Podcast Transcription: Myths And Facts About Obesity: How To Take Control Of Your Weight Beyond Genetics with Stephan Guyenet

Ted Ryce: Stephan Guyenet Welcome back to the show. Super excited to have you back on. You're one of my favorite people to speak to when it comes to health, fitness, and more specifically, your area of expertise, obesity, and, various. Neurobiological factors that play into that. So really excited to do our 2024 version. 

Thanks for having me back, Ted. Yeah, man. And let's start like this when it comes to obesity and We hear that it's genetic. so there's some narratives about obesity and I can't wait to get into the red pin reviews about misinformation because this plays into that. That narrative, there's this belief that. obesity, all you just need to try harder. You need to, take personal responsibility. Certainly some of that is true to some degree, but then there's this other side that doesn't get appreciated as much. Where obesity is heritable. Can you talk about what does that even mean? And then we can go from there. 

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah. What that means is that your genetics can determine how susceptible you are to obesity. It doesn't mean it's the only factor, but it means that some people by virtue of the genes that they inherited from their parents are going to struggle more with body weight control than others. And in twin studies, which is one of the most rigorous designs, For estimating heritability, what those studies on average report is that about 75 percent of the differences in body fatness between people is due to genetics. 

So that number is disputed by some people. It could be as low as 40%. It could be higher than 75%, but any way you slice it, genetics is important for me. The conclusion doesn't change that much, whether it's 40% or 75%. Genetics are still having a strong impact either way on your body, fatness, and I think this. 

Agree as well with common sense. Like we all know that there are people around us who struggle more with body weight control and who are trying really hard and still having higher levels of body fat than they wish they did. And then there are other people who don't seem to care at all and are lean. 

And maybe they can't even gain weight. maybe they're hard gainers who have a hard time gaining fat or muscle and they wish they could have more and they're trying and they just can't. Genetics obviously has a pretty powerful role to play there, and that shows up in the studies and, but I think it's important to interpret these numbers correctly because. 

there's a couple of things that I want to point out here. let's go with the 75 percent figure just for the sake of argument to illustrate what I'm about to say. Let's say that it's 75 percent genetic. That doesn't mean that environment is not important. That's not what is implied by that. 

That's basically taking a cross section of a population right now, living how people do right now and saying, what explains the differences between those individuals, but if those people. Are all living the same lifestyle. if you just as a thought experiment, if we assume that everyone has the exact same diet and lifestyle, then it's going to come back as 100 percent genetic because there's no variability in lifestyle to show up, right? 

Life's differences in diet and lifestyle are not explaining anything because everyone has the same. So it's 100 percent genetics in that scenario. If on the other hand, you compare a group of people that have radically different lifestyles, you're going to see that it's a lot more contribution from diet and lifestyle and a lot less from genetics, because there's a lot more variability happening in that lifestyle. 

Furthermore, if we look back throughout history, in the United States, for example, but it's the same in almost any country you want to look at what is that the genetics haven't really been changing that much. Okay, we have some immigration, but even if you look within. Races, obesity has increased dramatically despite no major changes in genetic makeup. 

And so you can't explain the obesity epidemic by changes in genetics. So somehow we got from most people being fairly lean to most people being overweight or having obesity without genetics explaining that. So those, findings. They do, suggest that genetics is important, but they don't imply that environment is unimportant. 

I think that's a very important thing to point out. I think what it does say is that if you go with the flow of what the average person is doing in a country like the United States, then genetics probably will be the main determinant. Of what your body fatness is and then, whatever your genetics say is how it's going to be. 

But if you step out of the mainstream and you have a diet and lifestyle, that's substantially healthier than that substantially more slimming, then that can actually be quite powerful and bring you away from. Whatever that genetic predisposition is, because it's not written in stone, right? It's not determining your body fatness. 

What it is giving you a predisposition to be either fatter or leaner and how hard you have to work to maintain, to create or maintain leanness is going to be determined in large part by what your genetic predisposition is.  

Ted Ryce: Thanks for that. That, that helps clear a lot of things up and stepping to take that a step further. 

Yeah, I love that you mentioned, it's, we just want to bring this into the conversation. cause I think it's like this. If you want to solve a problem, you have to correctly identify the problem. And if the problem is multifaceted, then you want to identify all the facets of the problem. You don't want to just because just saying, Hey, you're lazy. 

It's there may or may not be that component, but I've worked with some obese, some highly successful yet obese people. They are not lazy. They're, maybe sacrifice their health, but that's a different thing, right? I had one person, she was an auditor. She would stay up and work all night. It probably one of the top auditors in the United States, not a lazy person. 

