How to Lose Fat & Gain Muscle With Nutrition | Alan Aragon | Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Alan Aragon.

Alan Aragon is one of the most influential and respected figures in the fields of fitness and nutrition.

The reason for that is because of his strict reliance on evidence -based information, and because he's co -authored some of the most highly cited and respected studies and reviews on nutrition and fitness.

His expertise covers nutrition and training for women and for men, and for anyone who's seeking better health, fat loss, muscle and strength gain, or all of the above.

And in today's episode, we cover all of that and much more.

Alan clarifies the myths and the facts around things like seed oils, whether or not it's better to do your workouts fasted for sake of fat burning, low calorie and artificial sweeteners, sugar, alcohol, collagen and more.

Allan also explains how to determine your actual protein needs.

Despite all the discussion nowadays about protein, there's still a lot of confusion about this actually.

He covers the real science on meal timing, protein and carbohydrate intake relative to your training, how women's hormone cycles impact their training and nutrition needs and eating and training for body composition changes for anyone.

There is just so much advice and information online, line, but also in the peer -reviewed literature on nutrition and fitness nowadays, which makes it very challenging for anyone seeking to understand and implement what really matters toward their fitness and body composition goals.

If ever there was a voice of practical reason who is grounded in the peer -reviewed data, but who is also willing to acknowledge individual differences and preferences when it comes to fitness and nutrition, it's Alan Aragon.

And today he shares that information with us, and he also makes it clear and actionable as to what really works.

Thanks to Alan. By the end of today's episode, you will be armed with the latest and best knowledge on nutrition and fitness that you can apply.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science -related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Alan Aragon.

Alan Aragon, welcome.

Andrew, it is awesome to be here.

like literally awesome.

I'm not, it's no exaggeration.

This is, I'm super stoked, man.

Thank you for having me on the show.

Yeah. Well, I've learned a ton from you through our online correspondence, and we've met once before in person.

Let's get down to some important topics that are very actionable, because this is what I love so much about your work.

It clarifies so much of the confusion that exists out there.

I think this is really one of of the signatures of your work is that it clarifies.

Let's start off with something that many people have heard, which is that we can only assimilate 30 grams of protein per meal.

And the simple question is, what constitutes a meal?

Like if I eat 30 grams of protein and an hour later I eat 30 grams of protein, did I just eat two meals?

Can I assimilate 30 grams in each?

And can I assimilate more than 30 grams of protein under certain circumstances?

So what's the deal with this protein assimilation thing?

Okay. Well, you elucidated one of the issues right in the question.

It's like, are we talking about isolated, quickly digesting protein?

Or are we talking about a slower digesting protein?

Or are we talking about any one of those within the context of a mixed macronutrient meal with carbohydrate, fat, fiber?

All of those conditions alter the behavior of what happens physiologically.

And so the origin of the whole 25 grams of protein max is all you can use is the confusion of the two separate concepts.

So there is digestion and utilization at the kind of entire body level where protein has various metabolic fates for various systems and just various homeostatic needs of the body.

And then there is the specific phenomenon of the muscle anabolic response or muscle protein synthesis.

So we have to separate, okay, digestion and absorption in general or muscle protein synthesis.

So the 25, 30 -gram cutoff, it's usually listed like some people say 20, that refers specifically to muscle protein synthesis where there seems to be a plateau at 25 -ish, 30 -ish grams. And we thought this all the way until, gosh, from the late 90s, early 2000s, all the way up till 2016 -ish or so.

So in 2016, when McNaughton and colleagues compared 20 grams of protein versus 40 grams of protein, but instead of doing what previous researchers did with the training bouts being very low volume, like 8 to 12 sets, you know, a couple different leg exercises, you know, leg extensions, leg presses, 8 to 12 sets total.

And then you assess the muscle protein synthetic response to the protein dose.

what McNaughton and colleagues did, they hit the subjects with a 24 -ish set regimen full body.

So it was a little bit more ecologically valid in the sense that they tried to mirror what goes on in the real world with training regimens with people who are trying to build muscle and really elicit this anabolic response.

So when they ran this experiment and And they compared 20 versus 40 grams of protein.

The 40 grams of protein actually had a greater muscle protein synthesis response than the 20 grams. And it took us all the way to 2016 to figure that out.

And then a series of studies just kind of progressed from there and proceeded to kind of debunk this idea that muscle protein synthesis plateaus at 20, 25 grams. But now, and there's some interesting recent studies on that as well.

Up to 100 grams, as I recall.

That's exactly the study I was going to bring up.

That's by Jorn Tromelin and colleagues, where they compared a 25 -gram dose with 100 -gram dose post -exercise.

They used a slow -digesting protein.

They used milk protein, which is 80 % casein, which is a slow -digesting 20 % whey, which is fast. So mostly a slow digesting protein, and there was significantly greater muscle protein synthesis with the 100 -gram dose compared to the 25 -gram dose.

But my big issue with that study is they really, really needed to include an intermediate dose to see whether there would have been a plateau in MPS with something like, let's say, 40 or 50 grams. And that's because there's a lot of other research seeing that plateau somewhere between 30 and 50 grams. So I wish Jorn et al. included an intermediate dose with that.

Maybe a future study.

Let me just pause you for a second and ask a couple questions.

Sure. If you can give an across -the -board recommendation of how much protein people should consume post -resistance training.

Let's just leave cardiovascular training separately for the moment.

Post -resistance training, what would that number be?

Would it be 20, 30, 50, or 100?

Should it scale with body weight?

And how long after training should one consume that protein if the goal is muscle protein synthesis?

To maximize muscle protein synthesis, regardless of whether it's post -exercise and MPS will be larger with the protein dosing post -exercise than at resting or fasting.

To maximize MPS, we really haven't seen doses beyond 50 -ish grams, 30 or so to 50.

My colleague Brad Schoenfeld and I, we scoured the literature and we wrote this paper on what is the maximal anabolic dose of protein per meal for the goal of muscle building.

and we boiled it down to somewhere between 0 .4 to roughly 0 .6 grams per kilogram of body weight.

And so in freedom units, we're talking 0 .2 to 0 .25 grams per pound.

And that is what appears to max out muscle protein synthesis.

0 .2 to 0 .5 grams per pound.

0 .2 to 0 .25. 0 .25. Yes.

Okay. Yeah, so like about a quarter of your body weight in pounds if you're looking at grams of protein to maximize per muscle protein.

Yes, per meal. Okay, sorry, because I think many people, including myself, are going to say, okay, but this is only in the meal post -workout?

I mean, I wake up in the morning and I try to work out before I eat because I like to do that.

Sometimes I'll have a little bit of protein, but let's assume two conditions just for simplicity.

sure somebody did resistance training in the previous two hours or and and they're trying to evaluate how much protein to eat at that meal in order to maximize muscle protein synthesis or they're eating a meal separate for on a day they're not resistance training right so and then as just kind of a generic example of a meal that doesn't follow resistance training in a window of two hours or so how much protein should be consumed at these two different meals the answer to that is so weird andrew honestly really why does it have to be so weird freaking weird and it's complicated oh uh that's because okay

so if we go all the way back to 2003 2004 and four and then we walk forward 20 years so john ivy and robert portman put out this book called nutrient timing and they focused on this narrow post -exercise window of opportunity they called it so the the anabolic window and the concept was you needed to consume protein and quickly digesting carbs so fast digesting protein lightning fast highly glycemic highly highly insulinemic carb source together within 30 to 60 minutes post -exercise in order to maximize the anabolic response, maximize recovery, and then maximize your muscle gain.

So that was their hypothesis.

This was all based on subjects who were training after an overnight fast. And so what happens when you consume a meal pre -exercise or at any point, let's say, a regular old mixed meal, medium size, the anabolic slash anti -catabolic effect of that meal is going to last anywhere from three to six hours depending on the size of the meal.

meal. So when you're somebody whose goal it is, above all the other goals, is to gain muscle at the quickest rate possible, you're almost never going to train fasted.

You're going to have a pre -exercise meal at some point, at least a couple hours pre -exercise.

And so when you're training, you actually still have these substrates in circulation through the exercise bout.

And And oftentimes, like, if somebody has a meal, like, an hour pre -exercise, they're still absorbing that pre -exercise meal post -exercise.

So we looked at this whole post -exercise period as something that just doesn't necessarily have any external validity.

It doesn't have relevance to real -world training conditions where people are not training fasted.

And so what we did was we did a couple of things.

First, we wrote a narrative review criticizing the post -exercise anabolic window, and this was in 2013.

We kind of pissed off all the researchers who did the seminal work in that area.

I'm sensing a theme here.

It's teasing. And then we actually, we did a meta -analysis of the existing literature, looking at the anabolic window thing.

And for the listeners, a meta -analysis is a study of the studies.

You collect all of the studies on a given question, and then you kind of see, you look at, you know, effect sizes and you sort of see where the evidence leans, whether there's a, you know, a significant or meaningful effect or not.

And so we did this meta -analysis and we collected studies that compared a protein timing condition where protein was timed within an hour, either pre or post exercise.

And then the control group of the study would have to have protein a minimum of two hours of nutrient neglect on both sides of the training belt.

So we collected all the studies that compared these conditions.

And we had a brilliant stats guy, James Krieger, he ran the regression analysis and essentially we found that as long as total daily protein was about 1 .66, 1 .7 grams per kilogram of body weight, so about 0 .7 grams per pound, As long as total daily protein was at that or more, then the timing relative to the training bout didn't make a difference.

This is important for people to hear because what this translates to in my ears is a very simple takeaway, which is that you don't need to obsess about the post -training anabolic window, especially if you're eating prior to training.

Yes. Because you have nutrients circulating.

Now, if you eat your last bite of food at 8 p .m. and you wake up at 7 a .m. and you're training at 10 a .m., then perhaps by the time you finish your leg workout or whatever resistance training workout, you would want to prioritize getting some protein and other nutrients into your system.

What you're saying basically, it's so logical now that I hear it, which is that you have nutrients circulating in your body and stored in your glycogen.

And so you're pulling from a reservoir.

Fasted doesn't necessarily mean starving.

General rule of thumb, if you're burping your pre -exercise meal towards the end of your workout, then you don't need to run towards this.

This is why I don't like to ingest anything prior to training, besides caffeine, electrolytes and water.

The reason why there's a weird and complex answer with this is like a single resistance training bout causes this sort of, you know, this interesting cascade of things where muscle protein synthesis will peak 24 hours after the resistance training bout.

and it'll take as long as 48 to 72 hours to kind of come down to baseline levels to where you had not done the resistance training bout.

So, the anabolic window is actually not hours, but days.

So, it's more a matter of making sure you are consuming, well, the first in the order of importance is total daily protein.

So there's this hierarchy of importance.

If you get total daily protein right, then the timing of the constituent doses of the total are just a distant secondary concern.

Even if it's only distributed across two meals, like let's say I train in the morning.

Maybe I have some caffeine and a scoop of a protein shake before, like with some whey protein, maybe a few almonds to slow digestion down or whatever.

Train, and then I don't get to eat until 3 p .m., and I only train for an hour, let's say.

And then at 3 p .m., I have a little bit of chicken breast and a salad, maybe a slice of bread because I'm on the fly.

and then that night i get home and i'm hungry and i eat two rib eye steaks i'm exaggerating here i wouldn't do that i'd like to but i don't those two rib eye steaks probably give you 75 or even 100 grams of protein and a bunch of other things too can you use all of that for muscle protein synthesis the short answer is yes um the nuanced answer is let me tell you about a couple studies studies okay well as you do that but but let me ask you a little differently not not to not to shut down the the emphasis on studies because that's why you're here but is there anything wrong with consuming high

or very high protein meal every once in a while especially if you're not eating much or consuming much protein throughout the day and the reason i ask this this is for practical reasons.

Many people find it difficult to distribute their protein evenly through the day.

Many people also find it difficult to get enough protein in the middle of the day meals or the morning meals.

It can be done, and I know people will say, well, you have some eggs and some protein, there are ways to do it, sure.

But at least in this country, most people tend to emphasize dinner as their largest meal for better or worse.

And you can usually order are high quality, high protein foods in a restaurant like a steak, chicken breast, fish, et cetera.

So a lot of people stack their protein heavily towards the end of the day.

Assuming caloric load is appropriate, et cetera.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong or bad about doing that from the perspective of body composition and health?

I would say no. And then there's levels to it, right?

