What's Really Making Us Fat? Carbs? Sugar? (Joe Rogan Response) ft. Stephan Guyenet

okay so in this video I'm going to be speaking with dr. Stefan DNA Stefan has a PhD in neuroscience and he's done research in areas related to the neuroscience of body fatness for 12 years he's published many peer-reviewed articles and scientific journals in areas related to obesity and the brain and he's the author of the book the hungry brain which argues that it's actually our ancient instinctive brain circuits playing a survival game that's causing us to overeat in the modern food environment not necessarily a lack of willpower or an incorrect understanding of what to eat now many of you may know that Stefan was recently on the Joe Rogan experience podcast where he was debating what is actually causing us to get fat and I think we elaborate on that discussion over here so we talked about the calories in calories out model of weight gain we discuss whether or not a calorie is a calorie for weight loss purposes and we talked about the role of carbohydrates in sugars in the obesity epidemic and how a lot of this is regulated in the brain we do cover a lot of ground in just over an hour and I think this is a conversation that you guys are really going to learn a lot from so without further adieu I hope you guys really enjoy this discussion about fat gain models of obesity and the brain with dr. Stephan DNA so guys I'm here with Stefan G&A Stefan thanks for coming on I really appreciate it my pleasure so for the context of the viewers this is being recorded about a week after you were on the Joe Rogan experience podcast where you debated Gary Taubes so we're gonna do something of a response to that but I think what I want to do with this is cool with you is just really quickly recap how it was that that debate was set up and then we can kind of move forward with what I think are the more interesting areas that you guys touched yeah absolutely so initially Joe had Gary on to do the solo interview and I think a lot of people who had read my work that is critical of Gary's work saw that and they recommended that he interview me and so I got in touch with Joe and we talked about it a little bit and then basically it fell by the wayside for a while but what caused it to come up again this guy named Kevin bass on Twitter just started really agitating and saying that Joe essentially had a low car bias and that everything he had about carbohydrate on the show was very negative and that it would be nice if he had some balance and had some more evidence-based people on the show I'm not saying every one that he had was not evidence-based but I would say some of them were not evidence-based and so he started agitating and he did this really interesting analysis I'm still not sure how he did this how he pulled it off but he like transcribed every word that every person had said in all of Joe's interviews and did an analysis on it showing how many times they had brought up carbohydrate and whether that was positive or negative and essentially it was all negative almost all of it was negative and so yeah and so once Kevin did that it really to Joe's credit it really got his attention and he said hey maybe I should start having a little more balance here and so eventually that led to an invitation for me to come on the show and I think Joe has been enjoying the debate format and so it turned into an invitation for me to debate Gary and you know obviously that kind of a scenario kind of gets more attention and gets people more fired up than just having somebody on solo right I got you so I listened to the whole thing so I don't expect everyone listening to have done that but in case you have I think we'll still build on what was discussed over there and clarify some stuff up front I just like to do my best in like 30 seconds to kind of summarize both of your guys positions and you can correct me if I get anything wrong so essentially as I understand it Gary's position is that you have good calories and bad calories and the bad calories are basically carbohydrates and in particular refined carbohydrates and sugars and it's their consumption that is causing us to get really fat and calories don't matter all that much at least matter significantly less than carbohydrates do for getting fat and I feel like that's actually like a pretty accurate representation of what he has to say you can correct me after but that's pretty much the gist of it and then I think your position is that calories actually matter a lot in fact they're the main thing that's driving the obesity epidemic and what is causing us to get fat in general and then your background is in neuroscience so you've kind of taken a slant where you say that well the brains that we're working with haven't yet evolved enough for us to be able to handle our modern food environment where you just have this huge abundance of very delicious but also very high calorie foods and that's basically causing us to overeat on it and that's the reason we're getting fat and you say carbs play some role in it but they're not the main driver is that up front kind of accurate yeah I think that's pretty accurate I would I would maybe modify two things there one of them is with Gary's model he essentially doesn't think calories matter really at all I mean I think he would concede that like you know if you're eating no calories then that matters or if you're eating like super duper starvation level calories then maybe that matters but I think in general he just thinks that thinking about calories or having that as a mechanism is just irrelevant so then with my model I think there's another element of it that's important to understand and that's that obesity or leanness differences in body fatness are not just caused by passive differences in calorie intake so it's not like we're just you know one day waking up in the morning and saying hey I feel like eating more calories today there's actually regulatory changes that are occurring and how the brain regulates body fatness that allow the obese state to occur and maintain it once it has occurred and so and this is where my model partially overlaps with gay is Gary's model is that we agree that people with obesity are not just lean people who are eating more calories there's actually a regulatory change that happens in the biological pathways that regulate body fatness and we can talk about how exactly that happens later but the difference is that in my model those pathways are acting via calories primarily calorie intake so that's the main way in which the brain regulates body fatness is by regulating your calorie intake and so my point is simply that it's not a passive process it's not just however much we decide to eat that these things are regulated via the brain circuits that regulate body fatness and determine our appetite and our cravings and those types of things would you say that your position is the mainstream scientific consensus positioned like our position do most scientists agree with you or Gary so you know I hesitate to use the word consensus because getting scientists to agree on things is like herding cats but I would say that at least within my field that studies obesity from a kind of energy balance and neuroscience perspective that yes that is the predominant view and that I would say that not just in my more narrow field but in the broader obesity field in general there are very few people who accept Gary's model and I would say you can find some you know for example David Ludwig is a researcher at Harvard who agrees with Gary's model almost verbatim but I'm not aware of anyone else really that does there are other people who agree with like different versions of the model like Robert Lustig but his is more centered around the brain there are other researchers who think insulin is important like Jim Johnson but he's not really buying in to Gary's idea specifically so I think there are really very very few people within the scientific community that really buy into Gary's and I think people don't necessarily get that impression in the public from outside the scientific community because the people who do believe it are super super vocal so they're making a lot more noise than the people who don't and also when you look at popular health and nutrition writers they many of them do buy into Gary's model and so I think people get the impression that there's this like raging scientific debate about this in the scientific community but really there's not I mean I don't think there's hardly anybody who thinks calories don't matter and the reason for that is because the evidence very strongly suggests that they do matter yeah at least in my circle of the Internet this seems like such a fringe position that it's just mocked endlessly so coming into this debate it's just like from my perspective it almost feels like you know you turn on CNN and you have one guy who's denying climate change on the one side and then another guy you have like Bill Nye on the other side and it's like kind of obvious from a scientific perspective who you're listening to there but I think it shows that disassociation between what might be mainstream in the scientific community is not necessarily mainstream in the general public at this moment on this issue so I think it's a good thing that you got to go on Joe's podcast and talk about this stuff but yeah just to tip my own hand it's I was familiar with a few of those guys that you