So, without any pressure for it to be prescriptive, how do you approach eating given the knowledge that you have about food? I like to assume that you can sit down to a meal and not think about your AGRP neurons too much or any of that, but given that you have deep knowledge in this, has it shaped kind of how you think about food cravings your own?

You don't have to reveal what those are even if they exist. How you observe the eating behavior of others and yeah, how has knowledge shaped your feeding behavior? Well, I try not to think too much about my AGRP neurons when I'm eating. I would hope. I would hope. I think it gets, I think, you know, the circuitry is so complex and we're just beginning to see what's happening.

So, I wouldn't use that kind of information at this stage, where we're just beginning to prescriptively. But I think there is a set of basic recommendations from physiology and neuroscience, very simple things. You've probably talked about with people on your podcast before, for sort of shaping your diet to be healthier, to limit food intake.

So, one we've already talked about is limiting consumption of ultra-processed food, eating more whole foods for lots of different reasons. Because they're more satiating, because they don't have this sort of engineered palatability that causes you to overeat. Another big one, which I'm sure you've talked about with some of your guests, is protein consumption.

Making sure you get adequate protein consumption, both because there's this concept of protein leveraging. So, if you don't eat a minimum amount of protein, that's going to cause you to eat more calories just to try to achieve that minimum amount of protein. Also just because protein is more satiating and also because there's this idea of thermic effect of food.

And so, you basically burn more calories metabolizing protein than sugar or fat. How about consumption of fluids during meals? I've heard it said before that we're not supposed to consume too many fluids because it's going to dilute the enzymes that allow us to digest our food. I've heard other people say that's a complete myth.

That's a myth, I think. Humans don't have a perfect capacity to determine whether they're hungry or thirsty, and so drinking water will ensure you're not eating because you're thirsty. And there's no idea of diluting it, I don't think that meant. Distention itself, even though water provides a very limited distention signal, the expansion of your stomach and intestines is one important way that you terminate feeding.

And so, there is some component of that where you can get distention just from drinking water. I'm sorry I blurted it out. Interesting, because I didn't realize that fluid consumption only provides a limited signal for distention. It's not fluids, it's water. And so, the idea is that you can fill your stomach up with fluids, but the rate at which fluids empty out of your stomach depends on their calorie content.

So basically, if you drink water, it empties very rapidly into your intestine, and then goes through your intestine and is gradually absorbed. If you drink something like a glass of orange juice, it will empty much more slowly. And if you drink something that's really high in fat, really high in calories, it will empty extremely slowly over hours.

And that's because there's a negative feedback loop from the intestine that controls gastric emptying. So as those first nutrients leave your stomach and enter your intestine, that produces hormones that go back and then slow down the rate of gastric emptying. And the purpose for this is that you don't want nutrients entering the intestine too fast.

That's really unsafe. It feels very unpleasant, and it's just that your intestine can only metabolize nutrients so fast. And so, if there's calories, then it slows down gastric emptying a lot, but water just kind of goes through. What a beautiful system. There's regulation at every point, hypothalamus, brainstem, gut, the rate of emptying based on the difference between water and orange juice.

It's just awesome. Yeah. And that's part of the reason I think it's so hard to outsmart the system, right? Because these neurons are making predictions based on the sight and smell of food, but then the gut is doing its own thing. It's calculating it separately and relaying that information.

So at every step, there are these checks, basically, that are just confirming that what you thought happened the first time actually was really going on. And so, which makes sense, because it's so important for survival, these homeostatic systems. They're the product of so much natural selection. Thank you for tuning in to the Huberman Lab Clips channel.

If you enjoyed the clip that you just viewed, please check out the full-length episode by clicking here.