Layne Norton and Dom D'Agostino—biochemist and ketosis researcher—debate ketogenic diets, revealing how 80-90% fat intake enabled Norton to deadlift 675 lbs while D'Agostino’s military-funded studies show ketones prevent seizures and improve cognitive resilience. They dismiss dietary dogma, citing 95% weight regain rates and fructose’s role in fatty liver disease, but agree strict adherence via ketone elevation or fasting enhances metabolic efficiency. Norton warns against processed carnivore diets, while D'Agostino critiques industry-funded research, stressing individual variability over rigid rules. The episode ends with their skepticism of absolute dietary claims and promotion of the 2019 Metabolic Health Summit, where transparency and nuance in science will be prioritized. [Automatically generated summary]
And then did a BS in biochemistry, PhD in nutritional science.
Kept lifting, did powerlifting, won two national championships, got silver medal at worlds, set a then world squat record, and did also bodybuilding and won a natural pro card.
They actually have natural bodybuilding, believe it or not.
And throughout that time, just, you know, when I first got into it, one magazine said one thing, and even in the same magazine, they'd have an article one month, next month it would contradict it.
So I was like, I'm just going to try and figure this shit out for myself.
I, well, getting back, I majored in nutrition actually as an undergrad, but didn't actually see a career in it that much.
So I went into neuroscience.
The 90s was a decade of the brain.
And my formal training is in neuroscience, and it got steered towards basically changing the neuropharmacology of the brain with nutrition.
And that's what the ketogenic diet does.
And it has tremendous benefits, I think, for military personnel, which is funded by the Office of Navy Research and the Department of Defense to develop ketogenic strategies to enhance readiness, resilience, and performance and safety in military personnel.
And actually, I met a natural drug-free bodybuilder.
His name was Mike Dancer, and he had severe terminal epilepsy.
Google Mike Dancer ketogenic diet and you'll find an amazing story about a guy who used nutrition to manage his epilepsy when drugs failed and he used it to prep and win bodybuilding shows and compete in bodybuilding.
So for example, just 50 feet of seawater using a closed circuit rebreather, like a Drager rebreather, at 50 feet of seawater, your potential for getting oxygen toxicity seizure can occur in just 10 minutes.
So that's a little bit of time and that's not very deep.
So there's no way to predict that and there's no way as of now to prevent that.
So we study physiological biomarkers that could warn people of an impending seizure and we also develop countermeasures to mitigate oxygen toxicity seizures.
I focus mostly on drugs.
I'm in a pharmacology and physiology department.
I realized that people with epilepsy, the ketogenic diet was more effective than drugs.
So I got steered into nutrition, which was my undergrad.
And then that kicked off about 10 years ago.
And I've just been deep into probably a dozen or more different applications of nutritional ketosis.
And Lane, I've been paying attention to you online for a long time.
One of the things you do a great job with is just calling bullshit.
I mean, you love to call bullshit, clearly.
But whenever people are overstating claims or people get ridiculous, and I think this is one of the things that is a problem with any diet where people get really enthusiastic about it, that becomes an ideology, whether it's the ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or the, you know, fill in the blanks, vegan diet.
People decide this is the end-all, be-all.
It's going to cure cancer, make you smarter, the dick's going to grow a foot.
All these things are going to happen.
And you do a great job of calling bullshit on that kind of stuff.
And one of the problems we have is nutrition is replacing religion for a lot of people.
So you find something that you identify with.
And then people start to try to say, because they identify with that movement or like, for example, vegans, they identify with many of them, protection of animals.
Not my job to judge their ethics on that sort of thing.
But then they kind of try to backtrack to find the science to support them as well.
And they pick and choose.
And this is guilty of all groups, not just vegans.
This is also a lot of ketogenic diet cells, carnivore diet, whatever have you.
If it has the word diet, there's zealots out there who are going after it.
And I will stick up for, I've stuck up at a scientific conference for the ketogenic diet.
We were having a roundtable about something different.
And somebody said, well, we know that the ketogenic diet impairs exercise, performance, and endurance athletes.
And I said, I don't think that's necessarily true.
You know, it's pretty ambivalent or ambiguous as to whether or not it does.
It seems to be kind of individual.
But on the whole, on the average, it doesn't seem to impair exercise performance.
So it's kind of what you like.
But when you have people who, you know, like a Gary Taubes, who says, well, calories don't matter.
It's all carbohydrates.
That sort of thing, or the carbohydrate, insulin, model of obesity.
I mean, the research is you're able to do a lot of hand-waving about insulin and, you know, well, you burn so much fat when you're on a high-fat diet, which is true, by the way.
You burn a lot of fat.
But what they don't talk about is that it's overall fat balance, how much fat you store versus how much fat you burn.
And when you're on a high-fat diet, you store a lot of fat.
You also burn a lot of fat.
The overall caloric balance is what determines whether or not you will have net storage or net deposition.
It's the same thing for a high-carb diet as well.
You know, this idea that with high insulin, it just completely shuts down all fat burning everywhere.
That's just not true.
Now, if you have high carbohydrate, you will burn less fat, but you're also storing less fat as well.
And again, the net caloric balance is going to be what determines how much you store because you don't really store carbohydrate as fat for most people.
They did a study overfeeding women where they overfed them 50% above their caloric maintenance.
And they found that of 282 grams of fat that they stored during a day in adipose, only four grams came from carbohydrate.
So fructose does seem to have a little bit of different hepatic metabolism.
But I was actually across the hall from a professor who was doing a lot of the research on fructose and obesity and fatty liver disease.
And even he came to the conclusion that if you overfeed fructose and it creates a caloric surplus and you're overfeeding fructose, then you can have some wonky stuff start to go on.
So if you're doing that, if you're creating that caloric surplus, what you find is when you're in net storage, when you're driving more nutrients into adipose and sometimes liver, depending on metabolism.
But it takes a lot of fructose to do that and a caloric surplus.
You start to create a lot of wonky stuff going on.
The mitochondria starts to become dysfunctional.
And people make a big deal about, oh, well, you have, we have claimed now that everything causes obesity and type 2 diabetes.
For first it was fats, then carbohydrates, and there's actually professors out there who actually will claim that protein gives you diabetes.
Okay, so I'm going to state for everybody that I'm going out in a limb.
This is my opinion.
If you look at the research on obesity and diabetes, what happens is you have everything start to elevate in the bloodstream.
So if you measure, like there was a professor who thought that branched chain amino acids were causing obesity because they were elevated in the bloodstream during, or sorry, during type 2 diabetes.
Well, yeah, branch-chain amino acids are elevated.
So is fatty acids, so are triacylglycerides, so is glucose.
So is it really those things causing it, or is it possible that when you are overfeeding relative to what you burn, relative to that turnover, that mitochondria start to become dysfunctional, probably a lot due to inactivity.
And the mitochondria is, as we call it, the powerhouse of the cell, as you probably learned in high school biology or whatever they taught it to you as.
That is where everything fluxes through.
So that is where you're creating ATP.
That's where you're burning through lipids, carbohydrates, that sort of thing.
If that becomes dysfunctional and you're not getting enough flux, enough pull through that mitochondria, what happens is you start to back up every part of metabolism.
So all the metabolic byproducts, almost all of them, inhibit everything within the cell.
So these things start, these byproducts, these metabolic byproducts, because you're not fluxing enough through the cell, they start accumulating within the cell and start to inhibit the Krebs cycle glycolysis.
And so everything starts backing up to the point where you also start inhibiting the insulin receptor.
And now you have glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids also backing up to the point where they start to overspill into the bloodstream.
And you see this accumulation of all of them in the bloodstream in type 2 diabetes.
And I actually think that, again, me going out in a limb, that obesity doesn't cause type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes doesn't cause obesity, that they develop in concert from the same problem, which is overfeeding underactivity.
So a lot of it is about how much nutrients you're fluxing into cells versus how much energy you're creating, fluxing them through the cell and out.
So when you're overfeeding, whether it be carbohydrate, fat, you're fluxing more energy in than you can dispose of, and now you have to do something with it.
Well, when you run out of, when you do that much to it and mitochondria start to become dysfunctional, you start to not have enough places to put it away and it starts spilling into the bloodstream and now you cause all kinds of problems.
So one of the things that we really wanted to talk about here is high carb versus low carb because this is just a giant point of contention today in nutrition, especially in terms of athletes with performance in mind.
It's a big factor, whether or not high carb or low carb is the way to go.
And there's a lot of zealots on both sides and there's a lot of bullshit and there's a lot of online experts.
And one of the great things about bringing you two guys in here is because you could really actually explain the science behind it.
Now, you've been great, Lane, at pointing out that there's, it's not a magic bullet.
And, you know, and so many people like to sort of stress it that way, that they like to portray ketogenic diet as, this is it, this is the end-all be-all.
I don't think so because if you look at the weight loss problem in our society, and I'm writing a book called Fat Loss Forever, where I talk about this in detail, we don't have a weight loss problem.
Six out of every seven people are able to lose a significant amount of body weight in their life who are obese or overweight.
The problem is the weight regain statistics are absolutely like terrifying.
Within one year, 70% will put it all back on.
Within two years, it's 85%.
Within three years, it's 95%.
So that means diets have a 95% failure rate.
And of those people, one-third to two-thirds will add more than they originally lost.
And this gets kind of into yo-yo dieting, and I talk about that as well.
But the real problem is that people don't stick to pick something that's sustainable for them.
All the research, if there's one bit of research out there that we have that shows how to create lasting weight loss, and you look at the people who are the 5% who actually keep it off, It's that they pick something that's sustainable, whether it be ketogenic, whether it be low carb, high or low fat, whatever it is, vegan, something that they can sustain and make a lifestyle.
Because if you look at meta-analyses, for our listeners, meta-analyses are kind of a study of studies.
So they take researchers take studies that have similar parameters and they kind of lump them together.
And they look at, okay, what's the consensus amongst these studies?
And they have advanced statistics they use to run this.
If you look at low carb versus low fat, there's no difference in adherence overall on the whole.
There's no difference.
And there's no difference in weight loss.
