4 Food Myths That Create Weight Loss Roadblocks And Keep You Sick

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy with an F. place for conversations that matter. And if you're wondering what the biggest myths about food, diet, exercise, and weight loss that are making us fat and sick, well, this is going to be a good one for you. And it's part of our series called Health Bites, little bites of health information that help you make small steps that will lead to big changes over time. Now, other than politics or religion, nutrition is one of the most divisive areas of debate, and it's not necessarily people's fault because nutrition science is pretty crummy by design. I mean, it's really hard to do experiments on humans. You can't take 10,000 people and put them on one diet and another 10,000 people and put them on another diet and lock them up for 30 years and see what happens, right? Because people are what we call free living humans and they will do whatever they want. They don't eat fast food in a study. Well, they might eat fast food. So it's very hard to know what's true, but there are some things we really do know. And I want to talk about the biggest mess today. that are making us sick and fat and how we actually can begin to rethink our approach to food. And what I've done is really dedicated my life to understanding nutrition, understanding the role of food as medicine, and how food is information and how to use that to create health. Let's talk about weight loss and health and how we can navigate through the morass of different and discordant and often contradictory and confusing information out there. Sadly, most of what we're hearing in the news is superficial, is misguided, is misinformed, is misinterpreted, and misses the nuance in the studies. And sadly, a lot of the things that people believe today are misguided, outdated, and scientifically disproven. So let's talk about the big food myths that can create trouble with weight loss if you're following them, and even damage your health. The first myth is something you've heard me talk about a lot, which is the myth that all calories are created equal. Now, I remember sitting down with the Vice Chairman of Pepsi once and I said, listen, and he was by my diabetic. I said, listen, are you telling me that if you eat 2,000 calories of almonds or 2,000 calories of Pepsi, that it has the same effect on your body? and it actually will have no difference in impact on your metabolism or your weight or anything else. It's like, no, it's the same. All calories are the same. And it's sort of shocking to me to hear that because it's just purely from common sense perspective, it doesn't make any sense, right? Even a 55 year old kid will go, yeah, yeah, probably they're not the same, even though they contain exactly the same amount of calories. So the basic myth that we've been taught is that, if you want to lose weight, you should eat less and exercise more. It's all about calories in, calories out. Now that myth serves the food industry. Why? Because if there are no good and bad calories, then it's all about moderating your intake. If you want to include, you know, a, you know, three or 400 calories of soda as part of your daily diet, as long as you don't go over your daily limit, you'll be fine. But we know that's not true. And the, the government also believes this. The nutrition associations recommend this. The American Heart Association, Diabetes Association, everybody is pushing this myth that it's all about tracking calories. But good luck if you want to track calories. If you just are off by 100 calories a day for a few decades, you would gain like 20 or 30 pounds of weight because of that excess calories. You can't, unless you're like measuring every little thing and calculating every little thing, you can't actually determine what your caloric intake is every day because your body is way smarter than that and regulates things by understanding how to use the information of food to control what's going on. So one of the most important principles of functional medicine is food is information. It's code, it's instructions. And yes, all calories are the same in a vacuum. So people