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This week on the podcast I have returning guest Marty Kendall, creator of Nutrient Optimiser, back on to talk micronutrients and satiety. Marty originally came on back in Episode 120 to talk more broadly on his work in creating Nutrient Optimiser and helping people understand the importance of micronutrients. This time around, on the back of my conversation with Ted Naiman, we discuss the important role that micronutrients have on satiety. We discuss his data figuring out factors that help people lose weight and keep it off on either a low carb OR a low fat diet, the important role of fibre for keeping calories lower (by a substantial amount), the types of foods to focus on that provide nutrients and satiety regardless of dietary leaning, and much more.
Marty Kendall is an engineer who seeks to optimise nutrition using a data-driven approach.
Marty’s interest in nutrition began eighteen years ago to help his wife Monica better control her Type 1 Diabetes.
Since then, he has developed a systematised approach to nutrition tailored for a wide range of goals, contexts and preferences.
Over the past five years, Marty shared his research at OptimisingNutrition.com.
He has developed Nutrient Optimiser and Data-Driven Fasting to guide thousands of people on their journey towards nutritional optimisation.
Marty can. Be found here: https://optimisingnutrition.com/
Previous podcast here: https://podcast.mikkiwilliden.com/120
Just a reminder that the best way to support the 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 1000s of other podcasts, so more people get the opportunity to learn from the guests that I have on the show.
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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!
Transcript generated using AI transcription services, 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 Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast I have returning guest Marty Kendall, creator of Nutrient Optimizer, back on to talk micronutrients and satiety. So I originally had Mali on for episode 120 to talk more broadly on his work in creating the Nutrient Optimizer and helping people understand the importance of micronutrients when it comes to
00:53
their diet and it was such a fabulous conversation that we then we met up at low carb Denver and I got to know Marty a bit more and he's such a wealth of information and so this time around on the podcast on the back of my conversation with Dr. Ted Neyman which we spoke about satiety, Marty and I discussed the important role that micronutrients have on feeling satisfied in satiety in the diet. We discussed Marty's
01:22
data so if you remember he's an engineer and just an absolute data nerd in a good way which helped figure out factors that help people lose weight and keep it off whether or not you're on a low carb diet or a low fat diet the important role of fiber for keeping calories lower by a substantial amount and Mahdi's got some great research and great data points on this and has analyzed both data sets from broad sort of population based studies
01:51
but also has several thousand data points of his own from people who go through his course. We discuss the types of foods to focus on that provide nutrients and satiety, regardless of dietary leaning. And actually we discuss so much more than this because Mari is such an enthusiast in this space, so easy to talk to, so smart about the topic that really we just went through a range of topics and I think you're really gonna love it.
02:18
For those of you who missed the first episode where Mardi came on, that's episode number 120 and I'll link to it in the show notes. Mardi Kendall is an engineer who seeks to optimize nutrition using a data driven approach. Marty's interest in nutrition began 18 years ago to help his wife Monica better control her type 1 diabetes and we discussed that in that earlier interview. Since then he has developed a systemised approach to nutrition.
02:46
tailored for a wide range of goals, context and preferences. Over the past 5 years, Marty's shared his research over at optimisingnutrition.com. Honestly guys, if you have not been to that website, absolutely go there and just have a look at the amazing amount of free resources that Mari provides to help you better understand your diet and the approach that you can take.
03:11
He has developed Nutrient Optimizer and Data Driven Fasting to guide thousands of people on their journey towards nutritional optimization. So Marty can be found over at OptimizingNutrition.com which we've linked in the show notes and as I said I've also linked that previous episode. I think you guys are really going to love it. So just a reminder though, the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favourite podcast listening platform.
03:38
that increases the visibility of the podcast out there and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts. So more people get the opportunity to learn from guests that I have on the show, like the one we're just about to listen to today, Marty Kendall.
03:55
How's things? Yeah, good, good. So excited to touch again, Mikki. Oh, I am stoked that you were happy to come on. First of all, so great because of course, anyone who is a regular listener of the show will remember you were on an episode 120. And we talked about your work with nutrient driven fasting, which is super fascinating, optimizing nutrition. And then of course we met in person.
04:23
Like four o'clock in the gym. I was going to say. I know. And actually time wise for you it was still, it was like, so for me it was I think 1am New Zealand time or like 12am New Zealand time and for you it would have still been yesterday. Yeah, my body was just confused but I had so much energy from sitting on a plane for 24 hours that I needed to lift something heavy. And actually that gym was remarkable. Yeah, yeah.
04:53
Yeah, like often they oversell hotel gyms if you look at the pictures, because of course, that's one of the first things I look at wherever I'm going to stay most places. I mean, some places you just stay wherever, but and so it was just such a pleasant surprise that the picture they had actually was reality. It's not often the case. Everything's bigger in America. It's crazy. Big roads, big airports. Yes, totally. So what's been happening since then?
05:22
I just plug it away during my, um, my life has become data-driven fasting and macros masterclass and the micro is masterclass and using all that data and analyzing it, I'm just completely fascinated by data-driven nutrition and I'm taking an engineering approach to it. And, um, yeah, just really thrilled. You talked to Ted about satiety, just really thrilled that satiety as a concept is picking up.
05:50
data-driven approach that I think can help a lot of people. So that's inspired me a whole lot more to dive back into the data even more and try to answer all the questions. I chat to Andreas occasionally and see all the discussion on Twitter and it's like, how can I answer those questions with the data? And that's been my quest for a while. Here's all this controversy and dogma. How can I use the data to cut through and answer things quantitatively and give another perspective?
06:20
I love that because your talk at Low Carb Denver, I found super fascinating, like focusing in on the micros, because of course, we often think about macros for satiety and we'll do a bit of a, it's more nuanced, I think, than what, you know, even I was aware of, and you do such a great job to highlight where some of those, where some of the sort of assumptions we make, where they might break. So I'd love to chat to you about that. But particularly the micronutrients, because it just.
06:49
It's almost like that complete diet picture because we don't just eat macros, we eat food. Yeah, I'm trying to start a rumor that nutrition is about nutrients, Mickey. So I don't know if you can get on board with that. It sounds bloody stupid to say maybe nutrition is primarily about nutrients, but it seems to be about everything else like, you know, avoiding bad things, saturated fat, cholesterol, meat, plants, animals, you know, you name it, saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat.
07:19
You know, everything's trying to kill you. Oh, no, there'd be nothing left to eat if you just followed all of that, you know, everyone, you know, if you just listened to everything you heard, you'd be... Yeah, plant. What are the... I was going to say fruitarian, that's not actually true, but the people who just sort of subsist on air. I don't know who those people are. Yeah, breathetarian. Breathetarian. But what about those toxins in the environment? Yeah. It's all over. But just toxinates, you know, pollution in the air too.
