#798 - Dr Layne Norton - Nutrition Scientist's Diet Advice For Lean Muscle & Longevity

Chris Williamson
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Lane Norton. Hes a doctor of nutritional science, a powerlifter, and an author. Choosing the right diet and training plan for health can be complicated.

The Internet offers one view, while your jacked friend with a suspiciously high blood pressure suggests another. Fortunately, we have actual scientists like Lane to provide all the expertise you need to find the optimal diet, foods and lifestyle for you to build the healthiest version of yourself. Expect to learn why people so often fail at sticking to a diet if there is such a thing as a best diet for overall health and wellness. Lanes thoughts on the new wave of ozempic drugs? Whether the carnivore diet is actually healthier for you, the top health foods you should be eating more of how bad soy is for you, whether you can build muscle on a vegan diet.

Lanes thoughts on Gary Brecker and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lane Norton.

Why do diets fail so reliably over the long term? A lot of different reasons. But if we zoom out and take a 10,000 foot view, the main reason is because people view it as a diet instead of lifestyle change. So if we dig into the statistics, if of people who lose weight, or, sorry, of obese people, seven out of every eight will lose a significant amount of body weight in their lifetime. So why do we have an obesity problem?

Lane Norton
The problem is they, almost all of them put it back on and in many cases actually put on more than they lost. So if you look at the weight regain statistics and you go out like a year, depending on the stats you use and the inclusion criteria for regain, 50% to 70% will regain what they lost. If you go two years, it gets closer to 80 85%. And if you look at three years, I mean, you're looking at 90% plus have put it back on. And so a lot of people want to lose weight, but they only think about a diet as an endpoint.

And so if you stop doing the habits and behaviors that allowed you to lose it in the first place, you're not going to sustain it. I mean, a great example is my father did a ketogenic diet like 20 years ago, and he lost 30 pounds, but slowly he kind of reverted to his previous lifestyle, and so slowly the weight came back on. And so I tell people it's hard to, if you're going to lose a lot of weight, it's hard to change your life while dragging your old habits and behaviors behind you. And for whatever reason, this doesn't seem to, like, click with diet and lifestyle, because, you know, I looked at a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers. So you're basically talking about the 5%, right?

Like, the people who lose it and keep it off. What do they have in common? And this was a review by a researcher named Marie Shrekley. And it really stood out to me because some of the stuff that you would expect is on there, which is cognitive restraint, meaning they're either tracking calories or eliminating carbs or. Or time restricted eating.

Some form of restraint, right? Like, you have to have some form of restraint. But then, and then there was exercise on there, self monitoring, meaning they were weighing themselves frequently. You know, that's obvious. Like, feedback.

If you start going up, you change your habits again. But then there was something on there that really kind of, it made sense. But I was like, huh? I never thought of it that way. And it was a lot of them, almost down to a person identified that they had to form a new identity.

Like, they had to become someone else. And do you know Ethan Suplee? Yes. So Ethan is a Hollywood actor who lost over 300 pounds and has kept it off. And now he, I mean, he went from being basically, like your prototype fat guy in a movie to like, he looks like he'd play a Navy Seal.

Chris Williamson
He's the prototype hard guy in a movie, right? Yeah, yeah, he looks like a badass. And he always would put up something when he'd post his gym photos, which was, I killed my clone today. I've got a t shirt with that on. He sent me a t shirt.

Lane Norton
Yeah. And I was like, I thought it was a cool saying, but didn't really register. And then when I read this review, I texted them immediately, and I was like, is this what you mean? Like forming a new identity? He said, that is exactly what I mean.

And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense if you're. I don't want to say that there's, like, food addiction, because the actual research for that is kind of convoluted. It's more about what they call food dependence, which there are subtle differences, but regardless, if you're an alcoholic, you can't live the same lifestyle you lived. You can't just say, well, I'm going to stop drinking, but I'm still going to go to bars and I'm still going to be around a bunch of people who drink. I mean, I guess you can try, but it's going to be really hard for that to be successful.

Right? And so one of the other things that was in this review was they pointed out that they lost friends and then they gained new friends. I think a lot of people would interpret that as, well, they're getting into fitness now and think they're too good for their old friends. And I don't think it's that at all. I think it's at a much more pragmatic level that if you're just doing new stuff you're not gonna like, it's gonna be hard to hang around people who just aren't into the stuff that you're into.

And also, a lot of times, and we see this a lot, the whole crabs in a bucket, you start improving yourself. And people who, let me put that back because I might get a little, you start changing yourself and other people, it makes them feel insecure. I don't think you need to try and pull that back. I don't think that there is anybody out there that would say, I'm over 30 bmI. Taking myself under BMI is anything other than improving myself.

Chris Williamson
Like, your moral worth as a human doesn't change for sure, but your health outcomes do. That's improvement. There are people who would argue that it doesn't. Well, there's people who have got a fucking, like, 22.5 BMI that are told dicks. There's people who have got a 35 BmI that are fantastic people for sure.

But those 35 bmI, fantastic people at a 25 BmI have improved themselves. Like, presuming that what we want is flourishing humans that add to the world for a longer period of time, for sure. Give yourself the best chance of last. Get that in you. Go on, shove that in your face.

Lane Norton
Yeah, good man. You're dependent on it. Okay, so now actually give some good, you know, some good advice. Good, yeah. Thank you.

Chris Williamson
You've been slow so far. Speaking of this identity change thing, did anybody deconstruct that? Is there tactics, strategies, mantras, component parts that people can think, I want to change my identity. What does that look like? Like structurally?

Lane Norton
Yeah. So not in the study, but the way I kind of present it to people is retro engineer it. Okay, so think about the person you want to become and then think about what do I think that person's habits and behaviors look like? If I want to lose 100 pounds, do I think that is a person who's going to McDonald's every day? Probably not.

Now, can you theoretically go to McDonald's every day and lose 100 pounds? Sure. There are people who have done that sort of experiment, whatever. But for the most part, that is not, on average, what you would find somebody doing who does that, right. Are they drinking every day?

Probably not. Are they exercising frequently? Probably. So you start thinking about, what do I think this person does on a daily basis? If somebody, you know, comes to a Chris Williamson and says, I want to be one of the best podcasters in the game.

Right. Well, people, a lot of times they just try to emulate the end result. They don't try to emulate the process, which is why you've got a bunch of $30,000 millionaires taking pictures with rental cars and jets they don't own. Right? So the question becomes, okay, if I'm looking at the end product, what process do I think got them there?

And what is the evidence based process for getting there? And the evidence based process for getting there is setting yourself up for success in terms of your environment, the people you're around, and the things that you do on a day to day basis. So many people. And I think it's almost like a Hollywood thing. If you watch a movie, it's like almost always the change in a character or the crescendo of the movie is some revolutionary thing that changes everything.

And all of a sudden it stops on a dial. 182Nd montage. Right. And the reality is it's, it's rarely like that. Rarely does a switch flip.

It is the slow, progressive accumulation of small things that you do every day that feel like nothing, that feel like they don't actually do anything. But you do that over time, and it makes a big difference. One of my favorite quotes is one of the problems that keeps people from being successful is people drastically overestimate what they can do in ten weeks, but they drastically underestimate what they can do in ten years. And if I look back, I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine who's very successful financially and career wise, and he's in a place right now where he's saying, man, I just don't feel like I'm getting any traction and I feel stuck and I'm not moving. I said, hey, man, like, just look at the data, okay?

The data says over the last ten years, you progress and you are successful, but there are going to be periods of time where it feels like you're not. And even like the last ten years, if I look at the last ten years or even 20 years of my life, I'm like, my God, look at all the stuff I did. But if I zoom in to weeks, months, even some years, I felt like making progress was completely intractable. And it felt like I was, you know, stuck in mud. But when you keep your feet moving, when you zoom out and you kind of get through that spot, a lot of times you realize, oh, no, I was making progress.

I just hadn't actualized it yet. I hadn't seen those gains yet. We talked about this in powerlifting, which I compete in, a lot of times you're training under a high level of fatigue, and so you're getting stronger, but it's being masked by the fact that you have so much fatigue. And then when you pull back, when you taper, all of a sudden you actualize those gains. And I think so many people stop in that area where they're under the high fatigue and they never actualize those gains.

And so what, I'll, getting back to your original question, what I will say is, the stuff that works is not sexy. It doesn't sell, and it seems insignificant in many ways, but it is small. Daily, repeated habits done over and over and over again. And I even put up a post today talking about how lifting changed my life. And not because I got a better physique or because I got physically stronger, but because it taught me so many things about resilience and working through setbacks and not quitting when things got hard and being patient.

And I remember, like, I had really skinny legs when I started lifting. And even after three years of training, my legs were still really skinny. And I remember being really frustrated and wanting to quit, except I had these great parents that were like, we're not quitters. Nortons don't quit. And so I said to myself, you know, maybe, maybe I'll never have a good set of legs.

And this is when I was competing in bodybuilding, but I'm going to put in ten years of work, and if it doesn't happen, then I'll allow myself to quit. And I can feel good about it because I know I did everything I could. And sure enough, funny enough, after ten years, I didn't have the best set of legs on stage, but they were good, you know? And then 17 years after that, I actually went and set a world squat record. And I can remember my coach, who had known me for like, almost 20 years, when I came downstairs after I did my drug testing and setting that world record, he was sitting on a five gallon bucket and he was crying.

He never cries. He's not an emotional guy. I was like, dude, what is it? And he goes, you were the skinny kid. You were the kid with skinny legs that everybody on the bodybuilding forums made fun of.

How did you just do that? And when I. What I tell people is it was just, I just kept going day after day after day, doing the work. And again, it felt like it was taking forever. But when you accumulate all that stuff up, it's amazing what can do it.

I mean, even you, like, look at what you've done. You know, James was telling me about how you got started in podcasting everything. And James gives this great talk where basically he's talking to entrepreneurs, and the crux of the talk is just freaking go, just like, be willing to fail. Like, so many people are frozen by paralysis, by analysis. I think that's where a lot of the, where I work with trying to dispel diet myths, I'm trying to simplify it for people, because people hear all these conflicting myths, and a lot of times they never start because they're so afraid of getting it wrong.

And it's like, no, get it wrong, it's fine, like, get it wrong, but learn. And then over time, you will find what works, but you can't ever do that if you don't start. The best heuristic that I've learned to help people overcome that fear of not being perfect. Like, I'm an optimizer, right? Tim Ferriss, I loved listening to him on the come up.

Chris Williamson
We did 25 episodes of Life hacks on how to make the perfect toasted Sandu during your meditation app or screen time blocking, or this new type of crocs or whatever, like the best bamboo cotton pants we found. So, as an optimizer and the problem with being someone that wants to do things right and cares and does things with earnestness and stuff like that, is that there is this sort of. You allow yourself to be excused from doing a thing because I'm just finding out the information, right. I'm sort of stuck in this preparatory phase. I'm permanently, permanently writing the plan and not actually acting on the.

On the plan. And the best thing, because we can throw pithy aphorisms around all day, and I'm sometimes accused of doing that. Tactically, the best thing that I've relied on for this is, is this a reversible decision? If it's a reversible decision, starting a diet is the most fucking reversible. Because tomorrow, guess what?

You can do a different diet. Probably not a good idea. But if you say, hey, for 60 days, I'm just going to give this a crack. I'm going to see if intermittent fasting's for me as opposed to watching all of the podcasts. About it or reading all of the articles or, you know, arguing with people.

People on fucking Instagram comments about it. Like, you do that. Like, just. It's a reversible decision for sure, right? And if it's a reversible decision, then the net cost of you trying it is essentially zero, right?

Because all that you will have lost is some of the time that you would have lost vacillating about whether or not to make the decision in any case. So why not just have a crack and close the loop on, dude? I tried intermittent fasting. Do you know what it is? Might work for some people.

I can't deal with the hunger pangs. I get to 02:00 p.m. and I'm like, I got to eat everything, and it causes me to rebound more in the nighttime. Or it might be, like, for me, Keto, for me, really doesn't. I don't like the way that my stomach feels on Keto.

I feel very hungry a lot of the time. High fat doesn't seem to agree with me. Fine. But I closed that loop. I closed that loop, like, ten years ago.

I'm like, all right, I have some different dietary tools in my toolkit. Keto's not one of them. Maybe I'll give it another crack in five years. Maybe my constitution will have changed a little bit or whatever. So what you've mentioned there is that.

And this is really interesting and really important, I think identity based change, someone thinks about the end result type of person, not necessarily a person, but what would that type of person do? What would the best version of you tomorrow want you today to do? What sort of decisions would they make now? Presumably, the only way that you can actually work out what those decisions are. Yes.

I want to be lean or I want to be healthy. I want to be fit, or I want to be the sort of person that looks good with their top off or whatever it might be. But you need to actually understand what the contributing elements are of that strategy. And if you don't know what the principles are that you need to follow, you're, like, wishing for this outcome with no mechanism to help yourself get there. Yeah.

Lane Norton
And I think you need to have a strong why, too. Like, that's. That's the other thing I get. There are some people I talk to are stuck in perpetuity of trying to lose five pounds, and I'm like, hey, why are you trying to lose this? And a lot of times as well, you know, I just want to.

Look, I'm like, is it really going to be that big of a difference from where you are now, you know, like, you're torturing yourself over this thing and why don't you just do it? Well, the reason you don't, you not doing it is, is because your why isn't strong enough. You haven't identified why that is more important than, say, you're gonna eat the. Extra socializing with your friends or allowing yourself. Isn't that interesting that some people can kind of become?

Chris Williamson
And I've got a lot of friends. I probably, in many regards, still am this taking a good amount of pride in my condition, in my strength, in the way that I look, in the way that I can move and stuff like that. But I let go of at least, like, I have to be the one of the biggest, leanest Jack, just guys in the gym thing maybe about six or seven years ago. If you don't do that, you can basically just get stuck on that level playing the same game for the rest of your life. Like, I have this unrequited love with my physique.

