Giles Yeo: The #1 Reason You’re NOT Losing Weight (Follow THIS Diet and Start Losing Weight TODAY!)

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why is it so difficult to lose weight because your brain hates it when you lose weight you're fighting biology

dr jazio welcome thank you so much

so if calories is such a myth how come so many people have used it as a strategy for weight loss?

People get so obsessed with just the number that when they're cutting calories, they're considering the quality of the food that they're eating.

The major issue is not the quantity, it is the quality.

So what truly is healthier?

How do we know what healthy actually is?

Calories are not all equal.

For every 100 calories of protein you eat, we are only ever able to use 70 calories.

Protein counts are 30% wrong everywhere.

So if you could encourage people to change part of their diet, what should they be focused on?

Those are the three numbers I would use.

Deploy it to your culture, your type of diet.

If you actually focus on those three numbers, your diet will automatically become healthier.

So, we have to go do some shopping, which my wife will be very mad at me for.

I've brought things into this house that she would never allow me to have.

You see, here, berrets,

these are called incidental virtuous foods.

Automatically made everyone lower their calorie estimates by 10%.

If you're predisposed because of your genetics to being overweight, are you stuck?

The number one health and wellness podcast.

Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty.

The one, the only Jay Shetty.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed.

I'm so grateful that you tuned back in.

Make sure you subscribed if you haven't already.

And today's guest, I know, is going to be someone who's going to answer a lot of your questions.

We've been reading the comments.

I've been reading all of the things that you've been asking about, posting about when you're sharing the podcast.

And this episode is dedicated to you.

Today's guest is Jarles Yeo, a geneticist, author, and professor at the University of Cambridge, where he studies how our genes influence hunger and body weight.

He's the author of Gene Eating and Why Calories Don't Count.

This is the book that we're discussing today.

If you're listening and you're loving the information, go and grab your copy.

And he's one of the leading voices in challenging diet myths through science.

We all know there's a ton of diet myths out there right now.

Today we're going to bust them.

And Giles also hosts the podcast, Choose the Fat.

Go and subscribe if you haven't already.

Please welcome to On Purpose, Giles Yeo.

Giles, it's great to have you here.

Jay, thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, I'm so grateful for the work you're doing and excited to be educated and illuminated, surprised today with everything you have to share.

But the first thing I want to ask you that I want to dive in with you is,

do calories actually matter?

The book obviously says why calories don't count.

And every time I say that, people think I'm anti-physics, but particularly the gym bros, the guys who are all counting calories, they think I'm anti-physics.

I'm not anti-physics.

I know that 200 calories of chips is twice the portion of 100 calories of chips.

I do understand that.

But so is 200 grams of chips, twice the portion of 100 grams of chips.

And no one is trying to compare 200 grams of chips to 200 grams of carrots.

I think ultimately that is it.

So we eat food.

Our body then extracts the calories.

And depending on what we eat, your body has to work more or less hard to extract the calories.

So when does our body have to work more hard?

And when does it have to work less hard?

Primarily, if food has more protein in it and if food has more fiber in it, fiber only comes from plants, obviously, then your body has to work harder in order to get, you know, to get out the carbs, get out the fat, and get everything out of there.

If there's less protein and less fiber, then your body finds it far easier to actually extract those calories.

Put simplistically.

But that's not always good for us.

No, that's not always good for us.

So I think it depends.

why you need the calories, how healthy or unhealthy you are as you are actually eating to get the calories.

It probably was good for us 50,000 years ago.

So you can imagine if you've taken down the antelope, okay, and you're sitting there and eating raw meat.

Okay, you've taken really a lot of energy to take the antelope and you're eating the raw meat.

And so you're getting a certain amount of calories from it until someone suddenly invented fire.

Okay.

And so when you then put the raw meat into the fire, you suddenly have a kebab, okay, and you eat it, the cooking makes it easier for your body to extract the calories.

So in that sense, for X number of energy you've taken to chase down the antelope, you're now getting more energy, more calories.

So in that sense, it kept us alive.

In fact, people think that at around the time when we had fire and then suddenly were able to cook food, that is when our brain began to grow more.

Okay, because we then had time not to always think about food, but we could then get more energy from the food that we were currently eating.

So at that point, excellent.

Today, less good.

So, so if calories is such a myth, how come so many of the gym bros or the people have used it as a strategy for weight loss for so long?

You know, calorie counting has been around for a long time.

It has been around since the early 1900s.

There was a doctor called Lou Hunt Peters, based here, Los Angeles, okay?

Los Angeles-based clinician.

in 19, whatever the time, right after World War II, larger lady.

And she began to realize that actually she needed to lose weight.

Okay.

And I realized obesity wasn't a problem at the time.

But she began to say that, you know what, you can't imagine yourself lighter.

You have to really begin to think about how much you're eating.

And so calories were a new science at the time.

And what she did was she decided that, and I read the book, it's a good book.

It's if you look up Lulu Han Peters.

And what she would say is, don't think about eating a slice of pie.

Don't think about eating bacon.

Think about eating 100 calories of pie.

Think about eating 100 calories of bacon.

And she published this book, New York Times bestseller, for five years running, okay, in 1917 or something like that.

She was the first calorie counter.

The thing about calories is sure, okay, if you are cutting calories in a balanced way, so say your diet is actually fine, but you're eating too much of the diet, hence you have obesity.

Well, then if you then take a sort of a balanced way of reducing your calories, it does work.

The problem we have today is people get so obsessed with just the number, that calorie, 400, 500, 600, that when they're cutting calories, they are no longer cutting it either evenly,

but they're also not even considering the quality of the food that they're eating.

Just thinking, okay, if I only have to have 400 calories, I'm going to have it as a shake, I'm going to have it as a this, as a that, rather than thinking more in terms of nutritional quality of the food.

That is my major issue with calories, right?

So it's almost like the age-old quantity versus quality issue.

Absolutely.

Quantity does matter to a degree, clearly.

Of course.

But I think today the major issue to my mind is not the quantity it is the quality i think our diets on average have not improved so in fact they've gotten worse as a quality of diet we we get far more calories now calories have never been cheaper in the uk which is which is where where i'm based you can get um you can get a thousand calories of chips french fries okay for less than a pound, okay, which is what?

A dollar, a buck 30 or something like that.

Excuse me, really?

So it is very cheap, but are they good for you?

Okay.

Do those calories really, really matter?

Are you getting all the micronutrients?

Are you getting everything that you actually need?

Think about the quality of the food.

The quantity matters, but it's a secondary concern to me.

What is different between...

500 calories of French fries, because that's probably what it is, right?

If it's fried as well and the oil and everything that you add to it, versus what would you compare that to in our head?

What are the mistakes people are making when they're just calorie counting?

When they're only looking at quantity, what are they comparing to be equal almost?

That isn't really equal from a micronutrient level.

Let me give you

an extreme example first.

Okay, the same food, corn on the carb, sweet corn.

Now, if you had 100 calories of corn on the carb,

and then you looked in the blue the next day, it's quite clear you haven't absorbed anywhere close to 100 calories of free corn.

But when you take sweet corn, exactly the same corn, you desiccate it, you know, you sort of turn it into a masa, you make a contotilla, you make cornbread, Suddenly, a far greater percentage of the calories are made available to you.

But you always started with 100 calories of sweet corn.

Okay, so that, so that is the two thing where processing gets you more calories.

Think about a steak, okay?

Where you have a steak, just a normal steak, 400 calories of a steak, say you cook medium rare.

So it took five minutes, eight minutes to cook.

Imagine that same steak, murdered.

Okay, so you then mince it up, you put it into a ragu bolognese sauce, which you have to cook for two hours.

Then you layer that into a lasagna.

You cook it again for another three hours.

Suddenly, the same 400 calories has been cooked for three hours before you eat it.

You're going to get more calories out of that.

Not more than 400 calories.

You just have to work very hard to get the 400 calories compared to getting something which has been cooked for three to four hours.

So it's not

when you take the same food.

and think about how you prepare the food, then the different calorie counts then begin to matter.

The moment you then cross-compare food, if you're trying to compare chips to a steak, then it's very, very difficult to do because now you're talking about there's iron in steak.

You know, there's obviously a lot of protein in steak.

There is some fat in steak as well.

All these things that happen.

Whereas if you're now looking at

French fries, there's a lot of fat.

Obviously, there's a lot of carbohydrates.

There's nothing wrong with carbohydrates.

We need carbohydrates.

But comparing four to 500 calories of each of them, very, very, very different.

And you're saying that most of us look at them as the same because we're looking at quantity we're ultimately saying 500 calories of this and 500 calories of this now you got to go certainly it's true in the uk as well i think it's true here in the us you go to any of the big food manufacturer not manufacturers the restaurants okay big chain restaurants and you open it up and you see the calorie counts now when you see the calorie counts by the meal you're going

No, this is a thousand calories.