07:47
I don't know this about you, but did you sort of start with an evolutionary sort of lens to all of this nutrition? Great question. I remember Troy Stapleton saying, who's a radiologist, low carb type one guy who was a mentor in the early days, said to me, nothing makes sense outside the context of evolutionary biology. And I didn't quite understand that.
08:16
maybe eight years ago when he said that to me, but that makes a hell of a lot of sense now. A bit like Ted Naiman, I actually started in a Seventh Adventist upbringing until I was 10. We got out of the family, left the church at 10. So I started in a very much a creationist, you know, vegetarian approach. But I suppose that's given me a unique perspective on dogma.
08:45
And what it's like to live inside a fish bowl and why we need to jump out and use data to understand and break through the dogma. So everybody sort of lives their own little fish bowl. And when you can stand back and look at the big picture, you can sort of break out of the dogma and understand the fish bowl that you live in a little bit better. Yeah, no, for sure. And I guess I remember, I think, knowing that about you, because I've seen some stuff that you've written sort of in and around that. But I'd sort of forgotten.
09:15
Because your work with nutrients and micronutrients is just so sort of aligned with the... Highly in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah, because it's sort of what the body wants, you know, and we don't really think about that, and a lot of them aren't in the sort of modern day food supply. That doesn't mean that we can't have these other foods, which, you know, which we now have so accessible and so available, but it's just, you know, at what cost, I guess. Yeah, everything's on our spectrum of...
09:43
energy versus nutrients and really in the past, energy was hard to come by from carbs and fats. So it's really prized. We get a massive dopamine hit from getting carbs or fat. And you know, if you get both together, scored, you're prepared for when you're building fat, win, win, win. And you just get this addictive dopamine overdrive response, supraphysiological, according to Dana Small from a really cool 2018 study. You know, but in the past, that's how we're wired. But today,
10:12
We just live in this environment where we've solved the energy crisis. We've used subsidies and technologies and fertilizers and industrial ag and ultra-processed food that just give us this bolus of instant refined energy from carbs and fat together, and we're lacking nutrients. In the past, nutrients were really easy to get. Everything we could catch or kill or pluck out of the ground was packed.
10:41
with nutrients and not much energy, but today it's the opposite. So we can just use modern technology and data to reverse that just a little bit to get the results we want. Yeah, and I think that's what I really loved when I was just reading your stuff, Marty, is you're fairly agnostic when it comes to, and I know that we've talked about this before, when it comes to sort of diet tribes or, and of course, you just mentioned dogma, you know.
11:06
If I say there's no place for dogma, I mean, there isn't, but of course, dogma is everywhere. Oh yeah. We can't escape our own dogma. We've all got some bias. Oh God no. No, God no. We can use data to break free of it a little bit. Yeah. And do you know, some would argue, and I hear this a lot from nutritionists actually, and dieticians, that nutrients aren't a problem because of fortification. And if you look at a lot of...
11:33
Breakfast cereals, milk replacements, substitutes, even orange juice, I mean, Milo, so all of these foods, they're actually, and Mavi, in New Zealand, we have this thing, we have a Life in New Zealand lab, I'm not sure if it's still running, but it's down at Otago Uni, and...
11:59
They do a once a year, you know, how much it costs to meet your nutrient requirements. If you have a basic diet or if you have a diet where you are able to, you can afford a bit more indulgent type food. And if you look at it taking the nutrient box, it takes everything including iron, which I find amazing because, you know, 40% of women are sort of low in iron. But you know, takes all of these boxes. But if you go a little bit under the hood, you can see they include things like Milo in there.
12:29
have the quantity of animal protein sort of required, which is a bit of a tangent to my sort of certainly back to my sort of question is that, you know, do we even know, and I don't even know if you know this, do we know how available those nutrients are when we fortify? Like have you ever looked at that? I've got a question for you. Which food uses potassium fortification?
13:00
I actually don't know because it hasn't it's not on the radar actually isn't that interesting? Yeah and potassium keeps coming up as one of the things that is a dominant satiety factor in the statistical analysis and it seems we crave foods that contain more potassium calcium iron but not
13:25
you know, those B vitamins that are easy to throw into Milo or your breakfast cereals don't tend to pop up. So we tend to find, you know, you crave the nutrients that are harder to get, that aren't as fortified as much like potassium and calcium. But also you can identify the signature of satiating foods and they're not.
13:49
the fortified breakfast cereals that are chocked full of B vitamins that are healthy for you because they've got nutritious because we threw a lot of cheap teeny tiny B vitamins that we could advertise it on the label and they may actually make you satisfied with that breakfast cereal so you're less likely to go get meat and seafood that contains those B vitamins naturally. So it may not just be good for the label, it may be, maybe it's good to get a bit more B vitamins if you've got a really crappy diet.
14:18
It might actually make you more satisfied to keep on chowing down the cocoa pops rather than the steak and seafood that you probably really need that actually contains those nutrients naturally. So yeah, it's interesting to look at the data and see that we crave potassium and calcium in a big way and they're the ones that aren't fortified as much and maybe iron on a very low protein diet. Yeah. And you know, I like the way that you put that, the sort of the signature of...
14:47
a particular food because I think that if these are foods that we crave and hey, you have the data on this, but foods that do contain potassium naturally will also contain a lot of other things that we will probably need, right? So it's almost like this, so it's part of a complete sort of package that we would naturally sort of need rather than that you're just going to find in a box of refined grains. If you look at protein leverage, we seem to crave enough protein.
15:16
And it seems to maybe be a similar sort of nutrient leverage effect where we crave enough calcium and potassium and iron, but at the same time it might just be, you know how Facebook and Google and YouTube target, you look like someone who will buy this product, so we're going to advertise this product to you because you behave like somebody that will buy this product and give us money. This is a similar sort of approach to nutrition that we say, this is the signature of food that provides the nutrients.
15:45
aligns with a lower energy intake. So we can reverse engineer nutrition to say this is a higher satiety diet approach for someone on a low carb diet or a low fat diet or even a low protein diet. They all sort of have different signatures. Yeah. Okay. And I have to say that the relative success of that Facebook ad campaign.
16:08
Um, uh, campaigning for me to buy things leaves me hopeful for your approach. Actually, if it's, if we can at all, like, how much money is YouTube making out of targeted advertising? A little bit more hindered lately. Now you can opt out of, you know, every tracks you, but it's the same sort of data driven approach and chat GPT uses big data to specifically a big.
16:33
predictive text algorithms to understand what's the likely next word that will come after this word based on this question. Everybody who's winning the game these days is using big data and nutrition research is still in the freaking dark ages comparatively. The data-driven companies are winning data. Data is the big new oil really. It's where the money is in finance and I think it is with nutrition that we can say, let's cut through the dogma.