There's no difference in blood lipids, even glycemic control.
So there was a study where they, a meta-analysis of, I think it was 23 studies, over 3,000 people, where they looked at, okay, if you control calories, so calories are equated, does low carb versus low fat make a difference on weight loss, glycemic control, those aren't necessarily the ketogenic diet.
Before we get into the woods here, I want to clarify one thing.
The difference between someone being on a diet and being able to sustain it and not being able to sustain and gain all that weight back, isn't that a discipline issue?
Well, partly, but we kind of had to start looking at, okay, if we go and let me recircle.
We have to find what requires the least amount of discipline for somebody to stick to because discipline is, while some people have more, some people have less, it is a finite resource.
So when do we normally find that people like kind of drop off whatever they're doing?
It's when they're stressed out, work's stressing them out, they're going through a divorce, those kinds of things, right?
That's where our discipline kind of wanes because we're trying to be so disciplined for this other thing and it's draining us.
So what happens with diet is people who are busy, people who have a lot of stress in their life, that's where they really start overeating.
So we have to find something that requires, I look at it as let's find something that requires the minimal amount of discipline for a person so that when your life goes to absolute shit, you can still stick to it.
And so for some people, that is a very, very individual thing.
And they see this in the dietary studies, that what works for one person to create a deficit and sustainable isn't the same way for another person.
And Dom even commented on this about his wife, Chilla.
She does much better on a higher ratio of carbohydrates to fat.
Yeah, I mean, early on, it was obvious that she wasn't going to change her diet.
The time that we met, like 10 years ago almost, I was really getting into this and I really felt that for me at least, but she would stop at checkers and get a burger and sugary drink.
So, and the diet, low carb, I feel, and maybe in ketogenic, putting it under that umbrella works, I think, for up to 25 to 30% of people, especially if they're carbohydrate intolerant.
And I believe that it does that by virtue of elevating ketones, shifting the neuropharmacology of the brain.
For example, it works through ghrelin.
It works through there's new science emerging right now showing that appetite regulation is influenced positively by nutritional ketosis in ways that we're just starting to learn now.
I mean, when I was eating massive plates of pasta 25 years ago and I went to this, this long without food, I would start getting shaky.
I would have a hypoglycemic response.
And I'm completely resilient to that.
And that has major implications for military personnel being keto adapted, not just for performance, preventing seizures, and I think for cognitive function too.
But it's very liberating.
So meal frequency is not an issue.
So if you're in austere environments where you have limited food availability, that becomes a major issue.
If you're working as a scientist and you can't, you know, you're working with animals, you're doing experiments, you don't have time to eat.
I need to maintain that cognitive function.
I need to be sharp, you know, with limited food of it.
So it worked very good for me throughout my professorship, you know, getting tenure and things like that, where I could just put more time and energy into my work without having to stop, prepare a meal, eat a meal, clean up.
Like, I think I wasted a lot of time doing that when I was eating five to six meals a day.
So with carb intolerance, if you look at the benefits of like on blood glucose, blood lipids, it is almost 90 to 95% explained by weight loss.
So you can take people, put them on a high carb, very low fat diet, their blood glucose and their blood lipids will drop, even with like higher insulin levels than people who are on a low carb diet.
If somebody says, hey, I like a ketogenic diet because for me, it helps me to create a calorie deficit.
I can stick to it.
Hey, knock yourself out.
That is no problem.
But that is not always going to work.
Some people don't feel that satiated on a ketogenic diet.
There are people who do feel hungrier on that.
So that is a very individual response.
And again, when we look at studies, we're looking at means, right?
So we're talking about averages.
And there are outliers.
Like if you look at any Gaussian distribution chart, which is kind of how populations distribute based on a certain treatment, you have about 60 to 70% that fall into the average.
Then you have another, you know, 10, 20% that are kind of do a little bit better one way versus the other.
And then you have 5% on either end that are, or sorry, 2.5% on either end that are outliers, right?
So just to frame this again, let's take weightlifting.
We know weightlifting makes you bigger and stronger, right?
Like that is not up for debate.
We agree on that.
There are studies that have shown that some people who are beginners where you should be gaining a lot of muscle very quickly, some people will go from the first time they walk in the gym, squat 185, 12 weeks later, they're squatting 400 pounds.
Some people don't get stronger.
There have actually been studies where over 12 weeks there was a few individuals who did not get stronger.
So those are your outliers right there.
So if we circle this back to ketogenic diet, I'm not sitting here and saying that somebody may actually physiologically do better on a ketogenic diet versus a lower fat diet.
That's a very individual response.
But when we start making recommendations for people, what we should start with is: okay, create a calorie deficit that allows you to lose some weight.
Because if we look at the studies and we look at if we equate for protein, because that's a big thing.
So if you look at some of the studies where Volik did, where he compared like your kind of food guide pyramid type diet to a ketogenic diet, the ketogenic diets were a little bit higher protein.
That protein has a thermogenic effect and also an appetite suppression effect.
When you equate for those, and there's been 32 studies, there was a recent meta-analysis done of 32 studies that equated for calories and protein.
Absolutely no difference in fat loss when you equate for those two, calories and protein, because protein's a big one, because protein has a big benefit on thermogenesis and weight loss.
Also, lean body mass retention, which is huge, because one of the reasons people regain weight is because when they lose weight, they tend to lose fat and muscle.
And when they regain it, it's almost all fat in the initial phase.
So I think that what I'm going to say is that if we're going to talk about people getting healthier, the first thing we need to start with is let's not lose 50 percent, argue about 5 percent, right?
So if I tell somebody, hey, find a diet you can stick to that's sustainable, and if you can lose 10%, you can lose 10% of your body weight, even for obese people, they get almost all the health benefits in the first 10%.
Now, maybe some people, like you, or people who respond really well to a ketogenic diet, I'm not, again, there's outliers or people on the other sides of the Gaussian curve.
If you do a little bit better on there, then great.
But if you find a ketogenic diet is completely unsustainable for you and you're not able to stick to it, but you're trying to do it because you're trying to get a little bit better blood glucose regulation, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot because if you could stick to, like, let's say for the individual, a higher carb diet was easier for them to stick to.
They could lose weight on that.
Then that's the bulk of their health benefits they're going to get from it.
It comes from food preference, but I believe that by when you follow low carb, not even ketogenic diet, the variability of the fluctuations in your insulin and blood glucose, the post-prandial dip in blood glucose that you get after you eat, that's virtually abolished or significantly attenuated.
And then you have, you know, ketones and are working through ghrelin, for example.
You could just, you could eat a normal diet and drink ketones, and it's actually suppressing your appetite through ghrelin.
So these changes sort of are happening, but they're, my sister, for example, you know, followed the ketogenic diet and found it easy to follow, but she gained weight because she was eating all these fat bombs that she was making.
So she went too far.
And a lot of people don't necessarily need a nutritionist to tell them what to do, but they need like a nutritional psychotherapist or something.
You know, their relationship with food is really, and I think that's what Lane has a firm grasp on.
There's no substitute for experience.
And Lane has worked with so many different clients and knows that you could probably follow the ketogenic diet.
Your listeners are probably fans of the ketogenic diet.
I can do it.
I love fatty food, you know, high-fat food, low-carb food.
But generally speaking, it's, you know, you have to approach it from the perspective of sort of eating behavior.
And I think that's really, people want to go off the diet.
Go to ketonutrition.org, and there's some things there that are, I would say about 10 or 20% pass the test, meaning that they taste okay and they actually do what they say.
They actually elevate ketones or don't cause a glycemic response.
Interesting, though, if you look at people that think they're addicted to sugar or that sugar is a lot.
If you look at things like cookies and cakes, it's actually, they have more calories from fats than they do sugars.
It's sugar and fat together is hyper-palatable, right?
So we, one of the things I was going to bring up is, you know, this idea that sugar is so inherently bad.
And you said the cookie, you know, we view that as an inherently bad thing.
But what if I told you that there were certain people, not everybody, everybody's different, but there were certain people who, if you tell them, hey, you can have that cookie every once in a while, if you track it, work it into your macronutrient intake, that that's fine, that that actually improved their adherence to diet.
Because increased flexibility actually usually improves adherence.
So we see this actually with training too.
Athletes, when you do a flexible training model where they have to get in a certain amount of training, but they kind of can pick and choose their self which days are hard and which days are a little bit, they actually do better.
Diet is very similar to that.
So now you always have to sacrifice something in order to, if you want to lose weight, right?
So if you're doing a ketogenic diet, what you're sacrificing is saying, well, I like the spontaneous reductions in appetite, so I don't mind eating not these foods so I can get that.
If you're doing like kind of what I don't want to say I popularized it, but myself and some other people on the message boards popularized something called flexible dieting, where you can eat essentially whatever you want as long as you hit your protein, carbohydrate, and fat targets.
Now what you're sacrificing is, okay, you're tracking every day.
My girlfriend Holly, she has an app on her phone, and she has me like, if she's driving, she's like, oh, you put in what I just ate?
I'm like, babe, I don't even, no, I have no idea how to work this thing, you know?
So, because when I went to do my graduate studies, I mean, I wanted to find magic foods.
I wanted to find something that would, because how else can you make a living?
You have to set yourself apart.
I mean, if I'm over here saying, it's hard for me to sell what I do, because I'm saying, well, everything in moderation and you got to be diligent and you got to have these behaviors.
And that doesn't sound sexy when there's another guy over here saying, nah, bro, it's just carbs.
I know metabolism is complicated and everything, but it's just carbs.
You know, when I started working with people, and I've worked with over 1,500 people coaching in nutrition online over the past 13 years, which actually probably taught me more than my PhD did.
What I found was is that people were so different individually in terms of what made them tick.
You know?
Now I feel like I should probably go back and get some kind of...
I mean, we all have different SNPs, you know, that some people have suppressed fatty acid oxidation pathways, others are like screaming fat metabolizers, you know, or fat or sugar metabolizers.
So if you look at sugar intake, so this kind of gets back to the carbohydrate insulin obesity model.
