Dr. Christopher Gardner
Appearances
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It was great fun. I just love nutrition. It's really complicated, but it doesn't have to be. There can really be a lot more consensus than controversy if you can have this kind of exchange and explain some of the nuance behind it. And there really is a lot that we don't know. And so there's a room for a lot of different diets out there. And you should find the one that works best for you.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But I hope we can help people with some of the foundational principles. And there are many of them that don't change. There are some basics to nutrition. And many people don't follow the basics. They eat too much crappy food. So let's aspire to eat a healthful, environmentally sound, tasty diet.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I usually give them all the results of the studies and they like that. But I said, I'm going to hurt you. So how much would I have to pay you? And they said, yeah. And I said, how much? And they said, well, 250 bucks would be okay, depending on how long this thing is. And we sort of talked about the duration and it had an interesting design. So there's a standard test for lactose intolerance.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's objective. It's a hydrogen breath test.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
and so you have to drink 16 ounces of milk in one setting fairly fast and then you every half hour breathe into a tube capture the gas and put it into this breathalyzer and it'll tell you if there's hydrogen there and if you have not digested the lactose it'll go to your colon the microbes will eat it up it'll generate hydrogen you'll absorb that and you'll exhale it so it's a very objective test of whether you are or aren't digesting your lactose
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So they said, yeah, we would do this if the dose after we did the test was four ounces of milk one day and then eight, 12, 16, 20, 24. And I said, it's only going to be a week. And you can stop whenever the symptoms are intolerable. I don't want you to be in pain for this. You're not kicked out of the study. I'm really curious what dose it would take for you to react to this.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And on the soy milk, you won't react at all. There's no lactose. So it'll just be this question between the cow milk, the commercial one, and the raw milk. So the first part of this study was recruiting. And so we had to say, to be eligible for this study, you have to fail the hydrogen breath test, and you have to complain about symptoms.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So you have to be intolerant and objectively, not subjectively, fail this thing. And so we ended up with 16 people in the study. It wasn't a big deal. They did all three arms. And 50% of the people who swore they were lactose intolerant failed the breath test. Like their hydrogen didn't go up after they drank 16 ounces of milk. But did any of them feel lousy? Yes.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so I couldn't look at them and say, sorry, you're not lactose intolerant. You're lying to me. I had to say, you have failed our test. Our inclusion-exclusion criteria meant that you have to feel these symptoms and you have to have this response. Interestingly, so we had Asian, black, Hispanic, white. It was all the Caucasians that failed the test that said they had symptoms.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
and didn't pass the hydrogen breath test and show that they're hydrogen winch up, which pretty much parallels lactose intolerance is usually in non-Caucasians. So I'm sort of leading up to this point of they had symptoms. They complained. They attributed it to lactose intolerance. But technically, they weren't. Something else was bothering them.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Maybe it was small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, the SIBO. Now flip that to wheat.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
That's not fair. No, not at all. So they had the same exact symptoms on the raw milk as the conventional milk. Sorry, that was like the punchline of the whole story is it didn't help. At all. It was absolutely identical. But it was a really easy test to study definitively.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
16 people might not seem like a lot of people, but because GI disorder is so easy to detect, you either had diarrhea and gas or not. We're very proud of that tiny little paper, tiny little study we did. Although this raw milk company still, on their website, says they cure lactose intolerance.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So let's not go there, but let's flip that to wheat because so my concern in the world of wheat and gluten intolerance is, yeah, it's amazing how many people feel some distress. And if they were tested, you might find out that they're not clinically gluten intolerant, or I'm sure that's a continuum. But I think this actually has to do with our food supply.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So in a lot of foods that we grow, historically, there were multiple brands or types of bananas and corn and wheat, et cetera. And in the U.S., we pretty much grow one kind of corn and one kind of wheat, monocropping, massive amounts. And Americans in particular, of all the grains that people eat around the world, Americans eat wheat.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I actually had to do a paper one time where we were sort of trying to determine how much protein came from different sources, how much from meat, how much from dairy, how much from grains. And I was very intrigued to see that this USDA database said, here's our value of protein from grains.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And by grains, we mean wheat and oats and rice and quinoa and everything with a little footnote that said because 90% of the grains Americans eat is wheat, we basically just use the wheat value for this and we didn't use the others. And I thought, oh, my God, with rice and oats and everything else out there, 90% of the grains Americans eat is wheat. But think about it.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Bagels, pastry, breakfast toast. Even pizza crust. Pizza crust. We eat an insane amount of wheat. So one of my – favorite graphics. And sorry, maybe we'll get into this later, sort of looking at the types of carbs, fats, and proteins that people in the U.S. eat. And I'll have more details if you want to do this later. But 50% of what Americans eat for carbs is carbs.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And 40% is crappy carbs, added sugar and refined grains, which is mostly refined wheat. And 10% is healthy carbs. And so I think what Americans are eating, and I think the gluten intolerance, has to do with wheat being such a predominant grain source when it doesn't need to be. And very little variety in the wheat.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I know there's actually some folks out there that are trying to bring back sort of some heritage versions of different wheat grains. Camut and buckwheat and what are some of the other ones? Farro and wheat berries. I actually make a kick-ass wheat berry salad if you want to get into that later. But
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Of all this refined wheat that we're eating, to your point, I think, God, isn't that amazing that so many people are now coming up with gluten intolerance? What is going on? I think it's because we eat so much wheat, so much refined wheat, and it's really just one kind. I have heard, I don't know if you've had this experience.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I've had Europeans come and say, you know, I ate a lot of bread in Europe and I come here and I'm like gluten intolerant. And then I go back to Europe and I can have bread again. And I don't know this, so I'm not a food scientist, but I think that's part of it.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, not my area of expertise. Really can't speak to this effectively. Do know that for a basic nutrition class that I teach, I was looking at a survey of celiac disease and testing people for it. And even like half the population with full-blown celiac disease didn't know they had it and were consuming wheat. And so even if you have it, there's a range of response.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
You could have and just think, oh, my stomach's grumbling. Yeah. It doesn't bother me that much. Whereas you have some people who don't have full-blown celiac and they have some gluten intolerance and a small amount bothers them. So even in there, there's some wiggle room that's hard to explain where you can't look somebody in the eye and say, sorry, I've diagnosed you. You don't have this.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So it is really important for people to acknowledge and own what they feel and to look into it.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Happy to be here off Stanford campus talking to you.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
don't concern me more than any of the other things that are in the package, processed foods, and partly because those are almost impossible to study. So in my world, if somebody says this thing is a health concern or health benefit, I have to think, how would I study that? And what is the outcome? So really my world is what is the exposure and what is the outcome? Can I get funded to do that?
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And if the outcome is heart disease or cancer or diabetes, I immediately write it off. I can't wait till somebody dies. or goes to the hospital. I won't be able to publish my paper and I won't be able to keep my job at Stanford. I have to publish quicker. So most of my career has been very cardiometabolic oriented.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So I can move somebody's blood cholesterol, blood glucose, inflammatory markers, insulin in weeks. And sometimes say, oh, my God, how come you didn't do this for years? Well, because most of the effect happened in the first two weeks. I did it for eight weeks or I did it for six months. But really, the effect plateaued in weeks if it was the cardiometabolic risk factor here.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So if you want to ask me what a dye does, I'd have to randomize people to sort of get the exposure or not. So the same food with or without the dye. And I would have to have an outcome. There's really not many outcomes. Your cholesterol wouldn't move. Your blood glucose wouldn't move. If it was the same for everything except the dye, those measures would not move.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So the idea is you give it to a rat in a huge dose and you see if they get cancer. And it makes metabolic sense. That creates a plausibility that this is a carcinogen. But it's really hard to test and think of. You just said you couldn't keep track of how many red dyes there were or blue dyes. or yellow dyes, combined with emulsifiers and gelling agents and colorants and anti- or glazing agents.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There's a list. So this NOVA classification put together by Carlos Montero from Brazil. is like the hot topic in the world of ultra-processed food. So for the last decade, if you will look, papers coming out every month talking about ultra-processed, and if you look at that paper, it's the NOVA classification.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So an interesting thing, just to make this clear, and we can stop if this is too far down the rabbit hole, but the NOVA classification is agnostic to nutrition. He doesn't care how much fat or cholesterol or fiber is in there. His whole point in making this was... There's something beyond that. I know we're worried about lack of fiber, too much saturated fat, something else.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But isn't there something to the colorants and the flavorants and the gelling agents, et cetera, that could be separate from all this? And he, in his analysis, said if I parse that out in the data that I'm looking at, that has an additive effect. All these other things. And he's made a big case for it. And people are publishing papers on it all the time.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The American Heart Association has a scientific advisory on this. And I've seen the table. It's in our advisory. There's 150 different molecules in this list that come into the different categories. And if you look through the whole list, you would be a little shocked. So for one thing, turmeric is in the list of colorants. So technically, turmeric could move you into the ultra-processed category.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But turmeric is full of curcumin, and people are really excited about the possible health benefits of turmeric. Pectin is in there. People have used pectin for years to make jams and jellies and things like that.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And there's some horrific names that you can't even pronounce in this thing, which I've looked for in foods, and I can't find many of the horrifically named things in any real foods that people eat. Anyway, there's 150 chemicals in this list. And it's really intuitively appealing. It's like there must be something beyond just these nutrients. Oh, my God, the food industry is out of whack here.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And if we could pull in one other term, it's grass, generally recognized as safe. And so decades and decades ago, the FDA said, wow, there's a lot of these things that the food industry is putting in foods. To do an appropriate test to see if this would harm humans – is really not feasible.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Plus, in my world, I can't really do studies where I'm going to harm people, but I need you to sign up and your staff, and I'm going to randomize you to see who I hurt first. And once I know who I hurt, I'll know if I need to remove this from the food. So they'll do it in mice, or they'll do it in rats, or they'll do it in a petri dish to see if it's plausible.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And at one point, there were 800 of these grass items, and I think it's grown to 10,000 There's a whole bunch of ingredients that the food industry can put into foods because of this grass sort of byline, this option that's certainly problematic. So we have the NOVA list of these additives. He calls them cosmetic additives. Let's pause just for a minute to think of that name.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So the cosmetic means it's to make the food look good. If you're going to go buy it on the shelf, I mean, think just for a minute of an emulsifier. If you went to buy something and it was separated on the shelf, you thought, wow, I don't really want that. It looks like it's half this and half the other thing. Let's say it was a salad dressing.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I would want the salad dressing to look all homogenized, like somebody shook it up, and I don't want to put the parts on my salad. I want to put the salad dressing. So the cosmetic additives are to make it look good, and that's why we have dyes. I don't think I want to buy that gray thing, but I would buy the red or the yellow or whatever color it is.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