mentioned but it from my position actually before we came on the call here I was reading your bio and I noticed that you're the director or maybe a research assistant for the examine Research digest and yeah I'm friends with Kamala I've interviewed him too good time so we've got a few mutual friends there and just being familiar with this work it just feels like this is really not a very credible position within the scientific community but as you said I guess maybe there are there is some disagreement but people who believe this are in the minority you would say yeah absolutely and I I really don't think it is a credible position at least as articulated by Gary I mean and I hope that came across pretty clearly in the debate yeah so I think that pretty much at every turn when you actually sit down and ask the question you know what predictions does this hypothesis make and how can we test those predictions which that that's just the scientific method what I just described when you actually do that and you look at the things that have tested those predictions I mean you you find over and over again that those predictions are not supported and I mean we could talk about some of those things I talked about some of them in the debate but I mean at some point you can't just keep saying that all the evidence is garbage and you can't keep complexify on your hypothesis to you know allow it to escape refutation at some point you have to say okay well this is just not fitting the evidence that well I need to find another hypothesis and I think that we're long past that point so as I was listening to the debate one of the things that I noticed didn't come up a whole lot was the calories in calories out model of obesity so is this something that you subscribe to yeah that's a good question and actually I'm gonna I'm gonna turn the question around on you a little bit because this calories in calories out thing is a concept that people refer to a lot but it can mean several different things and so I'm never quite sure what people mean when they say that so would you tell me what you mean when you ask that well I think it's the difference between well let me just put it this way if you eat more calories than you expend then you'll gain weight if you expend more than you eat then you'll lose weight and ultimately changes in weight come back to energy balance that's as simple as I can put it forward and I I think it's for yeah and I think when you put it in that way I don't think Gary would deny that either because he I mean I he acknowledges the first law of thermodynamics that which is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and if you accept that then you can't deny that if more energy is entering your body and less is leaving then the energy content of your body is increasing you know so I think he actually accepts that I think what he would say is that energy intake and energy expenditure are independent from one another and so our sorry our dependent so your energy expenditure depends on what you're eating so for example you know if you ate extra calories from fat maybe your body would just burn it off your energy expenditure would increase to compensate you burn it off and then it wouldn't end up in your fat tissue versus overeating carbohydrate and you know your insulin goes up the energy goes into your fat tissue and your energy expenditure doesn't change or maybe even goes down so I think that's kind of how he would conceptualize it now of course that's not actually what happens when you run the experiments but I think that's that's what he would argue so he's not arguing against the laws of physics but he's arguing that what we're eating the types of calories that were eating can affect the energy outside of the equation such that fat is not accumulating in in fat tissue mm-hmm it seems a little bit hypocritical though for him to say on the one hand that calories don't matter for weight change yet calories in versus calories out is what determines weight change I mean I feel like he's got these conflicting statements and that's why I felt like if you could just ask him the question you know if you eat and I actually don't know if he would sign off on the calories in calories out model because he's more or less said you know in this example with his brother that you know his brother over ate by just as many calories as him and didn't gain any fat and you know he gained a bunch of fat eating same amount or forget exactly how the example went but there are all these instances where he seems to cut almost directly against the calories in calories out model so from my perspective it would have been very clear if you could have just like for you to say yes the cap the difference between calories in versus calories out is ultimately what's driving weight change and this is determined mostly at the level of the brain if Gary could sign off on the calories in calories out part then you could get you know move a little bit forward more easily with the the insulin and fat cell regulation stuff it seems like that's the most fundamental thing that you guys need to either agree on or disagree on well I think he he has this kind of he's looking at it from a very different angle so for him the calories in and the calories out are not driving anything those are the outcome of what's happening at the level of the fat cell and so that's kind of how he would respond to that and so for his brother in him you know assuming they were eating identical number of calories which we really have no idea and neither does he maybe he would say that because his brother had less of a capacity to store fat and his fat cells the extra energy was burned off and not stored as fat so his energy expenditure was higher I think that's kind of how he would conceptualize and again I'm not defending this idea I'm just trying to explain what I think he would say mmm-hmm so as a matter of you know communicating this stuff to the public do you think that it is a good idea to tell people that you should focus on you know eating less and moving more if you want to lose weight in that sense is the calories and calories out model a good one yeah so I think this is exactly I think the this question plus your last question kind of puts its finger on where the confusion lies because when people say calories and calories out sometimes they mean you know the question of whether energy balance determines body fatness we it does and sometimes they mean is it all just about you know how much you decide to eat or move and is counting calories the best way to affect your body fatness and so that's kind of the perspective of the second question you're asking which is the eat less move more question and and no I don't think that for most people that probably is the best way to affect their body fatness and you know I know that your your audience is a very physical fitness oriented audience and so I think there are probably more people who are successful with kind of calorie counting quantitative approach I know that's fairly popular in the in the physical fitness community but I think for the average person they're just not they don't have they don't want to engage with it at that intense of a level they just want to eat until they're full and stop eating and not be fat basically and so and you know you can't blame them like that's how the human brain has interacted with food for as long as the human brain has existed you know our ancestors didn't have Excel spreadsheets where they were marking down how many calories they were eating and marking down how many calories they were burning they had regulatory systems in their brains that would respond to signals of energy status in the body and food cues around them in the environment and naturally regulate their body fatness to the right level and so and generally you know those populations ancestrally probably had very low levels of obesity and so personally I prefer as a kind of like blanket general recommendation for the average person I prefer to try to construct a food environment and a diet and a lifestyle for them that allows their brains to naturally regulate them to the right calorie intake and to the right body fatness to meet their goals and so and again I'm not at all I'm not at all dismissing or discounting the value of actually counting and tracking calorie intake and expenditure I think if that's something that works for that's great I have nothing negative to say about that if it's working for you but I think for the average person that's not the approach that's gonna get them the greatest or the most sustainable results not because calories don't matter but simply because that direct approach is for the average person not the most effective one for actually regulating your energy balance yeah so I guess there's there's two things there so one is what is in fact driving changes in body weight and body fat and then the other thing is how do you practically implement that so people actually lose body fat in the real world so I personally think it's important to tell people that it's actually probably in a practical sense much simpler than you think it is because you'll hear people like Gary talk about insulin and leptin and all this stuff that sounds very confusing and they have to avoid carbs and they have to cut sugar and so on and so forth whereas if you had scientifically credible people saying it ultimately does come down to calories in versus calories out then