I don't eat that.

Oh, wait a minute.

I'm going to go with this one.

It's got 800 calories.

It's 200 calories.

And most people just look at that and don't even really consider, well, is it 800 calories of a salad versus this?

How much dressing in a salad?

No one is thinking about these things when they're just comparing the 800 versus the thousand and thinking, I'm going for 800 because that is healthier because it's a smaller number.

And a lot of us do this.

That's the danger of obsessing over one individual number.

So what truly is healthier?

How do we know what healthy actually is?

That is a very difficult question because it depends.

Now, clearly, if you are a child, clearly, if you are an Olympic athlete and exercising, or if you are an old person in a hospital, in bed, you know, and you're trying very, very difficult to absorb calories.

Then, from that specific scenario, you need a lot of energy that you can metabolize easily.

Okay, now if you're Joe Schmo like me, sat on the couch, okay, or if you're doing, or you're an office worker, well, then your needs, what is considered healthy then becomes very very different to someone else so what is healthy really does depend not only on who you are in terms of your age your ethnicity you know your sex right but it also does matter what you're doing at the time so it does depend when did obesity start to become a real problem and why it's obviously a spectrum i don't think suddenly one day we woke up and said ah it's it's it's obesity i think people began collecting numbers the united states in particular in around 1984 so if you go back and look, prior to 1984,

there was not a great deal of data.

Obviously, some people were still collecting data.

There had always been people who had obesity.

This is not a unique thing, but very few.

Around 1984, And coincidentally, that's also when Domino's Pizza made it to

the UK.

We'll leave that alone.

Okay,

from that.

But 1984 appears to be the ground zero for when people began to collect data.

And so I think that most people accept that the mid 80s was when we began to see a problem and it's only gotten worse and worse since the mid 80s when was the rise of fast food when did that really begin do you know i'm intrigued now so i think the first true well depends what you mean by fast food right i mean because i mean like when we just started to be able to go buy a burger or buy a pizza in the same way as you said so the first the first of the big fast food manufacturers was obviously well one of the first was mcdonald's okay yeah mcdonald's and i think there's a movie about that.

Right, great movie.

You know, how it's fine, how they work it out.

Yeah.

But he didn't set out to make unhealthy food.

Right.

He was setting out to make a consistent

product that people could afford and enjoy to eat.

Okay.

And at the time, obesity wasn't a problem.

So trying to increase access to foods that at the time were only available to people with more money, you know, was a positive thing.

As we begin to value convenience more and also, oddly enough, begin to value portion sizes more.

I like a big steak like anybody else, but now portion size has also overwhelmingly become

part of the goodness of a meal.

So it's very, very difficult to say, but I think it went drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, and then suddenly we're in a situation we are now.

Then boosted, I want to point out, completely boosted by the deliveroos and Uber Eats of the world, where suddenly we're at least, okay, in fact, let's back away.

First of all, you could drive through.

Okay, so that was probably the first of the true conveniences.

Oh,

I can drive through.

Okay, you don't even get out of your car.

Then I think, then we obviously had the situation.

Then they supersize me.

There's, you know, can I, where actually was a marketing employee where you can add that in.

Then you have deliveroo Uber Eats where now you don't have to get off your couch.

I can go beep, beep, beep, beep, and someone will actually deliver the food to my door.

It has been amplest.

So each step has amplified it more.

Till today, we're sat here.

If we wanted to eat whatever, I mean, we do it 20 minutes.

Suddenly, we'll have a whole fast food

feast in front of us.

So I think it wasn't one single thing, but

each of these things suddenly increased our ability and ease of getting these foods.

The foods also became cheaper.

Yeah.

That's the problem today.

Yeah.

And so since we've started measuring,

we are putting on more weight.

We are.

Yeah.

We are

as a whole.

On the whole, we're just putting, humans are just putting on more weight.

We are putting more on more weight and not

unhealthy ways.

And exactly.

And not the good weight.

You know,

we're not putting on muscle.

Interestingly, actually, if you go back to the time when we were working more physical jobs, none of us really worked physical, you know what I mean?

We're sat on our backsides and doing things.

We have dishwashers and stuff like that.

Actually, if you go around to the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, Victorian times, people were probably eating more calories then.

Actually, physically more calories, but people were doing coal mining.

They were working in, you know, in the steel mills and et cetera, et cetera.

So they were probably on average, certainly in Victorian era

in the UK, people were doing 3,000 average calories a day, but that's because they were coal miners.

That's because they were washing clothes.

That's because they were doing everything else.

So we on average are probably eating fewer calories.

But where they come from have really, really changed, right?

The type of food we're eating.

See, calories are not all equal.

Yeah.

And you say the body digests, obviously, carbs, fats, and proteins absolutely differently.

Correct.

Why is that important and tell us the difference?

Okay, there are three things.

So these are obviously fats, the macronutrients.

Okay, so fat, carbs, and protein are primarily made.

In fact, fats and carbs are only made of three atoms.

Okay, so carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but in different configurations.

Okay.

Protein, however, has carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but it's also full of nitrogen.

About 16% of protein is nitrogen.

So whenever our body is is dealing with the stuff it is far easy easier for your body to digest and then metabolize which is two different steps right so digestion means the food uh is converted the fat is converted to fatty acids protein is converted to amino acids and and carbs are converted to sugars unless you're eating sugars and then it passes across the gut wall that is digestion that's what that's when that happens metabolism is when those individual amino acids, fatty acids, sugars are transported to the cell and your cell then converts it to energy.

That's metabolism.

So each of those two stages takes time, takes energy, and your body has to invest energy into it.

So protein is the most complicated.

So for every 100 calories of protein you eat, pure protein calories, we are only ever able to use 70 calories, 7-0.

So protein counts are 30% wrong everywhere.

because we give it off as heat, as part of the energy we put in to sorting out, to sorting out protein.

Fat is nearly 100% available, so to speak, because it's very, very dense.

Carbs, this is where the fiber comes in.

So if you have refined carbohydrates, no, if you have sugar, if you have sugar, that's 98, 99% available.

Okay, so let's not ignore sugar, but sugar is a very simple carbohydrate.

But if we have something starchy, now if you had white bread,

so polished where the fiber has been stripped out, then it probably takes five calories for every 100, so 5%,

to deal with carbohydrates without fiber.

Whereas if you put in fiber, if you have whole meal, if what have you, then it takes 10% of energy to deal with

it.

Your body is just dealing with it.

So calorie counts are probably 5% to 10% wrong everywhere because of the amount of energy it takes to metabolize these macronutrients.

Yeah, I think you said that you're right that we absorb fewer calories from almonds than the packaging actually says.

Yes.

Far, far, far, far, far fewer.

Explain that.

So because almonds are, you know, they're eight are whole food.

You've got to bite through them.

There's obviously fiber in them.

There's all kinds of things.

And so what, okay, in fact, let's back away.

So how do we calculate how many calories there are

in a product?

Okay.

A guy called Atwater.

And this Atwater was a professor of biochemistry in Connecticut between 1880 and 1900.

This is a while ago.

He used a technique called bomb calorimetry.

And in effect, what you do is you take food, you burn it in a sealed container, and then you measure how much heat it gives off through a, this water and the temperature.

So how much heat it goes up.

So one calorie is the amount of temperature it takes to raise one liter of water, one degree Celsius at sea level.

So that's a calorie.

And so what he did, Atwater did, was he took almonds, celery, carrots, steak, he burnt them.

and figured out how many total calories were in there.

He also knew how much fat and protein.

He then fed the almonds, carrots, and to people, and then he burnt their poo.

Okay, for 20 years he did this.

And from there, that is where he came up with the at water general factor.

So for all of us who have done high school biology, four calories for a gram of carb, four calories for a gram of protein, and nine calories for a gram of fat.

So that came from at water and

what he was doing.

The issue is obviously that when you actually burn all of it, everything goes away, and so all the calories are there.

Whereas, when you have to metabolize it and it goes into your body, then your body begins to metabolize.

Energy has to go in in order to extract stuff out.

I'll give you another example, actually, celery.

Okay, now celery famously people have said has a negative calories.

That's not quite true.

Okay, don't make me hate celery.

No, no, no, no, no, I'm not eating celery.

So, like a medium stick of celery, like you might get with buffalo wings or something, right?

That is probably you may get raw, you may get six calories out of it if you're lucky.

If you cook that stick, however, you chop it up, you put it into a stew, what have you, suddenly cooking it, you get 30 calories from it.

The celery.

That's exactly the same stick of celery.

Right.

You're not adding energy to it.