those different additives are going in to make it look more appealing or feel more appealing or smell more appealing instead of just being food. So it does make sense that this is sort of we've gone too far. We have this incredible food system that makes inexpensive food very available for a lot of people 24-7. And we just went too far. It's too available. It's too inexpensive.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's too stable on the grocery shelf place there so that like three months from now, no bugs have eaten it. It hasn't gone bad. Isn't that good economically that it hasn't gone bad? But isn't it a little scary that the bugs don't even want to eat it? Because they can tell there's no nutrition in here. So, yeah, the processed food issue is very interesting. It's fasting that RFK Jr.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
wants to handle this. And a lot of us are really excited that somebody would like to take a real firm stance here because it is out of whack.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yep, it sure would. And that would wipe out 60% of what's in a grocery store right now. And if somebody went in to buy food for their family and 60% of the food was gone and we hadn't replaced it with food that is more nutritious but meets their budget and is accessible, that would be criminal. to be perfectly honest.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And that's why the health community is trying to figure out how to react to this. So part of this is, I'll just take an example, several examples of things that fall into the line of these ultra-processed foods. There's actually quite a few whole wheat breads, yogurts, salad dressings, and things like tomato sauces.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So picture a very inexpensive quick meal for a family where the parents have three jobs. They're trying to make ends meet. Sure, it would be great if they could be home growing their garden and scratch cooking all day, but they can't. So they come home, they cook some pasta, they heat up some red tomato sauce, and they pour it on top.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
More nutritious than, let's say, a fast food something or other. So if you take that tomato sauce away and they whip together a little salad, and the kids don't want to eat the raw vegetables that are just plain. They want some salad dressing on it. You picked up some salad dressing. And for breakfast, they were going to have some yogurt or whole wheat bread.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So they're going to make some toast and put some avocado on it and have some avocado toast. And it was said whole wheat bread. All four of those things could have met the criteria for ultra-processed food. So you take those off. They can't have the salad. They can't have the pasta. They can't have the yogurt. And they can't have the avocado toast because you took those all away.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Unless we had seen that and said, yes, we know these should be replaced with more nutritious food that don't have the cosmetic additives. And until we get to that place, you can't get rid of them all. That's just cruel.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So there isn't one best diet, and I don't think we need different diets. We're just incredibly resilient, and we can do crazy wild things. So the way I start my human nutrition class at Berkeley with students is in the very first class, I point out the Tarahumara Indians, who are like world-class ultramarathon runners, mostly corn and beans, like total carb.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So probably at least two answers, and one of them is going to be, I can't tell you how many Europeans or other folks from other countries have said, I bought the same product that I buy in my home country here, and it has twice as many ingredients. It's the same company. It's the same food. It could be, what's the hazelnut spread?
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Nutella. Like, here's the Nutella you sell here, and here's the Nutella I buy there. I've had multiple people bring those up to me and show me the different ingredients. And so it can be made the other country way. But in the U.S., it's made another way for Americans. So if we could even just make that move, if we could say, okay, you already make this in another country another way.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Can you just make it the same way in the U.S.? That would be a start right there.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I agree. I can't back up that one statement either. But I think that is true for reasons that I can't explain. And that's why it would be helpful to talk more to the food industry. I think there are some challenges with this reaction against ultra-processed foods. I think there are some problems with NOVA that I brought up earlier. You'd have to make those foods accessible.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But some of them you could fairly quickly if you took advantage of some of the other ways that people are making it. And the rules are just too loose, right? So I think that's important. And the level at which this could be impactful is not educating the public to look at the back and find the ultra-processed cosmetic additive and removing it.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's to say that we're going to do this and the food industry will say, I'm going to have to reformulate. If somebody is going to buy my product, if they're going to call me out on this. Not only am I going to have to reformulate, it won't be hard because I do it in another country and I could reformulate. And so that ingredient will be gone.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So several times. So I've got avocado money. I took soy money. Most recently, I took Beyond Meat money. Let me talk about the Beyond Meat, which was the most recent one. I pitted Beyond Meat versus red meat for cardiometabolic outcomes. And the Beyond Meat won in several categories over the red meat. And I got a lot of grief for that.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And then you can look at the Alaskan Inuits who for centuries lived on whale and blubber and polar bear and things like that. So that was like total fat and total carb. And they thrived. There was really no diabetes, no heart disease, no cancer. But eating all their local indigenous diets. You know, Michael Pollan has a great quote on this, the author of Omnivore's Dilemma.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Oh, my God. Gardner's an industry shill. All he does is take... No, most of my money does not come from there, but I actually couldn't get NIH funding to do that because they would say, wait a sec, Beyond Meat makes a crap ton of money. They just sold their IPO. Why would we fund that research? Let the food industry fund that. That actually happens... All the time.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And we could get into how problematic that is or isn't. It's certainly at least somewhat problematic that the company is funding the research that will test their product. But more interesting to me was that this was sort of Beyond Meat 1.0. And Beyond Meat actually did better than the red meat.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And they actually, after that, took out the coconut oil, took out some other ingredients, added some more benign ingredients, and they've actually reformulated multiple times. And so by reformulating, even though the study we did show they had a benefit, I totally respect that. They are listening. They're looking at the health concerns. They're trying to be responsive.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I think if the food industry as a whole did this and we could work more closely with them, that would be the way to improve the U.S. food supply as opposed to we have a new thing, it's NOVA, get rid of them all. That won't really work.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's not a simple answer to that because it's not a yes-no question. It's a total continuum. So they could say, we'll give you this money if you'll do that. They could say, we'll give you this money to do anything you want, but tell us about it as you go. You could write up the results. I'll give you the most interesting personal experience that I had in this.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And he says, you know, if you really look around the world, it is amazing. how much variety there is in a diet that people can thrive on, except the one that doesn't work is the American diet, the standard American diet, because it's full of processed, packaged food.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So everything was pretty benign all the way up until when we got the study done. And this had to do with cognitive impairment. And so I'm not going to even talk about the product. I'll just set this up because I think you'll find it interesting. So it turns out the people we recruited had pretty high cognitive ability. There's a survey you can take. And I think 50 was the top.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And everybody who signed up was a 45. And we were kind of looking to see if this supplement could increase cognitive ability. But we should have realized in the beginning that there wasn't much room to increase. They were 45 out of 50 to begin with. and it failed to show that the product increased cognitive ability.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So we shared it with the company, and they said, well, I can see you're saying there's a null finding here, but could you also say there was no deleterious effect? And I said, we weren't looking for a deleterious effect. We were looking for an improvement. They said, yeah, but isn't it also true that it didn't make it worse? I thought, That's actually true. It didn't make it worse.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Could I, to make these guys happy and to maybe get more money later, should we say it didn't make it worse? So that would be a really subtle influence that they could have later on.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And at the end of the day, really, the important thing is to look at the study design. So let me – I think I can flip this to something that's way more practical than that. It's not even industry influence. It's the investigator influence. So in my world of nutrition – and this is going to go back to the parking lot of not doing one thing at one time but doing multiple things at one time.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Let's say I want to study vegan or paleo or keto or something like that. I can have diet A versus diet B and make a kick-ass diet A and a crappy diet B. So it's really unlikely that B will win. And then I publish that and there's a headline on it. And then there's someone else who actually favors a competing diet. They start a study.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They make a kick-ass diet B and a crappy diet A. And the diet B wins because they set it up that way. No industry influence at all here. This is investigator influence. And then the public comes and says, what the hell? It said diet A is better one day, and it said diet B is better the next. My God, you nutrition scientists never agree on anything. I was going to go have a burger. I was like, ah.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And the sad thing is that the Tarahumara Indians now eat a lot of crap, and the Alaskan people and the Inuits now have a lot of packaged, processed food shipped in, and the world's all sort of centering... on an unhealthy diet that is convenient and it's inexpensive and it's available and it's addictively tasty and it's problematic. So no, there is not one best diet.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
If you had looked at the design, so one of my favorite new words in nutrition is equipoise. I've been trying to set up studies where it's the best diet A that you could be and the best diet B. So if I can just riff off a couple of things. One of my most famous studies is diet fits. It had to do with a low-carb, low-fat diet, 600 people for a year. This is an $8 million study.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah. And I told the dieticians, I said, I don't really care which one wins. We actually think there's some genetic predisposition or metabolic predisposition. It'd be great if everybody won. But just to test this fairly, I want all the dieticians to be advising the 600 people in this study. You have to teach both low-fat and low-carb. You get assigned to different groups.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And teach the best low-carb you can and the best low-fat you can so that if one wins at the end, we can say we gave both of them a fair shot. When we did swap meat, this is the study with appetizing plant food, a meat eating alternative trial, swap meat trial with Beyond Meat. What should we pick for the red meat? Should we pick fast food?
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Should we pick— We went to San Francisco and got good eggs, which prides itself on getting organic, regeneratively farmed, pasture-raised. So we wanted to get a good quality red meat. We did a study with a vegan diet versus an omnivorous diet. And so for the omnivorous diet, we went to a company that makes really good food, and we have it delivered. versus vegan.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We did ketogenic versus Mediterranean, and we made a good Mediterranean diet, and we did Jeff Folek and Steve Finney's well-formulated ketogenic diet as the comparison. So in all these, our group has been having fun trying to address your comment, separate from industry influence, just to try to make the two arms as fairly competing against one another as you can.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Going back to the industry one, there's no way to pull it off 100% clean. There's just no way. There's so many subtle things that could happen. So the thing that does help these days is you have to register your trial on clinicaltrials.gov to start with. You have to name the primary outcome ahead of time and the whole study design for the world to see.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So if it gets to the end of the study and you switched it, somebody will say calling you out on bs that wasn't your primary outcome you can have a third party analyze your data you can lock down the data at the end you can make the data publicly available there's a couple more of these steps that you could this is as transparent as i can be so you can make the chance of industry influence lower
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But you can never eliminate it. So if I find a positive result, maybe they'll fund me again later for something else. Even though they didn't, some of this industry folks, like I often get gifts. If it's a gift, they can't demand to see anything. But I can offer to show them what happened. And if I show them and they say, hey, would you consider doing this?