you could design a plan whether it be tracking calories or modifying the food environment or a meal plan or whatever that could work but the underlying science that's driving the positive body composition change would be well understood you see yeah yeah absolutely and I agree with that completely and I mean that's that's my perspective that the energy balance equation is really the most powerful driver of the changes we're looking for when we're looking for changes in body fatness however you know once it comes to implementing that how do you change energy balance that's where it necessarily has to become more complex and I actually think this is one of the places where a low carbohydrate diet the low carbohydrate diet really succeeds is in its simplicity because that's something where you can say hey basically this one food substance or this narrow subset of food substances is the thing you need to focus on get rid of that and you're automatically improving your energy balance and so I think it's actually very simple both for people to understand the model and to implement practically and I think that's actually one of the advantages of it but there are many ways to affect energy balance and you know low carbohydrate eating is a valid tool for doing that but I think there are other valid tools and personally I mean my view is I'd rather not restrict I'd rather not greatly restrict a macronutrient macronutrient unless I really have to I'd rather give my body all the macronutrients abundantly as long as I can control my calorie intake appropriately in that context but I mean it does you know when you're giving your brain everything at once in terms of macronutrients it becomes harder to control your calorie intake so people who are right in the middle of the spectrum where they're eating lots of carbohydrate lots of fat and lots of protein that's the place where it's going to be more challenging to control your calorie intake and so you might have to leverage other strategies whether it is actively counting your calorie intake or eating a lower calorie density diet or eating a less palatable diet or restricting your eating window or you know some combination of those things I want to get to quickly the brain related stuff in food environment related stuff but before we move on to that I I know that there will be some people listening who will still be very skeptical of the just energy balance in general because it's not really well accepted in the mainstream people either think it isn't true because clearly there are cases where you'll gain weight even if you're not eating much like say if you're stressed or whatever and people are notoriously bad at knowing how many calories they're actually consuming so there are all sorts of ways that this can seem to be obviously false when in fact the literature tells us otherwise so needless to say there are definitely calories and calories out and energy balance skeptics out there and in a conversation like this it's difficult to communicate how this model can be correct but yet still not capture everything there is to know about losing fat and how everything works at every level so how do you deal with scape that sort of skepticism how do you go about trying to convince people that it is energy balance that's driving changes in body weight and body fat yeah I mean all I can do is point them to the studies I mean the the problem is that energy balance is actually fairly challenging to measure and so whether you're a person trying to track your calories or whether you're researcher asking people how much they ate it's actually really hard to get accurate answers and so to get accurate answers you have to look at data that was generated using accurate methods those methods do exist but you have to go looking for them and essentially when you look at when you look at calorie intake in people of different levels of body fatness using accurate methods and I'm talking about things like respirometer II that measures respiratory gases to measure calorie expenditure if you if you can accurately measure someone's calorie expenditure and they're not and their weight isn't changing then you know what their energy intake is as well just that's you know first law of thermodynamics conservation of energy and so those are the studies that have most accurately measured calorie intake and what you see is that as body fatness increases calorie intake goes up and basically it goes from lean level up by about 10% to someone who is overweight but not obese up to about 20% for a person who just has mild obesity and then all the way up to 35% for someone who has very pronounced obesity and so and it's not because they have more fat it's because they're Zack they actually have more lean mass so the more fat you accumulate the more lean mass your body has as well and that's the more metabolically active tissue that drives up your both your calorie expenditure and your calorie intake so you're at a new equilibrium where you're eating more and burning more and that describes obesity and this is this is very well characterized this is not controversial within the scientific literature once you correct for height and sex and physical activity level what I just described is is what you see so there's definitely an increase in calorie intake that accounts for that increase in body fatness and we know if you take a person with obesity who's eating 30% more calories and you restrict their calorie intake by 30% they start losing fat so it's not a coincidence that they're eating more calories and they have higher body fatness the higher calorie intake is causing the higher body fatness but again it requires that regulatory change in the brain that we can talk about because if you overfeed lean people a lot of them will just burn off the extra calories okay so that's one piece of it the second piece of it is that you can feed people either excess calories or reduce calories or you can keep them on maintenance diets and you can feed them different amounts of carbohydrate and fat in those contexts and what you find is that the amount of carbohydrate versus fat makes almost no difference to their body fatness it's really the number of calories so for example if you over feed people using only carbohydrate or only fat you see the exact same amount of fat gain with the carbohydrate in the fat if you under feed people you see very similar fat loss so it's it really comes back down to the calories and not the carbohydrate or the fat that said I do need to note and I think this is very important that not everyone will gain the same amount of fat from the same number of calories over fed so as I alluded to a moment ago some people can take those extra calories and they'll just burn it off whereas other people every single one of those extra calories will go straight into their fat tissue and so that's one of the reasons why some people are fatter than others some people if they overeat it doesn't even make them fatter or I should say everyone will gain fat but some people gain a lot less fat than others so some people can just burn off most of the excess whereas other people will store every single extra calorie so yeah so there so it's more complicated than just calories but it is ultimately driven by calories so about the research where if you over feed people predominantly from increases in fat versus predominantly increases in carbohydrate you see on average similar levels of fat gain does that then imply that a calorie is a calorie as far as weight and fat gain is concerned yeah to a close approximation it does and I know this is like this is like the boring unpopular thing that everyone wants to disprove but it's the thing that has not been disproven by a number of studies to date it just you know if you the the best evidence we have I would say is a meta-analysis that was conducted by Kevin Hall of metabolic Ward studies these are studies where they put people in a very they put people in a research setting where they can absolutely control every morsel of food that's going into their mouths and then they feed them different amounts of carbohydrate or fat the same number of calories and when you bring together all the studies that have done this it's 20 studies so far what you see is that it makes almost no difference whether people are eating carbohydrate versus fat when calories are held constant and in fact the there was a difference it was a statistically significant difference but very small that actually favored the carbohydrate so eating the higher carbohydrate diet actually led to slightly less fat gain than eating the higher fat diet but the difference is so small that effectively it's it's negligible so you know the idea of a calorie is a calorie is not yes you know there 100.000 percent identical in all scenarios it's more like for all practical purposes they're the same so I just want to note too that I don't want to say that macronutrients don't matter at all they do matter obviously when people go on a low carbohydrate diet they lose fat when people go on a low-fat diet they tend to lose fat so it's not that it doesn't matter in a real-life scenario but the mechanism by which it matters is that it reduces your calorie intake it reduces your spontaneous calorie and so when you eliminate that effect in very tightly controlled conditions you don't see any effect on body fatness however in real life where calorie intake can very freely you do see a reduction