Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness | Huberman Lab

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And now for my discussion with Dr.

Lane Norton. Dr. Lane Norton, welcome back.

Thanks for having me back.

Before we jump in, I want to get your stance on what constitutes evidence, because I think a big reason why you are considered one of the, if not the most trusted person in the realm of nutrition and training is that you set a very high bar for what you consider science-based fact that motivates action.

So to just kind of break this down based on my read of the landscape online, it seems that there's a group of people, I don't know what to call them, purists or something, who unless there's a randomized controlled trial, so that means in humans, or several, that points in a particular direction.

They are very unlikely to adopt a new practice, say removing a given food or nutrient, adding a given food or nutrient, training a certain way, not training a certain way.

Okay, that's one group.

Then there are the people who, if they are told something could be a value, they hear it's worked very well for somebody, maybe they see some before and afters, and it gets mapped to a mechanism that exists in humans and animals like, oh, there's this molecule and if this molecule increases, x, y, and z happens and training this way or eating this way increases that molecule.

For instance, but no randomized controlled trial, then they're willing to try it or adopt it.

And then there's a third, probably a fourth category as well, where people say they don't trust science anyway, science is flawed or the controls required to design a really good experiment are so constrained that they don't mimic the real world well enough.

And so they're really just interested in what works.

So they look to people that seem to have achieved the results they want.

Feel free to add another group, but which group would you consider yourself in personally and then where does your evidence that you put out online and today come from?

And I already know the answer to the last question, but I think it was important to spell out the landscape.

So everything you just mentioned would fall into the category of evidence.

Everything that we can observe is evidence, but I think what people really struggle with is the idea of different levels of quality of evidence.

And if I had to put myself into a group, I have definitely been on the side of, well, there's a case study in this journal and we're going to try that now because it must work.

And or my friend tried this and they said it worked.

So I'm going to try it. And then I've also gone to the group of, well, there's no human randomized control trial.

So I don't believe it. And I think now, you know, I'm 40, total of science using these cherry picked studies.

And so what I'll tell people is if I go into a topic, if I go into something, what I'm looking for, the highest quality of evidence is first off, do we have some meta analyses on this topic?

Right. Just explain for the general listener what a meta analysis is.

Just in guy top contour.

Absolutely. So a meta analysis is basically we're trying to compile studies that ask similar questions and look at what is the overall effect?

Do we have a consensus in the literature?

Usually they, they're going to show some kind of force plot of all these studies and however, far right or left of the center line is kind of giving you an idea of how powerful the effect was in that study.

And then you can see the confidence intervals in terms of how much variability there was.

And then you can see the thickness of the dot on there, which shows how much it contributed to the overall analysis by usually how many subjects were in it.

Right. One study with 10 subjects would have a very small dot compared to a subject with 500 subjects.

Exactly. And so you're trying to, now you can do a bad meta analysis based on inclusion criteria.

You know, and that's where it's important to look at.

But let me give you an example of a meta analysis, I cite pretty frequently.

The inclusion criteria is very important to make sure that you answer the question that you want to answer.

And I say this when you're reading scientific studies, I'm like, listen, just because there's a headline in even a paper, just because the conclusion says something that is the author's opinion.

You need to check to see did they actually test what they're talking about?

And are the tests they use valid?

Right. So this meta analysis was looking at lower carb diets versus higher carb diets or low fat diets.

And the inclusion criteria, this is on my Kevin Hall of the NIH back in 2017.

I'm gonna say. And I thought he did a great job at the inclusion criteria, which was we're only going to include controlled feeding trials where the food is provided to participants because obviously we know the limitations of, you know, free living studies with nutrition.

Right. Self report. People sneak people forget.

We are going to make sure that these studies equated calories for the reasons we talk about you got to compare apples to apples.

Right. So a lot of studies will come out saying fasting, produce more fat loss, low carb, but then they didn't control calories.

And it's, it's very likely these people just ate less.

So they controlled calories and they controlled protein, which is also important because protein changes the composition of weight loss.

Protein has a thermic effect protein increases lean mass retention.

So that can change how much fat you lose.

And I think then also had a requirement of like a minimum of four weeks.

Right. And the outcome was looking at changes in fat mass, not fat oxidation, not energy expenditure.

It actually looked at the outcome that they cared about and they they showed no difference.

Right. So I thought, well, that's a very well done meta analysis because the inclusion criteria make a lot of sense for the question that they want to answer, which is not is one diet easier to stick to, not is it, you know, more practical.

The question was mechanically do these diets produce differences when we're comparing apples to apples in actual fat loss.

And the answer was no. Right.

So and then when you look at the other meta analyses that have been done, they tend to kind of support that.

Right. So the first thing I'm going to look at is, all right, these meta analyses tend to be looked at as kind of the highest form of evidence, right?

Because you're compiling a bunch of different studies, which listen, we know there are bad studies that get done.

I think the amount of studies that get like just straight up faked is probably much lower than people think.

But one hopes. But yeah, yeah, I would agree.

I think that people make errors.

I do think that a lot of quote unquote bad papers or let's just say false conclusions arise from elimination of data that did not fit the person's desired outcome.

And the reason I say that is I think it's impossible to control for.

So you've got the student or postdoc doing the experiment.

The results don't come out the way they would have preferred and then there, you know, let's just say I've observed before never in my laboratory, fortunately, but cases where people come up with reasons why that particular experiment wasn't valid because you know, the mice were initially sick or the drug, the lot of drug that they used wasn't it was heading towards

expiration. They come up with reasons to exclude rather than outright data fabrication where people literally create results that aren't there.

And you know, there are a number of different examples throughout history that where people have done that.

But I like to think that those are more rare.

I think that's probably pretty small.

My experience is the same as you.

I didn't see much of that or I never saw it observed.

Usually I end up reading about that in the form of retractions, right, in journals that come out.

Nowadays, more close to the publications because of AI's ability to scan images and things of that sort.

Yeah, I think, you know, usually if I see a paper and the conclusion, like just straight out, I go, oh, I don't know about that.

When I go and I read the methods and I read how they analyzed it and I read how they measured things 99% of the time I walk away and go, okay, it's not I'm not surprised they found what they found, right?

Because again, a lot of and this does happen and it shouldn't, but a lot of studies are set up to kind of find what people want to find.

You can bias things in a certain way.

Well, and what nobody talks about where it's not discussed enough is that a lot of times the way the paper is written poses a question after the results are in.

I mean, and this is a, this is a really a not correct way to do science.

I mean, in clinical trials, one has to wager hypothesis, excuse me, wager hypothesis from the outset.

Yeah. You go test that hypothesis.

You're not asking questions.

I never say what you're going to measure.

Right. Exactly. Whereas in more typical laboratory science, people will design and experiment.

They have hypotheses, but then depending on how the experiments work out or don't work out, oftentimes they'll change the question to modify the hypotheses.

And one wouldn't as a reader, as a journal, as a reviewer, one will never know.

And so that's a that's a slight of hand that is, I would say, unfortunately, is very common in better science.

But I will say like there's very rarely I say this was a bad study.

Often what I'll say is, you know, I don't agree with their conclusion based on their data and their design.

But the data is the data, you know, I was just very fortunate again to my PhD advisor.

I have so much gratitude because he just right away was like, Hey, I'm going if we're wrong about something, that's fine.

You know, and I'll give you an example of how results can seem to conflict, but you know, how things are designed.

We actually wanted to test this protein quality, make a difference.

And we wanted to look at it at like not low, but like, just kind of like RDA levels of protein.

And we saw that protein quality did make a difference at those levels of protein.

But if you look at experiments where people are feeding like high levels of protein, like 1.6 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight, you don't really see much difference in, you know, lean mass or protein synthesis with looking at different protein sources.

Well, that's because it's much more regulatory and a low end because you're closer to those thresholds that trigger that signaling.

And so, you know, we wanted to show at that level that it made a difference.

But then we also acknowledge, okay, at this level, it probably doesn't make as much of a difference.

But people can read those things and say, well, I don't believe studies because they're conflicting, but no, when you read how it was designed, I can easily say, like, I remember there was a somebody sent me a study and said, well, how does this fit with your data, which they were comparing rice versus way protein and found that both stimulated protein synthesis to

the same degree. And I said, well, they used 40 grams of protein.

Like, if you get protein high enough, you can max out protein synthesis regardless of the form of protein you're using.

And so that's just like one of those examples, right?

So when I'm looking through this stuff, I'm looking at, okay, those are seem to be a consensus in the data.

And then is it like in these meta-analyses, does the inclusion criteria make sense?

And then if there's no real agreement amongst the meta-analyses, then I'm looking at, okay, what do the most tightly controlled studies show?

Like in the randomized control trials?

And then I'm kind of like based on opinion off that.

But you know, you know, the hierarchy of evidence, the pyramid, you got meta-analysis, systematic reviews, randomized control trials, you have cohort data, epidemiology in the animal studies, tend to get kind of lumped in together.

And then you got like case studies and so on and so forth, right?

And so all that stuff is valid.

It's all valid. I think where I spend a lot of time on social media is, for example, I'll give you a great example.

Someone's saying, well, you don't want to eat cruciferous vegetables because they have isocyethanates in them, which can bind to iodine.

And that is going to impair your thyroid function, lower your metabolic rate, and cause you weight gain.

And so that's a pathway, that's a mechanism.

Is it possible? I suppose it is possible, right?

That pathway does exist.

iodine is important for thyroid function.

I associate with an it's Dubai into iodine.

You can take any food, even organic food, and you can find a compound in it that if you fed it in a high dose, it would have weird effects, right?

And so the question is not if you eat something, are there compounds in it that maybe activate negative biochemical pathways?

The question is, what is the overall outcome?

And so when these pathways are promoted versus let's see if we actually have randomized control trials in humans that measure what we actually care about.

And so we do have like in that particular case, we have randomized control trials looking at okay cruciferous festival intake and thyroid function.

And there's no difference in the outcome.

And so what that says, and then no difference in BMR, and then actually people who eat more cruciferous festivals actually tend to be a little bit leaner, but that could be a little bit of healthy user bias, and they'd probably just eat less calories because of more satiated.

But it's certainly not going the opposite direction, right?

And so the point is, again, if an outcome exists, there is absolutely a mechanism to explain it, but just because a mechanism exists does not mean you're going to produce an outcome.

And I got exposed to this very early, because I cut my teeth on the bodybuilding message boards back in the day, where it was a bunch of nerds arguing with each other, mostly who had no background arguing, but there were some actual sports scientists and professors who would get on those every once in a while.

This was before social media existed.

And I remember I was in biochemistry class, this is 2003, and they're talking about how caffeine inhibits glycogen phosphorylase, which is a mechanism, and it exists.

Caffeine inhibits glycogen phosphorylase.

And so I made this post-ry on the forums and I said, well, we should be having caffeine after work out then, because it'll help with glycogen recenthosis, because it'll keep glycogen phosphorylase from breaking down glycogen.

And somebody came in and said, you're really like zooming in on a blade of grass instead of zooming out and looking at the forest, right?

And biochemists, I was guilty of this, and biochemists by trade, we get very focused on pathways.

But if you think about what caffeine does overall, activates the sympathetic nervous system, its function is to like, you're liberating fuel.

Like you, and some people when they take caffeine, actually, have a rise in blood glucose.

So that is the outcome is actually counter to what that biochemical pathway is.

And so we've got to be really careful with how we promote these biochemical pathways.

I mean, I did a really funny post on Twitter where myself and Joseph Sundell, I'm not sure if you're familiar with these cancer biologists.

Great guy. And we were joking back and forth.

I said, you know what? I bet I could like come up with a pathway to get people to eat poop.

Like I can make a compelling argument for just eating poop.

And then he goes, I bet, he's like, I'll take that bet.

I'm like, okay, let's give a shot.

So I'm like, what is the, some of the most common compounds in human fecal matter?

And one of them is butyrate, right?

Which is a short chain fatty acid produced by fermentation.

Butyrate. And so I did this post where I'm like, here's why you should eat poop to lose fat.

Butyrate increases fat oxidation.

I think it activates brown fat, increases insulin sensitivity, decreases inflammation.

It's been shown to actually ameliorate the development of obesity in the in studies.

And I decided all these PubMed ideas.

Now what I didn't didn't tell people was those are all mostly in rodents, right?

And it's giving an amount of butyrate that you'd need to eat about 50 to 100 pounds of fecal matter a day in order to get, right?

It's sounding like a worse and worse idea by the moment.

But that is very similar to a lot of the content that is out there, which is find isolated compound, scare people or promote it to be the best thing ever.

And then link it to an outcome.

And then sometimes you can tie an epidemiology with it as well to support whatever you want.

But again, like I'm not saying I do things in my training and my nutrition that don't have randomized control trials to support, right?

They don't really have anything to support.

It's just it's how I kind of fall into doing things.

So that's okay. But what I wouldn't do is come out and say, what I do is the best thing ever.

And here's why especially if there was human randomized control trials to the counter, that is the biggest thing, right?

If we have human randomized control trials and they're going the opposite direction of a case study or an observation, there's a reason human randomized control trials.

I scream about them all the time and why they're considered the gold standard evidence.

When we look at cohort data, you're just observing people.

There's no way. Maybe explain what cohort data is comparing to groups.

Sure. So cohort data, you're comparing groups, but you're not having intervention.

So you're tracking them over the course of however, what period of time?

A lot of cohort studies like looking at cardiovascular disease, cancer, people decided to be vegan.

These people decided to be, let's just say on the board.

Yeah. Those are some of the classic experiments, right?

And they weren't assigned to this experiment.

They agreed to join the experiment.

They've been eating this way for a while.

Right. You ask them a bunch of questions and you look at, okay, over 10 years, over 20 years, who gets whatever, more often or less often, right?

And then we try to figure out and about calculate, okay, what's the effect and is this real?

The problem is you have a lot of bias with those sorts of studies, meaning people don't do single habits.

They don't isolate habits.

I was, I actually put up a real other day from my appearance on Stephen Bartlett's podcast where he said, if I want to fix my diet, I go to the gym because a lot of people do that.

If they're training in the gym, they don't want to waste their effort by having a subpar diet.

Now in reality, eating a healthy diet is more important if you're not going to the gym, right?

Because at least you're getting something, but people do this habit coupling.

And so it's really hard to disentangle those sorts of things.

Now, the reason that human randomized control trials are important is if you're designing the experiment and you randomize what you are doing by randomly assigning people to groups, you're washing out that bias because you can assume that whatever inherent characteristics that might be coupled to whatever you're going to try are going to be randomly distributed,

evenly distributed across the groups.

Therefore, we say human randomized control trials are kind of what's needed to establish causation because by randomizing, you can assume whatever differences are observed between the groups are due to your treatment and not due to random chance or data artifacts.

Now randomized control trials, especially in nutrition, have very strong limitations, which is you can't do a randomized control trial for 30 years.

I mean, I think the longest randomized control trial I heard about nutrition is like two years long, right?

