Lessons - Optimizing Diet for Muscle Preservation and Brain Health | Dr. Layne Norton - Founder of BioLayne

Today's success story podcast is brought to you by Van to now listen up this matters for your business and today's digital landscape security isn't optional it's essential without it deal stall sales cycle stretch out and scaling becomes really difficult why because investors customers partners they all expect businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit to anything and if you can't prove trust you lose opportunity so whether you're a startup founder trying to lend that first big client or an established company scaling your security program vanta helps businesses of all sizes prove they're trustworthy by automating compliance across 35 frameworks like sock to ISO 2701 and hipa the exact certifications your prospects your customers are demanding and here's why you need to pay attention vanta gives you back precious time you're currently wasting on compliance their platform automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work and it helps you respond to those endless security questionnaires up to five times faster and they also connect you with experts to get your security program running immediately in the results they speak for themselves a recent IDC report found that vanta customers achieve over 535 thousand dollars per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months so join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Kora and factory who use vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time and don't miss this for a limited time only my listeners can get a thousand dollars off vanta that's real money back in your pocket visit vanta.com slash scott now before this offer expires that's vant.com slash scott for a thousand dollars off in this lessons episode discover the truth behind popular diets and what actually leads to long term success learn why adherence matters more than the diet itself the power of meta analyses and nutrition research and key factors for muscle retention and weight maintenance what seems like when you look at all the different types of diets so you look at the high carb low fat you look at the low carb higher fat like more traditional keto if you look at intermittent fasting these are almost just psychological tricks to to promote a certain diet that you can adhere to for a long term is that is that more or less yeah I mean so there was actually a really a really telling study it was it was called um it was a meta analysis so a meta analysis just so people understand is not a study in and of itself you're not recruiting subjects or anything like that what you're doing is you are scouring the entire database of research and you're looking for studies that fit your what you call inclusion criteria right so basically these this particular meta analysis I forget the exact inclusion criteria but I think they were looking for you know studies looking at weight loss diets in humans that tracked I think weight loss over three months six months and two years um and there were some other inclusion criteria as well and basically they're including any studies that fall into this and then and they have certain exclusion criteria like I you know again I'm not certain I'm not saying that these were the exact exclusion criteria but like for example some studies will say you know we didn't take people with heart disease we didn't take people with type 2 diabetes you know like that sort of thing right and not saying that was the case for this study I'm just saying you can set whatever criteria you want so you include all the studies that fit that criteria and what you try to do then is basically combine all those data points to try to come up with a consensus of what the research says for your particular research question so it's a very powerful tool because a lot of times you can take you know individual nutrition studies and randomized control trials it is very very difficult to get randomized control trials that last lower than a few months with any kind of reasonable amount of control so for example um if you want to really highly controlled study you have to pay people like you like you can't just have that much control over people's lifestyle view and be like okay sure now do that you know I'll go sit in food jail for for six months you know so I mean there was a study recently where um uh I can't remember the exact study but basically they paid people like seven hundred dollars seven eight hundred dollars uh for like over a hundred thousand participants are sorry sorry sorry sorry seven eight hundred dollars per participant and the toll end up being like several hundred thousand dollars they had to pay out and all they were doing was monitoring people over like a six month period like they weren't even like forcing them to eat the meals that they wanted they just told them what to do and like had them come in and take measurements and stuff so the point being it's really really hard to get long multi-year randomized control trials with a high degree of control and so the ones that are do have a high degree of control end up being very few subjects right so the power of a meta analysis is you combine all these you can take you know a study they only have 20 or 30 people but what you do a meta analysis you may have thousands of data points so it really could be a powerful tool oh I was gonna say you have to be careful for uh searching for studies it also support what you're looking for because I know that you can find studies on anything to support almost any conclusion right right that again that's why meta analyses are so powerful because I always tell people I don't care about single studies I mean I may get like excited about how well a study was done or how tightly it was controlled or whatever but I will very very rarely make uh strong statements about one study I'll usually say this study suggests this here's how it fits with the rest of the evidence well we probably need more research and I will say that I was every time right so that's why meta analyses are so powerful because it's not one study it's multiple studies now it's important to read because you can do a bad meta analysis as well because there are meta analyses with like two studies you know three studies um you know especially if research is emerging that's not necessarily not going to meta analysis if the studies don't fit the inclusion criteria there may only be that many studies um but again in this one they were looking at 14 different like popular diets and how they you know their effects on weight loss over like six months a year two years and what they found basically is in the long term over two years all of them were equally forerable at promoting a facilitating long term weight loss there really wasn't much difference but when they took people and stratified them from least adherent to most