How to Reduce Your Food Cravings | Dr. Casey Means & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | One concept I have for food that really helps me is really thinking about the body's always
00:00:08.700 | trying to help me be satiated and trying to help reduce my cravings.
00:00:12.160 | I literally just have to give the body what it needs.
00:00:14.960 | I have to stimulate the body in a way that it will serve me in giving me satiety hormones
00:00:20.560 | to basically regulate my hunger.
00:00:22.360 | And again, with visuals I think it's so helpful.
00:00:25.440 | I think about these cells lining our small intestine that literally have nutrient sensors
00:00:31.200 | and literal receptors on the cell membrane in the luminal side of the gut that's facing
00:00:35.960 | all the food that are just sitting there waiting to bind with these things in our food that
00:00:41.960 | will stimulate the cell to make the satiety hormone that poof, effortlessly makes us not
00:00:46.760 | hungry, gets rid of that grip of attachment to cravings that all of us are so plagued
00:00:51.760 | by.
00:00:52.760 | And I think we have this intense conversation happening in society right now about GLP-1
00:00:59.400 | analogs and Ozempic and Menjara and all these things, GLP-1 agonists, but we rarely talk
00:01:05.680 | about the fact that we have nutrient sensing cells of the gut, the L cells of the gut,
00:01:10.800 | that when stimulated appropriately will make GLP-1.
00:01:14.220 | And when stimulated the way they want to be will secrete hordes of GLP-1 for us.
00:01:19.640 | And so how do we actually think about just literally giving the body what it needs to
00:01:23.560 | stimulate the satiety hormones?
00:01:25.040 | And the processed foods aren't giving us those things.
00:01:26.920 | You know, the things that are going to stimulate those cells – well, the things that will
00:01:33.360 | – I mean, this is kind of fascinating if you don't mind going down a little road.
00:01:36.320 | No, please.
00:01:37.320 | Yeah.
00:01:38.320 | Please.
00:01:39.320 | With the GLP-1 conversation, I feel like so missing from the conversation is the idea
00:01:43.640 | that like from a first principles perspective, there's three ways our body could make more
00:01:48.640 | GLP-1.
00:01:49.800 | We make more cells that make it, L cells of the gut.
00:01:54.000 | Each of those cells makes more GLP-1, and importantly, we can also inhibit the inactivator
00:02:00.480 | of GLP-1, which is an enzyme called DPP-4.
00:02:03.380 | So GLP-1 actually gets rapidly degraded by DPP-4 in the body.
00:02:08.060 | So if we can figure out how to inhibit DPP-4, we can raise our GLP-1 levels.
00:02:12.360 | What is DPP-4?
00:02:13.360 | It's an enzyme that breaks down GLP-1 rapidly.
00:02:15.920 | Got it.
00:02:16.920 | Thanks.
00:02:17.920 | I apologize.
00:02:18.920 | It's so fascinating.
00:02:19.920 | So how often have you seen in the headlines, "Oh, here's some strategies to inhibit
00:02:23.080 | your DPP-4."
00:02:24.080 | Never, because Ozempic is on track to be the highest grossing med in human history, and
00:02:29.960 | just like we talked about in the beginning of the episode, the whole industry, this $4
00:02:35.480 | trillion healthcare industry, is desperate for us to not understand how to do the things
00:02:41.320 | that drugs could do for us.
00:02:43.000 | So when we look at those three first principles approaches of how do we make more L cells,
00:02:47.480 | get them to produce more GLP-1 from each L cell, and then inhibit the breakdown through
00:02:51.120 | the inhibition of DPP-4, for the first one, we know that short-chain fatty acids, which
00:02:57.400 | of course are the byproduct of microbial fermentation of fiber in the diet, stimulates the differentiation
00:03:02.980 | of more L cells in the gut.
00:03:04.400 | So more short-chain fatty acids, more L cells.
00:03:06.840 | Can we translate that into support the gut microbiome?
00:03:09.620 | Eat more fiber.
00:03:10.620 | Eat more fiber.
00:03:11.620 | And we had Justin Sonnenberg from Stanford on, a world expert in gut microbiome, and
00:03:16.080 | he was a big proponent of, based on work he's done with Chris Gardner and others at Stanford,
00:03:22.280 | so happens, of ingesting one to three servings of low-sugar fermented foods each day.
00:03:29.040 | Things like sauerkraut, kimchi, again, low-sugar variety is probably best.
00:03:33.600 | Right.
