Phillips came out and Alan Aragon changing their views on these things.

53:39And really the consensus view from that was that if protein is high enough, so not at the RDA, point A, that's very low. But if protein's high enough and you're up at this 1.6 grams per kilogram, then the subtle differences that exist between the amino acid makeup of plant proteins and animal proteins doesn't seem to affect the health outcomes that we care about. So yes, we can drill down and look under a microscope at the difference between these proteins and come up with a digestibility score and all these things. But when you actually feed people these foods at a high protein intake and measure these outcomes that we care about, there's no difference.

54:20And that's what most people listening to this right now, that's what they really care about, is the strength and the hypertrophy. It's not an amino acid score on paper. When I started researching this, because when I wrote my book Young Forever, I started really looking at this. And I looked at this one large review by a group called the Protege Study Group, which looked at protein requirements in people over 60. Because when you're older, there's something called anabolic resistance, meaning you have to work harder to actually build muscle than you would have if you were 20. And that has to do with hormonal changes and other factors.

54:57and they said the recommendation was 1.5 to 2 grams per kilo and they also said that the that animal works better than plant and they also said that you should have at least 25 to 40 grams per meal in order to hit that that threshold of actually activating their switching on muscles protein synthesis or building muscle can you speak to that because i think you know when i read it i was like oh this seems like a bunch of experts who know what you're talking about and it seemed like a pretty well done review of the literature. The only two clinical trials that I'm aware of, and I look at this data all the time pretty closely, so I don't believe there's any others that have looked at comparing plant protein to animal protein at those levels that you just mentioned, 1.5 to 2 grams, and looking at muscle size and strength of the two studies that I mentioned where they showed no difference.

55:48Where I think those conclusions in that paper are probably coming from are that when you look at feeding studies in the context of low protein diets where total protein across the day is not where we would say is optimal animal protein does seem to be superior and seems to be more anabolic and probably because of the amino acid makeup and that's where i think the digestible indispensable amino acid score the ds kind of scoring profile that's often used that's where i think that that tool was really developed for parts of the world where there is food insecurity and you may be getting all of your protein from you know one or two sources of food and when you're doing that and you're under consuming protein it's very hard to create an argument that plant protein is equal or superior to animal protein because the animal protein has a better amino acid complex if you're under-consuming protein, particularly from one food.

56:47That's kind of undeniable. But even as recent as this year, and Luke Van Loon published a study, who's a big protein researcher, and this study was funded by Beef Chekhov. So if anything they wanted animal protein - Funded by the industry. I don't necessarily think that that immediately means this is a bad study. I think Luke Van Loon does incredible studies in science and is a great scientist. but if anything at least at least the hypothesis from this group was that animal protein should come out superior and usually that's why the industry would like to support it what they found and this was in elderly who you know again as you mentioned there is anabolic resistance so we would think that if anyone is really going to benefit from animal protein over plant protein maybe you don't see it in healthy middle-aged adults but maybe it becomes more important as you get older and this is where my view has changed a bit they had protein intake at 1.1 to 1.2 grams per kilogram and they were using elderly healthy adults that were active and looking at daily muscle protein synthesis rates and no significant difference between an omnivorous diet and a vegan diet which kind of challenged their group's hypothesis now where i'll say the gap is and we have to acknowledge this.

58:06That's a nine to 10 day study. The next step is to take elderly and run like the studies I mentioned before that go for 10, 12 weeks, maybe 16 weeks and actually measure muscle size and function. So look at strength and these things that we power, these things that we care about that we were talking about earlier and just confirm that, okay, what we're seeing in terms of a mechanism, because I would be really contradicting myself to what I said earlier. yeah muscle protein synthesis is a mechanism right that's one mechanism and we see in the nine to ten days no difference how what's the actual effect on on health outcome yeah that you know we care about the net effect and in order to assess that you need a longer study yeah yeah so that's a watch this space for me in terms of stay open-minded it could be that there's no difference in elderly at 1.1 to 1.2 grams per kilo could be that there is what was the forms of protein they were using?

58:59Because when you think about, you know, whole food protein, right? A little pork on the chicken breast has got about 120 calories, 30 grams of protein, but to get 30 grams of protein in beans with like black beans or whatever, that's about 500 calories. So you're having almost, you know, five times. A little less, but it's, it's, it's like 300 and something. Three, four, five times, whatever. It's still, it's a lot more calories. So in order to consume enough protein, are you consuming too many calories? And if you're not, does it mean the only way you can get there is using concentrated plant proteins that are processed?