It's because the fiber and everything like that, it's just very difficult to extract calories out.

Whereas when you cook it and you process it, okay, suddenly it's easier for you to get that calorie out.

So therefore, an almond, which is not a process item, right?

Because the only thing you've done is you just take it off the skin, okay?

And then you eat it.

Now, if you make almond milk if you if you if you actually put down and and and and put an almond powder and do things like that then you begin to get more calories out of the out of the almond got it so i have to ask you this

because every summer

a lot of people from the states will go to europe yeah and they'll say i ate pasta i ate pizza and i lost weight but when i eat that in america it's never going to happen Is that true?

Like, why is it that people feel when they go to Europe, they can eat all the things, they can eat bread They can eat pasta and they're not putting on weight They're not feeling the same I think there are probably two different reasons for that.

Okay, so I think first of all I think they're walking more because because when you go when you go to Europe and you're doing things you're not gonna drive around Rome, right?

I mean you're gonna be you're gonna be walking you're gonna be doing this So I think there's a walking element here try and walk around here in LA impossible So I think there's probably that as well, but everything there is made by hand and from scratch.

No, that's not a lot that's obviously you can go to fast food places as well.

But if you're going to Rome or you're going to Sicily, you're going to go to the mom and pop shop.

You're going to go to what they're doing.

Exactly the local places.

And so they would have cooked the food for less.

They would have used other techniques.

And so things just,

you are going to get less calories out because they're less processed.

Processing of food, there's nothing wrong with processed foods per se, because everything that you do to a food is processed.

So cooking is a process, fermentation is a process.

Ultra-processing, the super processing of food, that's another story entirely, because obviously what then happens is those are industrial processes.

And I think a lot of the food that we eat, 50% of the calories, okay, that we get, certainly in the UK as well and in the US, 50% come from pre-packaged foods, okay, are so-called quote-unquote ultra-processed foods.

This is less so in somewhere like Italy.

They're more likely to make the pizza from scratch.

You're more likely, no one's going to serve you a frozen pizza.

You're going to get it.

It's going to come out of the oven.

It's going to be fed to you.

The pasta is going to be dried in a specific way.

It's going to be doing all kinds of things.

So I think the way they make the food does matter, but you need to then take that into account that if you're on holiday in Europe, you're probably walking as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, because I think it's, you just hear it all the time.

And I'm like, wait, is this, is this real?

And even, even my wife says, I mean, when we saw the difference in water quality, even in England versus here, food quality for sure.

So much.

Bread quality.

Bread quality for sure.

Is it that everything here is being ultra-processed?

Is that your challenge?

Like, are just normal foods being, like, what about tomatoes and they taste different?

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Now let's dive back in.

I remember one year I was in...

When I spent more time in India, I remember the vegetables just taste different.

Like they have flavor.

Whereas here, every cucumber tastes the same.

You won't notice anything different.

Okay, so I think the flavor really, really does matter.

I think nutritionally, I mean, people say that

the vegetables here, or if you grow them in a certain way, you get less nutrients from them.

That's probably overstating it.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

I do think, however, that if you are, if you're growing vegetables, first of all, using more natural techniques rather than intensive techniques, you are going to get less pesticides and less things.

So just on that, that's better for you already, right?

Because you're not eating so many chemicals.

I do think that they are more intense in flavor.

Okay.

And does flavor mean more minerals and more and more things?

Probably a little bit of that.

But ultimately, I don't think the vegetables here are bad for you.

They just are not as tasty.

And depending on what you're eating, I think are going to be full of pesticides and other things that we probably don't want to eat that much of.

I don't think that actually there are fewer good things in the vegetables here.

They just don't taste as nice.

Yeah.

How is it that another thing I hear a lot lot is, hey, I'm eating the same exact thing as this other person over here, but they have a six pack and I can't even lose weight.

Why is that happening?

I'm sure you hear this too.

I do.

I do hear this.

So there is an element of truth there that we deal with calories differently.

So there are two elements

of it.

So obviously there's this.

You can break down why someone gains weight into a number of different things.

First of all, how much do they eat?

That is my expertise.

That's primarily what I study.

But even if you ate exactly the same thing, once it gets into you, there are two elements.

There's first of all,

your efficiency.

So in other words, for every given calorie, how many for amount of protein, for what have you, how efficient are you at releasing the calories?

That's going to differ between you and me.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is what we call nutrient partitioning.

So when it comes in, how much do you burn?

How much do you store?

And crucially, when you store it, where do you store it?

And so all of those have genetic elements to it, which means that they explain differences between different people.

And so undoubtedly, it's going to be a case where some people can eat more than someone else and not actually gain as much weight.

The six-pack element to it,

probably overstated.

The six-pack element would obviously be a more of an exercise and thing.

But yes, it is true that people can eat more and maintain the same weight as other people.

Okay.

And what do I do about that?

Because that obviously doesn't feel good when you're like, hey, I'm trying to do the thing.

I'm trying to.

I think it is not the reason for the obesity epidemic that we're facing.

That is down to eating.

I think that the energy expenditure and the metabolism, these things play a small role.

And that we have nothing,

there's very little we can actually do about it, right?

Because the own, interestingly, the easiest way to increase your metabolism is to gain weight.

And people think it's counterintuitive, right?

Brian.

But if you take a mini, as a small, tiny, tiny mini car, it is always going to have a lower fuel consumption than a big SUV.

Okay.

Ultimately, that's the case.

So the easiest way to increase your energy expenditure is to gain weight, but then that's not the aim of the game.

And the other thing is when you lose weight, your body also reduces its metabolism, right?

So

that is going to be an issue.

So the only way is to try and increase your metabolism temporarily.

There are no foods that can increase your metabolism.

Coffee probably does it briefly.

Okay.

Chilies don't do that.

Okay.

Briefly.

Exercise is probably the thing that most effectively increases your metabolism at least temporarily so when you're doing it and then there is a tail off as you stop so you're continuing burning that's the first thing and second is building muscle mass because your muscle your lean mass is more metabolically active than fat mass so you could be of the same weight but if you have more muscle

in your body as a as a ratio, then you will have a higher metabolism.

But your underlying metabolism, if you divide your metabolism by the amount of muscle you're carrying, that cannot change.

That won't change until you get older.

So, ultimately, that's what you're trying to do.

You're trying to say, well, okay, I've got a lower metabolism than you, for example.

Well, then maybe I need to make sure I gain a bit more muscle to sort of mitigate against that.

Got it.

So, how does someone get rid of that stubborn belly fat?

See, that's an excellent question.

And you cannot direct

where you lose fat.

It's very, very, very, very, very frustrating.

So, you know, you go to classes and there's booty busting and there's what have you.

And you know what the deal is?

The only way to get rid of the belly fat is to eat less and probably exercise more as well.

And people are going, whatever.

I'm coming onto this podcast to hear that.

It is because

it's physics.

It's difficult to do, but it's physics.

No, your weight will go on to where genetically.

it's going to go and will come off from that.

You know, what size of your boobs?

What's the size of your bum?

What's the size of your belly?

People wish they could direct where they get the weight loss from.

I want it from my tummy.

You know, for example, when I gain weight, I know I get a bit jowly.

Okay, this is where it goes on first.

My wife always tells me this.

Why?

No clue.

No clue.

And it's also, it does go off first when I begin to lose weight.

But so you, it's very difficult to get rid of the stubborn fat by trying to do sit-ups.

But what you have to do is

you do actually have to sort of shift your eating patterns in order to lose belly fat.

Let's talk about the genetics piece because I think that's the hard part.

If you're predisposed

because of your genetics to being overweight,

are you stuck?

If you are predisposed genetically to eating more because you are more driven to food for a number of different reasons, then it will always be harder for you to lose weight.

Okay.

Ultimately, that is true.

And there's no need to sugarcoat it.

But I guess the analogy I'll use is this.

I will never, ever be able to run as fast as Usain Bolt.

Okay, because it's my genes.

But it doesn't mean that if I train, I won't run faster than I do now.

So I think ultimately that's it, right?

None of us here are going to become an Olympic athlete, but if we train, we'll get fitter, we'll get better.

And so you've got to sort of deal with the genes you have.

You can't blame it.

You can blame your parents.

That's where the genes have come from.

But ultimately, you deal with the hand of cards you have.

I wish I looked like Brad Pitt.

But there are many, many reasons why that is not going to happen, right?

And so you deal with the hand of cards you are dealt.

But even with a more difficult hand of cards, so to speak, a more difficult set of genes when it comes to being overweight, it doesn't mean that you can't do anything about it.

What are you seeing in terms of gene limitations?

Do you see demographics having certain gene limitations and drawbacks compared to others?

Like I know as a South Asian man, generally putting on weight is easy, building muscle is hard.