I have this unrequited love with the number of partners I've slept with. I have this unrequited love with the amount of money that I've made or whatever. And people just continue to play this game over and over and over again as opposed to going. If this mattered to me that much, I would probably be closer to my goals. And that's probably an uncomfortable realization for a lot of people.

Lane Norton
Yeah, I mean, like, I've had this conversation quite a bit recently of that goal post will always move, you know, but for me, like, I'm competing in nationals this weekend, which, by the way, is why my nails are painted, because my daughter and I, we have a tradition. She's seven, and she paints my nails before everybody. What's the style that she's gone for here? Can you describe it? Usually we do red, white, and blue.

Chris Williamson
For the USA, obviously, red, blue and glitter, so. But she had some glitter, and she wanted to use that. So that's. I'm pretty sure. Because you're in a tested federation, correct?

I'm not sure that that's going to pass. It's not natty. No. That's the least natty thing that you can do. Well, it is a performance enhancer for me.

That's correct. That's correct. All right, so. But I did want to touch on, for me, I mean, I got second in the world in 2015 in powerlifting and at the biggest palting meet at that point in history, and then went through a bunch of injuries, um, like, I could write out a laundry list of stuff. Multiple herniated discs, tears and muscles in my hips, um, adductor tears, uh, partially torn pecs, like a laundry list of stuff.

Loads of fun. And it took me eight years to get back. And when masters worlds, sorry, seven years. And there were, I mean, that's a long time. And there was a lot of failures to launch of me starting to come back and then going back to the beginning, I mean, that must have been at least a half dozen times.

Lane Norton
And it was very frustrating. And there were times where I questioned it, but I had a very strong why of, I believed deep in my soul that I could be a world champion. I believe that. And I also believed deep down that I had not been the strongest that I could have been. And like, to your point of the Goalpost movie, it wasn't about I've got to be stronger than all these other guys.

It was, I believed it deep in my soul. And it was important for me to prove that to myself, that I could get through that, that I could come back. And I loved competing, so I had a really strong why, and that's what allowed me to get through that. And when I did it, I've, one of the things I'll give myself credit for is I'm good about giving myself credit. Some people have said, oh, you're cocky.

I'm like, no, I've done some pretty bad motherfucker stuff. And, like, I'm okay with giving myself that credit because I've met so many people who are so successful in so many ways, and they're miserable because they never go, that was awesome. Yeah, well done. Like, you're allowed to do that. It's okay.

You know, like, I, when I got second at worlds in 2015 and set a world squat record, and that was after I had herniated some discs even. I was out in my boat in the Florida Keys by myself, just on vacation, and I literally took 15 minutes. I was like, damn late, you minute, like, good job, you know, because I remembered, um, I knew this guy in the bodybuilding message boards, and this guy had a terrible aesthetics for bodybuilding. Like, horrible. Had no business even being a pro bodybuilder, but he worked so hard and he got so lean that he got third at the world championships for drug tested bodybuilding.

Like, it was unbelievable, honestly. Like, he maxed it out and people were congratulating him online and he said, I'll never forget it. He said, you know, thanks, guys. But to me, anything less than an overall victory is just a complete failure. And I'm like, what a miserable existence.

Like, dude. And it's okay. Just because you give yourself credit doesn't mean that you can't strive for more. You're selling yourself short. Yeah, for me, that actually helps me strive for more because I allow myself to feel it.

I allow myself to feel good. That's a positive reward. Yeah. If you're not going to celebrate yourself when you get even close to your goal, what the fuck are you doing it for? Isn't it strange that it's more publicly acceptable to be our own biggest critic than our own biggest fan?

Yup, exactly. I have a friend who's a psychologist, and every once in a while, she'll, like, she'll validate me. And then she noticed that when she would do that, I would kind of be like, oh, well, you know, it wasn't that minimized. And she would go, Lane, you're doing it again. This is what you.

You want this, but if you keep deferring it, you're actually. What you're telling me is you don't want it. And I'm like, you're right. I'm sorry. Thank you for validating me on that.

You know, and it really is funny. I think it's. It's so weird. We can even feel bad about, like, talking about our income or talking about something we're supposed to minimize the stuff we did. And look, I'm not saying, like, get up on the mountaintop and shout about all the great things you've done, but I think it's important to, like, make sure you're not goal post shifting all the time.

I mean, I've talked about this stuff with, like, really, really, really successful people. And I'll never forget, I had a client. I started online coaching in 2005 when I was in graduate school. And one of my first clients that I turned pro in natural bodybuilding, he was an estate planning attorney, and he pulled me aside after that show. This is, like, 2007.

And we were at dinner, he pulled me aside, and he goes, lane, I need to talk to you about something. I've been around a lot of really successful people, and I'm telling you, you've got it. You've got it. You're going to be successful. I have watched a lot of really successful people die.

And to a person, they all say the same stuff. They say, I wish I had spent more time with my family. I wish I would have spent more time with the people I cared about. I wish I would have traveled more. I wish I would have more experiences.

I wish I wouldn't worry about the dumb shit that I worried about. None of them say, I wish I made another million dollars. I wish I'd, you know, spent more. Time in slack or on Zoom or in email. Yeah, exactly.

And I had, like, that sat with me. But I think this last year, I kind of even really had an epiphany of like, I don't have to wait to enjoy my life. It's okay to enjoy it now. And I was having a conversation with somebody like, like, what's your goal? Is it like to build stuff up and make $100 million?

And I'm like, no, not really, because I don't want to live a life like somebody who does that. Because I want my kids to like their dad, and I want to spend time with my friends and do fun stuff and, like, compete in powerlifting and do stuff that's fun for me because, like, what is that money even worth if you can't do the stuff that you enjoy doing? In other news, this episode is brought to you by momentus. Trust is really everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they're top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with momentous.

Chris Williamson
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And if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Head to the link in the show notes below, or go to livemomentous.com modernwisdom for up to 32% of everything sitewide. That's livemomentous.com modernwisdom. There's nothing sadder to me than seeing somebody that's quantifiably very successful, admirable, lots of reputation, status, money, acclaim, prestige, all that shit. And you look and you go, you have no fun.

Like, what's the point, actually? What's the point. And there's some people, and I'm friends with a couple of them, for whom greatness in its sort of success metric kind of way is so important that they're prepared to sacrifice fun. I'm like, all right, that's not necessarily the way that I'm wired, but that took me a little bit of time to realize that it's not the way that I'm wired, because fun and your enjoyment of life does not appear on any observable metric that you can brag about to other people. It's not apparent in your Instagram followers, it's not apparent in your bank balance, but it's all of those things are supposed to be upstream from the actual outcome you want, which is presumably a life that you enjoy and that you're proud of and that in retrospect, you're glad that you lived.

Lane Norton
And they're not mutually exclusive either. Like, I think you can be successful and have fun. I don't know. Here's a question for you, and this is actually my number one question I wrote at the bottom of my end of your review the start of this year, which was, is it possible to be world class and have fun at the same time? The reason that that's an interesting question is that when you're talking world class, you're, you know, top point, whatever, 0.01% within your chosen industry.

Chris Williamson
If you are not prepared to sacrifice everything, you will be beaten by somebody that is prepared to sacrifice everything in that one domain. Now the question is, what's the outcome you're optimizing for? Are you optimizing for sort of a well balanced, holistic, integrated life, or are you optimizing for maximum success within this very narrow domain? If it's just that one, you're going to get beaten by the other people. But if you can sacrifice a couple of percent in that for 50% more life enjoyment, to me that seems like a trade that's worth making.

Lane Norton
I may have a different perspective on this and a couple different angles on it. I think the first thing is I look at it. If you're talking about like, we've got a very narrow window of time, I think you're probably right. But I've just seen so many people burn out so fast and stuff, and here I am 20 years later in the same industry, still doing the same things I've done, and it's because I enjoy what I do, and it doesn't feel super fatiguing for me, but I've seen people come in flash in the pan. And here I am, the tortoise over here, just chugging along.

And I keep going, you know. And the other thing that's interesting, too, is going through all these injuries and dealing with all this pain, specifically with, like, within sports and powerlifting there. Honestly, with as much quackery as around nutrition, there's just as much around pain science. We think of pain management as stretching, getting massage, surgery. If you look at the actual evidence based stuff, some of the strongest predictors of reducing pain and recovering from injuries are, uh, psychological in nature.

Um, so stress management, there's a very high correlation between, uh, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, in fact, most autoimmune diseases, and high stress and psychological stress and psychiatric disorders. When your body is like, when you're spun up all the time, it apparently increases your sensitivity to pain, is one of the things it does. It opens. They call it like kind of a. Sorry.

They call it kind of like opening the gate of pain that as you get more stressed, your gait widens and allows more things. In an interesting experiment, there was a while back where I think it was, I might butcher the specifics, but the crux of it will be accurate, which they took 300 people and they applied the same amount of pressure to their skin. And it was standardized, so everybody's getting the same pressure. They asked them to rate it zero through 1000 being absolutely no pain whatsoever, 100 being the most painful thing they ever felt. Most of the ratings were around the 50 mark, so right in the middle.

But there was somebody who rated it as low as four, and somebody who rated it as high as 96. For one person, the same pressure was basically nothing, and for another person, it was one of the most painful things they'd ever felt. And so what that says is pain is an experience. It's almost like an emotion. And if you read the biopsychosocial model of pain, it just really opens your eyes.

Another thing is sleep. So, sleep deprivation, uh, will can increase your risk of injury by up to 236%. So that looking at 8 hours sleep versus 4 hours sleep a night, um, and then actually, your beliefs about pain and recovery. So people who believe they need excellent form on exercises to not get injured are actually more likely to get injured than people who believe their bodies are strong and resilient. People who ruminate on pain, who think about it constantly, who, like, check it.

Like, if, like, if I have a back niggle and I'm thinking about it all the time, if I'm, like, messing with it all the time. The research shows that will make it worse. Whereas the people who are more like, oh, yeah, you know, I like, great example, complete total shift in my mind frame. In 2016, I had a hip injury in training. It started out that one that bad.

But I kept beating on it, trying to get through it, and I kept thinking about it and ruminating on it. And after like twelve weeks, I couldn't even squat the bar below parallel without like nine out of ten pain. Whereas a comparable tweak I did like six weeks ago, prepping for nationals, I was squatting 590 pounds for three reps. And on the third rep, I felt my adductor kind of tweak and it was sore. After that, probably like slightly strained it, and I backed off, I rested.

I didn't ruminate about it. I just was like, you know what? We've been here before. This will be okay in a few weeks. We'll just take it as it comes.

As it stands, three weeks, three weeks later, I couldn't even feel it. It's totally fine. And I mean, again, this is an n of one, right? But this is in line with the research. And so getting back to what you're saying about, can you focus and sacrifice all that?

So for me, my mental health became actually something I prioritized even more because it affected my training, it affected my recovery from training. So some people will say, well, you know, you post in your stories like you're having a bourbon, watching the sunset. Nothing exists in isolation. Like, in isolation. Is alcohol good for training?

Hell no. But what if, and again, I don't have any data on this, but what if me really enjoying that sunset, having a bourbon, the relaxation effect of that actually is a net positive for me. I'm not saying other people should do that, and I'm not promoting people drink alcohol if you can relax in other ways. But for whatever reason, I have been able to recover more, having more fun and sacrificing. I'm still sacrificing because I'm in the gym two, 3 hours a day pretty much.

I think my weekly training load is like twelve to 13 hours. It's a lot of training and I'm still being diligent with my nutrition, that sort of thing. And I won't go out and get hammered or anything like that, but I'll go with my friends on the weekend, I'll have a few drinks. And I think younger lane would have been like, you're not pushing hard enough for this. And now being older, I'm like, I'm trying to run the marathon.

You know what I mean? And I've just seen so many people burn out. So I think the answer is yes and no. So the answer is, if you're talking about if you got a sprint in a very narrow sliver of time, yes, the person who sacrificed more will win out every single time. But if you're looking at, like, long success, you have to find a way to make that sustainable for you.

Um, and I think some people, even, and even people who maybe have that success, how many of them do we see? They look back and they go, man, I would, you know, I probably didn't have to go do exactly what I did to get what I got. I probably could have, like, enjoyed it a little bit more. And so I think there is a fine balance there. And then the one other thing I will say is, people also give them stress over.

They try to do everything at the same time. And one of the things I've really embraced now is there are seasons of life. Right? So part of the reason I say I'm probably not gonna make $100 million is because even though I'm an entrepreneur, I wanna compete in powerlifting, and I wanna train two, 3 hours a day. But I also have kids.

Chris Williamson
So if you wanna be a good dad and a good athlete, you can't be a hundred millionaire at the same time. Yeah, and I'm cool with it. Triage your priorities. Yeah, I'm cool with making that sacrifice. Cause I know I've had some, like, epic moments that you couldn't pay me enough for, like, setting that world squat record back in 2015.

Lane Norton
There's not an amount of money you could pay me to give that back because what would I go spend it on? Like, to do what? And then, so, like, other things I enjoy, like, I used to do competition, tactical pistol shooting. I used to fish a lot more, got my boat a lot more. I don't do that as much anymore, but I'm cool with it because I know the kids are going to graduate one day, and I'll get to do that stuff in the future.

And I think if some people could just embrace that there are seasons of life, they feel they'd feel differently about things. I think a lot of people give themselves a lot of unnecessary stress because they feel like, I should go back to school, I should start a business, I should get my nutrition order. Hey, if you're a single mom going back to school and you're working three jobs, maybe now is the time to try to drop 20 pounds. It's okay to embrace the seasonality of life. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
Jujimufu wrote an article, I think, two decades ago talking about periodization for life. And it's so fucking. It's so true, man. All right, getting back to diet. Getting back to diet, I went real meta on you.

Not at all, not at all. I think it's important. I think it's important for people to see how goals overall are sort of couched within a bigger ecosystem. That stuff's really important. Nothing exists in isolation.

