Calories In = Calories Out? Exploring The True Science Behind The Calorie & The Real Truth About Fad Diets.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

The problem with portion sizes is it doesn't, to my mind at least, reflect the everyday reality of how much people eat.

When you eat a meat based protein, it's going to have a different thermic cost of digestion compared to like a vegetable or a cereal or a legume based protein, right?

This is the bottom line, right? You walk into any supermarket because they're industrially processed, there's economies of scale, they're long shelf lives. So the tragedy of it is this.

All right, so I recently read this book called why Calories Don't Count. And I kind of thought it was going to be a kind of like a ho hum treatise of, well, you, you know, maybe, you know, what you measure in a, in a protein doesn't exactly pan out based on, you know, you know, what it takes for the body to digest the protein or something like that. But gosh, this book took a deep dive into some really, really useful things when it comes to everything from food labels to calories. And it's written in a very entertaining, in a very entertaining manner. I really enjoyed reading it. And, you know, if you look around on packaged food, which I hope you don't have too much of in your diet anyways, or restaurant menus or online recipes, you're going to see all these authoritative numbers that tell you that the calorie count of what you're about to consume is exactly what's written on that label. And a lot of us will treat those numbers as gospel where we're like counting and cutting and consuming and kind of following this general advice that calories in equals calories out. Which is, it's a decent place to start, but it's definitely not the whole story, especially when you consider the fact that my guest on today's podcast says that basically all of the calorie counts that you see everywhere today are basically wrong. Fully inaccurate. My guest is named Giles, Dr. Giles Yeoh. He is an obesity researcher at Cambridge University. And he totally challenges the conventional model in his new book called why Calories Don't Count How We Got the Science of Weight Loss Wrong. He demonstrates really well that all calories are not created equal. And then he gets into some really, really great advice for what you can do as far as the way you eat based on what you learn in the book. And I have so many pages fold over and things I wanted to ask Giles about that. I figured I'd get him on the show. And I don't know if he's over there mowing down a cheeseburger or something, because obviously the calories in the cheeseburger don't count. I'll put a stick of butter in my coffee and you and I can just basically sit here and stuff our face with calories the whole time we record, right?

Absolutely, Ben. Thanks for having me on.

That's the takeaway of the whole book. Eat as much as you want, it doesn't matter. No, but seriously, I think this is going to be super fun to talk about and where I would love to dive in. Obviously, since we're going to be talking about them for a little while here, I would love for you to tell me and my audience how you would actually define a so called calorie.

So the calorie was initially a measure of heat. In fact, it still is a measure of heat. And so the first iteration of the calorie, the calorie spelt with a small C, is the amount of heat it takes to raise the temperature of 1 milliliter of water. 1 milliliter of water 1 degree Celsius at sea level. So that's a heat calorie, but that's not the calories we're dealing with. So the food, calorie, when, when we say calorie, A, it's spelled with a capital C, which is ridiculous because a capital C, calorie and a small C, calories both sounds like calorie. But in effect it's 1,000, 1,000 heat calories. So it is the amount of heat it takes to raise 1 liter of water 1 degree Celsius at sea level. That is a calorie.

Okay, so explain that to me. The big C versus the little C.

Thing, when calories were originally. So calor comes from the Latin, I think, heat. And in effect calorie is just a unit of heat. And they used it, it was really, really small. One milliliter is just one milliliter. It's just not a lot of water. And so when they actually then begin to measure food, food contains a lot more than just that little bit of calories. They started to realize that, oh, you know, actually there's a lot more calories in food. And so you need a thousand of these little small heat calories. And so they figured out, you know what, instead of changing the name, we're going to just spell it with a capital C. In the uk, which is where I live at the moment, they call it the kilocalorie or the kcal. And then obviously you can also convert that to joules. Which is the SI unit, if you wish, as well.

Okay, got it. So if we were using the little C and somebody picked up an energy bar that had, like 250 calories in it, technically it would say 25,000 calories. And that just might freak people out and perhaps use up a little bit of extra printing space on the label. Right?

That's right. Too many zeros. They couldn't be doing that.

Yeah, yeah. That might be a good weight loss hack, though, if we just told people to start using the little C instead of the big C, but be like, that has a hell of a lot of calories in it. Okay, so where did we get to the point where we actually started measuring calories in food? Kind of a big question. I know, because I'm almost like, asking for the history of the calorie, but I'd love to hear you unpack that a little bit.

Okay, so the first people actually to use calories as an indicator of the amount of food were actually German farmers. I know, it's just a dizzy. Going back probably into the early 1800s. And look, what is a farmer interested in? A farmer is acutely aware of. We're talking livestock farming. Okay. A farmer is acutely aware how much food or needs to be acutely aware how much food he feeds the cows or the chickens or the sheep. Because every penny he puts in to feeding the animal, he wants good quality meat, good quality produce out the other side. And so the farmers needed a way of measuring exactly what they were feeding the animals and exactly what was coming out the other side of the animals. So farmers knew in the early 1800s that animals didn't absorb all the calories. And so that was the first iteration of calories as accounting of food was in agriculture. And it was only latterly, probably late 1800s, when a couple of scientists in particular, a chap named Atwater, Wilbur Atwater, was an American professor.

