Exercise Scientist Challenges Andrew Huberman's Nutrition Advice

I'll just mention yellow number five was shown in a recent study spread on the bellies of these mice made their bellies transparent to light you can literally see their organs but but but but I but I'm a positivity influencer now I I can't be [Music] mean hey folks Dr Mike here for RP strength I'm a former professor of exercise and sports science the competitive Brazilian J Grappler and bodybuilder and a person who has maybe the most incredible haircut ever given to a human being you go like that little balding a little kind of like what

am I doing here anyway in any case my grotesqueness aside maybe it's Beauty I have the beholder type of today we are going to talk about Dr Andrew huberman you may not have heard of him because he's just coming up in the world very small influencer but uh he will claim to know things about how the human body works and how Nutrition Works and things like that so today we'll find out what does he really know and does he really know what he really NOS I had nothing anyway let's take a look at stuff and

see if we can uh learn something 3 2 1 learning time let's come up with the ideal intermittent fasting AKA time-restricted feeding schedule for you you want to avoid ingesting any food of any kind even one g of sugar remember this is the ideal 1 gram of sugar even would be too much for the 2 to 3 hours prior to bedtime how do I say this best the idea that one gram of sugar extra with 3 hours before bedtime will meaningfully impact long-term health and body composition and Sleep Quality borders on mental illness and I'm

not accusing Andrew huberman of being mentally ill of course he is the opposite and sely competent but um there are some ideas that strain credulity so much it's difficult to put them in a context that makes sense and you know 1 gram of sugar typically exists in like a pile of green veggies because like they do have some carbohydrates in there that are not fiber almost every Green veggie and tomatoes and um onions and uh bell peppers you know typical real healthy stuff like this nice young lady seems to be eating she sure Scott it's

nice that it's light outside you sure better not be eating that 3 hours before bedtime you must be crazy again that one gram one gram of sugar will you up it just storms in at night wakes you up pours water all over you and gets you doing push-ups now it might be good for you no I wouldn't do that um so it turns out like based on this cataloging of variables so almost every protein powder you can buy has at least a gram of sugar so no protein powder no casein before bed Greek yogurt is

categorically forbidden um and every single vegetable is forbidden so it's true to say that um almost every food is about a gram of sugar now now if you guys want to take a really deep dive into this this gets really psychotic if you eat a real nice serving of meat um it is probably true that you can get about a gram of sugar out of the glycogen the sugar stored in that animal's muscles like in the meat so it's it's true to say that a good portion of meat May in some cases have a gram

of sugar in it um and so the idea that a gram of sugar somehow messes with your cating rhythms but is just not true uh in the quite literal sense of it's just not true and I'll say more a little bit about the whole verdict on intermittent fasting because um we're starting to understand how intermittent fasting Works in in in conjunction with other variables and diet in a little bit but let let's see what else is said I just want to tell you that the whole gram of sugar thing is like just sentencing it would

be a schedule in which you started eating for instance at 10:00 a.m. and you stopped eating at 6 p.m. an absolutely Dreadful schedule for anyone that wants to have some semblance of a normal life in my opinion it's not really compatible with most schedules although some people might be able to do it Dam I I I really love that uh huberman said that because I I thought he was going to go and say like this is just what everyone needs to be doing but he really has given love to the fact that it's not compatible

with most schedule which is kind of a big problem uh because a lot of the advice at the extremes of the intermittent fasting situation is like no nobody can really do this or very few people can do this um it's needlessly constraining and the question always comes back to like so what's the trade-off like what if I don't constrain myself like this what are the Downs signs we'll get to that in just a sec and then of course we discussed how making sure that you're ingesting enough fluids in particular water and salt especially if you're