Is there such a thing as a best diet for fat loss and overall health? Okay, so if we look at the research, there are now two meta analyses looking at various different diets and their effectiveness on long term weight loss. And when I say meta analysis, what we're talking about is essentially study of studies where they're using different inclusion criteria and they're trying to compile a bunch of similar studies to see if we can come to a consensus, right? So one meta analysis looked at four different popular diets, another one looked at 14, and they ranged from low carb, high fat to low fat, high carb to everything in between. And when I say low carb, I mean ketogenic up to Ornish diet, which I think is like 80% carbohydrate.

Lane Norton
And what they found was over the long term, none of them were any better than the other ones for long term weight loss. And if we look at now, those are kind of free living studies. So people say, well, you know, maybe people weren't sticking to those. There's another meta analysis done that's one of my favorite studies. When we get in these arguments about low carb versus this looked at equating calories and protein, varying carbohydrate and fat.

And it's important to equate calories and protein, obviously calories. If we don't equate energy, we're comparing apples to oranges, and then protein is thermogenic. So diets higher in protein tend to cause more lean mass retention and tend to be more energetically expensive. So if we don't equate for that, sometimes we can see differences in fat loss even with equal calories. But when they do that and they vary carbohydrate and fat, this meta analysis used only studies where, at minimum, all the meals were provided to participants.

So very controlled feeding studies where adherence is very high up to metabolic ward studies where they basically have them in food jail and found that there was essentially no practical difference in fat loss between these diets. In fact, it actually slightly favored the low fat diets. But it was like 16 grams of extra fat loss per day. It was clinically irrelevant. Right?

Like, I would never tell somebody, do that diet because you might get, like, 16 grams of more fat loss per day. Like, do the one that you can stick to. So on a mechanistic level, we don't really see a difference in fat loss. And there doesn't appear to be, like, on the average, differences in adherence. The only time we really see big differences in adherence in studies is when there's some kind of support, like when they're talking to a dietitian every month or every week, that sort of thing.

That does increase adherence, but overall, no real difference in adherence rates, but when they stratify for adherence. So all these different diets don't produce differences in long term weight loss, but when they stratify for adherence, regardless of diet type, it's like a linear effect. And so what that says is the best diet for you as an individual is the one that you can adhere to consistently and to lose weight. I like what Peter Attia says. He kind of puts weight loss types of dietary strategies in three different buckets.

You have a tracking restriction kind of where you're tracking your calories or your macros, and you're restricting that way. You have dietary restriction where you're doing low fat, low carb, clean eating, paleo insert whatever type of diet, and then you have time restriction. So intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting, any sort of those buckets. And those are kind of your three strategies that you can use. You have to do some form of restriction.

All those involve some form of restriction. I like tracking macros and calories because I am brutally, absurdly consistent when I can kind of eat the foods I like. But just track it. Some people hate that. Some people have a lot of anxiety around tracking.

It feels very cumbersome to them. For me, it's like five minutes a day, and it doesn't matter. Some people like time restriction. They do it and they go, it didn't even feel like I was dieting. You tried it, you didn't like it, right?

Some people, they like the dietary restriction. Well, if I just eat these foods, I lose weight. Okay, cool. As long as any of those can be sustainable for you, you have to practice some form of restriction. But you should choose the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you.

And also, don't assume that it will feel the same for everyone else, because this is where we get into the diet wars, right? Where you have people have a diet that worked for them and now they're trying to evangelize everyone and get them on their team. And it's actually really, I've actually dug into the psychology of this a lot, because after I've had so many of these Internet debates, I'm like, why do people get like this? Because I'm diagnostic. I mean, I pretty much, I don't want to take credit for flexible dieting, and if it fits your macros, but I would say that no one would argue that I was one of the main people who popularized it.

I don't have Iafym or flexible dieting in my bio, like, because I'm, I don't like, I recognize that that wasn't for everybody, but when I first started it, I was in bodybuilding, and I found that just, I would try to eat clean, but then I was binging. Every time I got exposed to, like, pizza or my friends would, you know, have a dessert or whatever, I was like, binge eating, and I had this epiphany. I'm like, you know, I'm pretty sure it's not like the, if I had one slice of pizza, that's probably not what's harming me. It's probably the fact I'm eating the whole pizza. Right.

And so I just started allowing myself kind of what I wanted, but tracking everything. And all of a sudden, I got brutally consistent and started getting results very consistently. So why do you think it is that people are so tribal about their diet of choice? So I foolishly believed, oh, this is the solution for everybody. This is why people can't be consistent.

So it started out very innocently, and then I think there's an insecure element of it. If people feel insecure about what they're doing and they're trying to get people on their team so they can feel. Better about it, because there's an inherent uncertainty in any sort of diet science. Yeah, okay. And people are tribal by nature, and it's a little bit of, I think, what I like to call the Tim Tebow effect.

So do you remember when Tim Tebow was getting into the NFL? So are you familiar with him at all? Okay, so Tim Tebow was a Heisman Trophy winner who played in the NFL for, I think, probably like, seven, eight seasons. And the, the, if you listen to the critics of him, it was, he has a horrible release angle. His mechanics are terrible.

As a quarterback, he really should be a tight end. He doesn't belong playing quarterback. And he had low accuracy and all this kind of stuff. And the people who were on his side were like, well, he's a Heisman Trophy winner and he's got a bunch of heart and he works hard and very positive guy. Like, he was also very religious, and he was very outspoken about his religiousness.

He became very polarizing, not really for the things he said, but I looked at this with fascination because he had, he had won a playoff game as an NFL quarterback, and he kind of had these games where he would just have horrible, horrible games. And then somehow at the end, he would will himself to victory, find a way to get to victory. And when the chips were down, it just seemed like that guy found a way to pull it out. So I kind of became a little bit of a fan. He seemed like a very positive guy.

When you knew people who knew him, they're like, he's legit. He's a legitimately nice guy. And so I kind of was like, oh, I kind of like this guy. But then I would read the things that people would say that were negative towards him, and I would get kind of defensive about like, well, hey, you're how many, how many playoff games your quarterback won, right? But if you were somebody who was on the other side and maybe you're not that invested in it, you're like, yeah, I mean, this guy isn't that great.

He's got good players around him. Like, you know, look at his arm mechanics. He's horrible. You know, it's really bad. But then you got this whole, like, group of people who are, he's the best quarterback of all time.

He should be the NFL MVP. And you go, are you insane? And so I think we drive each other apart with the strongest. Like, we, we do this in politics, religion, whatever. We take the most straw man interpretation of the other person's argument and argue against that, and it drives us further apart.

I mean, I can, I have so many examples of this when I'll put up a just talking about what we were just talking about, saying, you know, it doesn't look like fat loss is different when you equate calories, protein, and somebody will say, oh, so we can just eat pop tarts all day and lose weight. And I'm like, I don't know where I ever said that. Like, eating pop tarts all day was a good strategy for weight loss nut picking. Yeah. We'll get back to talking to lane in 1 minute, but first I need to tell you about Marik health.

Chris Williamson
I wanted to get my blood work done in America, and after I asked around, I found out that Marik Health is the most sophisticated and comprehensive service out there. I loved it so much that I actually reached out to the owner to partner with them because thats how much I believe in what they do. You might have heard that I took my testosterone from 495 to 1006 last year, and that was done with the guidance of Marik Health without putting me on TRT. Best of all, they walked me through my entire lab report and gave me actionable recommendations to improve my health and my longevity. They gave me suggestions for diet, for training, for supplementation and if I needed them, pharmaceuticals.

Basically, it's like having a super well resourced blood expert in your corner at all times. Right now, you can get the exact same panel and medical oversight I got by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to marichhealth.com modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout for 10% off. That's Marek health.com modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. So two things that come to mind for that. There's an idea from evolutionary psychology called a failure of cross sex mind reading.

And it explains how men and women don't understand what the other is thinking from a mating perspective. So there's something called the over perception and underperception bias. On average, men seem to think that women are more interested in them than they are. And on average, it's shocking. Yeah, I know.

Shock, horror. And on average, women seem to think that men are less interested than they are. So when in a relationship, you say, you know that your boss fancies you, right? Your wife. And the wife goes, no, you're being stupid.

And he's like, fucking, yes, he does. Right? And I know that he does. Either of you could be wrong, but I would bet on the guy being right. The woman that says, like, you know, your girlfriend that says something like, I don't think that Caroline's that into you.

And you're like, no, you've seen the way that she, like, looks at me and stuff. And she's like, she's just being friendly. It's like, no, no, no. You don't get, like, you don't get it. I would rely on the woman with regards to that.

So the way that you see the world because of your biases, the person that you are, your unique constitution, you use that theory of mind and port it onto other people as well. Failure of cross sex mind reading. Now, this is like a failure of cross diet mind reading. Because your diet worked for you. You assumed that it is the thing that will work for everybody else.

Second point, I think that one of the big reasons why diet is such a breeding ground for very vehement, aggravating, adversarial conversation is because implicit in your choice of diet is your health, and downstream from your health is your longevity, and downstream from that is when you're going to die. So I think that a attack on your diet is an implicit attack that you're going to die sooner. I think it reminds people it's like a denial of death protection strategy. Right? That.

No, no, no, my thing is, right. And if you attack that, you're saying, basically, I've got it wrong and I'm close at moving myself closer to death, or I could be moving myself more slowly to death if I changed it. Therefore, there's a lot of existential passion that's tied up in that. And then that kind of gets folded into a broader conversation of if you. If I think that you're getting it wrong and you're popularizing a particular approach, that this has a blast radius where other people might do your thing, which is going to kill them more quickly.

So I think that that, from a psychological standpoint, there's definitely two elements in there, failure of cross diet, mind reading, and this sort of denial of death approach. I think that both of those are interesting. Another interesting element, I just had a conversation with Johann Hari, who's written the book Magic Pill, about the dangers of ozempic and. And where that might end up. Give me your opinion on these new GLP one agonists like Ozempic.

Lane Norton
I think I have a very balanced take on this. So if you look at the research data, I mean, they work. They work. They're very powerful appetite suppressants, and people, on average, lose about 15% to 20% of their body weight. People have concerns about thyroid cancer.

Those studies are in rodents. We know that less than 50% of those studies can translate to humans. I think rodents also have a very special kind of receptor on their thyroid that humans don't have. And I think that the dosages that they're being given to the rats are also very high. Yes.

Well, and this is, we could do a whole nother section of how people cite studies, and people have no way of knowing whether it was even a relevant study versus something that was a very relevant study that was done in humans.

So there's that, and then there's the. Well, people lose more lean mass. We have to worry about that. If you look at the amount of lean mass that people lose while on ozempic or glp one, memetics. It's very similar to the amount of lean mass that people lose when they just do diet with no resistance training or exercise.

And so these studies so far, really haven't combined those. And looked at ozempic plus resistance training. Correct. Um, there was a study looking at exercise plus ozempic and then people getting off ozempic that showed that exercise, uh, basically helped people maintain their weight loss from ozempic much better than people who didn't, uh, do exercise. Because there's a rebound effect in many of the studies about ozempic, when people come.

Yeah, yeah. And. And not probably for the reasons that people think exercise is good for weight loss, but not because of the calories burned, because you really have to do a lot of exercise to get a big calorie burn. But what exercise tends to do is actually sensitize your brain to satiety signals. So there was a very classic study in bengali workers done in the 1950s.

And again, I may butcher the specifics, but the, the crux will be right. They looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, and heavily active, like heavy labor jobs, and then looked at how much do people eat? So there was no intervention. They were just looking at how much did they eat. They found from lightly active to heavily active, they pretty much perfectly compensated for increased energy expenditure by eating more.

But sedentary was dysregulated. Sedentary ate more than lightly active, and, I think more than moderately active. And so you have this j shaped curve. So when you are sedentary, the research indicates that it may actually dysregulate your appetite signals. And so since many people are sedentary now, one of the things that GLP one does, if you listen anecdotally to people, is they say, it took the food noise out of my brain.

I stopped thinking about food so much. And I think it may be having, like, kind of that effect that sensitizing us to society signals. And GLP one is a satiety signal in and of itself in the brain, and also it slows down Gi motility, which makes you feel more full. What are you worried about? So I think for obese people, I mean, honestly, for a long time, we have been waiting for this.

We're like, when is the pharmaceutical industry going to come up with something that helps solve the obesity crisis? It looks like they got it, and everybody's pissed off about it. I mean, I think my concerns are the following.

It still needs to be done with lifestyle intervention as well, especially if people don't want to be on it indefinitely. So if people, and listen, I'm not making a judgment towards people who decide that they're going to be on it indefinitely. That is their choice. And honestly, like, despite the cost of it, if it gets people to lose the weight that it's been getting people to lose in the studies, it will save us tons of money. Now, the government will probably go blow it somewhere else, but it will save us tons of money on healthcare.

I more worry on an individual level that if we are not instituting good eating behaviors and lifestyle changes facilitated along with this, that people will go from eating a lot of crappy food to eating a little crappy food. Yeah. And still not getting enough dietary fiber. Uh, still not getting enough protein. And I think one of the things that happens is when you're not hungry, protein is probably one of the last things you're actually reaching for, and fiber is one of the last things you're reaching for.

So I, I am on board with people, especially obese people, using GLP one memetics, because it works and it will save us a lot of money. And everybody's. Some people are like, oh, these things have all these side effects. Honestly, the side effects are pretty mild. When you look at some of the other pharmaceutical drugs out there that have approval.

I mean, I mean, if the thyroid things ends up being a thing, okay, but we have no indication of that in humans yet. The worst thing we're worried about is some people get nausea, have maybe have gastroparesis. There's, there's some people who have reported that, but name me one really effective drug that doesn't have side effects. I mean, this is, they're for every. Give me their.

To gotcha. One of the big pushbacks that Johann got in the episode that I did with him was basically this sort of like a naturalistic fallacy, I think, or like a naturalistic assumption. We are offering people an easy way out. Why can't they just eat less and move more? These fat fucks?

