What? A family welcome to episode 267
of the genius live. Let's go.
What's crack-a-lackin' everybody? Welcome back to
another episode of The Genius life. I'm your host, Max Lou, Guevara filmmaker health and science journalist and New York Times bestselling author. I've dedicated my life to unraveling the science behind how our choices, including what we eat, and how we live affect our cognitive and physical performance, how we feel, and our health span and risk for disease. This podcast is all about how to live and that optimal state, which I call living like a genius.
Guys, on today's episode of the show. I welcome. Kevin bass.
Kevin is an md-phd student with a master's
degree in Immunology. He runs the website, the diet Wars, which
is devoted to debunking health
misinformation
online. More importantly, he is one of the deepest and most open
minded. Thinkers, I know on topics like nutrition, exercise, longevity, chronic disease, prevention, fat loss and more. We've become good friends over the past year or so and I not only value
Opinion on things but
I really respect his
humility and open-mindedness which is not always what you'd expect from somebody on as
hardcore and academic path. As
Kevin is, as I mentioned,
man is an md-phd student that might be the very definition
of Hardcore. I
think you're going to love this episode of the show in which we tackle the top
nutrition and wellness myths. Circulating online. Including is
saturated fat, healthy or unhealthy
are plant-based diets helpful or harmful
to
Mental health. What is the
truth about owes empik the latest celebrity weight loss obsession, is it Revolution for dieter's or just
another fad are industrially. Refined seed oils. Actually the worst thing ever or
is there - press overblown. We discuss a simple amino acid that has powerful blood pressure lowering. Affects the mind. Blowing relationship between dietary fiber and ketones and so much more. This is one of the longest episodes I've taped for the show to
date and
Good reason. It is packed with great information and we could have kept going. That's how brilliant Kevin is.
I guess we're just going to have to do around to this episode of show is sponsored by our friends at Bob's Naturals. But Naturals is my favorite collagen brand, every serving has 20 grams of collagen which includes seven essential amino acids. And I did a little bit of an analysis. I compared Bob's to another leading collagen brand and there are higher levels of leucine, which is that amino acid? That's important for stimulating muscle protein synthesis about 10% more.
Scene and higher levels of glycine, which is really kind of the money. In terms of what you take collagen for is like the glycine content, and you get about 10% more of that as well per serving Bub's is super soluble in water. It doesn't Clump like other protein Brands and it comes from sustainably, sourced, grass-fed and pasture. Raised cows, in southern Brazil. It's keto and paleo diet approved again, super high quality collagen that benefits joint Health, Muscle Recovery gut, health Hair, Skin, and nails, and more. And
Cool thing about Bob's Naturals is that the whole brand serves as a tribute to former Navy SEAL Glen Doherty whose call sign in the Navy was Bob hence Bob's Naturals. He was a Navy hero who laid down his life saving Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and ten percent of all proceeds to bugs Naturals gets donated to charity in Glenns name. Starting with the Glen Doherty Memorial foundation. So this is just a badass company. That really puts benevolence builds benevolence in
their bottom line, and they have the best quality collagen that I'm familiar with. And if you'd like to save 20% off of anything that bubs produces, all you got to do is head over to Bub's Naturals.com. And that's bewbs Naturals Bub's Naturals.com and use code genius, for 20% off site-wide again that is bubs. Naturals.com use code, genius for 20% off, site-wide check out their college and you will be happy that you did. All right, family while we are about to do a deep dive into this very
Auro widely spanning episode of the show with Kevin. I'm pumped for you to listen to it, sincerely, but before we dive in, I just want to give a shout-out to Apple podcast app user, Jeff Rice listens who took time out of their day to leave this wonderful, and kind review for the show on the app. They wrote life-changing podcast and gave us five stars. My wife and I are new to the genius life as of three months ago and it has reinforced and
Proved so many of our healthy habits the information and the guests, that Max has, are always very knowledgeable. Anyone, who is looking to make healthy changes in their life, big or small should give this podcast to follow. You won't regret it and neither will your body and mind. Well, thank you so much Jeff. I'm super glad that the show is resonating with you and having a positive impact in your life. You might be pleased to know that we are actually going to be. We're going to start doing longer episodes of the show. One of the things that I recently realized is that when we have
The Epic guest in the studio and we limit the interview to an hour in length. We're leaving a lot on the table, so we're going to try to be doing longer episodes. Of course, when the content warns it warrants it, and I hope you as well, as all of the listeners of the show out there, find that it adds even more value to your life. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for spreading the word. Thanks for leaving the ratings and reviews for the show on your podcast apps of choice. It really does help. It means a lot.
A lot. I see them. I appreciate them. Thank you. And now, without further Ado, here is my conversation with Kevin bass? Let's go. Kevin bass. Welcome to the genius life. This is a long time in the making.
Thanks for having me here. I couldn't be happier.
Looking looking steadily with the shaved head. You got the beard growing out.
Stop it because that a Uniqlo hoodie, is that even God? How did you recognize it? Yes. How did
you? Because I literally
Because I was wearing the same one earlier, but brown gray with like,
with. Yeah, that's how I know. I'm just happy. We both didn't wear it at the same time.
I was literally, it's like, over there. I was gonna wear it. Well, I'm psyched to have you here, because obviously, we're friends on social media. I think we have, mutual respect for each other's work. I love, you know, all of your posting and you know, you're the open mind and open mindedness that you show on a myriad of different nutrition Wellness.
Has related topics, but you also were like a no BS kind of guy. Like you, you know, you you look at the data and you're very thorough and so I thought it would be really fun to have you here to debunk a few wellness and nutrition Health myths because you're so good at that on social media. And if you like my audience would really appreciate it. So in your estimation what are the top nutrition, Wellness Health myths that you see circulating.
And and yeah, let's just debunk them.
Well, there's a, there's so many, so, we'll do a few and, but it's like hard to cover everything. I guess part of it is the reason like everybody eats. And so, everybody has like an emotional connection to their Foods, so that they end up like. So there's myths about literally everything that people eat, everything. I've literally. Yeah. Literally, right. Literally, there are literally people who think you can live without food.
Food. And food is a conspiracy, you know,
breathe a word of it. What are the breath breatharians? Yeah,
right there, yeah, breatharians breathe errands at. Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it. I just know, there's a Wikipedia article about these guys and they think that it's sort of a conspiracy that everybody's been conditioned into believing that you have to eat Foods in order to survive, but you don't. And that's not actually how people live. They, they actually can live off the air, so sing.
And I guess they're also people that believe the World is
Flat.
And yeah, literally everything. Why everything you can imagine?
Well, okay, let's start at the top. I think one of the more pervasive myths that I see or maybe it's not a myth, but one of the more pervasive Maxim's that I see circulating is that you've got to restrict carbs and eat a high fat diet to lose. Fat that carbohydrate, deprivation is the key to fat loss and it's Superior to other diets. What's your take on that?
That
there's like so many different ways of approaching this. But like the first way I would approach this is I would say look up pictures. Maybe there's a, maybe this is a mean way of approaching it. But like, this is a real, this is a no BS way. Look up, pictures, like go, find pictures of people at low carb conferences and then go compare them to pictures of people at like, high-carb, low-fat like vegan conferences. And what you'll see often is
People at low carb conferences are not necessarily ideal body weight and then the people that like to hike are vegan conferences, are often like kind of if anything almost underweight. Like they look like often like rail-thin and that's just an anecdote, that's not the first most important piece of evidence. But like if you just think about your common sense experience and you think about people who like eat like ha,
Like are vegan diets. Usually if anything they're almost emaciated sometimes, and then on the other hand, you know, not everybody who eats a low carb diet necessarily loses weight. But if we start digging down deep into this question, the idea that you have to restrict carbohydrates in order to lose weight is based in this idea called the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity. It's basically insulin is what drives the increase in.
Fat cell size. So whenever you get high insulin levels, fat cells, take up free fatty acids, they turn them into triglycerides and adipocytes or at least maybe the liver does that. I don't know neither case fat cells take up triglycerides and or free fatty free fatty acids from the blood. That's how they do. It is through high levels of insulin.
And so if you don't have high levels of insulin, then your body can't take up fat from the blood and your fat cells can't get bigger. The the problem with this is this is just not how fat cells work and this is not how obesity works. So first of all, when you look at the genetics of obesity, most of the genetics of obesity are not related to Fat cell size or, or insulin. Or there's a third, maybe a couple jeans but like, the vast vast.
Majority. I think something like ninety percent of genes related to obesity, or have to do with the brain, essentially, probably with food reward and people who just are genetically programmed to want to eat more for for brain related reasons. And sometimes the light goes off in this room. So now I look like I'm in one translation room but so what, sorry what
it just makes you look more dramatic.
Like so because so all better write something but that's okay. Already
model. Okay, so you're saying that
that genes that may predispose one to obesity are not necessarily having an effect on. Like, for example, metabolism, it's not that they have a slower metabolic rate, it's just that they may be more inclined to overeat.
Yes. In the 1990s it was thought that people who were obese had a lower metabolic rate but it's now thought based on better methods that have been
Been created since that time that that finding wasn't true. So there is a, it's not at the time, it wasn't misinformation but it's become misinformation because the science has been updated. People with obesity actually, probably don't have a little bit higher metabolic rate because they're burning more calories. Yeah. It's mostly a food intake issue which is causing obesity, rather than a, you know, a calorie output or a, or a calorie expenditure aspect. Of course, there's individual,
Differences. But overall obesity is overall caused by elevated calorie intake rather than depressed calorie output. So yeah, so it's brain related with respect to wanting to eat more essentially, and that's sort of an automatic drive that people have, we think that we can put it under our willpower, and to some extent, we can write, you can white-knuckle it, you can count calories bodybuilders, do it all the time, but for most people,
Who are not like absolutely obsessed with doing this. That's not generally going to be a way that you're going to lose weight. You're generally going to follow your natural eating drive and so people with differences in their brains, some people have more of a drive than others. And then, of course, one of the natural caveat to this is that it probably also depends on food environment, right? So in a, in a more ultra-processed food environment, the food environment that we have right now,
Those people with those genetic differences will be more inclined to getting obesity in such an environment. But if we had a food environment that wasn't full of ultra-processed foods, there might not be as much of a problem with with with these brain circuits because these brain circuits generally go after things like hyper palatable to or processed foods. And if those Foods don't exist those that super high-level food reward then the Obesity phenotype. So to speak will not be as expressed. So In traditional environments,
So it's an interaction between genes and the environment and people with those particular genes in this environment of the ones who tend to get obesity and people without those genes that well they're more protected.
Hmm. But he's back in the back in the day that provided like a survival
Advantage. There is such like a big. I would have said yes like a few years ago, but like apparently there's a really extensive debates. If you ever have a chance to talk with John Speakman, he's he's a
A genius in this area. He's like one of the
best obesity
metabolism maybe even like best biologists like in the world he's like a member of the National Academy of Sciences and even the Chinese Academy of scientific. He's member of like every Academy of Sciences like three different ones which is like short of a Nobel Prize. But ya know he has papers on this where he goes. He goes into extraordinary detail about this. I think his theory is that
I want to say,
Has to do with with predation, I think, yeah I think the dominant Theory according to him and he may need to correct on this but I think or this is 13 and I think this is his theory is that when humans were no longer subjected to predation threat, then we the genes that kind of kept our weights under control kept us from eating too much. I'm coming obese selection stopped acting on them. So there are certain people in the population in a certain amount of genes that
Stopped needing to necessarily keep us lean. And yeah, there might be some positive benefit for obesity Gene since an ashtray and social environments. So they some people want to eat more and so because of those two different things not necessarily needing to worry about predation plus maybe some other advantage or just maybe genetic drift humans have tended to have, maybe more obesity genes. That's one important theory that I think John.
Ascribes to but yeah it's funny. Yeah but but back to the carbohydrate insulin model so it's so. So obesity is not governed by insulin. Yeah, sure. If you have like a diabetic who loses the ability to secrete insulin, that's what died type 1 diabetes is at least. Yeah, they need insulin or else. They'll waste away because they can't engage in anabolic processes. They can't grow their fat cells, but that doesn't mean just because you have a path.
