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0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Christopher Gardner. Dr. Christopher Gardner is a professor of medicine and director of nutrition studies at Stanford University. Dr. Gardner has conducted groundbreaking research on dietary interventions for over 25 years, focusing on what dietary interventions reduce weight and inflammation and for generally improving physical health. He is known for doing extremely well-controlled studies of nutrition where calories, macronutrients, so protein, fat, and carbohydrates and food quality are matched between the different groups and not simply
0:46 comparing one intervention to the so-called standard American diet as so many other nutrition studies do. As such, his work has been published in prestigious journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. Today, we discuss several important nutritional controversies, and we examine what the science actually tells us. First, we explore protein requirements, how much protein we actually need, and do those needs change based on activity levels, age, and health status. And I should say that even though we started out with rather discrepant stance on this, we converge on an answer that I think will be satisfying at least to most people. and then you can tailor that answer to your unique needs. We then examine the ongoing debate between vegetarian, vegan, and omnivore diets for optimal health. And we dive into whether plant proteins are truly inferior to animal
1:32 proteins as is often claimed. We also discuss the role of fiber in the diet and the emerging science on fermented foods and their powerful anti-inflammatory effects. Throughout today's conversation, we focus on food quality and not just macronutrient ratios or calories and how those can impact health outcomes. As you'll hear, Dr. Gardner and I don't agree on every nutritional recommendation, particularly how much protein people need and the discrepancy in views about animal-based proteins versus plant-based proteins. But by the end, I do believe that we converge on themes that everyone, regardless of their dietary preference, ought to be able to benefit from. As always, we provide you with science-based, actionable information that you can apply to your daily life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
2:18 It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zerocost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Dr. Christopher Gardner. Professor Christopher Gardner. So nice to meet you and to have you here. Happy to be here off Stanford campus talking to you. That's right. Even though we've both been there a very long time, it is a big place and so we haven't had the chance to interact directly, but of course I know who you are and I'm very familiar with much of your work, but you'll tell us about more of it today. To kick things off, I want to know is it possible that even though all human beings are, I presume, the same species, that some of
3:03 us might thrive perhaps on one form of diet and others might thrive perhaps on a different form of diet. In other words, how do we justify talking about the quote unquote best diet for a given age, demographic, level of activity, etc. If one were to look at social media or even just the history of nutrition in this country, one can almost reflexively lean on the idea that you know maybe we all need something different and some experimentation and discovery is needed. So do we need different diets or is there a best diet? So there isn't one best diet and I don't think we need different diets. We're just incredibly resilient and we can do crazy wild things. So the way I start my human
3:49 nutrition class at Berkeley with students is in the very first class I point out the Taraohara Indians who are like worldclass ultramarathon runners mostly corn and beans like total carb. And then you can look at the Alaskan Inuits who for centuries lived on whale and blubber and polar bear and things like that. So that was like total fat and total carb and they thrived. there's really no diabetes, no heart disease, no cancer, but eating all their local indigenous diets. You know, Michael Pollen has a great quote on this, the author of Omnivore's Dilemma. And he says, you know, if you really look around the world, it is amazing how much variety there is in a diet that people can thrive on, except the one that doesn't work is the American diet, the
4:35 standard American diet, because it's full of processed, packaged food. And the sad thing is that the Tara Indians now eat a lot of crap. and the Alaskan people and the Inuit now have a lot of packaged processed food shipped in and the world's all sort of um centering on an unhealthy diet that is convenient and it's inexpensive and it's available and it's addictively tasty and it's problematic. So, no, there is not one best diet. It's incredible how resilient we are. So, I'd love to get into that. Great. Well, there's so many facets to what we call diet or nutrition. You know, there's the macronutrients, protein, fats, and carbohydrates. The micronutrients, there's how many calories are in there, there's how it was sourced, there's how that sourcing
5:20 impacts the environment. There just so many lenses to look at this issue through. I would like to know because of what you just told us that people prior to food making its way around the world from different cultures to other cultures, food largely centered on what was grown and hunted and harvested locally. Yep. Is it possible that even though people have dispersed across the planet, sort of going back to this first question, that there is a um quote unquote best diet, meaning not that we can adapt to any diet, but that for some of us high meat, high fat, maybe even high, let's say high protein, high fiber, just to make it a little bit um less extreme. High protein, high fiber, low starch is better. And in for people
6:08 that are descendants of people with genes from another another part of the world that um high starch, high fiber, lower protein would be advisable. For me, the best way to answer that is people come up to me quite often and say something like, "Professor Gardner, I know you're all into whole food plant-based diets, and I I was vegan. I was vegetarian. I was trying that, and uh I I had some health issues, and I switched to be more fat and more meat." And I'm I'm almost embarrassed to be asking you this cuz my doctor told me I shouldn't do this either, but all my health issues have cleaned up. I'm looking really good. And I have a whole another cadre of folks who were eating a lot of meat and a lot of fat. And they said, "I went vegan. I went low-fat vegan." And all my health issues cleaned