in calorie intake and fat loss right I think one point that a lot of people are a calorie is a calorie skeptics get hung up on his protein because of its thermic effect which i think does have a small but yet still negligible effect when you measure it what's your stance on protein and that is the thermic effect of protein enough to offset equivalent making all calories equivalent essentially yeah it's an interesting question and you would think I mean you really the thermic effect of protein is actually pretty substantial off the top of my head it's something like 20 or 25 percent of the calories go away through this thermic effect so it's actually a pretty substantial effect and so you would expect it to have some effect on energy balance and body fatness but when it's been tested empirically it actually doesn't seem to make that big of a difference and I don't know maybe the experiments just haven't been sensitive enough but what I've seen has suggested that it really doesn't seem to make that much of a difference I think that in really controlled metabolic word type situations it doesn't matter but when you're in free living conditions higher protein generally does work better even when calorie match just because of its satiety effect but again that's just affecting the energy in side of the equation so it doesn't get you outside the rules yeah exactly and I mean protein is the most powerful macronutrient in that regard in terms of its impact on calorie intake so for me if if someone's asking me for advice on how to control their calorie intake and body composition increasing protein intake is going to be one of the first things I say so just going back to the hall paper from what I remember even though in the aggregate you saw no significant difference between increasing fats versus increasing carbs in terms of fat gain actually you saw a slight difference in favor of increasing carbs in that carpet increasing carbs led to slightly less vacuum and increasing fasted but still on the individual level you saw I think a lot of variability between individuals in the sense that some individuals seem to do and may be better with you know restricting or rather they seem to do better with adding carbs whereas others seem to do better with adding fats so do you think that rather than maybe give the advice that it doesn't matter if you use if you restrict fats or restrict carbs maybe say you know self experiment and see what diet is going to allow you to restrict better yeah so I mean there's two different things here so the the hall meta-analysis didn't look at individual data and I'm actually not familiar with the individual data on that underlies the studies and that meta-analysis but I mean I'm sure if you looked at it there would be variability the question is is that random error or are some people actually responding differently and I don't know the answer to that but I would suspect that at least some component of it would be people responding differently so it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were actually some individuals that you know could eat the exact same number of calories from carbohydrate versus fat and gain different amounts of body fat so you know I don't think the research definitively demonstrates that there's no individuals where that might happen what it says is that on average that doesn't happen or at least doesn't happen to a to a large degree but the second thing you know the second thing is what happens in the free living studies and I think this is more relevant to what you're saying so we have for example the diet fit study that was conducted by Chris Gardner's group at Stanford in this study they put people on low carbohydrate versus low fat diets neither diet was calorie controlled in other words they weren't asking people to eat a certain number of calories it was just eat to satiety both diets were intended to be very healthy so based on unrefined foods what the low fat diet wasn't like you know snack wells you know snack Wells and fruit juice diet it was intended to be composed out of whole unrefined foods and so was the low carb diet and what they found was at the end of a year both groups lost approximately the same amount of weight in a free-living situation so I think the the low-fat diet group lost 12 pounds the low-carb diet group lost 13 pounds and that was not even close to statistically significant that difference between the two but if you look at the individual responses the spread was huge and this is what you see in almost every study the individual differences are much larger than the than the differences between interventions the average differences between interventions and so they they did publish the individual data in this study and you can look at those graphs and on both diets there were a few people who lost tons of weight you know and then there were a few people who gained weight on both diets but both the graphs look the same so the distribution of people who gained versus lost looked the same and if you averaged it all together you get 12 or 13 pounds but that doesn't and and again we don't know the thing is it's complicated you don't know why those people lost so much weight you don't know why some of those people gained weight maybe the people who gained weight didn't do the diet or they just started you know eating really poorly all of a sudden and just because they were randomized to that group doesn't mean they ate according to that group and then the people who lost a ton of weight I don't know maybe they got cancer or something so you don't really know why that happened but on the other hand I think it is at least plausible to speculate and I think this is almost certainly true that different people respond differently to that actually really do respond differently to those two different diets and perhaps to a variety of different diets and I mean certainly anecdotally this is true you'll have people say you know I what you hear most often is you'll you'll hear people say hey I tried a low-fat diet like they were recommending in the 1990s and it really didn't do it for me I was gaining weight and then I tried low-carb and it helped me out a lot and now I'm not gaining weight I also regular get emails from people who say I was on low-carb and I read your work and it allowed me to kind of realize that maybe the entire world doesn't revolve around low-carb and I tried actually going low-fat and it stopped my weight gain and now I'm finally losing weight again so there are people on both ends who I think just have better responses to one or the other it's hard to say how much of it is biology versus how they're implementing the diets versus other stuff going on in their lives but I mean I would be I would be willing to bet that there's at least some biology involved in that yeah so the one point is that different people might respond differently to either reducing fat in the diet or reducing carbohydrate in the diet the other point is that even if you gave a bunch of people the same diet you'd see very different levels of weight loss or weight gain as well so how do you explain that why is it that some people get fat on 2000 or let's say some people get fat on 3000 calories and some people don't gain any weight at all yeah so there's there's a genetic component to that definitely so there have been studies done on this where they over feed identical twins so they get like I forget exactly how many were involved but this researcher Claude Bouchard did these studies he got something like a dozen different pairs of identical twins and then he overfed them and what he found is that the twin within pairs they gained almost the exact same amount of weight and they gained it in the same places so if one twin gained ten pounds and gained it in the belly the other twin gained ten pounds and gained it in the belly so however when they compared across twins what they saw was that it could be very different so one pair of twins might have gained ten pounds the other pair might have gained three pounds and you know one gained it in the belly and the other pair gained it subcutaneous all over their bodies under the skin so there's definitely a strong genetic component to that and beyond that we don't really know a whole lot about it but essentially some people are able to up regulate their energy expenditure their calorie expenditure how many calories they're burning and that burns off the excess fat and I think or the excess calories I should say and I think that probably relates to these systems in the brain that regulate body fatness these systems we know that they they don't like you losing weight that's why weight loss is hard and they don't in in most people they don't really like you gaining weight really fast either so you see this in overfeeding studies where you give people a bunch of extra calories a lot of people will start burning off the excess and when you stop over feeding them their appetite goes down and they basically go back to the weight they were before in just a couple of weeks and so it's like this regulatory response that's trying to keep them at a stable weight and we know a lot about the brain circuits that that mediate this response yeah so basically some people you can think of it like a thermostat you have this so the thermostat in your house it has a set point right so you might have your set point at 70 degrees when the temperature goes below that it kicks in heat to bring