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I'd be pretty stupid to say, no, you gave me a gift, and I'm not going to consider the thing you said. I would say, yeah, I'll consider it. I will look at it, and I want to present objective data. But I don't think it's the industry as much as the investigator and how they handle it.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's incredible how resilient we are. So I'd love to get into that.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Historically, the proportion of the NIH budget that goes to nutrition studies is infinitesimally small. There's been many requests to create an institute of nutrition. Personally, that would be pretty selfish. I'm all in. I wish they would have more resources for me to do those kinds of studies with objective money.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The bigger challenge is how many nutrition questions there are. So I just served for two years on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. We had two years to consider 60 different questions. Each one of the questions generated sub-questions.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The vast majority of questions resulted in a conclusion that's either not enough data available or only enough data available to generate a limited strength response. To get a moderate or a strong response, more data are needed. This was almost mind-numbingly repetitive through the whole two-year process. More data needed, more data needed, more data needed.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And this had to do with snacks, skipping meals, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, pregnancy, infancy, processed foods, seed oils, meat and protein. The questions are pretty endless. So even if you opened up the NIH and said, yeah, we're going to move 25% of our budget to studying nutrition, you wouldn't even come close to answering all the questions that the public has right now.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, at the end of the day, if you put all of my studies together, it's a whole food, plant-based diet, which does not mean vegan and doesn't mean vegetarian, but could.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, so I don't like this new thing about plant-based being vegan. Sorry. It's a terrible name. So let's just do this for 60 seconds. So... pescatarian, lacto-ovo-vegetarian, lacto-vegetarian, ovo-vegetarian, vegan, flexitarian, reducitarian.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There's all kinds of words out there. And clearly, one of the ones that doesn't go over well is vegan. Vegan is very polarizing. And a lot of that is because the vegan community... An important reason many of them are vegan is animal rights and welfare. And it becomes sort of a condescending thing. Oh my God, you're so unethical and immoral. You slaughter animals and eat them.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I am holier than thou. I don't.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I have been plant-based vegan for many, many years, and I haven't blown up any buildings, and I haven't thrown any red paint on anybody wearing a fur. But because that was so polarizing, Recently – and I think this is going to have a backlash and it's going to be failed. People have been using plant-based as a different word for vegan. Just like, oh, we're not the polarizing group.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We're the plant-based, which is not polarizing. So I've been doing this for 30 years. When I said plant-based for the last 20 years – I meant most of its plants and some of its dairy and some of its meat. So I actually use it differently than what it has just morphed into recently. So when I say whole food plant-based diet, that could be 25% animal products. It could be 30% animal products.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It could be 10%. It could be zero animal products. It would be mostly plants. This is sort of Michael Pollan's old eat food, not too much, mostly plants. So... That's what my research would suggest. The vegans did better than the omnivores in our twin study that was featured on Netflix. The Mediterranean versus the keto diet, it's a little more subtle. We might have to get into that.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The low-carb versus low-fat was very specifically for weight loss. So another issue here is, you know, what's the goal? Is it a weight loss thing? Is it a cardio amount? You have to think about the exposure and the population. So the DietFit study, my most famous study with the 600 people, is really fun to work.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We had sort of unlimited funds, mostly from NIH, but some from the Nutrition Science Initiative that Peter Attia and Gary Tobes led. It's okay if I go here just for a minute. I had done another study before that called the A to Z study. And A was Atkins, and T was a traditional health professional's approach, and O was Ornish, and Z was Zone.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And three of those were popular books that were bestsellers, and they were wildly different in carbs and fats. Atkins was super low carb. Ornish was super high carb. Zone was kind of in the middle. And the traditional health professionals approach was sort of the control. It had 311 women who did it for a year. And it was a weight loss study.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And at the end of the day, when we published the paper in JAMA, there were a few pounds different. The only statistically significant difference was between Atkins and Zone, which was weird because those were the two low carb diets. You would have thought maybe it's Atkins versus Ornish. the two extreme diets, but those weren't different.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
When I looked at that study published in 2007, what really struck me was not the small differences between groups, but the within-group differences, which were massive in every one of the groups. 75 women in a group. Somebody had lost 30, 40, and 50 pounds, and somebody had gained 5 or 10.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I thought, oh, my God, like the difference within the diets is way cooler than the average difference between the diets. I'm starting to learn about insulin resistance. I'm starting to learn about genetic predisposition, which is sort of where our conversation started today.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
ah, you know, maybe I should be looking at these personal factors, these predisposing factors, so I could help see if somebody was better on one versus another. And as we looked through our data and the rest of the literature, the two things that arose were insulin resistance may be better on low carb because folks who are insulin resistant have a hard time putting away carbs.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So the low fat is problematic if it's high carb. And genetic predisposition, there was a group called Interleukin Genetics that came and looked at some of our data and said, oh my God, we actually have a 3-SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism, a 3-SNP multi-locus genotype pattern that we hypothesize predicts who's low-fat and low-carb. And we said, NIH, would you fund this? And they did.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And we got this extra money from the Nutrition Science Initiative. We got 600 people. We randomized them for a year. Everybody was into it. It was like the best, highest rigor, highest generalizability study I've ever done. And importantly, there was no average difference at the end of the year in the two groups, which is actually exactly what we wanted.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
If we had a high quality of low carb and low fat, we assumed that the average difference would be negligible based on our past work. But we would get this range and we did. This time, somebody had lost 60 pounds and somebody had gained 20 in both groups. And it was a continuum. It's like, oh. This is perfect.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
For me, the best way to answer that is people come up to me quite often and say something like, Professor Gardner, I know you're all into whole food, plant-based diets. And I was vegan. I was vegetarian. I was trying that. And I had some health issues. And I switched to be more fat and more meat. And I'm almost embarrassed to be asking you this because my doctor told me I shouldn't do this either.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We are going to have a chance to explain this variability with an oral glucose tolerance test, which is sort of state-of-the-art other than the steady-state plasma glucose thing Jerry Riven does, which is too intense and too expensive. Oral glucose tolerance test, much better than a fasting glucose. And we'll genotype them. And Neither of them predicted the variability.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So a postdoc looked at me afterward and said, there are like 50 single nucleotide polymorphisms that have been linked to obesity, and you tested one set of three of them. So that does mean there's 999,999 other genetic problems. probes or tests that you could use, and you've disproved one of them. And I said, yeah. But the insulin resistance one was very popular.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There were a bunch of studies that had done this. And I have to share a really funny comment that Gary Tobes made while we were doing this, because Gary Tobes was involved in NUSI.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Low carb. So Gary Tobes is a low carb fanatic. And he gives excellent talks. He can riff on and on about data and data and data. But I have to tell you a funny comment that he made as we got to the end of the study. He said, I realized now that you're at the end and you're about to publish it that you screwed up the study. I said, how did I screw up the study?
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And he said, well, for the low-fat group, you told them not to have added sugar or refined grain. even though those are low fat. And I said, well, yeah, actually we told both groups to have a really healthy diet and added sugar and refined grains aren't healthy.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And he said, well, that's going to diminish the chance to see a difference because most people who are eating low carb versus the traditional low fat do better because the low fatters eating high carb are eating added sugar and refined grain. I thought, that's not screwing this study up. That's doing the equipoise thing. Right.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I saw a lot of literature showing that insulin resistance did suggest that there was a subset of the population that would do better on low-carb than low-fat. And we've actually now followed up on that study with a ketogenic versus a Mediterranean diet study.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And in that particular study, the way we set it up is both groups would get a lot of above-ground vegetables, which keto says is okay, avoid added sugar and refined grain, And keto would have no beans, no fruits, no whole grains. And Mediterranean would embrace beans and whole grains and fruits. And so they didn't have a glycosylated hemoglobin difference.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
That was the primary outcome listed on clinicaltrials.gov. The keto diet raised LDL. The keto diet did actually a better job lowering triglycerides than Mediterranean.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
No, because they did better at wiping out carbs. When you wipe out all your carbs, then those extra carbs don't go into your liver to make triglycerides. Not surprised. And the keto diet was higher in saturated fat, so it raised the LDL.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yes, and that's the point. So can we go back there for a minute? So to me, that is the point of sort of looking at this equipoise. So when we made the low-carb and the low-fat both healthy— Our primary predictive outcomes, the genotype thing and the insulin resistance didn't work. And what we took home from that message is you could do either one. If you do them in a healthy way, it would be okay.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But all my health issues have cleaned up. I'm looking really good. And I have a whole other cadre of folks who are eating a lot of meat and a lot of fat. And they said, I went vegan. I went low-fat vegan. And all my health issues cleaned up. And I'm much better now than I was before. And it's really hard to look someone in the eye who's doing something wildly different and say, well, you're wrong.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And when we took it to ketogenic and Mediterranean, they both lowered glycosylated hemoglobin. The keto had a worse effect on LDL, but a better effect on triglycerides. But as we track the adherence, people couldn't adhere to the keto. They couldn't maintain that really low level of carb and the really low level of fat.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so as you're working through these questions, those are the subtle nuances in nutrition that you just said the poor public, and I agree, looks at so many of these and says, oh, my God, you guys can't agree. Can I go back to the fact that I've actually helped American Diabetes with their guidelines. I work a lot with the American Heart Association.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I just rotated off the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. And when there are scientists looking at nutrition data, we almost always agree. Nutrition scientists don't really disagree. We're almost boringly more in agreement than than most people think.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And what's fun for me personally, why I get up in the morning and stay up late at night, is the way you do science around food is fascinating and complicated. And the reason I'm on your show today is because I think if we had more of an opportunity to explain some of these subtle nuances, people would understand that the extremes probably aren't going to help you.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There's really some middle of the road stuff like a whole food plant-based diet where You could be vegan. You could be vegetarian. If you were vegan, you could be a crappy vegan. You could have Coke, French fries, and Oreos. Those are all vegan. If you were keto, you could be eating a whole bunch of meat, which is super low carb, but a keto diet is all fat.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's really not a lot of protein and meat. So it's fun to come on your show and have the chance to dive a little deeper and talk to the listeners about some of the important facts that get a little obscured when the social influencers or the headline is just capturing an overall message without seeing some of the rest of this. How do we communicate this in a fun way?