00:03:34.600 | Not kombucha.
00:03:35.600 | Yeah.
00:03:36.600 | Maybe not.
00:03:37.600 | You said not kombucha?
00:03:38.600 | Yeah.
00:03:39.600 | Yeah.
00:03:40.600 | 'Cause that's gonna be like the highest sugar of the fermented foods, which people often
00:03:41.600 | go to, but now that's become soda.
00:03:42.600 | And often costly too.
00:03:43.600 | Yeah.
00:03:44.600 | And pretty costly.
00:03:45.600 | I love sauerkraut.
00:03:46.600 | Oh, yeah.
00:03:47.600 | Tim Ferriss had a great recipe for this in "The 4-Hour Chef."
00:03:49.240 | You have to be careful because you can create some unhealthy ferment.
00:03:53.640 | You have to do it the way he describes.
00:03:54.960 | So check out the recipe.
00:03:56.200 | It's online.
00:03:57.200 | Or you can buy sauerkraut and the brines, drinking the brine off the sauerkraut, seems
00:04:03.680 | to be good for the gut.
00:04:05.280 | That's such a great point, which is that ultimately we want the short-chain fatty acids, which
00:04:11.240 | is the medicine that the microbiome are making for us through the microbial fermentation
00:04:16.840 | process.
00:04:17.840 | And we can basically do that in three ways.
00:04:18.960 | One is we can eat more fiber, which is prebiotics.
00:04:21.920 | We can also eat more polyphenols because we're now learning that the microbiome actually processes,
00:04:26.880 | they ferment polyphenols from our, which is basically you'll find those in colorful fruits
00:04:32.060 | and vegetables, spices, teas, cocoa, things like that.
00:04:37.080 | So fermentation of polyphenols and fiber to short-chain fatty acids, which then we absorb.
00:04:43.040 | And then, like you just said, in a fermented food, the bacteria in that food will be making
00:04:49.360 | short-chain fatty acids by fermenting the food in there.
00:04:51.960 | And then if we drink that, we're getting the short-chain fatty acids directly.
00:04:54.740 | So that's the kimchi, sauerkraut, Greek yogurt, kvass, which I'm obsessed with, which is like
00:05:01.400 | low-sugar kombucha.
00:05:02.800 | It's like made with fermenting beets, basically.
00:05:04.760 | That's good stuff.
00:05:05.760 | It's such good stuff.
00:05:06.760 | Miso, natto.
00:05:07.760 | So that's one.
00:05:09.080 | That has been shown to differentiate more L cells in the gut.
00:05:12.040 | We also know that people with type 2 diabetes have much fewer L cells in the gut.
00:05:16.560 | And it's hard to know what the causality is there, but I think a safe assumption is like
00:05:22.080 | if we keep our blood sugar under better control and sort of stay out of that diabetic range,
00:05:25.920 | it probably lends itself.
00:05:26.920 | I don't know what the chicken and the egg is there, but blood sugar stability, more L
00:05:30.680 | cell differentiation.
00:05:31.680 | And then actually, ginseng has been shown to improve L cell differentiation.
00:05:38.480 | So that's just sort of one set of things.
00:05:40.880 | And I don't think the dose on ginseng has been settled, but very high antioxidant component
00:05:47.960 | plant.
00:05:48.960 | When we look at actually stimulating more GLP-1, you've talked about your Ramate, I
00:05:53.160 | think, having like a mild effect on GLP-1, but there's actually a lot of other things
00:05:59.320 | in the literature.
00:06:00.320 | Protein, of course, very potently stimulates these nutrient receptor cells and specifically
00:06:05.680 | like valine and glutamine seem to have a potent stimulatory effect on GLP-1.
00:06:11.400 | So you're gonna find that in like meat and turkey and eggs and things like that.
00:06:16.680 | What are your thoughts on supplementing L-glutamine?
00:06:19.280 | It's controversial.
00:06:20.280 | I know that some people do it in an effort to relieve leaky gut, but there aren't any
00:06:25.980 | randomized control trials for that.
00:06:27.820 | So depending on one stance on what's required for kind of a threshold for adopting something,
00:06:36.240 | some people will say that's crazy.
00:06:37.600 | Other people really swear by supplementing L-glutamine.
00:06:40.480 | Maybe it's through this route of increasing L-cells that some of the gut relief might
00:06:45.760 | exist.
00:06:46.760 | I guess we'd have to explore it.
00:06:47.920 | So that's speculative, folks.
00:06:49.320 | So this is interesting.
00:06:51.080 | These are ways to increase the cells that then make GLP-1.
00:06:54.080 | So fiber, prebiotic, probiotic fiber, and fermented foods.
00:06:57.720 | Antioxidants, lowering blood sugar, ginseng.
00:07:00.420 | So those are kind of the L-cell ones.
00:07:02.400 | The actual secretion of more GLP-1, one of the most potent ones and the study that looks
00:07:09.580 | at this, like the bar graphs are very clearly statistically significant, lots of asterisks,
00:07:14.720 | is actually thylakoids.
00:07:15.720 | Thylakoids.
00:07:16.720 | Tell me more about thylakoids.
00:07:17.720 | Thylakoids are so fascinating.
00:07:18.720 | Thylakoids are actually a structure in plants that are part of the chloroplasts.
00:07:25.520 | So chloroplasts, and this also is fascinating because chloroplasts are basically the plant
00:07:29.400 | version of mitochondria, essentially.
00:07:32.560 | And thylakoids are a molecule in the chloroplasts.
00:07:35.280 | And there's actually been research that shows that when you eat about 100 grams of spinach,
00:07:40.840 | which gives you 5 grams of straight thylakoid over 12 weeks daily, it led to a significant
00:07:49.760 | increase in GLP-1.
00:07:50.760 | And again, I don't remember the exact, it was two or three-fold higher secretion.
00:07:58.620 | So that's a direct stimulatory effect of the L-cells.
00:08:02.040 | And so this equates to 3.5 ounces of spinach a day, which is like nothing.
00:08:06.760 | So just getting those...
00:08:07.760 | Raw spinach or cooked spinach?
00:08:08.760 | I don't think it actually...
00:08:11.040 | It might have said in the methods, but I would imagine raw because you want to get those
00:08:16.400 | undenatured thylakoids in the gut.
00:08:19.600 | So just kind of another...
00:08:21.760 | Actually thylakoids do a lot of other interesting stuff.
00:08:23.840 | They inhibit lipase in the gut and so actually help more fat get down to the distal small
00:08:28.920 | bowel and promote satiety.
00:08:30.480 | So this is one of the reasons why you talk about, oh, the people who eat all these healthy
00:08:34.360 | foods and greens, they're less hungry.
00:08:36.000 | It's like, it's biochemistry.
00:08:37.920 | There's stuff happening in there that is making the hunger signals go down through things
00:08:43.860 | like inhibiting lipase, improving GLP-1 secretion.
00:08:48.320 | So other things for GLP-1 secretion, the thylakoids, also fiber has been shown, specific amino acids,
00:08:54.200 | so high-protein foods, things that involve a lot of valine and glutamine, green tea,
00:08:59.320 | and specifically the ECGC that is one of the compounds in green tea, that's been shown
00:09:07.120 | to stimulate GLP-1, curcumin.
00:09:10.440 | So there's several things that are all in that whole food, basically things you would
00:09:16.080 | associate with a healthy diet, but we actually know they stimulate GLP-1.
00:09:19.440 | So those are all things I try to include in my diet.
00:09:21.720 | And the last one is inhibition of DPP-4.
00:09:24.160 | And that one, there's just actually, when you look at the research, there's some kind
00:09:27.480 | of random foods that tend to inhibit DPP-4, black beans, Mexican oregano, other forms
00:09:34.800 | of oregano, rosemary, guava, and I wrote this one down because it's a word I hadn't seen
00:09:41.440 | very much before I started digging into this, but muricetin, which is found in berries,
00:09:45.280 | cranberries, and peppers, and Swiss chard.
00:09:48.120 | So all that is to say, ultimately, many of us are gripped by cravings.
00:09:56.040 | And the idea of just not being constantly driven to eat more, which I would argue that
00:10:05.000 | about 80% of Americans are, feels really hard to overcome.
00:10:09.020 | But a lot of it is literally just communicating to your cells in a clear way through food
00:10:15.240 | to help you be satiated.
00:10:17.520 | And the science can show us how to do this.
00:10:19.600 | And a lot of it comes down to eating, essentially, what you were talking about, how you eat,
00:10:24.720 | protein, healthy sources with nutrient density, and lots of colorful fruits, vegetables, spices,
00:10:35.240 | herbs, things like that.
00:10:37.800 | Thank you for tuning in to the Huberman Lab Clips channel.
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