Like what population are we looking at?

Are we looking at guys who are trying to win a national competition in bodybuilding, for example?

No. No, we're talking about men and women, teens up to 75 years old, who are trying to be fit by doing a combination of resistance training and hopefully some cardiovascular training as well, trying to get their steps in.

We're talking about the general population, not somebody who's trying to win a physique competition or run a marathon or ultra.

Okay. So generally, no. And I want to qualify that a little bit.

So my colleagues and I did a study testing out this anabolic window thing.

This was 2014 where we tested immediate pre -exercise 25 grams of whey protein versus immediate post -exercise 25 grams of whey protein.

uh we ran the experiment for 10 weeks yeah 10 weeks yep eight or 10 probably 10 um and there was no significant advantage of either um condition so and and our thinking was look everybody's harping about this post -exercise anabolic window so it really if there is this opportunity to consume nutrients at prime time to feed the hungry muscles then you would want want to focus on availability of nutrients in circulation and not when you actually consume the nutrients because there's this time course for the nutrients to peak in circulation.

It's usually somewhere between one and two hours after you ingest the stuff.

So how about we consume protein immediately pre and then it'll be peaking in the blood like an hour -ish later, and then you'll be right in the anabolic window.

So we didn't see any advantage to the immediate pre pre -protein versus the immediate post -protein.

That was in 2014. So fast forward to 2024 -ish, 23, 24, one of my colleagues, Yassine Locke, he took our pre -post model and he kind of like, he ran his own randomized controlled trial version of it, but he wanted to kind of exploit the possibility of further protein neglect on both sides of the training So he compared an immediate pre and post, immediate pre and post 25 grams of protein sandwiching the resistance training bout with a group that neglected all nutrients for three hours on both sides of the resistance training bout.

Total daily protein was optimized at around close to a gram per pound, two -ish grams per kilogram of body weight.

No significant difference, no meaningful difference in muscle size and strength gains at the end of the, I believe it was a 10 or 12 week study.

That's very reassuring to me.

I mean, because I have a busy schedule as do many people.

And sometimes I'm a little hungry before I train and I'll want a scoop of protein powder and I'll think, oh, is it better?

We'll talk about whether or not it's better to train fasted for all sorts of reasons.

Sometimes people don't like to train fasted.

Sometimes people don't like to eat immediately after they train, sometimes you have to shower up and head to dinner after you train or shower up and head to a meeting and you don't have the opportunity to ingest in the quote unquote anabolic window.

So what I'm hearing through all these answers, correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's tremendous flexibility as to when you consume the protein that we all need, but that it, the overall protein requirement seems to center somewhere around 0 .7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight, somewhere in there total per day.

If the amount in a given meal is a bit higher than 20 or 30 grams, you're fine.

If it's a bit lower, you're probably fine.

But the thing that also I believe needs highlighting that most people don't talk about is distinguishing between what's in circulation versus when one ingests something like we'd love to think that we drink 30 grams of protein or eat the chicken breast or the piece of steak or have the eggs and suddenly those amino acids are available and it makes so much more rational sense now that you describe it that eating first makes those amino acids available for the muscles a couple hours later yeah and we just don't learn about it that way so i'm very grateful that you're bringing it up that way i realize

we We could probably drill into protein requirements ad nauseum.

Think about it this way.

The way I like to put it is total daily protein is the cake.

The specific timing of protein relative to the training bout, that is the icing on the cake, and it's a very thin layer of icing on the cake.

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Let's talk about fasted training and whether or not it indeed burns more body fat.

and here let's expand the conversation to include cardiovascular training and of course that's a vast space could be long slow distance could be high intensity interval training anything that gets your heart rate elevated deliberately for 12 uh for 12 minutes or more it's kind of how i put it um so let's be broad with what we're calling training could be resistance training circuit training whole body body part split whatever let's let's take all that and let's define the fast as not having eaten either for four hours during the middle of the day or for eight hours or to 12 hours including sleep

the night before right because people then say wait but i'm fasted because i don't eat lunch and then i okay it gets really murky and then we're and then we could spend 26 hours here and we don't want to do that so assuming that one trains fasted does one burn Earn more stored body fat in particular or just more dietary fat if there's dietary fat circulating and available.

Let's just say lipids.

I think when we hear the word fat, people think body fat, but there's also dietary fat.

So could you please discriminate between those two?

Yeah. Okay. Okay, so picture this.

Picture two people eating the exact same amount of, exact same diet, identical diet.

By the end of the day, same macronutrition, same food selection, everything is identical.

One person or one of the groups, let's say we're running a study, okay?

One of the groups trains in a genuinely post -absorptive fasted state.

eight to 10 hours -ish eating nothing.

They will burn more fat during the training bout.

Body fat? Yes. They will burn more body fat.

They will burn more intramuscular fat.

They will just, their net fat oxidation will be higher than the group that has a breakfast. And the group that has the breakfast will essentially be burning their breakfast during the training.

So yes, during the training, there is greater fat burning in the fasted group.

But once again, we're looking at two groups who are consuming the exact same diet.

So the group who consumed their breakfast is going to consume less stuff, less food, one less meal in the later part of the day.

So their fat oxidation is going to be higher in the later part of the day and so it all comes out even by the end of the day so that is the kind of the big issue and the big principle with with uh fasted training having yes it does burn more fat during training but you're looking at a snapshot of time within the course of the day you're not looking at the course of the day but you know what this was a huge idea that persisted throughout the late 80s and early 90s.

Even into the 2000s when Bill Phillips came out with Body for Life and stuff, he was big on the fasted cardio and stuff.

And so this kind of lore is really cool if you know scientists who are able to rope you in and help you investigate this stuff.

So once again, I got to give Brad Schoenfeld a lot of credit.

it, he wanted to test this hypothesis out.

And so we took college age subjects, women, and we compared fasted cardio with fed cardio.

And the predominant lower at the time was the fat burning zone, right?

So we're talking low, moderate intensity cardio, which they carried out for a little less than an hour.

And we compared an immediate pre -cardio meal, which was a standardized, it was like a meal replacement type of thing, with the same meal consumed post -cardio.

And then we measured body composition over, people criticize the study for being four weeks, but look.

It's hard to run human studies.

I've done it. it's i've done a clinical trial and humans have it's very hard to run long -term studies especially in humans especially when it involves nutrition and training yes it's it's brutal so uh hat tip to you for tackling it at all you're not going to catch any heat from me on the four weeks thing but i appreciate that you mentioned the duration of the study because uh in thoroughness which you're characterized for in thoroughness um people should know it yep yep so this is uh one of the the only existing studies that looked at this question and and controlled you know hypocaloric conditions

i actually put together all the studies by hand for each of the subjects kind of customizing it to their needs and making sure things were hypocaloric making sure protein was optimized uh interestingly there was no resistance training involved with the study they were just doing their cardio uh they all subjects in both groups maintained their lean body mass but both groups lost a significant amount of body fat.

No difference in body fat reduction between groups by the end of the study, whether they did their cardio fed or whether they did it fasted.

And that's because we equated the total nutrition between the groups.

And you said, again, the subjects were college age women.

College age women, yes.

And what was the cardio?

What was the workout?

And the reason I'm asking is that it's impressive that they all lost body fat as long long as they ate the appropriate amount of calories didn't matter when they distributed those calories relative to the exercise and they maintained lean body mass um and if they weren't doing resistance training um i'm impressed that the cardiovascular training was sufficient to allow them to maintain lean body mass what was the cardiovascular workout it was low moderate intensity um what um might be called zone two type of type of cardio where you can still hold a conversation but um you know it's not necessarily

a waltz and so the whole idea was to be in the fat burnings that we wanted to exploit the whole fat burning zone concept to keep the intensity low moderate so we can give the fasted cardio condition a chance to show whatever magic it might have and so we didn't see that magic by the end of the trial um and yeah Yeah, but here's the practical takeaway from that is, number one, we didn't see a bunch of lean mass loss in the fasted cardio group because there's this lore saying that, hey, you better not train fasted no matter what.

You better not do cardio fasted because you're going to lose muscle.

Well, they didn't lose any lean body mass.

And when you form practical takeaways from the findings, we can say that if you prefer to train fasted uh and you just feel better doing your cardio in a fasted state great do it fasted if you can't stand doing fasted cardio and you'd rather have a breakfast beforehand then go ahead and do that just know that that's not going to necessarily hinder your fat loss efforts as long as you're net hypochloric by the end of the day or the end of the week and i mean that those recommendations recommendations can change with the type of cardio you do, especially higher intensity stuff, or certainly competitive

types of sports that involve, uh, you know, endurance performance elements and stuff.

But that's the takeaway from our study that fasted versus fed cardio doesn't matter.

Do it based on personal preference.

I love it. After so many years of trends coming through train fasted, don't train fasted.

It seems like as with protein, what I'm learning from you is that there's a lot more flexibility in time than we might have once thought, but that the absolute calories of course matter.

Prioritizing protein matters.

And I'd like to, and that you still have to train, you got to do something.

And, and, and can I add this?

Cause I know you'll appreciate this.

I'm not going to cherry pick our study and say that this is the end -all result, that that is gospel.

So there's actually a later meta -analysis a few years later by, I think it's Hagstrom and Hackett, who looked at fasted versus fed training, and they overall found no significant differences or significant advantages in terms of body comp improvement, fat loss, in the fasted versus the fed conditions, as long as total Total nutrition is equated between the groups.

Love it. This is music to my ears, and I'm sure it's going to be music to everybody's ears because it just says there's flexibility, there's flexibility, there's flexibility.

And life is complicated.

So more flexibility is good.

But it's disappointing though too.

If you're looking for magic, if you're looking for that special little thing you can do that, ugh.

Well, maybe the magic is in the training consistently, the nutrition including protein, and the knowledge that there's flexibility.

I have this saying in my mind lately that the things that make 90 % of the difference, like sleep, exercise, nutrition, light, stress management, relationships, et cetera, in our health are the things we have to do 90 % of the days of our lives.

And that's why there can continue to be so much discussion around them.

This is why it isn't just like here are the basics.

Okay, you're done. It's because the things that we have to do every day, we often have to be reminded to do every day.

But along those lines, why is it, in your opinion, that protein is so critical?

That protein be treated as like the cornerstone of good nutrition, especially if one is attempting to consume calories to maintain or perhaps even lose a little bit of body fat, maybe simultaneously maintaining or gaining muscle.

But let's set aside muscle gain for the moment.

Let's just say like maintain muscle.

But many people want to lose a few percentages of body fat.

Why is it that protein is so critical to that process?

Why is it that indeed calories in versus calories out reigns true law of thermodynamics, but that protein is so crucial?

it's mainly just a couple of things to keep in mind potentially a third little thing so the the big thing about protein and body comp is number one protein directly supports lean body mass it directly supports all the lean tissues in the body uh skeletal muscle especially and um skeletal muscle is our basically our our metabolic engine that we can control role.

It manages our body's fuel use.

And so it's super critical to support skeletal muscle.

Protein does that directly.

And protein is more satiating than carbohydrate and fat.

And so it's the most satiating macronutrient.

The third little detail, well, it's got the highest cost of metabolism or cost of processing within the body.

So it's the most energetically or a calorically expensive macronutrient to process within the body so it has a higher so -called thermic effect and so those are basically the the three main reasons why protein is so critical to things like body comp improvement um high quality weight loss fat loss yeah those are great reasons and what about the hierarchy of protein quality i think of protein quality in terms of quality Quality of protein, meaning the type and ratios of amino acids, the availability of those amino acids relative to the amount of calories one has to ingest to get them.

Because, frankly, I've grown tired and slightly irritated at the, oh, you know, these plant -based foods have a ton of quality protein in them.

And I go, really? You have to consume 2 ,000 calories of that plant or grain in order to get the equivalent amino acid profile from a four -ounce piece of steak, for instance.

And this is not an argument that animal proteins are better ethically.

I'm just saying at a quality as a function of calories ingested, I feel like animal proteins are superior.

But tell me what the data say.

Sure, sure. Man, this is a lightning rod of a topic here.

We have a strong audience.

They can handle it.

All right, you guys, buckle up.

Brace yourselves, please.

So gram for gram, as a group, animal proteins are higher quality.

They're more anabolic.

They have a higher proportion of essential amino acids.

They have a higher amount and proportion of the most anabolic -driving amino acids, the branched -chain amino acids, leucine specifically.

