A MASTERCLASS On The 3 HACKS To Lose Weight & Prevent Disease EP 1295

Today’s episode is a masterclass around health and wellbeing, with three experts on the topic of health who share the daily hacks to help you improve your overall health. In this episode, Jason Fung, physician, author, and researcher, shares why you should be increasing the amount of time that you don’t eat. William Li, physician, scientist, and author, explains the most common misconceptions we have about metabolism. Gabrielle Lyon, physician and founder of The Institute for Muscle-Centric Medicine, tells us why we should be making muscle a top priority. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1295Full Episodes:Jason Fung on the Science of Intermittent Fasting: https://link.chtbl.com/1031-podWilliam Li on How to Use Food to Prevent & Beat Disease: https://link.chtbl.com/1207-podGabrielle Lyon on Why Building Muscle is the Key to a Higher Life Expectancy: https://link.chtbl.com/1267-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Fung?

  So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:35Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

• 0:53Jason Fung?

  You're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state. Okay, so when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up. And as insulin goes up, its job, like its normal job is to tell your body to store those calories. Okay, so you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat. But that's the point. So you eat lunch or dinner, there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage. Right? And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability

• 1:38Jason Fung?

  to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin's dropping and you're using calories. So you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, I'm going to go.

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  What I'm eating. Storing, I'm not using calories, is that right?

• 2:02Jason Fung?

  You will shut down.

• 2:03Lewis Howes?

  I will store, I'm not burning body fat.

• 2:06Jason Fung?

  You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example. Uh, and that sugar is gonna signal that, hey, sugar's coming in, use the sugar that's coming in.

• 2:15Lewis Howes?

  Don't burn anything off my body.

• 2:17Jason Fung?

  Exactly.

• 2:17Lewis Howes?

  Keep all stor- all that stored fat, keep it, just keep pirating on, right?

• 2:22Jason Fung?

  Exactly. So, the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So, if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can't skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you have to snack all day long. So now, if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for is about fourteen hours and forty-five minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at eight AM, you don't stop till ten forty-five PM. That's on average. That's the average.

• 2:59Lewis Howes?

  Fourteen hours, you mean a fourteen hour span of eating from the start to finish, right? You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours within a fourteen hour window.

• 3:08Jason Fung?

  It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. So, the point is that before, where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o'clock, you're done, you know, boom, you're, you know, now you shift into using those calories, and your mom would, you say, oh, you need time to digest, right? That's what she sort of said, but the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your mealtimes. Um, and that was the secret, that they could stay relatively slim. Now, if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories. The problem, of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories.

• 3:50Jason Fung?

  Your body, so the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat stores, because your body's like, the instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I wanna keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem, of course, is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same, same thing, right? Fourteen hours of, of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now, if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I gonna change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating and that's all intermittent fasting is. If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you eat within a eight hour window or a four hour window or whatever.

• 4:32Jason Fung?

  What you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat predominantly, but that is precisely the reason you carry body fat. Like that body fat is not there for looks, is there for you to use, right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're gonna burn it. Well, so again, go back to the seventies and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. Well, you know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, and if you're a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner. So you went from twelve o'clock to eight AM, twenty hours.

• 5:12Lewis Howes?

  You look good the next day. You're like a queen. You got a six pack. It's burning fat.

• 5:16Jason Fung?

  Exactly. And nobody died. Nothing bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right? And and that's the whole point is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today. Because when we were cavemen and cave women, there were periods of time. Exactly. They they couldn't, there might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food. And therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. And that was the whole point. So let's let our body, you know, use it. Because that's the most natural thing to do.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  What's the process for you, your day to day life? Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day? Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

• 6:14Jason Fung?

  Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, I rarely eat breakfast. And I'll tell you that it didn't come, I mean, I started this in medical school. And that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I'd wake up literally like five minutes before I left the floor. I brush my teeth. Put on some clothes and rolled out the door. I was, you know, it's just a, it's just that the way I was, right? And so I, I, I don't eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, what's gonna happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode.

• 6:56Jason Fung?

  Because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. Um, it's just gonna keep doing it, right? There's nothing wrong with it. So, um, so a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while, when I get very busy, I will do a twenty-four hour fast, which is a one meal a day. And then every so often I'll do a longer fast and the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's, it's, it's a tough one because. A lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive.

• 7:35Jason Fung?