Yeah. And the other thing about environment, you and I were just having a short conversation before we clicked record. I'm in Lisbon right now. My steps have probably tripled. Effortlessly, right? Not because I'm out like, Oh, I got to walk in place and I got to get up and get my steps in because I'm lazy. 

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah. Not a treadmill, right? Yeah.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. Under desk treadmill. I'm like, it's 15 minutes to go get a decent flat white here. And and it's uphill because Lisbon is the cities at seven Hills. So it's just, probably the best solution to obesity is to move to a different country than the U S it's just not a, or even move to Bolivia and, Insert yourself into the Shimane or, some other tribe, but since that's not something we can do and still live the type of lifestyle that we want, raise our kids and send them to private school and run businesses, we just don't do that. 

So coming back to this conversation about obesity and heritability, just again, and we're going to get into this when we start talking about red pin reviews. Just to avoid any misinformation here and so that people don't get the wrong idea. What does that actually mean? what are the genes influencing to the extent that we know? 

Cause we know it's calories in calories out is the mechanism that weight loss happens again to the best, according to the best evidence. But how is, how are the genes specifically affecting people's regulation of body weight?  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah, that's a good question. And I want to start off by saying that there's a lot that we don't know here. 

So there are literally thousands of locations in the genome that impact body fatness in humans. And most of them are only having a very small impact. Not all of them. There are some with large impact, but the larger the impact they have, the more rare they tend to be. So most people don't...  

Ted Ryce: Like the FTO gene, right? 

Stephan Guyenet: FTO is the largest common one. Yeah, but there are larger ones like, melanocortin receptor for mutations, leptin receptor mutations, leptin gene mutations that create more extreme versions of obesity. Basically, if you get a mutation anywhere in that leptin pathway that goes from your fat cells to your brain and then gets Propagated throughout your brain and determines body fat regulation and appetite any, major mutation in that pathway and you're going to be toast in terms of your struggle against gaining fat. 

And some of those are not extremely uncommon. like the melanocortin 4 receptor mutations, those, if you look at cohorts of children with severe early onset obesity, a few percent of those kids will have mutations in melanocortin 4 receptors. So not extremely uncommon. Interestingly, they occur in dogs too, certain breeds of dogs. 

It seems to be selected for because it makes them very hungry, which makes them very trainable. And so some breeds of dogs actually have been apparently selected for having these types of mutations. And yes, but common obesity, most people don't have the more dramatic mutations. Those are less common to rare, depending on the mutation. 

Common obesity mostly is the accumulation of small effect sizes, the largest of which is the FTO gene, which you mentioned, but there are thousands of other ones with smaller effects than that. And you just it's like you're rolling all these dice. And you're rolling thousands of dice and however, the luck of the draw ends up with how these stack up in your own genome is going to be your genetic susceptibility. 

And, we know a few things about these genes, like some of them, I'll start off by saying there's a lot we don't know, because some of them are just like receptors that are widely expressed neurotransmitter receptors that are widely expressed in the brain. And this changes slightly how. the expression pattern or something. 

It's what does that have to do with appetite or body fatness or anything? We have no idea. We just know it's happening in the brain. And that's how a lot of these genes are. But what we do see is that they are heavily enriched for genes related to brain development and brain activity. if you're looking for a signal in this pile of genes that says, what do these do? 

We know that the main thing is they relate to the brain development and brain activity. And so that suggests that the main reason why some people have a greater predisposition to obesity than others. is because of how their brains are constructed and how their brains operate. And, these types of studies, these genome wide association studies, they've been done on all kinds of different traits. 

So you can look at diabetes risk, you can look at autoimmune disease, you can look at height, you can look at intelligence, you can look at all kinds of things. And they're really good at figuring out what's the main organ involved. So you look at autoimmune disease, you're going to come up with immune cell related genes. 

You look at intelligence or psychiatric disease, they're going to come up with the brain. You look at diabetes, it's mostly about the pancreas and some about body fatness. And so these studies are really good at nailing down. What the main organ is that's involved organ or organs because it could be more than 1, and for obesity by far. 

The clearest signal is the brain. And to me, this kind of settles the argument about. What's the primary at a high level? What's the primary biology underlying obesity? If you're going to argue against these studies, you better have a darn good argument because these are some of the most rigorous studies in all of biomedical science. 

And And then if we look at what the mechanism is, I think it's probably primarily by a regulation of appetite or calorie intake. There are differences in calorie expenditure as well between people, and that could play a role. But what we see across a variety of different studies in a variety of contexts is that calorie intake really seems to be the main lever that the brain uses to regulate body fatness. 

For example, in weight loss contexts, if you measure what the body's reaction is to that, like, how is the body fighting back against that fat loss? Primarily, it's increasing appetite. for example, Kevin Hall has a study where they covertly cause people to pee out hundreds of calories a day placebo controlled study. 