17:03
and what foods actually help us to win the game of not overeating, which I think is a big deal for a lot of people, unfortunately, these days. I completely agree. And if we think about, I mean, because one thing that people tend to agree on is that the calorie itself is probably the toxin in the diet, and all the excess consumption of the calorie, right? We've talked a lot about insulin toxicity and hyperintraveneemia and insulin bad, but what's the root cause of that?
17:31
Energy toxicity, insulin is just a regulator hormone in your body. When you've got more energy stored, you need more insulin to hold that energy in storage and the root cause is energy toxicity and the root cause of energy toxicity is a nutrient poor low satiety diet. And we can quantify that. Yeah, for sure. And then for someone to adhere to a diet, they need, you know, we need to satisfy that appetite and that's one of the things that Ted and I
18:00
obviously spoke about like if you can have a diet that is satiating enough so you're not overeating calories and you're much more likely to be successful and successful in the long term. Yeah you can count calories and track calories and try to fight against your appetite and I'm gonna eat half a pizza rather than a whole pizza today but you know three days later you're still gonna be wow I'm so hungry and
18:25
I'm going to eat two pizzas now because I'm just so damn hungry. But if you can change what you eat, you can manage how much you eat. And we've got data to prove that protein is the dominant factor, but you've got other factors, energy density, calcium, potassium, iron, fibre, vitamin C even, folate on a low carb diet, the sort of different nutrients that come together that, you know, A, satisfy our cravings and B,
18:53
with other nutrients and see this, the signature of foods and meals that are more satiating. Okay. But most people most of the time. Yeah. So on that then, Māori, like I know that you've looked at both low carb and low fat and what these nutrients are that help people feel more satisfied, are more satiated, therefore more likely to sort of stick to them. Can we like, first of all, like,
19:23
I'm really interested to know why did you explore both? Is it just because of your, your agnostic sort of approach to diet? You thought it would be more helpful for people, or was this just the patterns that you were seeing people sort of adopting from your data or? I mean, the reality is that the majority of people follow a low fat diet and, um, you know, you want to tailor it to suit people who consume a low fat diet and not just use the factors that work for a low carb diet, which was originally most of our data. And then I bought in.
19:53
We had 150,000 days of data from people using Nutrient Optimizer Logging and Chronometer. And then I dragged in 150,000 days of data from the NHANES US nutritional survey. So doubled it. All of a sudden, I had all this data on people eating a low carb or a low fat diet. And really noticed that protein isn't as big a deal for people on a low protein diet or even a low fat.
20:22
diet because they're just not getting as much protein. So protein leverage doesn't work as well if you're not eating as much protein. So if you're not actually using the lever, you can't get the lever. It's like you can't, if you're not even eating fiber, you know, fiber's not going to be satiating because you're not eating any in a similar sort of approach that. If you're on a low fat diet and not eating as much protein, then protein isn't going to help you as much because you're just not eating as much. So it's like, what are the factors on a low fat?
20:52
can help people optimise their satiety as well. And this seems to be a break point with, you know, there's different factors. People who eat a lower carb diet eat 30% less, but people eat a lower fat diet also eat about 30% less than people eating a 12% protein with a perfect balance of fat and carb energy. So there's sort of a break point where jump either way and you have a different...
21:21
satiety factors for each diet. Yeah. So, Mali, how did you define low carb and low fat actually? Like, cause of course there are lots of definitions out there in both the literature and you listen to different people that they may tell you similar or different things, but given that we want to know success in these approaches, it would be good to sort of quantify that. Yeah. It's just, are you getting more of your energy?
21:44
Non-protein energy from fat or carbs. So it's just a simple clean. And there seems to be a peak when people are getting a similar blend, 50-50 energy from fat and carbs together. We get a peak. So if you go to either side of that, if you lower fat or lower carbs, you get greater satiety because you're just getting out of that fat carb dopamine overdrive, perfect, you know, evolutionary biology.
22:13
This is, we're preparing for winter and we're going to go hyperphage. You can eat as much as we can for as long as we can. And all of a sudden I feel addicted to food is what a lot of people say these days. A lot of people say, oh, this satiety approach doesn't work for me because I feel addicted to food. And you've looked at the low satiety foods, they're the M&Ms and Doritos and rich crackers and things that people feel addicted to. So no one's addicted to, you know, spinach and chicken breasts and steak.
22:40
That's true, that's true. And so, so if you were able to then go right, so the lower carb, so it's not necessarily, you're not talking about like a ketogenic approach or a super low carb diet. It's actually just, if you're getting more of your energy from fat and protein, then, then that's a lower carb approach and lower than what, you know, the guidelines would probably sort of have you at. Yeah, I mean, but you can becker over what's low carb and.
23:05
But it's just, are you getting more of the energy from fat or carbs? There's sort of different approaches that tend to work and different nutrients that tend to be more satiating. Yeah. I'm kind of interested like with that in Haynes data. Did you have a look at how many people were at, would actually sort of, you know, what percentage of that population fell into low carb versus the low fat? Like is there a shift or? Definitely the people they interviewed were more high carb, lower fat.
23:35
and scarily low protein. A lot of them are well under the 10% minimum AMDR, except for the macronutrient distribution range. So yeah, that gave me a whole lot more data to understand what happens on a lower fat diet because a lot of my data from the optimizers who are prioritizing protein and tend to be lower carb, really nice chunk of data from them too. Yeah.
24:03
And Mari, you, because you've written a couple of like, a lot of great blog posts, obviously, but one I'm thinking of in particular, when you and we'll link it in the show notes as well that basically, if you, regardless of whether you're reducing fat or carbohydrate, generally speaking, if you hit that sort of satiety factor, right, then they're going to be eating 30% less calories. Is that, did I read that right? Yeah, if you swing from 40%.
24:31
non-fiber carbs to 10 to 20% non-fiber carbs, you get about a 30% reduction in intake just because you're jumping out of that fat carb dopamine overdrive zone. And similarly, if you're on a very high carb, low fat diet, you know, think of just eating rice or spinach or a sweet potato without any butter or oil. Those foods are going to be hard to overeat. But if you take your potato and add a bunch of industrial seed oils, they become a potato chip.
25:00
and they're really easy to overeat. Oh yeah, totally. What about like salt? Like if I just put salt on my baked potato, am I gonna... because I feel like that's gonna drive a bit of my desire to eat the food. Like is that what you sort of see in your... Sorta, sorta. Like we definitely need sodium. Sodium is critical and it tastes better. Like sometimes sodium can nearly taste like sugar to me because you know it tastes good and you want it...
25:27
But if you eat too much of it, you get to a point where the food tastes too salty. Because you've, you know, it's basically an osmotic transfer when you don't have enough salt in your body, your body sucks in the salt really quickly. But when you get too much, you've got a higher sodium concentration. Your body doesn't want more salt, you don't absorb more salt and your taste buds say, no, thank you, I've had enough salt and that tastes too salty, thank you. And can we eat something else?