  To that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at, say, you know, during. Uh, major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that's sort of. Universal, so. Everyone's doing it, so no one's feeling. Exactly. Stress when they smell the food and they're like, ah. Exactly. So if you're, if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or. You know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not, physically it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly.

• 8:18Jason Fung?

  Um, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will. Sort of schedule a, uh, longer fast right after because I know. Uh, that I can lose that weight very quickly, but that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple of years ago, I went on a cruise. And really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot and I knew it and I could feel it in my pants were tight and stuff. So I did sort of a three or four day fast and I'll tell you by the next week I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week and but I got to enjoy the whole week prior. Where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation. I'm doing this.

• 9:00Jason Fung?

  And at the same time, I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat. And and and and it gives you a great tool to use if you need it, right?

• 9:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, six, eight hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the uh, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time. Is that right?

• 9:30Jason Fung?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard seventies style, sort of eight AM to six PM, which in a fourteen hour fast, every single night. Remember they're doing eight for twelve to fourteen hours day. Every single night without even thinking about it. Like that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating, right? But now, of course, the the the the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater. You can eat at your desk. You can eat in a car. Like in the seventies, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when

• 10:08Lewis Howes?

  Food everywhere. Donuts.

• 10:10Jason Fung?

  Donuts and cookies, right? Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right? It's like, well, why? We're having a meeting here, right? So that's the uh, that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window, four, ten hour eating window. You can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it and that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right? So if you think about fasting, you could go three days. You could go five days. You could go thirty days. People do that all the time. But

• 10:41Lewis Howes?

  No, no food?

• 10:42Jason Fung?

  No food. Yeah. So if you look, if you think about um, fasting, so uh, the uh, but the amount of energy that you need. So a pound of fat has thirty five hundred calories roughly. If you need about eighteen hundred calories. So that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like a hundred pounds overweight, you could go two hundred days. You know, if you want to lose a hundred pounds, you could go two hundred days without eating.

• 11:15Lewis Howes?

  And survive.

• 11:17Jason Fung?

  And survive, exactly.

• 11:18Lewis Howes?

  And be okay.

• 11:20Jason Fung?

  Exactly, be perfectly fine, because this is a very efficient, fat is an efficient store of calories. Right, it's very efficient, that's why we developed this.

• 11:28Lewis Howes?

  It's to keep you alive when there's no food around.

• 11:30Jason Fung?

  Exactly, so use it.

• 11:32Lewis Howes?

  Does it affect your digestive system, does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time?

• 11:38Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Lewis Howes?

  And what happens when you start eating again, does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your colon, your metabolism, what's affected there?

• 11:47Jason Fung?

  And this is the interesting part, is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself. From both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint. Assuming, of course, you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's, you know, ten, twenty, thirty pounds overweight, um, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're gonna burn a lot of muscle, and the, the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat. So people say, oh, you're gonna burn muscle.

• 12:26Jason Fung?

  It's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat, but the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, right? Like, why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive, right? And it's like, you know, if you save firewood all winter, for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire, it's like, why would you be so stupid, right? Our body's just the same, it's not that. So, you know, and I know, and everybody knows, that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, uh, you know, lift heavy weights. Then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right?

• 13:08Jason Fung?

  That does nothing for building muscle, like otherwise we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on earth. But we're not, we're the fattest nation on earth. So that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. Um, there is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown, and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle. But you're not. Protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place. And some of that is often burned off. So for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose a hundred and fifty pounds, they get all this flappy skin. That's not excess fat, that's excess protein.

• 13:51Jason Fung?

  So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast, because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein. Your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using. Um, so another big myth, so muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about is starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is the standard medical advice. Cut five hundred calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut five hundred calories a day,

• 14:35Jason Fung?

  uh, and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about five hundred calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time. Because. Why does it stop, why does it stop burning those calories? Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to, say, generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for a hundred years, that if you simply restrict the number of calories, but keep the foods very similar, um, what happens is that your body is going to start using less. So because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you spend a hundred thousand dollars a year.

• 15:19Jason Fung?

  Now you make fifty thousand, you don't keep spending a hundred, right? It's it's you're gonna you're gonna get thrown into jail. But so you reduce your expenditure, same as a body. So it's getting less, so it's gonna use less. And that's the natural reaction is it's it's important because it's a survival response. It cannot do anything different.

• 15:39Lewis Howes?