6:54 up and I'm much better now than I was before. And it's really hard to look someone in the eye who's doing something wildly different and say, "Well, you're wrong. You're lying." I mean clearly these people were really probing for the diet that was best for them and they they were following some advice that they thought was good and they kept following it and it wasn't working. They tried something counter to that and it worked better and they're trying to rationalize that and deal with that. So I am sure that there are different diets for different people. Um but at the end of the day it's just not the packaged processed food that the whole world is leaning towards. I really appreciate that answer because uh as somebody who's tried various diets, I never had any serious health issues, thank goodness. Um but I know
7:40 what I thrive on. I'm an omnivore. Um not that people need to know this, but I like to eat meat, fish, chicken, eggs, lots of fruits and vegetables. I eat very little starch. I wouldn't say I'm low carb because I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables um and some limited amounts of starch. But having tried many many different things including vegetarian diet, lactovo vegetarian many years ago and more extreme keto type diets that uh lean more heavily on meat as opposed to the way perhaps keto should be done which we'll talk about. I've just found this works really well for me. So I fully embrace the idea that different people thrive on different diets. How is it that's true? Meaning do
8:26 you think this is because of genetic uh you know our inheritance of genes from people that you know came from different parts of the world and to what extent can a different diet pass through generations have epigenetic effects? Maybe I thrive on that and somebody else thrives on something different because of where their ancestors are from and what they've been eating for the last maybe even 300 years. That's not long for a an evolutionary event to take place but some things can happen in 300 years. So really the only classic example that's well established is lactose intolerance and lactase and northern Europeans developing the ability to continue making the enzyme lactase to break apart the molecule lactose well into adult life. So the majority of the
9:11 world is lactose intolerant. And if we could just do that for a minute. So when you're a newborn infant and you're having breast milk you are getting lactose in your mom's milk. And then once you are weaned off the breast, most people in the world stop making lactase, that enzyme. And so I'm sure everybody listening to this knows someone who's lactose intolerant and either buys lactose lactase milk or avoids milk and avoids dairy because of the GI disorders. So, it really is fascinating that some northern Europeans at some point had enough cows and dairy and ate it that they developed the ability to keep making this enzyme later in life, whereas the rest of the planet didn't. And it's not really hard cut and dry.
9:58 So, there's actually people who are lactose intolerant who can still tolerate some milk. There's a lot of people who can't digest it. And to be honest, it doesn't really make much sense. If you look at mammals around the planet, all the mammals, right, mamalian breast tissue, bre breast milk. So, they're all drinking the mom's breast milk until they get weaned off for food. No other mammal on the planet drinks the breast milk of another mammal to thrive later in life. So, humans are the only ones who do it. It's really mostly cow milk. And it's kind of faking bizarre, but it works for a lot of people. And so that is the classic example of so sort of overcoming genes over the course of
10:45 evolution. But I don't know many like that. So I don't have a better example of can people who evolved from Africans versus Asians versus Scandinavians do anything different than that? That's the only example I've got, but could be possible. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each and every night. Now, one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop about 1 to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your
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13:50 What do you say to all these people who have uh wheat allergies or gluten gluten reactions? And and I want to be really careful here and distinguish between full-blown um wheat or gluten intolerant versus people that just don't feel good when they do this. I I recently took a blood test that that revealed to me I have a mild wheat um I wouldn't say allergic reaction because they didn't do the allergy test, but I I have antibodies against it. Um and dairy. And it's true. I don't like drinking milk. It makes me feel lousy. to get all, you know, um, mucousy and, uh, and puffy and, um, but I like some sourdough bread. I'm sure there's wheat and a lot of sourdough bread out there. Some, yes, some, no. And I can eat parmesan cheese and feel fine. But I know people that even though they're not clinically diagnosed as gluten intolerant, they
14:36 feel absolutely dreadful when they have any kind of gluten. So, what we're trying to do here, I guess, is um there's the science, uh, which we'll get into, and then there's people's experience. Yeah. And as you pointed out, people can't get around their own experience, and they probably shouldn't, right? I think, um, the whole world is done listening to people tell them that their experience isn't real, right? And that's what a lot of I think that the um, confusion in the world of nutrition is about. Totally respect that. Let me do the weed thing, but let me go back to lactose intolerance for just a minute. So, I had an opportunity to work with a guy who um raises uh raw milk products in California, and he was convinced this raw milk would heal lots of people of lots of things. Define raw milk. No
15:22 pasteurization. Yeah. No pasteurization, which drives might as well just be drinking out of the uh cow. Yeah. Which drives some health professionals crazy because at a large scale, you could get lististeria and other issues from this if if the whole thing wasn't properly hygienic. Okay. So anyway, some of his claims seemed outlandish and quite a few of them would be hard to test, like cancer or some chronic disease. You'd have to wait decades to see that happen. But at one point he said, "And raw milk cures lactose intolerance." And I thought that seems faking wild. So I mean, how would that happen? And for me, so I am a nutrition interventionist. That is like my superpower. I love designing trials to answer questions, but usually in a couple months or a year, not in 40 or 50 years. And I thought of all the claims that you have, lactose intolerance sets on in hours. So
16:09 if you wanted to know if this worked or not, you'd know right away. So I said, I will do this. This is like the most inexpensive study that I have ever run. I'm going to find people who are lactose intolerant and I'm going to give them your raw milk, some commercial milk, and soy milk as sort of an extra control here. And all we're going to test for is symptoms. And we actually had to have some focus groups up front. Uh, most of my studies are done in a way that I think this is going to help you, but I'm not sure. In this particular study, if you're going to do all three harms, I know I'm going to hurt you. You're lactose intolerant. I'm going to ask you to drink cow's milk. I need you to have GI distress so that I can see if on the raw milk you don't, and compared to the soy milk, you won't. So, in our focus groups, we asked I usually don't pay
