Joe Rogan Experience #1267 — Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet Transcript

Transcript

0:00 four three two one and we're live all right so to set this up um when gary was on last There was a lot of back and forth and cat wrangling, but we got it. Okay, sure. And yeah, so that's my background. We have hours. Perfect, beautiful. stephangeana.com, or if you don't feel like spelling my name, I think low-carb diets are a valid tool for controlling body fatness and controlling blood sugar.

3:53 is the thing that determines the speed of the car. There has been tons of research on fat cell biology, Fat cells do not regulate the size of fat cells actively regulate the amount of fat on our bodies. And that's one of the things I want to talk about. And then what you see as a result is the three hallmarks of obesity. First of all, the obvious, And we can get back to how that happens, but I'll just leave it there for now.

7:56 the model how about i lay out how about i finish laying it out and then you can ask a question and they figure out what parts of the genome make some people fatter than others. differences in height between people. And when you look at what those genes do, they tend to be So what do these studies have to say about obesity? fat loss drugs that I'm aware of that target insulin or fat cells. Third piece of evidence.

11:15 mutations that they've identified to date, a number of them are occurring in the leptin signaling pathway. And this is, the leptin is the primary fat-regulating hormone in the body. brains and the modern food environment that causes us to become fat. We've established that the brain is central to obesity, but we haven't really established what demonstrates this by the way i haven't been calling out numbers here okay let me call out

13:46 including humans. And what you find in the research is that the sugar and the carbohydrate You cannot cause the same degree of fat gain, the same extent of fat gain, the same extent of overconsumption using only sugar and carbohydrate that you can cause with a You're saying that you can't replicate that with just sugar and carbs? you will make them gain weight, but not as much weight as what?

16:11 Because you're saying if you give people the diet of American junk food, you get not as much of an effect if you give them just the sugar and the carbohydrates? So, it's more. drinking water sometimes it's a little bit fattening sometimes it's not it's not that but it's a much smaller effect Than you see with this full palette Well for sure it matters right

18:12 fundamentally what Stefan's saying and what the research community's saying and the conventional Ventura Boulevard and we see someone who weighs 400 pounds, How are we going to do this? So I took off my hearing aids. And as I was doing the research for my first book, which took five years, and the assumption was that they're gluttons or they're neurotic or they're

21:14 I didn't say it was greater, but I said it was on par. and I think Stefan kind of stepped into this with the very first thing you said, so the assumption was obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation. sort of, let's see what regulates fat accumulation, if that's dysregulated. 1970s, when obesity researchers came to understand, fat metabolism researchers came to understand the

24:23 Senior year in high school, I weighed 195 pounds and I played football. I became a football player, and I lifted weights. So that's, I think, kind of the fundamental difference. The question is, is the brain driving what's happening in the body or is it responding to what's happening? Wait, wait, wait. I'm in the middle of saying something. Like, how do we know how much they consumed in calories?

27:24 Used to say that Gary, I'm answering your question. Now, we've only identified a small proportion of the specific genes that underlie the propensity to obesity. Absolutely, yeah. So you can go check that out. behavior. It generates all of our physical activity behavior, and it actually regulates It's okay. And they come up with all kinds of hypotheses, and some of them can explain it.

31:57 And they assume that what leptin does is control the brain. assumption is it probably does in all cells, to tell your cells to burn fat. So it makes perfect There have been a number of them, but yeah, that's the most recent. expect to be controlled. Like when you build up muscle and you have to take in excess energy to do it, it makes you hungry. I don't think your brain

34:45 And I was going to call the researcher involved. They were just finding whatever was there. You say this in your book. on one cell is scattered all over the body because every cell, and it'll do different brain that is supposed to be about obesity. But in fact, you never mentioned And you're now divorced from the very simplest observations about obesity.

37:53 Okay, so as you mentioned, there have been different genetic studies total body fatness, the thing that causes obesity, what you see is that those genes are dominated by that maybe leptin is having important actions, focus on leptin actions in the brain because we're phase locked and we can't get out of our, same obesity if you knock leptin out of the brain, and particularly out of the hypothalamus, that you get if you knock it out of the whole body. So, that shows that the brain is the site of action that is controlling our appetite, that are controlling our metabolic rate.