And a lot of South Asian men will have that conversation with each other and say, hey, it's quite easy for us to be lean and skinny, but it's easy to put on weight around our stomach.

Like you said, you put on.

What do you see when you look at the genes and the genetic research?

So the genes telling us why people gain weight tend to be quite universal.

So they're eating too much genes.

Where the different ethnicities come from comes into the consequences of gaining that weight.

Yes, there's muscle building.

You're right, right?

Because Chinese people, I'm ethnically, I'm Chinese.

We're smaller-framed individuals.

We too cannot get that much weight, gain that much weight before we actually tilt into disease.

So, but the genes underlying why we eat are quite universal.

Okay.

But why we get specific diseases, very,

very genetically driven, very ethnically driven.

As you said, South Asian, East Asians, the moment we don't have to go anywhere close to a BMI of 30, and we are suddenly increasing our risk of a number of different metabolic diseases.

So, we compared to white people who can always get a bit more weight, compared to Polynesians.

A colleague of mine, actually, I was in New Zealand giving

a lecture, and I saw there's a big South Asian diaspora in New Zealand.

And so I saw a diabetologist, a diabetes doctor who is South Asian, giving a talk in which she was comparing BMI and rates of type 2 diabetes in the local Polynesian population versus

the South Asian diaspora.

And the local Polynesian population could get to something like nearly twice the BMI before actually reaching the same risk of type 2 diabetes.

It is down to, I guess, how much muscle you can put on, a little bit.

It's down to how much fat we all can store safely.

And so that is a crucial

bit of information.

How much fat can you store safely?

Can I store safely?

The safest place to store fat is in your fat cells.

Okay.

They're like balloons.

They go bigger, they go smaller.

You don't gain fat cells.

Boop, boop, boop, boop.

But they get full.

And the moment they get full, that's when the fat goes into your liver, your muscles, places that are not designed to store fat

in large amounts.

And that's when you become ill.

So that,

very, very genetic.

And it also comes to body shape.

Where you put your fat also matters, right?

Because then you can look at different populations and realize, oh my God, all these people are completely different shapes.

They are.

Because where you put your fat also influences how much fat you can store safely.

So that bit, very genetic.

Yeah.

So if you could encourage people to change part of their diet, what should they be focused on?

And what are are the mistakes that you think people are making right now when it comes to what we eat, what we put into our mouths?

What are the mistakes people are making?

And what would you encourage people to think about differently if it isn't calories?

Then it is very, very culturally specific.

But I think there's probably some universal rules

in order to follow.

You know, like a lot of South Asians, well, I mean, there are a lot of vegetarians in South Asia.

People in the Mediterranean eat Mediterranean diet.

try delivering a Mediterranean diet to Texans.

That's just not going to happen.

So culturally, it does make a difference.

I do think there's some

relatively simple quote-unquote rules.

I hate to use the word rules.

I think we need to eat enough protein, I think most importantly.

So I think about 16% of the energy in your diet needs to come from protein.

It is possible to eat too much because we have to use the protein we eat.

If we don't use it, we don't store protein.

Okay.

All the muscles in us, all the protein in our body is active.

So if you eat a lot of protein, but don't use it, it gets converted to fat.

Okay.

And then it begins to stress out your kidneys and stuff as well, right?

And your liver, unless you're lifting or doing something or doing something else.

So 16% protein.

Okay.

We need to eat way more fiber, way more fiber.

We need to double the amount of fiber we eat.

Fiber only comes from fruit and vegetables.

So we pretty much need to double the amount of fruit and vegetables that we actually eat.

And we probably need to limit the free sugars we eat.

Now, free sugars are sugars, sugar.

Anything that has been detached detached from fiber, so orange juice is a free sugar.

Honey is a free sugar.

Maple syrup is a free sugar.

We probably need to...

All the good stuff.

All the good stuff.

But the sugar is all the same.

It tastes nicer for any number of different reasons, but all the good stuff.

You probably need to limit it to 5% of energy or less.

Now, if you take those three numbers, right?

16% of protein, 30 grams, double the amount of fiber, and keep your free sugars.

You can eat as much fruit and vegetables as you want, but free sugars from 5% unless you can deploy it to any culture.

Because the protein, I'm not only talking steaks, right?

I mean, this is what people think here when I say protein, steaks, but no, I mean, tofu, beans, vegetables, it doesn't matter the source of the protein.

Those are the three numbers I would use.

Deploy it to your culture, your type of diet you wish to actually eat.

Then, obviously, you can tweak it.

But I think if you actually focus on those three numbers, I think it's your diet will automatically become healthier.

So, 16% protein, 30%,

30 grams fiber, 30 grams.

So, So double the amount of fiber.

On average in the United States and North America,

United States and in the UK, we're probably only having 15 grams of fiber a day.

It's difficult.

I think this is part of the problem of

focusing on calories is that what does that mean when I tell you 16% protein and what have you?

So

I do these things.

I speak to people like you.

I speak to industry.

I do this.

to try and push back and say, can we highlight different things on your pre-packaged food?

I mean, highlighting the calories, useless, right?

Whereas if you highlight how much protein it is, how much fiber is in it, and how much free sugars in a traffic light system or something, I think that's easier for you to actually do.

Let's actually talk about that.

So we had to go do some shopping, which my wife will be very mad at me for because I've brought things into this house that she would never allow me to have in the house.

Okay.

And so I've got to make sure that I...

give this out to someone else afterwards.

Don't give it to me.

She thinks I've been eating it.

She'll be mad.

But we brought in some products that people are eating because I think partly the issue is when you go out and you buy something, once you're educated, so my wife trained me in this, and I want to help pass it on and learn from you as well in how to actually read food labels.

Because I used to just be like, yeah, that's 50 calories.

I love that.

That's 100 calories.

It's easy.

So I'm going to throw you some products.

And,

you know.

you can tell us whether this is actually healthy or not and just walk us through all the packaging on the front and the back.

So a couple of things about this.

So

before we start,

I think I see where this is going.

One of the things that annoys me the most about

food and advertising for food is the health halo, right?

So this is what we're talking about, the health halo.

No one thinks that drinking Coca-Cola and eating thingies is healthy for you, but we do it because it's a treat.

We do it.

But I'm not thinking I'm having a health strength.

And so most of us take the precautions.

Now, if no one thinks that when you get a

many tortilla chip brands are available, let's look at this one.

First of all, it's green in packaging.

It has this, I am green, okay, from all the things.

Okay, totilla style, protein chips.

What the freaking hell is that?

That's a fact.

Let's see where the protein comes from.

Okay, I don't know.

Does it tell you where the protein comes from?

They added

milk protein isolate whey protein.

So they're trying to increase the amount of protein you actually get.

And so hence, they're telling you that this is a healthier option.

But you're still eating a torilla chip, right?

If you look at the...

It's still fried, right?

It is.

Let's have a look at the back here.

I'm not, it should be fried.

I mean, sometimes they bake it, I guess, but tortillas tend to be fried.

Oh, this one says it's baked.

Okay,

so that does make a difference, but it is still a, it is still a tip.

But they're trying to sell this as a health food.

Okay.

And you would say it's not a health food.

I don't.

I am not anti-totilla chips, but I know why they've done the packaging as they've done here.

So people will go and say, oh, these are the terrible tortilla chips.

I'm going to buy this one because these are going to be tortilla chips that are going to be better for me because it's in a green packaging and because it says high protein, high protein for it.

So

I don't know.

You know, it's still a tortilla chip.

Yeah.

And ultimately, so this is the kind of thing.

What is the difference between baked and fried?

Because I don't, I speak to a lot of people about this and I don't think they, people even think to think about that.

So baked would mean that you use less oil.

Okay.

And because things like tortilla chips and potato chips and all the kinds of things you get are very porous.

So in other words, they absorb a lot of fat to crisp up.

Okay.

A fried tortilla will taste better than a baked tortilla.

So undoubtedly they'll have more fat.

I'm not saying that this isn't slightly better for you.

It's still not a health food, though.

So that's the difference.

The difference is that when you fry something,

more of the fat gets absorbed into it.

Whereas you bake it, you sort of do put oil in it.

You have to, because otherwise, it's like using an air fryer.

Why do you use an air fryer?

You use an air fryer because you put in a little bit of oil, it then heats up the oil and then mists the oil.

So, so that what you're doing is you're frying with less oil.

That's why you're getting

less of the fats that

are actually

out there.

Got it.

Okay.

I'm going to pull out some more.

We had a lot of bags of chips in here, but let me lay this one out.

Oh,

all right.

So, this is

shredded wheat.

Okay, let's have a look at this actually.

Now, they're always.

Oh, wait a minute.

This is.