25:57
that a salty taste really attractive. Yeah, so up to about four, you know, we set our optimal nutrient intake for sodium at four grams per 2000 calories, which is a lot less than the 1.5 that's in the USDA guidelines, which is based on hypertension guidelines. Everything else is based on the World Health Organization guidelines, but then they've picked the, you know, hypertension guidelines for sodium, which is crazy.
26:27
Sodium guidelines seem to be a bit low in the USDA food guidelines and everybody else that follows them. But yeah, you definitely crave some salt, but you get to a point where too much salt is not going to help you anymore. Yeah, OK. Yeah, actually, when you just talked, then you said that your four grams was lower than that and then USDA. But what you meant was higher. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I.
26:56
Yeah, but for athletes, they're going to be sweating a lot and need even more and crave even more. But totally similar sort of way, you see a similar satiety response in the data for other nutrients as well. But sodium is the one we think of and we can taste, but they seem to be the same effect to some degree in the other nutrients. Yeah. Now, Mardi, this is a bit of a tangent, actually, but I'm thinking about when I think about salt. So there are these like competitions, like eating competitions.
27:26
And I can't, and I think I was looking at, no, I wasn't looking at, I'm sorry, it's a lie. I was reading Rob Wolf's Wired to Eat, and he talks about this ice cream eating competition where the person who was, you know, they were, how much ice cream can you eat in a certain amount of time or whatever. And then this person reached almost what you would think would be like complete fullness, and then they ordered chips, and they ordered hot.
27:54
potato fries and even though they're really full, they started eating them. And then that will almost like flip the switch for them to be able to eat more ice cream. Yeah. And that's where we like on a normal, not everybody's doing an eating competition, but at the same time, we're eating fish and chips, we're eating steak and eggs or steak and potato. We always balance our.
28:19
you know, protein and energy again and again and again. And we're always sort of seem to be balancing our energy versus nutrients. So, you know, that's an extreme example. If you got eaten too many hot dogs, then you need the ice cream to clean your palate. And then something that resets that you can keep on eating the other foods. So, yeah. Or we just have a dessert stomach, don't we?
28:44
Well, yeah, that's a different way of looking at it. If you love chicken breast and you can keep eating the chicken breast, but if somebody puts the ice cream in front of you, you're still going to be craving that ice cream and have room for it. So the key is not to jump to really high satiety only foods all the time, but just nudge up the satiety score just a little bit. And I think that's what I really love about what you were writing. You were sort of sitting out and we were...
29:11
talk, obviously we haven't really, um, sort of dived into the details and I've almost like gone to the punch line, but. Nikki, you wrote the question. I told you this wasn't a script. I said, this is, I said, these are bullet points, which I sort of like, which helped me think about these things. But you know, Marty, I'm organic in nature. I like, I just, I just talk the things that come out of my mouth. That's okay. We're having fun. Exactly. So, but, um, but essentially like.
29:39
The goal isn't to have the most, I mean, to have the nutrients that are going to give you the most satiety all of the time, because that's not necessary, it might not even be feasible, but it's to shift that satiety curve a little bit to the right, so you're able to then adhere to your diet of choice, be it low-carb or low-fat, because let's face it, adherence is the most important thing. Totally, totally.
30:06
jumping from a satiety score of zero to a hundred aligns with like a 70% drop of calories. So who wants to live on a 70% cut for very long? That's brutal. So let's go from maybe the average Americans sitting at 30%, they can nudge it up to 50% and get a 20% reduction in calories. Or if that's working for you, you can go from 50 to 55 next week and just nudge it up. And that's where I think a lot of these indexes fail.
30:35
You know, talk about low carb or carnivore or low fat or high satire, higher satiety. I mean, Ted and Andreas have been talking about higher satiety, not high satiety to try and get people away from that extremist edge. But everybody wants to go to the extreme and say, I chicken and chicken breast and spinach only, and I was hungry. I was like, yeah, because you just need a bit more energy. But if you just match it up incrementally at a sustainable rate.
31:03
that you're achieving half to 1% weight loss per week, you'd find that sustainable and you wouldn't break, you wouldn't fall off, you wouldn't be craving the ice cream and the chips and the pizza to the same degree and you could sustain it for the long term. Yeah, but 0.5% that's a bit slow really, isn't it? Is what people are thinking, not what I'm thinking, because I totally agree with you, but people are always in a rush. People want the 3% weight loss. Totally. The hardcore protein spring modified fast, which you're all about.
31:33
But if you live on a protein-sprung modified fast, yes, it's the most aggressive, most effective way to lose weight. But most people regain that because they didn't learn to eat normally. They didn't read and learn. They didn't form new habits on the way down. They just jumped off the mountain, hit the bottom, and then went, I'm so hungry. I've been living on shapes and protein powder and only, and well, I can eat chips and pizza now.
32:02
All bits are off. It's like you just took wego V for a year and, uh, you know, eight donuts and then you've got this massive nutrient deficiency that your body's trying to compensate for when the insurance money runs out. Yeah. 100%. I like that. Um, so if we get back to the nutrients on the low carb diet, that people are sort of that you recognize as important to try and include. And of course we'll talk about what food choices, um,
32:32
These potassium is one. Yeah. Protein's the dominant one for low-carb diets. So if you're getting plenty of protein, that's more than half the satiety factors, but then you've got calcium, potassium, folate and sodium is also a positive factor because a lot of people struggle to get enough sodium when they cut out processed foods. So you're going to be a little bit more satiated with enough sodium, but potassium and folate, the sort of the non-starchy green veggies that
33:01
complement the meat and seafood so you get a more complementary balanced micronutrient profile that aligns with eating less. Yeah, so what are those foods then? You said dark leafy greens? Yeah, dark leafy greens and then the meat and seafood will be, you know, yeah, seafood so with a lower fat which drives a higher protein percentage. Okay, cool, but I'm talking about a low carb approach here.
33:28
Yeah, yeah. So if you're getting most of your, say you're getting 70% fat, let's prioritise protein and dial back the energy from 60% fat while your carbs might be 10 to 20%. So it's not a low fat diet, it's just a little bit lower. Yeah. Because you're already lowering energy from carbs. Yeah, yeah. And that just gives people a little bit more, feels wiggle room actually when you sort of do it like that. Yeah.
33:57
And it's just dialing back. You can dial back carbs or fat or carbs and fat and you get the same response. Yeah. Now you mentioned industrial seed oils. Are they going to drive our hunger more, do you think, than just sort of natural sources of fat? What do you know about that? The fat in our diet over the last hundred years has gone up by 800 calories per person, all the availability of fat in the American food system has gone up.
