LS 25 - Nutrition Fads and Other Diet Cults with Matt Fitzgerald

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Welcome to the Longevity Show, Informing listeners on the important aspects of health, wealth, and happiness to ensure you live life to its fullest. With fascinating interviews with top authors and gurus in the field, along with the latest news in the science and technology of longevity, we're going to reveal expert advice and amazing secrets of living a longer, happier life. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Matt Fitzgerald to the show. He is a specialist in training intelligence for pair sports and a Featured coach on active.com he's author of a new book entitled Diet the Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and A Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of Us. And we'll talk about some of his other books as well. Matt, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on your show.

The pleasure is all mine. Just to give our listeners a sense of geography, where are you located?

I am in Northern California, in the Central Valley, smack dab between San Francisco and Yosemite National Park.

Got it. Okay. Good stuff. It's always, always nice to know, you know, we've got people from all over the globe listening and also as guests on the show. So, you know, there's still an importance to geography a little bit. It kind of gives a perspective. Definitely does. Gosh, I mean, how many diets have we all been exposed to, you know, in. By diet, I don't necessarily mean something to lose weight, but just an eating philosophy. Of course, when New Year's hits every year, everybody's trying something new. A lot of times they're doing it throughout the year. And I must admit, Matt, this year on January 1st, I started a very lightweight, not very strict version of the Paleo diet, which to me means something as simple as just cutting down on carbs. That's really, you know, But I don't know that I'm any paleo expert, but, you know, what do you think of all this? What do we make of all these diet fads?

Well, you know, this is a very human phenomenon with an ancient pedigree. You know, we've been making diets really that center around separate cultures for as far back as history goes. If you think of something like the, you know, the kosher dietary laws of the ancient Hebrews, you know, every culture had a way of eating that it came with and sort of identified with. Way back then. There was really only one way of Eating per culture. And things have changed a lot. Now you can live in Alaska and eat a Mediterranean diet or what have you. So there's this lot of freedom. There's also this competitive marketplace of health based diets that has emerged. So the situation has changed, but it's still sort of a new twist on an ancient phenomenon. But it has led to certainly a great proliferation of brand name diets and with more coming all the time.

Let's use the Paleo Diet as an example. Do you know who's behind that brand? Does someone have a trademark on that? Are they actually making money every time someone talks about it or writes about it? Or is that just something that's in common usage? I kind of wonder.

Well, it's certainly copyrighted. There's a book that came out in 2002, original by a gentleman named Loren Cordain called the Paleo Diet. So it goes back to him, although the concept actually goes back to the 70s. There was a gastroenterologist named Walter Voitman and he came up, I think he wrote something called the Stone Age Diet. Same concept, he just gave it a different name.

Yeah, Paleo, I think sounds a little more sexy and, I don't know, interesting than Stone Age Diet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marketing matters.

It does matter. It does matter. So I just looked it up while you were talking and there are a couple of trademarks. There's actually six of them. Paleo Diet Boot camp, the Paleo Diet, there's four of those. Those are probably in different classes. And then there's the Quantum Paleo 21 Day Diet. Corporate for corporate team building.

So there you go. Yeah. So humans have always had this sort of big thing about, you know, the way they eat. Of course, eating is a social experience a lot of times and certainly throughout history. Do any of them work? Does one work better than the other? Does it all depend on our unique body chemistry and our unique DNA? What's the answer to all this stuff?

Well, if nutrition science has proven anything, it has really demonstrated that there is no single ideal diet for humans. I mean, that's really what as a. Metabolically. Metabolically, it's what makes us distinct from pretty much any other species, is that we are nature's ultimate omnivores. If you go back and look at our deep history, it really is a story of constant experimentation with our diet. And that's one of the reasons I consider the Paleo Diet doctrine false. The Paleo Diet doctrine is based on the idea that it takes forever to adapt to changes in diet. But humans have been doing that for so long that we actually have built in adaptability. And there's pretty good research showing that humans can adapt to drastic changes in diet not only in less than millennia, but literally from one day to the next. Because that built in adaptability.