A logical process that causes people to be unable to maintain weight. Doesn't mean that process is necessarily the thing that drives obesity other processes are what Drive will be see. That's just something that you need in order to not waste away. So just because you have one pathological characteristic doesn't mean that with respect to one particular pathway, doesn't mean that pathway governs. Everything with respect to obesity, so insulin does definitely turn up the ability for fat cells to take up fat. However, fat,
Self in the absence of it insulin or with some basil level insulin, because we're always recruiting some insulin and that's even even better. We always have some insulin and then on, if you going on a ketogenic diet, maybe you could about half as much insulin secretion over the course of the day, but you're always having some compared to high carb diet but that aside simply elevations and triglyceride and free fatty acid content in the blood can increase the uptake of fat into the blood into the fat cell. So just because
you have my have lower insulin, you might have higher fat in the blood, which you're going to have. You're going to tend to have on a higher fat diet, lower carb diet, after a meal, you're going to have high fat, and that itself will sort of push the triglycerides in front of the blood and Kevin Hall knows a lot about this and that's where I learned that from, but you also mentioned. So, how do people lose weight on a high, an insulin High insulin, agentic diet?
Whenever they're having a lot of insulin around. Well, it's just that even though they might have a lot of insulin around that insulin is, it might not necessarily be being used to put that into fat cells. There might not necessarily be a lot available. It might just be being used to work through for carbohydrate metabolism to push carbohydrates into cells that that need need glucose.
And then if you and if and just think about it like this there are take two diets that are equally insulin or genic. But take one diet that's like less palatable less ultra-processed and has a lower seat calorie density. If you simply eat fewer calories on the diet that has less palatable has lower calorie density, which will happen spontaneously on diets that are less palatable and have
lower calorie density, less process, diets in general. Then you're just not going to have as much fat gain even though you might have more carbohydrate or more insulin being secreted, compared
to a
local low-carb high-fat diet. So in that case, they're simply just may not be enough substrate. And yeah, it's more of a brain level issue of how much food am. I being driven to eat as opposed to an
Level issue, of course, insulin can definitely affect the brain and drive some Hunger as well, there's no question about that but it's not entirely about insulin. And only insulin is probably only A Modest part of the overall picture compared to Simply, like, wanting to eat delicious foods or over eat foods are not being satisfied. Hey guys, who pause this episode of the
show is sponsored by AG 1 by athletic greens. I love athletic greens ag1 because it helps you to truly film nutrient gaps in your diet, promote gut, health and support hole.
Body Vitality, one daily serving delivers a comprehensive blend of nine. Count mm9 products, you get a multivitamin multi-mineral, you get a probiotic adaptogens and so much more all working together in beautiful Harmony to deliver the strongest possible Foundation For Better Health. It's a great Habit to get into the product Edge. One tastes great. It mixes easily into whatever protein shake you're already taking and I love that H E1 only uses the
Best and most natural forms of the vitamins that it incorporates, like, folate instead of folic acid, you'd be surprised how many high-end multivitamin products? Use the fake stuff folic acid. Not a G1, athletic greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs of a G1 with your first purchase. If you go to athletic greens.com /, genius head over to athletic greens.com genius to take ownership over your health.
Pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance and you'll get again. One free year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs of ag1 with your first purchase athletic, greens.com genius, check them out.
I'm not sure if that was a an adequate answer. But
yeah, well, it's just interesting because it's like, you know, you see, bodybuilders, bodybuilders all the time getting shredded on hypo caloric, diet.
In other words, while in a by making use of the calorie deficit but they generally eat, copious carbohydrates, right? So it's like it's just this interesting thing. Like, how I'm just I'm not sure how people in the, for example, to Quito camp or the low-carb Community, continue to believe that you can't lose fat while insulin is elevated. Because to me, it just seems very odd.
Obvious that that fat loss can be can occur while you're consuming carbohydrates. You just have to be in a calorie deficit.
Yeah I mean and bodybuilders still to this day one of the main kinds of diets that bodybuilders eat especially like Elite. Bodybuilders is often a low-fat. High-carbohydrate diet, I even know some body builders who are like Mass like 250 plus pounds and shredded.
Who actually inject insulin because they get to be so big. They can't even make enough insulin to. It's like incredibly unhealthy, but they actually actually inject insulin in order to have enough insulin to get everything into their, you know, their cells and and they're completely shredded. So they're not eating more than whatever their body needs even though their insulin levels are extremely high and obviously it's
terribly unhealthy but because they're not eating more than their body. Well and that's because they've giant muscles but they're not eating more than the what's necessary to maintain those muscles. They're not gaining fat. They're like sub 10 percent body fat so it's like way more complicated than insulin and calorie intake just as like the overwhelming part of the equation. I think most scientists would say, then that isn't to say like but I don't want people to
To think I'm just like advocating for like a willpower calories in, calories out model hormones, don't matter. That would be total nonsense that is total nonsense. Obviously like there's many biological mechanisms that determine how much food you're going to want to take in when you become satisfied. There's many hormones that govern these processes that are modulated by whatever different kinds of foods that you eat. And which is why if you go on a more healthy diet it's suddenly spontaneously much easier to
I eat less fewer calories and then lose weight and that's a biological process that we really don't fully understand. So definitely hormones and food quality and all those other things matter, but it's just not insulin by itself. It's so much more than insulin. And insulin is just really A Modest part of the overall equation. I would say maybe like 10 like 10% of the overall equation compared to all the other factors that are important.
Yeah. So what would you say is a high-level strategy
EG for somebody, looking to go for maybe not necessarily obese but overweight to having a nice healthy body composition. You already mentioned upgrading food quality I think but yeah. Are there any other sort of pointers strategies tools?
So you know what I would say probably like probably like first line probably this is going to be what is already what all the celebrities are doing, right? Like, to come.
Glp-1 agonists,
are you talking about owes empik?
Yeah. Look at break our break
this down for us. Why? Why are all the celebrities seemingly talking about this
drug? Because it allows you to maintain less body fat with less effort. Like, because everybody, even lean people or most people, there's some people who are very, very skinny, and they don't have to even try. That's
I hit obviously, everybody hates those people. But like, but like most people in order to like maintain this ideal figure that they want, it takes effort and the reason is is because, you know, there's things around you that you want to eat that. You can't eat like they look delicious, sometimes you're hungry, you have like an urge and you just, you're just can't eat them. If you eat them, you're going to lose what you're what you're working on. Well, this, this true,
New drug. It's it's a it's really revolutionising weight loss and obesity medicine in a way that was was really unexpected. We, I don't think scientists even five to ten years ago would have even predicted that something like this was going to be possible. So it's it's really unprecedented and and was unexpected, even to scientists, but they're but this drug it. Binds to what's called a glp-1 receptor which is just
From the outside of the cell, it binds to this hormone called glp-1 is thinking glucagon-like peptide. One if I'm if I'm recalling correctly and there's many different cells that Express this there's some in the gut, some in the brain but long story short, it's the cells in the brain and particularly with regard to and with respect to eating Behavior, metabolic homeostasis it.
Cetera in the brain that this hormone binds to those cells. It causes the brain. Simply to, I mean, this is a little bit complex, but I think
What people report whenever they are on this drug is that they can say, let's say, you have a, let's say that you have a eating problem and you're extremely obese. You have a giant pizza, that's given to you. And normally these people would often say want to eat the whole pizza but they find themselves satisfied at 2 or 3 slices. And almost just like, not even wanting to eat anymore so it's almost making them a lot more like, what's more normal? And it may be that
Turning off some of that reward circuitry that's causing them to just like be constantly rewarded in like constantly crave. And interestingly, these drugs are now being trialed for things like alcohol, abuse disorder and gambling disorder and things like that other sort of addictive disorders which suggests that maybe the circuitry for wanting to overeat has a lot of overlap with circuitry for other addiction Disorder. So but the interesting and cool thing which
Which is why all the celebrities are using this drug now, which you can mimics a whore mimics a hormone but you just give it in higher doses. The reason the celebrities are using it now is because it works on everybody. So anybody who who there's a, there's a Continuum of degree to which we are all seeking food reward even people who are maybe even on the lower end of that. Continuum if you give them some of this truck, they'll even be lower than they were. So then it'll just be suddenly easy for somebody who was relatively lean.
To be very lean all the time, if that's what they're there, what they're wanting to do. And if you're a celebrity and you have the money to do that, that's what they do. But what's interesting is as far as we know and we've had now years and years of randomized, control trials, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of trial participants, lots of epidemiology like looking for for for potentially negative effects. As far as we know, the worst side effects tend to be things like nausea.
Which often can be mitigated by slowly increasing the dose and not going too fast, and it doesn't have serious side effects, which is why it's so such a revolution. It's like it's causing. These dramatic reductions in eating, maybe up to or over twenty percent of body. Weight taken off. By the time you hit one to two years. So if you you're 200 pounds and go down to like what that would be like 160 pounds and that's average average reductions in body weight. So some people have
Percent reductions in body weight. So, going from 200 to 140 pounds. So going from being obese, to literally, basically, a normal weight for some people and effortless. Effortlessly, they're not having nutrition education, really and most nutrition education. Isn't that good? Isn't that good anyway? And they're just taking this truck and they're just eating in the normal food environment and suddenly, they're not as responsive to the normal food environment, so it works on everybody. So that's why celebrities are now abusing it. And
And buying it up and it's going to really going to revolutionize if the data come in as we're expecting. It's really going to revolutionize. Not even just obesity treatment but probably just weight loss. Because in addition to these like big weight loss, affects the long-term studies that have come out so far long-term data that have come out so far show like really dramatic reductions in like heart disease I think you shared with me a an abstract where they're looking at Alzheimer s disease. Now is that right? Didn't share that with me. I think there
I think, I think, I think you sent me that where I don't
remember, I feel like we share so many different things back and forth. I
think I'm sent me like maybe three or four months ago, an abstract where they're they're wanting to try out for Alzheimer's disease. So to reduce. Yes,
I do remember that? Yes. Yeah, well, because I think it makes it interesting part because it's also used as a type 2, diabetes drug. So it can potentially, you know, in so far as like, blood sugar complications and the, like, or associated with
Creased risk for and glucose dysregulation in the brain in the setting of Alzheimer's disease. Maybe it could be
useful, 100%. Yeah, obesity causes brain inflammation to be City causes dis metabolic effects in the brain, all this other stuff. So, so it helps with like pretty much every major Western disease. It doesn't seem to have many downsides. So it's a revolution. So that's so that's what I would tell people if they have the money. If there are waiting there looking to lose weight and to
To do apart from that if we're talking about lifestyle Honestly though, this is this. What I think this is why I'm kind of like
I'm more interested. Now, personally, become a more interest now in, like, how do we modulate nutrition for some of these other effects? Like, like cognitive effects, Etc, like what kind of nutritional quality changes? Can we make for these other effects? And I'm a little less interested in weight loss just because I think that we're going to have a revolution in weight loss with with with these medications especially if they get them down to a low enough price. They're already looking at these cost benefit analyses, see if I think if they get them down to like
Like blow. I want to see below four thousand dollars a year then. It becomes very cost beneficial. Even for for these things to be widely prescribed and then and then it's just going to be it's going to be a game-changer but that's what I so so I'm generally interested more in like like food quality for producing other sorts of benefits to health that are obesity independent. But I would say, if you're looking for like an old-school traditional approach, which I think still, most people are going to be doing for the next five or ten years until
These drugs are available in a wide spread manner. If you're looking for an old-school approach, it's there's a lot. I think the number one, I think you're probably agree with me on this. The number one lever is probably to replace ultra-processed foods with more Whole Foods.
Right. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah.
Yeah. And then I'm honestly, I'm like I'm thinking I'm like okay, I'm wondering if like because I feel like you might even be more of an expert here.
