Dr. Christopher Gardner: What’s the Real Protein Requirement for Muscle Growth—Plant vs Animal?

Summary

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The Neuro Experience Podcast

Episode: Dr. Christopher Gardner: What’s the Real Protein Requirement for Muscle Growth—Plant vs Animal?
Host: Louisa Nicola & Pursuit Network
Guest: Dr. Christopher Gardner (Stanford Nutrition Scientist)
Date: April 30, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Christopher Gardner, a leading nutrition researcher from Stanford, discussing the real science behind protein requirements for muscle growth, the debate of plant vs. animal protein, busting popular protein myths, and sharing insights from his landmark diet studies, including Diet FIT and the viral Netflix Twins study. The conversation also addresses why nutrition messaging is often misguided, what truly matters for performance and health, and the future of dietary recommendations for athletic and general populations.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Is Protein Overhyped? [00:00–02:45]

• Protein & Muscle Growth:

  • Both Dr. Gardner and Louisa question if we are overemphasizing protein in muscle growth.
  • Dr. Gardner: “More than 90% of that muscle growth and maintenance is your workout and less than 10% of it is the protein you ate.” [00:00, 11:47]

• Mythbusting the Leucine and Amino Acid Debate:

  • Dr. Gardner: “If you're complaining that plants don't have leucine, that plants are missing amino acids, that's bs.” [00:24, 18:18]

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2. How Much Protein Do You Really Need? [02:45–05:06]

• Confusion Over Numbers:

  • The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein is misunderstood; common recommendations: 0.8g/kg, 1.2g/kg, up to 2.2g/kg for bodybuilders.
  • Dr. Gardner: Most Americans get 1.2g/kg without even trying.

• Origins of the RDA:

  • Explains historical nitrogen balance studies which established 0.66g/kg as the average minimum, adjusted upwards (to 0.8g/kg) to cover almost everyone.
  • These studies reflect the minimum needed for maintenance, not optimal function or athletics. [05:06]

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3. Quality vs. Quantity: Plant vs. Animal Protein [07:54–13:36]

• Muscle Protein Synthesis:

  • Many studies only track short-term synthesis, not real-world strength gains.
  • Dr. Gardner: “Muscle strength doesn’t really change that much depending on the protein—plant or animal, raising it or lowering it.” [09:00]
  • Real-world results: Stanford studies showed no difference in performance (strength, speed) when athletes switched between vegan and omnivorous diets for a month. [09:45]

• Summary of Evidence:

  • Dr. Gardner: “Beyond what you normally eat in an average day will [not] help you. ... More than 90% of muscle growth and maintenance is your workout and less than 10% … is the protein.” [11:47]

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4. Special Populations: Women, Caloric Deficit & Protein [13:36–18:18]

• Unique Considerations:

  • Women in perimenopause may benefit from more protein, but again, most resistance-trained individuals are already meeting requirements.
  • Louisa raises the cultural fear of lifting heavy among women, affecting muscle maintenance more than protein intake.

• Energy Deficit & Protein:

  • Higher protein becomes more important if you’re dieting, to protect against muscle loss during fat loss [15:00].
  • Physiology: No storage depot for protein; excess is converted to carbs or fat.

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5. The Plant Protein "Leucine Issue" Revisited [18:18–20:11]

• Leucine Content in Foods:
  • Dr. Gardner: “All plants have all 20 amino acids and leucine is pretty similar across every single food ... It’s the same proportion of leucine.”
  • The alleged need for extra plant protein to reach a "leucine threshold" is exaggerated.

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6. Breakthrough Studies: Diet FITS & The Netflix Twin Study [20:11–29:29]

Diet FITS Study (Low-Fat vs. Low-Carb)

• Trial Design:

  • Compared low-fat and low-carb diets in hundreds of adults for a year, controlling for food quality.
  • Investigated if genotype or insulin resistance predicted diet success.

• Results:

  • Large variation in weight loss within each group; diet quality mattered more than carb vs. fat.
  • Dr. Gardner: “You can lose weight on either one. You should focus on the diet quality of either one.” [27:00]
  • Key learning: Adherence to a quality diet is the dominant factor.

Viral Netflix Twin Study

• Design:
  • 22 twin pairs: one vegan, one omnivore; showcased in a Netflix series.
• Biggest misconception:
  • Accusation that body composition data was "cherry-picked" and not properly included—Gardner clarifies the show showed only a few anecdotal Dexa scans [59:36–61:50].

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7. Satiety vs. Calorie Counting [29:29–35:34]

• Satiety as a Dietary Strategy:

  • Gardner advocates for diets people can adhere to by prioritizing satiety, not calorie restriction.
  • Differentiates “prescribed” vs. “achieved” energy restriction—advocates the latter for sustainability.
  • Memorable comparison: “If you want to lose a pound a week, cutting calories forever sounds ‘just horrifying’.” [30:57]

• Challenges in Measuring Satiety:

  • Current scientific tools for studying satiety are limited to meal-by-meal or daily assessments, not long-term outcomes.

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8. SWAP-MEAT: Plant-Based Meat vs. Animal Meat [40:24–49:26]

• Study Highlights:
  • Compared Beyond Meat products vs. high-quality animal meats in a crossover design.
  • Outcomes:
    • Lower LDL cholesterol and inflammatory markers with Beyond Meat
    • No rise in blood pressure (sodium equivalent across both diets due to added salt on meat)
    • Consistent (although small) weight loss with Beyond Meat vs. animal meat.
  • Dr. Gardner: “Nothing bad, and three positive things for your health happened in swap meet.” [47:29]

Addressing the “Ultra-Processed” Critique

• Gardner notes the study wasn’t about whether plant burgers are healthier than beans, but about whether a plant burger is healthier than an animal burger for omnivores.

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9. Improving Nutrition Education and Food Environments [50:18–57:40]

• Impact Beyond Research:

  • Gardner notes his largest impact came via public communication: “Thousands of people wrote to me after the Netflix series to say they changed their diet.” [50:47]

• Role of Chefs and Institutions:

  • Partnership with the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) to change menus in universities, hospitals, schools (“The Protein Flip”: more plant foods, meat as a condiment).
  • Gardner: “Chefs make great tasting food. If we merge…they can make it taste great…with chefs on board in institutional food settings ... that's how we'll move forward.” [54:51]

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10. Controversy & Clarifications: The Twin Study Revisited [59:12–62:10]

• Misconception:
  • Some accused Gardner of omitting vegan muscle loss data; he clarifies he never had access to those selective Dexa scans from the Netflix production and never suppressed unfavorable results.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Dr. Gardner:

  “More than 90% of that muscle growth and maintenance is your workout and less than 10% of it is the protein you ate.” [00:00, 11:47]

• Dr. Gardner:

  “If you're complaining that plants don't have leucine, that plants are missing amino acids, that's bs.” [00:24, 18:18]