That's interesting. So, you know, the way the Paleo diet was kind of sold to me, if you will, is I went for one of these one day executive health screenings. You know, the deal where you spend a whole. I never did that before. And you know, I did it right after Christmas. You know, it was a full day, you know, seeing like different specialists and fitness people and doctor, you know, meeting with the doctor for a couple hours, you know, $4,500. I always was kind of curious about this kind of stuff and so I did it. And you know, he said pretty much the same thing you just said, is that, you know, people really over the millennia haven't really change that much as far as their biology. And you know, that sort of strikes a chord with me as kind of a logical thing. And you know, a lot of the dietary problems arose when agriculture came around and, and you know, we, we weren't just eating vegetables and meat and you know, that's when all, all the bread and the wheat and you know, all this kind of stuff started and, and that was the problem. And I got to tell you, I still love cereal, albeit high end, you know, cereal, you know, that's really expensive. But I still, I absolutely love it and I, I really do feel like it's good for me. That's the thing. I haven't given up, you know, and I'm not very strict about anything really, but. So I'll eat some bread and stuff once in a while, but, but you know, it kind of makes sense, you know, that rationale. And it kind of makes sense, at least to me, that, you know, bread and starches and stuff, they turn into sugar and sugar isn't good for us. Really. I don't know. What are your thoughts? Am I wrong?

Well, I think it's no accident that the Stone age diet, the first iteration of this concept, came about in the 1970s. Really what happened then was people started to realize that we had lost our way with our diet. But the thing is, we really lost our way then in the 70s, not at the agricultural revolution. At that point we started cultivating grains. It didn't happen as abruptly as some people imagine, but whole grains are healthy. Pretty much anything that was introduced or given a bigger place in the human diet back then, about 12,000 years ago, when it's researched today, when the effects of dairy consumption or whole grain consumption, the effects of health are looked at, it's all positive, like whole grains. The people who eat the most whole grains today in 2014 have lower risk of diabetes, they have lower body fat percentage, they have lower risk of developing heart disease, they live longer. The list goes on.

So I intuitively think the grains are kind of good for me. You know, they feel like they're good for me for some reason. I just have that sense about it. But, you know, I. I mean, they do turn into sugar, right? I mean, doesn't that increase your chances of diabetes? Isn't that bad?

No, it's one of those things where there is one of the features of this diet cult mentality is a tendency to think in very absolutist black and white terms about foods and nutrients. So sugar has been branded bad. Well, guess what? Our nervous system runs on sugar.

Yeah. Our brain, our brain especially runs on sugar. Our brains really need it. Yeah, that's what, that's the fuel.

And also one of the reasons that sugar can. Let's be clear, we eat too much refined sugar today. But one of the reasons we do is because we have a built in sweet tooth. And we came about that sweet tooth through evolution.

There was a survival advantage back in our early prehistory to actually having a sweet tooth because most of the sugar came from fruit in our diet back then. And fruit was the most energy dense food that was available to us back then. That was a good thing. When starvation was the biggest problem with our diet, having a taste for high energy foods was good. Sugar is not bad. It's just something that we eat too much of.

Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. Because one of my ex girlfriends, I always tease her and I say, you know, you have orthorexia. Have you heard of that one, by the way?

Yeah, I talk about it a little bit in the book.

Okay. Yeah, I love that. So orthorexia, basically, unlike anorexia, orthorexia is, you know, that's just someone who's orthorexic, I guess, is what you'd say is really, you know, picky about food and they're into organic everything and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Right. So she's just a nut about this stuff. Right. And so I said to her, you know, I said, you know, we had this discussion about sugar once. And she explained to me, and this seemed logical too. You know, the problem is all of these things seem Kind of logical, you know. And she said, look, the reason that fruit, you know, fruit has a lot of sugar. We all know that. But fruit, when you eat whole fruit, like it was put out for us in nature, it also has a lot of fiber, which slows the absorption of the sugar. If you eat a candy bar, you know, that's just awful because it's just massive sugar with nothing to slow down the absorption of it, and it just goes right into your bloodstream, and you become fat and diabetic and you die. And, you know, she said, like, why pasta is bad is the same thing. There's really no fiber in it. But if you eat wheat pasta, okay, which also degrades into sugar, it degrades more slowly. I don't know if degrading is the right word, but it absorbs more slowly at a more steady pace, like the fruit. That made sense, too.

Yes. You can go down a primrose path anytime you pick up the microscope and look deep inside what's in food.

I prefer to keep my focus on the big picture, the food itself being close to its natural state. Because what happens if you. Michael Pollan coined the term. You probably are familiar with this one. Nutritionism. And it's where we're basically losing the forest for the trees. The mistake that you might make if you focus too much on what makes a food good in terms of the nutrients that's inside it, is that you could still engineer foods that have the good things in it. But guess what? The sum is usually greater than the. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts with food. So when we try to look at the good things that are in food and then engineer them, even take most vitamins and supplements, for example, they don't do any good, even though they contain only the good stuff and food. So, again, I like to focus on the foods themselves, the big picture, and not get too caught up in what they're made of, because that sort of atomistic perspective tends to lead us astray.