At this point than me, but replace ultra-processed Foods would be the first step focus on foods with higher in fiber. So well, honestly, you know, you know, I like, I like more of a plant based approach. So I'm going to give you more of a plant-based orientations, but
well unpack that, why? Because we want to know guys quick, pause before we go any further. I have to tell you about life force. Life force is a health optimization company that gives you the tools and
Support that you need to optimize your mental and physical health and performance. They offer the life force diagnostic which is one of the most affordable convenient and comprehensive blood tests out there which measures over
40 biomarkers, including
Hormone, Health metabolic conditioning, organ Health, nutrient levels and key risk factors for chronic disease. They measure your testosterone, estradiol critical nutrients like vitamin D and magnesium, your LDL cholesterol, your hemoglobin A1c, so many markers that you've heard us talk about on.
This podcast many times in the past that are worth knowing well life force makes it super easy to test and then your blood test results are reviewed in depth by a life force. Functional medicine, doctor followed by a Telehealth appointment with a life force clinician. It's a totally badass all-in-one solution, including quarterly blood tests again, Telehealth with a medical doctor performance coaching and so much more one membership, one Health optimization system if you head over to my life force.com and use code Gene,
You're going to get 15% off, I love home, testing Solutions like life force, and I've personally used them myself and I was very impressed with the white glove treatment, all the results, and the consultation that I got afterwards, it was amazing. Again, my life force.com that spelled myl, iife, forc.com use code genius and get tested your future self will, thank you. But also, before I think this
Is so important because just going back to the to the drug topic for a second. Don't the studies show that people who lose dramatic weight on this drug. Once they come off of the drug, they tend to regain it. It doesn't regain it right. Yeah. You'll regain the way. It's not
permanent. So so this
conversation I think is like it's not a separate conversation like it has to be had alongside the drug because anybody who's even you know who's thinking of using it like they're going to need to put these healthy habits.
Place. Otherwise when they come off the drug, unless they want to be Tethered to the drug for life, which we don't yet know what the long-term Health outcomes of that could could potentially be. They're going to need to have these habits in place, right?
Yeah. I think so maybe. Yeah. I think, I think the way the discussion is going is that people will probably be on the drug for life. And so, so personally, if I, yeah, I like personally, my natural level of body fat is closer to, like, 20%, I can get down to below. 15% of
I work really, really hard like super hard. Some people are closer to 15%. They can work get down to 10% of the work. Really, really hard for me. Getting down to 10% is it's possible, but it's like, it's a that would, it's like a bit would be a big, big big, big battle to get there if I could just take small doses of the drug for life to in. If I wanted to stay at 10%, say I would. And yeah, I mean some people have different philosophical philosophical.
Reasons about this, and it's actually really interesting that you say this because I haven't really considered this too much in depth until like maybe just now but I think there will be some resistance to, to taking a drug maybe. But, but imagine this, imagine this Max, let's say that you have this problem with overweight and then you're struggling with it, you know. Like if the if the drug helps you, I don't I don't do you think most people will choose a higher weight.
No, verse a taking the drug for life. I think most people choose the drug.
Yeah, I guess you're right.
I think I mean I would maybe there's going to be a small number of people who wouldn't, I don't know, it's interesting. I haven't really
thought about that, would you? I just think it's probably so much easier. It is so much easier to be able to take a shot, right, like, once a week is it once a
week? Yeah. But they're, they're coming with an oral form as well so or they're not, they're developing that. So it's believed that we will have an oral form as well and it won't just need to be injected.
So if we have that, then it's just taking a pill like say every day, you know, you for the rest, your life. Yeah sure. But you know, but for people who don't okay, sure, yeah. The first thing is replacing ultra-processed foods with with Whole Foods. The second thing is probably getting all the ultra-processed foods out of your house like, literally, just not having them, I can't have ultra-processed Foods in my house, I'm going to eat them first. Like that's the first thing I'm going to eat wake up a need. It's like learn how many I have chips and and like queso.
My fridge, I'm going to have chips and queso for breakfast. There's no question.
So I love that. I love that. I love the
honesty. So so the first thing I would do is, is if I'm really working hard to get to get lower, I would never have those foods and also ever, they're just not even allowed really to be in the house and then you won't be tempted and it's, and it becomes easier because then you'll just eat what you, what you want to eat etcetera and it's less of an issue because
Don't go out of your way to like, go to the, to the store and like, whenever you're having a craving often, people will just say, you know, whatever. I'll just I'll just eat this in these nasty lentils and, and, and suffer instead. Yeah, so, so sorry. Lentils. I like, lentils to I do, I love them. I knows most people don't but for some reason a lot of people don't, it's really weird. I like them.
Yeah I like them like the whole paleo thing of having to
Get, you know, to abstain from like beans and lentils legumes and things like that. I never understood. I feel like these are really great Foods provided you tolerate them,
right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that they're, they're awesome. I like the taste. I like the way they make me feel, you know, you can do you can eat like, too many like, but if you're not eating too many, then you should be fine. So I don't understand.
I don't know, maybe just people who don't want to eat their vegetables or maybe like, I don't know, some people bleep, believe this stuff. I guess, you know, that's another whole like the lectins or whatever it's going to, I don't understand. Yeah, not good. Not a lot of good evidence, but yeah. So that's the way I would do for, for those two steps would be like my main two steps, keep consistent exercise, especially with respect to resistance training, some kind of resistance training because you want to maintain muscle as you keep it.
Or body weight. If you lose weight, too often and too much you cycle, and then you're not also lifting, you can like, destroy your body composition and you actually end up looking worse because you don't have any muscle and this goes for men and women. So, even when some women who like, like there's many women who don't have a lot of muscle who like look like tons better, like like really much more attractive whenever they had like 20 pounds of muscle. Like it's so it's something both.
Men and women want to do. And you also want to do that to maintain a muscle for later in life, because if you don't, then then, then you can lose function later in life and that's a disaster. That's not something that's fun. So, maintaining muscle early in life is really important for maintaining Health later. So those that, I guess that's the third part of it. And then we can all talk about some smaller issues. So maybe protein intake, protein intake is important.
Point for maintaining muscle, if you, if you have lower protein and takes over time, you're going to have lower muscle eventually because you're not gonna be able to maintain the muscle whenever you get sick and then you, you need and higher protein and takes in order to to because you have higher protein needs. For example, you're going to take that from the muscle or if you again are losing weight. Sometimes again, you're going to take more protein for muscle. So I'll higher protein, diet, can help you to maintain more muscle. But it can also if you're a fairy, will adherent to such a diet
Maybe it can reduce weight by about 5 pounds, 5 to 10 pounds, at most 10 pounds at most, I think it's the more realistic estimate on average is maybe about five pounds additional fat loss of a higher-protein diet versus a lower protein dot assuming, some of these very adherent, so that's helpful in that respect. It's not it's on a massive effect, but it's a modest effect and it's meaningful. Yeah, higher fiber intake, you know, you can go too high, but, you know, definitely,
Our than I think even the recommendations are a little bit low, but maybe that's my my like sort of plant-based background bias. I think that going above 40 grams is good. You know, like up to
80 40 80 seems like a lot to me, but 40 seems reasonable.
I mean I have no trouble going over 100. I actually have to reduce whatever more. Yeah, more and more because I eat too much food. Now, like I'm trying to get up because I've been gaining a lot of weight for
For good reasons. I've been trying to bulk up, but, uh, yeah, I know it because if you're smaller, I think higher intakes are okay because the less overall food that you have to take in, then you can tolerate more fiber. If you're bigger, you probably have to have a lower fiber intake, that's been my personal experience, and that makes sense because you just have more food going through, but yeah, like up to, yeah, I think between 40 and 80 is good for most people hires.
I think the higher you can hire you can tolerate probably is maybe the best. There's some debate in the literature about what traditional people's Aid as far as their fiber intake. But it could get pretty high in some traditional populations with over 100 grams per day. But they were very lean and they weren't eating a lot often. But
and fiber what what makes fiber? So beneficial that it. Well, there's probably many many reasons why fibers vitamins beneficial but it's like it's very satiating because it helps stretch out the stomach and
There are there other reasons.
Sure. So this is where my PhD project comes in, and you have had to push this off few times because because I'm like, trying to graduate a venture, like, finally, graduated my PhD do that and hopefully, like two or three months, they'll be awesome. It's so
impressive, dude, I can't even imagine what like the workload course. Load must be like for somebody who's like trying to get both an MD and a PhD at the same time as you
are. Yeah, very commendable.
Yeah, basically, it's a lot of suffering. So that's it's, it's been a lot. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, it's been a lot is lots of suffering, but being a good suffering. I don't know.
Only worth in the end, for sure, for sure. We'll see like it a lot.
We'll see, ya know, I'm happy with where it's taken me. I'm happy with, you know what? I've become, who I become, that's holding their conversation, but it's
It's a lot. But I will say.
The. So this is where I'm peachy comes in. So for what our lab often works on is actually fiber, how does fiber affect health? And, and we work on some receptors some Transporters that take some of the. So, the microbiome, the bacteria in the gut, they process fiber and they turn it into often, what's called a short chain fatty acids. So, butyrate acetate propionate are the main ones, there's others but
These are some of the main ones in butyrate and particular has been looked at a lot by us and by other labs especially over the last 10 years and it's now believed based on our work and some other evidence that butyrate plays a really important role in God Health, in particular, maybe prevention of of inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's or ulcerative colitis but also in the prevention of colon cancer through.
In my my belief and this is what we're going to maybe write my dissertation or maybe even publication. My belief is the mechanism.
The reason that it does this is that butyrate sends a signal to the immune cells of God saying hey everything here is okay, everything here is fine, normal processes are happening when you don't have butyrate coming in. That means that there's like some sort of infection. There's means there's something going wrong with your microbiome, that the wrong microbes are there. And the bodies like, oh my God, Red Alert. Something's going on inside here, we have to defend ourselves.
If you don't have butyrate being produced under normal circumstances, you would have butyrate being produced because Normal circumstances are eating a relatively high fiber diet only recently in the past, you know 100 years have super low, fiber diets, been comment become commonplace, but traditionally everybody would be on a much higher fiber diet than most people eat today and if you don't have those signals coming in with butyrate, that's produced by fiber, your body thinks something.
Is wrong. So you'll have a more chronically inflamed state of the of the gut and so this might predispose you toward the development of: diseases of intestinal diseases. But also cancers because the more information you have in your gut, the more predisposed you're going to have to be towards cancer. Because inflammation plays a really important role for cancer and we've shown this in mouse mouse studies Mouse models. Eventually, you know, we're going to have to take it to the 22 drugs, into two things that help to produce.
Butyrate in humans. But yeah. So so even apart from weight loss, butyrate and fiber may play a really important role in the maintenance of Maintenance of long-term health, and even quality of life, especially with respect to the inflammatory disease of the gut. So fibers really good thing for those reasons, for sure,
that is fascinating guys, quick pause. There is no escaping stress. Not only is it at the root of everything that makes life feel harder like sleep loss.
And low energy but it's also linked to some of the world's toughest health problems, like depression obesity, high blood pressure and even heart disease, while you can't always outrun stress. You can stay healthy by outsmarting it to that end. I recently became aware of a new strain of probiotic called bifidobacterium longum 1714, which has been shown to reduce stress related, behaviors in preclinical studies, and improve stress responses and cognitive function in healthy human volunteers. That's why I was psyched to learn that bifidobacterium, longum 17.
14 is a key ingredient in, just thrives new mood management product. Just calm, which may help with Stress Management, improving Sleep, Quality, and energy, and even encourage better, focus and flow. I mean fan, they also package it with really helpful essential nutrients, like vitamin B12, as methylcobalamin, and folate as the natural form tetrahydrofolate, you can get 15% off. Anything that just Thrive makes if you head over to just thrive
Calm and use code genius at checkout again, for 15 percent off. They are pioneers in the field of consumer packaged. Psycho biotics, and the chief microbiologist at just Thrive Quran Krishna was just on the podcast episode 252, if you want to re-listen to that and learn more. So, if you'd like to say 15% off again, that is just Thrive health.com and use code genius, and you're going to get 15% off, enjoy, what? What is the, what is the average intake? And the u.s. to, you know,
Factor fiber.