Yeah. Using these drugs that are used for diabetes treatment. either you're peeing out. It was like, 3 or 400 calories a day, or you're not and you don't know which group you're in. So it's covert manipulation of energy balance. And then they looked at how did the body react to that, how, these regulatory systems that are there to try to maintain your body fat level, what were they doing in response to that? 

And what they saw that primarily the response was to increase calorie intake. these people, they lost a little bit of weight, but then they plateaued way higher than you would expect based on the number of calories they were. Peeing out, which suggests that there was compensation happening and they found that about 3 quarters of that compensation was by increasing energy intake. 

their brains were like, alarm bells going off our body fats dropping. We got to get this back, which, by the way, these people didn't need to retain body fat. They had plenty of it, but that's what the brain does. Alarm bells, we got to get this body fat going. and then the main way it did that was by increasing appetite, increasing intake of food. 

And again, this was totally non conscious response. These people didn't even know whether they received the drug or placebo. So this is a totally non conscious regulatory response, jacking up their appetite. So three quarters of the compensation happened through increase in appetite. One quarter happened through reduction in energy expenditure. 

And and that's consistent with a lot of other literature suggesting that the main lever the brain uses to regulate body fatness is appetite. And it's not surprising if you think about it, If you're going to modify 1 thing to modify your body fatness, that's what you're going to do, right? You're going to change your diet. 

You could exercise and that could be helpful, but it's not going to be as a standalone measure. It's not going to be as effective as diet for modifying body fatness. And Yeah, it just seems to be the main lever that the brain uses. It's the main lever that we use when we try to modify body fat, and it's just the most powerful lever. 

And, yeah, so I think that's about the state of our knowledge. So we don't have a lot of knowledge about. The specific neuroscientific pathways that explain how this specific gene impacts the firing of neurons in a particular part of your brain to alter your appetite to alter your body fatness. But we do know that the genes are primarily expressed in the brain. 

They're probably acting primarily by appetite. But they could be acting by, other mechanisms as well. And yeah, so I would say that's, where we're at, a high level.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. Anything on food reward? some people just think ice cream is just way more delicious, even though I think ice cream is quite delicious. 

So food reward as well. In other words.  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah,  

Ted Ryce: how good something or how strong of a reaction, let's say your reward pathways in your brain get lit up for lack of a, I don't know the right term. Can you talk about that a little bit?  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah, I think that's absolutely part of it. And let me clarify a little bit what I mean by appetite. 

I'm just talking about anything that increases your calorie intake. So I'm not necessarily talking about hunger in the sense of. just wanting to eat any kind of food that could also be food reward. So anything, whether your attention tends to be more biased toward food than other people, whether you have strong cravings for certain types of calorie dense foods that lead you to eat in the absence of hunger, whether you, actually just feel really hungry all the time and want to eat anything all the time. Those are all different pathways that could lead to higher appetite. And I'd be willing to bet that all of those things are involved. Basically, anything, any biological or neurological mechanism you can think of. That could impact your calorie intake. 

Probably there's a gene that impacts it. And probably that's part of the heritability of obesity. And but, yeah, to answer your question more specifically. I don't think we know a lot about the genetics that really specific detail about the genetics that impact it. But I will say that. It is absolutely known that some people have much stronger food reward responses and others, and that does relate to the tendency to gain fat. And, Jeffrey Epstein, for example, his group has this test that they do on people. It's It's like a video game that tests how hard you're willing to work for a highly palatable treat. 

And what they will do is they'll give people a snack before this test. So they're not super hungry. It's not like they're starving and they want food. It's more like how tempted are you by this piece of a candy bar, even though you're not that hungry, that's more what it's measuring. And. 

It'll you'll be playing this game and you'll be having to make responses to get this piece of a candy bar and it'll get harder and harder for you. Get it to get another piece of that candy bar. And so you'll see, it'll measure how hard are people willing to work to get that next piece Of a candy bar, and then it will do the same measure on some kind of non food reward, like access to a magazine or something like that. 

And what they find is that people's drive to work for tempting food. They call it the relative reinforcing value of food varies tremendously between people. Some people really don't care that much and they're really not willing to work very hard at all for the piece of candy bar or a little drink of soda. 

Other people, especially kids, teenagers. Will work really hard for just a little piece of candy bar or a drink of soda. Like that's highly motivating to them. And that's a trait that is, that varies a lot between people and tends to be fairly stable over the course of the life course. And so some people just have this trait where they are much more attracted to tempting calorie dense foods than others. 

I actually talked about this. Some, as a client in my interview with him, he asked me this question about, like, why is it that, I'll be sitting at a table with a bowl of chips. And the person across from me doesn't even seem to notice it. And for me, I'm sitting there the whole time, having to restrain myself from reaching over and eating the whole thing. 

