A MASTERCLASS On The 3 HACKS To Lose Weight & Prevent Disease EP 1295

So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start.

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You're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state. okay? So when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up. And as insulin goes up, its job, like its normal job, is to tell your body to store those calories, okay? So you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat. But that's the point. So you eat lunch or dinner, there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat, it's called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop, and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage. And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night, is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin is dropping, and you're using calories. So you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, I'm going good.

When I'm eating, I'm storing. I'm not using calories. Is that right?

Every time I eat down, I will store. I'm not burning body fat. You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example. And that sugar is going to signal that, hey, sugar is coming in.

Use the sugar that's coming in. Don't burn anything off my body. Yeah, exactly. Keep all that stored fat.

Keep it. Just keep Pile it on, right? Exactly. So the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can't skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you have to snack all day long. So now if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for, is about 14 hours and 45 minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at 8:00 a.m., you don't stop till 10:45 p.m. That's on average. That's the average.

14 hours, you mean a 14-hour span of eating from the start to finish, right? You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours within a 14-hour window.

It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. so the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o'clock you're done, you know, boom, you're, you know, now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you say, oh, you need time to digest, right? That's what she sort of said. But the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times. And that was the secret that they could stay relatively slim. Now, if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state. and start using those calories. The problem, of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories. Your body, so the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat stores because your body is like, the instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem, of course, is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same. Same thing, right? 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating. And that's all intermittent fasting is. If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you within an eight-hour window or a four-hour window or whatever, what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored which is body fat predominantly. But that is precisely the reason you carry body fat. Like that body fat is not there for looks, it's there for you to use, right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're going to burn it. Well, so again, go back to the '70s and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. Well, you know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner. And if you're a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner.

Right.

So you can tell, you went from 12 o'clock to 8:00 AM, 20 hours.

You look good the next day. You're looking lean, you got a six pack, it's burning fat.

Exactly. And nobody died, nothing bad happened, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right? And that's the whole point, is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today. because when we were cavemen and cave women, there was no food.

You didn't have food every day.

Exactly. There might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. And that was the whole point. So let's let our body use it because that's the most natural thing to do.

What's the process for you? your day-to-day life. Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day? Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, I rarely eat breakfast, and I'll tell you that it didn't come. I mean, I started this in medical school, and that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go, like, you know, I'd wake up literally, like, five minutes before I left the door, you know, I brushed my teeth. put on some clothes and rolled out the door. It was just the way I was. And so I don't eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, what's going to happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. It's just going to keep doing it. There's nothing wrong with it. So a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while when I get very busy, I will do a 24-hour fast, which is a one meal a day. And then every so often I'll do a longer fast. And the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive. to that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at, say, you know, during major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that's sort of universal.

So, you know, everyone's doing it, so no one's feeling- Exactly. Because- stressed when they smell the food.

Exactly. So if you're, if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or, you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, Everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. Physically, it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly. But that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple of years ago, I went on a cruise and really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot and I knew it and I could feel it and my pants were tight and stuff. So I did sort of a three or four day fast. And I'll tell you, by the next week, I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week and but I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation. I'm doing this. But at the same time, I know, Hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat. And, and, and, and, and it gives you a great tool to use if you need it, right?

Yeah, it's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, six, eight hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time. Is that right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard 70s style, sort of 8 A.M. to 6 p.m. which in a 14 hour fast every single night. Remember, they're doing 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it. Like, that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating.

Right.

But now, of course, the, the, the, the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater, you can eat at your desk, you can eat in a car. Like in the 70s, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting in.

A boardroom, for example.

Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there's food everywhere. Donuts, donuts and cookies, right? Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right? It's like, well, why? We're having a meeting here, right? So that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of you know, eight hour eating window, 10 hour eating window, you can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right. So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time, but no food. No food.

Yeah.

So if you look, if you think about fasting, so the ad, what, the amount of energy that you need. So a pound of fat has 3,500 calories roughly. If you need about 1,800 calories, so that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like 100 pounds overweight, you could go 200 days. You know, if you want to lose 100 pounds, you could go 200 days without eating. before you get and survive and survive. Exactly.