Chris Williamson
Like, you're supplementing sublimating willpower with this, you know, external thing, which is helping them to suppress satiety and almost like, kind of, almost like they don't deserve to be thin, they don't deserve to lose the weight because they're not putting the work in. What do you say to those sorts of criticisms? Why are you so lazy that you need a car to go to work? Just walk there, just take longer. So I think, let me go back 20 years when I got to graduate school.

Lane Norton
I was very much of the opinion at that time that if you were obese, it was because you chose to be and you were lazy. And obesity is a choice. I think there is personal responsibility to change if you want to change, but there is a lot more that goes into food than just, this is a choice. This is. Food is a pervasive theme throughout our entire society.

It's not just, oh, I'm choosing this or this. It's this is how I connect with people. When was the last time you went to an event that didn't have food? When was it like, do you just, like, go out randomly with your friends and sit around? No, you go out and have a meal, you know?

And so one of the other things where that breaks down as well, when people go, well, they just don't have enough willpower, is I've met some really successful, really smart people who were obese. You're telling me they don't have willpower. I mean, maybe in that one area, there's also a lot of really in shape, shredded people who are in tons of debt. But what happened with the willpower? Why isn't it translating?

Because this stuff is more complicated than just a very black and white. Just want it more. And if we look like a great example, where I started to kind of change my mind on things is we all cope in trauma with different ways. Some people become drug addicts, some people become work addicts. In fact, I heard something once that I thought was interesting, that that work addiction is the only thing that you can only kind of addiction you can have that you will be praised for.

Right. Which actually makes it one of the most dangerous kinds of addiction, because you can just justify it in perpetuity. Some people. Maybe the gym, too. Yeah.

Some people get addicted to porn. Some people, whatever have you. Right. Some people, they find comfort in food. And if you look at a study, they did a study where they looked at obese women and found that obese women were 50% more likely to have some sort of sexual assault trauma in their past.

Yep. They use the food as a protection strategy. If I'm less attractive to the opposite sex, it's less likely or even just bigger. Yeah. I'm not going to be able to be as frail and fragile.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, man. It's very interesting, I think very timely for Johann to release this book. There was definitely one other thing I was quite surprised about, was, I think some people accused him of basically doing an infomercial for ozempic. But he spends twelve different sections of the book, twelve different risks that he's concerned about. So I don't know.

I've cultivated an audience of people that are very agentic and high sort of in personal sovereignty, and I think that maybe this pushes back against a little bit of that narrative. So it's not exactly a fully representative sample. But I was surprised by that. You know, we know that obesity is a big problem. Lots of people, like, no one has no person in their life that wouldn't do from doing weight.

My dad. My dad would benefit from losing, you know, like, 20 pounds, 20, maybe, maybe 40 pounds. He would benefit from losing that weight. So I'm like, I don't know. I think it's to be seen, side effects, long term use, longitudinal studies.

How can we tie this in? Is this dependency? Is this big pharma owning people's health? But it's the same as the artificial sweetness thing. Like, look at what you are gaining versus what you are losing.

And to me, Johan's got this nice, like a taxonomy, I suppose he says under 27 bmI. He thinks probably no real reason to use it. 27 to 35, gray area. You need to sort of think about it carefully. 35 are over.

I think, on balance, I'm not your doctor, but this is probably something which will benefit your health rather than hurting it. And I was like, that seems like a really well balanced approach. Well, really well balanced means that both extreme sides hate you, unfortunately, which he. Managed to do successfully. You just mentioned there, about the importance of dietary fiber.

What do you think about carnivore as a diet? Speaking of extremes that hate you. So I will give a devil's advocate argument for it that any diet that is going to get people to eat less processed foods and more filling, satiating foods is going to be a diet that does better than the standard american diet. So I have no doubt that there are people who go on carnivore and they get healthier. The question really becomes, why did you need to do that?

Lane Norton
Could you do that and still have some dietary fiber and get the benefits of that? And so I have had carnivore, carnivores, carnists push back against me. Well, dietary fiber is just. It's just filler. You don't even absorb it.

In fact, in carnivore, I don't even poop as much because I'm absorbing so many more nutrients and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I always find these really, like, olympic level mental gymnastics interesting, because it's not like we don't just have tons of studies in humans looking at this with actual hard human health outcomes. And what those. What the criticism of a lot of these studies is because one of the downsides in nutritional studies is it's hard to do multi year randomized control trials. You interlock someone in diet jail for three years at a time.

Yeah, I mean, I think people have this misunderstanding that there's just, like, this random pool of people that are test subjects for different studies that just sit there waiting patiently for the researchers to come get them. And that's their life's purpose. And it's like, no, there are people like you and me who see a flyer and go, oh, I'll try that. And a lot of them drop out. Why?

Because the more controlled you try to make it, the less likely people are to do it. I mean, a great example is people like, why didn't they do more studies in bodybuilders? And I'm like, because they suck as test subjects. Because what happens when you're a bodybuilder who gets randomized to the low protein arm of a protein? You're immediately dropping out, right?

Chris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah. Or if you've got a bias, if maybe you think a low carb diet is really good, and you get randomized to a high carb diet. See ya. You know, so it's hard to do these for long periods of time and keep a level of control.

Lane Norton
So we have to rely on a lot of times shorter term randomized controlled trials looking at markers of health that are hopefully predicting longer term health outcomes and long term cohort studies. Now, cohort studies are kind of an arm of epidemiology. You have your cross sectional studies, which are, we look at this population and this population who has a greater rate of x disease, and what differences do they have? Well, those are difficult because there's a lot of confounding variables. Cohort studies are a little bit better, because what you're doing is you're tracking the same people over, say, 2030 years.

You're not doing any intervention, but you're seeing, okay, these people ate more fiber versus these people and had this outcome. Now, what I'll say is, the reason I became quite convinced of the healthfulness of dietary fiber is because. Are you familiar with the forest plot? So, a forest plot? This became famous because James Wilkes was on Joe Rogan debating the game changers a long time ago, and kept bringing up a forest plot because the person he was debating didn't know what it was.

Essentially, if you have a meta analysis of studies and you have a center line which means no effect, no overall effect of treatment. And then on one side of the line, you'll have favors x treatment, other side of the line favors y treatment, and then you plot each of the studies where they land. So if you have, like, this side is fabers dietary fiber for decreasing cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer. Literally every study is on this side. Positive.

Yes. Right. You might have some that, like, didn't show a significant effect or not a huge effect, but they're all on this side. Um, I am not aware of any cohort study that showed fiber or fruits and vegetables did not have at least a neutral, and most of them show a very positive dose response effect on mortality, cardiovascular disease. What's dose response?

So, meaning, if they do what's called a meta regression, so they look at the different, um, levels of dietary fiber intakes in these cohorts, then try to compare that to their risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. They can basically say, for example, in one meta analysis that was recent, I think it was, with over a million subjects, for every ten gram increase in dietary fiber, there was a corresponding 10% decrease in the relative risk of mortality, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Now, before anybody goes, well, I'm just gonna eat 100 grams of fiber a day and live forever, we are talking about relative risk, and it's important to point out the difference, which a lot of people don't get when they hear these things reported on the, on the news. So when I say a 10% decrease in the risk of mortality, if we're looking at, say, and I'm just making up numbers here, but if we're looking at, say, a 60 year old person and their risk of mortality in the next ten years is 20%, right? It's probably not.

It's probably different than that. But let's say it's 20%. A 10% relative risk reduction is an absolute reduction of 2%, because 2% is 10% of 20%. So for every ten gram increment of increased fiber, they showed a 10% decrease in the risk of these different diseases and mortality. If there are other things that there are claims about, like, for example, people on carnivore, it's so funny.

They'll be like, why are you trying to, you know, discourage high quality animal protein consumption? I'm like, sorry, not to sound curt, but do you know who I am? Like, have you done any, like, background on me? My research was funded, my lab was funded by the National Dairy Council, the egg Nutrition center, and the National Cattlemen's Beef association. If anybody has a bias towards high quality animal protein.

It's me. I'm just not crazy. And when we look at, say, a great example is red meat. So even the who has categorized red meat as probably carcinogenic? I don't necessarily believe it's carcinogenic based on the research that's out there.

And the reason is a lot of studies don't show that it's carcinogenic. A lot of these cohort studies don't. See where's the who getting it from. Well, I would say the over half of them do, but some of them don't. And if you look at the confounding variables of people who are high red meat consumption, it's not like we're talking about bodybuilders eating sirloin.

You know, most of them are getting it from like processed sources of red meat and red meat. One of the problems with these studies as well is if you are eating more of one thing, you're typically eating less of another thing. And actually red meat intake is actually quite a good proxy for poor diet quality. So there was a really good study from, I think, maximova in Canada, Alberta, Canada, in 2020, and they looked at trying to control for diet quality. So they did, uh, basically.

So three different levels of red meat intake with three different levels of fruit and vegetable intake, and looking at the incidence of cancer. And what they found was that at low intakes of fruit and vegetable intake, yes, there was an association of high meat, red meat intake with cancer. But at high levels of fruit and vegetable intake and high levels of red meat consumption, the risk of cancer was actually lower than low red meat consumption with high fruit and vegetable consumption. Because people who are eating a lot of meat and a lot of fruit and vegetables, they're probably not eating a lot of low quality foods because you just don't have a bunch left in your diet for that. We'll get back to talking to Elaine in 1 minute.

Chris Williamson
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Lane Norton
And then a lot of them are choosing very fatty cuts of meat that are high in saturated fat. And there is a big debate amongst diet tribes about the whether saturated fat is bad for you because it raises LDL cholesterol. And there's a debate around LDL cholesterol. And I will give you the devil's advocate argument for that, and then I will give you what the research says. So in 2005, when I was in grad school, I was in the camp of LDL doesn't really matter.

It's more about the ratio of hdl to ldl, the good cholesterol to bad cholesterol. And if you look at the research studies, there was a lot of kind of disagreement in the research literature, and a lot of the randomized control trials didn't really show an effect of lowering saturated fat on the risk of heart disease. But here's the problem with randomized control trials, is they're very short. Heart disease is not something that develops in two years. It develops in 40 years.

Heart disease is not the difference between you dying at age 40 and age 80. It's the difference between you dying at age 80 and age 72. And so a lot of these randomized control trials they're using, I mean, the Minnesota coronary experiment is one that gets cited by carnivore people a lot. Paul Saladino cites it a lot. And it was an inpatient.

The big, the strengths of it were it was inpatient. They were psychiatric patients, and they either fed them high polyunsaturated fats or high saturated fat diets and looked at the differences in heart attack rates or heart disease. Now, the, what they don't tell you about that experiment is those people were not housed consecutively. The average duration of each subject, of the subjects in that study, which was two years, and they were like, I think the average age was like mid forties. It's not super common for people in their forties to get heart attacks, even those who are inclined to get it.

And they were in and out of these psychiatric wards. They weren't consecutively. And the polyunsaturated fat group included trans fats, which at the time now are largely out of the food supply. But back then were a big part of the food supply. So its not really an experiment that carries a lot of weight.

And again, its only two years. Its hard to see differences if you and I invest in a mutual fund. So with LDL cholesterol, youre looking at a lifetime exposure risk, really? How much are courses through your arteries over the course of your life? I like to compare it to investing.

If you and I invest in, if you invest in a mutual fund that gets 8% and I invest in one that gets 9%, if we look out in two years, I mean, I'll have a little bit more money, but practically you'll go, it's no difference. But if we look out in 40 years, I'm going to have a lot more money than you, right. And so heart disease is kind of the same. It takes time to really see these differences. And people on Carnivore wall say, well, I feel great.

You can feel great right up until you have a heart attack. Like, heart disease is not something you feel now. So looking at LDL cholesterol, what really changed my mind on it, because, again, I was in that camp, was what were called the Mendelian randomization trials that started coming out around 2008, 2009. Now, mendelian randomization is where they look at people's bodies naturally have polymorphisms on genes. So you'll have people who secrete naturally more or less ldl.

But these polymorphisms don't affect other areas of metabolism. So what you have essentially, is a great lifelong randomized control trial of people exposed to more LDL cholesterol versus people exposed to less LDL cholesterol. And when you look at that, the exposure to lifetime LDL cholesterol, you can basically draw a straight line through it between that and the incidence of heart disease. And if we look at a mechanistic level, LDL cholesterol, they have shown mechanistically penetrates the endothelium. It's actually not the LDL necessarily.

It's the fact that it contains a protein called apolipoprotein B, which apolipoprotein D is what actually damages the endothelium and allows it to penetrate. And then deposit the cholesterol there. Now, some people have said, well, it's not LDL. You have to worry about the large LDL. Gotta worry about the small oxidized LDL.

I don't know if you've ever heard this, this argument. It's a very popular argument. And so what is true is that small oxidized LDL can more easily penetrate the endothelium, but it deposits less total cholesterol. Large LDL does not penetrate it as easily, but it still penetrates it, but it deposits more ldl, or, sorry, deposits more cholesterol per LDL particle. The net effect is both are equally atherogenic.

And so if it's funny, I tell people, when something aligns with our personal beliefs, our level of skepticism is basically nothing. When something opposes our personal beliefs, it's like this, right? Are we just are so skeptical. And so I tell carnivores all the time, if red meat had the data that fiber has behind it to support it being a health food, you all would lose your freaking minds anytime anyone even suggested that it might be bad for you. But because it doesn't align with your personal belief system, you won't hear a bar of it.

Chris Williamson
What do you make of the meat and fruit trajectory that seems to be Paul Saladino's new thing that he's landed on? Meat and fruit and honey is another thing that I'm seeing and hearing a lot more. What do you make of this? I mean, listen, like, I think fruits and vegetables are great. Meat and fruit, not fruit.

Lane Norton
Yeah, well, yeah, because vegetables have toxins in them. By the way, you can find toxins in fruit, too. This is like the, the influencer diet fear template to find an isolated chemical in a food and scare people with it. I mean, I think it's better than just meat by itself, but I think what's interesting is when he, when he said he went to fruit, he said he felt better because of an electrolyte perspective. You felt better because you're eating carbohydrate now, Paul, and you have some muscle glycogen and liver glycogen, and you're feeling better doing exercise.