I want to say like 20 grams a day. Something like really low. Like it has to campus. I was like how the hell does, how do you get that? How does he even possible? How do people even achieve that like, for like, how like you have to be like, one piece of bread or something? Like, let me see. I have like bread here, not to say necessarily bread, but like how much like 22 grams of dietary fiber in the bread, right? Okay. That's a lot
of the whole because it is, it like a whole grain bread. This is how
bread bread. But, like, so,
So many foods whole foods contain fiber, it's like it's just that people are eating like almost zero Whole Foods on average. It's incredible. It's really incredible. It's like hard to even believe that to me because I'm sorry. Like I've just never eaten like that. Well I did when I was like a little kid, we like microwave food all the time, like hot pockets and big ol B, solely, every it's terrible. But like but like as an adult, not eating kid Foods, man. I it's crazy like 20. It's like it's really, really low.
But yeah, so you
eat fiber ideally from you know, fresh whole fruits produce and the like and the fiber, how does this work? The fiber makes its way down to the large intestine and we get butyrate from that.
Yeah. So the so, your body itself cannot digest. The fiber, you don't have the metabolic Machinery to break it down in your gut. So,
It travels to the colon where there are these little guys that do break it down. Now they don't break down a ton. So we're not cows, you know, cows like live off of fiber where their microbes actually break it down and that's where they get a lot of their energy from we're human. So we don't firm in tons and tons of fiber. That's why we have like, we're talking earlier, maybe 80 grams, or 100 grams is kind of limit, but we do do firm. It's, um, and those microbes take the
Burton. They have the metabolic Machinery to metabolize it. So they then turn it into these short chain fatty acids, which which our body cells can then absorb and then and they can metabolize interestingly. And this is just like my PhD, I don't know of anybody else will be interested in this but for for my PhD we've shown that ketogenesis might play a really important role here too. And this is, we're getting it to nerd land. So I'm going to keep it short but it's traditionally thought.
Thought that the liver is what creates ketones and has all these ketogenic Machinery. Etc. But actually the gut the colon can create ketones as well. Just like the liver can and that generation of ketones. From the butyrate from the fiber is actually a really, really important part of the health. Probably, a really, really important part of the health benefits and fiber, so so maybe maybe ketones are. Well, they are definitely very, very
Beneficial for the gut. And that's that's the process that by which those benefits are produced is through ultimately, the generation of ketones in the gut,
dude. No, that's amazing. Because we know the benefits, the potential benefits that Ketone bodies have on the brain, right? And because they're, they act as a fuel, they have all these signaling effects. We've talked in the past, I did a podcast episode of down, D'Agostino, who came on, talk to all about the, the signaling effects of these.
Ketone bodies, that can increase blood flow to the brain, they can upregulate bdnf. But it was always, it's always been, I guess difficult to reconcile that with like, okay, well unless I want to be in, chronic ketosis. How do I get those benefits? Am I just supposed to be drinking like MCT oil in my coffee or like what? But this is really cool because what this suggests is that all the benefits that we see associated with plant Rich diets. Some of those benefits might be attributable to Ketone bodies produced by plants in the gut. That's in
saying it.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is really funny. How how those two threads get get get wound together. Yeah, 100%. And, you know, some people I shouldn't feed the crazy people here, but I will because whatever, but some people think that okay, maybe I shouldn't say this, but I want to say it because I'm already saying it. So some people think that maybe
Some of the key tones produced during our ketogenic diet. Even though they might not be eating any fiber, they may be able to replace some of the effects of butyrate on the gut on gut health because it's ultimately, in part, in part, may be mostly but at least in part the ketones that caused the beneficial effects of fiber on the gut. So they think it's okay. Maybe I can just like not eat any fiber and just have high ketones and I'll be okay and it may be true but I'm
Not be true. I don't know. But it's funny. So some people. Yeah. So anyway, very
interesting. Wow. So cool. So cool. I can't wait to, you know, to see like what you, you know, what you publish like based on. This is
It's it and yeah, well threat interestingly and this is an aside but interestingly ketones are also super important for pretty much all the body's processes. If you knock out Ketone production in the heart if you knock out Ketone production of various organs, that the animal,
Die ketones have a really important role to play in normal physiology throughout the body and I'm really excited about, you know, publishing soon 44 after my just because I because I thought man, foremost a PhD. I thought I was a loser, like, I was just terrible but and but at the end like we're finally maybe going to put together a good story, so that's nice. So like don't ever do a PhD ever? Never nobody if anybody out there is listening and
Thinking about doing a PhD don't like don't do it unless you really not. Like if you don't like yourself, then you should do it but otherwise don't do
it. But Somebody's gotta do it. So, thank you for, for, for doonan.
And,
you know, pushing pushing the science forward. Okay? So fiber fiber, definitely important we've established that. What is you mentioned a few times? You have this likely, you have a tendency to lean.
Words, a more plant-based approach, but you've also, you know, on social media, you post all the time, the value of protein, and the value of certain nutrients that seem to be found exclusively in animal products. And yeah. So we're and and you've acknowledged that all animal products are not unhealthy. So, what's your yeah. Walk us through your like you're thinking there and yeah, with regard to like,
Plant-based eating versus, you know, more and more balanced. I'm never I'm never surprised
ouch. I like how you said it was more balanced, omnivorous approach like like okay. All right, all right.
Well that's the thing is that you know for some like public health seems to give like these plant exclusive diets and a pass. Yeah. Ignoring the fact that they cut out an entire food group of very nutrient, dense foods. And and to me it's just like a very Fringe.
Approach that doesn't often get acknowledged as
such. Yeah. Yeah it's because it's politically correct. Yeah, yeah, this is the reason it's politically correct. Actually I even know like some people, some people you know, also who are in the plant-based world who like, who will just like tell you that they see this and it's definitely. It's because it's politically correct that a lot of this stuff happens. But yeah, but okay, okay. So the first
First reason that what the first. Okay, I'll first start by just talking about a little bit about like the kind of person I am. So if the kind of person I am whether I like it or not, or anybody else likes it or not is I like to find like exceptions I like to find edge cases. I like to explore those exceptions and educates, has I like to find sort of like what people aren't looking at and that's what.
Excites me, it's like a lot to do with my, like, cognitive cognitive processing, type or my personality type, it's it's sort of Playing devil's advocate. It's just, it's that's who I am like at the core of who I am. So if you ever follow me on social media, you'll readily see that. It doesn't always necessarily come out, but I just love to to ask questions and make a well, wait a second and then try to try to find the weaknesses of different positions. It's just something I love.
Do so, personally, from a personal perspective, I love plant-based diets because so it mainly started with ethical issues. So I really hated the idea of factory farming and how they would, you know, to mistreat animals especially like smaller animals like chickens and pigs because it seems wrong to like lock these animals up and tiny little cages for their entire lives.
Lives. And that's the entire life that they get to live. They're not doing the sorts of behaviors that are their species specific behaviors that they're supposed to be doing that. They're they have instincts to be doing, they're being prevented from doing those behaviors and I can't imagine that they're very happy most of the time maybe some of the animals are so I have a guinea pig or my daughter has a guinea pig and this guinea pig. Literally just like if you take it out of its cage, it'll just sit there for hours and the same spot, but I think most animals
Are not like that and it's kind of wrong to treat them like that, in my opinion. So I wanted a way of eating that didn't participate in that. I don't want to contribute to that. So, so anyway, just I'm, yeah,
I'm completely sympathetic to that. And I agree with you. I just want, like, to put that out there. Like, I'm yeah, everything that you've said that you've just said, I completely agree
with, right.
Okay, you've come back. I see that. Now once your agreed with me, I could start to see the normal video again. I don't know how weird, but yeah. So so at that point I got into stuff like pasture-raised and, and, and stuff like grass-fed. And I did that for a long time. But then I started to also just because I wanted to explore things like after that point. But also
so, because
Well, so there's this whole issue of okay, for example, with beef, how are we going to expand beef, production. So that everybody, so if everybody had to eat the same amount of beef As Americans eat, like we would, we just don't have enough land in the world to do that. Populations are growing. So my perspective in my point of view and this maybe not the original reason I got into it. I probably just got into it because I was just exploring things and interested but my point of view now is that
And and there's a lot of caveats here. And I know you've posted about this and there's such a conversation to be had here, but I'm just like putting this out and we can have that if we need to, or if we want to. But but my we probably need to eat less. It's probably better for ecosystems to eat less. We probably don't need to be mowing down the rainforest, Amazon rainforest in Brazil. It's probably not a good thing. It's probably bad things. Probably have better to have better have more trees and more forest and stuff like that. So,
We talked about regenerative agriculture, all that stuff. But my understanding is that we probably need to eat less be for example, in order to in order to be better for the environment in short, we can we can discuss as if we if we want to. But so as a result of that, Isis card, being more interested in sort of a plant-based Bridge. Also, just cause like, the plant-based grooves. Were telling you that, like you'd solve all diseases if you want plant-based was like, okay.
Try it. Let's see what happens like well I want to explore this. I was just interested in curious, so I was like, okay I'm gonna listen to ornish or those guys those legendary like know I know they're obviously want to say bad things but yeah we don't need to talk about them but I went down that I went down that path for a while and you know, it's plant-based diets. Are I liked what I was doing? I liked the groups of people that I was.
Getting to meet, I thought the ethics behind it. We're we're good. But then I started, you know, being myself which is hey, okay. So I'm doing this one thing but I'm trying, let's like find the weaknesses to it. So what are the potential downsides for a plant-based diet? Well, I started looking in the literature. One thing is that plant-based eaters to to eat substantially less protein. And this is the case in whatever population were talking about. Whether it's in America or Germany, or Australia or France, like plant-based eaters vegetarians tend
Eat less Protein, that's for obvious reasons, right? If you're eating beans and wheat, you're not going to get as much protein as somebody who eats a lot of beef and ham or whatever. So they're getting less protein will. So then I asked okay, they're getting less protein, are they all surely Also may be having less muscle and it turns out that probably there's not a lot of really high quality studies, but the studies that we do have many of the studies that we do have tend to point to plan B Cedars, having less muscle, I know anecdotally whenever I tried to gain muscle
So eating like a really low protein diet, was it didn't work like it just it was really not.
Like it just didn't work very well and then everybody knows anecdotally like the really frail-looking vegans. And so I think there's some definite truth to this. And I think that if we had more higher quality research would show this very clearly and if you look even deeper into the literature, you find that in order to maintain proper amounts of muscle mass in old age, you actually need to substantial amount, higher amount of protein then say, the dietary guidelines recommend. Well, guess what? Beings are probably getting even less than omnivores and omnivores. Probably aren't even getting enough.
At least definitely an older age and probably even in the younger age. It's going to impact how much muscle you have especially if you're a calorie deficit and vegans tend to eat fewer calories as well. So they tend to be leaner so then they're also eating less protein. So I think in terms of maintaining muscle mass, there are definitely has a really big downside to veganism or at least at least vegetarian diets. As as most people consume there's ways to compensate for this but the average typical vegetarian the
Which way the average typical veteran is educated, they're going to be consuming less protein and probably at higher risk for having lower amounts of muscle mass. So that's one downside. It's a really real downside. I like literally, like thought the vegans online for such a long time to point this out eventually? Like they started like saying that I was right. But then they wouldn't like they wouldn't say it was because I said it they like pretended it had nothing to do with me and I'm still a bad person as always because I'm questioning their diet.
But but I still like follow me and pay really close attention whatever. Well
because I feel like you're in a position similar to me where it's it becomes apparent. How much more difficult it is. To tow the middle line, the balance, the more balanced line where you know, suddenly everybody is hating what you're putting out, right? Like a vegans, the carnivores, they pay, you know, I say, I enjoy legumes occasionally like the
So, people are going to come at, you know, you're at, oh, it's awesome.
How can you say that?