• Dr. Gardner:

  “You can lose weight on either one. You should focus on the diet quality of either one.” [27:00]

• Dr. Gardner:

  “Chefs make great-tasting food. If we merge and they can make it taste great … with chefs on board in institutional food settings ... that's how we'll move forward and get people to change.” [54:51]

• Dr. Gardner (On public impact):

  “It was amazing to hear how many people had done that…thousands of people wrote to me and said they changed their diet [due to the Netflix series].” [50:45]

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Essential Timestamps

• 00:00–02:45: Protein hype and the real role in muscle growth
• 05:06–08:58: Origins of RDA and nitrogen balance studies
• 09:45–13:36: Plant vs. animal protein for athletes—Stanford study outcomes
• 20:11–29:29: Diet FIT and Netflix studies
• 29:29–35:34: Satiety vs calorie counting
• 40:24–49:26: SWAP-MEAT study findings
• 50:18–57:40: Changing nutrition education & the "protein flip"
• 59:12–62:10: Refuting criticism of the Netflix Twins study

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Tone & Language

Dr. Gardner is candid, evidence-driven, and approachable. Louisa brings a passionate, myth-busting energy to the conversation, providing a balance between science translation and pragmatic, athlete-focused application. The episode maintains an educational but engaging tone, often lightened by memorable analogies (the “protein flip,” cheesecake and raspberries, etc.) and frank myth-debunking.

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Summary for the Uninitiated

If you haven’t listened, this episode offers a science-based reality check on widely held beliefs about protein and muscle. Dr. Gardner cuts through industry-driven hype, explains why much research misses the real outcomes that matter (actual muscle gain, not just biochemical signals), and demonstrates that plant protein is just as viable as animal for muscle and performance. For weight control, diet quality and satiety trump carbohydrate or fat macros. By involving chefs and changing institutional menus, Gardner sees hope for meaningful dietary shift—one that puts taste and health on the same plate.

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Further Reading & Resources:

• Stanford Nutrition Studies Website (as referenced by Dr. Gardner)

Contact on Instagram:

• @louisanicola_

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Transcript

[A]

More than 90% of that muscle growth and maintenance is your workout and less than 10% of it is the protein. Christopher Gardner is a Stanford nutrition scientist whose Diet Fits trial and viral Netflix Twins study are transforming how we understand diet, disease and plant based eating.

[B]

Wherever I look right now, everybody is ingesting protein. Is this all just hyped up? Is it just marketing? Is protein really as essential as what we make it out to be?

[A]

I think it's completely overhyped. If you're complaining that plants don't have leucine, that plants are missing amino acids, that's bs.

[B]

I think the problem in that debate is the leucine threshold.

[A]

What is it?

[B]

Is it 2.2? I heard that in order to actually reach that through plants alone, you have to be having such a large amount compared to that of meat.

[A]

Yeah, I disagree.

[B]

One study which I loved is the Die Fit study. So you challenged some pretty entrenched ideas by showing that weight loss wasn't about carbs versus fats but overall diet quality.

[A]

We really expected to see a winner. We are going to figure this out and people are just going to call us up and we'll be on the talk shows cuz we know who should be on which diet and we'll end the diet wars and we didn't. I will say that the most impactful thing I have done to date wasn't even my best study. It was a little study with 22 pairs of identical twins where one went vegan and one stayed omnivorous. And it got featured in a 4 part Netflix docu series which is the.

[B]

Most talked about on social media. What do you think was the biggest misconception about the twin study and why do you think it was so controversial?

[A]

Oh good. I would love to deal with this one. So the biggest one was.

[B]

What I find fascinating. Wherever I look right now, everybody is ingesting protein. I feel like protein is either marketed so well or, or it's justified. Now you have, you've got the real data. You've been up close and personal with athletes and I want you to fill us in on what you know, what's the myth? Or if it's not a myth, tell me. Are we just. Is this all just hyped up? Is it just marketing? Is protein really as essential as what we make it out to be?

[A]

I don't think it is. I think it's completely overhyped. There's certainly a place for it. It's essential. You have to have protein and you have to have enough protein. What's really confusing to me, Louisa, is how this confusion arose about how much protein it is you need. Do you need 0.8 grams per kg? Do you need 1 gram per kg? Do you need 1 pound? 1 gram per pound? Do you need. I mean, the numbers are kind of all over the place, and so there's a couple of myths we could bust right up front.

[B]

Let's do it. So I'll tell you what the audience really understands so far. We understand that and we'll do. You mentioned kilograms, right? To my understanding, to maintain muscle mass, you need around 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. But if you really want to build muscle mass, you're looking at around 1.6 to 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. Correct me if I'm wrong. And then if you really want to be a bodybuilder, we've been told that you need around 2.2 grams per kilogram per body weight.

[A]

Okay, so that could be right. So, and how do you figure that out? What kinds of studies do you do? And we could talk about the kinds of necessary studies, but let me throw some numbers at you. 1.2 is the average American intake of protein. So if you do what Americans eat without even trying, they get 1.2. If you're trying to build muscle and you're working out hard enough to build muscle, I assume you eat more calories than the rest of the world. And so if you were, you would be getting more protein, because everything has protein. And if you were, you know, training for competitions, well, then you're in a whole nother league. And I, I can't even speak to that if you're a competitive bodybuilder. So you should do what you need to do.

[B]

Okay. But the rda, we've been told by numerous sources, especially here on the podcast, that the RDA is. Is so wrong and that we're not getting it right. And we're not accounting for even women who are going through the perimenopause and menopause stages where they really need to bank on protein because of muscle protein synthesis to induce muscle mass to help with even bone mineral density.

[A]

Sure, sure, sure. Okay. And Stacy Sims actually was a postdoc in our group years ago, I think, has been a. Been a big proponent of this. Stacy herself is vegan, by the way.

[B]

I know, I know.

[A]

Yeah. So she eats a lot of plant proteins. So part of this could be the amount of protein. And another thing that we could get into is how about how to. How does animal and plant protein compare? But let's go back to that initial 0.8. Is that okay?

[B]

Let's go back to it.