say, oh, Dr. Hyman, you can't go against the laws of physics. The law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics says that energy is conserved in the system. So calories in, calories out. that's basically true. And that is true in a vacuum. You know, if I take a pound of feathers and a pound of lead, and I drop them off a bridge, what happens? There's both a pound, the feathers go like this and float down gently, and the lead goes boom. Why? Air. Now, you can't see it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it. Well, at least in most cities you can, in most places, the place you can. But basically, when we eat food, it's the same thing. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. But when you eat it, it's different because it interacts with your metabolism, your hormones, your your immune system, it literally changes with every bite your gene expression. So the information in food beyond the calories, the phytochemicals, the vitamins and minerals, the quality of the macronutrients, the quality of the food determines so much about what's going on. So it actually is important not to focus on how much you're eating but on what you're eating. And when you change the quality of the food, the instructions change, your hormones change, your metabolism changes, and the data is very, very solid on this. So we really understand that this myth serves certain people. It serves the food industry for sure, right? But it's not serving the average American. We know we've seen such a dramatic increase in obesity. We'll talk about that in a minute. But, you know, there are good and bad calories. There are foods that are not good for us and there are foods that are good for us. And this is not just a math problem. Metabolism is not a math problem. okay? It's, it's a dynamic system that we're constantly playing with, with food and our, and our biology. So the, the, the, the, the, the, by the way, it's not just the vitamins and minerals and the phytochemicals, it's the quality of the phytonutrients. Let me just give an example. So if you eat a trans fat, let's say gram for gram, you eat the same amount of omega-3 fats. It's, it's fat. It's. got the same amount of calories. When you eat trans fat, we know that it increases your risk of heart attacks and strokes and cancer and diabetes. We know that it binds to a receptor on your cell called PPAR, which is peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor, blah blah blah, whatever. It doesn't matter. But basically PPAR, and that receptor, when you bind it with a trans fat, will activate inflammation, will slow down your metabolism, will make you more insulin resistant, If you take an omega-3 fat, EPA from fish oil, for example, you bind that to the same receptor. That's what's naturally supposed to bind that receptor. It does the exact opposite. It improves your gene expression. It reduces inflammation. It increases your metabolic rate. It increases your body's anti-inflammatory systems. So same fat calories and gram-wise, but very profoundly different effects on your biology. so I know people out there are kind of moving in this whole field of, like, calorie in calories out, energy balance. I I just think it's fundamentally flawed. And I'll kind of get more into it in a little bit. But we, we need to understand that, that sugar calories and starch calories act very different in your body, and they will spike hormones like insulin. For example, if you eat fat, but, by the way, think of this thing about this. If you're, if you're a type one diabetic, meaning your pancreas doesn't work, you're not making any insulin. what are the symptoms of someone presenting with type 1 diabetes for the first time? They're extraordinarily hungry and they're eating maybe 10,000 calories a day. They can't get enough food, but it's not getting in their cells. So they feel like they're starving. They eat 10,000 calories a day and they lose weight. So if it's all about calories, how can you explain that? e.g. eat a lot of fat and we'll talk about that in a minute. It has a very profoundly different effect on your biology than if you eat sugar or starch, which spike insulin where fat doesn't.