I resonate with that because I'm more like him. And, yeah, it's just people differ tremendously in this regard and. I don't think that's been linked back to specific genetics, but when you have this really stable trait like that, that differs a lot between individuals, I feel pretty comfortable saying that a lot of that is going to be genetic. 

Maybe not all of it, maybe some of it is early life experiences, but probably a lot of it is going to be due to genetic variability. Yeah.  

Ted Ryce: One more thing before we get into health and fitness, misinfo is. I believe I read about this in your book, the hungry brain, but more recently a study came out, I'm sure you've seen it because totally up your, this in your wheelhouse, but it was showing how when you eat more or let's say when you eat foods that light up your reward center more, you get less of reward over time, so you get less dope of a dopamine spike, but also your, dopamine spike. 

Or I forget all the details because I'm just just bring this up to the best of my ability because I didn't know I was going to ask this question, go down this route with you. But it also said the, reward that you get from less palatable or less, let's say more plain or basic foods is less. 

So in one hand you get. Whoa, ice cream. Whoa. But you keep eating ice cream and it becomes less rewarding. But the idea of switching to chicken and broccoli as an example, or chicken salad, it just seems super uninteresting, or at least like you're like, Oh, I'm not going to get the reward from that. Do you know what study I'm talking about? 

The more recent one came out a year ago maybe? 

Stephan Guyenet: Is it for Michael Crashe's group, a study in mice?  

Ted Ryce: I think so. I think it was that one.  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah, this 1 came out a couple of years ago. And essentially what they showed. On the level of neurons in the brain. Is that there is hedonic adaptation that occurs. 

To more desirable or higher reward foods. So if you have a mouse that is. Accustomed to eating unrefined mouse chow, which is a healthy kind of food for a mouse. Lower in calorie density, higher in fiber, and then you switch them to, what they call a high fat diet. It's like a refined diet. That's predominantly fat and has some sugar. 

It's just it's like mouse candy. You can think of it that way. They love it. Like they will eat lots of that. They will not touch the chow anymore. If you give it to them. And what they found in that study is that the exposure to that high fat diet, the mouse candy devalued the animals value of chow. 

So their reward centers weren't responding the same way to chow anymore. And they, so they would adapt to that high fat diet and that was like the new normal for them, the new baseline. And then the chow was down here. They just really weren't interested in that at all. And, yeah, so I think, it's, it makes sense evolutionarily, right? 

if you get to something more desirable and you have that for a while, your brain is going to get used to it. And then the less desirable alternative is not going to seem very good to you anymore. And. I think this kind of explains how, explains the fact that if you look at actual hunter gatherer and subsistence agricultural diets today, like what hunter gatherers and subsistence agriculturalists are eating today and did historically, it would be considered very unacceptable to the modern affluent palette, right? I don't think most people could handle eating how our hunter and gatherer ancestors ate. Just eating like plain roasted meat with nothing on it. Maybe the outside is burned and the inside is raw. And maybe there's some sand or charcoal sticking to it. 

And you're like cutting chunks off and there's no salt. No herbs and, you're eating fresh fruit. You're eating plain roasted nuts. You're eating fibrous tubers that might have some bitterness in them. some of those things aren't necessarily bad tasting, but I think most of the people would find them fairly bland. 

And at best, like bland at best for most of those foods and then honey is delicious, but hunter gatherers weren't spreading it on toast with butter. They were just like, drinking it. that's not how most people would prefer to eat honey. And I think that, yeah, I think it's interesting that now we have adapted to the point like growing up with foods that our brains intuitively find much more desirable with higher levels of all those dopamine stimulating nutrients, like the fat and the sugar and the starch and the salt all mixed together and delicious combinations. And our brains don't want any of the simple stuff anymore. 

And that's part of what makes it tough. Is we hedonically adapted to this extremely high reward diet by historical standards, and that's the new normal and going back to, the diet of our distant ancestors is not as satisfying to us as it would have been to our distant ancestors who were accustomed to that, So I think that's part of the challenge that we face in the modern world.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. Yeah. You're, bringing up a good point because, and this is a good time to transition into this conversation about fitness, health and fitness. Misinformation is, the so called paleo diet, it's not really paleo at all, not really paleo at all with your paleo, your 10. 

Meat rub and other things that you're doing with your 200 special grill. It's there's nothing paleo about it. Like you said, that, cooked on a fire charred on the outside, maybe a little bit raw on the inside and just some of these things that are distant ancestors, ages to survive. And, Yeah. I don't think we quite get that. 

