Harvard Professor: “I Tried Every Diet. This Is By Far The Worst.” - Daniel Lieberman - #1137

“Really scary number because those kids for the rest of their lives are going to be fighting their weight. And, and, and of course now we have GLP-1s, which we haven't talked about, which, which may be very helpful for them, but, but that's, that's not the necessarily going to be the magic bullet either.”

“So, we published, my colleagues and I published a paper in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, recently. One of the big concerns about GLP-1s is that people not only lose fat, they also lose muscle. And they seem to lose a lot of muscle. It's a bit like bariatric surgery, too. Like, when you lose a lot of weight really fast, people lose a lot of muscle, and that”

“Some people are kind of self-enforcing that inability to eat food through GLPs. Right. And so one of the big concerns about GLP1s is that if you're taking them, do strength training, please, because that can help reverse or help you maintain your muscle as you lose those GLP1s.”

“There's now pill versions, you don't have to inject it. But something like 60% of people who've tried GLP1s have quit them after a year or two, 60%. And the problem is that when you quit them, your body just still will, your appetite comes roaring back and you want to go back to your previous weight for reasons that we do not understand.”

“So that's a concern because then when they regain the weight, they tend to regain it almost completely as fat, not as muscle. And so then in a way, they're worse off. Oh, so they've lost muscle on the way down and gained fat on the way back up.”

“And even if you're on a GLP-1, you still have to figure out what to eat. What do I eat? And the GLP-1 might help you with your cravings for really fatty, sugary foods, but it might not. We just still haven't done those studies very well. So look, I think they're a useful tool for a lot of people, but I think we have a lot to learn and we have to figure out how to use them better.”

“And I think GLP-1s might be an example of a kind of a disevolutionary process. We can still have our frozen pizzas and our, you know, fried chicken and our, you know, doughnuts and all that kind of stuff. Now we get obesity, take the GLP1s, but we still have that same food system. 1700 calories of the frozen pizza and the donuts and the white.”

“meat is that that red meat not not not poultry or fish has a has a glycoprotein so a glycoprotein is a little you know every cell has these little kind of like forest of of like sugar protein molecules that stick off and”

“There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. Mediterranean diet often has fish in it, and fish has these omega-3 fatty acids. So it's the constellation of nutrients that are healthy, plus an absence of a lot of stuff like added sugar and a lot of what are the things that it eliminates most?”

“eating fish. Do you eat any raw fish? I ate raw fish, absolutely. I love sushi, but you can't have it with the rice because the rice is cooked, right? So it was really hard to, I mean, I was just constantly hungry.”

“Omega-6 fatty acid is six bonds from the end. And so fish are really rich in omega-3s. Omega-3s are great for you. Nobody disputes that. Eat a shit ton of omega-3s. Good for your brain, good for your nervous system, good for your immune system, et cetera.”

“You have to have them in their diet or you'll die. There's actually two fatty acids that you need to eat a little bit of, omega-3 and omega-6. But apart from that, you do need to eat protein. Secondly, protein is filling.”

“There's a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. Mediterranean diet often has fish in it, and fish has these omega-3 fatty acids. So it's the constellation of nutrients that are healthy, plus an absence of a lot of stuff like added sugar and a lot of what are the things that it eliminates most?”

“So omega-3 means that the double bond is three carbons away from the end. I don't know if this is too much information. So omega-3 fatty acid is the double bonds three carbons from the end.”

“Paleo diet said, well, look, you know, we didn't evolve to eat that many omega-6 fatty acids because we didn't have seed oils. And so we should try to have like a hunter-gatherer kind of omega-3 ratio. So try not to have more than twice as many omega-6s to omega-3s. And the argument behind that is that the omega-6 fatty acids can be turned into a, by your digestive system, to another”

“But if I was on a diet, I would probably cut down on my smoothies. I've heard that celery is net calorie negative. Yeah, I've heard that too, and I don't believe that. I'm sure you don't get it. The energy needed to digest the celery because of how rough and fibrous it is is greater than the amount of calories.”

“microbiome. So, all those bacteria that are, once the celery passes through your, you know, the fiber from the celery passes into your colon, there are all these happy bacteria in there to lighted that you had the celery, and they're breaking that celery down into what's called short-chain fatty acids, of which you which you then take up into your bloodstream, and then you use.”

“And that's, I mean, if I can be a little, you know, self-promoting, that's why I wrote the book because I tried and fed up to take all that evidence and to digest it, put it into kind of plain English and make it, you know, help people understand that. Because I think all of us need to try to answer these questions.”