So if you look at, so a couple of things before we go to the back, whenever you look at a cereal, you see here, for example, in the front, berries.

Right?

No one ever does it.

No one ever does it.

I mean, I have shredded, I'm not, I'm not against this, but I eat it.

Do you know what these things are called?

Within the field of sort of food science, these are called incidental virtuous foods.

Okay.

So, someone did an experiment where what they did was they asked a few thousand people, all right, and they put a burger, just a normal standard burger, and they asked everyone to sort of estimate how many calories are in the burger.

And, you know, obviously, you get people getting it right, people getting it completely wrong.

Then they took the burger and they put a stick of celery next to the burger.

That stick of celery, same burger, that stick of celery automatically made everyone lower on average their calorie estimates by 10%.

Just the presence of it.

Now, if you, in fact, we'll go back to that.

We'll go back to the chip.

Okay.

So here is a tortilla chip.

And obviously

there is lime, there is chili.

I appreciate they probably flavored it for some, nevertheless.

But here, cereal is one of these things.

That is why the berries are there.

Go into your favorite supermarket.

Look, anything you buy, once again, this is not anti-shredded wheat.

Okay.

Anything you buy, they'll always have these things because it automatically makes it a virtuous food.

Why do people, when you watch an advert or something, why is there a little bit of coriander, a bit of watercress, you know, over the steak?

Like, really?

It's incidental virtuous foods.

Okay, so, so that's, that's the first thing to know.

Really great note.

Now, if you're going to look in the back, let's look at the sugar.

I mean, this may be perfectly healthy.

I'm not entirely sure.

Okay, so this has no added sugar, which is fine, which is good.

So I do think that that's the one thing you want to look at.

So that's when we're reading a label.

When you're reading a label, what do you want to focus on?

Now, clearly, this is shredded wheat.

I'm not eating this for protein.

Okay, so you can look at the back of the protein, but the amount of protein on here,

where does it say?

Polyoncitrate.

Where's the protein?

Oh, no, there is protein here.

So seven grams of, seven grams of protein.

So that's quite high, surprisingly high for the amount of stuff that is here.

What you want to do, however, on this is not worry too much about the protein because you're eating a shredded wheat, is to look at the sugar.

Because, oh my God, I mean, if you actually look at some of the cereals, including some varieties of shredded wheat, you may as well be eating a chocolate bar, as far as I can gather, the amount of sugar, the amount of sugar that's in there.

So, this, you would look at it.

And broadly speaking, it's probably a relatively healthy thing to eat.

Got it?

Okay, except for the incidental virtuous foods.

All right, very good.

Well, you spoke about this earlier, so let's take a look at it.

We might as well.

Okay, OJ.

Now, what makes it light?

Very interesting.

So let me just...

Yeah, what does it say on it?

Tell us.

Is an orange juice with

50% less sugars and calories than OJ?

Then how did they make it?

Because OJ is OJ should be OJ.

You should take juice, you squeeze it out, maybe you put some heat in it to make sure it lasts longer.

What have they done to it to reduce the amount of...

Sugar and calories.

Ah, so what they've done here, first of all, is they have concentrated the orange juice.

So in other words, they have just, this is in effect, orange juice mixed with water.

So can I say something?

Can I please say something?

Save your cash.

Buy an actual bottle of water.

If you want to drink orange juice, buy an actual bottle of orange juice and dilute it with water.

Same effect, because it says here, the first thing on here is filtered water.

First

ingredient list.

It's fine.

Okay.

But now you're buying half the amount of orange juice for the same amount of cash, whereas you could buy exactly the same amount of orange juice and use water.

Now, what else is there?

Okay, now let's have a look.

No pulp.

Why is this a good thing?

So here's the issue with OJ, right?

So OJ, the full concentrated OJ, has the same, in fact, we'll read it out just to make sure.

So total carbohydrates here are 10%.

Okay.

So 5%, so it has 5% because it's half.

Coca-Cola has a sugar content about 11%.

Okay, in a can of Coca-Cola.

So OJ actually has the same amount of sugar as Coca-Cola.

This is diluted.

We have already established this.

And it's the same sugar.

It's not because it's natural sugar, it's healthier for you.

You've squeezed it out of the you squeeze out of the orange.

So the pulp was the only good thing about this.

I mean, there's probably vitamin C and stuff, but this, the pulp was the only good thing because that was the fiber.

So, what this has said is that we have made extra sure there is no fiber in this orange juice.

That's what this is telling you.

Okay,

I have no problems with OJ as a small thing, but people think it's a health food, and people will then drink a ton of this.

And you have to treat it like you're drinking a high-sugar drink.

Eat the orange.

Because when you eat the orange, you're chewing it, there's fiber, your body takes longer to release the sugar, exactly the same amount of sugar, because orange juice actually

comes from there.

You get a lot more goodness out of eating the orange.

If you have to drink orange juice, drink,

you know, do it in moderation.

This is a waste of money because, as it says in a bag, it's diluted orange juice.

For Pete's sake.

So, so, so.

Good and I'm not.

So this is useful.

This is useful.

All right.

All right.

This is fun.

All right.

Yeah.

Let's do.

I love this one because this

are great.

Where did you get these from?

These are all from.

I won't say.

Now, no.

Just can I please say, dried apricots, these are wonderful for you.

Okay, because obviously they're full of fiber.

And yeah, you might say, well, and they're high in sugar.

Yeah, but then they're all tied up in the fiber.

How much of a risk are you really going to eat anyway?

Wonderful for you.

Okay.

You shouldn't need

to enhance it with any probiotic apricots.

Now, what have they made it?

So probiotic means that's prebiotic and that's probiotic.

And prebiotic is adding fiber.

Probiotic is taking the bugs.

Because this is what confused me when I was looking at this.

So this is probiotic because they've taken normal apricots, and we're just full of fiber and added bacteria.

Now, this sounds a bit dodgy because they're telling me that the bugs cannot be alive.

I don't think, because they're in this thing.

What is the shelf life of this?

It looks okay, March 2026.

It's sterile, right?

In here.

So they say they've put the bugs in, but the bugs cannot be alive.

So it is not going to be probiotic if the bugs are dead.

And they have to be dead because this thing is not going to rot in a sealed container and it's good till March 2026.

So So, this, the bugs have got to be alive.

When you're eating yogurt, uh, yogurt, if you're eating, you know, kombucha, the bugs are alive.

That is why they work because they pass.

You need, you need those actually to survive the gut and go in in order to survive.

These are dead bugs, they won't complete BS.

Interesting.

Wow.

Wow.

I love how shocked you are right now.

All right, let's do this as the last one because I've done all the other versions of this, but

okay, let's let let me just let me see.

Let me see what the back is.

Perserving, so 65 grams.

Holy cow.

All right.

So this is a bar.

Now I know what this is.

This is what a gym bros, right?

But but if you actually look at the uh first of all, it tells you the amount of protein.

So they're selling this as a health food bar by its very definition because we're not we're not dealing with it.

But if you actually look at the at the back, yes, there's more protein in it, okay, for that, but it's 22% sugar.

It's 22% sugar, okay, 14%

fat, of which 13% is saturated fat.

Okay.

And the protein amount is 13% protein.

So actually, I'm saying we need 16%.

It's already below the actual what you should be eating in your total diet anyway.

I don't understand this bar.

I do understand it if you are taking it as a recovery bar.

Fair.

Okay.

If you've just done a workout, or if you're maybe recycling, you're trying to do that.

I can dig that.

The problem is if it's there in a supermarket shelf and you're coming in thinking, this is going to be healthy for me, but you're not working out, you're not doing any buy and eat it.

This is far worse for you than eating a chocolate bar, unless you're exercising at the same time.

Yeah, I mean, the sugar in that's high.

22?

It's really high.

It's high.

Oh, my God.

Is this even edible?

I mean,

I used to, so I used to eat those nearly every day until I looked at the back.

No, no, no, until I looked at the back.

Then you went, dude.

Yeah, and I realized even when I am working out, I don't need it.

No, you don't need 22% sugar.

I mean, yeah, you want more protein, probably.

I've shifted to one that does only one gram of sugar now because you do need some sugar you need some carbs obviously you do

but not that yeah not that good analysis so so walk us through two questions i have yes one is how can people read food labels better okay what were you doing that was making it effective for you to figure it out that quickly because the challenge is we have little time we look at the back there's like 50 ingredients okay the the the major problem i have with this is this isn't a lack of information problem because all the information is there but you need bright lights yeah i need to have my reading glasses with me.

But what you would do, I think ultimately, in order to better do it, the industry needs to change what they label.

But I don't have the power to do that.

So I think what I would do is I would focus on, first of all, the amount of, depending on what you're eating, the amount of protein, the amount of fiber, do they put fiber?

