Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 356: Alan Aragon

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. In this episode, I am joined by none other than one of the evidence-based fitness communities, true OGs, Alan Aragon. Alan is the author of Flexible Dieting, a science-based reality-tested method for achieving and maintaining optimal physique, performance, and health. He's been presenting and teaching about nutrition since I've been in this space, somebody whose work I've literally been consuming for over a decade. He's the curator of the Alan Aragon Research Review, and he's a genuinely good human being, someone from whom I've learned a ton, and somebody that I absolutely had to get on the podcast and share with you guys.

So please enjoy this amazing nutrition conversation with Alan Aragon. This podcast has some awesome partners. And one of my favorite, of course, is Legion Athletics. Legion is my go-to supplement manufacturer for what I like to call my big rock supplements. This would be my protein powder, my pre-training formula, my post-training formula and creatine, and my kind of ancillary vitamins and micronutrient protection. So why do I like Legion so much? What sets them apart? It's quite simple. Legion uses all natural ingredients. All the formulas include natural coloring and natural sweeteners. No artificial sweeteners, just stevia. And every single formulation,

be it a pre-workout or a vitamin, contains clinically effective dosages of ingredients shown to work in humans in clinical research supported by robust trials. No filler, just legit ingredients in each and every formulation proven to work. The whey protein isolate is so light. It's fantastic. It mixes in water. It tastes amazing. And I drink it every day, even as somebody who's lactose intolerant. That's just how high quality this whey protein is. And it's sourced from Irish dairy cows that are raised well, eat their natural diet and packaged in climate friendly packaging. I love their plant protein too, for those of you who like something that's a little on the thicker side and you aren't

a fan of animal products. Also, I love Legion's pre-workout, but specifically the pre-workout that does not contain caffeine. That would be their Stim-Free Pulse. I'm a huge, huge fan of beta-alanine and L-citrulline, but I don't like taking in wildly high amounts of caffeine. So if you are somebody who likes pre-workout with caffeine, you can try Pulse. Or if you like it without caffeine, because you maybe want to enjoy your morning coffee or monitor your caffeine consumption, try the Pulse Stim Free. My favorite flavors there for sure are the New Grape and the amazing, amazing Tropical punch. As for my creatine, I get that from Legion's Recharge, five grams each and every day. I take it on the days I train as well as the

days I do not because Recharge also contains L-carnitine, which can help with promoting muscle recovery and decreasing soreness, as well as some ingredients to help with creatine utilization. And of course, my favorite supplements for my ancillary micronutrient health are Legion's multivitamin and Legion's greens powder. Not only do these two products contain a ton of high quality vitamins and minerals, they also contain unique adaptogens like KSM 66 ashwagandha and reishi mushroom, which I like to take each and every day to promote my health. If you want to cover all your bases with a high quality protein, creatine post-workout or the ancillary micronutrient health stuff like greens, powders, and multivitamin, I encourage you to go over to

legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny. That'll save you 20% on your first order and you'll rack up points that you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be supporting the show. Alan, how's it going, man? It's going great, Danny. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm really happy to be here, bro. Absolutely, dude. I've been following your work for quite some time. It's a pleasure to get to catch up. You are the curator of my all-time favorite quote about nutrition. Did you know this? What quote is that? Every meal is a short-term investment in how you feel and perform, a mid-term investment in how you look, and a long-term investment in your freedom from disease. I think that is perhaps the most

succinct and effective call to eat like an adult that I've ever heard. Thank you so much, dude. That is a lot of people's favorite quote of mine. So sometimes I produce good stuff, man. And that's one of those moments. So it's really great to hear that you like that quote as well. Yeah, I love it. So for those of my audience that aren't familiar with your work, most of them are, why don't you tell everybody, uh, how you got to where you're at as kind of one of these pillars of nutritional authority and the quote unquote evidence-based, uh, fitness space. You are literally one of the OGs of, uh, evidence-based fitness. Like if there was a Mount Rushmore of OGs, you'd, you'd be up there.

Thanks, man. Thank you. Well, I got my, uh, I got my start in, I guess the academic space. Well, back in 1990 is really when, when I began my, my academic journey and, um, ended up through a series of serendipitous twists of fate, ended up getting a nutrition degree instead of an exercise science degree. And then I did my graduate degree in nutrition as well. And I was at a crossroads at one point where I needed to decide whether I wanted to become a registered dietitian or not. And the way it was presented to us as students at the time was, well, if you don't become a registered dietitian, then there's really nothing else out there that you can do in this space. But I felt like I had some specialized knowledge at the time because I had a couple of

friends who were doing personal training. And I'm like, you know what? Doing personal training sounds much more fun than being a dietitian for me personally. So I just decided to finish my graduate degree in nutrition and just go into personal training. And I was lucky enough to be living in California where it's kind of the Wild West. And it still is as far as nutritional counseling and nutritional practice. So I'm like, hey, I can legally practice nutrition here. I don't have an RD. on, the first decade was filled with with personal training and nutritional counseling. The second decade was almost exclusively nutritional counseling. And then the past decade, the third decade is almost all research. And when I say research, And when I say research, I mean doing a mix of randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, you know, systematic reviews and meta-reviewed publications, a small handful of which I'm the lead author.