16:54 people to be in our studies. I usually give them all the results of the studies, and they like that. But I said, "I'm going to hurt you. So, how much would I have to pay you?" And they said, "Yeah." And I said, "How much?" And they said, 'Well, 250 bucks would be okay, depending on how long this thing is. And we sort of talked about the duration. And it had an interesting design. So, there's a standard test for lactose intolerance. It's objective. It's a hydrogen breath test. And so you have to drink 16 ounces of milk in one setting fairly fast. And then you every half hour breathe into a tube, capture the gas, and put it into this breathalyzer. And it'll tell you if there's hydrogen there. And if you have not digested the lactose, it'll go to your colon. The microbes will eat it up. It'll generate
17:40 hydrogen. You'll absorb that and you'll exhale it. So, it's a very objective test of whether you are or aren't digesting your lactose. So, they said, "Yeah, we would do this if the dose after we did the test was 4 ounces of milk one day and then 8, 12, 16, 20, 24." And I said, "It's only going to be a week and you can stop whenever the symptoms are intolerable. I don't want you to be in pain for this. You're not kicked out of the study. I'm really curious what dose it would take for you to react to this." And on the soy milk, you won't react at all. There's no lactose. So it'll just be this question between the cow milk, the commercial one, and the raw milk. So the first part of this study was recruiting. And so we had to say to be
18:25 eligible for this study, you have to fail the hydrogen breath test and you have to complain about symptoms. So you have to be intolerant and objectively, not subjectively, fail this thing. And so we ended up with 16 people in the study. It wasn't a big deal. They did all three arms and 50% of the people who swore they were lactose intolerant failed the breath test. Like their hydrogen didn't go up after they drank 16 ounces of milk. But did any of them feel lousy? Yes. And so I couldn't look at them and say, "Sorry, you're not lactose intolerant. You're lying to me." I had to say, "You have failed our test. Our inclusion exclusion criteria meant that you have to feel these symptoms and you have to have this response.
19:11 Interestingly, so we had Asian, black, Hispanic, white. It was all the Caucasians that failed the test that said they had symptoms and didn't pass the hydrogen breath test and show that their hydrogen went up, which pretty much parallels lactose intolerances usually in non-Caucasians. So, I'm sort of leading up to this point of they had symptoms, they complained, they attributed it to lactose intolerance, but technically they weren't. Something else was bothering them. Maybe it was small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, the SIBO. Now, flip that to wheat. Uh, before before you do, because I just ask, I want to know, did raw milk help? Oh, so I just have to know. That's not fair. No, not at all. So they had the
19:57 same exact symptoms on the raw milk as the conventional milk. Sorry, that was like the punchline of the whole story is it didn't help at all. It was absolutely identical. But it was a really easy test to study definitively. 16 people might not seem like a lot of people, but because GI disorder is so easy to detect, you either had diarrhea and gas or not. It was very very proud of that tiny little paper, tiny little study we did. Although this raw milk company still on their website says they cure lactose intolerance. So this is a different issue alto together. So, let's not go there, but let's flip that to wheat because So, my concern in the world of wheat and gluten intolerance is yeah, it's amazing how many people feel
20:43 some distress and if they were tested, you might find out that they're not clinically gluten intolerant or I'm sure that's a continuum, but I think this actually has to do with our food supply. So in a lot of foods that we grow historically there were multiple brands of or types of bananas and corn and wheat etc. And in the US we pretty much grow one kind of corn and one kind of wheat monocropping massive amounts and and Americans in particular of all the grains that people eat around the world Americans eat wheat. I actually had to do a paper one time where we were sort of trying to determine how much protein came from different sources. How many how much from meat? How much from dairy? How much from grains? And I was very intrigued to see that this USDA database
21:30 said, "Here's our value of protein from grains." And by grains, we mean wheat and oats and rice and quinoa and everything with a little footnote that said, because 90% of the grains Americans eat is wheat. We basically just use the wheat value for this and we didn't use the others. And I thought, "Oh my god, with rice and oats and everything else out there, 90% of the grains Americans eat as wheat." And but think about it. Bagels, pastry, breakfast toast, um they're breakfast, even pizza crust. Pizza crust, they we eat an insane amount of wheat. So, one of my favorite um graphics, and sorry, maybe we'll we'll get into this later, sort of looking at the types of carbs,
22:17 fats, and proteins that people in the US eat. And I'll have more details if you want to do this later, but 50% of what Americans eat for carbs is carbs, and 40% is crappy carbs, added sugar, and refined grains, which is mostly refined wheat. And 10% is healthy carbs. And so I think what Americans are eating and I think the gluten intolerance has to do with wheat being such a predominant grain source when it doesn't need to be and very little variety in the wheat. I know there's actually some folks out there that are trying to bring back sort of some heritage um versions of different wheat grains. Kamut and uh al uh buckwheat and
23:05 uh what are some of the other ones? Uh pharaoh and wheat berries. I actually make a kick-ass wheat berry salad if you want to get into that later. But of all this refined wheat that we're eating to your point, I I think God isn't that amazing that so many people are now coming up with gluten intolerance. What is going on? I think it's because we eat so much wheat, so much refined wheat, and it's really just one kind. I have heard, I don't know if you've had this experience. I've had Europeans come and say, you know, I ate a lot of bread in Europe and I come here and I I'm like gluten intolerant and then I go back to Europe and I I can have bread again and I I think I don't know this so I'm not a food scientist, but I think that's part of it. Yeah. very interesting and I know a lot of people listening are are extremely