If you look at sugar intake over the last 50 years or last hundred years, it went up very steadily with obesity until around the mid-90s, and then it took a sharp dip while obesity continued to climb.
Now, again, that's just correlation data.
But if you do look at the overall calorie intake versus obesity rates, it's like an R squared of like 0.94, which is really sugar include high fructose corn syrup?
So if you're used to eating a certain amount of calories and you may, and we, back when we were actually maintaining our weight back before the 60s, we were eating about 2,200 calories a day.
That was the average.
And now it's like 2,800 is the average consumption in the United States amongst adults.
But you train, but you train and you have a higher lean body mass.
So that's fine.
Now, some people, yeah, that's a whole other rabbit hole.
If you start adding sodas in, which aren't satiating at all, they don't positively affect your hunger hormones, but you continue your same normal food intake, boom.
I mean, you can start to store, right?
So, but I can't tell somebody, hey, there's no way you can lose weight and drink a soda, because that's not true.
There was a study done by Surwitt, and they looked at high glycemic diet versus low glycemic, and I mean extreme.
They did, one group had over 100 grams of sugar a day, another group had 10 grams or less per day.
Or sorry, it was 11 grams or less per day.
And they looked at the differences in weight loss, blood lipids, all that kind of stuff.
But what they did find that they had higher insulin responses to the meal, the high sugar group did.
But no differences in weight loss.
So both groups lost weight.
The only real difference was the lower glycemic group had a little bit better, both groups improved cholesterol.
The lower glycemic group had just a little bit better improvement, probably because they were eating higher fiber, which can bind cholesterol and you excrete it.
I would like to see what happened if they equated.
So again, it's creating that calorie deficit.
Both groups lost weight.
Now, is it more difficult to create a calorie deficit if you're eating a lot of sugar?
Yes.
Okay.
So I always tell people your diet is like a budget if you're practicing something like flexible dieting, right?
So if I've got somebody like myself who has above average muscle mass, hopefully I can say that and people on the internet are probably going to know.
So if you have above average muscle mass, you train hard.
You have a faster metabolism naturally.
I mean, I've seen people who could maintain their body weight on six, 7,000 calories a day.
You have a higher metabolic rate.
You have a really big budget.
So if you make $100 million a year, is it a big deal for you to go out and buy a $500,000 sports car if you can still pay your mortgage and pay all the other requirements that you have?
No, it's fine.
But if you make $80,000 a year, should you go out and buy a $500,000 sports car?
So it's more about people saying, hey, I can still eat these foods I enjoy and I'm still losing weight because I'm in a calorie deficit and I'm hitting my protein, carb, and fat targets.
But if you're somebody with a slow metabolism and you're not exercising very much and maybe all you're eating is 100 grams of carbs a day, should you spend 75 grams of those carbs on two Pop-Tarts?
Hell no.
That's a terrible idea because you're not going to be able to hit your other micronutrients and those sorts of things.
But if you're eating 4,000 calories, like an Alberto Nunez friend of ours, if you're eating 4,000 calories a day and losing weight, is it a big deal if he has two Pop-Tarts?
Not really, because I actually had one competitor, again, a competitor, who had such a fast metabolism that he was actually having a lot of GI dysfunction because he was eating like 700 grams of carbs and 200 grams of fat per day just to maintain his weight.
And he said, I feel bloated all the time.
And I said, well, what are you eating?
Like, what are your foods?
There's chicken, rice, and broccoli.
And I said, and some peanut butter for fats.
And I'm like, well, no wonder, dude, you're having 150 grams of fiber a day.
You're literally full of shit.
Like, your shit is like literally backed up to your esophagus.
Okay.
So I said, do me a favor, eat some pizza, eat some Pop-Tarts, eat some more calorically dense foods and see how you feel after three days.
I think the accumulation of the post-prandial spikes in glucose and insulin over time, especially in the context of a calorie surplus, could be a bad thing.
If you are doing a calorie surplus to gain weight and mass over time, which bodybuilders do, you know, following contests in the offseason, I think it's even more important almost to actually stick with foods, carbohydrate sources that are lower glycemic.
You know, you can only tolerate so much fiber.
But I think if you are running a calorie, if you are doing a ketogenic diet and you have a calorie surplus, that could be a bad thing.
Your triglycerides will go up.
So you're putting too much fat in the system in that.
So, I mean, I kind of would stay along the lines of maybe proteins, but you just, you know, you titrate it in in a reasonable amount.
But I just think that the negative, you know, that could come out of that is that you're, you, you know, I'm following a blood glucose curve, right?
And an insulin curve.
And I see this very dramatically, for example, in my student, who's a type 1 diabetic, Andrew Kootenick, who's in, and he wears a Dexcom, a continuous blood glucose monitoring system.
And his insulin requirements dramatically dropped with low carb and his glucose fluctuations dramatically improved.
And that's going to pay big dividends probably if you have type 1 diabetes, the 10 top things on how humans die, you have a greater risk for every one of those.
Dramatic, cuts 10 years off of your life.
The tighter you can keep your glucose levels, your blood glucose and your insulin levels, that in the long run, I feel it's going to pay.
Science still has to show that, I think.
It's not totally clear.
But I think we can, for type 1 diabetics, which I think we can apply that data to the population, if they control their glucose levels, that pays big dividends in the long run.
Some insurances will do like a waist chest measurement, which helps.
But anyway, so postprandial insulin, they've looked at the relationship between people who have their BMIs and postprandial insulin.
They find that people with higher BMI have higher postprandial insulin.
But the opposite relationship does not hold true.
People who have higher insulin do not necessarily have higher BMI.
And they've done this in meta-analysis.
So what that says is, again, that if you are obese, type 2 diabetic metabolic syndrome profile, that you will have elevated levels of insulin because your body is becoming insensitive to it because of all the dysfunction that we talked about.
But just because you secrete higher insulin doesn't mean that you're going to have more body fat.
And there was a study done actually by one of the proponents of the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis that looked at what's called Mendelian randomization, which – where basically the idea is you have different gene variants like we were talking about.
And if, for example, like they've done this with LDL cholesterol, or sorry, yes, LDL cholesterol.
We believe, most people believe that LDL cholesterol has some contribution towards heart disease.
It's a pretty, I would say it's a pretty strong, now people can over context dependent and individual.
When they look at these gene variants, people who have gene variants where they run lower LDL have lower rates of heart disease.
People who are higher, higher rates of heart disease.
If you look at that with insulin, at best, insulin explains 10% of obesity at absolute best.
And that study actually showed a high level of bias.
It was between 1 to 10%.
So I'm not putting out the idea that maybe insulin has some effects.
So there was another meta-analysis where they looked at higher carb versus lower carb diets, equating calories, looking at HbA1C, and saw that, so the differences in weight loss were no different, like we've discussed when calories were equated.
But also the differences in HbA1C reduction weren't different.
They were the same.
Now, you asked about health and consuming some of these quote-unquote bad foods if you do it in the, but you said in the context of a caloric surplus, right?
Which is the important thing because they help to create a surplus.
But in a deficit, what's the downside?
Because kind of when you talk to people who are not ketogenic necessarily, but proponents of quote-unquote clean eating, which again has no real objective definition, when you say, okay, well, a POP-tart, maybe you can lose weight on it, but it can't be good for you.
Okay, well, then we have to have some objective measurement to show this by, right?
Because otherwise it's, do you believe in magic?
Okay.
So if you look at processed foods, what they have found with processed foods is that you have a lower energy expenditure from them.
Okay, so you have a certain amount of what we call TEF, thermic effect of food.
Higher protein has a higher TEF than carbohydrate and fat.
Okay, so we know that higher protein diets actually cause more weight loss and better lean body mass retention.
Part of that is through the increased thermogenesis of the TEF, thermic effect of food.
Well, with processed foods, you have a lower TEF.
But that doesn't mean you can't eat any processed foods and lose weight.
You can.
It just means you might have to eat a little bit lower calories overall.
If there was a ketogenic Pop-Tart and it was made with shit.
We know that if we eat almonds, we're probably, you know, or other nuts or things.
just giving an example you know we don't uh fully digest assimilate and utilize those calories they pass through us so with a pop tart uh i think it's pretty high with like raw like like a salad and with nuts and things like that like it becomes significant over time uh with a pop tart like you can basically 100 of that is going into your system and it's causing a hormonal response so the food that we eat creates uh is not only calories but
creates a hormonal response and also from the brain perspective can change the neuropharmacology of your brain i mean that's how i got into the ketogenic diet because it fundamentally changes neurotransmitter systems and reward systems and things like that right but hormones people get so hung up on hormones and and if you look at the research data it just doesn't support it like with insulin whatnot now in terms of like losing weight and you're you're what happens with leptin and ghrelin and all those kinds of things that is a huge one of the one of
the things we talked about before the podcast started we had about a 30 minute podcast yeah we did we actually you know people say things like one of the reasons people are really mistrustful of kind of the calories in calories out model is because it is viewed as a two isolated variables calories in and calories out are separate that's not true calories in effects calories out okay they're a moving target so people say well i ate the calorie deficit i didn't lose
weight no you ate in what you thought was a calorie deficit and you didn't lose weight but if you didn't lose weight it was not a calorie deficit by definition okay so you're retaining water or something yeah when we look at um dieting like just dieting in general over time lowers your metabolic rate right so if you take somebody they actually did a rat study again rats but rats tend to respond pretty similar to humans in terms would you agree with that in terms of blood glue i mean you do a lot of rats i do a lot of rats and
mouse studies uh yeah i i think there's a lot of overlap there yeah they're good so again but we have to put that out there because we want to we don't want to oversell it they did a um depends on the context of what you're studying of course yeah like you don't answer some questions you don't want to do like animal studies can be helpful but you don't want to do like a an insulin study in cows because cows are ruminants and they're they don't care about insulin anyway they took rats they took them through two diet cycles okay so this is kind of back to the yo-yo
dieting thing um and they looked at okay when they took obese rats dieted them down to a kind of normal level then they let then they basically gave them as much food as they wanted let them eat back to the original obese level dieted them down again to the previous level and then let them re-eat back up what they found was absolutely astonishing their food efficiency went so far up because their metabolic rate became suppressed every time they dieted down your body has this self-defense system that you activate every time you diet i talk about this in my
shameless plug book um so the first time they dieted if that's the kind of one times rate that they lost uh fat at when they let them regain it they regained it twice as fast as they lost it then the second time they tried to lose it they lost it at half the original rate then when they regained it the second time they regained it three times as fast their food efficiency went way up yeah ability to lose it have you noticed fast as well what's that yeah ability to lose it get
exponentially faster as well no no they're it took them twice as long to lose the same amount of weight sorry i probably didn't explain it very well yeah it took them twice as long to lose the same amount of weight and they regained it in a third the time of the original so your body's getting accustomed to famine exactly because every time you diet and we see this with yo-yo dieters who spend how many people do you know that seem to be perpetually on a diet yeah but they just have that short overfeeding period in between diets and then they it really does because
every time you diet you're activating your body's self-defense system How many fighters do you know that every time they diet, it gets harder and harder for them to make weight?
