The Uncontroversial Truth About Nutrition
When it comes to nutrition, it seems like we disagree about nearly everything: carbs, sugar, fat... even fruit. But, it turns out, there's actually a lot that the entire scientific community agrees on. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Christopher Gardner about nutrition science, what we've gotten wrong, and more importantly, what we've gotten right. It turns out, nutrition may not be as complicated as we make it seem.
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Guests
Christopher Gardner, PhD is a professor of Medicine at Stanford Prevention Research Center. His research focus is on nutrition science, studying the health benefits of dietary patterns, such as vegetarian diets, soy products and other popular weight loss diets. Check out his socials and research below!
Twitter | YouTube | Publications
Key Takeaways
Initial research suggested a link between cholesterol, saturated fat intake, and heart disease.
This leads the first dietary guidelines in the United States to advise, among other things, reduction of animal products like meat, eggs, and butter.
However, due to various lobbies, the emphasis was instead placed on dietary fat and cholesterol, rather than the food that contained these nutrients. This creates the “low-fat” era.
Nutrient-based advice can be taken advantage of by processed food manufacturers because they can simply re-engineer food to fit the new criteria.
The “low-fat” fad leads to a massive increase in refined carbohydrates and sugar in the American diet.
The Lipid hypothesis (the theory that dietary fat and dietary cholesterol are bad) turns out to be a vast oversimplification, and in many ways totally false. Dietary cholesterol, for example, for the vast majority of people has no effect on blood cholesterol.
1980-2000: Fat percentage decreases from 35% to 30%, but caloric intake increases by 500 calories per day, mostly coming from low-quality carbohydrates. This leads to different health issues than heart disease, like diabetes.
This prompts the low-carb fads like Atkins or keto.
Bottom line: When both diets are “high quality” (meaning lots of whole foods) low-carb or low-fat doesn’t really matter. It’s whichever you find more sustainable and enjoyable.
Dr. Christopher Gardener gives us an ultimate consensus on the ideal diet that everyone – even the vegans and Keto people – can agree on. Here’s his graphic.
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Juna Hey, guys, it's Yuna, and I have a favor to ask you if you're enjoying this show, if we're bringing you any sort of value, it would just be super awesome if you could help us out and go to wherever you get your podcast to give us a five star rating and review. Basically, this tells the algorithm that the show is good and it helps other people find us. Thank you so much in advance. And now to the show. Food We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, home of Full Plate Living. Okay, Eddie, I have a question for you.
Eddie Ask me anything.
Juna Okay. When you think about the world of nutrition. Yeah. What are some of the words that come to mind?
Eddie Tribal.
Juna Yeah.
Eddie Contentious disagreement. Yeah. It's a food fight, huh?
Juna Exactly. It just seems like a whole lot of fighting and arguing about types of fat and grams of carbohydrates. But what does nutrition science actually say about all these disagreements? Where did the dietary guidelines even come from? And do we actually disagree on that much? That is what we're going to talk about today. I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips.
Juna And you're listening to Food, we Need to Talk. The only podcast that has been scientifically proven to make everybody agree on absolutely everything just by listening. Today's guest is,
Christopher Gardner I'm Christopher Gardner. I have a Ph.D. in nutrition science, and I am a professor of medicine at Stanford University.
Juna So let's dive in to the history of dietary guidelines for a second. Specifically, how we get to the narrative fat is bad. Eddie , would you believe that this story goes all the way back to rabbits in a lab?
Eddie Rabbits? I thought we were all about rats in this podcast.
Juna Eddy We do not discriminate between furry little things. On this podcast, we include all furry things. So yes, we're actually going to be talking about rabbits.
Christopher Gardner So it really goes back a really long way to rabbits eating cholesterol, which is bizarre because rabbits eat greens and leafy things. They don't eat cholesterol. But this guy Russian guy, Aniskov.
Juna Anichkov
Christopher Gardner I can't remember how to pronounce his name did these fascinating studies and said okay look. Turns out there's an animal model, the rabbit. We can feed them stuff. Rabbits can practically look at cholesterol and get heart disease. Let's cut open their arteries and see what---Oh, my God. Their arteries are full of cholesterol. Wow. That's the thing that's impeding the flow of blood. And we're seeing a huge rise in heart attacks. Let's see. So where would humans get it? Cholesterol is always an animal foods, it's never in plant foods.
Juna But researchers identified that animal foods were super high in saturated fat and usually saturated fat and cholesterol travel together, they come in, appear in animal foods.