And even then, it's not going to be a very tightly controlled randomized control trial.

I mean, and if you're doing, if you're talking about like the tightest level of control, like a metabolic ward study, four, six weeks, maybe because you're keeping people in food jail.

And I think where some of this confusion comes from is I think people think that there's just like this pool of people waiting around to be selected for experiments.

Like, yes, I'm ready. I've been waiting here.

No, they're people like you, like me, like just the average person walking down the street who saw a flyer and goes, okay, I'll volunteer for that.

And the more control you try to establish over their lives, the less likely they are to do it.

And you've probably got to pay them, you know?

I don't know anybody who would do a metabolic ward study without getting paid for it.

I mean, you're basically giving up four or six weeks of your life to go do that.

And so while I love human randomized control trials, for some things, they're not always appropriate.

For example, if you're trying to look at heart disease and you want to do a one year human randomized control trial, looking at say, you know, saturated fat, LDL cholesterol, those sorts of things.

Well, how many people have heart attacks within one year after age 60?

I mean, it's going to be a really, you're going to look for really small numbers, differences between really small numbers, right?

And the problem with that is you have no idea about their diet 40 years leading up to that.

And we know based on now the Mendelian randomization trials that the risk of LDL is more of like a lifetime exposure risk.

It's not just in this narrow sliver of time.

And so I love human randomized control trials, but it's also I try to tell people never turn your brain off just because something gets published in a certain journal, just because a certain researcher said something just because it was a certain design, it doesn't make it infallible.

Okay, science is perfect.

Science is perfect. Science is what is, but it's done by humans.

And humans are fallible, imperfect people with their own personal beliefs and biases.

And that's why I look at consensus of data first.

Because yeah, you could maybe some of experiments got faked or maybe they had been, but when it's done over, let's take something like creative model hydrate, right?

You have thousands of experiments done over decades of time in hundreds of different labs with many different funding sources in bunch of different countries under a bunch of different conditions.

It works, right? Like if you go to consensus and you type in does create and build muscle, it's like 92% yes, right, which is crazy, right?

Consuming five to 10 grams of creatine monohydrate per day is going to benefit strength and muscle mass and likely cognition to some extent.

Yeah, yeah. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.

By now, many of you have heard the people that came out of that lab a lot of studs.

So I did an experiment looking at way protein or sorry, complete meal with way protein ingestion and how long the duration of muscle protein synthesis was because we most people kind of measured at 60 or 90 minutes like the snapshot post-prandially for protein synthesis, looking for a peak and we're like, is that really where the peak is?

We don't know. We're we're basing this off of a purified solution.

So let's do a duration experiment, right?

And my hypothesis was, well, however long blue scene is elevated in the blood, it's going to be how long protein synthesis days up.

And when we got the data back on protein synthesis, protein synthesis had come up peaked at 90 minutes and by three hours it'd come back down to baseline.

And I went to run the plasma amino acids and I'm like, okay, well, this is what we're going to see.

And that's not what we saw.

So plasma amino acids, not only were still elevated, they were like maxed out or plateaued at the highest they would level they would be at three hours, were protein synthesis would back to baseline.

And so I said, okay, well, it's got to be mTOR signaling.

mTOR signaling's got to be turning off or something's happening.

Nope, mTOR signaling was still elevated, right?

And we saw this through a phosphorylation of the binding protein 40BP1, which is a proxy for mTOR activation.

And then I said, okay, well, maybe blue scene isn't getting into the cell.

Maybe that's why. So we looked at intracellular losing, followed the exact path of plasma blue scene.

And so then I kept rerunning the plasma data over and over.

I probably ran it five times, right?

And layman finally calls me into his office one day and he goes, so where do we stand with this duration experiment?

And I said, yeah, it's almost done.

I just, I got to run the data again because the plasma data has got to be wrong.

And he, he, I saw his like little eyebrow go up, you know, and he goes, why do you think that?

Let me see your data. Because your standard air bars are good.

This looks to be relatively tight data.

How's your technique? And I'm going through like how I, you know, all the steps to analyze plasma amino acids.

It's not like CSI, by the way, everybody.

You don't just like take a pipette, put something in a centrifuge and also, and you get back data.

There's a, there's many steps in here.

And so I showed him all that and he goes, you know, it sounds like you are trying to get the data to fit your conclusion.

And what you need to do is change your conclusion to fit the data.

And that one line, again, it just opened my whole world up to one.

If I'm wrong, okay, cool.

Like I care more about getting the right answer than being right.

And that's why we were talking earlier.

I'm like, there's so much stuff that I just don't believe.

I want to see 10, 20 studies before I go, yeah, you know, and the other thing I'll tell people is, hey, I don't plant my flag real strong very often.

So when you see me do it, I'm not saying I'm not fallible.

But if you see me do it, you probably should pay attention.

Because I don't usually do that.

I love that description.

But now my curiosity is peaked and you got to tell me, so if 90 minutes after ingesting protein, protein synthesis peaks and then it drops to baseline at three hours, but losing one of the key amino acids in emtore, which is in the pathway of cellular growth and protein synthesis are still elevated three hours.

What is the conclusion that explains the discrepancy?

Yeah. So we actually looked for this for years.

So a few things, there was some other studies that supported that.

We called it a refractory response.

Actually, we didn't name it that.

There's another lab named it that basically that protein synthesis was becoming refractory to the signal for protein synthesis.

So just for real quick, I'm going to try and explain this easily.

So protein synthesis, you know, this sounds like probably a very abstract thing.

But it's how your body makes more protein.

And whether it's in skeletal muscle, whether it's in the liver, whatever, you have your DNA, which is your genetic code, right?

And then that gets transcribed to an mRNA.

By the way, I'm leaving out a lot of steps here, but just hit bear with me.

That mRNA gets translated by a ribosome into a polypeptide chain or a protein.

So a ribosome is basically attaching to the mRNA.

And then based on the mRNA sequence is bringing in amino acids to match that sequence.

So all the proteins in your body are coded for in your DNA, right?

So when it comes to this process, there's a complex called EIF4F, which acts as a scaffold for the ribosome to hook on to the mRNA.

And EIF4F, the formation of it is basically rate limited by the association of two proteins called EIF4E and EIF4G.

And I don't do it for any specific purpose.

This was long before such in panda started doing his work on time restricted feeding, aka intermittent fasting.

But I don't tend to want to eat any food until about 11 a.m.

Right. Occasionally I wake up hungry like this morning and I had some eggs, it was particularly hungry.

But I think that's representative of a lot of people.

I want hydration and caffeine in the morning.

I want to train in the morning and then I want to eat pretty soon after I train.

But what that means is that I'm eating during an eight to nine hour feeding window.

And if I only manage two meals in there in a snack, and I can only assimilate, or excuse me, I can only put 30 grams of protein per meal toward protein synthesis.

We have to be careful of not about using it for energy, but toward protein synthesis.

Does that mean that I'm not going to hit my target of one gram of protein per pound of desired lean body mass?

Because I'm 100 kilograms away about 220 pounds.

I can easily eat 220 grams of protein in a nine hour period.

Like give me three rib eyes.

I'll eat all three. I love rib eyes steak, right?

But the question is, can I use that?

I'm going to bring this background to that particular experiment.

Over time, when I love grad school, my position was that it matters.

Protein distribution matters.

I'll give you the straight down the line scientific answer and then I'll give you if you inject me with true serum, what I really think is.

We did an experiment. Again, in rats, we fed them completely same diets, same total calories, protein, carbs, fats.

But in one group, they got that pretty much evenly across three meals and the other group, 70% of their protein was coming at their last meal.

And then the other two meals were like 15% protein, 15% daily protein.

And 11 weeks, again, 11 weeks out of a rats life, rodents live 18 to 24 months.

That's a big chunk of their life, right?

And we did see about a five to 10% difference in the weights of the hind limbs in terms of muscle mass.

Okay. So what direction?

Favouring equal distribution.

Right? Now, again, hard to repeat that study in humans, right?

And for the duration, it's done.

So I came out saying, you know what?

That's actually less than I thought we're going to, I thought we're going to find bigger differences than that.

You know, because I mean, if you're thinking about number of times you're stimulating protein synthesis, I mean, one per day versus three per day, I mean, shouldn't there be like a pretty significant difference there?

And it was, I mean, it reached the level of significance.

But again, I thought the effect size was smaller than I thought.

And so I kind of walked out saying, you know what?

Total protein intake is the most important thing per day.

And then if you can distribute it relatively evenly, that's maybe the last five to 10% right?

And then you've seen some human studies where it seems to matter most seem to show it doesn't matter.

Really matter that much.

Here's, here's what I think if you're measuring an outcome like lean mass, that doesn't change much in eight weeks.

Unfortunately, very small differences.

And so I think it's going to be harder to detect that.

But what I'll tell people is can't if you're asking, can you build muscle intermittent fasting?

Absolutely. Can you build a lot of muscle?

Probably. If you are a body builder, specific population, or if your goal is to be the most muscular, strongest human being, you can possibly become, I think you're probably better off not doing intermittent fasting.

Just because those last that last five percent may make a big difference and you're never going to be able to pick that out of a human randomized control trial in eight weeks, at least I don't think you will.

And so again, I don't have any human data to really back that up, but just based on what I know about signaling and the effects we saw on animals, that's kind of my recommendation.

But most people don't fall in that category.

Most people are just worried about, hey, I want to look good, build a little bit of muscle intermittent fasting.

Perfectly fine tool for doing that.

I will say, you know, obviously we haven't studied some of the more extreme forms of fasting in terms of building muscle, right?

Like the 16-8 has been studied.

But like I'm thinking of a study that was done without resistance training, alternate day fasting versus continuous kind of normal feeding.

One day no eating next day eat.

Right. So they did brutal.

They did. Or at least for somebody like me.

I can't think of anything worse.

I'd rather fast for three days in a row and then eat for, you know, four days in a row simply because I know that by day two, it's probably going to get easier or not.

Not a lot of it. On off fasting eating's got to be just torturous.

So the way they did it was they did the continuous group was getting 75% of their maintenance calories per day.

So in a deficit and then the alternate day of group was doing 150% and then zero, right?

So you're getting an average of 70.

I would probably agree with that.

And then it's again, even if you're in a resistance training program where you're not really building much more muscle anymore, the process of remodeling is probably good for you, you know?

And I would just say try to ally some of these concerns from people who are concerned about getting too much muscle.

So I have been lifting really hard consistently for 25 years.

I am very comfortable saying I train harder than almost anybody else you can possibly imagine.

And anybody who has trained around me will back that up, back me up in the comments.

I'm I trained very hard.

And in a shirt, I look like an athletic guy who lifts.

I don't look like a monster, you know?

Like you might see pictures of me when I was a bodybuilding show like very, very lean and that looks, you know, over the top.

But for the most part, I just look kind of athletic and I spent my entire adult life trying to get too big, right?

So for most people unless you're on performance enhancing drugs or you just have incredible genetics, that's not going to happen.

And if it starts to happen, just back off on your lifting, easy fix.

So I think most people's concerned with that is is is a little bit misplaced.

And the other thing I'll tell people is like, Hey, some of these like fitness like, especially like for women, a lot of these fitness models you follow, they they show you certain workouts they do, they built that physique by lifting weights, right?

And you're you're thinking that's a toned feature.

Now that person is actually pretty muscular, right?

And so again, especially for women, there are exceptions.

Some people, some women have very great genetics for building muscle.

They usually wind up in track and field.

That sort of thing. But it's very hard to get too muscular for a woman.

And what I'll say is like, you know, typically muscle looks good.

And fat is what makes you kind of look bulky, you know?

So again, I want to paint with too broad of a brush.

But I would say that you don't really have too much to worry about when it comes to to getting too muscular.

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Since we're sort of in this realm of protein, maybe we build out from there because a lot of questions related to something akin to the following.

So, okay, so somebody strives to get one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight per day and I realize that whether somebody follows a pseudo intermittent fasting thing where their first meal does around 11 and they finish up eating around 8 p.m.

or a more traditional leading schedule.

It's just the addition of one more meal like in the morning.

It's like whether or not you eat breakfast.

Of course, some people shift it the other way.

They start with breakfast and they don't eat dinner, but I would argue that in order if you have kids or a social life of any kind, the most people can deal with sitting across the table with someone just having a cup of coffee for breakfast, but it's sort of awkward.

You limit yourself a lot in life if you can't eat dinner with other people.

I don't know, at least. And that's again where the rubber meets the road with what is practically doable because there's been some of these like circadian rhythm studies that suggest it will maybe early time restricted feeding is better than late time restricted feeding.

The more high quality, more rigorously controlled, randomized controlled trials are coming out now.

It seems to show that it doesn't really make a big difference.

And some of the again, the measurements you use matter, right?

So there was actually a very recent study where they looked at 12 weeks.

They provided all the food to participants equal in protein calories, the whole deal.

The only difference was one group was eating 80% of their calories before 1 p.m.

and they had a eight hour feeding window in total.

The other group had a 12 hour feeding window and were eating over 50% of their calories after 5 p.m.

I want to say. And so really like based on some of the the chrono nutrition stuff we've seen from some of the lesser well controlled trials, we were they were expecting to see differences in like glucose metabolism and whatnot.

And they just didn't really see a difference in anything.

And the only the I think the only thing they saw a little bit of a difference was in fasting blood glucose.

And here's what I tell people when you see a difference in fasting blood glucose but not HBA1c, you're you're looking at a transient difference.

And what I mean by that is HBA1c is such a great measurement because it's a spot an area on hemoglobin that can be glycosylated.

And so that is very dependent on what is your overall concentration of glucose in the blood over a 24 hour period of time because it's exposed the entire time it's in your bloodstream.

So whether you're getting it, you know glucose bikes at meals or you have higher fasting blood glucose it's going to be very reflective of the overall 24 hour area under the curve, right?

So why did they see why do some of these study see a little bit better improvement in lowering fasting blood glucose whereas HBA1c doesn't show up?

Well think about it if somebody's early time restricted feeding and they finish most of their food intake before 1 pm.

They have an extra like 6, 7, 8 hours that they're not hardly eating anything.

It doesn't surprise me that the next morning because they've technically fasted for longer, you have a lower blood glucose.

I can't I can't really back this up straight up.

That makes sense. It's measured.

But that I think is a logical explanation while you see some of this stuff and that's why I tell people you know the measurement you take really matters.

I think fasting blood glucose is a useful measurement but I put much more value on something like home IR, you guys see it clap or HBA1c.

So anyways I think the early versus late time restricted is kind of doesn't matter too much.

Great you answered a future question right there.

See I've your telepathic.

That's what you didn't know about them.

So the scenario here is whether they're not meals are distributed evenly through the awake day or stacked a little bit more toward the morning or stacked a little bit more toward the evening.

If somebody gets that 1 gram of quality protein per pound of body weight then they need to make up the rest of their calories with other stuff.