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And the personal way I've been doing this, actually, My career has shifted now. I now work a lot with the CIA. I am on the scientific advisory board of the CIA, not the Pentagon one, the Culinary Institute of America. And what's really been fun about them is how much they appreciate taste, energy, taste, like the things that people really care about.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
not some of my p-values and my statistics and my equipoise. They want the aesthetic. They want to look good personally. They want the food to look good, taste good, be accessible. So I've been doing some new fun studies where chefs are sort of leading the way. So I'm pretty much against this whole protein craze thing that's going on.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And the Culinary Institute of America has introduced this concept called the protein flip, where instead of having a massive piece of flesh in the middle of the plate with maybe some vegetables and starch on the side, it's vegetables and grains and beans in the middle of the plate with an African, Asian, Mediterranean, Latin American emphasis.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And the meat is two ounces, or it's a condiment, or it's a side dish. It's like making the aesthetics look good, making it taste great. So the phrase I use is from Greg Drescher from the CIA, unapologetically delicious. So I'm hoping to have the science in my back pocket. I'm a card-carrying PhD nutrition scientist. I got the science. We'll probably go there later.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I got the environment in my back pocket too, but don't beat people over the head with that. Beat people over the head with, oh, this is going to blow your frigging taste buds away. This is so good. That's a good incentive. Working with chefs has been very fun.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
You're lying. I mean, clearly these people were really probing for the diet that was best for them, and they were following some advice that they thought was good, and they kept following it, and it wasn't working. They tried something counter to that, and it worked better. And they're trying to rationalize that and deal with that. So I am sure that there are different diets for different people.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Omnivore is fine. Plant-forward people have used, plant-centric people have used.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So let me tell you a funny story. So I participate in something called the Google Food Lab, which is a whole bunch of people that come together for googly casual collisions twice a year. And at one of these twice-a-year events... Probably a decade ago, it's usually a two-day event, and they have all kinds of different talks and sometimes breakout groups.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They had for a whole hour and a half, two hours, we separated into 10 tables, and the challenge was with 100 really bright people, all from the food industry, to come up with options for plant-based, and they failed. New names. Two hours. Two hours, 100 people couldn't come up with a name for that everybody agreed on. So it's a problem.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We need more marketers and we need more infographic people to help with this thing. But these were all really bright people. So I agree the naming is problematic. Instead of naming it something, let's just point out that Americans eat more meat than anyone else in the world. If you see these WHO World Health Organization graphics of who eats how much meat, it is the U.S.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
and Canada and some European countries that eat the most. And there are countries who eat the least, and they have limited access to foods. And some of those countries would benefit from more meat per person because, really, they're eating cereal. They're eating dry cereal-based foods. that honestly just don't have the full nutrition. They're just trying to get enough calories for the day.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And it's not just about calories. And part of that isn't just access to food. A lot of those are countries where there's political issues, where somebody is actually withholding food or making the distribution of food problematic.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So there's something called the Lancet Report that came out in 2019, published in Lancet, the Eat Lancet Commission, and came up with a healthy transformative diet for the planet that was the intersection of human and planetary health. And it was very little meat. It wasn't vegan. It was very little meat.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Open to the idea that some of these countries that ate the least meat should probably eat more. But what was obscene was how much meat is eaten in America compared to the rest of the world. And to eat that much meat and be affordable has led to the concentrated animal feeding operations, which... If they had glass walls, probably most of the country would go vegan.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
If you saw what was happening, not just to the animals, the way that they're raised and the speed, the line speed. Part of this is the way the humans are treated who are in the meatpacking industry. So it's a very repetitive job. There's a lot of injuries in that situation. And it's part of the reason we have very inexpensive meat that's very inaccessible.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But at the end of the day, it's just not the packaged processed food that the whole world is leaning towards.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There's a guy named Timothy Pacherot who, for his doctoral thesis, went and worked in a slaughterhouse for a year undercover and published a whole book on this. And the title of the book is Every 12 Seconds. And the reason it's titled that is because a new cow came through the slaughter line every 12 seconds, every day, all day, every year.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And that the ability to protect some animal rights and welfare, the ability to protect the rights of humans, to have some dignity. I like people peeing in bottles because they can't leave the line. They can't even take a bathroom break. It's a messed up food system. So I had an interesting debate with Mark Hyman the other day. who's all into regenerative meat. You mean like regenerative farms?
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Regenerative farming? Yeah. Yeah, on regenerative ranches and said, you know, he's all against the CAFOs, the concentrated animal feeding operations, if we could just move all those off to pasture. And he said, yeah, we could just do that. And I said, do you know how much pasture that would take? That would take like three planets of agricultural land to move the millions and billions of cattle off
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
out of the CAFOs into there. So I would like to move in your direction where some meat would be fine. if it was raised in a way that didn't require hormones, didn't require antibiotics, didn't require feeding cows corn and soy. They're supposed to graze on grasses and the corn and soy give them health issues.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so they have to be treated prophylactically for the problems they'll have digestively with that. If we could go back to sort of the old animal husbandry of the day when the cattle and the pigs and the chickens were on pasture, we would eat a lot less meat. But we would eat meat that was raised appropriately and would be more healthy.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And that would be that middle of the road where we were having multiple types of wheat, not just the one grain that grows right. We wouldn't be monocropping corn. We wouldn't be monocropping soy, which is mostly going to livestock feed or fuel. Very little corn or soy that we grow in the U.S. is eaten directly by humans as corn or soy.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I would be all for that if we spread out the meats that way and it would be better, basically less meat, better meat would work fine. That would be part of a healthier diet for people on the planet. That meat would cost more. Raising it that way would certainly cost more. But if you ate less of it, it wouldn't be that big of a hit on your budget. So if you had less meat, better quality meat.
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
You might be spending the same amount, but then you could also have more fiber for your microbiome, more other vitamins and minerals, less saturated fat, less hormone, less antibiotics.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Right. And that's why it's so fun now working with chefs. So really our emphasis for right now, think about educating the population. That usually doesn't work. This is a big shift potentially that we're talking about. If you tied this to the environment, we're kind of on a horrific path to not having enough air and land and whatever, water to do this.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But in the U.S., at least 50% of food is eaten outside of the home. And if you think of a group like the Culinary Institute of America that trains chefs, you might think chefs, I bet their goal is to be in a three-star Michelin restaurant. Apparently, they've trained 55,000 chefs to date, and very few of them run Michelin three-star restaurants. They're in hospitals. They're in the Marriott Hotel.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They're in universities. They're in schools. More of them could be in schools. And really their gift, their superpower is taking different food sources and putting them together in flavorful ways that people enjoy. And so my current interest actually in working with the new Doar School of Sustainability at Stanford is
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
is to bring the chefs in and to think of these institutional food settings where so many people are eating at the work site, at the school, while they're visiting the hospital, whatever. And their choices are different, and they taste good, and they look good. And in the back pocket, they're actually good for you nutritionally, and they're actually good for the environment.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We don't have to teach any about this. We work with the chefs, chefs and scientists and business people, This group that I work with at the Culinary Institute of America about 12 years ago, I was invited to something that's now called the Menus of Change. And for the Menus of Change,
Huberman Lab
How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The background to this was the chefs were getting very frustrated that it was gluten-free one day and then vegan and then keto and then paleo. And they sort of were getting this popular demand to change their menu design and to change some of the equipment that they had. And they were getting a little frustrated at the leadership level thinking, why are we being so reactive?