[A]

I got my PhD at Berkeley. And the fifth floor of Berkeley is the penthouse. And the penthouse is where 70 years ago they housed conscientious Vietnam War objectors, put them in blue zoot suits, kept them there for month or months at a time, paid them to do this. I'm pretty sure, I don't know, it was before I was born, I think, that they did this. Doris Calloway and Shelley Morgan are the famous scientists who did this, who pooled their data with other groups doing similar things and that. It was disgusting what they did, Louisa. So they lowered everybody's protein to zero slowly over a couple weeks. And as they were doing this and they were wearing these blue zoot suits, every night they would vacuum the suits to collect everything that left them. All the hair that fell off, all the skin that sloughed off. They got all the poop, all the pee, all the nose, everything that left their body, they collected. And then they would slowly increase their protein up. And at that time they would also measure all the protein going into their body from food. And one of their goals, it's called nitrogen balance. This might be too geeky, but the best way to measure protein is the nitrogen component of it because nitrogen is kind of unique to protein and doing that is easier than assessing different amino acids. So it's called a nitrogen balance study. And they raised it back up until the amount of nitrogen going in the body was the same as the nitrogen leaving. And they said, ah, that's what you need to maintain. But if you can imagine that sounds like a pretty minimal situation, doesn't it? This is like just the amount to maintain. Okay, so that was the original set of experiments where the actual number was 0.66 grams per kilogram body weight, not 0.8. Because when they did this, that was the average and some people were higher and some people were lower. When they originally designed the protein recommendations, they said, well, oh my gosh, if we recommend that number and everybody gets it, by definition, half the people would be deficient. The half of the people who needed more than average, because the average is the middle for a population health approach, why don't we take two standard deviations above that? Mathematically, that's a way to say, okay, this should cover all but 2.5% of the population. And for the other 97.5, the way the theory is, the math goes, that will meet or exceed the needs of the other 97.5% of the population. So it wasn't the average requirement they were recommending. It was two levels higher than that for the average person, and that ended up being maybe 50 grams for women and 60 grams for men, roughly. Okay, So I know that a lot of people aren't very happy thinking, well, the nitrogen balance, that totally sounds like a minimal thing. I want the optimal thing. I want to go out there and have a lot of recreational activity and build muscle and maintain muscle. So, interestingly, I see a lot of these papers that people rely on, and they're sort of looking at, okay, they had a meal, and they looked at their protein synthesis rates over the course of the day. This is what you needed to build muscle. And here's my frustration is many of these new studies that are done don't look a month or two down the road to see if your strength has increased, been maintained, or lost. Because to me, one thing is this metabolic rate of a biopsy. So as I understand it, this isn't my forte. I don't do this particular kind of study. If you want to see muscle protein synthesis, you have to take a biopsy.

[B]

Oh, look, I've done many of them, and it's like in the calf, and it looks excruciating.

[A]

Yes, isn't it?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Signing up saying, wait, I want to have my muscle protein synthesis measured. Please rip some muscle out of my flesh right now. Okay. So, interestingly to me, that the end game would be, are you stronger? And so to do that, let's say, you know, the certain number of reps you do for different workouts and things like that, what if you went a month out to see if getting that new level of protein made you stronger and you could lift more or maintain? And from what I understand going to those studies, muscle strength doesn't really change that much depending on the protein plant or animal, raising it or lowering it. So Stu Phillips does a lot of these studies. He's a McMaster professor. Have you ever had him on your show?

[B]

He's staying on the podcast. Yep.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think we're in agreement because we did a debate on the Simon Hill show, and it didn't turn out to be much of a debate. We kind of agreed on most things, one of which was he hates the 0.8 number. And I said, well, I like it. I'm a nutrition scientist, not a physical activity guy. But I admit it might be low, but I don't really care because Most Americans get 1.2 without even trying. And he said, whoa, well, that's right too. If they get 1.2 or 1.4 or 1.6, then they're fine. They don't even need any supplements or anything. I'm interested in those studies. And Luisa, we did two studies here on Stanford campus where we took recreational athletes. One was in undergraduates and one was in graduate students and go vegan for a month and Omnivore for a month in different orders. We randomized which order you did first. Everybody was their own control and half were resistance trainers and half were runners. We had them do a test before and after each of these four week segments. They ran just as fast and far and they lifted just as many weights. And they had much less protein on the vegan diet, but they got enough protein on the vegan diet. What I would love to see is some more of these studies with the people talking about 1.2, 1.6, 2.2. Instead of looking at the same day muscle protein synthesis rate, I would like to see how fast they're running or how much they're lifting a month later. Because at the end of the day, if you're not lifting more, if you've lost your ability and you're lifting less, I would not want anybody's performance to be compromised. And what I think is the studies that I've seen are not very compelling, that beyond what you normally eat in an average day will help you do that. And I will roughly quote Stu Phillips who will say more than 90% of that muscle growth and maintenance is your workout and less than 10% of it is the protein you ate.

[B]

Oh, that is so interesting. So just to rephrase, you're saying that it is 90% physical activity, efficit stimulus effort via weights, et cetera, and around 10% nutrition.

[A]

Less than 10 for the less than 10 protein. So that's what Stu Phillips said when we had this discussion. He agreed with that. And I think part of that is, again, think about this. For somebody who's working out really hard competitively, they're eating more calories than the average American. They have to. A really interesting thing was that Stacy Sims sent me a bunch of the papers that she refers to and maybe you can help me with this part. I was kind of stunned. I've been looking at a bunch of the papers she sent me and quite a few of them involved caloric restriction or an energy deficit. And what I took from this was people were trying to either maintain or gain muscle while they were losing Fat. Part of the numbers that I was seeing in these papers was, wait, this isn't the study design I was expecting. I was expecting somebody to eat food, wonder about supplementing with protein, and then maintain or build muscle. If you're trying to cut calories and lose weight overall and lose fat specifically, but not lose lean muscle, that's a different thing. So since that isn't my world and maybe it's yours, let me ask you what, what is the average person out there who's doing resistance training doing? Are they in energy deficit? Are they restricting calories, or are they just trying to eat and maintain and grow muscle?

[B]

Here's my theory on that question. It depends on who you are. If you look at the average woman in my experience, and I'm not, I am a female. I'm not picking on females. But what you see is a lot of women aren't really lifting as heavy as what they should be to provide for the stimulus. So that's one thing. The second thing is we still, a lot of us are still living in that old era where we believe if we want to lose weight, you know, sometimes we don't even differentiate between weight and fat, then we need to starve ourselves. So we, we bust our backsides at the gym with really little weights, maybe doing 30 reps or going to Orange Theory, which I know Stacey Sims hates, or just doing high repetitions, low volume, not eating enough. Therefore we think that we're losing fat, but we're probably just eating away at our muscle. So I don't. You know what I think it is? I think, Christopher, it's a, it's an education problem that we have here. But let's also answer for the people who are, who know what they're doing. I think most people, when they're trying to lose fat and gain muscle, I think they are not restricting their calories. I think they're going really protein heavy and adopting more of a, a carnivore, ketogenic diet, nutrition protocol over, over anything else, right?