Oh, yeah, I've heard of that guy before.

That's right. Who did a sabbatical. I think he had a sabbatical in Germany and learned about this calorie and learned about the way to measure calories. And then when he went back to the States, and this would have been like 1880. So this is really quite old science if you think about it. He then began to be interested. Okay, well, we're not cows, but how efficient are human beings? You know, when we eat, how much food do we absorb? How much comes out? And so Atwater then began to take human type foods. So rather than just hay or whatever they fed, you know, animals at the time. He began to calculate the total number of calories in regular, normal food. We eat steak, corn, celery, carrots, and begin to try and figure out how much the human beings would absorb. So he was probably the father of not calorie counting, that comes later, but of applying the word calorie to the amount of energy present in a food, or at least something that humans would recognize as food.

Okay, got it. And the way that he actually measured that, was he the first guy who used this bomb calorimeter?

He was the first guy to use bomb calorimetry for food.

Okay, can you, can you explain what a bomb calorimeter is, people?

Oh, yeah. So a bomb, the eponymous bomb, is a sealed container, all right? Now, it's pressurized with, like, 30 atmospheres of oxygen. And the reason why it's so highly pressurized with this oxygen is so that when you put in a piece of food, piece of anything, to be honest, but a piece of food. And you burnt the food because of the high pressure of oxygen, everything, it gets carbonized. The food turns to. It goes completely black. So now around this bomb, the sealed container is then a water jacket. It's a known volume of water with a thermometer in it. And all you do is you put in whatever X grams of food, dried food, I want to point out, because water has no energy value to human beings. If we were nuclear reactors, we would, but we're not. And then you burn the food and measure the amount of temperature given off by the burning food, and that is the number of calories, total number of calories within the food.

Okay, now, now I think that's where the disconnect begins to lie, is that the human body does not necessarily operate the same as a bomb calorimeter, right?

Oh, it doesn't. It doesn't at all. So, so, so, you know, we don't just torch our food because obviously digestion, which is how we extract the energy from food, the first step of how we extract energy from food is actually relatively gentle. Okay? You don't want to stick your hand into the stomach, which has. Which is like battery acid, but otherwise it's one long chemical reaction that takes place over 24 hours when you eat, and by the time it comes out the other side, you know, and it's just a whole bunch of enzymes. And biochemistry is relatively gentle. We don't burn the food. And so we work to get the food out. It takes time to get the. To get the calories up. It Takes time, Right? Right.

We have all these different enzymatic reactions, and there's a lot of things that go on that don't occur inside a bomb calorimeter, which I think leads to, like, the equation that pops up over and over again in your book. I think this might be a perfect place for you to begin to kind of outline your philosophy here. This equation, like A, B, C that you say multiple times in the book, you say, a, the number of calories actually in food does not equal B, the number of calories on the side of the pack does not equal C, the number of usable calories we finally get out of food. Can you walk me through that equation and what you mean by that?

Okay, so A is what I've just described, right? So A is the total number of calories within the food if you actually burnt it. So it doesn't. There's no digestion involved because you're just putting intense heat to it. So that's the total number of calories within. Within the food. But because human beings are not bond calorimeters, we cannot extract all of the calories in the food. So the one example I always use is if you eat corn on the cob, we call it sweet corn in the uk. I think it's corn on the cob in the US you know, when you eat corn and the next day you're sat on the porcelain, you know, throne and you look down, it's clear you haven't absorbed a whole bunch of sweet corn. So stuff goes right through us. And so what happened was Atwater. So we have to go back to Atwater now. He realized this phenomenon, right? He realized this phenomenon that humans didn't absorb everything.

One day, Atwater was looking at the corn in his crap and.

Exactly, exactly. And what he did was between 1880 and 1900, roughly in Connecticut, he then spent 20 years. And I want everyone to think about this before you complain about your job. He then, what he did was he burnt loads of food in a bomb calorimeter, loads of different types of food. And so he made these tables of steak, you know, per 100 grams, how much calories were in it? And he made just this huge thousands upon thousands of foods. But here's the critical bit of the experiment. He then got volunteers and fed people the items of food, and then he burnt their poop. Pretty much, yeah.

In a bomb calorimeter.

In a bomb calorimeter. In a bomb calorimeter. And so now he really makes me.

Wonder how the poop got from the anus to the bomb calorimeter, if he actually designed a bomb calorimetry toilet, which would be a great invention, by the way, if anybody is looking to get on Shark Tank. Or how he actually wound up doing that logistically. But anyways, maybe that doesn't matter. Go ahead.