adherent regardless of diet used there is a linear effect on their results so basically the most adherent people got the best results regardless of diet used so what that says to me especially based on another meta analysis I kind of was talking about this one from 2017 by Kevin Hall where they looked at low carb versus low fat diets when protein was equated and when calories were equated and when meals were provided to the participants so actually a high degree of control and they found that there was no difference between fat loss between these groups really so taking all those things together I look at that and say well the best diet is probably the one that you can stick to as an individual and we look at adherence adherence appears to be very individual because they even looked at hey did any of these diets tend to have better herest than others and the answers though um there doesn't really seem to be one diet that pops up as as being better for adherence but for individuals you'll hear individuals say man I did time restricted eating it felt like I wasn't even dieting you know so easy for me or I did low carb it felt easy I did plant based it felt easy I did flexible dieting it felt easy so if you want to lose fat um you have to you have to restrict in some way but you should probably pick the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you because most people think about a diet just as a diet and they don't think about it as a lifestyle and that's why the weight loss recidivism rates which is basically relapsing to previous weights after weight loss are like 80 90 even high even higher if you look out past five years so what it really says is whatever diet that you're choosing to use to lose weight those habits and behaviors you build you better be able to maintain them because weight maintenance is actually more difficult than weight loss a huge shout out to federated computer for supporting today's episode let me explain why I love federated computer why they are friends of success story they are changing the way businesses buy software because we all need software to run our businesses I don't care what kind of business you're building but the best business software doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars each month so federated computer replaces a lot of the software that you're using right now let me explain the average typical federated computer customer save 75% or more on their software built and gets great software top notch customer service and support and a software solution that is uniquely installed for your business without any sort of surveillance or breaches of privacy for example if you use google for email sales force for CRM slack for team chat list monkey for customer acquisitions and air table for data management with a team of 10 you'd save 9000 dollars per year on software costs by switching the federated computer they replace all of those and what's wild is that the cost of federated computer doesn't grow as your team grows you can use federated computer savings to grow your business rather than feed the woke Silicon Valley software companies the federated computer team literally invented cloud software they actually have the patents to prove it and they are taking a hammer to the ridiculously high prices of business software that all entrepreneurs are suffering from federated computer they've been a long time supportive success story they're offering 30% off they're already low prices when you use a coupon code freelance so go to www.federated.computer to begin saving 75% or more on your monthly software costs that's www.federated.computer these folks are going to do you a big favor check them out yes so on that point when you're talking about all these different types of diets is there any uh type of diet that is not just for fat loss but for muscle preservation and or cognitive performance that could be optimal or does it still follow those that exact same trend i can't really speak to the cognitive because not really my area what i will say is if you see people lose body fat um following healthier diet practices you do seem to see better cognition i will say there appears to be a link between the gut and the brain don't fully understand it yet so i will say eating sufficient amounts of fruits and vegetables uh and enough dietary fiber is pretty much the best way to have a healthy gut microbiome and that may be important if it ties into cognition but i wouldn't say that there's strong direct links between the two yet although i haven't looked really hard at it either so it could it could be there and i just not aware of it um when it comes to muscle retention really what you're looking at is getting enough protein in and then resistance training if you do those two things you're you're you're doing 90% of the work there is some data that suggests that a ketogenic diet specifically may not be optimal for lean mass retention compared to a diet that has sufficient carbohydrate that is mechanistically that's probably because carbohydrates release insulin insulin has a inhibitory effect on what we call proteolysis which is basically muscle protein breakdown right so that is probably why and then we do see that in the randomized control trials too especially a randomized control trial by Kevin Hall where they took people and put them on a ketogenic diet compared it to eating like a sufficient amount of car or not a sufficient because there's no requirement for carbohydrates but like a high carb low fat diet and they found that their urinary nitrogen excretion was higher and they had they lost more lean mass over the course of the rct so urinary nitrogen basically why that's important is because protein is the only nitrogen containing macrodutrient there is the nitrogen component of what makes it unique and so um we can look at how much nitrogen appears in your urine we can also look at how much you're taking in and we can come up with like a pretty good idea of like whether or not you're in a positive or negative nitrogen balance and if you're in a negative nitrogen balance that's a pretty good indicator that you're probably losing lean tissue so I'm not saying that you can't gain muscle on a ketogenic diet because I know people will misinterpret what I'm saying and and make it black and white and go to extremes you could absolutely gain muscle on a ketogenic diet um but when they compare them straight up to diets equal in protein that are non ketogenic then non ketogenic diets tend to do a little bit better again it's not a massive difference in lean mass retention so I wouldn't tell anybody hey like if you have success in the ketogenic diet that's easy for you to adhere to I'm not saying don't do it because you're just going to strip off a bunch of muscle but is it the best thing for muscle retention not based on the the data we have thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one