Now, I think it's safe to assume, just to interject, that if you diet for 16 weeks for a show, for example, or a contest, or what you actually educated me in like 10 years ago, and I thought there was this like post-contest rebound, and in two weeks there'd be this anabolic window or whatever.
It actually, if you diet hard for 16 weeks to make weight, it takes an equal amount of time to get your metabolism back to that level again.
Or maybe, so Lane coined the term, right, reverse dieting.
I don't know if I call, I coined it, study this with metabolic chambers and rats and use a variety of different approaches to determine how fast it actually takes to bring your metabolism back up and if different strategies can be used to ramp up your metabolism again.
What's the so you have, so we can calculate all this stuff.
So your overall total daily energy expenditure, your TDEE, is made up of your basal metabolic rate, which is what you burn, like what we're doing right now, just sitting around doing nothing.
So when you think about, so there's meat, that's that.
Then your exercise activity, which is intuitive, that's how many calories you burn exercising.
And then there's what's called the thermic effect of food, which we already discussed, how much energy required to get energy out of food, okay?
And all those add up to your total daily energy expenditure.
And we can predict based on equations what your metabolic rate should be.
So these people, their metabolic rate was 500 calories a day lower than it should have been just based off the weight they lost.
Because if you lose muscle and you lose fat, you have less weight to carry around, right?
So your metabolic rate goes down just from that.
But it goes down way more than it should.
That is the first prong of your body's self-defense system to stop you from starving yourself is to become more efficient.
We hear the word efficiency and we think, wow, that's a good thing.
Think about if your body fat levels were a gas tank and you had a car, okay?
You would not want to be efficient, right?
You wouldn't have one of the old suburbans that was like half a mile per gallon, right?
You don't want the Prius because you can go way longer.
So going back to that study on rats, they became so much more efficient with their food.
And this is the second prong of your body's self-defense system is to not only slow down your metabolic rate while you're dieting, but to start activating systems that deal with restorage once you actually start overeating again.
Have you ever done a long diet or known somebody who did it and then they start eating again?
It's like everything sticks to you.
It's like you just, it's like you're like, how did I gain five pounds from one day?
And people are like, oh, it's water.
Well, water doesn't stay around for six months, so it's not water.
That is your body preparing all these systems.
So even like enzymes that deal with fat storage while you're dieting actually go up because it's preparing your body for restorage.
And then even probably the most interesting thing is – So this all falls back on the importance of tracking macros, which is completely ignored with guys coming off of a fight or fitness competitors.
But the point I'm trying to make is that the way most people diet, which is this kind of, I mean, you know, you've probably been around people who do this yo-yo stuff.
It's a lot of people.
They pick the next fad diet, whatever's popular.
They do it.
They lose some weight and then they regain it.
My dad lost 30 pounds on the ketogenic diet, regained 50, right?
Now, the real problem is in the- Now he does.
But the real problem, and he's down 30 pounds again.
But the real problem is we used to think adipose tissue was like a sponge, right?
So if you ate too much, you just threw more in there, right?
Soaked up extra nutrients.
And then if you started, if you're in a caloric deficit, you were losing weight, it just gave up some of its nutrients, you know, like the guy who fasted for 365 days and didn't die because he had so much fat.
We now know that body fat fits every definition of the endocrine system.
It's a tissue.
It is an actual organ because it sends out hormonal signals, it integrates hormonal signals, it talks to the brain, the hindbrain, the archivate nucleus.
It is integrated in all of metabolism in a big way.
And typically, you have, the way we gain fat or lose fat is based on the fat cell size.
So you have a set number of fat cells, and they either expand or they shrink.
Pretty intuitive.
Unless now you can create more fat cells if you become so obese that you literally can't stuff any more fat in there, right?
So obese people have fat cell hyperplasia a lot of times.
What's really interesting is people at the end of a diet, when your thyroid hormone is lower, your sympathetic nervous system tone is lower, this unique hormonal melie, if you overfeed too rapidly, there's a researcher named McLean out of Colorado that showed that you can actually increase your fat cell number if you overfeed too rapidly right after a diet.
Now this was in rats, full disclosure.
But it was fascinating stuff.
Now you're increasing your body's, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
Your body's like, shit, we had this famine.
We don't want to deal with this shit again.
We want to make sure that we can store as much stuff as possible.
So we're going to create some new, this dude is rapidly overfeeding.
We're going to create some new fat cells to make sure we're not going to miss any of this energy.
I like what you're saying, and it makes a lot of sense.
You're talking about weight loss and weight gain, but you were specifically discussing hormonal changes in the body due to the ketogenic diet that are beneficial.
And that these hormonal changes and the changes to the way the brain functions would be a benefit of following that diet versus just working on calories.
I remember presenting this at Lane's camp a while back.
And when I read this study, I had to call him on the phone.
He passed away in 2012, but we had a number of conversations before he passed away.
And I was amazed that he got ethics approval to do that because it's basically like killing someone, injecting 20 IUs of insulin.
But what was fascinating that they were asymptomatic for hypoglycemia at a level of hypoglycemia that's typically universally fatal.
And they were also very cognitively lucid.
And that was a dramatic demonstration.
At the time, it was thought that the brain could only use glucose.
So this is a paradigm shift in the way we understand sort of fuel utilization, particularly in the brain.
So that has major, and I can go kind of on and talking about the different applications of the ketogenic diet, which I did on the first podcast.
But from a perspective of someone dieting to lose weight, dieting as a lifestyle, doing intermittent fasting, the ketogenic diet makes intermittent fasting much easier because your brain's adapted to it.
That for me had tremendous practical applications that allowed me, I feel, to excel through academia.
I was able to do a lot more work, not get hungry.
And, you know, we haven't trained in a while, but when we trained, I remember last night we did deadlifts.
I mean, we were both deadlifting 675 for reps.
And I was on, actually, I was on the classical ketogenic diet then.
That's when I was just doing it.
And I would have like 80 to 90% fat.
And I was doing that for about a year.
And, you know, deadlifting like three times my body weight for reps, you know, and it didn't hurt me.
I can't say that would be the case for everyone, but I also titrated the calories in that I wasn't really at a calorie deficit.
I lost a little bit of weight.
So I guess by definition I was at a calorie deficit.
Now, for people that are thinking about gains when you're trying to gain weight, they would think that the ketogenic diet, that 80 to 90% fat would not be enough protein.
I believe that the ketogenic diet shines when you are in a calorie deficit.
My mentor for the cancer work, Tom Seyford, had published a study showing an unrestricted ketogenic diet can actually promote cancer growth in a brain tumor model.
Like, in the super heavyweights, yes, because, like, for example, the IPF, which is kind of the IOC-recognized powerlifting federation that I compete in, their cutoff for super heavyweights, 265.
So, if you're going to be a super heavyweight, you might as well just be 350.
So people, not to make too much of a side tangent, but people look at DEXA, dual X-ray absorption technology, and they say, oh, that's the gold standard.
DEXA is actually really finicky.
Like I remember DEXing rats in studies.
We do it in duplicate.
So we do it twice.
And sometimes you'd have like differences just DEXing the same rat twice.
It depends on the machine, your hydration status, because water, if you want to gain, you know what the best way to gain eight pounds of lean body mass within five minutes?
Go do a DEXA, then drink a gallon of water, go back to another DEXA.
But the change, like if I'm dexing, if I'm calipering consistently at 10% and then it drops to 8% and then 7, I can be relatively confident that I'm losing body fat.
Same thing for DEXA.
But you have to do it at the same time of day, same hydration status, all that kind of stuff.
And I don't really use DEXA because people, in order to get it accurate, you'd have to use it like every day for it to be actual relative.
There's some good ones out there, but some of the stuff I've seen, I'm like, God, I wish I could talk to somebody in that realm because it's so much pro science.
I actually have a pretty naturally high testosterone level.
Every time, ever since I'm 16 years old when I've got tested, I've been like over 800 if I'm eating enough.
When I was at contest, I was under 300.
This is part of how your body fights you.
Your body does not want you to be that lean.
But if you're kind of reining this back into the discussion, this is why I talk about why it's so important to pick something that's sustainable for you as an individual.
Because if you do this shit where you yo-yo diet or you don't come out of it appropriately, it will fuck you up.
I mean we've all – I think females especially have a lot of track records.
I've worked with a lot of females now because especially in physique sports, there's a lot of really bad coaching.
Oh, the kind of the evolutionary validation and the fact that we didn't drink milk and we didn't eat beans and this kind of thing.
Didn't drink coffee.
But the question shouldn't be what we were doing.
The question should be what makes sense and what is healthy now.
Like if you look at studies on dairy, almost all studies show people who take in dairy are healthier, better bone density, more lean body mass, lower body fat.
or and and i think it's a spectrum right so it's not like you have it or you don't i think you know there's this spectrum and bovine protein is kind of Viewed foreign to the body.
That can allow certain nutrients through the wall.
And that will initiate a body's immune response.
Holly is celiac.
And she, so if she has gluten, you will know it because she will have a huge inflammatory response.
But in people who have normal digestion, that just doesn't happen.