So he didn't realize how much went in the top end, right. How much we ate and how much comes out the other side. So you can then subtract one from the other. And he then came up with the number of calories in any given food that a human being would absorb. He fed a number of different people. And then he then, through a whole bunch of math, then came up with the famous general Atwater factors. And so these general Atwater factors dealt primarily with the three macronutrients of protein, carbs, fat. And he was the one that came up with the numbers that there's nine calories for every gram of fat, four calories for every gram of protein, and four calories for every gram of carb. He published this probably in 1900. Actually, I went online and I managed to pick up the original copy of the book. Well, not the original copy, a print of the book. And I read it through, and it's all there. Every calorie count that we see today is still based on these three numbers. Incidentally, alcohol, for those of you who want to know, is seven calories for every gram of alcohol. Now, when you guys go and look at the back of the pack and try and calculate this to see this, if this is, if I'm lying, you'll see a wobble. So it's not perfectly 944. And the reason why it's not perfect, it's because of different manufacturers have different ways of estimating how much protein there is in food, and because people use different equations. There is a wobble factor as to how many calories on the side of your Snickers bar, for example.

So based on the first law of thermodynamics, which would be that the first. I'm trying to remember the exact way the first law of thermodynamics is stated.

Conservation of it.

Yeah, the conservation of energy. Basically everything that goes in should be equal to everything that comes out with no loss of energy. Did that water actually demonstrate that the first law of thermodynamics is functioning when we consume food, or did he address that at all?

He did actually address that. And so what, he. He was able to in human beings less well than he did with animals. And only because. Only because animals are smaller and is easier to measure. And what he did was he realized that he fed human beings a certain amount, a certain amount of food, then the amount of energy x 100 calories of food, Then what came out the other side and what came off in the water vapor and in the heat that you actually gave off and the amount of food you actually absorbed was equal. He actually managed to demonstrate that there was this conservation of energy in human beings. It was demonstrated in animals before, but human beings are rather. We think we're better than everything else. Right. And so we think, well, it can't be true in humans. And he actually demonstrated that this thing which farmers knew happened in cows and dogs also happened in animals, also probably also happened in humans. Pardon me.

Okay. But there were some flaws with the whole Atwater factors that when you open up just about any food app or the government database on food that all these calorie calculations are based off of, there were some pretty significant flaws that you bring up in the book. I think the first one was about the protein and nitrogen relationship. Can you get into that?

So the difference between. So fat and carbs are made entirely of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, just in different configurations. And so when we actually deal with fat and carbs, we can deal with it relatively. Our body can deal with it relatively efficiently because they're the same three atoms just moving around. The problem with protein is not a problem, but protein, in addition to having carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, also has nitrogen in addition to other things, but quite a lot of nitrogen. Actually, on average, 16% of a protein is going to be nitrogen. And so the issue with protein is this. There is no. Unlike fat, which we store and carbs in which we can store as glycogen or as fat, there is no store of protein in our body that is inert. So in other words, all the protein in our body is active. It's there to repair, or if you're lifting, to build. But if it's not used immediately, it has to be stored. And protein cannot be stored as muscle. Protein has to be stored as fat. And so when you're actually then converting protein into something that can be stored as fat, you have to remove the nitrogen. And so that is a lot of energy in nitrogen that comes out in your wee in your pee, typically. But it also costs energy. It also takes energy in order to do this, to actually perform this whole process. And it's cost. Heat, in effect.

Right. What we call the thermic cost of digestion.

That's it. That's it. It's waste energy in very many ways because yes, sometimes we use it to heat ourselves, but it's energy we don't actually utilize to move or to do anything. It keeps us warm. That's about the only thing it does.

Okay, so basically when we look at the nitrogen content of proteins, it widely varies as well. Isn't that another issue?

That is another issue, because unlike fat, they're fat, I guess, of different chains and sugars, but they all roughly have the same proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The problem with protein is they are made of amino acids and there are 20 different amino acids. And so depending on the amino acid you're talking about, they have different number of nitrogen atoms in them. And so depending on your protein, depending what you're talking about, you can actually there is probably a 5% swing in the amount of the percentage of protein in any given type of food. And so when you actually just take an average, which most people take an average of 16%. So how people calculate how much, how most people calculate how much protein there is in food is by measuring the percentage of nitrogen. Okay. Because that's the only. Because it has to come from protein. And so they, then they measure it and then they use that, assuming that 16% of protein is nitrogen, they measure the amount of nitrogen, they do the maths and they predict how much protein there is in a food. So it's, that's how it's done even today.

Right. But 16%, from what I understand after reading your book, is the average amino acid composition of meat. But in reality, if you look at other proteins, like, you know, cereal or legume or vegetable based proteins, that factor varies quite a bit, dictating that you're going to have very different total protein amounts and different calorie accounts that are going to vary quite a bit from that factor. Meaning, like when you eat a meat based protein, it's going to have a different thermic cost of digestion compared to like a vegetable or cereal or a legume based protein. Right?

Absolutely, absolutely. And so not only is there different thermic capacity, this difference in the amount of protein found in a vegetable versus versus a meat, it's not truly reflected, it's just all estimated. And so even though the numbers are wrong, even just taking a look at the percentage of protein, let alone not counting the thermic effect of protein.

Okay, so that's the first flaw, is the protein values are based off of an inaccurate calculation. And then the second flaw I think had to do with carbs.

