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This week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Dr Ted Neiman, science communicator and whole food diet expert, all about protein and satiety. They talk about how Ted became interested in nutrition (from a vegetarian background) and how his patients opened his eyes to the various ways which with we could use diet to arrive at optimal health outcomes. They discuss how Ted’s approach has evolved from protein:energy ratio to encompass much more around satiety related to other factors (fibre, micronutrients, and the hedonic nature of food). Ted outlines the satiety per calorie index (his new book is focused on) and why this could be the best tool to determine the best approach with regards to food (as they iron out a few wrinkles). They also discuss the biomarkers that Ted is most interested in when ordering tests for his patients, personal fat threshold and how this relates to health, and other topics which are in the realm of metabolic health. An insightful conversation!
Dr. Ted Naiman, MD, is the Senior Science and Communication Advisor at Diet doctor and a board-certified Family Medicine physician in the department of Primary Care at a leading major medical center in Seattle. His research and medical practice are focused on the practical implementation of diet and exercise for health optimization. He has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and utilizes engineering principles when dealing with complex systems such as human health and nutrition. He is the author of ‘The PE Diet’
Ted can be found at
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https://mikkiwilliden.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mikkiwillidennutrition
https://www.instagram.com/mikkiwilliden/
https://linktr.ee/mikkiwilliden
Save 20% on all Nuzest Products WORLDWIDE with the code MIKKI at www.nuzest.co.nz, www.nuzest.com.au or www.nuzest.com
Curranz supplement: MIKKI saves you 25% at www.curranz.co.nz or www.curranz.co.uk off your first order
Creators & Guests
What is Mikkipedia?
Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!
Transcription genrated using AI transcription; errors may occur. Contact Mikki for clarification
00:03
Welcome, hi, I'm Mikki and this is Mikkipedia, where I sit down and chat to doctors, professors, athletes, practitioners, and experts in their fields related to health, nutrition, fitness, and wellbeing, and I'm delighted that you're here.
00:26
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to another episode of Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast, I speak to Dr. Ted Naiman, science communicator and whole food diet expert plus physician, all about protein and satiety. We discuss how Ted became interested in nutrition, he comes from a vegetarian background, and how his patients opened his eyes to the various ways with which we could use diet.
00:55
to arrive at optimal health outcomes. Despite the fact that at various points along the way, Ted was very dogmatically keto, low carb, carnivore and all of the things. So it's a super interesting conversation. We discuss how Ted's approach has evolved from the protein to energy ratio to encompass much more around satiety related to other factors, such as fibre content, micronutrients.
01:23
in the hedonic nature of food. Ted outlines the satiety per calorie concept, his new book is focused on this, and why this could be the best tool yet to determine the best approach with regards to food. Whilst they do as well, I iron out a few wrinkles with some of the food ratings. We discuss the biomarkers that Ted is most interested in when ordering blood tests for his patients.
01:52
personal fat threshold and how this relates to health, and other topics which are in the realm of metabolic health, which I know that you guys are super interested in. So you're really gonna love this insightful conversation that I have with Ted, and I think get a lot from it. So those of you unfamiliar with Ted Naiman, he is an MD, a senior science and communication advisor over at Diet Doctor, and a board certified family medicine physician.
02:20
in the Department of Primary Care at a leading major medical centre in Seattle. His research and medical practice are focused on the practical implementation of diet and exercise for health optimization. He has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and utilizes engineering principles when dealing with complex systems such as human health and nutrition. He is also the author of The P.E.
02:50
You know how I feel about protein and I learned a lot from the method employed early on from Dr. Ted Naiman in terms of approaching diet from this PE ratio concept. I have links where you can find Ted over on all the usuals, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and he is easy to find if you just go looking. He's pretty active on social, particularly Twitter.
03:17
Before we crack on into the interview though, just a reminder that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favourite podcast listening platform. That increases the visibility of the podcast out there in amongst the literally thousands of other podcasts, so more people get the opportunity to learn from the guests that I have on the show, like Dr Ted Naylor.
03:42
Ted Naiman, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me this afternoon. I've been looking forward to this conversation, followed you forever on Twitter, stalked you at many conferences, and of course, binge listened to almost every podcast interview you've probably done. So, I'm really excited to talk to you about sort of your philosophies around nutrition and how they've evolved over time and some of the sort of...
04:08
not controversies around it, but some of the sticking points that some people might have in and around it. And then also just some basic, as a doctor, what do you think about XYZ questions? So thanks so much for being here. Oh, no, thanks for having me. Great to talk to you. I really appreciate it. So Ted, as I understand it, you started practicing maybe in the year 2000 or so.
04:36
The world didn't end and in fact, you became a doctor for real. When did you start to be interested in nutrition? Was this something that drew you to the medical profession or did that happen as you just started practicing? I was always a little bit interested in nutrition. I was raised seventh day Adventist and my mother was very into nutrition in an extremely plant-based sort of way. Let's just say.
05:04
But I was always interested in nutrition and health. Really not super focused on medicine in my undergrad, got an engineering degree, thought I wanted to do aerospace, couldn't get a job due to a bunch of Boeing layoffs here in Seattle. So ended up in medicine just kind of like as a last minute thing. And at the time, I wasn't really thinking, oh, wow, I'm so interested in nutrition that I'm going to be a doctor and help people
05:35
diet or exercise or any of that. I really had none of that in mind at the time. So it was definitely kind of an on the job thing that I realized, wow, everybody's super sick and their diet has something to do with a big chunk of it. When I first started, I didn't really understand how it worked or what amount of chronic disease that I was seeing was related to diet, but it kind of became apparent pretty fast that that was sort of a huge factor.
06:05
Yeah. And did you have the autonomy at the time to be able to talk to your client or your patients about nutrition? Were you still sort of thinking, oh, I've got to give them this XYZ medication and sort of on like, how confident were you at sort of making that shift in your practice? Oh, zero, starting out because, you know, we had very little nutrition information in medical school. And really, the whole nature of medical training was just like, these are the drugs you use.
06:33
and this is when you use this drug and this is when you use another drug. And so, you know, like for type 2 diabetes, for example, the main thing I left residency with was how to just titrate insulin higher and higher and higher until someone's sugar is for in the normal range without any kind of thought beyond that in terms of lifestyle or, you know, just very, very little. And so I really had to
07:00
kind of figure it out on the fly because I certainly wasn't educated about how to incorporate lifestyle to improve chronic disease. Yeah. And who were your early sort of go-tos or mentors in that space? Like who did you first sort of look to? Oh, wow. Basically no one. I was just on my own with this like incredibly plant-based upbringing and background. I trained at Lumblin University. That's where I went to medical school. And it's just this famous...
07:30
plant-based location. And so I had this kind of background my whole life and really not a lot else. I was just kind of an empty canvas at that point. And so I was learning from anything I could get my hands on and my patients who have taught me, you know, probably more than anything else over the years. And so when did you sort of, like...
07:52
At the time, were you vegetarian and you shifted according to the information you were reading? Or how did that work? So I was a vegetarian for about 20 years and I ate very little animal products. And what I realized is that I wasn't actually that healthier than anyone else at all, maybe slightly worse than average. And so I did learn the hard way that just being...
08:19
militantly dogmatic about one facet of nutrition might not buy you anything. I mean, it might be slightly better than the standard American diet, but it might not give you all the answers. And then unfortunately, I went from being dogmatic and religious and mono-focused on one element to reading a Gary Taubes book about good calories, bad calories. And then I'm like, oh, wow.