All of those publications are by invite, which is good and bad. You know what I mean? It's good in the sense that I don't allow people to value my work enough to tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, you want to be on this research project, you want to be on that research project. But bad in the sense that when somebody asks me, hey, Alan, how on earth do you get to do these research publications? You know, how on earth does one go about that? And I'm like, well, I just got invited to all of them. And then it ends up being no help

to the person asking me. But I did tell them, look, I put in 20 years of apparently good work and it got noticed. And so, you know, put in the work and then you may get noticed as well. And so, you know, to kind of tie together my long-winded answer to you, Danny, To kind of tie together my long-winded answer to you, Danny, I was one of the first guys to bring forth the idea of an evidence-based approach to fitness and nutrition. Because roughly 15, 20 years ago, there really wasn't that. You just kind of depended on hearsay and the anecdotes of the most apparently trustworthy person or the best looking or the fittest or the most jacked with the biggest mouth. And so much like the area of medicine, it started off as just observing which shamans and which doctors had had the most successful patients and then it evolved towards looking at okay well we have a

scientific evidence basis now so let's weigh the scientific research with what we're seeing in the field and kind of cross-check the two and see what we can put most of our confidence in as far as what we believe to be true. And so that's sort of what I've done with the fitness space is kind of get people to look at the scientific research evidence base and weigh it against field observations, instead of just going through anecdote and gym gossip to, you know, build your knowledge base and form practice guidelines. And I'm not the only guy at the vanguard of that movement. There's guys like Will Brink, Brad Schoenfeld uh even lyle mcdonald um and and uh you know later down the line guys like

lane norton who uh sort of carried the torch and started setting things up for the future generations of practitioners in and coaches in the personal training and nutritional counseling space who have taken an evidence-based approach and not just an anecdote and lore and tradition-based approach. So yeah, that's kind of in a nutshell, that's sort of who I am and where I came from. Yeah. And I remember you were the first person who introduced me to this idea of a kind of three-prong model for evidence-based practice. It's the best scientific evidence we have paired with what works best for the client or patient, and then the clinical or anecdotal

experience of the trainer and the coach. I remember thinking at that time in my career, I'm just a personal trainer. I don't even think I can be evidence-based because I'm not a doctor. I don't have a PhD. And I remember very, very vividly after that live event that you did that I went to feeling very motivated and inspired to be part of moving nutrition and fitness forward as kind of one leg of what it is to be an evidence-based kind of fitness community. Like I'm on the ground, I'm in the trenches. I do have a role here. I have something to bring to the table. So I've never really forgotten that. And, uh, I'm very appreciative that you've come as far as you have. First question I have for you is something I've been thinking about for a long time. I'm starting to change my tune on it. Um, but it's the idea that food behaves similarly to a drug. Would you say

that food is like drugs or foods can have drug-like properties? Yes, they can. Yes, they can. But the analogy that I draw between food and drugs, although they ignite similar neural pathways, the magnitude of effect and the magnitude of withdrawal slash dependency is far smaller with food than it is with drugs. So whereas food might be a 10-speed bike, a drug might be one of those crotch rockets that you see the guys blazing through the canyons in before they drive off the edge and regret it. So yeah, that's how I would put it with food and drugs. Similar reward pathways, way different magnitudes of effect. So with there, there's been a lot of discussion with the new weight loss drugs, so Zempe, I call these GLP ones, um, around the kind of genetic predisposition people have for obesity. Um, and that's what got me thinking about this. Do different people have different genetic predispositions for

food reward? Are some people just straight up like I came from a heavier family and there's probably something in my brain genetically that makes food more rewarding to me than somebody like myself who's comes from thin parents and who's always been thin. Yes, I do. I mean, it's been demonstrated that there are those differences in people. Some people have much stronger reward responses and much stronger hunger responses in terms of elevations of certain hormones peptides that would reflect this objectively and people vary rather widely in in that regard and there is a wide range of different environments that can be either conducive or mitigating as far as these types of behaviors go that would manifest in obesity. So yes, yeah, the short answer is yes, there is a genetic component to it.