And I try to stick to the evidence, but I'm I'm very skeptical about seed oils being this health bun. So, then I've got the evidence based people, you know, 99% of what I say could be completely accurate in accordance with the data, but I come out semi against well, I guess not send me, but I come out again seed oils and suddenly, I'm a quack to them. So it's like, you know, it's just Towing that middle line is like, I think, is the, that's the most difficult thing to
Do and and I think you do it really well but that's why you, you know, might be prone to getting more criticism at
times. Yeah. There's there's tribes man. They're all these dumb tribes and they're all certain that the right and everybody wants to be a part of a tribe because you don't want to like, well, first of all other safety. So, you can just listen to what somebody else says and then say it and then you're like safe because you know, like your tribe is right. So then I'm safe if I just know that my tribe is right. So that's nice. And then also it's not getting at
Tact is nice. So, like, most people are tribal, most people have their little tribes and most people will defend these tribes, and it's pretty bad. But yeah, like I do it because I can't help not do it. Like, I don't, I'm not the kind of person to try to fit in because I want to fit in. I'm the kind of person to try to find like the other side of things. So, I'm always going to be like, having somebody who disagrees with me, because I'm always trying to find, like, what do they not know, what are the what
What other people wrong about? I'm always looking for that, and there's good reasons for doing that too, because if we're talking about veg, vegan diets are vegetarian diets and plant-based diets in the first place, right? We're talking about protein intake, right? Like, let's say, I want to be a plant-based eater, and I want to do it in such a way that I don't have negative Health consequences. Well, then having this information from somebody who's maybe looking at things a little bit different, can help people to eat a plant-based diet and health their way so that they don't have these negative consequences. So instead of being like tribal and being like, Oh,
I want to like, protect my vegan tribe and, and, and like, be angry at anybody who says protein might be beneficial for health. You can be like, hey, I just want to, like, find what's going to help people and people can make their own decisions. And they'll actually have better health than if I, like lie to them about what the evidence says, but, but I don't know, man, like, people people, for whatever reason, they value their tribes more than the truth. But okay, so so yeah. So, I'm passionate personally, I and I've changed my mind.
My personal passion for like, trying to find the, the, the flip side of things. I'm personally passionate about making plant-based diets better. So what can we find out about the current weaknesses of plant-based diets? What can we find about the current weeks is plenty space? That's that would make plant-based eating more healthy than it is now on average and it is unhealthy and thinking a lot of ways on average. So that's just protein proteins. The first one, but there's a lot of other nutrients that are relatively deficient plant-based diets vitamin A. So there's a lot of assumptions made.
About vitamin A.
In plant-based diet, people think that if you eat these carotenes there in converted into Vitamin A retinol, there's a, and there's individual differences in how much you convert. So some people don't convert much, some people convert a lot more
you're doing with beta-carotene, right? Which is pro-vitamin, a everybody knows found a carrot, sweet potatoes and things like that.
Yeah. But there's wide wide Divergence is in variation in how
Much vitamin A might be optimal for health. We actually don't really know, like scientists really don't know how much vitamin E is optimal. Like most of the recommendations provided means and minerals are based on really rough estimates and really old studies that are not really good with respect to health outcomes. They're actually quite terrible they're like not even good at all. With respect to health outcomes, most vitamin and mineral recommendations. So we think that maybe people on average
or maybe getting enough beta carotene to get enough retinol. We don't know that that's actually the case for everybody because everybody has different rates of conversion and also we don't know exactly how much retinol people actually need, but we do know that. If you're an animal, if you eat more animals, you get a lot more retinol, like naturally, you don't have to have the beta carotene, you get the retinol directly. So what's the difference between plant-based eaters? And and, and, and omnivores with respect that vitamin in particular, we know, for example that what was
So I recently saw a study where they supplement with vitamin A, with retinol, in particular, is it malaria? It's measles so. And with measles, there was a 1988, I want to say, Lance hours a Lancet or New England Journal of Medicine randomized control trial, where they took kids with measles, they gave them vitamin A and they saw that the kids who got the retinol, the vitamin A did way, better way better with respect to their measles outcomes, like
Like way fewer Health complications, much healthier, etc, etc. Then the ones who weren't receiving vitamin A supplements. These were omnivores. These are omnivorous children's. Imagine if these are plant-based children now, of course, measles doesn't Rampage through populations, but the point is that there's, there's there's Health functions and health health modulating properties of these different vitamins and minerals that we really have only scratched the surface about. And so whenever people say, oh plant-based diets are like perfectly healthy for everybody, they're saying on the basis of no.
We really have a really, really crude evidence. If you think of like the old video games of like the Atari Etc, the tiny number of pixels is very grainy. It's like our evidence is even worse than that. In terms of what we're seeing, it's definitely not like really high resolution. We don't see very much with our current level of evidence and yet people can make these dogmatic claims about. And the Reason, by the way that retinol does that, is it because it modulates like like
Like membrane permeability, modulates immune cells. It does all sorts of really important things with respect to immunity so. So what happens with people who are getting other kinds of infections, who have low, intakes of retinol Roland takes a vitamin A, or there are low converters of beta-carotene or are eating vegan junk food, right? Yeah, so when we look at vegan diets, they're deficient o'clock across they're deficient. They have lower intakes. And deficient some cases across a really wide range of different vitamins and minerals. So retinal maybe one of those
That's one of the edge cases. The someone, the errors. We don't really understand that well, but there are other cases that are actually much more clear. So for example, iron,
So iron the rate of iron deficiency in plant-based. These areas is much much higher than it is in omnivores. In every population you look at if you took a look at India, you're looking at America, it's like across different populations. It's much much higher. Well, if you have low iron levels first often get an e Mia, the second you get like depressed because you have low iron levels, you're anemic and so you feel terrible and yet and yet whenever I mentioned that on to people as like maybe this is the reason some vegans don't do feel that. Well, it's because they have low iron levels are
No ours, not involved in that. Like, no, that's frog, like I have a PhD, you should stop posting about this and it's crazy. People are crazy but but it's like, yeah. Anyway, so, it's like that with don't eat, don't be like. Oh yeah, right. It's Tony
Gonzalez, wouldn't don't. Don't they argue that like omnivores or, you know, your average Omnivore's deficient in a bunch of nutrients as well? Like, what what's their sort of counter-argument CounterPoint to that?
Do they say that? I mean, yeah, there are some vitamins. I think that vegans have higher intakes of than omnivores. I think maybe vitamin C might be one. There's a couple of them, there's a chemically, there's, there's definitely more that, that like, there's every two or three times more number of vitamins, and minerals that vegans are tend to be low in than omnivores. But yeah, there's a few and I think the answer to that is not too hard, although it is, you know, we should
Acknowledge that which, you know, right. But the answer to that is probably people need to eat more whole plant Foods instead of eating, like honey buns and stuff. I love honey buns but like don't eat his Meal which replace them with like oatmeal and other stuff that is going to be more. And then I think you can somewhat correct that. Like I think vegans tend to eat more fruits and vegetables and those are definitely really important for health, right? They definitely have an advantage there. Vegans probably have better lipid profiles, so maybe with respect to if so long as you maintain a
Body composition and don't get too much visceral fat. Like maybe with respect to cardiovascular disease risk because my might do a little bit better. It depends though, there might be other deficiencies or other things that might make them do worse. But overall having better lipids is better than having course lipids. Right. So, yeah, there's some things that vegans vegetarians have better and but it's not clear necessarily that a plant-based diet is necessarily healthier. If everything else is is is doing well so far.
Example, if you look at those studies on showing plant-based diets cause Better Health outcomes with say with respect to cardiovascular disease risk, that may be real or it may just because be because vegans vegetarians are plant-based. Dieters eat there tend to be more health conscious so if you compare that if somebody who's equally health-conscious with those groups then you may not see as much of an effect or no effect at all with respect to those outcomes. And
you also you also mentioned that they tend to eat less in general which may be
Getting to the, to the, yeah, I observed Health that we see, right? Like,
yeah, 100%. Yeah, real less. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, vegans and vegetarians are like, like two or three BMI points lower than their counterparts omnivores. They're just, there's a much leaner. Well, some of that's muscle mass but some of that's probably also fat. So yeah. It's that's going to make an impact on long-term Health, especially if you carry less fat over time over a longer period of time. Yeah, so yeah, there are some advantages for sure. I mean but
But bought like why not also ask the question. What are the disadvantages? So that you can have both like you can have the good things from both like that's that's what I'm always asking about because I want to make plant-based diets better and I want to ask like how do we may be fortify or supplement plant-based diets with things that are good? And from that we get from meat to make people healthier on plant-based diets because personally, if I go vegan, I feel like crap. I feel just terrific. So, I want to help people not to feel that way. And I know a lot of people feel that way on a vegan diet, like it's people can people do
Like people, get so mad. Whenever whenever we say this, like, people here this or people find out, I said this little bit so mad like, no, that's like you need to do this, not true. But everybody knows this. Everybody knows that. So many people feel like crap I'm vegan diets. Like it's not just hard to maintain because you can't have your bacon. It's hard to maintain because you because a lot of people feel like crap whenever they eat this way. So like what if we could just help people not feel like crap why do we have to deny that people feel like crap because we want to like, no, don't don't don't.
I find out that people like feel like, crap, know, you don't really feel like crap, you're making that up. No. Just like, try to help people with, like, what people probably feel like crap, a lot of people do so.
Yeah. Anyway, I mean, I see all the time, I'm not,
by the way, by the way, vegans have like a rated depression, like double the amount of, of omnivores, like a double, the rate of a product of depression. Yeah. And then what they'll say, they'll say, like, oh, it's not really the vegan diet, it's because they care so much, they get depressed because they care so much. And I'm just like, dude, what if it is the vegan diet?
We need to really be careful about that because if you're just like, gaslighting people about their diet, because it's, they care so much but it's actually the vegan diet itself. But then you're recommending to vegan diet and you're not really taking that concern. Seriously, you're doing people a disservice because if you want to take that concern seriously, so that we can avoid people becoming depressed, because being depressed is the worst thing in the world is so, I mean, it's not the worst thing in their bodies, like one of the worst possible things. You can experience is being depressed. So wouldn't you be concerned that? That people might be getting depressed because of nutrient deficiencies but
You know people aren't because it's politically correct. You know, damn
I love that rant that I mean yeah, 100% because that's what they're doing. They're
gaslighting. Yes, you know, if you feel like crap on a vegan diet I think
that, what they'll what you'll often hear is. Well, they didn't do it correctly. You
know, I could scream. I could scream. Yeah. This one because because that is the worst because every diet tribe does that. By the way, every single one of these stupid diatribes does that argument everybody? The carnivores, do it. The keto people do, whatever is at all? You're not
Doing it right? Hey, this is the perfect diet. The only way you could feel bad as you're not doing it right? That's the only way. There's nothing wrong with this. Stop it. You're on band band button. Get, get out of our forums. You're not allowed to say, is there's you don't feel good. This is every, every cult does this, every not even not even diatribe, but like, meditation people do like Buddhists do this. Like meditation Pro meditation? Be all you're not meditating, right? Because you don't feel like amazing when you meditate, they all do this. So it's that's
That is the worst argument because it's like why can't people just acknowledge maybe there's ways you can get better. I don't know.
Yeah, exactly. There's also been this interesting. I feel like Evolution where at first, you know, the the vegan talking points were that some some of the vegan talking points were that all animal fats are bad and that dietary cholesterol is bad. Then we started to see that. And by the way, correct me if I'm wrong here on on any of these points that I'm that I'm about to make. But then we started to see
Dietary cholesterol, maybe wasn't so bad and so that stopped being as prominent of a talking point and then the evidence started to show that, okay, well fish Fat seems to be very beneficial. So then now fish started to get a pass right? So fish, they started to attack fish less and now all of a sudden, I feel like, Dairy, it's starting to come to public awareness. That dairy fat is also maybe with the exception of butter, which we could talk about. But that's besides the point in general dairy, fat seems to be beneficial right? Like paradise.
Toxically full-fat Dairy seems to be associated with better cardio, metabolic Health, as opposed to like, low-fat and fat-free Dairy. And so, the last Bastion is beef, fat still seems to be the boogeyman as far as the vegan, you know, zealots are concerned. But it does seem to be the case that like, this whole thing that animal fat is the worst thing for us. For our health, that seemed there seems to be. It seems to be sort of coming to light it.