Okay, all right, good. Well, so tell us more. I mean, what. What should people know?

Well, one thing I think that people expect when they pick up my book and look at the title is they expect me to be bashing all of these diet cults, as I call them, and exposing them as unhealthy when they claim to be healthy. And that's actually not the case. I make at all quite the opposite. I think that most of the more popular fad diets or popular diet are, or at least can be perfectly healthy. And that's actually the first indication that there is no single best way to eat.

Right.

Because they all work more or less, or at least they all can work. I'm sort of more interested in the phenomenon itself, like what makes people attach themselves and invest their identities so much in.

One kind of rule bound way of eating. And you know, you see some of actually the ugliness, the tribalism that comes out of this, like the current ongoing wars between the low fat crowd and the low carb crowd or the vegan crowd and the meat loving crowd. It's pretty interesting stuff. So that's kind of what the book focuses on more because I really think that the rules of healthy eating are pretty simple and people try to get too clever by half with some of the doctrines and rules that they come up with. But it's really a book that's not so much on this is how I think you should eat versus here is this phenomenon out there that it's good to recognize all these traps we fall into where we start thinking non rationally about food so that you can just be clear headed and make sort of open eyed choices for yourself as a.

Okay, so what are some of those rules? You said it was pretty simple.

Yeah. So if the question is what do we really know about how people should eat.

It'S not terribly sexy. And that's why the government has their MyPlate guidelines. Right? That's sort of the new version of the old pyramid. Well, do you know anyone who's on the MyPlate diet?

No, not at all.

No, because it doesn't have that community, it doesn't have all those mechanisms that the diet cults have to get people to really get excited about a particular way of eating. But the rules it's based on make perfect sense. So the idea is you should be eating more fruits and vegetables than any other type of food. Things like sweets, refined grains and fried foods should be kept at a minimum. Whole grains should be eaten in preference to refined grains. Just stuff like that.

I think a lot of fourth graders in this day and age really understand that much. And there are plenty of examples of people who decide to clean up their diet knowing no more than that about healthy eating. And they get terrific results when they do well.

Okay, so one of the things you said and you said fried foods for example, should be kept to a minimum. I mean granted they taste good and we're all probably going to eat them at one time or another, but kept to a minimum, shouldn't we just ideally not eat them at all? There's no redeeming value in fried food, right?

Well, from a health perspective, no. But health is not the only reason we eat. So I don't think there is any expert out there would say that if you eat fried food one time in your life, you've shortened your life. I don't think anyone believes that. So then the question becomes, well, then why not? If it tastes good and if it's part of our culture, why not? You just try and find that threshold where the harm starts to occur. And there's nothing that is considered food in the current American diet that you can't eat in small amounts without paying zero price for your health. So I don't believe in that kind of. I mean, if you just have no interest in fried food, more power to you. But if you do, there's no reason for draconian, absolute forbidding any particular kind of food, whether it's apple pie or fried chicken.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the exercise side of the equation and the training? Your other book, what is it entitled about? Brain Training.

Brain Training for Runners. Yeah, so that's really, you know, I am both a sports nutritionist and an endurance sports coach, so I coach triathletes and runners. So I'm big on exercise. But there are actually a couple chapters in the Diet Cults book that also handle the address the exercise side of the equation. There's a chapter in there called Eat Bad, Look Good, which is really about just how much more can you get away with in your diet if you have an intensive exercise habit? The answer to that question, in terms of what science tells us is quite a lot. In fact, no matter how healthy your diet is, you cannot really be a very healthy person if you sit in your recliner all day, every day. You know, there's that expression, you are what you eat, but I think you are what your body does with what you eat. And the same diet will have very, very different effects on your body if you exercise versus if you do not exercise. So you can't be as healthy as you can be without good exercise regimen. But also if you do have that regimen, it really does give you a little bit more room to have the occasional bucket of fried chicken.