Um, there's not a ton of electrolytes in fruit or honey. Um, yes, the sodium transporter in the gut is co transport with glucose. So, yes, maybe you get a little bit more sodium transport, but, like, you're getting plenty of sodium. Like, that's not a. Like, you're not feeling better from electrolyte perspective.

So I did think it was. I I applaud him for changing his view. I also find it kind of, um, after you've told people repeatedly for years that this is the optimal diet for human health while you were feeling bad. Um, so I struggle with giving credit for that. Um, I, you know, I've interacted with Paul quite a bit.

I'm sure he's a perfectly nice guy, and I think he probably is, is trying to help. I think the way he goes about it is relatively unhelpful. But, yeah, I think if you go from eating just meat to actually including some carbohydrate, I'm sure you'll feel better. But I just find this entire trope around toxins in food to be ridiculous. What is someone's listening and says, oh, I quite like eating meat.

Chris Williamson
It's something that seems to work for me. I'm a bodybuilder. I struggle to hit my protein, whatever dietary fiber sounds useful and important. What are the easiest, best sources of dietary fiber that people can add into their diet right now? I mean, the data on fruits and vegetables is great.

Are there some fruits and vegetables that. Are better than, yeah, I mean, I don't like saying better or best or things like that, but I would say, like, berries are much more fiber dense than, say, like bananas. Um, they tend to be also, like, lower carbohydrate. Berries are, um, apples pretty good source, especially if you're, you know, eating the skin, uh, that contains a lot of the, uh, I believe pectin, um, vegetables, of course, uh, cruciferous vegetables are very fiber dense. Uh, so like, uh, broccoli, cauliflower, those sorts of things.

Lane Norton
Um, but I mean, honestly, I think the average American gets 13 grams of fiber intake per day. And I mean, if you look at the, the drop off in mortality from going from like 10 grams of fiber a day to like 20 or 30 grams of fiber a day youd be getting your fiber up. I mean, there are some kind of sources that you wouldnt necessarily think about that are good sources of fiber. I mean, this is going to get me in trouble because people are going to say, im just a food show for the diet industry. Um, but, uh, I mean, whole grains, they're good sources of fiber.

And if you look at the data on whole grains mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer, again, you won't find any studies showing that they're negative for those things. Now, people will say, well, you saying people got eat lucky charms? No, I'm saying like, oatmeal, some cereals that are more intact sources of fiber. But again, I'm somebody who's like, let's not let the enemy of good or better be perfection. Right?

And there's so much like diet evangelism out there. Hey if somebody eats a cereal that's fortified with fiber or some bread that's fortified with fiber, maybe not the best possible thing they could do. I'd rather them get, you know, fruits and vegetables. But if thats what they can do, then thats what they can do. What about beans?

Yeah, legumes, great source of fiber as well. They come with some protein as well. Um, yeah, all those are great sources of fiber. I mean one that I use that is kind of non traditional is air pop popcorn. I love popcorn.

And its actually very, very high in fiber. No way. Yeah, yeah. Like um, you get a, I dont want to say a cup, but like a serving which might have like 50 grams of carbohydrate will have anywhere depending on the, the particular brand and source like six to 10 grams of fiber in it. And it's nice in that it takes a while to eat.

Chris Williamson
You know, like super high volume for. Yeah, you could have, you know, you. Could have 50 grams of carbs from popcorn. Must be a fuck ton of popcorn. That's a big old bowl.

Yeah. Whereas like 50 grams of carbs from a sweet potato. I mean you can eat that in. Three minutes from Haribo. You can eat that in a minute.

Lane Norton
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Lane Norton
So, I mean, again, like, I'm all for, like, those non traditional sources, but I would say, like, there's probably something to Mother Nature's kitchen of. Talk to me about some of the sleeper foods that you think, you know, you like eating this. Most people listening are probably going to eat some blend of, we go out for dinner, or I get a combination of carbs, fats and proteins in one form or another. What are some of the things where you go, if you were able to switch this out for that on a typical sort of meal plate for someone that's remotely healthy, relatively healthy, trying to watch their diet, here are a couple of little adjustments that you can make that I think have got a lot of bang for their buck. What are some of the top foods?

Absolutely. I like where this is going. The first thing is if you can ask the waiter to just use less oil when they cook. Like, that is one of the biggest sources of added calories. I mean, I was out at a restaurant last night that lists their calories on there.

Chris Williamson
I'm like, was it cheesecake factory? No, no, but it was. God damn it, Lane. Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks.

Lane Norton
Don't go to cheesecake factory. Women don't like if you take them on dates there, apparently. Have you seen that whole thing incorrect? Well, well, there's like, a whole, like, TikTok thing going around of, like, a woman saying, it's a red flag. No, it's a red flag if a woman doesn't want to go.

I agree with you. God damn it. So. But, like, less oil. Yeah.

I'm looking at the menu and it's like 1200 calories for a salad. And then you look down, well, it's got bacon, cheese, nuts, it's got oil in it, and then it's got the dressing. Right. So, okay, maybe say, hey, could you do a half portion of cheese or could you do a half portion of nuts? Could you leave off the bacon?

Could you put the dressing on the side? Cause a lot of times you don't like, it gets doused in dressing. Right. Like, you just do a little bit. America.

Yeah. I mean, I do that for almost anything. Like, if I have a burger that has, like, I love, like, garlic aioli. Love that. But I always ask for it on the side.

Right. Because I just need a little smear to get the taste. I don't need to be drenched in it. Okay, so looking at stuff like oils, dressings, reducing that. What else?

Chris Williamson
What are some of the other things? And then, like, when you're picking your cuts of meat, you know, if you want to get a steak, I mean, things like fillet, sirloin, tenderloin, those are going to be much leaner than, say, your rib eye, your t bone, uh, your strip steak, those sorts of things. Uh, and then when you're like, white fish is going to be a very lean, typically, if it's grilled chicken, typically very lean, unless it's fried. Um, and again, just asking, like, hey, could you use a little bit less oil? Um, and when it comes to, like, carbohydrate sources, this is one of the ones where it's, if you put rice on a plate, the, the view of 50 grams of carbs from rice versus 100 grams of carbs, it's very tough to tell the difference.

Lane Norton
Right. So what I tell people is this is where eating in food order can help you. Um, so eat your vet, eat your proteins and vegetables first. Leave your starches for the last so that you're a little bit more full. So then you, then you can rely a little bit more on your satiety signals, right.

And when it comes to vegetables, you can ask for them steamed instead of having them cooked in oil or fried or whatever it may be. So you can do some simple switches. And usually, most restaurants, at least in America now, if you go to Australia or Europe, and you might not be as accommodating, but in America, they're usually pretty accommodating. And so you can make those small switches, and it will make a big difference. And even just, like, I think being a little bit mindful, like, if you're somebody who's trying to lose weight, like, if you know you're going somewhere for dinner, do a little bit of recon, look at the menu beforehand.

If you're curious about, like, okay, what is a fattier cut of meat? Look up those different cuts of meat and see what the, what the macros look like on it, you know, look at, okay, well, what do I think might be something I want to try here? And if you're, you know, I think a good heuristic is, hey, if you want to have an alcoholic beverage, don't have dessert, you know. Oh, you get to pick one of the two. Yeah, if you want.

Or if you want to have dessert, don't have alcohol. Or the other thing I tell people is if you could just stay engaged with your own satiety signals. Are you eating because you're still hungry or are you eating because you feel like you need to finish it? Because I can promise you, you're not paying for the food when you go out to eat. You're paying for the experience.

Because if you were just paying for the food, I mean, you can go down to McDonald's and get some stuff that tastes great for $5. You know what I mean? You're paying for an experience, so value the experience. And if you're full, don't feel the need to finish everything. Like, be in tune with your own satiety signals.

I think that is something that's really lost on a lot of people, is just asking themselves, am I eating this because I feel like I should finish it because I paid for it, or am I eating this because I'm actually hungry? I think that's very important. And this is one of the things that I like, the evidence based movement. I like Menno, you, doctor, Mike. It's a cool movement.

They're okay. Yeah, they're all right. But one of the things that I think is really important, especially when we're talking about diet. Diet mechanisms, conversations online, is how to get things tactically down for sure. Like that.

Chris Williamson
You know, you can throw studies at me all day about legumes and dietary fiber and fucking ldl cholesterol, but hey, okay, cool. Mister science man. What do I do when I go to cheesecake factory? What do I do when I go to Dean's italian downtown in Austin? Just tell me what, like, what's a good way to take all of this research into something that's applicable?

And I like that. Presumably just being like, we don't need the bread this evening. We'll just start with the meal is a good idea because that bread, that bread, I don't know where it goes. Doesn't go to my stomach because it takes up no room. It just.

It's like a Harry Potter's fucking closet, and it just disappears out somewhere. Well, another thing is, like, show up not super hungry, you know, like, make sure you've had some filling foods throughout the day. This is a good one. So when you go shopping, if you go shopping in a supermarket, as opposed to ordering it online and you're absolutely starving hungry, when you go at the front of pretty much every supermarket, there will be sort of a to go fridge. Sandwiches and other bits and pieces.

Grab yourself a dollar four sandwich that's got a good set of macros on it and seems to be relatively well balanced. Eat that before you go shopping. Your shopping bill is now just being chopped in half. That's the best $4 investment that you can do because you're not, you're hungry and you're walking around. Of course I want that.

And I want this and I'll have that and oh, I'll get that. You, oh, I just doubled all of the bullshit that I have in my cupboards and I didn't really need to. I'm a big fan of ordering online now just because I have, like, I just go back and I just reorder the same things every week. It's so good. It's so, it's so good.

All right, so going to the other side of the fence, we've spoken about carnivore. Is it possible to build muscle on a vegan diet? Great question. The answer is yes. Yes, you can build muscle on a vegan diet.

Lane Norton
It's if your goal. So I always have to like unframe it out of like my mind frame, which is I want to be the most muscular, strongest human being I possibly can. And remember that not everybody is like that. In fact, most people aren't like that. They just want to build some muscle and look a little bit better and feel stronger.

Sure, you can absolutely build muscle on a vegan diet. Now, will it take a little bit more, uh, wherewithal? Probably. Is it the absolute best diet for muscle building? Um, it can be, but you have to be more targeted with it in terms of making sure you're getting enough total protein and probably trying to pump your protein quality up a little bit.

For most people who are like, if they're vegans and they're bodybuilders, I'll say you're probably going to want to use some kind of isolated source of protein. Uh, it can be vegan protein, but youre going to want to probably use an isolated source of protein. And the reason being that um, not only is vegan sources of protein typically lower in amino acids that are anabolic promoting, like leucine, which is the amino acid thats been shown to increase muscle protein synthesis, um, they also in intact sources of plant protein. Its not as bioavailable as an isolated source of protein, like a, like a protein powder, for example, because some of the protein is bound up in the fibrous material of the plant. Now, cooking can make it more bioavailable, but typically not nearly as much as like an animal protein or an isolated source of protein.

But I mean really the big thing is if youre getting enough total protein, you know, say 2 grams/kg of body weight, I mean, the research says that you're going to build as much muscle so you can, um, the, the, what I would say is it's just maybe a little bit more difficult, especially on like a calorie deficit because the, if you're, especially if you're trying to do all intact sources of protein, like whole food sources of protein, because now you're getting the calories from protein along with. Calories from carbohydrate because they come along for the ride. You can't isolate them as effectively as a steak or a set of eggs. That's correct. What are your main concerns about somebody that's on a vegan diet?

Uh, I think the main concern is, I have about pretty much any diet is if you, if you do vegan the right way, it can be very healthy. Just like if you do keto the right way, it can be very healthy where you're using mostly unprocessed sources of food. But when you become a diet evangelist, it can become very unhealthy because you tie the identity to the vegan portion of that. And so I remember watching the game changers and they're talking about all the health promoting effects of the vegan diet. And then theyre showing a scene where theyre like having them eat vegan chicken wings and vegan Mac and cheese and Im like, youre missing the point here, by the way.

Why are you trying to have it both ways here? Its either health promoting. Now, im not saying you can never have fun foods like that or anything like that. Of course, nobody should be worried about being 100% all the time. But just like without any nuance to.

Chris Williamson
That, well, if the ideology is based around whole foods from nature, natural, etcetera, etcetera, and then you try to recreate your version of the very food that you're trying to run away from or disparage that seems to sort of turn the bar stool upside down. Well, and keto does the same thing. Like I said, we've seen where like the ketogenic diet is not superior for fat loss. If youre equating calories and protein, we have really tightly specific studies looking at that. Like metabolic ward trials looking at that.

Lane Norton
Now theres keto ice creams that have more calories than regular ice creams. And its like, no, no, youre missing the point here. The whole point is if you do keto where youre eating a lot of filling, satiating foods, youre going to eat less calories and youll lose body fat. Do you really think a keto ice cream is going to help you facilitate that? No, if you want a treat, but just get the regular ice cream if you want a treat.

Chris Williamson
It seems to me with the vegan diet that it is practically a little bit more complex to eat it well than most other diets. I have a bunch of friends who have gone vegan for a variety of reasons and were, you know, evangelists for that, but said, in retrospect, after stopping, look, I'm sure that a well balanced vegan diet can give you everything that you need, but the level of hurdles that I needed to overcome in order to be able to hit the macronutrients that I wanted to get to, it was so restrictive that I really found that quite hard. I'm not sure if the same would be said for other diets. Yeah, I mean, I think, like, rich roll and I actually had this kind of like, discussion where he was kind of like, well, couldn't you make that argument for getting enough dietary fiber on, say, an omnivore diet? Because if you're eating more meat, maybe you're eating less fiber by default.

Lane Norton
I think any diet needs to have some mindfulness behind it. I think the thing with veganism is if you are being really strict with it, there are things that might show up that are just more apparent, which, like, so, for example, omnivore diet, maybe you're not eating as much fiber, but you're not going to feel that difference really quickly. If you're not getting enough vitamin b, twelve or iron, you're going to feel that pretty quick. Well, in a few months, right? Because you're going to have way less energy, you're not going to feel great.