Christopher Gardner You could even go the other way and say it looks like fiber is protective and these animal products are devoid of fiber. They don't have fiber. Wow. And as we've seen a shift in global economy and food supplies, it used to be that people would eat meat this often and now they're eating it more often. And now it's in fast food restaurants and it's super accessible and inexpensive. Hmm. Okay. So mechanistically, epidemiologically, from a cardiovascular point of view, it sure looks like these animal foods, because of the cholesterol, because of the saturated fat, because of the absence of fiber, are contributing to this.
Eddie So we have rabbits who are herbivores being fed animal products and developing high cholesterol and heart disease. And with that and some other epidemiologic data, we think, well, there's probably a link here.
Juna So in 1977, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs say that ten times fast, led by Senator George McGovern, recommended dietary goals for the American people.
Eddie The initial draft recommended consume only as much energy as you expend. Imagine if we all did that.
Juna Easily.
Eddie Eat more naturally occurring sugars. Okay. Sounds good. Consume more fruits and vegetables.
Juna Right.
Eddie And go easy on the eggs and butter.
Juna So these are all pretty straightforward food based recommendations. But,
Christopher Gardner The dietary guidelines, folks, the USDA who represented the Cattlemen's Board and the pork board and the egg board and the poultry board said, well, y'know, it's not quite said that way. Let's say eat low fat. And when you want to eat animal products, choose the lean animal products. Why lean? Because they're low in fat. Why fat? Oh, because fat is what we're demonizing. We're not actually demonizing foods that would be bad for somebody's pocketbook.
Eddie So the science at the time seems straightforward, but the lobbyists, well, they're doing their jobs and they never let anything get passed that makes them look bad.
Juna What's really interesting about dietary guidelines is that contrary to what you might think, it's not just about what the science says. It's just as much about what the lobbyists want and what the public is going to understand.
Eddie Right Juna. It's much easier to understand recommendations around a food. You could see it. You could touch it. You could taste it.
Juna Right.
Eddie But it quickly gets squishy when the discussions around nutrients.
Christopher Gardner If you had asked the scientists, they said, oh my God, it's more complicated. You're eating this instead of that. It's actually not the total fat, it's the saturated fat. Fiber probably plays a role in that's in plant foods. So the absence of one is the presence of the other. And in the end it got dumbed down to eat low fat. And that was a misinterpretation of what the science was at it wasn't completely inconsistent with it, but it was very much an oversimplification.
Juna So do you know what happened after these guidelines came out?
Eddie Well, I was actually there. Well, let's go ahead and play the clips for those that weren't.
Food Advertisements They said we couldn't create a low fat ice cream delicious enough to be called Haagen-Dazs, but we did it. Introducing Reduced Fat Oreo twist twist reduced fat Oreo less fat loads of taste. These Fleishman Margarine has zero cholesterol, low saturated fat FLEISCHMAN Margarine. Because your heart is in your hands.
Eddie Focusing on nutrients rather than the food hands, processed food manufacturers, a golden opportunity because they can engineer processed foods to have whatever nutrients are in vogue.
Christopher Gardner And so the folks who are making the cook cakes, the cookies, the sauces, the dessert things, they can say, oh, here's some indulgent foods. People seem to like these, but won't they like the more if the label says fat, free, sugar free, low sodium, right? And so when it was very nutrient based, it was kind of easy to make a claim on a label that your product had the absence of a vilified nutrient or the presence of a glorified nutrient. You could stick fiber in it, you could stick a plant estrogen in it, you could stick antioxidants in it. And it was still cookies and cupcakes.
Juna So this is where we're at. Americans are told to cut down on their fat consumption. Food manufacturers change their formulation to reflect that. So what do you think happens?
Christopher Gardner So we actually did see somewhat of a decrease in heart disease. And it's hard to say if that was because of changes in diet or new drugs, new diagnoses, new procedures, new things like that.
Eddie Okay, so a modest decrease in heart disease may be due to better treatments. But the real fascinating part comes when you look at the American diet overall as it's changed throughout the 20th century.
Christopher Gardner Protein has stayed completely constant the whole time. Fat intake has crept up consistently the whole time. There is a spike in carbohydrate intake going up right about the 1980s right then. And so this is fascinating if you really put this in, this kind of historical perspective. Are we talking grams or are we talking percent? Because in percent fat the US diet probably dropped from 35 to 30% fat. The grams of fat actually continued to go up modestly. That whole time, they never dropped.