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That's drhyman.com/protein and use the code PROTEIN10 that's one in a zero. So we need to understand that the the quality of the food matters most. And we wanna eat food that's as high quality as possible, meaning it's just real food. It's as close to its native state as possible. If you could recognize it as an egg or a tomato or a carrot or a piece of chicken, you kinda know where it came from, right? If it's some highly processed, pulverized, chemically extruded food that's made in a factory, it may look like food, but it ain't food, right? this food like substance. So we don't want to be eating that stuff. So get rid of all of our Ultra processed food. But by the way, if you eat real food, it's naturally lower in calories. Right? I mean, if you want to have 750 calories, you can have a big gulp and drink that in about three minutes. Or you're gonna have to eat, like, 35 cups of broccoli. Good luck with that. Right? Good luck with that. You're gonna be full and stuffed, and you got so much fiber in there, you're gonna be, you bloated. It's not gonna be pretty side, but. Same calories, very profoundly different effect, right? The soda is going to spike insulin, cause a fatty liver, increase inflammation, screw up your cholesterol, damage your microbiome. Whereas the broccoli will do the opposite. It'll increase your fiber content, it'll feed your microbiome, it'll prevent insulin resistance, it'll heal your liver, and it contains glucosinolates, sulforaphanes, indoles, and things that actually help reverse damage liver problems, that increase detoxifications full of vitamins, minerals, very profoundly different effects on your body. So when you talk about what should you be eating, it's, you know, it's something I've talked about forever, right? The Pegan diet, it's basically eat real food and includes high quality animal foods. Obviously, regeneratively or grass fed animals or pasture raised chickens, eggs, small wild fish, nuts, seeds, lots of good fats, avocados, extra virgin olive oil, omega-3 fats, lots of colorful fruits and vegetables, really important. So that's basically what we should be eating. And it's not about calories. If you focus on what you're eating instead of how much you're eating, it's going to be very easy. I mean, who here is listening has binged on a bag of avocados? Nobody. Who has binged on a bag of ice, bag of cookies or eaten a whole pint of ice cream? I certainly have. I mean, you just can't eat the amount of real food that would actually cause a problem because your body has this naturally regulated system where if you eat enough of nutrient-dense food, you feel full. The next myth that I want to talk about is it's all your genes. And there was a recent doctor from Harvard who was on 60 Minutes who said obesity is genetic. We need Ozempic to fix this problem. And I'm like, what? Because, yes, there may be a genetic predisposition, but it's not your predestiny. genes load the gun, the environment pulls the trigger. The Pima Indians 100 years ago, or maybe now probably 120 or 30, 40 years ago, they were thin, they were fit, they had no obesity, no heart disease, no diabetes. Now, their average one has diabetes by the time they're 30, about 80% of them get type 2 diabetes by the time they're 30. Their life expectancy is 46. Some kids as young as two or three in that community are getting type 2 diabetes, which we used to call adult-onset diabetes. Now, they were adapted to a very different environment. So genes are susceptible to diabetes and obesity, but if they have different conditions, they won't get it. So when you look at the idea that our genes are the problem, it just doesn't make sense, right? There was a, we call it GWA study, genome-wide association study, and they found over 32 genes that were obesity predisposing genes in the population. And it encountered really only 9% of the obesity cases. And it was amazing, because even if you had all 32 genes, all of them, which never happens, it would only account for about 22 pounds of weight gain. And yet today, 42% of Americans are over obese. When I was born, obesity rates were 5%. Now they're 42%. That's like an eight-fold plus increase, an 800% increase in my lifetime. Now, our genes change only 2% every 20,000 years. so it's not genetics, bands. It's actually our environment. Now, we didn't change with our genes. What did change was we went from eating very little starch and sugar to refined sugars and starches. Sugar was a very rare commodity and very, very much of a treat in 1800, which they were still eating a lot then. It was 10 pounds per person per year. Now it's about 152 pounds per person per year and about 136 pounds of flour, which is pretty much just the same in the body. These are pharmacological doses of sugar and flour and they hijack our metabolisms and they make us sick and fat. And a lot of things will contribute to obesity, environmental toxins, stress, changes in our microbiome, obviously the high starch sugar diet or ultra processed foods. But genetics is not really the problem, right? I mean, you look at even, I mean, photographs from the 1960s, people on a beach or in the 1950s, Nobody was overweight. I mean, I just went to a concert in, out in Washington and I'm like, wow, like there was, it was hard to find a person who wasn't overweight. So, and that's because 75% of us are overweight. Now, the third myth I want to talk about is exercise. Now, exercise is critical. It's the, one of the most important things you can do for your health. And particularly as we age, it becomes more and more important. Strength training, cardio training, flexibility training, stability training, all really, really important. However, you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. If you go to the gym and then you have a pint of ice cream after or have a soda or maybe Gatorade or a sports drink or an energy drink, you are actually screwing yourself up pretty bad. You cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet because what happens is, you basically need to do a lot of exercise to burn the same calories that you just consumed. If you drink 120 ounce soda, you have to walk four and a half miles to burn it off. So if you just walk four and a half miles on the treadmill and you have one soda, you basically cancel it out. So the amount of food people are eating is just too much. Now, I said calories aren't the issue, but they are. I mean, they are. If you obviously can overeat calories and that will cause a problem, but it's not the quantity that we should be focused on so much as the quality. When you focus on quality, the quantity.