It does so the second flaw has to do with carbs. In particular, it has to do with the presence of fiber. Because now the problem with fiber, as we know, depends whether we're talking about insoluble fiber, which is the. The majority of fiber, and that's what we consider fiber. It causes the sweet corn effect, celery, that kind of thing. Right. Soluble fiber. The problem is that fiber really messes up the calculations of. Compared to burning sugar, for example, or burning a refined carbohydrate without the fiber present. And so the presence of fiber was a big mitigating factor in accurately trying to calculate the percentage of carbohydrates that is there and also the thermic effects of it. Right?

Because if I ate like a piece of, say, like white wonder bread, maybe that's close to the 4 calories per gram of carbs. But then like something high in dietary fiber, like the same gram of, let's say, kale or green beans or something like that, that's going to be closer to, I think it's like 2 calories per gram once you add in the fiber. So again, you can't say that 100 grams of, let's say potato is equal to 100 grams of kale.

Not at all. And that. That is that this is the second big problem. Protein and fiber, those are the two big problems. They're not problems. They're good for you. But that's the problem with the calculation.

Okay? And then I think the last one had to do with, like, the heat of combustion or something like that.

So the last thing is the most difficult, and even towards the end of my book, I never get to the bottom of this. And the last thing has to do with the fact that how you combine the foods together, what percentage of fat versus protein versus carbs and the fiber and how they're put together would in of itself also influence the heat of combustion. Now, that is very, very difficult to try and predict because that would mean that every configuration of food you could think of is it beef in a burger, beef in a lasagna, will have to be calculated individually to see the thermic effects. Right?

So to truly know how many calories were in that Pad Thai that you had, you would technically have to take the rice noodles, put them in a bomb calorimeter, take the egg, put that in, take the oil, put that. But what you're saying is that you can't just slap a whole platter of Pad Thai into a bomb calorimeter and expect an accurate result.

Well, you will get an accurate result, but it's just more difficult to. So this is the problem. If you took out the noodles, the peanuts, the egg, and burn each individually and add them up, all right, they're not going to equal. If you just put the whole plate of pad Thai into the bomb Kellerombit's head and burn it, they'd be close, but it wouldn't be equal. Because what they're next to, how much protein and fat and carbs and how they're interacted, how you cooked it, will also influence the thermic effect of food. And this is the most of all of everything I've just said this is the most complex of all because obviously there's infinite number of ways in which we put together food and we eat food. We don't eat macronutrients. Right, right. And so that's the critical thing. We eat food.

Right, exactly. And furthermore, like, if you were to have, let's say, prior to consuming your plate of pad thai, I don't know, like some chia seed gel or something like that, like a whole bunch of fiber, you would technically be decreasing the amount of calories that you might absorb from the pad Thai because of the fiber that's present in your system.

That's correct. Absolutely correct.

Yeah. Yeah. How about this DIT value? What's the DIT value that you get into?

So the DIT value, which stands for diet induced thermogenesis, the heat that actually gives off when you actually eat is the cost of metabolism. Now, digestion is when you take your food and convert them into the primary macronutrients. So glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. Okay, but those are not energy. They cross the gut wall into your blood and get transported to wherever, whatever cell you're going to use, that's going to use the energy. Then what then happens is you have to metabolize those nutrients, those intermediate nutrients, and that costs energy. And that is where we actually lose the energy from protein compared to fat and carbs. So, like, if you actually ate 100 calories of pure protein, which I know we don't do, but if you did, then actually we as human beings can only ever absorb, on average, 70 calories after 100 calories. So 70% of the calories we eat, of the protein calories we eat, we can absorb and use. 30% is given up as heat. And Atwater never took that into account. So those 30% of protein calories are 30% wrong everywhere.

Right. So when we come back to your equation, then the energy that is consumed, we have Some calories that are lost through fecal matter, and then we have digestion, the thermic cost of digestion, and then we have nitrogen loss through the urine, dictating that the number of calories that are reported to be in the food aren't going to be the same once they get into the actual human digestive system. So you have diet induced thermogenesis, you have nitrogen lost through the urine, you have calories lost through fecal matter, and then you also have your potential metabolic rate. We didn't get into this like your thyroid hormone activity or your, your endocrine system activity. Overall, the amount of physical activity that you may or may not be doing during the day, including fidgeting, going to the gym, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, et cetera, et cetera, dictating that. If you look at, let's say, like a so called nutrition expert these days, who might be saying that, you know, it's all, if it fits your macros, it's all calories in equals calories out. Therefore 2000 calories of pop Tarts on any given day is going to be the same as 2000 calories of chicken and green beans and sweet potato. That's just seriously flawed. I mean, the latter scenario would not only result in better satiety, but actually in fewer calories overall absorbed. That's what you're getting at.