They do put fiber.

The amount of fiber that's actually in there and the amount of sugars.

Protein, fiber, sugar.

Protein, fiber, sugar.

Yes.

And what you don't want is to see an equal balance of all three.

You want to try and see the percentages you said earlier.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's what I would do.

Yeah.

And of course, it won't be, you're not expecting to get all your protein from a bar anyway.

No.

So I think what you want to do as well is not concerned.

Okay.

Not obsessed about one item of food.

What you should do is be thinking about your diet over a week.

A week's a good period because there are work days, there are weekend days.

You may have a birthday.

You go to the restaurant for your friends and you're eating on the run or what have you.

So over a week, how much protein, fiber, and things have you been eating?

That's better because then that allows allows you to go to the pub, the restaurants, your child's birthday, and then say, well, I had my child's birthday party last night, so I'll go to do something else.

So you need to consider that, but over the context of a full week rather than obsessing over one individual bar would be what I would say.

And what are the three hidden ingredients that you think people should watch out for on food labels?

I think sugar is probably the big, the biggest thing to look for because they, my wife sent me to the supermarket to buy, she goes, can you get me some beetroot?

I want to make a salad.

Okay.

And so I went into a supermarket chain in the UK and I bought their finest, because I'm a mug, okay?

I bought their finest item and I brought it back and she yelled at me.

She goes, did you see the amount of sugar on here?

Why didn't you get the one made with vinegar?

Why didn't you get one?

And so sugar is the thing that they shuffle in the most because it's so, it improves the flavor so quickly and they put it into beetroot.

It's a beetroot.

Why do you have to boil it in sugar?

It's completely ridiculous.

Sugar is probably the big, it's the easiest thing to shovel in.

So to watch that.

How addictive is sugar?

I don't think sugar is addictive.

I don't think there is such a thing as food addiction.

If you speak to addiction biologists, they do hijack certain pathways.

Okay, because so the part of the brain that makes things feel nice, your rewarding part of the brain, it's the same part of the brain for everything.

It doesn't matter if you're talking about food, sex, or drugs, or alcohol.

Okay.

It hits the same place.

The roots to it are different, but it's the same.

It's the same part of the brain.

And so I think that clearly sugar tickles the nice part of the brain.

Because, why would it not?

But it is not crack cocaine.

People say it's worse for you than crack, but it isn't, okay?

Because you clearly get used to it, you like it.

There are addictive behaviors,

but sugar in of itself is not addictive.

If I took sugar away from you, you're not going to go into cooked turkey, okay?

You're not.

You might think, oh, I want to eat that, and what have you, you're not.

So, it's not addictive, but we need to eat less of it.

And clearly, there is an addictive behavior of getting used to eating sugars as well.

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and back to our episode is healthier food more expensive to produce no or is it what is the reason that healthy food has become expensive so i think there's a marketing element to it so that for healthy food that they they can make money from it But then what then happens is there are cultural differences as well, right?

Because then what happens is people say lentils are cheap, which is true.

But that's a culturally specific thing.

If you go to India, you go to South, everyone knows how to cook lentils.

So lentils are cheap because everyone can do it.

But other things are not here, okay, here or in the UK for that matter.

First of all, do people know how to cook lentils who are not South Asian, for example?

That's the first thing.

The second is it will always require half an hour on the...

electricity or gas.

And it's always cheaper to stick a pre-meal into the microwave and put two minutes

in order to do it.

So you have to take the whole life cycle of the food and also the amount of time and effort and education you actually have about that specific food.

So it's a holistic view of how expensive something is.

Yeah, it could be expensive in terms of time as well.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And some people don't, some people don't at the time.

And culturally, it does make a difference because like lentils are cheap.

Yeah.

Obviously.

And you go to some countries.

Exactly.

Those are, those are, but if you buy them from scratch, you need to know how to soak them overnight.

You need to then boil them for experience of time.

And if this is part of your culture and you always have a, you always have beans pre-ready to cook and everything is ready, perfect.

And you have the spice mix ready, perfect.

But for a lot of us, that's not the case.

Great answers.

That was fun.

I'm glad we did that.

That was really cool.

I wanted to ask about this idea of, you say that weight is biology, not laziness.

Let's talk about that.

Okay.

I think weight is more biology than people think.

How about that?

Okay.

So if we actually look at the genetics heritability, okay, so what percentage does genetics actually play into body weight?

And we can use that by looking at twins, identical twins and non-identical twins.

Then actually, the heritability of fat mass, of weight, is around 40 to 70%.

So in other words, let's take the average, 50-50.

So 50% is going to be driven by biology.

and 50% by non-biology.

And in that non-biology, it could be socioeconomic status, how rich or poor you are.

It could be your culture.

It could be any number of different things.

So weight is probably about 50%.

Now, within that 50%, it does play a pretty powerful role.

And I guess the one example I'll give is this: we do not gain or lose weight overnight.

We just, we just don't.

Any meal, no matter how big, is not going to perceptibly change your body weight.

Okay.

Your body weight is the function of thousands of feeding events that have happened over the past couple of years.

Okay.

That's okay.

Now, imagine, however, if because of your genetic hand of cards that you've been given, you are slightly less likely to say no.

5%.

That's the kind of scale we're looking at.

So one out of every 20 times you say, hang it, I'm going to have the extra slice of pizza or what have you.

5% over thousands of feeding events is hundreds of thousands of calories.

So over the period of time that food intake does begin to influence your body weight, it is not a choice.

In casino terms, the house will always win if the dye is weighted a certain way.

In that sense, there is a lot of biology, but clearly, if you take the top 20% socioeconomically versus the bottom 20%, The bottom 20% are more than twice as likely to have obesity and most diseases, to be fair, as the top 20%.

There's no genetic difference between rich and poor people.

It's an accident of birth.

And so there, your environment really, really, really does matter.

So even with the same genes,

the same genetic burden and drive, if I live in a leafy Cambridge village, which I live so far out that delivero won't deliver to my village.

And so this is a true story.

Okay.

Then if I'm hungry and I don't have a corner shop, I have to drive to the next village.

If I'm hungry on a Sunday night, well, either I have to get in my car and drive somewhere, or I have to open my fridge and eat the carrots or humor stuffs in my fridge, right?

Whereas if I lived in a city, if I live above a chicken shop, if I live above, then exactly the same genetic drive will make me go and I'll make different decisions, different things will be made.

So there's a huge genetic drive, undoubtedly, but the environment also matters.

How much is willpower involved?

What is willpower?

What is it?

I think willpower is an interesting term.

I think that if we're talking about food intake, which means to say that, oh, I'm not going to eat the chocolate bar or pizza or something today.

I think willpower is simply the physiological manifestation of how much you want that item of food and whether or not you say yes or no.

So willpower is simply part of the biology that drives you or stops you from eating, from eating it.

So that's what I think is willpower.

So if that plays a role, yes, willpower plays a role because it's part of your biology.

It's almost like a sense of, I like the word discipline more.

So as someone who grew up eating, and i've spoken about this on the show before i literally grew up eating every day a chocolate bar a chocolate biscuit a chocolate yogurt and a chocolate ice cream every day okay because that's how i was raised in my house yeah and i was overweight growing up and then in my teens i started playing a lot of sports i lost lots of weight and but then still even when i was at university i drank a sugary soda every single day and had a chocolate bar every day.

And because of my genetics or my metabolism, I was lean throughout college and all the rest of it, but I wasn't doing anything healthy.

And what I found was that I had to create discipline at one point in my life because my natural instinct is to want sugar to solve my fatigue or energy or whatever it may be, because that's what I've been taught or at least trained to believe is that sugar will solve my lack of energy right now, not realizing that actually I could get that from a healthier place.

I mean, I guess discipline is one is one way.

I mean, I don't like the term lifestyle.

A lot of people call it this as a lifestyle problem because lifestyle means choice.

But I do think that many of us need to make behavioral changes.

So that's

the terminology I'd like to use because ultimately this is the issue.

It doesn't matter whether or not the genetic drives make it easier or less easy for you to lose weight.

It doesn't matter.

Ultimately, because if you carry too much fat, you're the one that's going to suffer.

right so i think life's unfair okay and sometimes biologically unfair and and and what have you so i think what we've got to do is for a lot of us we do need to think about behavioral changes.

And you're absolutely right.

We need to be more educated about certain things.

We need to just this conversation we've had, right?

I mean, just look, look, looking at these things.

And if you then begin to notice, so even just what I've said, if you notice a couple of these little things and you incrementally make a better, you buy a better bar, you buy a better, you know, bag of chips or anything like that.

Well, then that's a positive thing.

These are behavioral changes, but we need to sort of get the word out there, right?