And be okay.

Exactly. Be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient fat is an efficient store of calories. Right. It's very efficient.

That's why we developed it.

It's to keep you alive when there's no food around.

Exactly. So you use it. Does it affect your digestive system? Does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time?

Yeah.

And what happens when you start eating again? Does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your Choline, metabolism, what's affected there?

And this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint. Assuming of course you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're going to burn a lot a lot of muscle. And the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat. So people say, oh, you're gonna burn muscle. It's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat. But the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, right? Like, why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive? Right? And it's like, you know, if you save firewood all winter for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into.

Fire.

It's like, why would you be so stupid? Our body's just the same. It's not that. So, you know, and I know, and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right? That thing does nothing for building muscle. Like, otherwise we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on earth, right? But we're not. We're the fattest nation on earth. so that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown, and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle, but you're not. Protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place. And some of that is often burned off. So, for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds, they get all this flappy body skin. That's not excess fat, that's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein. Your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using. So another big myth. So muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about as starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice. Cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time because--.

Why does it stop? why does it stop burning those calories?

Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to, say, generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for a hundred years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less. So because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make $100,000 a year and you spend $100,000 $10,000 a year. Now you make 50,000, you don't keep spending a hundred, right? It's, it's, you're gonna, you're gonna get thrown into jail. But so you reduce your expenditure same as a body. So it's getting less. So it's going to use less. And that's the natural reaction is, it's, it's important because it's a survival response.

It cannot do anything different. So it's almost like, so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use.

Yeah.

In order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you, but if you just do a little bit, I'm going to eat a little bit less today, it's.

Not going to be that much. It doesn't work. And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories, you don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. As you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. Instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat, just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric. It's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. Then it goes, whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here. Why do I need to cut Cut it down. And the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat, of course, it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there. Why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source. That's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat. because your insulin's here, your insulin's high, you're using food. Then you get hungry, so you eat some more, right? You have a snack, you have a low-fat muffin, you stay here, you can only burn food. All that stuff over there, those 500,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body. So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of 2,000 calories, I'm going to eat 1,500, but I'm going to eat 10 times a day, keeping myself here. Now you only have 1500 coming in. You can only burn 1500. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom, and then your body burns the full 2000. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measured their VO2, which, as you know, is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing. and what they found, so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food, and they were burning 10% more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO2 was 10% higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down, it's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that, and we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort you know, mode that you're burning fat. Other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of, again, it's a survival response. So imagine again, we're cave man and it's winter and there's no food. So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never gonna eat again. You're gonna die because every day is gonna be harder. You're gonna circle the drain. So, our body is just not that stupid, right? So, what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in, boom, I'm gonna switch you over to body fat, and then I'm gonna pump you up so that you have energy.

You go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth. You're focused, you're clear, you're in the zone, everything.

Exactly. And that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And in the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat. They just lounge around. But if you're the hungry wolf, That is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. Same thing for us. Our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that. That doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic. It means you're focused.

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So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who got he went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. And he was talking about starvation and they were literally starving. They'd eat almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. so the guy says, this is simply the mental Clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like it was so widespread, everybody was starving, and they'd see these incredible Feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time.

In your Decades of work through, from medical school to your research to your practice, to these things. what was the biggest aha, when you learned this thing, it changed everything for you.

You know, there've been so many instances of that, like the scientists, I'm seeing new things literally on a weekly basis. Things are like, my jaw drops virtually. But, you know, like last week, Louis, I read about a new discovery that we just discovered a new type of human cell in our heart last week. Like, you know, like that. That's like, I hit my head, like, oh, my God, really?

We.

A couple years ago, we discovered a new brain cell called the rose hip neuron. Okay. And it seems to be linked to depression. So I. I'm always amazed. I mean, as a scientist, I'm amazed by the. By the marvelousness of the body and how much we. don't know about it and still, so we have to respect it. Did you know, by the way, that we had it also, this is just this past year, 2021, there was a landmark discovery that changed everything we knew about our metabolism. What is that? Well, so everybody says that, you know, like when you're a teenager, you're grown tall.