But again, I think one of the tropes that I've really tried to get away from with people is like, hey, you can supplement. It's okay. You know, like, just like, round it out. Like, if you're worried, you know? And it's like, it's funny because I had a carnivore kind of argue, like, well, you couldn't eat just this food and get everything you get from steak.

I'm like, why do I need to pick one food or one food group to just eat that to justify a diet? That seems like a false dichotomy to me. Right. And that's what you find with a lot of these diet tribes, is they have to, like, force these really, like, black and white scenarios to make their argument work. And one of the things in science is like, it's not really Occam's razor, but Occam's razor is basically like all things being equal, the hypothesis that requires the least amount of assumptions is usually true.

Which layman translated as the simplest answer is usually true?

Also, the hypothesis that requires the most stringent protocols to prove it to be true is the flimsiest hypothesis and usually. Not true because you're making arbitrary rules that fit your particular priors. Right. Okay. Bingo.

Chris Williamson
What about soy? Does soy make you soy? Should we soy boy? Yeah, should. Should we read about soy?

Lane Norton
So there was actually, like, I think, two meta analyses done now in men looking at testosterone, showing that at least with a few servings of soy per day, no effect on testosterone or estrogen. So at least in men, it doesn't appear to do much now. And I don't want to get this wrong, my scientific friends, if I butcher it, please feel free to comment on this. In, I believe, premenopausal women, it has been shown to have an effect on some sex hormones, but I don't know if it's a good, bad, or neutral. So it's so girl that we actually need to be worried about.

Not soy boy, apparently, but in men, doesn't seem to have an effect, at least in the, you know, two to three servings per day range. You've mentioned it a couple of times today. I hear this word thrown around on the Internet all the time. What the fuck's bioavailability?

So, basically, if you ingest a certain amount of a certain food, how much of that, of the nutrients from that wind up in circulation? Which nutrient are you talking about? Is it as big of a deal as everyone makes out? So, like, let's take protein, for example, right? So if I'm looking at protein bioavailability, and I take in 25 grams of, say, a protein source, how much of that 25 grams actually hits circulation?

How much gets absorbed through the intestinal lumen? That's really what we're talking about when it comes to bioavailability. And so, uh, it does matter. I mean, again, like, we're looking at, like, if you look at certain plant sources of protein, they could be 50, 60, 70% bioavailable of the intact plant form. Like I said, cooking may make.

Take that up a little bit more. Um, whereas if you're looking at animal sources of protein, they're usually, like, 90% and up. Eggs. Eggs are very absorbable when they're cooked. Um, whey protein, very bioavailable.

I believe it's almost 100%. Uh, have you looked at blg protein, beta lactoglobulin this stuff's so cool, dude. So, um, soccer players in Europe are using this at the moment. It allows you to get 20 grams of protein in 100 mil shot. So it's must be very soluble, ultra, ultra concentrated.

Chris Williamson
And the reason that they're giving it to athletes that are doing, I guess, power endurance or intermittent cardio work. Precisely. You are training for 4 hours a day, but you don't want to have to sink 400 mil of liquid to get your protein in. You can put 200 mil and get twice as much protein as you would have done. Really interesting.

I think it's just an area that I'm keeping an eye on a little bit. That beta lactoglobulin stuff seems to be really interesting. So related to bioavailability, another sort of hot buzzword that's being thrown around at the moment is the gut microbiome. How much should people be focused on it? Is it really the beginning and end of all disease?

The gut brain axis, is it causing all of our autoimmune disorder? Like what do you make of this sort of current furor around the microbiome? I think the microbiome is super interesting. We have more bacterial cells in our body than we do eukaryotic cells. But if you talk to microbiome experts, and there was a gal in the lab where I did my PhD who was doing her masters at the time, who's now a PhD in her specialties, microbiome, she's considered one of the foremost experts on it.

Lane Norton
Her name is Suzanne Devkota. When you actually talk to gut microbiome experts, they're basically like, yeah, we got a lot of data. We don't really have a good idea of what it all means. Um, and so basically when you talk to them and you read the scientific research, we seem to know a few things. The first is that fiber is good for the gut microbiome.

It's the main fuel for what we think the beneficial species of bacteria are. And diverse array of fibers and a diverse diet seem to be beneficial for the gut microbiome. Eating too many calories appears to be not beneficial for the gut microbiome. Now, we don't know, again, this, where is it, the cart or the horse? What I think is likely, and again, I am tenuously speculating, but when you have excess adiposity and metabolic dysfunction, uh, you know, large adipocytes, uh, secrete more adipokines, which are inflammatory cytokines secreted by the adipose tissue.

Uh, they seem to screw up a lot of stuff. Uh, perhaps that's having an effect on the gut microbiome. Just being fat does lots of things downstream that you don't want to do. To your body, but also the diet that makes you become obese is probably not a high quality diet. And so that may negatively impact the gut microbiome.

Chris Williamson
How much is overeating contributing to that quicker gut motility that you're sort of running things through the gut very quickly? I actually don't know the answer to that. So this is one of the things. I have a friend who's on tzepatide, which is the second gen, the GLP ones, and he always struggled with Sibo, with gut microbiome things. And his current working theory is that because he's basically eating less and moving food through his system less quickly, that it's giving his gut more time.

Lane Norton
Possible. Hard to know. Like I said, I always tell people, if you want to know who really actually knows what they're talking about, know somebody who's willing to say they don't know when it comes to something. What else? Microbiome.

Chris Williamson
What else haven't we covered? So, diverse array of fibers. Exercise apparently appears to be very good for the gut microbiome. So they think it has something to do with the lactate production from exercise. That that appears to have a beneficial effect on the gut microbiome.

Lane Norton
And then maybe saturated fat may have a negative effect on the gut microbiome, not necessarily because of the saturated fat itself, but because of the end bile products that from saturated fat consumption, those appear to possibly be toxic to some. Sorry, toxic to some species of beneficial bacteria in the gut microbiome. But that's kind of what we know, and people have run. I mean, it is. So when I see gut microbiome in someone's Instagram bio, usually my first thought is, this person's full of shit.

Chris Williamson
Vaginal health expert. Often one that. And there was someone who I met a couple of months ago in Austin who uses astral tapping into the fifth dimension to inform her crypto investments. That was a particularly interesting day. Well, this is what people struggle going meta real quick.

Lane Norton
This is one of the things people really struggle with online is there's so many experts that have credentials, and I'll tell people, I'm like, usually if you go and like, okay, this person's making comments on a diet. They're a chiropractor, naturopath, they're, you know, psychiatrist, whatever. Like, expertise does not translate across disciplines. I don't have to listen to your idea about how to fix the Ukraine or the border? Yeah, yeah.

Like, like, somebody was like, are you going to comment on Israel and Palestine? I'm like, absolutely not. Why? What are they eating? Yeah.

Chris Williamson
Like, no, this is deficient in a particular nutrient. This is not my area of expertise. I know that they don't like each other and have not liked each other for a long time. That's about the extent of what I know about it. You know, the.

Lane Norton
I think war is bad. I'll say that, you know, spicy, but all you need to do is go to. This is another question I've asked myself a lot. Why do really smart people believe really dumb shit sometimes? Because people have come to me and said, well, lane, this person does this and look like.

Or Elon Musk does this, or like people who are intelligent. Very intelligent people. Look up Google Nobel Prize syndrome, and you will find a laundry list of, unequivocally some of the smartest people in the history of mankind who changed si. Like, one of the people who discovered DNA and a laundry list of these people believed in things like astrology and eugenics, healing crystals. Know what Newton did for, like, the last three decades of his life?

No. Alchemy. Adamant that alchemy was. And we're talking about the guy who invented calculus on a dare before age 26. Like, invented a whole field of mathematics.

Because somebody was like, no, you can't prove that. And he was like, watch this, bitch. Like, yeah, so some of the smartest people. Expertise. Expertise does not translate across disciplines.

Chris Williamson
Speaking of expertise, what's your thoughts on Gary Brecker?

Lane Norton
I'm sure he's a perfectly nice person. His claims are pretty wild. Which ones do you disagree with mostly? Well, I've seen him say a video of, like, 82% of the amino acids from whey protein are converted to carbohydrate or fat. I don't know where he got that number.

I don't know where it comes from. And there is nothing to back that up. It would not be. I mean, you can't even make that claim without understanding somebody's diet on a holistic level, because 82%, in what context? Like, if I give them 100 grams of whey protein, 82% is going to get converted to carbohydrate or fat.

Like, how are you measuring that? Like, what isotopic labeling study are you doing to support this? Because you would need that. And over what period of time? Because that label would be recycled as amino acids are broken down and recycled between various processes in the body.

So, like, what he's saying, it would be almost impossible to even measure that. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you would be measuring in a very specific framework of this much protein in this period of time, looking at these tissues using these isotopic labels. He did manage to get Dana White to lose a lot of weight, though, right? Well, and I think so. Dana actually commented on one of my posts and got really mad.

And I actually like Dana. I've watched the UFC for a long time. I think he's a smart guy. I think Dana's interpretation of what I said was that I was saying his results weren't real. That's not what I'm saying.

Dana White obviously did a great job, changed his lifestyle, but he got healthier because he lost 30, 40 pounds. He adjusted his lifestyle. He exercised consistently. Probably stopped drinking if he was drinking before. I don't, I don't know about his habits there.

Like, he should be getting the credit for that. Not from, like, grounding with electric rugs and red light therapy, which there may be some benefits to red light therapy. I didn't look at the proposed or the protocol that magician Dana White's weight loss. What was it? I'm not super familiar with the complete protocol, but, I mean, I know there was, like, infrared light and cold plunging.

And again, I think one of the, like, he's, some of the cold plunge claims have been pretty extreme. Like he said, there's nothing on the surface of the earth that will burn fat faster than cold water. This is Gary. Yeah. It's simply not true.

It's just demonstrably not true. Like, if we look at the studies where people do cold water, they, the most of them show no effect on energy expenditure. None of them show an effect on fat loss that I've seen. And the absolute best that you see is, like, an increase of, like, 100 calories in energy expenditure in a day for like, an hour or two of exposure in pretty cold water. Like, okay, okay.

And people will say, well, see, okay. But that's not, that's not the fastest way to burn fat. Okay. The fastest way to burn fat is to get the gym or eat less. And the other thing is actually one thing that exercise in cold water.

So I know he's talking about cold plunging, but he talked about Michael Phelps and eating so many calories. First off, I don't believe that Michael Phelps was eating 10,000 calories a day. No disrespect to Michael, but he's in the pool for, like, 8 hours. When would he have this time to eat 10,000 calories. 10,000 calories for nobody who's never done it.

That is a unbelievable amount of food. Have you ever tried to do a 10,000 calorie challenge? No, I've gotten to like 6000 calories in a day. And that's like, it was insane. I was insane.

Um, and, but one thing that exercise in cold water will be reliably do in studies is significantly increase appetite. So there's actually quite a few studies to show that it raises appetite. So it may not be a great fat loss tool, actually. Now, again, people will say, well, I like cold plunging. By all means, do it.

I mean, there do seem to be some benefits for inflammatory markers. And some people say they feel more better, more cognitive. Cool. But like, why do, why can't we just say, I like doing this thing, instead of like, creating this whole narrative around it? And what you're also doing is people will view this and it makes fitness feel really inaccessible to them because like.

Chris Williamson
Well, I don't have a cold plunge. I don't have a cold plunge. I don't have red light therapy. No, no, no. Just like adjust your dietary habits and lifestyle because that's what caused Dana to get healthy.

Lane Norton
Like, and again, full credit to Dana. He should get full credit. He looks fucking, he looks great. Awesome. Yeah, he looks great.

And as somebody who probably has a very, very demanding hectic lifestyle, that's not an easy thing to achieve. So my thing is, no, he deserves more of the credit than this other stuff. The magic from that. And then some of the other things he said was like, you know, you only store, you only have 20 minutes of glycogen and then you're out of energy and, uh, you're, you're. What happens when you have no, I think he said, what happens when you have no glue blood glucose in your, in your, no glucose in your bloodstream?

And I did a video response, I'm like, you're dead when you have no glucose in your bloodstream. I mean, I, I think he means probably like a baseline level of glucose, but still, um, there's just some things that are said that I'm like, there's no real great understanding of some of these, um, some of this biochemistry here. Would you debate him? For sure. For sure.

I think another thing he said is you start to liquefy lean muscle in three minutes.

I think based on nitrogen balance studies as well as actual studies looking at progressive loss of lean mass from detraining and things like that, at best you start to see like a loss of nitrogen from the body in a day or two. But that's not necessarily, like, showing lean mass loss. You really need, like, days and weeks to start seeing loss of lean mass. So the idea that we're just like, you know, 20 minutes, you're through all your glycogen, and now your body's just chomping away at your muscle, that's not super accurate. Similar to that, how big of a deal is insulin?

Chris Williamson
More people, continuous glucose monitors. It doesn't matter if you're a mom of three. You've got to wear out the thing and check and all the rest of it. How much of a vector for health is insulin? Baseline levels of insulin and measures of insulin sensitivity, like homa IR and HBA one C.

Lane Norton
HBA one C is probably the. For, like, long term looking at long term metabolic health and blood glucose regulation, HBA one C is probably one of the best metrics. And the reason is HBA one C is glycosylated hemoglobin. So certain positions of hemoglobin can be glycosylated, so a glucose molecule can get added to it. And so I think it's something like, you know, the actual percentage is, like, six.

Less than 6% is what you want, and probably closer to, like, five. Um, but what's nice about that is red blood cells take about 90 to 120 days to turn over. I think that's it. It's several months. And so you're.

You can see, like, short term changes in basal levels of blood glucose or, like, um, blood glucose responses to things. But HBA one C is going to actually give you a really good idea of what, like, your long term exposure to glucose is and how sensitive you are to insulin because it doesn't turn over very quickly, and because it's sensitive to how much concentration is in the bloodstream over time. So insulin in response to normal feeding is not something we need to be worrying about. In my opinion, long term basal elevations in insulin are what we should be worried about. What would that be due to?

