Joe Rogan & Dr. Layne Norton - Nutrition is Replacing Religion for Some People

And Lane, I've been paying attention to you online for a long time. One of the things you do a great job with is just calling bullshit I mean you love to call bullshit clearly But whenever people are overstating claims or people get ridiculous And I think this is one of the things that is a problem with any diet where people get really enthusiastic about it That becomes an ideology whether it's the ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or them You know fill in the blanks vegan diet people decide this is the end all be all it's gonna cure cancer Make you smarter dicks gonna grow a foot All these things are gonna happen and you do a great job of calling bullshit on that kind of stuff Yeah, I mean I I'm not anti keto. I'm not anti vegan. I'm anti bullshit and One of the problems we have is nutrition is replacing religion for a lot of people so you find something that you identify with and Then people start to try to say because they identify with that movement or like for example vegans They identify with many of them protection of animals not my job to judge their ethics on that sort of thing But then they kind of try to backtrack to find the science to support them as well And they they pick and choose and this is guilty of all groups not just vegans. This is also a lot of ketogenic diet cell it's Carnivore diet, whatever have you if it has the word diet There's zealots out there who are going after it and I will stick up for I've stuck up at a scientific conference for the ketogenic diet You were we were having a roundtable about something different and somebody said well We know that the ketogenic diet in prayers exercise performance and endurance athletes. I said I don't think that's necessarily true You know the it's pretty Ambivalent the ambiguous as to whether or not it does it seems to be kind of individual But on the whole on the average it doesn't seem to impair exercise performance So it's kind of what you like, but when you have people who you know like like a Gary Taubes who says well calories don't matter It's all carbohydrates That sort of thing of the carbohydrate insulin model obesity I mean the research is you're able to do a lot of hand waving about insulin and You know when you burn so much fat when you're on a high fat diet Which is true by the way you you burn a lot of fat But what they don't talk about is that it's it's overall fat balance How much fat you store versus how much fat you burn and when you're on a high fat diet you store a lot of fat You also burn a lot of fat the overall caloric balance is what determines whether or not you will have net storage or net deposition It's same thing for high carb diet as well You know this idea that with high insulin It just completely shuts down all fat burning everywhere That's just not true now if you have high carbohydrate you will burn less fat, but you're also storing less fat as well And again the net caloric balance is going to be what determines how much you store Because you don't really store carbohydrate as fat for most people they did a study overfeeding women where they overfed them 50% above their caloric maintenance and they found that of 282 grams of fat they stored during a day in adipose only four grams came from carbohydrate 278 came from fat so glucose what about fructose so fructose causes we think you know Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease so that could be you know that's de novo de novo Lipogenesis is higher with fructose and you think about people consuming it in liquid drinks a hundred to 200 grams a day Which is not uncommon even for my wife not uncommon, so Fructose does seem to have a little bit of different hepatic metabolism But I was actually across the hall from a professor who was doing a lot of the research on on fructose and obesity and fatty liver disease and even he came to the conclusion that If you overfeed fructose and it creates a caloric surface and you're overfeeding fructose Then you can have some wonky stuff start to go on relative to other macros Try to keep this right next to your face. Sorry got it. She said so powerful I Talked loud and a lot. It's good So if you're if you're doing that if you're creating that caloric surplus What you find is when you're in net storage when you're driving more Nutrients into adipose and sometimes liver depending on metabolism But it takes it takes a lot of fructose to do that and a caloric surplus You start to create a lot of wonky stuff going on The mitochondria starts to become dysfunctional and you know people make a big deal about oh well you have We have claimed now that everything causes Obesity and type 2 diabetes for first it was fats Then carbohydrates and there's actually professors out there who actually will claim that protein gives you diabetes I stopped for something. I mean the mitochondria becomes dysfunctional. How does the mitochondrial how does that happen? Okay, so I'm gonna state for everybody that I'm going out a limb. This is my opinion, okay? if you look at the research on obesity and diabetes What happens is you have everything start to elevate in the bloodstream So if you measure like there was a professor who thought that branched chain amino acids were causing obesity because they were elevated in the bloodstream During or sorry during type 2 diabetes Well, yeah, branched amino acids are elevated so fatty acids so or triacylglycerides So is glucose so is it really those things causing it or is it possible? That when you are overfeeding relative to what you burn relative to that turnover That my mitochondria start to become dysfunctional probably a lot due to inactivity And The mitochondria is as we call the powerhouse of the cells you probably learned in high school biology or whatever They taught it to you as That is where everything fluxes through so that is where you're creating ATP That's where you're burning through lipids carbohydrates That sort of thing if that becomes dysfunctional and you're not getting enough flux enough pull through that mitochondria What happens is you start to back up every part of metabolism? So all the metabolic byproducts almost all of them inhibit everything within the cell There's a metabolomic signature for that and in epi phenomenon if you want to call it that would be elevated branched Amino acids could be consequence of that and in some people Yeah, so these things start these byproducts these metabolic byproducts because you're not fluxing enough through the cell They start accumulating within the cell and start to inhibit the Krebs cycle glycolysis and so everything starts backing up to the point where you also start inhibiting the insulin receptor and now you have glucose fatty acids and Amino acids also backing up to the point where they start to over spill into the bloodstream and you see these this accumulation of all of them in the bloodstream in type 2 diabetes and I actually think that again me going out a limb that Obesity doesn't cause type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes doesn't cause obesity that they develop in concert from the same problem Which is overfeeding underactivity? So a lot of it is about How much nutrients you're fluxing into cells versus how much energy you're creating fluxing them through the cell and out? so when