23:51 curious about this issue of real versus not clinically diagnosed food allergies but just negative experiences with food. So how many people are actually gluten intolerant? Um you hear about celiac disease. I mean people also now know what the names of these things so they just kind of throw them out there um whether or not they have them or not. And how many people do you think actually struggle with a wheat intolerance like a wheat sensitivity? Seems like these are millions and millions of people. Yeah. Not my area of expertise. Don't really can't speak to this effectively. Do know that for a a basic nutrition class that I teach. I was looking at a a survey of celiac disease and and testing people for it. And even like half the population with full-blown celiac disease didn't know
24:38 they had it and were consuming wheat. And so even if you have it, there's a range of response. You could have and just think, "Oh, my stomach's grumbling. Huh, doesn't bother me that much." Whereas you have some people who don't have full-blown celiac and they have some gluten intolerance and a small amount bothers them. So even in there, there's some wiggle room that's hard to explain where you can't look somebody in the eye and say, "Sorry, I've diagnosed you. You don't have this." So it is really important for people to to acknowledge and own what they feel. and to look into it. Let's talk about processed foods. That gets a lot of attention nowadays and there are I think we need to parse what we mean by processed foods. I'll just ask this in a very direct way. There are the so-called food
25:24 additives, the dyes, the binders, the other things that are in um processed foods. We should talk about that. There's also the issue of caloric density relative to macro and micronutrients, right? a lot of calories but not a lot of nutrition so to speak. Sure. And then there probably 10 other things about what processed food is and what it isn't. Like tends to be low fiber, high calorie, low fiber for instance. So let's start with these food additives. This is very um much in the in the media space now and it's controversial. The dyes like they just banned another red dye number 40 I think it was. But the fact I can't remember which one just tells you that there are a lot of them. What about these dyes? How bad are these dyes? That was on the basis of a rat or or rodent study
26:11 rather. How much does do food dyes concern you as somebody who spent so much time in this studying this stuff? Um, nutrition don't concern me more than any of the other things that are in the packaged processed foods and partly because those are almost impossible to study. So in my world, if somebody says this thing is a concern, a health concern or health benefit, I have to think how would I study that and what is the outcome? So really my world is what is the exposure and what is the outcome? Can I get funded to do that? And if the outcome is heart disease or cancer or diabetes, I immediately write it off. I can't wait till somebody dies or goes to the hospital. I won't be able to publish my paper and I won't be able to keep my job at Stanford. I have to publish quicker. So most of my career has been
26:57 very cardiomatabolic oriented. So I can move somebody's blood cholesterol, blood glucose, inflammatory markers, insulin in weeks and sometimes say, "Oh my god, how come you didn't do this for years?" Said, "Well, because most of the effect happened in the first two weeks. I did it for eight weeks or I did it for six months." But really, the effect plateaued in weeks if it was the cardioabolic risk factor here. So if you want to ask me what a dye does, I'd have to randomize people to sort of get the exposure or not. So the same food with or without the dye and I would have to have an outcome and there's really not many outcomes and your cholesterol wouldn't move. Your blood glucose wouldn't move. If it was the same for everything except the die, those measures would not move. So
27:45 the idea is you give it to a rat in a huge dose and you see if they get cancer and it makes metabolic sense that creates a plausibility that this is a carcinogen but it's really hard to test and think of you just said you couldn't keep track of how many red dyes there were or blue dyes or yellow dyes combined with emulsifiers and jelling agents and colorants and uh anti or glazing agents. There's a list. So this NOVA classification put together by Carlos Montera from Brazil is like the hot topic in the world of ultrarocessed food. So for the last decade if you will look papers coming out every month talking about ultrarocessed and if you look at that paper it's the NOVA
28:31 classification. So an interesting thing just to make this clear and we can stop if this is too far down the rabbit hole but the NOVA classification is agnostic to nutrition. He doesn't care how much fat or cholesterol or fiber is in there. His whole point in making this was there's something beyond that. I know we're worried about lack of fiber, too much saturated fat, something else. But isn't there something to the colorants and the flavorants and the jelling agents, etc. that could be separate from all this? in it and he in his analyses said if I if I parse that out in the data that I'm looking at that has an additive effect to all these other things and he's made a big case for it and people are publishing papers on it all the time um the American Heart
29:17 Association has a scientific advisory on this and I've seen the table it's in our advisory there's 150 different molecules in this list that come into the different categories And if you look through the whole list, you would be a little shocked. So for one thing, turmeric is in the list of colorants. So technically, turmeric could move you into the ultrarocessed category, but turmeric is full of curcumin. And people are really excited about the possible health benefits of turmeric. Pectin is in there. People have used pectin for years to make jams and jellies and things like that. And there's some horrific names that you can't even pronounce in this thing which I've looked for in foods and I can't find many of the horrifically named things in any real foods that people eat. Anyway, there's 150 chemicals in
30:04 this list. And it's really intuitively appealing. It's like there must be something beyond just these nutrients. Oh my god, the food industry is out of whack here. And if we could put pull in one other term, it's grass. Generally recognized as safe. And so decades and decades ago, the FDA said, "Wow, there's a lot of these things that the food industry is putting in foods to do an appropriate test to see if this would harm humans is really not feasible. You Plus, in my world, I can't really do studies where I'm going to harm people. I I need you to sign up and your staff, and I'm going to randomize you to see who I hurt first. And once I know who I hurt, I'll know if I need to remove this from the
30:50 food. So they'll do it in mice or they'll do it in rats or they'll do it in a petri dish to see if it's plausible. And at one point, there were 800 of these grass items and I think it's grown to 10,000. There's a whole bunch of ingredients that the food industry can put into foods because of this grass sort of by line this option. That's certainly problematic. So we have the NOVA list of these additives and he calls them cosmetic additives. So let's pause just for a minute to think of that name. So the cosmetic means it's to make the food look good. If you're going to go buy it on the shelf, I mean think just for a minute of an emulsifier. If you went to buy something and it was separated on the shelf, you thought, "Wow, I don't really want that. It looks