I don't think actually, you know what I'll tell you, Stephan, I've lived all around the world. I think I have a better idea than most. And one of the things that I've learned about Americans completely disconnected, like Americans believe in starvation mode, right? Oh, I'm not losing weight because I'm eating 1200 calories. 

And that's what's stopping my fat loss. And then you look at people in South Asia, haven't been to South Asia, but. I've been to Southeast Asia and people with not enough to eat, and it's just that's not happening. It doesn't exist. so let's talk about what you're doing with red pin and, just talk about Red Pen reviews and why you started it and what it's for. 

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah, so Red Pen reviews publishes the most informative, consistent, and unbiased reviews of popular nutrition books available anywhere. That's in a nutshell what we do. And Really, it was created in response to my perception, the perception of some of the others who helped me develop it. especially Seth Yoder and Mario Kratz created. 

Because of our perception that there was a lot of misinformation in the popular nutrition sphere. I think many of us recognize that's true not to say that it's all misinformation. I think it just ranges widely and I think. Not only does it range widely, but it's really hard for most people in the public to distinguish the good quality information from the bad quality information. 

And I say that, almost impossible. Actually, I would say it's really hard. It's really hard. And even for me, right? If I haven't gone through the red pen process on a book, and I'm reading a book that's not exactly in my area of expertise, I can be misled too by, selective citation of studies by telling a good story, persuasive writing. 

I can be misled too. And then it's not until I start looking up the citations. And doing scientific literature search on key claims where I'm like, okay, actually, this is not really well supported by current evidence. And if I struggle with a lot of these things, then most people are going to struggle with them as well. 

So we just live in this. Low quality nutrition information environment and so how do we. Sort the fact from the fiction, so we wanted to build a method that was going to really, evolve the way that we evaluate information quality. So not just, review a book and give our opinions on it, but have a structured method that is allowing us to review books in a very consistent way and is removing as much of that human bias as possible to remove. And I just want to acknowledge there's no way to completely remove human bias. And we don't claim that we are able to completely remove human bias. But what we do claim is that we have a structured method. 

That is designed to minimize that as much as possible. And that we apply that method as rigorously as we can. And I think that goes a long way. And What that yields is a, at the end of the day, a review page takes us. 40 plus hours to do each of these reviews. yeah, 40 to a hundred hours. That's what we estimate. 

And, so it's incredibly time intensive, but what that yields is a page where you land on the review page for a particular book. And the first thing you're greeted with is an image of the cover of the book. So you can, immediately know what you're looking at. And then to the right of that, score bars for each of the domains that we're scoring in. 

So scientific accuracy. That we, we review 3 key claims in the book for scientific accuracy by doing scientific literature searches. 2nd category is reference accuracy. We randomly select 10 citations from the book and we check to make sure that, the book is using them accurately. And then the last 1 is helpfulness. 

1. Rate how effective is this intervention going to be against the condition that is targeted. For general health, and then is it meeting general nutrition requirements? Those are the 3 metrics that go into the helpfulness section. And then you get these at the top, you get these score bars, color coded score bars that are percentages.

And so you can land on the page. And literally in seconds. You can have a really informative picture of what the information quality of that book is. And then if you go down, so it's organized in a tiered way based on how deeply you want to engage you scroll down and then there's a summary of the review that says why we gave it the scores that we did at a really high level. 

And then you go down below that, and you can see the section summaries for each of the major scoring domains. And then you can click to open those and then you get the full details on how we exactly how we assign the scores that we did complete with page numbers quotes from the book and click through links to all the scientific citations that we're using in our view. 

It's a very, it's a very intensive and detailed process that you can go as deep as you want into. But at the same time, if you only want to engage at that. faster, higher level, you can do that in seconds by landing on our web page. And at this point, I think we've reviewed 23 books and we have another 1 that is going to be coming up here really soon. 

And, yeah, we do, we just, we, we chip away at them and we publish them when we can.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. And I'm on your website right now, red pin reviews. org. So red pin reviews. org and, just looking over some of them as you were discussing, looking for like the overall score and the scientific accuracy, reference accuracy, and healthfulness. 

So, it's such a great, I really appreciate what you do because I used to be lost down, it's so funny. I've been in this business 25 years. I was lost. Yeah. And I was, I don't, do you know who Paul Check is? Do you know that name? 

Stephan Guyenet: It rings a bell, but I don't know much about him.  

Ted Ryce: He's not that popular anymore, but 20, let's say 25 years ago, he was super popular. 

He was a contemporary of Charles Pollack. And if that is the strength coach. It's worked with several Olympic and professional athletes, made a name for himself was on Tim Ferriss's podcast died. A few years back from heart issues, early actually, but anyway, lost down. I was paleo before it was called paleo. 