And in the majority of the literature, when you compare animal versus plant proteins head -to -head, you see greater muscle protein synthesis.

synthesis. Now with muscle protein synthesis being sort of the short -term indicator of what might indicate a growth trajectory over time, we have to see if we can corroborate that with these longitudinal trials where you drag the experiment out for weeks and months to see if there's any superiority with the animal versus the plant protein for kind of where the rubber meets the road, which is increasing muscle mass and or strength.

So there have been a lot of studies comparing animal versus plant proteins.

And interestingly, okay, so the animal proteins do have the edge in that department, and that's been reported in a couple meta -analyses now.

One of them compared whey and soy and didn't find a staggering difference between the two anabolically, so we can call soy actually a high -quality protein.

But when you look at the individual studies, way still has an edge in terms of because meta -analyses just like take the data and cram it all together into a single conclusion.

And so it's also important to look at the individual studies too.

So here's where the story gets interesting.

There are two studies now that compared a, and this is what's been missing from the literature.

Usually we We take two groups of omnivores and we supplement them with, let's say, whey protein.

And then we supplement the other group with some sort of a plant protein.

Like pea protein. Yeah, pea protein and interesting thing about pea protein, it actually outperformed whey in one study.

So in this 2015 study where pea protein supplementation outperformed whey for increasing muscle thickness.

I was really sad to see that because I was weighing it up and I was like, oh, God.

Yeah. What are we doing here?

That study has not been replicated, but okay.

So the interesting part, we finally have studies where we're looking at completely vegan regimen, a group who's totally vegan, no animal products at all in the diet versus an omnivore group and put them on a resistance training regimen, 12 weeks.

This was done by Lorraine and colleagues.

This was like a few years back.

And so they optimized protein, or at least made it at the bottom of optimal at 1 .6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day in both groups, okay?

And so, but the unique thing about this study, it was the first time ever we're comparing vegans with omnivores.

So there were no significant differences between groups in muscle size and strength gains by the end of 12 weeks where they were put on on a progressive resistance training program.

It was isocaloric. Isocaloric.

Meaning, for those that don't know what that means, it's total number of calories ingested per day, same in the vegan versus omnivore group.

Yes, that's right. Isocaloric, isomacronutritional, isoproteic, everything.

Everything is equated between the groups macronutrition -wise.

No significant differences in the size and strength gains.

And they're suspecting...

Oh, and by the way, the vegan group, their protein intake was boosted up to 1 .6 grams per kilo or 0 .7 grams per pound.

It was boosted up by soy protein supplementation.

So apparently, I mean, we're beginning to see that at a dose, a total daily protein at 1 .6 grams per kilogram of body weight, the totally vegan group was able to hang in there against the omnivore group for muscle size and strength gains at least within the conditions of the study and at least for those 12 weeks and at least for the the subjects that that were used who weren't necessarily you know these high level athletes or yeah so you can if you construct it properly you can follow a vegan diet as long as you get 0 .7 grams per pound of body weight and And the weird thing, man, is the vegan diet overall had

significantly less essential amino acid content and significantly less branched -chain amino acid content.

But apparently the resistance training stimulus is robust enough to make protein effects almost secondary.

Interesting. Getting right back to exercise probably being the major lever in everything.

Oh, well, sleep, I would argue, is the major lever over time.

I would agree, man.

Yeah. But I will say this because then people think if they get one bad night's sleep to not train.

I don't know if you're familiar with these recent studies showing that you can offset the inflammation that arrives from getting five or fewer hours of sleep the previous night with exercise.

You just don't want to get into a habit of it.

So, um, but if you're easier said than done, I know if you're on the fence about whether or not to train because you're sleep deprived train, but don't do that more than one to two days per week, ideally, and even better would be to get great sleep and train.

But I know you're, you're gearing up to, to hit, hit the next thing.

I want to mention that this study I just talked about was not a one -off.

a couple years later montene and colleagues did the same thing but they used mycoprotein for the vegan group mycoprotein it's a fungus based protein so you've seen that that um that that i think it's on is it on netflix or hbo the last of us where that fungus makes people anabolic i haven't seen that that's what this is it's based on this i'm doing a joke about a fictional show some some of the audience will will chuckle or just think i just busted the most terrible dad joke ever but um it's a fungus -based protein uh commercially it's called corn so q -u -o -r -n okay it's one of these weird uh types

of products that is unfortunately expensive and um so the plant -based or the animal free group their protein intake was boosted with this mycoprotein and then they were compared against omnivores with mixed mixed protein sources and by the end of the study i believe it was a 12 -week study no differences no significant differences in increases in muscle size and strength and they a, you know, progressive resistance training regimen.

Once again, not necessarily highly trained people, but we basically saw the same thing.

As long as total daily protein is where it needs to be, then apparently the animal free group can hang with the omnivores, at least for the conditions of that study.

So I always look at these things skeptically.

But the mycoprotein also outperformed milk protein for muscle protein synthesis in this acute study that preceded this longitudinal study.

And so there's some weird stuff that we can look at aside from animal protein that could be just as anabolic.

So yeah, that's the story with animal versus plant and or fungus -based protein.

And so, yeah, I just had to throw in the montane.

That's very interesting.

You know, I think when people hear soy, you know, there's been this, you know, kind of assault on soy for years.

And I've avoided it not for any specific reason, but because I prefer other sources of calories.

I like meat and berries and eggs and this kind of thing.

But it's interesting that some of these engineered proteins and soy protein and pea protein, when you really put them to the test under the right conditions, you know, they seem to gram for gram.

they seem to uh to perform just as well as the animal proteins you did mention however that satiation uh satiety rather is a key factor so i'd be curious in this study i don't know if they measured this whether the people in the vegan group felt that they were happy with what they were eating as compared to the animal protein group you know at the end of the day are they they still craving more food do they feel um like they desperately want a ribeye steak in order to follow a fairly strict diet of any kind but in particular plant -based one has to have a good reason you know i i think that otherwise

you you just kind of fall into the the availability issue you know it's a lot easier to fight to eat an omnivore diet yeah yeah um that wasn't measured in either of the studies and i always look at these things skeptically when you used essentially untrained subjects because untrained subjects are always going to kind of incur this newbie gains effect for the training regimen where the the gains that you get from the resistance training alone are going to just mask any potential advantage of either protein type and so um you know people would will stew phillips will argue with me on that all day

long we did a two day long uh twitter argument about that you spend two days on an argument on on x like stew is a freaking legend man he is he is a legend in the protein research area but he will argue with two to three days on on twitter and so you know we always end up at the same spot where um Look, we need more research to see whether, and this wasn't about vegan versus animal proteins, plant versus animal.

This was about just total daily protein intake, period.

We just need more research on highly trained, highly resistance trained subjects to see whether, in fact, a completely plant -based protein regimen that's optimized calorically and total daily protein amount -wise can really run with the animal -based stuff, like the high -quality animal -based proteins.

And so it almost depends on where you want to place your bets and where you want to take your risks.

So if gold is on the line, if first place at a professional or national level is on the line, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know if I would.

it, but everybody's ideology is what it is, and some people are just governed by what they want to stick to.

It really depends on the population and what the goal is.

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I'd like to talk a little bit about body recomposition.

Simple question to start off.

Is it possible to quote unquote gain muscle while at the same time losing fat?

Yes. Great. That will be reassuring to people.

Um, does it require a caloric deficit?

This is the weird part.

No, no. And, um, just super interesting, man.

Um, my, my friend and colleague, Chris Barakat, he collected all the studies that witnessed this recomposition phenomenon with a recomposition.

We call it recomp, you know, with simultaneous gain and in lean mass and loss in fat mass.

So he collected all the studies.

He collected 10 studies, and this review was put out five years ago.

So you can imagine there's probably a few more studies that have shown re -comp now.

So we can say at least a dozen studies have shown this phenomenon, which we didn't necessarily think was possible like 10 years ago.

You know, we thought, okay, you need a caloric surplus to gain muscle, and you need a caloric deficit to lose fat.

But what happened in these studies is the recomposition phenomenon is, I think seven out of the 10 studies was a lean mass gain dominant recomposition.

So in other words, more lean mass was gained than fat was lost. So there were net gains in body mass by the end of these trials, which would at least very strongly imply that fat was lost in a caloric surplus.

If you were going to suggest to somebody somebody uh the best way to approach this um let's say somebody loosely speaking this is not a competitive athlete this could be man or woman assuming that the same advice would pertain to both um is willing to do resistance training three to four times per week let's say three times per week do some cardio three times per week um for about an hour each session for for those and they are willing to eat maintenance calories or slightly over, and their goal is to gain some muscle and lose some fat, where would you set the calories relative to their needs?

Would it be an extra two to 500 calories?

I realize that's hard to say because we should talk in percentages, but let's just keep it broad for sake of a broad audience.

um how much more than maintenance should somebody ingest and let's assume that when they go in the gym they know what they're doing they warm up for five ten minutes and then they train hard they take the sets close to failure they're doing you know three to six sets per body part they're that they're training meet with meaningful effort and when they do their cardio they're somewhere between zone two and maybe they throw in a uh you know a max heart rate workout once a week they do some some sprints in the middle of their zone two and go back to you know this i think is pretty pretty typical

of what a lot of people are willing to do or currently doing.

I would say sort of the simple and direct answer is to try to keep the caloric surplus pretty judicious.

So 10 % ish above maintenance conditions, which could be for somewhere between 200, possibly 300 calories above what you see as maintenance.

and the common thread amongst these recomposition studies was that protein was very high protein was somewhere between a gram to a gram and a half per pound of body weight interesting so now we've upped the protein intake yes could we even say that the caloric uh this 10 above maintenance should come from quality protein exactly yes yes and um there's a series of studies done by Joey Antonio and colleagues where they fed the subjects four to eight hundred calories above and beyond their habitual intakes just in protein.

And either recomposition happened or no significant change in body composition happened.

Were they training?

They were training.

They were resistance training.

And so what protein apparently does when you consume very high amounts ounce of it up to you know a gram a gram and a half per pound of body weight is it just sort of spontaneously does some magical things it'll drive down your intake of the other macros it will potentially increase your exercise uh energy expenditure and or your non -exercise energy expenditure um it will do odd things like i i talked to joey antonio when he he got some feedback from the subjects on his very high protein study where he subjected them to two grams per pound for an eight week period.

And he had subjects coming to him saying, hey, I'm like sweating while I'm sleeping.

When you say two grams of protein per pound of body weight, are we talking about increasing total caloric intake or just using more of one's daily caloric needs, devoting more of that to quality protein?

protein. See, that's the super interesting and kind of mysterious part.

They're literally saying, okay, maintain your usual dietary habits, and then just add 50 to 100 grams of protein on top.

So you're eating an extra chicken breast and a couple scoops of whey protein, or maybe some eggs as well.

And you're just adding more quality protein on top of what you're already eating.

And we already learned that we can distribute that pretty much wherever we want.

Just do what's most comfortable for you relative to your training and other needs.

And you're saying then, but they're sweating in their sleep, sweating in their sleep, extra 80 to 100 grams of protein, just add it.

And it's a look, it's a, it's a free living study.

So we're not surveilling people in a metabolic ward. So the increase in protein could have translated to greater energy expenditure through a, you know, a number of pathways, non -exercise pathways or exercise pathways.

It could put more power to the ground during their training.

um there could have been some you know just sort of some magic thermic stuff going on who knows but um and and also we can't discount the fact that look when you're telling people to add let's say 80 or 100 grams of protein to to their habitual intake the weird thing about subject self -reporting is they tend to over report the healthy stuff that that you assign them and under -report the unhealthy stuff?

The good pupil phenomenon.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

And so there could be some misreporting going on there.

But over a series of like five -ish studies now, just stack the protein on top, nobody gains fat.

And some people lose fat.

Awesome. It's, yeah, it is pretty freaking awesome.

Now here's the thing that needs to be said.

Okay, so there was a metabolic ward study done in 2013 -ish by Bray and colleagues where they subjected the participants to escalating amounts of protein.

And it was a protein overfeeding study.

There were three levels of protein intakes.

There was a 5 % protein diet, a 15 % protein diet, and a 30 -ish percent protein diet.

The calories, the total calories escalated too.

There was no exercise involved with this metabolic ward study, And the subjects gained both lean mass and fat mass with the escalating protein amounts.