Going back to the paleo thing, what I was going to say is, even though I disagree with their relevance, if you told me, okay, you take their general recommendations, limit sugar, eat more whole foods, eat higher protein, I think in general, that's pretty good recommendations for most people.
I just, as you said, I'm anti-bullshit, so I'm not going to let you make claims about why something works when that's not why it works, right?
So when we look at like the differences in diets, like I think what I would say generally to people is here's the great news.
As far as fat loss goes and health markers, if you want to lose weight, if you eat, if you control your calories, so eating a calorie deficit, you eat enough protein because protein helps spare lean body mass and is thermogenic, so it increases your energy output, then you can kind of do whatever you want with carbs and fats and whatever you prefer, and you'll still lose the same amount of weight and get about all the health benefits.
But it has to be something that you can sustain because if you can't sustain it, you're going to put all that weight back on.
So Dom loves sustaining it, meaning that it's a balanced diet that you could stick with versus some sort of calorie deficit that's really only a temporary thing to lose weight.
So now, obviously, you can't eat in a deficit forever, right?
Because then you would starve yourself to death.
But the body corrects that.
As you drop body weight, your metabolic rate slows down.
You're not in a calorie deficit forever.
When we talk about losing weight and then maintaining it, right?
So eating in a maintenance.
So eating, basically the behavior you use and the style of dieting you use, you have to continue that if you want to maintain it.
So if you like ketogenic, like you like ketogenic, you like ketogenic, and I think you're a big fan of meat.
If you can sustain that, you know, like people out there say, oh my God, people probably tell you, you're going to get cancer and you're going to do this and you're going to do that.
Most of those health benefits are just from not having excess body fat.
Excess body fat and the metabolic dysregulations of a metabolic type syndrome.
When your body gets to a fat-burning stage and then on top of that, you pile on carbohydrates, then your body wants to store those carbohydrates as well.
So carbohydrate, if you say, well, why does, if you don't store carbohydrates, I talk about this in my book because people will go too far to each direction to say, well, you said you hardly store any carbohydrate as actual fat.
Why don't we eat zero fat and mostly carbohydrate?
Well, then your body, you know, your body's not dumb.
Your body, you didn't get here today and get through evolution and tens of thousand years of hard, you know, living by your body being stupid.
So your body can ramp up de novo lipogenesis so that you can create fat from carbohydrate if fat gets low and carbohydrate intake gets high enough.
There was a research study or a meta-analysis done by Kevin Hall, who's an NIH researcher, and they showed that if you equate calories, you get a small extra benefit from fat restriction versus carb restriction on fat loss.
So you get about 26 grams extra fat loss per day, calories equated, protein equated, if you restrict fat versus carb.
Now, before everybody goes crazy, that's probably due to a little bit of inefficiencies in ramping up de novolpogenesis because it takes energy to move that system.
But 26 grams of fat loss per day to me is not a physiological, like I don't care about that.
That's nothing compared to, okay, if you like low carb better, don't worry about losing an extra 26 grams of fat.
If you like low carb better and you can sustain that, then do low carb.
One of the things that we seem to be getting into here is the difference between losing weight and optimal performance and then optimal performance mentally and hormonally versus optimal performance physically in terms of like athletic pursuits.
Well, maybe if they were overweight, that could be beneficial.
But I think it would decrease his performance unless he goes through the keto adaptation phase.
But there's a lot of, when you're a teenager, I would say your carbohydrate tolerance is very high.
I want to address this after you look at it.
Mine was very high.
I could eat huge plates of pasta that I could not eat now.
You know, I just simply couldn't.
So I think as we age, I would say our carbohydrate tolerance decreases with age because our metabolic machinery is not as hungry for glucose.
I mean, we're set up and hormonally, our insulin sensitivity is not as high, glycolytic pathways are reduced, things like that.
That happens as a consequence of age.
So it makes sense that as we transition into age for longevity and for health span, maybe not lifespan, but health span, carbohydrate restriction makes sense.
And even in some cases, the ketogenic diet makes sense.
I'm describing it as also a means of, because people put on weight as they age with a low carb and with a ketogenic diet, that becomes a practical strategy to create a sustainable calorie deficit for losing weights, sustaining that, and also if you elevate ketones over time, a lot of the new research that's coming out, you know, over the last five years, ketones is not just a superior source of energy metabolically, but it also has epigenetic effects on the body.
It activates gene pathways that can confer resistance against oxidative stress, the longevity pathways, anti-inflammatory pathways.
You could feed ketones, take a ketone supplement, and it activates just simply elevating beta-hydroxybutyrate functions as a histone deacetylase inhibitor and can activate, if you will, gene programs that can confer resistance against many different things, oxidative stress pathways, and also activate or suppress an inflammatory pathway that's linked with many age-related chronic diseases and autoimmune pathways.
It decreases the activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome.
When you're talking about people living longer, you're talking about that epidemiology study that was like a questionnaire of people, what they ate over a long period of time.
So one thing I want to bring up that I think is really important is we have, I think we're all getting to this point and people out there think that there's like this perfect diet that's going to cure everything and all of our ails.
The fact, the uncomfortable truth and the fact of the matter is that if one diet is, and I don't know this specifically, but my guess is if one diet is better for cancer, it might be worse for heart disease.
Or if one diet is better for insulin resistance, maybe it's worse for cancer.
When people like Gary Taubs say things like carbs are causing obesity, just carbs, you create this problem where if people don't like eating a high-fat diet or a low-carb diet and they can't sustain it, they just feel like they're a big failure and they just quit.
Because what's the point?
If carbs are causing fat and I can't stop eating carbs, what am I going to do?
Well, I think a diet strategy that controls your appetite and does not have your appetite controlling you, which I think is accomplished with a ketogenic diet.
That's also one that's a well-formulated one that controls, you know, that has fiber and adequate protein, is a strategy that allows you to be far less fixated on food because you're not as hungry and you could decrease your meal frequency.
So if there's, I know there's people out there that are probably busy people, CEOs of companies, students or whatever, that simply do not have time to prepare and eat meals when they get hungry.
So by reducing meal frequency, you can increase your productivity.
And I think you're kind of coaching your body to be a better fat-burning.
I think there's definitely benefits.
So when you are on a ketogenic diet, you are storing more fat, but you are burning more fat.
So think about your adipose tissue as little bags which have fat coming into them and fat leaving them.
And the fat oxidation pathways are elevated.
And when I eat a ton of fat at night before I go to bed, I am like some people carb load.
I'm like fat loading at night.
And I'm pulling off those fat stores during the day through my adipose.
I think about it like that.
So instead of just, you know, carbing up at nighttime, I tend to, I would wake up hungry.
I would probably dump insulin and then wake up with a hypoglycemic cravings in the middle of the night if I did that.
I will start, I'll do a small meal like at work, and then I'll eat my big meal at about 7 o'clock, maybe 7 o'clock, and then snack throughout the night and maybe eat within, you know, I start eating at 4 p.m. and I finish eating at about 10 p.m.
I didn't know it was possible to have that amount of control over my appetite and actually feel as lucid and as energetic and be able to, you know, get with Lane and do deadlifts with him and actually maintain my performance and my strength in the gym.
I go, some nights I'll sleep and I'll wake up and I'll go 12, 13 hours.
Like I'll go in sometimes and I don't usually get hungry.
Now, but again, that's what you think that is.
Just, well, if you look at, so some of the things that I'll disagree with are the idea that insulin has these big fluctuations and you become hypoglycemic and that causes overfeeding.
And some people, that's the case, but most people, if they're eating a, especially with a higher protein diet, that doesn't usually happen.
I want to add that the population, most people are not bodybuilders.
And the population of people that Lane mostly communicates with are on the border of being metabolically elite and also have a very high carb tolerance.
If you're a bodybuilder with a large amount of lean body mass, you are pretty much metabolically set up to be a very, have a high carb tolerance.
So I actually, the first experimental biology we ever went to, this is why, you know, even scientists get this shit so wrong sometimes because they get so in their echo chamber, they don't bother to look outside of it.
I mean, it's just a fundamental physiological concept that you are diverting blood flow to the job of a scientist is to question even those theories we hold most to be true.
But this is the hard thing with anecdote because we can't tease out whether or not that is an actual physiological thing or whether you just feel better and you think you'll do better so you do better.
Because the brain is unbelievably powerful.
There was a study, and I may butcher it because I can't remember it exactly, but they took people who had legit allergy problems and they gave them a sugar pill.
And they said, this will improve your allergies.
It should not have done anything.
Over half the people reported that their symptoms got better and 30% actually physiologically got better because their brain was telling them, get better.
Like, it's pretty crazy.
So that's part of probably the best diet for you might be the diet you can stick to and just feel real positive about, right?
Because you feel like this might be some of what's going on with a lot of this low carb stuff that people say they feel so fantastic because there's some sort of a placebo effect.
I think part of it is, too, is that a lot of these studies give me more confidence.
When I can look at rats or mice on a ketogenic diet and see an objectable, you know, objective increase or decrease in a parameter, then I gain confidence.
I believe that, you know, well, I'm a person of faith, but I also believe that if you have faith in the methodology too, the patients that have communicated with me that actually believe that this approach is going to work and then they reach that actual therapeutic state of ketogenic diet have results that kind of defy what you would expect scientifically.
So I believe it's working physiologically and also psychologically.
There's immunopsychotherapy, right?
Or immunology.
So our brain can actually control many different physiological processes, including our immune system.
And that is something that's underappreciated and understudied.
Holly tries to stop me because then I usually end up going to the bathroom for like five times.
But I'll eat a little bit less in the morning if I'm going to go straight in and train.
But one of the things that going back that so many scientists miss is that context.
Like most people miss context, but scientists even miss context.
So the first experimental biology study or first experimental biology symposium we ever went to, there was a poster where they fed people a ketogenic diet or they fed them a high carb diet.
And then at the end of six weeks, they challenged them with 100 grams of glucose and looked how long it took for them to clear that glucose.
The ketogenic diet people would have been worse than like type 2 diabetics at clearing glucose.
Okay.
Whereas people eating a high carb diet cleared it just fine, right?