Juna Whoa, whoa, whoa. So let's just look at these numbers for a second, because it's kind of confusing here. Eddie, I know you love when we look at the numbers. So we are told to decrease our fat.
Eddie Right.
Juna And as a proportion, we actually do that. Our fat goes from 35% to 30%. Uh huh. But our grams of fat are going up?
Eddie Well, that's because, in absolute terms, Americans from 1980 to the end of the 20th century actually increased our caloric intake on average by 500 calories per day. And yes, fat went up a little.
Christopher Gardner But what was interesting was how much faster there was a rise in carbohydrate intake. And the carbohydrate intake, I promise, was not vegetables and legumes. It was in added sugars and refined grains, which we found out at that time. If you refine the grains and do all the bread products and put them on a shelf, they have a longer shelf life. And so while fat gram intake is slowly creeping up. Grams of carbohydrate intake is going up faster. And so we can say, Oh, this is the low fat era. People are eating low. They weren't they were never eating low fat. They were just eating higher, crappy carb and patting themselves on the back. And that's probably how we got ourselves into a lot of trouble.
Juna A big part of this was the old American icon, the SSB.
Eddie The SSB?
Juna Oh, yeah. So that's this new nickname I've come up with for sugar sweetened beverages. I just thought it kind of had a ring to it.
Eddie Got it.
Christopher Gardner First there was soda.
Food Advertisements For the times of your life. And the thing to do is Coke is right there with you. Coke is it! When you want to feel refreshed!
Christopher Gardner Then there was power drinks and Red Bull and monster drink and Gatorade.
Food Advertisements Gatorade is first aid to get your body what it's thirsty for.
Christopher Gardner Which shouldn't athletes have water? No. They need to have a lot of electrolyte with their water. Should there be some sugar in there? Not really. But let's put sugar in there.
Eddie Well, this is also the era of the HFCS.
Juna Eddie. What?
Eddie Oh, I thought I would have my own nickname for high fructose corn syrup.
Juna I don't know about that one. I know that one's going to stick.
Eddie It is a little sticky, actually. Well, either way, high fructose corn syrup is sweet like sugar, but it's also cheap. So if something is cheap and makes things taste good, throw it in.
Juna Plus, it's no secret fat makes things taste good. We love fat. So if you're taking fat out of something, you have to add something else in to compensate and make it taste good. And that thing was sugar.
Christopher Gardner And so you can actually, as a food industry, put more sugar into your tomato sauce, into your salad dressing, into something else, we think. Why would anyone put sugar in this? Oh, for the palatability. Oh, my God. Americans have this incredible palate where they love sugar. Let's just sneak it in all over the place. And as they did that, they were adding calories.
Eddie So we have to address the elephant in the room here.
Juna Okay. Which one?
Eddie Well, there are downstream effects of eating that many more calories on a daily basis. And we'll talk about that right after this break.
Eddie Food We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, the home of Full Plate Living. Full Plate Living helps you add more whole plant based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with apples bean strawberries and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes. Full plate living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers and better blood sugar management. Best of all, Full Plate Living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at fullplateliving.org.
Eddie And we're back.
Juna So where we left off, Americans had been told the simplified message, fat is bad. And this message didn't exactly cause a decrease in fat consumption. Right around the 1980s, we saw an explosion of sugar sweetened beverages that SSBs refined carbohydrates and sugars and a whole lot of, quote unquote, low fat foods. Bottom line, people were eating a lower proportion of fat, but they were eating 500 calories more a day.
Eddie Well, if we're eating more food than we used to, to the tune of 500 calories on average a day, we're going to experience weight gain and diseases associated with excess weight.
Christopher Gardner So the actually the big thing that happened in the 1980s is that's when it became clearer and clearer that we were experiencing an obesity epidemic. And from a disease perspective, type two diabetes was right on the heels of that. And so as you looked at the incidence of new cases of diabetes, type two diabetes in particular, which makes up about 95% of all cases, it was really a response to what happens to metabolism when you gain weight.
Juna Now we can kind of see this shift. There is an increased incidence of metabolic diseases.
Eddie Like diabetes.
Juna Right. And they're much more visible.
Christopher Gardner You can't actually see heart disease or cancer in your neighbor. Right. That's all internal. You can see the increase in weight and you can see people taking shots of insulin. And so it became very visible that our nutrition was going awry here because of the increase in weight, because of the rapidly growing rates of diabetes. Very interestingly and appropriately, the focus came more on carbs.