31:36 like it's half this and half the other thing." If it, let's say, it was a salad dressing, I would want the salad dressing to look all homogenized, like somebody shook it up, and I don't want to buy the I don't want to put the parts on my salad. I want to put the salad dressing. So, the cosmetic additives are to make it look good. And that's why we have dyes. Oh, I don't think I want to buy that gray thing, but I would buy the red or the yellow or the whatever color it is. So those different additives are going in to make it look more appealing or feel more appealing uh or smell more appealing instead of just being food. So it does make sense that this is sort of we've gone too far. We have this incredible food system that makes inexpensive food very available for a
32:24 lot of people 247 and we just went too far. It's too available. It's too inexpensive. It's too stable on the grocery shelf uh place there. So that like three months from now, no bugs have eaten it. It hasn't gone bad. Isn't that good economically that it hasn't gone bad? But isn't it a little scary that the bugs don't even want to eat it because they can tell there's no nutrition in here. So yeah, the processed food issue is very interesting. It's fasting that RFK Jr. is wants to handle this and a lot of us are really excited that somebody would like to take a real firm stance here because it is out of whack. That's super informative and I appreciate it for
33:09 several reasons. Uh one that I'd like to highlight in particular is how now several times you've described that to do a proper study you need to manipulate variables one at a time. You just can't do the sorts of studies that one would like to do where you manipulate 10 20 40 100 variables of dyes and colors and in people and and do that in a reasonable amount of time as you mentioned either people would all be dead or um there'd be no more funding uh for the government for any purpose if uh for a study after a study like that was done. It's just too expensive too timeconuming. The other thing is, given what you just told us about these additives, wouldn't it just make the most sense to just ban them all? Yep, it sure would. And that would wipe out 60%
33:56 of what's in a grocery store right now. And if somebody went in to buy food for their family and 60% of the food was gone and we hadn't replaced it with food that is more nutritious but meets their budget and is accessible, that would be criminal to be perfectly honest. And that's that's why the health community is trying to figure out how to react to this. So part of this is I'll just take an example several examples of things that fall into the line of these ultrarocessed foods. There's actually quite a few whole wheat breads, yogurts, salad dressings, and things like tomato sauces. So, picture a very inexpensive quick meal for a family where the the parents have three jobs. They're trying to make ends meet. Sure, it'd be great if they could be home growing their
34:42 garden and scratch cooking all day, but they can't. So, they come home, they cook some pasta, they heat up some red tomato sauce, and they pour it on top. More nutritious than, let's say, a fast food something or other. So, if you take that tomato sauce away and they whipped together a little salad and the kids don't want to eat the raw vegetables that are just plain. They want some salad dressing on it. You picked up some salad dressing and for breakfast they were going to have um some yogurt or whole wheat bread. So, they're going to make some toast and put some avocado on it and have some avocado toast and it was it said whole wheat bread. All four of those things could have met the criteria for ultrarocessed food. So, you take those off. They can't have the salad. They can't have the pasta. They can't have the yogurt. And they can't have the avocado toast because you took
35:29 those all away. Unless we had seen that and said, "Yes, we know these should be replaced with more nutritious food that don't have the cosmetic additives." And until we get to that place, you can't get rid of them all. That's just cruel. Yeah. No, it's a it's a wonderful well sad but um important excuse me example of the challenges that people face um in terms of how to feed a family. Um and at the same time we could wage the argument that people in Europe um you know have families um they work very hard um and their grocery stores include a lot of ultrarocessed foods and processed foods
36:14 but also a lot of fruits and vegetables and as we talked about before maybe more variety of grains etc. So, we don't want to um paint a picture of like the French countryside uh where everything is grown and harvested and um you know, searching for truffles during the morning. I spent some time in the south of France and they actually do this. People there spend an immense amount of time and energy thinking about what they're going to eat, preparing that food, eating it, and talking about other great meals they've had while they eat it. And even people with without large budgets, at least at that time, um ate exceptionally high quality food um in reasonable amounts. and it was incredibly delicious. So there are areas of the world where people do this, but Northern Europe there's a lot of processed food and at the same time we don't see the same sorts of issues with obesity, at
37:00 least not to the same degree that we do in the United States, the same chronic health and metabolic issues that we see here. So what if we were to compare and contrast just because they're closest um a northern European grocery store and family and the North American grocery store and family which you just described you illustrated for us I think a fairly representative example. What's different? What are they eating for dinner that's different? Is it that the tomato sauce doesn't contain these dyes? That it doesn't contain sugar? Um, and what are they replacing uh those foods with, if they're replacing them at all? So, probably at least two answers and and one of them is going to be I can't tell you how many Europeans or other folks from other countries have said, I bought the same product that I buy in my home country
37:47 here and it has twice as many ingredients. It's the same company. It's the same food. It could be um what's the hazelnut spread? Nutella. Nutella. Like here's the Nutella you sell here and here's the Nutella I buy there. I've had multiple people bring those up to me and show me the different ingredients. And so it can be made the other country way, but in the US it's made another way for Americans. So if we could even just make that move, if we could say, okay, you already make this in another country, another way. Can you just make it the same way in the US? That would be a start right there. Why is it that there's this discrepancy in ingredients? This um became uh very much uh uh in the