And that is 100% correct. Because we, you know, and I end, I end the book by saying because we eat food and we don't eat calories. So we need to think about the quality of the food rather than the total number of calories per se. Now look, I understand that 200 calories of potato chips is twice the portion of 100 calories of potato chips, of course, but so is 200 grams of potato chips more than 100 grams of potato chips. And no one is trying to compare 200 grams of potato chips to 200 grams of carrots. That's the kind of the equivalent comparison we're trying to make here.

Okay, so when you look at food labels, whether it's a UK food label or US food label, do you think that we should be basically going about the process of labeling in a different way?

Think so. I mean, look, I don't want to prescribe my own solution to it. I do think so because I think there's too much information is good. But I think, look, when I go shopping, I don't bring my reading glasses. And so yes, I'm here, I'm trying to look at the back of the pack, I can't see what the nutritional counts are, so I just kind of pick it up and walk away. And so I think we need to highlight the critical elements in the food better. And I think the amount of protein and the amount of fiber and probably the amount of sugar free added sugars are the three items that I want to see highlighted, like traffic lights on the front of the pack of any food, because it will allow us to make better decisions rather than simply just the calories and actually even simply just the amount of fat, you know, what kind of fat are we talking about? You know?

Yeah, yeah. And then the other problem is portion sizes, right?

I never understood portion sizes. Who are the people that decide what portion sizes are? So. So in this country, I don't know what it is. In the States, a portion of pasta is 75 grams. I have never measured pasta in my life. I just kind of tip some in, right?

The only people I know, by the way, that actually have the jewelry scales and the food scales, like the bodybuilders. And honestly, it sucks a ton of the enjoyment out of food to have to weigh every single thing to see if you're actually getting what's written on the portion size on a label.

I mean, okay, professional athletes, bodybuilders, people competing in the Olympics at the moment, they probably. Or their nutritionists, I want to point out, probably, probably do weigh out, weigh out their foods. But Joe Schmo, like me, and then when you look at the portion size and when you go to the hotels and they give you a little tiny pack of cereal, of Cheerios or whatever, right? That is meant to be a portion size when you pour it into the bowl. And I look at that, great. This is not how much of my cereal I pour in the morning when I use the big box. I think the problem with portion sizes is it doesn't, to my mind, at least, reflect the everyday reality of how much people eat.

And a lot of people don't even look at that. Like, you go buy a kombucha at your health food store and a lot of people will suck down the bottle. They'll look at the label and they'll be like, oh, there's 60 calories. But some people don't even look carefully. Some of those things. It's like three portions in one bottle. You're drinking 180 calories. You don't even realize it because the portion size on the label is a third of the bottle. I don't know a lot of people who will Buy like a bottle of kombucha and drink a third of it and then set the rest in the refrigerator, then drink a third later on and a third later on. They usually down the whole bottle.

They down the whole bottle. And this is going to be true for most things. For oj, for soda, for. For most things. And very, very few items, aside from when you go to the hotel and they're trying to save money, are given to you in one portion sizes. And you're right, no one puts half a bottle of kombucha back in the fridge. And why would you? It's just silly.

So let's say that we weren't going to weigh our food and we were just going to kind of try to approximately judge the calorie content in foods. You know, specifically foods that contain fat or carbs. You have an intriguing section in your book where you talk about how crappy a judge we are as humans of the actual calorie content in foods. Can you get into that?

So this was actually work that was done by a colleague of mine, Professor Dana Small, who is a professor at Yale. Very smart woman. And she was interested in how. She was interested in two things. She was interested in how good human beings were at estimating calories and how much we were willing to pay, metaphorically, how much we were willing to pay for the food. And so she set up the experiment in which human beings, volunteers, were meant to try and estimate how much fat there were. So a food that was high in fat, butter, for example, how much calories were there in butter or a piece of fatty meat, versus how much there was in a carb, whatever it is, pasta or potato, versus when you mix the two together, when you actually mix fat and carbs together. Now, what is really interesting in the natural world, very, very, very few things naturally occur that are high in fat and carbs together. Yes, you cook things. We do fry a potato, but that's not in the natural world. In fact, the only thing that we actually have that is high in fat and carbs naturally, or one of the only things is milk, mother's milk.

Right.

And so like breast milk.

That's why I tell people, like, if you want to get fat, one of the best things to do is to consume a lot of dairy because A, it was designed to turn a small mammal into a big mammal and B, it's incredibly hyper palatable because of that blend of fat and carbs. I mean, it was kind of like engineered for a baby to keep coming back for more.

Exactly. Because the Baby doesn't know what else is eating at the time. And so you need to make something. You're right. Otherwise the baby becomes tiger food. So the baby needs to eat as much of it as possible. But the intriguing thing is humans are very good at estimating how many calories, what the energy content of fat is. On average, we get it pretty right. We're less good at estimating how much calories there are in a carb, in a potato, for example, less good. But when you mix the two together, when you mix fat and carbs together, we have no idea. It's just a complete guess. And she tested hundreds of people. It's a complete guess as to how many calories there are in foods that are mixed with fat and carbs, which is a lot of what we eat today. So that's a problem. We are awful at actually trying to off modern foods that are available now. Human beings are terrible at trying to judge how many calories there actually are in them.