On the exercise side. It's interesting that you're an endurance coach. So, you know, you're talking about half marathons, triathlons, probably marathons, maybe even Ironmans. I don't know. Let me just tell you about what one of the other things that the doctor told me when he sold me on the paleo idea. And you know, it's kind of funny I should mention to the listeners that when I was in my 20s, I tried being a vegetarian. You know, again, a not super strict one, but I did it for about six years and I do not think that was good at all. I really, you know, at the time I felt, I must admit, kind of self righteous about it. The same girlfriend I just mentioned to you gave me the book Diet for a New America by John Robbins, which, you know, I read and I ate it up, if you will. You know, all of the information seemed really good, you know, and the connections seem good, but, but I just did not feel good. I think we are meant to be omnivores. I, I just don't, you know, and it's funny because over the years, like I've watched people who are vegan vegetarian, I have yet to see one that really has good muscle tone. They do not look that great to me. You know, I mean you could do it for a while and sure, but like over a long period of time it just, you know, I kind of think we need animal proteins, you know, that's not exactly what I was going to talk about, but. Thoughts on that?

Yeah. So I do exist in a different.

Sphere where most of the vegetarians and vegans I know are in fact endurance athletes. And my personal experience says they certainly have muscle tone. Not only that, some of them are professional athletes, world beaters, and some of them have been for years and years and years. So you certainly can be, I think you just found.

What works for you and what doesn't work. And there is individuality. I think there are some people for whom a lot of grains don't work. I personally, that's not my experience. I seem to be able to eat grains as long as they're mostly whole grains, without consequence. But I would say that if you put a well constructed vegetarian diet together with exercise, in my experience it seems to work more often than not, though I would recognize that it doesn't work for some people.

Actually that'll, that'll dovetail into the other point I was going to make. When the doctor sold me on the Paleo diet, he also sold me on the idea of interval training. Because just before we talked about this, I was on the, the bike, the exercise bike where they put the mask on you and you know, they look at your breathing and how efficiently you use oxygen and all this kind of stuff. You know, I had never done that before. That was a first time. And they talked about the importance of Interval training and told me what my range was. And they said the whole point of exercise should basically be you take your heart rate up to this number and then as soon as you hit that number, then you slow down and you let it drop down to this number. And then as soon as it gets to that number, which for me was like 125 per minute, you know, then ramp it back up to the other number again, which is like 165. Okay? And then just keep doing that, you know, do it maybe five times or so and you're done. That's all you need. Interval train like that every day and you'll be awesome. The way he sold that to me was twofold. He went back to the whole argument of, you know, what did we do when we were cavemen? Okay? And if we had an animal that we needed to hunt and chase and, and capture for food, you know, we had to run really fast and chase it, and we didn't have to run 26.2 miles, okay? And if, and if a predator was running after us, we didn't have to run 26.2 miles to outrun them. We had to run really fast for a short time. And that's how we're built. And then he also said, and I'll just tell you the next thing he did so you can come back at me, then he pulls up on his computer, he pulls up a slide and it's got a picture of a marathon runner. You've probably seen this, a marathon runner and a sprinter. And he said, who looks better? And I said, well, the sprinter looks much better to me. The marathon runner looks emaciated. You know, the sprinter looks fit and good and I want to be the sprinter. And he said, well, you know, that's another reason that interval training, sprinting, doing the 100 yard dash a few times a day makes a lot more sense than going out and running a marathon. And now this is going to be interesting saying that to you because you're an endurance coach. So blow that argument away. Feel free.

Well, you know what's interesting is that if you take, if you find someone who is into the paleo diet, nine times out of ten, you already know his philosophy of exercise and you also know his philosophy on barefoot running. So either people tend to be when they're right about one thing, they're right about everything, or it's really not about being right or wrong at all, but it's a matter of groupthink that forms around particular cultures.

Yeah. And just to be fair, he didn't say anything about barefoot running. We didn't even discuss that. But.

Right, but I'm telling you, I could tell you what his philosophy is. Do you see what I'm saying?

I'm going to ask him now that you mentioned that.

Yeah, it all fits together. And that's not just a paleo thing. That's with all diets. I was interviewed by a paleo runner guy recently and I swear I could have written his interview questions for him. I knew what they all were going to be because they have the same set of memes that they all just, they're just fed a doctrine wholesale and just accept it all. So, yeah, all that stuff you told me, I've heard it a million times before. And it's just interesting how that's. Rather than blow it out of the water, I'll just say that, that all these things tend to come together as a package deal in all of the.

Diet cult talk, if you would, about the point of endurance training. I mean, you know, what's so great about it? I, you know, my friends that run marathons and half marathons and triathlons, let me tell you, I have a massive amount of respect for them because, you know, I'm not trying to do that. In fact, when I run a 5K, I think that's a major accomplishment. You know, running just for long distances just kind of bores me. I just, I, I don't know, I just, I think it's a great willpower achievement to be able to do that. I'm not one of those people, you know, so, you know, I'll say that. But you know, a lot of these people that run these long distances, I mean, you know, you fast forward 10, 20 years and they've got like joint problems, knee problems, you know, all this kind of stuff or, or not, you know, tell me, tell me what you think.

