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Episode 43: Nutrition Facts vs. Fiction with Dr. Ben House, PhD
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Welcome to Episode 43 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode Laurel sits down to talk with nutritional scientist, Dr. Ben House, PhD who has been working in nutrition and fitness for over 15 years, and has published many articles in peer reviewed, scientific journals. In their conversation, Ben and Laurel talk about the intersection between nutrition and fitness, specifically for women between the ages of 40-65 who may exercise and eat with a number of related (but different) goals like performance, health, and aesthetics.
You will learn:
- Why food fear spreads like wildfire on the internet
- Why Paleo, Keto, carnivore diets, and veganism have more in common than they have different.
- That muscle can prevent hyperglycemia and inflammation.
- The difference between macro and micro nutrition.
- How the energy from food (listed on food labels) does not correspond with how your body metabolizes and gets energy from that food.
- That low carb diets, like keto go back to the mid 1800s and then resurge every couple of decades.
- That body-building is not just about aesthetics.
- Why thinner is not automatically healthier and what the “cost of leanness” is.
- How fat is responsible for the evolutionary success of humans.
- What sarcopenic obesity is.
- What apophenia is and how it is responsible for lots of myths about weight gain and menopause.
- Why 8,000 steps/day and the CDC’s physical activity guidelines will move the needle a lot further than Andrew Huberman’s litany of “protocols”.
- Ben’s research-supported recommendations for daily dietary intake.
- What body recomposition is and how it could help people maintain weight loss.
Sign Up Here for the Movement Logic Newsletter and receive our free Barbell Equipment Guide!
Article in New York Times - What We Think About Metabolism May Be Wrong
Articles on Deconstruct Nutrition:
How Bad are we at Calorie Math?
Does Menopause Cause Weight Gain?
What Percentage of Americans Are Metabolically Healthy?
Articles in Stronger by Science:
Research Spotlight on Metabolic Rate
Dr. House’s Nutrition Course - https://broresearch.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Ben House Interview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey y'all, Laurel here. You're about to hear a excellent interview that I had with Dr. Ben House, nutritional scientist, who sat down and basically blew my mind 1000 times in this interview. So I'm really excited to share this with you. But I also wanted to remind you that we have Sarah and I, a free barbell equipment guide for you via the link in the show notes, which you could head over to right now.
00:00:29
Speaker
sign up and get immediately in your inbox. This guide is to give you barbell curious folks some background on what all the essential equipment for working with barbells is in order of importance.
Free Barbell Equipment Guide
00:00:43
Speaker
You'll be able to click over to links on Amazon,
00:00:46
Speaker
to research more to kind of see what are the prices, what are the different types of equipment I need, how big is it, what are the different ways that I could set this up, potentially in your home if you're interested in having a little home gym area for barbelling. It's probably dawning on you all by now that Sarah and I have something really exciting coming down the pike
00:01:09
Speaker
And we aren't ready to talk about it yet, but obviously it has something to do with barbells. So you can use this guide to just get a feel for what's entailed with barbells. We're going to have more free stuff coming soon as well.
00:01:24
Speaker
And hey, maybe you aren't ready to purchase. That's totally fine. You could start to send subtle or not so subtle hints to your significant other or your friends or your parents like, hey, my birthday's coming up. Just take a look. And you know what? Maybe you have a gym membership and you don't need any of this equipment in your home either way.
00:01:44
Speaker
We would like you to cozy up with the barbells. So go ahead, head on over to the show notes, download the PDF, click on over, see what is involved with barbells. All right, and now my excellent interview
Current Evidence in Nutrition and Fitness
00:01:58
Speaker
with Dr. Ben House.
00:02:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:02:47
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast.
Dr. Ben House's Background
00:02:49
Speaker
I'm Laurel Beaversdorf, and I'm here with a very special guest, Dr. Ben House. Dr. House has his PhD in nutritional sciences from UT Austin and has been working in nutrition and fitness for over 15 years. He has numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Thank you for joining me today, Ben.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yes, it's great to be here. I'm honored to speak with you about nutrition and try to keep it as simple as possible. Excited to be here. Thank you so much. I first learned about you from your partner, Stevie, who, Stevie Nagora, am I saying her last name right? I don't think I've ever said her name out loud. No, it's Gongora. Everyone likes to say Gongora, but it is Gongora. I follow her on Instagram. She has an amazing presence there.
00:03:40
Speaker
And she shared a while back during the pandemic, actually the lockdown, your website Deconstruct Nutrition that you had launched. It's a subscription based website where you share tons of research and then your own commentary, which I find very down to earth and humorous and relatable, which is from my perspective, it's actually kind of rare to have a writer like yourself who's able to take a piece of research that
00:04:05
Speaker
Okay, I'm just gonna be honest with you, like I find nutrition complex and at times boring. But for you to be able to take this research on nutrition, but also on strength training, bodybuilding, and on the connection between nutrition and bodybuilding and strength training, and make it super relatable and easy to read,
00:04:25
Speaker
You write how you speak, I feel. This is very unique. So I subscribed, and I devoured a lot of your articles. And I can say that what I love so much about deconstruct nutrition and the way you write about nutrition research is that it's not preachy.
00:04:41
Speaker
That's number one. It's not preachy. You're not telling people what they should do. You're giving them the information and you're directing their awareness to what
Approach to Nutrition Writing
00:04:50
Speaker
they should consider. It's also not dry or boring, which is just amazing. I've always found nutrition just a little bit preachy at times. My mother was really into it. She wasn't super preachy about it, but she had a lot of things that she was reading. Did you ever hear of Prevention magazine? No, I haven't heard of it.
00:05:08
Speaker
Reader's Digest. Oh, yes, yes. I might be dating myself a little bit. I'm 42. My mother, she's passed away, but she she was reading this around the time that she was about 42 years old, I would say. And she was, you know, coming up with a lot of like, what are probably now food myths about like not eating sugar, staying away from carbs, and then various other probably ideas that are that still hold factual still hold true. But she talked a lot about nutrition, and I just was never that interested in it.
00:05:35
Speaker
although I have to say that I did consume a pretty healthy diet as a child. And so that was kind of like my introduction to conversing about nutrition, thinking about nutrition was through my mother. She was very interested in it, kind of on an intellectual level actually. And then my second kind of foray into nutrition was when
00:05:52
Speaker
I had to learn about it for the CSCS exam for my personal trainer certification. And I had to study the nutrition topic a lot because I actually knew the least about nutrition compared to everything else that I was going to be tested on. And I became actually
00:06:09
Speaker
authentically interested in protein intake. Because I really started to believe that it mattered to my pursuits of getting stronger. And so that right around that time, a little bit before that, actually, I subscribed to your platform. And like I said, I was really blown away by the way that you take this, this super dense topic of nutrition science, and you address questions that are really common within your audience. They're maybe not as common questions that are that my audience or the movement logic audience
00:06:37
Speaker
is asking, but there's enough overlap there to where I got just so much out of so many of the articles. I love that it's evidence-based and that you're unpacking the research. You're looking at what some of the limitations are of the research and you get into the nitty-gritty science without making it super overwhelming and you're not preachy. So anyway, I want to share what you wrote in the prologue of this website, which I think kind of really nicely summarizes what you're about with regards to
00:07:04
Speaker
you know, nutrition education. So you write, the simple side of simple and the algorithm have left us with perpetual food fear and a never ending parade of nutrition religions.
00:07:18
Speaker
constantly at war with each other. On the simple side of complexity, all we want is for the noise to stop. It won't, but amid the ceaseless cacophony, at least we will be able to ask ourselves, what is the independent effect size of this intervention? So let me just start off right now with a question.
Understanding Nutrition Research
00:07:40
Speaker
Dr. House, what is an independent effect size? Why is that important when we're looking at research? What does that mean?
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think the easiest way to explain this is healthy user bias, which is going to be near and dear to most people in the yoga centric world, right? So if I pick out, say, vegetable intake, or the opposite of that would be red meat intake. So if we just look at observationally in the population, if you pick out vegetable intake,
00:08:05
Speaker
you're going to pick out a lot of other variables. Those people are going to have higher levels of physical activity. They're going to probably eat less fast food. They're going to be a higher socioeconomic status. Whereas if you pick out red meat intake, they cluster with more sedentary behavior, more alcohol intake. So healthy behaviors are generally going to cluster together. And then also we have the halo effect, which is when someone starts healthy behavior, and most people can relate to this, you generally just don't do one thing.
00:08:32
Speaker
You're like, I'm going to change my diet. I'm also going to start training. And so for the average person is most people starting on a health journey are not doing one thing at a time. They're, they're having multiple things that are happening. And then kind of whatever is their favorite, they will pick and say, Oh, that's great. Um, that worked for me. And then they'll find other people that, that worked for them. And then they'll create a Facebook group.
00:08:56
Speaker
And so that happens all the time. And so you see it with carnivore, you see it with paleo, you see it with vegan, anything that you can name. All of these diets have more in common than they have against each other. They're for whole unprocessed food, and then they just have different things that they demonize in different ways. And so I think if you're willing to be objective and think about, okay,
00:09:19
Speaker
What are we demonizing? How much water does that hold? Because sugar, for instance, sugar's innocuous. If you get very, very sick, they will literally put glucose, which isn't sugar, they will put glucose directly into your veins, and that will help you survive, right?
00:09:38
Speaker
And sugar is just a disaccharide, which is a fancy word for sugars, of fructose and glucose put together. And then your body digests that. So there's nothing inherently wrong with sugar, dietarily. Now, hyperglycemia
00:09:52
Speaker
which is high blood sugar. This is why it gets complex. Eating sugar doesn't necessarily mean hyperglycemia. The more muscle mass you have, think of muscle as a sink for glucose, for instance. So the more muscle that you have, the more glucose you're going to be able to store without overflowing your sink. If you overflow your sink, you get hyperglycemia. The water goes in places that it shouldn't
00:10:14
Speaker
And it's pretty disastrous to the human body over time. And so that's why hyperglycemia is inflammatory, but sugar is not inflammatory. So that kind of the complexity and the nuance, they're like, yes, high blood sugar can be inflammatory, but sugar itself is not inflammatory.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yes, super complex. Super complex. The noise will not stop, right? We have to kind of talk about everything while we're talking about one thing whenever we're talking about a complex system. It's really difficult, would you say, to actually isolate an independent effect size then? I don't want to get lost in the weeds of like research design. Say like energy density, which is, think of not energy dense foods as vegetables.
00:10:59
Speaker
A potato has an energy density of maybe 0.7 calories per gram, and then a potato chip has an energy density of four to five. For the same weight, you took the water out of it, and you added oil, and you essentially raised the energy density 400 to 600%. And so now, if you ate the same volume, you would get 600% more calories. That's something you can isolate, is what you're saying. Yes, energy density is a variable, right? When we look at processed, ultra-processed food versus whole foods,
00:11:28
Speaker
In the research, they will try to make the energy density the same. And to do that, they have to do very odd things to ultra-processed food to make it less energy dense. Like they have to add fiber or lemonade. They have to do water pre-loads. So they're trying to isolate the effect of ultra-processed food outside of energy density.
00:11:45
Speaker
And so that's what science does, is it tries to very rigidly try to figure out through the process of elimination what is causing what. And it is very hard to do that in nutrition because if I increase your protein intake, what else do I do? What are those foods? What did I take away?
00:12:07
Speaker
If you go vegan, yes, you went vegan, but you also probably took things out of your diet, right? Like you changed something for something else. If you go carnivore, you took out carbohydrates.
00:12:21
Speaker
to an excessive degree and now you're only eating a lower residue, probably higher fat, probably very high protein diet. Was it carnivore or was it the things that you took away? Yeah, I want to relate this to what I think my audience can draw a parallel to, is that a lot of the people listening right now probably have suffered what they deemed a yoga related injury.
00:12:48
Speaker
The story is that they healed this yoga-related injury by starting to strength train. But my question has often been, was it the strength training that helped you out of pain or was it the time that you are now not spent doing asana and instead doing the strength training? Was it actually the subtraction of the asana that helped, the addition of the strength training?
00:13:11
Speaker
both or some other variable entirely. And I think a lot of times we speak with a lot of certainty about what causes something to happen, right? And whenever we're dealing with a complex system, which is a system of systems, that's our body, a system of systems, it's extremely difficult to show causality because everything is related to multiple things happening at the same time.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a beautiful example. As a coach, I try to avoid the writing reflex as much as possible. So someone who comes to me with myths and things in a consult, I don't really debunk those. I just take them in and we just keep talking and eventually they'll fall away. You call this the writing reflex? I've always thought of the writing reflex as the way our vestibular system, our eyes help us keep our head upright all the time. But what are you calling the writing reflex?
00:14:02
Speaker
So MI is motivational interviewing. This is a term from that. So the writing reflex is someone says, oh, carbs make you gain weight. That is purely wrong. Okay. If someone, they could, but it's not like a cause. Carbs don't automatically create weight gain. I understand why someone has that belief because they associate ultra-processed foods with carbohydrates.
00:14:28
Speaker
They read Prevention Magazine. Yes, yes. There's plenty. We now have hundreds of studies showing that you can lose weight eating a lot of carbohydrates to an extent that is appropriate for the person. So if someone says that, I'm not going to burn, interject, correct them. I'm just going to take it in and be like, OK, let's create a plan that works for you. It doesn't matter. That's the fastest way that I put someone on defense on the nutrition world is I destroy their teddy bear or their belief structure.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah. And so for your comment on injury, I mean, I don't think there's something more complex than injury for the human body, like biopsychosocial model of pain. At a certain point, is it important? What you did worked. Right. But I think as a scientist and as a coach, we want to know why that is, because we want to repeat it.
00:15:22
Speaker
And we want to know that it works for a large population rather than just n of one, right? Yeah. And I think you could make an argument in that specific circumstance if someone had a yoga related injury. One thing that we do know about injuries is like having new experience.
00:15:38
Speaker
go to a new experience that moving your body in a way that does not give you pain, right? And so that's what happened there is we moved to a new experience. You could probably find just as many people who got injured in the weight room and went to yoga, had a new experience moving their body, and they were relieved of pain. I've definitely said that before.
00:16:01
Speaker
And same thing in the diet world. And that's what's really, really tough about social media is because now it's not like some random person in prevention magazine that's telling you this. It's someone that's relatable. It's someone that you know. It's like, well, maybe I should try that. Hyper charismatic. Yeah. Now you're, whoever it was, your aunt or your sister's cousin sees great results, posts about it. And you're like, wow, I should do that. And that's how humans learn. That's how we, that makes total sense to do that.
00:16:31
Speaker
and to trust that, but if that's where the buck stops, it's no problem for the individual, but I think it gets problematic when you're preaching and you want to share the thing that worked for you and then other people argue with you and it just gets really nauseating. Yes, agreed. Agreed. So I want to back up, Ben, and I want to ask you maybe a more personal question, which is actually,
00:16:57
Speaker
How did you get started with nutrition science? Why did you choose that as your subject of study? Yeah. So I'm from the Midwest, originally about 90 minutes north of Chicago in a town called Racine, Wisconsin. Hey, I'm from Wisconsin too. Did we know this about each other? I don't know. I don't think so. Where are you from? Well, I'm 30 miles north of Wisconsin Dells from Adam's Friendship, a very small town. Have you heard of it? Yeah. My dad grew up there. No. Yeah. What? Yeah.
00:17:27
Speaker
What? Oh my gosh. My uncle lived there. My great uncle lived in Adams. How long ago was your dad in Adams' friendship? He might have had my parents as teachers, I'm thinking. Potentially. He lived in Adams until I think he was in a younger grade school, and then he moved to Tomah, Wisconsin. This would have been in the 60s. Okay. Okay. No, then if he never made it to high school, he probably did not have my parents as teachers. That's just amazing that we're discovering this right now.
00:17:55
Speaker
Anyway, where she says it's a little things like that like relatedness, right? Like that happens on the internet and it's like that person has the same first name as you like all of these things and they're super weird like if your name starts to Jay you are more likely to marry someone whose name starts to the J so like none none of these are
00:18:13
Speaker
problematic at the individual level, but at the population level, they do become problematic because, all right, you have this relatable thing, now there's this weave of trust, right? And now this person, if they give you advice or something like that, you're more likely to defend them, you're more likely to hold what they say in higher esteem. And humans have a very, very hard time
00:18:33
Speaker
figuring out who is the more right out of two people that sound smart. You must have a very hard time doing that. And they like authoritativeness. One thing that's very annoying for people with me is I'm not going to kickstand on my degree. I'm not going to do that. I'm a doctor listening. Here's the evidence. Let's go through the evidence together. Whereas people want that. They want like, oh, this person said that. I trust this person.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah, I see that a lot. I see that a lot in the movement world as well, where my teacher said that this was true, therefore it must be true. And now I'm really upset that you're saying it's not true because you've attacked not only my source of knowledge and what I believe, but like my identity too. So how did you get started with nutrition and why did you choose nutrition? And then also
Dr. House's Academic Journey
00:19:24
Speaker
fitness. From Wisconsin, never thought I could make nutrition a career. That's where I was going with the Wisconsin bit.
00:19:28
Speaker
Why would you think that? Probably some beer and pizza. I was weird. I was really weird. I love the gym since I was like 12 to 13 years old. I mean, my mom was a baker, like sixth grade. I was a little chubby. I didn't have any skills, resources, competencies. I didn't have any of these things. So I just tried to work harder while eating massive amounts of honey bunches, votes, and toast.
00:19:53
Speaker
People always ask you, if you could change one thing about your life, what would you change? Man, if I could just give myself a smidgen of what I know now, because I had all the effort, it just wasn't directed in a very efficient or effective way. And I still made, for all intents and purposes, I ate a ton of protein, I squatted a lot.
00:20:10
Speaker
I made a lot of progress. Even though I had a lot of things right, that effort still got me pretty far. I wanted to know more. In the late 90s, early 2000s, we pretty much only had muscle magazines. Got into college and I was pre-med, was going to go to med school. I was like, yeah, that's an esteemed track. I'll go be a medical doctor. Took some time. I shadowed an orthopedic surgeon and everybody was the same.
00:20:40
Speaker
The patients were different, but they were all the same. They were all overweight, pre-diabetic, new knee, new hip. I was like, why don't we get on the front side of this? We're fixing all these problems that I don't really have an interest in. How do we get on the front side of these problems?
00:20:57
Speaker
Because I was always interested in training in nutrition. It was always like this side thing that really wasn't involved in my academic career. I put the MD on hold. I was accepted, but I just elected not to go and then started a master's in nutrition. And while I was in my master's in nutrition, I applied to UT Austin, which I didn't know was very, very hard to get to. It's a top five school in graduate school.
00:21:20
Speaker
And so I didn't get in. We were in Austin, Texas, and I was like, I'm just going to apply to UT, not knowing anything. I wasn't a very big planner at this. I was kind of a planner, but not to the states that I am now. And so Cathy McWilliams, who was in charge of the nutrition department, I applied it in the juncture. So I applied it for spring semester.
00:21:40
Speaker
And I didn't get in. And then she called me in the summer. I was like, this is weird. Why is this academic lady calling me? I was like, I didn't get in. Is she just going to rub it in my face? Like, what's happening here? Like, hey, you didn't get in. But she called me. She just said, can you please resubmit your application? She's like, you don't have to pay any money. Just resubmit your application. And the next day, I got an acceptance letter. And so the reason was I spoke Spanish. And so they needed Spanish-speaking people
00:22:09
Speaker
Oh, wow. So I was brought into UT for a specific study that got funded by an investigator. And so that's how I got into UT.
00:22:21
Speaker
Very cool. Very cool. I also speak Spanish. I'm finding all of these parallels, Ben. I trust you more and more and more. The more we talk, I'm just believing everything you're saying now. No, I'm just kidding. That's the hardest thing I've ever done. Academically, I gave an eight-hour presentation in Spanish. I had a translator, but I didn't use him for the first four hours. Then the last four hours, my mind was shot. I was forgetting words. I was like, bubble. What is bubble?
00:22:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's a different level of exhaustion when you're teaching or talking or conversing in a different language than you would experience if you were doing it in your native language. It's unreal. All right. I want to ask you our kind of first sort of nitty gritty nutrition question. And it's going to be super broad. And I said this to Ben before the interview. I was like, the only type of question that is appropriate for me to ask is a broad one. Because that's where I'm starting, right? I'm starting from.
00:23:20
Speaker
a place of really not knowing a whole lot about this topic to be honest okay so i'm gonna ask you just a super broad question.
Basics of Nutrition: Macronutrients and Micronutrients
00:23:27
Speaker
What is nutrition then what is it include it is the study of what you eat so you can further break that down into macronutrition or micronutrition is also a little bit about what those words mean macron micronutrition yes good.
00:23:41
Speaker
Nutrition is how we essentially feed ourselves. And so macronutrition would be broken down into three macronutrients, which is fat, carbohydrates, and protein. And then micronutrition is the vitamins and minerals that humans need to
00:23:58
Speaker
Not necessarily survive. We can survive without them, but not get diseases like rickets or insufficiencies. For your audience, the number one mineral insufficiency in the world is iron. Heme iron is going to be more digestible. Heme iron is in meat. When we think about nutrition, there's all these components. There's adequate macronutrition, and then there's adequate micronutrition. So a lot of the nutrition world is arguing about
00:24:25
Speaker
macros. There's this idea that pizza or a kale salad are the same if you match up the macros, which is very hard to do anyways, possible in theory. But that's just macronutrition, but that's not getting into micronutrition. One thing that happens in the internet with this type of broad, like what is nutrition? You get into what are calories.
00:24:48
Speaker
We won't get into it, but it's basically how much energy it takes to heat up some amount of water. That is what the calorie is. It's a unit of energy. So when you look at a food label, it is going to give you however many calories that thing is. It's plus or minus 20% if it's a packaged product. And then your body's going to metabolize that. So that's not how much energy that your body gets from that food. Calories do absolutely matter.
00:25:17
Speaker
The first law of thermodynamics is true. It's a law of physics. It's a law. Calories in does equal calories out, but the equation is insanely complex on both sides of that equal sign. When you say calories in equals calories out, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Is that kind of what you're saying? Exactly.
00:25:44
Speaker
whether or not you gain weight is dependent almost entirely on whether or not your calorie expenditure is higher or lower than your calorie intake.
Calories and Weight Management
00:25:56
Speaker
So if you have a high calorie intake and low energy expenditure, you're going to gain weight. If they're equal, you're not going to gain weight or lose weight. And then if you have a
00:26:04
Speaker
low calorie intake relative to calorie expenditure, you're going to lose weight. You summarized that perfectly. Oh, okay. That equation is correct. If you are going to gain mass, you by definition have to be in an energy surplus. If you are losing weight, you by definition have to be in an energy deficit. The problem is people are very, very, very, very bad at quantifying their energy intake. On top of that, you don't know how much of that energy will be metabolized.
00:26:35
Speaker
Like so natural almonds, you're gonna metabolize about 48% less energy than almond butter. So it's the same food, but you just processed it more. So like, even if those calories are the same on a box, you're still gonna metabolize less energy from them. And everyone is different in how much energy they metabolize. By definition, you have to be in an energy deficit if you want to lose weight. Our ability to quantify both sides of that equation on the individual level are crazy bad.
00:27:02
Speaker
Bad, bad, bad. Like your pedometer, remember I said like authoritativeness, like people love it. My aura rings as this. My pedometer says this. No, that thing could be right, but it also could be very, very wrong. There's huge, huge error bars in that. Same thing with my fitness pal. Like the average person is going, the average person is going to under report by 400 to a thousand calories. Like, hmm, even dietitians under report, but even me, I'm probably under reporting by 10 to 20%. Huh? I have a PhD in nutrition. Right.
00:27:31
Speaker
Gotcha. I'm not sure how helpful that was to people, but a lot of people when they get a nutrition, it's for a reason or goal oriented. They want to do something. They probably want to change their physique in some way or they want to become healthier. Yes. Right. Or they want to perform better. So for me, when I was an actress, I was interested in aesthetics, right? I wanted to lose weight and I wanted to be thinner and thinner and thinner.
00:28:00
Speaker
And then I learned, you know, through a little bit more study in nutrition, taking the CSCS that I maybe could up some of my protein intake a bit and for health reasons, but also because I really wanted to get stronger. I wanted to put more muscle on my body so that I would be able to do certain things that I couldn't do like pull ups, for example. And I knew that like adding muscle mass to my body was going to be crucial to my ability to do some of this stuff that just required sheer strength that I lacked.
00:28:30
Speaker
So I think there's the aesthetic side of nutrition, there's the health side, right? My husband is watching his diet because of some feedback that he got from his doctor, right? And then there's also the performance side of nutrition. And this leads me to my next question, right? A lot of people listening to the Movement Logic podcast are movers. A lot of them are professional movers. They're teachers, right? We've defined nutrition. So maybe what we can do is take a step back here, define fitness.
00:28:59
Speaker
And then I'd love to hear what the connection is.
00:29:04
Speaker
specifically between nutrition and fitness. If fitness is individual, so you threw out a lot of words there than like, my reductionist mind wants to like define them like, okay, muscle mass strength, what are what kind of strength because strength is rep range and task specific. There's lots of ways to get stronger that you can get stronger through neural mechanisms. You can get stronger through muscular mechanisms. You can get stronger through soft tissue mechanisms like plyometrics. You can get stronger by improving your coordination, right?
00:29:30
Speaker
Yes. So those things happen. If you're thinking about time scales, these are all debated. I think they're all happening all the time, just like energy systems. And so how nutrition really gets into fitness is a prototypical thing that I see in offices like I do yoga and I rock climb. Okay. Yeah. And so in my mind, I'm like, okay, that's their fitness. This is
00:29:49
Speaker
benefit. It's your goal, whatever that you want to do, we can break it down into different components. But do you care about strength? What strength do you care about? What tasks do you want to do, right? And then once you've selected the things that you want to do with your body, then you can look at how nutrition can potentially support or take away from those goals, right. And that's, that's what I do as a coach. Like so yesterday, I had the opportunity to consult with a pro soccer player. And we kind of got like, should he gain upper body mass, like
00:30:17
Speaker
that a thing that is going to benefit him for his sport? Like he has to carry it around. We were talking about like, where would he want to be body composition wise, where's the best place for him for his particular sport and what he wants to do. If he wants to keep his muscle mass the same, then he actually can probably not eat as much protein, maybe like he's an endurance athlete, maybe like 1.2 to 1.4 grams per kilogram. If he wants to increase his muscle mass, he'd probably want to increase his protein intake to somewhere between 1.6 and 1.8 grams per kilogram. And so that's where it's like, can nutrition support the person?
00:30:47
Speaker
Yes, but it depends on what that person wants to do with their body. Fuel wise, we all have plenty of fat. Flat is burned in low intensity states. Everybody's different, the amount of glycogen that we can store, but you're going to deeply glycogen resistance training, high level sprint efforts, things like that.
00:31:06
Speaker
in those types of scenarios, in those types of sports, carbohydrates are very important. The body can replete glycogen, which is the storage form of carbohydrate, without any food, which is mind-boggling to a lot of people. It can actually do it fast, which is crazy, but it does it a lot faster when you give it the things that it needs and the fuel that it needs. That's why carbohydrates are going to be very, very important.
00:31:31
Speaker
for those types of athletes, like crossfitters, any type of field sport athlete, whereas a power lifter, they can get by without actually eating a lot of carbohydrates because they're not using that system very much. And so they're training, you know, one threes, fives, eights would be like a marathon.
00:31:49
Speaker
Powerlifting is very heavy strength training. I just want to say that. Squat bench deadlift. Yeah, the big three. The big three. There, carbohydrates aren't necessarily going to be as important. Now, I do think that you can clearly be an ultra endurance athlete and do keto. Can you tell us what keto is?
00:32:08
Speaker
So keto is eating so few carbohydrates. This is actually like so few is a giant asterisk. For most people, it will be so few that your body starts creating ketones, which your brains can use as a backup fuel. Your body can use it too. But you're eating so few carbohydrates and such little protein.
00:32:28
Speaker
because your body can create carbohydrates from protein, that your body gets into a state where it's creating this backup fuel. It's creating ketone bodies, beta hydroxybutyrate, lots of words. Do people do the keto diet predominantly to manage their body composition or for performance?
00:32:44
Speaker
Keto comes in and out of vogue. All of these diets are essentially recycled. They essentially just come back. I think keto originally propagated in the late 1800s was the first time that a low carbohydrate diet was found to be helpful, and then researched in the 20s, then obviously researched with Atkins, and now we have the big researchers again. And so most people, I would say, are interested in keto from a body composition's perspective.
00:33:12
Speaker
Right. The best way to think about it is Keto does work for weight loss. We have lots of head-to-head trials of Keto versus veganism, and they both seem to perform equally well. Can you say that again? This will blow people's minds. Yeah, I think it will. When you stack up low carbohydrate diets, very high fat, versus
00:33:34
Speaker
That's keto, right? Low carb, high fat. Semantically, I would say it's low carb, high fat. There's nothing about ketosis that makes anything better for fat loss. It's not like we have these studies now like keto versus slightly not keto and keto doesn't win. So there's nothing about ketosis that maximizes fat loss. You will maximize utilizing fat as a fuel, but that's just because you're eating more fat. On the flip side, if you look at veganism, which is predominantly very high carbohydrate, low fat,
00:34:02
Speaker
Both of these would be moderate protein intake diets on paper. Keto would probably have more bioavailable protein, veganism. You'd have to be smart about protein sourcing because your plant proteins are going to be lower in certain amino acids, so you want to pair your proteins effectively. But when we compare these diets head to head for weight loss, neither one of them wins when you equate for calories.
00:34:29
Speaker
When you equate for calories, both of these diets can result in equal amounts of weight loss. You will get people who just have a propensity to either one, like one works better for them, maybe they like meat, maybe they like vegan. That's where these camps come from. But if I put people in a controlled environment and I cook them all their food and I mashed everything as well as I possibly could, you can get results doing either of those approaches. We look at nutrition for the purpose of
00:34:57
Speaker
being more fit from the standpoint of strength.
Strength, Muscle Size, and Body Image
00:35:04
Speaker
What starts to emerge in my population is a conflict then between this third goal, which is aesthetics. We're going to set aside competition for a bit because it's actually not as relevant to this audience. We're going to talk specifically about health and aesthetics because what
00:35:25
Speaker
I hear a lot in my population of movers and teachers is that there's this fear amongst an overwhelmingly female population that if we build muscle, we get bigger. In so many ways over the course of our entire lives, women have been told that they're actually more desirable
00:35:54
Speaker
when they're smaller, when they're thinner, when they weigh less, when they often also say less and think less about things. So that's what's maybe more mainstream communicated to women. In my community, there is this movement now toward
00:36:16
Speaker
a little bit of fuck that. Let's actually put some muscle on our body. Let's get stronger. This conflict, though, is always there because it's deeply entrenched in the ideals of our capitalistic society, which champions thinness and whiteness and wealth. All of this is wrapped up in status and power.
00:36:36
Speaker
In focusing on strength, building muscle is one of the main ways we get stronger. It's not the only way. Strength is multifactorial. Strength is complex, just like our body is. It's a physiological outcome that is dependent on many different factors. But what can you say to women who don't want to get bulky, but they want to get stronger?
00:36:57
Speaker
One of my tenants is I'll just take whatever motivations people have and I'll try to help them on that journey. That's my job. I'm a Sherpa and I'll try to move their field goal. And see, I understand moving field goals. I'm definitely not the person to move that field goal. So you mentioned like, oh, let's just talk about aesthetics and health. Health is hard to define.
00:37:16
Speaker
We probably want to define health as biomarkers, like not BMI. Body mass index will have a determinant of your health. It is somewhat predictive. Even your muscle mass and your fat mass are not going to dictate your health. It is a proxy measurement. If we want to measure health, we might as well measure it with blood glucose control, lipids, inflammation, things like that. If you want to lose weight for health purposes, we need to measure health.
00:37:40
Speaker
And then I can tell you if losing weight will potentially make you healthier. I can't do that without biomarkers. I legit, I could tell you probabilistically, like if you're over this body fat percentage, it would likely make you healthier to lose this amount of weight. But I cannot, unless I have markers of health, I cannot track that. So I know a lot of people in my community do want to lose weight, but what I hear more about is that they want to get stronger.
00:38:04
Speaker
and then the competing goals in their mind are i want to get stronger but i don't want to get bigger do you see what i'm saying like yeah yeah they want to be more fit in terms of being more stronger but they don't want to get bigger so they want aesthetics and strength if i'm speaking to that avatar we created these three ideas right like performance health
00:38:25
Speaker
and aesthetics, right? Could you get healthy by just focusing on strength and aesthetics? It's possible you could also be unhealthy doing those two things. Individuals I'm going to treat as individuals, so I'm going to be like, okay, how strong are you? What do you want to do? Would losing mass help that? If your measure of strength is a pull-up, losing mass is going to help you. As long as it's not lean mass, right? As long as it's not the muscle you're losing.
00:38:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you can make an argument like calisthenics people don't have very big legs. Like if I wanted to be really good at calisthenics, my legs would have to shrink a phenomenal amount. Strength, I'm going to try to define that outcome. Aesthetics, I'm going to try to define that outcome. Like what are you after? Okay, you don't want to get bigger. Where don't you want to get bigger? How can I not train that? And most females will say like, I don't want my quads to get bigger. I don't want my traps to get bigger. Right? And so I'll be like, okay, let's not do that. Muscles,
00:39:16
Speaker
are going to get bigger. If you train them, they're going to respond to loading. They're going to respond to mechanical tension. I'm going to take whatever someone wants to do, and I'm going to try to help them do that thing. I hear a lot of times that women want to get tone. So when you hear, I want to be tone, but I don't want to be bulky. What do you think? In that scenario, generally, they want to lose body fat. Okay. Can you be tone without building muscle?
00:39:42
Speaker
Yeah, you would just have to get more and more shredded. It just depends on how- Shredded, shredded meaning lose fat or shredded meaning build muscle. My understanding is it's a little bit of both, right? Aesthetically, everybody hates bodybuilding, but bodybuilding, you can learn a lot from bodybuilding and extremes. Why do people hate bodybuilding? Wait a second, back up. Well, what is bodybuilding? We're going to back up again and define that. Then how is it different from string training? Why do people hate it?
00:40:09
Speaker
physical capabilities used to be intertwined. Um, and then like in the forties, they, bodybuilding became its own thing, which is just aesthetics. And so bodybuilding is, is really whether we call it a sport or not. I think it has lots of support elements. It is symmetry. It is how much muscle mass you have. How lean can you get essentially for, to be good at bodybuilding, you will have to get to unhealthy levels of leanness. Um, just like, like, just like any sport is a contact sport. It has negatives.
00:40:37
Speaker
Is bodybuilding predominantly aesthetic? Is it to be good at bodybuilding? Are you being good at it or are you looking good? No. People who have never bodybuilding will say these types of things. Posing is an art form. Posing. You can be big and not look big.
00:40:58
Speaker
Bodybuilding, there is a huge smoke and mirrors element to it. There is a very high skill component. It's about being able to control your muscles, right? You are isometrically contracting your muscles. Sometimes 30 to 40 minutes, you are sweating. Oh, wow. You have to be able to control muscles that you've probably never felt before. You have to be able to turn your lats on in a moment, notice, make yourself look as wide as a door. There's lots of things that you have to be able to do. But to get ready for that, this is where it's like,
00:41:27
Speaker
there's a huge preparation aspect. Generally getting bigger will help you because you will put on more muscle mass and then when you take the fat away, you will look like you have more muscle. If you don't have a lot of muscle, you just get leaner and you don't really aesthetically look what people are after. So if someone doesn't have a lot of muscle and they just get leaner, they just kind of look emaciated. And so you need amount of muscle mass
00:41:53
Speaker
that someone wants for their look. And then we're humans. We care about everything. We care about how we look. If you're single, you probably care more about how you look. I'm not trying to tell people not to care how they look, but body image, 60% of females hold a negative body image. 40% of males hold a negative body image. We're always comparing ourselves to other people.
00:42:13
Speaker
I don't, the crazy thing is like, will weight loss make you happy? Will weight loss make you more happy with your physique? The answer is it might or might not. It depends on the person. If I play both sides of it, losing weight, getting the physique that you also always wanted could lead to more weight checking, more figure checking. You could be worried about losing it.
00:42:35
Speaker
So there's lots of pros and cons on the aesthetic side. And so your original question is like, all right, so we have a female person who wants to look more toned or wants to... They want to get stronger, but they don't want to be bulky. That's it, right there. Yeah, yeah. So what I need to do is I need to define what bulky is. If bulky is big quads and big traps,
00:43:01
Speaker
We can try to train around that 100%. You don't want a giant back. You're not going to train your lats. You're going to maybe take it a little bit easier on your rhomboids. You can do these things to some degree. And then strength, what do you mean by strength? With strength, you keep trying to come back to the performance side of it. What do you want to be able to do? Well, you have to. Yeah, I think so too. I think so too.
00:43:23
Speaker
What is strong? Do you want to be able to do more handstand pushups? Do you want to do a single leg squat? Strength is rep range and task specific. Once we define what you want from a strength protocol, then we can try to build that strength. Is that strength more pushups? Is that strength a pull up? Is that strength being able to squat your body weight? Is it some type of other thing?
00:43:48
Speaker
A lot of times what I hear, at least in my population that I serve, which is probably 40 to 65, age 40 to 65, is that women want to be able to age well. They want to stay capable. They want to maintain bone density, bone mass. They want to maintain muscle mass because as we age, we know that
00:44:14
Speaker
We start to lose muscle mass at a faster rate. We start to lose bone density, especially around perimenopause. And menopause as estrogen levels decrease. And so I guess being strong might be a stand-in for I want to live well, right? I want to live
00:44:29
Speaker
higher quality life for longer. I would try to define what you want to do. If what you want to do is maintain muscle mass throughout the life course, training for that is easy. That is a goal that allows me to pick that up. There's tons of different ways to do that. There's so many different ways to train for that.
00:44:45
Speaker
Now, if you have an aesthetic goal and you want to be stronger and less bulky, what does that mean? No one can help you. You probably can't help yourself if you have nebulous definitions of what you want. If you want to lose weight for aesthetic purposes, there's a higher chance that you will be unsuccessful.
00:45:02
Speaker
If you want to lose weight for health purposes, there's a higher chance that you will be successful. Why? Why do you think that is? This gets into different types of motivational theories. Extrinsic motivators are generally going to be less powerful than intrinsic motivators. If I'm doing something for someone else or how I want people to think of me, that probably has, it can work obviously, social cultural dynamics can work, but it probably has less power than I want to do this to be a better father.
00:45:30
Speaker
I want to do this to be a better mother. I want to do this to be a better grandfather or grandmother so I can pick up my grandchild. That's why I want to train, train. Do you think that nutrition is similar in the sense that the way we use food and think of food can be driven by external and internal motivations?
Motivations in Nutrition and Health
00:45:48
Speaker
Extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation is continuum. There's lots of different types of motivation. I'll give you an intrinsic motivator, which is me. I love to train.
00:46:00
Speaker
Training gives me joy intrinsically, like just training. I love to train. So I eat the way that I eat to support my training. For my group, they don't necessarily love to train as specifically as maybe what you mean that to mean, but they love to move. They want to stay moving for as long as possible in all the ways that they
00:46:20
Speaker
They want to go on that 10 mile hike and they want to be able to move to another house and lift heavy boxes and they want to be able to pick up their grandkids and they want to be able to play soccer and they want to be able to run around or whatever it is like they want to be able to do a pull up maybe too, right? So when you eat in order to do what you love,
00:46:43
Speaker
How does this change how you eat? How does it change what you eat? And what can you say to the people listening about approaching food, approaching nutrition from this standpoint that would maybe be more from the angle of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic? What do you flip? How do you think about it differently?
00:47:04
Speaker
If I want to utilize nutrition as a way to live a potentially longer, better, more... We've moved the conversation to health span and lifespan and the ability to be autonomous into old age. If I am training for that and I am a 40 to 65 year old female, I would get a bone density scan. That would be square one. Where are we at?
00:47:28
Speaker
I'm annoying. I want to define variables. Is this a problem? Is it not a problem? And then I'm going to create the micronutrition to support that. So do I have the things to build bone? Do I have the things? Do I need to build muscle? How much muscle do I have? I'm super annoying. Fat-free mass index is a measure of muscle mass on the frame. Where are you on that? We know that once females get lower than about 14 on an FFMI, I'm worried. On an FFMI, what is that?
00:47:55
Speaker
fat-free mass index. You can search that, Google it, and you can put in your weight. You also need a body composition metric. Fat-free mass is everything except fat. It's like bone, muscle, soft tissue. Okay. Correct. Correct. Okay.
00:48:09
Speaker
You get the obesity paradox where overweight seems to be protective, probably due to a lot of things, but one of those is muscle mass. Can you say more about that? In observational trials, it looks like overweight people will live longer than normal weight people, and this is probably due to a lot of extenuating factors, cancer being one of them. When you control for muscle mass, this generally falls away. Like I said, BMI has
00:48:39
Speaker
terrible roots. It's just a metric. BMI is what it is. It's a measure of your body mass compared to your height.
00:48:47
Speaker
the, it's actually going to be U shaped in the opposite direction. So like not having a lot of fat mass will be deleterious. And then you're going to hit this break point where it probably doesn't matter. And then having more fat mass than a certain point than a threshold, essentially your individual threshold for fat and where you get that spillover effect. And then the same thing with muscle muscle probably has the opposite U shaped curve where less muscle is going to be deleterious. And then probably more muscle at a certain point standpoint will be deleterious because
00:49:15
Speaker
Yes, because your heart has to pump against all of that muscle mass. Heart disease is the number one thing that kills both males and females. We don't know where that break point is because that population is few and far between, and it's hard to isolate them. But there probably is also a break point for longevity in terms of having too much muscle mass. We don't know where that is.
00:49:36
Speaker
You want to have enough muscle master that you can be autonomous. That means like to do the things that you want to do. Uh, and then you want to try to maintain that throughout the life course. So defining those, what are the things that I want to do? I don't think a pull up is probably necessary for that.
00:49:52
Speaker
Being, if I'm thinking about my mom or my dad, it's like being able to trap our deadlift, maybe 135, or pick up two 50-pound suitcases. That could be a good thing. If you're in the training edition, you feel like these metrics are probably way lower than you want them to be. I think that's humbling. If we measure strength in nursing home studies, it's like number of chair stands in a minute. It's not deadlifting. It's just like how many times can you get up off the chair?
00:50:18
Speaker
Again, strength is rep range and task specific. If you want to be able to hike 10 miles, you want zone two low level cardiovascular and muscle endurance. I'm always going to come back to like, all right, I'm going to make Jill fit. I'm going to make Roger fit. I'm going to make whatever. I'm going to make the fitness plan for that person and what they want to do in the short term and the long term.
00:50:45
Speaker
All right, a couple more questions for you. What are some of the biggest misunderstandings people have about nutrition and health? Yes. I think the biggest one for this talk is like thinner is automatically healthier. That's something that's been invoked for a really long time. That is not the case. At some point, thinner will be
00:51:06
Speaker
Like I said, it gets complex. It will probably be metabolically healthier, healthier, meaning your lipids and your blood sugar could be better, but hormonally, appetite, sociologically, physiologically, there'll be a lot of negative consequences to getting thinner. This is something that is critically important on social media because we compare ourselves to other people. You could get very thin and you could take 365 pictures and you could post them throughout the entire year.
00:51:34
Speaker
In other words, you'll look thin for a year, but it's an illusion.
00:51:42
Speaker
Thinness is not synonymous with health. There are very wide brackets where people can be healthy. And then outside of those brackets, it has to do with individual risk, an individual risk tolerance. And so if you get into shame and blame and anything like that, those don't necessarily move behavior, so it doesn't matter. That's why I constantly come back to, let's quantify, let's be annoying, let's attach a metric to this thing so that we can start to move the needle.
00:52:11
Speaker
females, it looks like they can be healthy.
00:52:15
Speaker
in the low twenties, even in the teens on a percent body fat, and they could be likely healthy into the mid thirties. So females are responsible physiologically for turning calories into babies. That's what allowed us to take over the world as apes. They are meant to have more fat on their frame. A lot of people demonize fat, but fat is something that humans evolved as a protective mechanism against food shortages.
00:52:45
Speaker
And cold. Yeah, to a certain degree. But I would say even a bonobo, how much fat does a female bonobo have? It's single digits. It's very hard for a female human to get into single digits. They'll probably die. Even shredded bodybuilders on stage
00:53:06
Speaker
females are like 12%. Male bonobos have no fat. They're like, even in captivity, they're like 1%. So our ability to store fat on our frame is one of the things that allowed us to take over the world. It's a human quality, in other words. There's other things that store fat, obviously other animals that store fat, but in terms of the great apes, we are unique in our body.
00:53:32
Speaker
our ability to store that. Humans are not very good at anything. We're not very strong. We're good at walking long distances and we probably found tools and we're very good at cooperating. None of these things are very sexy and they're probably all backfiring on us. Do you have any other misunderstandings out there about nutrition and health that you want to call attention to? But the one you just
00:54:00
Speaker
named is gold. Thank you. I would say if you are bought into dietary dogma, and I've bought into dietary dogma multiple times in my life, it feels good. Being righteous always feels good. And so I would
00:54:24
Speaker
really take a look at the other side of whatever you don't. I think one of the best ways to refute yourself is look at the positives of something that you don't like. If you've fallen for a carnivore diet, for instance,
00:54:39
Speaker
No beef on that. I understand. Pun intended. There is a subset of the population that has large amounts of GI distress and they do better on a lower residue diet. They have found that this does ostensibly make them feel better. They feel better eating lower residue foods. I would say
00:55:00
Speaker
If vegetables were so horrific, if they were this terrible thing, then we would have to see some signal of that in the literature. We see no signal of that. We see no signal. Carnivore diet people say you shouldn't eat vegetables. Also, if your dietary dogma
00:55:23
Speaker
is very restrictive and then it comes back. So carnivore was only meat, then it was meats, eggs, dairy, bananas. Anytime you're moving things and now we're just going to demify vegetables, anytime you're just demifying one food group,
00:55:39
Speaker
I have no problem. If I'm going to demify one thing, it's ultra-processed foods, but what are we going to do with them? Now you're inside of every cultural norm. I'm all for a sugar tax, but does it work? Does it actually reduce sugar consumption? Does it actually do the things that we want to do? That's why I'm a scientist. I'm annoying, right?
00:56:00
Speaker
If we're going to demify something, I'm fine demifying ultra processed foods, but then you're going to invariably create a heuristic about good versus bad. I eat processed foods every day and I am very healthy.
00:56:16
Speaker
Like I eat ultra-processed foods every day. And my lab work is better than 0.1% of the population, right? So I am healthy and I eat ultra-processed foods. Like how is that possible?
00:56:32
Speaker
Any type of any type of good versus bad narrative in food, I would really look at that because it's probably causing social isolation. It's probably cause you're probably putting that on other people. And so I would think like, okay, why do I have this belief of good versus bad? And are there places that this is untrue? Because if we seek to understand, then we can potentially get out of that judging shame mind, which is so present in nutrition. And we can just eat, we can just eat
00:57:01
Speaker
food with people. I just want to eat food with people and just eat food and hang out. I don't care what kind of bread you're eating. It doesn't matter to me. What are your goals? What do you want to do? Let's not talk about it and let's just eat some really delicious food. Yeah. Let's not think of food as punishment and maybe also not as reward, but as a way that we can be together and enjoy.
00:57:29
Speaker
And neither of those things are bad. Like if you think about food in that way, accept it. And like, hey, this is how I think about food right now.
00:57:39
Speaker
This gets into like dbt theory. Like the only way to change is radical acceptance. Like I'm having these, I'm having these feelings. Like I think I I've been doing this a long time. I have all those feelings too. That's okay. We can have those feelings. We can have those thoughts. Those thoughts will always appear. Those thoughts are appearing again. I'm thinking about food as, as a punishment for these things I did. Okay. That's fine. This is bullshit. Very self-aware.
00:58:05
Speaker
All right, so one more question that I think is important to ask before we talk a little bit more about you. Do women specifically need to take a different approach to nutrition
00:58:21
Speaker
as we age. One of the things I hear a lot, and maybe you can speak to this, there was an article in The Times about it that I'll link in the show notes, is that our metabolism slows down or our metabolism changes as we age and therefore that's one reason we need to eat differently.
Metabolism Myths and Realities
00:58:37
Speaker
Yeah, this gets into a cultural phenomenon of women are not just small men, which I think is 100%
00:58:43
Speaker
I would be an advocate of that. We don't have enough female research. We don't have enough 100%. But as sexes, we are more similar than we are dissimilar. We are the same species. Especially so, we get more similar throughout the life course. The sexes do come together. Males will get more female and females will get more male in general as we age. What does that have to do with hormones?
00:59:10
Speaker
Yeah, so testosterone is always the dominant hormone in females, even when they're cycling. Interesting. It is always the dominant hormone. There's way more around that estrogen. Estrogen is very potent. This is from Herman Potcher's lab. There's a huge, these huge commemoration double abled water studies. It does look like our metabolic rate slows, but it doesn't happen until 60. This is very, very, very disconcerting to a lot of females because they would thought it would have been 51.
00:59:40
Speaker
Because that's when they started to gain weight and they were like, my metabolism is to blame. Metabolism is broken. What you're saying is that metabolism doesn't actually slow down until what age? 60.
00:59:51
Speaker
So what's the weight gain about? What's the weight gain about? This is called apophenia. I'll define the term. So apophenia is when people put two unrelated things together and they infer causality. So we have menopause, females start feeling lots of things. And I'm a male, I'm not trying to tell people how to feel inside their own bodies. I understand that this message probably shouldn't come from me, but I've researched this to the nth degree. You're the PhD.
01:00:14
Speaker
When you track females across menopause, they do not gain any more weight. So from 40 to 50, people did not gain any more weight than they gained from 30 to 40. Human beings in our current environment just gain weight. And so it's an associative thing. You will have slight body composition changes. Slight, very, very slight, even hard to measure with body composition metrics. But you mentioned muscle loss. At the age of 30, females start losing weight. If you don't... Losing muscle.
01:00:44
Speaker
Yes. If you don't use it, you lose it. We gain weight until about 65, but then we start losing because our appetite decreases. That gets into sarcopenic obesity, which is an absolute wave that is going to hit our population. It's going to be terrible and it's going to cause potential bankruptcy of our healthcare department.
01:01:01
Speaker
That's Wally. That is where we are headed. 48% of our current population has metabolic syndrome. Two-thirds of our population is now pre-diabetic. We have to honor that
01:01:18
Speaker
overweight and obesity are a problem for our species. Probably the biggest, having too many cupcakes and too much delicious food and easy access to it is probably the... I mean, we have a lot of problems, but it's a big problem. And we don't know what to do with that, social, culturally, individually. But we also have to honor, we have a huge body image concern, which is also perforated by a lot of things. And so I've written articles on the solutions to these problems
01:01:47
Speaker
are more intertwined than people think they are. So we have these body image problems, and then we also have the obesity crisis. They're super related. It's a false dichotomy to put them against each other. Right. It's like, what are the interventions that are going to help with body image, and what are the interventions that are going to help with obesity? One of the big ones is resistance training, physical activity, not focusing on how your body looks, but focusing on how your body performs. Yes.
01:02:16
Speaker
So that's why I'm constantly coming back to defining strength. What does fitness look like to you? What is your ideal body composition for you? How does that relate to health? Is that possible? What is the cost of that? On the individual, none of this stuff matters. On the population level, it matters a lot, but it's a very different kind of thought process. On the individual, it's just like, OK, what do we want to do? Let's get in the weeds. It seems, though, right, that
Navigating Health Narratives
01:02:46
Speaker
eating healthy according to the internet and being fit according to the internet from my perspective is very complicated. If you listen to the influencers who have the biggest microphones, a lot of them who have maybe ranging from like
01:03:04
Speaker
ridiculous ideas about seed oils. We're going to talk about seed oils and I kind of interrupted you and we don't have to go into seed oils right now, but like seed oils are being demonized and the carnivore diet is being heralded as the best diet and then we've got the keto people and then we've got like, you know,
01:03:22
Speaker
somebody like Andrew Huberman, who's just rattling off like 16 different things you need to do during the day to have a healthy kind of lifestyle protocol or whatever he calls them, right? It just seems so complicated. But like, is nutrition and is fitness really this complicated? What should we think?
01:03:42
Speaker
No, I mean, that's why I come back to the individual is like, what do you want to do? What is the individual price? What is the benefit you started? What is the individual effect size? Is doing Ben Greenfield's or Andrew Huberman's? Is doing that 30? That could be important if you want to move the needle 1%, but what are the things that are going to get you very healthy?
01:04:04
Speaker
And so 8,000 steps looks to be the breakpoint for regulation of appetite. Also looks to be the breakpoint for how you adapt to exercise. So steps isn't the best marker of movement, but it's a marker. So moving more will help your body in a ton of different ways. So everybody really gets mad about the physical activity guidelines. They get so mad about them.
01:04:26
Speaker
But they're actually pretty good. They're pretty good. Like, oh, strike train twice per week, right? And do some moderate physical activity. They're good. They're good. If people did the recommendations, even the dietary ones, the dietary ones aren't terrible. They're not that bad.
01:04:46
Speaker
What are they? The dietary recommendations are, the problem is they're very broad. They're like, eat this much protein, eat this much because nutrition, you can be inside of those windows and be healthful. There are some types of like, this is where I get, if we want like an 8,000 step one, I would say five to seven servings of vegetables. Per day. Per day. I'm not getting that. I'm not getting that.
01:05:16
Speaker
five to seven, you can clear a lot of micronutrient deficiencies. And then if I'm thinking about, all right, what are general heuristics for nutrition? It's probably five to seven
01:05:30
Speaker
servings of fruits and vegetables, then the next one would be protein intake throughout the life force. That's going to likely be as you age, like 1.2 grams per kilogram. It's not a ton. If you want to make gains, it's probably 1.6 and 1.8 grams per kilogram of bioavailable protein. Those are kind of two pretty solid heuristics that you can go to bat for. And then the other one is like, if someone doesn't have disordered eating or eating disorder tendencies,
01:05:57
Speaker
I think it is generally a good idea to try to track some stuff and have this experience because you'll start to see like, wow, I thought I was eating this many calories, but I am so wrong because I'm eating a lot of mixed food. People are generally eating a lot more fat than they think, a lot less protein than they think, and I'm not advocating this for anyone who has had those.
01:06:19
Speaker
We now have a hunch that tracking your food, turning your food into numbers, doesn't probably lead to disordered eating, but people who have disordered or eating disorder tendencies, if they do that, it's probably not a good idea. Thank you for saying that. That's really super relevant to this audience. I know mostly women, so that right there I think is going to be potentially a population that would be more likely to have had disordered eating, and then also yoga teachers who
01:06:49
Speaker
tend to also be dancers, maybe coming from like performance professions like I did the acting. So thank you, thank you for saying that. I'm sorry to interrupt, keep going. The worst place to be in the diet world is having high levels of dietary restraint and not getting results. I'm trying to do all of these things and nothing's working. And that is where I...
01:07:17
Speaker
I thrive because, and that's where there's lots of coaches that thrive because I've seen so many patterns. Then I can be like, Oh, you're clipping yourself here. This is where you're running into trouble. Like, and I try not to like tell, sometimes if I have a good relationship with someone, I'll just tell them like here, here, this is what's likely causing you. Like you're, you're controlling your diet to a large, large degree, but you're not getting results. Um, and you're, and you, and that's super frustrating. I understand that that's frustrating. Um, and so one of the things that can
01:07:46
Speaker
break through that is actually getting success. And then once you get success, then you have to decide like, is it worth it? Is me
01:07:53
Speaker
not being as social. What is the cost of this thing? Because everything has a price, right? And this gets into the price you asked about aesthetics. The price of leanness. There's always a price. Every level of leanness has a cost. And then you have to ask, am I willing to pay that price socially?
01:08:16
Speaker
individually, are you willing to pay that price? Financially. Financially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What food you buy. And some people aren't going to have the capabilities, the opportunities. They're not going to have the environments even be able to ask those questions. The access to the supermarkets that sell the food. 100%. Right. Right.
01:08:33
Speaker
100%. Like one of my core values is intentionality. Um, and so like, if, if I can, if I know the price of something, I can be like, okay, I know that's not worth it, but I know the price of this other thing and I can step back to that. And that's what's really, I'm going to come back to bodybuilding and why everybody hates it. That's why bodybuilding is really cool. Because if you have a really good coach and you're, and you're highly self-aware, you kind of stair step down and you hit this point where you have the body that you've always fucking wanted.
01:09:03
Speaker
You've always wanted it. If you get big and you get shredded and you still don't have the body that you wanted, that is time to talk to a therapist. Body dysmorphia, I imagine, is a thing amongst bodybuilders. 100%. If you ostensibly get absolutely shredded and you have the body that you've always wanted, I've been there. Wow. I got the body. I've worked for the body that I've always wanted since I was a sixth grader, and it's unmaintainable.
01:09:33
Speaker
Yeah. I'm, I have all, like my hands are cold. My feet are cold all the time. I can't, I can't, I can't sleep. Right. Then I'm able to eat with it. Then I'm able to have intentionality. Like the price of this is way.
01:09:48
Speaker
way too high, right? Then the social comparison theory doesn't, I don't care. Okay. Awesome. You're shredded. For me, I can't be that. There's some people that can live that shredded, but once you understand, see, first understand if you have the opportunity, that's why bodybuilding was so, such a cool experience to me because
01:10:05
Speaker
I got that low and I was like, oh, that's not something that I can maintain. The price is too steep. But I can stair-step it back up. Rather than like always wishing, always wondering. And I can also like, there's no reason that people have to do that. And it's all a barometer of where you've been and where you are, right? Like the body, the brain seems to respond to body fat levels. The most I've ever weighed is 200 pounds. And I got down to 160. Like I could not maintain that.
01:10:35
Speaker
That's 20% weight loss. Yeah, that's, that's a lot. It's 20% weight loss. But if we look at the weight loss, like where people seem to not maintain weight loss, it's 10 to 12%. Yeah. And so like, maybe I think in my head, like, at some semblance, me living at 160 may be the same as someone who's 240 and got down to 190 as a male.
01:11:00
Speaker
It's not the same thing. I would be lying if I said it was the same thing. But I have so much empathy. Like if their brain was as food focused as mine was in that state.
01:11:11
Speaker
I have so much empathy for that. They are walking a tightrope probably in terms of their life, trying to maintain that. And one of my goals is in that scenario, that is kind of what we need at the population level. We don't even need that. We just need people to move and eat vegetables really. And if we can get people
01:11:32
Speaker
what's called body re-composition. This is one thing I'm super interested in. I know that's a question that you had. If we get people to lose 10 pounds of body fat, this is not your audience. Remember, 47% of our population has metabolic syndrome. Two-thirds have pre-diabetes. It's bad. They teach those people, though. They teach those people.
01:11:57
Speaker
This is the trade that I'm trying to make on the broad level. This will not match people's motivations of how they want their bodies to look. But from a health perspective, if they can lose 5% of their body weight and gain 5% of their body weight in muscle, probably doesn't have the negative effects of long-term weight loss, which does seem to be very hard to maintain for most people. Not all people, it is possible. I mean, it's not impossible. But look ahead, the potentially most expensive long-term weight loss study that we ever had.
01:12:27
Speaker
The majority of the weight they've lost was lean body mass in that study. Over the long period of time, it's not good. We can do both at the same time. If you want to be the study, be the end of one where you lose 10 to 15 pounds of body fat and you gain five to 10 pounds of muscle. Be that study because I think your brain might not fight it. Health-wise, you're going to be so much better off. Performance-wise, whatever that means for you, you're probably going to be better off.
01:12:54
Speaker
Aesthetically, it probably won't match what you want, but that's when you're going to talk to a therapist about what do you want. Doesn't that make you happy? Awesome. Amazing information. Thank you so much, Ben. I wanted to ask one more little question. Where can people work with you and learn from
Interconnection of Nutrition and Psychology
01:13:13
Speaker
you?
01:13:13
Speaker
We talked about opportunity and resources and access. I made a lot of what I do very, very cost effective. I have almost 100 articles that are available for $8 a month. You can buy it for a month and read every article and then cancel. I don't care. I don't look at it. That's deconstruct nutrition. We're going to link that in the show notes.
01:13:35
Speaker
We do have two courses which will close at the end of 2023. We have a nutrition coaching course and also behavioral psychology, because I think behavioral psychology and nutrition are directly intertwined. You'll hear me talking about Com B and DBT, all these acronyms from the psychology world, because there's no way you can disentangle those two things. How are you going to change behaviors and nutrition? We're going to link that course as well in the show notes. What is the course called?
Origin of BroResearch.com
01:13:59
Speaker
I created a company as a joke and it's pre pandemic. It's bro research.com. I have a daughter. I wouldn't name it that now. Uh, that's why I grew up.
01:14:09
Speaker
The goal of that is still my, it is still my passion. It is researching
Challenges in Measuring Muscle Mass
01:14:15
Speaker
like super hyper nuance. Like, can we even measure muscle mass effectively on a lot of levels? I would say no. Listen to the podcast where I go with Grant Tinsley and we talk about all the negatives of different types of body competition, composition methods. They're all flawed, huh?
01:14:30
Speaker
I'll
Nutrition Myths and Mismeasurement
01:14:31
Speaker
leave people with this. What gets measured gets managed. What gets mismeasured likely gets mismanaged. And so many things in nutrition gets mismanaged that we get so many myths because of the mismanagement and just our inability to measure things effectively. The calorie myth really stems from our inability to effectively measure calorie intake and calorie output. Because people can't measure it effectively, they think it's wrong.
01:14:58
Speaker
Got it. And their experience is not wrong. For them, they are really bad at this math. It's not working for them. It's our inability to measure it. Our inability to
Conclusion and Resources
01:15:09
Speaker
measure a lot of these things is causing a lot of problems.
01:15:13
Speaker
Cool. So we're going to link deconstruct nutrition and your nutrition course in the show notes. Thank you so much. I feel like this has been a fascinating conversation that went many different directions, but kind of all came back to some.
01:15:29
Speaker
endearing topics and so thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your passion. I'm looking at Ben right now, we're face to face and he just jumps through the screen. So if you do get a chance to work with Ben, I'm gonna tell you it's a delight, it's a delight. Note to you listeners that you can check out our show notes for links to references that I mentioned in this podcast.
01:15:56
Speaker
You can also visit the Movement Logic website where you can get on Sarah and my mailing list to be in the know about sales on our tutorials. Finally, it helps us enormously. If you like this episode, please subscribe and then go the extra mile rate and review us as well in iTunes or anywhere that you get your podcasts. We'd be super appreciative of you if you did that.
01:16:19
Speaker
Join us again next week for more movement logic and more of our strong opinions loosely held. Thank you so much again, Dr. House, for joining me today. Thanks.