So there's different stuff going on.

When you lock people up in a metabolic ward and they can't train and then you're escalating their protein intakes and calories, they will gain fat and lean mass.

But in free living conditions with resistance training, if you just over protein the subjects, they actually have a tendency to lose fat.

And it's a really interesting phenomenon because it's been seen repeatedly.

With men and women?

With men and women, yes.

The message I'm getting is if you're going to add calories, add quality protein.

Yeah. Make sure your resistance training, here I'm building on the previous things we talked about, the distribution of the protein probably doesn't matter as much as just getting the total protein correct.

I find it very reassuring that I can train fasted or not fasted, mostly because very few of us have total control of our schedule.

So sometimes we need to train first thing in the morning and we got to catch a flight or head to work.

Sometimes people only have time in the the evening this kind of thing um i want to make sure that we talk about some of the other macronutrients sure um because carbohydrates do exist um we won't talk about fiber just now i think can we actually put fiber um onto the shelf quickly by saying fiber is good right yes okay fiber is good get fiber answer the short answer is this is it's good get fiber um and get it through fruits and vegetables.

And if you're not doing that, get it through some supplement, but ideally through fruits and vegetables, right?

Fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains.

Grains are a double -edged sword. Because they're high -calorie.

You got the refined grains, the flour foods, and then you have the whole grains.

But even some of the whole grains, there's such thing as whole grain goldfish crackers.

So, you know, a bit of a treacherous little area there for people who are trying to economize on the the junk and the calories that they consume you can still have a whole grain diet that has just a bunch of crap right so fruits vegetables get but get your fiber fiber is key but when we talk about carbohydrates let's divide them crudely sure into starchy carbohydrates so stuff that basically will melt in your mouth that's the way i think about it right a piece of cooked potato a piece of cooked yam you know if you yes if you put a piece of cooked pasta in your mouth long enough, or even uncoated

pasta that will eventually dissolve.

Or you just inhale it.

Right. Well, don't do that.

Or, you know, a piece of broccoli, which, you know, most of it is not going to melt in your mouth.

You'll be waiting several weeks for it, you know, because there's a lot of fiber there.

So this is the crude way of distinguishing between fibers and non -fibers, you know, so starchy and non -starchy carbohydrates.

Starches, in some sense, are a great fuel.

They put glycogen in our liver and muscles.

They can fuel things like resistance training.

They can help us think.

All the ketogenic folks are like, I think best fasted or I think best keto.

But brain likes glucose.

What is your take on carbohydrates with respect to maintaining or losing body fat?

Do carbohydrates make it harder to do that if one is doing everything else equally?

meaning you're getting exercise you're um you know you're not exceeding your caloric daily caloric intake um is it are starches inherently bad that's a great question um i mean i defer to the evidence you know you've got and of course evidence is its own thing you've got got research here and then you have observations and anecdote here right well let's talk primarily about research and I mean anecdote is great but it generally tends to circle around to what people find has worked best for them and I'm happy to talk about that I'm sure you're happy to talk about that but I think what I like to

emphasize on this podcast and what you do so beautifully is to talk about like what does the best possible set of controlled studies say yeah when kind of lumped together unless there's one study that kind of rises above the rest because it who's done so well.

I mean, I think it's so hard to do quality studies in humans.

So we have to have that caveat.

The more you control, the less natural the conditions are, right?

The more natural the conditions are, the less can be controlled.

This is why there will never, there will always be jobs for people in nutrition and fitness because ultimately you bring people into a metabolic ward. It's very unnatural.

You let them free range and just tell you what they ate.

they lie or they forget or they and they cheat they like sneak a they sneak a uh some starburst and they don't tell you about it so that's just life you know even clients who are paying you a lot of money you you you can't necessarily trust 100 of what they're reporting to you you know much less like a group of subjects in in a study so um yeah the the carbohydrate thing Starch, whether it's starches, whether it's sugars, either one.

So the body of research on carbohydrate and fat loss, you can distill it down like this.

As long as between the two groups you have equated total calories and you've equated protein intake between the groups, then body fat reduction by the end of every well -controlled trial in existence basically shows no significant difference in fat loss between the groups.

So protein is kind of the great equalizer, that protein and total calories.

Now here's the little wrinkle to that answer.

If you take somebody who's on a standard Western diet and you put them on a ketogenic diet, or if you control the experiment with like kind of a high carb, low fat type of regular run of the mill control diet versus a ketogenic diet and you don't equate protein then the ketogenic diet will beat the crap out of the control diet every time with fat loss and weight loss because it has more protein and in some cases uh you know if you go as extreme as like carnivore type diet and stuff like that then you're looking at a narrowing of your options so the reduction in variety and And possibilities also leads

to less total caloric intake.

So with ketogenic diets, there routinely is when it is an ad libitum ketogenic diet that you put the subjects on.

Maybe explain ad libitum to people whose Latin is lacking or haven't worked in a lab.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. No, thanks for that.

So ad libitum means that you are not consciously calculating or restricting.

You are just eating as desired, as desired.

And so when you assign somebody a ketogenic diet where you say, hey, avoid this, this, and this and that carb food, avoid carbs.

And you can eat as much as you feel like with the proteins and the fats.

Go, go do it. What happens when you assign somebody that is they spontaneously eat across the range range of studies, somewhere between four to all the way to 900 calories less per day compared to their habitual intakes or compared to the control diet intakes.

That's just what happens.

That's interesting, right?

Because they could eat more if they want.

They're not being restricted.

Yeah. I think this speaks to how satiating protein is and especially how satiating protein and fats are in combination.

I mean, if I'm hungry on a long drive and I can only eat one thing, I'm assuming I have water, which I would want with me.

I would like, I'm out on the road.

I'm on interstate five.

I've got no food with me.

Everything's closed.

It's Christmas day, but there's a In -N -Out burger.

They're probably closed too.

And I can get two hamburger patties.

That's my pick, not the French fries.

Even though calorie for calorie, you know, probably landing about the same place more or less because there's just something so inherently satiating about protein.

yeah so that makes sense that the keto diet um makes sense the issue i uh have with the keto diet is that until pretty recently it was tougher to uh remain in the general social context of life i mean you can't have a cracker you can't i don't like crackers but you can't have a piece of sourdough bread that that's uh that's rough that's rough right sourdough around yeah and And then people struggle a lot with holidays.

I think keto is tough for people around the holidays.

As long as we're in this category of discussion, what are your thoughts about inflammation?

And here's why I ask, and I ask it this way, is I know many, many people who struggled with their weight for a very long time.

A lot of male friends, some female friends, who when they adopt a diet of the following things, meat, fish, eggs, Parmesan cheese as the only category of dairy, so hard cheese, fruit and vegetables, olive oil, butter, coffee, tea, fine, but no sodas or anything except diet sodas, they lose significant amounts of body fat, probably some water too.

so they're not eating any starches no rice no oatmeal no bread no pizza nothing but they have all managed this is anecdote but they've all managed to lose anywhere from 25 to 50 or even 60 pounds they're exercising typically sometimes just cardio so significant amounts of body weight and they keep it off and the number of their health challenges seem to resolve themselves perhaps perhaps secondarily to the weight loss.

But I often wonder whether or not this quote unquote, what some people call a low inflammation diet, because there's so few processed and highly processed foods in this regimen has additional benefits that start to synergize with the fat loss.

And, you know, it's remarkable how, how much better they look, how much better they feel.

And they can maintain that pretty well.

Cause you can say, you know, I'll pass on the, on the bread and the, and the pie, but you know, I'm going to have double serving of turkey and Brussels sprouts.

And I, you know, it's kind of remarkable what can be accomplished with what I just described.

And yet I don't know a name for that diet and it's not my, it's not what I follow.

I eat starches, but what are your thoughts on inflammation and how certain macronutrient profiles perhaps are pro -inflammatory or anti -inflammatory or something people rarely talk about which is inflammatory neutral kind of keep you in a neither high nor low inflammation state but just kind of a normal fluctuations in inflammation long question but i feel like it's one i've wanted to ask for a while and you're the guy to ask okay so i'm i'm going to speculate a little bit uh i think that any diet that facilitates substantial fat loss is going to to lower the amount of inflammatory cytokines circulating

and emanating from the adipose tissue.

And so if you can get that body fat down, then you can get chronic low -grade inflammation down.

If that body fat is reduced from everywhere, the subcutaneous space, especially the visceral space, then you're going to do a lot of good things for long -term health.

The reason why the diet that you described is so effective at this is because it lacks hyperpalatability.

And so the way that you create hyperpalatability, hyperpalatability is basically the tendency for a food to be very flavorful, very delicious, and very easy to passively overconsume.

And so the formula for hyperpalatability is basically refined carbs, fat, mixed together, salt it, and or make it sweet.

And there's your formula for food that is easily, passively overconsumed.

And the diet that you described doesn't have these ultra -processed, highly engineered, refined carb and fat combo foods that we are just kind of driven to just inhale down.

out um and so i i think that my view could possibly be a little bit too simplistic but i think the inflammation issue is really tied to uh an excess body fat issue i'm very grateful for that answer and and um again i've seen so many friends that lose significant amounts of body fat and stick with this diet it's also one that if one were to have a slice of cake or a piece of pizza, you're not really deviating that far from the, from the total contour of the nutritional plan.

It's not like you're suddenly out of keto or something.

And they don't tend to cascade into binges and things of that sort.

I will say that most of these people also quit drinking alcohol at the same time, which probably has its own benefits.

We'll return to alcohol a little bit later.

And there are some nutrients that are directly anti -inflammatory, like omega -3 fatty fatty acids, huge literature on their anti -inflammatory effects.

Do you supplement with those personally?

I do. You take fish oil?

I do. And I know that there is some controversy and some infighting with the idea of supplementing with fish oil.

Now people are afraid of atrial fibrillation and things like that.

But, you know, I've been doing it.

And if you look at the literature, especially the randomized control trials, um it is mostly good stuff man i mean you you could find negative literature on almost anything that you do sure but uh on balance i am still comfortable with supplementing with fish oil at this point in time regardless of uh the mounting evidence that oh it might not do anything or oh it might have this or that potentially adverse effect i kind of think it's a no -brainer if you're not somebody who eats fatty fish regularly through the week yeah the high quality sources of fatty fish tend to be very expensive.

Um, and they're harder and harder to find and talk about controversy.

You get into this debate about whether like different sources of salmon and it gets really messy.

Um, I'm sure there are great sources out there, but that's a whole discussion into itself.

I take fish oil also have for many years.

I plan to continue doing it.

And, um, you know, so I'm grateful to hear that you do as well because we're both on that expert we're both on that train we're rebels yeah so the um yeah the anti -inflammation effect if nothing else um seems to warrant that i'd like to um i'd like to talk about sugar i've had people on this podcast um sit where you're sitting and basically paint a picture of sugar that it is not quite as bad as crack cocaine and meth but not too far from that kind of exaggerating and And I've had people who land in the more kind of tempered response to sugar.

But let's define sugar.

We're not talking when I say sugar, I'm not talking about fructose in fruit, because in fruit you've got fructose, but you've got fiber and there's a high water content.

And some sure some fruits have higher fructose content than others, mangoes versus apples, for instance, or something of that sort.

But when I'm talking about sugar, I'm talking about if one looks at a package or a label and sees added sugars, how bad are added sugars?

Because those are really the ones that tend to fall into this bin of quote -unquote bad sugar in a lot of people's minds.

Okay, so they dilute the nutritive value of the diet and they contribute to hyper -palatability.

If you're talking about extrinsic sugars added to to the diet, you know, they're only really only two sources of intrinsic sugars are in fruit and in milk.

Everything else, you're just pretty much adding it.

The exception of like maybe agave, but that's kind of a rare esoteric thing.

But added sugars to the diet should be consumed judiciously.

The working recommendation is to try to limit added sugars to the diet to 10 % of total calories.

So if you're somebody who likes to put maple syrup on whatever you might do or somebody who likes to put honey on whatever you might do, then you may want to limit that to typical, let's say, 2 ,000 -calorie diet.

You may want to limit it to like a maximum of 40, 50 grams a day.

That still seems high.

It does. 40, 50 grams. Who's eating that much sugar?

Me. Oh, really? You have a sweet tooth?

No, no. I love honey and I love maple syrup.

See, I have a savory tooth.

Like if I have to try and not eat the entire block of Parmesan cheese.

