SANE Fat Loss – Carbs, Fats and Calories with Jonathan Bailor

Ari:  Yes, so I agree with you completely that it is not necessary to have knowledge of calories to either lose or gain weight or be healthy. Certainly, hunter-gatherers and much more recently than hunter-gatherers but basically, all humans for all existence up until, let’s say the last 100 years roughly, had no knowledge of calories. Obviously, they were doing just fine. So, I think there’s no compelling argument of someone saying it is necessary to learn about calories and count calories to be lean or healthy. One of the other layers of this is not all calories are equal. What is it about different kinds of calories that make them not equal? What are they doing in your body differently?

Jonathan:  I think it’s really important also to couch the fact– If we really want to get– And if we get too esoteric, cut me off. But your show is one where we can geek out a little bit, so I’m going to geek out if that’s okay.

Ari:  Please.

Jonathan:  A calorie is a unit of energy. I really want to be clear here that no one goes to the grocery store and buys calories, ever. So in some ways, it’s just– I used to really, really care about the academic conversation and then I started to try to actually help people. [chuckles] It’s wonderful to sit in message boards and talk about our theories about calories and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, while the world dies and gets worse over time. We all know that food does different things in the body and it’s pretty difficult to eat food without eating calories. So, when we talk about calories, we got to talk about the food sources that they’re found in. What I found in the research, and you found in the research as well, is that there are objectively-measurable things that we see in food and food contains calories. For example, different food has different levels of satiety, for the same level of calories. For example, if you eat 200 calories of Pringles that company will tell you, “You’ll probably be hungrier after eating 200 calories of Pringles. Once you pop, you can’t stop.” If you eat 200 calories of protein and vegetables, you will be more satisfied. Nobody [crosstalk]–

Ari:  To your point, just to emphasize it further, we don’t see broccoli manufacturers coming out and saying, “I bet you can’t eat just one head of broccoli. You won’t be able to control yourself. You’ll just have to keep on eating that broccoli,” right?

Jonathan:  Exactly.

Ari:  But it is explicitly the goal of manufacturers of processed food products, especially in a capitalistic society- and I’m not bashing capitalism here. But in an environment where you are in business and your business is to sell people on a particular product, and have them buy as much of it as possible and be as addicted to it- addicted; I’m using that word loosely- as possible so they keep coming back forever and ever as frequently as possible, that is ultimately the objective of processed food manufacturer. They’re literally engineering their foods- knowing what they know about the human brain and human biology, they’re engineering their foods to do that as well as possible because that’s what maximizes their profits.

Jonathan:  100%. To your broccoli point, I want to add on to that because people might say, “Well, of course, you’re not going to keep popping broccoli because it’s disgusting.” The same thing applies to– Just think about a chicken breast, a lovely, marinated, delicious chicken breast. When you eat a chicken breast, you’re like, “Okay, I’m good,” and that’s probably sub-300 calories. Very few people are like, “Oh, God. Man, I just ate six chicken breasts. I couldn’t stop myself,” right? So, there’s a natural satiety point. That’s why again, I want to poke the bear a little bit and just say, anyone who’s sitting in a message board who wants to get like fired up about It Fits Your Macros or whatever, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in talking about the things that actually help people and make a difference in real life. If anyone anywhere wants to disagree with the fact that certain sources of calories, calorie-for-calorie, are more or less satiating than others, that seems undebatable to me. That’s a [crosstalk]–

Ari:  It is undebatable. I want to add one more example that’s maybe even a more perfect example of this. We used Pringles as the example of the thing you can’t stop. Pringles are potato chips. What if we just compare that to boiled potatoes, which are actually one of the most satiating foods per calorie? Believe it or not, a lot of people think of potatoes as like– There’s a lot of potato products that are not very satiating. Certainly, french fries and potato chips are not satiating per calorie, but if you eat boiled potatoes, they actually are extremely satiating per calorie. Now, the more you pile on butter, and cream, and sugary sauces and things like that and make it taste really delicious, it will be less and less satiating per calorie. But you can compare potato chips, potatoes processed in a particular way with added oil and added salt in just the right proportions to light up that reward center in the human brain, versus just plain boiled potatoes and get dramatically different satiety per calorie.