you back up to 70 when it goes above that it kicks on the AC to bring you back down to 70 it's called a negative feedback loop it's a basic engineering term we have tons of negative feedback loops in the body that regulate all sorts of things like temperature and blood pressure and a lot of different things one of them is body fatness and so when your body fatness starts to decline you get all these compensatory mechanisms that kick in that collectively I call the starvation response so your hunger goes up it takes more food for you to feel full at a meal you get more cravings you're more reactive to food queues and your metabolic rate goes down conversely if you overeat a lot in a short period of time you get a compensatory response in the other direction that that helps protect you against fat gain it's not perfect you do gain some fat but the key thing is that the thing that defends against fat gain the mechanisms that defend against fat gain are not as effective and not and they're much more variable between individuals so almost everyone will have a strong starvation response if they lose a lot of body fat but some people will not have much of a response from gaining fat so their body is like man I don't really care about that whereas if they were losing fat that it would care a lot and you would get hungry and feel you know tired and sluggish etc yes so I think it relates probably to how our how our brains are wired in terms of how we respond to changes in energy balance but we have a lot to learn about that and you know there's there's very little that you can measure in a person beforehand that will tell you how they will respond to a calorie excess so this is something that's been studied quite a bit the only thing that I know of off the top of my head that has been shown to predict whether people will gain fat or not when they overeat is their level of physical fitness so people who are more physically fit that's correlated with a greater ability to burn off excess calories when you over consume them but it's an area that we really don't know a whole lot more about I'm sure there's a lot of genetics behind it for sure one thing that a few other guests and I've talked about it on the channel a bit is neat so non-exercise activity thermogenesis and it seems like some people you could over feed them by a thousand calories and they'll just fidget a thousand extra calories off throughout the day and it doesn't stick at all whereas other people will almost have all those thousand calories go straight into adipose yeah that's right yeah and thanks for bringing that up because that's another point that I that I didn't mention but that's relevant yeah that some studies have suggested that that ability to burn off the extra calories is through neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis as you said basically a fancy word for fidgeting but I think it's important to emphasize too that this is non conscious it's not like people are like oh I'm overeating I should fidget more and burn more calories and you know changed my posture all the time this is a non conscious response that the brain is activating to maintain energy balance yeah you're you're not completely screwed though if you don't have this favorable needs adaptation response just I feel like if you did make a conscious effort to move around a little bit more it would do you think it would help you a bit yeah better than no I mean you could make a conscious decision to go for a jog or some weights I mean yeah I mean if you want to increase your energy expenditure there are many ways that you could consciously choose to do so yeah it is funny though when people say I think I'm gonna you know increase mine eat try to burn more calories it's like I think neat by definition actually I'm not sure if this is true or not but I the way it's usually used in the literature is subconscious but if you just spell out the acronym it's anything that isn't formal exercise but yet still burns calories yeah I I don't think the non conscious aspect of it is part of the definition right so what I want to do is talk about obesity in particular what is it about the brains of obese people that cause them to gain weight at a faster rate than non obese people essentially yeah that's a good question and I think there are probably multiple reasons for this so if we look at the genetics of obesity what we see is that genes that make some people fatter than others tend to revolve around brain function and some of those genes relate to the circuits that we have identified in my field that regulate body fatness but I mean if you think about it there are a lot of different ways that brain activity could contribute to excess body fatness you could either be wired to have a higher appetite you could be wired to find food more seductive more pleasurable so you eat more of it you could Wyatt you could be wired to have less executive control and so when you're feeling tempted you have a hard time saying no you could be wired to have a lower level of calorie expenditure or your body fat regulatory circuits could be wired to give you a higher body fat setpoint or make it easier for an unhealthy diet and lifestyle to increase your setpoint over time and so there are many potential paths to gaining fat but I think which ones are most important in different individuals will probably vary right so what do you that and some people will think that you're just kind of in the totally wrong direction with this and a lot of people I find especially recently are really quick to blame this on something very particular such as sugar sugar is really a big culprit at the moment in the public consciousness and I realized this when I did a video saying that sugar probably isn't the villain that everyone is making it out to be I heard from all these people I'm sure you have as well so I actually think I'd like to hear your opinion on sugar and what role you think it plays in this whole equation yeah sure so you know first of all I'm not a fan of refined sugar I don't think anybody needs to be eating a lot of it but I also don't think it's Beelzebub I think that the recent focus on it is in a sense it's good you know people are eating less sugar but it's also a distraction because sugar is one factor in a more complex equation that's affecting our appetite and body fatness and this is one of the things that I object to about Gary's perspective is essentially he is saying and and by the way I'm not putting words in his mouth at all this is quite literally what he argued very explicitly in the case against sugar that only sugar matters or it's overwhelmingly the primary the primary determinant of obesity and chronic disease and that calorie intake physical activity dietary fat intake are basically irrelevant so that I think is a dangerous perspective because it's saying it's putting all of the focus on one factor in taking all of the focus away from these other factors that actually do matter especially when it comes to health so you know the issue with sugar is that it is refined it's an empty calorie because of the high level of fructose and contains and the fact that fructose is metabolized almost exclusively in the liver it overloads deliver with energy and can promote liver insulin resistance and metabolic abnormalities and that that's actually an area that Gary and I at least partially agree on sugar does have some harmful effects that are independent of its calorie intake but those seem to manifest at higher levels of intake you know putting a couple teaspoons of sugar in your coffee is really not gonna cause that to happen but I think the most for me the the biggest deal with sugar is it just makes us eat more you know sugar tastes great so you put it on foods it contains calories it increases the seductiveness of those foods I mean think about you know ice cream for example ice cream to me is one of the absolute most seductive foods like for me it's almost drug like eating ice cream how amazing it tastes and but what is ice cream without sweetness it probably would taste good sure but you're not gonna eat hundreds of calories out of it after a large meal and same for if you remove the fat if it was completely fat-free ice cream you probably wouldn't want to eat that after a large meal at least me for me you know the fat and the sugar together is really the combination that is is where it's at but yeah I guess what I would say is I'm not here to argue that sugar is harmless but what I am here to argue is that there are other things that matter too and so for example if we look at physical activity physical activity has a huge effect on insulin sensitivity and insulin sensitivity is one of the primary drivers of chronic disease risk especially diabetes but also cardiovascular disease public answer and a wide variety of other common ailments so you know if you think that insulin resistance matters if you think that diabetes risk matters then you should be getting physical activity on most days and the evidence is very clear on this if you look at athletes they have very high insulin sensitivity if you take those same athletes with high insulin sensitivity and you make them sedentary for 10 days suddenly their insulin sensitivity drops quite a bit and then similarly you take someone who's sedentary and get them to exercise more and their insulin sensitivity goes up furthermore we have large like huge well-conducted multi-year randomized controlled