It was called ancestral eating. the whole seed oil thing, Stephan was into that 20 plus years ago, right? The whole videos of the extruder process of making what are now known as seed oils. 

Stephan Guyenet: I have to fess up that I was, part of that too. Yeah. I have to fess up there.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. we didn't know any better and I think people don't realize. 

It was easier to believe in things in those days because there wasn't as much in 20, 25 years ago, the amount of research that exists and the quality, what you have access to, it's insane. But I still see people saying the same stuff that I did over 20 years ago. And then it's just Oh man, like not believing in calories or, or a whole seed oil argument, which I don't even eat. 

Cause I'm not going to get, if I'm going to get my, if I'm going to use added oil, I'm going to use peanut oil because it tastes delicious. Or I guess that's a legume oil, not necessarily seed oil. I don't know. I don't know what the classification, maybe it's the seed oil, but, or olive oil is what I usually use because of the health. 

So seed oils, for example, are. They help when you change saturated fat out in terms of lipid. Lipid markers, right? Olive oil has health promoting benefits. Again, according to my understanding, my, my best understanding of the literature has health benefit, health promoting benefits, whereas, what are known as seed oils, I don't think they do. 

But, I still am out there, just telling people like, Hey, it's more of a calorie thing. And these seed oils are found. So talk a little bit about, you and I have both been down this road, and you're doing this great service, which I want to say one more thing, Stephan, because I think it's appropriate. 

You're doing a great job. I almost feel like it's niche because there's a lot of people that have no interest in critical thinking and evaluating this stuff at a deep level. It's like I did carnivore. I healed my joint pain, which, was just caused by inflammatory chemicals, most likely because of excess visceral fat, but... and I could have done a vegan diet and lost body fat and healed my joint pains. But, if you're a person who you're like, okay, I want to get away from the tribalism and the diet world. And I just want to know, I want a more objective, like you said, Stephan, you guys aren't perfect over there at Red Pen, but, you do your best to present the most, you, have a process that you've developed to help people make better, informed decisions about what information they should read. 

But, if you're that person, then this is a great resource. I've already looked over a few things in the past, but also just now, again, as we've been talking, I mostly read research these days. I don't read books, but if you read books, this is fantastic. So can you talk a little bit about man, where, you know, what are some. 

Red flags for neutral. How about this? Where do you even think this comes from? Cause I have my own views being in this business and getting into these heated arguments where I'm just like, what is going on? Like why the, connection? Why do you want to die on this hill?  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah. I think when you see people acting like that, it's because they're, it's connected with identity. 

Yeah. So you'll see it with politics. You'll see it with religion. You'll see it with nutrition when ideas get taken personally and connected with personal identity. That's when people get really ideological and really tribal about them. so personal identity or group identity, of course. And, I think that's what's basically going on. 

Like eating is a very personal thing, right? You're putting stuff inside your body and it has a big impact on your health. It has a big impact on how you look. It's related to culture. And And there's a lot at stake. So it's, people view it as important, rightly And so they form communities and they build up ideas in those communities. 

They get attached to those ideas and then it becomes a team sport. And I think that also diet is a place where people. Can access hope and access big promises and access community. if, if there's a diet guru out there, who's making huge promises about curing or preventing some disease that you're afraid of, and your doctor hasn't said anything about, your doctor hasn't made big claims like that. 

You're looking for some way to heal or revert or, avoid this disease. You're afraid you want reassurance. You want safety and here comes someone who's making claims about those things, that's very attractive. And then there are the community is the community aspect. People want community. They want a tribe. 

And so that feels good to people to be given that hope and that community. So I think people get very, for all those reasons, people get very personally attached and relates to their personal and group identity. And at that point, once it's relating to your identity, then anything that threatens it is going to be a threat to you personally. 

It feels like a personal attack. And then at that point. You need to fight back, you need to defend, you need to attack all any ideas that challenge that. And so that's why you see these people who are so aggressive and have big communities of aggressive people behind them, who were just, getting so fired up about what you eat because, they, it's just very personal for them and they may not, they may cloak that really well. they may cloak that in scientific studies that they're citing selectively or presenting in a certain way or misrepresenting. but that's what's behind it. Ultimately is that need to defend identity. That's what I think.  

Ted Ryce: So I'll say two things about that one in support of what you just said, which I agree with. I remember, I don't know how I stumbled upon this. I think I was searching for something, but there was a book on a woman and why she became a part of a white power, right? 

And so I can't remember how I stumbled upon this, but it caught my attention. I was like, And cause you know, I mostly read health and fitness stuff and behavior change, but it was talking about her story. I didn't read the book cause I wouldn't read a book about, I wouldn't spend my time on something like that, but I read the back and I got it immediately. 

She had been through something really bad. One of her family members had died. I think her husband or something. She had nothing going for and she found community in this group. Okay. It's a terrible, you could even use the word evil to describe a group. But, she found, but what she got out of it was that community and support when she needed it most and she didn't get it from other places. 

I would imagine she's probably not a very high IQ person and, very, educated and probably in a bad part of the United States, probably pretty isolated, but I just, and the second thing I would say is I would add my own two cents into this is that. As a coach. And from my perspective, we, I call it emotional leverage. 

Maybe there's a term for it in the psychological literature, but it's so hard to get yourself to change. What sounds more convincing or motivating? Hey, listen. You're overweight because you don't take a lot of steps and, portion sizes have grown in the U S over time. And it's really about a calorie thing. 

Oh yeah. You can actually eat sugar or, I'm in Lisbon, so you can have a pastel de nata or ice cream. You can go to a gelato place and you can have what you want, but it's just, it's calories, so you really got to learn about, the calorie density. And you also need to, or what sounds better, the government. 

And big pharma and big food want you weak, docile, overweight, and just buying things and shoving in your face. so they can make money and keep you weak. and you're, the government wants you weak. So they help with big food and, sub subsidized certain foods. And so you're eating too much and then you get sick and then you have to pay big pharma. 

there's probably a little bit of that's true, even But I don't, I, the thing about conspiracy theories is they give way too much, in my opinion, at least gave, give way too much credit to the people involved. And, it's just, there's too many things going on and everyone's a complete mess. 

No matter what socioeconomic level you're, everybody's just trying to figure it out. I've worked with very high net worth people and certainly they're doing things, a little bit different than your common person, but it's just so hard to motivate yourself to change. I find it's okay, you're not just threatening the group identity of this person, but all the result, like their ability to adhere to it. 

Cause that's the number one challenge. How can you stick with something? And then you join carnivore and yeah, it's super extreme, but you get the results and you stick with it, even though it sucks because you have this community behind you in this, deep belief helps you stay adherent. That's my 2 cents there. 

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah. And that brings up another point is that, part of what gets people tied up in these communities is that there is some truth to what they're saying as well, for sure. Yeah, especially in the old days, there was a lot of old days, 10, 15, 20 years ago, there was a lot of anti low carb sentiment. 

Like the mainstream establishment was very anti low carb. Like you eat all that fat, you're going to get fat, you're going to get heart disease, whatever. that did turn out to be wrong. And so mostly wrong. And people who, We're going on these diets and losing weight. They're saying like, you're full of crap. 

Look, I did it and it actually helped me. And so that kind of helped them stick together, in this like counter cultural group. But part of it was that it actually had effectiveness, right? And so all these diets, all of the most popular weight loss diets, they do cause weight loss, whether it's carnivore or a whole food. 

Low fat vegan diet or, regular low fat diet or calorie control, intermittent fasting, they all cause weight loss. And so that's the truth part of it. And, I think where people get tripped up is. They assume that because this 1 thing is true, then I have to buy into this whole world view that makes this the only true thing. 

And all those other people are full of crap. I'm the carnivore and I lost weight. I see that this is true. And so I'm going to believe what the carnivore gurus say that the carnivore diet is the ancestral human diet and that vegan diet is poison and they'll just make you fat. and then on the other hand, you have the vegan people who are sometimes believing the opposite and so difficult to deal with. 

Yeah. And so, part of it is that the diets actually do work to some extent and people can see that they work. And so that kind of pushes them to buy into the broader narrative, which may not be correct.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah, so, don't join any nutrition cults. And yeah, it's so much and it's also become more connected, like tribally associated with political, left to right? 

Carnivore being more right. Veganism being more left. And actually is. I know some pretty smart people in both groups, or at least, with, advanced degrees, let's say, emotional intelligence. I don't know about that discussion, but yeah, so it's just fascinating. Me personally. 

I'm a, I learned this from John Beraldi I don't know if you, do you know who that is? The guy who built up precision nutrition, he's helped. He was a. A nutritionist or dietitian, I guess has his PhD worked with a lot of high level athletes, but built this coaching program called precision nutrition and also coaching certification kind of move coaching into more client centered. 

Instead of what we used to do back in the day. But, yeah, anyway, so he said dietary agnostic, he used the term dietary agnostic, and so there's a group of principles that'll work, but, when you start putting your name in your Twitter hand or X handle, Or a bio, you start to get all wrapped up into it. 

Maybe you feel like you need it. To be inherent, but yeah, Stephan, I know we're coming up on time for you here. What would you want to say for someone who, what would you want someone to take away from this interview today? What do you feel like is the most important message you would want to share? 

Stephan Guyenet: I think the most important message I would want to share is that we have a highly variable nutrition information environment. And much of that. Information is low quality and that we're not really doing a lot about that right now. we didn't talk about this much today, but I actually think that nutrition misinformation is causing a substantial health burden on par with other things that we care about, like motor vehicle accidents. 

Firearm homicides. I think nutrition misinformation.  

Ted Ryce: Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Do you have a couple of minutes? It's up to you.  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I, a while back I did a scientific literature search looking for estimates of the total public health burden of nutrition misinformation in the U S and found nothing. 

So there's been very little research on this. So I was like, okay, can we generate some estimates? Can we at least bound our uncertainty? About how many people are dying prematurely due to nutrition misinformation in the U. S. and, when you do that exercise. What I start off with is how many people die in the U. S. How many of those deaths are premature and due to suboptimal nutrition? There's estimates of that go between 14 and 22%. And then how much of that suboptimal diet is due to nutrition misinformation. Probably most of the reason why people eat unhealthy food is not misinformation. It's just convenient, cheap, palatable food is probably the main reason why people eat unhealthy, but I think. for me, my guess is that somewhere between 1 and 20 percent of suboptimal diet choices are misinformation, whether that's things people heard about online or whether it's packaging on food that's misleading, it's making some kind of health claim that is misleading people, which I think is 1 of the main forms of misinformation. 

And yeah, so if you multiply all that through, I'm going to pull up the numbers here just so that I give you the accurate numbers that I, that it came up with. So yeah, if you multiply all that through, what it suggests is that somewhere between 4, 000. And 127, 000 Americans every year are being killed by nutrition misinformation. 

What was that again? 4, 000 and 127, 000 Americans per year killed by nutrition misinformation. I would say that the true number that's a wide range, but I would say the true number is probably somewhere within there. And if we compare that to road death injuries, 41, 000 per year, homicide 18, 000 per year, We can see that, these are big numbers that we should be caring about and no one's very few people seem to be doing research on this. 

And there are very few other organizations like red pen reviews. In fact, no other organizations that are doing what red pen reviews is doing and really rigorously trying to help the public. Sort the chaff on nutrition misinformation in a really standardized rigorous way. And so I think it's just something we should be taking more seriously as a society as a real public health problem and doing what we can to build the infrastructure to help people get better nutrition or get better information, not misinformation. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, get better misinformation. Don't get that crappy misinformation.  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah, exactly. There we go.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. It's, it brings up, it brings up important questions about regulation and, is it the way to go? How do you regulate it? Who regulates, it? especially with Americans, we're, very different when it comes to that. 

And also, this is completely unrelated to health and fitness, but like the UK, again, I'm not going to, I don't know enough about it, but like they're starting to prosecute people for saying, I saw some of this stuff, it was pretty bad, but should we be able to say things without the government intervening, even if it's extremely distasteful, and what should that, punishment be? 

Or what should the, repercussions be or punishment be? It brings up a lot of interesting questions, in the meantime, we got, I do my best, man, but I can't do a vigorous, rigorous review of things because, Yeah, I'm coaching clients and even writing social media and getting back to people on social media. 

I do my best, but I've been called out a couple of times, not by health and, not on the nutrition side. I feel like I'm doing pretty good, but, some of my. I don't want to call it beliefs because they're not beliefs, but some of the information that I learned about injuries, as an example, I got taken to task about shoulder impingement because I just wasn't read up on a lot of the research shows that it doesn't exist, not the way that it was presented back in the day. 

Stephan Guyenet: Interesting. Nobody is omniscient, if you're, open to being wrong and updating your beliefs, then you're doing well.  

Ted Ryce: Agree with that. Agree with that. And that's a good way to, to finish things off. are you still learning and are you open to growing? And, I'd say that's one of the best signs of a person who is, let's say on the right track in terms of personal growth or emotional intelligence, whatever you want to say So Stefan, if, you wanna check out red pin reviews, I really highly recommend it. 

Red pin reviews.org. Stefan, any anywhere else that you want people to go? Stephan d a.com.  

Stephan Guyenet: Yeah. and then my Twitter handle is at S-G-A-G-U-Y-E-N-E-T. I'm not real active anywhere anymore. I would say. If you're gonna go anywhere, check out Red Pen reviews.  

Ted Ryce: Yep. And I'll have that all in the show notes. So go to Red Pen reviews. 

Click around on the reviews and see the different titles, click on them, they've got really cool, they have the scoring, the key points, the bottom line. very in depth, a nice article, let's say written about the review. So very cool. Appreciate you, Stephan, thanks again for coming on the show. 

I like to do this once a year with you to see what you're up to and, also fight the good fight against misinformation out there. So really appreciate you, man. And thanks again.  

Stephan Guyenet: All right. Thanks, Ted.