And we have broadly speaking starches, fibers, you know fruits and vegetables, starches and of course fats.

And weight gain and weight loss I think we both would agree is or weight maintenance is going to largely be dictated at this point by not you consume more calories than you burn or not.

So assuming somebody's getting that 1 gram of quality protein per pound of body weight is there any data that support or do you believe just by your own experience that there's some value in stacking the starchy carbohydrates toward the earlier part of the day versus the later part of the day.

And this has been an ongoing debate like I for instance like a nearly pure protein and fat meal for the first meal plus maybe a salad some fibers carbohydrates.

And then as they get towards evening I like more starches and I actually taper off the protein.

I find personally that matches what I need to do with my brain.

I'm more alert when I'm drinking caffeine and hydrating on a backdrop of slightly lowered carbohydrates.

But then as I get towards evening taper off the caffeine of course for me because I want to sleep well, start ingesting some more starches.

It's not starch heavy but I sleep like a baby.

But everyone would tell me and does tell me eating starches late in the day is going to make me fat.

Eating starches late in the day is going to do all sorts of terrible things.

I find the exact opposite for me.

So is there any real evidence that where one places their starches throughout the day matters?

And let's just forget resistance training for the moment because there is this post training window where I'll if I train in the first thing in the morning I will eat starches at that time.

But I'm let's just remove resistance training for the for the moment.

So again we're about rubber meets the road in practicality versus what hardline research says.

So I am not real convinced at all that it really matters when you eat your carbohydrate.

Thank you. Thank you. I think I knew I brought you here today for a reason.

No, I brought you for many for many reasons.

My bias has been validated.

I can leave now. So I really try to get people focused on the stuff that matters the most.

Right. So this is if we're worried about carbohydrate timing, even if there are differences we are zoomed way in on the blade of grass.

Right. We're not zooming out all the way.

And I think hey if somebody likes to eat more carbohydrate in the morning and that fits their lifestyle and that is easy for them to continue to do, then I would say do that.

And could I add in terms of not focusing on a blade of grass but something that I consider a major lever?

If eating fewer carbohydrates in the afternoon and evening doesn't impede your sleep, then you're okay.

But I would argue if anything is interfering with your sleep on a consistent basis, you've got a serious problem.

Yeah. So there are no solutions only tradeoffs, right?

And when it comes to carbohydrate intake, you'll hear people say the date is all over the place.

Okay. In terms of like timing and how people feel.

Some people say, well, I feel sleepy after I have carbs.

Some people have and I feel great after I have carbs.

Like I'm ready to go left.

I'm I have a big carb meal before I go left.

You know, it seems to be all over the map.

Now here's the thing when I'll tell people because people ask me how I eat people wanted me to do it, you know, a full day of eating video.

And I've kind of put it off for a while because I'm like, so much of the stuff I do, I'm not going to give you guys a citation for you know, and I know you're going to want it.

And some of the stuff I do, because I just like doing it that way, right?

Like I grew up in the era of bodybuilding magazines where they said, you've got to have a big carbohydrate intake and a big meal before you go train and a big meal after you train.

So guess what I did? I got in a habit of eating like that and it still sticks to this day.

I don't try to tell people it's better doing it that way.

Plenty of people have told me, hey, I don't feel good with a lot of my stomach when I go train or I if I have a carb heavy meal in the morning, I feel tired.

The data doesn't really support that in terms of like, you know, on an average response.

But if you know that you feel that way, then by all means avoid, right?

Like there's I remember one time I um, so I used to go to massage therapist in Tampa who would do cupping and there's really no data to backup the efficacy of cupping.

Yeah, not much. But she did it.

I like the way it felt and I'm like, okay, whatever.

So I posted a picture and be flexing one time, you know, and there's the cup marks all over and everybody's like, go and crazy like, how could you do this?

You're I'm like, hey, hey, hey, wait a second.

I never said this does this and I never made any claims about it.

She does it and I like the way it feels.

I'm not saying it does anything.

Actually, one of the things about being a scientist is like, now I'm impossible to placebo, which is really annoying because I would love to be able to placebo myself a little bit more because placebo effect is powerful.

And it's one of the, I was telling you earlier before we started filming like, it's one of the reasons I just don't believe a lot of stuff because I know how powerful the power of belief is.

I mean, you had, uh, Sean McEy on here, your beliefs about pain, change your pain, like actually change how much pain you get.

It changes your pain experience.

So one of the things I've become big on recently is, hey, what happens in the mind affects the body, what happens in the body affects the mind.

So just because I don't have a randomized control trial to support something, if we know the RCTs don't say it's worse, right, then you do whatever you like, right?

And I think a lot of people get a bin on a shape when I say, well, you know, when they control the variables that need to be controlled, there's no difference between intermittent fasting or just regular old color restriction or there's no difference between low fat diets and high fat diets.

What people here is low carb sucks, intermittent fasting sucks.

He said they don't work.

No, no, this is great. This is a great news for everybody.

It means you have all the tools at your disposal and you get to pick the one that fits in your lifestyle best because that is what makes the difference is what your overall lifestyle looks like.

And we have way too many people worrying about the minutia who just don't even exercise on the consistent basis.

So they don't sleep well on a consistent basis.

So they don't manage their psychological stress well, or they try to be perfect with their nutrition, then they fall off the deep end.

And what I'm saying is like, no, like be imperfect, but be consistent with what you do, right?

And so for you, obviously carbs at night have not made you fat.

Like I have eyeballs. So we can just dispel that myth right now.

Yeah, I would say eating eating the way I eat now, I'm leaner at 49, even then I was 10 years ago or 10 years before that.

I was pretty lean then. And I don't put a ton of attention to tracking calories, although, and I want to be very, very clear, I this I was not paid to say this.

Like I I've purchased and use Lane's carbon app.

He happens to be wearing a shirt.

This is carbon today. But I've talked about this before on other podcasts and social media.

And it's absolutely true that there's no endorsement relationship.

I but I love the app because that was really the first time.

I since college, as I started lifting, I was 16 running and lifting has always been my thing.

Well, like even a year ago, the lowest it's been, I think, has been like 750 and the highest it's been, it was like 1050.

And so I obviously don't need it.

You're well, you're on the upper, you're on your high normal.

Right. Yeah. So the reason that I've been able to have so much six, and I get the skepticism, I really do.

So many people say I mean, look at how many people are out beating their chest, saying their drug free.

And then it comes out that they weren't, right.

But I have been brutally consistent for 25 years.

In 25 years, the longest I ever took off of resistance training was seven days.

And it was after I won World Championships in 2022 for M193 kilo.

You know, I so I've been able to be really consistent with my training.

And I always give this comparison of, and I think it just really highlights how powerful consistency is.

And it relates back to my favorite quote I've ever heard.

The magic you're looking for is in the work you keep attempting to avoid.

The work is the hack. If people, and I liked what our friend Peter at Tia said this when he was talking about biohacks and why I didn't like the term biohacks, he said, I don't like that occupies so much mind space, right.

You get people really focused on the minutia, which is fine if they're already doing the big stuff if they want to kind of level up a little bit cool.

For me, minutia is where I live because the difference between me winning a powerlifting meet me losing World Championships is 1%, right.

But for most people, we just got to get inconsistent.

If I said Andrew, I want you to become the best three points shooter you possibly can be, but you can't get any coaching.

You can't even watch any tutorials, right.

But all you did for 10 years was go out and shoot three pointers for two hours a day.

You probably won't go to the NBA, but I bet you'd be pretty good at three pointers, right.

And I feel like if people could just get that message and internalize it more, no, it's not that you didn't have your carb to fat ratio perfect.

No, it's not that you ate your carbs at the wrong time.

No, it's not that you didn't get exactly this much protein.

It's you just stop being consistent.

You stop doing it. Yeah, you were really consistent Monday through Friday.

And then Saturday and Sunday came and you blew out, right.

Like if I'm consistent with my budget Monday through Friday, but then I blow it on the weekend, hey, guess what?

That weekend, money still counts.

And calories are the same way.

And you enjoy resistance training.

I love it. I love it. Do you do cardiovascular?

Defined as because people get I'm starting to catch black these days when I say cardio, believe it or not, but repetitive motion movement design to elevate your heart rate for 12 minutes or more.

So I'll do usually do like a five minute warm up on the bike before I train.

And then I will, I will also make sure I get at least 10,000 steps on average per day.

I usually average more closer to like 11,000, but I don't do a lot of purposeful cardio.

Now what I will tell you is my average heart rate in lifting sessions is about 140 to 150.

So if the definition of cardio is that that I'm getting cardio and actually when we when I've had, you know, most of my markers of metabolic health assessed, I'm very metabolically healthy.

I've got good, actually, it was funny.

I just competed at nationals in late May.

And I think one. So I won.

And actually again, very cool kind of side story.

You we talked about the injuries I've dealt with.

And so I'm 42 now. It's been an eight year journey.

And I mean, going from I've had back pain so bad, I couldn't even get up the floor needed a quarter zone injection of my spine at one point, just be able to stand up.

And multiple hip injuries, a lot of chronic pain I dealt with.

And I'm very proud of myself that I never gave up because in my heart of hearts, I felt like I haven't hit my last PR yet.

And at Nationals this past year, I actually set a national dental record for my agent weight and it was actually an unofficial world record and qualified for world championships.

But the one of the team USA coaches, his name is Matt Gary.

Him and his wife Susie are like an evidence based parallel thing.

There are the goats. And they are there is no better game day coach to pick attempts than Matt and Susie Gary, other than maybe my coach Ben Eskro, Sean to Ben.

But they were at the meat and we've known each other for 15 years.

And the next day I came down into the lobby and they're down eating breakfast and mats like your ears must be burning.

We were just talking about you.

And I'm like, Oh, well, he goes, you know what I'm impressed with?

He goes, your cardio vascular fitness.

And you know, a balancing meets nine lifts, right?

You get three attempts on squat bench press deadlift.

And so I kind of like looked at him where he goes, we were there between warm ups and finishing.

It was about four hours.

You never sat down. You were yelling the entire time.

You're talking the entire time because I'm a very extroverted, active person.

Then when I'm firing myself up, it comes out very extra.

He's like, you're yelling the entire time.

And you never were tired.

You're and I again, I look at my part rate and I was at the meat.

I think in the average was like 150 or 160.

And so, you know, some people will not consider that cardio.

But I would say my cardio vascular system does all right.

So I would argue it might be related to you're not getting sick very often.

You know, it's very clear that activation of the sympathetic nervous system is one main driver of the immune system.

This is why often people observe that they go through a very stressful period of life.

And then they go on vacation and they get sick.

Yeah. Or they're taking care of a loved one and that person either gets better or passes away or you know, they're some ending to that care taking.

And then they get sick. I have observed that exact thing.

When I went through my first divorce, I was also getting, I was also involved in a lawsuit with a company that I used to own a portion of.

It's a very long story. I ended up having a good ending for me.

And all that stuff kind of resolved itself.

The divorce, the lawsuit, everything resolved itself in about a six week time period.

As soon as it resolved, I got sicker than I ever had been in my entire life.

I got the actual influenza.

You know, I tell people after that experience in 2018, I go, here's words I'll never use again.

I think I might have the flu.

No, you know, after you've had it for sure, you know.

And I mean, it, but it was like my body had just, maybe it's a little bit of woo, but it was like my body, I dragged it across the finish line that said, okay, we'll see you in a couple weeks because we're taking a break.

You know, you think about human evolution.

I mean, these are just so stories anytime people talk about human evolution, by the way, like no one really knows, but the idea that, you know, if there was a famine or you need to take care of children and famine, the idea that you would be more vulnerable to disease at those moments, sure.

But it's also true that the cataclysmines, dopamine, epinephrine, norapinephrine, activate certain components of the immune system that protect you against things.

I mean, it's not going to protect you against everything, but it's when you relax and rest finally that you are more vulnerable to incoming infection.

We see this with pain too, right?

Like, you had Sean McEon talking about this stuff where, you know, I forget who was talking about this.

I remember listening to a podcast with it wasn't him, but there was another pain expert, and they said, you know, because your beliefs about pain, your stress level, your sleep, like your psychological maloo actually matter in terms of your pain experience.

In fact, the single biggest lever I've pulled to get me consistently training and pain free was becoming more relaxed and less stressed out all the time, and managing my psychological stress better.

You know, when you're not vibrating and spun up all the time, your body has, again, this is a little woo-woo-ee, but I think you have more energy.

I mean, if you look at...

Makes sense. It makes sense.

I mean, those cataclysmines, I mean, there are other molecules involved too, but that, you know, dopamine, epinephrine, or epinephrine, you know, cocktail is driving us forward in motion and thinking, you know, all the time.

And if you're putting dots into one set of things, they're not going elsewhere.

Like you said, it's all trade-offs.

I read something from a PhD in psychology who said, stop thinking about your problems.

The problem is you're thinking about your problems too much, thinking about it doesn't solve them, and just ruminating on the makes it worse.

And actually, again, if you look at like pain literature, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, syndrome, very close ties to psychological stress.

And we were talking earlier about, like, if you look at the data on mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer, with ACEs scores, which is adverse childhood event scale.

So, zero being best, you were loved as a child, that sort of that you had no real big worries, 10 being basically abused.

There's like a very, I don't want to say very tight, but there's a dose response of ACEs scores on the risk of mortality.

So, what happens in the body affects the mind, and what happens in the mind affects the body.

And we were talking about with pain literature, what happens in the mind affects the body in your pain experience.

And even just something like sleep, there was a study done where they looked at military members, and they had eight hours of sleep versus four hours of sleep, and they looked at the risk of acute injury.

236% increased risk, and the people getting four hours of sleep versus eight hours.

And now, here's where people get this wrong.

Somebody reached out to me and said, well, I got four hours of sleep last night.

Should I? No, no, no. One bad night of sleep doesn't do that.

Sleep was a cumulante 90s, and he ate a steak every day.

He smoked till pretty late in life before he eventually quit.

He had ice cream dessert after every dinner.

His Argentine, so they they stacked their meals toward the end of the day, definitely.

Like walking, I guess the point is that he was always interested in what was in the newspapers, but he wouldn't get riled up about it.

He liked walking. He really enjoyed life.

Like if there's one key characteristic to describe him as he really enjoyed life.

Now, he didn't take the best care of himself in the in the sense that had he perhaps never smoked or quit earlier or, you know, dropped the excess calories.

He might have lived in additional two or three years, but he was really happy until the end.

And that's the lesson there is we're not saying that that stuff doesn't matter.

He would have gotten better results if he hadn't smoked if he had, you know, paid more attention to nutrition.

That's what a thing. But we have to keep in mind like what is the hierarchy of importance and the power here, right?

And so I'll give you an example.

It's a it's we're going to assume it on the blade of grass, but I believe it relates back to this conversation we're having.

So we know creatin works because we've got thousands of double blind placebo control trials showing that creatin works, right?