  So it's almost like so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use

• 15:44Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 15:45Lewis Howes?

  in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you. But if you just do a little bit, I'm gonna eat a little bit less today, it's not gonna do that much.

• 15:54Jason Fung?

  It doesn't work and and people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories, you don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. And as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat. Just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like five hundred thousand calories of body fat here. So why do I need to cut cut it down?

• 16:38Jason Fung?

  And the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat, of course, it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there, why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source, that's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat. Because your your insulin's here, your insulin's high, you're using food. Then you get hungry, so you eat some more, right? You have a snack, you have a low fat muffin, you stay here, there's you can only burn food. All that stuff over there, those five hundred thousand calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body.

• 17:23Jason Fung?

  So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of two thousand calories, I'm gonna eat fifteen hundred, but I'm gonna eat ten times a day. Keeping myself here. Now you only have fifteen hundred coming in. You can only burn fifteen hundred. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom, and then your body burns the full two thousand. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measured their VO two, which, uh, as you know, is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing. And what they found, so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food.

• 18:03Jason Fung?

  And they were burning ten percent more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO two is ten percent higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down. It's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that, and we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of uh, you know, mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of, again, it's a survival response. So imagine again, we're cave men and it's winter and there's no food.

• 18:44Jason Fung?

  So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never gonna eat again. You're gonna die, because every day is gonna be harder. You're gonna circle the drain. So our body is just not that stupid, right? So what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in, boom, I'm gonna switch you over to body fat. And then I'm gonna pump you up so that you have energy, you go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth. You're focused, you're clear, you're in the zone, everything. Exactly. And that's, that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And the constant, the, the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat.

• 19:26Jason Fung?

  Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really wanna just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? Right? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat, they just like lounging around. But if you're the hungry wolf. That is not, that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. Same thing for us, our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility, goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that. That doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic. It means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken,

• 20:11Jason Fung?

  which is a biography of this fellow who got, who went to prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. And he was talking about starvation and he, they were literally starving, like there's, they eat like almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his, his, uh, his, uh, other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he, he, so the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like, it was so widespread. Everybody was starving. And they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time.

• 20:59Lewis Howes?

  In your decades of work through, from medical school to your research to your practice of these things, what is, what was the biggest aha, when you learned this thing? It, it changed everything for you.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  You know, there've been so many instances of that, like as a scientist, I'm seeing new things, uh, literally on a weekly basis, things are like, my jaw drops virtually, you know, like last week, uh, Lewis, I read about a new discovery that we just discovered a new type of human cell in our heart last week. Like, you know, like that, that's like I hit my head like, oh my God, really? We, uh, a couple of years ago, we discovered a new, uh, brain cell called the rose hip neuron. Okay. And it seems to be linked to depression. So I, I'm always amazed. I mean, as a scientist, I'm amazed by the, um, uh, by the marvel-ness of the body

• 21:56Speaker 02

  and how much we don't know about it and still, so we have to respect it. Did you know, by the way, that we had it also, um, this is just this past year, 2021, there was a landmark discovery that changed everything we knew about our metabolism.

• 22:14Lewis Howes?

  What is that?

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Well, so, everybody says that, you know, like, um, when you're a, a teenager, you're growing tall.

• 22:25Lewis Howes?

  You got a high metabolism, you're just burning calories.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Right? Okay, totally wrong. Metabolism's going down when you're a teen, okay? And then people say, when you're, um, in your twenties or thirties, you know, and you're starting to gain weight and getting out of shape. And they're like, man, my metabolism is slowing down. And then some people basically say that, uh, you know, I was unlucky because I was born with a bad metabolism. Look at my sister, or look at my cousin, she's rail thin, she's so lucky she's got a fast metabolism, right? All that has been upended completely. It turns out that all humans go through only four phases of metabolism in their whole life.

• 23:07Lewis Howes?

  Tell me.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm actually, I'm gonna show you this, because it's actually right here on my desk.

• 23:11Lewis Howes?

  You got a chart, you got a, you got a graph, you got a chart?

• 23:13Speaker 02

  No, no, I, I got, I got this baby right here, it's in a journal science, okay? This is how researchers do it, like, I, I'll run my office, man, like, I am reading this stuff. And this paper, uh, I tell you, I, I gotta look at this. It, it studied eight thousand people from like thirty countries. And it studied people from eight days old to ninety years old, across twenty different countries, all right? This is the largest study of human metabolism ever undertaken. And here's what they found, that if you subtracted out body fat, and, and which is different for everybody, okay? And you were to just go right down to the core of real metabolism.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Energy usage, uh, energy generation are, oh, oh, here's, here are the four phases. When we're born, we got the same metabolism as our mother. Makes sense, synchronized, okay? From zero, or from, from, from the day you're born, to one year old, your metabolism skyrockets. In fact, it's twice high when you're one year old as when you're twenty years old.

• 24:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so from one year old down to throughout your teenage years and puberty, at time you think that you're eating a lot and your metabolism is going sky high, it's actually coming down from its peak.

• 24:37Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Why does it seem like you're burning so many calories?

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Well, you, you just, you, you, um, well, you're more active and you're growing.

• 24:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, so you may be burning more calories, but your metabolism isn't changing. This is the key thing. We are hardwired to go through these phases. Now it's going down to 20 years old, from 20 years old to 60 years old. Okay, from college to retirement, it doesn't change. It is rock stable.

• 25:06Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  All right. So it's our, and then after 60, it starts to diminish, but not as fast as you think. It's a slow, it's a slow grade down. Okay. Four phases of human metabolism. We never knew this before this year. All right. This is how it knew it is. So here's the key thing. What makes all the difference between people? Like, how, why is your metabolism different than mine? And why is somebody, why is a sumo wrestler's metabolism different than, you know, uh, somebody who's on a runway in Milan? Okay. And it has to do with the fact that our metabolisms are all the same, but the lifestyle choices that we make can actually push our metabolism one way or the other. So it, our metabolism

• 25:47Speaker 02

  doesn't cause us to be fat. Our fat slows down our metabolism. It's the other way around.

• 25:56Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Completely.

• 25:57Lewis Howes?

  So what, so how do we burn more fat then? To

• 26:02Speaker 02

  All right. So that's

• 26:02Lewis Howes?

  Feed up my metabolism.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  That's what I'm working on right now. And that's, that's, that is the topic of my next book, by the way, which I'm writing right now. Yeah. So, so stay tuned for that answer. Cause I, I'm, I'm on to something really hot on that. Um, and I will give you a little bit of a, of a

• 26:18Lewis Howes?

  Sneak peek. What's that early finding?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, you can eat certain foods to burn your fat down. So, so

• 26:28Lewis Howes?

  What?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  While, while a caloric restriction and fasting, uh, uh, can actually also do it.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  It turns out there are certain foods that you can actually eat that will trigger it.

• 26:41Lewis Howes?

  Ooh, one of those. Give me some of those.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  I, I don't, I don't want to give you a, a too mu- I don't want to give your, yours as a spoiler because I, I'll have you come, I'll have you invited back to the show.

• 26:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, we'll have you back, we'll have you back on for sure. We'll have you back on for sure. You can give us the whole debrief, but what, what would you see? A, a couple of these foods at least that you think that are, are now researched and proven to be powerful, fat burning.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Well, I'll, I'll, I'll give you, I'll give you, I'll give you one that's actually just a surprise is seafood, actually.

• 27:07Lewis Howes?

  Seafood?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:09Lewis Howes?

  Helps burn fat?

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 27:12Lewis Howes?

  Is it help burn fat or it starts to trigger and activate the fat burning process?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  It's, it, it triggers. So there's, there's certain elements in food that are newly discovered in research. Like I just told you, I just told you some new stuff out that's coming out of the hot off the presses, but I can tell you like, this is where, this is what I do. The research that if I told you about research about biotech developments, it may not actually mean anything to you for 10 years. Maybe ever, you never, okay. But when there's, when there's research about food or about your health, a lot of times there's stuff that you, that has immediacy. You can put it to use right away.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  So cancer starving foods, regenerative foods, gut health foods that can also help your brain, foods that slow down cellular aging, foods that lower inflammation and boosts your immune system at the same time. You know, that's what I'm talking about because the power of healing rests inside our body and healthcare is not something that we need to rely on when we go to the doctor's office, right? Every year you go once, healthcare is everything in between that we do for ourselves and food is a medicine that we take.

• 28:27Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. Uh, I've talked about this many times on, on my show before that I grew up. In a specific religion called Christian Science, where it was more the practice of spiritual awareness and that were spiritual ideas and less on using medicine to heal, but more using the mind and awareness to heal, you know, thought, which would then heal the physical body. So medicine was never really a thing I studied or really took growing up. It was just kind of like when we got sick or when something happened, we used thought, prayer, spiritual prayer to kind of remind ourselves of who we are. But the, I'm curious, do you think that people could live without modern medicine?

• 29:12Lewis Howes?

  If they eat properly, like all the things that you talk about in your book, eat to be diseased? Do you think we could live longer lives, healthier lives without the need of certain medicines? Or are you saying we should be using and eating food when we need them?

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Well, we should be eating to enrich our lives from the time we're young, all the way until our last breath. And that should actually be able to tackle about two thirds of all the chronic diseases. And by the way, about a third of all cancers are thought to be due to diet and lifestyle. One third of cancers, all right, we ought to be able to dodge. But you got to start early, right? I mean, this is not one of these things where I've been smoking my whole life and now I'm going to actually turn over a new leaf. It's never too late to quit, by the way. However, the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, like, so you grew up, you know, in Christian, in the Christian Science framework.

• 30:15Lewis Howes?

  Which you're in, you're in the Boston area, so you.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where the hub is.

• 30:19Lewis Howes?

  The mother church is in, is in Boston, yes.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  It's amazing, it's an amazing place, a really spectacular place to visit and a very special place, actually. But I will tell you that the idea of, of.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Having formative years groomed in a healthy mindset.

• 30:45Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Which is, I think, what you're talking about.

• 30:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Is so important, so that if you've got kids and if you're involved in teaching, and if you're involved in the business where you can actually impact on kids, think about the impact that you have now could actually influence their health 30, 40, 50, 60 years from now. And that, to me, is a big responsibility, it's a giant opportunity to make a better society.

• 31:12Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful. I'm curious, we've got a few more minutes left. What do you think, you're telling me that every week you're essentially finding these aha moments based on the research papers you're finding and things that you're discovering yourself? And what do you think, in your mind, if you could predict the future 10 years out, five, 10 years out, what are going to be the groundbreaking things that we as humans discover in the next five to 10 years that is going to transform our health?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 31:43Lewis Howes?

  Based on what you've seen in the last five to 10 years and where you're like, these are unbelievable, every month there's new findings. What do you think is on the horizon for us?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Well, one thing that I think is most, one of the big aha jaw droppers for me in the kind of the journey that I've actually had in my career is the fact that we can regenerate ourselves. Okay, and I never thought that was even possible. I had been working in stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine and, you know, it's a real struggle, it's an uphill climb to really try to show that we can actually regenerate the heart or the brain or nerves. And yet the body does it every single day. And when I discovered that, you know, you could regenerate tissue by.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Uh barley, you know, eating barley, which has beta D glucan or with uh uh chocolate, as I mentioned to you, cacao polyphenols or even olive oil, the there's something called hydroxy tyrosol. It's a natural chemical and extraversion olive oil. It helps to kind of make that distinctive olive oily taste.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  That that can actually help to protect your stem cell. Or if you are not a vegan, but you eat seafood um uh and and you've and you're really adventurous. You know that black pasta squid ink uh that they have sometimes on menus. Uh I I happen to uh I, you know, I like to explore different kinds of food. Squid ink actually protects your stem cells. It's like a shield. Okay. And so the fact that you we can actually eat to regenerate. So I'm very excited by this idea that we can um uh eat foods. And we're still discovering what foods can help our propel our bodies regenerate a capacity. I think that's going to actually be um uh uh groundbreaking.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  And then something that I'm actually working on that is really, you know, future forward. Right. So you're asking like what what's going to be mind blowing in the future? Yes. All right. Well, look, um, I'm a I'm kind of like a pretty down to earth guy. Like I believe that we should be protecting our planet, doing everything we can we can to um take care of nurture this ball that we live on. Uh and we should be doing better for our community. Um, but I also, I think from the time I was a kid, I appreciated and I was excited by this idea of space travel, which is now happening more often. Right? All right. So here's something I think is going to happen over the next decade.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  As humans become extraterrestrial, we're going to be the first extraterrestrials are ever going to meet is ourselves. And we get beyond near earth orbit. We're going to be, our bodies are going to be bombarded by galactic radiation and and and have the effects of negative gravity. Um, changing our body. We're going to find what kinds of foods or supplements that we got to eat to protect ourselves. That's crazy. So I'm working on that. That's cool. So I I I've been meeting with astronauts. I've been talking to people in the space program, flight surgeons. And what I'm figuring is that if we can figure out what we're going to need in the future. For that, we could probably bring that right down to earth, right now.

• 35:06Lewis Howes?

  Why are some of the longevity experts who talk about mitochondria and telemeters and all these other things that they're saying, I guess they're saying that the studies are showing the more plants you have, the longer your telemeters. And if you're eating more meat, maybe it doesn't work as much.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Let's talk, I'm so glad you.

• 35:25Lewis Howes?

  Share with me the studies, yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, first of all, um, let's define longevity.

• 35:31Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Longevity is defined as what?

• 35:36Lewis Howes?

  Living as long as you can, I guess.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:38Lewis Howes?

  Living longer than expected.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Okay, so that.

• 35:42Lewis Howes?

  And living healthier.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Okay, so but now that's not longevity.

• 35:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  So now that is a health span issue and not longevity. And I think we have to be very careful about how we talk about longevity. Are we talking about living six hours longer? Are we talking about living six weeks longer? What does that mean? And I will tell you, as a trained geriatrician from Wash U, it is about the quality of your life.

• 36:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you don't want to suffer for 10 years.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Nothing is going to determine more quality than muscle. Hmm. Because you must be able to do your activities of daily living.

• 36:18Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  You must be able to be mobile. You must be able to do the things that were once, that you once had the capacity for your own autonomy.

• 36:28Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Now, and let's take a look at the longevity expert, or whatever we, you know, we mean by that. The one thing that we know and have control over, right? Directly is what we eat and how we move. Right? In order to protect muscle. You need high-quality protein. This is in the literature.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  You can't build muscle without protein?

• 36:57Speaker 03

  No, you cannot. It would be very difficult.

• 36:59Lewis Howes?

  Just carbs or?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  It would be very difficult. There is an essential amino. So protein is an essential nutrient. There are 20 amino acids, and of those 20, you, there are nine essential, and you must get those nine essentials. Now, I, I will say that of those nine essentials, you require, and, and I'm so glad you brought this up because in those early nitrogen studies and the RDA now, it is not taken into account that we have individual amino acid needs. It is looking at protein as a whole. That is incorrect. I just mentioned that there are 20 different amino acids.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  The information on nutrition as it relates to protein is archaic.

• 37:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  When you look at the back of a label, you will see carbohydrates, and carbohydrates will be broken down into sugars and fibers and all kinds of things. You look at the back of a nutrient label and you'll see fat, and fat will be broken down into, you know, whether it's, you know, trans fats or saturated fats or whatever. You look at the label and it says protein. But not all protein is equal. Let's, let me give you an example.

• 38:17Lewis Howes?

  What's the highest-grade of protein and what's the lowest?

• 38:20Speaker 03

  So eggs would be considered one of the highest forms of protein. Eggs, beef, chicken, fish, whey protein is the gold standard.

• 38:29Lewis Howes?

  Whey?

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:31Lewis Howes?

  Not plant protein?

• 38:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 38:33Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 38:33Speaker 03

  And, and listen, so when we, plants are notoriously low in the essential amino acids.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 38:40Speaker 03

  They are. It, you can eat a diet that is plant-based, but you will require 35% more calories. So for example, let's say you wanted to get your protein from quinoa. You would need six cups of quinoa to equal the amino acid profile of one small chicken breast. That is a metabolic disaster.

• 39:05Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Because in order to stimulate muscle, you need the essential amino acids. Well, you need all the amino acids, but in order to stimulate muscle, you need one of the branched-chain amino acids. Now branched-chain amino acids, they're leucine, isoleucine, and valine. Leucine is necessary in a meal threshold amount to stimulate muscle. And you're like, well, the listener's like, well, what does that mean? That means you need to get thirty grams at a minimum as you age to stimulate muscle tissue. Because you need two and a half grams of leucine. And this, you know, I earlier talked about Don Layman. These were some of his discoveries.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  This is his contribution to science is that we have an amino acid meal need of leucine, which eludes people. So let's say you are gonna have fifteen grams of a protein for breakfast, fifteen grams of a protein for lunch, and then fifteen grams of a protein for dinner, and the majority of the rest of your meal was carbs and fat. You will not stimulate muscle.

• 40:18Lewis Howes?

  So you need more protein to stimulate muscle?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  It either happens or it doesn't. From a nutritional perspective, you require a certain bolus amount at one time to reach the bloodstream.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  That is two and a half grams of leucine to begin this as you age. If you are eating sub-threshold, you will not stimulate the tissue nutritionally.

• 40:40Lewis Howes?

  What do you say to the people that these like athletes that were extreme meat eaters?

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:47Lewis Howes?

  Then went plant-based?

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:49Lewis Howes?

  And they talk about how they're stronger, they recover better, they sleep better. What do you say to some of those cases that are out there of these athletes?

• 40:58Speaker 03

  I would say everyone is individual and.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  If they feel better, that's great. I would say that the science doesn't support that in that way.

• 41:08Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  From a muscle recovery, from a body mass, body size, skeletal muscle size. But again, everyone is individual.

• 41:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  And I want to be very clear that I am not anti-plant.

• 41:20Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  I'm not. And I am not in at one extreme or the other. I do believe in eating high-quality protein. I know its importance. And I think what's happened now, and part of the reason I was so excited to come and talk to you, is that what we need in order to have a healthy world is we need transparent conversations.

• 41:44Lewis Howes?

  So you're not extreme either way. You're saying where's the science?

• 41:48Speaker 03

  I am saying-

• 41:49Lewis Howes?

  How do we lean into the science?

• 41:50Speaker 03

  I'm saying what is the truth?

• 41:52Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  What is supported by the science? What do we know to be true? And then we can make decisions.

• 42:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Whether an individual is plant-based or an individual is eating a high-protein diet, which, you know, I believe in because I've seen it for decades. And also, it's in the literature, high-quality evidence in the literature. I believe that to be true.

• 42:14Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  And what's happened now is-

• 42:17Lewis Howes?

  You're saying it's also hard to be a high-protein diet, plant-based.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  It is difficult, and it can be done, but it needs to have very careful, you know, nutrient complex. You know, again, it's not just about a macronutrient. Food is a matrix. You know, for example, in beef, there's creatine. There's components that you won't get from plants in beef. You cannot get it otherwise. There's no creatine in plant products.

• 42:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 42:45Speaker 03

  No, it comes from meat, right? The bioavailability of iron is much higher in red meat. B vitamins, zinc, these are things that are what is offered.

• 42:58Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Taurine, these-

• 43:00Lewis Howes?

  They're not in plants.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  They're just not in plants. So we have to be able to have intelligent conversations. And right now, what we hear is a lot of narrative. And a lot of, "Don't eat meat because it's bad for the planet." Well, the reality is, if we, in the US, if we care about global warming, and we really look at what are the biggest drivers, we're looking at 80% is industry. Electricity and transportation. This is makes up a huge chunk, eighty some percent or more. Agriculture in the US makes up what? Maybe nine percent?

• 43:38Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Wait, maybe nine percent. Of that nine percent, how much you think is is, you know, related to cattle? Or animal, maybe it's three percent? So what are we talking about? Those so the statistics is just not, it is a lot of discussion. When the reality is if you look at this book, right? So there's a book here and you take one sheet of paper and that's the entire world. Okay. And then you fold it down to a postcard, like, let's say it's half that. So the entire world, the landmass is one postcard. You take that one postcard and you give me your business card, Lewis. And you say, okay, here's my business card. Now we tear it two thirds and one third. Okay, so we're now down to, we're talking about landmass.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  We're now down to one business card and two thirds of that business card is called marginal land. Which means we can't grow anything on it. It can only be used for cattle. One third of that land can be farmed. So I bring the point up to this saying. Are we looking at the right things? If you care about the environment and you live in Minnesota, then you shouldn't eat avocados. And why? Because of transportation.

• 44:53Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  So those are ways that individuals can make a big impact rather than reducing high quality nutrients. Because ultimately, you know, you live in a beautiful area and you're on a coast and you know, I'm on the other coast. But it's the people in the middle that we affect the most. So if we tell people to go more plant based, which they're already eating seventy percent plants. This is according to the NIH's data, right now people are eating seventy percent plant based. Who is it going to affect?

• 45:20Lewis Howes?

  Well, I guess if you're focusing on your vision, which is to help people live a healthier, longer life. You need more quality protein.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  You do.

• 45:28Lewis Howes?

  Based on the evidence.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:29Lewis Howes?

  And so it's not about having less or more plants. It's about having more quality protein to build skeletal muscle.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:37Lewis Howes?

  If you want to eat more plants, eat as much plants as you want.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Right ahead.

• 45:41Lewis Howes?

  But it's also makes you get the quality protein is what I'm hearing you say. Because that is one of the main factors to. Healthy longevity.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  And healthy aging.

• 45:51Lewis Howes?

  And healthy aging.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  And we need more protein as we age, not less. We actually require more protein.

• 45:58Lewis Howes?

  To build a muscle, to stay healthy.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  To maintain it, to just keep it. So basically, if you don't stimulate that tissue, right?

• 46:06Lewis Howes?

  Lose it.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  You're going to lose it.

• 46:08Lewis Howes?

  And it's harder to gain it back when you're 50, 60, 70.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  I mean, I wouldn't know, but yes, yeah, yes. If we take the narrative that we are looking at right now,

• 46:19Speaker 03

  eat less protein, eat less red meat, do all these things, while you are young, you have a much greater margin of error.

• 46:28Lewis Howes?

  What about the inflammation or disease conversation around, I guess, way with milk, you know, milk products and dairy? I grew up drinking about, I don't know, eight glasses of milk a day.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:42Lewis Howes?

  From Ohio. I think it's the reason I'm a foot taller than everyone in my family, because of the hormones probably in the milk and the beef and everything I was eating. But I also had a runny nose every day.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  So this is something separate.

• 46:53Lewis Howes?

  And it was like inflammation from the milk and from these types of proteins potentially. Or maybe there's a number of causes, but I got rid of the milk and I got rid of the.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  So that's just one source of protein.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Right? And milk, we know is a, is really, I mean, I personally don't drink milk, but dairy is really important. Dairy is very bioavailable for the bones. A lot of people don't tolerate it, but to, to.

• 47:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  You know, I, I'm not sure that we can equate that with inflammation.

• 47:20Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  So you can equate that with mucus production, but perhaps not inflammation.

• 47:25Lewis Howes?

  Does red, any red meats cause inflammation?

• 47:27Speaker 03

  There is no quality evidence to support that.

• 47:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  And I will tell.

• 47:32Lewis Howes?

  There's suggestion, but not evidence.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  So you bring up a really good point.

• 47:36Lewis Howes?

  Or clogging arteries or these types of conversations.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  Absolutely not. When calories are corrected, absolutely not.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  What do you mean calories corrected?

• 47:43Speaker 03

  The biggest driver of inflammation and obesity is excess calories.

• 47:48Lewis Howes?

  Too many calories.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, it's, it's not protein and it's not red meat.

• 47:53Lewis Howes?

  It's probably sugary drinks and just sugar in general.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  It is excess. You know, it is not inherently bad if you have, if you have healthy muscle. It's not inherently bad.

• 48:03Lewis Howes?

  Cause your muscle will be able to process it and just flush it out.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  So let's, let's, let's go back to red meat being bad for you. There was a series of papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine. By a head researcher named Bradley Johnston. And this, he looked at a tremendously large number of people. And he questioned, well, should be, should we reduce the amount of red meat that we're eating? And right now, I think on average, people are eating 1.6 to 1.8 ounces a day. Do you think that's a lot?

• 48:38Lewis Howes?

  It's not that much.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  That's like, that's like this much. Okay, so to say that we need, you know, so are, is this data true? Is, do we really need and believe these negative influences that we're hearing? So he went through the literature and he, he did something and put it through something called the GRADE system. The GRADE system is the global gold standard for evaluating evidence. Doesn't get better than that. And do you know what he found? That there was no reason for us to be cutting back our red meat consumption.

• 49:15Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  And it created so many issues.

• 49:19Lewis Howes?

  When was this?

• 49:20Speaker 03

  This was 2019.

• 49:22Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Pretty recent. They went after him, people went after him. They tried to not get it published.

• 49:28Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  They were, people were so up in arms, again, food science. We should just call it, we should replace this with something else.

• 49:36Lewis Howes?

  Emotion.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Exactly. And they were so up in arms. And we have yet to see one randomized controlled trial with humans to support red meat being dead. It doesn't exist. There's a lot of epidemiology data talking about, you know, this is where all that information comes from. But epidemiology is not high quality data. And we have many randomized controlled trials talking about the importance of protein, whether it's from Don Lehman's lab, or Stu Phillips, or Doug Patton Jones, or Kevin Tipton. These guys are like, people that have been looking at it, or Heather Leidy, these,

• 50:17Speaker 03

  there are some really good researchers out there that are putting together information for the, that, you know, that's available.

• 50:25Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  And again, it's not to say that Plant is bad, or animal is bad.

• 50:32Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.