You got a high metabolism. You just burn calories, right?

Okay. Totally wrong. Metabolism's going down when you're teen. Okay. And then people say when you're in your 20s or 30s, you know, and you're starting to gain weight and getting out of shape, and they're like, man, my metabolism is slowing down. And then some people basically say that, you know, I was unlucky because I was born with a bad metabolism. look at my sister or look at my cousin. She's rail thin. She's so lucky she's got a fast metabolism, right? All that has been turned up ended completely. It turns out that all humans go through only four phases of metabolism in their whole life.

Tell me.

Okay, actually, I'm going to show you this because it's actually right here in my desk.

Got a chart.

You got a.

You got a graph. You got a chart.

No, no, I got.

I got.

Paper. This baby right here, it's in a journal of science.

Okay?

This is how researchers do it. Like, I. All around my office, man. Like, I am reading this stuff. And this paper, I tell you, I gotta look at this. It. It studied 8, 000 people from, like, 30 countries, and it studied people from eight days old to 90 years old across 20 different countries. all right. This is the largest study of human metabolism ever undertaken. And here's what they found, that if you subtracted out body fat and which is different for everybody, okay? And you were to just go right down to the core of real metabolism, energy usage, energy generation are here are the four phases. When we're born, we got the same metabolism as our mother. Makes sense. Synchronized. From zero or from the day you're born to one year old, your metabolism skyrockets. In fact, it's twice high when you're one year old as when you're 20 years old. So from one year old down to throughout your teenage years in puberty, at time you think that you're eating a lot and your metabolism is going sky high, It's actually coming down from its peak.

Interesting. Why does it seem like you're burning so many calories?

Well, you just, you, you, well, you're more active and you're growing.

Yeah.

Uh, so you may be burning more calories per your metabolism as a changing. This is the key thing. We are hardwired to go through these phases. Now it's going down to 20 years old, from 20 years old to 60 years old. okay. From college to retirement, it doesn't change. It is rock stable. All right? So it's our. And then after 60, it starts to diminish, but not as fast as you think. It's a slow deep. It's a slow grade down. Okay. Four phases of human metabolism. We never knew this before this year. All right? This is how it knew it is. So here's the key thing. What makes all the difference between people? Like, how? Why is your metabolism different than mine? And why is. why is a sumo wrestler's metabolism different than somebody who's on a runway? Okay. And it has to do with the fact that our metabolisms are all the same, but the lifestyle choices that we make can actually push our metabolism one way or the other. So it, our metabolism doesn't cause us to be fat. Our fat slows down our metabolism. It's the other way around. interesting. Completely.

So what, so how do we burn more fat then to, all right, so.

That'S, that's what I'm working on right now. And that's, that's, that is the topic of my next book, by the way, which I'm writing right now. Yeah. So, so stay tuned for that answer because I, I'm, I'm on to something really hot on that. Um, and I, I will give you a little bit of a, of a.

Of a sneak peek. Sneak peek.

Sneak peek.

Yes.

Well, you can eat certain foods to burn your fat down. So. So what? While. While caloric restriction and fasting can actually also do it, it turns out there are certain foods that you can actually eat that will trigger it. I don't want to give you a too much. I don't want to give your viewers a spoiler because. I'll have you come, I'll have you invited back in the show.

We'll have you back on for sure. We'll have you back on for sure. You can give us the whole debrief, but what would you see are a couple of these foods at least that you think that are, are now researched and proven to be powerful fat burning.

Well, I'll give you, I'll give you one that's actually just a surprise is seafood.

Actually, seafood.

Yeah.

Helps burn fat.

Yeah.

Is it help burn fat or it starts to trigger and activate the fat learning process.