“Daniel, you're great. Your work's awesome. Where should people go to check out the book and everything else that you got going? Well, Fed Up comes out August 11th. And I tried to make it fun and readable and with information that I think all of us need. And it's filled with references.”

“Or for example, fruit roll-ups. You go to the supermarket, you buy fruit roll-ups, and they say, made with real fruit, filled with vitamin C. Well, very few kids are vitamin C deficient. And yes, it's made with real fruit, but they've removed all the fiber. So a fruit roll-up is basically like a form of candy, right?”

“And it's not a healthy person. So it deserves a red label. Now, if you want to get a fruit roll-up, fine, but you should know that it's not a healthy food. Scary stuff. I mean, look, it doesn't surprise me that America is kind of the battleground for this.”

“That's right. Because you break... You break the food down to tiny little particles, right? And your enzymes... Surface area, yeah. Right? Surface area to volume ratio. Your enzymes can break that food down. If you take a banana and you blend a banana, you get more energy from that banana than if you just eat the banana whole. People have done that experiment. Another example...”

“It lights everything up, right? Doritos. Doritos have more than, go get a pocket of Doritos. Don't necessarily eat them, but there are 30 ingredients in Doritos the last time I counted. And they have, you know, garlic and there's all these different flavors, but they're all balanced.”

“would be a little bit more concerned about it or whatever. For instance, I can give you one. I think maybe dried fruit might be one of those things where people think, oh, well, you know, this is, it's a fruit. It's a little bit of a snack, but you go, that is some really fucking refined sugar in there. Okay, that's a good one.”

“I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that. But dried pineapple chunks, dried mango strips. Good stuff. Yeah, but just straight sugar. It's a candy. Yeah. Why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working?”

“I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that. But dried pineapple chunks, dried mango strips. Good stuff. Yeah, but just straight sugar. It's a candy. Yeah. Why does almost every successful diet eventually stop working?”

“It's not going to be a kind of berry because, again, that's going to be too much in the sugar. I'll give you a hint. It's the first food you ever ate. Milk? Yeah. Wow. Milk is rich in fat and it's rich in sugars, right? And but after you wean, you know, that's it.”

“But you can also get a lot of protein from quinoa and from, you know, from nuts and whatever. You know, it's not a, and you can certainly buy, and every culture on the planet has figured out, you know, every farming culture on the planet figured out to get sufficient amounts of protein by combining a grain with a legume.”

“Okay. So, yeah, I mean, look, I like dried fruit too, but I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that. But dried pineapple chunks, dried mango strips. Good stuff. Yeah, but just straight sugar. It's a candy. Yeah.”

“You're a human being, right? And so, for example, if you take peanuts, right? And you measure the content of the energy in your peanuts, and now you grind those peanuts up into peanut butter, which by the way is the world's greatest food, you get way more energy, about 25% more energy than if you ate the peanuts whole.”

“Okay. So, yeah, I mean, look, I like dried fruit too, but I love putting raisins in my oatmeal and stuff like that. But dried pineapple chunks, dried mango strips. Good stuff. Yeah, but just straight sugar. It's a candy. Yeah.”

Also filed under Dried Fruit

“So your brain doesn't think any one is too high. So there's a book by a guy named Michael Moss called Salt, Sugar, Fat, which is really worth reading, where he's an investigative journalist and he studied and collected information on how the big food companies, through serious testing, these are not accidental foods.”

“No. And in fact, in Mexico, when they tried to put a tax on soda, it got fought by the big, by the Coca-Cola. And the tax was reversed.”

“whatever. They're having their legume and their cereal, et cetera. And they're making bread, but it's going to be sourdough, whole grain, whole wheat, you know, sourdough bread with lentils. These are healthy diets in the general. These are not insulin-spiking diets.”

“And, you know, over months, weeks, years, you have no idea. Or another example would be a lot of people eat a lot of soy products because they think they're trying to be very vegetarian. That's fine. Nothing wrong with being vegetarian. They're eating a lot of soy, but some soy products are made through solvents.”

“foods that like meal replacements, for lack of a, I hope I don't get in trouble, but like hule and soylent. I mean, there's all, I mean, you, you could, and I actually tried them for a few weeks.”

“eat or gut mortality, you know, level of hunger and stuff like that. Yeah. So I, I, I, a few, about 13 years ago, I wrote a book called The Story of the Human Body. And in the end of that book, I propose an idea called disevolution.”