Takes care of itself.

Like I said, nobody binges on a bag of avocados. So exercise is important, particularly as you're losing weight because you don't want to lose muscle. When you lose weight without exercising, half of the weight will probably be muscle and you'll end up having a slower metabolism at the end than when you started. The same thing with drugs like Ozempic, they cause you to lose weight but they cause about 40 to 50% of the weight loss as muscle. and then when you end up at the weight you are at the end of the treatment, you're gonna actually have a slower metabolism and need less calories, which is kind of a bummer. So you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. And it's important, but make sure you exercise and eat well. The last myth is fat. Eating fat makes you fat. Now, I wrote a whole book on this called Eat Fat, Get Thin, but eating fat does not make you fat. It's really actually critical for health and weight loss. and I want to go into this a little bit. In most weight loss studies, you see 5% weight loss. That seemed like, wow, great job. That's an amazing amount of weight loss. But the truth is that, you know, that's not very much. But it does make a difference in your health, obviously, but it's not that much. The one study that was done, there are actually a number of these, looking at ketogenic diets, and this was for type 2 diabetics. Not only did they reverse the type 2 diabetes in 60% of the cases using a ketogenic diet, which is basically 70 to 80% fat, about 20% protein and maybe 5% carbs. They found that they had a 12% weight loss, which was more than most studies ever see with weight loss. Very impressive. Now, when you look at the studies on this, and this is a lot of this work has been done by David Ludwig at Harvard, and in the nutrition studies, as I said, are hard to do. These are rigorously controlled trials. These are done with extreme scientific rigor by, you know, MD, PhD, Harvard, Stanford trained doctor. at the best institution in the world. And they really spared no expense. I mean, it was $12 million to do a really relatively small study, but it was a very robust study with profound effects. And what they found was that when they basically put two groups of people on, actually even this, I think it was the same group, but switching their diet one time to the other, so their own internal control, it's called crossover design. It's actually one of the most rigorous scientific designs. the first part, they put them on the same calories but high carb, low fat. The second part of the study, they put them on a high fat, low carb diet. And what they found was really interesting. The group that was overweight and insulin resistant in these studies, they actually, when they had the high fat, low carb diet, burned 400 calories more a day. Now, put that in perspective. A pound is about 3,500 calories. That's about a pound a week. If they ate that diet, they would lose a pound a week, which is pretty amazing. In a year, they could lose 52 pounds, right? So the data for me on this is really compelling. If you want to learn more about it, we'll put it in the show notes, but there's a lot of review papers by Dr. Ludwig and others on the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis. I encourage you to dig into this research if you really want to understand it. There are others that say, oh, no, this isn't true. And people like Kevin Hall at NIH have done very short studies where they don't give the body a chance to adapt and they don't see this sort of change. But these are large human trials and I think they're very compelling and there's not just one, there's many, many. So I think when you eat actually fat, it speeds up your metabolism. And when you eat sugar, it slows down your metabolism. So think about that. It's like imagine burning an extra 400 calories just sitting on the couch doing nothing. because of the quality of the food you're eating, the difference in the macronutrients. So, in you look at these identical calorie diets, it's kind of shocking to think that one group could burn more calories than the other, but they do, and that's the power of food is information. So, the right fats actually are your cells preferred fuel, and so you want to stay away from the bad fats, obviously, like trans fat, and often for some people too much saturated fat, but extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, nuts and seeds, nut butters, they are critical for our health and you have to actually eat more of these and less sugar and starch and you'll be far healthier. So I hope you love these myth-busting tips, right? All calories are the same?

No.

It's all genetics? No. You can exercise your way out of a bad diet? No. And eating fat makes you fat? Well, no. So hopefully you'll get that and put that down in your little encyclopedic in your brain and think about this next time you're eating and shopping and exercising. So I hope you've enjoyed these health bites. I look forward to seeing you next time. Share with us on social media how you've used these insights to help your health. We'd love to hear about it. And we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.

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