I have both, man. I always joke that I have an inner fat boy within me, but I actually have been technically obese by BMI standards like 10 years -ish back.

You're how old now?

53. Great, well, you seem to be in great shape.

No hormone augmentation.

We clarified that earlier, I asked.

This is what guys ask each other nowadays.

Are you doing any hormone augmentation?

No. So Alan says no, and I believe him completely.

But yeah, you're in great shape at 53.

Thank you. And you have a sweet tooth and a savory tooth.

I do, man. So how do you contend with it?

I do. Oh, okay. So that's a great question because I can dish out something practical here.

Protein powder. Protein powder satisfies the heck out of my sweet tooth.

And I actually don't have the full 50 grams of added sugar.

I might add like a tablespoon of maple syrup to my coffee in the day.

Sorry, I was just laughing.

Okay, so you know those mocha pot thingies?

Oh, mocha pot? Sorry.

It's called mocha pot.

It's like some... It's a piece of hardware?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

It's the thing where you...

It's this odd like...

Oh, right. Right. It's like an hourglass -shaped coffee pot.

Yes. Yes. Okay. So I have that.

And what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to duplicate the Thai coffee.

Is it Thai? What is it?

It's really freaking good coffee.

Oh, Vietnamese coffee.

Vietnamese coffee. Yeah, I love Vietnamese food.

I don't drink the Vietnamese coffee.

It's too sweet for me.

Dude, I'm trying to do a version of that with the mocha pot.

And if I put maple syrup in that tablespoon, it's freaking awesome.

And I have that with half and half.

It's really good. So you got a fat sugar combination plus caffeine.

You do this in the morning before you train?

I've been doing it.

I go through these phases, but I have that.

And so the extent of added sugar in my diet is that tablespoon of maple syrup.

So, you know, I do agree with you.

50 grams could be a little bit out there.

Listen, I'm not here to judge.

Like I said, if I had a sweet tooth, it's interesting.

I used to have one.

I lost it over the course of about a decade.

I used to love like Sour Patch gummies and gummies.

And I love the gummy.

I love fruity taste and that kind of thing.

I lost it by doing something that probably has no scientific basis.

But I heard years ago that if I took a teaspoon of L -glutamine and put it in high fat, in half and half in cream, basically.

and took a shot of that twice a day that it would kill my sugar cravings and i did that and it weaned me off sugar and then i increased my protein intake so it could have been any combination of things or it could be total placebo i mean so i i want to acknowledge that um although i've recommended this to some self -professed sugar addicts okay and they're like yeah it kills the sugar craving but then they always add the but i still miss my you know whatever they long for the the sugary thing i don't any longer this is where i headed off the the the sweet stuff i make protein smoothies and they're just

they're artificially sweetened so it satisfies um that you know that dessert craving if you will well along the lines of artificial sweeteners um Um, why, if you want something sweet, wouldn't you just replace the honey with like stevia?

Cause it doesn't create the same, um, satiety that, that the maple syrup does for you.

Oh man. Okay. So maple syrup aside, um, the, you get caloric savings, you know, if, if your protein powder is artificially sweetened, let's say with stevia or sucralose or monk fruit or whatever is being used in the product.

You get caloric savings and you just kind of get the macro savings, if you will, as well.

And so protein powders are like, I mean, in my opinion, they're just such a breakthrough because they satisfy the protein requirements or they significantly augment the protein requirements and they take care of like essentially having something that that is the experience of a dessert to me anyway i make some really good fruit smoothies i use frozen fruit protein powder um sometimes i do like a mocha type of smoothie sometimes i do like a tropical fruit type it's like a milkshake yeah it is like a milkshake right yeah so you mentioned artificial sweeteners so let's uh let's double click there

sure i've seen some literature that points to the possibility that they might be, quote, bad for the gut microbiome.

Those are animal data.

There are some human data.

But I think nowadays saying artificial sweeteners is too broad.

As we say in science, there are lumpers and splitters.

And I think we need to split that because there's low -calorie sweeteners like stevia, right, that are not artificial.

They're sort of technically plant -derived.

And then there's artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sucralose saccharin and my understanding is that sucralose and saccharin have some bad properties if consumed in excess what is the deal with artificial sweeteners so we're talking aspartame sucralose saccharin let's just focus on those sure and let's leave aside monk fruit stevia etc for the time being okay you can pretty much simplify it by saying out of all the sweeteners that we study whether they're the natural kind or whether they're the artificial kind it's saccharin that is showing a lot of the adverse potential so for example the negative

effects on gut microbiome that have led to impaired glucose tolerance in humans over a short period of time of course they you know the dose is debatable that they're flooding these humans with but nevertheless Nevertheless, it's saccharin that showed these effects with even body weight gain comparing saccharin, sucralose, and I believe it could have been one of the others, aspartame.

The saccharin group, apparently, maybe appetite was dysregulated, actually gained weight.

And so there is something about saccharin that is not great as far as the range of low -calorie sweeteners go.

But thankfully, saccharin is almost commercially extinct.

It's hard to find saccharin unless you go to a Denny's or some sort of greasy spoon place and you get those little pink packets.

So now we've got this other range of low -calorie sweeteners to choose from.

And it's a little bit of a mystery of which of these low -calorie sweeteners has the best health and body composition to it.

But they're all pretty much in the same boat.

You can find a bunch of good stuff with Stevia, like the dirt on artificial sweeteners.

You can find a bunch of potential dirt on aspartame.

You can find a bunch of potential dirt on sucralose.

Stevia, it's a little bit harder to.

Maybe some benefits of Stevia.

Yes. Yes. Benefits too.

Improve glucose tolerance and things of that sort.

So I, yes, I'm not afraid of Stevia.

I was called it Stevia, but now it's Stevia.

That's me. Stevia is a me thing.

Okay. So I'll call it Stevia.

I'll call it Stevia for this conversation.

Thank you. So tomato, tomato.

I've, I've heard it's, it's potentially good for us.

No good evidence. It's bad for us.

So if you don't mind the taste, and I happen to like the taste, Stevia seems like a perfectly fine thing to include in one's diet.

Yeah, I tend to be amenable to all artificial sweeteners, honestly, even aspartame.

You know, the sheer amounts that you would have to consume of these things, even hypothetically, to incur negative health outcomes is just absurd amounts.

amounts um it's probably you know more dangerous to step outside and breathe in the la air you know then engage in like some you know aspartame or sucralose on a regular basis that you know one or two cans a day i don't think that can affect people in the course of a lifetime thank you for that clarification very hard to study though it's not like you can find out definitively right although my read of the literature people that drink artificially sweetened soda or stevia sweetened soda as an augment to their efforts to consume fewer than needed calories per day in order to lose body weight body

fat in particular is that diet sodas can actually be a great assistance to people yes you know and i went back and forth on this literature because i thought no water would be better but they compared water two liters a day or a liter or more per day of diet soda.

And it seems like it's a pretty good weight loss tool for people that would otherwise be drinking soda or would otherwise be drinking just water, which really surprised me.

I'd love to say water's the best, but for weight loss, maybe diet sodas actually provide an important role for people.

Yeah, that was an interesting finding.

I do think that the most, if not all, of the controlled intervention trials show positive effects of artificially sweetened or or low calorie sweetened beverages on weight loss and all of the consequences of the metabolic consequences of what happens with weight loss.

And they're all positive.

There's some observational literature that casts some doubt on whether diet sodas are a good thing or not.

But then we have the issue of in quotes, reverse causality where people who are in poor health are sort of seeking out these diet sodas rather than the diet sodas causing the poor health.

So on balance, artificially sweetened beverages tend to be a net positive for health.

But I know that a lot of people have a lot of issue with that because people have just sort of this natural hippie streak within them that would want to preach only water, water, water.

And you know what? I think it's a good idea to practice drinking plain water water, to get that experience of it being a positive thing.

And I encourage it, but sort of the vilifying of artificially sweetened beverages is just not necessarily founded in especially the controlled intervention literature.

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Is there any evidence that coffee or other caffeinated drinks have a thermic effect that allows you to burn more fat?

So if I drink, I'm a yerba mate fan.

fan. So if I drink, uh, cold brew yerba mate or a hot brew yerba mate before working out, let's forget fasted.

I happen to do it fasted and then, and then train, am I going to burn, mobilize more body fat by ingesting a stimulant like caffeine prior to working out?

Yes. And yeah, it's a, it's a pretty consistent finding.

Um, the issue is whether the amount that occurs is is something meaningful that would be durable enough over time for us to be able to say hey we can use coffee and or caffeine as an agent to enhance fat loss i'm not sure if we're we're there yet but the literature on balance shows a a modest effect modest advantage on fat loss with caffeinated beverages like tea and coffee great i don't think that's discussed very very often these days.

That was kind of more in the nineties, but I think it's a great thing for people to hear because 90 % of adults worldwide consume caffeine every single day.

It's the most widely used drug in the world.

Man, you know, I just looked at this huge umbrella review on coffee and health effects.

It's net positive. I was very happy to see that.

On what sorts of metrics?

tricks, a range of clinical outcomes, cardiovascular health, different effects on sort of intermediate markers, mortality even.

So almost everything that we can think of that most people generally care about, coffee either has a neutral or positive effect on it, but the threshold of of benefit sort of cuts off at three to four cups a day.

So much more than that, or after that threshold, then we're looking at potential detriment.

I suppose the only thing is to remind people to not consume caffeine too close to bedtime, because even if you can fall asleep, it's going to disrupt the architecture of your sleep.

But I and I am sure so many people are so relieved, even delighted to hear that coffee and other forms of caffeine are healthy for us, maybe even pro longevity coffee and tea yes that's for sure uh whereas it's been debated and it continues to be debated whether alcohol is good or bad for longevity last week another study saying champagne was good for longevity i think it was or uh but plenty of studies recently showing that alcohol increases cancer risk so much that the federal government now is talking talking about putting this on any uh on the label of any alcohol containing drink I have an issue

with that. Yeah. About putting that on the label.

Yeah. Yeah. Please share.

So we can't lump alcoholic beverages into this single bucket.

The literature on red wine specifically, man, you would be hard pressed to find carcinogenic effects from red wine, either epidemiologically or interventionally.

interventionally, and even down to like the mechanistic in vitro stuff like tumorigenesis, anything like that, it actually has anti -cancer effects.

And, you know, even the brain shrinking threat of alcohol intake, red wine consumers actually in at least one controlled trial showed improvements in neuropsychological tests.

And so I don't think we, We can say alcohol as a group.

We have to sort of look at the individual drinks because I'm sure there's differences between red wine versus some other alcoholic beverage.

But people study the crap out of red wine and there's almost nothing but good stuff that comes out of the red wine literature.

Who knows how biased it might be commercially or other.

But that's another thing.

I don't like to dismiss studies based on funding source, but the red wine literature is almost all positive.

I feel like I have to push on this a little bit.

I think assuming everything about those studies is intact and not biased, et cetera.

I do think that when people are consuming alcohol and thinking about the potential longevity effects of red wine, that there's some questions that come to mind.

First of all, what is the caloric tradeoff?

You know, so if you're drinking a glass of wine, you're consuming calories, perhaps not a problem.

Perhaps that's taking up room for quality nutrients that could come from other sources.

i have a theory which is that the um the controversies in the alcohol around the alcohol literature and longevity in my mind could boil down to something as simple as sleep disruption for instance drinkers have more inflammation um but in those particular studies perhaps i'm i'm speculating here uh they're drinking with dinner and we know that disrupts sleep architecture reduces REM sleep deep sleep i mean this has just been shown over and over again And chronically, over time, especially on a backdrop of a high -stress lifestyle, perhaps leads to more systemic inflammation and poorer health outcomes.

In another culture, maybe in Sardinia or something, or in one of these, dare I say, blue zones, people perhaps are eating and drinking and living longer and have lower inflammation because, you know, they might drink just as close to sleep, but they have a smoother, lower stress entrance into the next day.

And so the disruption in sleep might not be a problem.

There's an afternoon nap in many of those cultures.

So when I look at sleep as kind of the foundation of mental health and physical health, which is clear, it's at least one of the layers of the foundation, I then wonder whether or not the alcohol studies can be evaluated just strictly on the basis of the measures that are being taken.

And that if we start to think about the context in which alcohol consumption is occurring, occurring social context, sleep hours, stress and lifestyle, genetic predisposition to cancers, et cetera, high processed food, you know, and on and on and on.