Yeah, well, running, you know, long distance running, Running is one of the most popular fitness activities and one of the most popular participatory sports. Why do you think that is? I would say it's because running is the oldest form of exercise and just something very natural, very human and also highly enjoyable for a lot of people. Not everyone for sure, but that's, that's how I started running. My dad was a marathon runner back in the 80s and I got into it through him and I happened to be good at it. And every kid's a sucker for what they're good at, but I just enjoyed it. So fast forward 30 plus years and I'm still at it. I've had every overuse injury, you can name some of them more than once. I've had.

Surgery on both of my knees.

But I still love it and that's why I do it. Every now and then someone comes up with a study showing that running marathons damages the heart muscle. I just don't care. I'm 43 years old. I still get asked for my ID when I buy alcohol.

I'm an exceptionally healthy person at 43. Now it may all catch up with, with me when I'm 85 and you know, boo hoo. I won't live to 120. But my personal philosophy is that I would rather add life to my years than add years to my life. And I just feel fantastic.

That's what, well, you, you get the runners high. I mean that's a legitimate thing. Those, those endorphins just start pumping in and you know, it's kind of like you're just coasting when you're, when you're in the groove, right? When you're in the zone.

Yes, but it also lasts all day, every day.

I have tons of energy just getting through a long day of work and chores, doing laundry, cooking, plus my workouts, all that. It's absolutely no sweat because I'm so healthy, because I do so much aerobic exercise.

But doing the interval way wouldn't do that for you. I mean, when I, when I get up in the morning and I do, you know, like I have an app on my phone called the 7 Minute Workout. And you know, I've worked out for an hour and a half at a time. I've done, you know, tons of hot yoga and you know, weightlifting and things like that. But you know, when I do that seven minute work, that's pretty good. I feel pretty great, you know. Would you feel just as good if you did the short, quick interval type thing?

Well, I wouldn't perform as well competitively. It's funny that we've gone down this road. My next book, as a matter of fact, which will come out in the fall, is one called 8020 running. And the 8020 stands for the concept that to achieve maximum fitness for endurance sports, you should do 80% of your training at low intensity and 20% at high intensity. This is in fact what elite athletes in all of the endurance sports, from rowing to cross country skiing to cycling to triathlon to running, all of them, they all do this and they all evolve that formula unconsciously. That's how evolution works. When it has found the ideal solution To a problem. It's the blind watchmaker. You would not see that kind of absolute uniformity unless it, it's like the eye, the camera eye, as biologists called it. It evolved independently in multiple species because it simply is the best solution to a problem. And now that this 80:20 ratio has been identified, scientists are now proactively testing it. Where they'll take a group of athletes, put them on an all intervals plan, then take another and have them do 80% of their training at low intensity. And in every single instance, the people who do most of their training at low intensity, they still do intervals, but they choose their spots for them. They end up getting much fitter, much faster than people who either go slow all the time or go fast all the time.

What is the camera eye?

The camera eye is the eyes in your head.

It's the biologist's formal name for the particular structure with retina and lens and all that stuff. So if you go millions and millions of years back, it evolved independently.

In multiple different species.

Okay, but you say that as though like all these athletes sort of discovered this 8020 rule in common and then you said that was the camera eye.

Yeah, I'm drawing an analogy. The, the term for it is convergent evolution.

Oh, okay. Okay, okay. Yeah, okay, good. Well, that's very interesting. Matt, what else would you like people to know as we wrap up? And please give out your website, tell people where they can find you.

Sure. So I guess one thing I didn't get to mention is that aside from kind of explosing exposing the phoniness and exposing it.

Yeah, that's a good way. We just coined a new term. Let's go trademark that. Yeah, I like it.

Leave it there. There's this concept in the book called agnostic healthy eating. So I don't just pick apart the doctrine of various diet cults. I also offer an alternative for maybe people who want to eat healthily but are sort of turned off by the sanctimoniousness of the vegans and the arbitrary restrictions of the paleo people or what have you. I consider it the least restrictive way to attain the highest level of health through diet agnostic healthy eating. And you can find out more about diet Cult and all of my books at my website, which is mattfitzgerald.org and.

That'S mattfitzgerald.org not.com that's.org. okay, great. Well, Matt Fitzgerald, thank you so much for joining us today.

I really enjoyed talking to you.

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