[A]

And so I can easily say that if you're restricting calories. So think this, this is the way your body works. Picture this. So we have an infinite capacity to store fat, right? Butts, belly, underarms, everywhere. We have a very limited capacity to store carbohydrate. We have some in our liver and some in our skeletal muscle. And the amount of that, just to sort of put into sheer numbers how much storage that is. I don't know how many runners you talk to. I'm assuming you have runners on your show. But no matter what you carb load right the day or two before the marathon, if you run hard for four hours, that carb storage is completely gone. That's why we have the 20 mile bonk. That's why people are taking goo and other stuff and getting some carbs before they finish the marathon. So that's a very limited carbohydrate store. If you're restricting calories, you will start burning fat. You may run out of that carbohydrate storage and the other source for you, there's actually no storage depot for protein. There's nothing. Let's say you've overeaten protein today, more than you needed for your muscle maintenance and, and enzymes and hormones and hair and fingernails. There isn't a place in your kneecap or your toe or your spleen to store that protein for tomorrow. You turn it into carbs, and if your carbohydrate stores are full, you eventually turn all this into fat. If you're calorie restricting, one of your body's mechanisms is to steal protein from your skeletal muscle to serve as energy. So I could see that for the woman who's cutting calories, doing energy restriction, trying to burn fat and maintain muscle, I could see getting extra protein so that you're not catabolizing your own skeletal muscle protein to make you weaker. My bigger concern would be you're starving yourself. So as you started to say, it sounded like maybe we need to educate people. So it's great to work out, it's great to be physically fit, but we do have some societal norms that are pretty messed up about starving yourself while burning extra calories, lifting and doing resistance training, and trying to meet that model of ultra thin and ultra ripped at the same time.

[B]

But also a lot of women are scared to lift heavy. I actually had Stacy on the podcast for the second time four weeks ago and we were talking about reps. She educated me, which is funny. She said, we should be as females, we should be focusing on three rep ranges. And I said, three? Like maxing out at three or four. And I said, that's. I said, stacy, I mean, have you seen her shoulders? I said, that is so heavy. If I'm going to do, if I'm going to max out at three, I mean, I'm going to be lifting so heavy. She said, yes, because I've been doing six to eight. She's like, no, you bring it down, do four sets, three reps. And she goes, just go in, do three or four exercises. And then Leave. I was like, wow, mind blown. And I don't think many women are doing that.

[A]

No. And so I got. I have to admit, this is not a group that I work with at all. So I'm more likely to do a weight loss study, a microbiome study, a cholesterol, a blood pressure, an inflammation study. So I don't want to extend beyond my wisdom. I just have some basic protein facts. Like you don't store any and all plants have all 20amino acids and leucine, which in the workout world is a really popular amino acid. I often heard it said that plants are short on leucine, which is not true. So I have a paper published and I show the amino acid distribution of 40 or 50 different foods. And I've grouped them into grains, beans, veggies, meats, dairy, all those groups. Leucine is pretty similar across every single food, the amount of leucine per hundred percent. Now, I will admit that plants have less total protein than meats because meats don't have any fiber and they don't have any carbs. They just have fat and meat. So you will get more protein per calorie with meat. But if you're complaining that plants don't have leucine, that plants are missing amino acids, that's bs. It's the same proportion of leucine.

[B]

I think the problem is in that debate is the leucine threshold. What is it? Is it 2.2? What's the threshold of leucine to induce muscle protein synthesis?

[A]

I've heard something like that. Not my field.

[B]

Okay, me too. And then I heard that in order to actually reach that through plants alone, you have to be having such a large amount compared to that of meat.

[A]

Yeah, I disagree. If you add up the amino acids that I have in my graph, you'd see it wouldn't take that much protein to get the 2.2 from Leucine.

[B]

Let's go on to. Because you mentioned your studies, and one study, which I loved, is the dye fits study. So you challenge challenged some pretty entrenched ideas, if I do say so myself, by showing that weight loss wasn't about carbs versus fats, but overall diet quality. That's pretty radical given how polarized nutrition camps are these days. What did these results of this study teach you about why people struggle so much with weight adherence?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And part of that was to address this debate. And can I say up front that the results surprised me. I expected something different. So let me explain the design real quickly here. Which Is. And I actually have to go back to a previous study that we had done with 300 women on Atkins or Zone or a health professional's diet or Ornish. And we had picked those four because of the range in carbs and fats. So Atkins was the lowest carb, Ornish was the lowest fat. The other two were in the middle. We kind of picked four diets that would range tremendously in fat and carbohydrate. And when we did that at the end of 12 months, there was very little difference between the groups. There was only a couple of pounds difference. The only statistically significant difference was between Zone and Atkins, which was a little weird because those were the two low carb diets. I would have thought it would have been between Atkins and Ornish, because those are the two most polar opposites. But what we thought found, Luisa, was the range of weight change over 12 months was huge and identical in all four groups. Somebody had lost 30, 40 pounds on each one of the diets and somebody had gained 5 or 10 pounds on each of the diets. And those weren't outliers. It was an absolute continuum from losing a lot to gaining a little. And so I went to the literature and I said, God, I really thought I was going to find a winner there. I wonder if, I mean, this variability within the diet groups is much more interesting than a couple pounds on average difference between them. And one of the first things I found was this whole insulin resistance hypothesis. And that was, wow, there's a whole bunch of people going low fat. And when they do that, low fat means high carb. There's a bunch of people out there that have insulin resistance having a hard time putting away carbs. And so a low fat diet is exacerbating that by pumping more and more carbs into them. So I thought, wow, maybe there are some people who are more insulin resistant who better do better on low carb. There's people who are insulin sensitive who do better on low fat. Wow, that would help explain some of the variability. And then I had some other colleagues who said, oh, we think we have a genotype predisposition. We think if we know your genotype, that there's a low fat and a low carb genotype. And when we submitted this proposal, we said, look, we just did this study with 300 overweight women. On average, all four groups lost weight. But the difference within the groups was way more interesting than between the groups. Let's do a new study, just two diets, just low fat and low carb. And let's make them as low as fat and as low in carb as we can. Realistically, let me put that in the parking lot for now and if you want, I'd love to come back to that. Let's have them both be good quality low carb and low fat diets. And for that part it was really fun because we had to say, hey, I've hired these dietitians. You have to counsel these men and women. There are 600 of them this time, 600 for a year. You get randomized to one or the other. We do a special test called an oral glucose tolerance test to see how insulin resistant you are. And we get your DNA to see what your genotype is. And heading into the study, the hypothesis was built on this idea that both groups would lose the same average amount of weight. Both groups would have a huge range of difference in weight change and that the insulin resistant folks would do better on low carb and the insulin sensitive people would do better on low fat. If we matched your genotype to your diet, that would also explain some of the difference. And neither of them worked. We did get a huge range in weight change. This time it was losing 50 pounds to gaining 20. So like a 70 pound range of weight change to the same advice, the identical same advice we had. Every dietitian who was part of the study design had to counsel both low carb and low fat. And we said, just so you can sleep at night, make sure you teach the best low carb and the best low fat you can. You don't want to give one group an advantage over the other, so try to teach a healthy version of both and that way we'll see what happens and everybody gets a fair chance here. We'll see if some diets are better for some people and we know what predisposes them and will help them. And we'll be able to do this test and say, oh, Louisa, you would be better off trying this because of your metabolism and your genotype. That part failed. Later on we looked at the two groups. A large component of it had been focusing on quality. We actually published a whole side separate paper on who got the lowest in fat and the lowest carb and the highest in quality. The ones who lost the most weight were either low carb or low fat, who got highest in quality. And so it seemed to be more of a quality issue than a low carb or a low fat issue. And that is not what I expected. We really expected to see a winner. We went into this sort of With a. You're not supposed to, but with a bias. We really, we are going to be so famous, we are going to figure this out and people are just going to call us up and we'll be on the talk shows because we know who should be on which diet and we'll end the diet wars. And we didn't. We just came up with sort of, ah, you can lose weight on either one. You should focus on the diet quality of either one. And let me give you one specific issue, which is the low fat people were very seriously told to avoid added sugar and refined grains. Those are both low fat, but they're crunchy carbs. And it was really funny. So Gary Tobes, who's a huge low carb proponent, helped us fund the study. And as we got toward the end of it and we were just about to publish it, he said, ah, Christopher, I just realized you screwed up the study design. And I said, what? This is like, not a good time to tell me we're almost done. And he said, yeah, I'm realizing that you told the low fat people to avoid added sugar and refined carb. I said, well, yes. Part of the design was both of the diets were designed to be good quality and added sugars and refined carbs. Those are crappy carbs. He says, yeah, but that's what people usually do when they go low fat. They usually have a lot of added sugar and refined carb. Now you're going to make it harder to see a difference between the low carb and the low fat group. And I thought, well, yeah, that was on purpose. I didn't screw up the design. I wanted to give them both a good chance. And for the low carb, I didn't just say, here's butter and lard. I said, here, here's a bunch of healthy low carb foods. Like, I gave them both a good chance and on average they ended up the same. And our two predictors that we thought would predispose them didn't work. And a couple people said, wow, your study failed. Sorry, dude. And a couple others, many others said, thank you for doing that study. We have counseled people for years and we find that some people do better on low carb and some do better on low fat. And it isn't one or the other. It really is trying to choose a good quality diet. Either way you go, it's not one.

