How to Make Better Food Choices for Health & Longevity | Dr. Casey Means & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | Food is the molecular building blocks of the body.
00:00:06.000 | It is the cell-signaling functional molecules that tell our cells what to do.
00:00:12.280 | They act as transcription factors, epigenetic modifiers, cell-signaling pathway intermediates,
00:00:21.280 | and it's also, of course, the substrate to change what the microbiome does and the composition
00:00:26.000 | of the microbiome, which is basically a pharmacy inside our bodies to create different molecules
00:00:30.360 | that can affect our health.
00:00:31.840 | So food is certainly a calorie is a calorie from the concept of thermodynamics, but from
00:00:38.680 | the concept of molecular information, it has three massively important parts that are unavoidable
00:00:46.760 | for creating cellular health.
00:00:48.800 | So I would just say that that is the pillar that we can drill, be happy to drill into
00:00:52.780 | of like what do we really do to build as much metabolic health as possible.
00:00:58.360 | >>AJ: Yeah, I want to focus now, if you're willing, on food, not just macronutrients,
00:01:04.400 | proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, not just calories, although that as well, but things
00:01:08.800 | like timing, things like fasting, and micronutrients, which I think is a highly underexplored topic.
00:01:16.540 | So with respect to food, gosh, I feel like we've all been exposed to pretty much every
00:01:22.120 | variation of it's all calories in, calories out.
00:01:26.800 | And by the way, I believe in the laws of thermodynamics.
00:01:30.280 | So yes, total caloric load matters.
00:01:33.800 | Total energy expenditure matters, without question, within the framework of not consuming
00:01:40.820 | excess calories.
00:01:43.480 | There's a lot to explore, however.
00:01:45.760 | I can just say for myself, for what it's worth, I'm not very hungry until 11 a.m., noon or
00:01:51.800 | 10.
00:01:52.800 | I'm okay not eating until then, and just water, electrolytes, and caffeine does me just fine.
00:01:57.680 | I can exercise, et cetera.
00:01:58.840 | But once I start eating, I really enjoy eating, and I mostly like the proteins.
00:02:02.320 | I like meat and fish and eggs, and I like cheese and vegetables and carbohydrates and
00:02:07.240 | fruit and all of it.
00:02:08.240 | I like all the stuff.
00:02:09.240 | And I tend to like single or few ingredient foods.
00:02:12.360 | I just naturally do.
00:02:13.360 | So I've been lucky in that way.
00:02:16.000 | But I know a lot of people like sandwiches, processed foods, things that are combinations
00:02:22.520 | of ingredients.
00:02:23.800 | What do we know about kind of, I don't want to say optimal, but if one, we're going to
00:02:30.440 | explore different ways of eating for sake of adjusting these biomarkers in the right
00:02:34.360 | direction and improving metabolic health, is there kind of a generic jumping off point?
00:02:40.620 | Would most people, for instance, be wise to cut back on the total number of sugars or
00:02:46.620 | the total amount of sugar rather, perhaps reduce the amount of carbohydrate and replace
00:02:50.300 | it with some lean quality protein?
00:02:52.540 | I mean, are there generalizations that we can make, or is it really all just about not
00:02:57.140 | getting excessive calories and trying to get those calories from the most nutrient-rich
00:03:02.740 | sources?
00:03:03.740 | Well, just drilling in on two things you just said there.
00:03:05.460 | So one thing you said that was interesting was that you're lucky that you like all of
00:03:09.140 | those foods.
00:03:10.140 | And the second thing was, is it just about not getting excess calories?
00:03:14.100 | But I think what's interesting about both of those is that I would argue that the reason
00:03:18.580 | you like those foods is because you have given your body enough whole real foods that now
00:03:24.640 | everything in your biology, neurobiologically, your reward circuitry, your microbiome, your
00:03:31.780 | satiety hormone threshold, all of these are now basically creating a situation in which
00:03:37.140 | you like those foods.