Now, if you just looked at these numbers as a doctor, you'd be like, oh my God, you're diabetic.
No, that's what they were adapted to.
And I challenged the person with the poster.
I said, and for all you ketogenic diet people who hate me on Twitter, I defend the ketogenic diet when it is time to be defended.
I said to the girl, if you had fed a high-fat meal to these people, you would have seen the same thing in reverse.
If you would have fed a high-fat meal to people who are out of the ketogenic diet and then a high-carb diet, you would have seen really elevated triacylglycerides, LDL cholesterol, VLDL cholesterol, colomicrons, and people who were carbon acted because it wasn't being cleared because that's not what you're adapted to.
Lane has a good analogy in his book, that book, where if you have a factory, a military factory that's making planes and then it has to switch over to making ships, right?
So it takes a lot of time to change sort of all the processes that take place.
And the same thing is sort of happening.
I mean, you're giving your body a different fuel source.
So it has to ramp up the enzymatic machinery, the pathways, the regulatory pathways, and the transporters, even to basically use those fuels.
Yeah, and a misunderstanding of that, or at least an ignorance, is one of the more frustrating things online when I hear like nonsense people, these internet air quote experts talking about the negative aspects of the ketogenic diet that they tried it and they felt weak.
Like when you review a study, and I think you have a study in your book, actually, that shows in the gym, you basically say the ketogenic diet can hurt your performance in the gym.
So, and you reference a race walking study where I think they did the ketogenic diet for like three weeks or something like that.
So if you do a ketogenic diet and you want to stay in a state of ketosis, the days that I do intermittent fasting now, which I didn't do like five years ago, I don't necessarily do the ketogenic.
I do a higher protein, low carb, but my macros are not ketogenic.
Typically, not all the time.
Sometimes they are.
But there are different, like you could do intermittent fasting with a carb-based diet and still get ketones, you know, by the end of your fast.
You could do low carb.
You could do ketogenic.
I actually think it's a little bit better to be metabolically flexible.
So I'll throw in, I tend to eat a lot of vegetables and then throw in some fruits too a few days a week, where it may kick me out of ketosis, but during the middle of the day when I need to be at my best, I pretty much always, I'm running low to moderate ketones during the day.
And I can do that with different strategies now, you know, with my body.
Half of dark chocolate, one or two things of dark chocolate, which is maybe 15, 20 grams of carbs and maybe a half cup of blueberries and then a big salad and some vegetables, typically green vegetables.
Yeah, because in the beginning, you spill out a lot of ketones in your urine, but as you increase ketone transport and utilization over time, less of them end up in your urine.
How much time is that?
Depends on the person, but after about two or three weeks, you may see less of a color change on the urine strips, even if you didn't change your diet.
Yeah, well, I think the blood, you know, Abbott Labs makes the precision extra.
There's the Keto Mojo, which I also use, we use in the lab.
What's that?
Keto Mojo is a blood measurement and glucose measurement device that's essentially because Abbott cornered the market, they basically allow you to check your ketones for a dollar a strip instead of $3 or $4 or $5.
I don't use the, I actually use a syringe and just take a running start and jab my finger now because it doesn't, I got calluses like you do on your fingers.
Yeah, I'm kind of used to it, but the urine strip is actually pretty good relative marker.
And the Siemens multi-stick SG will measure ketones and then nine other things like that measure kidney function and your blood glucose and things like that.
So I recommend that's 25 cents a strip.
And then there's the breath ketonics meter.
You blow into it and it measures breath acetone.
And the level is also another breath acetone measurement system.
I'm going to ask about that.
So yeah, and breath acetone highly correlates to fat oxidation.
So if your breath acetone is high, you are burning a lot of fat.
And if you I know that if you drink alcohol and do a breath ketone meter, you can kind of pin it, depending on what meter you're using.
If you're using a breath, that's a for a breath ketone meter.
If you have a breath alcohol measurement and you're in a state of ketosis, I have not seen that, depending on the device, that you'll have a false positive, if that's your question.
So one thing I'll bring up, because you said, well, you work with these kind of metabolically elite people.
So one of the problems, I say what you're doing, where you kind of take yourself up to the point where you're sort of getting out of ketosis and then going back in, that's probably fine.
But most people aren't going to do it that way.
They're going to be like, oh, I had a cheesecake or, oh, I couldn't take any more and I had some pizza or whatever.
Actually, I wanted to bring up intermittent fasting too, because I think, again, like if you so the studies on intermittent fasting show that you lose the same amount, if calories are the same, you lose the same amount of weight, same amount of fat, maybe might be at risk for a little bit more lean body mass loss just because you're triggering protein synthesis less often.
But you do have a little bit lower insulin levels, it seems like.
Now, whether or not that's, again, beneficial based on the research that we talked about.
So the point being over 24 hours, you don't see differences in fat loss or fat gain, intermittent fasting versus non.
I would be interested in the inflammation stuff and the autophagy stuff because again, caloric restriction in and of itself decreases inflammation, increases autophagy.
Interestingly enough, one of the sugar studies they did with higher sugar with still calorically restricted, they showed decreases in inflammation.
Like look at, if I give you a plate of french fries, like 200 grams of french fries, you can get a lot of calories from that.
If I give you 200 grams of meat, even a real fatty meat, it's not nearly the same.
Like you're going to be much more satiated from the protein.
Like you can only eat so much meat, you know?
And again, like if you, I don't want to go too far down the carnivore diet hole, but the stuff I see with people, yeah, do I think you can eat meat and improve your blood markers?
So full disclosure, I mean, I was, because I get accused on Twitter of being a carb guy, and I'm not.
My research was funded by the egg board, the beef, or beef, national beef something or another.
Sorry, guys.
And then the National Dairy Council.
So, you know, full disclosure.
By the way, all you guys out there who, again, you're just taking my word for it, but who think that like industry is this evil thing that comes in and controls everything, I met one person in my entire PhD from the funding sources, and I met them for literally 30 seconds.
They were at a, it was at experiment biology, and they said, hi, thanks for, thank you for the grant.
Oh, great, great, great job.
Thank you.
That was it.
Now, I'm not saying that there isn't nefarious things that can happen, but like when I heard when I, like the show with Nina, everything was about who funded it and this and that.
But that's why they have to disclose those things on papers.
And also, this is why science is self-regulating because somebody is going to repeat your study.
And if they don't find the same thing you found, you're going to be in trouble.
So I should probably say I am not a medical doctor or even a registered dietitian.
I'm a PhD scientist.
So don't take my word as medical or nutrition advice.
We do, our research is funded not only by the Department of Defense and Office of Navy Research, but also by companies that actually develop ketone food products and also exogenous ketone supplements.
And our university owns the rights to those patents.
I don't have any products myself.
We have a company, Ketone Technologies, and Ketonutrition is the information website.
But at this time, we have no products, but the university licenses our intellectual property and products are made out of that.
And I get patent royalties.
And I put the patent royalties back into our research.
So buying various exogenous ketones, products that are on the market can come back and help support the science and the application of this.
We all have things that we think work better than other.
But I think the fundamental, if you meet a scientist, and hopefully I equip myself well in this, and I think Dom does as well, is that, one, you have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
And two, you care more about getting the right answer than being right.
When I went to do my PhD, I was eating eight meals a day.
I was eating 300 grams of protein a day.
I was looking for more reasons to eat more protein and eat it more frequently.
When I left my PhD, I ate four meals a day, and I ate a little bit less protein and less frequently.
I would say, I mean, we study, you could look at PubMed, everything from polycystic ovary syndrome to acne, you know, type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes now.
That's a little bit controversial.
Genetic migraines, you know, a whole host of neurological disorders simply because beta-hydroxybutyrate is, I believe, sort of from there's an objective truth that it's a superior metabolic fuel.
And if you have millimolar levels in your blood, that's a significant amount of energy in your blood that your tissues can use.
Yeah, so you are more metabolically efficient potentially, but I don't think in the context of fat loss, but it's also enhancing insulin sensitivity and simply feeding ketones independent of carbohydrate restriction increases fat oxidation in the muscles.
I actually, when I used to give talks, I would say for these things, but if you're type 1 diabetic, you want to avoid the ketogenic diet as much as possible because there's diabetic, something called diabetic ketoacidosis.
Yeah, so if you're type 1 diabetic, you make little or no insulin at all, right?
And I guess maybe just going back to a normal person, when they fast or they do the ketogenic diet, it increases fat oxidation in the liver, and that fat oxidation actually accumulates acetyl-CoA, and that creates ketones, acetylacetate, and beta-hydroxybutyrate.
And it occurs in the context of insulin suppression.
But you still have normal insulin, but it's very low, right?
And then when your ketones get elevated, you spill some out in the urine, and that's how you eliminate them.
Your muscles, your brain burns them.
And if they get really high, you have an increase in a small increase in insulin release when your ketones get real high.
And that insulin ramps down fat oxidation in the liver and decreases ketone production.
So, and there's other things too, but I don't want to get too much into the weeds.
But you're a very, a normal person is finely tuned to create, to maintain physiological ketones within a certain range with nutritional ketosis.
With diabetic type 1 diabetes, that's completely thrown out the window.
So, without insulin being there, the absence of insulin essentially creates runaway ketogenesis.
And your ketones become very, very high in the context of very high glucose.
Well, there's a Harvard study that basically looked at a group called Type 1 Grit on Facebook.
There's a group called Type 1 Grit, and it's got thousands of people who use a low carbohydrate approach, not necessarily a ketogenic diet approach, some are, but it's very carbohydrate-restricted in terms of what a doctor, an endocrinologist, would prescribe for a type 1 diabetic.
It would almost maybe look like suicide to some people.
And low carbohydrate dramatically decreases your insulin requirements.
And if you look at your continuous blood glucose recordings over the course of a week, those numbers are much, much tighter.
And that's going to pay huge dividends in the long run when it comes to longevity and health span and the potential for going blind or decreasing your kidney function by these huge post-paraneal spikes.
Essentially, if you're type 1 diet, you're always chasing your glucose with insulin injections or an insulin pump.