08:48
There's a lot we don't know about this whole diet thing and carbs are probably bad and for quite some time I was just rigidly religiously dogmatic about low carb and unfortunately I had such a Religious trauma going on with My views towards nutrition that I kind of careened through all the diet religions as fast as anyone could going from like plant-based to low carb to
09:18
Paleo, keto, carnivore, and I fell down the same little rabbit hole that everyone else in the alternative diet space was in. Of course, the whole time I was just doing as much research on nutrition and health outcomes that I could possibly get my hands on. And I kind of eventually got to the point where I'm at, which is way more agnostic and non-dogmatic.
09:46
a little bit zoomed out, if you know what I mean. Thank God. So I just want to apologize for all of the decades that I was just completely clueless or absurdly dogmatic about various diet religions. But I do think that anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So I think going through that probably brought me to where I am today, which is a little bit better, a little bit less dumb than I was before. Yeah.
10:13
Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because almost everyone I've spoken to, and myself and colleagues included, everyone seems to sort of do that from one end of the spectrum to the absolute end of the other. It's almost like this, like, you almost have to earn your right to be, you know, a little bit more moderate in your approach and do all of the learning sort of in between, which is super funny. So I'd just love to ask you, Ted, before we get into the protein energy concept and the satiety concept.
10:42
which of course you've written a book, The P.E. Diet, and are you currently writing a book or you're co-authoring a book on the satiety piece? Am I right about that? Yeah, I'm just slowly and painstakingly writing it by myself on satiety. That's correct, absolutely. Okay, awesome. Before we get to that, I'd just love to know sort of some of your, there'll be opinion pieces probably on like doctors and medicine and stuff like that. So.
11:09
One thing, obviously you're hot on protein, which I don't think that's changed regardless of the sort of shift in your focus. Yet so many doctors are scared of protein with the sort of the information they have in and around proteins impact on the kidneys or you get a blood urea nitrogen result or a creatinine result that's super high. And I have clients who tell me that their doctors tell them they need to look at their protein intake and things like that.
11:39
Whereas as I understand it, like when I look at the literature and I can sort of see the evidence that shows us that this is not actually harmful, where is the missing link there? Why are so many people sort of in that, the medical profession still thinking about it as being an increased risk for having this high protein intake? It's just a little bit unfortunate that most of our ways of measuring kidney function have
12:09
based factors. So, you know, like creatinine, for example, creatinine is made in your muscle cells and your kidneys filtered out of your blood. And we really rely on creatinine, or at least we have historically to know when somebody has kidney failure. So typically, if someone has higher creatinine, their kidneys are worse. So higher creatinine means you're filtering out less creatinine, your kidneys are not working as well. But there's so many confounders. So like, for example, if you just have
12:37
more muscle or way more muscle, your creatinine is instantly way higher. You know, if you have twice as much muscle, you're going to have twice the creatinine. And so I will see sarcopenic elderly people with just a shockingly low creatinine of like, you know, point six or something. Way lower than average. And it doesn't mean they have like the most amazing kidneys of all. They're just horribly sarcopenic. And then I'll have bodybuilders who have creatinine double or triple that.
13:06
who have perfectly great kidney function, but it looks like they have stage four chronic kidney disease based on their creatinine. So they're all these confounders. Then there's blood urea and nitrogen. Blood urea and nitrogen goes up when your kidney function goes down. And so that freaks a lot of doctors out, but it also just goes up if you eat a bunch of protein. And then anytime anyone goes to the lab and their results are used to make a U-shaped curve, the bell curve that...
13:34
builds the normal range of any of these lab values. So your blood, urine, nitrogen normal range is just basically two standard deviations above and below the curve of everyone who goes to the lab. And since everybody in America is eating 12% protein, and women are eating like 68 grams of protein a day or something pretty low, everyone's view ends fairly low. And mine has a little H next to it and it's in red.
13:59
every time I get my blood drawn. So there are all these things that kind of feel like protein kills your kidneys. And then, you know, if you have advanced kidney failure, you have if you have diabetic nephropathy or hypertensive nephropathy or all of these chlamyrile nephritis conditions, you're going to have a bunch of protein in your urine. What? Oh, protein in your urine means your kidneys are dying. So there's protein again, right? This is just
14:27
really, it gets kind of conflated together with bad kidneys all over the place with all these markers of the protein in the urine, the blood, the re-nitrogen, the creatinine. And so it's no wonder that doctors have just been super freaked out about protein and kidneys their whole careers. Well, now we have better ways of measuring kidney function like Cystatin C. You can use that to calculate glomerular filtration rate and it's not affected by protein or
14:54
lean muscle or anything like that. So we have these new ways of kind of separating kidney function from anything protein-y, which is great. But this is brand new and it's really not, nobody's up to speed yet in the general physician populace. So it's going to be better in the future. There are all these meta-analyses now that show that basically high protein diets don't harm your kidneys.
15:22
And in fact, the protein restriction that we've historically recommended for people with kidney disease, it's not terribly evidence-based. It turns out the vast majority of people with chronic kidney disease do not benefit from protein restriction in their diet. And so there's just so much baggage that we have from, you know, historical concerns about protein in kidneys. It's terrible. Yeah.
15:48
And is it just, are we just like two or three medical conferences away from this being common knowledge or are we like one or two decades? Like how long does it just take time to shift? It's about like the turning radius of the Titanic, pretty much. That's what we're dealing with. Anything in medicine is so just freakishly slow. It's quite painful. You know, all of these medical organizations are...
16:12
date their guidelines, you know, maybe once a decade at the very most. And so everything's so slow that I'm not going to hold my breath. You know, I'll be either retired or dead by the time, you know, cystatin and C is like the mainstream way to check glomerular filtration rate and kidney function. But that's okay. You know, you have to just take the ball and run with it sometimes because if you wait for guidelines and official recommendations, it's probably going to be too late. Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
16:41
Ted, I've heard you talk on another podcast about blood biomarkers and what you see as useful. If I'm thinking in the realm of cholesterol panel and triglycerides, but also fasting insulin, fasting glucose, how much do you lean on these as giving you a good indicator of health for your patient? Well, I do love fasting triglycerides, I'm going to be honest.
17:11
that's going to be elevated when you're fasting if that fat has no place to go. And typically, let's say your fat cells are nearing their maximum size and you're near the upper end of your personal fat threshold, your fat cells don't want any triglycerides. Maybe your liver, which you cannot hold very much fat to begin with, is already full. Your muscles can hold a tiny bit of triglycerides, but unless you're doing a bunch of exercise, you probably haven't tapped into that for a long time.
17:39
So it's very easy for someone who's over fat and you're at the top of their personal fat threshold to not have a bunch of good places to put triglycerides. So your overweight people, they're fasting triglycerides if they're starting to get insulin resistant. That might be the very, very first sign of all that they're getting insulin resistance. You're not gonna have elevated glucose until you're 99.9%.
