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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello. Good morning or afternoon, wherever you are in the world. Today's podcast is based off the book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, How to Know What's Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake by doctor Steven. Brilliant book. Read it a few years ago.
Speaker 1:Well I listened to it first and I've read it, gone and looked at some of the concepts again. And I think understanding these concepts is important for us because the health and fitness industry is probably the worst for logical fallacies. So that means like, because we haven't really learned critical thinking skills, right, let's be honest. I'm not sure whether there was like specific lessons in school as a primary school or when you're a kid. It was kind of like maybe science touched upon it obviously, but there wasn't a specific lesson for this.
Speaker 1:And the ancients, ancient philosophers probably had more lessons on this than we do. And the reason I, like, wanna dig into this today is because I saw a TikTok the other day and it said that seventy four percent of, miscarriages are because of the vaccine. Right? I looked at that, looked at the data, it didn't say that at all. It said that seventy four percent of women who have had the miscarriages have also had the vaccine.
Speaker 1:Right, so it doesn't mean the vaccine caused the miscarriages, it just means that seventy four percent of the women that have had miscarriages have also been vaccinated. And if you look at the stats, ninety-ninety three percent of the population has been vaccinated in The UK and stuff anyway. So it makes sense that if a vaccine is happening, which is ten to twenty percent of pregnancies, the majority of them will have been vaccinated because most people are. Right? So it doesn't mean the vaccine caused it.
Speaker 1:They would have the the miscarriages would have happened anyway. I'm not saying there's maybe no link at all. I don't know. But from that start and that article he pulled it from, it wasn't right. And obviously, deleted my comment and deleted all of that.
Speaker 1:So they wanna learn. But the reason this is important, like I said, health and fitness is bad for it, but another reason is that for us to navigate the truth of what you see online, so you see like Daily Mail articles and big headlines. They take these things from research studies, and they take a research study out of context sometimes. But also, a lot of the things people say are based off observational research, which just means that it's research, you're looking at data, you see this going up and you also see this going up. So you kinda say well one causes the other.
Speaker 1:But you can't do causation with observational, there is no cause and effect in observational data that's why it's weak in our sense, but observational data can be massive data points, right? So it can potentially show links to go and look into further, but it does not mean that it is a cause and effect. A classic example of this is that they observed that people who ate more red meat also had a higher chance of metabolic diseases or being overweight or obese and all that, so they were like red meat's bad. Right? But when they looked into it, it was because and it's processed, by the way.
Speaker 1:The the reason why is because the people that were having, a diet high in processed red meat, like sausages, bacon, also were eating way too many calories, also weren't very active, also like didn't train a thing. So yes, that one piece of the puzzle maybe can explain the full picture sometimes, but it wasn't just because of the meat intake, it was the lifestyle that person typically had. If you isolate it and you had red meat or processed red meat in the context of a a moderate healthy diet, then it doesn't have that relationship. This is the case with all things, same with this. I dropped my carbohydrate intake and I lost weight.
Speaker 1:So that means that if I eat carbs I won't lose weight, and if I drop my carbs I won't lose weight. All that's happened there is that you've got three main nutrients. You've got protein, carbs and fat. If you remove an entire food group, which is the carbohydrates, which is about 50% of the western diet, or 50% of human diet over time, carbs play a big role in our diet. Carbohydrates are where we get our main source of energy from.
Speaker 1:The brain is run on glucose. There is a backup system, the ketosis kicks in, but the primary system is carbohydrate based. So you are removing 50% of a typical diet's food options, and then by doing that you've reduced someone's calorie intake, and also you've reduced muscle glycogen. So you've reduced carbs from in the muscle, which means there's no water being pulled into the muscle. So you drop a lot of water weight, and then you've come to the false that carbs cause fat loss.
Speaker 1:Reducing carbs can cause weight loss through water retention, but it doesn't beat another diet for fat loss once the calories and protein are the same. See I'm going with this? So yes, okay, you dropped your carbs, but that it's not true that dropping carbs causes fat loss because you can still gain weight without carbs if you eat enough calories from protein and fat. Right? Anyway, let's go through some concepts here that I'm gonna talk about.