59:32I think a lot of these studies, and I think if you were to go out and look in like a plant-based community of people that are eating moderate to high protein, legumes like black beans and lentils are not a go to source because of that reason. There are sort of supplementary food on the side that offers some protein and some carbohydrates but the more protein dense kind of foods would be tofu tempeh seitan for people that can tolerate gluten micro proteins like a big one that's now starting to become very popular which is they're actually not plant-based it's derived from fungi and is incredibly rich in protein and fiber and iron so you'll start to see more of that and that that was actually used in the alistair montaigne trial they used a fair bolus of that oh interesting And in the other one, the Hamilton Rochelle trial that I mentioned, the healthy adults, in the omnivorous group, they use whey protein to supplement their whole food.

1:00:27And in the vegan group, they used a soy protein isolate to supplement their food. But the same amount of protein powder. But they didn't add extra amino acids or anything. No, they didn't do any fortification of leucine or anything like that, which is interesting because you might hypothesize that you would need to do that. Yeah. But what we're seeing is that, again, once you're up to 1.1 to 1.2, at least in those short-term studies, and then 1.6 in those longer-term studies, that at that level of protein intake, we're not seeing a difference between the anabolic kind of potential of the animal protein and the plant protein.

1:01:02Alan Aragon actually beautifully walked through this on a Huberman show like a few weeks ago. Oh, really? Yeah. And it's challenging. I get it. Like, Mark, I was one of the biggest meat eaters, honestly. In my friendship group. They're from Australia, so it's basically. I was the dude who was organizing all the steakhouse dinners. It's the only place I would ever want to eat. And so I understand that because I think the strongest argument for animal protein over the last 10 or 15 years has been that it's better for muscle-related outcomes. Yeah. Because to be honest, the research looking at chronic disease, it tends to favor plant protein.

1:01:40because you get the added benefit of increasing fiber and phytochemicals and probably a healthier fat profile. Now we're in this position where I think it is challenging because a lot of our society loves to eat meat, and that's fine. I think meat can be part of a healthy diet. But also as scientists and people that want to be objective, we have to stay open-minded to what these studies are showing us. And like I said, I'm prepared to be wrong or to change my view if they do a 12-week study and show that people eating the animal protein, the elderly, had better strength and hypertrophy. Those are all the studies I've seen.

1:02:20It typically shows the opposite. And so I would like to see those studies replicated because they're interesting, but then does it comport with all the other data? And I think when you're looking at any kind of scientific question, you've got to look at not just one study, but how does it fit in the context of the overall literature from basic science to observational data to randomized trials? And, you know, what are the quality of the studies? What is the methodology? How are they powered? I mean, it's complicated. Even as a doctor or scientist, like it's hard to figure these answers out. And we might even have the right studies to answer the question.

1:02:51That's the other problem. And that is where, though, the longer-term health outcome studies become really important. Because, yes, the studies that you're referring to, they exist. But what's the background diet? Are they actually optimized their overall protein intake for the day? Or are they at a low protein intake? Where I think it's pretty established the animal protein is probably going to be superior in that context. What's really interesting to me that I think also is changing the way I look at protein is, is the distribution question. So I think for a long time - When you eat it throughout the day?

1:03:27Yeah, for a long time, it was thought that having 25, 30 grams and spacing it out into all these different meals throughout the day is definitely the superior strategy. And at least what's being borne out in the data now, and one of those studies that I mentioned there, the Nicholas Bird study, not only compared a vegan to omnivorous, looking at muscle protein synthesis, but looked at two different distributions, uneven and even. So they looked at one where they had five meals across the day, even distribution, and then the other was uneven. So they only had 10 % of protein at breakfast, 30 % at lunch, and 60 % at dinner.

1:04:02And the reason they did that is that that tends to reflect protein intake in America. Yeah, for sure. And so they were interested in, okay, is there a difference between animal and plant? But also, maybe there is a difference, but you only see it in an uneven distribution. And they didn't see it. And in fact, across both groups, even comparing to the same group, there was no difference in daily muscle protein synthesis rates, even in an uneven distribution. And so I think if you were to get really into the weeds, distribution might matter, but it matters far less than the total amount of protein that you eat in a day.