It's not necessarily true.
So, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
I don't have strong opinions on this. I can I can tell you what I think. So I think with let's talk about dietary cholesterol to start dietary cholesterol and let's start with eggs for example, because eggs are sort of the diet that actually a really interesting case, right? Because eggs, not only have are really high in dietary cholesterol, but they're also really high in things like choline which is, which is maybe really important for the brain and may be really helpful for brain function as mean you've been talking about recently,
And so it's, what do we do about eggs? Like what do we do? Well, I think the first thing to recognize is that most people may be between 50 and 80 percent of people may be as many as 80%. If they eat more dietary cholesterol than what they're already eating it, you know, as a normal part of a background, I'm never start. They're not going to get higher cholesterol, higher cholesterol levels from from eating more, so they're not going to get elevations and what's called LDL cholesterol since they're not going to get elevations LDL cholesterol. They're not
A higher risk of cardiovascular disease
if they did, if they eat
eggs there's a lot of different ways to look at this particular issue, but like the first thing I'll say is like, most people don't know what kind of person they are with respect to eggs, you know. Like most people don't know if you're a hyper responder or not. I don't think most people like test that, that's the first thing I say so. So, so historically, I don't know if I maintain this position anymore. I eat. I'm eating more eggs lately, but
But traditionally I would say like overall it's probably not like why mess with it, because some people can't get higher higher, LDL cholesterol levels. But the other thing aspect of this discussion is it also depends on what your background diet is, right? So if you're looking at epidemiological study some studies show, no harm of eggs. No, it's like not harmful. Some studies even show, maybe even they're better for you than
Not having eggs. And some studies show harm, it's probably because it depends on the background diet. So, if you have a really healthy background diet, then maybe eggs, it may be in those people who have a elevations LDL cholesterol. A might be harmful with respect to say heart health. But if you have a, if you have a relatively, not good background diet, then they're not going to be harmful or maybe even beneficial. And then they might be beneficial for your brain because they're increasing or choline. And choline is probably really important for improving brain function. Even
Quickly, right. You probably quickly preview brain function like within a few weeks.
So I like eggs. I personally this not going to resonate with your listeners. Probably you're going to say something.
I was going to ask if I don't want to cut you off, but I do, I did want to ask, is there a way to test to see whether or not you are a hyper responder or
not? Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty easy. Like, maybe I mean if you if you have the time you have the inclination, you could he not eat any eggs and well.
Yeah, you can maybe not eat eggs and eat your normal diet and then have your blood tested your LDL cholesterol you see and then maybe you know six to six eggs a day for a week or however many eggs that you want to eat. So you want to eat to a day, right? They need to a day and then have it tested again and see if your if your LDL cholesterol changes, it doesn't change. Then you're safe with in. That
wasn't, it's my understanding. I mean I
I think I probably heard this from an expert who I trust. I haven't like, vetted this in the literature, but that it it may change your your LDL cholesterol but in the short term as your liver compensates, right? Like if you start eating more dietary cholesterol, you're going to absorb more and then your liver.
Might not necessarily respond right away with regard to producing less, but over the long term. It has no, you won't see as much of an effect but in the short term you might see an
effect. Yeah, I don't know. That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know, I don't know about
that. I saw that between a there was a conversation that it was an Instagram live between Gabrielle lion and Don Lemon. Hmm. And they were both talking about that and I thought it was super interesting so I haven't vetted it but but
I mean you know at least on the surface it makes sense to me.
That's cool. Yeah that would be cool. I think I think the reason that recommendations about eggs have changed and so that we don't care about them is because on average if you if you if you eat fewer or more eggs it's not going to affect your health. Most average people it's not going to fit though. I think on the margins it might, if you go completely plant-based adding eggs, probably going to increase your cholesterol. So then but then nobody's completely plant-based. Like, so they're just like, okay, they're just being practical.
People like the, they're like, no it's not going to affect anybody. So that's why the recommendations have changed but yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't think eggs are probably a big bogeyman if you're like, really looking to optimize cholesterol may be but like here's another consideration. And again, this is not going to resonate with your ears, but maybe I shouldn't say this. People are like telling me not to say only here,
it's not going to, it's not going to be a, Kevin bass, bass podcast, unless you say some controversial
shit, okay? So the first
Thing I want to point out though is I have to apply for residency soon. So I have to like get into residency and not like have things said that, like so like and then I also just don't. Yeah, I think it's a good thing too. But
Okay, so what I personally do because I think I believe in the Elder the lipid hypothesis of cardiovascular disease. I believe that like the evidence is so overwhelming and so crystal clear that. So then personally, I like take a low dose of a Statin. I don't have okay, high
cholesterol, I knew that by the way because you have said that on
social media and I say it, but I'm trying to be more careful lately because I don't want, I don't want to
Like residencies to be like, no we're not going to take him because he says, he says like. So I'm trying to be a little bit more circumspect although I still want to say the truth. So I'm going to say the truth to and I'm like, say what I really think but in the reason for this is that
I think it's brand stands, especially really low doses are relatively. They're very safe and that's probably even more true of like, pcsk9 Inhibitors there like extremely safe. I think the ones that are hydrophilic, right? The ones we've added this discussion. The ones that don't enter to the brain. So we're suicide and Provost, and in particular
super safe. So some just just, yeah, real quick. Some statins are more lipophilic and summer.
More hydrophilic and the lipophilic ones have a greater potential for entering the brain and screwing with the cholesterol producing Machinery. In the brain. Is that did I characterize that? Well, yeah,
perfect. Yeah, the lipophilic ones like enter all the cell's not. Yeah, the brain, the muscles, they enter all this was very easily. Whereas the hydrophilic ones, they don't because to enter the cells, you actually have to either go, you have to go through the plasma membrane, and, and if you're lipophilic, that means you.
Your soluble in fat. So you can very easily pass through plasma membranes. But if you're hydrophilic, you have to have a receptor to get you in. Well, The receptors are really only present in the liver. So for the most part. So the hydrophilic one's really only going to the liver, whereas the lipophilic ones go everywhere. There are more dirt, the more dirty, so to speak. So you you probably don't want. I want your lipophilic statins going into the brain. It's probably not the best for the brain. That's not so,
If you had to, if you had to pick a step, if you had to pick a Statin, make sure that it's a hydrophilic
pravastatin rosuvastatin. I think people should be emphasizing a think current practices moving in that direction of people emphasizing those over say like a tour of a Statin or which has been traditional, but I think receive a sentence better and it's just ridiculously cheap. So, I take like a hick two point five milligrams of reduced at a day and I don't notice any
anything but my LDL
cholesterol gets really low, so I don't
60
milligrams per deciliter and it's thought or sometimes said, I'm not exactly sure whether this is exactly true but a lot of cardiologists will say like below 50 milligrams per deciliter, you're basically impervious to cardiovascular disease if it hasn't developed already. I don't know if that's inside exactly true but I try to keep everything like my risk factors really good and then if I can just reduce my LDL cholesterol even lower and I have no untoward effects, then I do that to just keep everything as optimal as
Because most people end up with some cardiovascular disease. Most people majority of people. It's the number one killer, and having just one risk factor off, like dramatically increases your risk of cardiovascular. See if you have just one risk factor, that's not perfect. Your lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease goes like 35%. If you have like zero, it's like, 10% and I want to just keep things as you know, because then I'll then at that point all you have to worry about his cancer and Dementia or lose the main two other ones. So then I just try to keep LDL
Cholo. So for me, I'm like I don't really care much about eggs because I'm like, well, my LDL cholesterols like already tanked from taking a Statin. So it's something that people could could talk to their doctors about if that's what they wanted to do. Probably not, don't say my name and don't share this with any residency directors, please, because it's also not officially medical devices legitimately and I'm not a cardiologist that's, that's for sure. But but but but the whole field, the whole field of Cardiology is moving more and more. The direction of of broad.
Prescriptions for better or worse, maybe you might have some problems with that. But like I think we're finding that the lower the LDL cholesterol for a longer period of time. It's it's pretty beneficial for heart disease and people are still dying a lot of heart disease. So the field is moving more and more. The direction. I believe at least intellectually in the journals is becoming more of a discussion to to start Stan therapy. Earlier not quite as radical as what I'm doing but it's moving kind of in my direction but
You know, we'll say we're able to eradicate heart disease, right? Like you put every but we put statins in the water. Everybody's on in this. Hypothetical scenario. Everybody's on plant-based diets. What is then going to? We're all gonna die, right? So what is then, going to move into first position? Like it's gonna be something else. Yeah, cancer, cancer cancer. So, I just, I can't, I have trouble wrapping my head around this, like, yeah. You know, the this idea that like cholesterol as the as the, as the
End-all be-all. Yeah. Indicator of human health, you
know? Yeah well it's not obviously like you've got cancer. Will obviously move into first place and some, you know some yeah, some LDL lowering medication. I'm not going to say it. I'm going to get myself in trouble. There was a recent meta-analysis. I'll say it. Did you see that? She see that Kanye interview, where there's a clip, I'll show you later. It was the worst thing I've ever seen but also funny because he's he just can't help himself.
Just can't help what he says like she's like I'm not going to say it but then he says it anyway. So I'm doing what he did. There was a recent meta-analysis with acetamide that showed that like reducing cholesterol through using his etem. I might increase the rate of intestinal cancer. It's looking at the randomized control trials and so it's not observational evidence. It's like randomized control trial that is showing an elevated risk of because it probably, it may be because it perturbs, the, the homeostasis in the gut because it prevents cholesterol reabsorption from the gut and
So you excrete it and so maybe as much anyway. So there are downsides. Yeah but but but but I will say if we can do reduce LDL cholesterol without down sights, right? Or with minimal downsides or with or small enough, downsides, that doesn't offset the benefit then just knock. Let's say, we knocked out all of heart disease. Well, yeah, you'd get more people dying of cancer but they end up dying later, right? Because you know, if you're going to, if you're a knockout, heart disease and died of cancer. And said, well then,
Ever that cancer is is what's going to happen later after after the heart disease at you knock down so the so that's that's why because then you're going to buy a few years now are you going to get more immortality know and my parents make the same argument to me that you that you're making right now. Like they always say this to me, but know, if you want a couple more years, it's not, you know. And also if you don't have heart attacks, like, heart attacks are terrible. Like, let's say you have a heart attack when you're 50 and knocks out some of your heart function, like you may not be able to bike as well, you just may run out of breath easier.
Like whenever you get to be like 80 the may not be able to go upstairs because you're like more more weakness in the heart so it's not just heart, attacks is not just death. It's also like disability that you're that you're reducing as well and a lot of people are affected by these things and so if you can just knock that out then yeah you're going to still maybe dive cancer debenture or a number of other potential diseases but it's going to be later. So if you're interested in having a little bit more life, which I am because I only have one, right? Yeah. So I'm trolls,
Say you say you use beef for exam meat and animal products? Which are which are generally speaking going to raise LDL compared to plant proteins, right? Because you get, you get certain saturated fatty acids, right?
Like yeah, maybe I don't know, maybe our
is there and you use animal protein to get yourself into a great body composition your lean your metabolically in.
Teen Health is having an LDL that is still within a reasonable range but not at the floor like it is, you know, in your case is that I mean is that not a
I guess what I'm what I'm trying to say is like, yeah, is it do the Bennett? Do the do the risks? Don't the benefits. Outweigh the risks in that scenario.
I'm not I didn't ask that question very well, but
But it's like I feel like I feel like there's I feel like it seems to me unlikely that the that the risks would outweigh the benefits. I think it would makes more sense to me that the benefits would outweigh the risks and you'd, you know, you'd you'd
And I don't know if we have this data that people on, you know, super high-quality diets, that integrate animal products into their lives. Are at, you know, we all we have are like is like population-level evidence. My God. Am I wrong? I'm happy to be wrong in this, by the way. Well, I'm just kind of like,
yeah, I will also. I like, I like to go back to what you mentioned at the beginning of this, of this part of the conversation, which is that, like, we've changed our opinions about fish, for example, and then we started to change our opinions about
Gary and maybe eggs as well. And so, you know, we're we're progressively, I think that there is a range of health effects of of animal products on the heart and that not all meat is the same. And if you talk to us, say a vegan that they think that all meat is the same or whatever. It's just nonsense. It's not. So, I think there's a spectrum and I think at one end of the spectrum is fish, right? Fish is like the most benign.