Where it's not always, they're obvious things, but the not obvious things also matter.

I think for me, one of the behavioral changes that has helped so much is out of sight, out of mind.

What you just said, like when you walk in, look at your refrigerator, and there's only carrots and hummus.

Like I said, like I bought this bag in today for this episode, but we wouldn't have this available.

So do I want those chips?

Of course, I want tortilla chips.

I would rather eat tortilla chips than any whole foods because that's what I'm conditioned to want.

But when they're not available in our snack drawer, you know, then I have to think, think i've got to wait 20 minutes so so now that is very true right so i think we have to control the environment we have control over which broadly speaking is our household and so same for me my wife bans me from buying so she loves chocolate and she i mean me

me chocolate i i like chocolate but if it if there was a chocolate bar there for example i would eat a piece and then i would continue talking to you yeah i couldn't do that my wife

yeah so my wife says please don't buy chocolate in the house so if we go to a restaurant we go to a meal that's different right because we're outside but within our house like you you said, there are no, and I love crisps, so I don't buy crisps in the house because I know that if it's there and I hear the rustling, I'll eat it.

Out of sight, out of mind is a good way of handling it.

Yeah, that's been one big thing for me.

And the other one that's really helped me is having a plan for when that craving comes.

Strategy, strategize, right?

Like rather than feeling like, oh, you know, I'm in a good disciplined mode.

I'm not going to have the craving today.

It's like, no, I know that at 8 p.m.

at night, I'm going to get a craving.

And so let me have a plan B option available that is healthier, better, more natural than putting myself into grabbing one of the

ultra-processed foods.

So whenever I talk to people and someone come up to me and whatever their genetic drive, they says, oh, you know, I need to lose weight.

How would you do it?

I say, look, if you know you need to lose weight for whatever reason, then what you've got to do, the easiest thing to do, okay, don't go take a genetic test, anything like that.

It's free.

Okay.

Is be honest with why you eat when you eat.

And some people eat when they get stressed.

Other people don't.

Some people have a craving for chocolate at eight o'clock.

Understand this.

And the moment you understand that, put a strategy in place to kind of mitigate against against that.

And that is your way into dealing with your biology.

Don't worry about the fact that, well, when I go to my friend's house, anything like that.

That's fine because you live in your house.

So fix your house first.

Then everything else, you can kind of, you can kind of take it day by day.

Fix what you have in your house.

Absolutely.

Those two things have helped me out of sight, out of mind, and making sure that I have a plan for the things I know are going to happen, not hoping that they don't happen.

Yeah, exactly.

Don't lie to yourself.

Do not lie to yourself.

Yeah, exactly.

Because yeah, it's, I've lied to myself too many times and then ended up overeating or over sugaring or whatever it may be because I didn't have a plan.

And so I fell to my devices.

I was intrigued to something you write about is why is it so difficult to lose weight?

Because your brain hates it when you lose weight.

So it thinks I'm losing weight.

This is lowering lowering my chances of survival in a world where there's not enough food.

This is not true now, but in a caveman brain that is actually dealing with is thinking I'm losing weight.

I need to put the weight back on.

And so your brain does everything in its power.

It does two things.

It makes you hungrier, as you know, when anyone who's dieted, you feel hungry.

And more insidiously, because this you don't know, it lowers your metabolism.

Okay.

So imagine if I were, I'm an 80 kilo human being.

Okay.

Imagine if I used to be 90 kilograms and I've lost, so I've lost 10% of my body weight.

Okay.

The previously, me who lost 10% of the weight versus me, never been 90 kilos.

He has to eat less than me to maintain the same weight as me.

Okay.

80 and 80, but he used to be because he's lost that weight and the brain is trying to drag him back, kicking and screaming, back up to the weight he was before.

Your brain hates it when you lose weight and it puts into homeostatic measures, it's all to make sure you gain the weight back again.

So that's very depressing.

I know it's very depressing, but it's, yeah, you're fighting biology.

Yeah.

And as we get older, we're putting on more weight naturally.

You do for a couple of different reasons.

I think I would have given you a different answer five years ago, but new work

has shown that actually you don't begin to drop your metabolism per gram of muscle in you.

All right.

Just to be clear.

So in other words, how much muscle you're carrying really till you're mid-60s.

So people thought it happened earlier.

It doesn't.

Okay.

The problem is when you get into middle age, okay, is this.

First of all, we tend to get richer.

Not rich, but richer.

We're set on our backsides.

We have more money.

We have more money.

We don't, we eat richer food.

We're not going to eat less.

Right.

We're moving less.

We tend to exercise less.

I'm sorry, that's true, which means that your muscle mass begins to lower.

So a mix of all that.

You have more money.

You eat better food.

You exercise less.

Okay.

And that is the toxic mix that then ends up with you gaining weight, middle-aged bread, et cetera, et cetera.

How do we stop that?

I think the most important thing, if we if we're dealing with actually zeroing in clearly we can say we need to improve our diets and things this is all true

the most important thing about health span rather than longevity right because who the hell wants to live forever you know with tubes and you just don't okay but people want to live healthy for longer the marker that most predicts your health span is the amount your percent your ratio to muscle to fat heading into your late 60s and into your 70s okay it doesn't matter very many

clearly how heavy you are matters.

Okay.

But more importantly, how much muscle are you taking into that period of time?

The more muscle mean, lean mass you actually have, going in particular into your 70s, the healthier you're likely to be.

So do not neglect, do not neglect moving and keeping your muscles in shape, particularly as you get older.

And that is the way to fight all the bad things that can happen.

Yeah, what's really interesting is that as a society, I feel like we've been struggling with weight loss for so long.

And that's why we've obviously seen the rise of weight loss drugs, and especially more recently with Ozempic.

And it's become commonplace now, it seems at least.

I don't know in the UK, but definitely in the States.

And people are open about their usage.

There's a debate over whether it's good or bad.

And people have different views on it for different reasons.

There has been this almost pressure that we've placed on people, not always from a health point, but from a vanity point to lose weight.

Yes.

Whereas what we're talking about today is a healthy, yeah.

We're talking about health.

And I think, look, there is nothing wrong with these drugs as long as the right people get them.

I think ultimately that's true.

Now, if you have a lot of fat,

you know, you have severe obesity, then the drug is for you because you're ill, you are getting diabetes.

The drug is for you.

The drugs are not a cosmetic drug.

So these drugs are modified gut hormones.

They're modified versions of natural hormones that we actually have.

So in one way of looking at things, we could say that, well, I've only tweaked one hormone in your body and suddenly you eat less.

Then you can argue that a lot of people with obesity probably just have a hormonal deficiency that you're trying to fix.

However, the reason these drugs are good is because they're powerful and they work.

The reason these drugs are bad is because they're powerful and they work for everybody.

They make you feel fuller, whether or not you're 300 pounds looking to lose 100 or whether or not you are a 16-year-old girl who's 75 pounds.

That is the problem.

It will still make you eat less.

So they're not cosmetic drugs.

They're powerful drugs.

They should be be used as drugs, not as a red carpet tool.

So you're saying that there are a group of people who it's healthier for them to use it.

Yes.

And there's a group of people that shouldn't be using it.

Correct.

Because I think everyone who needs the drug should get the drug.

And these are people who, in fact, there's more nuance about this.

At the moment, certainly in the UK, there are rules about how...

what your BMI, what your weight should be before you are allowed the drug.

And it's above a certain amount, et cetera, et cetera.

We've already discussed, for example, that South Asians and East Asians, we can't get that much weight before we get risk of disease.

So we need to be more nuanced about who gets the drug.

And the person, the people that get the drug need to be closing in on their disease state, okay?

They should get the drug.

So in other words, you could be a little bit heavier, but actually be perfectly healthy.

Do you need the drug?

Whereas maybe a South Asian man who's BMI 27, but actually is already close to being type 2 diabetic, maybe he should get it.

So I think at the moment, people draw a line in the sand about your BMI.

I think we need to be more, in fact, just talking about obesity in general, we need to be more nuanced.

Yeah, it's really hard because people will say, well, I feel more confident now that I've taken it.

And, you know, I feel better about myself now that I've taken it.

I mean, okay, as a, as a game, if we game it in our head, do I see if these drugs were shown to be fully, fully, fully, fully safe over a long period of time?

And broadly speaking, we know the right people will get it.

Can I or do I think that if I can walk into a drugstore, because at the moment, for example, we go in and buy Tylenol, okay?

We buy, we give it to our kids, right?

Now, we also know that if I had a whole bottle of Tylenol, I may endanger my liver.

Okay, so there, right?

It's, it can be toxic as well.

But now society has accepted that this is something that we can choose to self-medicate with without a prescription.