18:04
run out of storage. So triglycerides can be an early warning that you're getting insulin resistance at any level of body fatness. That just tells you you're at the upper end of your personal fat threshold, which is basically the room you have in your fat cells to easily dispose of fat. So if you look at super lean people who are really low in their personal fat threshold, they have plenty of storage space in their adipocytes. Their fats and triglycerides are extremely low. And then if you did like an oral fat tolerance test and they, you know,
18:34
100 grams of heavy cream or something, their triglycerides go up a little but then just right back down again because all their fat cells just suck the fat right out of their bloodstream you know on the first pass basically they're very insulin sensitive at the fat cell or maybe their entire body and so this is a really great way to know if you're insulin resistant or not. I really do like fasting triglycerides you want to have these drawn when you haven't eaten calories for nine to twelve hours you don't want to have any caffeine or
19:02
Stimulants and you just want to see where you're at anything. Well, I we have a weird unit system here in this country But you want to be below definitely below a hundred milligrams per dust litre I'm gonna get fast and triglyceride and I apologize that I can't really convert that to the rest of the world it's like the US is its own little island of like dumbness with our metric system
19:30
non-adoption or whatever. Yeah. And I think that might equate to our units cut off at the conventional is 1.7 and above is starting to elevate in terms of triglycerides. And I think your 100 might equate to around about one for us. I don't think it's a direct, I don't think it's a sort of times 10 or anything, but I think it's quite similar to that level. Right. Yeah. It's like...
19:59
you know, you multiply 100 by 0.01 and you're gonna get a 1 basically. It's, you know, 0.0113 or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, Ted, what you mentioned there a couple of times, personal fat threshold. And I've heard the term before and I know that some of the listeners would have as well. Can you give us a bit of a definition for that and how does someone, I mean, obviously triglycerides is one way to know this, but...
20:27
Is it possible for a lean person to sort of extend their personal fat threshold without actually looking particularly like they've got a lot of excess body fat? Well this is a term that I've just completely stolen from Professor Roy Taylor in the UK and he's a physician and a researcher and he's done tons of MRI studies on people with diabetes and what he realizes is 100% of type 2 diabetics have a fatty liver and a lot of fat in their liver.
20:57
And these diabetics also have adipocytes near the upper end of size in terms of their diameter or in their volume. So let's say a fat cell could be as small as 20 microns in diameter or as big as maybe 200 microns in diameter at the very, very highest. And these fat cells literally have a maximum diameter that they just can't get bigger than, like an overfilled balloon. You know what I'm saying?
21:25
And if you look at lean people on average, there's of course a bell curve of all their subcutaneous fat cell sizes, but they're gonna have like 60 microns as a diameter of their fat cells. And you look at obese people or diabetic people and their fat cells subcutaneous on average, the median is gonna be like double that, 120 microns. So basically these fat cells are over expanded and they're literally running out of place to put fat. So...
21:54
You have three major storage depots in your body. There's your adipocytes, which is where the vast majority of your energy is at, and that's fat in your adipocytes. And then you've got a little bit of room for storage in your liver, hardly any, a couple hundred grams of glycogen, glucose, and just a tiny amount of fat as well. And you've got storage in your muscles, mostly glycogen, but you can store a little bit of triglycerides there too. And so once someone's...
22:22
basically fill their fat cells. You fill your subcutaneous fat cells first. Once they're as big as they can comfortably get, you start storing fat viscerally, and then you're storing fat in your liver and muscles. And once all of these tissues are saturated, your subcutaneous fat, your visceral fat, your liver and your muscle cells, and they're all, you know, basically they've accepted as much fat as they're willing to accept.
22:46
then you're getting more and more insulin resistant and all the fuels in your bloodstream go up. You're fasting glucose, you're fasting triglycerides, you're fasting free fatty acids. You've got all these fuels in your bloodstream and insulin then goes higher and higher and higher because insulin is literally just trying to clear the fuels out of your circulation and put them in storage, but it's not gonna work if all your fat cells are refusing fat. So it's usually fat refusal first and that's why we see triglycerides climbing.
23:15
But then the end stage of that is glucose refusal. And once your cells are all refusing glucose, your fat cells, your muscle and your liver all won't accept it, then you're diabetic. Now your sugar climbs outside of the normal range, your insulin is probably already very, very high, your triglycerides are already very, very high. And now you have full-blown type 2 diabetes, which is basically just end stage over fatness, which is just overfilling all your fat cells. Now this can happen at literally any body weight, body fatness, body fat percent.
23:44
Because if someone has trillions and trillions of fat cells, they might be 500 pounds before they run out of storage. But someone who's genetically thin, like someone from Southeast Asia, from China or India, they might be just 10 pounds overweight and have a BMI of 26. And boom, they're at the top of their personal fat threshold. None of the fat cells can get bigger. They can't sprout any new ones, which is a...
24:13
basically genetically determined ability that people might or might not have. And then you're fully diabetic at a very low absolute amount of fat, but you're still at the top of your personal fat threshold. So you can never really tell by just looking at someone necessarily whether they are at the top of their personal fat threshold or not. You can sort of tell by just looking at them based on like waist circumference and
24:40
and how even someone lean might look a little bit skinny fat to you if they have a kind of protruding abdomen, but they're otherwise really skinny. This is someone who could be very insulin resistant or even diabetic at a low overall fatness and a low BMI and low weight, just because they're skinny fat. And that typically means you don't have a lot of subcutaneous fat cells and you don't have a lot of storage room versus a Caucasian maybe who could be hundreds of pounds overweight.
25:09
and still have the ability to sprout new fat cells and store more energy. And so that's what personal fat threshold is. It's basically how much fat can you store? It's how many fat cells are you capable of generating times the size of all those cells, and that's how much fat you can store. There are conditions like lipodystrophy where someone has hardly any subcutaneous fat at all. And I have had patients with this condition. I have them now and I have in the past.
25:38
And basically, they become severely diabetic, even if they look just very lean. And you would think they're the healthiest person out there. But if you do cross-sectional imaging on their abdomen, they've just got tons of visceral fat. They're packed full of fat, visceral fat, liver, muscle, and they're maybe diabetic, even though they look quite lean. I mean, I have patients with six pack abs.
26:06
you know, vascularity veins, you can see in their arms and legs, they look like a bodybuilder. And they're fully diabetic because they're just packed with visceral fat inside the abdomen, you'd never know it unless you really, really, really measure their waist circumference at the belly button with the abdomen fully relaxed and then do a waist-to-height ratio or if you do any kind of cross-sectional imaging and look in the abdomen. Yeah. And so, with your example of your patient who might look like a bodybuilder,
26:32
Was it his blood test results that sort of indicated to you, hang on, you might look like this, but hey, look at your triglycerides, we need to do a bit of a deeper dive. Right, right, right. Your only clues would be a waist circumference right at the belly button without them fully relaxed, where one of these persons might have, they might wear size 29 pants, inches male, but if you measure their waist right at the belly button, it's maybe a 35 or something and that's... Yeah.
27:00
That's your only external clue, except maybe they are starting to have high blood pressure or something like that as well. But then, yeah, if you look at fasting, glucose, fasting triglycerides, fasting insulin, all of these things are going to be way higher than you'd expect. Yeah. And tethyses, there's that term that's, I see in the literature, but the metabolically healthy obese person.
27:26
Essentially, what I've seen is that whilst at one point in your life, you can carry excess body fat and be metabolically healthy, over time, they're at much greater risk of the complications that we often see associated with obesity like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, et cetera. Essentially, these people then probably just haven't tapped out their personal fat threshold to then see those changes in their metabolic health.
27:56
400, 500 pounds who were still actually quite insulin sensitive, very low A1C, very low triglycerides, very low blood sugar, reasonably low insulin. I've seen this at incredible weights, really mostly just in Caucasians and frequently females who have just a lot of fat storage in the thighs and buttocks rather than the waist.
28:24
So I will have like a Caucasian female who's just very pear-shaped and possibly still quite insulin-sensitive. Usually they'll have tons of subcutaneous fat and plenty of room to even make more. And this is quite amazing. Unfortunately, they still have a ton of problems just from the obesity, like mechanically, we see major destruction of the weight-bearing joints, the hips and knees.