00:03:38.740 | And then the caloric thing fits into that because the reason we're eating excess calories,
00:03:43.740 | the reason chronic nutrition is happening, and the reason we are quite literally in the
00:03:48.900 | United States eating ourselves to death for the first time in human history is because
00:03:55.740 | we're not eating real food.
00:03:58.220 | And we're eating 60% to 75% of our calories of ultra-processed, nutrient-depleted foods
00:04:06.900 | that fundamentally don't give our cells what they need.
00:04:12.380 | And a real premise that I think is so important to realize is that our cells are brilliant.
00:04:18.740 | And if the cells aren't getting what they actually need to function properly, they will
00:04:24.380 | drive you to eat until they get their needs met, unfortunately, because the ultra-processed
00:04:32.340 | food is designed to be highly addictive, and it's devoid of what the cells actually need
00:04:37.940 | for good function.
00:04:40.100 | We end up eating ourselves into a grave, and now almost 80% of Americans are overweight
00:04:45.720 | or obese.
00:04:46.720 | Close to 50% of the country is obese.
00:04:49.000 | We literally gloss over this as a culture.
00:04:50.820 | It has become so normal in such a short amount of time, but I always think about the fact
00:04:54.220 | that like there are really no other animal species in the world that have obesity and
00:05:00.980 | chronic disease epidemics.
00:05:03.180 | And they don't have social media.
00:05:05.180 | They don't have experts.
00:05:06.180 | They don't have PubMed.
00:05:07.180 | They don't have the FDA.
00:05:08.180 | They don't have the USDA.
00:05:09.180 | They don't have any of it.
00:05:10.380 | And they have somehow figured out a way to stay at a healthy weight and to not get heart
00:05:14.740 | disease, and it's because they're eating real food that meets the needs of their cells.
00:05:20.060 | And so I think to just boil that down, the root cause of the problem is that we have
00:05:25.380 | a toxic food supply that's no longer filled with the molecular information that our body
00:05:30.860 | needs to know to be satiated and to function properly.
00:05:35.620 | And so through the complex biology of satiety hormones and neurobiology and microbiome function,
00:05:43.300 | we are driven to eat so, so, so much more.
00:05:45.840 | So truly the jumping off point for anyone on the quest to better health is to eat as
00:05:53.620 | much real, unprocessed food from good soil as possible.
00:06:00.060 | Kind of really of any dietary philosophy they want, truly.
00:06:02.980 | I think if someone's eating real, unprocessed food from good soil who is plant-based or
00:06:08.460 | who is keto, they are going to have such a higher chance of meeting their body's actual
00:06:13.620 | fundamental needs.
00:06:14.740 | And the good thing about biomarker testing is they can track for themselves if they are
00:06:18.220 | having good cellular function with that strategy.
00:06:21.540 | There's been studies that have panned this out.
00:06:23.740 | We know that the more ultra-processed food you eat, the higher risk of obviously obesity
00:06:27.420 | but also chronic diseases are, but then of course there's an amazing study from Kevin
00:06:30.940 | Hall just recently where he basically locked people up at the NIH and for two weeks he
00:06:35.900 | had them eat ultra-processed food and for two weeks he had them eat real food.
00:06:39.940 | And people ate 7,000 more calories in the two-week period when they were eating ultra-processed
00:06:47.420 | food versus the unprocessed food.
00:06:49.860 | They were locked at the NIH?
00:06:51.100 | I mean...
00:06:52.100 | I've been to NIH quite a bit.
00:06:55.240 | It's great for a day job or a day visit.
00:06:56.900 | I don't know that I want to be locked there.
00:06:58.240 | That sounds like the Stanford prisoner experiment.
00:07:02.180 | I say this tongue-in-cheek and with such admiration for what he had to do, but I think it's so
00:07:06.060 | amusing that we have this totally frankenfood, toxic food system that's largely ultra-processed
00:07:13.060 | and it took amazing Kevin Hall to basically do an NIH-funded study where people, what
00:07:19.580 | I say by locked is that they were inpatients at the NIH and had unlimited access to food
00:07:27.960 | during each of those two-week interventions.
00:07:30.380 | So it was two weeks of ultra-processed food, two weeks of unprocessed or minimally processed
00:07:34.020 | food and they could eat whatever they wanted, as much as they wanted in both groups and
00:07:40.700 | then they would weigh every single bite that was left on their trays.
00:07:44.060 | They knew exactly, exactly how many calories they ate and literally just giving people
00:07:48.620 | this ultra-processed food, which is devoid of what our bodies need and therefore will
00:07:54.420 | drive people to eat more.
00:07:56.940 | They ate 500 calories more per day for a total of 7,000 calories more in that two weeks and
00:08:03.260 | they gained about two pounds and then lost two pounds in the unprocessed group, which
00:08:08.580 | makes sense, of course, because a pound is about 3,500 calories.
00:08:11.740 | So we have to do these kind of crazy studies just to prove what we kind of know is true,
00:08:17.500 | which is that this ultra-processed food environment that's cropped up over the past 50 years is
00:08:21.820 | an experiment that has failed.
00:08:23.980 | It has failed.
00:08:24.980 | You know, close to 45% of kids are overweight or obese now.
00:08:28.180 | Like it's not working and that really is the root cause.
00:08:32.100 | So I think a lot of food is about quality and how do we actually really meet the needs
00:08:38.740 | of the cells so that our satiety hormones get secreted and we naturally stop eating.
00:08:43.940 | Because just telling people, "Eat less calories, but eat whatever you want," that just doesn't
00:08:49.460 | work.
00:08:51.140 | We have to inspire the body to not want to eat excess calories, which we do by stimulating
00:08:59.220 | satiety hormones, helping the microbiome support that process, and then change our reward circuitry,
00:09:06.180 | which is done with nutrient-rich, the most nutrient-rich food we can possibly get.
00:09:11.620 | And that's why I mentioned the soil because our food is drastically depleted of nutrients.
00:09:16.220 | So when we look at that 70 metric tons of food we're eating in a lifetime, it's just
00:09:20.820 | fasting.
00:09:21.820 | That's the information for our body, what it's going to be built from, how it's going
00:09:25.260 | to function.
00:09:26.260 | Well, right now, 60% to 75% is ultra-processed, so we slash the value because the ultra-processing
00:09:32.180 | just like slashes the nutrients.
00:09:33.780 | We slash the value of that 70 metric tons and then we have crappy soil because our industrial
00:09:40.300 | agriculture system, which means the food, in some cases, has 70% less of key micronutrients
00:09:45.980 | in it.
00:09:46.980 | So that 70 metric tons, what's actually useful for our body becomes so much smaller.
00:09:52.900 | So what we want to do is basically expand the value of that substrate we're putting
00:09:58.140 | in the body, and that means real food, unprocessed, from good soil, meet the needs of the cells,
00:10:03.560 | naturally don't be hungry, maintain a healthy weight.
00:10:07.640 | And something I talk about is that we could talk about nutrition, the biochemistry of
00:10:12.220 | nutrition all day, but in my review of the biology and the biochemistry, there's five
00:10:18.540 | main things I think we can strive for in our food that can really help meet the needs of
00:10:23.060 | our cells.
00:10:25.020 | And when it really comes, there are obviously more things our body needs, but if we strive
00:10:29.340 | for these five things, we will ultimately, I think, eat a really healthy diet.
00:10:32.700 | And that is fiber, omega-3s, adequate healthy protein, a good amount of probiotics, and
00:10:40.700 | high antioxidant sources.
00:10:42.700 | And if we build our diet around knowing a few things in each of those categories that
00:10:47.660 | we really love and stock our kitchen with it and make our meals a mixing and matching
00:10:51.620 | of each of those components and we get a good amount of those, we will give the body a lot
00:10:58.020 | of what it needs to have mitochondrial health, reduce chronic inflammation, reduce oxidative
00:11:02.820 | stress.
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