If we can get to that level of safeness for these weight loss drugs, why not, I guess?

Please, I am not saying we will get there and I'm not saying it's possible to get there for the reasons which I've told you.

But I think as a principle, I don't mind doing that as long as it's safe and only the right people get it.

Those are the two critical things.

What are the dangers of weight loss drugs like Ozempic?

Like, what are the actual ramifications?

The ramifications are the wrong people get it.

I mean, very rarely, I think there are certain things that could happen extremely, extremely rarely.

The biggest danger is the people who who are taking it for cosmetic reasons and don't have a lot of fat to lose and take too much of it.

And then what then happens is they then lose too much weight.

And what are they damaging?

What are the consequences?

Because what these drugs do, because they make you feel fuller,

the drugs itself don't do a great, you know, they're positive effects to the drugs.

They just make you eat less.

So if you are already skinny and take it, you are in effect starving yourself.

That's the one thing.

Starvation is not a good thing, okay, for that.

Now, equally, if you take the drug and don't improve your diet, because these drugs also don't improve your diet, they just make you feel full.

So, if your diet was crap to begin with and you were eating chips and Oreos all the time, what these drugs will do is to make you eat less chips and Oreos.

And so, actually, what happens is you could end up malnourished.

So, even yes, you're losing weight because you're now eating calorie-wise, less food.

So, oh, I'm losing weight.

Look at me, I'm good.

But then, if that's all you're eating, and you're not doing your fiber, your protein, and all that jazz, right, and micronutrients, then you're going to be be skinny and malnourished at the same time on the drug.

So, the drug is a silver bullet for the feeling full of it.

It doesn't improve your behavior.

It doesn't improve your diet.

It doesn't stop people from not taking it, who shouldn't be taking it.

So, I'm pro-drug for the people who need it.

Got it.

Relief,

I appreciate that.

I wanted to ask you this question because I think you've alluded to it.

But if you could put a warning label on one part of the diet industry, what would it be?

Can I have two things?

Yeah, of course you do.

So, so i think that we've already alluded to it i think two two things the first which is most important is don't obsess over one item of food because look sometimes life demands a chocolate bar sometimes life demands a banana it depends what you're doing okay can you make a healthier chocolate bar and actually over a period of time we don't eat chocolate we shouldn't eat chocolate bars every day so that's the first thing we shouldn't we shouldn't eat chocolate bars every well we shouldn't why should we it's like saying that we shouldn't eat burgers every day it's very normal though that people do that right that's common.

But we shouldn't.

It is common, though, right?

I think it probably is quite common.

It is common.

I assume so.

Maybe you're right.

And the burglaries will be smaller.

So I think what you've got to do is...

I did up until I was 21.

Every day.

So that's what you got to do.

What you've got to do is there's nothing wrong with the chocolate bar.

You've got to think about your whole diet with those numbers that are very.

So that's the second are those numbers that I were actually telling you about, the numbers that just focusing on the calories.

I really wish that if they make it in small numbers I think maybe the genie is out of the bottle and we can't get those calories I think obsessing over the calories is the wrong thing to obsess about because it doesn't improve the quality of our diet to me the big thing that I think I really want people to take away is this idea of look at the protein look at the fiber and look at the sugars yes because that solves it right like i'm thinking right now if someone's feeling overwhelmed if right now they're listening

they're just thinking right now like charles i want to do this but i I don't even know.

I don't have time to.

Where would you suggest they start?

Is that where you'd suggest they start?

Yes.

Yes, me too.

I think that's a really clear way of looking at it: is think about your diet as protein intake, fiber intake, and sugar intake in the percentages that Giles broke down: 16% of protein, 30 grams of fiber, and

5% sugar or less.

And all of a sudden, now you're hopefully going to feel healthier, have more energy, and naturally eat less.

Yes.

Or eat less.

Eat less crap.

Yeah.

You're going to eat better.

And you might say that, well, wait a minute.

They don't label fruits and vegetables and they don't label meat because they don't need to.

Ultimately, if you get, if you're actually eating a piece of meat and some fruit and vegetables in which there's no labeling and it's just, how do I know?

How do I know?

If you're eating that, you don't need to know.

That is the point.

Because if you're cooking a steak and you're having broccoli and you're doing the things and you're peeling the potato and boiling it and you're nan concerned about, well i don't know how much sugar they put in it well it's because you have to add sugar if you want to do it and and you want to do so the moment you're cooking from scratch not everybody can cook from scratch which is what this is right so but if you are eating foods with no labels then they tend to be fresh stuff then that's a great point right that the foods that don't have labels correct is because they don't need them correct that i've never even thought about it like that sounds so simple but it's a really good point and if you're eating that way then generally you're going to be healthier safer more secure.

Yes, there's still a danger of eating too much and what have you, of course.

But as a general rule, if we're looking at a general rule, I think that's going to be.

Amazing.

Charles, it's been so great talking to you today.

We end every on-purpose episode with a final five.

These questions have to be answered in one word or one sentence maximum.

So, Charles, yo, yo, you look prepared?

Uh, here's your final five.

The first question is: what is the best health advice you've ever heard, received, or given?

Do you know what?

Move more.

It's a great one.

Question number two: what is the worst health advice you've ever heard or received?

Count calories.

Question number three, something you used to believe was true about health, but now you know it's not true.

I used to think that the moment you hit your 40s or 50s, your metabolism dropped.

And that's not true.

It's only because your muscle mass dropped.

So I think this metabolism thing, your metabolism stays stable through your life.

That was a very long answer.

I'm so sorry.

But I used to think that five years ago, and now I don't think that anymore.

What's the recent study or research that you've read about the work that you do that blew your mind or fascinated you or something that made you really curious and interested?

When I first learned that this

lowering of metabolism when you lose weight is pretty much permanent.

Right.

And so in other words, this is why it's so difficult for you to lose weight.

This is probably, it's probably 10 years old.

So it's not new.

It's part of the reason why your brain hates it when you lose weight or why it's so difficult to actually lose weight.

So once again, this is, so I'm 80 kilos.

If I used, and I'm not, I've always been, okay.

So, but imagine if exactly the same me, my twin, got to 90 kilos and then came back down to 80 kilos.

Then

from a physics perspective, you think, well, this is an 80 kilo gentleman.

I'm an 80 kilo gentleman.

We should be able to eat exactly the same thing.

We can't.

He will always have to eat less than me to maintain the same body weight because he has a brain that used to be 90 kilos and is dragging him back up.

And I remember seeing the very, very first time seeing those studies.

I was going, this is depressing.

But then you think, well, how do we mitigate against these things?

And how do you do it?

I mean, the drugs do a job for that, for example.

People who exercise.

So exercise is terrible for weight loss because we don't exercise enough, but very good for weight maintenance for that very reason, right?

Where when you exercise, your expenditure goes up and it mitigates against this loss of metabolism.

So this is not a brand new study, but I found it very interesting.

Is there a way to trick your brain?

There is a way to trick your brain in a bad way.

So in other words, if you gain weight and stay there for a long enough time, your brain begins to defend at higher weight.

Okay.

Whereas if you lose weight, your brain, from what we know so far, never defends that lower weight because evolutionarily, there is no reason to do that, right?

Because this is less likely of survival.

So, your brain can train in the other direction, vicious cycle, not in losing weight.

And, fifth and final question: we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show: if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

I think that healthy food should always be the cheaper option wherever you go.

At the moment, that's not true.

It's very uneven, where at the moment, unhealthy food is cheaper.

And so, if we want to cure diseases and obesity equitably across the world, regardless of how rich a poor you are, then by default, the food that you eat must be healthy.

Charles, thank you so much for your time and energy.

So grateful to connect with you today and learn so many things from you.

You blew my mind multiple times.

And everyone who's been listening or watching, go and grab the book, Why Calories Don't Count, How We Got the Science of Weight Loss Wrong.

Follow Giles across his podcast and social media if you don't already.

And make sure you tag us on TikTok and Instagram and let us know what you're connecting with, what you're experimenting with, and what you're trying.

I love to see how you're putting all of this insight into action.

Thank you so much, Ian Giles.

Such a pleasure.

Grateful to meet you.

Thanks for having me.

If this year you're trying to live longer, live happier, live healthier, go and check out my conversation with the world's biggest longevity doctor, Peter Attia, on how to slow down aging and why your emotional health is directly impacting your physical health.

Acknowledge that there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition and health.

And people are going to be shocked to hear that because I think most people think the exact opposite.

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Kevin and Rachel and Peanut M ⁇ Ms on an eight-hour road trip and Rachel's new favorite audiobook, The Cerulean Empress, Scoundrel's Inferno.

And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

And And his pecs glistened in the moonlight.

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This is an iHeart podcast.