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Couldn't we be more proactive? Like, we're the chefs. Can't we help with food demand? Because we can make it taste good. So they got a science board together to say, okay, science doesn't really change. These things are healthy. They got a business board together, like they have to stay in business. The customers have to come back and they have to pay so we can stay in business.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And they had a chef board who said, this is our craft. This is what we want to do for our life. We want to help people eat. And they sort of put all three of these groups together with their recommendations and they came up with what's called the 24 Principles of the Menus of Change. 12 of the principles are food and nutrition oriented, and 12 of them are operationally oriented.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Choose locally when you can. Celebrate diversity. Source locally. A whole bunch of different principles. And the idea was there, they would take the set of principles to these institutional food settings where they order pallets of food every day. They don't just go to the grocery store and, I'm going to buy the organic one instead of the conventional one.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I'm going to buy the regenerative meat instead of the other meat. They're going to order crap tons of food for everybody. And the idea was that if you could do that across these different institutions, you could change the palate. You could show people, here's some great tasting things that really hit the intersection of taste and health and the environment all at once.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So personally, this is what I'm most excited about is keeping my PhD in nutrition in my back pocket. doing podcasts with somebody like you, working with these chefs in these different institutional settings, because there's a lot of different ways to eat. There's a lot of delicious ways to eat, and it would be not too hard to eat more nutritionally, beneficially than we do now.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, absolutely. And going back to the Stanford only thing, I mean, part of this argument was, so the central campus of the Culinary Institute of America is Hyde Park, New York, in the Hudson Valley. And most of the 55,000 chefs that have graduated from their program are are all over the country and the world.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They could be in a Marriott hotel in one place and in a school district in another place. Let me take a quick run at this. 2010, Michelle Obama thought, maybe much like RFK Jr., that, wow, the school food that we're giving kids... is setting them up with habits that they're going to carry forward in life where they're going to want Cheezos and pizzas and burgers all day long.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We really have to do something there. And in 2010, they passed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kid Act, which was to improve school food. And they gave schools four years to prepare for it. So 2014, it was required. By 2015 and 16... All kinds of people were complaining that the kids were throwing the food away. It wasn't working.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We're going to have to go back to pizza and cheezos and whizzos and crappy food because we don't want the kids throwing the food away. There were a couple people who put chefs in schools and said, okay, you can't just say eat better. If they were eating this way for the last however many years they were in school and you just took the pizza away and put in the hummus,
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
they're not going to try that. But what if you brought a chef in that worked with not just the kids, but the teachers, the administrators, were thinking about attendance and kids who go to detention and test scores and things like that. The teachers are complaining that kids are either hungry or they're not paying attention in class. Food, many times, if you pay more attention to it,
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
can have an impact on all those things, many of which you were just talking about a minute ago. And school food is a great place to do that. And to put a chef in a rural school district in different places is amazing. I now work with another amazing partner named Nora Latour, who has a nonprofit called Eat Real.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And Eat Real goes in and certifies K-12 schools and school districts for meeting 10 different parameters, some of which are nutritious, but some of which have to do with sourcing locally and sustainably and things like this. And I was just on a Zoom call with her with a pitch. yesterday for some funding to do some more work.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So really the only classic example that's well established is lactose intolerance and lactase. And Northern Europeans developing the ability to continue making the enzyme lactase to break apart the molecule lactose well into adult life. So the majority of the world is lactose intolerant. And if we could just do that for a minute.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
She's already serving a million kids in school with this new thing, and she's getting demands from school districts. Can you please come look at our school, certify it? Schools are buying new equipment. They're redesigning some menus. They're talking to the staff, and they have happier staff. They're talking to the kids. The kids like the food. If you put some effort into this,
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
You can make it taste good and be healthier and be affordable in rural, in red states, blue states. This can happen anywhere. It's really not – certainly not just went to Stanford and got good tasting food.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I would push back on small farms to middle-sized farms. So really what we've got is gigantic mega farms. And this isn't my area, so I'm speaking completely out of my wheelhouse right now. But if you look at the amount of corn and soy or potatoes or the way things are grown, they're really inexpensive because they're so huge.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
If you look at dairy in the U.S., dairy farms in number have been going down and down and down. And the mega dairy farms are huge. So we have suicides in the dairy farmer community. Because of losing their family business. We have all kinds of, I'm sure you've heard this. This isn't any mystery, but a lot of farming families are having a hard time getting their kids to take over.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We have a lot of really old farmers in the U.S.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah. So we got a brain drain because of sort of the get bigger, big out. We used to have diverse agroecology going on on farms and they would have some livestock and they would have some produce. And if there was any blight that happened, it didn't wipe out the farm because they had other crops or other livestock to back that up. And
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
At one point, there's a guy named Earl Butts who said, ah, the military, the men are too weak to be in the military. We're not getting enough calories. This goes back like more than 50 years. Plant corn or soy fence row to fence row. Buy more land. Buy the huge combine machinery to plant this. Don't be so diverse.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I know of one particular person at Stanford whose family had a farm, and the dad said, I don't even want you to take over the farm. I've ruined the land. The biodiverse thing was great, but this monocropping thing has ruined it. Please go get another job. And so what my sense was is small farms aren't enough to make a decent living, and farmers should make a decent living. Absolutely.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The farmers and ranchers and fishers should make a decent living. So, again, out of my wheelhouse, but you mentioned small farms. I think the problem is mega farms. I think there's something in the middle where you could make a respectable living, but it would have to be a more diverse agricultural system than just corn or just soy or just a concentrated animal feeding operation.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So when you're a newborn infant and you're having breast milk, you are getting lactose in your mom's milk. And then once you are weaned off the breast, most people in the world stop making lactase, that enzyme. And so I'm sure everybody listening to this knows someone who's lactose intolerant and either buys lactase milk or avoids milk and avoids dairy because of the GI disorders.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It had to be multiple crops, multiple livestock working together.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Absolutely. And it wouldn't just be mine. I'm having a blast at Stanford right now just because this new school of sustainability is interested in this, very much thinking of the farmers and the ranchers and the fishers. I mean, the school of sustainability sort of grew out of the earth science school.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so a lot of those people have been working with land and water and air, and they're always looking for that win-win across all sectors. So that's one of them. Yeah.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Oh, okay. Do we have six more hours or just four?
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah. Okay. So a super important fact just to dive in right off the bat is how much protein do you store if you ate in excess today for tomorrow? Like if you were just hedging your bets, how much of that 175 grams of protein – Do you think you applied to muscle? Very little. You're not gaining muscle right now. I'm going to guess. You're stable weight, stable muscle? Pretty much.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So it really is fascinating that some Northern Europeans at some point had enough cows and dairy and ate it that they developed the ability to keep making this enzyme later in life, whereas the rest of the planet didn't. And it's not really hard cut and dry, so there's actually people who are lactose intolerant who can still tolerate some milk. There's a lot of people who can't digest it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So I'm not sure if they've been my recommendations. Part of it is just sort of pointing out protein 101. There's some myths here that are pretty ridiculous. Okay. So if we were to start at the beginning, and if I go too far down the rabbit hole, feel free to stop me. I got my PhD at Berkeley.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Part of the dietary recommendations for protein were established by Doris Calloway and Shelley Morgan at Berkeley. In Morgan Hall, the fifth floor is called the penthouse. And in the days of the Vietnam War, conscientious war objectors were allowed out of the war if they would be study participants and go up in the penthouse, where they put on blue zoot suits every single day.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And there was a kitchen facility up there, and there were beds. And they were not allowed to leave for months at a time to do this study. And they did what are called nitrogen balance studies, which today the protein community despises and says this is a horrific way to determine protein needs. But in the day, it was super clever.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So picture that you're 50, 60, 70 years ago, however long ago it was now. So protein is the main source of nitrogen in your body. If you were to do one of these bomb calorimeter things that blew up and burned your whole body, minerals would be left. You can't get rid of minerals. And nitrogen is in that list.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so you can actually do a nitrogen analysis of food that you're eating, and it'll tell you how much protein is in the food. And if you were to be in a blue zoot suit all day and collect your poop, your pee, your nasal blowings, the hairs that came off, the skin sloughing, the fingernails, if you captured everything that left your body,
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
you would know how much protein you had eliminated during the day. So somebody came up with this idea for a nitrogen balance study, and they took these conscientious war objectors and put them in these suits for months, and they lowered their protein to zero, at which point they realized, wow, this is fascinating.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The losses that you have from protein decrease as you lower your protein to zero because your body realizes you need to be more efficient with what you had. And then they raised the dietary protein level back up until they were in balance. So the amount of protein leaving the body was the same as the amount going in. And they said, this is the protein requirement.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And to be honest, it doesn't really make much sense. If you look at mammals around the planet, All the mammals, right, mammalian, breast tissue, breast milk. So they're all drinking the mom's breast milk until they get weaned off for food. No other mammal on the planet drinks the breast milk of another mammal to thrive later in life. So humans are the only ones who do it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's the amount that will replace your losses in this group of people. And it wasn't just Morgan Hall and the penthouse at Berkeley. It was multiple other groups were doing this in other places. And they pooled all their data and said, this is, and there's a range. And some people need more and some people need less. And let's pretend it's a normal distribution. It isn't quite.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But after all this, they came up with what would be an estimated average requirement for this population that we've studied in this bizarre prison, incarceration, food manipulation thing with this clever idea focusing on nitrogen just because it's so unique to protein. And they came up with 0.66 grams of protein per kilogram body weight per day. Yeah. And this is the estimated average requirement.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Okay. Now, let's do some super simple math. Let's say if you told the American public, now they've done this bizarre, disgusting task. This is how much everybody requires, this estimated average requirement. And thereafter, everybody got exactly that much protein. What proportion of the population would be deficient at that level if they pick the average requirement? Half, by definition.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
That's only the average. Half of the people are above average. So the recommended daily allowance of protein is set at two standard deviations. above the value determined by this disgusting nitrogen balance test decades and decades ago. And I understand that the community of protein fanatics doesn't like that. That's not an optimal protein. It's like a minimal protein requirement.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So I totally buy that argument. But I think the first thing that people get wrong is they think that that old method is recommending the average requirement. And it's not. It's got a safety buffer. It's got two standard deviations built on top of it so that if everybody got that 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight per day, 2.5% of the population would be deficient.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And not only would 97.5% of the population meet their requirement, they would exceed it. If you drew the graph, right, you're seeing the line, this whole group would exceed it and this group would not meet it and this group would get just a small sliver, would get what they needed.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So this is just at Berkeley? So other people were doing this too. It wasn't just this one group. And I don't know who the others were. Got it. I just remember that I got my PhD at Berkeley. And it's like, as soon as I got there, people said, do you want to see the penthouse? I said, what the F is the penthouse? Oh, the penthouse is where Doris Calloway and Shelley Margin figured this out.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And like, this is a famous thing. So, you know, they took great pride that part of that came from their work.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, it was unpleasant.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So that was the first one. I feel like that's a misperception that that was the average requirement. All the points you made are dead-on critical important. Okay. Then the second one – is where do you store it if you've eaten an excess?
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's really mostly cow milk. And it's kind of frigging bizarre. But it works for a lot of people. And so that is the classic example of sort of overcoming genes over the course of evolution. But I don't know many like that. So I don't have a better example of can people who evolved from Africans versus Asians versus Scandinavians do anything different than that.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Because the fact is right after that, I had a debate with Stu Phillips at one point on Simon Hill's podcast because we had exchanged some Twitter things and said, oh my God, they disagree. They should have a debate.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
No, Stu Phillips, I'm sorry, is an exercise... He's super great at exercise studies at McMaster University. Okay. And... After we actually emailed one another, not just tweeting however many characters you get on Twitter, said, oh, my God, we actually agree on most things. And the reason we agreed is we have national data on what the protein intake is of Americans.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So forget the protein bars and the protein powders and everything else. The average American doesn't do that. And the average intake is like 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight per day. Or higher. Of quality protein? Just food. So just food. So let's stop here. Just food. So the fun thing was that Stu and I got together. I said, you know, Stu, you hate that 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And you're saying people should have one gram per kilogram body weight or maybe even 1.2, which would be 1.2 would be 50% higher than 0.8. That's the average American intake. And he said, well, that's true too. So he hates the 0.8, but he realized it's almost an irrelevant number because most people get more than that.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I just served on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, and we looked at those same data, and it's still true. Americans eat more protein than the RDA on a general basis, without trying, without knowing about it. It's just in more foods than you think. So the second issue is, well, if so many people are eating more, is there anything bad about the extra? Like, what do you do with the extra?