1:04:36My understanding was that it mattered more for those who are not adapted to strength training. So if your muscles are already sort of kind of on and you're used to strength training and used to building muscle, that it doesn't matter as much when you distribute your protein. But if you're not, it matters more. Is that true? I haven't seen that, but I mean, it's interesting. I'd love to read about it if you can send me a study. That was some of the protege work, but it was fascinating. Okay, so we need basically more protein, especially as we age, than the RDA, which is how much you need to not become protein deficient, which is not really a big problem.

1:05:17Two, you can get there with plant proteins, but you need to have some type of supplementary protein that's concentrated. Because that's what worries me. You don't have to have whey protein if you're eating animals in order to get enough protein. but do you have to eat a processed pea protein or a processed soy protein, which may have other consequences to get the adequate amount of protein or can you get it by eating beans and grains and nuts and seeds? You could get it if you were eating enough tofu and tempeh and seitan and micoprotein and these kind of some of these more novel types of plant-based or fungi-based protein.

1:05:55But I would say, I think a lot of people that are eating an omnivorous diet are definitely supplementing with a whey protein. I think it's pretty common. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad choice, even if it's a whey protein or a pea protein. Particularly now, if it's like NSF certified, you know that there's third-party testing. It's tested for heavy metal contaminants. It's tested for banned substances. And what they say is in it on the label is actually in it. I think if you can go through that kind of process and find a protein that ticks those boxes, it can be a very convenient way for someone to increase their protein intake, particularly as people are aging, often their appetite goes down.

1:06:40So I don't want to necessarily scare people from supplementing their diet with protein powder, but I think it needs to be, it's complementing and supplementing a diet like we spoke about before. Yeah, yeah. Right? If you're eating an ultra-processed style diet, and you're going out of your way to buy high protein, ultra processed foods. Yeah. That's, that's, to me, that's not optimization. Even there's mostly protein bars. I look at them and go, Ooh, that's like the most processed crap. I remember I would never eat that. And to, and to be honest, back to the coconut thing that I mentioned earlier.

1:07:16So I'm training for a marathon right now. And one of the, the, I don't know if consequences is the right word, but one of the realities of that is I have to increase my calorie consumption by quite a bit in order to fuel my training. and so one of those the changes that i made was to add this coconut yogurt and the reason and this shows like how all of us can be kind of fall victim to the high protein messaging yeah yeah the the reason was i chose a a high protein coconut yogurt and i just didn't that and and then cooking with coconut oil i didn't realize how much saturated fats were coming along for the ride in that coconut yogurt with the eight grams of protein.

1:07:56Right. And so for me, that was not an optimal way to increase my protein. It's interesting. You know, I remember hearing a lecture when I went to the Institute for Functional Medicine conferences 20 years ago and it really stuck with me. And it was a researcher from the NIH who was studying soy because, you know, we were here, soy is bad. It's like estrogen. It's going to give you breasts and blah, blah, blah. And it maybe caused cancer. And if you talk to most oncologists who take care of people with breast cancer, they tell people not to eat soy foods, which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

1:08:27They say, eat ice cream, but don't eat soy foods. You know, it's not actually like that. It's more like a regulator, like a sort of modulates hormone, not stimulates it. But what he said was really interesting was when they studied in animal models, giving isolated soy protein, which is what was done in these protein studies versus whole soy foods, they're profoundly different effects, particularly on cancer. and that basically soybean protein that comes from as a byproduct of making soybean oil is kind of a waste product and it's turned into these soy protein shakes or soy protein bars or soy protein whatever and that hydrolyzed soy protein is chemically different than soy protein and linked to these cancer outcomes in animal models.

1:09:19So that makes me a little worried about that. Yeah, you don't have to consume soy protein isolate. Whey protein is also a bit of a waste product as well from the dairy industry. So they're kind of similar in that. Curds and whey. It's like Little Miss Muffet. So yogurt is the curd and the whey is the little liquid stuff on top. But you don't have to consume soy protein isolate. There are other forms of plant-based proteins. And I think on the soy kind of cancer relationship, I mean, the guidelines now certainly are not telling people to avoid soy foods for preventing cancer or whether they have cancer.

1:09:57But they do say, and I think this is important for people to know, not to take soy isoflavone supplements, which have become relatively popular. You'll find them all over the internet. So having that very isolated high dose of isoflavones, there is no evidence right now to recommend that for people. And it could be deleterious for someone who has cancer. So I think that's worth kind of differentiating. But soy whole foods themselves, we see a neutral or a positive relationship for at least for risk of cancer. And if you look at certain Asian cohort studies, they have a lower risk of breast cancer in the parts of the world where they consume the most whole soy foods.