But there was a study where they gave people creatin or didn't give them creatin and then randomly told them if they got it or not, meaning you had people who didn't get creatin, got creatin, who didn't get it told they didn't get it.

People who got it told they got it and people who got it told they didn't get it.

And what they found was the results.

And I forget what they actually specifically measured, but the results basically were like not what they got what they told them.

Okay. Now people will misinterpret that as we'll see creatin doesn't work.

No, no, no, it works. It just means your beliefs about what creatin does or more powerful than what it actually does, just like actually there's a similar trial with caffeine.

And I'm thinking about there was a study I don't have the specific citation, but they they had two groups of men train drug-free.

One group they told they were getting steroids.

That group gained significantly more strength in muscle mass.

Now, I would argue that's probably because they're going into training sessions believing that they can train harder, believing that they will recover better.

But that goes to show the power of placebo and the power of belief.

When I say placebo, people think what I'm saying is you're lying about your experience.

That is not what I'm saying at all.

I think your experience is probably quite valid.

What I'm saying is it may not be due to the thing you think it's due to, but your beliefs about the thing.

And so where I get really focused is let's do the big stuff right because so many people are so worried about little stuff.

And one of the things I'll tell them is, hey, I have no data back this up.

But my intuition tells me that the amount of stress you're spending on these small variables is probably killing you faster than if you got those variables wrong.

And if we could just focus on the big rocks first.

And if we can pick up some pebbles after we get the big rocks, great.

But don't drop the big rocks trying to pick up pebbles.

I love it. And I love this example of the creatine experiment because just to repeat the conclusion because I want to make sure that people don't take away the wrong conclusion.

And creatine works. Absolutely.

But your belief about creatine works more in this case.

Yeah. So two things can work one more than the other.

And the placebo aka belief effects are very, very powerful.

Exactly. Completely agree with you there.

Wonderful way to set the stage for some of the specific questions that were asked when I said on social media, I'm going to sit down and lay norton again.

And I'm very curious about some of these as well.

So I'll inject some of my own experience and questions.

Training to failure and reps and reserve.

We should define these a little bit.

And before we get into it, it's fun to have these kinds of conversations nowadays about resistance training knowing that both men and women should resistance train people who want bigger muscles and who don't should resistance train because in the past it was always about like body building and preseason football and people going to the military.

I think thanks to the great work that you've done.

But I'll just give a particular shout out to some of the women in the nutrition and fitness based namely Dr.

Gabrielle Lion in terms of menopause perimenopause, Dr.

Mary Claire Haver and women in that sector are really emphasizing the key need for resistance training.

Their other names as well.

But you know, really championing the importance of resistance training.

Training to failure in my book means when you can't move the weight by whatever means any more in good form in proper form.

That's failure. So we're not talking about forced reps.

We're not talking about swaying the upper body or using momentum when so train to failure.

You can't move the resistance anymore in good form.

And reps and reserve my understanding is one's own subjective understanding about how close they are to that point of failure.

Do I have that right? Yeah.

So you define failure the way I define failure, which is you cannot take the weight through another concentric repetition without breaking form.

Repson reserve would be an RIR of one means you stopped one Rept shy of failure, RIR of two, you stopped two Rept shy of failure and so on and so forth.

Right. And so I would define those that way.

Okay. So with those definitions in mind is training to failure more effective at generating strength and hypertrophy increases than if one keeps a few reps in reserve.

And of course, we have to balance this against all the factors related to recovery, etc.

But assuming that one follows a program of doing and I'm really just trying to cut us right through the middle here.

Let's say two or three exercises per muscle group and does after a sufficient warmup, let's say two to five sets that we're going to call work sets.

You could imagine an extreme scenario where every single work set is taken to failure.

You could imagine taking only the last set of each exercise to failure.

You could imagine taking none of them to failure.

Assuming adequate volume is achieved across the week, my understanding is this is 10 to 20 sets per muscle group across the week.

It could be distributed across different workouts or all done in one workout is training to failure going to generate more strength and hypertrophy than leaving some repetitions and reserves.

So let's start with the extreme scenario.

I go to failure on every single set and I do what I need to to recover.

It doesn't matter if it's a one, you know, only doing that muscle group once per week or spread out multiple times per week.

I'm doing what I need to to recover in between.

My genetics, my hormone status, my sleep, my nutrition, on and on is going to failure more effective than not going to failure.

This is going to generate a lot of discussion in the comments.

I can't wait to see it. So I'm going to cite quite a bit of work from my powerlifting coach Zach Robinson because he is at FAU just finished his PhD and did a lot of meta-aggressions and meta-analyses on this exact topic.

So I'll give you the answers first that are straight down the line scientific answers and then I'll explain things.

For muscular hypertrophy, you need to get close to failure.

But you probably don't need to train to failure to maximize hypertrophy but you got to get pretty close.

You can be stronger but to maximize strength, you're probably better off not touching failure very often.

So there are a few studies now looking at this showing that I think there was one study recently and I can't remember these exact details but that I remember it being pretty well designed and the takeaway was hypertrophy was similar between the groups but the group that went to failure or stayed a few reps shy of failure actually got stronger compared to the group

that was taking most sets to failure.

And did they control for total volume of work?

Yes, because I can imagine not going to failure you can do more sets because you've got and that's exactly more quote-unquote gas in the tank.

And practically that may be a benefit of stopping shy of failure, right?

But yeah they control for those variables.

So when we talk about volume the way we define that is essentially a number of hard sets which a hard set would be a set close to failure.

The general consensus is within five reps of failures considered a hard set.

Now what I will tell people is that may not sound like much.

Most people have never truly pushed themselves to failure.

Okay and I'll give some practical examples of me.

So my best set of squats ever I did 530 for 10.

This is long time ago. When I finished that set I actually somebody had to come save me because I couldn't fully lock out my lumbar and I couldn't get the bar on my right side all the way back up so I went to run over in the gym and help me.

After that set I laid down and I physically hardly could move for about 15 minutes.

So this is you know gun to the head.

Yes, do as many as you can.

Your family has been kidnapped if you don't get these 10 reps you're you know all those mental games.

That's sort of thing. I mean I was done you know what I mean.

And so one of the things I'll tell people is the first five reps of that set were still hard.

They still felt hard right.

And so people who say oh you stop a rep or two shy failure you're trained like a like you so you're telling me if I stop two reps shy on that one that that's an easy set because it's not I can tell you that.

And the reason I'm giving this background is because in research studies where they have people who are like beginners or intermediates and they ask them to rate their RIR they tend to underestimate their RIR right.

So they they'll say you know during a set say your RIR and they might say two and what they find is when the researchers push them to true failure yell at them crank the music get them really psyched up.

They get five more reps than they think they'll get on average right.

So most people if you've never actually taken things to true failure you actually probably don't know what it is.

So I do think it's useful to train to failure at times.

I think you make a very important point which is that occasionally training to failure gives you a sense of what failure really is for you.

And and no one can really tell you that only you can tell you that and experience that.

But if I understand correctly earlier you said once you know what failure is for you then if strength gains are your goal.

And I think more and more people by the way are training for strength who don't want hypertrophy at least not across every muscle group.

I think when I talk to the general public which I do a lot I get the sense that men and women are like yeah I'll lift weights I can see the value of that would love a little bit more muscle here a little bit more muscle there but they don't want to be generally larger.

And yet they cannot understand and appreciate the value of getting stronger everywhere.

Because being strong across your whole body is one of the core definitions of health.

Thanks strong as fun. So again for hypertrophy doesn't seem to matter if you take every set to failure or stop a couple reps shy.

I would argue that probably you'd you'd want to leave most reps.

Roast sets shy of failure and if you're going to take one to failure take the last set of an exercise to failure.

Because then you can get whatever benefits might be there.

But if you take the first set to failure I mean imagine if I did that like set of 10 with you know 5 30 on squats as my first set to what am I going to get the next set if I try to do 5 30.

I can tell you based on how I felt maybe three reps maybe you know and so your performance is just going to really drop off a cliff if you're going to true failure on like a compound exercise.

Isolation is a little bit different.

And so I would say whereas if you you probably could have done like sets with you know six seven reps for multiple sets and then have gone to failure on your last one right.

Now it may seem a little bit counterintuitive why would it be the same for hypertrophy but different for strength.

Well strength you also have to think about stimulus to fatigue ratio because fatigue will mass strength right and I know this because I've like when I overreach for powerlifting competitions which is basically like we're taking me a little bit past my point of what I can recover from.

I mean I've had literally before nationals in 2017 I was warming up on deadlift and my last heavy deadlift session like 10 days before the meet and I went to pull my final warm up which is 585 and I couldn't budge it off the ground.

I was so tired sore I couldn't get it was like I couldn't get my body to do what I wanted it to do 10 days later I pulled 716 right it's amazing what what fatigue will mask and so if you're always training to failure you're going to be training under pretty high fatigue circumstances.

It doesn't really matter for muscle growth because it's really just about doing enough hard sets and putting that mechanical tension on the muscle.

With strength you also have to think about like what is the most pure form of strength it's force production right and forces mass times acceleration so you have a you have a mass component you have a you have a speed component and so this is actually Zach Robinson in this company David David driven strength who I've been coaching with for three years I heard them on a podcast

and he was giving his like hypothesis of how to optimize strength in a power lifter and I remember thinking I really like the way this guy is thinking he's thinking outside the box and it makes a lot of sense so one of his things was if you're training close to fatigue all the time and the goal is strength think about what that means in terms of your force production so let's

let's say you do a set of eight reps right your first few are pretty fast and then by the end they're pretty slow the load hasn't changed so what happens to your force production your force production is going pretty far down he said I don't really want my athletes grinding reps and training I want them to hit some heavy singles and doubles and triples because they need

that because that's a skill you have to have those neurologic if everybody's done this where they go why I hit this for 10 reps and here's what my run rep max should be and then they go and get stapled with it right because it doesn't necessarily translate because a one rep max or the purest form of strength is a very specific skill if you've never trained it it's very

difficult to get accustomed to so we want to hit some his idea was you know in workouts we're going to hit a heavy top set heavy single double or triple or whatever it is and then our back offsets instead of taking those close to failure instead of doing say well we'll do you know 75% of your your training max for sets of eight and have you getting pretty close to failure

and seven three sets of eight why don't we just do like six sets of four with that weight because now you're doing those first four reps which you can move that weight faster you're having greater force production and creating the good stimulus but with less fatigue and so again that was kind of the hypothesis and he did a men and I'll suspend a regression that supported

this and now some of the randomized control trials have come out and shown something similar and in my experience I was honestly shocked at because he had all kinds of stuff to deal with when he first started training me because I still was dealing with a lot of back pain a lot of hip pain I hadn't really gotten that under control yet and when I got ready for worlds in 2022

which I think we did our first podcast like the week after I had one worlds I worked up to being able to do like two or three hard sets of squats a week and deadlifts and that was all I could do that was all my body could tolerate before I get pain and so we did a lot of low load relatively low low for me you know 60 to 70% 1RM for low rep number sets but trying to move it as fast as

possible to keep that pain under control for me but to get the stimulus and I was shocked at how strong I got because before in 2014 15 when I was winning open national titles I mean I was doing 15 20 hard sets of squats and deadlifts a week and and way more for bench press and so I always thought well that's how much I need to get to that level of strength and even now like so we've

we've been able to keep progressing it now I'm doing probably more like six seven harder sets of those exercises per week and I'm basically back to the the strongest I've ever been doing way less sets and I think a lot of it is we have learned to find the sweet spot with managing that stimulus to fatigue ratio so all that to say if your goal is building strength it's mostly

about you know doing enough like heavy lifting that you actually do get stronger and then if you want to train closer to failure you can because again most my audience isn't trying to be a power lifter right no but I think a lot of the audience would like to be stronger and not necessarily grow their muscles bigger except in a few specific places on the body and so this would be

the protocol there we go protocols we'll plug this would be a protocol for probably not necessarily like growing the most muscle mass but getting stronger because you're not training so close to failure but you know obviously you're trying to move as Zach says you whatever that given load is you want to move it as quickly as possible and so and there's actually also data to

show that like if you train slower purposefully then it's not as good for strength so they actually there was a man I think a men analysis recently when they looked at either concentric repetition of slower than two set of more than two seconds or less than two seconds and so I'll shrink that comes where better and people taking less than two seconds to complete a rep

interesting so that's the concentric phase now the lowering phase the eccentric phase we're not sure about that yet interesting so I mean we do we do use some tempo training in my training but it's mostly because like me doing a slower tempo squat if my back starts acting up I can do some squatting and not really hit that pain trigger as much so but I'm still trying to

move the concentric as quickly as possible and so I don't know about that doesn't matter how slowly you move the concentric versus how fast you move it but I was going to try Zach's way of training you know three years ago so I was very very excited about it you know so I think there is a place for that but I think people tend to fall into a little bit too much of doing the same

thing over and over or constantly changing things because they're always chasing that novelty and I think that the reality is probably somewhere in the middle but specifically for older over 50 I think whatever you can do with low pain level and be consistent with that you enjoy that's what's best for you I mean I always tell the story I had a client who they loved

CrossFit they loved doing CrossFit and they said you know what I want to but I want to build muscle and I know it's not the best workout for building muscle I said it might be for you because if you hate bodybuilding training and you're not motivated to go do it and you don't enjoy it you're probably not going to work hard at it and so maybe for you a CrossFit workout is the best

muscle building workout because if I try to get you to do something else you'd hate it and would lose motivation right and it feeds back to that consistency principle that you talked about before exactly so when we look at like I think this is might be interesting for some of your listeners so when we look at how much muscle you can build after a certain age you can build

the same amount of muscle as a percentage of your starting skeletal muscle mass okay so what I mean by that is 150 60 you've usually lost some muscle okay and if you've never lifted before if you go into lift as a percentage basis it appears that you will still gain the same amount of lean mass but for example if somebody has 80 kilos of starting lean our most your podcast

listeners or USA assume so let's say somebody has 150 pounds of lean mass when they start just throwing around a number and they gain 10% over a couple years now they have 165 pounds of lean mass they've gained 15 pounds but they the percentage is 10 if somebody starts and they have a hundred and say 20 pounds of lean mass 10% of that is 12 pounds they gained an absolute

less amount but as a percentage it was similar or same and we actually see that with women too women actually develop as a percentage of their starting lean mass the same percentage increase in lean mass as men when they do the same level of hard training so what I tell people who are I'll hope people say well you know I'm too old to start resist no no now is the perfect

time to start right now and honestly it doesn't take a huge dose I mean if you want to be like you know go get in a powerlifting and like compete at competition yeah now it takes a bigger dose right but what it takes to get and I'm just gonna throw a number out 80% the majority of the benefits for health strength resistance training you could probably get in three four sessions

of 30 to 40 minutes you know you don't have to have a huge input of time and just look at the depression study we talked about obviously that's not like muscle and strength but two sessions of 25 minutes I mean it is a absurdly low dose that you require and I think a lot of people I try to be careful about this too we'll see how I train which is two three hours a day for five days

a week and think that's what's needed no that's what I want to go win a world championship that's what's needed for that it's not needed for you to build muscle and get stronger and even when I was at grad school across the street they did a study in frail elderly where they had them basically they had trouble like standing up from a seated position and by the end of a 12

week study of them like progressively overloading them which was basically like them just lowering the seat at first right and then maybe adding like a little little bit of weight they saw these people built muscle built bone got healthier better quality of life and these are people in their 70s and there was a study in Australia that actually got on the news Peter