I wonder whether or not some of this is going to shake out in the noise, as we say, I need to qualify.

I agree with all that.

And, and here's the thing, like my statements on alcohol mainly had to do with red wine and cancer.

So if we look at a typical – what would be considered a moderate amount of drinking, one to two glasses a day for little people.

And then let's say two to three glasses a day for larger people.

That is sort of the – kind of the moderation models for those two.

Regardless, red wine or not or something else, there is a degree of disinhibition that occurs with drinking that can make you say, ah, screw it.

and potentially have you just wipe out the entire pasta plate, for example.

And so there's the disinhibition piece.

And there's also the inherent calories piece to where I don't know a whole lot of guys who I am aspiring to become look like body comp wise who are regular significant drinkers.

Most of them barely drink.

Okay, so that's sort of the observational side of things.

and then there's the addiction side of things where you read the stats on the percentage of the general population that has some degree of alcohol use disorder it's a staggering percent 10 so in a room of 10 people chances are one of them is going to have alcohol use disorder that's gnarly um and it's the easiest addiction to mask because you know alcohol is so freely available it's everywhere and people don't it's glamorized it's the alcohol intake at least until until recently, things are changing, is the one drug, because alcohol is a drug, then again, caffeine is a drug.

It's the one drug that if you don't consume it as an adult, people often are put off by that, right?

They're like, hey, like what's wrong with you kind of thing?

Or like, I thought real men drink or something like that.

So I quit drinking a long time ago and I didn't have alcohol use disorder, but I didn't like it because I wouldn't sleep I like to train in the morning.

So when people would say like, you don't drink, what's wrong with you?

And I said, no, I train in the morning while you're sleeping.

And then let's check in it.

I used to be a little in my thirties, I was kind of cocky.

So at meetings, you know, I'd say they'd be like, oh, you're going home at 9pm on the first night.

I'm like, yeah, but let's check in on Wednesday of this five day meeting.

Let's, let's look at how you're hanging in there versus how I'm hanging in there.

And so I was always interested in the long arc of things, how I could maintain eight or nine out of 10 performance, maybe even 10 out of 10 performance.

day after day after day after day not necessarily a healthy mentality but you know this is what happens if you have you know my my mentality and and i think it's typical of many people so for me drinking was a hindrance to life performance i think for many people alcohol is the way that they mesh with the people around them and i respect the fact that that exists that it's it's hard to be the odd person out it can be socially isolating and social connections is important.

Here's what I found with quitting alcohol.

A couple of funny things.

Number one, I did get shamed.

I was in the Dominican Republic at the dinner table and I like pina coladas, you know, virgin pina colada.

So I ordered a virgin pina colada and the server just like cracked up and laughed at me and made fun of me for doing a virgin drink.

So I actually have Have gotten shamed for ordering a virgin pina colada.

But one of the reasons that I was afraid to quit is because I thought that events would lose their fun.

I felt like I would sort of lose my ability to, you know, be social and have fun and have the same degree of, you know, it's a weird thing.

You don't know until you quit drinking that things are just as fun.

you're, obviously you're lucid and you take a lot more in and you can, you know, you can enjoy everything moment to moment and there's no lost patches of time.

And the interesting thing and the positive thing about quitting drinking for me, and I haven't drank not one, not one drink in almost seven years now come August, is that it taught me how to sit in my feelings, And cope with the stress and come up with solutions.

Whereas prior to that, oh, I know the solution.

Put the alcohol Band -Aid on it.

But I think that impairs character building.

It impairs problem solving capabilities.

It impairs coping capabilities.

And I think those are super important for just basically being an adult.

And so those were kind of the hidden benefits that I experienced from quitting alcohol on top of having better training sessions, having better training recovery, consuming 1 ,000 calories less per day, or almost 1 ,000 calories less per day, improvements in body composition, just mental health.

all departments of life just kicked up and improved after I quit drinking.

But, see, I was one of those 1 in 10 who got into the drinking routine, and I'm one of those guys, if I like something, I'll have it every day.

I'll do it every day.

Like, I'm probably going to have either coffee and or eggs every day for the rest of my life.

Same thing happened with alcohol, but the thing with alcohol is You have to try to maintain the buzz, which increases over time because of tolerance, as you know.

So that was the issue, you know, with with me and alcohol.

And so, well, thanks for sharing that.

Again, we're not here to ram anything down anyone's throat, but I think there are many.

And I think that many people can do alcohol in moderation.

I just was one of them who was much better off quitting.

Great. Well, I appreciate you sharing that very much. So let's talk about seed oils, the dreaded seed oil debate.

Should we fear them or not fear them?

Let's assume somebody is going to maintain calories.

Like they're not adding seed oils as a source of additional calories above what they would normally be taking in.

But let's say they have the choice.

They can consume a seed oil like canola oil or soybean oil or they can consume olive oil in place of it.

and let's just compare like which one is better if either and is there anything inherently bad about seed oils and i want to make sure that we talk about the processing because people will say ah the seed oils aren't bad if they come from a quality source but most of the seed oils are through this high pressure high temperature refinement process and that's the problem so So what's the deal with seed oils?

Okay, the big picture is that people over vilify seed oils.

One side over vilifies seed oils, just like the other side over vilifies, let's say, your standard, you know, land animal fats like beef tallow, butter, lard. But when you compare those two, like seed oils versus the butter, beef tallow, lard, you compare the evidence base of those two things you can find more dirt as far as adverse health outcomes from the land animal fats compared to the seed oils and and that is the reality of the matter um it's really weird that seed oils are being vilified right now because that's not the scientific consensus uh people who have their nose in the literature

are are just kind of scratching the heads at the whole seed oil scare thing.

And there are some people on the fringe who laser in on their philosophies and ideologies about seed oils.

But then all you need to do is ask a short set of questions.

Okay. And you specified the seed oils in the question, which is great.

I mean, you're ahead of like everybody else.

So what seed oil are we talking talking about?

What kind of dosage are we talking about?

And what health outcome are you concerned with?

And then what trial do you find most compelling that supports your fear of the seed oil?

And so everybody, like nine out of 10 people immediately will say, ah, okay, you want to know what seed oil?

Canola oil. Okay, great.

Let's look at the canola oil literature.

And one of the The hardest things to do is find dirt on canola oil amidst all of the positive effects in almost every trial of canola oil.

There is even a meta -analysis comparing directly the effect of canola oil versus olive oil on blood lipid profile.

And maybe, you know, unsurprisingly to some, but surprisingly to most, canola oil outperforms olive oil for improving blood lipids in the sense of lowering LDL cholesterol.

That's surprising to me because I assumed that olive oil can do no wrong.

You know what? I was taken aback by that too.

I would have been just fine with seeing there's no damn difference, one of these anticlimactic results.

But when you take a look at canola oil's composition it has a kind of an extraordinarily high proportion of omega -3 fatty acids compared to olive oil and compared to the rest of the seed oils for that omega -3 i thought it was high in omega -6 it's it does contain omega -6 and that is the predominant um fatty acid in canola but it has a high omega -3 content as well it has a high proportion of omega -3 i don't know the exact proportion of omega -3, but what makes canola kind of special as far as the vegetable oils go is its high omega -3 content.

Wow. Okay. That's going to surprise a number of people, including me.

My sense is that any ill effects to come from seed oils are because of who seed oils hang out with, right?

This is sort of the old, if you're old enough like me to remember, I'm 49 turning 50 in September, so I'm not quite 53, but we're of the same generation.

We grew up without the internet.

Right. Well, there was a discussion around cannabis, for instance.

We've done several episodes about it.

We didn't paint it as good or bad, although I do believe that young people, especially young males, smoking high THC cannabis can predispose to psychosis.

I mean, there's a bunch of debate around this, but back in the day, it was if you use cannabis, soon you'll be using crack cocaine.

That was kind of like the argument, right?

And over time, people realized that cannabis has its own potential benefits and its own potential risks, right, depending on a number of things.

It seems that people who consume a lot of seed oils consume them in conjunction with a lot of starches and perhaps with added sugars as well.

well. And when you lump those together, you end up with a pro -inflammatory, often hypercaloric set of conditions and people aren't getting enough quality protein.

And then we know what that picture looks like.

It looks like the United States of America, right?

Or most of the United States of America.

And so I do think that there's something about who olive oil and grass -fed butter hang out with that has the opposite effect.

Like people go, oh, this is a really high quality olive oil, generally, in my mind, are the sort of people who are thinking about the quality of the salad ingredients.

They're thinking about the sourdough bread, as opposed to maybe a more refined sugar -containing bread.

And the people who talk about grass -fed butter are thinking about the quality of the meat sources.

And they're not eating other protein sources that are laden with other preservatives.

So to me, I think a lot of this, quote unquote, seed oil debate will be resolved when we start pulling apart the individual components.

They're riding in the wrong vehicle.

Right. Right. And I think that from a cost perspective, you know, this hadn't occurred to me until I started voicing a little bit of this online, in which case you learn a lot quickly.

And what I learned was, you know, there were a number of people who said, yeah, I'm hearing all this great stuff about grass -fed butter and olive oil, but there are people for whom the cost margins are just too high to consume all organic organic and olive oil, and, and, you know, you have to listen to that and say, okay, well, you know, for people needing to feed an entire family, um, you know, perhaps some of these other fat sources, uh, are more affordable and therefore what are the real health risks with those?

So anyway, I was a bit of editorializing there, but, um, I have a feeling some of this is going to shake out in the, in the, in the fine parsing of these different diets.

I think people oversimplify it.

What people do with seed oils is what people do with dairy.

They say dairy as if it's some monolithic thing.

You know, with dairy, you've got the hard cheeses, you've got butter, you've got yogurt, you've got milk of varying fat levels.

You know, you're kind of hard pressed to find negative stuff on yogurt.

You'd be kind of hard pressed actually to find negative stuff on hard cheeses.

Butter of all of the, you know, the range of dairy foods, butter is the one that you you can find the dirt on.

Similar story with seed oils.

Try to find some negative stuff on flax seed, chia seed, sesame seed.

You can't. I mean, yeah, if you dig hard enough, you can.

Try to find some negative stuff on canola.

It's very tough too.

Even things like soybean oil and corn oil, you can look at the literature and it doesn't paint this sinister picture either.

And so I think people are missing the forest for the trees in general when they're focused on, honestly, the cooking oils.

You shouldn't be drowning or deep frying your stuff on a regular basis anyway.

So yeah, and beyond that, when you look at the effects of seed oil that are examined in the literature for various outcomes, everything from the intermediate outcomes like biomarker effects all the way to the in quotes hard endpoints like mortality heart attack you know cardiac events and heart disease so the hard endpoints as well as the intermediate or soft endpoints they're all superior with the seed oils compared to butter um lard beef tallow On the whole, so there is a severe misunderstanding and falsely founded scaremongering with respect to seed oils to the point where I just think it's

incredibly silly. People just have to get a hold of themselves and focus on the overall quality of the diet and not really get into these absolute death matches over what oils they use to cook their foods.

I am a huge extra virgin olive oil fan.

That is my go -to. That's what I love.

I could, honestly, I could like do shots of the stuff.

I love it that much. Yeah.

And, and I love sesame oil, you know, but sesame is a seed oil.

But sesame oil has been consumed by very healthy populations throughout Asia for the last 5 ,000 years.

And so I don't necessarily like canola oil, you know, like as far as the sort of the stickiness and the oddness about it.

But I'll still acknowledge that the literature shows overwhelmingly positive stuff about it in the majority of trials.

But I prefer olive oil.

And I would almost feel more comfortable recommending that if you like olive oil, then that should be your go -to rather than oils that are, I guess, maybe Frankensteined or engineered to a degree.

And you mentioned the whole idea of how these oils are produced.

One of the concerns is hexane use to extract the oils from the seed cakes and stuff like that, so the use of solvents to get these oils out of their native source.

There's some interesting literature showing higher hexane levels in olive oil than in – I forget.

It was some other seed oil, whether it was canola or sunflower.

flour and so but nevertheless the hexane amounts were well below established safe thresholds and so i think i really do think that people are getting sort of lost in the weeds and kind of missing the forest for the trees focusing on the little grains of sand and missing the big boulders thank you for that i think it's going to clarify a number of things for a number of people i also love olive oil over the years i've tried to consume less butter i love the taste of butter can i interrupt and let you know i'm not anti -butter at all i just um when you look at the evidence if you butter everything

up in your diet and you really pound like that it's just eating sticks of butter then you're hedging your uh bets in the direction of increased cardiovascular risk and there's even a really interesting study comparing cream with butter on blood lipids And so cream actually had a neutral effect on blood lipids, whereas butter kind of skewed things in an adverse direction.

