Joe Rogan - The Truth About Diet Coke

I think the problem was like making sure it doesn't taste like shit when it's going down Because like the cows can open up. It just makes it with sugar and then you got other problems. Right. A spoon full of sugar makes the poop go down. I know it's crazy. What do you think about stevia? So the stevia, it's a non-nutritive sweetener. So it's not like aspartame or saccharin or what's the other one, sucralose. Which by the way, those have all been shown to like screw up the microbiome. Yeah, those are really bad. Yeah, they like change the bacteria. By the way, Diet Coke is what the president drinks 12 cans a day of. What? Yes. No wonder why he's making shit decisions. 12? Are you serious? Yes. New York Times story, they said that he drinks 12 cans of Diet Coke a day and watches as much as eight hours of television a day. So he's literally like a test monkey. Is that really true? That's crazy. It's really true. See if you can find that article. 12 cans of diet. There it is. Trump reportedly drinks 12 cans of Diet Coke. It looks like you're using an ad blocker. What's the main sweetener in Diet Coke? Aspartame, I think. Is it aspartame? Yeah. Trump drinks 12 Diet Cokes per day. What can that do to a person's body? Then they have a scientist on. We're fucked. I'll tell you what it does to the microbiome. It changes the composition so that you're getting the kind of bacteria that are really good at harvesting the glucose from the small intestine area. It makes people become obese. That's the associative studies in people. They've shown that in people. Then, of course, they've done causal studies in animals showing that. Stevia is interesting because I've seen positive studies with that where it seems to improve insulin sensitivity, which is kind of weird. That is weird. I personally am always ... I'll use Stevia if I'm like, let's make some hot cocoa with 100% cocoa and it just tastes like ass. I'm like, I need some Stevia in here. It's like otherwise you're just doing a shot of it like whiskey stuff. Yeah, that sounds nasty. Hot cocoa with no sugar is rough. Yeah, 100% cocoa. Yeah, cacao. Yeah, cacao. There's all sorts of benefits with that too. I don't really use a lot of Stevia. My in-laws, they like to put it in their smoothies because I've gotten so used to my smoothies tasting Cayley that I guess ... Plus, I don't eat anything sweet, so I don't really need it, but they like to put it in their smoothies. I don't know if it has any ... We haven't really seen negative health consequences. With the exception, I think there was one study in rats where they gave them exceptional amounts and it changed the hormonal profile or something. I didn't consume any during pregnancy because I was worried about that. Don't be a rat. You'd be fine. Study, study. I think that's probably my choice. If I were to sweeten something like put it in my coffee or something, I'd put Stevia. Trump is grossly overweight. The microbiome ... What's funny is that people taking Diet Coke are trying to improve. They don't want the refined sugar. They don't want to have the constant insulin response, and so they're drinking the Diet Coke. It's kind of ironic that it's like making the more obese by changing the gut microbiome. No. Is it safe to drink just one can every now and again, or is it just something you should put in your board? I'm sure. One can every now and then is okay. It's not going to completely ... Not 12 cans a day or even one can a day. You're constantly going to start ... Your microbiome, you're constantly going to keep shifting it towards ... Really? Even one can a day? Probably, yeah, because the microbiome is ... Yeah. I like the way it tastes, though. Diet Coke? I do enjoy Diet Coke. I haven't had Diet Coke since 2006. I had one yesterday. I had one yesterday in a hotel. I cracked it open. I enjoyed it. Really? I really haven't had one since 2006. It's cold. Yeah. I used to drink them for in college and stuff to stay awake and study for exams and all that. But if you're taking something like that, should you take a corresponding ... Some sort of a probiotic to try to combat that? The problem with that is the probiotics, which by the way, there's all sorts of interesting studies that have shown effectiveness of certain probiotics that have a lot of ... That have a live bacteria in a lot of them. But in order for the probiotics to work, you either have to constantly take them or there needs to be space in your gut for them to take residence in. So if you're filling your body with all sorts of sugar or Diet Coke and all this, then where is the probiotic that you're taking in going to attach? So it's kind of flow through. The flow through has benefits, but you have to keep taking it for that to happen. So really, a healthy diet's the way. You can't just counteract with supplementation. Healthy diet's the way, meaning the fermentable fiber, which is what helps the commensal and good bacteria basically grow and thrive. But probiotics helped me a lot after I had some gut issues from stress with graduate school. So that definitely helped me. I take them once in a while now, but I don't take them every day like I did when I was trying to heal myself. The one I was taking, I think we've talked about, was this $450 billion. It's called VSL number three, but now there's another company called VisBiome that is like the guy who made VSL number three is doing this VisBiome, make the same formulation. I've tried it out as well, but it's like a little cheaper. And I don't have any affiliation with either of those companies, but there's been clinical studies with both of them showing effectiveness. And so it's certainly an interesting field, growing field. And there have been some clinical studies in humans where, for example, the one that's super interesting, the brain stuff, the way it's affecting the brain is interesting. There's clinical studies. There was one recent one I think I tweeted where there was like 10 randomized controlled trials. They weren't really high quality, but it's a start, and it improved measures of anxiety in people. Other studies have shown randomized controlled trials have been a couple others showing it improves depression scores and also in cognition. So there's, again, the immune system, modulation of the immune system will affect the brain. Immune system definitely is basically inflammatory factors and things like that can cross over to the blood-brain barrier and get in the brain and disrupt neurotransmitter production and all sorts of stuff, but also the gut-brain access, the vagal nerve, where you can make certain things that are like if you have certain bacteria in the gut that are making, for example, GABA, that can stimulate the nerve in inhibitory way that calms and does something calming to the brain part. We don't really understand all the mechanisms. It's just a fascinating field that I'm trying to follow and keep up on. The question is do normal healthy people need to take probiotics all the time? I don't know the answer, but I do think that we need to eat the right foods to get our microbiome healthy and avoid things like what's it called, Aspartame. Yeah. Aspartame, NutriSweet, all that. That's the same stuff, right? That's NutriSweet's Aspartame. Yeah, I think it is. The blue packet. Yeah. Yeah.