41:18 not seeing the evidence for that. I mean, Gary, if you want to cite specific evidence demonstrating Yeah. little bit hotter, your AC turns on to bring it back down. If it starts getting lower, the heat by using a thermostat, sorry, a thermometer. correct when you're losing body fat in general your body exacerbates your hunger and this is Correct. Correct.

44:53 the carbs. So it's basically a molecule that can tell other cells that there's fat available, That's just, you know, that just like if a room is getting more crowded and then they went to the brain to look at why people might overeat. They've been suffering through a famine for 40 years, and famines, it's hard to overeat during a famine. Well, so one of the things that happened during the beginning in the 1860s, the Pima were put on a – well, they moved on to – they were reservationized, whatever the verb form would be.

49:22 They develop what's called metabolic syndrome, which is insulin I have a Dropbox folder I could share with you. the kids starving? That's sort of the question. And this was the first thing that I think we that's going to include They were hunters. Look, we have data. We can't say things like that, stephan because we're going to disagree on what the data let's let's move on you think

53:36 They were like Gary said, uh, flour, lard and sugar. And then they became very obese now there was a population of pima right across the You seem to believe that people can gain weight even if they are eating very few calories, Can I? One group lives in Mexico. suggest that they habitually consume and expend more calories. It doesn't matter if you do it by restricting carbs or fat.

56:21 And I want to talk about another one that really- and the men had high levels of diabetes The question is, can they get obese without a lot of food? population where it's not like, I mean, this is a very poor Because she doesn't need them. fat even when half-starved. They will make fat out of their food even when half-starved. point is, I'm for some metabolic hormonal reason, I'm taking the fuel I eat and turning it into fat

1:00:10 Okay, fine. Wait, Stefan, the reason I'm using these populations, like I said, I'm just giving you an observation. So now, look, there are many reasons why a child could be malnourished in a non-industrial situation. not getting enough protein. could have caused that, Gary. It's not necessarily because, you know, it's not necessarily the reason So we have a lot of studies that compared diets in which calories were the same, but carbohydrate

1:03:52 So now if we want to understand why people get fat, we can look at studies that overfed people on fat or carbohydrate exclusively. Okay. monitor the the actual calories they got correct yes they were they were good they had a baseline Which study did Horton do? Gary, you know what, I don't actually know. The reference, what's the reference? of body fat, exact same amount of body fat. There was another second study that did the same thing

1:07:04 And this experiment is a classic example because they assume that people get fat by overfeeding. Oh, it wasn't Sims. Yeah, Alestra was a fat substitute. Because you think it's a biased study that was influenced by it? But he basically held Procter & Gamble for ransom. you don't absorb it. 2,700 calories a day, half carbs, 35% fat, 15% protein, and 10 calories a day get trapped in your fat

1:11:15 small. And is the brain somehow regulating that? Or again, is there a dysregulation in the body involving pick your hormones, pick your enzymes that somehow traps fat in the fat cells or prevents the fat from being used for fuel when it's released from the fat cells? and not elsewhere? And as Stefan said, this is insulin-dependent fat tissue. Can I pause you for a second?

1:13:38 So you're saying that if two people are on the same diet, one of them is on 2,000 calories Your perspective is that this is not the case your perspective is that like as you were saying in the study where Well, that's very short-term. So over a – I promised I wasn't going to say oy. As Stefan said, they calculated how much energy they needed to stay in energy imbalance.

1:16:08 Okay. different diets, which is kind of exactly what we're talking about, because if you want to be energy expenditure should be. And then the point is when you increase, and again, part of the trick moving them. And when you look at insulin dynamics, when insulin is below a very low point, the two hypotheses predict something entirely different. stored in your fat cells.