[B]

That'S just right for you or your genetic profile. It's one that you can adhere to over a long period of time.

[A]

And that is A great many health professionals will say that. Luisa, you know what's the best diet for me? The one you can maintain?

[B]

You've argued also, I'm going to keep going on with this and what you just said. You've argued that future diets should focus on, on satiety, right? Making people feel full rather than counting calories, which is funny. I don't know if you've met Lane Norton, he's been on the podcast. He's also a good friend of mine. He, he's very, a very big proponent obviously of protein, but he also speaks about, hey, if you want to lose weight, then counting calories is probably the best thing you could do and you're arguing the opposite. So I'm curious, from your experience, why hasn't mainstream diet advice embraced satiety yet? I actually haven't heard of it until GLP1s came on the rise. Because GLP1s, when you've got GIP plus a GLP together, that's doing both, right? It's delaying gastric empty and so you feel fuller for longer, but you also can't eat as much. So that's the first time probably like two years ago or maybe a year ago that I actually heard the word satiety.

[A]

And that's funny. So I didn't say it in our meeting, but if you saw it in any of my write ups, this is one of the conclusions I came to, which was, oh my God, the metabolic thing didn't work, the genotyped thing didn't work, but we still had that massive variability within each group. So, Luisa, while we were in the middle of our study, a health statement came out from the American Heart association, the Obesity Society and the American College of Cardiology. And they put all the diet papers together and they were looking at diet and weight control, weight loss, etc. And they said what we found with all the data available is that somebody loses weight on every single diet. There's always someone who can lose weight. And in general, people can lose weight on almost every diet, but there isn't one that works above the others. We seem to think that it requires energy restriction for this to happen. So you have to have this caloric imbalance to lose weight. Then there's a little paragraph at the end that I've been clinging onto for years because I loved reading this and I haven't heard many other people bring it up. But there was a statement that said, and some of our studies involved energy restriction, a prescribed energy restriction, and some involved an achieved energy restriction. Okay, so let me parse that out.

[B]

For you really quick.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I need you to pass those two terms out for me.

[A]

So picture this. You're going to join my weight loss program, let's say, okay, I've looked at your physical activity level, your age, your height, your weight, your gender. By my formula, you need 2,500 calories a day to maintain your weight. I want you to lose a pound a week. So I'm going to keep you on 2,000 calories a day, even though you normally eat 2,500 calories a day. And the first thing that should go through your mind is, crap, I'm going to be hungry all the time. Like, how long do I have to do this? Oh, forever. Oh, crap, I'm going to be hungry forever. Like, I'm going to be doing this energy restriction, this prescribed amount, this 500 calorie deficit. You want me to do this every single day from now for that? Doesn't that sound just horrifying? Like this? Oh, this sucks. What am I signing myself up for? The achieved energy restriction was. We don't tell you how many calories to cut back on. You just cut back through one strategy or another. So here was something very specific. Luisa. In our study, we actually. This is not going to roll off anybody's tongue. We called our method Limbo Titrate quality. And the limbo part was, okay, for the first eight weeks, cut everything out. You can go as low as humanly possible, push yourself beyond what you even thought was realistic, and get as low as fat and carb as you can, partly to psychologically anchor yourself that, I'm in a study. I'm in a research study. It's NIH funded, Stanford run. I gotta be serious here to help the people in America and the world who want to know the answer to this. And then we said at the end of those eight weeks, we actually think those two diets are both too restrictive. If you're restricting so much fat and so much carb, there's probably some vitamins and minerals you're not getting and you're probably going to be hungry. So the next phase was titrate. And we said, add some fat and some carb back, and if it's not enough, add a little more back. And when you're done, look us in the eye and say, this is how low I got and I'm fine. Actually, if this works and the study's over, I could keep doing this. I'm not feeling hungry. So we told them up front to go as Low as they could, but not so low that when the study was ended, they didn't say, oh, thank God, the study's over, I got to go back and add more. I could never maintain that to us without even trying. What I realized as I was reading this other paper, we were asking these people to achieve an energy restriction without prescribing it. Go low in fat or low in carb, or take another strategy. But if you're feeling hungry and not full, it's not going to work. So you're going to have to add something back. And so that was the limbo and the titrate and the quality part was, and don't do this with low fat brownies, don't do this low fat cookies. Go to the farmer's market, cook more on your own, go to restaurants and ask for good quality things. So in the limbo titrate quality approach we got, we lost, collectively 6,000 pounds were lost over the course of this study. And we never gave anyone a prescribed energy restriction. So when I read this, my conclusion from our own study, which didn't work out the way I thought, I really thought that insulin resistant folks would do better on low carb and it would be obvious. And it didn't work that way. I thought, God, you know, this satiety thing is probably the thing that we're missing. This thing where you've achieved an energy restriction successfully partly because you didn't feel full and you already identified the two domains. One is you stop eating sooner, so you haven't consumed as many calories that meal as you would have otherwise. And it's longer, you're full longer till your next meal. So it's longer before you start your next calorie intake. And if we could, if we could tie into that and figure that out. The only downside of this, Luis, is studying satiety is a bitch.