If you're carbohydrate restricted, you're basically not, it's very liberating because your dependence on insulin is far, far less.
Controversially, some people have gotten completely off of insulin.
would not recommend that but some people are actually doing that so the the i think highly not I hear this from critics of the ketogenic diet, and this is a BS criticism.
Again, here's me defending the ketogenic diet.
Well, you'll become people who are healthy.
You have ketoacidosis.
That is not going to happen because by definition, if your ketones are high and you're relatively healthy, not type 1 diabetic, your blood glucose is low.
It's when both are elevated that it's dangerous.
And if you're a type 1 diabetic like Andrew, who are just using a little bit of insulin to get that baseline, to get your glucose levels down to a baseline level, and then you're using a carb-restricted diet that creates ketones while your blood glucose is at a normal basal level, that, again, not a doctor, not medical advice, that should not be dangerous, right?
Now, over the years, because he's a powerlifter and he's a super big dude, he's like 250 pounds, like when he goes to the gym, he has learned that he can pulse a little bit of insulin and maybe ramp up his protein or maybe even take a little bit of carbohydrates.
But the next day, he's still doing low carb throughout the day.
But he's learned to leverage, as a type 1 diabetic, you have that advantage, right?
Because you can manipulate insulin for body composition alterations and things like that.
So he has learned to adjust his protein to maximize his sort of gains and performance in the gym.
But nonetheless, he went from a strategy, he transitioned to a strategy that would be would look to be almost suicidal from the perspective of an endocrinologist doctor managing type 1 to do that level of carbohydrate restriction.
And now we actually have hard science to show that that not only can be done, that dramatically decreases the variability of your blood glucose fluctuation throughout the day from a weekly perspective and your requirements for insulin.
Whenever you could use less insulin to manage your blood glucose, that's a good thing.
It's very hard for a doctor to argue against using less insulin and keeping tighter numbers.
There's no way to argue against that.
If you can follow the diet, so that this gets back to adherence again, right?
I have a chapter in his book that's coming out that we worked, you know, together and just took some of the concepts that I've don't you find your preferences change as well, like in terms of your hunger pangs?
You're not, you don't crave sugary foods, carbohydrates, yeah, but you do.
And it got to a point where for some people, their calories get so low if they have slow metabolic rates that the level of fat restriction it would take them to is probably not great for hormone levels.
So I tended to pull a little bit more carb relative to fat.
And so we didn't start out targeting them as ketogenic, but by the end they were.
My theory is that when you do that and you carb restrict and you well you calorie restrict rather and get down once that shit's over, you just want to reward yourself as often as possible.
So when someone comes along with something like a ketogenic diet and go, no bread?
For some people, for some people, this works better because they feel better.
They have better adherence.
For other people, if you say, now you've got some people, if you say, hey, you can have a cookie, it would screw them because they would just go crazy.
But for other people, if you allow them more flexibility, their adherence improves.
What I'm saying is, we need to give people all the options on the table, not demonize any one diet and say, hey, maybe you try to figure out what work, for lack of sounding bro, what works for you and what you can sustain, go from there.
Like, it's in the 30, 40% people just quit, give up, don't do what they're supposed to do, don't do as many reps as they're supposed to do, don't work out, take days off just because they're lazy.
So I think various foods that are emerging on the market right now, at-based systems, Verta Health actually has a great app-based system that actually coaches you through that.
And I think that's very helpful.
So I think new technologies, foods, will make it, will increase adherence.
Also, when you have a person who knows and understands all the health benefits associated with nutritional ketosis or just low carb, I think that can be a motivating factor to make them stick to the diet.
Yeah, but for a guy like you who's rational and disciplined, but people that are self-destructive and weak, they're going to, oh, I can't do this anymore.
I think you need to sympathize with them a little bit because I think the market, and I think this is a fruitful area for entrepreneurs to create technology and foods that can actually enhance adherence to stop eating.
I feel like so much of it is what you're willing to accept from yourself.
If you are willing to accept this seesaw obesity thing that so many people get on, on and off, this yo-yo effect, if you're willing to accept that, that's fine.
But I just feel like it's a mental state.
I really do.
I see, once you achieve a certain amount of success, people start sabotaging themselves.
They start dwelling on the fact that they're doing well, but how long can they sustain this?
It starts being a big fat mind fuck.
And that's when you say, like, what's sustainable?
What's sustainable?
A lot more than you're willing to do.
What's sustainable is stop being a bitch.
Not you.
The person out there that's listening.
But you know what I mean?
It's like there's a thing, like we're giving people these fucking escape clauses.
We're giving them these parachutes that they can pull.
That's why we talk a lot in the book about behaviors.
Because if If you change your behavior, that's what we, I think there's not enough research focused on is let's look at the people who actually achieve weight loss.
And if you look at people who achieve it and keep it off, they do it through many different methods, whether it's low carb, low fat, whatever it is.
But let's look at the behaviors that they make.
And those behaviors can tell us a lot about people.
One thing we know is they practice forms, they weigh themselves very often.
So they're accountable.
They practice some form of cognitive restraint, whether it's weighing food, recording macros, ketogenic, fat restriction, whatever it is.
And also they exercise regularly.
And one, there's physiological benefits to that.
Exercise lowers the body fat set point that your body will defend.
So it actually has a physiological benefit.
But also just mentally, like you said, I mean, I never, if you took me back 30 years ago and you told me, hey, or when I was 10 years old and you said, hey, when I was like bullied and picked on, had no self-esteem, you're going to fucking squat 668 pounds one day on your back at 201 pounds and set a, it's been broken since then, but a world record.
I would have been like, there's no fucking way.
There's no way.
But when you have discipline, like you said, and you, that doesn't just, people say, you should have more confidence.
That's a, that's fucking horseshit advice.
Confidence is built through, you set a goal and you achieve it.
Now we're on to something because I think that the mental state in which you approach anything, a workout routine, a lifestyle, the way you decide to live your life, that is critical.
And here's one of the things that people are cynical about that's probably one of the best sources of fuel is inspiration from other motivated people.
Well, I think when I say sustainability, I mean if it's if it's because everybody has stuff that they find, again, you find a carb-restricted diet to be easier to stick to for you.
Well, and part of that is like, you know, it's hard to get, that's a lot of money that's going to be spent to get that data for an individual.
So part of it is going to have to be, what do you feel good on?
And what do you feel like is, again, most sustainable for you.
Because no matter what, people want a diet.
What people really want is they want, I don't want to have to track and I don't want to have to sacrifice anything and I want to get to my goal.
Well, tough shit, that's not going to happen.
You have to pick what you're going to sacrifice, right?
So if you say, I hate tracking calories, so I'm just not going to eat carbs because I can regulate my body weight that way.
Fuck yeah, do that.
I had a post on Twitter that was like one of my most popular Twitter posts.
I said, you know, health improvements are largely driven by caloric restriction and weight loss.
But if you like vegan, if you like keto, if you like carnivore, if you, and I just listed a bunch of different diets, and they help you create a restriction and it keeps you at a healthy weight, then fuck yeah.
Hell yeah.
Like if somebody says, I like eating a vegan diet.
Like losing it more quickly – There's debate about this, but I would say that you have to create a more extreme deficit to do that.
And so you are activating your body's self-defense system more intensely, if I had to say it that way.
So the rebound is usually bigger as well.
So it's trying to find a way, okay, can we get this weight off?
And then let's really emphasize to people that the diet after the diet.
Nobody talks about this, except for us in the book.
Nobody talks about this.
My co-writer for the book, Peter Baker, and I, we spent chapters talking about when you go and transition into, okay, we've lost the weight we want to lose, we're healthier, you have to have the same amount of discipline and intensity to then maintain that loss.
Because if you let up, if you let your foot off the gas, now you don't necessarily have to be at the same caloric restriction level.
But if you just let yourself come, well, I'm going to vacation, I'm going to eat, I'm going to eat what I want, boom, gain 10 pounds.
And everybody knows people like this, who they go, and they do this.
And you've just, you've literally just undid months of hard work in one week.
If you stay at a, there is evidence that if you stay at a reduced body weight for one or two years, that that can become your new set point that your body defends.
I think what can happen is even if your leptin doesn't go up.
Now, I want to talk about performance because this is a big thing with athletes and particularly in my field with fighters.
Many of them are reluctant to try a ketogenic diet initially because of the first few weeks are pretty rough and it really inhibits training and you get that keto flu feeling and I've experienced that too.
But overall, is the ketogenic diet a good strategy for someone that's involved in some sort of a brutal athletic pursuit like football or wrestling?
And it will be dependent upon being keto adapted over time and actually training in a state of ketosis so you force those adaptations over time.
We know the ketogenic diet is glycogen sparing over time.
Glycolytic pathways will be decreased over time.
So that may impair anaerobic power output initially, but I think that most people, I think a good amount of people could adapt back to, especially if they're taking things like creatin monohydrate and taking various supplements that can kind of fill that gap to meet the glycolytic anaerobic energy demands.
Probably relatively sparingly compared to a person that's already very carb adapted.
So, right?
So you just want to, especially a 100-mile race, you titrate in small, instead of drinking 50 or 100 grams of carbs, 20 grams of carbs every hour or two may be more than enough.
And actually, there's research out of Lehman's lab years ago that showed that actually sucrose replenishes glycogen in muscle faster than pure glucose, which is interesting.
Probably because the fructose gets taken up by the liver, so the glucose you do eat, the liver doesn't steal any of it, and it goes, your glucose go into muscle.
Ketone esters, most of the science behind ketone esters, but there are valid applications for the ketone salts that are emerging on the market too, like ketenics.
I think that the science just over the last couple years has been incredible emerging on that.
And I think it's something to watch over time.
It's a new fuel source.
It's like the fourth macronutrient, right?
We have carbs, proteins, and fats and alcohol.
Yeah, arguably it can be.
So I view ketones as they are a calorie-containing energy source.
If you were doing a nutritional consultant for, say, someone who's a UFC champion and they said, you know, I want to get on the optimal diet for performance, you don't think that a ketogenic diet is the optimal diet for performance.