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There's sort of infinite capacity to store fat in your body. You probably know this. In your belly, in your butt, in your underarms, everywhere. Limited capacity for carbohydrate store. You can store... I actually heard Gabrielle Lyons talk about how much is in your liver and how much is in your skeletal muscle.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But if you are a marathon runner and four hours after 20 miles or so, you bonk because... You've exhausted all your carb stores. You can exhaust all your carb stores in four hours, where it would take days and days and days with fat. But there is no storage depot for protein. At the end of the day, if you ate more than you needed, you're not storing any for the next day. It's not in your big toe.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's not in your spleen. It's not in your liver. It's nowhere after you made all the enzymes, hormones, hair, fingernails, and muscle tissue that you wanted, you break off the nitrogen. You have to eliminate that as ammonia in your kidney.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And you turn the carbon skeleton into carbs, which if we do get back to the keto diet is throwing the meat eaters on the keto diet out of ketosis because you just turned the protein you're eating to avoid the carbs into the carbs that you're avoiding. But we won't go there. For the moment, we'll just say, There's no place to store it. So you're not really getting any benefit about it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I was very interested to hear you just say you're fine eating the protein for the calories, the energy.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
That's the only example I've got, but could be possible.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Okay, fair. But, okay, so weight is a little separate issue, and if you're getting that from meat, you're getting more saturated fat and not fiber. And we're destroying the planet with the amount of meat and the kind of meat that we're getting right now. But parking lot for now— Unless it's sustainably sourced. Which is such a small proportion of meat grown in the U.S.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Most people cannot access that right now.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So that is— A great comment. I would love it if we went there. Okay, but let me move on. So one was the two standard variations. Two is there's no place to store it. You're going to convert it to something else. And three is your quality thing. So here's another myth that we need to bust. So the myth part is that plants are missing amino acids. They're not complete.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I'm sure everybody listening today has heard quinoa, the only plant with all nine essential amino acids. Bullshit. So I don't know if you can look at my paper in your podcast or show it. And I have it on my computer.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So we wrote a paper in 2019. And this actually was pretty fun for me. It came from working with the chefs. The chefs were working on that protein flip idea that I mentioned earlier, and they were a little worried. They said, what is the thing about the plants missing the amino acids or being incomplete?
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so I knew a lot about this, but to make a slideshow for them that day, I did something I had never done before, and I got a whole bunch of foods, and I plotted out the amounts of every single amino acid in the food in the proportions they were in.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
If you looked at that 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight per day and if you thought that exceeded the needs of some people, it's plausible that a lot of people by that calculation need 40 grams of protein a day, which sounds, I'm sure, very little. And I'm only bringing that up because there's 20 amino acids.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I would assume the average person would think, well, if I needed 40 and there's 20 amino acids, I would need two grams of every amino acid. And that is totally not the way it works. It actually works more like a board game of Scrabble. So when you're drawing, there's 100 Scrabble letters in the bag, and there's 26 letters in the alphabet.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And it almost seems like there would be four of each letter in the bag. But you all know there's only one Z left. And one Y and one X. I mean, there's two Ys. But there's a crap ton of Es and Ns and Rs. And your amino acids are just like that. So you need a crap ton of lysine and leucine. And you need very little methionine or cysteine. So it was really fun in putting these graphics together.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I said, here's eggs, here's beef, here's salmon, here's pork. Get ready, because I'm going to show you beans and rice and grains and fruit. And I'm focusing on proportion. I will say per calorie, meat has more protein than plants, just in terms of calories. But proportion-wise, one of the myths is the missing amino acids are the incomplete ones.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Because if you make a graphic out of this, you will see all plants have all goddamn 20 amino acids. They all have lysine. They all have methionine and cysteine. And the idea that they're missing is wrong. The idea that you have to complement your beans and grains is wrong, unless you're getting very little protein.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
At that point, it is important to complement them, but it's really not hard to get a lot of amino acids. You mentioned the quality of your protein. If you're getting 175 grams of protein a day, the quality doesn't matter a hoot. You match your needs. At 60 or 70 grams, and I think you're converting the rest to carbs.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, and I wouldn't go with the grains. So the grains are only like 10% protein. Beans are 20%. Soybeans are like 40%. And actually, the amino acid profile of soy is better than any other bean. So the Asians who were doing soy milk, tempeh, tofu for so long, pretty smart. But actually, there's an interesting issue in the U.S. compared to other countries in the world is how few beans we eat.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And beans are super versatile. So you've got Red Red in Ghana, and you've got hummus in the Mediterranean, and you've got tacos and burritos and things in Latin America. Yeah. Or it's an Indian, you've got dals and lentils and things like that. That whole legume family is the best source of quality protein for the plant eaters.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so it's really a shame that sort of the quality thing is like, oh, plant foods... don't have quality protein, they're missing amino acids. So if I can add that to the pool, so the two standard variations, no place to store it, and plants are better sources of protein than most people think. And so that's why there are vegan bodybuilders.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
You can win a gold medal in a bodybuilding competition strictly on plant proteins because they're not missing. So if I could just help dispel that myth, they're not missing, they're not absent, There is something to the proportions of protein. So if you were to see the grid of the heat map of amino acids that I'll share with you later.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Almost identical, all the way down the list of foods that I have. Leucine is not a problem in plant food. The problem in plant foods is it's low in lysine for grains and it's low in methionine for beans. They're actually called limiting amino acids because they would run out. If you only ate grains or you only ate beans, they would run out first. And then you'd be screwed.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
You can't actually substitute another amino acid for a hormone or an enzyme. You have to have all the amino acids in the proportions you want. And that's where the complementary thing came in because grains, although they're low in lysine, are a little high in methionine. And beans, which are low in methionine, are a little high in lysine. If you ate them together, it would be closer –
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
to the proportions in meat, meat would still be better. Because animals are animals and we're animals, the proportions are perfect in animals. But what most people in this conference where I presented to, the chefs, their jaws were on the floor. Seriously, the proportions are that similar? God, that is mind-boggling that they're that similar. I realize they're not perfect.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Absolutely. And that's why for the next slide, when I give these presentations, my next slide is 100 calories of 20 foods. We didn't plan that, folks. So it shows like for black beans, two and a half cups would be 40 grams of protein. For soybeans, two cups would be 40 grams of protein. For rice, like 20 cups of rice would be 40 grams of protein.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But if you put the different plant sources together, broccoli is actually oddly a good source.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, so in my field, that term would really mean digestibility and absorbability. And so at the level of protein and carbs and fats, humans get like 80% to 85% to 90% of everything. It's not like 20% and 80%. Even if it's plants bound in fiber, you're getting 80% of the protein absorbed And then it's a question if the proportions are correct.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So if you're losing a little bit from not absorbing at all, and if the proportions aren't perfect, that's where meat comes out on top. Absolutely. So some colleagues and I wrote a paper called Modernizing the Definition of Protein Quality, which is technically always been on amino acid proportions and availability of digestion and absorption. And meat always wins.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And we said, that's fine, but nobody in the U.S. is deficient in protein. I go and talk at conferences all the time, and I say, oh, you're all physicians. How many of you have a vegan or vegetarian in your practice? All their hands go up. They have some. How many of you ever in your entire career treated anyone for protein deficiency? And no one's hand has been up to this day.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
No one has treated them for protein deficiency, short of caloric deficiency or other things that are going on. And it's not an isolated protein deficiency because they're vegetarians or vegans. And so... Our definition included environmental impact and the other nutrients that come with meat that don't come with plants.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so when we created a scale that said chemical amino acid composition and bioavailability and impact on the planet and the other nutrients that come with it are absent, plants and animals were the same. We sort of neutralized it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It was overwhelming. Yes, they responded to that. Okay, great. And they've reformulated because of that. It's quite clean. And let me go back to your meat. So in the ingredients in the meat, is there antibiotics? Is there hormones? Is there corn? Is there soy? So it's a really easy argument to make when you slaughtered the beef and you took the kite, and here it is. It is only beef.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
That is not everything that went into it. So I actually am writing a book, and I have a chapter where – I got some guy who had done this whole assessment of meat, and the list is longer than Beyond Meats of all the things that went into the beef that you would find at the store to get that thing to market. So it's an artificial argument.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Right, but you would be concerned with all the things that went into making that meat.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
which is only 1% of the meat.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But the average person can't.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
My contention here is, so two of my favorite sayings are instead of what and with what. And so the instead of what, we did a study of Beyond Meat versus Red Meat. A bunch of people said, I can't believe you're saying Beyond Meat is healthy. Don't you want them to eat the beans and the lentils and the other things? I said, I sure as hell do.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
For 30 years, I've been asking the people to eat more beans and lentils, and they're not. They're still having fast food hamburgers. We didn't even use fast food hamburgers. We used like regenerative meat stuff, and we got cardiometabolic benefits. I'm just saying sort of for the average American who has access to the meat that's out there, Beyond Meat is healthier.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
If you had, so again, when I do a study, I have to have a preset number of outcomes and I have to have a defined exposure. So at the same dose, LDL cholesterol went down, TMAO went down, weight went down, blood pressure didn't go up. So here's sort of a funny little sideline. A lot of people were trashing them for being processed foods with high sodium.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And what we found in this study was when we delivered raw meat and raw ground beef and patties, the participants salted them.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so when we did it, the sodium was identical and the blood pressure was identical in the two groups in the study. So the sodium comment is fair that they have more sodium than red meat, but when you take this to people that are eating food... They salt it and it ended up being the same level of salt. So it's not a fair criticism of the way people actually eat it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So let's talk about the study, but let me address that up front. So none of those metrics are part of the study. There's no follow-up in the study. No, this was interviews. This always happens.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
No, but that's anecdotal. So I'll tell you anecdotally.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, they get randomized. Okay. So I will tell you that there was a Stanford media report on three pairs of twins. And one pair said, no, we went back to our other diet. One pair said, yeah, we're both vegetarian now. And one pair was sort of in the middle of that. There's another two of the featured twins in the movie, Michael and Charlie, contacted us afterward.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And the one who was omnivore said, we're both trying to be more vegetarian. Can you give us more resources? So they shifted. Yeah. Okay. So two of the pairs that I know of that we had anecdotal follow-up with shifted more toward it, and one was intermediate and one just completely blew it off. That's an N of four pairs out of 22, not science. I'm only going to answer it that way.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
My anecdotal evidence said some yes, some no.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, and not part of the study. So let's go back to the design because we can have some fun with this. And there's a really fun part. I would love to have the chance to address a critique that we've received that's part of the challenge of communicating this to the public. And it has to do with lean mass and DEXAs, dual energy X-ray absorbed geometry.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So the story starts with, this is all funded by a producer who comes to see us in 2021 and asked Justin Sonnenberg, the microbiome expert that you've had on your show and I, if we would consider doing a study, the parameters being it had to be identical twins and one arm of the study has to be vegan. His name is Luis Sehoyos.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
He got an Academy Award a decade ago for The Cove, which was a documentary about dolphin slaughter in Japan. Mercury-laden dolphins were being fed to schoolchildren. He also did Game Changers, which was elite athletes on plant-based diets. And he wanted to do another one to test out like the health of the diet, not in elite athletes but in the general population.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And he said, I have a donor who has the money and I have a contract with Netflix. They like my idea. And it would have to be identical twins for the science of it. And one diet has to be vegan. Can you design a study? What would it cost? How long would it take? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he said – Wow, that is fascinating. Identical twins is going to be a bitch.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And he said, oh, no, no, I'm totally going to help you. So I'm not going to hold you to the recruitment. We've already found a whole bunch of identical twins for you. I said, well, wow, recruiting is the hardest thing. Okay, so we're going to make a good vegan diet, and we're going to make a good omnivorous diet, and we're going to randomize each pair of twins one at a time to one versus the other.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And we don't have enough money to do this for a long time. We budget it out and you have enough for like eight weeks of doing this study. And it would be important that people catch on to the vegan part quickly, the omnivorous thing they already do. So what about the other group? Ah, we'll deliver food for the first four weeks.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And then for the last four weeks, we'll have them cook on their own now that they have enough ideas from having been fed for four weeks. And so that's how it started to be designed. And we got blood and poop in the microbiome. And we got epigenetic data and telomere length and things like this and adherence. And we have a whole new paper on adherence coming out. And so we randomize them.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And as part of this, the producer kept asking for more and more things. And eventually he said, okay, we're measuring a lot of stuff. We have blood and poop and genes, but we can't measure anything. He says, I want dexa. I want body composition. I said, I don't have enough money. And he said, well, we're going to go ahead.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There's four featured pairs that are going to be in the documentary that we selected ahead of time. And that means there's 18 pairs that aren't involved in the documentary. And we have this super studly Nimai Delgado, who is a medal-winning vegan bodybuilder, and he will train them. And so Nimai had access to the four pairs, the eight twins, and nobody else did it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I actually never got those decks of data. It's not even part of the study. So jumping to the end, when we finished this study, the vegans lost a little weight more than the other group, and they lowered their LDL cholesterol, and they lowered their fasting insulin in the main paper that got published in JAMA Network Open.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
On the side, because we measured a ton of crap, and now this has to be anecdotal and exploratory because it wasn't the main outcome. LDL was the main outcome on clinicaltrails.gov. A group that does telomere length and epigenetic clocks published a whole separate paper, and the vegans, according to the biological clocks...