Typically, usually from insulin insensitivity that's usually caused by excess body fat and obesity. Now, people will say, well, glucose is toxic in the bloodstream, and you got to clear it out and whatnot. The problem with looking at these short term glucose responses and trying to equate them to long term health is, if we're going to play that game, I can make a compelling argument that you shouldn't eat fat or protein because you don't want to eat fat, because fat impedes flow mediated dilation, which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. So a high fat meal will impede flow mediated dilation. You can go look up these studies.

Um, don't eat protein because protein stimulates mtor, and mtor is elevated in many cancers. So what are we supposed to do? Eat ice cubes and photosynthesize? So you're looking at the difference between state and trait. So this is something that a lot of scientists don't even distinguish between.

There is a massive difference between acute, truncated, short term normal responses versus long term dysregulation. Let's just take an example of exercise. If I told you, if you didn't know about exercise, let's say exercise didn't exist. You have all the other, you have all the other knowledge that you have about the body, but you don't know anything about exercise. And I said, chris, I'm going to make you do something that is going to raise your heart rate, raise your blood pressure, raise your inflammatory markers, raise your reactive oxygen species and raise your cortisol.

What would you tell me? No. Exactly. Exercise does all those things in the short term. What happens in the long term?

The opposite actually happens. So that means we can't use short term measures to predict long term outcomes. We have to look at long term outcomes and see what the difference is. So when we look at insulin. Okay, I'm thinking of a few different studies here.

First of all, let's just take fat loss, right? Some people will say the low carb trope is, well, you can't lose body fat if insulin's high. Um, this is usually the, the, they've, like, read one page out of a biochemistry book and closed it and said, nope, got all I need, which is insulin inhibits lipolysis and decreases fat oxidation. So lipolysis is the process of liberating stored body fat from adipose so that it can be available for fat oxidation. Insulin inhibits both those processes because when carbohydrate is high, you have to burn carbohydrate.

This is part of the Randall cycle, and that's you're going to be preferably oxidizing carbohydrate and not dietary fat. When insulin is low, you're going to be not oxidizing a lot of dietary carbohydrate because it's not available. You'll be oxidizing a lot of dietary fat. So shouldn't that mean that low carb diets cause more fat loss? And I just talked about how they didn't.

Well, how is that possible? Because you're only looking at one side of the equation. So much like protein metabolism, the net gain or loss of lean mass is the balance between protein synthesis and degradation. So you have to have synthesis running at a greater rate, relative rate than degradation to accumulate lean mass. Body fat loss or gain, is the balance between the amount of fat you store versus the amount of fat you burn.

So let's look at these different diets. On a high carb, low fat diet, you will not burn much fat, but you also don't store much fat. Because if we look at metabolic tracer studies where they give labeled carbohydrate, and look at where that label winds up, less than 2% of dietary carbohydrate is stored in adipose tissue as body fat. Over 98% comes from fat. So if you are eating a low fat, high carb diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're also not storing much fat.

If you're eating a low carb, high fat diet, you are burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. What is going to determine the net deposition in either case will be energy balance. Good old calories in versus calories out. That sounds like an argument for low carb, low fat, high protein. Uh, yes, but that's just, that's just typically called low calorie, right?

Because, like, it's hard to over consume a lot of protein. But then the downsides are for fat loss, okay? If you're not eating much carbohydrate or fat, you are going to have a lot of protein oxidation. And you don't want to lose weight, probably too quickly because it could tap into your fat store, your, um, your lean mass stores. And we also know that the benefits of protein kind of tap out at a certain level.

So you're also, if you're resistance training for your own performance benefits, you probably want some carbohydrate as well. And carbohydrate is protein sparing as well. But again, it really boils down to, like, which do you prefer and can execute on a long term basis. Now, in terms of overall health, there have been a few studies looking at kind of lower carb versus lower fat and whatnot. And essentially, in the long term, they show that if you lose similar amounts of weight, similar.

If you lose similar amount of weight on low carb versus low fat, your improvements of metabolic health are very similar. They showed this, the diet fit study. They showed this in meta analysis in 2014. I believe the citation is now et al. Where they looked at, like, cardio metabolic risk factors in basically balanced diets versus low carb diets that were equated in calories, and basically saw that they were equally good at improving metabolic health.

So I'm not really worried about insulin. And even on a more granular level, they have done studies looking at where theyve actually measured insulin, or like, c peptide, which is a proxy for 24 hours insulin, and seen, like, even 50% greater overall insulin and still lose the same amount of fat when calories are equated. I want to get tactical for a second. Youve mentioned a few things, and id like tangible, tacit takeaways that people can have for stuff like this. Are there any things small additions to lifestyle?

Chris Williamson
The way that people eat, the way that they heat or store food? Any of these different bits and pieces where you think these have a lot of bang for their buck? What are the best nutrition sized sort of diet hacks that you think? This has been a high return for me. Okay, so can I say lifestyle hacks?

Whatever you want.

Lane Norton
Activity, even, like, if people knew the disgustingly small amount of exercise you needed to get health benefits from it, they would not be so worried about starting. I think a lot of people will look at somebody like me and you and think, I don't want to go to the gym for an hour or 2 hours every day. You don't have to. There was actually a study done where they looked at four minutes of vigorous activity per day. Okay.

And it didn't even have to be consecutive. It could be broken up into, like, little bits. Four minutes decreased the risk of cancer incidents by 20%. And I think when they got up to, like, ten minutes, it was something like 30 or 40% decrease in the risk of cancer. What's vigorous exercise?

Um, basically, like, I actually don't recall the actual specific of that study, but I think it was like, getting your heart rate above, like, 150 for, like, that period of time. Pretty high. Yeah, pretty high steps. Like, if you look at, like, when you're doing stuff, like, if you're listening to a podcast or watching a show, just walk. Or get a.

Like, if you don't have a treadmill, like, if you can go outside, go outside. One we've already talked about, activity sensitizes you to society signals, so your diet's going to work better if you're active, okay? And steps are so easy to get in through a lot of different mechanisms. Now, if you're somebody who sits at a desk job and you really can't move, okay, then maybe you're somebody who needs to incorporate some of that more short bursts of physical activity when you're off work to get the benefits from it. But for a lot of us, you know, we work from home.

You can get a standing treadmill where you're just kind of like walking at half mile per hour per day. Or just like while you're listening to something. Or like what I do, for example, like when I go do my social media content for the day today, I went out, went down by the river, walked for an hour. While I'm posting my social media content, I'm getting work done and I'm getting some activity in. And the drop off in mortality from going from like 2000, which is like sedentary steps per day, to 8000, it is like a linear reduction in the risk of mortality.

I don't think there's anything magic to steps. I think it's just a proxy for activity. Right. Okay. So get more steps in and also get active.

Chris Williamson
Get active in terms of vigorous exercise. Because of the benefits of it and the effects on satiety. Now, diet wise, one big one. Actually, I'll give you two. One big one.

Lane Norton
Stop snacking. In the studies where people lose weight and keep it off, one thing that commonly pops up is they do not snack. And it's one of the reasons that in dietary recall studies, people routinely under report their nutritional intake because people remember their meals, they don't remember their snacks, and they've shown that snacking has less impact on satiety than meals, even calorie per calorie. And a lot of it is around mindfulness, because when you're sitting down to a meal, you're sitting and you're more engaged with that meal. They've shown that people who think about the food they're eating and enjoying each bite, that they get a greater level of satiety from that food.

Um, this may sound weird, but like, smaller dinner plates, people eat less with smaller dinner plates because it looks bigger. Um, chopsticks. Eat with chopsticks. You'll slow down, you'll feel more satiated. Because a lot of times I wonder.

Chris Williamson
If a smaller fork would. Yeah, yeah. I don't know the studies specifically, but I bet it would. Um, but, you know, a lot of times it just takes time for our satiety signals to catch up with what we're actually doing. But if you're shoveling down a bunch of food in five minutes, I mean, do you really think your satiety signals have had a chance to hit you to let you know, hey, we're full.

Well, that's what competitive eaters actually try and do, right? Override that, put the food in so quickly that it hasn't got to the point where, wait, whoa, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah, so, and again, like, snacks are typically something we're doing when we're like watching tv or we're like grabbing something as we're walking out the door, we're being unmindful. I mean, and the other thing is, if you've never done it just for one week, I'm not saying do this again for the rest of your life, for one week. Weigh out every single thing you put in your mouth.

Lane Norton
Just weigh it out and track the calories. And I think for a lot of people, it'd be like the first time you did your budget and look where your expenses are going. You're like, wait, what the, I'm spending how much on eating out every week? It's the same as when you track your sleep for the first time. Yeah, it's the exact same.

And what's crazy is a lot of times this happens on a particle level. If we monitor something, it changes behavior. Right? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We found that when we monitor particles, they change their behavior.

When you monitor people, guess what happens? They change their behavior. But a very, a very classic study in nutrition because everybody says, well, I eat low calories and I can't lose weight. I, I think a lot of people think they eat low calories and really believe it. A classic study, nutrition from 1992.

They had people who were self reported weight loss resistant, who were reportedly eating 1200 calories a day, go into a metabolic ward, and they gave them doubly labeled water, I believe, which basically the researchers were going to be able to track how much energy they were expending and how much they were consuming. And I think they even told the participants, we'll know if you're not telling the truth. And I think I heard a story somewhere from one of the researchers. I could have butchered it. But I think they actually said some of the people argued with them afterwards about what they're eating.

Even though they were monitored. And the, they reported they were eating 1200 calories a day, the average underreporting the study was 50%. They underreported by over 50% their calories they were consuming, and they over reported their physical activity by 47%. And I think a lot of people will interpret that as an attack and saying that people are lying. I don't think that people are necessarily lying.

I think that most people have a very poor understanding of what a true serving size looks like. And if you ever want to be depressed, go weigh out a serving size of peanut butter or a serving size of ice cream or a serving size of cereal, and you will realize that, oh, I was having a bowl of ice cream, which is actually four servings. I was having a scoop of peanut butter. That's three servings. I was having a bowl of cereal that was three and a half, four servings.

And so you really, you think you're eating low calories when in reality you're not. And so I think that could be really instructive for people. Again, I'm not saying, like, listen, I still weigh my food. I like, I have a food scale at home. It's not a big deal for me.

I'm used to doing it. I do it when I have access to it. I don't have access to it. I don't really worry about it. And the one thing it did by doing that for so long is I know serving sizes.

Yeah, you know, for the most part, I can eyeball stuff. I have essentially maintained my body weight, which I, I walk around about 208 pounds, and I compete at 205 in powerlifting. And we have two hour weigh ins. So you gotta weigh in, and then you're lifting in 2 hours. So you can't really cut a bunch of weight and maintain your performance.

I'm pretty lean at this body weight, and it does require, like, some, some work for me to maintain it, but I've maintained it for almost, like, over four years now, and it's not difficult for me. And I would say I'm only weighing probably half the time, because a lot of times I travel, I'm not taking my food. What you've done is you've spent so much time being specific with the weighing that that's now become your new baseline for intuitive. Well, and also, I stayed with some friends who were influencers a while back, and she was doing her degree in psychology, and she was very focused on food behaviors. And she was like, I thought it was, she's like, lane's really interesting because when he was in control of his meals, like, at breakfast, she's like, he ate egg whites.

You know, it was very low calorie. But when we went out and people got dessert, he still ate dessert with everybody. He, like, you know, had some fun foods, whatever. And just through, I didn't even realize I was doing it. But just through sheer kind of force of habit, I've gotten to the point where especially when I'm traveling, the meals I can control by default, I make them low calorie and high protein because it's more satiating and it gives me room that like when I go out to dinner tonight, I have a bit of bread.

Yeah. Or I can have a burger or I can have something that's a little bit more. And I have room in my budget for that. But a lot of people wake up and they have, you know, pastries and then for lunch they have a big foot long sandwich thats, you know, another thousand calories. And then for dinner theyre having, you know, whatever else theyre having thats usually loaded in oil and starchy carbohydrate.

And you know, I put this up one time, I was like, you know, the average amount of physical activity in this country is less than 20 minutes per day. And the average caloric intake is 3500 calories. And we think we're worried about seed oils and artificial sweeteners. Like you guys are focused on some pebbles when we need to be worried about the really big rocks. You know what I mean?

Like so many people get hung up on little stuff and don't even think about the really large rocks that they need to be paying attention to. I saw a study last week that says american adults spend on average 8 hours and 15 minutes a day on screens and 6 hours and 30 minutes of sleep. I saw that. I saw you post about that wild. Okay, final element of the tactical stuff.

Chris Williamson
What are supplements that everybody should have in their stack on average, do you think? What are the supplements that really work? So I kind of like branch these into like tiers. Right. So my mount Rushmore of supplements would be creative.

Lane Norton
Monohydrate would be number one dosage frequency, 5 grams a day. There may be evidence that like ten or even maybe a little bit more has cognitive benefits. Tim Ferriss been talking about that. Yeah. So it's very safe.

I mean, there are people who have been hand wringing about creatine for a long time. And the worst thing that you can say about it is people say, well, it causes hair loss. No. There was a single study in 2009 that sowed creatine supplementation increased DHT. That is not the same thing as showing hair loss.

DHT is a marker and that is a mechanism now that's never been replicated. And they didn't show a viable mechanism by which it does it because the, the, their testosterone levels didn't change, which is the precursor. And then the product after DHT didn't change. So either creatine is having some direct effect on this enzyme, or this is a data artifact that has not been replicated. I tend to lean towards the latter.

So, creatine monohydrate increases lean mass, improve strength, improves performance, improves cognitive performance. It has been shown to have a similar effect on depression as SSRI's. I'm not saying for people to do. Come off your SSRI's and switch it out for creatine. Just saying that this seems to have some really ubiquitous benefits.