38:32 media recently with Froot Loops. It was argued, I don't know if this is true, but it was argued that Froot Loops in Canada are um colored with carrot juice and beet juice and Froot Loops in the United States use artificial dyes. And I I I can't verify that. Um I don't know that to be true, but I think a number of examples pointed to that possibly being true. Why would you uh have a system like ours if other people can do it presumably for same or lesser cost? I agree. I can't back up that one statement either, but I think that is true for reasons that I can't explain. And that's why it would be helpful to talk more to the food industry. I think there are some challenges with this reaction against ultrarocessed foods. I think there are some problems with NOVA that I brought up earlier. You'd have to make those
39:17 foods accessible. But some of them you could fairly quickly if you took advantage of some of the other ways that people are making it. and the the rules are just too loose in the US. So I I think that's important and the level at which this could be impactful is not educating the public to look at the back and find the ultrarocessed cosmetic additive and removing it. It's to say that we're going to do this and the food industry will say I'm going to have to reformulate if somebody's going to buy my product. if they're going to call me out on this, not only am I going to have to reformulate, it won't be hard because I do it in another country and I could reformulate and so that ingredient will be gone. I should ask directly for your research. Do you take funding from uh
40:03 companies in the food industry? So, several times. So, I've got avocado money, I took soy money, most recently I took Beyond Meat money. Let me talk about the Beyond Meat, which was the most recent one. I pitted uh Beyond Meat versus Red Meat for cardioabolic outcomes and the Beyond Meat won in several categories over the red meat and I got a lot of grief for that. People love their red meat, including me. Yeah. Yeah. I'll go easy, but I'm not going to go completely easy. Oh my god, gardeners and industry shill. All he does is take No, most of my money does not come from there. But I actually couldn't get NIH funding to do that because they would say, "Wait a sec. Beyond Meat makes a crap ton of money. They just sold their IPO. Why would we fund that research? Let the food industry fund that. That actually happens all the time. And we could get into how problematic that is
40:50 or isn't. It's certainly at least somewhat problematic that the company is funding the research that will test their product. But more interesting to me was that this was sort of Beyond Meat 1.0. And Beyond Meat actually did better than the red meat. And they actually after that took out the coconut oil, took out some other ingredients, added some more benign ingredients, and they've actually reformulated multiple times. And so by reformulating, even though the study we did show they had a benefit. I totally respect that. They're like, they are listening. They're looking at the health concerns. They're trying to be responsive. And I think if the food industry as a whole did this and we could work more closely with them, that would be the way to improve
41:36 the US food supply as opposed to we have a new thing, it's NOVA, get rid of them all. That won't really work. So I'm hearing two things. One, we need to pressure the food industry to reformulate, get rid of these additives, dyes, what you call cosmetic additives that may or may not be deadly. Um, certainly not in the short term, but that in the long term could very well be problematic. We just we need to do something to make sure that that stuff's removed. It just doesn't make sense to to hedge on that one. and we can look to Europe and other places that don't clearly that if nothing else they've proved that you don't need these things in the foods for them to have a stable shelf life etc. Okay, so that's one. Uh
42:23 the other is this issue of of food industry funding of of studies because um you know I'm not an expert in nutrition but I pay a lot of attention to the way that nut nutrition and health is discussed online. That's I'm in the that's my business more or less and every time somebody hears that a researcher took money from a company to run a study uh they assume that there's bias. um in fairness to you and to the process I'll just ask are they able to influence the question certainly not the collection of data there's I mean you know the data are the data um your graduate students and posttos who are the ones who actually run these experiments um presumably no have a hypothesis at the
43:08 beginning they ask a question and they try and disprove that hypothesis um but does the company say we want you to test a given hypothesis or is it funding for you to test a hypothesis that you select. In other words, is there good separation of concept? Um, clearly the money issue gets people inflamed, but it's a very different thing when a company says, "Hey, can you test whether or not our product outperforms in terms of cardioabolic markers compared to red meat versus, hey, listen, you know, you want to stud you want to study cardioabolic markers in people that consume Beyond Meat versus cow meat? Um, okay, we'll fund that." There's there's it's it seems subtle but it's not so subtle because in one case they have a an endpoint that they're interested in. In another in the other case you have an
43:53 end endpoint that you're interested in. Yeah. There's not a simple answer to that because it's not a yes no question. It's a total continuum. So they could say we'll give you this money if you'll do that. They could say we'll give you this money to do anything you want but tell us about it as you go. Uh you could write up the results. I'll give you the most interesting personal experience that I had in this. So everything was pretty benign. all the way up till when we got the study done. And this had to do with cognitive impairment. And so I'm not going to even talk about the product. I'll just set this up because I think you'll find it interesting. So turns out the people we recruited had pretty high cognitive ability. There's a cog there's a survey you can take and I think 50 was the top and everybody who signed up was a 45. And we were kind of looking to see if
44:40 this supplement could increase cognitive ability. But we should have realized in the beginning that there wasn't much room to increase. They were 45 out of 50 to begin with and it failed to show that the product increased cognitive ability. So we shared it with the company and they said, "Well, I can see you're saying there's a null finding here, but could you also say uh there was no dilitterious effect?" And I said, "We weren't looking for a dilitterious effect. We were looking for an improvement." They said, "Yeah, but isn't it also true that it didn't make it worse?" I thought that's actually true. It didn't make it worse. Could I to make these guys happy and to maybe get more money later? Should we say it didn't make it worse? So, that would be a really subtle influence that they could have later on.