1:10:41But I guess the point being there is like, if you don't want to consume a soy protein isolate, there's all these other options now. And come back to like, is it NSF certified third-party tested and just find a, find a good one that doesn't have a lot of ingredients. Yeah. Fascinating. Well, you know, this has been such an incredible conversation. I think, you know, you can tell from the listening to this, that the science is really hard to navigate through, even for people who spend their lives, like you and I trying to think about it and be honest about it because it's constantly shifting and there's always a boogeyman in nutrition and there's always the darling of nutrition.

1:11:18And right now, seed oils are the boogeyman and protein is the darling. I mean, I cover, I think we cover those pretty well. I think hopefully you understand after listening to this, what is the bottom line? So maybe you kind of summarize the bottom line for people, like what should they do? What should they be eating? And if you want to go home and after listening to this podcast, do the right thing for you when it comes to fats and protein, what would you tell people? I would honestly start looking at the Mediterranean dietary pattern or even the Nordic diet, like the Danish dietary guidelines.

1:11:52These are dietary patterns where the focus is on whole foods. That's a herring. Yeah. There is a, compared to a standard American diet, there's less ultra processed foods. There's more fiber. There's more omega-3s, fatty fish. There's more emphasis on dark, leafy greens and if you're going to consume grains whole grains nuts and seeds and from there now you have a basis and like i said earlier you you can you can tweak that to suit your needs are you an athlete and want to go higher carb or do you want to go more down the low carb direction and go higher fat but the bias for the fats there is going to be from fatty fish and avocado and macadamias and nuts and seeds and olive oil so you're going to have a lot of these monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats.

1:12:40It's a little bit different to how you might see an animal-based diet online sometimes now. Within the context of that, be protein aware. You might want to, for a week, just log your food, which I don't think is a bad exercise because a lot of people are not really sure how much protein is in their food at all, and just see where you land. Are you at at least 1.2 grams per kilogram within that context of that theme? and if you're doing that, you're ticking a lot of boxes. And I think sometimes we can go into all these rabbit holes and people get paralyzed and make no change. So I would say start there.

1:13:18Get all of that in play. It's not like Michael Pollan. Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. But it works. And here's the thing. And food meaning real food. Real food. But Mark, it only works if we are consistent with it and imperfect. if we try and get this thing perfect forget it and we go and do it for a couple weeks that that's not going to make a dint in our chronic disease risk yeah so have some grace for yourself right try and get as much of that into play as possible find a way that leaves you feeling good today and you're achieving whatever goals it is you have supplement it complement it with resistance training we didn't even get into the other forms but the plyometric kind of power I'll work aerobic training, get all the other aspects of health in play, like good relationships.

1:14:05Yeah, pretty basic stuff. All these things that, and anything that I've put forward, I'm of the view that if someone presents me with a good scientific argument, they show me how they're thinking, and it is more logical than the position that I've found myself in, I will change. So if there's something that I've stated that someone thinks, hang on, I disagree with that. if you show me your thinking, I'm going to take a look at that. And I'm prepared to change my views. Yeah. Fascinating. Okay. So Dr. Jay Bhattacharya calls you up, the head of the NIH right now, the National Institute of Health.

1:14:42He says, Simon, I know nutrition is a big question. What are the most important unanswered questions in nutrition today that we should spend the government's money figuring out? What would you tell them? I think we should spend the government's money figuring out how to change the food landscape, the environment. I think we actually know enough, Mark. And we know enough. We don't know everything, but we know enough to help people get into their 50s, 60s, and 70s without these sky-high rates of chronic disease. And so I don't want the government to not act thinking that we need a whole lot more information.

1:15:23Sure, we need some funding to learn things on the periphery and get a little clearer here and there. But I would spend the money on understanding what is it going to take to create new environments. That's not an NIH question. That's more of a – well, actually, not really true because I've been talking to folks in the government and there's a new initiative, which is the FDA and NIH initiative around regulatory science, nutrition science. meaning what regulations and legislation is required to actually fix food in America. That's where I'd be pouring the money. That's happening. That's happening.

1:15:57That's good. All right. Good answer. Good answer. All right, Simon. It's great to chat with you as always. I hope everybody listening had a little bit of awakening around some of these very sticky, confusing, and messy topics. And hopefully you brought some clarity to them and helped you navigate just how to eat in a way that's going to help you thrive instead of make you sick. So thanks, Simon. This was fun. I appreciate it. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out.

1:16:27I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.

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