It's, it triggers. So there are, there are certain elements in food that are newly discovered in research. Like, I just told you, I just told you some new stuff that's coming out of the hot off the presses. But I can tell you, like, this is where, this is what I do. The research that if I told you about research about biotech developments, it may not actually mean anything to you for 10 years, maybe ever. you never. Okay, but when there's, when there's research about food or about your health, a lot of times there's stuff that you, that has immediacy. You can put it to use right away. So cancer starving foods, regenerative foods, gut health foods that can also help your brain, foods that slow down cellular aging, foods that lower inflammation and boost your immune system at the same time. You know, that's what I'm talking about, because the power of healing rests inside our body. And health care is not something that we need to rely on when we go to the doctor's office, right? Every year you go once. Health care is everything in between that we do for ourselves. And food is a medicine that we take.

Absolutely. I've talked about this many times on my show before that I grew up in a specific religion called Christian Science, where it was more the practice of spiritual awareness and that were spiritual ideas and less on using medicine to heal, but more using the mind and awareness to heal, you know, thought, which would then heal the physical body. So medicine was never a really thing I studied or really took growing up. It was just kind of like when we got sick or when something happened, we used thought, prayer, spiritual prayer, to kind of remind ourselves of who we are. But, I'm curious, do you think that people could live without modern medicine if they eat properly? Like all the things that you talk about in your book, Eat to Beat Disease? Do you think we could live longer lives, healthier lives, without the need of certain medicines? Or, are you saying we should be using and eating food when we need them?

Well, we should be eating to enrich our lives from the time we're young all the way until our last breath. And that should actually be able to tackle about two-thirds of all the chronic diseases. And by the way, about a third of all cancers are thought to be due to diet and lifestyle, one-third of cancers. All right, we ought to be able to dodge. But you got to start early, right? I mean, this is not one of these things where I've been smoking my whole life and now I'm going to actually turn over a new leaf. It's never too late to quit, by the way. However, the fact of the matter is that, you know, like, so you grew up, you know, in Christian, in the.

Christian science framework, which you're in, you're.

In the Boston area.

So you, yeah, that's where the hub is.

The mother church is in, yeah, is in Boston.

Yes.

It's, it's amazing. It's an amazing place, a really a a spectacular place to visit and a very special place actually. But I will tell you that the idea of having formative years groomed in a healthy mindset, which is I think what you're talking about, is so important so that if you've got kids and if you're involved in teaching, And if you're involved in the business where you can actually impact on kids, think about the impact that you have now could actually influence their health 30, 40, 50, 60 years from now. And that to me is big responsibility. It's a giant opportunity to make a better society.

That's beautiful. I'm curious, we've got a few more minutes left. What do you think? You're telling me that every week you're essentially finding these aha moments based on the research papers you're finding and things that you're discovering yourself. And what do you think in your mind, if you could predict the future 10 years out, five, 10 years out, what are going to be the brown groundbreaking things that we as humans discover in the next five to 10 years that is going to transform our health?

Wow.

Based on what you've seen in the last five to 10 years, and we're like, these are unbelievable. Every single finding, what do you think? is on the horizon for us?

Well, one thing that I think is most, one of the big aha jaw droppers for me in the kind of the journey that I've actually had in my career is the fact that we can regenerate ourselves. Okay? And I never thought that was even possible. I had been working in stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine and you know, it's a real struggle. It's an uphill climb to really try to show that we can actually regenerate the heart or the brain or nerves. And yet the body does it every single day. And when I discovered that, you know, you could regenerate tissue by barley, you know, eating barley, which is beta D glucan, or with chocolate, as I mentioned to you, cacao polyphenols or even olive oil. There's something called hydroxytyrosol. It's a natural chemical and extroversion olive oil. It helps to kind of make that distinctive olive oily taste that that can actually help to protect your stem cell. Or if you are not a vegan, but you eat seafood and you're really adventurous, you know that black pasta, squid ink that they have sometimes on menus, I happen to, I, you know, I like to explore different kinds of food. Squid ink actually protects your stem cells. It's like a shield. Okay. And so the fact that you, we can actually eat to regenerate. So I'm very excited by this idea that we can eat foods, and we're still discovering what foods can help our propel our body's regenerative capacity. I think that's going to actually be groundbreaking. And then something that I'm actually working on that is really, you know, future forward. Right. So you're asking, like, what, what's going to be mind-blowing in the future?