Is that safe to say?
Or you would have to expand for a long period of time.
But the problem is, is you don't necessarily get an off-season because if they call you with a fight, it's not looked nicely upon if you turn it down.
So I think based on the research I've seen, I think you're hard-pressed to convince me that a ketogenic diet is worse than a non-ketogenic diet on endurance.
I think that's pretty clear.
And there may actually be some benefits, depending on the individual.
As far as repeated sprints or things where you need that anaerobic system, I am not ready to say that a ketogenic diet is going to be as good.
I think that a non-ketogenic diet offers you...
Now, this is where ketone supplements may be actually the best thing possible, because you could be using glucose, so you're getting that fuel source, and taking a ketone supplement where you're getting that fuel as well.
I mean, you know, just basically trying to leverage all the various substrates that your body can use, especially under, if we're talking about anaerobic, people are going to call me a ketogenic supplement.
You want to have a suite of different fuel sources, you know, and not rely, like the term metal bottle flexibility, which is kind of used quite often.
But I think if you train and get your body fat and keto adapted, that provides benefits for recovery.
It provides benefits if you're getting enhanced, you know, lower inflammation, lower chronic inflammation over time.
You know, chronic inflammation can contribute to insulin resistance, poor glycos neuroinflammation if you're getting concussions or even sub-concussive events over time can actually cause a lot of damage.
I mean, just simply lowering insulin spikes and glucose, but the NLRP3 inflammasome is something that we looked at.
There was a study where actually we used the ketone ester, and it was published in a journal Nature Medicine, showing that in response to LPS, which is kind of like a very powerful inflammatory stimulant, that it reduces that and suppresses inflammatory pathways for a particular pathway.
So in the context of being in a state of ketosis, it reduces an inflammatory pathway.
Think of it as a hub.
And when that's activated, you have a host of inflammatory cytokines that flow throughout your body and your brain and cause this persistent, low-grade neuroinflammation, inflammation in the body that can impede recovery processes over time.
And I think that really contributes to brain health too.
So I might be getting a little far ahead of myself because that is, it's animal work, but it's convincing animal work, looking at a particular pathway that's pretty well defined.
Right, but I mean, in terms of is there a benefit to the ketogenic, to being in a state of ketosis with this reduction of inflammation versus low carb?
Like I said, I don't think it's going to be optimal for everybody, but I know there's going to be benefits to maintaining low to moderate levels of ketones for neurological health and also for recovery and maybe performance.
And so the part of growing muscle and recovery is actually inflammation.
Macrophages and all these sorts of things are involved in that process.
Now, if it gets run away, if it's too much, it's not a good thing.
But if it's too little, it's also not a good thing.
Andy Galpin did a great job on your show of talking about recovery versus adaptation, right?
So one of the things he said, if you do ice baths, you do these sorts of things, you're in the short term allowing yourself to recover faster, but you're also limiting how much adaptation you're going to incur.
And I love that because people miss this.
They say, you know, if you're somebody in the offseason, if you're trying to grow, get more lean body mass or trying to get better at something, it's probably good to let your body, like, for lack of a better term, have some inflammation and not in the long term, but in response to that training session.
But then if you're in a camp, again, this is where it's context dependent, or like I'm a powerlifter getting ready for a meet and I'm supposed to be squatting four times a week.
I've done that before.
And I'm so sore that I can't squat my fourth session, then an ice bath or something, I'm not worried about growing muscle in that time.
I'm worried about getting recovered enough that I can go do my next training session because that is a lot more important for my competition coming up than having that little bit of extra muscle.
Grants where this is being studied at a very fundamental, very controlled level from cells to animal models to human clinical trials going on and where the data is being collected now.
And some of it is taken empirically and anecdotally from the field or just from various exclusive channels, I guess I would say.
So that I am coming at it as a bias and I'm kind of speaking ahead of the science.
But I do think that science already exists showing that you have a greater adaptive effect just by virtue of lowering inflammation over time in athletes, especially this probably pertains more to endurance athletes.
So it really needs to be studied in resistance and MMA fighters and things like that.
So there was a recent study, and I can't remember the researcher's name.
I'll send it to you.
I had a lot of criticisms of it, but they did show that ketogenic versus non-ketogenic diet and people who were lifting weights trying to get bigger, that there was actually slightly less muscle mass using the ketogenic diet.
And so I'll go back and look, and I'll send it to you if you want it.
But it is possible, like, again, for every give me, there's a gotcha in certain things, right?
So like these things that activate different pathways.
Well, part of what ketones may signal is a deficit because usually you don't have them in a surplus, right?
So, you know, we don't know if you can, like, for example, like autophagy, right?
Like, if we're talking about performance and muscle, everybody here is autophagy, and that's a very, by the way, that's such a weird way to pronounce that because it's auto and phagocytosis, so it shouldn't be autophagy.
But even like you brought up Floyd Mayweather earlier, which I thought was great because you said he drinks a Coke after training.
Well, it's hard to argue with his results, but then again, sometimes elite athletes can get away with a lot of really dumb shit because they're so genetically superior that they were going to do well no matter what.
So it's, did he become this great because he ate this way?
Or can he eat this way because he's this great athlete?
It's probably the latter, right?
So we wouldn't recommend like somebody, like if somebody's sitting at home and they want to become the greatest boxer ever, don't go, you know, probably drinking Coke isn't the first step, right?
But this is what we do with nutrition because we pick out people that we follow and we go, oh, I'm just going to do that.
But again, at the end of the day, if his carbohydrate intake, and I don't know what it is, but if he's eating five, 600 grams of carbohydrate a day, is it really hurting him to have 40 grams of sugar from a Coke if he's maintaining his body weight, performing optimally?
And maybe that's the only way he can, maybe, I don't know.
Again, I am theorizing.
Maybe that's the only way he can get enough food in is to eat really energy-dense sources of food to maintain his body weight.
And if you started saying, well, we need you to eat chicken breast and broccoli and this organic rice and all this kind of, he might start dropping weight like a stone and his performance go in the tank.
So this is why context is so important.
And again, like when we talk about people think, how many times have you seen two guys in the octagon and just looked at their bodies and gone, this one guy is going to smash this other guy, like just in the primal part of your brain because he was built like a tank.
And then the other guy who looks like nothing just goes out and completely obliterates him.
The biggest thing is to make sure that you don't run out of fuel during these things, right?
Or whatever, and whatever your sport is.
I mean, again, I'm known as a carb guy, and I had this powerlifter one time telling me, he's like, don't you think you should carb load the night before powerlifting meat?
And I was like, dude, you're doing nine reps.
Like you're doing, so you get three attempts on each lift, squat, bench, press, and deadlift.
But even then, it's probably not optimal to go and fasted to go do a strength in an athletic event.
But you have to pick the context, the individual.
And honestly, people probably aren't going to want to hear this from a scientist, but we don't know enough about this stuff yet to really say for each individual person what's best for them.
In fact, I won't say anybody by name, but I used to be in business with somebody who I found out that I had no hard evidence, but I had a lot of circumstantial evidence that they were faking data.
And I took this person out to dinner and I told them, I was like, we're done.
Like, this thing we're doing is done.
And thank goodness I did because it came out later.
People started trying to replicate his data and nobody could replicate his data.
And they still had a pretty big following even now.
But, you know, it's one of those things.
It makes me so mad because then people get so frustrated because they feel like if they feel like scientists are just an industry's pocket, why are they going to believe anything any of us say?
If a lab, it's a company's funding you for a particular supplement and you come out with consistently with negative data, what's the incentive for them to keep funding you?
I keep reminding people, like people who say things like, we found the cure for cancer and the government is suppressing it and like and all the scientists are just in the pot.
What you're saying is you're saying that every scientist on the planet who does cancer research is an immoral, unethical piece of shit.
That's what you're saying.
Because you're telling me they don't have friends and family who are dealing with cancer and they're suppressing this research.
Come on now.
And that's the other big thing, I'm a small government guy and I'm like I said, a libertarian.
But one of the things that makes me cringe about libertarians sometimes is these big, elaborate conspiracy theories that come up around science and whatnot.
Like, you realize a senator can't even text a dick pic to his side chick without it winding up all over Twitter.
You think they constructed these big, elaborate theories?
They can't even tie their shoes in the morning without spending $10,000.
So the idea that all this research is being suppressed by the government, I'm not saying it's never happened, but I think it's pretty darn rare.
I'd like to add one thing that the science is rapidly emerging and the Metabolic Health Summit, which is happening in the end of January, beginning of February, next year, 2019, will be bringing in the leading scientists that are talking about all the different topics right now, including weight loss.
And that's going to be in LA.
It's actually, there's a flyer in your book there.
It's going to be a very comprehensive group of basic scientists, clinical scientists, entrepreneurs, and people, everyday people that are just interested in this space.
Well, that's why, like, you'll, I always say people, you know, it's hard because if you're not going to do a degree yourself or do research yourself, it's so hard to know who, like, you kind of have to pick people that you trust.
And it's so hard to know who to trust because there was something that Greg Knuckles, really smart guy, said that I think kind of ties things together nicely.
He said, people are really good at knowing when somebody has more knowledge than them about a subject.
Like you talk to somebody for a little bit and you really can get an impression pretty quickly if they know more or less than you or about the same.
What they're really bad at doing is figuring out amongst two people who know more than them who is the more knowledgeable of the two.
They are very bad at picking that out.
So you kind of got to pick people who you trust.
Now, if you're looking for people to trust, notice the three magic words that me and him both said on here today at one point.
I don't know.
Well, usually, experts, they don't make broad claims.
They don't use superlatives.
They don't say things like best, worst, never, always.
They're usually putting context to everything and they're providing you with information that helps illuminate you that everything is nuanced.
And that's why, like, I'm sure, again, I'll relate it to MMA.
If you talk to anybody who's an expert in any different discipline and you ask them a broad question, you're going to get a really broad answer.
And if you ask them a specific question, give them a lot of context, then they'll give you a specific answer.
I don't have any products per se, at least not yet, but I put products on there that I personally use and kind of edit out that I think could be helpful.