[B]

I was going to say that's because you've got so many variables. I mean, one night of sleep deprivation is going to affect it. Certain medications. I know that quite recently I had a patient on prednisone and she's like, my, like my appetite has increased. It's like, well, that's what it does. Like, it's just. So medications come into play and then menstrual cycle probably comes into place. I think it'd be really hard to control that from a societal standpoint.

[A]

It would. So I haven't done that study. I haven't proposed it in addition. So this is going to be a silly inside baseball kind of Comment for you here, but our metrics for satiety suck. So I know somebody who does satiety studies and they're no longer than a day or two and really what happens is they get a standard breakfast one and a standard breakfast two. It's a set number of calories, they feed it to you, you have to eat it in a set number of minutes and two hours later they ask you how hungry you are. And the problem with that is it's so standardized, it's artificial, it's not what we really want to know in our studies, Luis, is basically how hungry were you in February, how hungry were you in March, how hungry were you in May? There actually isn't a metric for that. And if I had that, I might be more inclined to write a grant where I would say I'm going to have these people mess with their calories this way. I'm going to look into satiety and I'm going to do this year long study of weight loss. Really all the satiety studies that I see are for the day or for two days. And what we do find is that a lot of satiety things Louis said that work for the hour or the meal get negated that evening or the next day when your body actually got you to eat more to make up for what you didn't eat. So it might have been satiating at the time you ate it, but you actually compensate and eat more later on and it negates that calorie saving that you got. So to be realistic, it's almost like similar to my interest in the muscle builder saying not how much muscle protein synthesis you got today, but how much stronger are you at the end of the month? So you might have been satiated for the meal or the moment, but how many calories did you eat tomorrow and the next day? Was it really something that you could maintain? And we often don't do this.

[B]

I'd like to take a quick moment to thank and talk about a company that has become a cornerstone of my daily protocol. Momentous. Many of you know that I've been using Momentus for years because they do things differently. Their supplements, such as creatine protein omega 3s, aren't just clean, they're elite. Every product meets what they call the momentous standard, which means no artificial sweeteners, no fillers, and every batch is NSF certified for sport or informed sport testing. That's the same level of testing trusted by all 32 NFL teams and over 2,200pro and collegiate programs. Their formulas are developed alongside leaders such as Dr. Andrew Huberman, myself, Stacey Sims, Andy Galpam. And it shows in both the science and the results. Whether you're focused on brain performance, muscle recovery or long term health span, their products are designed to support you every single day. So if you're ready to switch to a brand that's all about performance and transparency, head to livemomentous.com/neuro or use code neuro N E U r o for 35% off your first subscription. If you aren't all going on the website now to buy their creatine, I don't know what you have in store for your brain. Head on over, get your creatine put in code neuro for 35% off your first subscription. Yeah, of course. Because we need more than just a 24 hour period to justify any protocol. Okay, great. I, I really want to go on to your next trial, which was the swap meet trial. Ah, God. I don't know what was going through your mind at that stage, but that's fascinating. It fascinated me because you essentially showed that swapping regular meat for plant based alternatives improved cholesterol and inflammatory markers. So I'm an Alzheimer's disease researcher. So inflammatory biomarkers. Yeah, are really at the forefront because we know that that's what actually induces amyloid in the brain. They see, you know, inflammatory cascade, then you've got cholesterol, which we know that for the Apoe 4 carriers. We know that there's a problem there as well because Apoe 4 essentially helps with lipid metabolism in the brain. So that's why I was really interested in this. But despite the common claims these foods are ultra processed and unhealthy, you still bypassed all of that. So how do you respond to critics who say that these meat alternatives, which by the way, I am one of those people, are just expensive junk food or worse, just another profit driven trend.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's perfectly fair. I mean really the sort of, this new generation of beyond meat and others were designed not for vegans or vegetarians anymore. So I grew up eating a plant based diet for many, many years. Started in 1983.

[B]

Is that because of your parents?

[A]

No, that was because of Tiffany who dumped me. Tiffany was a vegetarian. She dumped me. I wasn't. I thought if I became vegetarian she'd take me back. She didn't. I stayed vegetarian. But if you, if you go back decades, there was the Boca burger and the garden burger and it was for the small number of people who are Vegetarian or vegans, and there's really not that many who maintain that diet. For a long time they were very, they were beans and seeds and whatever, and they weren't that great. But if, if you were vegan or vegetarian and you missed it, that's what you had just, you know, 10 years ago when they started these other products, they were designed to try to make them look, smell, taste, feel like meat. And so to do that, there's definitely more processing involved to make all those sensory qualities the same. You can't make a black bean burger and fool somebody. Right? So I actually did this study because I saw several full page ads in the New York Times saying, oh, make sure you don't buy these. Here's the ingredients of dog food and here's the ingredient of plant based meat. And they're the same. And then I looked who had funded it, and it was really a front group for the Cattlemen's Association. And so I could see that they're a little fearful that this might eat into their market, much like plant milkshake have eaten into the dairy milk market, which is much more substantial.

[B]

The controversy right now on social media between what is it, the, like fresh milk? What is it? Fresh cow milk or raw milk? Sorry, my gosh, brain fog. Yeah. Raw milk versus non pasteurized milk versus oat milk. It's just crazy.

[A]

Okay, but let's go back to me. I'm happy to go there, but I haven't done that study yet. So my thought was, wow, it's really interesting. Kevin hall has done this amazing study that showed that ultra processed foods led people to eat more calories and gain more weight. These burgers are certainly processed because they're trying to make them look, taste, smell, whatever, like meat. But they're accusing them of being blood pressure raising because of the sodium and weight gaining and cholesterol, all these things. And that. Oh my God, wait, that's my superpower. I design studies that I know how to design studies like that that will test one versus the other because they absolutely do have a lower water footprint, a lower greenhouse gas footprint, because beef in particular is the highest in the water. The eutrophication, the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff across all kinds of domains. But could the health claim be a problem? So we had 36ish people. I'm forgetting a little anyway, close to 40 people in a crossover study where everybody did both arms for eight weeks. And we're going to deliver two servings a day of beyond meat versus two servings a day of red meat. And this is what my group likes to do. Again, I actually call the term equipoise. I was trying to make it as fair as possible. We didn't just deliver fast food hamburgers. We delivered grass fed, pasture raised, organic red meat. We delivered quality meat to the participants in the other phase. And it wasn't just beef. There was also some sausages, some chicken versus chicken. So it was really animal meat versus non for eight weeks. And the final results were head to head. That's the only thing they changed. And that was actually 25% of their calories each time. The other 75%, if you were having a white burger bun on your, with your burger, you needed to have a white burger bun in both phases. And if you had a whole wheat foofy seed colored bun in one phase, you had to have that same bun in the second one. So you're supposed to keep the other 75% of calories similar. So the only change is the red meat versus the Beyond Meat. And the Beyond Meat folks lowered their trimethylamine oxide, which you recognize as one of these inflammatory markers, sort of emerging heart disease risk factors. They lowered their ldl cholesterol by 10 milligrams per deciliter. Totally made sense because there was more fiber and less saturated fat in the Beyond Meat. Blood pressure didn't change. This is kind of interesting because yes, some of the Beyond Meat burgers had more sodium than the red meat ones. But when we took data for the whole day, guess what people did when they got plain ground beef and plain burgers? They salted them.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[A]

And so the sodium content actually wasn't different and the blood pressure wasn't different.

[B]

That makes sense.

[A]

Finally, and this is surprising, and I have to take an extra little minute here to explain this, on the Beyond Meat phase, they lost a statistically significant amount of weight. Not gained weight, they lost weight. Which is the opposite of what happened in Kevin Hall's study where that study was all day ultra processed versus all day unprocessed. This was just the meats, the amount of weight. I hope you can appreciate this as a scientist physician. The amount of weight wasn't much. It was two pounds over the course of eight weeks. But the reason it was statistically significant was almost every single person was two pounds lighter in the Beyond Meat fees than the red meat. So there's hardly that's huge at all. It was very, it wasn't much. I don't think £2 is clinically relevant, but it was so consistent and in the opposite direction. That people were talking about. So when we published it, we said, okay, we did this head to head. Beyond was better in trimethylamine oxide. LDL cholesterol, weight wasn't different in sodium and blood pressure. We think overall, the swap meet, one head to head versus good quality red meat. And that was our question. And a bunch of people said, oh, I can't believe you're saying these are healthy or don't you want people to eat beans? And I said that that wasn't the question. I wasn't asking are they healthier than the original whole beans they come from? These guys are making things to replace meat. So if you just did it head to head to replace the red meat, even good quality red meat, what would happen? Nothing bad. And three positive things for your health happened in swap meet.

[B]

I'm interested to know what the initial LDL readings were. Did they have hyperlipidemia?

[A]

No. And these are people without much room to drop. Their baseline LDL cholesterol was about 120 milligrams per deciliter.

[B]

Oh, so higher than the average. But that's, that's still not like drastically high. That's not statin high.

[A]

That's not. None of these people prescribe drugs. This isn't 130 to 160. This isn't 160 to 190.

[B]

Did you measure CRP as well?

[A]

We did not know.

[B]

Okay. Which, I mean, what about the. Has that got anything to do with mtor?

[A]

So I don't know. That is not my field. So I'm not big on mtor. Can't answer that.

[B]

No, of course not.

[A]

There wasn't any, any kind of weightlifting, There wasn't any kind of resistance training in this. This is really very much a cardio metabolic study, cardiometabolic outcomes.

[B]

Well, I think that, that would, that would be really interesting for a certain subgroup of people. I know that I have somebody on the podcast, you know, his name is Indigo San Milan and he's really into cancer research. And personally, he's like, he went on a, a vegan diet, a plant based diet. His triglycerides, his total cholesterol, ldl. And he said it was enormous what he achieved in a two month period. And I was like, like, he's, I'm talking like dropping like LDL. I think it came back from like 150, like really drastically dropping it down to like 110. And he's like, just because of the plants that I was ingesting. So I thought that was pretty interesting.

[A]

Yep, pretty Interesting stuff, I will say. Somebody did a side study. We got some pilot seed money at Stanford. It was a nephrologist who was interested in kidney stones and kidney disease. When he compared the beyond meat to the red meat, the beyond meat did better for some of the markers, not kidney stones themselves. It was a small, short study, but did better for kidney health to the extent that he's now applied for a big NIH grant to study the beyond meat versus the red meat for kidney disease and for kidney stones.

[B]

Oh, that's going to be so interesting and controversial. So I can't wait to see that. Okay, so Christopher, this. I've got so many questions here that I've like, really carefully mapped out, but I'm going. We're coming towards the end. I think this is going to be part one. But from a lot of the research that I've seen from you, you've. You've dedicated decades of your life to improving how we eat you. Yet you've open joked at times about feeling that you've had limited impact given how processed and unhealthy the modern diet still is. Big picture. What needs to fundamentally change in how we approach nutrition education and the food environment if we're actually going to make progress in some of the leading epidemics like obesity, chronic disease and even human performance?

[A]

Sure, yeah. So let me start with a little bit of my new life over the last 10 years. Because I've been at this for 30 years, I will say that the most impactful thing I have done to date wasn't even my best study. It was a little study with 22 pairs of identical twins. One twin went vegan and one stayed omnivorous. And it got featured in a four part Netflix docu series, which is the.

[B]

Most talked about on social media, by the way.

[A]