using caffeine in order to increase your levels of alertness regardless of where that caffeine Source comes from from coffee tea or otherwise that can cause the excretion of sodium and can lead to a kind of shakiness a light-headedness um and the feelings of hunger that may or may not be related to blood glucose okay uh some good stuff in there yes caffeine helps dehydrate you a little bit almost everyone gets their caffeine from uh fluid consumption and so it ends up being that caffeine actually hydrates you more on the net balance because like if you

drink a cup of coffee there's uh some fluid excreted because of the caffeine but there's more fluid introduced with coffee so the next thing you have to wonder is like okay but um pure fluid is getting excreted and um that means that like maybe there's like a salt thing because most caffeine drinks have not any real Salt in them and so we're constantly drinking more to get the caffeine and peeing out more and then drinking more to make up for that so maybe we can get a low salt situation that is possible for people that

are in very hot climates people that chronically undereat salt in their diets that's almost no one by the way typical Americans just generally get more salt than they need by a long shot this has been a public health concern for Generations um and folks undergoing intense physical activity consistently in hot climates where sweating a lot can run into sodium issues now for them I would say like eating more salt in your diet overall is totally fine but if you want to keep it simple that every time you have one of these workouts that gets you

really really sweaty and makes you lose a lot of fluids just throwing in an element pack into there which is a a proprietary blend of various kinds of electrolytes AKA salts that are super well balanced it's tasty you shake it up in your Shaker you can add it to your protein and carbs at the end of a workout whatever you like that can take care of that you can also increase the sodium intake from the rest of your diet but this element situation is for folks that are very hard trining athletes that are sweating a

lot and um uh for everyone else most people are just consuming enough salt so we do elements a sponsor you can buy their the link in the description all that stuff but um there's kind of a a direct way to go about the problem I will say for most people who consume caffeine um most people probably who are in uh Andrew huberman's demographic are consuming more than enough salt and almost never run into this problem some people genuinely need to eat I certainly would not want to see people getting hypoglycemic to the point where it's

dangerous certainly if you are diabetic okay so hypoglycemia to the point where it's dangerous occurs to very very few people but yeah definitely don't want that to happen most people will not get hypoglycemia when they don't eat because the body's uh glucagon axis makes uh blood glucose appear from your liver in into your blood and so it makes sure your brain has enough fuel almost all the time so typically when you don't eat for a while you don't actually have hypoglycemia you just have like lower than average blood sugar but you're still upright because glucagon's

doing the thing um if you're diabetic there's a whole other host of concerns there it's quite a bit different you and in fact for all people you should consult with your physician when exploring any major changes to diet or additions or subtractions of anything including supplementation that's good advice so here's the actual um my best understanding of intermittent fasting as it is um seen in the literature today uh good news bad news good news inter fasting works just fine uh another piece of good news if you hold the conditions of total calories the same and

food quality the same that is you're eating mostly healthy food within a caloric balance in either multiple daily feedings or intermittent fasting there's some earlier research that said intermittent fasting has these kind of big advantages the more research we do of studies that compare U normal feeding and intermittent fasting the more it seems that intermittent fasting has fewer marginal benefits than we thought and it's getting to be real close to parody with just normal eating so current best practice understanding as far as I see it and it could be that like I'm not entirely correct

or Andrew human is not entirely correct or we're both not entirely correct that's probably the one um but my best reading of the literature is that as long as you're controlling the calorie intake to what your calories are supposed to be and eating mostly healthy foods as long as you're not eating in a way that gives you um stomach discomfort and you're not waking up halfway through the night sweating because you're still digesting your food so giving yourself like an hour or two if you're eating a decent calorie meal before you go to sleep or

if you have like a protein shake before you go to sleep or you know a cup of Greek yogurt you can probably do that 15 minutes before you go to sleep and pay functionally zero downside and so uh on the aggregate we look at all the literature together is just a true thing to say that intermittent fasting the reason it works so well is caloric restriction and it doesn't let you overeat calories as much and so all of the specific timing benefits being regular is good eating meals at the same time roughly every day is

good but that can apply to fasting and regular eating no problem so I would say intermittent fasting if it works for you as a thing you like to do as a thing that gives you mental Clarity and energy and all that stuff and as a thing that fits your schedule really well and it lets you control calorie super well and stay on your Ps and q's it's dope and you should do it if you want to gain as much muscle and retain as much muscle as possible you should probably be eating uh protein roughly four

times a day evenly split four or more no benefit probably to more than four but at least four for intermittent fasting uh it's not not ideal but for almost everything else inter fasting is great and great and roughly equivalent to just doing the same kind of caloric load and food composition but spreading it over any number of meals anything from 2 to 3 to four to 5 to six seems to have roughly the same uh effects as intermittent fasting so intermittent fasting over the last several years of deep research has lost almost all of its

magic and now it's for most people in the evidence-based space just another way to control your calories and your intake that if it works well for you great if not then you can eat in any wide variety of eating patterns throughout the day they have almost the same uh identical effect same identical almost the same effect on roughly every measured variable that there is except for like a few like getting ejected I would argue that our food supply is really dreadfully dreadfully contaminated with things that are of real concern I'll just mention yellow number five

was shown in a recent study this was covered by Science magazine that yellow number five I forget the technical name when spread on the bellies of these mice made their bellies transparent to light you can literally see their [Music] organs but but but but I I'm a positivity influencer now I I can't be mean um positives and negatives the upside is that almost every single study perhaps every single study about things that we are eating is technically a concern and should be looked at um and so I'm not trying to say like n cuz this

is a thing and curious side effects like making things transparent are definitely like things we look at you don't want to accidentally be transparent do you know what I'm saying you in the bed like she's like all right let's can see it Daddy and you're like yeah yeah you she's like you don't have a you don't have a cocket it's not even there yellow five um so that's the positive the downside is one study at a time is just not how science is conducted you have to take all of the studies together and there are

on Yellow 5 dozens and dozens of studies going back decades and decades and um these studies were conducted by multiple different parts of Private Industry government regulatory bodies and even in varieties of countries and they all go through a very very meticulous approval process to be allowed to be served as food to as food additives to people in the United States and almost every other country and almost always food dies that are proof for use in the United States have been shown by teams of professional toxicologists whose job it is to figure out how unhealthy

various things are cuz remember everything's unhealthy to some degree you can drink so much water that you die the sun is a thermonuclear bomb that shoots pure radiation at you just as a reminder um they have to set these cut offs and limits as to what's healthy and not and they usually do whatever's like uh healthy unless you eat that much of it and they usually divide that number by 10 and that's the max allowable RDA and they go on that so they're they're not like getting close to it ever as a matter of fact

they're not getting to within a factor of 10 of it almost ever and so when they look at this kind of stuff four things like Yellow 5 and red whatever the hell um all these dies and additives go through this extensive process and pretty much all of them that are approved it's not really controversial if they're very very safe in the typical dosage people take them and so every now and again you get one study this is something different and sometimes those studies are the beginning of a little breadcrumb Trail to show like oh oh

we're doing more studies oh this isn't really that good and then that would be great so we need more literature and more uh more insight on this uh kind of continually a slow drip and if we see anything really intense we start try to get studies to replicate it like other people do studies is we really find the same thing and uh that that's great but also a lot of the times you do multiple studies and it turns out one study was just kind of aberant if you have a hundred studies just the the way

um the process of statistical significance works like if you think there's really difference here or not you will detect a difference when there's no actual harm from a food die uh something like five out of 100 studies will show definitive harm just by pure chance so we have lots and lots of studies to look at here so if you just go to the internet and type in study that shows yellow D whatever is bad you're almost certainly going to find a handful of studies and you're going to go see see see what you didn't find

is the dozens and dozens of studies that said like actually we understand this phenomenon very well we understand the toxicity margins very well and so if you ever want to talk to like chubbt about that it'll tell you till you're blue in the face and you can Google it you can look up your own pupet searches you can go to toxic toxicology associations toxicologists don't get enough love they do the goddamn Lord's work on this and so like is there a probability Yellow 5 like will make you transparent that's bad for you yes is that

probability high no it's insanely small and we need multiple studies to replicate this phenomenon and actually say what does it do to human beings and rant but but not for long because I'll be back in a sec folks still more video to come but we have a members area with a longer form of this video which gives you more information more jokes and more absurdities that start out as maybe information and maybe jokes and just go nowhere and I just shut up just like now pesticides are a major cause of endrine disruptor so people in

rural communities are much more prone to cancer causing and endocrine disrupting pesticides this is a serious serious issue the FDA is a very conservative organization now you might say wait hold on they'll put yellow number five in our food they won't do that in Europe or Canada but they won't approve that D yep there is a higher bar for drugs to become FDA prescription of free drugs in this country than there is for stuff to make it into the food supply the bar for things to make it into the food supply is very very high

and we don't want to make that bar arbitrarily High because there is a massive cost to not having various food additives your food will cost more you won't get the kind of food that you like nearly as often you will pay more in taxes for more regulatory throughput the efficiency of the system starts to really drag the more you put into it and all the way down the line it is true to say that the FDA by delaying the drug approval process to be extra extra safe and careful has no doubt contributed to the killing

of of probably tens of millions of people over the decades that's the thing we have to remember like if you don't want to leave your house because there's a thunderstorm it's safe it's smart if someone in your house is bleeding to death and you won't take them to the hospital because there's a thunderstorm you might be uh forgetting that there's a a downside to staying so there is a downside to excessive regulation incredibly well documented in the economic literature and some of it is like people don't get what they need ASAP and so for food

additives the regulatory bodies are typically very very careful as Andrew Hub admits are very very conservative that means if there's much evidence that's conclusive of food dice being bad for you then it's a bad deal so I would come at this issue from the opposite perspective there is no amount of noise some people don't like to hear about things in our food are killing us and most of that is wrong most of the problem you have with food almost all of the problem most Americans have with food has nothing to do with additives and dyes

it has to do with the fact drum roll that many people overeat very processed very tasty junk food with excessive calories and if you have food that's artificially dyed or colored or whatever added and you stick to a roughly healthy diet having some of those Foods as you're supposed to sticking within your calories and having generally high level of physical activity we almost can never detect any maladies that these ad additives are causing now the endocrine disrupting chemicals is still an area of ongoing research some of the studies say it's a big deal some of

the studies say it's not a deal at all we need more investigative efforts I will say a pesticides thing it is theoretically feasible that the people in rural areas directly working with pesticides have a different risk of exposure much higher and pay higher costs now from what I understand this hasn't really borne out with cancer it turns out that people who work with pesticides don't have higher of cancer like we used to suspect that doesn't mean they don't have higher rates of other things and endocrine disrupting is a potential thing that happens so we have

to be very keen to this but at the same time we can ask an opposite question of the pesticides that end up on fruits and vegetables that humans regularly eat in a normal environment how big of a deal is that we have every reason to believe so far it's not a big deal now that means we need more research so that we can have very definitive answers in this we do not have definitive answers like this yet and if we rush to ban everything because of some exploratory data while missing out on the big pieces

like stop eating nearly as much junk food and stop getting fat then we have really really really Mis prioritized our efforts very big thing to remember we could all get super scared about the stuff most of it after multiple studies turns out just not to matter doesn't mean this one thing of endocrine receptors doesn't matter it means we need significantly more insight you've put in the work over the years and you've made good Gams but now you're ready to create your most impressive physique ever and the RP hypertrophy app is designed designed to make this

possible you can customize every single aspect of your training plan or let the apps AI Take the Lead whichever combination you use your results will climb higher than ever all you have to do is bring the effort click on the link in the description of this video to get started because of the structure of alcohol it is what's called both water soluble and fat soluble translated into what's meaningful for you what that means is when you drink alcohol it can pass into all the cells and tissues of your body and the fact that it can

pass into so many organs and cells so easily is really what explains its damaging effects okay it produces substantial stress and damage to cells I'd love to be able to tell you otherwise but that's just a fact when you ingest ethanol NAD and related biochemical pathways are involved in converting that ethanol into something called acetyl alahh it's broken down into acety alahh and if you thought ethanol was bad acetyl alide is particularly bad yeah you got to be real careful about this kind of stuff there are a variety of intermediary products that your body converts

all of its normal fats and carves to and from that if you just take a look as a molecule by itself you jack up how much of it you have are profoundly toxic in a a bunch of different ways so taking a look at intermediary products without a demonstrative uh empirically supported ways in which they at those concentrations actually hurt things is not a good way to reason about things I am not defending alcohol in this regard alcohol by itself FS you up a bunch of its Downstream metabolites you up it you up in both

direct ways and a ton of indirect ways as well so alcohol is definitely one of these things that there used to be an argument for it that I myself have been supportive of when the literature sort of stood in this respect that uh like one or two drinks a day is totally fine and um may even have some health benefits in various parts of the body and health detriment in others and is roughly even the literature coming out lately and there's more and more and more of it all the time seems to show that like

uh yeah maybe a drink a day can have a neutral effect and some people that get a very big relaxation effect from a drink maybe a drink or two a day but if you're one of these people that you don't get a huge relaxation effect and you have other ways to relax at the end of the day that don't evolve alcohol you're probably just like um better rough drinking as little as possible and if you just don't drink at all it's probably the net balance longevity and quality of life best thing for you to do

there's a Nuance there um there is how much quality of life do you get from social drinking with friends because remember um interacting with people socially even a few times a week is incredibly good for your long-term Health and Longevity this is not so debated anymore and so if that occurs in the context of some mild tomatoa drinking every now and again you have to weigh the trade-offs so yes alcohol is and always was aing poison like in the literal sense it it smells like poison too by the way fellas but um it's one of

these things where like the less you drink the better and if it's a few drinks here and there I just wouldn't get super caught up about it um because there's all kinds of stuff you take in and again the sun is a thermonuclear bomb rinder that none of us are always 100% safe from everything but yeah the more alcohol you drink the worse it gets uh as far as all the other stuff he's going to say here about very specific effects of various chemicals I mean um yeah it's probably true as far as it goes

but that method of analysis has some problems with it where you know very very short-lived metabolites in some process of chemical conversion in cells may or may not actually cause direct harm uh versus if you have research on it you take a bunch of cells and culture you pour alahh onto them and uh all kinds of bad stuff happens that's not exactly the way to conclude [Music] them all right that's a whole lot of me ranting and saying things that most people disagree with me on which seems to be what I do on the internet

nowadays but I'm always trying to keep it real and trying to give you guys um The Right Stuff I'd say um Andrew hberman is a really good person to listen to for all his kind of advice um he tends to sometimes lean a little bit more into his the exploratory side I tend to be a bit more conservative I like to aggregate lots and lots of data and be extra sure before I go out and say stuff there are still other people that would call me too exploratory and in some ways I am but so

Hues I'd say it's good to listen to his stuff for like very interesting ideas about what's going on and then always check back talk to Chachi PT come back on this channel so on and so forth and see like okay it's like how bad or how dangerous are various things because for example food dies and stuff it turns out they're almost entirely safe uh but other stuff he says about end disruptors we really need to pay ATT attention to and the stuff he says about healthy eating is really really good so um folks thanks for

tuning in have fun um start your intermittent fasting window now and I'll see you guys [Music] later all right that was fun hopefully things were learned I I sure learned something anyway uh hbes is my man he's doing good work out there for the most part we're all uh all trying our best and speaking of trying your best there's a video right here you can click on no idea what that has to do with trying your best but but cool video it's nice see you guys next time