Eddie Aha. And this is how we've gotten to the low carb craze that seems to be more popular today. At first with Atkins in the early 2000s. Right. And then on to Keto today, the.
Juna Genesis of Keto.
Christopher Gardner What is diabetes? It is a condition where you have a hard time managing the glucose in your body. What's the main source of glucose? Carbs. Oh, this is when the public did this whiplash that. Oh, wait, it's not low fat. They were wrong the whole time. It was low carb. No, they weren't wrong. It's just it's the oh, it's the way the food industry responded.
Eddie You can hear the frustration in Professor Gardner's voice there. You know, hindsight is always 2020. I got that. When we look back, it can really look like the public health message was corrupted by the lobbying for big food, meat, dairy and sugar beyond how the food industry responded. Nutrition research is just not that simple.
Juna While it turns out feeding rabbits, cholesterol, it actually can't really be generalized to humans. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I know. Right. Like a big shocker. This goes back to the original uses of nutrition science, which was first used to solve the problem that has plagued humanity for a lot longer than overeating, and that is under nutrition. The first applications of nutrition science were actually used to address the diseases that came from certain vitamin deficiencies.
Eddie So that's the stuff I learned in medical school.
Juna Wait, I thought you said you didn't learn any nutrition in medical school.
Eddie Well, we did this at least. We had to know which vitamin deficiency caused which disease. Not enough vitamin D. Well, you get rickets. Not enough niacin. You get pellagra.
Eddie Iron.
Juna Anemia.
Eddie Vitamin C?
Juna Scurvy.
Eddie Small historical note. Cue the music. Perhaps the first controlled experiment was introducing fresh fruit to British sailors way back in the 18th century to avoid scurvy. It worked on the ships where the limes or other fresh fruit were given to the sailors they lived. And the boats that didn't get the fresh fruit. Well, they didn't live. The British sailors to this day are called limes.
Juna Wow. Guys, I loved that small historical note from Eddie. Thank you so much for that.
Eddie All right. So back to testing whether or not vitamin C cures scurvy or iron cures anemia is really kind of straightforward. No one has to change what they eat. You just give some of them a placebo or a vitamin C pill and see if it works. And bada bing boom, you have your results.
Eddie Well, the health problems of today are not quite as straightforward as vitamin C pills.
Christopher Gardner The whole world of nutrition science has really shifted to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and the problems of being overweight. And those outcomes in and of themselves other than weight are very long term outcomes.
Eddie If you want to study things like diabetes, cancer and heart disease, we're going to be here for a while.
Christopher Gardner And if you wanted it to change your diet, you have to say, I have the scientific curiosity here. Can you either totally avoid meat or eat meat every day just for like 20 or 30 years? And I kind of need about 10,000 others of you to do this because not everybody is going to have a heart attack in the next 20 or 30 years. And I need enough of you to do that for me to publish my paper.
Juna Eddie, are you going to volunteer as tribute?
Eddie Do I get to decide which group I'm in, whether I get to eat meat or not?
Juna Eddie No, that's the whole point of it being a randomized controlled trial. Hello. Also, we don't just need to test one food. We need to test an entire dietary pattern.
Christopher Gardner It's more like, Oh, should I go vegan or paleo or Keto or Mediterranean?
Juna And then what about the quality of each of these dietary patterns?
Christopher Gardner There's actually isn't one way to be Mediterranean. I know crappy vegans and healthy vegans. I know Keto people who don't even understand keto and they're doing it the wrong way, but they say they're keto.
Eddie Also, we need to eat a certain amount of food every day. If the study asks you to cut something out.
Eddie Then you're going to need to add something in in order to stay alive. Am I right?
Eddie Uh huh. And if we ask you to add something new to your diet.
Juna Then presumably one would be taking something out. Presumably. Mm hmm.
Eddie It gets very confusing to determine if the effect of any diet is from what's being removed versus what's being added. Or maybe a combination of both.
Christopher Gardner My two favorite things are instead of what and with what. Anytime, says Professor Gardner, Should I eat this? Well, instead of what? And with what? I know that you think eggs are good and you want to have them today. So are you having eggs, sausage and bacon? Are you having a veggie omelet with salsa and avocado on top?
Juna Also, there are certain studies. They are rare, but they're out there where we can see exactly how much people eat because we basically lock them in a lab for 30 days and we measure all the food that goes into their mouth. But the vast majority of studies people are basically left on their own. Out in the wild.
Eddie Out in the wild. Sounds like your hunting and gathering, but it's really more like surviving the food court at the mall, huh?
Juna Right. If you're asked to stick to a diet like low fat, we all know how hard it is to actually stick to a diet. And this makes a lot of study findings just a lot less conclusive.
Christopher Gardner Or the instructions clear. How good was the adherence? It's real life. So it's important actually to see the real life perspective. So there is an aspect of generalizability that's an advantage of doing that kind of study. But then to go back and say the low fat group didn't do any better and so low fat doesn't work. It's not really fair.
Juna If people did not actually follow low fat. So people will follow a study protocol maybe for the first year, maybe they'll keep following it for two years. But seven years, ten years down the line, the people who were told to eat low fat, they're basically eating the same thing as the people who were told nothing. So how do you interpret results on a study where everybody is basically eating the same thing?
Eddie It's moments like this that I'm so glad that I'm not in charge of a nutrition research. You know, exercise is just so much more straightforward, right? I mean, on one hand, you can understand why the public is so frustrated if the headlines always seem like they're changing. On the other hand, it just seems like the problems we're trying to solve today are a lot more complicated than they used to be.
Christopher Gardner When we're trying to do this science, if we're very reductionist and isolationist, we're really good at answering the question. But those aren't the interesting questions anymore. Nobody's really that interested in vitamin C and scurvy or niacin pellagra.
Juna Hey, hey. Some people are really interested in scurvy. Okay. And you looked up a whole anecdote for us. Come on.
Eddie All right. Well, but what people really want to know today is how they could avoid getting diabetes like their parents, how they could live healthier for longer?
Juna Yes. So we get it. Nutrition research is very hard. Chronic diseases are very complicated. But contrary to what the media may portray, it actually turns out there is a lot. In fact, dare I say a majority of nutrition research that almost everyone agrees on. Professor Gardner has a great graphic for this, which we will link to in our show notes. Food. We need to talk. But we're going to go through an auditory description right now.
Christopher Gardner So I have drawn the center of a circle with a few things, and it says more vegetables and more whole foods, less added sugar, less refined grain and less processed food. So I cannot think of any group that disagrees with that, including what I think are the two most polar opposites in the entire nutrition world, the ketogenic fanatics and the low fat vegan fanatics. They would all say more vegetables, more whole foods, less added sugar, less refined grain, less processed foods, even they would agree on that.
Eddie Well, you're not going to get an argument out of me. I think increasing vegetables and lowering ultra processed foods is something we mention in almost every single episode of this show.
Juna All right, we're on a roll. Let's keep it going. What are other things we agree on?
Christopher Gardner And my next outer shell of agreement, I have beans.
Juna And of course, you're going to hear a very vocal few voices on the Internet say something like.
Christopher Gardner Oh, my God, but the beans are lectins. But there are so many cool things in beans other than lectins that if you wanted to take the net benefit, even if there was a downside to Lectins and I don't really think there is, the benefits far outweigh that. And my next category is fruits.
Juna Again, a very loud minority.
Christopher Gardner Oh, my God. Fruits have sugar. Okay, but wait. It's in a food matrix, and you actually absorb the sugar a lot slower than you would from added sugars. So the sugar that is in fruit is not really the same thing as added sugar and fruits have lots of nutrients in them and they are fiber. So that's pretty good. And then my next one is nuts.
Juna A few cuckoos on the Internet.
Eddie These are the nuts.
Christopher Gardner Oh, my God. That's fat. Yeah. Yes. But it's mostly unsaturated fat and a little bit of nuts on some kind of dish. I put them on my salad all the time. I put on my steel, cut oats in the morning. For the most part, everybody agrees on nuts. Okay, how about eggs? Oh, eggs have cholesterol. Oh, we're going to die.
Juna Contrary to what the rabbit studies from the 1950s would have us believe, there's actually very little research connecting dietary cholesterol to the cholesterol in our blood. Plus.
Christopher Gardner If you're thinking of my instead of what question, I'm pretty sure eggs for most people bring up a breakfast dish. Not always, but for the most part. And the classic American breakfast is a refined grain breakfast cereal in a box with added sugar in it.
Food Advertisements And we heard you were wishing for something to eat, something delicious, something sweet. And here's a treat that can't be beat sugar crisp it's fun to eat.
Christopher Gardner And so I'd take the eggs any day over that.
Eddie Darn it, we just lost. Captain Crunch has a sponsor.
Juna Mayday, mayday.
Christopher Gardner And the last one in my category here would be fish. And the vegetarians are gonna say, Oh, my God, fish, have a face. No, please don't kill the fish. Yes, they do have a face and they have omega threes and they've got unsaturated fat. And if they're raised and cut properly, they can be a great source of nutrition. So my little extra circle there was the beans and the fruits and the nuts and the eggs and the fish where almost everybody would agree that those are good sources. I don't really know any health professions, say, oh, my God, they're getting too much of those.
Eddie Oh, my gosh, do my ears deceive me, is this a consensus about foods?
Juna Can you believe it? I hope no one was operating any heavy machinery during this time that was dangerous.
Eddie We should have done a trigger warning.
Juna I know.
Eddie You know, you can find people online or entire books written about why any one of those things is going to kill you. I mean, there are people online right now saying it's bad to eat certain vegetables. But the truth of the matter is, those people are a tiny, tiny portion of the, quote unquote experts. And the vast majority of real experts agree on most of the fundamental parts of a healthy diet.
Juna To circle back to our original topic here, first we had the low fat craze, then we had the low carb craze. So Professor Gardner decided to test these two diets head to head. And his basic question was, was there a genetic factor that predisposed some people to do better on one versus the other. But one important thing was that he wanted both conditions to be high quality diets.
Eddie Right. To do a scientifically rigorous study, you have to avoid potential bias in the investigators who may want to show that their favorite diet is the healthier one by using higher quality food for their preferred diet.
Juna Yeah, that's not very fair or objective. Professor Gardner wanted to give both diets a fair shot, making them full of nutritious whole foods. And the results.
Christopher Gardner At the end of the day, there wasn't a predisposing factor that could predicted differential success. We were actually shocked, given what we have read in the literature. I was a little disappointed and somewhat surprised because I thought, This is so cool. I could go down in history as helping move the the issue of personalized precision nutrition forward. And I, I didn't but a fascinating thing happened is they got a ton of love from social media, from colleagues and like, oh, look at this, you could eat either way. And Professor Gardner, what you do is you make them both good diets, so you kind of gave them equal footing, one versus the other. And it gives people more choice.
Juna So the overall message goes, yeah, they both work low carb, low fat, high carb, high fat, whatever you want to call, whatever you're doing as long as you're doing it in a healthy way.
Eddie Again, it seems like the concept we keep coming back to is food quality. Prioritize what works for you, what makes you feel satiated, not restricted, and is sustainable. And people were stoked to see these results because it showed there's not one right answer.
Christopher Gardner They should get rid of their added sugar and the refined grain and they should eat more whole foods and vegetables. And you could do that in a low fat and a low carb way. And even though you don't know what the predisposing factor is, if somebody wasn't doing so well, one way they could try the other and not be vilified by their friends and family saying, Oh, my God, you're doing that awful diet. No, no, no, no, no. There's a study out there that says you can do this in more than one way.
Juna The bottom line is everybody and every-body is different and responds differently.
Christopher Gardner In fact, you know, we still get the same variability. As always some of the 600 people lost 20, 30, 40 pounds some gain five or 10 pounds in a weight loss study. They gain five or 10 pounds.
Eddie So here are some great advice from Professor Gardner on the best diet.
Christopher Gardner Eat the foundational diet, get all the main things right that I talked about in my inner circle and maybe the outer circle and then biohack. Try some different things for yourself and be satiated and in particular make sure that some joy and pleasure is there in your food, because food should be joyful and pleasurable and doesn't have to be-- I'm forced to do this, I have to, No food is social and so many other angles like that. So I think you should be able to find out something that works for your budget and socially and culturally, if you could stick to that diet, that's the diet that's going to work best for you.
Juna And what a great note to end this episode on. If you guys want to see more of Professor Gardner, he is @gardnerphd on Twitter and he has a ton of amazing lectures and videos on YouTube. We also have link to his graphics on our website foodweneedtotalk.com. You can find us @foodweneedtotalk on Instagram. You can find me @theofficialjuna on Instagram and JunaGjata on YouTube and Tik Tok you can find Eddie riding his commuter bike to and from work. Food We Need to Talk is a production of PRX.
Eddie Our producer is Morgan Flannery.
Juna Claire Carlander is our associate producer and Tommy Bazarian is our mix engineer.
Eddie Jocelyn Gonzalez is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Juna Food We Need to Talk was co-created by Carey Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me Juna Gjata.
Eddie Always remember to consult with your health professional for your personal health questions, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and tell a friend.
Eddie and Juna Thanks for listening!