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
were younger than their omnivorous twins just eight weeks later by epigenetic clocks. Not my specialty. How much younger? It wasn't even, so you can't even, it's statistically significant. So it's not like in eight weeks you got four years younger. It's more like statistically significant. And their telomere caps were longer. In just eight weeks.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Sure, sure, sure. So on all our chromosomes, there's sort of a hot new topic, which is there's these protective caps on the ends of our chromosomes. And as we age, they shorten. And some people are sort of looking at biological age versus chronological age. And it would be a good thing to have a longer telomere cap on the ends of your chromosomes. And I said, no way in eight weeks. They were.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So both of those were statistically significant. And just as a side note, that's a little bit fun. How familiar are you with altmetric scores? I mean, in terms of paper recognition. Yeah. So the altmetric score for the listeners is my currency and yours as an academic is like how many people cite our work. If no one cited it, who cares? Yeah. And it takes a while.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It could take like five or ten years for people to cite your work. The altmetric score is all based on social and traditional media. So it appears the week that your paper comes out. And there's some correlation. If you've got a lot of media coverage, maybe it will get cited later on. So the funny thing is a good altmetric score, if you Google it, is 20.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The JAMA Network Open Paper had an altmetric score of 2,000, the main paper. The biological clock, epigenetic data, and the telomere length had an altmetric score of 3,000. It was more widely broadcast than the main paper. The Sonnenbergs have another paper under review right now, and I can say this because it's already been published preprint. The vegans had better microbiome results.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so now we've got cardiometabolic benefits, biological clock, telomere length, microbiome benefits. On the twins who did this for eight weeks. So those are the scientific results.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah. Versus omnivore. Okay. Now, part of this is think, is my message I want the whole world to go vegan? No. My idea is if I only have eight weeks, I need to make a big difference in these diets so that if I get a signal, I can see it in eight weeks. Would there be disadvantages or advantages to doing this? And part of the fun of this is the producer approached us in 2021.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
He said, my contract with Netflix is I'm going to release this on New Year's Day when people are making their resolutions, not knowing the results ahead of time, 2024. And that means we would have to do this study in the first six months of 2022, analyze them all in the second half of 2022, let the producer film the participants in the study, and give them a year to edit it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So we did all this fastest study we've ever run, actually. And he filmed a lot of other things. And we weren't actually sure how much we would be in the docu-series. And it's like holiday time 2023 at the end of the year. And he says, there's a showing of the Netflix thing. Come. And I said, I can't come. I'm not even available. So I never actually even saw it before it was released.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so I wake up in Hawaii in the first week of January, and my wife says, holy shit, you're number three on Netflix. 50 million people watched the docuseries in January alone. That's a lot of people. Biggest impact, anything I've ever done. I can't tell you how many people said they changed their diet from watching the movie, but it also elicited criticisms.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so this is really – I've actually been asked to do a whole bunch of talks now on health science communication. And when I get the chance to describe it, it's pretty fun to look into such as In the docuseries, the producer made a big deal of the dexadata.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And it seems odd that he made a big deal of it because the vegans that were featured, in particular Michael and Charlie, one of them lost lean mass. The vegan lost lean mass. And who wants to lose muscle? That sucks. But that wasn't even an average data point. That was one data point.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Turns out Charlie moved three times during the eight weeks of the study, and he didn't follow Nimai's advice anyway. And he was having a hard time eating. So that's why you have more than one person in a study. You have lots of people. Never saw those data. People saw it featured on Netflix.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And the reason it was featured on Netflix, because then he got to show off Nimai, who's this totally ripped, buff, vegan dude on there. But people saw that, ah, I saw the Charlie data. He lost lean muscle. Gardner, you are so unethical. You left that out of the JAMA paper. You are manipulative. I can't believe you left data out of the paper to only show the things that were positive.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And my response was, I wish he could have said it was like only in the eight people. I never saw the data online. I didn't have them. I reported all the data that I said I would report. So that's sort of one.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Which is horrible science. Right. Which is not even science.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Okay, that sounds really good. Okay, so we were never pushing the vegan diet as a whole thing. It was just like, this is the study design, we have to do this. So another of their critiques comes from Peter Attia. And this is going to go back to a parking lot item from the beginning of our discussion when we were talking about ultra-processed foods and the need in science to isolate a variable.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Sure, yeah. Okay, so interestingly... When it came to those ultra processed foods, that was an important point because there's 150 chemicals. And in so many ultra processed foods, they're in combination. So it's really hard to call out one of them or identify one and then put them all together. So you're right. At one level, science needs to be isolationist and reductionist.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
In the nutrition world, we've actually moved from nutrients to foods to food patterns. So one of the things that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans actually did 10 years ago was they said, God, you know, we've been... praising fiber and we've been slamming saturated fat forever. And so if you say, hey, patient of mine, go get fiber and avoid saturated fat. It's like, that's not helpful.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I go to the grocery store to buy food. And they say, ah. okay, go buy avocados and stop buying luncheon meats. Okay, that's a little more helpful.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And then what we would find is people heard about the Mediterranean diet, and I'm going to be ridiculous here, but they'd have their Egg McMuffin for breakfast and their Whopper for lunch and a Big Mac for dinner, and by their nightstand they put a little jigger of olive oil, and they chugged that before they went to bed and said, I'm Mediterranean.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But my point is then they said, ah, so, you know, some people are gaming this sort of identifying a food. Maybe what we need to talk about is patterns. So there's been a shift in the public health community in nutrition about dealing with patterns. So Peter called me out and he said, that vegan study is so stupid. He didn't say so stupid. He said it's violated the principles of science.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They not only manipulated the saturated fat, they manipulated the fiber. They didn't Isolate this. You have failed the basics of Science 101. The header of the critique for me was that I had compromised Science 101 by failing to isolate a single variable.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
It's in his post that he does wherever—I don't know, is it LinkedIn or is it his letter? And the response is, if you're going to test a vegan diet versus an omnivore diet— It would have to be different in saturated fat and fiber, B12 and cholesterol, eggs and lentils. It would have to be different in many, many categories.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And so to circle back to your original comment, good science has to isolate the variable. It depends if the question is the vegan diet versus an alternative pattern. then the variable you're isolating is the diet pattern. And so it would have to be absent in meat and eggs and chicken and everything. And that doesn't undermine the science.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So I got crap for not publishing the decks of data, which I didn't have. Peter gave me crap for that. And I got one other piece of crap that I really addressed really well on Twitter. And I'm super proud of this. Somebody went to the supplement. where many of the tables were because they didn't fit in the main paper.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And they saw the caloric distribution in the two arms during the feeding period and when they were eating on their own. And what they noticed was during the phase where we were feeding people and delivering food to them, the vegans were eating fewer calories. And the criticism on Twitter was... When you fed them, you gamed the study by delivering less food to the vegans.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They lost weight because you under-delivered calories to them. And maybe all the differences that we're seeing are just a caloric difference. They're not the diet type. That would undermine the whole study. And it was great. I had the chance to respond. So I used to do a lot more on it. I don't anymore, but I did tweetorials back when it was Twitter.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I said, that is a great catch that you saw this. Thanks for going to the supplement. That's pretty cool. So let me explain something else. So for the food company that delivered the food, we absolutely matched the caloric intake that we were delivering But in a nutrition study, it doesn't come with a gavage. You can't cram the food down their throats. You have to let them eat what they want.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So we didn't actually publish what we delivered. We published what they said they ate. And they ate slightly fewer calories and they lost a small amount of weight on the side. So good for you for catching that, but let me have the chance to show you this. And there's actually another Twitter person named Dr. Tro who trolls me and gives me grief for some of my studies.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And he wasn't the one who critiqued me. It was someone else. And apparently he did critique me and I didn't see it. And the next day, I got a Twitter video apology from Dr. Tro. He said, I read your response to the criticism. I admit I'm wrong. I retract my critique.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And if it could be more civil like that, it wasn't even just a message. It was a video message. And I've been, to be fair, he said something the year before where I wrote back and said, this is so cool. We agree on this. I'm sure we don't disagree on everything. Thanks for calling this out. And I want to call out you and agree that what you said I think is true.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Let's try to make this social media discourse more civil and more complete. That was almost better than doing this study for me was to see this social media discourse. exchange where we said, ah, I sort of misunderstood that point. Thanks for clarifying. Wow, now we can move on and deal with some of the real substantive differences that we have.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Totally respect that. Let me do the weed thing, but let me go back to lactose intolerance for just a minute. So I had an opportunity to work with a guy who raises raw milk products in California. And he was convinced this raw milk would heal lots of people of lots of things. Define raw milk. No pasteurization. Yeah, no pasteurization, which drives health.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Okay, cool. Love the Sonnebergs. Justin and Eric are two of the greatest scientists that I've ever worked with. They're practical. They're very rigorous scientists. So there's a little backstory that's kind of fun. Much as this is the first time I've met you, even though you're at Stanford, Justin and I had never met at Stanford.