1:20:24 He's got to address the underlying mechanism. Meta-analysis, correct. There have been 29 studies to date that have measured calorie So you get a slightly higher metabolic rate And interestingly, if you actually look at the data, this study no longer reports a higher energy expenditure and this idea of the 10 extra calories a day. I'm not done. Can I just finish this?

1:23:41 We don't know what he's going to say. their body gains lean mass as well? They're gaining muscle tissue? So, it's not just one or two Cokes a day that is allowing them to remain obese. Everybody gains a different amount of weight. they eat about 10% extra calories. It's like a dime is going into the bank. But the thing is that as you get bigger, what you need goes up and up and up.

1:27:32 United States has been declining for the last 20 years. So it peaked in 1999. And it is currently And in the U.K., sugar intake has been declining for 50 years. stephan actually i'll let you respond for me because we had this debate with the Cato Foundation. All right. Okay, and I think we both agree that cigarettes are a major cause of lung cancer, smoking.

1:30:14 As it starts to come down, imagine we only cut that to 17 cigarettes or 16 cigarettes, Probably see them drop. later. Who knows whether that's relevant? But to get a small decrease in sugar, even if it's 20%, that's 20 to 16 cigarettes. And the other factor that I talk about in my book, and Stefan knows Stefan's about to say this is a story, and it is a story. But it's clearly the case that mothers

1:33:03 The sugar hypothesis is a little different than what we've been talking about. Maybe it's sugary beverages, for all I know. I mean, I can come up with a story that cosmic rays cause obesity by hitting what he just said so that is a story that is not supported by evidence. We've talked about this also. And they eat fruit sugar on top of this. You stand on this platform.

1:37:17 Correct. If you look at a lot of the average hunter-gatherers, Their cardiovascular risk markers are excellent. I think sugar does contribute. And one of the things they trade for is sugar, the point i'm trying to make is that it's more complicated than just sugar. many of us have, and then with that lifestyle consume sugar, that you're going to get fat.

1:41:21 Yeah. I mean, I completely agree with you that it is more complicated than just sugar. they're sedentary. stephan is he writes off my stories as stories, which they are. Oh, boy. The study you cited is interesting. I said I'm leaving out the cup of a sugar cane because I don't know what that is meant or how they assess it. they used to live because they trade for it than when they get into the city. So five glasses of

1:45:39 You have evidence. here, the case against sugar, is you add sugar to any population's native diet, and you get is it a refutation of the hypothesis that I found a hunter-gatherer population that eats a lot of Because if you could create a fatty liver with a macronutrient, you could probably create insulin resistance as well. and it just said, get rid of the sugar in the diet, the fatty liver disease resolves.

1:48:40 But these are the kinds of ways you could test these hypotheses. fat intake around, fat and carb intake around. And then we can throw all that garbage into a Several of the other studies were Jim Hill studies. Jesus Christ. It's about a $12 million study that was done at Harvard based on Kevin Hall. the line here. We have obesity and diabetes epidemics. I mean, tragic shit is going on

1:52:04 i representing them according to your beliefs is not representing them correctly okay I'm responded here. I know, I know, but you've got to represent the studies correctly. Gary, Gary, Gary, Gary. point out a specific problem I explained to you the problem with the study. I'm pointing out a culture where sugar came in and it did not make them fat. And that's one of

1:54:21 Vaseline went way up. again, if this is, this is a situation where we can test Gary's hypothesis. and that's why obesity rate went down. they went back to their normal diet. And so I find this- Let's go with when he was refuting the studies and you wanted to oppose that. No, I will, but we'll be off the air by then. evidence. Stephen, damn it. But simultaneously, people accuse me of writing a 600-page book with

1:58:41 refuted oh that was the gym health studies yes No, no, no, no, no. The scientific community is I hope I'm doing Kevin justice. you do another one. Kevin has decided, well, Kevin is doing another one. I think he's asking Pretty typical. We knew they were going to do it with the low-carb group because you have to, Well, their argument, and we talked to Chris for a lot of his argument, he was afraid.