Tia talked about it with elderly women who I think they were above age 70 and there's some of them in their deadlifting like 150 like like upper hundreds in deadlift you know it's incredible how I took a class called skeletal muscle structure function in plasticity your skeletal muscle is so adaptable it is such an adaptable tissue it's amazing the same thing that can allow

somebody to squat he's just all of a shout out squat over a thousand pounds is the same tissue that can allow somebody to run a hundred miles like David Goggins think about that that's really incredibly adaptive and so what I'll tell the people who growls of your age your sex whatever demographic you are in resistance training for just a couple times a week for a short

period of time will drastically improve the prospects of your quality of life your longevity if we look at hand grip strength we look at lean master all inversely associated with mortality especially the older you get becomes a stronger association and always tell people like it's not about the hand grip strength this is a proxy for just strength overall right

there was a study where they looked at pushups and found pushups were inversely associated with mortality it's not that doing pushups is magic it's that that is a proxy for that person being strong and we focus so much of our attention especially like on falls in the elderly right of well if they had more bone mass they wouldn't break their bones what if they didn't

fall in the first place because they were strong enough and had good enough gate and balance to catch themselves and oh by the way nothing better for increasing bone mass than resistance training so I am a huge fan and then we already talked about like the metabolic like skeletal muscle Gabrielle touched on it was one of the first things Don layman said when I came

in his lab he goes skeletal muscle fits every definition of an organ and we don't talk about it like an organ we talk about like it's this inner tissue that just sits there and it is not it sends out signals to other tissues it integrates signals from other tissues it is an endocrine organ and so many people have unhealthy skeletal muscle and if we treat it and what happens

when you resistance train what happens when you build muscle muscle is a metabolic sink it is greedy right it's sucking up it's incredible you could take people who are type 2 diabetic and if you get them on a slight calorie deficit you get them to start exercising it is incredible how fast their blood markers will start to resolve like they can still be obese and you'll

see their blood markers start to resolve within like you'll see improvements in weeks layman did a I want to say a 16 week study and either diabetic or prediabatic women back in like 2003 I want to say and he said within four weeks he said we already saw these blood markers start to resolve like your HBA1C hasn't resolved but a lot of the other markers start to resolve

because at a fundamental level at least in my opinion and other metabolism people may disagree I'm a big fan of Occam's razor which is plainly stated the simple all things being equal the simplest explanation is typically true the the the actual hardcore scientific definition is the the hypothesis that requires the least amount of assumptions is usually true

you're putting in so much energy into a system and you're running out of places to put it so you have skeletal muscle mass you have liver these other tissues and periphery and then you have adipose tissue and did you know they actually show people who have more adipocytes are actually more resistant to type 2 diabetes so they have more smaller fat cells that can soak

up more of this stuff and since type 2 diabetes is basically too much glucose in the blood right and a lack of insulin sensitivity small adipocytes are more insulin sensitive and so what happens is we at least in adipocyte physiology we used to think of adipose is also an inert tissue and now we know that's not true either and lots of different cell types we did just

think that there was you know brown beige and white fat cells and subcutaneous intravisceral now they've done you know sequencing of different white fat cells and like 25 probably now 50 different I mean different genetics among those cells that respond differently to insulin I mean fat is a very interesting and it's really an issue to issue yeah but most fat cells

at least based on literature I've read and again I'm happy to have somebody correct me who's an expert in this but they can expand to a certain point where they really becomes difficult for them to get bigger the integrity of the cell because you still got a cell wall you have plasma membrane everything and you have an extra cellular matrix that is scaffolding this fat tissue

onto your body and so at a certain size of adipocyte it basically becomes you just can't pack any more in there okay and so if you can't put any more in muscle because muscle isn't you're not active and muscle is not moving and churning through substrate and you can't pack any more in adipose where's it wind up it's in your blood you can't care and now when your blood levels

of it's interesting because there are some people who have all these theories but like one person a researcher was like well I think branch chaminocytes actually cause insulin resistance because we see them elevated in the blood in type 3 diabetes and I was actually in a it was in a I was a grad student watching this person present I put my hand if I said isn't everything

elevated in the blood in type 2 diabetes you know why are we picking up branch chaminocytes so you do have some people who are two can become type 2 diabetic who are no bees they tend to have not as many fat cells which sounds like it be an advantage and if you're lean or sorry if you are not overeating right and getting enough exercise in it probably is an advantage because you

have less overall fat mass but you are going to reach that critical mass of an adipocyte of about 100 microns I think it is faster because you're you're overall fat cell number so at the same fat mass your fat cells are bigger and bigger fat cells are less insulin sensitive in fact one of the treatments for type 2 diabetes so far you're re as I think they're called their

p-bar gamma agonists they actually increase the production of fat cells they create new small fat cells now you have a place to put stuff and you lower your blood glucose so very it's a reservoir exactly and I'm over generalizing to be sure and again I hope if I've butchered anything somebody who come and correct me they will but what's amazing is this stuff in the blood

you just got to get stuff moving like because you start doing exercise start controlling your calories a little bit guess what you're oxidizing things with the crep cycle you're oxidizing going through glycolysis you can now start to pull things in right you're you're using this substrate you can start to pull things in and because you're pulling things in now

adipose can start to release some of its free fatty acids into the blood I have someone to try to still glycerides into free fatty acids into the bloodstream which can also facilitate this this must so using muscle you are it is a partitioning effect and it doesn't take long to start lowering this glucose blood lipids these things in the blood it can actually resolve

you know at least those markers can start resolving themselves pretty quickly which is why you know when we look at weight loss what level of weight loss they say is clinically relevant it's only 5% right which you'll have obese people and they'll say well 5% weight loss you see these big benefits in like blood lipids and metabolic health you wouldn't think which is 5%

weight loss you would get that but you do because just you're just giving a little bit of space to get that stuff in the blood out now again this is my I want to be very clear this is not a proven thing I I feel pretty strongly that this explains a lot but again this is my personal opinion about how these diseases develop and whatnot but it is I think it's relatively simple

yeah using thinking about muscle as an organ thinking about feeding muscle we talked about that earlier thinking about moving muscle and in particular training for strength resistance training of different kinds hypertrophy yes and but I you know I'm kind of giving a little bit of a biased vote for more strength training out there across the population for really

for the longevity reasons I mean Peter T has pointed out that the percentage of people who die after a fall not because of the fall itself but because of a hip injury or a wrist injury and then they're they go immobile not or they're just not exercising as much anymore than they get an infection and then it cascades in fact I had a conversation with one of my parents recently

on their 79th birthday I said you know in the next 5-10 years your biggest risk is probably going to be going downstairs or stepping off a curve not going up but as Peter's pointed out going down so that that eccentric movement break you know being able to sustain a fall being able to not fall to catch yourself so to speak well I'm practically you fall farther going downstairs

and you do going up exactly and this and that pattern of falling while going down precedes a lot of infections and that end up deadly right so yeah and I you know hats off to Peter for really pointing out the relationship between those things and to you for encouraging people to strength train also I love the idea that I don't have to go to failure if I'm strength training

because I like training heavy but the the training to the point where the the muscles are quaking yeah even though that's how I initially started training because I came up in the Mike Menser camp I actually find that it eats into my recovery in a way that yeah maybe is a little more subtle but meaningful and nonetheless which is that I do fatigue later in the day whereas

if I complete a training session where I can complete every rep I notice I don't get into that quaking thing I actually have a lot of mental and physical energy later in the day and it's psychologically emotionally fatiguing as well maybe this one could be out of a brief answer or maybe not I don't know are there true age-related changes in metabolism that are independent

of decline in muscle mass you know I saw a paper I think it was published in science a few years ago that said that metabolism actually doesn't slow that much as we age of course total muscle mass so you mean BMR BMR okay so metabolic rate in general you know I well I should just say up until that paper came out I thought okay as we get all our quote unquote metabolism slows

then of course we have to remember that puberty and childhood is sort of like being on performance enhancing drugs in the sense that protein synthesis is just massive and ongoing but in a let's just say from age 30 onward let's say between 30 and 80 assuming that somebody's doing things to maintain muscle mass is there any reason to believe that they're they're basal

metabolic rate actually goes down just as a function of age yeah you're starting to work from herman ponser and really great lab looking energy expenditure that he does a lot of great stuff and so that study was looking at several thousand people I think looking at their total daily energy expenditure and really found it's pretty flat from like age 20 to age 70 and then

it kind of starts to go down but you can tie it to the loss of lean mass and same thing for basal metabolic rate when they do inter at climetry if you look at and this goes for so older people also women versus men and then also type 2 diabetics versus non-type 2 diabetics obese versus non obese 80 I think that the number is like over 80% of the variance in BMR is completely

explained by the lean mass by the amount of lean mass somebody has and by the way the last 20% probably is explained by where that lean mass occurs because liver for example is a more medically active tissue grant program than pretty much any other tissue skeletal muscle is more metabolically active than like the fat tissue but for a lean tissue is actually somewhat like

metabolically slow because it's turnover rate is only like one percent per day you just have a lot of it yeah right right but on an absolute amount of calories you burn you burn a lot in muscle because you have so much of it right great point um so things like gut liver tissues program of tissue are very active so yeah that just doesn't seem to be a lot for a long time we spent

so much time focused on the metabolism side of things when we're looking at aging when we're looking at obesity and we just didn't really find impressive stuff even so obese people don't have slow metabolism on average the the the research shows that actually on an absolute basis they're faster than people who are normal weight when you standardize for lean mass

it ends up being about the same people who are type 2 diabetic same thing when you standardize for lean mass if anything they have a little bit faster BMR and so if you think about it it actually kind of makes a little bit sense on a biochemical level because if you're insulin resistant you're also insulin resistant and fat tissue right so like okay so it makes sense

that maybe you like waste some more energy because you're not able to put it where you want to put it right so the people get upset about this because oh no it's got to be metabolism metabolism and then GLP1 mimetics have a really kind of shown no the answer to this question is very much on the appetite side of things it's like we tried to make a bunch of different drugs

that would increase metabolism we tried to do all these things to increase metabolism and nothing seemed to really make a big difference and then we came out with the most powerful appetite suppressants in the history of mankind and people are losing large amounts of weight and keeping it off so I think you know people got too focused on that metabolism side or or what I

hear a lot of is from like like post-millopausal women you all hear somebody say my metabolism dropped what probably happened you're sleeping less you're more stressed you don't feel as good because the hormonal changes you don't feel as good and so you spontaneously became less physically active and didn't realize it because our meat like our non-exercise

activity thermogenesis are non-purposeful physical activity that we do fidgeting pacing is actually a large portion of our daily energy expenditure and people get this wrong you can't make yourself do more meat because then it's just exercise if you're purposely doing its exercise it's all subconcious right but if you're not sleeping as well and you're feeling

worse spontaneously you just not move as much and I know that people like that feels like there's like a lot of judgment shame associated with that but it's it is the truth it is a practical limitation and it may not be metabolism I guess I'm a little bit pedantic with that but it still contributes to your overall energy expenditure and so again they've they've looked

at this and I mean there there is some evidence that like if your estrogen drops and you replace that with supplemental estrogen that that can like help out with like maybe 50 to 100 calorie energy expenditure per day so if you're replacing something that's like now clinically low but my guess isn't that it would also drive more activity feeling better more activity

so that's that's that's that's and that's where it's hard to to disconnect that right so yeah I think metabolism wise the result ended up being pretty underwhelming for all this stuff that we just assumed well if somebody's overweight it's because there's no metabolism the research didn't pan that out but I still think it was very interesting and again it speaks

to like the power of the mind and the connection in the mind of how some of these drugs act but I do tell people when they say we know I you know calorie deficit didn't work for me and I I you know obviously my metabolism was messed up because you know I had to get on ozimpyk to lose weight I'm like whoa it doesn't really do anything the metabolism like the speed of your metabolism

what happened is you just you no longer mindlessly snack you feel you you you are now in touch with your satiety signals and that's why you're losing weight and that's why these drugs they work all right so speaking of ozimpyk, mongaro and similar let's talk about these drugs that are reducing appetite and you know in fairness have allowed millions of people to lose

substantial amounts of weight and keep it off this topic tends to get people a little bit riled up on social media because I think for some reason people believe that if one gives these drugs the nod that you're essentially saying you don't need to exercise but I didn't see anywhere or hear anywhere that the use of any compound drug or otherwise is mutually exclusive

with taking good care of oneself in other ways too so what are your thoughts on these compounds and what you're seeing out there I think my take is pretty balanced on this which is I think they appear to be great tools for people reducing their intake and reducing body fat and it functions through appetite I mean these drugs are GLP1 memetics and so GLP1 is a hormone

secreted by the gut in response to feeding and it acts on the gut as well as the brain to reduce appetite you know slow motility so it's a it's a society hormone essentially now it has a very short half-life in the body so the reason a lot of people will come out say well there's things you can do naturally to increase your GLP1 this is like talking about I mean yes a BB gun

fires a projectile and a tank fires a projectile but there's a pretty big difference right so with GLP1 memetics what's happening is they're taking that protein and changing out some of the amino acids in that protein and it basically just gives it a much longer half-life that's why people can take it you know once a week or whatever it is because it just stays around

much longer and so if you think about the food environment we live in which is free access to cheap hyper-palatable foods our brains for the most part are probably not equipped to regulate appetite in that environment and it really actually is kind of incredible how resilient the human body is because if you look at when the obesity crisis started we already had

ultra-processed foods available we had cakes cookies all these sorts of things but the difference was you had to go to the bakery and get it you had there there had to be some small barrier right and then you know I think kind of the the barrier that got flipped was basically now you know in the last 30 years you can go anywhere and get access to cheap ultra-processed

hyper-palatable killerly dense foods and they just don't have the same effect on satiety that normal food does where like in Kevin Hall study at NIH where they took people from a mentally processed diet and switched them to an ultra-processed diet and they spontaneously increased their calorig intake by 500 calories a day like overnight that may sound like not a big

deal to some people listening that is a very big deal it's about a pound of week per week of increase in body weight yeah I mean assuming I'm not not super worried about that on a practical level I can see some concern with it because if you don't have much appetite you're usually not selecting protein it's kind of your first you know line of what you're going to pick and additionally

fiber you're not usually going to select is your first so I think again these are great kind of like if we think about like training wheels I think there's a great training wheels for people and through natural just having less appetite people start controlling their intake better and then all these other habits start to fall in the plate for some people and I talked

to a friend who she's an arch practitioner and she tried a GOP1 ametic just because she's like I'm gonna ever say what the stuff is like for me and then she talked to a lot of her clients and the the anecdotal feedback that popped up a lot was it stopped the food noise in my head I wasn't thinking about food all the time I just stopped thinking about it so much and if you look

at obesity I mean again it really is on the appetite side we know that obese people have lower sensitivity to satiety signals they get a greater reward from food like I just posted about a study that today where they gave a milkshake to people and they didn't really see a dopamine response and but and people with binge eating disorder when they give something like

that they do see a dopamine response so a lot of it is contextual right and so I think a lot of it's contextual around obesity of okay these are people who get a greater reward from food on average they're thinking about food more often they've probably also dealt with people telling them their entire life or however long that they need to lose weight and so food is always

on their mind and one thing or another it's kind of like in ghost busters where they say you know don't think about anything bad what's the first thing you're gonna do you think about something bad right and so trying to calm down food noise while knowing that you need to eat less food is probably pretty difficult so on the whole I think these drugs are positives I think

it's gonna lower the healthcare burden and I think it's gonna help a lot of people and the other thing I'll say is like there's been a lot of pushback in the fitness industry by fitness influencers why do you think that is like as if it's gonna take their jobs away it's like the same way that people fear AI like it's somehow like like this stuff is here to stay it benefits

many many people I feel this way about these GLP1 mimetics and I mimetics excuse me and I feel the same way about AI it's like these things could be yes potentially used for evil but but you know also for good if I think back about when I might have had that sort of reaction I was in my early 20s and that's when I thought obesity was a choice I still think there is personal

responsibility involved in obesity but I think my feelings about obesity at that time were when somebody's obese they're making the choice they don't care about the stuff they eat that mindfully they are choosing to eat these foods knowing this is gonna be the outcome like self-inflicted yeah and that I don't think that's the case at all I think a lot of people's

habits and behaviors are are on autopilot you know I can remember very clearly I dropped my kids off at school one day I stopped at 7-11 to fill up a gas and like grab something from the store drink and there was somebody there was a obese woman in front of me and she was getting two slices of pizza at 8 a.m.

