Food is the molecular building blocks of the body. It is the cell-signaling functional molecules that tell our cells what to do. They act as transcription factors, epigenetic modifiers, cell-signaling pathway intermediates, and it's also, of course, the substrate to change what the microbiome does and the composition of the microbiome, which is basically a pharmacy inside our bodies to create different molecules that can affect our health.

So food is certainly a calorie is a calorie from the concept of thermodynamics, but from the concept of molecular information, it has three massively important parts that are unavoidable for creating cellular health. So I would just say that that is the pillar that we can drill, be happy to drill into of like what do we really do to build as much metabolic health as possible.

>>AJ: Yeah, I want to focus now, if you're willing, on food, not just macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, not just calories, although that as well, but things like timing, things like fasting, and micronutrients, which I think is a highly underexplored topic. So with respect to food, gosh, I feel like we've all been exposed to pretty much every variation of it's all calories in, calories out.

And by the way, I believe in the laws of thermodynamics. So yes, total caloric load matters. Total energy expenditure matters, without question, within the framework of not consuming excess calories. There's a lot to explore, however. I can just say for myself, for what it's worth, I'm not very hungry until 11 a.m., noon or 10.

I'm okay not eating until then, and just water, electrolytes, and caffeine does me just fine. I can exercise, et cetera. But once I start eating, I really enjoy eating, and I mostly like the proteins. I like meat and fish and eggs, and I like cheese and vegetables and carbohydrates and fruit and all of it.

I like all the stuff. And I tend to like single or few ingredient foods. I just naturally do. So I've been lucky in that way. But I know a lot of people like sandwiches, processed foods, things that are combinations of ingredients. What do we know about kind of, I don't want to say optimal, but if one, we're going to explore different ways of eating for sake of adjusting these biomarkers in the right direction and improving metabolic health, is there kind of a generic jumping off point?

Would most people, for instance, be wise to cut back on the total number of sugars or the total amount of sugar rather, perhaps reduce the amount of carbohydrate and replace it with some lean quality protein? I mean, are there generalizations that we can make, or is it really all just about not getting excessive calories and trying to get those calories from the most nutrient-rich sources?

Well, just drilling in on two things you just said there. So one thing you said that was interesting was that you're lucky that you like all of those foods. And the second thing was, is it just about not getting excess calories? But I think what's interesting about both of those is that I would argue that the reason you like those foods is because you have given your body enough whole real foods that now everything in your biology, neurobiologically, your reward circuitry, your microbiome, your satiety hormone threshold, all of these are now basically creating a situation in which you like those foods.

And then the caloric thing fits into that because the reason we're eating excess calories, the reason chronic nutrition is happening, and the reason we are quite literally in the United States eating ourselves to death for the first time in human history is because we're not eating real food. And we're eating 60% to 75% of our calories of ultra-processed, nutrient-depleted foods that fundamentally don't give our cells what they need.

And a real premise that I think is so important to realize is that our cells are brilliant. And if the cells aren't getting what they actually need to function properly, they will drive you to eat until they get their needs met, unfortunately, because the ultra-processed food is designed to be highly addictive, and it's devoid of what the cells actually need for good function.

We end up eating ourselves into a grave, and now almost 80% of Americans are overweight or obese. Close to 50% of the country is obese. We literally gloss over this as a culture. It has become so normal in such a short amount of time, but I always think about the fact that like there are really no other animal species in the world that have obesity and chronic disease epidemics.

And they don't have social media. They don't have experts. They don't have PubMed. They don't have the FDA. They don't have the USDA. They don't have any of it. And they have somehow figured out a way to stay at a healthy weight and to not get heart disease, and it's because they're eating real food that meets the needs of their cells.

And so I think to just boil that down, the root cause of the problem is that we have a toxic food supply that's no longer filled with the molecular information that our body needs to know to be satiated and to function properly. And so through the complex biology of satiety hormones and neurobiology and microbiome function, we are driven to eat so, so, so much more.