Yes.

All right, well, look, I'm a, I'm kind of like a pretty down to earth guy. Like, I believe that we should be protecting our planet, doing everything we can, we can to take care of, nurture this. ball that we live on and we should be doing better for our community. But I also, I think from the time I was a kid, I appreciated and I was excited by this idea of space travel, which is now happening more often.

Right.

All right, so here's something I think is going to happen over the next decade. As humans become extraterrestrial, we're going to be the first extraterrestrials we're ever going to meet is ourselves. and we get beyond near Earth orbit, we're going to be, our bodies are going to be bombarded by galactic radiation and, and, and have the effects of negative gravity, changing our body. We got to find out what kinds of foods or supplements that we got to eat to protect ourselves.

That's crazy.

So I'm working on that.

That's cool.

So I, I, I've been meeting with astronauts. I've been talking to people in the space program, flight surgeons. And what I'm figuring is that if we can figure out what we're going to need in the future. So that we could probably bring that right down to earth right now.

What are some of the longevity experts who talk about mitochondria and telemeters and all these other things that they, they're, I guess they're saying that the studies are showing the more plants you have, the longer your telemeters, and if you're eating more meat, maybe it doesn't work as much.

Let's talk.

I love.

I'm so.

The studies.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, first of all, let's Define longevity.

Okay.

Longevity is defined as what?

Living as long as you can, I guess. Right. Living longer than expected.

Okay. So that.

And living healthier.

Okay, so. But now that's not longevity. Okay, so now that is a health span issue in not long. and I think we have to be very careful about how we talk about longevity. Are we talking about living six hours longer? Are we talking about living six weeks longer? What does that mean? And I will tell you, as a trained geriatrician from Wash U, it is about the quality of your life.

Yeah, you don't want to suffer for 10 years.

Nothing is going to determine more quality than muscle. Because you must be able to do your activities of daily living, you must be able to be mobile, you must be able to do the things that were once, that you once had the capacity for your own autonomy.

Right.

Now, and let's take a look at the longevity expert or whatever we, you know, we mean by that. The one thing that we know and have control over roll over, right, directly is what we eat and how we move, right? In order to protect muscle, you need high quality protein. This is in the literature.

You can't build muscle without protein?

No, you cannot. It would be very difficult.

Just carbs or-- It would be very difficult.

There is an essential, a need. So protein is an essential essential nutrient. There are 20 amino acids, and of those 20, there are nine essential, and you must get those nine essentials. Now, I will say that of those nine essentials, you require-- and I'm so glad you brought this up, because in those early nitrogen studies and the RDA now, it is not taken into account that we have individual amino acid needs. It is looking at protein as a whole. That is incorrect. I just mentioned that there are 20 different amino acids. The information on nutrition as it relates to protein is archaic. When you look at the back of a label, you will see carbohydrates and carbohydrates will be broken down into sugars, and fibers and all kinds of things. You look at the back of a nutrient label and you'll see fat and fat will be broken down into, you know, whether it's, you know, trans fats or saturated fats or whatever. You look at the label and it says protein, but not all protein is equal. Let me give you an example.

What's the highest grade of protein? And what's the lowest?

So eggs would be considered one of the highest forms of protein. Eggs, beef, chicken, fish, whey protein is the gold standard.

Whey is.

Yes.

Not plant protein.

No. And listen, so when we, plants are notoriously low in the essential amino acids.

Really? They are.

You can eat a diet that is plant-based, but you will require 35% more calories. So, for example, let's say you wanted to get your protein from quinoa. You would need six cups of quinoa to equal the amino acid profile of one small chicken breast. That is a metabolic disaster.

Why?