trials showing that increasing levels of exercise prevents the occurrence of diabetes so I'm not talking about biomarkers I'm not talking about animal studies I'm talking about randomized controlled trials with real diabetes endpoints showing that exercise can reduce the risk by something like 45 to 75 percent so huge effects and you see the same thing with with dietary fat you put people on a drug called called orlistat that reduces dietary fat absorption in the gut by 30% so it's not even that large of a change in dietary fat absorption well that reduces diabetes risk by a lot it's like something like 35 or 45 percent I don't remember the exact figure something in that range and then you can give people a carbo's which is which reduces carbohydrate absorption and you see something very similar so anyway that you affect energy balance whether it's through physical activity or reducing fat intake or reducing carbohydrate intake or just an overall low-calorie diet these things have all been tested in large well conducted years long randomized controlled trials with a real diabetes endpoints and they all reduce diabetes risk and so anything you do that affects your energy balance such that you're taking in less energy and you're losing fat even if it's not a lot of loss even if you're not losing a lot of fat that is enough to substantially protect against diabetes and so I just want people to know the full picture I don't want them to eat more sugar I don't want them to stop restricting their sugar intake at least refined sugar but I just want them to know that it's not just about sugar there are these other really really important factors out there that you should understand and you should be leveraging if you want the best effectiveness that you can get mm-hmm I think when it comes to insulin resistance and avoiding diabetes the best things you can do are live active healthy lifestyle like you said and maintain a good body composition and then pick the right parents because that genetics play a big role there as well whereas I feel like many people in the mainstream public sphere would say that you should reduce sugar because sugar reducing sugar is a good idea if you have diabetes but doesn't necessarily mean it's independently causative of it would you agree it may be independently causative to some degree I mean in the sense that it can increase liver insulin resistance in a manner that's at least somewhat independent of his calorie value so I don't want to say it's completely dependent on you know its calorie value and the body fatness that the fact that it increases our calorie intake and body fatness but I would say that certainly I would say that I have little doubt that the primary causes of diabetes just to put it simply our excess body fatness physical inactivity and genetics I think if you look at the overall picture that's what the literature suggests and is sugar playing some role independently of those factors yeah could be a little bit but I think that those are the really the biggies fair fair getting back to sugar in obesity I noticed on Rogen's podcast you showed I think some Ann Haynes data basically showing that sugar rates have just dropped off progressively since the 80s or 90s but yet obesity rates have increased since then so it's clear that they're actually not even correlated let alone causally related that was a similar case that I made in my video except I used Australia the same exact trend is you see the exact same trend over there how can people not acknowledge that I mean that if they're not even correlated if one is going down and one is going up how can you still make the case that sugar is is the main factor yeah I think it becomes pretty difficult but people have found a number of ways to continue believing what they want to believe so gary is argued maybe there's a threshold effect if you get above a certain amount then beyond that it doesn't matter or maybe there is an intergenerational effect where we're actually experiencing the negative effects of our grandmother's or mothers eating sugar and so it doesn't really matter how much we're eating some people would say well maybe the people who are reducing sugar intake are the people who are lean anyway and it's you know the people who have obesity are eating the same amount these are all ideas that I'm not aware of any evidence to support but you know there are ways that people have kind of continued believing what they want to believe but I think that the more important thing is you know it's not it's not an ironclad piece of evidence seeing that sugar has gone down by 15 to 23 percent since 1999 in the US and seeing that obesity has gone up you know it's not an ironclad piece of evidence I'll agree with that but I would say that it's it's a fairly strong piece of evidence especially when considered in the context of all the other evidence pointing in the same direction for examples like you mentioned similar trends happening in another number of other countries there's Australia there's the UK sugar intakes been going down for about half a century in the UK it's gone down by about 22% and that covers the entire period of the obesity epidemic in the UK so I mean and and then there's other evidence from other lines of Investigation and you put it all together and you can either have a really complicated hypothesis that explains away all these things that don't you know conform to your model or you can have a really simple model that says that sugars not the primary cause of fat gain and then everything makes sense so that's kind of my perspective on it but you know I also want to emphasize that the fact that sugar and obesity are going in the opposite direction right now that doesn't mean that sugar is not involved in causing obesity because if your model is that sugar is a factor among other factors then you don't necessarily expect to see a great correlation because there could be other things changing that confound that it's not what it really refutes is more the idea that sugar is the primary cause of obesity if there's if sugar is the primary cause there's got to be a correlation or else that's pretty tough to explain with the model yeah so I've got two other questions for you and then we'll wrap it up the first is especially given your extensive background in neuroscience what's your opinion on sugars addictive qualities you talked about how people tend to over consume on it too you would you go as far as to say it's addictive yeah I mean I think there are certain foods it's it's tough it's controversial whether or not we can apply the word addiction to foods in in the you know strict sense of how the research community and the medical communities would use the word addiction you know that has a pretty strict definition but I think it's clear it's absolutely clear that some people have addictive like behaviors that they use around certain foods and so you you know some people's eating behavior in regard to certain types of foods is certainly addiction like it looks a lot like the types of behaviors that someone would have around an addictive drug or gambling problem or something like that and so I think everybody agrees on that in the research community that whether or not you can truly call it addiction you can at least call it addiction like behavior now what types of foods does this apply to the most common foods that drive addiction like behaviors when they survey people and these are very similar to the foods that people report craving the most it's bait I mean addiction is basically a strong craving the most the foods that people report having a diction like behaviors toward and cravings toward the most are generally combinations of carbohydrate and fat some of those will contain sugar sugar and fat like ice cream or baked goods chocolate is actually the most commonly craved food and then also savory foods that don't contain sugar but maybe they do contain carbohydrate and fat things like french fries and pizza those are also really commonly craved popcorn unsavory snacks of that nature and so when we look at the commonality here what we see is not sugar what we see is the combination of carbohydrate and fat especially when you throw in some other things that spike our dopamine like salt and glutamate which is that umami flavor and nice textures and flavors and things like that so that's really where it's at as far as the brain is concerned and those are the foods that really drive addiction or addiction like behaviors and very strong cravings that are hard to control and it's really all about dopamine these are foods that have properties that spike dopamine in the brain very strongly and probably the reason why chocolate is the most commonly creative food is that not only does it have a lot of fat and a lot of sugar it also contains a drug called di bromine that activates the dopamine system in the brain and so you have this convergence of all these different factors in chocolate that really get the dopamine going and DR heightened motivational states toward eating and you know if your motivational state is strong enough we call it addiction that's really what addiction is it's a result of dopamine spiking too much in the brain too much motivation you prioritize those behaviors too highly and it causes harmful effects in your life and so to get back around to your question is sugar addictive I would say that sugar is part of the picture of foods that stimulate us too much