and at first I kind of had that knee jerk response of so lazy of course you're over and then I thought you know what this is probably something she's done for a long time this is probably a very habit where she goes to 7-11 she gets pizza or on Tuesday morning at 8 a.m.

she's around this area and she goes 7-11 and gets pizza and maybe not but I think a lot of people out there like that whether habits and behaviors are very much on autopilot it's not this mindful mindfulness that we think they're doing and that translates into other areas and the other thing I I realized that I'm like it can't be lazy this like all of it because there's

obese people who are very successful in other areas of their life so they don't want to work hard and so at least not for everybody that can't be the explanation and I think with fitness influencers or people who have you know actually they've worked hard they've built a good physique it's almost like how dare you get results without without doing it yourself without

I did this of course because people aren't necessarily going out of robbing people but maybe just touch on your view of sugar as a substance we're not talking about the sugar in fruit we're talking about candy ice creams desserts, quote unquote hidden sugars yeah what are the real risks of these things if people are consuming them still within the confines of their

daily caloric needs so they're not eating excess calories what's the deal with sugar okay so this is where it's very important to give the appropriate context and nuance I'm glad you set it up the way you did so I always tell people when it comes to almost anything have guidelines not hard rules because hard rules will get you to do things that are kind of dumb right

so for example if you say I'm never going to eat processed foods well way protein is processed but if you look at the data on a way protein it improves metabolic health that increases lean mass body composition even lowers inflammation so I mean if we're just going to say all processed foods are bad will isn't then then way bad so guidelines in that nature same thing

for sugar because obviously okay well added sugar is it's not it doesn't have a big satiety benefit it's calorically dense makes food very palatable I'm going to come back to that because it's contextual but fruit has sugar and biochemically not really that different I mean if you're talking about sucrose okay it's a molecule of glucose and fructose okay a lot

of fruits have glucose and fructose in them right so if sugar has some inherent lipogenic biochemical toxicity addictive quality whatever we should see similar effects across different sources of sugar and we don't see that right and even when it comes to some of the the processed foods people don't realize what goes into creating making something hyper palatable

is complex it's not just sugar it's not just fat it's not just sodium it's texture mouth feel you mentioned temperature all these things matter and in fact there was actually a study a while back that suggested that texture might actually make a bigger impact on the palatability of a food than even the sugar content and let's take it more from a mechanistic level

from your example if you're in the confines of your calories what happens I would say a high sugar diet is still not ideal because it's going to be hard to get enough fiber in a high sugar diet but I long time ago beginning grad school I was under the opinion that sugar and high fructose corn syrup were calorie per calorie more fattening metabolic than healthy now is that a graduate

mixer with a professor named Maninakamura who was illinois and he had done some of the feeding studies in rats with fructose and seen these weird metabolic effects right and I overheard him having a conversation with another professor and I was shocked by what he said because he's the one that did this some of this research and the other professor said so you know

high fructose corn syrup is bad and fructose is bad he goes now it's really just the calories that are in it it's it's easy to over consume people consume it through soda and you know they just eat too much and and the guy was like well you showed all these things in these mice he goes we fed him like over 50% of their calories were from pure fructose that's pretty much impossible

to get through the diet unless like you're literally doing nothing but drinking soda and he said you know we showed a pathway but that's not practical in terms of like the application to humans and so I got curious I really started going down the literature on sugar trying to say okay was is he okay is he right about this is it is it really not you know calorie per calorie

more damaging than than non sugar carbohydrate when you look at sugar intake it is associated with increased levels of inflammation it's associated with obesity but there are what we call confounding variables which is people who eat a lot of sugar tend to eat a lot of calories so if we look at here's my favorite human randomized control trials where we control

total calorie intake and sugar intake what do we see and probably the best example of this was a study from Sirwit back in I want to say 1997 and the reason I'm going to pick out this studies because it had the best controls in it so they provided all the food to participants the protein carbohydrates and fats were all the same it was a I think it was a 1200 calorie diet and they

provided all these meals for six weeks and looked at fat loss and some blood lipids and those sorts of things and they found that so one group was getting over a hundred grams of sugar a day I think it was around I mean it was based on some like body weight energy expenditure stuff but I think it was around like 110 grams of sucrose per day right I'm sure other group like

around 10 so 10 times difference sugar and at the end of the study there was no difference in fat loss there was no difference in lean mass retention there was no difference in almost any marker they looked at the only difference they saw all the blood markers improved the only difference they saw was that LDL cholesterol improved a little bit better in the low sugar

group and that is probably a function of the fact that the low sugar group had more fiber we know fiber combined to out to to cholesterol and lower LDL cholesterol in the blood so when I saw that I was like oh man and then when I look through all these other studies with similar kind of controls they pretty much show the same thing across the board on metabolic health on inflammation like

inflammation really isn't different if calories are controlled with high sugar versus low sugar as long as you're getting enough fiber what about feelings of satiety because well that's the that is the real downside if you're eating like like if you're eating a 1200 calorie diet and 400 calories are coming from pure sugar I mean you're probably going to be kind

of hungry right yeah I'd be extremely hungry I mean I consume artificial sweeteners for the record right but there are enough data and I have enough experience with them to know that sometimes they will curb my appetite like they'll get me over the bump but I've come to associate it's probably just pure paired placebo association it's such a thing where if I drink

a diet coke pretty soon after that I want to eat something now I've challenged that by not eating something because I have pretty good discipline and it passes but I think I've come to associate the sweet taste with wanting to eat something and nothing to me is more delicious that well there are many things like a diet coke and slice of pizza from in New York or a diet

coke in a burger or you know that they're these as food associations but I don't think for instance that sweet taste necessarily stimulates appetite but I can imagine if I only had as you said 1200 calories a day to eat and I'm getting you know 400 of those calories from sugar like you said there's not going to be much I better be eating a lot of broccoli as well or else

I'm going to be pretty hungry just based on my learned relationships between sweet taste and food consumption well I tell people is I would focus less on like sugar intake I mean if you want to focus on added sugars that's fine focus on calories protein and your fiber content right because if you if you're getting enough fiber it's going to be hard to eat a lot of junk

doing that right and when we look at the sugar intake and calorie levels all that kind of stuff actually a great example would be the case of Dr.

Mark Howe are you familiar with him he's a Kansas state he's a nutrition professor in 2011 he got the name the Twinkie diet professor I'm not sure if you saw this but I know about the Twinkie defense right so he he asked his students what they thought mattered more for for fat loss the calories you eat or the food choices you make and they said most of them said food choices

and he said okay let's do an experiment do you think if I do an 1800 calorie diet from ultra-process foods exclusively then I will lose weight and get healthier and most of the students said no and so for 12 weeks he 1800 calories he called it originally the 7-11 diet he basically is like if I couldn't get to the 7-11 I didn't eat it he now the caveat is he had a multivitamin and he

had some way protein so he was getting enough protein because it's hard to get protein from some of those ultra-process foods and but 1800 calories and he lost 27 pounds and all of his blood markers improved and his insulin sensitivity improved now that seems crazy to a lot of people but for those people who have worked and looked at blood work with weight loss and whatnot I

mean it's not that surprising that is the one of the biggest levers for metabolic health and so when they asked him afterwards we you that what like what a great diet like you could eat all this all this junk food and he goes well not really like it's 1800 calories a junk food it goes really fast I was pretty hungry and honestly like at first week it was like oh this is kind

of nice and then after that I was like you know I'd really like just a really big salad you know just something satiating so again no solutions only trade-offs there is a benefit to being able to go well I can if I can fit into my calories it's okay as long as I get enough fiber and protein yeah the trade-off is it's a it's a high budget cost right same thing with people's

you know the data on like moderate alcohol consumption shows that it doesn't impede fat loss it doesn't if you account for the calories in it but I'll tell people like hey do you really like if you have like two craft beers do you really want to spend four 500 calories on like 24 ounces of fluid that's not going to impact your satiety at all and so I think a lot of people

view this for a very black and white lens right where it's like oh Lane says or this person says I can eat sugar and lose fat so I can eat as much sugar as I want no no no no no because there are practical limits to this right but take somebody like me right if if my calorie intake is my budget I train two three hours a day my maintenance calories are anywhere from 33 to 3400 calories

a day which is a not crazy amount but a healthy amount for somebody of my size I have a decent size budget right if I if I can still get my protein in get my fiber hit my micronutrient targets and I've calories left over for energy filler sure just like if somebody makes a million dollars a year and they want to go buy a sports car it's not a great investment it's not a good

investment at all why wouldn't they just bank every single cent they make well because maybe for them having that little reward motivates them to keep doing what they're doing and making that level of money right but if you're making in a let's take loans out of it right if you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year does it make sense to spend ninety thousand dollars

on a sports car if it means you can't pay your mortgage and you can't save money for retirement you can't meet your obligations no it's it doesn't make sense right and so if you're a small woman small lean mass wise who is trying to lose some weight does it make sense if you're eating twelve hundred calories a day to lose weight to spend three hundred calories of that on some

ultra processed junk food I don't think it does but if you're an Olympic athlete who's burning four five thousand calories a day good luck eating that level of calories from good minimally processed foods you're going to feel full all the time there there does seem to be a kind of requirement in books in sometimes even in podcasts or to take a stance like to be anti

something yeah because saying you know what I personally believe based on my read of the data is that most people should strive to get anywhere from seventy to ninety percent of their food from non-process minimally processed quality foods and then allow some space for the you know some processed food highly processed foods and sweets and things like that but mostly

to get the macros right as we've described them earlier and what the range will depend on age will depend on activity level will depend on prior health history I mean there's some people who have enough issues that relate to diet and lack of exercise that when I've seen them get it right and undergo such incredible transformations that like I also know these people's

capacity to fall off the train right and you want to say you know maybe make that number a hundred percent so you never go back because I've seen them slip before and then and then the guilt and then they come back excuse me so there are two ways to look at it one is use tell people listen you don't have to be perfect right because if the if perfection is the goal you're going

to fall off but then there are those individuals like severe alcoholics who quit drinking you don't say like hey like you can have a beer on Christmas you don't say that right it's all or none but anyway um here we're getting into the psychology of it but I think that that's what you're saying right there is that's where the individualization comes in right like it's

it's it's contextually dependent and it's been not in the individual and what makes sense for them and I think we as people if we find something that works for us we're a little bit too quick to want to evangelize everyone else around us because we want we do want to help we do have good intentions for the most part and we overgeneralize and I've you know for me again like

counting macros flexible dieting when I I I dealt with a little bit of binge eating when I was young when I first got into bodybuilding because I was trying to you know eat clean and I would end I was in college so my buddies would order pizza whatever that I like an entire pizza by myself right and so once I allowed myself to just have that the foods I wanted in moderation I

just got brutally consistent right so that for me that was the switch that flipped but other people that may not be the right solution and I think we we we make a bunch of well that diet worked for me we we assume physiology when actually I think it's much more psychology and just trips that compliance algorithm and somebody's head and it makes sense and if we could just

if we could just be willing to say more often hey this is what I do but I I like this and and you don't have to do it maybe try it yeah oh and and everyone struggles with different things and everyone finds certain things easier like I I'm not an alcoholic I'm an adult so I can have a drink or two I just don't like it so everyone assumes because I do this episode on alcohol that I'm

like anti alcohol like I'm like if you're an adult you're non alcoholic you don't have issues with you know alcohol used to sort or something like you might guess like just know the data right but there are certain things like steak I'm never giving up you could tell me it takes 10 years off my life and I'm not going to give it up I'll do other things to offset whatever

and that you know decrease in longevity might be I don't think that that's a real thing but I'm just not going to give it up it's central to my enjoyment of life yeah that period speaking of which when if one really wants to wait into the waters of strong opinions and conflicting data we covered this a bit last time you were on the podcast but the questions were replete

with requests to discuss seed oils I'm sure seed oils and I must say this whole thing about seed oils has really gotten in my head even though even though I'm a scientist like the the other day I went to my sisters for dinner and she made a really nice dinner and it's from our mom's birthday and then she made a really nice salad and I love fruits and vegetables so it's like

salad and then I looked and I was like she's made this out with like grape seed oil and I was like why do you use grape seed oil instead of olive oil and she's like well I ran out of olive oil and I found myself like looking at the at the salad like is this safe to eat I was like I heard your voice in my ear I also heard Paul's voice in my ear salad he was always going to thought well