Because in order to stimulate muscle, you need the essential amino acids. Well, you need all the amino acids. but in order to stimulate muscle, you need one of the branched-chain amino acids. Now, branched-chain amino acids, they're leucine, isoleucine, and valine. Leucine is necessary in a meal threshold amount to stimulate muscle. And you're like, well, the listener is like, well, what does that mean? That means you need to get 30 grams at a minimum of as you age to stimulate muscle tissue because you need two and a half grams of leucine. And this, you know, I earlier talked about Don Layman. These were some of his discoveries. This is his contribution to science, is that we have an amino acid meal need of leucine, which eludes people. Let's say you are gonna have 15 grams of a protein for breakfast, 15 grams of a protein for lunch and then 15 grams of a protein for dinner. And the majority of the rest of your meal was carbs and fat. You will not stimulate muscle.

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It either happens or it doesn't. From a nutritional perspective, you require a certain bolus amount at one time to reach the bloodstream. That is 2.5 grams of leucine to begin this as you age. If you are eating sub-threshold, you will not stimulate the tissue nutritionally.

What do you say to the people that these athletes that were extreme meat eaters then went plant-based? they talk about how they're stronger, they recover better, they sleep better. What do you say to some of those cases that are out there of these athletes?

I would say everyone is individual and if they feel better that's great. I would say that the science doesn't support that in that way from a muscle recovery, from a body mass, body size, skeletal muscle size, but again everyone is individual. And I want to be very clear that I am not anti-plant. I'm not. And I am not at one extreme or the other. I do believe in eating high quality protein. I know it's important. And I think what's happened now, and part of the reason I was so excited to come and talk to you, is that what we need in order to have a healthy world is we need transparent conversations.

So you're not extreme either way. You're saying, where's the science?

I am saying, how do we lean into the science? I'm saying, what is the truth? What is supported by the science? What do we know to be true? And then we can make decisions. Whether an individual is plant-based or an individual is eating a high protein diet, which I believe in because I've for decades and also it's in the literature, high quality evidence in the literature. I believe that to be true. And what's happened now is they- you-'re.

Saying it's also hard to be high protein diet plant-based.

It is difficult and it can be done, but it needs to have very careful, you know, nutrient complex, you know, again, it's not just about a macronutrient. food is a matrix. You know, for example, in beef, there's creatine, there's components that you won't get from plants in beef. You cannot get it otherwise. There's no creatine in plant products.

Really?

No, it comes from me, right? The bioavailability of iron is much higher in red meat, B vitamins, zinc. These are things that are what is offered taurine, These...

They're not in plants.

They're just not in plants. So we have to be able to have intelligent conversations and right now what we hear is a lot of narrative and a lot of don't eat me because it's bad for the planet. Well, the reality is if we in the US, if we care about global warming and we really look at what are the biggest drivers, we're looking looking at 80% is industry, electricity, and transportation. This makes up a huge chunk, 80-some percent or more. Agriculture in the US makes up what? Maybe 9%.

Right.

Wait, maybe 9%. Of that 9%, how much do you think is related to cattle or animal, maybe it's 3%. What are we talking about? Those, so the statistics is just not, it is a lot of discussion when the reality is if you look at this book, right? So there's a book here and you take one sheet of paper and that's the entire world, okay? And then you fold it down to a postcard, like let's say it's half that. So the entire world, the landmass is one postcard. You take that one postcard and you give me your business card, Louis, and you say, okay, here's my business card. Now we tear it two-thirds and one-third.

Okay?

So we're now down to, we're talking about land mass. We're now down to one business card and two-thirds of that business card is called marginal land, which means we can't grow anything on it. It can only be used for cattle. One-third of that land can be farmed. So I bring the point up to this saying, Are we looking at the right things? If you care about the environment and you live in Minnesota, then you shouldn't eat avocados. And why? Because of transportation. So those are ways that individuals can make a big impact rather than reducing high quality nutrients because ultimately, you know, you live in a beautiful area, you're on a coast, and you know, I'm on the other coast, but it's the people in the middle that we affect the most. So if we tell people to go more plant-based, which they're already eating 70% plants, this is according to the NHANES data, right now people are eating 70% plant-based, who is it going to affect?