and you know I think colloquially sure we could call that addiction whether you would really diagnose it as addiction in a clinical sense is controversial I would say probably yes for some people but that's my opinion but are you gonna sit there and be addicted to a bowl of sugar on your table if it's just plain sugar no if you look at the studies foods that are just high in sugar and not high in fat and other things some people do have addiction like behaviors toward those things but it's a lot less common than the types of foods that I was talking about earlier like chocolate and pizza and ice cream and the things that are really not just sugar they're combining together different dopamine spiking nutrients mm-hmm I think that's that's really well said I'd pretty much totally agree with you on that one as most of the points you've made so to kind of wrap this up what would be your say main takeaway like it for someone who maybe has this predisposition toward fat gain they may be overweight and there's all this noise out there and it's hard to know exactly what to latch on to what do you think is the most important thing for avoiding obesity maintaining a healthy body weight etc what's your kind of main finishing package yeah so the first thing I would say is that you know don't beat yourself up we have 75% of differences in body fatness in a country like the modern US are attributable to genetic differences different people are dealt a different hand in terms of their challenges in life and one of the ways in which were dealt different hands is in how hard it is for us to keep our body fat level down and that relates in large part to how your brain is wired but it's not necessarily about conscious choices that you're making a lot of it is non conscious brain activity that sets your appetite and your cravings and how you respond to food cues and many other things so these are you know non conscious brain circuits that we inherited from our ancestors that are not designed for the modern world and they're doing what they're supposed to do they're doing what they evolved to do it's just not playing well with the modern food environment in the modern lifestyle environment so that's the first thing is just don't beat yourself up just understand that this is your body and your brain that's just designed to do this but it's just not really playing well with the environment that you find yourself in but at the same time you have to try to find some kind of solution for that if you want to control your body composition if you're someone who is susceptible to fat gain and so I think the first thing that it's really important to do is to control your food environment so you you know the brain is very reactive to what's in our environment and once you've eaten the food and you've got your dopamine spiking the next time you encounter queues that remind your brain of that food whether it's the site or the smell or even just knowing it's in your in your closet those things will get your dopamine spiking again and will put you back into that motivational state that you're gonna have to struggle against so it's really important to have a support of the food environment around you both at home and at work you don't want to have tempting foods on the counter you don't want to have anything especially you don't want to have anything visible that's not a food that is supporting your goals so you don't want to have tempting things so for example in my kitchen I've got raw fresh fruit usually something you have to peel like a banana or an orange so there's a little work there's a little effort barrier involved peanuts in the shells that are salted so it's not like that tempting if I'm hungry yell you know in salted peanuts but if I'm not hungry I won't eat it and I have to work a little bit for it I have to shell those peanuts so that's just some ideas if you walk into my kitchen there's not like cookies or soda or really any kind of tempting food on the counter or visible anywhere and if and there's not a ton of snack food in general so controlling your food environment I think is really really important not only does it make it harder for you to deviate from the foods that support you but you actually won't even crave those foods you won't want them as much because your brain not consciously understands that they aren't even available so that craving will not even be generated in most instances and so that's one thing second thing I think is really helpful is just eating a simple whole food diet eating food that's more similar to how our ancestors ate unrefined lower calorie density foods so you're avoiding refined flours and I would say flour foods in general probably not a bad idea to avoid if you're trying to control your body composition added sugars added fats you know you want to get your carbohydrates and your fats and your proteins from whole foods that you're making from single ingredients in your kitchen and you know not necessarily getting fancy and trying to make it all delicious but just eating these very simple whole foods like our ancestors would eat and that has some properties like increased satiety and more moderate palatability that helps us regulate our calorie intake more effectively and feel satisfied with fewer calories another thing I would say is increase your protein intake that's kind of a no-brainer it helps reduce your calorie intake and it helps support your muscle mass as you're losing body fat another thing that I would say is to get regular physical activity and try to get plenty of sleep and regulate your level of stress and then finally you know I don't want to leave out because I know some people find this effective is you can also consider reducing your carbohydrate intake or reducing your fat intake if those other strategies haven't worked for you so if you're eating a whole food diet and you're exercising regularly and you're eating a higher protein lower calorie density diet and it's just not quite getting there - getting you to your goal then you could consider adding on that extra level of carbohydrate restriction or fat restriction yeah absolutely love that answer and it's really refreshing to hear because in my corner of the internet a lot of people will focus I think almost reductively on tracking your calories track your macros as you kind of said at the beginning people and these like almost obsessive fitness fears tend to really get very analytical with it and then project that on to people who might not want to track calories macros or whatever so I think that hell even people who are really obsessed with going to the gym having this focus on not only the calories but also the types of foods that you're eating is important because it might be a really simple way for you to just modify your behavior and eat a better diet as a result without having all the extra steps so I really like that on your last point of reducing carbs or fat one thing I've recommended in the past was it's kind of weird but alternating carbs and fats meal to meal so you never combine them because it's when as you said you know when you combine them the foods just start to taste so much better and you're so much likely to go back for a bigger serving so it's just splitting them out doesn't do anything magical from like an insulin perspective but it just will help you eat less almost automatically anyway Stefan it's been a great chat I'd love to chat again sometime maybe we could go more down the rabbit hole of like the brain circuit stuff in a little more detail people would like to hear that but I really appreciate your time I know you're a busy guy and maybe you can let people know where they can find you oh I was going to say one thing I'm actually meant to say this at the beginning in the Joe Rogan debate you talked about how you had a reference list on your website of everything so as you were going through your points you were kind of referring people to like reference 24 or whatever and I think you really under plain your reference list because it's not just I was expecting it to be like number and a name of the study but it's a summary of everything with multiple references in each bullet point so it's almost like a wiki of everything you've talked about so it's a fantastic resource and I'll have that linked below if people would like to check it out but other than that where it where's that people can find more Camille yeah I appreciate that yeah there's there's probably a couple hundred references yeah in that post yeah it's on my website Stefon Guillen a.com or if you don't feel like spelling my name it's whole health source arg that'll take you to the same place my book is the hungry brain and that is a general audience book on the neuroscience of overeating and body fatness and I'm pretty active on Twitter my Twitter handle is at wh source and one last thing I want to tell people about is a new organization slash website that I just created it's called red pen reviews and we post the most informative consistent and unbiased health and nutrition book reviews that you can find anywhere awesome I'll look forward to checking that out and yeah for anyone listening I'll have all of the relevant links down below including the studies that we talked about and I'll have that full database that you've got on your website there as well so thanks again so much for your time for everybody listening don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Jeff Nippard

