I'm Dr David Katz let's answer some questions from the internet this is nutrition support [Music] Curtis M Whitaker in your opinion what is the best diet for Health and Longevity it's a theme it's not one specific diet seven words eat food not too much mostly plants and that comes to us courtesy of the blue zones five populations around the world in ikoria Greece Sardinia Italy Okinawa Japan Loma Linda California and the nicoya peninsula in Costa Rica where people most often live to be a hundred years old don't get chronic disease or dementia they all adhere
to that same basic theme real food mostly plants lots of vegetables fruits whole grains beans lentils nuts and seeds mostly plain water when thirsty aim to love the food that loves you back if that's the foundation of your diet you can't go too far wrong at J Hartman 24 asks can you have too much protein yes you can eat too much protein most Americans get about twice the recommended amount of protein excess protein is acidic X excess protein can't be used by the body doesn't turn into big strong muscles the body can store carbohydrate and
it can store fat it cannot store protein our carbohydrate store is called glycogen generally about 1200 to 1800 calories worth protein does not get stored so what the body does is convert it into something it can store and since glycogen is already capped out all Surplus protein the body doesn't need and can't use now it stores this fat at EXO baby doll 9 ask where does keto science and nutrition come from how does anyone believe that eating zero carbs and almost all fat could be good for you it doesn't make sense to me so where
does it come from is there a science Yes actually so the origins of the ketogenic diet were was discovered that if you restricted fuel to the brain you could sometimes treat seizures that nothing else would treat intractable epilepsy if they're seizures sometimes would stop if you starve the brain of carbohydrate sometimes especially in in children if typical drugs to treat seizures are not working sometimes a ketogenic diet is used but that should give everybody else pause the calling card of this particular diet is that it starves the brain of a key nutrient and quiet sprain
activity is that really what a healthy person wants their diet to do I would say no at outdoctrination asks what are some of the biggest nutrition exercise Health myths you can think of so the prevailing view these days seems to be that carbohydrate is bad everything from lentils to Lollipops are carbohydrate in fact all plant Foods along with most processed foods are carbohydrates so vegetables fruits whole grains legumes all carbohydrate and all of the best diets for humans tend to be rich in carbohydrate but good carbohydrate is there bad carbohydrate refined grains added sugar Ultra
processed junk food yeah that's bad and I don't know myself asks how do you change your metabolism how mine is my worst enemy I hate it good news you actually can change yours add muscle to your body do resistance training three times a week when you add ounces or pounds of muscle to your body you're burning more calories 24 7. so if you kept your current eating the same and worked out doing resistance training three times a week you would start to lose weight if your current calorie intake was maintaining your weight because you would
need more for those muscles to survive at Allison McKinney asks are all calories really created equal I think what you're really asking is does it matter what the source of the calorie is and obviously foods are not all created equal one of the critical considerations is that if you eat a wide variety of really Wholesome foods Foods direct from nature they fill you up on fewer calories than if you eat Ultra processed foods here is something you may not know non-food components added in with the food now you've got an ultra processed food those foods
are manipulated in all sorts of ways to extend their shelf life and to stimulate your appetite Center and make you overeat so Ultra processing is bad at stephanieb789 asks what is a completely healthy weight because BMI is BS and so is the weight number body mass index does not tell you if you're healthy it does tell you if I on average your weight is what it should be for somebody who is your height weight is not a measure of Health one thing that's more reliable than BMI or weight to get at specific health issues is
waist circumference more than 35 inches puts a woman at increased risk for a man it's a little higher it's about 40 inches the fat that that tends to accumulate in the lower extremities for example the legs the buttocks much less metabolically active fat around the middle has a nasty habit of getting into the liver it disrupts normal liver function it impairs our ability to manage lipids in our blood and it tends to make us insulin resistant you don't make enough insulin to manage your blood sugar and you wind up with type 2 diabetes we cannot
pretend that accumulating excess body fat doesn't matter but you're absolutely right BMI is not a measure of Health at paleo plus asks how legit is the paleo diet a true paleo diet is really difficult to achieve in the modern world the Paleo Diet Paleolithic diet is about how did humans eat during the Stone Age first of all you can't eat any processed foods you can't eat any dairy if you eat any meat it has to be game wild animals exclusively the kind of meat our ancestors had access to was a lot like antelope about seven
percent of the calories in an antelope steak come from fat almost none of that fat is saturated quite a lot of it is omega-3 compare that to beef 35 percent of the calories come from fat most of that fat is saturated and none of its omega-3 night and day our Stone Age ancestors didn't eat that our Stone Age ancestors got about 100 grams of fiber every day now the recommendation here in the U.S for adults is about 25 grams a day but 100 grams a day probably means more time in the bathroom than your schedule
would allow at cgwa 85 asks I've come to accept that girl dinner is the main thing holding me back in life like why can't I nutrition properly I'm relatively new to girl dinner but I've done some searching and I understand it's something like this it's basically a quick assembly of foods that you can easily get your hands on the basic concept I think emphasizes convenience we've got some processed meat but we don't really need that we could have an alternative to that if you wanted to take out some of the least healthful foods but why
can't the dip for example be a bean dip or hummus crackers as opposed to chips that are made from whole grains with a very short list of ingredients there is cheese if you're going to keep the cheese grapes go well with cheese some dried fruits go great with cheese but when you have milk chocolate and add in a lot of saturated fat and a lot more calories typically more sugar comes along for the ride too but if you traded this up to pure dark chocolate 60 cocoa or higher it's delicious it's Rich it's rewarding and