Jonathan:  It’s profound, Ari, and I’d like just to take it to even the next level. I would argue, and I bet you would agree, that you could eat more. 300 calories of french fries that are salted are less satiating, probably, than 200 calories of boiled potatoes. So, you can actually eat more and be hungrier.

Ari:  I completely agree with you and I would even go so far as to say that’s probably the single biggest contributor to the obesity epidemic, but maybe I’m jumping ahead. I don’t want [inaudible] away from you.

Jonathan:  Satiety, right? Satiety is a key factor. Folks know I run a company called SANE and the “S” in SANE stands for Satiety. The second factor, which I love– What we’re talking about here is what some people call first principles, where they’re like the baseline where if we can agree on these principles, a bunch of other stuff will fall out. A lot of the conversation- just as a quick sidetrack- that happens about nutrition or even like politics, basically everything in the world, people are arguing about stuff like 17 levels above where they should be arguing because they’re not even talking about the same stuff. Like if you and I are playing a sport and I’m like, “We’re playing football,” and you’re like, “We’re playing basketball,” we’re going to continuously disagree about the rules because we’re playing two totally different sports. So, we got to understand and agree on the playing field first. I’m defining, in some ways, the playing field for the discussion about nutrition. Satiety; the “A” stands for Aggression, or the hormonal impact or the hormonal response that your body has to certain forms of calories. Again, this cannot be debated. What happens to your insulin levels- so when you eat a 100 calories of coconut oil is not the same as what happens to your insulin levels if you eat a 100 calories of boiled potatoes, for example. I’m not going to say anything good or bad, I’m just going to say there is an objectively-measurable difference in the hormonal response to certain sources of calories. I call that aggression. Is there an aggressive response of your hormones? Do they swing wildly? Or is there an unaggressive response of your hormones, meaning they stay more moderate? A lot of folks might know this as glycaemic load or glycaemic index, blah, blah, blah, blah. The caveat I will give here, and one of the things that I really like about the SANE framework for eating, is a lot of people will get hung up on any one of these four elements we’re going to talk about and they’ll predicate their entire way of eating around one of them. For example, the keto diet is predicated around just this element in some ways. Like insulin is bad and if you eat keto, you will have less insulin and that’s good. Now if you eat keto, you will have less insulin. Whether or not that’s just kind of a modified version of The Calorie Myth in the sense that now insulin is the problem whereas before calories were the problem, it’s an oversimplification that misses the broader picture, is a separate topic. But again, just like we said, there really is no debate that different sources of calories are more or less satiating. There is no debate that different sources of calories provide different or lead to different hormonal responses in the body.

Ari:  I agree to a large extent with what you said about keto. I would say it’s actually most true for the original conceptualization of the low-carb path as formulated by Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories. The basic idea of which is that insulin regulates body fatness. By eating a low-carb, high-fat diet you are lowering insulin levels and therefore, you’re lowering this key regulator of body fatness, therefore driving fat loss via this hormonal pathway. We can tag this topic and come back to it because I think we probably have some degree of disagreements here, but I’ll let you complete the framework, the N and the E.

Jonathan:  Sure, so the “N” is nutrition. Again, it’s not debatable that certain sources of calories have more or less essential nutrients than others. When I say, “Essential,” I mean essential, meaning your body can’t produce them. So, essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids. I am considering essential amino acids and essential fatty acids as key components of nutrition. They are essential. You die if you don’t eat them so I do think they should be considered essential. Certainly, I don’t think anyone disagrees that certain forms of food are more nutrient-dense than others. The “E” is efficiency or just how easily your body could store an excess of certain macronutrients as body fat. Protein, for example, is not an energy source. If you overate a 100% protein diet, you would inevitably- if you overates a 100% protein diet, you would store fewer calories as body fat, as compared to an isocaloric diet with the same number of calories came from fat. That doesn’t mean that fat is bad and protein is good. It just means that protein, fat and carbohydrates are processed, in terms of fat storage, more or less efficiently by the body. This is why a lot of studies when they show an isocaloric substitution of protein for other macronutrients, often result in a change in body composition because the affective calories the body is getting is lower because protein is processed less efficiently than other macronutrients. Again, this is something which is not debatable and just gives us a framework; satiety, aggression, nutrition and efficiency, where now we can evaluate foods according to those metrics, versus whether or not they’re organic, or whether or not they’re from plants or animals, or whether or not they’re keto, or whether or not they’re paleo. There’s all these other markers or labels- or even whether or not they’re healthy. Like what does that even mean? If you ask 10 different people if a banana is healthy, you’re going to get 10 different answers. But we can tell you objectively, is a banana more or less satiating than rice? Is a banana more or less aggressive than rice? Is a banana more or less nutrient-dense than rice? Is a banana more or less efficiently processed by the body than rice? And now we can have a more meaningful conversation.

Ari:  I completely agree that protein is really the area where a calorie as a calorie doesn’t hold up to your point that if you consume lots of protein, it is less likely to be stored as fat compared to carbs or fats. However, I feel that a lot of people invoke this idea of a calorie is not a calorie, not all calories are created equal, in the context of carbs versus fats. There it becomes not very accurate at all. Because the studies- as I alluded to earlier- the studies that have precisely controlled for calories on equivalent protein diets that are either high-carb, low-fat or low-carb, high-fat have actually shown equivalent amounts of fat loss. On the opposite side, overfeeding studies, again, have shown equivalent amounts of fat gain on low-carb versus low-fat diets. So, it does actually seem to be largely the case in that context of the carb to fat ratio that for the most part, a calorie is a calorie.

Jonathan:  It is definitely the case in what I’ve seen. That the discrepancy between fat and protein and the discrepancy between carbs and protein is monumental and undebatable in terms of the impact on body composition. When you combine aggression and efficiency, one would argue that carbs are more– I’m speaking in gross oversimplifications right now. Assuming that a carb is a carb- which it’s not but let’s assume that it is- if you assume that a carb is a carb, carbs are more aggressive than fats and they’re slightly less efficient than fats. Fats are less aggressive but slightly more efficient. I would argue that that might be sort of balancing one another out and that might account for the– In those isocaloric studies you mentioned, the reason why swapping fat for carbs or carbs for fat doesn’t really have an impact because of those two factors put together. But obviously, protein has that wild swing because it is so much less efficient than either.

Ari:  I agree with you. I want to come back to the A; the aggressiveness and the hormonal aspect. I think you gave the example of coconut oil versus boiled potatoes. The potatoes would certainly be more insulinogenic, would release more insulin. What is the meaning of that in terms of what actually happens in the body over time? Maybe coconut oil is not a great example because it’s uniquely metabolized, so maybe we can swap it out for olive oil, or macadamia nut oil, or avocados or something like that. But let’s just say a fatty food; a steak, a glass of milk or something like that, some kind of fatty food versus boiled potatoes- a carb-rich food- the carb-rich food is going to produce more insulin. There’s this narrative of insulin as a fat-storing hormone but as we just said, at equal levels of calories, we see the same exact amount of fat loss. So in other words, a 1,500 calorie diet that’s rich in boiled potatoes that causes lots of insulin secretions throughout the day, compared to the same calorie diet that’s rich in nuts, and seeds, and avocados, and cream and butter, causes much less insulin secretion but you’ll lose identical amounts of fat on both. So what, in your view, does those different deviations in hormones- like why do they actually matter?

Jonathan:  The only reason they matter- and this is a really important point- is not because insulin is bad and we want to minimize. The only thing that we can say here with scientific evidence is just like what you said, a boiled potato will cause more insulin to be released, calorie-for-calorie, than an equivalent number of calories of, say, butter. That’s it, that’s all we can say. That’s not good or bad, that is. Now, what we want to keep in mind- and this is really important- is the reason the fat isn’t releasing any insulin when you eat it is because your body doesn’t need insulin to put it in your fat cells. This is, again, why– Sometimes I get a little bit lonely, Ari, and here’s why. I don’t fit in either of the camps. I literally was on a podcast with Gary Taubes, who I think is brilliant and I love him, and I was like, “Man, I’ve listened to everything you’ve ever done. I’ve read everything you’ve ever done. If you drank 10,000 calories of butter, are you saying you would not gain fat because very little insulin would be released?” And he wouldn’t answer the question. I was like, “Gary, come on. You got to answer it-” [crosstalk]–

Ari:  To interject, I think, undebatably, Gary is high- he’s of high IQ. He’s an intelligent person. However, this commitment to his own dogmas and lack of willingness to go where the evidence goes, but to just keep insisting, “I’m right no matter what the evidence shows and no matter how much evidence accumulates showing that I’m wrong,” that made me lose respect for him.

Jonathan:  What I will say is look, if you eat 100% fat, you don’t release insulin. That’s because you don’t need to. That’s it. If you 100% super starchy carbs, you’re going to release a bunch of insulin because your body needs that insulin to process stuff. Let’s also keep in mind that you’re always storing or burning fat, period, always. If you didn’t store fat- this is an oversimplification- if you didn’t store fat, especially from carbs, you’d have a potentially fatal disease called Type 1 Diabetes. It will kill you and it killed a lot of people before the discovery of insulin therapy because you would just excrete out calories that you do need in your cells, and you do need your fat cells. You do need the ability to store calories so that you don’t have to constantly be eating. The amount of either blood sugar or ketones circulating in your bloodstream at any point in time is very small. So, if you have no way to store calories, you’re in a bad spot. Again, people are like, “Oh, insulin–” Ari, I get beat up because I’m a fan of whey protein. People are like, “But whey protein causes an insulin release. How could you possibly-” [crosstalk]–

Ari:  I was just going to bring this up. I think a couple of myths that need to be debunked here or layers to this story that are important that most people are not aware of. One is as you alluded to a minute ago, fat can be stored in fat cells. A lot of people have been talked into this narrative of, “Fat doesn’t make you fat, only carbs and sugar makes you fat.” It’s a nice little catchy thing that’s caught on. However, it’s, unfortunately, totally disconnected from the actual evidence, which shows very clearly that fat can very easily be stored as fat [chuckles] in our body fat tissues. If you’re going to make an argument of any kind from a biochemical level, you could actually make the argument that dietary fat is more easily stored as body fat than carbs are. Carbs have to be converted through a process called de novo lipogenesis, which is not particularly efficient. But at the end of the day, it’s mostly a moot point because at equivalent levels of calorie excess, whether you’re eating a carb-rich or a fat-rich diet, you end up storing the same amount of body fat either way.

Jonathan:  Ari, to that point, when we look at the same acronym, fat is the most efficient macronutrient, period. If you look at the actual way of eating I recommend, it is not out-of- the-box ketogenic for this. Just like it is very easy to take the low-carb– The low-fat diet dogma got taken to an extreme and as human nature has it, then we swung the other direction. The truth, as Aristotle taught us thousands of years ago, is probably somewhere in the middle, that golden mean, and I think we share that opinion.

Ari:  Yes, we do. I want to talk about what the truth is in that regard. Specifically- well, from my perspective, I think you agree- in fact, I know you agree- why the focus on macros has been misguided and what we should focus on instead. The one other myth that I want to just mention here as you pointed out with the whey protein, people think that only carbs and sugar cause the rise in insulin. Most people don’t realize that protein and, in fact, many kinds of proteins, for example, beef, many types of fish, whey protein as you said, many other types of protein actually cause a huge amount of insulin to be secreted that’s on par with many carb-rich foods. We know- just to add one more layer- we know that consuming those proteins is decidedly associated with moving people in the direction of leanness rather than fatness. So, this is another layer to the story that’s really hard to account for- I would dare say impossible to account for, if you’re being intellectually honest- in the model where you say insulin is the central driver and regulator of the entire body fatness of the human organism. I think it’s just very clear that that is just not true. It is one of many different biochemical pathways and compounds that are needed and are involved in fat storage, but it is not the thing that is regulating the entire system.

Jonathan:  I think it’s funny- and I love that you said intellectually honest- because when you really look at it, even the human pursuit of, “My one–” There’s this thing of like, “My one thing is the one thing.” “No, this is the one thing.” That sounds so much like my dad can beat up your dad. It really does. Like, “No, my dad is the strongest.” This one thing is the most important and it’s better than all the other things. What if it wasn’t that way? What if it wasn’t that way [crosstalk]–

Ari:  My theory can beat up your theory, Jon.

Jonathan:  [laughs] What if it was a little bit more multifaceted than that?

Ari:  No, it’s got to be only one thing. You said a moment ago the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You’ve already talked about these principles of saying– I said that I think this focus on macros, this whole thing, “It’s low-fat. Fat is the devil.” Then, “No, we got it all wrong. Really carbs and sugar is the devil, and insulin is the devil.” I’m putting words in your mouth because I think you agree with me. Why do you think that whole frame of searching after the answer via carbs and fats as a proportion of the diet, is misguided and what should we be focused on instead?

Jonathan:  It is misguided for all the same reasons, I would say -1%, that counting calories is– Counting macronutrients is counting the source of your calories. It is the same basic logic just with, “I’m going to count macros instead of counting calories.” What we need to focus on, if you want to count anything, just count servings of various- count food, count how many servings of non-starchy vegetables you eat in a day. Count how many servings of nutritious sources of protein you eat in a day. Count how many servings of whole food, fatty foods you eat. Count how many lower-sugar fruits you eat. Count how many legumes you eat. I know it might sound crazy and too simple, but if you count the actual food you eat, pretty soon you won’t need to count, and you’ll be thin and healthy and have a lot of energy. But that doesn’t provide enough fodder for discussion groups on the internet. It’s too simple, it breaks everything down, but it’s the truth, right? Nobody in the world who eats primarily– If you eat most of the food that goes in your mouth from vegetables, and you eat protein at regular intervals, and you eat a decent amount of calories from whole foods that have most of their calories coming from fat, like nuts, and seeds and eggs. And if you eat fruit, you eat the lower-sugar, non-GMO garbage kind, maybe you throw some legumes in there, pretty hard to be unhealthy eating that way. It’s delicious and you can do it anywhere. If you really want to have a community, you can do that. You could probably be keto, you could do that. You could probably be vegan, you could do that. And probably be South Beach, you could do that and probably be paleo- you can tailor it however you want and you can have friends on the internet now.

Ari:  Or more in real life.

Jonathan:  Or in real life, but people don’t– Ari, you’re so old school. What are you talking about real life?

Ari:  Or you don’t have to have relationship-ending fights with your family over what your dietary dogmas are.

Jonathan:  Yes, exactly. That’s what we talk about when we say there was a beautiful universe moment. I didn’t intend for this acronym to spell out an actual word that describes the dietary philosophy but it does. Satiety, aggression, nutrition and efficiency spells out the word SANE. That’s really what we try to do, is we’re trying to restore sanity to this nutrition conversation because frankly, it’s just insane. Most people are talking about things that are completely irrelevant and completely esoteric, while more people are dying from this issue that we’re talking about right now than literally any other issue. This has actually been studied. McKinsey did a study and there is more suffering in the world from incorrect food consumption and production than there is from violence. It’s shocking and you can measure it from an economic perspective too, I believe. The study is probably three-years-old at this point, but the global economic burden of all tobacco was something like a trillion dollars. Then all forms of violence was 1.2 trillion. Then just obesity or diabetes- forgive me, it’s one or the other- was 1.2 trillion. So, if you combined obesity and diabetes, we don’t have time to argue about this anymore. We just need to eat better. We can agree on what better is. We can fight about perfect all day, but we can agree on what better is, and we need to move forward and support each other on that front.