Views: 338,060

Rating: 4.8561554 out of 5

Keywords: vlog, vlogger, iifym, science, bodybuilding, legs, arms, chest, back, fit couple, build muscle, jeff nippard, christian guzman, summer shredding, lean, ripped, abs, diet, lose weight, fat, fitness, flex, biceps, shredded, gymshark, alphalete, physique, motivation, natural bodybuilding, canadian, stephan guyenet, sugar, jeff nippard calories, jeff nippard sugar, calories in calories out, is a calorie a calorie

Id: t30tPISf5cw

Length: 72min 44sec (4364 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/askstoomany]

I hate the 'a calorie is not a calorie' debate because it's so nuance.

Yes, in a vacuum, energy balance wise, a calorie is a calorie. Exactly. It's a unit of measure. 1 cm is 1 cm. Exactly.

Another obvious, in terms of health, hormones, and the body as a whole, the colloquial 'a calorie is not a calorie' means that it would be better if you eat 2000 calories out of veggies and proteins, than KitKats.

[u/The_Rick_Sanchez]

Time stamps:

• 0:00 - Intro and topics summary
• 1:44 - Joe Rogan's podcast has a negative bias toward carbs
• 3:54 - Cliffs notes summary of Gary Taubes and Stephan's positions
• 7:25 - Is Gary's or Stephan's model the "mainstream" scientific model of weight gain?
• 12:20 - Is the calories in/calories out (CICO) model of weight gain correct?
• 17:02 - Is tracking calories or "eating less and moving more" the best way to implement weight loss?
• 23:22 - What does the science say about calories in/calories out?
• 28:54 - "Is a calorie a calorie?" discussion
• 38:22 - Why do some people gain fat more easily than others?
• 45:27 - Is there anything "different" about the brains of obese people?
• 47:06 - What is the role of sugar in driving fat gain, obesity and diabetes?
• 58:53 - Is sugar addictive?
• 1:03:39 - What are the practical takeaways for avoiding obesity or losing weight?

Useful studies:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2673150

---

I originally saw this guy on JRE and was glad that someone actually came on the show saying that carbs are not literally Satan.

It seems more and more everyday I either read someone online or overhear them at the gym saying that carbs cause fat gain and that keto is magic. Finally someone is actually becoming popular by showing that calories are actually what's to blame and is backing it up.

[u/hardman52]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the answer is that we're eating more calories than we're burning.

[u/shreddedbliss]

Jeff, stop touching the table and checking yourself in the camera. You look fine, stop banging on the table and posing.

[u/danny_b87]

Listening to this on and off. Prob all stuff you've heard before but good to confirm information

[u/T-Baggins415]

Been over weight most of my life. Only when I began counting carbs (Atkins) did I lose so much weight pretty girls began to talk to me. Thank you Doctor A. Wish I could shake your hand.

[u/bradbrookequincy]

So does fat vs carb % macros on a cut have anything to do with body composition? It sounds those macros are personal differences and no rule exists except test them and see if you do better on one or the other?

[u/rialed]

Have we really gotten to the point that this is a serious question? If so, how much dumber are we now than any previous generation in human history?

[u/Callum-James2707]

It’s ok, we can do both!