you're overfeeding whether it be carbohydrate fat, you're fluxing more energy in then you can dispose of and Now you have to do something with it. Well when you run out of When you do that much to it and mitochondria start to become dysfunction Dysfunctional you start to not have enough places to put it away and it starts spilling into the bloodstream And now you cause all kinds of problems So one of the things that we really wanted to talk about here is high carb versus low carb Yeah, because this is a just a giant point of contention today in nutrition, especially in terms of Athletes with performance in mind that's it's a big factor Whether or not high carb or low carb is way to go and there's a lot of zealots on both sides And there's a lot of bullshit and there's a lot of you know online Experts and one of the great thing about bringing you two guys in here is because you could really actually explain the science behind it now You've been great Lane at pointing out that there's it's not a magic bullet and you know and so many people like to Sort of stress it that way that they like to portray ketogenic diet is this is it this is the end all be all I figured Out what to do. This is the way everyone should be eating. You don't think so. I Don't think so because if you look at the the weight loss problem in our society And I'm writing a book called fat loss forever. Well, I talk about this in detail We don't have a weight loss problem Six out of every seven people are able to lose a significant amount of body weight in their life who are obese or overweight The problem is the weight regain statistics are absolutely like terrifying Within one year 70% will put it all back on within two years. It's 85% within three years It's 95% so that means diets have a 95% failure rate and of those people one-third to two-thirds will add more Than they originally lost and this gets kind of into yo-yo dieting and I talked about that as well but the the real problem is that People don't stick to pick something that's sustainable for them all the research if there's one bit of research out there that that we have That shows how to create lasting weight loss and you look at the people who are the 5% who actually keep it off It's that they pick something that's sustainable whether it be ketogenic whether it be low carb high or low fat Whatever it is vegan something that they can sustain And make a lifestyle if because if you look at meta-analyses For our listeners meta-analyses are kind of a study of studies, so they take researchers take studies that have similar parameters and they kind of lump them together and they look at okay What's the consensus amongst these studies and they have advanced statistics they use to run this If you look at low carb versus low fat There's no difference in adherence overall on the whole there's no difference and there's no difference in weight loss There's no difference in blood lipids even glycemic control So there was a study where they met analysis of I think it was 23 studies over 3,000 people Where they looked at okay if you control calories so calories are equated Does low carb versus low fat make a difference on weight loss glycemic control those things early the ketogenic diet? So by definition we have an objective biomarker that defines the ketogenic diet It's the only diet that actually has something that you you know you can measure in your blood to say you're on this diet And when your ketone levels are elevated that confers many different benefits That I believe Can enhance adherence to the diet before we get into the woods here? I want to clarify one thing the difference between Someone being on a diet and being able to sustain it and not being able to stand in gaining all that weight back Is not a discipline issue? Well partly, but we kind of have to start looking at okay if we if we go in Let me let me recircle We have to find what requires the least amount of discipline for somebody to stick to because discipline is is while some people have more Some people have less It is a Finite resource so when do we normally find that people like kind of drop off whatever they're doing? It's when they're stressed out work stressing them out. They're going through a divorce those kinds of things right That's where our discipline kind of wanes because we're trying to be so disciplined for this other thing and it's draining us So what happens with with diet is? In people who are busy people who have a lot of stress in their life. That's where they really start overeating So we have to find something that require I look at is let's find something that requires the minimal amount of Discipline for a person so that when your life goes to absolute shit you can still stick to it And so for some people that is a very very individual thing and they see this in the dietary studies That what works for one person to create a deficit and sustainable? Isn't the same way for another person and Dom even commented on this about his wife chilla She does much better on a higher ratio of carbohydrates to fat yeah I mean early on it was obvious that she wasn't going to change her diet I the time that we met like 10 years ago Most we I was really getting into this and I really felt that for me at least But she would stop at checkers and you don't get a burger and with it Sugary drinking and she's a tremendously carbon tolerant. She was very skinny as a kid and she tolerant Carbohydrates she's very carbohydrate tolerant. Yeah, did I say intolerant? Yeah. Yeah, so and and you know if the diet low-carb I feel and Maybe in ketogenic putting it under that umbrella Works, I think for up to 25 to 30 percent of people especially if they're carbohydrate intolerant and I believe that it does that by virtue of elevating ketones shifting your the Neuropharmacology of the brain for example it works through ghrelin it works through there's new science emerging right now showing that appetite regulation is influenced positively by Nutritional ketosis in ways that we're just starting to learn now well you can certainly feel it It's one of the things about the ketogenic diet when you're in that state you all of a sudden You're just not hungry the same isn't there's not a an overwhelming need for food. Yeah, I'm I haven't had anything to eat today I mean when I was eating massive plates of pasta 25 years ago, and I went to this this long without food. I would start getting shaky I would I would have a hypoglycemic response, and I'm completely Resilient to that and that has major implications for military personnel being keto adapted not just for performance preventing seizures, and I think for cognitive function too, but You it's very liberating so meal frequency is not an issue So if you're in austere environments where you have limited food availability that becomes a major issue And if you're working as a scientist, and you can't you know you're working with animals you're doing experiments You don't have time to eat. I need to maintain that cognitive function I need to be sharp You know with limited food of it so it worked very good for me throughout my professorship You know getting tenure and things like that where I could just put more time and energy Into my work without having to stop Prepare a meal eat a meal clean up like I think I wasted a lot of time doing that when I was eating five to six meals a day