45:26 In theory, they could mark it with this supplement maintains high levels of cognitive performance and be truthful but not giving the whole picture. And at the end of the day, really, the important thing is to look at the study design. So, let me I think I can flip this to something that's way more practical than that. It's not even industry influence. It's the investigator influence. So, in my world of nutrition, and this is going to go back to the parking lot of not doing one thing at one time, but doing multiple things at one time. Let's say I want to study vegan or paleo or keto or something like that. I can have diet A versus diet B and make a kick-ass diet A and a crappy diet B. So, it's really unlikely that B will win. And then I publish that and there's a headline on it. And then there's someone else who
46:11 actually favors a competing diet. They start a study. They make a kick-ass diet B and a crappy diet A and the diet B wins because they set it up that way. No industry influence at all here. This is investigator influence. And then the public comes and says, "What the hell? It said diet A is better one day and it said diet B is better the next." My god, you nutrition scientists never agree on anything. I'm just gonna go have a burger. I was like, if you had looked at the design. So, one of my favorite new words in nutrition is equipoise. I've been trying to set up studies where it's the best diet A that you could be and the best diet B. So, if I can just riff off a couple things. One of my most famous studies is diet fits. It had to do with a low carb, low-fat
46:58 diet. 600 people for uh a year. This is an $8 million study. This is the 2018 study. Yeah. Uhhuh. And we try and I told the dietitians, I said, I don't really care which one wins. Uh we actually think there's some genetic predisposition or metabolic predisposition. It'd be great if everybody won, but just to test this fairly, I want all the dieticians to be advising the 600 people in this study. You have to teach both lowfat and low carb. You get assigned to different groups and teach the best low carb you can and the best lowfat you can. So that if one wins at the end, we can say we gave both of them a fair shot. Um when we did swap meat, this is our our say the study with appetizing plant food, a meat eating alternative trial, swap meat
47:44 trial with beyond meat, what should we pick for the red meat? Should we pick fast food? Should we pick? We went to uh San Francisco and got good eggs which prides itself on getting organic, regeneratively farm, pasture-raised. So we wanted to get a good quality red meat. Uh we did a study with a vegan diet versus an omnivorous diet. And so for the omnivorous diet, we went to a company that makes really good food and we have it delivered versus vegan. We did ketogenic versus Mediterranean and we made a good Mediterranean diet. and we did Jeff Folic and Steve Finn's well formulated ketogenic diet as the comparison. So in all these our group has been having fun trying to address
48:30 your comment separate from industry influence just to to try to make the two arms as fairly competing against one another as you can. Going back to the industry one, there's no way to pull it off 100% clean. There's just no way. There's so many subtle things that could happen. So, the thing that does help these days is you have to register register your trial in clinical trials.gov to start with. You have to name the primary outcome ahead of time and the whole study design for the world to see so that if it gets to the end of the study and you switched it, somebody will say calling you out on BS. That wasn't your primary outcome. You can have a third party analyze your data. You can lock down the data at the end. you can make
49:17 the data publicly available. There's a couple more of these steps that you could This is as transparent as I can be. So, you can make the chance of industry influence lower, but you can never eliminate it. So, if I find a positive result, maybe they'll fund me again later for something else. Um, even though they didn't, some of this uh industry folks like I often get gifts. If it's a gift, they can't demand to see anything. But I can offer to show them what happened. And if I if I show them and they say, "Hey, would you consider doing this?" I'd be pretty stupid to say, "No, you gave me a gift." And I'm not going to consider the thing you said. I I would say, "Yeah, I'll consider it. I will look at it and I want to present
50:03 objective data." But it's I don't think it's the industry as much as the investigator and how they handle it. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily for more than 13 years. However, I've now found an even better vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. That new and better drink is the new and improved AG1, which just launched this month. This nextgen formula from AG1 is a more advanced clinically backed version of the product that I've been taking daily for years. It includes new bioavailable nutrients and enhanced probiotics. The NextGen formula is based on exciting new research on the effects of probiotics on the gut microbiome. And it now includes several specific clinically studied probiotic strains that have been shown to support both digestive health and immune system
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53:11 betterhelp.com/huberman. When it comes to Well, let's just um close the hatch on the industry funding part because I I know that's going to get um some people uh hair standing up a little bit. Is there a world where you don't have to rely on industry funding to do these studies? I mean, my first response is is like um why go there? Why not just I mean, we have a National Institutes of Health. Um they fund studies on everything from developing novel molecules for the treatment of Parkinson's to studying the effects of breath work on cancer outcomes. I mean I mean it's a nowadays it's a very wide range of topics that the NIH embraces but I think most people don't realize this but
53:57 there's and everything in between so why not just go to NIH for the money historically the proportion of the NIH budget gone to nut that goes to nutrition studies is infinite decimally small there there's been many requests to create an institute of nutrition I personally that would be pretty selfish I'm all in I wish they would have more resources for me to do those kinds of studies with objective money. My guess is Robert Kennedy would be a fan of that sort of thing. I'm not speaking about this with any um political affiliation, but he seems to care a lot about getting dyes and additives out of food and cares a lot about the food supply. At least he stated that. Um and NIH is currently in a state of massive revision right now. Pause revision.