Maybe even beneficial. It's still being debated. Exactly. But it's, at least the most benign and it's definitely associated with far less far less. But it's definitely associate with less cardiovascular disease even then some plant Foods by the way, right? So fish seems pretty good. And then, I think next to fish is chicken. I think, if you look at the epidemiology epidemiological evidence, chicken actually, isn't that far away from fish in terms of
Reduction in heart disease risk. So chickens also high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, just like fish. It's more Mega sixes. So maybe it's not as anti-inflammatory, but it's not as far as its effects on lipids are concerned. It's probably like, not negative effect on lipids and it's not associated with. It's pretty good. As far as the association with, with the disease.
And then I think you get into stuff like pork and maybe even them beef, it's really interesting my understanding it, but the more I look at this, the more I'm a little bit confused about this evidence is like, my understanding is that the relationship between saturated fat intake from like fatty fatty meat. Like beef is still not good. But I don't understand exactly why. Because if you look at the composition of beef in terms of the fatty acid composition,
One of those fatty acids aren't that bad? Like it's not. It's not like yeah, especially butter, you know, it's
not right? Yeah. It's beef is about 50%, monounsaturated fat, right? And then, and then of the remaining 50%. I forget that it's probably mostly saturated fat. There's a very small proportion of polyunsaturated fats, and beef, but among the saturated fatty acids and beef, many all the cows fed, you might get a higher or lower proportion of stearic acid,
Yes, we know is like yes it's a saturated fat but it's also neutral from a cardiovascular.
Yeah, yeah. It's neutral or might even be good. Like if there might be any good. Yeah, might be some good parts of it, you know, mighty be help you with help from like mitochondria or whatever. You know. Like if we want to go down that, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole but like, yeah, it might be good. So maybe cocoa butter is good for you because cocoa butter also contains a lot of stearic acid stearic acid. So then why is his big bad? But as far as I still understand,
When I talked to the people, I know it's probably okay if there is a spectrum, and if me if some meats are worse than others, than probably beef is, probably not as good as a chicken or chicken or fish that, that tends to be the Paradigm. I don't have a complete Mastery or and reverse strong opinion about about this. But that's I think is a paradigm that I can do tend to think is is moving in the right direction and then butter is at the end. But
Otters. Probably a bad idea. As far as cardiovascular disease risk is concerned. It really raises LDL cholesterol, the composition is not that great. Okay.
So, yeah, you know, that's an, that's an area where I've changed my position and I still, I'm, I don't like to fear monger and I still will, you know, integrate butter as like a YOLO Indulgence but like, I think I'm in agreement that it's a, when you get a little bit of retinol, as you know, retinol, we talked about in butter and butyrate but it's butyrate and butyrate get all your beer.
Butter just eat sticks of
butter. Yeah, but yeah, so in general, it's not the most new. It's not a nutrient-dense food like any pure fat. Like it's just not a nutrient dense food and the, the it's really extracted from the dairy food Matrix. You know, it's like it's churned. And it lacks milk, fat globule membrane and it's, it's a very, it seems to be a potent relative to other Dairy fats, and animal fats. I think, in general potent, elevator of LDL. So that's to me.
Me where I think I've changed my publicly. Like, you know, my purse, my stance. And I to me it's more of like a YOLO Indulgence and of course, like all the Paleo people, you know, hate when I bring that up. But
yeah. So then the question is is like okay? So then if you if you eat beef and you have not like super low LDL cholesterol but it's you know but you're in perfect health otherwise it may be. You have normal. LDL cholesterol is like still okay?
You know, I think if you optimize your LDL cholesterol I don't think there's really good evidence. Like if you are if you go with other cardiologist says and you're not increasing your LDL cholesterol and it seems to be pretty low and healthy. I don't think there's any evidence that independent of that, you're really harming your health by eating beef. So, I don't think you have to worry about. I don't think there's any evidence that you have to worry about beef independent of
its effects on LDL cholesterol. So if your Optimal Health markers in every respect and you're not have elevated, LDL cholesterol is like, in the normal range, it's like, well, within the normal range. I don't think that there's, you know, any good evidence. Now, I again, I think that having even lower is probably better, but again, that's still not mainstream conventional, medical advice yet and it may not never be but but I think it's all else equal to, well, it's probably better but I don't see any harm of having like,
Really good, LDL cholesterol levels and then eating beef if you can maintain those little cholesterol levels, eating beef. I don't think there's any issue with that and there is differences in how people respond, some people have higher elevations than others. So maybe that accounts for some of the health effects that we see in the epidemiologic literature. And if you don't have those bigger and if you have perfect LDL cholesterols on a big deal, if that's perfectly possible and I think that's probably the like, the consensus view. So,
Yeah I'm probably genetically prone to hypercholesterolemia because of my my apoe4. Yeah allele you know. Yeah and so and so I like to balance my, you know, my intake. I'm not even consciously balancing. It like I think beef meat. I like I think meat is is very beneficial and it's helped me get into it helps me, stay lean, relatively lean, and and, and, and strong in the gym and, and
Thing. But I like to also you know like integrate like vegetables and fiber and I think fiber is important as we as we've talked about and I think like psyllium husk is a great potential supplement to use you know a few if you're you know you psyllium husk actually could bring LDL down by like 20 percent or something. Yeah. Like a fairly significant 10 grams a day, I think is the dose which is a bit much. It's a lot of psyllium husk.
But but yeah, I think fiber is super important. Coffee coffee is actually a natural Pcs. I mean, my pcsk9 inhibitor of choices, coffee really has been has been shown to be
effective. Oh, really know that entirely and caffeine. Yeah. Oh ha
ha Joseph's high doses. But yeah, they've shown that caffeine is a natural pcsk9. This is a
health drink. I didn't know that. That's right. Health drink. Yeah.
Yeah, I think about that. I think the dose was like, 400
mg. It also asked some Palace has carnitine and touring. What else that's perfect, right? Has all the things that meat has that are great and cap. It was like a week. There was like a
week-long period. Where you were going off on Tori? Mm, yeah. It was like your, it was like your favorite nutrient for like.
Yeah, like a
month.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean well so touring acts kind of like I don't know if it's the same, it's not the same mechanism but it acts kind of like psyllium husk and bring it out LDL cholesterol it like brings it on a lot substantially. It also I think helps with blood pressure helps like glucose it's like helps the everything it's like amazing and turing's not in plants like there's not a lot of touring plans like one plant where there's torn eating like a bean like I'm some Mexican being or at least according to somebody that like had an angry response to me.
In saying that actually beans like not all plants. Don't have torn. Whatever there's a parent like something that has touring but like, but like it's only an animal foods and interestingly, it has like Mental effects as well. So has like this. It's like Pro gabaergic. It apparently binds to like, the glycine receptor. So some people take glycine to help them, go to bet. There's not really good clinical trial evidence on this, but there's some mechanistic belief, but it binds the same receptors.
Torres. Glycine and so it may facilitate sleep. It can crash blood pressure. Like, almost as good as like blood pressure medication, like high doses touring touring. Yeah, touring. So I might be one of those many compounds that's in meat, that's not present, in plants, that might actually be responsible for not acting like a crazy person. So maybe whenever you find the crazy, the vegans who are like just bananas on Twitter and everywhere they need to take Tori.
Because that will help be not crazy anymore. So I think maybe it's something in meat that might actually promote promote mental health. So, oh, there's a that there was a study. Interestingly, there was a study where there they gave it to people who have like psychotic episodes and they had a faster rate of recovery from psychotic episodes having the touring supplementation, it was incredible. So psychotic vegans out there if you're listening thing.
About it. You can do in a cut that one out, we should cut that part
out. Good that, but that, that that's why I think it's a Mists take a
mistake to
out. It's a, it's a mistake to cut out all foods that have the potential to raise LDL cholesterol. Because yeah, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater you're getting out as a result, which could have potential unintended
Consequences, right? Yeah. All the other nutrients that we that we know and suspect to play a beneficial role in health like touring carnitine, creatine, it's just it's nutritionism, which I think is a big, which is a big profits and that, it hasn't worked for us, well, in the past, right? And, and I don't think it's the right approach.
Okay, I agree over that LDL cholesterol is not the be-all end-all. And yeah, 100%. And I think that like beef may have a lot of really good things, not just taurine, right? Like carnitine creatine creatine might help calling a function, help me help memory. So, and and may not even just be these compounds, may be vitamin D. There might be a like half a dozen or dozen different compounds that independently might have small effects but then overall especially over a long period of time. Might have a substantial impact on health, maybe, maybe.
Brain health, for example. And so yeah, your may be increasing your LDL cholesterol, but then you're getting all these other positive benefits for the brain. Maybe it's not. It's not we don't know that yet because we have studies were there. Combining all these into it. Like one, you know, supplement or whatever. It's just sort of like they do a clinical trial just touring by itself, or just creating by itself. But like so, we don't know. But it's possible that especially you add everything together using might even start getting substantial effects and yet,
We don't talk about that very much and that's not, that's not a good thing. Yeah, we make everything about LDL cholesterol 100%. So, so what we should we should. Yeah. But we should have some idea what the individual components of the contributing affects the individual components are because maybe it's possible to choose some foods that have some of the positives, without some of the negatives or maybe it's possible to take out some of those positive. Those nutrients and supplement them instead of having those folks,
These are things that I'm looking into lately but yeah, I agree with you. So,
yeah, if you don't meet weird. No, I love it. I love it. And by the way, I don't want it to be lost on my audience that you low-key refer to yourself as the Kanye West of Health, which I think actually. No, please sit.
I shouldn't have done that. No, no, no, no, no.
He is a genius. He's a lunatic.
But musically, at least
I think he's great like he I don't agree with his views. I think he's been through some bad experiences but have led him to say some things that are not
Man, I know a lot of Jewish people, it's like he's lost it there, but he had some really he had a lot of really bad experiences. We're not going to go too much into this, but like he had some bad experiences that have led him to say something like that. Yeah.
And I'm Jewish. I do. You know. Like I didn't know. Yeah. I didn't know. I. Yeah. You you don't get it for my last name. Yeah. Because my last name is like a a it was probably changed.
At some point, you know, Jewish Jewish last names are usually traceable. My dad thinks that it's possible that my last name at some point was like, Levine or something like a few Generations back. But, but yeah, when I, you know, when I see, I just see a guy who's like, crying out for help, you know, probably has some what we know he has mental health issues and I wasn't like, oh my God, Kanye West, like lock him up, you know,
you have to take these kinds of things
seriously when they're when they're echoed on a big stage because
They can create Downstream
effects. Yeah. Yeah. Not worried about that a lot, especially the with that kind of stuff.
You know, I don't even know if he's gotten even mentally ill. I wouldn't even say it like that. I just think he's going through stuff, you know. He's trying to you know, and he needs to mature but he needs to grow up like he needs. He's got stuff to work on for sure. And I think that that's that's the I think we can definitely agree on that. But yeah yes I guess on the Kanye West in nutrition. Fine we'll accept it. He
It sounds like you could use some touring.
Yeah.
We need to find a way to DM him. We need to let him know when I send this to him. This podcast, we're the solution to his problems. You need some vitamin D3, you need some taurine, he's and L carnitine, and he's some creatine and yeah, but yeah, no, I agree with you, so. So, so, yeah, I agree with you. And so, that's the one. So that's why you can take a stand. That's why I kind of take a Statin and I like to enjoy the other things. Also, choline, man, there's a bunch of health benefits from that.