Usually it's typically an increase in LDL.

The reason why cream had this neutral effect is what they're figuring, and this is based on other studies as well, is it's got this component called milk fat globule membrane, MFGM, which gets churned out of butter.

And so even within the dairy category, you have very differently behaving types of foods.

And once again, I'm not anti -butter, but we have to acknowledge that some foods within a given food category are a little bit riskier and you should be a little bit more careful about just the sheer amounts you consume of it over a lifetime.

time yeah uh years ago when first starting the podcast when i wasn't aware of frankly how big the podcast was going to grow to i made a joke about like i eat slabs of butter to increase my cholesterol so i have higher testosterone like and then did i pay for that one um i i've always can i've always pure gold yeah i've i've always um i've always tried to get a little bit of saturated fat in my daily diet either through red meat or through eggs or through you know a a tablespoon or two maybe of butter, depending on how hard I'm training and what my caloric needs are.

I don't like to drop my saturated fat to zero because I find my skin gets dry.

I don't feel as well.

My blood profiles actually suffer a little bit.

So that's just me. I do well, but I wouldn't, I just want to re -emphasize, I don't think people should consciously try and increase their butter intake.

But between butter and olive oil and the fats naturally occurring in nuts and eggs and red meat, consuming some omega -3s through fish oil or through some fatty fish intake, you can get a pretty nice contour of the different lipids that include a bunch of micronutrients too, right?

I feel like the idea of just emphasizing tallow and butter and red meat to the exclusion of every plant -based fat or nuts, to me, seems nuts.

And I'm friends with paul saladino and i'll say that i also think that if you eat a diet that's very low in saturated fat like very very low in saturated fat um most of the people that i know who've done that and certainly myself uh it leads to drier skin brittle hair um achy joints i do think there's really something to including some saturated fat in one's diet in in i would say low moderation right sure sure right especially as one gets older and i know uh all the carnivore folks are probably like left the conversation by now you know the mediterranean keto model is legit i mean it's got nothing

but positive uh effects that that have been seen in the literature so like if you wanted to go keto but you're instead of eating a bunch of lard or butter or beef fat you swap it out with nuts, avocado, extra virgin olive oil, you know, some extra virgin coconut oil, then you have a much better cardiovascular risk profile and you can still be on keto and you can still consume, you know, the range of protein sources and you're sort of getting kind of like a win -win there.

You know, oddly, the government, the US government used to recommend and they used to dish out this recommendation of your fat intake, a third of it.

So the government has always been into low fat.

So 30 % fat, 10 % should be saturated.

10 % should be monounsaturated.

10 % should be polyunsaturated.

And so they kind of had the right idea there with kind of getting a variety of the fat types in there.

And I'm familiar with the literature on saturated fat and cholesterol and testosterone levels.

And, you know, as somebody who is not on exogenous testosterone, dude, I'm going to be grabbing for whatever dietary advantage I can get as far as keeping my testosterone levels up.

And so I personally would not engage a zero saturated fat diet either.

I think that's great for people to hear.

Are you aware of any female -specific nutrition advice aside from adjusting for body weight?

On average, women tend to be lower body weight than men, not always, and so on, lower lean mass, et cetera, not always.

Is there anything specific about some of the topics that we've discussed thus far that from your experience, and I know your wife is extremely skilled in the Department of training and nutrition, et cetera, for clients that is truly female specific, like that they really benefit from doing certain things or not doing certain things that men can get away with or don't have to pay attention to.

There's very little in that direction, almost nothing, almost no meaningful differences that you can sort of universalize about women need to eat this way, way.

Men need to eat that way.

The only thing that I would concede to is that if you have somebody with the goal of, you know what, forget about the goal.

If somebody is of childbearing age, she's going to have a monthly menstrual cycle.

And during that monthly cycle for about a week out of the month, her cravings are going to go through the roof.

She might have lethargy at the same time, just feel generally like crap.

And, you know, even emotionally, things will be kind of, um, dysregulated during that time.

I don't think, I don't think women should totally fight their, their cravings.

And, um, especially if somebody is on a weight loss diet.

So there's a, a tactic that we use we can use with clients called diet breaks so if you're endeavoring weight loss then you can go you know you can go hard for three weeks and then on the week of the menstrual cycle kind of take it easy and then give in to your cravings so to speak for that week and i'm not talking use that week to undo the progress you made in the previous three weeks but i think that if you're going to diet in a cyclical fashion and this works quite well with women observationally then your week off or your higher calorie week or your maintenance week just coincide it with the menstrual

cycle and that way you're not fighting Mother Nature you're sort of kind of riding with Mother Nature and you can have potentially easier time improving body body composition that way.

As far as the other claims that float around about, you know, the perimenopausal period or the menopausal transition and women have to eat this way, they have to avoid this and that and eating, you know, there's all kinds of claims being made.

They should be framed as speculations, honestly.

And with the menopausal transition, like menopause is a really hot thing right now amongst the influencers and things like that and there is some research showing that there is fat mass that's gained during the menopausal transition and lean mass that's lost at a general population level but there's a lot of scaremongering around that as well and there's a study that was done it's called the swan study it's the it's the longest and uh largest study study on this topic and they looked at the four to eight year menopausal transition.

And that usually occurs in women from like mid forties to mid fifties.

And they looked at early menopause, mid menopause, post menopause.

And they looked at the effects on body composition or the relationship at least with the menopausal transition and body composition.

During a concentrated three and a half year period where most of the changes took place, And the average body fat gained was 1 .6 kilograms, so that's three and a half pounds.

The average amount of lean mass lost was 0 .2 kilograms, so about half a pound of lean mass lost. So yes, these things occur, but the magnitude of which they occur, and this is in the general population.

This isn't in like fitness people who are really meticulous about high enough protein, resistance training, et cetera.

I don't think the scaremongering is warranted.

I know that there's very real symptoms associated with the menopausal transition that make adhering to a, you know, a fitness program or a diet program very tough.

You know, the hot flashes, the lethargy, joint pain, changes in sexual function, the combination of those things, how they affect sleep, poor sleep affects everything negatively.

And so when you work with somebody as a practitioner who's going through the menopausal transition, I would grant that maybe you set their expectations at maybe 50 % the amount that you would with somebody who was not in the menopausal transition.

So whereas you would maybe set somebody to expect like a pound a week loss if they're trying to lose body fat, then you should maybe set somebody in the perimenopausal period to be okay with like half of that.

Because of the other changes that are occurring that make the rest and recovery more difficult.

Yep. Absolutely. Thank you for that answer.

I know it's a topic that's, as you mentioned, is more frequent these days.

is i think it's important that it is it it's been a topic that hasn't received a lot of attention until fairly recently i think because a the women's health initiative studies weren't weren't completed a lot of them were completed in recent years and so the data quote unquote were in i think also um the the effects on on brain like the relationship between estrogen testosterone and brain function in males and females is something that we're just now starting really understand with modern imaging tools and so on.

This is an area, of course, that's going to evolve quickly in the upcoming years.

Collagen. I've had a dermal oncologist on this podcast. We talked about collagen.

My read of the data on collagen is that the amino acid profile in collagen, which typically comes from fish, I believe.

Most collagen sources are fish -based.

based bovine, or bovine, or that the amino acid profile is not terrific from the perspective of muscle protein synthesis.

Low in leucine and other branched chain amino acids, higher in other amino acids, but that the amino acids that it is high in comprise a significant fraction of what skin and other soft tissues are made of, so that ingesting 15 to 30 grams of collagen per day might be beneficial independent and uh separate from dietary protein for sake of muscle protein synthesis it also so happens if you don't mind me saying you have very nice skin so do you take collagen um and uh he's 53 years old you got nice skin um uh do you take collagen and what are your thoughts about people who want to take collagen

specifically to improve skin appearance and for no other reason.

Okay. So I want to start off by saying that fitness professionals in the in quotes, evidence -based community, they have almost a pathologically minimalist approach to supplementation.

So it's almost like if you can avoid a supplement and dismiss it and poo poo it, Hey, great.

We won. I'm not like that with a few supplements and collagen is one of them.

And for one thing of all the proteins in the body, collagen is the single most abundant.

Um, and collagen comprises about, gosh, you know, 20, 20 to 40 % of, of the proteins in the body.

It comprises a significant amount of bone tissue and not just the joints and ligaments and tendons.

And so from a very kind of no -brainer troglodytic level, it's like, what is everybody's issue with providing the raw materials to the body that it can use to build these tissues?

And the pushback on that is the idea that the body takes any protein, breaks it down into its constituent amino acids, and the amino acids get shuttled to where they need to go depending on the homeostatic need of the body or, you know, whatever need the body has at the moment.

Okay, well, if we go with that logic, then we would say, okay, so then there's really no such thing as better proteins than others as long as we have sort of a basic amount of the essential amino acids.

No, that's just not true.

And then beyond that, the interesting thing about collagen and uh this is debated as well is it's resistance to full hydrolysis where you've got these collagen fragments that can float through circulation and into the target tissues these di and tripeptides right that they've been they've been observed through isotopic tracer technology and they make it into the chondrocytes or the or the you know the joint cells and they increase activity in the chondrocytes that that's been documented and published but beyond that it's like why would nobody box about consuming enough calcium dietary calcium

to maintain the integrity of the skeletal system but hey you talk about consuming enough collagen to maintain the integrity of connective tissues throughout the body and including skin skin skin is 80 collagen by dry weight then people lose their crap you know um i i kind of think it's a no -brainer to at least be optimistic about collagen supplementation if you're somebody who never eats the cartilage of the meat that the bone the connective tissue parts if you don't eat you know your animal foods nose to tail and you're just eating muscle meats eats uh i think the guy who does that but takes

collagen as a supplement is going to have an edge on you throughout the life course um and you know on a related note i think that's one of the disadvantages that that vegans might have until they find a genius way to manufacture a non -animal collagen molecule uh there are multiple systematic reviews showing the benefits of collagen on various skin outcomes, which are debated, of course.

Whey protein always seems to kick collagen's ass for muscle -related outcomes.

But that's not what we're taking collagen for.

So back to your original question, yeah, I do take collagen.

How much do you take?

About 15 grams a day.

To me, it's kind of a no -brainer, just like getting enough – you're providing the raw materials that the body is going to use and need anyway, and the debate is whether or not the bioavailability is meaningful or not.

You know what? I'm willing to just do the first world thing and take that chance and take the collagen supplement.

The downsides are basically nonexistent.

Great. Right. What other supplements do you take and what, maybe we can establish a hierarchy of supplements or clusters instead of like, like the top one.

Let's talk about the, the by disposable budget.

I think this is a real world perspective.

So let's agree that the main thing is get enough sleep, exercise, eat well.

To eat well, you want to emphasize what you talked about and to try and get the best quality sources that you can afford. Let's assume that somebody has the amount of disposable income to be able to buy one or two supplements to take on an ongoing basis.

And let's set aside food supplements like whey protein from vitamins and performance supplements and just kind of put them all out there and say, okay, let's say I've got, it's just going to differ by country, but let's say I've got 150 bucks of disposable income where I could get like one or two supplements I can take ongoing.

What would you place into that category?

If the goal is keep lean tissue the same or increase lean tissue and keep body fat where it's at or lose some body fat, overall vigor, overall health, longevity.

Yeah, the big picture.

Sure. Yeah. Got it.

Got it. OK, so my answer to this is going to be very bro scientific because it is so hard to study those outcomes that we almost are just, you know, placing our bets when we do the supplement thing beyond having a diet that is diverse across and within the food groups and provides all the essential macro and micronutrients.

which it often doesn't especially if we're dieting especially if we're we're training or a combination of both especially if we're caught out in not eating an optimal diet traveling all over the place which we often are um so I personally see a multivitamin multivitamin mineral as a no -brainer it's no freaking brainer like who do you know eats this pristine diet that just nails all the the micronutrients in in optimal amounts that's a very rare person and that that person would have to be covering the food groups and eating a whole lot of calories of the different groups and across and within the groups

so i this is the bro science part of me i i take two multivitamins and a double dose of the same Same one or two different ones?