So, and even like some of the more diseased states, we're starting to see some benefits for creatine supplementation. So I'm not saying everybody should be on it, but it is a low cost, high yield supplement that is very safe. And we're not talking about a couple studies, we are talking about thousands of studies done over decades in labs all over the world. I am very confident. Now, caffeine, caffeine is the original nootropic.

It is the original performance enhancer. And if you look at the benefits of caffeine, increases cognitive performance, increases exercise performance, downsides, negatively impacts sleep. So if you're going to take it, do it early in the day, preferably unless you've got a podcast. Yeah, you know what, one of the wildest things is whoop. Release an aggregated set of their data at the end of each year.

Chris Williamson
And on whoop, you can track behaviors, and it will correlate those behaviors with outcomes that you get. HIV, resting heart rate, sleep, sleep quality, duration, blah, blah, blah. One of the best predictors of good recovery and sleep was caffeine. Interesting. Yeah, so that, and that's like tens.

Of thousands of people. That's interesting. So this could be a case where, you know, there's confounding variables of perhaps people who are taking in more caffeine or exercising harder, and that's helping them get better sleep. Right. That's interesting.

Lane Norton
So there's obviously, like, I mean, we know based on the mechanistic human randomized control trials that caffeine negatively impacts sleep. I wonder what about, is there a potential that you've got kind of like a healthy user bias here with people that are doing whoop? They probably know that you've got a nine hour half life for caffeine. So maybe they're pumping a couple in the morning, and then by the time that they get to an evening time, that adenosine is. Yeah, I mean, I think what's probably the most likely outcome is some sort of healthy user bias with people who are using wearables, also taking a lot of caffeine, probably more likely to exercise and have other healthy lifestyle behaviors.

Chris Williamson
But why would all of the people that are using whoop are using whoop? Like, it's interesting. It's something I might try and reach out to the guys and get a little bit more data. I could send that to you. All right, so creatine, caffeine for caffeine.

Couple of questions. First off, there's no real, like, optimal dosage, but what do you think about when it comes to dosage? What do you think about when it comes to timing? And what do you think about when it comes to dependency? So, obviously, earlier in the day, it can be better for sleep based on what we know.

Lane Norton
So, um, as far as dosage, I mean, you get some anti fatigue benefits, like 5100 milligrams. You get start to get the performance benefits once you get up around 2300 milligrams of caffeine, like, for exercise, strength benefits, like acute strength benefits are more like three to 600 milligrams of caffeine. So, I mean, I'm, I'm a pretty big fan of caffeine. And before the meat on Saturday, I'll probably have about a nice 5600 milligram shot right at the beginning. And I'll probably have a 200 milligram boost, which I'm lifting in prime time at 06:00 p.m.

so I probably won't be sleeping real great that night. But that's okay. It's just one night. Um, so, yeah, for the, for the more like standout kind of performance benefits, um, you know, you gotta get a little bit higher dosage. Dependency.

Yeah, I mean, you can definitely get, I mean, there are absolutely caffeine withdrawal symptoms. I go through them whenever I start tapering off for a meat because I'll usually taper down to, I used to completely cut a cold turkey and I just found that that was intolerable. So I go down to about 100 milligrams a day. Uh, because actually the other thing people don't realize and I found, I'm like, when I cut out caffeine completely, I started like feeling like aches and pains and stuff. It's actually a slight, uh, analgesic.

It has a slight analgesic effect. And I started getting all these like, like, feeling. Why am I, like, having like, back pain that I haven't had before? There's other things. And when I just went down to kind of like a hundred milligrams a day to kind of like, just maintain.

Um, I noticed that that stuff went away. All right, creatine, caffeine. Um, one other thing to add. You can completely reset your caffeine tolerance in about a week if you go cold turkey, but you're going to feel pretty miserable for a couple days. It's, it's.

I mean, I thought it, I thought it was a placebo thing, and then I did it and I was like, why does my head hurt? And why am I so freaking tired? And then my ex was like, you haven't had caffeine in two days. Duh. I'm like, oh, yeah, duh.

Creatine, caffeine, whey protein. Whey protein. Tasty, relatively cheap, soluble. Been shown to improve body composition numerous times. It's not magic.

It's just a very tasty kind of ubiquitous form of protein that's highly bioavailable. So I put it on my mount rush isolate. Concentrate concentrates perfectly fine. In fact, there may be some benefits to concentrate in that it has some of the, some of the components that positively influence glutathione and antioxidant status. But a lot of people don't tolerate a pure concentrate well because there's quite a bit of lactose in it.

And some people have sensitivities to the lactobumensin way. A whey isolate is going to basically eliminate the lactose. So if you have any kind of lactose sensitivity, most people tolerate whey isolate. Like, um, my company, outward nutrition, the protein we sell is a whey isolate. People like, is.

Is that because it's more anabolic than concentrate? I'm like, no, we just wanted to make sure that almost anybody could use our protein. Uh, it is more expensive. Uh, typically, mix is better, too, so there's just, there's trade offs. Uh, whey concentrates cheaper, but there's more carbs and fats and more lactose.

If you don't tolerate either of those, well, then away hydrolysate will probably work for you, which is basically pre digested whey. So they've chopped up the lactal bull. It does not taste very good, and it's expensive, but it will work well for somebody who can't tolerate the lactobins in a way. And then we go down to, like, my tier two, which is stuff that I feel strongly is beneficial, but I just want to see, like, more research done over a greater period of time. And those would be things like Rhodiola Rosea, things like beta alanine, citrulline malate, ginseng actually has quite a bit of good research on it.

Chris Williamson
Just naming the ingredient profile of newtonic here. I'm just. There we are. Yeah, there it is. That's what we're here for, baby.

That's what we're here for.

Lane Norton
Ashwagandha. Another one. So, betrayalanine. Everyone went crazy for that. When Matt Fraser said on Rogan that maybe it was Rogan or something else, he basically retired from Crossfit and said that I think he was taking some absurd amount of beta Alanine and attributed a lot of his increased work capacity acutely to that.

Chris Williamson
Was citrulline malate in there? Was that one of the ones you just said? Yeah. Why fatigue resistance? It also seems to.

Lane Norton
There are some studies suggesting it may simulate mTOr, so there may be a small anabolic effect. We don't know if that's independent of other things that simulate mTOR, but it seems to improve performance and improve fatigue resistance. Just going through what we went through there, the rhodiola, the ginseng, the citrulline bedrolanine, and the ashwagandha. Have you got dosages that you prefer for yourself with those? Yeah.

So, rhodiola, it seems like anywhere from, like, 150 milligrams to 450 milligrams, and then after that, it actually seems to be like a kind of u shaped. Curve tapering off of n shape curve. Yeah. You know, we actually. Even as low as 50 milligrams, there might be some benefits as well.

But if you want, like the. Like, there's some studies that show, like, actual decreased fatigue and actually decreased perception of fatigue as well. As well as, like, cognition benefits. And it seems to be like a very. What we call an adaptogen ashwagandha.

Kind of like that as well. So it kind of puts you back to center, for lack of a better term. But, yeah, some good data on fatigue resistance for that ashwagandha. Oh, man. Dosage.

Why did it escape my mind just now? I think that's actually about 150 to 300 milligrams or. Sorry, 300 to 600 milligrams for ashwagandha. Um, that's, uh, in our recovery product, and downside to that is, doesn't mix super well. Um, when you.

When you mix up our recovery product, it tastes great, but it kind of looks like, uh, beach water a little bit, um, because of the sediment. But the ashwagandha, it's interesting because I'm convinced, pretty convinced, because there's been quite a few studies now showing reliably it increases strength lean mass and decreases cortisol and modestly elevates testosterone. But the effects of on cortisol and testosterone would not be enough to show those lean mass benefits. So my one hesitation is, I kind. Of want to know what the fucking mechanism is.

Yeah. What the mechanism is for that. Because whenever I see an outcome, but we don't know the mechanism, I kind of get the heebie jeebies, but it seems to do that. There's been several labs that have tested it, you know, across different. You know, that's why I tell people is, you know, science is.

Is self correcting. Right? Like, people will say, well, I don't trust science. They. They speak about it like this very.

I don't know, like, science is what is. People are the ones that screw it up. Like, people, imperfect humans are doing science is perfect, and the scientific method is about as close to perfect as you can get. But since people are doing it, we screw it up. Now, where it's.

The reason that I don't go crazy over individual studies is because the reason that creatine is on my Mount Rushmore, because there are thousands of studies over decades of research across thousands of different labs. If this was all a hoax, it is a very elaborate hoax. You know what I mean? But can one study be faked or, you know, done in a way where the participants and the way it's set up or massaged in such a way to get. Of course, not a thousand times, though.

Yeah. But it's hard to do over decades and across a bunch of different labs in a bunch of different countries. Ginseng. Yeah, ginseng. I have to go back.

I think it depends on the extraction method, but I think somewhere in that, like, 100 to 500 milligram dosage, I'd have to go back and look at the specifics. I could have butchered that a little bit. And you know, the citrulline number as well. Yeah. So the minimum appears to be about 6 grams, um, and then up to, like, 8 grams.

And so actually, that's one thing to look for in pre workouts. If they don't list, if it's a proprietary blend that has citrulline, I mean, you can almost be assured that you're not getting enough. Is that expensive? So, of our pre workout, which has citrulline malate in it, as well as rhodiola and caffeine, um, there's five ingredients. Citrulline is, I think, 40% of the cost of our pre workout.

Chris Williamson
Rhodiola is 10% of the cost of newtonic. Yeah, it's fucking painful. Yeah. Yeah. So it's.

Lane Norton
Those things are, you know, I feel pretty confident about them. And then there's other things like fish oil. Melatonin, I think would be on that list. You're not concerned about long term use of melatonin? I mean, I think it would show up in the human outcome data.

I think the worry is like, with caffeine, the dependence. Right. The best thing for that, which I found for me, when there is something that has a risk of behavioral, or maybe even pharmacological dependence on usage, just never take it two days in a row. If you set yourself that rule of, if I took it yesterday, I can't take it today, and if I take it today, I can't take it tomorrow, you become so much more mindful about your use of these things, especially caffeine. And you're like, right, okay, I didn't have caffeine yesterday, so I could have it today.

Chris Williamson
How much do I need it today? Well, tomorrow I've got legs first thing in the morning, and I've got dinner on the evening time. Fuck, I really think I might need. All right, you've just gone two days without caffeine. Like, how spectacular.

And I think that, for me, was the. I did 500 days without caffeine, so. Wow. Yeah, I'm sure after the first couple weeks, it got easier, though, to be. Honest, dude, I never felt the withdrawal thing.

I know people get absolutely brutalized by it, but I never felt it. And yet my reintroduction of caffeine was, let's just not do it two days in a row, because I want you to hold on to those sort of realized resensitivities. Even though, according to you and Menno, like, between three days and seven days, I could have done it in that time at all. But it was more like a can I do it? Thing.

And, yeah, just don't do it two days in a row. And I think the same for melatonin. You're definitely an optimizer, because I have another friend who actually lives in Austin who's very much an optimizer. And whenever we talk, I go, okay, what kick are we on this time? Because whenever I come to visit him, it's always.

Lane Norton
It's always something he's doing, where he's. He's doing this every day, or he's not doing this at all for a period of time. And I'm always like, what? What kick are we on now? It's the way it works.

Lane. Norton, ladies and gentlemen. Lane, I appreciate the hell out of you. I love you, nails. Good luck with the meat this weekend.

Chris Williamson
Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the things you do. Yeah. So, I mean, Instagram is kind of my digital business card now, which is iolane, and my website is biolane.com. and I've created a whole host of stuff to try and help people from every different level, from our team of coaches that do one on one coaching to our app, carbon diet coach, which is less than $10 a month.

Lane Norton
That's an algorithm based coaching app that, you know, basically, you know, it tracks like myfitnesspal, but then it actually adjusts your nutrition based on your individual metabolism, based on how you're responding, based on your goals. Um, it works extremely well. We've had, you know, tens of thousands of users and like a 4.8 rating in the app store. And so that's been nice because I've always felt like, you know, one on one coaching can only help so many people. And so that has been something thats allowed to reach a lot more people.

And then the supplement company, we talked about outward nutrition. I have a research review where I try to simplify research. We kind of break down studies every single month. Its called reps, and thats on my website, biolane.com dot. And then I also really, when I was thinking about how do I affect the largest amount of change, I also feel like it was mentoring coaches.

And so I started something with professor Bill Campbell called physique Coaching Academy, where anybody who has a goal of basically helping people transform their bodies, who wants to be a coach? This is essentially like, we set out to make it the equivalent of a college level education in physique transformations. So, like, if you want to get deep into the science behind how to, like, build muscle, lose fat on a biochemical level, but then also like, relate it to actual practical coaching, we do a great job of that. I didn't know you had all of this stuff going on. Yeah, I got a lot of stuff rattling around, you know what I mean?

Chris Williamson
Yeah. Well, this week you've got to lift some heavy weights. That's the only thing you need to do. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm very excited. Um, I think I might be set up to have I got a chance at possibly hitting my biggest total of all time, which after every, all the injuries I've been through and everything, um, that would, that would, uh, you'd probably see me lose my mind if I did.

I would be because you always seem so calm when you're lifting. Typically, when I see you on Instagram. Well, I tell people, I'm like, when you see me on Instagram and you think I'm fired up, that's like 70, 80% lane. When you get meat day lane, that's 100%, which is basically a berserker, but it allows me to. I get to do my my Superman and Clark Kent thing.

Lane Norton
You know what I mean? I get to be the nerdy Clark Kent kind of guy, and then I get to go out and enrage and, you know, do some crazy stuff. Oh, yeah. I appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming.

Thanks for having me, man.

Chris Williamson
Ends. Get away, get offense.

#798 - Dr Layne Norton - Nutrition Scientist's Diet Advice For Lean Muscle & Longevity

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1. Introduction to Dr. Layne Norton

2. Why Diets Fail

3. Sustainable Weight Loss Strategies

4. The Science of Ozempic

5. The Importance of Exercise

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