Speaker 1:So the first one he talks about is the Dunning Kruger effect. You might have heard about this. So it's the inability to evaluate one's comp competency leading to a general tendency to overestimate one's abilities. 90% people think they are top 10%, for example. And this is good in, you know, in health fitness.
Speaker 1:Someone just gets into the gym within a year and they think they know everything. Number two, motivated reasoning. Biased process we use to defend a position, ideology, or belief that we hold with emotional investment. Am I reasoning or fighting this fight because I'm motivated due to an emotional investment or not. We need to look at that.
Speaker 1:I'm not married to a single idea when it comes to nutrition. I look at the nutrition, I look at the research, I speak to experts very frequently, I've spoke to experts from across the world for years, even decades at this point, to really get the information from them and speak to thousands and thousands of people in the trenches, and also myself. But I don't hold my data for myself in high regard because it's just an antidote, there's one person. But I know, you go off the research, the experts have been saying for years, and you know, you kind of look back and they get confirmed with RCT trials, you know, and you go from there. Arguments and logical fallacies.
Speaker 1:Invalid connection between a premise and a conclusion where the conclusion does not necessarily flow from the premise but is argued as if it does. I explained that with the carbs thing. That's that's that classic. Cognitive biases. Flaws in the way our brains process information.
Speaker 1:So he talks in the book about how memory is not useful at all when it comes to court cases. So a lot of people's memory is when you think of memory, it's not a film tape. He says when you have a memory, say five years ago, every time you think of that memory, depending on your emotional state when you're thinking about it each time, you layer onto that memory another emotional state and another viewpoint, and eventually it gets distorted and it might be quite far from the truth. So it's not really something you can rely on. And that's why when it comes to food tracking and stuff like that, it's important you do track because your memory of what you've eaten even yesterday afternoon is gonna be quite bad.
Speaker 1:And especially snacking and mindless eating, again you're going into the you you say to your coach or whatever, yeah, you know, I've been eating great, honestly. It's like okay, show me your food log. Oh, that's fine, I've been eating this. Look, cognitive biases are coming in here. The way you think you process memory while you've eaten is not the way you've actually been eating.
Speaker 1:That's the truth of it. And another one is that going against a law of science. Like I have someone will say, I've been eating in a calorie deficit for eight weeks and I haven't lost conclusion then is calorie deficits don't work by that person. But that's not true. What's more likely is that that person hasn't gone into a deficit for long enough time over the eight weeks.
Speaker 1:Because if they had, they would have lost fat. Because it is a law. Energy balance is a law. It is we all abide by it in the universe. Yes, there's systems that are more dynamic and more complex, but in the end it is energy in, energy out and there's different processes, Right?
Speaker 1:But, again, that's another false conclusion. So if you would think about it with a with no emotion, you'd come to the same conclusion. You know, if your friend said to you, listen, if I if I eat less energy than my body needs for eight weeks, will lose weight? And they're like, yeah, well obviously that makes sense. Yeah, but I have been doing that and I haven't lost weight.
Speaker 1:And his friend would be like, well you probably haven't then because you would have lost weight, you know? Quite simple. Confirmation bias. Tendency for individuals to seek out or interpret new information as support for previously held notions or beliefs, even when such interpretations don't hold up to statistical scrutiny. This is the carnivore gang, this is the paleo gang, this is the keto gang, all of these people, when they say that their diet is the best for weight loss or fat loss, right?
Speaker 1:When they look at research, they will try and find one smidgen of information that will back up, oh maybe this person lost a bit more weight on keto, yeah. There is a range guys, like if you might do keto or paleo or whatever, and you might find that it was easier for you to maintain your calorie deficit in one of them, and it worked more effective for you. But that doesn't mean this is the most effective diet in general, because it comes down to energy and protein. Once those two are the same, there is no difference. So you pick what works for you.