So truly the jumping off point for anyone on the quest to better health is to eat as much real, unprocessed food from good soil as possible. Kind of really of any dietary philosophy they want, truly. I think if someone's eating real, unprocessed food from good soil who is plant-based or who is keto, they are going to have such a higher chance of meeting their body's actual fundamental needs.

And the good thing about biomarker testing is they can track for themselves if they are having good cellular function with that strategy. There's been studies that have panned this out. We know that the more ultra-processed food you eat, the higher risk of obviously obesity but also chronic diseases are, but then of course there's an amazing study from Kevin Hall just recently where he basically locked people up at the NIH and for two weeks he had them eat ultra-processed food and for two weeks he had them eat real food.

And people ate 7,000 more calories in the two-week period when they were eating ultra-processed food versus the unprocessed food. They were locked at the NIH? I mean... I've been to NIH quite a bit. It's great for a day job or a day visit. I don't know that I want to be locked there.

That sounds like the Stanford prisoner experiment. I say this tongue-in-cheek and with such admiration for what he had to do, but I think it's so amusing that we have this totally frankenfood, toxic food system that's largely ultra-processed and it took amazing Kevin Hall to basically do an NIH-funded study where people, what I say by locked is that they were inpatients at the NIH and had unlimited access to food during each of those two-week interventions.

So it was two weeks of ultra-processed food, two weeks of unprocessed or minimally processed food and they could eat whatever they wanted, as much as they wanted in both groups and then they would weigh every single bite that was left on their trays. They knew exactly, exactly how many calories they ate and literally just giving people this ultra-processed food, which is devoid of what our bodies need and therefore will drive people to eat more.

They ate 500 calories more per day for a total of 7,000 calories more in that two weeks and they gained about two pounds and then lost two pounds in the unprocessed group, which makes sense, of course, because a pound is about 3,500 calories. So we have to do these kind of crazy studies just to prove what we kind of know is true, which is that this ultra-processed food environment that's cropped up over the past 50 years is an experiment that has failed.

It has failed. You know, close to 45% of kids are overweight or obese now. Like it's not working and that really is the root cause. So I think a lot of food is about quality and how do we actually really meet the needs of the cells so that our satiety hormones get secreted and we naturally stop eating.

Because just telling people, "Eat less calories, but eat whatever you want," that just doesn't work. We have to inspire the body to not want to eat excess calories, which we do by stimulating satiety hormones, helping the microbiome support that process, and then change our reward circuitry, which is done with nutrient-rich, the most nutrient-rich food we can possibly get.

And that's why I mentioned the soil because our food is drastically depleted of nutrients. So when we look at that 70 metric tons of food we're eating in a lifetime, it's just fasting. That's the information for our body, what it's going to be built from, how it's going to function.

Well, right now, 60% to 75% is ultra-processed, so we slash the value because the ultra-processing just like slashes the nutrients. We slash the value of that 70 metric tons and then we have crappy soil because our industrial agriculture system, which means the food, in some cases, has 70% less of key micronutrients in it.

So that 70 metric tons, what's actually useful for our body becomes so much smaller. So what we want to do is basically expand the value of that substrate we're putting in the body, and that means real food, unprocessed, from good soil, meet the needs of the cells, naturally don't be hungry, maintain a healthy weight.

And something I talk about is that we could talk about nutrition, the biochemistry of nutrition all day, but in my review of the biology and the biochemistry, there's five main things I think we can strive for in our food that can really help meet the needs of our cells.

And when it really comes, there are obviously more things our body needs, but if we strive for these five things, we will ultimately, I think, eat a really healthy diet. And that is fiber, omega-3s, adequate healthy protein, a good amount of probiotics, and high antioxidant sources. And if we build our diet around knowing a few things in each of those categories that we really love and stock our kitchen with it and make our meals a mixing and matching of each of those components and we get a good amount of those, we will give the body a lot of what it needs to have mitochondrial health, reduce chronic inflammation, reduce oxidative stress.

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.