But yeah, again like the but okay, but then, but then you have basically these ethical issues. You have like the land issues, have all this stuff. So what vegans will do or with the establishment will do is BET it'd be like, okay, overall we have to decrease animal intake and stuff. So then they Overlook the downside of what they're doing. This happened with covid to write this happened with, like school, lockdowns, like like getting people, a kids didn't have learnt in school for like a whole month and that's because they're like, well, we need to reduce spreads reducing
Reza, most important thing etc, etc. But they didn't realize like the impact of closing schools on on people's education was going to be horrific and it was horrific and has been horrific for those kids. So what people do is, we'll take this one little marker one, little nutrient, one little thing. They're focusing on them like that everything. And in that respect, I agree like this reductionism in nutrition has been terrible. We can even segue into seed oils from that, right? Because you love seed oils.
People made seed oils reduction of LDL cholesterol they've made that like their God and make their Idol. So and so they made that like you know, and so therefore seed oils are great because he Doles reduce LDL cholesterol compared to, you know, write water but but it may be the case that like having access into, I'm not going to endorse this view necessarily because I don't know what the truth is here, but it may be the case that Having excess linoleic acid in takes my beak. That's
Or mental may not be, may be fine, but may be detrimental. And so just because you reduce your LDL cholesterol, doesn't mean you're making Health better, you're making me the heart disease risk at least along that dimension of that one parameter better but you're not making Health better because there's so many other negative things that you're creating. I don't think that's been shown that there's negative things from Seattle reducing Seto. I think there's some trials that suggest a benefit and some other trials that are not that good that maybe show
I think signals are probably not that bad and like I'm not anti seed oil, but I'm open to the possibility that especially for the brain because we don't have good evidence about the brain, right? We don't have any evidence about the brain we have, like, we have like these, these cell culture studies, which show interesting things that are a little bit concerning. We have some speculation but we don't have long-term studies looking at. Okay? What if you supplement, massive amounts of seed oil, what is the effect on the brain? We haven't zero evidence about that.
All that concerns me because especially if you make these really big population, level recommendations, you don't have good evidence to support them. You don't have any evidence at all zactly, you don't have really good safety evidence. You just have like some evidence on one particular Axis or one particular disease, and then you tell everybody to do it. Well then what are the other Downstream consequences of doing that? And that could have been. There could be some for seed oils for example, but yeah.
I think that's, I think that's the right attitude to have that. You are that you're not against them necessarily, but your, and I might take a harder a somewhat harder line approach. But that you're at least open-minded to the possibility that these novel foods are having some kind of Downstream effect somewhere in the body, possibly our brains where we have zero evidence, right? Zero long-term,
Human evidence. Well. Okay, so to say with certainty that they're
safe. Yeah. There's so your Alzheimer is your dimension Mentor. The guy at Cornell. What's his name? Again,
Richard Isaacson
Richard Isaacson so he has an end and
he's not he's not he's not against them like. Yeah. This is not like an idea that I've done for him, just to be
clear. Yeah, but but it's important to realize that with every action there's a potential downside right with everything that we do. So
So something in his book that he recommends, for people who are at higher risk of dementia is reducing homocysteine, through vitamin D supplementation. So I think it's like a B6 B12. And I think is it folate is the the other one anyway? Like, yeah, those are the three vitamins in those vitamins, they reduce homocysteine levels and they also have been shown in randomized, control trials, to slow the rate of brain shrinkage, among older people, and like, a really remarkable in substantial ways.
It's like holy crap, it's a big deal. But if you look at some studies like in the I think is the 2000s early 2000s published in the New England Journal medicine. There's a pair of studies where they gave these vitamins to people with, I think hyper homocysteine emia because there was a whole Theory and those at that time about how homocysteine levels might contribute to cardiovascular disease. They're checking to see if, by giving those vitamins to reduce homocysteine, you could reduce the risk, the risk of cardiovascular disease, they actually found in those studies. There's some
All signal a substantial signal in one of those studies even in the the abstract that notes like, there's some sub signal, that maybe the reducing homocysteine too much in these. And this population might actually increase the risk of heart events. Unstable, angina so, so there's maybe a positive effect. But there's also, you know, a - and I think that, I think we should just always be open to the potential negatives. Now, I supplement with these B vitamins because I don't think my heart disease risk, is that high. I don't want my brain.
Drink. So, I like the, I like the idea of supplementing with these vitamins, keeping homocysteine regular relatively low, but we should be open to the possibility that there could be other considerations, that may make us change. Our mind about what course of action we think is best because there's always downsides to things and we should always be open to the downsides of things. Yeah. So
yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't agree more. There was a really good study that I shared a couple weeks ago. I don't know if you saw it, it was on who's with a, it was on migraines. And basically, they took this population that has chronic migraines and they randomize them to either like their control diet, an omega-3 supplement to die, or they were giving them one and a half grams of Omega-3s per day or an omega-3 supplement to diet with reduction in linoleic.
So they got rid of all of the Grain and Seed oils but they replaced it with other oils so as not to to control for calories and fats, right? So it wasn't just like they were eating less or anything like that and what they found was that the magnitude of the effect was the highest by almost twofold in the group that also that simultaneously lowered their linoleic acid. So it wasn't just supplementation with these anti-inflammatory Omega-3s. But the concurrent reduction in linoleic acid and migraine
That's like you can see that acutely right? If it's if like this is having an effect on like neuroinflammation which we think is involved in migraine so I don't know man. I mean, I'm not connecting that to Alzheimer's disease or dementia like that. But well
well well you can I just can I just money? Yeah it's always yeah. I mean that makes sense. That makes sense to me. Yeah, I mean everything you said makes sense, the mechanism makes sense. I'm open to that. But yeah, but I also I also just
Just to take the other into things, I don't like when people fear Monger based on stuff, we don't know enough about. I'm not saying that you're doing, you're just fair, you're pointing out, you're pointing out of a potential something that's going on and yes, seed oils omega-6 fatty acids, do it interfere with the anti-inflammatory effect of them get fries, we know that so that it makes total sense like your mechanisms and then you talk about brain inflammation, that makes total sense those mechanism. I would not want to have brain inflammation. If I could figure out a way to have reduced, my brain inflammation, I would do it.
Stop trying to talk me out of reducing, all getting rid of all the Mexicans in my diet, but like, it's just yeah, butbut. Yeah butbut. But like we, but I will say this, we don't like, yeah, I mean, I'm now becoming a follower. Now I'm, we're going to have to buy. I don't think I should. I don't think we should blame Seto as for everything, but I don't think that that's like been shown either. You know what I mean?
But I agree with that, I agree that there's not, they're not the Smoking Gun, I think their part they play there, they are. Part of the
The Expos ohm, have you heard that term like they just the overall, like, exposure to Industrial toxicants everywhere overly sedentary Lifestyles, you know, hyperphagia induced by chronic exposure to hyper hyper palatable food, environment, like and then you've got these like these oil, these novel oils which, you know, like are maybe playing. Like it's just all the all the things it's not just one thing, but
But, you know, I will say that growing up. The reason why I might have a bias against them is that those were the oils that I had in my house and my mom was like on a very low saturated fat low cholesterol diet because she was concerned about heart disease and those are those are the facts that we have, I swear to God. Like and so I'm just, you know, anything that was like around chronically in my house that led to my mom's illness like I'm just like yeah, I've got a magnifying glass, you
know. So did she ever have headaches or migraines just said,
Curiosity,
she did. I mean, she passed. She passed away three years ago but she did yeah. Occasionally, Yeah, Mmm. Yeah,
okay. I want. Yeah. I'm I'm going to have to like I want a little searching. The literature after this conversation. I'm interested in which stuff now to it. Yeah.
Well um we could do this forever. This is a good place to cap
it. Yeah, it is. It is we got that we got the major Concepts. I feel we succeeded. So that's good.
Taupe awesome. I love it. Well.
Last question for you, before we get to that, where can my listeners, my viewers connect with you on social
media? Yeah, like Twitter is going to be Kevin and bask a viiiain PA SS and scram, same thing. So there's two ends. What's your middle name? Norris like, Chuck Norris,
basically, ah, nice. I don't know the Kanye. The Kanye of
Helder Chuck Norris.
If I don't know, which is like, which is
A cooler. They're kind of a little bit of both.
Well, I'm happy to hear that.
All right, Kevin n bass on on the social media. Yeah,
channels. I'm not I'm not as active as I want to be. Also have a YouTube. I'm really want to be more active on that in the long term. I will be more active on that. I'll probably have another push. I don't know what I'll do it. It's like right now. I'm focusing mostly on Jiu-Jitsu. I'm like, loving that and obsessed with that right now. So I haven't been doing as much social media as it was, but it's, um,
When I will become more active and and I'll be doing a lot of it. I don't know when that's going to be, but it's going to at some point. So, but you can catch me on those. Yeah. And yeah, I talk about this stuff and I criticize everything. Try not to engage in like big fights anymore. And I don't because I just like this, too, it's too tiresome. But I definitely try to ask a bunch of questions and in provide new kinds of information people. So
Love it. And you never put me on the quack
list, which I'm forever grateful. You're too nice, man. Like I like, I know I didn't I haven't read hadn't, read your stuff and then you are so nice and like I think one of our mutual acquaintances wanted me to I think, you know, but
but probably can figure it out know.
Exactly. But but like but like whenever I think I think me and you talked and I was like, he's so nice like
And then I just like, didn't even look into it. I was like I was so so so I didn't ever by pretty much everybody got up quickly so that time I like put every single person on the internet on The Blacklist at a time so but not
you. So you did and that's why I was I was very grateful that I didn't see myself on their left a mark left a mark. Kevin. The last question that gets asked to everybody on the show, is a bit more philosophical. What does it mean to you to live a genius life? I was living a genius. Life mean to you.
like,
You, you always ask it just like that. Barad, there's I have to have to ask it abroad. Oh, my
gosh. Yeah, yeah. It's like, what is like a life well-lived? Yeah.
Um, always, always, always learning. Always asking questions. There was, there was a really cool vignette in this book called camera name, but his by Georgia pelant and he's a Harvard, professor of Psychiatry are Yale.
Heather, yellow. Harvard. What am I confused here? I think he might be. He has to be a thought it was a Yale, but he might be at Harvard anyway, one of those great places.
Hmm, But either in either case, it's a really great vignette from that book where he talks about. So there's a study called The Hobbit Grant study, where they ran it from all the way, from the beginning of the 20th century, all the way to the almost, to the end of the 20th century. And they just looked at Harvard, Harvard undergraduates and what happened during their entire life, they followed them up, they did a bunch of tests. They interviewed them repeatedly. There's a cohort of Harvard part of
Harvard integration graduates that they just followed up and they tried to look at what contributed to those people living happy fulfilling successful lives and what contributed to them? You know, like becoming alcoholics getting divorced, repeatedly, Etc, and having miserable lives, Etc. What were the main things? There was one guy in particular who had a really rough childhood and having a really bad childhood and having like bad relationships early on.
Really predispose people to having worse outcomes later on, but there was one person in particular who had a pretty bad upbringing and he even struggled through the course of the study but at the by the end he was like thriving. Like doing really well in his community really rich relationships, a happy person and something that really struck me whenever I heard about that guy is the way that he did it in. One of the things that like really marked him is like a lifelong, curiosity a lifelong.
Desire2learn into any read books, this entire life, he's just reading all sorts of different books and learning through his entire life because it allowed him to challenge a lot of his ideas about things about the world. And those tend to be the things that can undermine our happiness or undermine our success, bad thoughts, bad beliefs about how the world Works, how relationships work, how people work, how life works and challenging yourself on those sorts of things and constantly being curious and open-minded.
Ended and constantly growing is one of the best ways to prevent those kinds of things that from happening. And to allow you to get closer and closer to what might be called the truth or or many truths about life and allow you to thrive the best way. So I think the genius life early consists of lifelong learning and curiosity. So love
it.
Beautiful. I agree. Beautifully put thanks again for your time and to all you guys out there and podcast land thanks for listening. Share this episode of the show with friends and loved ones, leave a rating and review for the show on your podcast app of choice. I know on Spotify you can now leave a rating. So if you're listening on Spotify please leave a rating or listening on the Apple podcast. App rating, review helps the show grow. Thank you guys and I will catch you on the next episode. Peace.