I ate the salad by the way I really enjoyed it was good grape seed oil doesn't taste as good to me as olive oil yeah generally like trying to use olive oil butter things like that when I when I cook but what's the deal with seed oils I understand that they are colorically dense told us that last time I understand people tend to over consume them and then blame them for a bunch

of things that are not related to their seed oilness rather than their calorie containing this these aren't real words of course but you get the idea but are there any data out there that have your you know ears kind of pricked up to the possibility that assuming equal equal calories that there might be something bad about seed oils or is there zero and there's no pressure

here to answer one way or another not that you would respond to pressure from me anyway so I think it's all about making the appropriate apples to apples comparison right because if we're looking at addition studies of you know adding something to a diet adding a mega sixes linoleic acid linoleic acid whatever well if you're adding those you're adding calories

which is a confounding variable right so ideally what we what the real question is because the the bait tends to be the people who are anti-seed oil tend to be very procetuated fat and so the question really is okay if we swap out these things in a one-to-one ratio what is the outcome right so not like when outcome I mean metabolic health inflammation those sorts of things

so in the studies I have yet to find a good human randomized control trial where they give polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat you know exchange it a one-to-one ratio and see negative like actual outcomes what about swapping with monounsaturated fats like what why are we talking about seed oils versus lard and butter why aren't we talking about seed oils

versus olive oil yeah that's I've looked less than that just because people ask that question yet less but it seems like both poofas and moofas are better than saturated fat in terms of metabolic health and risk of front of astrophysic disease those sorts of things does anyone have a problem with olive oil I'm sure you could find somebody okay well that's a good way

for me to pose the question is there any reason to think like like for the person who isn't sure about seed oils because they've just heard enough negative things even if there's no basis for it like me who's like I like butter and I also assume that eating too much butter might not be good for me just because I'm a rational human being based on my read of the day anyway

so I have some butter yes but I like olive oil olive oil's tasty I'm told it's good for me is there any knowledge about anything in olive oil that says listen even if you consume it in concert with your colorect thresholds meaning you're not eating too many calories so anything bad in olive oil I'm not aware of anything but I will say like if you extend the logic of the the seed

oils crowd or anti seed oils crowd which actually I'm gonna make a new logical fallacy which is just appeals to seed oils because I so many times when I've laid out this data have people go basically like have a freak out and go but seed oils how dare you defend seed oils and I'm like I'm not defending them I'm just talking about data people on ex when I put out questions

for you're coming on this episode literally there were multiple people that claim that you are paid off by this by them by big seed oil and I was just like I have to laugh out loud I was like there might be a lot of companies that are large that make seed oils but I I guarantee they're not paying lame nor yeah say what do you say um so I find this actually very funny as somebody

whose research was funded by the National Dairy Council the Agnucishance Center and the National Catalan's Beef Association that somehow I would be the person who would be you know different and all these things act in opposition to it's like well you think I'm pro seed oil but then over here I've been defending meat with this thing right and then over here I've

been defending not sorry defending is the wrong word discussing the data on sugar which by the way those would be in opposition to each other and you're very pro fiber right right yeah so and even when I talk about saturated fat I don't like sex toxic it's gonna I say hey it raises LDL cholesterol which is independent risk factor for heart disease I'm just discussing

it right so I'll say what I said online which is I don't defend nutrients they don't need defending there's not ethical considerations here if you want to eat them I don't think you're less of a person I find it curious that some people get so emotionally and just like ethically entrenched around certain nutrients so the the logic goes something like well you have these

multiple double bonds and so they can be oxidized and so that oxidation is gonna cause an increase in inflammation which is gonna cause heart disease and cancer okay well all of all is a monounsaturated fat it still has double bond so by that logic it would still be worse than saturated fat so when we look at trading out and Mufas would fall in this too I believe if you

look at the cohort data polyunsaturated fat substituted for saturated fats have a stronger effect on reducing heart disease than then monounsaturated fats but monounsaturated fats do still tend to have an effect of reducing the risk of heart disease compared to compared to saturated fat okay so that would be trading out butter and lard on meat fats for more olive

oil right and just to add some nuance to it not all saturated fats created equal there are like steric acid I believe doesn't raise LDL cholesterol like it but in general saturated fat is gonna be something that raises cholesterol more it also again and I'm thinking of several randomized control trials where they feed the same calories they feed the same amount

of fat and they just have people either you know saturated fat or polyunsaturated fats you see either neutral or positive effects on inflammation you see neutral positive effects on liver fat you see neutral positive effects on basically overall metabolic health and insulin sensitivity so again and Paul actually counted this one time and he decided to study

looking at I think it was I don't want to say it wrong it was like giving omega-6s and they saw an increase in lipid peroxidation I don't think they were comparing it to saturated fat I could be wrong but again this is an example of a mechanism right so lipid peroxidation mechanism we can try to project what that might mean down the road but when we look at actual levels

of inflammation actual risk for cardiovascular disease actual insulin sensitivity actual levels of liver fat these are outcomes we can actually if we're worried about those we can actually measure them and again some studies show no difference some studies some of some of the studies I've seen on like inflammation between polyunsaturated fats and liver and saturated

fats don't really show a difference in inflammation but I'm not aware of any that show what going in the opposite direction where substituting in polyunsaturated fats actually raises inflammatory markers like CRP and IL-6 those sorts of things and actually one of the things I tell people when they're worried about you know fructose activates the novalypeogenesis in the liver

and I'm like well here's this study where they overfed fructose and saturated fat by the same amount and saturated fat increased liver fat by 70% more than fructose so if you're worried about fructose you better really be worried about saturated fat now again both that's an overfeeding study they're eating excess calories but again calorie per calories saturated

fat was worse for liver fat so that's kind of where I land on it I just you know maybe I'm missing some data but when you're when you're looking at these studies again I'm looking at not one study not two studies I'm looking at 50 studies or however many studies are as on the topic and I go on this forest plot where do they land and when they're almost all on one side or neutral

I feel pretty confident that that's something not to worry about right so let's let's take another discussion to tie this and I think this will help people understand how I come to a conclusion about this sort of stuff so I do not necessarily think red meat is carcinogenic even though the IRC has classified it as probably carcinogenic right because when you look

at the studies you can find studies that associate red meat with cancer and you can find studies that show no associate of red meat with cancer and so it's kind of all over the place now there's probably more that show the association than don't but when you look at like studies where they control for overall diet quality so I'm thinking of a study out of Canada back

in 2020 I think the author was Maximova I want to say they looked at different levels of red meat intake and incidents of cancer but also with different levels of fruit and vegetable intake and so what they found was at low levels of fruit and vegetable intake lower red meat consumption reduced the risk of cancer relative to higher red meat consumption but at high

levels of fruits and vegetable consumption I don't think there was a significant difference but actually the high level of red meat consumption was lower risk than low red meat high fruit and vegetables I believe I believe I have that correct in terms of the absolute risk and I don't know if it was statistically significant but what that says to me is red meat is more

of a proxy of poor overall diet quality and if you control for that with some diet proxy of fruit and vegetable intake you know if you're eating a lot of red meat and a lot of fruit and vegetables there's not really a whole lot of room in your diet for a bunch of crap you just described the way that I eat and that any time a friend of mine and this happens a lot comes to me and has you

know 20 to 50 pounds to lose you know well make it as easy on yourself as possible you can eat meat eggs vegetables and fruit and that's all you're going to do for two months and most of those guys in this case they were guys lost a substantial amount of weight and kept it off they all exercised as well and of course it's called restriction related yeah hard over it yeah

but they're not touching pasta they're not touching bread they ask me all the things that you can I do this and yeah I just said listen if it wasn't the list I just gave you you're not eating it sounds restrictive the good news about something like that is that it's generally tastes good and steak is very satiating it's delicious yeah if you don't like me I suppose this wouldn't

work but but I don't think there's anything magic about that diet it just gets people below their maintenance calories with relative ease well it's simple you could probably still do it in a restaurant right because you just asked for meat and vegetables right socially compatible so there's there is some beauty and simplicity there's beauty in what I do which is I

track everything and I can have whatever I want you're going to have some form of restriction to lose weight you pick the the kind of restriction that you can stick to right so bringing that all back so you have this data that's all scattered on meat right and then let's look at something like dietary fiber okay because people say when you you can't establish causation this is some

people might say well the the carnivores might say well it's all healthy user bias if it was healthy user bias there'd be some disagreement in the data and there's no disagreement in the data I am not aware of any study looking at dietary fiber intake or fruit and vegetable intake that doesn't show reduced risk of cancer reduced risk of cardiovascular disease reduced

risk of mortality usually in a dose response and it is very consistent now some studies might show more of a risk reduction versus other studies randomized control trial looking at LDL levels it says nothing about what the eight before and you know in that time frame what's the likelihood people are going to have heart attacks or some sort of myocardial infarction it's

pretty low now that we have all these like data banks of you know blood samples and whatnot from people from all these old studies they go back and do these analyses and when they look at LDL cholesterol and plot it so lifetime exposure to LDL cholesterol and plot it against the risk of heart disease I mean you can pretty much draw a straight line through it and so to me

that's pretty strong evidence if you're if you want to apply the same logic of what we have this you know and LDL by the way can cause inflammation in the endothelium so you have that damage to it because the April Epib protein that attracts inflammatory marker so people are getting some of this cart before the horse and then the other thing that sealed it for me was again like

HDL they looked at the same thing at HDL turns out HDL is just kind of a marker of metabolic health it's good to have high HDL but HDL itself doesn't appear to be protective because if they raise it with drugs or look at people who secrete more or less it doesn't seem to independently modulate risk of cardiovascular disease so all that to say saturated fat is really only

an issue I would say for the LDL the fact that it can raise LDL and there is some evidence it's not necessarily good for the gut microbiome because the bile salt in products from emulsifying saturated fat because it requires more bile that those might be toxic to some beneficial species of bacteria but here's what I'm not saying I'm not saying don't eat any saturated

fat what I'm saying is again your overall diacquality is what matters I think it's fine to have some saturated fat I think probably try to keep below 7 to 10% of your daily calorie intake what also matters is there's no solutions only trade-offs and so if somebody says to me you know I was able to lose 50 pounds on low carb and everything got better but my LDL went up a little

bit and they felt like that was the only thing they were able to be consistent with I'd say on balance they're probably better off with that slightly elevated LDL than they would be if they kept the 50 pounds on now I would argue if they had lost the 50 pounds and lowered their LDL their overall risk would be lower than it is now but again we have to look at what can somebody

consistently execute so all that to say I'm not saying you should consume seed oils I'm not saying that there's no negative downsides but if we look at comparing it to a comparable molecule of saturated fat there's a much more compelling argument that saturated fat is bad for you versus seed oils.

Thank you for that very thorough and very clear answer and I just will highlight that you ate a steak last night so you were by no means anti-meat or saturated fat.

It is steak right in front of a vegan.

Okay. It was not to aggravate them just because they stuck to their principles you stuck to yours.

I was originally going to order fish and they said it's okay if you want to go steak and I said okay if you say so now they did make a couple of comments ingest during the meal.

Fair enough. Let's talk about artificial sweeteners.

Sweet. That's the other people that pay me.

That's right. He's kidding folks.

I got into it. It wasn't a scrap we got into a little disagreement about this years ago so long ago that it's probably not even worth mentioning that you know I was somewhat enticed by the data from Dana Small's laboratory then at Yale I think now she's up at McGill looking at some kind of Pavlovian conditioning of artificial sweeteners so basically children in that case

consuming a high amount of I think it was either sucralose or saccharin in combination with a meal kind of standard meal and look at the insulin response and then removing the food component sometime later and what they essentially observed was a conditioned insulin response so they then have these kids just have the sweet tasting non-chaloric drink minus the food

and they still and they then saw an elevated insulin response.

In other words the same way that Pavlov got dogs to salivate in response to a bell that was paired with food then you remove the food and then they just simply salivate in response to the bell.

The idea was well maybe you can create a conditioned Pavlovian like response to artificial sweeteners.

Okay I thought it was kind of a cool study looking back I probably wouldn't have covered it the way I did because it's not a typical scenario.

It's not everything's technically diet soda but I think people know diet drinks in particular where they're comparing them they tell people either switch out either have cola or have diet soda or sorry diet drink or just use water.

Now they absolutely every single one of these trials they lose weight going to diet drinks usually a pretty significant amount of weight.

Yeah and usually as I recall pretty significant amount of diet drink like two liters a day even like the person will carry around a liter or two liter of diet drink and sip on it whenever they get thirsty or hungry.

Yeah so then what's really interesting is they they've done direct comparisons to water and some studies don't really show a difference but several studies and several meta analyses now have shown that when people if they have either them use water in place of regular soda or diet drinks in place of regular soda the people actually lose a little bit more weight

and it's statistically significant with the diet drinks.

Now I don't think diet drinks are fat burners okay they're not causing you to have increased energy expenditure but if you are somebody who is used to a sweet taste if you switch to water perhaps you're seeking out that sweetness elsewhere and so maybe those people are consuming a little bit more sweet food or whatnot whereas in the diet drink group maybe that's filled

that sweet taste for them.

So I don't get into the back again this gets it like people get very like ethically charged about they're like what's wrong with drinking water there's nothing wrong with drinking water if you can drink water you feel satiated and you maintain your body I'm just struggling because if drinking water becomes an issue online then I would already have no no it already

has all right I'm not quitting but that's that's that's ridiculous yeah well so again perhaps that mechanism exists but at least on average it's obviously washed out by the fact that for whatever reason for most people who do this they get a little bit more satiety out of consuming a diet beverage as opposed to substituting water for a beverage.

Now again if you're somebody who you can drink water and you don't have an inclination for diet drinks then don't do it it's you don't need it but again I look it at as we need to lower the barriers for people to start getting healthy and unfortunately a lot of people with the message of just drink water and they'll say well diet coke is just diet so it's just bad for you

is regular soda or it's worse for you than regular soda their intention might be I just want people to drink water but the outcome is people go why can't I get my soda so I'm just gonna drink regular soda then right and so while your intention was positive the outcome is actually kind of disastrous right and so we have to disconnect with the intentions of the message

off from what the what it actually produces and so that's why I say hey if we're moving levers if somebody if somebody is obese and they came to me and they're like well you know I drink five just coke is a day I'm like fantastic because I'm thinking five diet soda is instead and now we have just saved 750 calories and you're gonna start lose a weight just by doing that right

which again people say well what about a hundred years down the road or whatever I'm like well most of these sweeteners have been around for decades now we do have quite a bit of data on them but let's say that there is something we don't want again I'm shooting the alligator closest to the boat right like we know what obesity does so and and people who do these diet drinks

lose weight they get more metabolically healthy so again if it comes down to soda or diet soda by all means let's do the diet soda and if there's some small negative effects to it we'll deal with them so that brings me to the gut microbiome most of the research studies in humans where they use reasonable doses don't really show much effect on the gut microbiome however

there are a few with particular sweeteners like sucralos that do show an effect now there was one that got a lot of play and you would actually talked about this I think we actually talked on the phone about this and it was an interesting study I thought it was well done but I want to be careful about how over generalized it was so the first part is in this study they selected

for people who basically they did a very very like intense selection process where I think there was over 1500 people who were like originally included in the study and they riddled them down to like a hundred something because they wanted people who had really hardly ever used artificial sweeteners in their life and that's a pretty small percentage population what they

found was a lot of people submitted saying I don't use them I've never used them and then when they did dietary recall logs like oh well actually you're using it here and you're using it here so they selected all these people out and they found that when they gave them sucralos that the composition of the microbiome changed and they called it dysbiosis and I'll come

back to that because that's a scary sounding word first off what's interesting is if you're somebody that population that they're selecting those are probably people who have been specifically trying to avoid them because if you're not even if you don't try to consume them they're everywhere so if you haven't been consuming them it's likely that you're specifically

trying to avoid them which probably means that you have negative thoughts and beliefs around artificial sweeteners and again we've discussed the power of belief before I'm not saying it was a bad study because of that I'm just saying we had to be careful about how much we overinterpret this research data.