The fun. Yeah. And I'd love to address the criticisms that we got for it that are sort of easily addressed in an interactive conversation. But let's not go there for a minute. Just to point out that I can't tell you how many thousands of people wrote to me and said they changed their diet, a neighbor stopped me on my bike. Christopher, saw your Netflix series Change My Diet. I have people with their uncles and their sisters and their daughters. After saying jokingly before, I don't think I've had any impact. It was amazing to hear how many people had done that. And much as I'm talking to you right now, Luisa, I've been doing a bunch of podcasts. I've been trying to do social media. So an Interesting. Most scientist don't like this part of science. We don't like talking about it in this way. We're kind of geeks. We'd like to publish our paper and go to our medical science conference and not be challenged. Because there is, as you're noting, there's a backlash here. If you get your put yourself out there, somebody's going to criticize you. So one of the things I've been doing is working on my health science communication skills and trying to be open minded and listen to other people and try to explain myself more clearly. So that's one step. But really the more fun step has been I now hang out with chefs. Chefs make great tasting food. I am on the scientific advisory board of the CIA and the joke is the Culinary Institute of America, not the Pentagon one. So they've actually, I helped them about a decade ago, a little more than that, come up with these 24 principles of the menus of change. And the Culinary Institute has partnered with mostly Harvard at that time. But I joined in saying that the chefs were really frustrated that their clientele one day wanted gluten free, then they wanted paleo, then they wanted vegan, then they wanted keto. It's like, God, this is. Can't we just make a menu that like, will stick around? Or why do we have to be so reactive and so to be proactive? They had a science group, a business group and a chef group and they said, look, we need to stay in business. We want to be chefs and create great tasting food and it should be science based. Like, how many of these are not fads that are going to go away another day so we can stay in business? And of these 24 principles of the menus of change, they looked at them and you can look this up online. There's a very cool infographic of the 24 principles of the menus of change. They said, wow. One thing that would work across a lot of these different principles is a concept they have called the protein flip. The protein flip started as the dessert flip. As a culinary institute, the food industry came and said, we're getting hammered over dessert. Desserts have too many calories. Can you help us? And their quick idea was, you know that big piece of cheesecake you have with a raspberry on top, why don't you make it a bowl of raspberries with a dollop of cheesecake on top? You can still call it cheesecake and raspberries, but there's more raspberries than cheesecake. And so they said, what if we did the same thing with protein, what if we created a concept of a protein flip? Instead of having meat be the center of the plate and a starch on the side with butter and sour cream on your potato and overcooked spinach, what if the center was beans, grains and veggies grilled and cooked in a global fusion of flavors with Moroccan spices and 2 ounces of meat, or meat as a condiment or meat as the side dish? And what I found is, and I go to their conferences, their conferences are almost obscene. The food is so good and they are making more and more plant based. Although I, I don't want that to be vegan. So plant forward might be a better word. They're not always vegan or vegetarian. There's often some meat or fish or chicken or pork in there, but it's much smaller portion. And so the fun of hanging out with chefs is the food is delicious.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So as a way to get people change, Luisa, part of me is like, look, I've been doing this for 20 years. Nobody's changing because I tell them this very cool biochemical pathway, and they look at me and they say, yeah, but it is. Does it taste good? Well, that's not what I was studying. But if I hang out with chefs and we merge and they can make it taste great. Your question was sort of, how are we going to move forward and get people to change? And I think with chefs on board in institutional food settings, think how many menus are designed in a university, a work site, a hospital, a prison, the military, the K to 12 school. They're chefs in charge of all those menus. And the Culinary Institute of America has graduated 55,000 chefs, most of who which don't end up in Michelin star restaurants, they end up in hospitals and work sites and universities. And so it's really been fun partnering them with them, trying to sort of do this human and planetary health, which I keep in my back pocket. I know how much this contributes to greenhouse gas. I know what this will do for your ldl. But couldn't we first talk about this global fusion of flavors? It's going to blow your taste buds away. You're going to love this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is that much more fun?

[B]

I think that's going to be monumental, especially if you're going to attack the school nutrition standpoint as well. Because I know that kids, I know it starts from there, right? How they're rewiring their brains, how they're wiring their brains to know what is healthy. Like the first thing they have in the morning. Most schools, everything is in packets and kids go to school and that's where they seek to get all of their meals, their breakfast, their lunch, even sometimes after school meals. And they're feeding them with packaged goods and ultra processed foods and that's where they learn to eat really. So if you can have an effect on that from both nutritional standpoint, but also taste and then bring that if you could. Hospital food. I do rounds in the, in the stroke ward, in the neurosurgery wards. Let me tell you, I see what they eat like I just want them to have proper food. I think that would be great.

[A]

Healthcare without harm is a group of hospitals. The Cool food pledge is getting hospitals to sign up the New York City due to Mayor Adams. Let's not talk too much about Mayor Adams. But that the hospitals there are going plant forward where the plant based meal is the default meal. They can order something else. But there's really some interesting things going on in hospital food and school food right now. That's very exciting. And all chefs.

[B]

Well, Christopher Gardiner, I rarely have people like you on the podcast in terms of the nutrition space. I try and stay so far away from it just because I, it's not my field. But I've, I've loved our conversation and I, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I am dying to talk to you about your gut microbiome studies.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

We're going to be doing part two, hopefully in person. I'll have to come out there.

[A]

Oh, that would be great fun.

[B]

How can we support you?

[A]

Oh, share our website. Nutrition Stanford. Eduardo. Look at the studies that we do. I'm sure there's a donate button on there. So a lot of our studies are through philanthropy. The nih, as I think a lot of people know right now, is sort of turned upside down. Our normal source of funding, read what we do, pass it along, try some recipes. Yeah. Talk to people about what they eat. We really give us more ideas for the questions that the public wants answered. That's why we designed Swap meet and the vegan study with twins and the low fat low carb weight loss study. We love trying to answer the studies that the population has questions about so that we can provide the evidence that you need to look at it. We never designed the one perfect study that answers the whole question, but we're really happy to contribute what we do to the evidence base of nutrition and health.

[B]

I have one last question. What do you think was the biggest misconception about the twin study and why do you think it was so controversial?

[A]

Ah. Oh, good. I would love to deal with this one. So the biggest one was that we published the main paper and I malevolently left out the body composition data where the vegans lost muscle.

[B]

Oh, gosh.

[A]

So this wasn't true. So here's what happened. So we measured a lot of things in that study, and then the study was featured in the Netflix docu series and they featured the four pairs of twins that were in the movie because there were 18 other pairs of twins that weren't in the movie. And they showed them working out with Nimai Delgado, who is this totally ripped, buff, vegan, medal winning bodybuilder. I actually didn't have enough money. At some point I had to tell the producer, we can't measure everything. And I ran out of money. I don't have enough money to measure Dexa. This is the dual energy X ray absorbed geometry where you get lean muscle mass and body fat. And in the movie they show this and they say, wow, the vegans lost visceral fat, but they also lost more muscle. But they only show the results of two or three people. And I never saw the data, Louisa. And I never had the data. I actually told the producer, look, I don't even want to see those data. You're only looking at eight people. That's not enough to answer the question scientifically. If you want to do that on your own, go ahead. And when I saw it in the movie, I said, oh, my God, I can't believe you put it in the movie. We actually never saw those data. But people who saw the movie said, wait, I saw that guy. I saw that Twitter. He lost muscle. You manipulative son of a bitch. You cherry pick the good results for your paper and you left out the ones that didn't work your way. And my quick response is, never saw those data. Never had them. They have no adherence data to see if the twins really followed the exercises they were doing with Nemi Delgado. And I know why the producer kept it in the movie. I was kind of surprised because it didn't look very compelling. I know he kept it because then he could show Nimai exactly.

[B]

He could show his before and after results and get some clients along the way.

[A]

Nimai looked awesome. If you wanted. Oh, my God, could you be vegan and ripped? Yes, you can. So that's why he did it. But I get criticized for the few little bits of data he shared on the movie that weren't in our paper. So I'm happy to have a chance to address that. Thank you.

[B]

Yeah, we're going to we can address that again. But I know that you probably, if you're ever going to do another series after this, you probably know now a bit more than what you did before.

[A]

So firefighters, we're now doing 120 firefighters in San Francisco, and we're doing dexes on all of them.

[B]

Oh, dexes are the gold standard.

[A]

Half the firefighters go plant based and half the fire stay omnivorous.

[B]

Oh, I can't wait for that one. Well, we're definitely going to have you on for a part two. Christopher Gardner, thank you so much for being part of the Neuro Experience podcast.

[A]

Thanks, Luisa, for having me. This is a lot of fun.