34:26
massively since we learned to use synthetic fertilizers to grow seed crops that we could hydrogenate and process and make really cheap oils. You know, they were a lubricant and useless until they realized we could use them in food and color and flavor them so they looked like butter and call it margarine or crisca or whatever. I'm sort of with Ted Naiman on the idea that I don't think there's any magical thing about
34:55
them that makes them inherently evil, particularly poofers. They're just a very small proportion of a diet and to get down to 2% that some people advocate by eliminating all nuts and pork, you know, non-grass fed beef. And it's really hard to get to that really, really low level. Um, but I think where you get into trouble, definitely.
35:19
is where you're combining industrial seed oils with refined starch and sugar altogether, particularly it's the refined starch and the seed oils, monounsaturated fat, particularly together, that's the signature of ultra-processed foods that we can't stop eating. So if you're managing your overall fat intake and not eating industrial seed oils, particularly combined with refined flour, you're going to be in a pretty good place and it's going to be hard to overeat those things and you'll have your...
35:48
Omega 6 and omega, you know, and monounsaturated fat end chick. Yeah. And, you know, that's what I think as well, that we talked earlier about sort of a signature, like signature of what sort of in food. And that's what I see industrial seed oil sort of being, or that really high omega 6 intake. Like if you're getting those industrial seed oils, then you're getting them from the processed food. And it's, you know, it's so reductionist.
36:15
even though we are actually talking quite reductionist about nutrients which impacts satiety, but to look at zoning on just one thing when you ignore these other features which we know drives overeating, it does seem a little bit short. I don't know. I'm not sure why that's not part of the conversation, I guess, when it comes to those things. Yeah, I fully agree. I mean, if you decide you're allergic to omega-6 fats, you'll be avoiding every bit of...
36:44
processed foods. So it'll work like magic because you'll never touch anything packaged or processed because they've all got added canola or rapeseed oil or you know whatever oils that are added to starch and sugar. And even sugar you know a lot of people are afraid of sugar and they're addicted to sugar and whatever but you know similar to that peak in carbs that's at 40% we get a peak in intake at 20% sugar but if you're eating a diet that's
37:12
40% sugar without any fat, it's probably going to be mainly fruit. Those things are hard to overeat. So if you're living on a diet that's a large, 40% sugar, you're going to be eating veggies and fruit that are hard to overeat. So it's not necessarily the individual nutrient that's evil. It's when you combine sugar, starch, saturated fat, monounsaturated fat,
37:40
never ever occurs in nature. It only occurs in ultra processed foods. So once you identify that combination signature, you can then avoid those. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And what about for a low fat diet then? And I have to say, like when it comes, like I was very much in the low carb, healthy fat, high fat camp, probably seven years ago. And I have changed that actually.
38:07
Māori over time, just working with people just in that I'm certainly lower carb. I mean, that hasn't really changed. Inappropriate carbohydrate for activity, but I'm not as much of a fan of the higher fat approach for most people in real life because most people have, they've got excess body fat that they need to lose themselves. And I remember reading in Volokhan Finney's Bible, the art and science of low carb living.
38:35
how they actually say it's right at the back. You know, like if you're struggling to lose weight on a ketogenic diet, you could actually just be overeating that fat. So the idea isn't to layer on all these low, you know, the cream and the cheese and the oils, it's actually to encourage your body to utilize that as an energy source. So, you know, naturally, and maybe this is my 80s diet background as well. So maybe it sort of precedes this, but I'm probably more in that low carb, low fat camp, but without the, yeah.
39:04
Yeah, and high protein, obviously. Yeah, totally. Totally. And same here as much as I've written a book, big fat keto lies. I live with type one diabetics and we tend to eat a lower carb, higher protein, you know, with as many veggies as we can throw in sort of diet. But yeah, on a low fat approach, protein has a smaller impact. Energy density has a bigger impact.
39:29
And then you've got calcium, potassium, iron, vitamin C, sodium as well tend to have sort of nutrient cravings. And yeah. So that vitamin C, that's different, isn't it? Because that wouldn't really feature as much in the low carb diet. Yeah, calcium and potassium and iron are all identified in the USDA food guidelines as nutrients of concern that the average American's not getting enough. And then when you're, you know, vitamin C was the first micronutrient that was discovered when
39:57
all the sailors got scurvy and you read, you know, the chaplain at the time recounted the stories of the sailors jumping off the ship and indulging with luxurious indulgence in these moss and fruits and anything they could find that contained the vitamin C. So obviously when you get deficient enough, you potentially crave maybe any nutrient that seems that vitamin C on a diet.
40:26
that is, who's eating fruit and veggies these days? It doesn't seem many people are, and it seems the average American who shows up in the NHANES data is potentially craving vitamin C to some degree, in addition to calcium and potassium. I actually think I saw something a year or so ago, maybe longer, because time seems to fly, that actually said that in real life, there are cases of scurvy, actually.
40:54
Um, which is like, I mean, I'm a massive vegetable fan, like, and, and fruit, and I enjoy fruit as well, but I, you know, I tend to eat more veggies and than anything else. And so vitamin C was never sort of an issue for me, but yeah, actually, when I talked to a lot of clients, a lot of, you know, some of them really struggled to get in or they just don't prioritize the vegetables in their, in their low carb diet or the low fat diet, actually, which I find super interesting. Yeah.
41:24
So Marty, what types of food, are the food choices then going to be that different if we're thinking about, you know, optimizing satiety on a low carb approach versus a low fat approach? Because a lot of those nutrients were the same. Yeah, yeah, definitely. There's definitely some overlap with protein, calcium, potassium and thin, you know, but lower carb foods are the non starchy veggies and sorry, lower fat foods are the non starchy green leafy veggies.
41:51
onions, potato, peppers, those sorts of things on a lower fat diet, along with maybe fruit. And then on a lower carb diet, you've got the meat, seafood and lower fat dairy. If you're trying to lose body fat. Yeah. I'm a fan of low fat dairy. It's like one of my favorite foods. Yeah. Are you a fan? Oh, yeah. I'm all over the high protein yogurt with some tasty protein powder mixed in for a quick
42:19
breakfast snack and that's pretty much my go-to. So that's how I start the day. Just smashes hunger for a lot of the day. Well, and in Australia, you guys have some great yogurts, actually. You guys have a much better range than what we do here in New Zealand. I love New Zealand food. I thought it would just taste it all. You could drive around the South Island and see all these happy sheep and cows and green pastures.
42:44
And the food was just off the chart because it's all so natural and minimally processed, at least on South Island. Oh, well, amazing. I'm glad you have that perception and I'm not going to disabuse you on that. So you keep that in your thought process. It's crazy. We went to Vanuatu and they've got the best tasting food in the world, but it gets shipped to China and then they get all the local, new Vanuatans go, you know, we're going to eat this white man food.
43:13
that's the processed junk and you go into their stores and they're lined with Oreo cookies and seed oils and they are literally addicted to those Oreos. They're lining every row, the empty packets. They take their food that they grow and then make a bit of money at the market and buy vegetable oil and Oreo cookies. It's just diabolical. They just blow up. Oh, and you all know.
43:41
Professor Grant Schofield, he talked about his experience in Carabas, which was very similar actually to that. It's just a sort of the result of an industrial sort of world really, isn't it? Yeah, it's criminal. Yeah, totally. So, Mari, can you talk to me about the protein leverage theory and when that breaks, because you did already mention that, but I did come across something that you wrote that talked about.
44:10
A low, well, maybe yes, when it breaks, can you just remind me of sort of what's going on there? But also, you know, like you mentioned low protein diets. Is there ever a reason to have a low protein diet? Like I'm really interested to sort of understand more your thoughts around that. Short answer is no, but there's definitely an observation that when people eat a very, very low protein diet, they eat less than the 12% protein, which seems to be optimal to.
44:39
eat more and store more on your body. It seems to be optimally efficient to build fat and, um, you know, store energy on about 12%. So if you get down to 7%, which is extreme therapeutic keto or fruitatarian or whole food, plant-based diet, those people tend to eat less. A lot of people talk about the longevity benefits of a diet that avoids
45:06
I'm pretty skeptical there because what do we die of? We're not laboratory mice in cages with no infections or cold, miserable, depressed, sea elegance worms in a Petri dish in a lab. We're robust outdoors humans who get infections and die of broken hips that put us in hospital and we get an infection in hospital and then we get on 18 medications that we get certainly prescribed and die of the complications.
45:34
you know, 30% chance of death within a year if you break your hip. So being robust seems to be really important when we're older. I don't think there's anything wrong with eating lower protein, low energy density foods, if you've already got your protein in for the day and your nutrients in for the day, but those lower protein, lower energy density foods aren't as nutritious as the the lower carb protein focused meat.
46:03
seafood and veggies. Yeah. And I guess the only, the people that might have a lower percentage of protein in their diet yet still meet protein requirements will be those with very high calorie requirements, right? The super active people where actually they don't need to do a lot to get in those nutrients they need because they're eating such a volume of food, which sort of describes elite athletes really, you know, like the swimmers, the NFL players.
46:32
rugby players who don't sort of think about body composition and things like that. I'm not suggesting they all have rubbish diets, but you certainly hear of these athletes. Michael Phelps pounding 8,000 calories a day to survive the thermal, you know, and activity that he needs to put out. You just can't do that on a whole food diet. Like it's nigh on impossible, the digestive district, like it would be physically impossible to do that, right? If you're an Ironman triathlete, you know, the average couch potato
47:01
who's not active needs a higher satiety diet and more nutrients, more nutrients per calorie. But the average Ironman triathlete, he's working out for 50 hours a week training, is going to need a lower satiety diet with a lower nutrient density because they're getting a lot more energy in so they can get the nutrients they need because they're consuming a lot more calories. But you know,
47:28
People who are less active need less energy and therefore need to work out a way to pack in all the nutrients they need with less energy. Yeah, for sure. And I find that 12% number super interesting because that's essentially like a protein dilute diet, right? This is what we're talking about. This is the modern diet. Like if you were just to eat...
47:50
The you know if you didn't really think about nutrition you just sort of eight foods, you know, we bake some toast sandwiches, maybe pasta, maybe some peas and carrots or whatever. Probably coming in at about that 12%. Yeah, the average American is 15.4 based on the enhanced data analysis. So yeah, 12% is pretty close. Yeah, and actually, you know, I remember looking at the data for New Zealand and a colleague Jamie Scott pointed this out that in New Zealand, so we have.
48:20
Um, the last time we did a national survey was 2008, 2009. So I suspect if anything, it's going to be a bit lower, but the average protein intake was about that 16%. But when you took out bread based dishes from the analysis, the actual protein was about 10% of quality protein. We'll be getting 10% of our calories from protein. And I imagine Australia isn't that different actually.
48:48
Yeah, Australia's about 16% as well. Yeah, yeah. Like you said, the protein that comes with grains is bound with fibre and harder to access. So if you're not getting most of your protein from plant-based sources, you need more protein. Yeah, for sure. And then, Marty, what is the, like when you were looking at your data, what was the, so generally speaking, people who followed either a low carb or a low fat,
49:18
that had these higher satiety foods, ate sort of 30% less calories than those people who didn't really focus on these, on the protein, on the calcium, iron, potassium, things like that. Yeah, that's when you just look at carbohydrate. Yeah. But when you look at, if you move from zero satiety index score to a satiety index score of 100, it's 70%.
49:44
drop in calories. So it's very extreme from one extreme to another, but let's say most people are at 30%, just nudging up a little bit will help you. Yeah, OK. How does your satiety index differ from satiety per calorie? It's still a focus on satiety per calorie, but Ted and Andreas, Dr. Hava, you know, Ted and I have been on a very similar journey for quite a while from the SDA.
50:11
upbringings, not that we knew each other back then, both engineers and both gone through a lot of the same mistakes and diet fads of paleo, low carb, keto and- Did you do carnivore? Were you carnivore? Ticking for a while. I've never been a, I eat plenty of, I'm not anti meat at all. No, no, no. I enjoy my steak and protein, but I've never gone exclusively carnivore. But Ted and Andreas are big on the RCT trials.
50:41
They want a robust study to validate everything that goes into the satiety index. And me, I'm just like, give me all the data and I'll analyze that to find out what's most effective. And the good thing is both approaches come out at a similar sort of outcome that aligns and confirms the approaches. So, yeah, I've brought in all diet doctors' satiety scores and they align fairly closely with mine.
51:08
So it's good for both of us to cross validate with different approaches. I agree because a randomized controlled trial is it, I mean, it's I mean the very term obviously indicates that everything is sort of clinical and controlled, which isn't real life, right? And I guess it's, you know, you're studying mechanisms in an RCT. What happens when you change this one thing? If that's sort of the thing that you're thinking of and then.
51:36
But then in real life, there are just so many factors which influence what we do that the good to sort of inform, I mean, they're good to sort of make a statement about something, but it's that real life data, which is what you've got access to and what you work with that then can sort of, I don't know, I feel like that's, that's just as valid as an RCT. Yeah. I mean, also referring to Silicon Valley.
52:02
whose philosophy is move fast and break things. And that's sort of my approach is give me all the data. I'll make up something that generates a hypothesis. And if you can't wait for Kevin Hall to run the randomized controlled trial with a high satiety index nutrient dense diet to have that RCT, if you can't wait for that, we've got.
52:24
data analysis now to tell you what foods and meals will help you do that. Like we've got 832 person years of data. Can you imagine what that would cost for Kevin Hull to do in his little laboratory hospital? It'd be exorbitantly expensive to collect that much data to get the level of statistical significance that we can get from 300,000 days of data from thousands and thousands of people living at a wide range of protein and carbs.
52:54
fat intake. So Kevin seems to end up going, we're going to feed everybody 15% protein. It's like, well, you know, that's not enough protein to actually see the protein leverage effect. And you know, yeah. And I like this data because it automatically eliminates ultra processed food, which is ultra processed food has got that signature of low nutrient density and a combination of energy from starch and monounsaturated fat together. So you're automatically avoiding
53:23
ultra-processed food and you don't have to do the ANO the calculations and say, how many ingredients is this got? And was it designed for profit? It's just like, yeah, here's the data, here's the nutrient formation. It does the calculations for you. Is it mono, it's muddy, isn't it poly? No, mono is just the biggest contributor to our energy. Is it? Poly is just a small.
53:49
5% of energy. So what is the mono that's used in processed food? Most industrial seed oil has a dominant energy from mono. Yeah, because I thought soybean and canola were largely it's soybean and vegetable, I mean vegetable oil and what the heck is that anyway, but you know, like, you know, like it's just some yeah, but is it? But mono is the one that pops up as statistically significantly correlated with eating more and yeah.
54:19
saturated definitely contributes to eating more. But if you're getting protein, then that's going to come with some saturated fats. That drops off and it's mono. That's the thing that as much as everybody says it's the magic heart healthy seed oil that you can eat in infinite quantities. If it's combined with starch and sugar with flavourings and colourings, it's also called ultra-processed food and not so good for you. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. Because of course, it's the
54:47
Well, it's more than just the oleic acid in olive oil that's sort of related to heart health and stuff, isn't it? But I don't think that we're talking about extra virgin olive oil here, because that's certainly not what's put in ultra processed food. No, no, no, no. Yeah, it's just crazy. Like the plant-based vegans will tell you that when I'm unsaturated fat is magic and poly is great too, and saturated is evil. And then at the other extreme, you've got the...
55:16
carnivore community telling you that, you know, poly is evil, which is contained in industrial seed oils. So they're just sort of shooting across the chasm, having this war about the oils that come with the opposition's favourite foods. And it just seems crazy. It seems like a crazy argument to me when if you're managing the balance of nutrients and energy and not overdoing the fat.
55:45
But all become irrelevant. Yeah. And this is the thing like you're, I mean, you have highlighted which nutrients are going to be most beneficial from a satiety perspective, regardless of those two dietary approaches. Um, it doesn't seem overly complicated. You know, you're not like telling us to go out and, and seek out these sort of unicorn type foods, right?
56:06
So how many people are actually doing this? Like when you look at the data. I was going to say, I'm not telling you to go out and sign your privates, but that was a bit of a smash. Yeah. Oh, no, I've seen, I've seen people talk about things like that. Isn't that the new thing? Oh, I'm not sure. Cause I haven't engaged. I've sort of just inverted my eyes and just moved on to the next Twitter argument. I'm not, I'm not up for any health. Sorry, what was the question? I lost my train of thought. So how, so when you were analyzing your data then, and you, you know,
56:36
these nutrients are important for satiety. Like, it doesn't feel like it should be that hard to get. Is that what your sort of data showed you, that actually the majority of people who you would categorize as low carb, all low fat, like they were pretty much meeting what you would suggest? Yeah, A, it's not magical. B, I don't know, you talked in your excellent 20 minute rant on protein that
57:05
we're all sort of aiming for lower in protein. And I think, you know, everybody wants to tell you that you don't need that much protein because these foods are really profitable. You know, the lower protein diet is really, you know, hyper profitable, hyper palatable in a similar way. We're recommending, you know, we're even reducing, trying to reduce the targets for how much vitamins and minerals we need. So it's easy to sell these.
57:33
ultra-processed foods that are apparently good for the environment in some magical way. But really when you get more nutrients per calorie, you know, more is often better. And if you've got a balance of all of them that are, you know, our optimal nutrient intake targets are two or three or four times the minimum to prevent disease of deficiencies. So if you're, you know, and definitely if you're staying out of that
58:03
better. But once you get out of that, once you're not eating ultra processed food, you can improve by then dialing in your micronutrients even more. And when people chase their priority nutrients that you can quantify for yourself, if you track your food, you get even better results. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And what do you think though, Marlene? I know you've got an index yourself, the satiety index score. Then there's the sciences.
58:31
the satiety per calorie. And in fact, on Twitter last night, I saw Kevin Hall put up something that suggested that, well, there was a paper just released that showed that you could consume a diet that was maybe 60% ultra-processed food and yet still meet the healthy eating index, which is another. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it was 80%. Oh, 80%, yes. 80% ultra-processed food. And it's in, and look, there are ultra-processed foods which are not.
59:00
They're not terrible for you. You know, there is, there are different categories of ultra processed food, but it's just most people are eating the types of ultra processed food, which do a disservice rather than that would actually, you know, help with healthy indexes, healthy, healthy eating indexes. Terrible. Yeah. Um, like it prioritizes, it says let's prioritize monounsaturated fat and avoid saturated fat, so it's really skewed to that the protein targets are in.
59:29
incredibly low and then you've got to get a whole lot of whole grains. And by the time you've filled your plate with a loaf of bread each day, you don't have much room for the meat and seafood and non-starchy veggies that actually give you the nutrients you need. So yeah, I think it's no surprise that the healthy eating index, you can create a good score with ultra processed foods.
59:59
you know, Adventists and the ultra-processed food industry. You mean Kellogg's? And Sanitarium? Yeah, Sanitarium, the seventh-day Adventist, have a large part in a belief-based dietary approach that avoids animal-based foods and prioritizes plant-based foods. So you're automatically, like, if you're avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol and prioritizing unsaturated fat.
01:00:26
and try and get your healthy whole grains, you've automatically avoided most animal-based foods and minimizing animal-based foods, which are quite nutritious. Yeah, it just, it so surprises me, Marty, that there are legitimate experts out there that do believe that this, that something like the Healthy Eating Index or the COMPAS, the Food COMPAS score, or whatever, are legitimate ways, markers, or, you know, if you optimize these, then it's a good marker for a good diet. Like,
01:00:55
I don't know, like is it, is it just a gender and money and, well, do you know what? I sort of liken it a little bit to multi-level marketing. So the people that are out there selling AirBorn and isogenics and stuff, like they've bought into this belief system basically. So it's actually, it's not the individual's fault because they truly believe they're doing you a service when they're trying to sell you their shakes. I sort of feel that way about these, these.
01:01:22
indexes here, like they must, it's somewhere along the way, they've just completely bought into it. It's not that they're not intentionally trying to overfeed us and create issues. But I don't know, what are your thoughts anyway? Wow, that's a whole new rabbit hole. Sorry. And not in totally off script as well. Yeah, I didn't prepare. But to be honest, I think where did nutrition science come from? It was Kellogg's and the STAs.
01:01:50
Lena Francis Cooper who started the American Dietitians Association who were trying to research to prove the beliefs and visions of LNG-wide and that's where nutrition started. So that's the bubble, the fish bowl that nutrition science started and it's hard to escape that belief system that emphasizes minimizing animal flesh because it leads to, you know, insert.
01:02:18
If you listen to Blinda Fetke, Rant and Rave, everything she says is fantastic and spot on and agrees with my experience and upbringing. So yeah, nutrition science is rooted in belief and profiteering and come together. So I think there's, you know, maybe some differential benefits of unsaturated fat versus saturated fat. But if you prioritize getting the nutrients you need from food, you're not going to be obese and...
01:02:47
metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance and all those disappear. So it gets really murky when you focus on your balance of saturated versus unsaturated fat and you just go down a massive rabbit hole that is largely irrelevant. In my book, if you're prioritizing getting the nutrients you need from food that provide greater satiety. Yeah, because essentially if you do that, then it's a wash, not a wash, but it's irrelevant because...
01:03:15
Naturally, you're not going to be over consuming these other things. Yeah. Hey, this is completely off script as well, but I'm so paying to know. Have you looked at Mediterranean diet, Mari, in all of your, like everyone talks about Mediterranean as the diet. And I think there are some healthful, of course there are healthful properties of the diet, you know, vegetables, olive oil. I am a fan of olive oil and oleic acid actually. Um.
01:03:40
and in small amounts of, well, I'm not a fan of small amounts of meat, but whatever. Have you looked into it at all? Or is that a project for the future? I don't know. I heard Stephanie say that a Mediterranean diet is sort of optimized for heart health based on the omega, mono versus an omega six versus saturated fat, not necessarily for weight loss and satiety. I think if you're eating whole food,
01:04:10
fish and veggies and with a bit of olive oil, you're going to be perfectly fine and probably thriving and yeah, they all avoid the ultra processed fat and carb combo, their whole food and these people have great community and walk in the sun and live a long happy life that's low stress. So I think there's something magical about the Mediterranean diet or the, you know, that you can't differentiate from.
01:04:38
getting the nutrients you need without excess energy. Olive oil is great if you need the energy and you're doing, you're active, but if you've got a whole lot of stored body fat that you want to get rid of, adding more olive oil or any oil or any fat or even any carbs is not going to help you. Yeah, no, that's a very good point. Um, lastly, Marty, your
01:05:01
data driven fasting. So I know we touched on this last time and this isn't in my script either, but I'm just keen any further insights into that that you can sort of update us on or? It's great. Yeah, I'm just fascinated that we end up sort of designed it to help people with type 2 diabetes and weight loss, but it seems to have attracted all these menopausal women that have tried fasting and keto and everything and you know, it seemed to be a
01:05:28
be growing this massive community of middle-aged women that say, this is the only thing that works for me and it's magical. Cause that's really encouraging. So it continues to grow and get great results every round and about to start round 24 and yeah, it just really helps people using glucose as a fuel gauge. And I think, you know, the future we can combine AI with your CGM data and your satiety and what you've eaten to design a diet.
01:05:57
that sort of is optimized based on your current blood sugars and how you slept and all those sorts of things. But I think, yeah, quantifying nutrition and tailoring what you eat based on your blood sugars is really powerful. And that, you know, you can make better choices based on your blood sugars at the time, along with your hunger and just getting in touch with your true hunger signals is really powerful. I think I'm probably going to have to ask.
01:06:22
To speak to you at another point, we actually do a really deep dive into that, because I just find that so fascinating, you know, if that's cool, because so many people say that fasting is not good for women, and your experience and your thousands of data points would suggest that that's not the case. But maybe it's the way that it's been the way they're doing it is misguided. Yeah, I mean, again, it's the more is better approach of, you know, fast for two weeks. So.
01:06:51
one meal a day or some extreme approach using a glucose as a fuel gauge just says it validates your hunger. It's yes, I need to eat now. So it's a sort of a confirmation that yes, I need to eat two or three meals a day when my body needs the fuel and this is the fuel it needs. If your blood sugar is higher, you don't need as much energy from carbs, particularly if your blood sugar is really low, then time to eat some carbs to boost it up quickly because your blood sugar is low.
01:07:21
times what you eat to exactly when you need it. And if you're chasing a lower blood sugar before you eat, you're draining your stored body fat and stored glucose. Awesome. OK, well, let's book that in. Let's do it again. This is fun. Yes. So, Marty, I always love chatting to you. I really enjoyed your company at Low Carb Denver because it's so easy just to nerd out on all of these things. But I'm hoping that what people take away from this is that.
01:07:49
It doesn't matter whether it's low carb or low fat. It's actually chasing a nutrient dense diet is going to overall support better body composition, better adherence to whatever plan you sort of use. And a large part of that is, of course, making sure you're not diluting the protein and protein as well. Definitely spread the new the rumor that nutrition is about nutrients. Nutrition is about nutrients. I love it. Crazy.
01:08:16
Crazy engineers. No, I love it. And of course, we talked all about your background in the first episode that I did with you, which was number 120. Where can people find out more, Amari? Yeah, Google Optimizing Nutrition, Amari Kendall. We've got a blog. I've been spending way too much time on Twitter, which has been a bit too much fun lately. And we've got a community of about 8,000.
01:08:43
people in our Optimizing Nutrition Mighty Networks community, where I've been loading up all these simple three by four slides of pretty pictures to show you this is high satiety foods, these are low satiety foods and here's a list if you want to download it. So if you jump into that and get a whole ton of free stuff, I just want to see people get the ball rolling with this approach because it really works. We've been doing it for five years with our macros and micro's master class and it definitely works.
01:09:12
of a fad and yeah, just hope it can help more people. Amazing. Marty, thanks so much for your time this morning. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much, Mikki. So much fun.
01:09:34
Alright team, hopefully you enjoyed that conversation. Look, we're both nerds and love it. And I just think you must be a nerd too if you are engaged in this podcast. So I reckon that that was just a real treat. So I'm so stoked that Marty was happy enough to come on again and chat to me. Next week on the podcast, I have a chat with plant-based physiotherapist and holistic expert and coach Brad Dixon. Such a great conversation.
01:10:03
That is next week on the podcast. Till then though, you can catch me over on Instagram, threads and Twitter @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition, or head to my website, mikkiwilliden.com to book a one-on-one call with me. All right, team, you have a great week.