Speaker 1:That's why I don't say in these apps, do this diet to that diet. It's eat eat the foods you want to eat. You know what foods you should be eating and not. We've learned this. Your fruits and veggies, your lean meats, you know, you get your protein in, you know, we know to eat a range of colorful veggies ideally.
Speaker 1:In an ideal world, we would be doing all of that. No one needs to tell you what the unprocessed foods are. I back your information on that. We all we've all been eating all our lives. Right?
Speaker 1:So it's kind of an insult to say to people, you know, you don't know what to do when you eat. And of course we do. We know what foods are going on, nutrients and others. But what we don't well, then what we falsely believe is if we just follow that path, we should be a healthy weight. But actually it comes down to energy balance, unfortunately it does.
Speaker 1:So you can eat these healthy foods and you can eat them in nutrient dense foods and all this stuff that is labeled as good, and you can still be gaining weight. So that's why the label good and bad doesn't really work. How it should be said is I'm gonna eat the foods I genuinely enjoy, and over time, I will track my calorie intake and protein intake from these foods. And, eventually, I'll tweak my intake to match what I need. So maybe my dinner that I usually have, which is a chicken dinner, the protein I get from chicken is only 12 grams.
Speaker 1:I'm not having enough of a portion size, so I'm gonna double my portion size of chicken. Or maybe you say, well, I have lunches, but I don't really have any fruit and veggies at all. So maybe for lunch, I'm gonna have a fruit on the side and I'm gonna have a bit of veg on top of what I usually eat. Right? And you can start like that.
Speaker 1:Or it could be that you realize that you have three snacks a day and they're really causing your protein calorie intake to go up. So then you start adjusting and go, well, maybe you should have two snacks a day. This is how it works. This is how it should work because you can maintain that. And once you've dropped weight and you're in what we would call a healthy zone, and I don't like to use our word, but in, you know, in the sciences, a body fat percentage level that we should ideally be at, once you reach that guys and you go that base, everything else starts working better from that base.
Speaker 1:Your health is improved. Likely your mindset is improved, your mental health is improved, your ability to do things resilience is improved, your body is just in a better position, right, to withstand anything, really. Okay. Next one. Appeal to antiquity.
Speaker 1:Special form of the appeal to authority fallacy. In this case, the alleged authority is the assumption of ancient wisdom or the notion that an idea that has stood the test of time must be valid. So this is a very interesting one because a lot of us, and I read a lot of ancient stuff, ancient wisdom or philosophy stoicism. Right? And it's it's important to really take it in the context it was taken in.
Speaker 1:Because a lot people read back to that and they go, well, they said this two thousand years ago must be true. This you know, they had the Roman empire was running slaves, guys. Come on. Like, there was a lot of mindsets they had back end that doesn't fit today. But there's also the other side of the other useful information tends to be passed down over time.
Speaker 1:Grandmother wisdom, for example, it tends to be some truth in these things. But you can't take them as absolute truths. They might be pointing you in a direction that you need to go down and you need to read more about it. So there's two here. There's the appeal to antiquity and the appeal to authority.
Speaker 1:The appeal to authority is being used a lot in the industry by doctors, and not even nutritionist doctors, they're kind of like doctors of chiropractic or whatever, and they use the title doctor and they really abuse them. And they release books and they've gone to social media, well I'm a doctor, I should know more than you. Well actually there's some doctors out there that their field of expertise is in a certain thing. And it doesn't mean it crosses over. Right?
Speaker 1:And sometimes a doctor in one field can have such a big ego because they know so much in one space that they think they can learn everything in another space. They think they're right. You know, there's a lot of this going on. So it's really hard out there when it comes to this. Appeal to nature.
Speaker 1:Logical fallacy based upon the unwarranted assumption that things that are natural are inherently superior to things that are manufactured. Additionally, it relies upon the vague definition natural. You get this in food. You should only have foods with one ingredient because it's it's natural and you should never have foods that are processed. And all processes is taking a raw material and turning it into a specific form.
Speaker 1:So for example, yogurt is processed, but a lot of people consider yogurt, quote, healthy. Well, it has got a lot of good stuff. It's got usually good fats, protein, good micronutrients. Just because it's processed and it's not its natural state, which is milk, doesn't mean it's bad. Right?
Speaker 1:So this one's a big one right now on social media. There's a guy that has literally built a following on the appeal to nature. His name's Eddie Abu or something. So he's done that. Okay.
Speaker 1:A few more before you get bored to death. Fundamental attribution error. Cognitive bias in which we ascribe other people's actions to internal factors such as personality whilst rationalizing our own actions as being the result of external factors beyond our control. And you know why? This is so big in fit in weight loss.
Speaker 1:It's like we say, ah, well, that person's overweight, because it's standard, they need to change, you know, they should be motivated to change and all that. But if it comes to us and we go through a period of our life what stressful and people wait on, we say oh well, it's it's because of that event that happened and my my my relative died or I lost my job, that's why I'm waiting, you know, it's not my fault. So when it's us, it's not our fault, when it's them, it's their fault. And it's important to really pick up on when we're doing this. It's Like, all of these things guys by the way, we all do them.
Speaker 1:That's the first step. We're all doing all of these, and it's because we are like wired to do them. So we have to really catch ourselves, for sure. Anormally hunting, something that sticks out because it doesn't seem to make sense or it appears to contradict established knowledge or scientific theory. The fallacy of anomaly hunting comes from looking for anything unusual, assuming any apparent anomaly is unexplainable, and then concluding that this is evidence for one's pet theory.
Speaker 1:Classic in most diet stuff. Data mining. Process of shifting through large sets of data looking for any possible correlation, many of which will occur by chance. Whilst this is a legitimate method for generating hypotheses, such data are not confirm oh my god. Can't speak confirmatory, and the method is easily abused.
Speaker 1:Again, classic one. Well, if, you know, what diet's the best? No diet, calories, and protein. Well, actually, there's this one person over here. I know.
Speaker 1:There was even a research study done on if you matched your genes to your diet, do you lose more weight? So some people prefer higher carb, some people prefer higher fat. What if we match the people who are meant to more and more do the genes are better for higher carb, will they lose more weight? And the answer was no. They don't.
Speaker 1:So yeah. So you can find them individually, but overall, no. And I'll finish with this one because I like it. All comes raised up. When two or more hypotheses are consistent with the available data, then the hypotheses that introduces the fewest new assumptions should be preferred.
Speaker 1:So, basically, assuming the simpler explanation is true. Okay? That's really one we need to use. Okay? So, you know, we know the energy balance equation, Occam's razor, bam, simple.
Speaker 1:Then you add protein. I know you got people adding gut health and all these things that are the big influence. Say, well, if your gut is bad then you're gonna be overweight. Maybe it's not the calories, it's your gut. But actually, you know, you add in so many potential, assumptions there that you've got another list of 50 assumptions that must be true.
Speaker 1:And you cut the cut the cut and you cut and you cut there. And this is not to say that the complex stuff isn't true or doesn't matter. It's to say that the simple explanation is usually what we should go with, based on the research, and it it tends to be this way. It tends to be this way. But, anyway, I hope that was an interesting podcast, maybe some thinking for you guys to do.
Speaker 1:You're gonna find a lot of this online once you start looking for it. But if you wanna read the book or listen to it, an audiobook, it's a long one, but it's called Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. So definitely be a skeptic when it comes to health and fitness stuff and, you know, do Occam's razor. Don't add more complexity to your life. There was a study on this, and they looked at if if you improve a room, what would you do?
Speaker 1:And it's always they were always looking to add stuff to the room. There's a tiny percentage of people that looked at taking away things from the room. And sometimes we need to take away a lot of things to improve our current situation. And that's what I'm trying to do with this stuff is to take away as many stressful things away from you to track, focus just on what matters so you can actually add to your life via subtraction. And I think that is the way to go potentially for you to try out for this year even addition via subtraction.
Speaker 1:Have a look at all your years of your life and see what you can come up with. Have a good day. Speak to you all soon.