Two different ones.

One of them does not have iron.

One of them does. You take them with meals?

I take it with meals, yes.

In the early part of the day, presumably?

I take it with dinner.

That's usually my largest meal.

Okay, so a good quality multivitamin.

Okay. I do that. Usually with multivitamins, it would have to be an absolute horse pill to get enough vitamin D, vitamin D3 in that.

So I do take extra vitamin D3.

How many IU per day?

Oh, that's where I get real bro scientific on you, man.

I take quite a bit.

The literature cuts off with benefits like below 1 ,000 IUs.

I take 4 ,000 IUs. I don't think that's exceedingly high.

Well, you don't. You're a bro too.

Yeah. I mean, listen, I have female family members who were having some health struggles for whom the only change, the only change was 5 ,000 IU of vitamin D3 per day.

and it made a significant positive effect on a number of different subjective metrics and some objective metrics.

And these were people that were getting their sunlight and eating very high -quality food, really putting time and effort into it.

So I'm a believer in D3.

D3 is getting PubMed -ed right now in a similar way that fish oil is getting PubMed -ed.

and so it's we verbed uh yeah we did so it's now it's a controversial thing to take you know vitamin d3 you know you you have position statements rolling out oh well we thought you need now you don't really okay so good multivitamin with iron especially for women who menstruate right yeah especially you don't need that uh vitamin d d3 i i take vitamin d3 i I take fish oil.

I take three grams of fish oil, not three grams combined EPA, DHA, but three one -gram capsules.

That's a good amount, I would say.

Does that get you over the one gram per day of EPA?

It's right around there.

Yeah, that's what I shoot for too, one gram per day of EPA, which means taking about three grams total.

It's about one gram a day of combined EPA, DHA, and the atrial fib literature is showing that much above that okay then you're incurring this risk but you know what man i don't believe everything i read even in the peer -reviewed literature you've been a scientist too long to believe everything yeah dude right there's just yeah certain things you just take it with a grain of salt you you recognize the literature evidence base and then you make the judgment call um it's based on your own sensibilities and how you respond individually.

There's a regular hierarchy of evidences one way, but I think at the very tip is how do you respond individually to protocol?

So, yeah, and so, Vishal, as you take that, another thing that would blow up the size of a multivitamin is getting enough magnesium to show benefit.

So I take magnesium.

Which form of magnesium do you emphasize?

Magnesium citrate. I'm cool with pretty much anything except magnesium oxide.

oxide okay oxide is the low bioavailability form but yeah magnesium citrate uh and i do take creatine um about five grams a day and uh i do take another bro science maneuver which which uh boy i'm really incriminating myself here i i take vitamin c extra vitamin c a gram a day What effect are you seeking with the vitamin C?

Effects on immunity plus kind of a potential synergy with the collagen.

Oh, right. And there are some data on this.

I realize that you're framing all of this very cautiously under the umbrella of bro science.

And this is just me.

I wouldn't tell everybody to do this.

You asked me what I'm doing.

But I think there are good data on vitamin D, on D3, on combining 15 grams of collagen with vitamin C, at least in the studies looking at skin elasticity.

So you're not that far out on a limb.

I'm realizing, and the audience is certainly realizing just how cautious and conservative you are with your words, which I believe everyone appreciates.

So the five grams of creatine, some vitamin C, anything more esoteric than that?

No, nothing beyond the multi vitamin d fish oil vitamin c creatine um magnesium how many days per week are you resistance training about about four to five and do you do cardio regularly okay so here here's the thing that a lot of people would ding me on is um i try to make my resistance training cardio Cardio.

So I, my cardio, if you can call it cardio would consist of just, just walks around the neighborhood on occasion, um, or just really light hikes on occasion and maybe pacing around between sets.

I enjoy resistance training.

I make it fun. I mean, everybody wants to wait two to or three minutes between sets to move the maximal amount of loads.

But you know what? You can do progressive resistance training.

You can do progressive overload.

Even within a short rest paradigm.

I mean, as long as it's, it's trending up, you know, your, your net tonnage moved is trending up over time.

It won't move up as quickly as if you were to freaking rest two to three minutes between sets.

But I love short rest. I love high rep.

You and I are not training together.

I like to lift heavy and slow, like three to five minutes between sets.

Now I'm in like two to five repetition range.

Anything more than six feels like cardio, but I like to run and I do other forms of cardio for cardio, but we should make sure that at some point you and Cameron Haynes train together because he does the circuit, his run lift shoot thing that he does every day.

You know, he shoots arrows to practice his archery.

he runs often 10 to 20 miles a day, but he lifts every day.

And he does the circuit style lifting training that I've done with him.

And it's for a guy like me, it's murder.

I mean, it is so hard. I've never been so sore.

I've never been so exhausted.

But it sounds like it's very well tuned to what you thrive on.

I've been messing around with cluster sets and I want you to try this.

Can you explain what for people, what a cluster set is?

A cluster set is you you basically, you're breaking up a set with, with rest periods that range from anywhere from gosh, five to like 20 seconds with, within like a single like set or like leg extension, leg press, and then squat as that, that would be more like a super set or a giant set.

So a cluster set is like a single, I'll, I'll, I'll explain it.

I want you to try this.

I think you'll find it fun.

Okay. So with a given lift, let's imagine what's your, what's your favorite.

I'm talking to you as if you're a bodybuilder.

What's your favorite body part to train?

I like to run and I lift to stay strong enough and stable enough to run.

What do I like to train the most?

Yep, as far as just muscle groups.

These days I've been doing a lot.

I love leg day. I'm a huge fan of leg day.

So I'll do, I go very heavy on like hack squats or belt squats.

Are you a leg extension person?

Yep, I do those too.

Okay, so let's imagine you pick a weight for leg extensions that you can do.

Your first work set, after however you might warm up.

Your first work set, pick a load that will enable you to fail out at about, let's say, 16 reps.

How about this? We'll do 12 reps.

Okay. 12 reps. Fair enough.

Take it to failure.

My colleagues would say, okay, well, you know, leave like one rep in reserve.

I like to train to failure all the freaking time.

I just it's more fun.

I i've been training for a long time I don't hurt myself with training failure and I wouldn't train a failure with a freaking bench press or a squat But you can choose the exercises you can take to failure.

The leg extension is is one of them You can take to failure you can take to partials.

So Um leg extension so choose a weight you can do for 12 reps Take it to failure and do five slow breaths breaths.

That's one. And take that five times, and then go right back into the set.

Don't change the weight.

Try to do half the amount of reps you did.

And you'll usually hit it.

Sometimes you won't.

You know, if you breathe fast enough, you kind of won't hit it.

But if your five slow breaths are slow enough, you'll hit the six reps in this case.

Okay, after that, ten slow breaths.

try to try to beat your your previous set try to do if you can do six great if you can do seven great that's that's a cluster set with failure built into it a couple times how many cluster sets would you do per body part two yeah and multiple sets yeah this seems like a great thing to do if one is uh low on time um and perhaps if one has a nagging injury that you need to work around by avoiding heavy weights.

I hope to never be in the position to have to do this workout.

And you can add a drop set to the second exercise.

Bam, cut the weight down by 25 -ish percent and go right into a drop set.

So kind of the point of that and how I'm sort of defending my non -love for formal cardio is a lot of my resistance training, I try to make it, I sort of try to gamify it in that sense, and it ends up stimulating cardio respiratory pathways to a greater degree than your typical resistance training.

I would never deny the benefit of formal cardio, but just how I navigate my training and sticking with what I enjoy.

I do enough volume through the week to where I would say that, look, whoever loves endurance adaptations increases in VO2 max, pushing that in.

Great. Good for you.

I just think that there's a limit to how much that will benefit cardiovascular health and or longevity compared to just staying physically active, keeping good body composition and just being consistent with that.

And of course, the other lifestyle factors, too.

So, yeah, different conversation, I guess.

yeah but i think it weaves very nicely into what we've been talking about up until now which is which is a real world um scenario like this is what works for you um i you know touch on what works for me but this is what works for you and you're able to kind of merge cardio and resistance training in a way that sounds very time efficient and well i i don't always do the cluster set set thing.

I love doing supersets.

So if I'm, you know, if I'm at a station where I can superset chest and back work, I'll, I'll superset with minimal rest. Also very time efficient.

And, or, you know, you know, bicep versus tricep work or any, anything that you can do sort of supersetting antagonistic muscles.

I take advantage of that.

I don't necessarily always always do the cluster set thing you mentioned that your wife is a trainer yeah does she train her female clients this way and do you train your female clients this way the reason i ask is that in my experience i realize this is a generalization but i've had female training partners before some of the best training partners have had by the way female training partners they they they worked hard and they were also great athletes um they tended to view resistance training at least it's at first as something to limit the rest periods between sets.

Like they felt like if their heart rate wasn't up continuously, it wasn't exercise.

Those people often were pleasantly surprised by doing lower repetition, longer rest work.

But in general, do you recommend what you just described more for your male or female training clients?

You know, being perfectly honest, it's just what I enjoy doing.

and it is probably not the most efficient way to make muscle gains but i just find it fun and and i enjoy it um when i was training folks for the specific goal of hypertrophy i would put them through kind of a standard you know let's let's rest between sets move the maximum amount of load um let's cover a a spectrum of of loading zones i i don't you know i'm sort of with brad Brad Schoenfeld, I think Brad has done the best work in the hypertrophy realm, and training for hypertrophy is one of the best ways to train for, I guess, optimizing metabolic health.

So there should be some hypertrophy training included in any program, in my opinion.

So yeah, it's just what I enjoy, man.

And I realize it does go against a lot of the the, the typical like consensus.

Well, thank you for sharing that.

I think it highlights, if nothing else, that doing what one enjoys in the realm of fitness and nutrition is equally important to what's best because if you don't enjoy it, you're unlikely to stick to things.

So find what you enjoy.

Listen, I want to extend a huge thank you for coming here today.

This was a long time coming.

I always knew from our first in -person meeting that we would do this at some point.

And I'm so glad we're doing this now.

I must say, you have an absolutely staggeringly impressive command of the literature.

Anyone that's listened to this realizes that you don't just say stuff.

You always precede your statements with the origin of the information you're about to convey, whether or not it's your own personal experience and preference, whether it's from a meta -analysis, whether or not it's from a particular study.

And as an academic, I especially appreciate you always credit the authors of the study.

I mean, I know people heard this, but I want to underscore the scholarly nature with which you present evidence and attribution to the original authors of the work.

And it's so clear that you've got your mind wrapped around these massive topics that are of immense confusion to the general public and importance.

And to take us back to something I said at the beginning, when I think of Alan Aragon, I think of immense amounts of knowledge shared and this immense property of clarifying things for people.

Today, you've taught us that protein is extremely important.

What qualities of protein exist in different domains of the different food groups, timing of a protein intake, timing relative to exercise, timing of exercise, type of exercise.

Talked about collagen.

We talked about calorie surplus deficit.

Yes, you can gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously.

And you make this information not just clear, but extremely practical.

So thank you. Thank you.

thank you for the immense amount of information you provided us today and that you continue to provide online and elsewhere.

We, of course, will provide links to where people can learn more about you and from you.

And I just want to say, keep going.

I value you as a colleague and a friend.

And I'm so grateful that you came out here today and that I said the wrong thing on social media so that we had the opportunity to meet.

It goes right back to you, Andrew.

Andrew. It is an honor and a pleasure to be here.

And I really, really think this will bring a lot of value and just thank you for everything.

Well, you're most welcome.

It's been a true pleasure.

We'll have you back again.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Alan Aragon.

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Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Alan Aragon.

And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

And as mentioned at the beginning of today's episode, we are now partnered with Momentus Supplements because they make single ingredient formulations that are the absolute highest quality and they ship international.

If you go to livemomentus .com slash Huberman, you will find many of the supplements that have been discussed on various episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast, and you will find various protocols related to those supplements.

[Optimizing Nutrition and Fitness: Evidence-Based Insights with Alan Aragon]-[How to Lose Fat & Gain Muscle With Nutrition | Alan Aragon]

📋 Summary

The Hierarchy of Nutritional Importance

Protein Assimilation and Timing

Fasted vs. Fed Training

Body Recomposition and Protein Quality

Inflammation, Sugar, and Seed Oils

Supplements and Longevity

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript