Dr. Jason Fung Breaks the "Counting Calories" Weight Loss Myth and What You Should Be Doing Instead

this episode is sponsored by skillshare and the first 1 000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare's premium membership enjoy the episode counting calories simply does not work at all and people will say oh but it does it does it does well if you look at the scientific studies it doesn't hey everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i am here with nephrologist and best-selling author dr jason fung jason thank you so much for joining me oh thanks for having me great to be here dude i am really excited to talk to you about two things that i think are really revolutionary that i don't see anybody talking about as well as you or maybe even at all and that is you've really um pushed for a paradigm shift in the way that we think about both insulin and its role in longevity obesity diabetes and on and on the list goes and then this whole idea of cancer paradigm 3.0 which i find really really interesting i want to start with the role of insulin in weight loss in uh disease mitigation what is it that was sort of that key insight for you that got you thinking about this in a different way and how exactly is it that you think about it well it's interesting because the question of weight loss is one that has really become more and more important as we've had more and more obesity so over the years we've seen more people with obesity which has led to more people with type 2 diabetes which has led them to get kidney disease which is where i kind of come in because i'm a kidney specialist so it's become a bigger and bigger part of the practice and it sort of dawned on me that eventually got through my thick skull that really weight loss is sort of really critical to keeping people healthy because it's sort of obvious like it leads to type 2 diabetes which is a huge risk factor not only for kidney disease but for heart attacks and strokes and cancer and it's a leading cause of blindness and amputations and diabetic infections and all kinds of bad things so almost like you know 50 of what i do is related to type 2 diabetes and the point was that if you can reverse your type 2 diabetes then you're not going to get these diabetic complications and in order to do that you need to lose weight which is why i became very interested about eight years ago in the question of how to lose weight and i didn't know much about it at the time but people were always you know what i had learned in medical school was all about sort of calories and calories out sort of uh thing but the more i looked into it one it's a very very um unsuccessful way to lose weight counting calories simply does not work at all and people will say oh but it does it does it does well if you look at the scientific studies it doesn't every single study that's looked at sort of say you know trying to restrict calories leads to at best a couple of pounds of weight loss over like eight years so you acknowledge that if you if you take calories out of somebody's diet long enough they are going to get lean regardless of anything else so where is where does that paradigm break down in reality and is it just willpower that people aren't sticking to it or is it something else well it's something else and the whole point is that it's not the number of calories it's what your body does with those calories because if you take 100 calories if you eat a cookie for example you take 100 calories your body has a decision to make do i store that as body fat or do i burn it for energy and say increase body heat generation for example and that's the basal metabolic rate that's the number of calories that your body uses uh in a day so which your body does so for that same 100 calories you can either become fatter or you can have a bit more energy during the day and which one your body does really depends on the hormones that are associated with the foods that you're eating and that's the real key because if you simply cut calories and this is the way that you know i was taught and everybody was taught you simply cut the fat eat less fat because fat is very dense in calories you get less calories and therefore your body is going to lose body fat but that's not necessarily true if you eat 500 calories less your body could simply decide to burn 500 calories less and you won't lose any body fat and it's not a matter of thermodynamics because that's that whole idea that it's just about thermodynamics assumes that your basal metabolic rate remains absolutely rock stable that is if you're using 2 000 calories a day today you go on a diet you'll still use 2 000 calories a day but you won't we know we've known that for at least 100 years of basic research that your body will actually use less fewer calories so cutting 500 calories a day which has been the standard device is very unsuccessful because if you don't change the hormonal system in your body the the different foods contain different hormonal instructions your body could simply decide to burn 500 less and you will not lose body fat so it's simply false to say if you cut 500 calories a day down you'll lose a pound of body fat a week it's actually not true in any way shape or form um just like if you say well if you make an extra hundred dollars uh you know this week that you'll be a hundred dollars richer you might or might not be if you make a hundred dollars more and you spend a hundred dollars by going out you're not richer same thing with your body you you you take 500 calories or less that day but you burn 500 less because your metabolic rate goes down you're not losing body fat and that's the whole point so it's it's not the total number of calories that's important it's what your body does with those calories and that depends on hormones and in fact everything in our body runs on hormones those are the instructions that we give to our body as to what to do so everything your body does or doesn't do depends on hormones those are the sort of mediators do you have any sense of why different foods have different hormonal cues like why is it that carbohydrates signal the body to secrete insulin i think the most out of all the macronutrients given that that is the signal to the body to store like why doesn't protein for instance signal the body to store why is it specifically carbohydrates yeah actually protein does stimulate insulin as well and equal amounts um some of some proteins can actually stimulate quite a bit of insulin it doesn't so if you eat carbohydrates your glucose goes up and then your insulin goes up and protein your glucose doesn't go up your insulin does go up and it's really to do with the way the body metabolizes so insulin in a more general sense is a nutrient sensor so that tells your body that hey food is on the way in therefore let's switch over to storing calories as opposed to burning calories the reason dietary fat doesn't do that is that it doesn't get metabolized through the liver dietary fat actually gets absorbed through the intestines goes into the lymphatic system and sort of goes directly into your fat stores so because it doesn't go through that whole processing through the liver it actually never metabolizes and therefore doesn't really need insulin for that but one of the things is that insulin you know different hormones our body needs to know what's coming in in what proportion so insulin is a nutrient sensor but so is something called mtor which really is very specific for proteins it goes up quite a lot tells your body that there's a lot of protein coming in and there's a lot of associated things but one of the things that's important is that these nutrient sensors are also linked to growth pathways so therefore your body really only wants to grow when nutrients are available and therefore when you do get take a lot of carbohydrates or even protein your body senses that there is food coming in and therefore will turn on growth pathways to grow muscles to grow you know stores of body fat that kind of thing is the key in this then because the thing that i found most interesting about what you talk about is a focus on insulin at least that's been sort of my read on what you talk about moving away from you know for a long time you hear people talk about glucose blood glucose the body tightly regulates that but this idea the analogy that you use of the suitcase right and sort of where this starts to become a problem is what we call insulin resistance is probably not the right way to think about it we'll get to that in a second but first i want to talk about low carb diets right so low carb diet was wildly effective for me in terms of reducing the body fat that i had that's certainly something i've heard you and other people say that reducing your carbohydrate intake is you know going to have a disproportionate response in terms of body fat than something like you know dietary fat or protein help me understand then the relationship if protein is spiking my insulin and insulin is the thing that's storing things into my fat cells why are carbohydrates more quote unquote problematic when it comes to storing fat i think it comes down to several things so proteins is actually quite complex because it's not primarily fuel so carbohydrates and fat are primarily fueled we we burn it and we store it so our body stores glucose or body source fat but our body doesn't really store protein so it's primarily a structural thing so your body isn't uh so even though insulin is stimulated it's actually quite complex because glucagon is stimulated which keeps the glucose normal but then protein also has very strong effects on satiety that is there are certain other hormones that when you eat for example protein are going to tell you hey you're full you need to stop eating so if you think about eating steak for example you can eat a certain amount of steak and then at some point you can't really just keep eating you will actually just get nauseous as we've all done at the buffet when we've eaten too much you can't just say oh that looks good i'm just going to have another pork chop it's really hard to do that because those satiety hormones are very powerful the reason carbohydrates are very problematic is that they tend to be processed so processing removes a lot of these satiety signals so even if you've eaten a huge buffet and somebody says hey do you want a few sips of my soda you'd say sure no problem because they don't activate your satiety mechanisms and same for like a cookie you could easily eat a cookie after after you're full from dinner where you would not eat another you know pound of steak so it's it's a bit more complex because there's multiple interacting hormonal systems that regulate how we respond uh protein doesn't seem to be nearly as bad even though it has a lot of insulin effect it has probably a lot of these other hormonal effects that are just as important and really stop us from eating just like if you were to eat steak and eggs in the morning a lot of fat a lot of protein it tends to keep you more full than if you're to eat white bread and jam you eat that and then at 10 30 you're looking for a low-fat muffin for example and and this is uh one of the things which i always say is like when you're thinking about weight gain weight loss you really have to think about hormones because it's really a hormonal imbalance not a caloric imbalance because the calories on all these foods can actually be exactly the same and that's why i'm not you know not all carbohydrates are bad for you like clearly there have been many many societies that have lived primarily on carbohydrates yet if you measure the insulin response they're actually quite good so something like that they did a study in catawba for example which is a south pacific island and they measured their diet and there's about 70 carbohydrates but natural carbohydrates and they weren't eating all the time then when they measured their insulin their insulin level was below the fifth percentile of a reference sort of swedish population so that means that even though they're eating a lot of carbohydrates their insulin levels are still very low so there's lots of things not only the foods that you eat but also the frequency which with you eat them plays a really important role and the amount of processing that goes into it and you can see that effect in something like the glycemic index where when you eat white bread things just spike way up but if you were to eat beans which is all carbohydrate the glycemic index is much much much lower and most natural foods are like that you don't see that huge spike that you get so the processing of the carbohydrates makes it especially problematic because it is a fuel source for our body that our body is able to use very easily and it's highly refined so that you don't have any satiety and then you're getting it sort of absorbed very quickly because you removed all the fiber you've removed all the fat and that's you know that's that's sort of what goes into it but focusing on the hormones is really important because it leads you away from focusing on something like calories the only implication of focusing on the hormones as opposed to calories is that some foods are more fattening than other foods that's really the only implication it's like boy if you were to ask your grandmother or great grandmother she said well duh i hope you didn't have to go to university to learn that of course some foods are more offending than other foods like cookies are fattening like anybody could have told you that anybody with an ounce of common sense would have told you you don't get fat eating broccoli like these are just like things that we take for granted that we should know but you get so people get so so focused on oh it's all calories it's all calories that they say ice cream is as fattening as salmon it's like no obviously not if you've ever lived you know in on this earth you would know that ice cream and salmon are not equally fattening for the same amount of calories that's just common sense so this distinction between chronic caloric restriction and fasting that i find really interesting and let us for the sake of this discussion assume that we have a person who is willing to endure an unlimited amount of suffering and you even you've talked a lot about the book unbroken that you read about world war ii people in japanese concentration camps and they were literally being starved and obviously all of them got lean so what i want to understand is okay fasting seems to have all these tremendous benefits chronic caloric restriction has some but also has like this really damaging psychological component if there was no damaging psychological component would they be equal or is there still some difference it all depends on how you do the caloric restriction so because it's not just about the calories it's about the hormones right so you have to sort of take it not to sort of this two compartment problem you have to take it to like a three compartment problem right there's what's coming in there's what's stored and there's what's being used okay so most people only think of sort of the two compartments and then the storage is sort of left over that's not the way the body works if insulin is high your body is going to store calories remember insulin is a nutrient sensor it tells your body that hey energy is coming in you're eating you need to store some of this right so so you eat breakfast lunch dinner did you get somebody on a low calorie diet like if you were on 700 calories a day but i gave you insulin could i make you fat yeah absolutely whoa because think about it this way if you have insulin your body and so if you think about it physiologically if you have insulin your body goes into a storage mode because it's a hormone insulin is a hormone it tells your body food is coming in and even if you don't give food if you just give insulin you're going to switch your body into this mode where it thinks that food is coming in so it's going to store energy so imagine that for example you are a coal you know a coal uh plant right the power plant you get 2 000 tons of coal coming in and you burn 2 000 tons of coal that's fine you have a storage compartment too so if you're you know if you do a thought experiment say you say you have 2 000 tons of coal coming in but you divert the whole thing over to uh or a thousand tons of coal into storage well you only have a thousand left so you're gonna feel tired and cold and hungry and you're gonna get fat at the same time right that's what's gonna happen but it's because of the way that you've diverted off the energy so think about it from a human body standpoint suppose you have 2 000 calories coming in 2 000 calories going out now you artificially inject insulin well you shuttle a thousand calories immediately into body fat and you have a thousand calories left to burn well what's going to happen your your body heat generation is going to go down your heart rate is going to slow you're going to feel tired you're going to feel hungry because you want to get more energy right that's the signal for you to get more energy so that you can get more you can burn more guess what that's exactly what happens when you go on a chronic calorie restricted diet and the the point is that if you do it correctly and you you correct that insulin part of things so that none of it's going into storage and you can't do that with chronic calorie restriction you certainly can you have to know that you have to do it properly like cutting out processed foods cutting out refined carbohydrates that kind of thing but it all depends on that sort of that sort of toggle in the middle that says how much goes here how much grease here insulin what it does is it tells your body to store fat but it also turns off fat burning remember fat is purely a store of energy it's a store of calories so you're immediately shuttling all your energy into storage and you have nothing left so say you take 700 calories but you're pumping people full of insulin so that energy is going to go into into uh storage and 700 is probably the lower limit of what you could really do but your body would then try to subsist on say five six hundred calories of energy you get really hungry because you're you've got no energy coming in you probably wouldn't be able to last very long but you could still gain weight there's a great experiment a few years ago where they actually took the type 2 diabetics and they gave them a lot of insulin so they went from zero units a day to a hundred units a day over a span of six months which is a lot and they dropped the number of calories that they ate by 300 okay so they're taking insulin but they're eating less 700 300 calories a day less so over the span of six months on average that group gained 20 pounds 20 pounds by eating 300 calories a day less why because so let's take an example you're eating 2 000 calories you go down to 1700 but the insulin is shuttling 700 of that immediately off to storage so you're gaining body fat now your body can only burn 1000 calories a day so you feel like crap you feel tired you feel hungry and you're still gaining weight and guess what if you do it wrong which is constantly snacking and eating cutting out all the dietary fat and eating all refined carbohydrates which remember is almost precisely what we told people to do in the 80s and 90s oh i remember it well yeah actually i had a tub of licorice because it was fat-free and i would just eat it and eat it i'm like it's fat-free what's happening why am i getting fat yeah that was a very confusing time it makes perfect sense from like because but you have to think of that additional step that is what is the body actually doing it's this sort of flip this switch so when you eat you're storing body fat when you don't eat when insulin is going down you're going to burn body fat you're actually going to you can't burn body fat if insulin is high technically we say it inhibits lipolysis as many of you know i'm all about constant self-improvement growth mindset and a relentless focus on progress and skill acquisition that's why i'm super excited to tell you guys about skillshare skillshare offers classes designed for real life and all the circumstances that come with it these lessons can help you stay inspired express yourself and introduce you to a community of millions creative self-discovery and expression can settle your mind and spontaneous acts of creativity can help break up the routine of a day indoors skillshare is an online learning community that offers membership with meaning so much to explore real projects to create and the support of fellow creatives skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth with thousands of classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills for instance they have an amazing class by simon sinek called presentation essentials how to share ideas that inspire action if there's anyone that should be teaching that class it is simon sinek this is a perfect example of the unique classes you can find on skillshare you can also find classes on illustration design photography video freelancing entrepreneurship and so much more and skillshare is also incredibly affordable an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and right now the first 1000 viewers to click the link in the description we'll get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity don't miss this one guys sign up right now let's ask then the reverse question so i fully accept that all food is a signaling molecule that's triggering a some cascade of hormones i know what to do if i want to store a lot of fat i'm going to eat a lot of processed carbohydrates that are going to remove all my society mechanisms and it's going to spike my blood glucose like crazy my body's gonna pump a bunch of insulin to make sure that that gets pulled out of the bloodstream i'm gonna get fat okay is there a diet that's optimized on the exact opposite side where i'm taking in a very satiating amount of calories but it's dropping my insulin or failing to trigger my insulin is maybe the right way to think of it and therefore i'm eating maybe more than your average bear but i'm actually getting leaner yeah there's certainly lots of them there and the principles are much the same one is you want to avoid sugar because sugar the way that we process fructose is sort of particularly bad and that's why sugar is particularly fattening really and that's that's true if you're a bear you're eating a lot of ripe dairies and stuff because you're trying to gain fat and it's also true as anybody knows if you're eating a lot of cookies and brownies you're probably going to gain weight the um the other thing is you can't eat all the time because again it's a cycle between feeding and fasting that's what we're supposed to do if you don't give your body time to burn off all those calories that it's taken in which means the fasting period you're going to overall gain weight it's like a one-way valve if you go in but don't come out eventually everything just gets bigger same thing that energy cannot come out if your insulin levels are high that's just the way it's designed and it's sort of like you know if you see a tanker you know those tanker trucks on the side of the road sometimes you think oh they'll never run out of fuel because they have all this fuel but they do run out of fuel of course because you can't access that fuel that's in that big container same thing with your body's fat right it's locked away if you do not lower your insulin levels you will never have access to those stores of energy once you lower it hey all that energy just comes flowing in and and for people who are who are on long who have done longer fast and this is what's so interesting about the whole process when you actually do it is that the hunger starts to go down significantly the psychological hunger goes up because people are like oh i really want to eat that but the physical hunger actually tends to go down meaning measured by things like ghrelin or whatever and so hunger hormones and so on and then people you talk to people and you know i've done it live i know lots of people have done it and then they all say the same thing by day three they for the hunger is almost completely disappeared and why is that well because you're fueling yourself from your body fat stores and therefore you actually have no no need to eat it's it's it's it's an interesting process which people never think about but it's completely physiologic yeah so i've done my longest fast was five days i've done many fasts that are 24 hours to 72 hours i find 72 while not pleasant i find it relatively easy i don't decline in performance but day four and five i do and i'm super curious to know if i am doing something wrong like am i supposed to be supplementing and i'm talking a true water only fast um should i be eating salt should i be taking magnesium like what what is it yeah everybody's different certainly some people salt is probably the main thing people get into trouble with because we're on a relatively high salt diet and then to go to a sort of zero with just water only zero salt is a bit of a transition sometimes so some people find that their pressure blood pressure goes low and that that makes them not feel so good so a lot of people have found better from taking salt either salt and water or just the salt the like a under their tongue even magnesium is another one that that tendo low and some people find it helpful to supplement there as well the other things that uh people find uh useful is to take some broth for example which is going to give you it's not a true fast none of these i'm gonna say yeah they're sort of like um i call them variants because they're not the water only fast is really a true fast um but you can get a lot of the benefits by taking some of these other things and it makes it easier so it's a sort of a trade-off it's sort of like bulletproof coffee which is of course not fasting but it's a very very pure sort of fat and therefore it's going to provide a lot of satiety and then let you go through the day maybe it allows you to go long and overall you might wind up positive in terms of weight loss and so on so lots of people certainly have found that useful not everybody but certainly it's it's that but water only fast can be more difficult because of the associated electrolyte problems your body is supposed to handle it but it doesn't always sure so if we're looking at longevity and we want to prolong life as much as possible and anti-cancer in fact this might be the perfect transition into your brilliant synthesis of what's going on from cancer paradigm 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 i found that absolutely fascinating in your new book cancer code it was subtle and yet changes everything and if you can just like give a quick sort of thesis on that one two three thing i think that really helped people yeah yeah and and you know i'm not the one who made it up i just was the one to sort of explain it sort of in an accessible way and honestly it's it's the most fascinating story in medicine today i think is cancer because it's undergone this tremendous change in the last sort of 10 20 years and nobody even talks about it and what i talk about is sort of the these modern paradigms of cancers the way that we look at cancer and the reason they're important is because they determine what sort of treatments we use so the first sort of modern paradigm of cancer is sort of this cancer is a cell that grows too much so you have breast cancer for example you have a breast cell now something happens to that normal breast cell okay so it starts off as a normal cell but somehow mutates into this breast cancer cell or this lung cancer cell and this lung cancer cell then grows and grows and grows and then it moves around and spreads or this is called metastasis then you die so the first paradigm is hey this is a cell that grows too much so therefore our treatments are actually ways to kill cells and that's the sort of core of modern oncology is to cut it out which is surgery you can burn it with radiation or you can poison it with chemotherapy chemotherapy is really nothing more than a selective toxin it kills some cells faster than it kills another cell so that's why you have these horrific side effects their hair falls out they nauseated all the stuff you think about with chemotherapy is because the idea of chemotherapy is to kill the cancer slightly faster than you kill the patient that's really it it's a selective toxin but that's the paradigm and it makes sense from that you know because if it's if it's growing too much then kill it that's basically it now that reaches limits probably by the 60s and by then we were talking about genetics so everybody started to look at genetics and then that's the sort of next huge paradigm shift is that we were trying to understand at a deeper level not we weren't saying that cancer cells didn't grow the question we're trying to ask is why are they growing and so we said well the answer now is that they have genetic mutations that lets them grow too much and sure enough when we look we found these onco genes and tumor suppressor genes so genes that control growth and when the cell gets a mutation in one of these critical genes then it would grow too much and that made perfect sense so the point of of something like lung cancer and smoking because we know smoking for uh you know clearly causes lung cancer smoking is not a targeted mutation device it's very non-specific you're just creating damage all over the place so what they said was that this is a random genetic mutation so you're just creating damage in the genome and if you're damaging a lot you're getting a lot of chances to hit this critical growth gene area and it's going to let cells grow so this was the the genetic paradigm which really has dominated cancer medicine for the last 50 years and so instead of trying to kill cells this led to new treatments and instead of trying to kill cells we're trying to correct the genes that controlled it and the first few drugs of the sort of genetic paradigm were just amazing so by the 2000s we were like we are going to cure cancer so we did this whole human genome project we said all we need to do is map out all the genes look at the cancers map out those genes and see what's different we're going to find one or two genetic mutations we're going to find a drug to cure that one or two genetic mutations boom we're going to cure cancer and that was really what we thought at the time it was a time of incredible promise but it didn't work that was like if you look at the number of genetic treatments of cancer that really made a difference you're talking maybe five right in the last 40 years five really good drugs that's not a lot and that's a long way from curing cancer and the problem is when we went back so they did the human genome project then they did this cancer genome atlas where they mapped out all these genes they took 30 000 cancers mapped out the genes and said what are the one or two critical genetic mutations they didn't find one or two each cancer had like 50 or 100 genetic mutations and it was crazy because if you had a cancer clinic where one patient had lung cancer so patient a had lung cancer patient b had lung cancer patient a's lung cancer had 50 mutations patient b had 50 mutations completely different mutations so how are you going to treat this you can't get 50 drugs for patient a and 50 completely new drugs for patient b it's just impossible and that's why cancer treatment just sort of slowed to an absolute crawl it was just you know a huge amount of disappointment and that sort of spelled the end it wasn't a random genetic mutation so it wasn't that genes weren't mutated it was what is driving these mutations and that sort of spawned this whole next paradigm shift to cancer paradigm 3 which so few people talk about and i don't understand why because i i find it endlessly fascinating and what we were trying to do we weren't trying to uh invalidate that these genetic mutations because clearly these genes had mutations what we're trying to understand was once again try and get to that one level deeper of why why are these genes mutating and the totally fascinating answer that they came up with is that it was an evolutionary process not a forward-moving evolutionary process it was a backwards evolutionary process towards a more primitive form of our cell which was there from evolution and what's fascinating is that if you look at pathologists like the way that people who look under the the microscope at cells that is exactly how they describe cancer cells primitive uh undifferentiated you've got to use you use a an analogy or a metaphor in the book about a bear in a tutu that i thought oh my god like it lets you conceptualize what this is so perfectly will you walk people through that yeah and the point is that the cancer is actually a reversion to a more primitive form of the cell and it's sort of like if you have a wild bear you can raise it and teach it to dance and wear a tutu but it's still a wild animal so if you provoke it it'll still kill you like you'll still wear a tutu but it'll still kill you so it reverts to being that wild animal and our cells are very much like that so we came from unicellular organisms so all of us sort of evolved from small bacterias and so on fungi and so on and under the right conditions these cells actually undergo an evolutionary process back towards this more survivalist sort of primitive cell a single-celled organism its primary mandate is to compete with other cells as opposed to a multicellular organism which its mandate is cooperation and they are fundamentally against each other as we move from cellular competition to cellular cooperation we had to put on all these instructions on top these genetic instructions to suppress all these competitive urges when you cause genetic damage and strip away you damage all these sort of controlling layers what shines through is that competitive nature and then the cells those cancer cells actually behave exactly like unicellular organisms and that's fascinating again because our own immune system has actually identified these cells as foreign cells like there are you know immune cells in our body that identify sort of self our own cells versus other cells so you avoid friendly fire and cancer cells are actually identified intrinsically without being having seen them ever before your own body will identify these as foreign cells and destroy them and that's really the reason why we don't have cancer sort of with 99 of the population because when you suppress the immune system of course you increase your risk significantly of developing these cancers because it's our immune system which is playing that anti-cancer role so what you're trying to do is weed out so our body has these very efficient anti-cancer mechanisms where we go around and we're hunting down these sort of you know anarchists and stuff trying to these people who are not going to follow the rules who are who are competitors not cooperators we try and hunt those down and we kill them so that we stay cancer free it's only at the end of you know only with time uh when stuff falls through or with chronic damage such as with lung uh lung cancer for example with smoking that that you're damaging the genome and those controlling organisms and allowing to shine through which is called an activism which explains a huge amount like that this theory just explains so much about cancer because if you think about say let's take lung cancer again so you have 50 mutations in patient a 50 different mutations in cancer in in patient b but their lung cancers look exactly the same under the microscope how does that happen like if you have a hundred mutations your cell should look completely different than this other guy cell yet they look precisely the same under the microscope it's because it was the original sort of cell you're simply stripping stuff away you're not adding mutations on you're actually stripping those away and what's fascinating is that the genetic so all this genetic stuff that we've done when you look at the mutations of cancer they're all concentrated in this area which is the the the difference between unicellular and multicellular organisms so they did these studies where they take all the genes and they say let's rank them by evolutionary age so these are the ancient genes these are the recent genes and they put them on and then they say where are the cancer mutations and they're all clustered right around the point between unicellular and multicellular organisms i'm like that is so interesting so then of course the reason it's important is because now you have if this is an evolutionary problem if these are actually unicellular organisms well now we actually have ways to fight these unicellular organs and that's our immune system and that's led to this sort of explosion and interest in immunotherapy because we're not trying to kill cells with immunotherapy we're not trying to um we're not trying to fix genetic mutations what we're trying to do is treat these cancers like a foreign species like an invasive foreign species and be able to identify them and also bolster our own immune system to attack them but now you're getting a totally different paradigm because your the concept of what this disease is it's an evolutionary disease which requires immune system to fight it because that's our own defenses that's fascinating like that's a totally different paradigm and such an interesting way to look at it and it's going to lead to all these new treatments so in the book i talk about immunotherapy we talked about the scopal effect which is how radiation plus immunotherapy may actually help unearth these things we talk about adaptive therapy where perhaps you don't have to give maximally tolerated doses of chemotherapy because you may not need it it may be more effective to use smaller doses all stems from the understanding of the evolutionary paradigm of cancer as opposed to the genetic paradigm of cancer where you would never be able to understand why these treatments that are coming up now are going to be effective man this this is really feels and you talk about sort of the hope this brings in the book and it really does feel hopeful you know because if you've pursued something to a dead end it's like until you have another path to go down it's a pretty ugly place to be one of the things that you outline in the book that i thought was really enlightening is what it is exactly the you talk about the seed in the soil so what is it about our modern life that creates this soil that stresses the cell just enough that it is like sort of in scramble mode of whoa i have to i'm constantly looking for this new mutation or stack of mutations it's going to allow me some path through this cigarette smoke this dietary problem this whatever if you can walk people through what we've sort of done to the soil and please if you can't mention the when you talked about the bomb in in hiroshima and nagasaki how they were expecting a certain cancer rate but they didn't get it and why that is so interesting yeah i thought i thought so too thanks um this concept is that you need both genetics as well as the environment like both are important i'm not saying one is more important but you have to have a seed which is obviously all the genetic material that you need to become a plant for example but you have to plant it in the right soil so you take a seed you put it in the desert it doesn't grow put a seed put it in proper soil and give it water it grows so cancer the seed is there in every single one of our cells in not just us but every animal practically that we know has that seed of cancer because cancer of course is our sort of genetic uh ancestor that was the unicellular organism from way way way back so that's that yeah exactly the selfish sort of unicellular organism but that seed of cancer is there luckily if we prevent it from growing by using the proper soil we can actually prevent it and you you look at these things that cause you know cause cancer they're called carcinogens turns out our diet is one of the biggest ones so other than tobacco smoke diet is sort of way up there and when you look at carcinogens there's a specific sort of thing that have to be chronic and they have to be sort of sublethally damaging which is the point about hiroshima that is radiation we know causes cancer for sure so when they drop the atomic bomb they thought man we're going to get a lot of cancers coming down the pipes but it was a single large dose of radiation not a chronic low dose of radiation which does cause a lot of cancer so they did these atomic uh they did these studies where they followed people for for years and years and there was a little bit of extra cancer but like on on average way less so when they estimate how many months of you know months or years of life lost it was like two months something like that so people these people were living like 82 years and they estimate that that that atomic radiation maybe cost them like two months of life way less because we are thinking that these people are going to get you know cancers at age 20 sort of thing and that didn't happen because it wasn't this chronic thing and the reason it has to be chronic is that cancer is an evolutionary process if you do not have chronic selection pressure you don't get this change if you just have to change the mutations and you need they're going to be random and they need to occur over time they have to occur continuously because that's the way that selection pressure works in an evolution in a population of cells that is if you if you select for certain cells and do it once that's not going to be that effective if you keep selecting for those cells like you only take the the the cells that are sort of survivalists which are the the sort of more primitive cells then you over time you're going to select the population that's going to have more of those sort of survivalist cells if you have a single event there's no further selection pressure that is uh if you look at you know if you look at evolution of species it's the same thing you can't simply have one event it has to be a continuous selection pressure that produces that change and that's why it has to be a chronic thing so it's tobacco smoking for example you look at viruses so if you have a single terrible virus like hepatitis a which is causes fulminant hepatic failure it kills you but it doesn't give you cancer as opposed to hepatitis b which is a chronic virus it doesn't kill you but it certainly does give you cancer h pylori in the stomach for example a very low-grade chronic infection is what gives you cancer not a single sort of feminine episode of of inflammation that doesn't give you cancer so um you know all of these these sort of things uv light and so on they're all chronic damage and that's part of that soil and diet plays a huge role and the promise of course is that if you look at traditional populations like when they look that populations that lived very simply so very low sugar very natural foods they weren't eating all the time very little obesity so people in africa that they had studied dennis burkett in the 50s and 60s and then in the inui people which live in the far north for example they used to send these expeditions up to the arctic circle to find why these these native peoples these inui were immune to cancer then of course they became civilized we gave them you know sugar we gave them white flour because they didn't go bad then they got all the same cancers turns out they weren't immune at all it was their environment it was the soil that was so important but the promise is that if you can fix that soil that means you could actually overcome the genetics not in all cases but in many cases especially of these obesity associated cancers the breast cancer colorectal and so on and that's the sort of really important thing and the sort of take-home message for a lot of people is that the diet actually plays a massive role and by understanding it perhaps you can reduce your risk of cancer and that's where fasting as a way to control your weight as a way to control type 2 diabetes which is a risk factor as those are going to lower the risk factor for obesity which is a big risk factor for those obesity associated cancers but it's your lifestyle that's going to play a big role not necessarily some drug that's or anything like that so it's all in your own hands it's amazing that that is truly amazing now as one sort of final point on this is is the chronic stressor is that simply being tipped into growth mode or is it inflammation coupled with the fact that we're tipped into growth mode like what is it specifically about our diet that's causing this perfect soil for mutations over time um that leads to cancer i think there i think both are are correct so if you have a chronic hyperinsulinemia insulin is a very powerful growth factor inflammation as a cause of chronic damage in itself will cause cancer so you look at the disease such as ulcerative colitis or crohn's colitis these are called the so-called inflammatory bowel diseases there's this chronic inflammation in the bowel and what you get is a super high risk of cancer down down the line so both inflammation and hyperinsulinemia and obesity all of them are risk factors and and this is the important thing is that there's a lot of different things that can contribute to the risk of cancer it's not just that if one is right then the other is wrong i mean both are correct so if you eat foods that are highly inflammatory and a lot of people feel that for example omega-6 seed oils perhaps are in in these big doses that we take perhaps those are highly inflammatory that even if it doesn't cause obesity could be a factor because we know inflammation chronic inflammation can certainly do that so both can be very important man i really hope people read your book the cancer code it was very insightful if people want to stay connected with you learn more follow your extraordinary clinical based uh thinking where do they go you can follow me on twitter my handle's at doctorjasonfung that's drjasonfung also my website is thefastingmethod.com and you can also find me on youtube my channel is jasonfung and i have a number of videos on fasting um and and other things uh so check me out there and you know i hope uh you know and then my books of course the the obesity code the diabetes code the cancer code love it awesome jason thank you so much for joining me today i really really enjoyed our time together and i really enjoyed researching you as well i'm so super grateful and speaking of things you'll be grateful for if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 366,544