Are you saying that the potential that those subjects had to believe that something that zero calorie sweeteners or low calorie sweeteners could be bad for the microbiome might have actually made their got microbiome more dysbiotic maybe I mean again what we've talked about the power belief is very powerful now I have I have no way to support that right I'm just

saying be careful before you overgeneralize plus it was a two week study and just two weeks yes it was two weeks now again two weeks is two weeks is enough time to show differences in the gut microbiome actually a few days is typically enough time and only for sucralos so stevia no change there was another there was another sweetener that I think had a change it might have been

saccharin saccharin and sucralos are the ones that seem to always show the biggest effects quote unquote and I don't know how often those are used in diet drinks these days I mean less and less I mean it's usually aspartame stevia more in the kind of wellness health fitness crowd drinks sucralos is pretty ubiquitous a lot of diet products and whatnot but I like like

like being frank my way protein powder without nutrition is sweeten with sucralos I mean it's a it's a great sweetener and so some people will take that as well of course he's going to defend sucralos because in his protein but if I thought it was really bad I would just use a different sweetener so what I will say as well is gut dysbiosis sounds bad but it simply means

that the gut microbiome changed and I have several friends who are gut microbiome experts and they'll when we sit down and talk about this stuff they're like I mean they're take away as yeah like 50 years we'll probably have a really good idea of this stuff but right now we like we just know that certain things change it we don't really know like if it's a good change

bad change so I'll give you an example in it there was another study that did show a gut microbiome shift with sucralos and they showed some of the species of bacteria that were increased or decreased and one of the species that was increased I believe I'm gonna butcher this so badly I think it was bloudiacocoidus was the name of it or at least how I tried to read it right

because these are very like strange Latin words yeah the the names of bacteria are really difficult yeah to pronounce now what's interesting is this species of bacteria was associated with better metabolic health lower risk of obesity um better insulin sensitivity and so I kind of walked away saying well couldn't you make the argument that sucralos actually

changed the gut microbiome for the better based on some of this data and so I'm not saying that what I'm saying is the following we don't really know if that changed the gut microbiome is a good change bad change or neutral we just know that it changes so if you want to avoid fine but if you're somebody who really struggles with moderating your intake and a sucralos is or an aspartame

or whatever have you helps you moderate that intake then again you're shooting the alligator closest to the boat let's let's focus on the big stuff right and that's kind of where I land and again I hold open that perhaps my mind will change and adjust but sucral has been around a long time the other thing people bring up is cancer they'll bring up cancer with artificial

sweeteners and I'll give you an example why I'm not worried about this first off you have to keep in mind that negativity bias in the news all right things that are negative are much more likely to get played than things that are positive okay think about how much you hear about this causes cancer this causes heart disease versus this protects against this this protects

against this it's also safer to when the media warns people off things as opposed to towards things because if they push people towards things there's more reliability right push people away from things rarely are they responsible for the opportunity cost there or the trade off as you as you refer to it right so you hear a lot people like oh man all these studies say

that these cause cancer so again I'm gonna give a shout out to consensus because it's a great AI tool that basically will give you like if you ask the question and there's some filters that help with that it will give you kind of like this percentage of studies say yes this percentage same possibly and this percentage say no have used it a little bit yeah and if you type

in does aspartame cause cancer for example 80% say no and then like I think those split as like 13% say possibly and 7% say yes right but you would never know that from like listening to social media watching the news but I want to point out one study in particular that did show an association of aspartame intake with cancer and it was from the NutriSanti cohort I think

that was out of France like 100,000 people and they looked at like people who didn't use it versus people who were like low moderate users and then people who were like high users they categorized in the turtiles and between the non-users and the low moderate users there was like a I believe it was like a 15-ish percent relative risk increase in cancer incidents and that's

what got reported in the news and then that dropped to like a 6% increase risk in the high group so it did this which I'm not aware of any carcinogens that they actually decrease in terms of the risk like carcinogenesis as they go up in like the concentration and so to me you know one of the things you've got to realize my PhD advisor used to say if you torture the data enough

it will confess what you wanted to say and so if you go through a large group of people and you start trying to associate things with other things you'll find things but you got to be very careful with how strongly you interpret it and so for me again if I'm feeling strongly about for me to feel strong about something there has to be some kind of dose response or at least

like if there's a bell curve sometimes you see that but you know very rarely especially with with cancer stuff usually this is kind of a linear effect and so again that's where I land right now on artificial sweeteners I land on them is a useful tool for a lot of people I don't think they're magic I think they occupy that sweet taste for a lot of people and if you can completely

avoid them and abstain from them and you're perfectly happy then biomines do that but if they help you maintain a healthy body weight then biomines do that love it you've dealt with some injuries you've dealt with pain you talked a little bit about how reducing your stress and interpretation of the pain could help I want to talk about pain and pain management but before

we do that a more general question that relates is about recovery tools many many people want to know okay if we were to create the pyramid of the hierarchy of tools for recovery after training and here let's change out or let's use resistance training and cardiovascular training interchangeably some people run hard other people lift hard or do both from the moment

that session ends what do you have in your in your kit of things to maximize recovery over the shortest possible amount of time and I can immediately think of sleep as critical but what are the things that you can do starting from that final repetition so I think it's not so time dependent and like I say it's more about what you do over the course of 24 hours and you know

in your day-to-day lifestyle but sleep as you said also you nutrition so being consistent with nutrition and you don't have to get in you know ultra fast adjusting carbohydrate and you know 50 grams of weight isolate right after you you know but it's probably a good idea within a couple hours of finishing your workout that you have you know meal with high quality

protein and that you're just eating an overall healthy diet throughout the course of a day and we've kind of discussed that at length you could do it immediately after you can yeah you can absolutely quick I'm an in layer in an additional question is there any evidence that fruit is not good at replenishing glycogen as compared to starch because the reason I ask this is that you

know like if I finish a workout and I have some like a way protein shake with a bunch of berries in it and a couple bananas assuming equal calories is that going to replenish glycogen the same way as if I have a couple scoops of weight protein and a bowl of oatmeal and rice this is going to circle back to our mechanism versus outcome and this is one where I change my mind because of seeing

outcomes so the reason this comes up is you fruitose your muscles and other tissues lack the enzyme to turn fruitose into muscle glycogen your liver has that enzyme so your liver can take fruitose and turn it into liver glycogen so that has led some people in sports science or research to say well don't have fruitose after workout actually fruitose is kind of a dead

carbohydrate right because it's not going to replenish muscle glycogen and then I was reading a study from Tracy and Josh Anthony which were they came out of layman's lab and they actually are responsible for really flushing out a lot of the imtor pathway a lot of that translation initiation pathway very very brilliant people and I'm glad I got to see them a few weeks

ago in my advisor got this award Tracy personally taught me how to Western blood so thank you Tracy they did a study where they looked at glycogen replenishment after exercise giving either sucrose which is 50% glucose 50% fruit dose or pure glucose and actually if I recall correctly they actually got a little bit better muscle glycogen replenishment with sucrose

now this how do you explain it that seems completely counterintuitive and there I believe again it's been sometimes since I read this paper but I believe the explanation was by providing some fruitose what you're doing is you're kind of satiating the liver's need for glucose and so that glucose that does come in from sucrose can then kind of just bypass the liver

and be available for muscle whereas if you're getting pure glucose the liver is going to start picking things off now it wasn't a if I recall correctly it wasn't a big difference in the rate of glycogen replenishment but um nothing is people don't realize well even though fruitose can't be used to replenish muscle glycogen directly you forget about how the body

operates in terms of whole body metabolism and you can store fruitose as glucose glycogen in the liver and then the liver can release that glycogen at some point into the bloodstream and then that can be taken up by the muscle and turned into muscle glycogen so again when it really boils down to what are you doing on a 24-hour basis and what I will say too is the rate of glycogen

replenishment gets really tossed around a lot as something really important for the most part the rate isn't so important if you're eating enough total carbohydrate on a totally daily basis and enough calories you'll replenish your muscle glycogen and most of you people I always say dude you're weight training for an hour you're going to do it again in 23 hours

you got plenty of time to replenish that glycogen you don't need cyclic destined or dextrose or whatever and so I'm not really worried about that I think where the rate of glycogen replenishment really matters is when you're dealing with athletes who have multiple events in a day right where it is they're going to perform and then they need to replenish quickly

before they go to the next event or you know people obviously doing like endurance exercise where like iron man's triathlons and that sort of thing where you know getting in that replenishment and keeping it going is very important but I think for the average person who's just exercising once a day not really a big deal just make sure you're eating enough total carbohydrates

so for you the berries and the fruits in the in the way approaching afterwards excellent okay and then perhaps and then typically I'll do a meal that includes some starch a little bit later in the day yeah great so nutrition post workout or in the eight hour or two post workout thinking sure you eat enough in the following hours do you include any kind of stress down

regulation are you are do you do anything else besides nutrition and sleep to accelerate sure so stress management like you said so I am blessed enough that I currently live at home on Tampa Bay and I get to watch the sunset over the water every night and that might say that might seem like a weird thing but I really feel like that is helped with my stress level viewing

horizons we know just you into panoramic vision we know this from stuff like your new house right yeah panoramic vision is is a will you know come off the the accelerator of the of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system which is just nerds speak to say enjoy those sunrack I went looked up some more research and I've actually changed my mind a little bit

okay which which probably wouldn't surprise you that I've completely changed my mind but I've shifted a little bit so first off my first thought was exactly what your thought was this is all getting broken down to constituent amino acids does not like you're taking college and just like putting it in the place you want it like just you know like that sort of thing

so my in my skepticism was also because one of the highest quality protein metabolism labs out there where Jordan Trombola is is Luke van Loon Luke van Loon's lab is one of the best protein metabolism labs in the world and they were publishing research back when I was in graduate school in fact I think Jordan and I were actually in graduate school at the same time so they

did a study where they looked at after exercise giving either way protein or college in protein and they looked at skeletal muscle proteins to this and they looked at connective tissue protein synthesis right and they saw no difference between way protein and collagen protein and connective tissue synthesis after exercise and so by the way collagen did not stimulate

muscle protein synthesis even like 25 grams I think it was which most protein sources even like plant protein sources will stimulate muscle protein synthesis at like 25 grams so it's very low quality so it's low quality in terms of skeletal muscle anybody who's telling you like your like collagen's good for building muscle I mean it's better than no amino acids

but it's one of the worst you can get in terms of all protein sources so that study I again since I know this lab I have a lot of trust of the data that comes out of there right and it was a world design studies will execute study but then there's these men analysis out there looking at skin looking at you know even like some we're trying to make associations with connective

tissue injuries and whatnot and again I'm always a little bit have the heebie-gb's when we we jump straight to we have an outcome but we don't know what the mechanism is right and then I start reading a review by Luke van Loon actually and I was talking about like the so that collagen is three alpha helixes so if you think about DNA right it's a it's a double helix right

so think about three helixes and an alpha helix just refers to the way a protein is shaped and they are they have a very large amount of glycine so glycine is an honest enchilimino acid and every third residue in collagen in the three alpha helixes every third residue is a glycine molecule so 33% of collagen is glycine and then I want to say 10% is proline and then another

like 10% ish is hydroxyproline so proline that's had a hydroxyl molecule out of to it and that's done apparently the the hydro nobody needs to know this but just for fun stuff the hydroxyproline helps stabilize the structure because of the hydrogen bonding with the hydroxyl molecules which I found interesting so you have these three amino acids and amino acid

derivatives that make up over half the amino acids in the collagen protein and well my next thing was well a lot of non-essential amino acids if you give them in the diet they don't really raise non-essential amino acids in the plasma because the got liver extract a bunch of them glycine is different if you give there was a study looking at giving just one gram of pure

glycine and looking at the rise in plasma glycine and I think it went up like I think the like native level of glycine in the plasma something like 250 micro molar and after giving a gram of it it went up to like 400 micro molar I'm I'm giving my best estimate based on the graph I saw and so then I got thinking okay that's I guess possible if you have more glycine and proline

I didn't look I didn't see the proline data but if you have more glycine and proline that's winding up in the plasma not that they're being directed to those tissues but since those tissues use so much of that amino acid perhaps it does help and then if you look at like way protein versus collagen and the content of glycine and proline I think collagen has like three

to ten times the amount of glycine and proline in it compared to way protein so am I right?

your audience that is not being dismissive that's actually respect for them it would be disrespectful to just give them the answer they want or give them a quick answer without the explanation so I just really want to extend like a real voice of gratitude for you for what you did for us today just far too much to list off it's all so valuable just so so valuable and also what you

do on social media and the way you do it and look I also really love and respect your your fighting spirit because you're fighting you're fighting for truth you're fighting for good and I also love the posts and the pictures of your kids they're delightful and it's great to see that the balance in your life you've created so I could go on and on but I'm going to cut this short

by just saying a giant thank you for being the signal among all the noise well uh speak for yourself of being long-winded because I'm not I honestly I I appreciate that that means a lot to me um you know I I recognize how you know valuable your platform is and how many people want to be on it and the fact that I've been asked to come on again I really appreciate it and uh to

be able to have the opportunity to disseminate this information and not just talk about the studies but talk about hey here's a here's a method of thinking here's a way to approach this stuff and I mean I you kind of pointed out like I would love to be able to say yeah see the rules are bad like I'd love to give you that answer I can't I can't do it I can't make myself do it because I

look at the evidence and I'm glad you said spirited I I do feel like I do have some fighting spirit but at the end of the day I I tell people you know I'm human I got my own biases my own beliefs and I like making money like anybody but I and I like to be right but at the end of the day I I want to help and I believe that if I continue to execute on that mission that you know financial

stuff will take care of itself and at the end of the day I just want to be want to be a net positive on the world so thank you for giving me that chance it's been a true pleasure and you're absolutely more than net positive on the world um and we'll just have to have you come back and uh talk to us again before long thank you so much anytime thank you thank you for joining me for today's

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[Dr. Lane Norton: The Science of Nutrition, Training, and Evidence-Based Decision Making]-[Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness]

📋 Summary

Navigating Nutritional Science: Evidence, Mechanisms, and Practicality

The Hierarchy of Evidence

Protein and Muscle Growth

The "Big Rocks" vs. Minutiae

Metabolic Health and Modern Tools

Conclusion: The Power of Belief

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript