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

Daniel Lieberman is a Harvard professor of human evolutionary biology, paleoanthropologist, and author. What is the best diet for peak human health? From vegan and carnivore to Mediterranean and raw food, how do you know which approach is right for you? And are diet and exercise still the keys to good health—or does modern science offer another solution? Expect to learn why nutrition and diet feel much like a religion, which diet is healthier: Vegan or Carnivore, why the Blue Zone science might be one big scam, what the best and worst diets are for your health, why most diets stop working after a certain period, if GLP-1s are the artificial solution to a real problem and much more… - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 How Diet Shapes the Way You Think About Food 2:12 Diet Through the Lens of Human Evolution 2:55 Do We Look For Meaning Through Diet? 5:56 Are Plant-Based Diets Actually Better? 11:30 Why the Carnivore Diet Is Taking Off 14:04 The Truth About Proteinmaxxing 19:50 Is There Really One “Best” Diet? 24:00 Can We Trust Epidemiological Studies? 31:46 Why the Mediterranean Diet Keeps Winning 34:36 The Blue Zones Myth Explained 42:18 Can You Lose Weight Without Cutting Carbs? 51:57 Why Dieting is Simpler Than You Think 54:00 Is Calorie Restriction Worth It? 01:02:35 What’s Special About Intermittent Fasting? 01:06:15 Breaking Down the Paleo Diet 01:11:13 The Truth About Antinutrients 01:12:45 Why the Raw Food Diet is So Hard 01:15:48 What Cooking Really Does to Digestion 01:19:38 Did Farming Make Humans Healthier? 01:24:58 What’s the Real Story With Gluten? 01:27:51 Why Are So Many People Overweight? 01:32:16 Why We Crave Balanced Flavours 01:38:41 Food Labels Don’t Tell the Whole Story 01:43:06 “Healthy” Foods That Could Be Making You Worse 01:51:40 Do Diets Stop Working Eventually? 01:54:08 The Biggest Concerns About GLP-1s 01:59:40 The Principles Behind Every Healthy Diet 02:07:35 Where to Find Daniel - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spotify.modernwisdom.com or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.modernwisdom.com Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You've spent years researching every major diet and trying many of them yourself. I want to go through and review all of those. But first off, what was that journey like?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Well, it was fun. I mean, I've been working for quite a few years on a book about the evolution of diet. And I thought, rather than just simply studying them, which was the majority of the book, I thought I should try them as well. So kind of, you know, on and off, as I was working on the book, my, my wife joined me for many of these diets, kept trying some of these, you know, diets, some of them, some of them better, some of them worse, but just kind of give a little, first of all, some participant observations. So I got a sense of what these diets are like, but also to kind of add context and experience them for myself.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  What did you start that journey believing about food that you no longer agree with?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Gosh, that's, I changed my opinions about so many things. I mean, the reason I started this book and this, and this journey, as you say, is that I'm actually, my research is mostly on physical activity. I, I study the evolution of running and walking and throwing and, and various other physical activities, but I also teach nutrition and digestion and physiology and, you know, that kind of stuff. And I read the literature and a few years ago, actually with some colleagues, I taught a course on diet and exercise. And I've just been so confused by what I read, right? Cause one, you can read it in the New England Journal of Medicine, you know, arguably the top journal in the world, articles in the same year that tell you that saturated fat is good for you, and then articles that tell you saturated fat is bad for you, you know,

• 1:36Speaker 01

  this much salt is too much for you, and this much salt is actually just perfect for you. I mean, you, you name it, there's controversy and confusion. And so I wanted to explore those problems myself. But as an evolutionary biologist, I wanted to integrate an evolutionary perspective, an evolutionary lens with hardcore biomedical data, cultural data, anthropological data, experiential, you know, information, all that together to think about it in whole. So, so my, so I was really trying to do this in order to answer questions for myself.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  What use does an evolutionary lens give you that is typically missed when people make assessments about diet and nutrition?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, it's hard to know where to start. There's a famous expression in my field that nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution. It was written by a guy named Theodosius Dobzhensky in 1972. And what he meant was that we didn't, we weren't engineered, we weren't designed, we evolved. And if you understand why things are the way they are, you need to take an evolutionary perspective, right? So evolution answers a lot of why questions. And when you start addressing why questions, you begin to think differently also about how questions and what questions. So, so I mean, so nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution and diet is no exception.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  It feels like nutrition and diet are a little bit like new religions. There's dogma, it's a super sensitive topic, people get tribal, it's often impossible to change their belief, no matter how much evidence you give them. Why do you think that's the case? Why do people become so ardent?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  That's, that's, I completely agree with you. And in fact, I think that one of my biggest takeaways from working on the book was just how tribal people are about their diet. And I, and I, I don't know the, the answer, but I suspect it has, goes something along the lines of this, which is that for, for millions of years or thousands of years, depending on which time scale you want, people ate the way their culture dictated, right? If you lived in the Middle East, you'd eat like a Middle Easterner. And if you lived in Japan, you'd eat like a Japanese person. And now we live in a world where everybody kind of eats the same stuff. And, and a lot of institutions are sort of crumbling. And I think people are searching for identity.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And I think one of the ways in which we define ourselves is by what we eat, or very often by what we don't eat, right? And that's been sort of the case all along, you know? If you're kosher, you don't eat this. If you're, if you're a Jane, you don't eat that, et cetera, et cetera. But, but I think people are searching for, for meaning and identity and diet is a really important way of defining it. A lot of the, a lot of diet, I mean, some diets are kind of like cults. I mean, they're sort of online.

• 4:21Chris Williamson?

  Nutritioning theology.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  They're all kind of online cults and everybody kind of agrees, it's kind of like group think.

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  You know why I think at least part of it is because we all understand that the diet that we eat is related to longevity. What we are faced with when somebody says that they disagree with our, they diverge from what it is that we're eating, it's kind of a threat against our own existence that if this person is right, implicit in that if I believe deeply about my diet and they believe deeply about theirs and we diverge in our opinions, that means maybe they're going to live longer than me, or that means that maybe I'm going to die sooner, or that means that I'm wrong in some sort of a way. It's not an abstract discussion. It's got, it's going to have real world implications. This is going to come into land at some point.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think that one of the key words you just said is belief, right? Because one of the real problems about diet is that it takes years, many years for the effects of diets to manifest themselves in terms of our health. And so we all have to take leaps of faith when we pick our diet, right? I mean, right now, I'm, you know, let's just say I follow the, the Mediterranean diet. You know, I can read all the, the studies I want about how good the Mediterranean diet is for me, but I won't know for 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years, if, if it's true, right? So we all have to take a leap of faith to some extent when we pick a diet. Some people take leaps of faith based on their friends, their, the group, the community.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Others are a little bit more scientific, but no matter who you are, you have to figure out what you believe and how you're going to, or what information you're going to use to credit.

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay, let's get into some of the religions, maybe two of the most ardent groups are vegans and carnivores. Plant-based diets superior?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  You know, I try not to be that judgmental about anything. I mean, if you look at the data, look, no matter what you, everybody who has a particular diet idea, and including the fad diets, almost all of them are based on some grain of truth, all of them, the carnivore diet included. However, when you look at the data and you look at like big meta-analyses, large scale studies, I don't think there's much contest that, you know, plant-based diets of various sorts, and they're not all the same, tend to have better health outcomes in terms of meta-analyses, long-term studies. And there's also mechanistic data as well. So I think if you're going to err on the side of animals versus plants, I, I think

• 6:51Speaker 01

  that science is pretty clear, plants.

• 6:54Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Gosh, there are a lot of reasons for that. Well, one is that plants, again, not, not all plants are the same. If you eat crap plants, right? If you eat sugar and, you know, highly refined grains and carbohydrates, you're not eating a very healthy diet. I mean, a lot of ultra-processed foods are mostly plant. That doesn't make them, the fact that they're plant-based doesn't make them healthy.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  But so, so, so, you know, it's, when we oversimplify, we can get ourselves into trouble. But, but there's evidence that, that meat for, even though we evolved to eat meat, meat has been played an important part in evolutionary history, meat is nutritious.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  There's no question about that. But for example, there are studies which show that there's a dose response effect between how much meat you eat and your risk of cancer.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  I think it's like one serving of meat, which I think they count as 85 grams, increases your, your, your risk of cancer over, over X years by, I think 13%. And if you, if you double that, you double the risk. So there's a, there's a dose response effect. So that's, that's this epidemiological data, and there are quite a few studies which show that. Secondly, there are mechanistic studies, right? So we know, for example, that meat has a protein called carnitine. And carnitine, when it goes to your gut, is transformed into another molecule called TMAO. Don't ask me to give you the long form of the, of the, of the molecule. And TMAO is a known inflammatory molecule that causes inflammation and has been associated

• 8:30Speaker 01

  with risk of, of, actually, it's been shown to be mechanistically related to atherosclerosis, to hardening of the arteries, so increased blood pressure. Another effect of meat is that, that red meat, not, not, not poultry or fish, has a, has a glycoprotein. So a glycoprotein is a little, you know, every cell has these little kind of like forest of, of like sugar protein molecules that stick off. And red meat has a particular kind of glycoprotein called NEU5GC. I mean, that doesn't really matter with the, the name, but it turns out that humans have an inflammatory response to that.

• 9:08Chris Williamson?

  All humans?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  All humans. It is a gene called CMAH, which causes us to, to transform one prote glycan into another kind. And that makes us have a response to any red meat. And, and that's also been argued to be another mechanistic reason for the, the data I mentioned earlier, that there's a relationship between dosage of meat eating and, and cancer risk. But again, it's not so simple because everything has trade-offs, right? There's no such food that doesn't have a trade-off. And, and meat is just one of them. And so the other, of course, the issue about meat is that meat tends, not always, but tends to have a higher amount of saturated fat.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  And saturated fat is one of the most controversial things on the planet, right? And when, especially when it comes to nutrition.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  And we all don't, we don't, you know, there's a lot of variation in how we respond to saturated fat. Some of us can eat as much saturated fat as we want, and it doesn't really have any negative effect. But others do have some genetic susceptibility to saturated fat, and it does raise their risk of, it will raise the levels of lipoproteins, cholesterol molecules that cause heart disease. So it's complicated. There's just never a simple answer for anything.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  It's seems like maybe some of the reasons for plant-based diets having better outcomes, at least epidemiologically, is not maybe to do with what's in the plants, but what's not in the meat that isn't being eaten. It's like the elimination diet of meat as opposed to the inclusion diet of plants.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Of course. I mean, that's part of the problem with studying nutrition, which is that every time you don't eat something, you're eating something else. Or every time you eat something, you're not eating something else.

• 10:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Or almost. So, so that's one of the reasons why, you know, you can't do a study, right? I can't, I, there's no one is ever going to do a study where they take, you know, a hundred groups of tw- a hundred sets of twins and have one group of twins eat an all-meat diet, and one group of twins eat an all-plant diet. And even if they did do that, how would you separate all the other effects, right? Because when the ones are eating the meat diet, what is it they're not eating? And the ones who are eating the plant diet, what is it they're not eating?

• 11:20Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And so on. And how do you correct for the effects of exercise and, and, and smoking and, you know, all those other factors? It's not possible to do that.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that the carnivore movement has had such a boon recently if some of the data seems to be skeptical about the kind of outcomes of a very heavy meat-based diet?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  You know, that's a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, I think part of it is, again, it's a bit tribal. I think meat is associated with manliness and, and masculinity. That's, explains, I think, some of it. In the book, I recount, you know, James Blunt, the English singer.

• 11:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Went on an all-meat diet and ended up getting scurvy, but he describes, he describes that, that the reason he did is he thought it made it more manly. And now, I mean, that's probably not everybody. There are others who, you know, that they hear podcasts or, or, or whatever that, that, that expound the benefits of a meat diet, and they're attracted to it for one reason or another. And, and, and, you know, one other issue is that a lot of people are on really unhealthy diets. And if you pick pretty much any diet that's not a crap diet, for lack of a better term, you're going to do better. And so you might

• 12:39Speaker 01

  think, okay, wow, I'm eating all this meat, I'm feeling better than when I ate lots of McDonald's and drank swirled lots of, you know, soda and, and whatever. It doesn't mean that you do, wouldn't do even better on, say, a Mediterranean diet, or a dash diet, or a Blue Zones diet, or, you know, fill in the blank.

• 12:56Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying that the best diet is the one that you're able to stick to?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Well, it depends what your goals are. If you're trying to lose weight, absolutely. I mean, that's actually, there's something called the National Weight Loss Registry, where they've actually analyzed, again, because you can't randomize huge numbers of people to different kinds of diets perfectly. So what this study has done is that they've looked at, they've tracked people who've managed to lose weight and keep it off for a long period of time. I think the average for the respondents is at least six years or something like that, 5.6 years or something like that. And, and, and people's diets are kind of all over the place, but, but what they all share is they're not junk food diets, they're tending not to a lot of sugar and a lot of, you know, added fat and things like that. And they're able to stick to them. Because, because, you know, a lot of people

• 13:41Speaker 01

  find diets hard, right? If you go for a low-fat diet, I mean, it's, I tried a low-fat diet, it's not, it's, fat makes food tasty, you know? Going on a low-fat diet is really hard, and a lot of major studies have failed to have very much effectiveness because people can't tolerate the diet. They, they, they just start eating more fat.

• 14:05Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the current protein-maxing push? Given what sounds to me like a degree of skepticism around the importance of meat, protein is the new hot girl in school, everybody wants her, everybody's having more of her. What do you make of the current world of protein consumption?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I find it fascinating. I mean, protein's having its day. And you look, there, there's some truth to the interest in protein. Protein is important. It's, you need protein. There's, every day, you need protein. You can live without eating fat, and you can live without eating carbohydrates, but you cannot live without eating protein.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  Is that true?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, your body can turn anything into fat, and your body can turn, and can, your body can transform fats and proteins into sugars. But you cannot, there are a bunch of amino acids that are essential. You have to have them in their diet, or you'll die. There's actually two fatty acids that you need to eat, a little bit of omega-3 and omega-6. But apart from that, you, you do need to eat protein. Secondly, protein is filling. So, so people tend to be a little bit more sedent on eating protein. Protein takes a little bit more energy to digest, and, and it's pretty nutritious. But here's the thing. And I think a lot of people, and if you're, you know, very physically active,

• 15:28Speaker 01

  if you're menstruating, if you're pregnant, you need, you need extra protein. As people age, they also lose muscle mass, and it's really important for them to have protein. But here's the thing, the body can't store extra protein. If you eat more protein than your body can use, you can't store it. So what do you do? You turn it into, turn it into fat. So eating massive amounts of protein is probably not that harmful unless you get to ridiculous levels, and you can do kidney damage. But you have to really eat a lot of protein for that. So eating huge amounts of protein is not going to have some massive benefit. And there's no, I don't, I've never seen any strong evidence to that, to that say.

• 16:07Chris Williamson?

  One gram per pound of body weight is the rubric.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  That's what they say, yeah.

• 16:11Chris Williamson?

  And what do you, where do you come into land on one gram per pound of body weight for protein consumption?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  I don't have a strong opinion on that. I mean, I think, you know, we're all different. I mean, part of the problem with the way we think about diet is we, we medicalize it, right? You know, that, you just gave a dose, right? But it doesn't work that way. It's, it's complicated. It depends on what you're doing, and how old you are, and whether you're losing muscle, and whether you're working out, and whether you're 20 or when you're 80. I don't think anybody's able to come up with a perfect dose of protein. I mean, it's, you know, the old definition of economical, you know, enough but not too much. And I think that, and we all have to figure out that out. But, but it's not, you know, it's, it's really hard to come up with a very simple diagnosis for any human being. And that's, again, part of the problem with diet. We all, we all want to be told what to do. We

• 16:58Speaker 01

  all want to make it simple. We want a magic bullet. We want a quick fix. And the problem with diet and nutrition is that it doesn't work that way.

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  I imagine we're only two religions in to our nutritional theology trip around the world. I imagine some people are already feeling a degree of maybe uncertainty or confusion. Why, okay, so it's important for me to have protein, that I need that, it's actually mandatory. It's one of the few things that I have to have, or else I'm going to die at some point. But also, there's some pretty sort of negative effects, especially around red meat, it seems, of a long-term populations. The plant-based thing appears to maybe went out a little bit, but the carnivore thing is missing some stuff.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Well, but, but one of the weird things about the whole protein thing is that people seem to associate protein with meat. You know, when you got all, all those plants out of there, there, there's a lot of protein in those plants. Beans are filled with protein, legumes are filled with protein. Whole grain foods have a lot of protein. You don't need meat in order to get protein. And in fact, you know, soy is a complete protein. You could actually live your life off soy. You don't actually need to eat meat in order to get protein. So the equation of meat with protein, I think, has been exaggerated. It's true, meat is rich in protein, and meat is a complete protein. But you can also get a lot of protein from quinoa, and from, you know, from nuts and whatever, you know, it's not a, and you can certainly buy, and, and every culture on the planet has figured it

• 18:25Speaker 01

  out, you know, every farming culture on the planet figured out to get sufficient amounts of protein by combining a grain with a legume. So rice and beans, or corn and beans, all of those are, are solutions that, that cultures worldwide figured out in order to help make, ensure that people got adequate amounts of protein.

• 18:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. 95% of people don't get enough fiber, which is why Momentous built Fiber Plus, because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually kind of hard, even harder than your last toilet trip. Fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed, everything else you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  That's why I plan to make my next big dump Momentous.

• 19:22Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, they offer a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom. A modern wisdom at checkout. Mediterranean diet is regarded as one of the most healthy on the planet. Is that right?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  It has probably more scientific evidence to support it than any other diet because, and that's partly Eurocentric because of course, you know, Europeans and Americans do most of the research and Americans do most of the research. So there's a lot of, there's a lot more data on it. I'm not sure that the Mediterranean diet is necessarily healthier than a traditional Asian diet or a traditional American diet or, you know, Mesoamerican diet or traditional Asian diet, but absolutely there's a ton. If you were to go purely on epidemiological data at the moment, you would pick a Mediterranean.

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain what epidemiological data in the world of diet and nutrition means?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Excellent question. So, so there's a number of ways to figure out the effects of food and diet on health. And so one is to do, I'm going to back up a little bit if you don't mind. So one of those do a randomized control study. That's the gold standard, right? I give you and your twin, two different diets and I follow you for X number of years, right? And then I can measure its effect on your cholesterol levels and your this, you know, your steroid levels and your, you know, your nasal mucosa production, whatever, you know, I can measure anything I want, right? But of course it takes a long time to do that. And so because we can't wait for you to die, we're going to lend measure proxies, right? Rather than your actual health outcome.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  The other is to take large samples of people and then try to make associations between what they eat and their health outcomes. And that's what, that's an epidemiological study. So, so there are statistical associations within a population between, say, what people eat and their likelihood or their prevalence of getting heart disease or hypertension or cancer or arthritis or whatever it is. And so for the Mediterranean diet, there are both epidemiological studies, large scale ones, huge. I mean, there are now meta-analyses involving hundreds of thousands of individuals. But they're also prospective studies.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  So that's the kind of the gold study is when you take a bunch of people and you again, randomize them into two groups. So one of the biggest studies was one done in Spain, for example, where they had over 7,500 Spaniards and they assigned some of them a Mediterranean diet where they had to have olive oil or walnuts, there were two arms to that versus Spaniards who were not eating a Mediterranean diet. And after, I think after five years, they stopped the study because the effects, the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet were so high that they felt that it was unethical to continue the study and not.

• 22:40Chris Williamson?

  Deny the other group from the benefits of having a Mediterranean diet.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 22:46Chris Williamson?

  Wow, it was so good.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Pred med study.

• 22:48Chris Williamson?

  A non-Mediterranean diet was essentially seen as kind of a toxic.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  As unethical, as unethical.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yes, way. So, so that's just one study. There's other studies in France, elsewhere. So these are, and again, these are prospective studies. So those are the best studies, right? Now, every study has its drawbacks and its problems and its flaws, right? You can't, you know, because you have to count for, for, you know, all the other things that people are eating, their smoking, their physical activity, you know, whether or not they're, you know, whether they're lawyers or not, who knows what? But, but when you combine all those different, but there's, and then on top of that, there are studies where you can feed people a Mediterranean diet for just a few weeks in a lab, for example, and then measure its effects on, on, on, on aspects of your health that have a outcome like, like a cholesterol level, right?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Or, or so on and, or markers of inflammation. And so you combine all those kinds of data together, the mechanistic studies, the epidemiological studies, the prospective studies, and the Mediterranean diet comes out as a very, you know, probably, I wouldn't say it's a clear winner, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it probably has the most evidence in its favor of any diet that's ever been studied.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  I imagine when it comes to the epidemiological studies, people's dietary choices are idiosyncratic. They're informed by the culture that they're from and the, the job that they have. You know, if you're, there's an entire industry of PTs that are probably overeating meat, which means that you have meat eaters that are disproportionately personal trainers, but that means that they have the lifestyle of a personal trainer. Or perhaps there's something cultural that, you know, red meat is eaten by dudes that like to barbecue from the deep south. Maybe they're doing other stuff with their health and maybe they're smoking or whatever. So the selection effect of what people eat, which diets, and what are the things that aren't under the studies purview? What does that sort of?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Huge, huge effect. Like, you know, vegetarians also tend not to smoke, right? And, and so how do you separate the fact of eating a vegetarian diet from the fact that you, you're much more likely to smoke? And people who tend to be more physically active also tend to eat a healthier diet. In fact, you know, big studies where they, like when, when you and I die, right? There's going to be a death certificate, right? Saying we died of such and such. And it might be, you know, cancer or a heart attack or whatever. But then what was it that caused the cancer? What caused the heart attack? Right? And that's, there's a, there's a, a bunch of epidemiologists out there trying to try to figure that out. And many studies are unable to separate statistically the effects of exercise and diet because people who exercise tend to eat well and vice versa.

• 25:26Chris Williamson?

  So is that healthy user bias?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the co-variation is what we call co-variation is so strong statistically, it's very difficult to separate these things.

• 25:35Chris Williamson?

  Does that make epidemiological studies in nutrition and diet largely useless then?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  No, they're, so that's the wrong way to think about it. Epidemiological studies cannot measure cause and effect, but they are one of many forms of, of information that we can and should use because again, you can't, I mean, like again, the gold standard study for a true skeptic is a randomized control study. But as we had talked about before, you can't do a proper randomized control study and wait 50, 60 years for somebody to, to see the effects of the diet and control for everything else too. So we, we need to be, do you know the, the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox?

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Okay. So there's a famous piece of paper from the seventh century B.C. by a guy named Archilas of Paris, which wrote, he wrote, and it's like a fragment, he's a poet, like a boring poet, but, but apparently he, he wrote this like bit of a poem that survived. And it says, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." And what he meant by that was that when you chase a fox, it'll do anything to run away, right? It'll hide, it'll, it'll, you know, it'll, it'll.

• 26:44Chris Williamson?

  Climetry.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Climetry, you don't do whatever, right? You chase a hedgehog, it just rolls into a ball, right? Hedgehogs just do one thing. And that analogy was used by a very famous English philosopher named Isaiah Berlin to think of, to kind of divide the world up into hedgehogs and foxes. So, so hedgehogs are big idea guys, like they, protein is your answer.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  You know, meat is your answer. Never eating meat is your answer, et cetera. Those are what I call hedgehog diets. They're single idea, big fix diets. Whereas foxes are the, see nuance, they see trade offs, they see complexity. They realize that every time you eat one thing, you don't eat something else. And, and, and we need to apply, I think that, you know, the hedgehog approach to diet is always the wrong way because it's complicated. People vary, the effects of foods are complicated, there are trade offs. And when we start to oversimplify, we inevitably get things wrong. And that's true for even how we analyze the scientific record. If we decide, well, epidemiological data, it's just junk because you can't test cause and effect, you're missing important information.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Just as if you decide, oh, you know, randomized control studies are really problematic because they're too short term and they don't involve variation and whatever, you're also missing something important. The best approach is to look at as much of the information as possible and put it together. And that's, I mean, if I can be a little, you know, self-promoting, that's why I wrote the book, because I tried and fed up to take all that evidence and to digest it, put it into kind of plain English and make it, you know, help people understand that. Because I think all of us need to try to answer these questions. Let me put it another way. For millions of years, millions of years, our ancestors. They had to know enormous amount to get their food, right? If you're a hunter gatherer, you have to know how to hunt animals, right?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  You need to know where they are and how to track them and how, you know, what's the right, you know, what environments they're going to be in and, and how to butcher them and all that kind of stuff. To find plants, I mean, I've gone out foraging and hunting with hunter gatherers. Finding plants is not a trivial matter, right? Finding where the plants are, knowing how to dig for them and knowing where they are, different seasons, we had to be naturalists. We had to know a huge amount of information in order to survive. Now, you and I can walk into a Whole Foods or whatever, you know, whatever, Sainsbury or whatever, whatever it is. And we're confronted with 40,000 different kinds of food. We don't know how to, we don't need to know how to get our food anymore. We now need to know how to choose our food. So we, we need a different kind of knowledge.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  And, and you can, you can throw up your hands and just have somebody tell you what to do, or you can try to learn for yourself what you, what you want, what you care about, what's important to you, what your trade offs are. So I think all of us need to educate ourselves to, to figure out how to choose our food, because that's the challenge our modern world has set us.

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  The question of what should I eat today? Evolutionarily is pretty novel.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  It's completely novel. Nobody ever asked that question. I mean, the people I work with-

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  I will eat what is in front of me because otherwise I die.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the people I work with in, in my field work, you know, so I've done a lot of work in Kenya. I've been working recently in Rwanda. And, you know, occasionally people invite me for meals, right? In the, in the area where we work, we're kind of very remote. We've worked for 15 years in a very remote part of Kenya, actually where a lot of the famous runners are from. And I don't even have to ask what I'm going to be served. It's always exactly the same meal. You have a dish called ugali, which is like a, like a cornmeal kind of porridge with, with either sakumba wiki, which is a, which is basically collard greens that have been chopped up and sauteed, or sometimes if you're lucky with some beans or something like that. That's it. That's what you get. Nobody asks what's for dinner. They know what's, because they eat what they grow. That's all the food that they have available to them. Or I've gone out, you know, with hunter gatherers.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I've had the privilege of spending some time with hunter gatherers. They don't like, well, gee, tonight, am I going to have Italian or Chinese? Or shall I have, you know, shall I have turtle? Or shall I have, you know, tortoise? Or shall I have, you know, kudu? They eat whenever they manage to hunt and whenever they manage to gather. That's it. There's no, nobody asks what's for dinner. They, they eat what they have. And all of us, and farmers and hunter gatherers, this is, that's the way life was for, for most people. Except, you know, the King of England or whatever, he got to choose what he wanted to eat. And now we're in this completely weird, bizarre, modern environment. And, and surprise, surprise, we have a hard time. Because not only do we not know what to eat, we're also confronted with a lot of really bad stuff.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  I mean, typical, as I said before, the typical American supermarket has 40,000 different kinds of food, 40,000. It's kind of amazing. And over 50% of that is ultra-processed, designed to be highly appealing, addictive, convenient, inexpensive, although that, that's going up a bit. And, and, and how are we supposed to, how are we supposed to cope? We're not, we're not, we never evolved the mechanisms to handle that.

• 31:47Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the Mediterranean diet, what is it about that diet that seems to, what, what's the mechanistic reason for why it seems to outperform others?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  There's probably a number of reasons. There's, again, there's no one reason. So one is that it tends to be whole grain, right? So you, so when you take flour and you refine it, right? You remove the, the outer layers and you remove the germ. You're removing a lot of the protein and you're removing a lot of the fiber.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it has a healthy balance of fat. So of course it's famous for olive oil, which is a mono unsaturated fat. We can talk about that if you want. And mono unsaturated fats are associated with a lot of health benefits. There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. Mediterranean diet often has fish in it and fish has these omega three fatty acids. So it's the constellation of, of nutrients that are healthy, plus an absence of a lot of stuff like added sugar and a lot of-

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  You say, what, what are the things that it eliminates most?

• 32:50Speaker 01

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

• 33:33Speaker 01

  So it's, it's, it's a mixture of things that have in toto been shown to, to be reasonably healthy. Now, is it, is it, is it like an optimal diet? Is it perfect and will guarantee perfect health? No, no diet is optimal. But is it, does it, has it been shown to be effective for preventing weight gain and for reducing your risk of a wide range of diseases? Absolutely.

• 33:58Chris Williamson?

  How much is it the lifestyle? I've heard about the importance of the sociality around the Mediterranean diet and stuff like that. Has that been separated out? You know what I'm talking about, right?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, again, it's very hard to do that. But, but for example, that, that study I mentioned, the Spanish study, the pre-med study, I mean, that, that essentially by randomizing people who all presumably had similar lifestyles.

• 34:20Chris Williamson?

  They're hanging out on the street corner, having a coffee at 9:00 PM at night there with their friends.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  But both arms of the diet were probably the same. So, so that, so that study, for example, controlled for that. So, but of course, there's more to, to health and longevity than just your diet.

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  What about blue zone diets?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Oh my God, don't get me started on that one.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  I mean, blue zones are fun. I mean, look, there's a lot to say about blue zone diet. The first is, again, you know, if you, it's kind of like a Mediterranean diet, but with even less meat. And if you, if you look at what it prescribes, you know, and, but it also prescribes skipping breakfast. It tells you to be social.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  It tells you to not finish your plate. You know, there's some social aspects to it. But, but what's, I find, and you know, if you look at the, the, the, the, the, the sort of prescription of the diet, especially nutritionally, it's kind of what a lot of, you know, it's not far off from the Mediterranean diet. I don't know of any really good, high-quality studies for the blue zones diet compared to say the Mediterranean diet. But what I find amusing about the blue zones diet is how it's been advertised. Because it's advertised and marketed as a diet that'll help you live to be 100. And that's where I begin to have some concerns. Because even if you look at the data for the blue zones, like if you, there's these supposed blue zones, these five regions on the planet.

• 35:48Chris Williamson?

  Where are they?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Let's see, one of them is in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. One's a little, kind of little village in Sardinia. It's like a little area in Sardinia. One is an island in the Mediterranean. I've forgotten the name of the island. One is Okinawa and the other is Loma Linda, California.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Right outside of LA.

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  I didn't know that one was-

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Those are the five blue zones. And, and the idea behind these are, these are supposedly areas where a hot, twice as many people live to be centenarians, they live to be 100 years old. And so the idea is if you eat like the people in these areas, you too are going to live to be 100 years old. Now, there's some problems with this. The first is that even if you believe the data, that, that these, these regions have a, have a higher percentage of centenarians, that turns out that the percentage of centenarians is tiny. So it's like, it's like six people out of 10,000, as opposed to in the United States where it's three people out of 10,000.

• 36:45Chris Williamson?

  The base rate's so low that small changes are massive proportions?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  These are statistical outliers. So you basically have to, if you, if you're not a statistical outlier, which most of us are not, it's irrelevant. It's not a very, it's statistical nonsense, basically. Secondly, there's a guy in Oxford, is a demographer at Oxford. I'm trying to remember his name, Saul Newman, I think his name is? He's published this really fascinating paper. He did a deep dive onto these blue zones and found out that only 18% of the people in these blue zones actually had birth certificates. So we don't even know how old these people are. They just self-report their age and these are areas, so, and he claims-

• 37:22Chris Williamson?

  Are you telling me, are you telling me that a good chunk of the blue zone fervor could have been around the fact that people just didn't register how old they were?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Correct. Or it could be insurance fraud. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah.

• 37:39Chris Williamson?

  I'm sorry, it's just-

• 37:40Speaker 01

  You can get online, you can read Saul Newman's paper. It's hilarious paper to read.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  But also think about it this way, like there's this like little area in Sardinia. If you go on, if you look on the Blue Zones map, there's this like, you know, think about Sardinia. It likes, you know, it's an oval shaped island, right? And there's this little area on the, on the western side, there's a little blue, you know, zone on the map, right? And in that little area, you have all these centenarians. Now tell me that if you got go like 30 miles north or 30 miles south, that people have totally different diets? And it's like, so why in this little spot are they all centenarians? And just 20 miles north or 20 miles south, they're not, it's kind of suspicious.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  What are the, what is the blue zone proponent explanation for that?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Uh, I think he's answered. I don't think he's-

• 38:27Chris Williamson?

  Is it a guy?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, guy named, um, what's his name? Um, Butner, Butner? I can't remember. He's a, he was a, he was a, um, he was a National Geographic reporter who, who got really excited by this and figured out how to market all this. But, you know, the one of the most interesting Blue Zones is Loma Linda, California. Do you know who lives in Loma Linda, California? What, why Loma Linda is a Blue Zone? Cause obviously they're not little, you know, peasant, you know, farmers eating their traditional foods.

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  They're Seventh Day Adventists. And the Seventh Day Adventists don't believe in smoking, they believe in exercise, they're, you know, they believe that, that many of them are vegetarians. They believe that-

• 39:04Chris Williamson?

  They don't believe in exercise?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  No, they do believe in it.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  They do believe in it.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they believe that, that God gave us our bodies, our body is a sacred thing and that it's our responsibility as, um, as, as, as, as Christians to, to take good care of our God given body.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. That's a physiological theology. Very good.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And, and so, um, you know, they don't smoke, they exercise, many of them are vegetarians. They have, they do all these sorts of things that the, you know, most doctors will tell you is what you should do. And guess what? They have a high percentage of people who-

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  Do they eat the same thing as the people in Sardinia?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  No, of course not. They're eating-

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  Right. So what the fuck, what's going on with this Blue Zones thing? Is it fair, is it fair to say that the Blue Zone diet isn't a diet? It doesn't, it's, it doesn't do what it says it does.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it does, if you read the Blue Zones book, it tells you what to eat. Tells you to eat at least a half a cup of beans a day. It tells you to eat lots of vegetables. It tells you not to eat too much of this and not too much of that. So there, it's got some, it's got some parameters, you know, um, but it's not a, it's not a, it's not a rigidly defined diet. And you know, the, the suggestions aren't totally crazy. But they're, again, it's, it's kind of oversold. I mean, like one of the, one of my, you know, the, one of the refrains from, in, you know, that I keep going back to in my book is that there are a lot of people telling, selling us optimal diets, you know? And I have come to hate the word optimal. If you want to piss me off, say your diet-

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  That's your trigger word.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  It's my trigger word. Tell me your diet is optimal. First of all, is it optimal for you or optimal for me? Cause you and I are not the same, right? We have different genetics, we have different backgrounds, you're young and strong, you have a lot more muscle, you know, but I'm probably faster than you and who knows?

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  Not probably, certainly.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  But, um, um, I'm 62, you're probably a lot younger. Um, you know, um, is, is, uh, are you, are you more worried about heart disease or Alzheimer's or, or arthritis? Or this, or that, or the other? Are you, are you, do you care more about the environment, et cetera? There's, uh, you, there's no such thing as optimal. And, um, and it's, it's kind of a, it's just marketing. And, and we, and I, and so I, I now react against people who claim their diet is optimal because it's just marketing. It's salesmanship, it's not science.

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. I'm younger than me. Yeah, but my dad got a DUI.

• 41:36Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if your setup is messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Gymshark, Skims, ALO and Neutonic. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout's 36% better on average compared to other platforms. And with Shop Pay, it can boost conversions by 50%. So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Neutonic with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Okay, let's piss off some more people.

• 42:20Chris Williamson?

  What about low carb, high fat?

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Boy, am I going to get in serious trouble after this one.

• 42:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes. We both thought it's fine. Low carb, high fat.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Again, there-

• 42:29Chris Williamson?

  Used to be Atkins, now it's keto.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, look, both, depends what your goals are, right? It turns out if you want to, if your goal is to lose weight, for example, you can lose weight on a low carb diet and you can lose weight on a low fat diet. It is true that people tend to lose a little bit more weight on low carb diets than low fat diets. But the, but, um, and in fact, I'm one of the co-authors of the carbohydrate insulin model, big paper that was recently American Journal of Climate Nutrition. So I've-

• 42:58Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I put my, I've signed my name in blood on the, and I believe in the biology behind the low carb diet. So we can-

• 43:06Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain that in layman's terms?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  We can, but before we do, let me, let me just get to this, which is that

• 43:14Speaker 01

  pretty much any non-crappy diet can help somebody lose weight. And the hard part is to sustain it. And so you need to make a distinction between efficacy and effectiveness. So efficacy is basically how well a diet works when it, in the perfect world, right? When there's no cheating and you eat exactly what you're told and you can do it for a long time and, and you know, it's perfect. Effectiveness is how it works in the real world. And it turns out that low carb diets have this higher efficacy for weight loss than low fat diets. This is for weight loss, but their effectiveness, because people have a hard time sustaining them, is only slightly larger.

• 43:53Chris Williamson?

  Right. If you could do it, you might perform very well, but being able to do it, the difficulty is somewhat harder.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  It's hard.

• 44:02Chris Williamson?

  Which means that it mitigates some of those gains.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I tried it. I mean, I tried it.

• 44:05Chris Williamson?

  I've tried every, I've tried every single one of these. By the way, I, I have done a much more bro science equivalent of what you did in the research for this book. I've tried all of them.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I tried the, I tried an Atkins diet and I was hard because I had intense carbohydrate cravings and I'm a runner. And you know, it's hard to be a runner and not eat carbs.

• 44:23Chris Williamson?

  The hunger is rough.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I just, just, I didn't like it that much, um, but I didn't like a lot of the diets that much. But let's, let's go into the biology behind low carb diets, cause, cause it's really interesting. So when you eat food, um, your, um, some of that food, of course, is carbohydrate. And carbohydrates, your body breaks down into, uh, some of it into glucose, which is the base, one of the two major kinds of sugar. There's fructose and glucose. Fructose is what you get from fruit. It's kind of, it's sweeter. Glucose is the kind of more starchy, you know, less sweet form of sugar. And so that, and that goes, goes straight into your bloodstream. Glucose is, your body can only handle a very, very

• 45:08Speaker 01

  small range of glucose because too much is toxic. In fact, I think

• 45:14Speaker 01

  average human being has about a teaspoon and a half of glucose in their entire bloodstream. And if it goes above that, you're in trouble.

• 45:22Speaker 01

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

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Now, insulin also tells your cells to hold on to energy. So, so to prevent your cells from releasing, releasing fat. Cause you, you store that energy as fat, your cells turn the glucose into fat.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Excuse me. So when you are on a low carb diet, you keep your insulin levels low. And that means that you're storing less and also you're not holding on to that fat. And that helps you, and that can, and so, so the biology is pretty simple. And I guess pretty clear, though it gets more complicated because there's another hormone called glucagon, which makes it more complicated. Physical activity affects things. There's, you know, there's, nothing is ever simple. And, and, and the carbohydrate insulin model is, is, is no exception. So, so there's a real basic logic behind the, the carbohydrate insulin model. The problem is that when people go on these low carb diets, they're hard to sustain.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And a lot of people, um, uh, can't maintain them for that long and their carbohydrate levels creep up. And, and, and, and that's the end of the diet. But you can also lose weight on a low fat diet and plenty of people have.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  I didn't even know that low fat, high carb diets were a thing. That's one that I haven't tried.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Oh, so, so there are plenty. I mean, I mean, they're the, some of the biggest diets in the country were, you know, the Pritikin diet, the Ornish diet. There's a whole bunch of-

• 47:20Chris Williamson?

  These sound like fantasy races from a Lord of the Rings novel.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Dash stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. So it was originally developed for

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  Blood pressure.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  For blood pressure, but it turns out to be a low fat diet. And it's actually probably the second most studied diet after, um, after Mediterranean. It's very well stated. So it was developed by NIH. And there's a lot of scientific, there are a lot of randomized control studies for the dash diet. And people who stick to the dash diet, which, which by the way, tried in the book, uh, do lose weight. Absolutely. They can and do.

• 47:52Chris Williamson?

  Surely somebody that's on a low fat, higher carb diet is going to be ripping their insulin levels around more.

• 48:00Speaker 01

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

• 48:41Speaker 01

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

• 49:23Speaker 01

  And I dare you to find somebody with overweight or obesity in the area. They don't exist. There's none of them. They don't, they're not around.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  How much of that is because of the type of carbs? And how much of that is just because of the number of calories?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Well, they're eating a lot of calories. It's, it's a combination. It's, it's, it's the kind of foods they're eating. So they're, they're eating, for example, and I got that, that meal I described earlier in the Nandi Hills, right? Where we have some agali, but we also have succumbah, we can, we have beans. These are all high, highly fibrous, low, low glycemic foods. They're, it's a generally healthy diet. They're also very physically active and that helps. And when you're physically active, so one of the reasons physical activity helps people prevent weight gain. It's not just how many calories are going in versus out. But when people are very physically active, it changes the insulin sensitivity of their muscles. So that they're, um, so that you actually produce less, um, you actually produce less insulin for a given amount of carbohydrate.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  So again, nothing is simple. And, and, and, and, and when we try to oversimplify, we, we get into trouble. And, and, and I wish it were simple, but again, one of the major arguments that I'm trying to make is that, is please, it's a plea to stop oversimplifying complex multifactorial things. We just all need to educate ourselves a little bit so that we can help make sense of all the diversity out there and all the different people out there trying to make money off of us with their various different diets. It, it just doesn't work the way, um, we've been told it does.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  I understand that people shouldn't be trying to overcomplicate or oversimplify things. But the degree of the, the, even just so far, we've done like five diets or something. And all of them kind of feel like they're pointing in the opposite direction. You said, well, low fat can work because of what it doesn't do to insulin in terms of spiking insulin. But high carb can work as long as you eat the right kinds of carbs. And the plant-based stuff, that works, but you do need to get some protein, but it doesn't matter where it's from. And, you know, some people feel good on the carnivore thing, but, but, so it's, I understand why people feel this like malaise. This degree of overwhelm, like, okay, uh, we shouldn't be oversimplifying it. Optimal is your Russian sleeper agent activation code word.

• 51:42Chris Williamson?

  But at the same time, if I'm so

• 51:46Speaker 01

  So I have a solution for you.

• 51:47Chris Williamson?

  Burdened. I don't know what to do.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  I have a, I, I have a solution for you, which is that, again, there's, there's, there are kernels even larger than kernels. There are whole cobs of truth to all of these diets. And why do we have to pick between low fat versus low carb versus low calorie? I haven't talked about low calorie, right? Why do we have to pick? You can actually take the best of all, of all of them, right? So you can take the best of the low carb diet by, by eliminating or removing or not eating too much of refined carbs that raise your insulin levels. You can take the best of the low fat diet by not eating too much highly caloric saturated fat,

• 52:27Speaker 01

  which does, according to a lot of studies, um, either increases your risk of cardiovascular disease or doesn't lower your risk of cardiovascular, we can talk about that later on. So polyunsaturated, monounsaturated fats are, are risk lowering fats. And also, you know, calories do matter. How many calories you eat do, do matter.

• 52:46Chris Williamson?

  We, we need to talk.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And so, so you don't, you know, not eating too much is also helpful. So why not combine the best of all these various kinds of diets without, without going down the, the kind of

• 52:57Chris Williamson?

  But as soon as you combine the best of all of those kinds of diets, you now have a new diet.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  No, you have the, you know what you have? You have the Mediterranean diet.

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  That's the diet. That is a new diet.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Or, or, or you have essentially any traditional farming diet.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  So, so I would say that a, a, a traditional Asian diet, a traditional African diet, a traditional Mesoamerican diet, a traditional Mediterranean diet, all share the same basic characteristics that we just talked about. A lack of highly refined carbohydrates that raise your insulin levels, not too much saturated fat, not too much food, not too, you know, it, a, a diversity of foods, a mixture of, of whole grain cereals combined with legumes that give you complimentary protein. People have been eating these for thousands and thousands of years. Now, are they optimal diets that are going to guarantee you to live to be 100? No, but are these diets that have over the time, course of time, plus in recent studies, been shown to be generally healthy and prevent weight gain? The answer is yes.

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  So it's, so in a way, it's not that complicated.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  That we've started to simplify. What about calorie restriction? I've been told that it's the only reliable intervention that actually works for extending lifespan.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  If you're a mouse.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying that, are you saying that the rodent studies don't come across into humans when it comes to calorie restriction for lifespan?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  There's no evidence yet in humans, in fact, not even in primates. So do you know, there's, there was a big study that was done in, um, in, um, was Wisconsin where they took a whole bunch of macaques, right? And they gave, uh, one group of macaques, a calorie restricted diet and another group of macaques. And this is a 20 year long study. Imagine how much time it took and

• 54:34Chris Williamson?

  Two decades of calorie restriction, if you're in the wrong group of macaques.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  And guess what? The group of macaques that were in the calorie restriction diet were way healthier than the ones that were not in the calorie. And so, so there were these papers published saying, ta-da, calorie restriction works in primates, which means it probably works in humans. But guess what? When people looked at the data, the non-calorie restricted macaques were basically being fed a crap food diet. They were getting lots of sugary foods. They were getting obese. They were, you know, they were not healthy, normal macaque diets. They were fed an ad lemonum crap diet. So the NIH at vast expense, I mean, we're talking millions of taxpayer dollars, redid the experiment.

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  For another two decades.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  For another two decades.

• 55:17Chris Williamson?

  If you're the guy, if you're the guy that fed those macaques fries for two decades, you really should be out of a job.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  It's very shameful, but anyway, so the NIH redid the experiment and, and this time they had them on the same monkey chow diet.

• 55:31Chris Williamson?

  Just chopped one in half or whatever.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And, and one had a third, 30% less food than the other. And guess what? No difference. So in terms of health and longevity.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it does show up in mice?

• 55:42Speaker 01

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

• 56:24Speaker 01

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

• 57:05Speaker 01

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

• 57:47Speaker 01

  up repair. And that's obviously good, right? But you can't repair all the time. Sometimes you have to grow. And so this kind of metabolic switching between the two is really good. The problem, I think, is that a lot of Americans and Europeans and, you know, people in high income countries, we're constantly in growth mode. I mean, how often are we hungry anymore, right? There's

• 58:06Chris Williamson?

  Permanently grazing.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  We're permanently grazing. There's, you know, in my building, you know, if anybody gets hungry for just, you know, you just go down one flight of stairs and there's these stack machines and you never have to be hungry. So that means that some people are just constantly in this on mode and they're not turning on, on, on the repair mode. But we obviously evolved to have these mixture of repair and growth. And so, so there is, and of course, when you go into intermittent fasting or, you know, calorie restriction, you are turning on that repair mode. And that's good. So there, so I'm not saying that it isn't necessarily beneficial or that it might not lead to increased longevity. It's just that the evidence

• 58:48Speaker 01

  so far doesn't exist. So you're, you're taking another leap of faith. I'm sure it's, it's generally healthy. Whether it'll help you live to be 100, anybody who tells you that's the case is, is, is going beyond the evidence. It might, it might, it's not a bad strategy, but it's not, there, there's no strong evidence to that effect.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy. I didn't know that there was no strong evidence. I mean, like the hormetic stressor.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Well, that's how people make money. You know, if they told you, if they told you like what I just told you, that, you know, this is how it might work, but we're not really sure.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  Highly unsexy.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  You're not gonna buy, you're not gonna buy the product.

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  Many, many of your arguments are highly unsexy, is a way, like unmarketable.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Completely unsexy. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. But because we want quick fixes. We want, you know, wouldn't it be great if I just by skipping breakfast, I could live to 100? I wish that were the case, but I can't promise you that.

• 59:42Chris Williamson?

  If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So all you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP Strength app could wipe your ass for you, probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow

• 1:00:26Chris Williamson?

  the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. Heading to rpstrength.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/ModernWisdom. A modern wisdom at checkout. The reason that I think people are not only drawn to it because simplicity is seductive, but also just think about how many different choices you need to make. Now, again, what am I going to eat today is an evolutionarily novel question that humans have never had to ask before.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Chris Williamson?

  Never had to answer before. And if somebody comes along with something that feels like a relatively tight set of guardrails, it's why I think constrictive diets, generally, whatever they are, just help. Like I speak for myself, right? So a couple of years ago, lived in a house with toxic mold. One of the byproducts that comes out of that, an awful lot of inflammation and brain fog and TGF beta and C4A and MMP9, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. One of the often cited diets that seem to help people with some of the brain fog is going carnivore. Get rid of anything that spikes blood sugar. I felt remotely human for the first time in six months.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure you did.

• 1:01:43Chris Williamson?

  I also had LDL in the 400s. And I then had to unwind that.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Everything is a trade-off.

• 1:01:49Chris Williamson?

  So you're looking at my bloods versus looking at how I felt. I'm like, well, it was so good because it was restricting something. It made it very easy for me to follow. It's a super simple set of rules. Is it meat or blueberries or raspberries? If not, don't fucking eat it. But what it did to, and it made me feel good and it made me look, I was shredded out in my mind, looked fucking fantastic, finally hitting my protein goals for a bodybuilding, you know, diet. But also, what's this going to do to my arteries over if I keep doing this for only a couple of years? Like even on a clearly scan, I could see a little bit of progression just from a short space of time, right? Plaque progression in the space of like nine months that we've done this clearly scan 18, 18 month intervals.

• 1:02:33Chris Williamson?

  So I understand why people want that simplicity. What is interesting to me around the sort of calorie restriction thing is the super magical sauce that's inside of the intermittent fasting. It's the 16 eight, right?

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Five, two.

• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Or there's the, there's the, what's it called? The warrior diet.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  Is that OMAD?

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  I can't remember. The warrior diet is you eat like, like only once a day.

• 1:02:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. OMAD, one, one meal a day. Is there something special about intermittent fasting?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Well, again, intermittent fasting moves your body in and out of what we call positive and negative energy balance. Therefore, turning on and off mTOR and AMPK is called metabolic switching.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  But you could imagine.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  But there's no one way to do it.

• 1:03:16Chris Williamson?

  You could imagine a world in which you did calorie restriction. Let's say maintenance for me is 2,400. I could calorie restrict even down to like a significant amount, like 1,800 or 1,500 or something. But I could do that by consuming 100 calories every hour for each week, waking hour that I was, this would be kind of a highly inefficient diet to have. But you understand what I mean, right? There's a difference between grazing your way to calorie restriction or fasting your way to calorie restriction. If you were to take, have you seen any evidence that if you were to take two populations, one of whom was doing OMAD and another of whom was grazing to a similar kind of calorie restriction, that they would have different outcomes?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  In terms of weight or in terms of inflammation or whatever? So, so if, if those studies exist, I don't know them because I'm

• 1:04:01Chris Williamson?

  Be a cool study to do.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, yeah, maybe, but.

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  Don't maybe my suggestion. That's a cool study. Okay. Says a guy that's not in your industry at all.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  I'm just thinking about the hypothesis that we're trying to test. So the, the mechanism by which intermittent fasting or low calorie, you know, calorie restriction is supposed to work is by, by putting the body into a negative energy balance. And as you say, there's two ways of doing it. One is to fast or the other is to not eat very much. Certainly, there's a lot of data on not eating very much. That's just called the diet, right? And, and, and the problem with diets is that people get hungry and they're really, really, really hard to maintain. And they're not very useful for most people because you're tired, you're exhausted, you're cranky, you're hangry, you're whatever, right? Intermittent fasting, and one of the reasons people love intermittent fasting is that you just, you

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  know, basically skip breakfast, for example, by one, one form of intermittent fasting. And so you can, it's much more tolerable. And plus, the other benefit of intermittent fasting, again, is that is the metabolic switching, going from one to the other. Because nobody in their right mind would think that being in a constant state of negative energy balance is a good thing.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  It's called starvation.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  It's called starvation, right? This is, and here's another thing.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  In addition to the fact that there are trade offs, every time you do one thing, you don't do something, every, every food, every diet, everything, there are benefits and there are costs, there's nothing, find me one that doesn't have a trade off and I'll be, I'll be really interested, but I have yet to find one. But remember this also, that we are adapted, not, we're not adapted to be healthy. We, natural selection didn't put us on this earth to live to be 100. We evolved for one thing and one thing only, as far as natural selection is concerned, is to have babies. So, we evolved to maximize our reproductive success and not to be long-lived and healthy. And so, so a lot of the adaptations that

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  we have are, are, are there not to improve our health, they're to improve our reproductive success. And, and that makes things complicated. And, and that adds to the trade offs.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Get me to puberty and hope for the best. What about the sort of world of the modern paleo movement? Because what it sounds like, paleo is in one of the titles that you have for the world that you come from. Looking at a more ancestrally aligned, natural, without falling into a naturalistic fallacy type diet, you could assume, hey, well, if we just eat like hunter-gatherers did, and the paleo movement kind of promised this, from a dietary perspective, but is it right to say that there is an ancestral diet that we can recreate? Has the paleo movement got it right?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  I wish they had, but they, again, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but they got some things right, and they got some things wrong. So, it is true that some aspects of the pale diet make a lot of sense, right? You know, don't eat a lot of sugar, don't eat a lot of saturated fat. That's the original paleo diet, is don't eat a lot of saturated fat. And there's some paleo dieters dispute that. But the paleo diet also says you should never eat legumes, and you should never eat grains, and you should never eat dairy. And, and the, the argument for that is that our ancestors didn't eat legumes and grains. And then we only had dairy until we stopped nursing. And then, you know, that, after

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  we stopped drinking our mother's breast milk, that was it. Well, several problems. First is, it's not true that hunter-gatherers don't eat legumes and grains. It's absolutely just, just, that's just-

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  Don't or didn't?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Don't and didn't, both. We have paleontological evidence, we have Neanderthals with green starch thing on their teeth, we have-

• 1:07:52Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like reliable evidence.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  We have very reliable, you know, that we have this kind of cartoon character of the Neanderthals eating like all meat, like, you know, Inuit in Greenland. But, you know, you know, 125,000 years ago, there were hippos frolicking in the Thames when the Neanderthals were hanging out in southern England. The Neanderthals were not living in Arctic conditions all the time. They were, there were times when there was plenty of plants available, and they were eating plenty of plants. We have archaeological evidence for that. In addition, for example, hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, the second most consumed food are is a kind of bean. It's called the marama bean. It's their number two food. So, don't tell me they don't eat legumes. They do. Hunter, we evolved to eat almost everything. And so, actually, we did a study on this a few years ago. It was actually during COVID, when, you know, it was locked down, and I had an undergraduate who's gonna do an experimental

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  project in the lab that involved, you know, putting people on treadmills and that kind of stuff. And of course, she couldn't do it because the lab was closed. So, we decided, since she was stuck at home, to, to go through the literature on all the high-quality data on hunter-gather diets from the tropics, and just analyze the hell out of the data. And compare that to what the paleo diet prescribes. Because the paleo diet says you should have, I can't remember, it's like 35% protein and X% carbohydrate, and I can't remember the exact formula. The, there are 12 hunter-gather groups for which we have really good data, excellent data, where people actually measured carefully what they eat. And they're all over the place. Some of them are eating pretty much all plants,

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  They're clearly not, right? So, there's, there's, again, there's, a lot of these diets are based on elimination, and, and, and they're based on, on stoking certain kinds of fears. And, and, and that's problematic. So, the paleo diet's not completely wrong, but it's not completely right. Sorry to, long answer to your simple question.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  I'd never heard of anti-nutrients before, but I knew that people get worried about lectins and phytates and oxalates.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Those are anti-nutrients.

• 1:11:22Chris Williamson?

  What's the truth about the danger of lectins and oxalates and phytates?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Well, if you ate raw beans, you'd be in trouble, right? Because they're filled with these lectins, and they would, you know, they could cause all kinds of problems. But guess what? If you cook your beans, you're just fine. So, these are compounds that, that are, that we, that's why we can't eat raw beans and raw grains, because of those, those compounds.

• 1:11:45Chris Williamson?

  What do they do to us?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Again, they bind to, to minerals and vitamins, so that you can't absorb them in your guts. You'd have malnutrition. You'd have-

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  You'd eat it, but you wouldn't absorb it.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Correct. But obviously, that's not the case, right? I mean, I know plenty of healthy vegetarians who are clearly not malnourished.

• 1:12:03Chris Williamson?

  Despite eating lots of beans?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Because they cook their beans. Paracelsus, remember Paracelsus, famous alchemist from, chemist from, from the 15th or 14th century? He famously said, "It's the dose that makes the poison," right? And, and these, these compounds, by the time that you cook them and ferment them, they're in such harmless doses, there's absolutely no reason-

• 1:12:24Chris Williamson?

  Even the oxalate thing, I've heard even cooked spinach, that's a concern for some people, you're taking, come on.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Maybe for some people, but not for most of us.

• 1:12:33Chris Williamson?

  Right. You're not, these aren't, anti-nutrients aren't a concern as long as things-

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I think there are some people with certain kidney issues, that, that have problems with spinach. But for the rest of us, I think spinach is a delicious, healthy food.

• 1:12:44Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've activated another trap card now, which is the raw food diet.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I have to tell you, of all the diets I tried, by far the worst.

• 1:12:54Chris Williamson?

  What, what was a typical day for you, eating the raw food diet?

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, we gave it up because it was so hard. I mean, I mean, look, first of all, I was eating because, look, cooking increases how much energy you get from food. It actually, cooking releases nutrients from food. So, on a raw food diet, you have to eat ridiculous amounts of food, just to, just to get enough food. I mean, I was just eating constantly. I was always hungry, and I spent huge amounts of time thinking about food.

• 1:13:23Chris Williamson?

  What were you eating? What's a typical day?

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Oh, we were like, well, I mean, it was, it was, it was difficult, because so much of what we eat requires cooking. Humans evolved to cook. It's, there are no, the only people on the planet who don't cook are raw foodists in places like Berkeley and Cambridge and stuff like that, right? And, and they're-

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  The most developed places in the world, not the least developed.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  You cannot possibly survive on a raw food diet without a really high-quality diet. And even then, it's difficult to thrive, because, because cooking releases energy, cooking releases nutrients. You get more energy from cooked foods than from that. So, we were eating like, you know, zoodles, you know, zucchini noodles, and we were eating, you know, smoothies, and we were eating-

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  Fish? Do you eat any raw fish?

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  I ate raw fish, absolutely. I love, I love sushi, but you can't have it with the rice, because the rice is cooked, right? So, it was really hard to, to, I mean, I was just constantly hungry, and my wife got depressed. She, I describe it in the book, she, after three days, she disappeared and came back really happy. She went out and got a bagel, and that was, that was it for her.

• 1:14:31Chris Williamson?

  She broke containment.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  I, I made it another day. I mean-

• 1:14:35Chris Williamson?

  You lasted four days on the raw food diet?

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  I lasted four days. It was, it was, it was, it was really hard. Yeah. And look,

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  it's based on, again, it's a naturalistic fallacy that somehow, because, you know, you know, animals don't get these various diseases because they eat raw food, that somehow it must be really good for us. But, but we, our species started cooking, maybe a million years ago, certainly by 400,000 years ago, cooking became extremely common among our ancestors, to the point that it's changed our digestive systems, and enabled us to have these big brains and big bodies and high metabolisms that, that we cannot support without cooking.

• 1:15:13Chris Williamson?

  How important was cooking to human development?

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  What does cooking do to digestion?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:29Chris Williamson?

  And speaking of somebody that got salmonella in Rwanda, yes.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Oh dear, I'm so sorry.

• 1:16:34Chris Williamson?

  It's okay, I survived, I survived. But I did get a call from the UK, it's like food and safety, people that they go around and they, if you go to your GP, I felt horrible, obviously, and went in, did some stool sample thing, and I got a call from environmental health before my doctor called me to tell me what happened. And they said, Mr. Williamson, we understand that you were part of a salmonella outbreak. I'm like, okay, well, thank you for telling me what's wrong with me. But they wanted to work out where I'd been. They wanted to know, hey, what was the restaurant, what restaurants have you been? I'm like, unless you're gonna fly out to Rwanda, this is not in your purview, I don't think.

• 1:17:16Chris Williamson?

  But that took a long time to recover from, like, fully, fully recover digestion from. It is gnarly.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  I've had salmonella once, it's tough, yeah, it's really hard. I got it, I got at them, at the, at the cafeteria in my medical school in Eldoret, Kenya. My entire team got, got sick from the.

• 1:17:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, at least it was something that you could bond over.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Bonding is one word for that.

• 1:17:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you can be in the stalls next to each other, all hating your life. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money? That's where Function comes in, gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone panel. Every result is reviewed by clinicians, anything out of range is flagged, and you get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. Whether you just need to go to the gym more, or you need to play Creed louder in your car, Function will tell you exactly where your testosterone and everything else stands.

• 1:18:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Not on a regular basis. But it's interesting, though, if you, there are these fun experiments where they give chimpanzees, give them the opportunity to choose between cooked food and raw food. And even though chimpanzees don't cook their food, they always, they're not always, they usually prefer the cooked food. And it has been observed that sometimes, like after a brush fire, the chimpanzees will eat the burnt stuff.

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, barbecue?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a natural barbecue, but they're, they're taking advantage of a natural brush fire, they're not, they're not cooking it themselves. If there are animals that, that, you know, that, that I don't know of.

• 1:19:36Chris Williamson?

  Was.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  We're unique.

• 1:19:38Chris Williamson?

  Would you say that farming was a healthy human development?

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Oh my God, that's an interesting topic. I mean, it's, how many hours?

• 1:19:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm just throwing grenades at you here to.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Remember the equation of life, right? Food in equals babies out.

• 1:19:56Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  So some people say that farming was the biggest mistake that humans ever made. Because once people ate farming diets, they had less nutritional diversity and they ate more grains and cereals and blah, blah, blah. And if you look in the archaeological record, once farming starts, people's health declined. But the reason for most of those declines in health was because of infectious disease, because we started several things. First is, we started living with animals, right? So we had, we're living with our sheep and our cows and whatever, we started getting diseases from those animals. So, so infectious.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to only having the animals with us that we could kind of kill or use to maybe pack, like carry packs and shit?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't, yeah, exactly. We don't, we didn't get many animal, animal diseases.

• 1:20:39Chris Williamson?

  Just as exposure of human to animal was so low.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  So that's one. The other is that with farming, you produce way more food. I mean, hunter gatherers struggle to get, you know, a few thousand calories a day, but farmers can, even, you know, neolithic kind of farmers, you know, with simple, non, without machines and all that.

• 1:20:56Chris Williamson?

  Even a shit farmer can get more calories than he needs.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Way more, right? This, they have much larger families. So, and with farming, not only did populations start to increase, but we also became sedentary and started living permanently in villages. So now you have higher population densities, higher populations, living with animals, now you're surrounded by your own shit because you don't have, you don't have sanit, you don't have toilets and you don't have, you don't have sewers and all that kind of stuff. And so now you get the perfect mix of factors to increase infectious disease and infectious disease transmission. And so with the advent of farming, you had more people, but you also had a lot more disease. And so, so on the one hand, farming was great from an evolutionary perspective because

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  we had more babies. I mean, the population of the world by the end of the farming era was up to about a billion people from probably about, you know, just a few million from before farming was invented, which is only what, about 600 generations ago, some six, like 590 generations, the world went, got up to about, from about a few million to a billion people. So from that perspective, from a natural selection perspective, farming was a great idea.

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  Scale, good, individual.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  But from, from, from disease and misery, it was terrible. Also with farming, you get famines, right? If you're a hunter gatherer and, and the weather is bad and you have a drought or whatever, you just move, right? You, you're in enormous territories at extremely low population density, there's a lot of variation. So you go to where the food is. Now, it doesn't mean it's easy or you're necessarily gonna, you know, you know, live in the lap of luxury, but if you're a farmer and you're living in a village and you can't go anywhere else because the next folks that were gonna kill you and you have a drought or say two years of drought and famine, you die, right? So, so farmers are much more vulnerable to famine and, and disease. Also with farming, you also have the rise of complex civilizations and armies and, and

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  you know, the, you know, Napoleon's gonna come and, you know, burn your fields and, you know, I mean, so you have more of this kind of organized violence. It's not that hunter gatherers don't kill each other, they do, but with farming, you have, you have, and civilization, you begin to get more large scale warfare, which of course, who suffers? It's the peasants. So farming brought a lot of misery and, and, and problems, although it did provide more food and more energy. So, how's that for a?

• 1:23:21Chris Williamson?

  Yet another mixed bag. I mean, like, it's just, it's so.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I'm an academic.

• 1:23:25Chris Williamson?

  Not at all, no. I think it's so, it's so wonderful, like the, the understanding the fifth order effects of something like that, what happens downstream, I think is so cool.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  But if I could say something more about farming diets, so a lot of people mistake farming diets with modern diets, because when farmers were eating their grains and cereal, like think, think of a typical, like, let's go back to the Mediterranean diet, think of typical farmer from somewhere along the Mediterranean, they're growing barley or wheat and they're having their lentils and their whatever and their, you know, their, their, their chickpeas and whatever, they're having their legume and their cereal, et cetera. When they're, and they're making bread, but they're, it's gonna be sourdough, whole grain, whole wheat, you know, sourdough bread with lentils. These are healthy diets in the dinner, they're not, these are not insulin spiking diets. These are, these are effective diets.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  And it wasn't until the late 19th century, actually it was in Hungary, that, that in the industrial revolution, that we figured out how to mill flour to get rid of the germ and the sperm. And then now, all of a sudden, we, when we think of like high cereal diets, we think of white flour, not brown flour, and that's a very different thing. I mean, there's actually a fair amount of nutrition in whole grains. They're not, they're not the kind of poison that some people think they are. They're not, and especially when you combine them with legumes. So, so I think people have a kind of a funny conception of what a traditional farming diet has been, a kind of a bit warped by modern, by modern cereal diets.

• 1:24:57Chris Williamson?

  What's going on with modern gluten intolerances?

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  It's gone sky high. I mean, but so have peanut allergies and, I mean, we have all these autoimmune diseases where our immune systems have start essentially erupt when we eat certain foods. And, and gluten, which is a protein in, in, in wheat, is one of them. But I would, and.

• 1:25:21Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on with gluten?

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  I think it's, if I had, have you heard of the hygiene hypothesis?

• 1:25:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes. Where if you live in a house that's got a dishwasher, there's an increased chance of asthma. If you live in a house that is that as you make-

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  That's, that's, that's, that's, that's part of it. Yeah. So the hygiene hypothesis is this idea that we have these, we have immune systems that evolved to be very active, right? The world was full of germs and worms, basically, until, until, until modern sanitation. But you and I still have the same immune system that our great, great, great grandparents had with the same kinds of cells and all that waiting, waiting to defend us against all the, all the, all the pathogens out there. Now, we have dishwashers and we have bleach and we have, you know, you know, we clean everything, right? And, and the result is that we have much less, we have fewer, I mean, how many worms have you had to deal with recently in your, in your food? Probably very few.

• 1:26:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  But until recently, and in many parts of the world, everybody's dealing with worms.

• 1:26:21Chris Williamson?

  Saying that worms are an important hormetic stressor for the immune system?

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  They are. So, but you still have the same immune system. And now your immune system is, is still waiting to do its job. And the analogy-

• 1:26:31Chris Williamson?

  It becomes hypersensitized.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's not that, it could be hypersensitized, or the, or the other analogy I use is, is it's like bored teenagers. Like, you know, they have all these cells waiting around to do stuff and there's nothing for them to do. And they're more likely to get into trouble because they now are more likely to attack self versus non-self, because there's no non-self to attack.

• 1:26:50Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the data around children that grow up in houses that have got dogs?

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And they're much less likely to get autoimmune diseases.

• 1:26:58Chris Williamson?

  Any, any excuse to make dogs great again?

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  But there's another factor too. So, so one, so that's one possibility, which is all the, all the, all the, all the sterile environments that we're in. But another important factor could be antibiotics. I mean, we now have so many antibiotics that we are constantly taking. And it's even, even if you don't take them, it's in your food because the antibiotics are given to animals. We are in a, in an antibiotic zone.

• 1:27:26Chris Williamson?

  Milieu.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Milieu, thank you. That's a much better word. And, and of course, those antibiotics are affecting our gut microbiome in all kinds of ways. And they're breaking down the mucus barriers, they're affecting bile, they're affecting all kinds of aspects in ways that we do not understand. And I think, I think there's, there's a lot of people trying to study how those antibiotics may also predispose us to, to having things like celiac.

• 1:27:51Chris Williamson?

  So farming makes bag probably good overall for having more humans on the planet.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  We wouldn't be here.

• 1:27:59Chris Williamson?

  But for individual humans, good. Cooking, same thing. I'm, I'm interested. Over time, typically, things get better. Obesity is now a bigger global health issue than malnutrition.

• 1:28:11Chris Williamson?

  How come so many people are overweight?

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Well, there's no one answer. But if there's any one dominant factor, it's obviously processed food. I mean, I think you'd be hard pressed not to, I mean, we are surrounded by, you know, you walk into a supermarket and you're just surrounded by foods that are engineered for us to be, that be hyper palatable, that are loaded with, with sugar and fat and they're, and you know, hitting our bliss point, so that we keep eating more and more and more and more. And, and you add, and you add to that physical inactivity, although exercise is not the world's best, is not that great for losing weight, it is

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  extremely important for preventing weight gain. And then, and then you add antibiotics and you add various other factors. And, and of course, some people have genetic proclivity, although that doesn't explain the, the recent rise. Yeah, we are, we are, we are, we are surrounded by food that makes us, makes us gain weight. And then, then the difficult thing is that once, because of natural selection, we have this, we never evolved to lose weight. So we have these adaptations to hold on to fat because we are, we never evolved to lose-

• 1:29:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, once you, once you create fat cells, you can't get rid of the fat cells, they only empty themselves. Is that correct?

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  That's correct, for the most part. Yeah, the fat cells swell. And so you're doing is reducing, but each cell is its own little kind of, you know, metabolic powerhouse and it's producing hormones.

• 1:29:46Chris Williamson?

  If the fat cells get sufficiently big, then they split. And you now have two fat cells, which means that getting fat in future becomes easier. When I first learned this, I'm not off with the science, right? Like this is-

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  No, you're, you're not off. And furthermore, when you have more fat cells, remember we talked about the carbohydrate insulin model?

• 1:30:00Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  When you have more fat cells, those fat cells are-

• 1:30:02Chris Williamson?

  Signaling-

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Sucking up all that stuff. So you eat the same food, but now your body thinks you're, you're, you're starving.

• 1:30:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Because you've sucked up all that glucose, you become hypoglycemic. So gaining weight actually makes you eat more.

• 1:30:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, it, this, this, learning this, when I, this was in uni, when I was thinking about bodybuilding and wanting to be, you know, lean and jacked and stuff. And, uh, hearing that if you get sufficiently fat, fat cells grow and grow and grow. And then when they grow big enough, they split into two. And then maybe you lose fat. Maybe you're going through the, the classic sort of bulk cut seesaw. But when you lose fat, those two now, what used to be one, two fat cells, they shrink down and they become smaller or more empty or whatever, but there's still two.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  And, and they're also, they're also, they're producing less of a hormone called leptin, which is now telling your brain, shit, we're losing energy, you need to eat more to replace us. So, so it's this, we called it the leptinostat. So the fat cells, when you lose fat, you're, you're, the fat cells send a signal to your body to eat more. So, so, so it's-

• 1:31:13Chris Williamson?

  Becoming fat at one point in your life makes not being fat for the rest of your life harder.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. So that's the problem. So if we are going to tackle this problem,

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  A, we need to help people figure, lose weight. But B, we need to spend more energy and more effort to help prevent people from gaining weight in the first place. And one of the scariest statistics I know is the percentage of young people who are having, or overweight or obese. Those numbers are going up and up and up and up.

• 1:31:42Chris Williamson?

  How many young people are overweight?

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  I think in the United States, something like 30% of, of, of American teenagers are now classified, or 25% are classified as, as being obese. Yeah. And that's a really scary number because those kids, for the rest of their lives, are going to be fighting their weight. And, and, and of course, now we have GLP-1s, which we haven't started talking about, which, which may be very helpful for them. But, but that's, that's not the, necessarily going to be the magic bullet either.

• 1:32:16Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned before about the particular combinations of, of flavors, flavors representing macronutrients and what's inside of this and some of the textures. Well, I learned about orification, about the design of the texture of food and how that's used to kind of bypass our, our usual levels of, of satiety and stuff. Can you just explain to, let's say that somebody didn't understand why particular combinations of flavors and textures are seductive and attractive to our system? What, what are they? And why is, why does that work in that, in that way? I've seen these videos of hunter gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time and it looks like they've taken MDMA.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we, we, I describe in, in, in, in the book, actually, one, one, in the last day, we were with, with a group of hunter gatherers and we, and we cooked for them. And I've never seen anybody eat that much food as these, at these hunter gatherers. I mean, they, they were just like, they were like complete non-petite diet nightmares you can possibly imagine. Because humans are humans. We like, we like, we like sugar, we like fat, we like energy rich food.

• 1:33:27Chris Williamson?

  But we don't just like sugar on its own, right? We don't just like fat on its own.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  You mix the two. Yeah. So, so too much fat is greasy, right? Too much sugar is cloying. But it turns out that if you have, if you balance them, it turns our brains on like crazy. Like, can you name, here's a, here's a quiz for you. Can you name a natural food that's high in both sugar and fat that you can get without, you know, stores?

• 1:33:54Chris Williamson?

  Fuck. I was, the fat thing is-

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  There's only one, there's only one.

• 1:34:00Chris Williamson?

  It's not going to be, it's not going to be honey because that's just the sugar. It's not going to be avocado because that's just the fat. It's not going to be some sort of mushroom. It's not going to be a kind of berry because again, that's going to be too much in the sugar.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  I'll give you a hint. It's the first food you ever ate.

• 1:34:16Chris Williamson?

  Milk?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  Milk is rich in fat and it's rich in sugars, right? And, and, but after you wean, you know, that's it. Unless, unless you have a supermarket or, you know, from a food factory near you. Now we're able, and think about the foods we love, they combine fat and sugar. They, there's something Freudian about it for sure, right? And you can, and if you balance high amounts of fat and high amounts of sugar that on their own wouldn't be pleasurable. Together they balance each other out. Now add some salt, your brain is on fire.

• 1:34:49Chris Williamson?

  And then if you can do the texture development, if you can get fluffy with crunchy.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Oh, hot and cold. I mean, think about a McDonald's Big Mac. I describe it in the book, right? I actually, you know, a Big Mac has, I think, every flavor pretty much, except for spicy, that you can possibly think of. It's got, it's got hot and cold. It's got crunchy and smooth. It's got sweet. It's got salty. It's got everything. There's a reason that people love that stuff, right? It lights everything up, right? Doritos, Doritos have more than, go, go, go get a package of Doritos. Don't necessarily eat them. But there are 30 ingredients in Doritos, the last time I counted. And they have, you know, garlic and, I mean, there's all these different flavors, but they're all balanced. So your brain doesn't think any one is too high.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  So there's a, there's a book by, by a guy named Michael Moss called Salt, Sugar, Fat, which is really worth reading, where he's an investigative journalist and he studied and, you know, collected information on how the big food companies, you know, through serious testing. These are not accidental foods. These are carefully formulated foods to keep us.

• 1:35:58Chris Williamson?

  Precision engineered.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Keep us reaching for more. Another example I got from his book is M and M's. You know why M and M's have all these different colors?

• 1:36:06Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  To turn our brains on. Cause you know, think, oh, I have a red one. Now I'll have a green one. Now I'll have a brown one, whatever. Your, your brain, even though they all taste exactly the same, it's, it gets you to eat more, right? So, so we've been subjected to, to foods, or we have to cope now with an environment, with all these foods that have been literally engineered to get us to eat a lot of them. And, and of course, and then, and you add all the chemicals to them, which are probably not very good. And you, you, you end up with what we have today, which is that 40% of American adults are classified as having obesity. And another 35% are classified as having, as being overweight.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  So only one in four Americans today is actually by, you know, by BMI classification, which has its own problems, is considered normal weight. One in four. And, and look, you gotta, and there's probably other factors too. Exercise is probably one of them, but, but obviously our food environment is unquestionably, is, is, is the main reason.

• 1:37:14Chris Williamson?

  If there was a pie chart contributing to weight gain, and some of it was calories in and some of it was calories out, how much of it would be diet consumption increased? And how much of it would be sedentary movement increased or, or lack of movement, movement decreased? What do you think's the sort of proportion? Cause obviously we've had this big change in terms of obesity over the last few decades.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  That's a, it's a hard number to come up with, but obviously the vast majority has to be with calories in.

• 1:37:39Chris Williamson?

  You think it's mostly on diet?

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but remember our metabolism isn't just calories in versus calories out because it, that, that's important. But remember that when you exercise, so I didn't get, cause I got up at some ungodly hour this morning to get the airplane to come here. I have not had a chance to go running today. I'm a bit of an exercise addict. But had I gone running this morning and I just had lunch, I, my, the amount of insulin I would have produced from the taco that I had in the airport would have been less than, than the fact that I didn't go running this morning. So physical activity doesn't just affect your calorie balance. It also affects your metabolism. So that's one of the reasons why physical activity, although it's not the best way to lose weight,

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  it's very hard to diet by, just by exercising. You can lose, but you have to do a lot. But physical activity has been shown, even moderate amounts of physical activity have been shown to help prevent weight gain. And part of that, it's not just the calories spent, but part of that is the fact that it changes our metabolism.

• 1:38:40Chris Williamson?

  Why are the calories on a label, not the calories that you absorb?

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. That's an interesting question. So because the calories on the label are a kind of an idea, it's a formula. Actually, it's over a hundred years old. This formula was created by, by a guy named Wilbur Atwater, who, who, who analyzed more poop than you can imagine. But anyway, Wilbur Atwater was a professor in, in, in Connecticut who, who came up with these, these, and what they do is that you take some food and you, you separate out the carbohydrates, the fats and the protein. And then you use a formula, 4.1 calories per gram of, of carb.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  For 4.1 calories per gram of protein and nine point something, you know, for, for the fat. And, and that's the number on your, on your canned food. But that's what, that's what's available to you and that an average person would get. But it's not actually what you, you're, because you're, you're, you're not a, you're not a particip, you're not a, you're not a bomb calorimeter in Atwater's lab. You're a human being, right? And, and so for example, if you take peanuts, right? And, and you measure the, the content of the energy in your peanuts. And now you grind those peanuts up into peanut butter, which by the way, is the world's greatest food. You, you get way more energy, about 25% more energy than if you ate the peanuts whole.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Because the food processing, even though it's the same stuff, the food processing gives you access to more of those nutrients.

• 1:40:15Chris Williamson?

  Because you don't have to work as hard?

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Yes, right. Cause you break the food down to tiny little particles, right? And, and your enzymes, right? Surface area to volume ratio. Your enzymes can break that food down. If you take a banana and you blend a banana, you get more energy from that banana than if you just eat the banana whole. People have done that experiment. Another example.

• 1:40:32Chris Williamson?

  Imagine if you were to just swallow the banana as well without chewing it, that would also help.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  Good luck doing that. But one of my favorite experiments is a guy named Stephen Secor at the University of Alabama, who studies what's called diet and just thermogenesis, you know, the energy it takes to break down food. Cause food takes energy to digest. It's a lot actually. And he, he used boa constrictors, because boa constrictors, you can, you know, they cannot eat for like weeks. And then you can give it a rat and then you can measure how much energy the boa constrictor spends eating, digesting the rat. And he would give the boa constrictor a rat. And then he'd give the, wait a few months and measure how much energy the boa constrictor spent. You could do that by just measuring how much the boa constrictor heats up. And then you wait a few months, boa constrictor is very happy. You give it the same rat or the, exactly the same size rat. But this time he grinds it up. Same rat, same amount of calories.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Ground rat. And the boa constrictor slips right through his digestive system. It doesn't heat up at all, or much less so. Because the boa constrictor is getting way more energy from that rat. So when we pulverize our food, we grind it up, et cetera. So when you make a smoothie, for example, you're getting more energy from a smoothie than if you ate the same amount of fruit whole.

• 1:41:39Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean that people should or shouldn't eat smoothies?

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Well, it depends if you're trying to lose weight or not. I mean, if you know, if you, I mean, I like smoothies. Smoothies are great. I eat them all the time. But I'm not trying to lose weight. But if I was on a diet, I would probably cut down on my smoothies.

• 1:41:51Chris Williamson?

  I've heard that celery is net calorie negative.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've heard that too. I don't believe that. I'm, I'm sure you don't get a lot.

• 1:41:59Chris Williamson?

  The energy needed to digest the celery because of how rough and fibrous it is, is greater than the amount of calories.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Fiber doesn't take a lot of energy to digest, actually. Fiber is just what you send to your microbiome. And by the way, we don't, when we measure the calories from food, we're not taking into account the, the contribution from our microbiome. So all those bacteria that are, once the celery passes through your, you know, the fiber from the celery passes into your colon, there are all these happy bacteria in there to light, light it that you had the celery. And they're breaking that celery down into what's called short chain fatty acids of which you, which you then take up into your bloodstream and then you use. So we think actually that for some people, maybe about 10% of the energy that they get from their food is not even measured on those nutrition fats labels because it's our, comes from our microbiome.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  We have no idea really. When you have studies that tell you how much energy somebody's eating, they're making it up. We're not making it up. They're estimating it and, and it's actually extremely inaccurate. Which is another problem with our studies of calories in versus calories out, because nobody really knows how many calories go in.

• 1:43:06Chris Williamson?

  Modern food environment, novel, calorie dense, hyper palatable, processed, et cetera. But as soon as you create a problem, solutions come out for that too. And we have modern technology and people can design new foods.

• 1:43:21Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the foods that people are eating every day that they think are healthy, but it's actually making them worse?

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  I don't know. I worry about some of the ultra-processed

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  foods that, like meal replacements, for lack of a, I hope I don't get in trouble, but like Huell and Soylent. I mean, there's all, I mean, you could, and I actually tried them for a few weeks. I didn't eat dinner, but I had all my lunches and breakfasts.

• 1:43:54Chris Williamson?

  How was that?

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  by, by, through solvents. They use hexane. You don't want hexane in your food. Hexane is-

• 1:44:42Chris Williamson?

  Sounds like some shit that I'd put in my barbecue.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you're in your car, right? You know, it's a, it's a solvent. It's a flammable solvent. And, and, and then you try to wash the hexane out. But hexane is a toxin. It's a neurotoxin. And, and, and studies have shown that you can actually measure people's urine and people who, who, who are not in the petroleum industry, and they have hexane in their urine. And it's probably coming from soy or from non-expeller pressed seed oils. So like when I get canola oil, I only get expeller pressed canola oil because I don't want my canola beans, you know,

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  dissolved with hexane in order to get my oil. And so-

• 1:45:24Chris Williamson?

  I thought seed oils were bad for you.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Oh, no. That's, that's, there's, that's another one of those myths, I'm sorry to say. But let's go, we'll get to that in a second. But I, so I think there are some foods that people think are healthy, but the way in which they're processed might be unhealthy. And again, it's very, it's, as Paris also said, it's the dose that makes the poison. We don't yet know, it's very hard to do the studies. You can give huge amounts of, like these foods to rats and they get cancer, but we just don't know about humans. So it depends on what your null hypothesis. So right now, the government's null hypothesis is that this hexane that we get in our food is okay. Generally recognized as safe. Others think, well, unless you can prove it's safe, I don't, I don't want anything to do with this.

• 1:46:08Chris Williamson?

  Seed oils.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  Seed oils. Okay. So the idea behind seed oils, so there are different kinds of, little jargon here. There are different kinds of polyunsaturated fats. So a polyunsaturated fat, so fats are these long chains of carbon, lots and lots of carbons. And, and if the carbons have single bonds between them, remember single bonds from chemistry? That means that they can have two hydrogens, one on each side that bind to them. So a saturated fat is all single bond carbons and that each carbon has two hydrogens. So that's saturated with hydrogen. That's why it's called a saturated fat. If you make one of the carbons a double bond, now you don't have the hydrogen X on it,

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  and that creates a kink in the fatty acid. So that's why fatty acids that have, have, have a double bond are either mono or polyunsaturated. So mono is one double bond. Poly means there's more than one. That's why they're liquid at room temperature. They have kinks. So they're, they fold up. So it turns out that, and we, and we label polyunsaturated fats by where those double bonds are. So like omega, so remember in the Greek alphabet, alpha, omega, alpha's the beginning, omega's the end. So omega three means that the double bond is three carbons away from the end. I don't know if this is too much information. So, so omega three fatty acid has,

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  is, is the double bonds, three carbons from the end. And omega six fatty acid is, is six bonds from the end. And so fish are really rich in omega threes. Omega threes are great for you. Nobody disputes that. Omega, eat, eat, eat, eat a shit ton of omega threes. Good for you, good for your brain, good for your nervous system, good for your immune system, etc. Omega six fatty acids used to be much more rare in our diet. And so the paleo diet, I think it started with the paleo diet. Paleo diet said, well, look, you know, we should, we didn't evolve to eat that many omega six fatty acids because we didn't have seed oils. And so we should try to have a, like a hunter gatherer kind of omega three ratio. So trying to have more than twice as many omega sixes to omega threes. And the, and the argument behind that is that the, the

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  omega six fatty acids can be turned into a, by your digestive system to another thing called a rachidonic acid, which can then be turned into an inflammatory compound, like a prostaglandin that gives you like a headache, right? So they, so there, there is a biochemical pathway by which these fatty acids can become inflammatory. So that's the concern. However, people have done studies. They give people like you and me, they go, go sit in a lab, they give people omega six fatty acids and then measure whether their metabolism does that. Turns out that doesn't. There's no evidence, and there are quite a few studies, my book cites them, you can go look them up, where, where the, the, increasing the amount of omega six fatty acids actually increases

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  inflammation. It was a, it's, it was a fear, but the fear turns out not to be the case. Furthermore, there's, so that's mechanistic study. There's now epidemiological studies as well, which show that people eat a lot of omega six fatty acids do really well. In fact, people eat, in fact, omega six fatty acids have been shown to be more preventive, like the Nurses Health Study and various other big, huge studies. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people, prospective studies over decades, actually have lower risks of heart disease, cancers, etc., than people who don't eat them. So, so although there were concerns about them, the evidence, if you're, if you're just purely evidence-based, the evidence suggests you should stop worrying about omega six fatty acids.

• 1:49:47Chris Williamson?

  If you walked through the average healthy person's cupboard, kitchen, what do you think would concern you most?

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  The average healthy person.

• 1:49:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, someone that considers I'm eating a modern, healthy diet. I'm the sort of person that shops at Whole Foods. I try and make sure that I'm remotely paleo and naturalistic informed when it comes to my diet. I'm a healthy person. You're going through my kitchen. What are the common things you think would concern you most?

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I think, what's, I think the more I study diet, the more I realize that there's incredible variety of foods that we're able to eat. So you're asking, like, what's an unhealthy food that people think that's healthy, that they tend to eat a lot of?

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  I need to think about that. I'm not sure. Good question.

• 1:50:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  You stumped me there.

• 1:50:41Chris Williamson?

  I guess.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  I'm not a very judgmental person, actually. So that's part, maybe that's one of the-

• 1:50:46Chris Williamson?

  Healthy versus unhealthy is not necessarily a judgment, right? We can say, hey, that would be, you think that this thing is sort of net positive for your health, but I would be a little bit more concerned about it or whatever. For instance, I'll give you one. I think maybe dried fruit might be one of those things where people think, oh, well, you know, this is, it's a fruit, it's a little bit of a snack that you go, that is some really fucking refined sugar in there.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a good one. Thank you. You win.

• 1:51:12Chris Williamson?

  That wasn't a competition.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  You get it, you get it, you get it. Another one would be fruit juice.

• 1:51:16Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Because fruit juice is basically soda. I mean, it's, you know, you're not getting a lot of nutrients from fruit juice. You're just getting a lot of sugar. So I would think that would be another one. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I, look, I like dried fruit too, but I, I, I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that. But, but you're right.

• 1:51:32Chris Williamson?

  Pineapple chunks, dried mango strips.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Good stuff.

• 1:51:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but just straight sugar.

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's, it's a candy.

• 1:51:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Do they? I mean, there are some that keep working. I mean-

• 1:51:50Chris Williamson?

  When you look at people longitudinally over time and somebody does a diet, how many of them that lose weight, maintain that weight loss?

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Well, again, there are, you know, various studies have shown that a lot of the standard traditional diets, people do fall off them. And they're, the numbers run all over the place. But, you know, I would say that probably a reasonable estimate is about 75% of people fall off their diet. And why? Because they can't sustain them. Again, going back to the natural weight loss registry that I mentioned earlier, the people who managed to, to keep, lose weight and keep it off are the ones who managed to keep the diet going. And what's interesting is that many of them don't follow an actual prescribed diet. They just avoid junk food. They avoid foods with a lot of sugar. They avoid foods with a lot of added fat. They cook most of their meals at home. They tend to exercise. They tend to weigh themselves on a

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  regular basis. So they're keeping track of how they're doing. But very few of them actually are following an Atkins diet or this diet or that diet. They're just trying to eat reasonably, sensibly. That's the, that's the evidence. So I think it's, you know, the old joke is, you know, that, that, you know, the best, worst part about diet is the second day in the diet. Because you stop, you, you know, that's when you stop the diet, right? Many diets, remember the difference between efficacy and effectiveness? Many, most diets are effective.

• 1:53:11Chris Williamson?

  In vitro, wonderful.

• 1:53:13Speaker 01

  I mean, most diets have high efficacy, but they have low effectiveness because, and they've low effectiveness is generally because we have a hard time maintaining them. And that's because of our food environment.

• 1:53:22Chris Williamson?

  Does the body fight weight loss very aggressively?

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the biggest one is hunger, right? When you lose weight, your body sends all kinds of signals. There are leptin and there are peptides, PYY, etc., that tell your body, you are losing weight and turn on your appetite. And that's why-

• 1:53:41Chris Williamson?

  Grelin in the stomach.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, grelin, exactly. I mean, it's very hard to fight all those, all those deep and fundamental adaptations. And, and so the best diets are the ones that kind of trick your body, but also require, you know, they're hard. And that's why GLP-1s have been so incredibly successful because GLP-1s, for many people, just turn off that appetite and enable them to eat less.

• 1:54:08Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about GLP-1s?

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, they're game changers for many people. I mean, they've, they've, they've been incredibly successful. Some people lose 25% of their body weight and there are new ones being formulated that maybe even, they've been more powerful. So for, for, I mean, that can be really huge for somebody to really lose that kind of weight and turn off those cravings. But there are some concerns. So we published, my colleagues and I published a paper in JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association, recently. One of the big concerns about, about GLP-1s is that people not only lose fat, they also lose muscle. And they, and they seem to lose a lot of muscle. It's a bit like bariatric surgery, too. Like when you lose a lot of weight really fast, people lose a lot of muscle. And that can put you at serious risk of frailty and you get older.

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  Cause when you lose muscle as you age, you get, you can get what's called sarcopenia. Sarcos, the Greek word for flesh and penea is loss of flesh loss. Sounds bad, doesn't it? And sarcopenia is really debilitating because as it becomes a vicious cycle, because as you become less strong, you know, just get doing acts of daily living become harder, getting up from a toilet, you know, shopping and doing stuff. And then you become less physically active and you become, get into this vicious cycle and things get worse and worse. Basically, my, you know, my, my mother, for lack of better, you know, she, she died essentially of sarcopenia. She got more and more frail as she got older. I tried to get her to eat anything, you know, ice cream, this, that, you know, whatever. Try to put on some weight and she just couldn't.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  It was really hard to watch.

• 1:55:41Chris Williamson?

  Some people are kind of self enforcing that inability to eat food through GLP's.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Right. And, and, and so, so the, so the, one of the big concerns about GLP ones is that if, if you're taking them, do strength training, please, because that can help reverse or help you maintain your muscle as you lose those GLP ones. So that's one concern about GLP ones. Another is that a lot of people quit them. The last study I saw, and again, things may change because there are now oral versions of the pill. There now, there's now pill versions, you don't have to inject it. But something like 60% of people who've tried GLP ones have quit them after a year or two, 60%. And the problem is that when you quit them, your body just still will, your appetite comes roaring back and you want to go back to your previous weight for, for reasons

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  that we do not understand.

• 1:56:32Chris Williamson?

  So most people who use GLP's, take them for a period of time that they can lose an appreciable amount of weight and then stop, don't maintain the weight loss.

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:56:43Chris Williamson?

  So it's a lifetime contract.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  So, exactly. So that's, that's what we're currently seeing at the moment. So that's, that's a concern because then when they regain the weight, they tend to gain it almost completely as fat, not as muscle. And so then in a way they're worse off.

• 1:56:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so they've lost muscle on the way down and gained fat on the way back.

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's one of the concerns. We, we're still, we're conducting this experiment in real time without knowing the results. And then a final concern about GLP ones is that, look, nobody likes taking medications, right? At least most people don't like taking medications. And, and it doesn't solve the problem of what you should eat in the first place. And it doesn't prevent obesity in the first place. So it's great for people to lose weight, but we also need to focus on helping the people not have to take those GLP ones in the first place. I'm a little worried that we're going to take our eye off the ball. And even if you're on a GLP one, you still have to figure out like what to eat.

• 1:57:37Chris Williamson?

  What do I eat?

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  And, and the GLP one might help you with your cravings for, you know, really fatty, sugary foods, but it might not. We just still haven't done those studies very well. So, so look, I think they're a useful tool for a lot of people, but I think we have a lot to learn and we need to figure out how to use them better. They're not going away, but, but I think they're, again, they're not the magic bullet that some people think they are, but they may be very, very helpful for some folks.

• 1:58:05Chris Williamson?

  It feels like an artificial solution to an artificial problem. We have this novel food environment, which like we shouldn't be in, right? In an ideal world, if we were to design things better. And we now have this thing which kind of solves it. We solve the calorie dense, hyper palatable food world with this thing that comes in and puts the kibosh on our ability to either eat or gut motility, you know, level of hunger, stuff like that.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, I, a few, about 13 years ago, I wrote a book called The Story of the Human Body. And in the, in the end of that book, I proposed an idea called disevolution. Disevolution is when we treat the symptoms, not the causes of a mismatched disease. So we're talking about mismatched diseases. These are, these are illnesses that are caused by not being adapted to our modern world, right? But when we treat the symptoms, not the causes, we keep the system going, right? And, and I think GLP ones might be example of a kind of a disevolutionary process. We can still have our, you know, frozen pizzas and our, you know, fried chicken and our, you know, donuts and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  Now we get, get, get obesity, take the GLP ones, but we still have that same food system.

• 1:59:17Chris Williamson?

  1700 calories of the frozen pizza and the donuts.

• 1:59:20Speaker 01

  We still have that food system that's going to keep going, right? We need to solve our food system problems if we're going to help prevent people from getting, and, and, and right now, we're not doing enough to help each other eat, eat sensibly so that we don't gain weight.

• 1:59:40Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me when you get to kind of that point of the conversation, the food environment is predatory, engineered, capitalistic, designed to hook people. People tend to split in one of two ways. One is they go towards systemic change. We need grass to be changed. We need to look at what can snap payments be spent on. We need to kind of step in and there should be a additive restriction. We can't have these food dies and some of that stuff.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  Regulation.

• 2:00:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. A degree of top down sort of bureaucracy that'll come in and fix it. And then the other side is aggressive agency. It's you need to take control of this. No one's coming to save you, you know, constrain yourself only to the outer aisles in the supermarket or shop in one that, that doesn't have any of the hyper palatable stuff. Like across all of this research and self experimentation, what are the most robust principles that you think people should take away when it comes to having a good diet, nutritionally complete and evolutionarily at least not totally deranged?

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  Avoid processed foods. I mean, and by processed, I would include foods that are refined. So white flour, I would include foods that have a lot of added sugar, foods that have a lot of added fat. You know, fat's not your, as bad as maybe some people think, but filling your food with fat and sugar is certainly not great for you. Avoid foods that have, I avoid foods that have really weird ingredients that I have no idea what the hell they are. Things like maltodextrin. If you see maltodextrin in your food, run away.

• 2:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

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

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

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

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  Why, why don't we teach this stuff so that we can all, because it's, right now, all this stuff I'm, I'm talking about is, is, some of it's considered arcane knowledge, but it's actually not that complicated. And I, and I think most of us can learn this. And I tried to put it in the book so that, you know, anybody can learn it. But, but, you know, unfortunately, that's, that's, that's part of the puzzle. But the, the fact of the matter is a lot of us aren't going to learn that stuff. And so we need to help, helping ourselves, because I think most people would not want to get obese. Most people want to eat a healthy diet, but they're stressed, they're, they're, they're, you know, their finances are limited, they don't have a lot of time. Imagine you have, you commute, you have kids, you rush to the supermarket, you don't have

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  a lot of time to, you know, whatever. We can't get rid of processed foods, but if we could help have processed foods that are more healthy, I think that's the solution. And so like in England, for example, like when you go to the supermarket in England, there are the green, yellow and red labels, right? They're super easy, right? And the, you know, I mean, you can debate the fine points about whether they've got the labels right, but for the most part, they're pretty sensible and they're a quick way for somebody to see, oh, you know, this is good for my kids and this is less good for my kids. Why can't we do that? It's so simple, right? It's green, red, red. So, and then you're not forcing anybody, you can still buy the red label.

• 2:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Informed choice.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, just give people more information. And, and so we can, we, we could do more. Another, another opportunity is to tax, we tax cigarettes. Cigarettes, we all, everybody agrees cigarettes are bad for you, right? Everybody agrees that cigarettes, we don't prevent people from smoking and I, I'm not going to prevent somebody from smoking if they want to. But we, we, we, but we've agreed as a society that cigarettes should be taxed. Why don't we tax junk food? I mean, they're, they cause probably, you know.

• 2:04:42Chris Williamson?

  Is there no additional tax on sugary or hyper processed?

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  No. And in fact, in Mexico, when they tried to put a tax on, on, on soda, it got fought by the big, by the Coca Cola.

• 2:04:55Chris Williamson?

  Big soda.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and the tax was reversed. So no, we don't. So again, I'm not saying we should, but, but we should be having a public discussion about this because it's a, it's a, it's a problem that's larger than any one of us. It's a public health issue that we all pay for. Because it's, it's, it's, and it's, you know, there's never going to be one solution. I'm a bit of more of a libertarian paternalist. I think that, and I'm not into pretending, you know, telling people what they should do, but I think we should have, we need help helping us do what we would actually like to do. And, and often we don't know what's in our food or we don't know what the effects of the foods are. So, or for example, fruit rollups. You go to the supermarket and you buy fruit rollups and they says, made with real fruit, filled with vitamin C.

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  Well, very few kids are vitamin C deficient. And yes, it's made with real fruit, but they've removed all the fiber. So a fruit rollup is basically like a form of candy, right? But, but the advertising allows, you know, advertisers are allowed to basically misinform.

• 2:05:56Chris Williamson?

  So that might be another one of the, I think it's healthy, but in reality it's not, and it's in a healthy person's kitchen.

• 2:06:02Speaker 01

  It deserves a red label. Now, if you want to get a fruit rollup, fine, but you should know that it's not a healthy food.

• 2:06:10Chris Williamson?

  Scary stuff. I mean, like, it doesn't surprise me that America is kind of the battleground for this. I think french fries from McDonald's in the US have got 18 ingredients and in the UK they've got three and one of them's salt and that one's optional. So this really is, you know, patient zero as a country in wonderful meritocracy, free market, American dream thing. But if you take those reins off, there's going to be some pretty negative consequences. And the only way that you can step in is to re-constrain yourself through your own choices, or then have some bureaucracy come in to start to restrict optionality for people.

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  I think, I think most people would like help because we, we are, we are, we are not completely free agents in this system. And

• 2:06:59Chris Williamson?

  It's certainly an unfair battle when you think I've got the biggest

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  It's not a fair fight.

• 2:07:02Chris Williamson?

  Companies on the planet trying to attack the fundamental drive to not die from starvation.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  Oh, and what I love also is that you have on one aisle of the supermarket, you have companies that are selling you foods that are really unhealthy. And then you go to the health food section where you can buy like, you know, Weight Watchers, you know, kind of foods owned by the same companies. So they're, they're, they're on both sides of the equation. They're on the, on the, on the, on the weight loss side and on the weight gain side. They're, they're making money on both sides.

• 2:07:34Chris Williamson?

  Daniel Lieberman, ladies and gentlemen. Daniel, you're great. Your work's awesome. Why should people go to check out the book and everything else that you got?

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  Well, Fed Up comes out August 11th and I tried to make it fun and readable and with the information that I think all of us need. And it's filled with references. So you can find, you know, and so you can find the data yourself.

• 2:07:55Chris Williamson?

  Heck yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:07:57Chris Williamson?

  All right. Bye, my beauties. Dude, yes. So fun.

• 2:08:01Speaker 02

  If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to the butcher at your local grocery store. He'd probably talk about trimming the fat, but it'd be about your brisket, not your insurance policies. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They offer personalized assistance in finding the choicest cuts of coverage for all your insurance needs, which means more money for filet mignon, or if you're a vegetarian, tofu le mignon. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit geico.com/ local.