Well, I guess if you're focusing on your vision, which is to help people live a healthier, longer life, you need more quality protein based on the evidence.

Yes.

And so it's not about having less or more plants, it's about having more more quality proteins to build skeletal muscle. If you want to eat more plants, eat as much plants as you want.

Right ahead.

But it also makes you get the quality protein is what I'm hearing you say, because that is one of the main factors to healthy longevity.

And healthy aging.

And healthy aging.

And we need more protein as we age, not less. We actually require more protein.

To build the muscle.

To stay healthy and to just keep it. So basically, if you don't stimulate that tissue, you're going to lose it.

And it's harder to gain it back when you're 50, 60, 70 years old.

I mean, I wouldn't know, but yes, yes. If we take the narrative that we are looking at right now, eat less protein, eat less red meat, do all these things, while you are young, you have a much greater margin of error.

What about the inflammation or disease conversation around, I guess, whey with milk, you know, milk products and dairy? I grew up drinking about, I don't know, eight glasses of milk a day. Okay. Right up in Ohio. I think it's the reason I'm a foot taller than everyone in my family because of the hormones probably in the milk and the beef and everything I was eating. But I also had a runny nose.

Milk every day.

So this is something separate.

And it was like inflammation from the milk and from these types of proteins potentially. Or maybe there's a number of causes, but you got rid of the milk and I got rid of the.

So that's just one source of protein.

Sure.

Right?

And milk we know is really, I mean, I personally don't drink milk, but dairy is really important. Dairy is very bioavailable for the bones. A lot of people don't tolerate it, but to You know, I'm not sure that we can equate that with inflammation. So you can equate that with mucus production, but perhaps not inflammation.

But does any red meat cause inflammation?

There is no quality evidence to support that. Okay.

And I will tell you- There's suggestion, but not evidence.

So you bring up a really good point.

Or clogging arteries or these types of conversation.

Absolutely not. When calories are corrected, absolutely not.

What do you mean?

What do you mean calories corrected?

The biggest driver of inflammation and obesity is excess calories.

Too many calories.

It's, yeah, it's not protein and it's not red meat.

It's probably sugary drinks and sugar in general.

It is excess. You know, it is not inherently bad if you have healthy muscle. It's not inherently bad.

Because your muscle will be able to.

Process it and just flush it out. So, let's go back to red meat being bad for you. There was a series of papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine by a head researcher named Bradley Johnston. And this, he looked at a tremendously large number of people. And he questioned, well, should we reduce the amount of red meat that we're eating? And right now, I think on average, people are eating 1.6 to 1.8 pounds of red meat per week. 1.8 ounces a day. Do you think that's a lot?

It's not that much.

That's like this much. Yeah, it's not that much. Okay, so to say that we need, you know, so is this data true? Is do we really need and believe these negative influences that we're hearing? So he went through the literature and he did something and put it through something called the grade system. The grade system is the global gold standard for evaluating evidence. It doesn't get better than that. And do you know what he found? That there was no reason for us to be cutting back our red meat consumption.

Interesting.

And it created so many issues.

When was this?

This was 2019.

Okay, interesting.

Pretty recent. They went after him. People went after him. They tried to not get it published. They were, people were so up in arms. Again, food science. We should just call it, we should replace this with something else.

Emotion. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. And they were so up in arms and we have yet to see one randomized controlled trial with humans to support red meat being bad. It doesn't exist. There's a lot of epidemiology data talking about, you know, this is where all that information comes from. But epidemiology is not high quality data. And we have many randomized controlled trials talking about the importance of protein, whether it's from Don Layman's lab or Stu Phillips or Doug Patton Jones or Kevin Tipton. These guys are like people that have been looking at it. Heather Leidy, there are some really good researchers out there. that are putting together information for the, that is, you know, that's available.

Sure.

And again, it's not to say that plant is bad or animal is bad.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple podcast as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great. Hey, everybody. Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrelson. It's called Where Everybody Knows yous Name, and we're back for another season. I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it. Listen to Where Everybody Knows yous Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrelson, Sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.