Right. And it's kind of a one, two combo whammy, because not only do we really crave that hedonistic combination of food, fat and carbohydrates, but then a lot of times we don't even realize how many freaking calories we're able to consume of that before we realize that we've had too many of those calories.

Absolutely. Now, the second part of the experiment, which she did, was she then scanned everyone's brains when we were doing this. I wasn't doing it when her volunteers were doing this. And when they ate fat, the reward elements of the brain lit up. Ooh, fat. And when they ate carbs went, ooh, carbs. But when they ate the fat and carb, potato chips, chocolate, pizza together, their reward element of the brain lit up like a Christmas tree. It was like super, you know, boosted. And so probably to go back to mother's milk because it was so hyper palatable to. It was meant to be. It was designed to be for the baby to do so. But now we're eating all of these foods that naturally occur and high in fat and carbs, but that's a lot of what we eat today. So the foods we actually eat today are. I don't know if they're designed necessarily to be hyper palatable originally. They probably are.

Ask some of the corporate executives at Nestle if they're actually designed to keep people coming back for more, and I'm guessing they'd probably have an internal response.

I mean, they probably knew these results. So my colleague at Yale she obviously is an academic. She does the research, she publishes the work. I'm almost certain that these results were already realized internally in the major food manufacturers today before she published the work.

Yeah, absolutely. It's of course a total evolutionary mismatch for us to have this contemporary environment rich in all these ultra processed foods that are high in fat and carbs that we do a very poor job calculating the calories of anyways. But then you throw into that the fact that many of these foods, like when you combine a fat with a carb, you're increasing the potential for lipopolysaccharides and toxins to cross from the gut into the blood. You're increasing the potential for inflammatory cytokines that could impact thyroid hormone and metabolism. And so there's all these downstream consequences that could further lower the metabolic rate or impair nutrient absorption that dictates that eating out of packages in general, especially via food that's been ultra processed, is definitely a fast track to fat gain. And you cannot say that the number of calories derived from these ultra processed foods is going to be the same. Again, not to kick this horse to death as the number of calories you might get from eating close to earth and having a high amount of fiber and a decent amount of protein and trying to, as much as you can, kind of separate fat and carbs, especially when they're in an ultra processed scenario.

Aside from everything you've mentioned, the key problem with ultra processed foods, because they've been. I just want to, just want to clarify. Ultra processed for your listeners. Maybe, maybe they do know. I'm not talking about processed foods. So processed foods is cooking something, fermenting something. Yogurt is a processed food. Bread is a processed food. Ultra processed we cannot replicate in our house. Okay? We domestically, we can't do it. Ultra processed foods are industrially processed foods, processed foods that we just cannot replicate. The problem with this heavy industrial processing is it typically strips out protein and or fiber. So these foods are low in protein and low in fiber anyway, increasing the availability of the calories. And because they lack flavor, you have to add flavor back in. And flavor comes from the holy trinity of sugar, salt and fat. And so they have to then. So these foods, you could add this back in. And so ultra processed foods tend to be lower in protein and fiber and high in salt, sugar and fat. That's why they're not so good for you.

Yeah, I passed up an investment opportunity a couple of months ago where someone came out with basically like the equivalent of A Cheeto, you know, essentially like hyper palatable, you know, cheesy bits on your fingertips, you know, lovely umami taste snack combined with of course all the fats that they infuse into this as like an oil for both the, you know, for both the preservative and a food flavor standpoint. And then they added on top of that a little bit of THC into these, into these packaged Cheetos. It was like a THC infused Cheetos Cheeto. So then you've got the endocannabinoid reward system triggered and the whole munchie effect. And again, great business model but pretty crappy for human overall health. But if I would have been shoving aside my thoughts about how many people were probably going to have their metabolism damaged by this stuff, I'd probably be rich. But at the same time I understand that that stuff is not going to do anybody any favors in the weight loss or the health department.

The real difficulty, and I think I'll just raise this, raise this issue now, is when we're talking about ultra processed foods is they're cheap. This is the bottom line, right? You walk into any supermarket because they're industrially processed, there's economies of scale, they're long shelved lives. So the tragedy of it is this, because they're cheap, then the less privileged in society end up eating it more because, well, look, the less privileged in society lack a lot of things. They lack cash, they lack time and they lack knowledge as well actually. But they lack cash and time. And so if you're Mrs. Smith who works two shifts to keep your kids alive and suddenly you come home, you have no time, you have no cash or very little cash, you end up buying the unhealthiest foods for your family because, and I can't blame her, she's trying to feed her kids, right? And this is the real tragedy. Whereas us middle class people here having this conversation, I think we should follow that we really need to reduce our ultra processed foods. The question is, how do we do it equitably across all of society, how do we make sure that Mrs. Smith, when she makes a choice, because she has less choices than us, to feed her kids, can feed them healthily. And this is something which I've been grappling with. And what do I say, right, what do I say when a government minister asks me? Well, you say all these negative things, well, how should we be feeding our people? And I struggle, I struggle to say how I'm going to try and get Mrs. Smith fed when she doesn't have time or money.