28:53
end-stage degenerative joint disease frequently of these large weight-bearing joints and a bunch of other musculoskeletal problems, even if you're insulin sensitive. So it's still not great, but they are way healthier than someone who's maybe skinny fat and insulin resistant. Yeah. And why do you think, Ted, because I know here in New Zealand, at least, fasting insulin isn't something that is...
29:20
routinely measured and you have to ask for it. And also, because our health system is publicly funded, it's user pays. So you have to ask for it and then convince your doctor that you are absolutely fine. You can pay that $12 or $16 or whatever it is to get the test. So you can get it, but it's not routinely sort of measured. And then with triglycerides, it's actually like the overall guideline or recommendation is...
29:48
Oh, you don't need to be fasted for that. So you can just come on in and get your bloods done any old time of day, no problem. Why is there that disconnect? I'm not sure what it's like for you guys here. Right. It's the same thing for us. Nobody cares about triglycerides. Your cardiologist doesn't care about triglycerides. Maybe if it's over 500, they'll put you on a drug. Maybe.
30:11
but it's never been shown to lower your risk of all-cause mortality. So nobody's really caring and really paying a lot of attention to it. And it's kind of too bad because that's a really good canary in the coal mine that something's not right. Fasting insulin, when I started looking at insulin decades ago, I was very excited about fasting insulin and I...
30:39
used to order them all the time, but unfortunately, it's so incredibly labile that it's a little bit difficult to use in clinical practice. After doing tons and tons and tons of them, I'm actually backing away from it a little bit, just because you can radically change it in a few days. I mean, insulin has a half-life of like three minutes, and so it's just very, very dynamic. I can have someone who's fairly insulin resistant.
31:04
And they'll just fast for several days and come in and have a really low insulin. Or they'll overeat, they'll go on a cruise and hit the buffet three times a day for a week, and their insulin will double. And so you can go from half the insulin to double the insulin that you had at steady state within just a few days of severely overeating or undereating.
31:29
And that just makes it so radically labile and dynamic and transient. It's very ephemeral and it's just not what you want in a... It's just really not what you want in a good biomarker. You know what I mean? You want something that stays the same for days or weeks or months. That's why we love A1C. You know, this thing is extremely steady. We love tests where it's slowly changing over a month. You know, thyroid stimulating hormone, TSH.
31:58
Awesome, you know, it takes weeks to change. A1C, super great. Even triglycerides are very lay-by-by dynamic, but they're not as bad as insulin, so it's better. And of course, the very best one is a waist-to-height ratio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's changing, you know, every several months, and it's very slow, and so that one's awesome. So to be honest, I'm backing away a little bit from just telling everyone, oh, make sure you get your fasting insulin, because...
32:27
I've found that it's just a little bit too all over the place. And then a lot of people come in with one that's kind of just meh. You know, it's like, you know, the... I know if it's super, super high, you've really got a problem. If it's super, super low, you're really awesome. But there's this massive grey zone in the middle where I just don't know if you've been eating well for a couple days or not. And it's just who knows. And that's where...
32:55
these other markers are a little bit better in my opinion. Yeah, no, that's great. That's really good. Ted, so your PE concept, can we start there? So can you chat to us about how you came or how you came to that sort of initial nutrition sort of philosophy and what it actually means? Because I think, and I'm not sure, and I actually, I imagine that satiety is an expansion on this, but of course we'll get there, but can we start with the PE?
33:23
Absolutely, you got it. Okay, so I zoomed way, way out and I'm like, well, what is eating? You know, what is eating? What even is eating, right? And it turns out that basically, plants make all the food for everything. They make their own food, they make all the food for animals. And then, you know, herbivores eat plants and carnivores eat herbivores and we omnivores eat whatever, but all of our nutrition is being made from plants. And they're really just doing two things.
33:52
they are taking carbon dioxide from the air and solar power to perform photosynthesis and making chains of carbons with high energy carbon-carbon bonds. And these are either carbohydrates or hydrocarbons, which are fats. But both are just chains of carbons. And you're literally just ripping the carbons off the chains and oxidizing them in your mitochondria. And that's how we get most of our energy. And in fact, your mitochondria is kind of doing the same
34:21
with these little two carbon chains at the end of the whole pathway metabolically, whether it's carbs or fats, it almost doesn't really matter. The other thing plants are doing is they're sucking minerals up out of the soil, most notably nitrogen, which is used to make all of your proteins and also some vitamins and things like that. These minerals are incorporated into basically protein and vitamins. So you're kind of eating to get two things. You're eating to get...
34:49
protein, which is nitrogen and amino acids and other minerals that are in micronutrients that you cannot manufacture yourself. And then you're eating to get some sort of carbon chain to use for energy. It could be carbs, it could be fats. And in fact, humans have this incredibly wide carb-fat spectrum where you can eat zero carbohydrates whatsoever and you're completely fine or almost no fat at all. I mean, the amount of essential fatty acids you need daily is, you know...
35:19
It's basically single digit grams in terms of essential fatty acids that you absolutely have to eat. So humans have this incredibly dynamic range on the carb-fat spectrum. We're definitely hybrid engines that can switch back and forth between carbs and fats no problem. But this protein tends to be a little bit different where it's just absolutely essential. And like on any given day, day after day after day, you need about 50 grams of protein just to be alive.
35:47
you know, over the long term. But there's way smaller requirement for either carbs or fats individually, although you need a lot of some sort of energy macronutrient just to run your metabolism. So, you know, I think that when I was low carb, I was like, wow, look at this. When people cut their carbs, they just automatically do better, right? Everyone loses weight, it's super awesome, it's magical. And then I realized, oh wait, when you do that, your protein percent
36:17
always goes up. And look at all the people who just go on a low-fat diet and have the exact same results. All of your vegans, all your plant-based people, all of your half the planet. Like half the planet has an anecdote of losing just as much weight on a low-fat diet as somebody else did on a low-carb diet. And so I'm like, okay, there is something good about low-carb, but there's something good about low-fat too. And then how could you actually come up with a paradigm that explains both of this?
36:47
And that's what I ran across professors, Rabinheimer and Simpson, these two entomologists from Australia, who basically looked at protein leverage and pretty much every form of animal you can think of, all the way from insects up to primates. And of course, humans are just basically animals. We're just a monkey that talks. And so they found that this protein leverage phenomenon was pretty much something you could see in almost every animal species.
37:15
where you're going to eat until you get enough protein and only then do you stop eating. And then, you know, after more research, I realized just what kind of protein dilution we're getting in the standard American diet and the modern food supply, mostly driven by economic reasons. It's just really cheap now to refine out carbs and fats, and they have a shelf life for a million years, and you get a really high profit margin. And so proteins, not only what you're really needing for true satiety,
37:44
but it's also the most expensive macronutrient, it's the hardest to find, and there are all these reasons why people are basically eating less and less protein percentages in their diet, and then possibly having to eat more to get the same absolute amount of protein to not be hungry. And so that's how I kind of got into the PE diet. Basically, this just looks at the ratio of protein in your food to non-protein energy, which is carbs and fats, or I guess, technically alcohol too.
38:11
But it's really just protein percentage, right? And if you look at worldwide hunter-gatherer macronutrient estimates, they're around 30% protein by calories. Worldwide, now we're down at about 15%. And it looks like over the 60 years of the obesity epidemic in the US, we've fallen from maybe 16% down to 15 or 14%, or some estimates say 12.5%.
38:37
But you can just walk down any middle aisle of your grocery store and kind of get a good flavour for the protein percentages a lot of people are eating. Yeah. And also if you look at the recommended dietary allowance or RDI for New Zealand, at least for us it hasn't changed forever. And so when you look at the recommendations in a gram amount, women are sort of 56 grams a day.
39:04
is what's sort of touted in men up to sort of 64 grams a day and it's set at that sort of 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight. Ted, what would you sort of say to a patient that you're talking to about where they should sort of start with their protein intake? Well, you want to just definitely immediately double the RDA. I mean, that's the very first thing, Anne-Li, that'll get most people in the ballpark. So if you just basically double the RDA, the RDA is like,
39:34
If you go below this, you're just gonna have a frank deficiency. You're just gonna literally be deficient. So sure, females can live on 46 grams of protein a day. You will be alive. Yeah. It is not gonna be pretty. So your body does this triage thing where you're gonna use protein wherever you need it the most. And then maybe if you have a lot left over, you might grow some hair or some nails or something that's just not.
40:03
mission critical, right? Or maybe even be fertile, who knows? But there's definitely all these things that get triaged and it's probably not a good idea to be at the bare minimum. And so for most people, I would say you just want to immediately double it at least. So, you know, 1.6 grams per kg, I could definitely deal with that. I mean, personally, I think that if you're trying to be optimal.
40:29
your whole goal for both looking good and performing well and being methodologically healthy is to have as much lean mass as possible with as little fat mass as possible. And in fact, we have the evidence to suggest that the higher your lean mass, the better it is for all-cause mortality and the lower your fat mass, the better it is for all-cause mortality. And so you're really just trying to recomp, everyone wants more muscle, less fat, and this is...
40:59
awesome for looking good, feeling good, performing well, longevity, metabolic health, because that's storage space. And you really, really want to maximize your lean mass and minimize your fat mass. Well, protein supports your lean mass all day long. Carbs and fats are really just there to support your fat mass. So when you're trying to get the highest lean mass and the lowest fat mass, the PE diet just falls out of the sky right into your lab.
41:28
as the ultimate way to look at what you're eating and prioritize the protein part while maybe minimizing or, you know, not prioritizing, let's say, the non-protein energy part, the carbs and fats. And so, like in a perfect world, all my patients are doing resistance training. They're all bodybuilders because I hate to break it to you, but everyone is a bodybuilder and everyone's built the body they've got.
41:58
So if you're a bodybuilder and you are, and if you're an athlete and everyone is, then you really probably wanna go even a little bit higher than that. I like a gram per pound of ideal body weight, which is what you would weigh for your height if you were just completely ripped and jacked. Like if you pictured yourself as just like a, you know, a god or goddess carved out of solid granite, what would your weight be at your height? That's what you should be eating, one gram per pound.
42:27
of ideal body weight. That's what I like. Although I would be fine with some, and that's 2.2 grams per kg, sorry. But I would be okay with 1.6 grams per kg. I'm just going to say going a little higher is going to be even better if you're really trying to get some impressive results in terms of higher lean mass, lower fat mass. Yeah, nice. Ted, how much protein do you eat a day?
42:56
pounds right now, which is about 75 kilos and I eat about 180 grams of protein. I'm a little higher than that. I would say I eat about a gram per pound, maybe 1.25 grams per pound. So, 2.2 grams per kilo or maybe 2.5, somewhere in there. Yeah, yeah. I have a good appetite and a good appetite for protein. So, I have no problem at all at sort of meeting, exceeding that sort of like recommendation, which is great because I...
43:25
I'm always quite flummoxed by people like, I just can't eat like 150 grams of cooked steak and I'm like, how can you not eat that small amount of steak? I think people need to, people sort of, when you look at say a chicken salad that you buy and it's got like 60 grams of chicken.
43:43
that's sort of what they've normalized in their head as a decent hit of protein. So it's sort of getting your head around the fact that actually you probably just need to go and double all your portion sizes of lean protein. And that's probably going to get you to sort of ballpark the numbers that you're thinking about. Yeah, absolutely. I have all these, you know, like my female patients will be like, well, I do, I eat an egg every morning for breakfast. So there you go. I'm like, okay, that's six grams. That's great. That's a really good tiny microscopic start.
44:10
And I have people all the time, they're like, how could you eat that much protein? I could never eat that protein. And what I tell these people, number one, get the leanest protein you can possibly find. And number two, eat that before you eat any other non-protein energy. You know what I mean? You make it the star of the show, you make it the focus of every meal and snack. And once you've eaten some very lean protein, as the first thing you're eating before you're eating anything else,
44:39
It's pretty easy to do. It's actually trivially easy to do. Anyone can do that. Yeah. And so, Ted, do you use protein sparing fast in your practice at all? Very, very rarely. So personally, I don't like to, you know, after years of careening off the extremes, you know, nutritionally bouncing from one guardrail to the other, and, you know, 100% of this, 0% of that.
45:06
I've realized that the answer to everything is always somewhere in between. And you really want to be kind of moderate and you really want to be doing something that's just slightly different than what you were doing before in a moderate and progressive and sustainable fashion. So I usually don't recommend anything extreme or proteins being modified fast. I'm like, look at whatever it is you're eating now, make all the proteins a little leaner, make, eat them first, get the quantities a little higher.
45:35
trim off grams of carbs and fats everywhere you can. Everything should either be low carb, low fat or both. So it's like prioritize the protein, eat the protein first, get the leanest protein you can. Everything else is low carb or low fat or low carb and low fat. And you just want to do something that's a little bit better than what you were doing before. So most people, they just shave, you know, if they just add 10 grams of protein to each meal and shave off 10 grams each of carbs and fats,
46:04
they're going to be successful over the long term. They're going to be able to sustain that. It's not that bad. And it looks like just making these tiny little substitutions. You know, it's like, okay, you eat eggs and bacon every morning of your life. How about eggs and turkey bacon? Or, you know, two eggs and two egg whites, and, you know, or something like that. You're making these little changes that, okay, sure it's not 10 out of 10 delicious, but it's like a seven out of 10, and you could absolutely do that day after day. And I just don't like,
46:34
to me feels a little bit like just an eating disorder, and it's like, everyone's gonna get starving, and then they're gonna binge, and they're just bouncing back and forth. And I'm like, okay, why don't you just start eating now the way you're gonna eat long-term, and just clean it up a little. And now there are exceptions. I do have patients who are dangerously energy toxic. I have patients who come in, and their haemoglobin AOMC is unmeasurably high. The lab just says it's over 14.
47:03
So who knows? I'll get a critical call from the lab because there's sugars 500, you know, and just extremes of energy toxic. And I'm like, Whoa, okay, your whole life was a cheat day. So now it's time for you to actually do like a protein-bearing modified fast. So I did dangerously energy toxic people who I'm just begging them to do something extreme because they're just going to die.
47:28
And that is the one exception. I think for everybody else, it's a little bit more, you know, let's just make some changes now that you could do long-term and you just slowly lose weight and it's way more sustainable, it feels like. Oh, no, that's great. I mean, I don't know if now is a good time to tell you that I have a fat loss program that utilizes PSMF. Sorry. But as part, no, no, it's actually, it's funny. But I like, this is why I like talking to people, you know, with slightly different
47:56
views, but who are aligned is just different ways to sort of skin the cat if you like. Well, you know, I'm going to just for your benefit say that there are people who really, really do get a great jumpstart from something like that. So there are people who will do like a cleanse for three days where all they're eating is just like salad and tuna or something like that. And you get this, you get like three major benefits. First of all, there's a hedonic reset where
48:27
Before everything you ate had to be 10 out of 10 delicious. It just had to be like a Trenta Frappuccino with extra whip on top. And it had to be the most exotically delicious, high carb, high fat, high energy density, whatever thing you could find every meal, all day, every day. And so this protein-free-remodified fast is like a hedonic reset, where you're kind of resetting your taste buds and your dopamine levels in response to food. And you're kind of like, okay, you know, I'm just eating food.
48:56
to get some food, I'm not eating it to basically be cracked out on the hedonic pleasure and reward of eating the most tasty thing ever. The other thing is basically stomach size. You know what I mean? You get this stretch response when you eat food. And if you're doing a protein-sperm-modified fast, you get a little bit of a reset there where you're definitely going to be eating smaller portions and then you're going to get a little more in touch with hunger and fullness. Okay. Am I really hungry?
49:26
And then the last part is basically it's just a lot more mindful because you're like, am I really hungry enough to eat another skinless chicken breast? Yeah, no, I'm good. And then so you get all these kind of resets. And so I do actually love for certain people, certain personality types to do a couple days of that just to get the ball rolling. So I am going to tell everyone go buy Mickey's PSMF, British Berry Muffin Fast Cleanse.
49:55
restart thing. Bloody amazing, Ted. Unless there's like some sort of colonics in there or something that I don't know about. I could actually support that for a lot of people, anyone who really needs to hit the reset button, anyone who's dangerously energy toxic or hypervoicemic or whatever. There's definitely a role for that. So I'm not going to just say that's never good. No, no, I love it. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely room for that out there. Yeah. And actually, and just...
50:22
just so you do know. I follow the satiety protein approach and then I have a couple of, instead of a 5-2, if you like, it's a PSMS as opposed to just straight fasting on a day. But you're absolutely right because it is an effective way to, it's an accelerated way to drop fat. Yet the rest of the days, I try to get them to eat in a way which I hope would be their forever diet. But anyway, enough about me. Thank you for that lifeline. I do appreciate it.
50:52
Can, actually Ted, sorry, how did your PE concept move into more looking at satiety? And of course, now you've got, and I'm so sorry, that index name is this, what is the official name for this? Is it satiety? I want to say SP satiety per calorie. Is that correct? Yes, yes, satiety per calorie. Yeah, yeah, how did you move, how did you move on into that? Well, I mean, I've just steadily been wrong about one thing after another.
51:21
You know, oh, plant based diets are the best. You know, no one should eat animals. Oh, wait, I'm doing that. And I'm not that healthy. I'm actually pretty unhealthy. OK, forget that. And then it was paleo. Oh, my gosh. Everybody goes on a paleo diet. Huge success rate. Oh, but look at all these other people who are just eating anything they want, this not paleo, and they're still also losing weight because they just did low carb or low fat or something. Then I got on the low carb bandwagon.
51:49
big time, obviously. And that was just the best way to lose weight. And that was where it was at, for sure. Until, oh, hold on, half the planet loses weight on a low-fat diet. And so that doesn't really explain a lot. And then the keto and carnivore, those faded out pretty rapidly for me. And so now I'm like, okay, this protein energy thing, that has to be it, right? I mean, look at
52:19
Bodybuilders get really lean on a super low fat, super high carb diet. But then some of your low carbers get super lean on a very low carb high fat approach in both ways you have to prioritize protein. Okay, PE is the final destination. This is the one thing people need to pay attention to. And then it's like, oh, hang on for a minute. What about all these people out there on an actually fairly low protein diet who are incredibly successful? I've got vegans who are bodybuilders.
52:48
they are not eating a very high protein diet. They're maybe eating 20%. So I have patients on these very high carb diets that are just moderate in protein, certainly not even really high. And they're just as successful. And I'm like, wait, how am I gonna explain that? What about the like the Samané or some, you know, indigenous persons who are eating, you know, 12% protein? And they were...
53:17
all very, very lean and all very, very successful. And I had to realize that, okay, you can't just pick one of these parameters and say that's the end all be all, because you can be successful in a bunch of different ways. And it turns out that there are these basic pillars and you can leverage any one of them really, really hard and be successful, or you can just cut back a little on one of them and be successful.
53:44
or you can do any combination of all of them. And these levers kind of became satiety per calorie model. So you've got a protein percentage, which is one of these four pillars. And this is very strong. We've talked about protein leverage, and this is basically the PE diet. But pretty much the higher your protein percent, the less calories you're gonna eat full stop. This works in humans, it works in animals. That's why you can reverse almost any type two diabetes with a 30% protein diet.
54:13
or higher. You can take animals and put them on a 50% protein diet, and you're just going to have the thinnest, most ripped and jacked animals you've ever seen. It just basically doesn't fail. All your bodybuilders are 35, 40, 45% protein. All your permaline people, really, really high in protein. So protein works, right? We know that. But then what about your people who are successful without a high protein diet? Well, okay, energy density. That's the next piece, right?
54:43
eat until they get a certain amount of protein, and that's protein leverage. But humans also eat until they eat a certain weight and volume of food, and then they stop eating. So your average human's eating three to five pounds a day. Yeah. Right. And, you know, two thousand calories or something. So if you're eating something that's one kcal per gram or lower, you can't get fat on it. It's just absolutely impossible. I mean, you've got like like carrots, right?
55:10
Okay, low carbers won't eat carrots, right? That's carbs. Yeah, I'm not gonna eat carrots. You want me to get fat? Just think about how many carbs I'm gonna get. Oh, it turns out that the fibre is so high and the weight is so high and the energy density is so low that to get your full day's requirement of calories out of carrots, you have to eat, I believe it's 18 pounds of carrots. Goodness. So, to be weight stable.
55:38
I'd have to eat 18 pounds of carrots a day. And I'm pretty sure that's just not going to happen. And so they have this absurdly low energy density and absurdly high fibre, grams of fiber per thousand calories off the charts. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's how some of these populations like the Samané are keeping their weight under control. They're eating these, you know, these purple sweet potatoes that are not domesticated, or you know, they're basically just incredibly low energy density.
56:07
you're lucky to get any calories out of it at all, and the fibre’s through the roof, and you basically can eat these things all day long and not gain weight. Even though their diets are 88% carbohydrate and 12% protein, and this throws all the rules out the window, right? Where's your low carb, carbs cause obesity? Where's your PE diet, which I'm now throwing under the bus, just because I realize it's solid for explaining one little portion of it, but not everything.
56:37
Basically, it's tidy per calories looking at protein percentage, it's looking at energy density, it's looking at fibre grams per thousand calories. All of these things are evidence-based. We know that pretty much the higher protein percent, fibre grams per thousand calories, or inverse energy density, the weight you get per calorie, the less people are going to eat, just like these just work. And then the fourth piece, this is the missing piece. This is probably...
57:07
the most important and probably the real driver of the entire global diabetes epidemic. And that is hedonics and palatability and liking. So humans eat for two reasons, right? Either you need to eat or you want to eat. So need to eat is homeostatic eating. That's eating because you got to have protein to live, right? You have to eat your 46 grams of protein a day because you're just losing skin cells all day long and sloughing off cells from your gastrointestinal tract.
57:35
And if you don't get your 46 grams of protein, you are just gonna die eventually. So basically, homeostatic eating is you need to eat because you're physically hungry. You have to have calories because you're burning 2,000 a day at least, and you're losing protein. So that's just eating enough protein calories to be alive, right? That is needing to eat. Wanting to eat is a little bit different. So humans are just hardwired that any time we come across anything
58:05
super, super high in fat or carbs or both or calories or energy density, we basically just binge eat the hell out of it. I mean, if you look at any hunter-gatherers, they come across something that's high carb or high fat or high energy density or any combination of those three. They're just going to eat their faces off. If you just dumped hunter-gatherers into modern society, they would be just the fattest people you know. They would just immediately, you know, it would be just extreme binge eating.
58:34
And this is hardwired into humans. That's just how we operate. It's just very rewarding to eat these foods that are gonna keep you alive during the winter when you're not gonna have any food. So that's the biggest part, I think. I think the hedonics by itself is at least 50% of the obesity epidemic. Everything else, the protein dilution and that sort of thing is probably 50% together. The hedonics are 50% by itself.
59:02
And everyone's really just making these food choices that are heavily influenced by what tastes the best. And that's high carb, high fat, high energy density, what I call the trifecta in these books, which is basically something that you're just going to overeat because it's that tasty and delicious and hedonic and palatable. And so, satiety per calorie is kind of looking at getting higher protein, higher fibre, lower energy density.
59:32
lower hedonics or at least, you know, middle of the road hedonics. You can't, you won't eat it if it's just gross and horrible. No, you're not trying to take the fun, all the fun out of food. Yep. And so you can use any of these factors by themselves and you're going to have some success. You could just eat nothing but foods that are gross and bland and tasteless, right? You can eat your just your raw bowl testicles and your cubes of pork fat or whatever these
01:00:00
extreme keto carnivore people are doing. And that's gonna be successful just because the hedonics are zero. Like nobody even wants to eat that. It's like, gross, okay, you're done eating. Or you can just use pure energy density. Like, you know, you can just say, okay, I just, all I eat is fruits and vegetables. So there's, you know, basically no fruits and vegetables that have more than one gram per, I mean, one kilocalorie per gram. So you have to eat, you know, five pounds of food just to get enough calories.
01:00:30
to stay weight stable. And that's why all your fruitarians are super thin and they're just making fun of low-carb people because they took that one energy density lever and pulled it as hard as they could and you're going to be successful. You can do it with fibre, you can do it with protein, you can do it with any of these. I mean, you have people go on a diet of just bacon and they're losing a bunch of weight and they're like, look at me, bacon's where it's at. Well, that's because it's 30% protein, right? It's, you just, you're...
01:00:59
you're not going to overeat that. And so any one of these levers by itself works. And any one of these levers by itself is good for like a middle of the road diet book, like the PE diet. But once you kind of figure out all of these, it really, I think, takes it to the next level. Because now you can explain pretty much any observation in the whole diet space. It's like, all right, we could actually explain.
01:01:29
anything we're seeing using this model looking at all these things. Now, it still doesn't explain everything. Well, actually, the model now includes things like sodium, potassium to sodium ratio. And it turns out that if you have a high fat food and you just add a bunch of salt to it, you make it more hedonic and palatable. And that's why people eat salted nuts more than they'll eat plain nuts. And you'll eat salted meat more than you'll eat... Coat grinds. Yeah, exactly. So there are a few other things in the hedonic bucket as well.
01:01:58
But satiety or calorie for me is just kind of the next evolution of just being wrong about every single dietary factor and not really understanding it and not having the whole picture. And I'm basically like the blind guy feeling the elephant who walked all the way around it by themselves, you know what I'm saying? And that's kind of like where I'm at. Yeah. No, I love it. And I also love that you mentioned bacon. You've just given me an idea for another.
01:02:27
diet that I could do, like the bacon diet actually. I think that would also sell really well. That worked. Yeah, it totally would. So I absolutely see what you're saying there and it makes perfect sense to me as someone who works with people, who helps them with their diet and the rest of it. And that's, I always think about vegetables and protein as being great for volume. And then you've got to add a little bit of fat.
01:02:52
your body's got a lot of fat as well if you're trying to lose weight. So we want to use that as an energy source. And so I get all that. And do you know what the thing that most surprises me is the vitriol that you've now sort of experienced because you've come out with this satiety per calorie sort of index and, and is it the, is it the miss or what is it that when you start categorizing foods, I mean, there is always going to be some outliers and some sort of.
01:03:20
you know, well, that's not exactly right, or we've got to do work on this or whatever. But I've just seen the whole Twitter seem to blow up and around this concept that it's like, how can you possibly come up with this sort of myopic way of looking at food and it's doing a real disservice to people who've been successful on low carb and the rest of it. It's been really surprising to actually read all of that sort of Ted. Firstly, were you surprised? And secondly, what are you know?
01:03:48
Is there a basis to have this such a backlash against it, in your opinion? I am not surprised at all. Because if you have a unifocal over-reliance on one of these factors, this is a huge threat to you. Because these people have to go around all day long explaining away a bunch of data and explaining away a bunch of studies and explaining away a bunch of epidemiology and explaining away other anecdotes.
01:04:18
And once you adopt this broader view, looking at all of these factors, you don't have to explain away anything. And in fact, what I've done is if I found something else that I would have to explain away, I just incorporate it into the model. And it's just part of it like sodium and high fat foods being hyper palatable. This is just another facet now. And so I've used my ability to
01:04:48
actually change my mind about things and follow the data. Yeah, turn that into a superpower where anything comes along now gets incorporated into the model. And now it's very anti-fragile. And this is extremely threatening to anyone who's in in an old fashioned camp of just one diet, religion, one thing. You know what I mean? I mean, because it's basically better. And that's super threatening.
01:05:14
Especially if you've wrapped your whole identity into one of these unifocal over-reliances like just low carb or just keto or just carnivore. It's very, very threatening to realize that somebody out there on a super high carb, super low energy density, maybe even low protein diet is just as successful. And so what I do on social media is I follow anybody who's doing something that's totally opposite from what I think would be good. So my my whole feed is just
01:05:44
low-fat vegans. I mean, I'm literally just following anyone who's doing something like that, who's talking about what they're eating, who is showing their results. And so I'm really I'm trying to disprove it. I'm trying to find outliers. I'm trying to find black swans. And then I'm using that to just broaden the net a little bit. You know what I mean? So I do not spend any time anymore.
01:06:12
in a low-carb silo, although I did for a long, long time. And I apologize. I was on the Dunning Kruger roller coaster. I was strapped down to that thing. But now that I'm old and I have some wisdom, hopefully, a little bit, more than I did, let's say, then I think that it gives you the ability to kind of like
01:06:38
be a little bit more moderate, a little bit more middle of the road, realize that the answer to everything is always somewhere in between, incorporate all these things together. And I can see how that's totally threatening. I'm not surprised by the backlash. And I like it because if this was a dumb idea that was stupid and pointless, nobody would even care. Nobody would be backlash. They'd just be like, okay, that's dumb. Goodbye. So the more vitriol this stirs up, the happier I'm going to be.
01:07:08
Ted, and I'm so sorry, I know that we're mindful of your time, but I just have a couple more questions and hopefully it won't take too long for you. How would someone, so if someone's interested in this satiety per calorie, how are they going to find information on it? Obviously you're writing a book and how was it actually incorporated into, how do people actually use an index or a scoring system like this?
01:07:34
Right. So I'm actually working with Diet Doctor right now to build just a really simple satiety score calculator that's very visual and very easy and will not only tell you where different foods are at or what foods you're choosing, where they are at, but also suggest little directions you could go to make things better. But it's really, really simple. You take any food you're eating now and find a version that's slightly higher in protein.
01:08:03
or slightly higher in fibre, or slightly lower in carbs, or slightly lower in fat. The end. So it's like, okay, you eat bacon, turkey bacon. You eat eggs, two eggs and two egg whites. You eat Greek yogurt, or you eat regular yogurt, you switch to Greek yogurt. You eat Greek yogurt, you get the low carb and low fat, Greek yogurt. If you're eating anything carby like bread or tortillas, you get the low carb version. If you're eating anything fatty like, you know, cream cheese or cheese or...
01:08:32
you get the low fat version. So you get the low fat fats, you get the low carb carbs, you get the high protein anything that you can, you get the high fibre anything that you can, you just combine these all together. And to keep it sustainable, it just has to be a little bit lower carb and lower fat and higher protein. You don't have to be extreme. Like if everybody just added 10 grams of protein to each meal and shaved off,
01:09:01
five grams of fat and 10 grams of carbs, the whole obesity epidemic would just reverse. Like it would really get better. It's, you're fighting the war of grams every day and every meal and every time you eat. And it's really just about making these very boring, very mundane choices over and over and over and over and over super consistently. So if everyone just got, you know,
01:09:28
Any little change, you get a breakfast cereal that's higher in fibre, higher in protein, lower in carbs. You put milk on that cereal that's higher in protein and lower in carbs. You eat the low carb toast with it. You're getting the low calorie juice. You're basically just making these little substitutions in these swaps and you're going to start reversing direction on the obesity epidemic. And it doesn't have to be extreme and it doesn't have to be a named diet.
01:09:58
even the PE diet or whatever. I mean, PE was great as like a starting point to all this, but, and it's still a great mental construct, I think, for just looking at that in general. But there are other directions you can go, besides protein, and it's really good to be aware of all of them, because some people are gonna have tons of benefit from, like fibre, for example. There are people out there, they just eat one giant salad every day, they could pretty much eat anything else they want.
01:10:27
they're gonna get enough weight and volume that that is gonna do it for them. That's gonna reverse everything. Someone also there is gonna go to the protein angle and they're gonna do a meal replacement shake or drink a protein shake, have it for their meals, and they're gonna just automatically eat 300 calories less a day and just slowly lose weight. And so you can kind of do any of these things. And what I don't want is for people to have to be religious about one of them.
01:10:54
And that's just the only way to do it. Like you just have to keep your carbs less than 20 a day and then everything else is fine. That actually, it sounds like it's gonna be easier. It's actually harder, right? It's harder to do long-term. It sounds easy. It sounds simple and it sounds just like so straightforward. You can't do it wrong. But it's actually harder than just being like, okay, everything you eat, try to tweak these ratios a little bit. Protein fibre up, carbs and fats down.
01:11:24
And that's actually, once you get the hang of it, it's more complicated at the beginning. But once you kind of get it, it's actually easier and it fits into real life way better. And you can go to any restaurant you want and you can eat out and you can eat foods from any category. And you just even if you're eating something that's really high carb, high fat, hedonic, you're doing ratios. You're eating, you're putting two chicken breasts on your plate and then one little square of lasagne instead of the other way around.
01:11:54
You're just ratioing, even if you're in an environment with suboptimal stuff, you just ratio the amounts of what you're eating. Yeah. And you can still get it done that way. So, yeah. Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. And so, you've got a book that, it's slowly being written. Hopefully, it will be written before you die. I don't know, by the way you were talking, I was wondering. But of course, because you're working with Diet Doctor, is it going to be sort of a web version of this?
01:12:22
as well that people could use to sort of be able to calculate, maybe calculates the wrong word, but sort of directionally know that they're sort of following these kind of pillars. Absolutely right. So, Diadocra is working on an app that's just going to be super easy and convenient to just kind of, you know, you don't really have to track, you know, air recalorie or anything like that. It's just going to say, hey, in general, this is where you're at. That's a tidy per calorie.
01:12:49
And this is where everybody else is, and this is where you could be. And it just gives you very subtle nudges in different directions. You could go mostly with substitutions and food choices or ratioing, like I described above. And I feel like people, once they kind of learn this, they'll just be off and running. They can just incorporate into their regular life, and they don't have to track or be.
01:13:15
religious about anything or be extreme. You don't have to get a satiety score of 100 for everything you eat and all. You can have this celery and water. It's just like, basically in general, it's kind of a heuristic, it's kind of a mindset. It's kind of just a way of looking at food like you're in the matrix. And so you can see the ones in seras. And once you kind of learn that, you don't really need anything in particular. You're just, you've just got the skills to basically eat.
01:13:45
the food that's in your environment and make choices and quantities that are going to just make you more successful. Yeah, totally. And are you working with Marty Kendall as well? I feel like he's a cousin of mine because he lives in Australia. Absolutely. Yeah, Marty is another, Diet Doctors is consulting with Marty all over the place because he's one of my favourite people in the food space and Marty's awesome. Marty's doing for micros what we're doing for macros kind of. But if you...
01:14:14
combine the two, it's like unstoppable. It's like food. Yeah. I absolutely love Marty, possibly because I'm an engineer and so is he, so that helps. But yeah, he's great. Yeah. And I do feel like it's people who are outside of the nutrition space originally, who have that sort of critical problem-solving mindset. Engineers seem to come up a lot actually in nutrition as being sort of forward thinking in this. Ted, thank you so much for your time. I have loved chatting to you.
01:14:44
I know that you're into resistance training because you just mentioned you talk to your people, but is this true? Do you only do 12 minutes of exercise a day? Is this correct? I mean, I basically never do more than about 15 minutes of resistance training for sure. I mean, I'll do a little more cardio if I'm playing Ultimate Frisbee or something where I'm just running a lot for fun. But yeah, when it comes to resistance training, it's never more than 15 minutes a day. I usually also do more.
01:15:11
cardio than that. And so it is pretty tiny, tiny volumes. And I make up for that by just using very high intensity and being really, really purposeful when I am doing it. Yeah, I love that. I'm unfortunately too lazy. Well, not lazy, but I can't work that hard. So I have to go for longer. And I think that's probably what most of us struggle from. Ted, can you tell us where we can find more information on what you're putting out there in the interweb?
01:15:41
Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, you can just follow me on all the socials at Ted Naiman, mostly on Twitter, also on Instagram. And, you know, if I'm writing this book, It's a Tidy for Calorie, it should hopefully come out by the end of the year. Oh, cool. Maybe, but certainly not anytime soon. And I'm sure I'll announce something when it comes out. And in the meantime, you can read The P.E. Diet. Pretty much anywhere books are sold, you can go to thepediet.com or just TedNaiman.com or just look at a book store.
01:16:11
Yeah, no that's cool because the PE Diet is awesome so that's certainly if anyone wanted to get sort of part of an understanding of where you're at, absolutely start there. Ted, thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it. Oh thank you, great to talk to you.
01:16:36
Alrighty, hopefully you got a lot from that conversation. Ted is super nice and a wealth of information and I really enjoyed chatting to him on the show. As I said, I have popped links to where you can find Ted and of course his book over in the show notes. All right, next week on the podcast, I bring to you a conversation I had with greenhouse gas expert, Frank Mitliner.
01:17:05
all about the misunderstanding around greenhouse gas emissions and agriculture, you know that's a bit of a favourite topic of mine. But until then you can catch me over on Twitter and Instagram at Micky Williden, Facebook at Micky Williden Nutrition or head to my website mickywillardin.com, sign up to one of my plans or book a one-on-one call with me. Awesome guys, you have a great week and I'll see you next week.