because it's bittersweet rather than purely sweet it actually fills you up on fewer calories and now you're having the Indulgence but you're also improving overall nutrition so I don't think it would be that much work to overhaul this stick with the girl dinner trade up the nutrition and then girl Dinner won't be holding you back at flagpea asks explain the major difference between macro and micronutrients macro is something you can see with the naked eye so there are three macronutrients that make up the bulk of food they are abundant enough to be visible protein carbohydrate
and fat micro is something for which you need a microscopes micronutrients are vitamins minerals antioxidants that are still very important many of them are essential nutrients but they're too small to see at John Peterson FWS I'd really like to know from someone that actually knows if buying organic food for double the price is actually worth it slash better for you a great question we really can't say for sure that it's better for human health but we have reason to think so herbicide should not be part of the human diet pesticide should not be part of
the human diet antibiotics dose to animals should not be part of the human diet and if you eat organic you're avoiding all of those things produce grown organically seems to be on average as much as 20 percent more concentrated in a wide array of micronutrients than it's non-organically grown counterparts so that would mean 20 percent more vitamins 20 percent more minerals and 20 percent more antioxidants for example if I look at these Foods here you think about when would it be more important to buy organic I like it for the lettuces we've got Radicchio here
I like it for the carrots I really like it for these berries so whenever you're not taking a surface off of food and you're eating it whole buying organic tends to matter more at Cartier Angel asks intermittent fasting is BS it's literally just skipping breakfast with a fancy name it's a bit more than that but you're not entirely wrong there have been randomized controlled trials putting them Head to Head intermittent fasting to limit your calories and no time restriction but portion control and you wind up with the same number of calories the same Foods just
is distributed differently with intermittent fasting being the difference guess the results no discernible difference but that doesn't mean intermittent fasting isn't a valid tactic for some people it just works better than thinking about portion control all the time I mean if you start your day at lunch and have dinner and then you stop you're right that that pretty much involves just skipping breakfast and the idea is you're poking a hole in your daily intake of calories so you wind up eating fewer calories and that tends to help people with weight loss and and weight control
at ajrendon 96 asks ketosis how does that feel the ketogenic diet is trying to avoid overt starvation but mimic its effects when people go into a state of starvation they have this sense of euphoria some people report mental Clarity some people report feeling very energetic and people who are trying to stay on a ketogenic diet experience some of what people in an extended experience of starvation feel which is exhaustion brain fog constipation and a whole host of other ills so when we're are starving we actually start to break down our own tissues we use up
our glycogen and once that's gone we don't have carbohydrates so we can't make sugar so we start burning our body fat from my point of view the ketogenic diet is not a recommended approach for long term it restricts many of the most nutritious Foods the very Foods we know are associated with both longevity and vitality at Luna asks what food drinks should I cut out of my diet so I'm going to go with soda source of empty calories source of a lot of the excess sugar most Americans eat easily replaceable with much better stuff water
would be ideal but any kind of Seltzer would be a good intermediate step we're just going to cut one thing out of a diet let's cut out soda at Swiss business asks is going gluten-free good for everyone no gluten is a component of some really nutritious foods like whole wheat whole barley other grains avoiding gluten is only important if you're Gluten Sensitive that means you either have celiac disease where you actually make antibodies and you absolutely have to avoid gluten and then it's very important or you just don't feel well when you eat foods that
contain gluten in those instances you should avoid it for everybody else there's no advantage in avoiding foods that contain gluten at nicely asks are you plant-based vegan and finding it difficult to get the proper nutrition protein minerals micro macronutrients now first of all I'm primarily vegans you get many more vitamins and minerals from Plants than from animal Foods there are a couple of exceptions like B12 and so supplements not an unreasonable idea protein is not deficient in plant Foods all plant foods contain all essential amino acids and if you find it hard to believe that
you can build big strong muscles from eating just plants take a look at a horse take a look at a gorilla take a look at an ox at poetic dweller asks is the food pyramid steel real like are you guys actually eating all these servings every day this just feels like a lot this is what we're talking about here it's not still in use it's actually been replaced it's been replaced by a plate so if your plate is taken up three quarters by vegetables fruits whole grains on average over the course of the day you're
going to be doing pretty well at bull spear says honestly I don't know why I bother eating nutritional labels I don't know what the nice it is or why one nutrigrain bar has 10 DV of it okay our problem used to be micronutrient deficiencies our problem today is much more about macronutrient excess just eating too much of all the wrong Foods I would say look at an ingredient list and look for things you recognize as food well if you're having a Nutra grain bar you'd really like to make sure that the first ingredient is a
grain and ideally a whole grain and that would be a good thing if the first ingredient in a grain product is anything other than a grain like sugar for example you could do better at mintpoid asks what do I eat pre-workout versus post-workout macros wise in general you want to pre-load for a workout with carbohydrate that's going to help you fill your glycogen stores that's the fuel you're going to be running on during an extended period of exercise a long bike ride a long hike a long run a marathon complex carbohydrates that would be whole
grains it would be fruit for Recovery afterwards you've used your muscle you've broken down muscle if you've worked out intensely high quality protein and the the other thing that would be really important post-workout would be antioxidants antioxidant compounds actually help protect the cells as they go through that process of breakdown during exercise recovery after so those are all the questions I really appreciate the honesty thank you for joining us today on nutrition support [Music]