Yeah. A lot of people who I give advice to about this, I tell them, well, you would be shocked that if you just tell yourself that you're going to try for the next few times you go to the grocery store not to duck down in the aisles, maybe the spice and oil aisle, but aside from that, everything is done around the perimeter of the grocery store. And from berries and avocados and a bag of produce over to the meat section where you grab a few cuts of meat, even if it's less expensive stew meat, you know, over to the. Over to the, you know, the bakery section where you might grab a loaf of sourdough bread. You can actually get by if you shop the perimeter of the grocery store on a pretty low food budget. And that. That doesn't even count. You know, the idea of, you know, maybe joining a local CSA or, you know, buying into a part of a cow and, you know, some of the things that you can do from a bulk standpoint, but honestly, like a big, big one for a lot of people is just see if you can shop around the perimeter of the grocery store. And it is shocking how inexpensively you can do that if you just kind of resist that urge to duck down the aisle. The other thing about ducking down the aisle is, of course, there's all the food marketing, everything down to even like the cartoon characters on the front of cereal boxes. They've adopted those so that the eyeballs of the cartoon character on the front is like oriented down to about the level of a child's. A child's eyesight, meaning that the kids are more likely to grab that off the shel and throw it into mom's cart. So you're fighting a battle when you go down the aisles versus when you shop around the perimeter of the grocery store. So that's one big tip that I give to people. But then at the end of the book, you actually have. You present all these problematic scenarios, but then you have some pretty good advice. I don't just want to present people with a bunch of problems here without giving them some solutions. And you get into some of your ideas about protein and fiber and sugars. Can you lay out what your. It's not overly prescriptive advice, but your general idea, based on writing this book, of what you would tell people who want to get a pretty good macronutrient ratio and fight a little bit less of an uphill battle against the whole calorie counting and weight gain scenario that comes along with ultra processed food okay.

So instead of counting calories, I think there's some numbers we want to think about, but hopefully they're not too onerous. And the first is considering your protein. And I think there is a sweet. Incidentally, there is a sweet spot for protein if you are not hugely. If you're not an athlete. Okay. And that sweet spot is 16% of your total energy intake during the day to come from protein. And incidentally, when I say protein, I don't necessarily mean a steak. It could be from a steak, obviously, but from. From pulses, from tofu, from. From any source of protein. Will. Will. Will cut it. 16.

16%. Yeah, that, that. So what I tell people is, you know, if you take your weight in pounds somewhere around 0.55 to 0.8 ish, if you actually want to do the math. And. And that generally for most people, does come out to about 15 to a maximum of 30% of protein. But, you know, so you can customize it if you want to take your body weight and go 0.55 to 0.8 grams per pound. But that 16%, that. That's a. That's a pretty decent value. It's a good baseline based on a lot of the research that's out there on protein. And that, of course, based on what we've just learned about the thermic effect of protein and the satiety of protein and the fact that it just makes it. I mean, anybody who sits down to a meal of, let's say, chicken, like, try and put a bunch of chicken on your plate and nothing else and tell me that you're not already feeling full after one fricking chicken breast. I mean, that's right. Unless you've got it doused in, like, you know, cheesy whiz sauce and enormous amounts of salt and maybe some type of caramelized balsamic vinaigrette on top of it, it's pretty hard to just sit there and mow down protein without feeling full pretty quickly.

That's. That's. That's exactly right.

Okay, so. So we got protein. What's the next one?

The next one is fiber, which is 30 grams. Now, the problem is, on average, certainly in the US and the uk, which, the numbers I know. Well, on average, we're probably only eating something like 15 or 16 grams a day. We need to double or actually more the merrier. We need to double or more the amount of fiber we eat. We don't eat enough fiber. Nowhere close to it.

Right. And I think that for some people who have gut issues like small intestine bacterial overgrowth or, you know, an inflamed gut or leaky gut. Sometimes they don't do well with the raw roughage. You know, putting a bunch of kale in a blender or eating a giant ass salad from Whole Foods or something like that. But I should note that there are ways to go about doing this even if you have gut issues. Like I mentioned chia seeds, right? You can literally take a few tablespoons of chia seeds. And I do this. I always have a couple big glass mason jars of just chia seed slurry, which is like a gel in my refrigerator along with pureed pumpkin. I get organic pureed pumpkin. I just order that from Amazon. Incredibly satiating. And I'll put a few pilefuls of that next to dinner or the chia seed slurry. And then the other one that I really like is, is it's called Sea Moss Gel. There's a company called Akasha that I order this from. And again, it's like a very soluble form of fiber that's nourishing to the gut that doesn't result in the same type of digestive distress as say a handful of almonds and a bunch of raw kale and a giant salad of, let's say carrots and tomatoes and cucumbers. And so there are ways to get your fiber even if you have digestive issues. Because I personally eat, I eat a lot of nose to tail carnivore based protein like I do a lot of bone broth, a lot of liver, a lot of heart, a limited amount of red meat, but I'll have a couple portions of red meat a week. I have some wild caught fish, you know, big fatty cuts of fish. But then I dress that up with these really digestible forms of fiber like the chia seed slurry and the pumpkin puree and the sea moss gel. And I find that I'm able to get my fiber and have my poops, but not do so in a manner that results in a bunch of vegetables in my crap or the digestive distress that I think a lot of people do get from the raw roughage. So don't think that 30 grams a day of fiber has to be all from raw vegetables, right?