But then the nuance to it, which I just kind of want to throw in, That's what we want. I just kind of want to throw in. There's different cultural aspects. There are cultural, sociocultural differences that could predispose people to obesity or not. biological connections that are set up by these socio cultural environments that really either happening or facilitate it and almost encourage it so that across the globe there are just varying environments there and very psychosocial setups for obesity or not yeah and so in the western world it is almost like the perfect storm yeah for obesity whereas in the eastern world and not really yeah so yeah there's a lot of factors floating around there. I don't personally like the idea of the general population thinking, oh, cool, we've got these new obesity drugs out.

And so if obesity ever, in quotes, happens to me, I can just grab myself a drug, get on the program, and then life will be much better. And sorry to say that that may be a bandaid rather than a cure, a root cure. So, yeah, I mean, it's an option option, but, um, it's a treatment option. And I believe that the more treatment options that we have, the better, because there's going to be situations where they will ultimately help some people. Yeah. But I don't like the idea of people using something like Ozempic as some sort of a crutch or some sort of a bandaid. And yeah, yeah, there's, that's a kind of a big rabbit hole there, Danny. It is, it is. But I think you hit on something big, which is that obesity appears to mostly be, you know, there's biopsychosocial component to it, but a lot of it is environmental.

And there's no denying that the Western world has a very different environment than, like you said, the Eastern world or parts of the less developed world. But right here in the United States, baby, we are number one when it comes to, I think, optimizing an environment for obesity, metabolic illness, and something I've been a lot more passionate about recently, which is a lack of skeletal muscle. I think we are a population that is under-muscled, over-fat, and we don't move enough. And you've, like you said, you've been in this game since 1990. What has changed or what has, I should say, mutated over that time? Because it's not like it was great in 1990, but what has really changed and mutated since 1990 that has allowed our environment to become so obesogenic? What are the big things that make America such a kind of

bastion for fatness? Yeah, that is, um, that is an awesome question, man. Um, uh, three main things come to mind. So the first thing would be the internet. So having had a decent part of my, the first, you know, 18 years of my life, having lived it without the internet at all, gives me and, and, you know, a lot of other folks, and perhaps you do a degree, um, some perspective on, on how much more physical activity just in general was necessary to live to live a normal life. It's really incredible when you think about it just like that. I remember going to the video store and walking up and down every aisle to look at a potential movie.

every aisle to, to look at a potential movie. Blockbuster. Yes. Yes. And like now you can quite literally never leave your house and probably not finish all of the content available just on streaming without even having to move to you. You don't have to move to shop. You just get it fricking, you know, sent to your doorstep. You don't have to move to even get something to eat.

It's like incredible, right? Absolutely incredible stuff. I mean, you do have to kind of get up to go to the fridge if you want to, you know, but that, that might be the majority of some people's physical activity for the day. So really the, when the internet hit and it really did hit right around 1990, hit and it really did hit right around 1990 everything changed everything in terms of the obligatory link between movement and survival was just eliminated completely and uh that's one factor and so the the digital revolution as it was called which really started with the advent of of the internet and the widespread use of the internet. That was a big game changer in terms of a decrease in energy out. But there was also this continued increase in energy in. And so over the next decade, from like 1990 to about 2000,

there was this brewing idea that, Hey, maybe there are certain dietary factors that are driving the rise of obesity in, in the Western world. And you're out what that was. And it hit a fever pitch in the late nineties when the low carb and keto bestsellers and related media were really kind of at their peak. That was their Super Bowl season. And so what happened in the late 90s, and you can see this in the economic research service data sets of the USDA, you can see that flour consumption started decreasing and flour consumption has been going down since the late 1990s. Sugar consumption, added sugar consumption has been going down since the late 1990s. And dietary fat consumption has continued to go up. But obesity and diabetes have continued to increase since the late 90s. And obesity, it can, it still has continued,

it experienced a bit of a plateau there. But then it started going back up again lately. And that's probably, you know, because of the pandemic. Sure. But, um, um, alcohol consumption has steadily just been going up and binge drinking has been going up. Um, and so the kind of the inflection point that I want to, uh, I want to shine a light on is this decrease in carbohydrate intake due to the mass media propagation that carbohydrates are the bad guy. And well, nationwide, we actually did reduce our carbon take reduce our added sugar intake, but obesity kept going. And the thing that a lot of people miss is that we never reduced total caloric intake that just kept going up. And so in people's effort to try to solve the obesity problem by looking at a single scapegoat, like for example, carbs, or grains or sugar, they are missing the forest for the trees there. And so I think that that

alongside with the internet really was kind of the perfect storm to set the Western world up for obesity and metabolic diseases of excess energy. Yeah. So you did touch on something there, which I think is very in vogue right now. And it's, you know, you can see a societal awakening around, hey, like carbs and sugar, let's maybe cool it there. But all this is doing is creating space for additional calories from things like alcohol or dietary fat. I think the kind of big dietary fat thing everybody's talking about right now, and you know what I'm going to say, is seed oils, which have been...