Rating: 4.8765759 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Dr. Jason Fung, Jason Fung, Diet Doctor, Health Theory, health, impact theory, intermittent fasting, low carb, type 2 diabetes, fasting, weight loss, fasting mistakes, fasting tips, insulin, calories, carbohydrates, obesity, hormones, counting calories, cancer, immunotherapy, genetic research, lung cancer

Id: XhPwjmbkgDs

Length: 51min 14sec (3074 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/kingcrimson216]

I not wasting my time to listen to his BS. I am down over 70 lbs from counting calories.

[u/iarmhi06]

I was listening to a podcast earlier and I’m not sure who said it but this guy said “whatever works for you” and it’s just the best way to put it, so if you feel healthier from doing cico and what you are doing is sustainable then I wouldn’t care what this guy, or any other guy, has to say. Yeh there might be other ways to do it but they might not suit you the way cico does.

[u/caviaa]

When I was researching and writing my thesis, my teacher told me: for every conducted research, there is at least one other research claiming the exact opposite. So when searching for more information you can always find what you want to find. For me, I remind myself of this and agree with the other comment: do whatever works for you (and you'll probably be able to find research results backing it up)

[u/SmileThis9582]

garbage. this is the first diet that has ever worked for me and i’ve been obese my entire life. down 60 pounds since november! haven’t weighed this much since 8th grade. screw this guy.

[u/pyanapple]

THIS JUST IN: Internet Doctor says thermodynamics is not a thing. Has no evidence to refute this fundamental law of physics, but is wearing glasses.

COMING IN NEXT: Someone on the internet says the Earth is flat, Unicorns spotted in Scotland by a blind dog, and homeopathy proved to be more than water in a bottle and you're definitely not being charged for being a mug.

[u/TheophileEscargot]

So apparently this guy is selling his own book "The Obesity Code" and associated weight loss technique. Here's an article criticising it.

[u/Bigbob257]

CICO is the least complicated way to lose weight imo

[u/hydenrique]

I’ve been counting calories for about 1 month and feel overall healthier. I haven’t completed the video but I thought I’d share this and get different opinions, it’s just always weird to start something and then hear people say it’s not the right way

[u/moments_ago]

Next, he'd like to share you with his views on the misconception about the rotundity of the planet earth and explore his alternative view that our world may in fact be more flat than we first believed.