Oh, no, that's great advice. I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes that. No, that's excellent advice. That's fantastic advice.

Yeah, yeah. Because I had to deal with a lot of that. And then once I followed a low fodmap diet for a while and had to kind of look for sources of fiber that weren't as and carbohydrate that weren't as fermentable. Those few really wound up doing well with me, along with the majority of my carbs being root vegetables like purple potato and sweet potato and pumpkin and parsnip and beet. And those just seem to be very digestible, yet fiber dense carbohydrate sources that don't result in the same issues that some people get from corn and raw salads and things like that. How about sugar? What do you think about sugars?

Okay, so sugar. Now, there is a big distinction between free sugars, or in America, In America, they call them added sugars as opposed to sugars that are stuck in a food. Okay. In particular, fruit. All right, so it's the difference between drinking orange juice, OJ and eating and eating an orange. And so what we got to do is to try and limit the amount of added sugars, free sugars you have in your food to 5% or below, and stuff that was fiber. It helps you get the fiber in. There's no, there's no issues with that. But. So we should actually try and reduce the amount of free sugars, added sugars we actually have to 5% or less.

Okay. All right, so. So 5%, that. That's not your total carbohydrate intake. That's the actual added sugar.

That's it. And this includes, incidentally, it includes honey. It includes maple syrup. It doesn't make it any better. It tastes nicer, but it doesn't make it any better that it comes in a maple syrup or in honey. It's still the same sugar as the powdered white stuff.

Right. And one other piece of advice I give people that I kind of alluded to when I was talking about, like underground storage, root type of carbohydrates. But it's this concept that I learned a while ago about cellular carbs versus acellular carbs. Like, cellular carbs would be things like root tubers or shoots or leaves or fruits that have the carbs actually packaged inside of the cells. And those cells have fiber that remain relatively intact during cooking. So the number of carbs that you get from them is less. Back to what we talked about regarding the flaws of the bomb calorimeter. And their carbohydrate density is low. And if you were to do a Google search for cellular versus acellular carbohydrates, you would find some really good lists. You know, whereas the acellular Carbohydrates, they don't have cell walls. Those have been removed due to the processing that you just talked about, Giles. So their carb density is high. And that would be like refined flour and white sugar and processed grains. And I mean, I personally would take your 5% of added sugars and maybe raise that to consider just 5 to 10% of overall carb intake to come from acellular carbs. And if you choose the majority of your carbs from cellular carbs, I think that's enormously helpful as well from a satiety and a health standpoint.

And it maximizes your fiber. Right, because by doing that you automatically have more fiber as well.

Right? Exactly, exactly. Well, this is just all fascinating. I mean, your book goes into a lot more, but I think it was just chock full of really practical advice. And hopefully folks are now equipped with a little bit of knowledge. When your personal trainer, your nutritionist says, oh, it doesn't matter, just eat your 2,000 calories a day, let's just start there. I don't care what else you do. Well, I do. I mean, and not only does this have environmental implications, when we look at monocropping of a lot of these, well, what wind up being acellular carbohydrates, but it also has some pretty significant health implications as well. So understand that as Giles has pointed out, for those of you listening in, you know, really, if you're trying to lose weight or you're trying to just eat fewer calories or eat more of the right kind of calories, it really comes down to higher amounts of good natural organic protein. You know, right around that 16% range that Giles has talked about, or that 0.55 to 0.8 grams per pound that I mentioned. Eating a lot of the cellular carbohydrates versus the acellular carbohydrates, rich in fiber, going for around 30 grams of fiber per day, avoiding added sugars and trying to restrict those to less than 5% and just understanding that your body is not a freaking bomb calorimeter. It's a lot more complex than that. And there's a lot of hormonal and digestive interplay that goes into the foods that you eat. And this book, if you guys want to get more, it's called Calories Don't Count. Calories Don't Count. How We Got the Science of Weight Loss Wrong is a really great read. If you want to delve into this even more and get into some of the other things that Giles talks about in the book. Giles, anything else you want to share with people while I've got you on the show?

No, no. This has been a great interview. I love going into the science of it. Normally people ask stupid questions. You ask great questions.

I love to geek out on this. Are you still doing your podcast by the way?

I am trying to get the publisher to fund another bunch of episodes, so tune in.

Alright. That one was called Dr. Giles Yo. Choose the fat, right?

That's right.

Okay. All right, cool. Well, thanks for coming on with us folks. I'm going to put all the show notes as well as a link to Giles book and everything else we talked about. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com countingcalories that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Countingcalories until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Giles Yeoh signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mentioned. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is probably providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.