I have become much more patient in how I respond to comments about it, but I will oftentimes try to minimize the demonization of certain ingredients. And I'll say things like obesity is not driven by carbohydrates. It's not driven by seed oils. It's not driven by this. It's driven by many of the things you just stated. It's multifactorial. And somebody in my comments will go spot on brother, except seed oils are poison. You know, it's like there is that this is one that has become really sticky and it's something that I quite frankly don't know enough about. I don't even know what seeds they're making these oils from. Like I'm guessing it's like sunflower seeds. Like when people say seed oils at this point, I've gotten so lost. I don't even know what they're talking about. So what, what are

seed oils? Is that what really kicked off the obesity epidemic? Um, and what do people really need to know about this? Cause it's one of the, let's call it higher volume pockets of the nutrition space right now are the anti-seed oil zealots. They're making an awful lot of noise. Yeah. Okay. First of all, the anti-seed oil zealots, they mean well, but they lack basic science literacy, or some would say scientific literacy. They just lack that.

They lack that skill. Some of the most vocal folks against seed oils are just very passionate and some of them are good people. But it is almost a basic human tendency to latch on to a simple idea and think you found the smoking gun. Yeah. And think you found the scapegoat, Eureka, but we found a secret. And, you know, that's really where the error begins is thinking that there can even be a single factor in things like the metabolic syndrome and things like developing

diabetes and things like developing obesity it's like okay at best at best what seed oils do is contribute to the caloric surplus that's unused by lean tissue that accumulates over time which gets deposited in the wrong depots in the ectopic depots and the visceral depots etc which leads to insulin resistance and then which leads to this constellation of metabolic dysfunction driven by obesity. And so, um, it, it's a lot, a lot more boring to say it that way than to say, we found it. It's seed oils. We thought it was carbs. Not really. It's seed oils. You know, seed oils are the new villain. They're the new carbs. Yeah. They're the sugar. villain they're the new carbs yeah they're the sugar cdols are the new sugar and if you if you um watch the the uh if you watched what happened on instagram i did a post well actually it was a collaboration post with myself and a gentleman in the space named Tony coffee, uh, where he was interviewing me about canola oil,

because I did an audience poll and I asked my audience, all right, you guys, I want to talk about seed oils, but there's two dozen different seed oils we can talk about. I want to talk about the arch villain. Who's the bad guy here? Who's the arch nemesis? Yeah. And so, you know, you can look at the evidence basis behind any claim. You can look up the scientific evidence basis behind any claim by going through the PubMed items and just seeing, you know, what are the systematic reviews saying? What are the meta-analyses saying? And what are some of the key randomized controlled trials saying? What are the meta-analyses saying? And what are some of the key randomized controlled trials saying? And of course, you know, if you want to look at long-term outlook and disease endpoints and stuff like that, what are some of the key prospective cohort studies saying?

And so in the case of canola oil or any given agent, you can look at intermediate endpoints that would indicate the development of disease or not. So your intermediate endpoints would be blood markers of health and things like blood lipids, blood glucose, things like insulin sensitivity, things like markers of inflammation and stuff. So across all of those things, canola oil just improves all of it. Relative to like another fat, for example. Relative to another fat. In fact, there is a systematic review and meta-analysis looking at canola oil's effects on blood lipids compared to other oils, and it just outperforms most of them. Yes.

And it's really kind a scavenger hunt type of challenge to find the literature that shows one bad thing about canola oil. And so since it's nearly impossible to do that, what people default to, because the lay public in their lack of scientific literacy, they do the opposite of what you're supposed to do as somebody who's scientifically minded. If you're science minded, you let the data determine your beliefs or your opinion. If you are not science minded, you make sure that whatever data you allow into your brain aligns with your preexistent beliefs. So it's a completely different mindset. And so, oh, gosh, that data doesn't align with my beliefs.

All of this, all these positive health outcomes from canola oil don't align with my beliefs. Therefore, I'm going to reject it. And therefore, I'm going to redirect and say, ah, it's got to be funded by the canola oil industry. Yeah. And that's a very common default. Big oil. It's big seed oil. And that's a very common default.