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And we went to a conference in Seattle and met one another because we were presenting after one another. And he said, oh, my God, Christopher, I just saw your presentation where you showed how much you change people's diets. I have colleagues who told me never to go near humans, like only do mice because humans are a pain in the ass and I'm terrified of humans. I was only going to do mice.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But all the stuff I find in mice looks like it's diet related. And I said, oh, poop is icky. I do not want to do poop. But I fear poop. If you fear humans and I fear poop, we could get together. And he said, great, let's do some stuff together. What should we do? And he really found fiber to be the big deal for his mice. And he said, let's do a fiber study with humans.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I said, ah, it seems like the public is really confused about probiotic and prebiotic, probiotic being live bacteria and prebiotic being the fibers. that feed them. And I heard him say this on your show. So if anybody saw this show, your podcast with him, he said, all right, we're just going to humor you and we're going to have a fermented food arm, not just a fiber arm.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So we've got 18 people to eat as much fiber as humanly possible and 18 people to eat as much fermented food as humanly possible. And so we didn't actually set an upper limit on these. We just said more. We're only going to do this study for Four weeks of ramp up so you can get accustomed to this new stuff in your diet. And then six weeks of maintenance.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And then we'll even go back four weeks later after the study ends and see how you're doing. And we will look at the microbiome to see if we can change the diversity of the microbiome, the characteristic of the microbes that are in there. And we'll go to this human immune monitoring center that Mark Davis, an immunologist, runs at Stanford. And we'll look at multiple measures of inflammation.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Yeah, which drives some health professionals crazy because at a large scale, you could get listeria and other issues from this if the whole thing wasn't properly hygienic. Okay, so anyway, some of his claims seemed outlandish and quite a few of them would be hard to test like cancer or some chronic disease. You'd have to wait decades to see that happen.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So we did it. We got the people randomized to fermented food who previously had been eating less than half a serving a day to get six servings a day on average. And I will pause just for a moment there in case that seems obscene. So picture that one bottle of kombucha that I have right under the table here is two servings. It's only 50 calories.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And a serving of sauerkraut or kimchi is likewise very few calories. It's mostly just cabbage. So actually six servings a day was about 300 calories a day. It's not like most of their food was fermented. But given that they hadn't eaten any fermented food hardly at all before, six servings a day was a lot. Yogurt, kefir, kombucha, kimchi, and sauerkraut. Those are the five main things.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Low-sugar fermented foods.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Plain yogurt. So of these, we actually looked at 90 different inflammatory markers because that's where the field is. We could go to inflammation as a whole separate topic if you want. 20 of the inflammatory markers dropped and got better in the fermented food group. When we went to the fiber group, oh, plus, I'm sorry, wait, this is super important. Their microbial diversity increased.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Which is a good thing. Not always, but if it's the good microbes that are increasing, that's a good thing. But the other funny thing is the Sonnenberg lab was concerned that the only thing that was increasing, or they wanted to characterize it, are the microbes coming from the foods they're eating. So they went and bought all the different foods that people were eating and characterized them.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And the majority of microbes contributing to the increased diversity were not in the foods that they were buying. So this is a little side statement that they made in the paper. Wow, this is super cool. When you change the milieu of the environment of the gut microbiome, you might actually see some microbes appear that you weren't even feeding them.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They might have been in such small concentrations that when you change that gut environment, some of them bloom that you didn't even know were there. So it's very fascinating that the microbial diversity increased. The markers of inflammation decreased. Great, it's like a clinical outcome benefit. And on the fiber side, the microbiome diversity didn't increase.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And as a whole, the inflammatory markers didn't change.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But so part of that was fascinating. Because what they did is they said, oh, God, this is all that mouse study stuff. We thought the fiber was going to be the only one who won. Christopher, we were only humoring you that the fermented foods would have an impact. We thought it was going to be all fiber. Now we got to, God, we are scratching our heads here. Let's see what we can figure out.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But at one point, he said, and raw milk cures lactose intolerance. And I thought, that seems frigging wild. So, I mean, how would that happen? And for me, so I am a nutrition interventionist. That is like my superpower. I love designing trials to answer questions, but usually in a couple of months or a year, not in 40 or 50 years.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And they actually separated the 18 people into roughly three groups of six. And they said, let's look at the data in a little more detail. And let's see if we can see anything. Like there's a range of response in the inflammatory markers. Some got worse, but some did get better. That's why you do multiple people. You see if it cancels out in the study. We wanted to see the average difference.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
But they looked at what might be predictors of those differences. And the key factor that came out was the baseline microbial diversity. And so the idea here was that people who had low diversity, like a compromised Western diet, depleted diversity, when they stuffed all that fiber down their gullet, they actually had an adverse reaction to it. It's like fire hose of fiber.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
can't handle this, going to actually have more of an inflammatory response to that, not less. But the people with the highest microbial diversity at baseline were more like the fermented food folks, and they had a benefit. And so this is where I thought they were brilliant in writing this paper,
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
is that what they said was sort of from a general population standpoint, fermented foods are good, like no matter whether they're eating the yogurt or the kimchi or the sauerkraut, because not everybody ate the same proportions of the different things. It's like across the whole group, the benefits were clear. The fiber was much more nuanced, and this is more like a personalized nutrition thing.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
So one was a general health recommendation. And one was, if you're going to go for more fiber, you might need to make sure your microbial diversity is up first. That might be part of what we have to figure out. Or warn the people with a compromised or depleted microbial diversity that you won't do well right now with more microbes. Super fun paper to work on.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
A geeky science thing, because I know you're a data science guy. It's fun. The primary outcome for that study was the cytokine response score. So in the world of inflammation, nobody has a single thing that they all like, not C-reactive protein, not interleukin-6, not trimethylamine oxide.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
There's all kinds of things floating out there, but there isn't one that clinicians agree on and measure in the clinic. So Mark Davis had found this sort of cluster of 14 different things in a paper that they found looking within that population. They said, maybe people should be looking at the cytokine response score and then on
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
clinicaltrials.gov, we said that's our primary outcome and we're going to look at all this other stuff. And in the cell paper, cytokine response score didn't change. And since then, Mark Davis has kind of abandoned this score because it hasn't been reproduced in other populations. But I think it's really interesting from a paper publishing point of view that the reviewers caught it.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
They said, look, in this paper, your primary outcome didn't change. All it changes is you're seeing are secondary and exploratory. But we kind of admit that you have 90 markers and 20 get better and nothing gets worse. That's probably worth talking about. So this is how nuanced that is. And the Fiverr story is nuanced. It wasn't 100 people. It was 18 people. And we divide them into groups of six.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
And I thought, of all the claims that you have, lactose intolerance sets on in hours. So if you wanted to know if this worked or not, you'd know right away. So I said, I will do this. This is like the most inexpensive study that I have ever run.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Very exploratory. And yet, that paper has now been cited a thousand times.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Got to look out for that. So an interesting part of this study is, again, because it's a six-week maintenance phase of this thing, we had to make a big difference. So if there's a signal you don't want to miss a small signal. So in some of our studies, we kind of exaggerate. We go vegan, even though we're not expecting the world to go vegan. We just want them to eat more plants.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
We went to six servings because they were eating a half a serving before. And to just say, why don't you double that to one? It's like, okay, we're not going to get a perturbation of metabolism with one. Let's go to six. The interesting thing was, Four weeks after the study ended, this group of 18 that were eating basically no fermented food at first were still eating three servings a day.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
I'm going to find people who are lactose intolerant, and I'm going to give them your raw milk, some commercial milk, and soy milk as sort of an extra control here. And all we're going to test for is symptoms. And we actually had to have some focus groups up front. Most of my studies are done in a way that I think this is going to help you, but I'm not sure.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
You ate some before our talk today. I did.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Justin and Erica actually did look at that weight loss study that DietFITS and saw some microbial diversity changes at six months that disappeared at 12. The term that they use that I probably can't explain effectively is residence. So if you eat yogurt every day, then that microbe is there because you ate it every day. But if you stopped...
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
The benefit would probably come if the microbe took up residence and was there without you eating it again, which isn't always the case. Sometimes you might have to actually eat the yogurt every day. The cooler thing, like a fecal transplant, would be somehow you got somebody to adopt that microbe and take it up regardless of what you eat, and it changed the environment for good.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
That's another place where the field is still exploring how to help people the most.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
Love it. Yeah. We're always looking for new ideas. Thanks. We'll make you a co-investigator.
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How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner
In this particular study, if you're going to do all three harms, I know I'm going to hurt you. You're lactose intolerant. I'm going to ask you to drink cow's milk. I need you to have GI distress so that I can see if on the raw milk you don't and compared to the soy milk, you won't. So in our focus groups, we asked... I usually don't pay people to be in our studies.