2:02:40 Okay, that makes sense then. So you could think of it as a low-fat, carbohydrate-restricted diet and a high-fat, carbohydrate-restricted diet. both groups ended up, on average, eating 500 calories each it ends up from a Both sides are not eating processed food. And you could be talking about vegetables. is that refined carbohydrates and sugar increases insulin levels relative to fat okay and so if that is true And these groups And that matters for fat loss

2:05:39 Correct I see a study that he does the same thing. when we started the nutrition science initiative the choice that was a non-profit, the choice of the word initiative was to get nutrition researchers to, in effect, So a non-randomized study, you can't infer causality. the fructose molecule is metabolized in the liver. There's now a new version of the Ludwig experiment being done at the Arnold Foundation. Lauren John Arnold funded to the tune of, I think, $13 million. And whatever

2:08:45 It wouldn't require a journalist to come along in 20-whatever-it-is-19 to make these arguments. fatty, you know, what causes fat storage, insulin is the hormone that primarily regulates Yeah. going to be more fattening no no i didn't say it was independently of calories. It's entirely dependent on calories. Well, it depends on how you define short term they're not lasting years and years and years isn't the

2:11:43 No, it does make sense. So the idea is... But why doesn't it make sense to you what he's saying? Well it depends Yeah that's incorrect Okay, so you don't believe insulin. And then we'll let Joe here. So we agree on the molecular mechanisms regulates the total size of body fat stores absolutely absolutely that is that is something Okay. your body restricts the fat from going out of fat cells. It turns that down, not off, but down.

2:15:33 Amount that you ate minus the amount that you burned. We decided that I think, you know, that the... I think it's one of the problems with modern nutritional and medical science is you do crappy studies, generate garbage, and then you sift through the garbage and say, I can find a truth in here. And the answer is do better studies. The answer is always do better studies. You can't do – meta-analyses exist for everything.

2:17:22 Among other things, you generate ketones, and you lose ketones in the breath and in the urine. And one of the things And so you just don't know. You can read it if you want, but I don't see the point. Adipocytes. Yeah. L-I-P-A-S-E. Right. That's not the correct word. And they said, well, obesity is caused by people eating too much. but it includes getting fat or your waistline increasing,

2:22:13 And when I said this to Keith, you've got one mechanism for why fat cells get fat and a different mechanism for why humans get fat. nothing else, ask a student to do it as an experiment. I mean, that would be a great thought they're so locked into this thinking that obesity is this energy imbalance, They assumed energy balance was the cause, convinced by your perspective when I read this book. And you signed this book.

2:25:06 I started doing my own research. I didn't take your word for it. I started doing my own research in the lab as well and actually doing real scientific studies. And I found the same historical evidence have come to different conclusions than you have um and that includes me And you talked about your resistance. So one way is the low-carb diet somehow because of, I don't know, food reward issues affects your urge to eat low-carb foods.

2:27:20 his insulin levels are staying lower. There's a different way to look at everything. Well, you're saying, like, we're talking about fasting, right? that you're getting thinner on that low-carb diet. That's why we founded NUSI. There are many studies on this. were different in the 60s than they are today. So they used prisoners in the Vermont State Prison,

2:30:01 Some studies were crazy because they published in 15 different journals. brain to increase food reward, or is it the carbs are doing something in the body so that it implies that the reason they get fat, even the overeating hypothesis. So the whole low-carb movement, as you said it on this podcast, that getting people to eat less sugar is a good thing.

2:32:13 Do not influence body fatness and are not important Okay. I'm saying calories are the wrong... Can you solve an obesity problem? I'm not putting words in your mouth here Even after having a hefty lunch Yeah, how is this going to Well, I just want to know One of my problems We're talking about one person. We are talking about one person. Yeah, how is this going to differentiate?

2:34:28 I don't know what you're talking about there, Gary. I could probably get a pretty decent estimate, actually, based on published formulas. without knowing if i have excess body fat you cannot tell whether i'm overeating which is the So there's nothing circular about this calorie thing at all. We're going to wrap this up I think you both make some excellent points,

2:36:51 what is your book again? I think we've just begun this debate. Thank you.