54:45 Um, and I would imagine they would allocate more funding for studies of nutrition um, given who's in charge. Now, the the bigger challenge is how many nutrition questions there are. So, I just served for two years on the dietary guidelines advisory committee. We had two years to consider 60 different questions. Each one of the questions generated sub questions. The vast majority of questions resulted in a conclusion that is either not enough data available or only enough data available to generate a limited strength response to get a moderate or a strong. More data are needed. This was almost mind-numbingly repetitive through
55:30 the whole two-year process. More data needed, more data needed, more data. And this had to do with snacks, skipping meals, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, pregnancy, infancy, processed foods, seed oils, meat and protein, the questions are pretty endless. So if even if you opened up the NIH and said, "Yeah, we're going to we're going to move 25% of our budget to studying nutrition," you wouldn't even come close to answering all the questions that the public has right now. Yeah, that's an important point and I would say that the the public is also doing these experiments. You know, the health and wellness uh community gets um catches a lot of flak from the standard scientific community. They'll say, you know, supplements aren't regulated. They are
56:16 regulated. There is variety of qualities across brands and even probably even supplements within brand. But um the experiments are ongoing. You have people who are carnivore, you have people who are vegan, you have people finding what works for them. they eliminate this or they add that and they're becoming scientists for themselves and we've really decentralized nutrition science in my opinion. That's just my little editorializing. Um, you mentioned this 2018 study and I'm so glad that you mentioned um, your efforts to remove investigator bias by making the vegan diet not like crap vegan food and not making the meat diet all processed meats because that's happened in a lot of studies. Yes. And then that's why the headlines are so confusing over the years or even within a year. So um could
57:03 you just share with us the major results of that study? What the what the key takeaway was so that people who heard oh I heard paleo, vegan, vegetarian um you know Mediterranean and omnivore which diet was best if any and for what purpose? Yeah at the end of the day my take if you put all of my studies together it's a whole food plant-based diet which does not mean vegan and doesn't mean vegetarian but could wait plant-based but includes meat. Yeah. So, I don't like this new thing about plant-based being vegan. Sorry. So, we're not It's a terrible name. So, let's just do this for 60 seconds. So, uh pescatarian, lactoova vegetarian, lacto vegetarian, ovoarian, uh vegan, flexitarian, reducarian. Oh my
57:52 goodness, there's all kinds of words out there. And clearly, one of the ones that doesn't go over well is vegan. Vegan is very polarizing. And a lot of that is because the vegan community uh an important reason many of them are vegan is animal rights and welfare. And it becomes sort of a condescending thing. Oh my god, you're so unethical and immoral. You slaughter animals and eat them. I am holier than thou. I don't. Well, then it gets into issues whether or not a vegan is wearing leather shoes or not wearing leather shoes. And the vegan community and historically was very closely tied to the animal rights community. some of which were radical animal rights activists that blew up buildings and you know and worse. I know people who have been targeted by those explosions. I have been plant-based vegan for many many years and I haven't blown up any
58:37 buildings and I haven't thrown any rain red paint on anybody wearing a fur. But because that was so polarizing recently and I think this is going to have this is going to have a backlash and it's going to be fail. People have been using plant-based as a different word for vegan. Just like, oh, we're not the polarizing group. We're the plant-based, which is not polarizing. So, I've been doing this for 30 years. When I said plant-based for the last 20 years, I meant most of its plants and some of its dairy and some of its meat. So, I actually use it differently than what it has just morphed into recently. So when I say whole food plant-based diet, that could be 25% animal products, it could be 30% animal products, could
59:22 be 10%, it could be zero animal products, but it be mostly plants. This is sort of Michael Pollen's old eat food not too much, mostly plants. So that's what my research would suggest. Um, the vegans did better than the omnivores in our twin study that was featured on Netflix. the Mediterranean versus the keto diet. It's a little more subtle. We might have to get into that. The low carb versus lowfat was very specifically for weight loss. So another issue here is you know what's the goal? Is it a weight loss thing? Is it a cardio amount? You have to think about the exposure in the population. So the diet fit study my most famous study with the 600 people is really fun to work. We had sort of unlimited funds mostly from NIH but from
1:00:09 some from the nutrition science initiative that Peter Atia and Gary Tobs led. If it's okay if I go here just for a minute I had done another study before that called the A toZ study and A was Atkins and T was a traditional health professionals approach and O was Ornish and Z was zone and these were three of those were popular books that were bestsellers and they were wildly different in carbs and fats. Atkins was super low carb, Ornish was super high carb, zone was kind of in the middle and the traditional health professionals approach was sort of the control. We had 311 women who did it for a year and it was a weight loss study and at the end of the day when we published the paper in JAMA, they were a few pounds different. The only statistically significant difference was between Atkins and
1:00:54 Zone, which was weird because those were the two low carb diets. You would have
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