And so my response to that is something that makes people super uncomfortable because then I say, all right, so are we throwing out all research that's funded by the given industry, by the given food industry of that area? Are we throwing it all out? Crickets, because you can't, because then you can't have a belief system about meat yeah meat research egg research dairy research heck fruit research vegetable any kind of food there goes your your evidence basis because you've now cherry-picked the industry that you're not going to believe and even if you were somebody to adopt that position that can't trust, can't trust the oil industry, the seed oil industry, can't trust it. All right.

So how do you think the research gets done? Who do you think is doing the research? And how do you think they're actually benefiting from the outcomes of the research? benefiting from the outcomes of the research. And so in order for you to believe that big seed oil is nefariously at work putting out their agenda, you would have to say, all of the scientists in charge of the research are in cahoots, and are somehow motivated financially to make sure they're fabricating results. I can tell you just from being within that community that we don't get paid if stuff gets published or not. In fact, a lot of times we're paying to publish. We don't get any under the table money. We don't get Lamborghini money. We're working way too hard for the love of this stuff. I mean, we, we literally do it that the whole point of doing research is to,

to find out the truth, to just uncover the truth. If you're not doing that, then you're defeating the entire purpose. And to be able to make the claim that a given industry works through scientists who have no moral and ethical integrity, that's a huge claim because what would we be risking our careers for? We ain't getting Lambo money, guys. So, yeah, it's a huge gripe of mine, man. It's a's a huge gripe of mine man it's a huge huge gripe of mine and i've done industry-funded research where our results were counter to what the industry would benefit from but still get it published because this is science this is this is the way it works but it goes far beyond that it's it's like um you just don't like the idea of seed oils not being the scapegoat that you really thought they were, you know? So it's a human nature thing. It's a complicated thing. I don't personally know what the psychology is behind this emotional attachment to seed oils. I mean, do you have any ideas?

Well, I think you hit on something big, and that's that we want simple answers for complex problems. And we talked a little bit off air about, thankfully off air, about politics and religion. And I think in both of those situations, people want more simplified answers to very complex problems. And nutrition has become a very polarizing and oftentimes partisan arena. one demon to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, because they're simply too either lazy or intellectually ill-equipped to take a 5,000-foot high view. What's going on, guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about

my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells, or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar

fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days just click the link in the podcast description below can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective my app-based training community back to the show a lot of these things seem to be substantially more complicated than look it's this one issue it's this one issue. Uh, it's this one thing. I believe it can be pretty simple. I think most people, if you don't want to be metabolically sick, lift some weights, eat some protein, eat a lot of vegetables. That's about as simplified as you can get, but even that's too simplified. So blaming any health epidemic on, on a single

villain, I think it's just, we have a proclivity for wanting there to be a bad guy, and we want to be able to blame that bad guy. And we see it in politics. We see it all the time. And it's usually that there can be bad guys, but it's never the fault of one thing or one person or one oil. And again, it prevents us from finding real space for discussion about something like obesity, which is a huge problem, a huge, huge problem. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that.

And I think that seed oils contributing to obesity would be limited to their inclusion within hyper palatable, highly engineered, ultra processed foods that are packaged and shelved and inexpensive and easy to passively over consume. Sure. So they, they, they participate within the whole symphony that results in obesity, but we can't just sit there and shine a spotlight and go, ah, it's seed oils. And some people go as far as saying, ah, it's omega-6 fatty acids. Well, that's even stupider because we have omega-6 fatty acid rich foods like nuts, for example, which improve metabolic health and don't contribute. You know, like the collective evidence shows that they don't contribute to the obesity problem.

And so some people are willing to be overly reductionist about things while being increasingly more wrong about their position. And yeah, it's a, it's an interesting and it's an odd thing. And I'm actually writing an article about it right now, uh, in my research review. And, and I think you're definitely going to enjoy it. Yeah. And it was, which is a good, it's a good segue to a follow-up question about fats, which is specifically saturated fats. And, uh, I have, I've changed my opinion on this in the last, let's say year and a half. Um, but I got, I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of no fat you eat. It's going to fuck with your cholesterol. It's fine to eat saturated fat. It's fine to eat cholesterol-rich foods. I find that the people who hold these very, very negative beliefs about seed oils are typically the most, let's call it, outspoken about the benefits of more animal fat.

You know, they're eating shit cooked in beef tallow. They want grass-fed butter. And I found that to be unbelievably simplified, but also for some reason, it totally made sense. I was like, yeah, well, if you just eat cholesterol, which makes testosterone, and you eat more of it, you'll be even more of like a Sigma male alpha male type and like seed oils are totally in all this garbage. So, you know, that's, that's garbage and you should eat more saturated fat. And, uh, you know, I'm just going to eat all this bacon and red meat because it confirms my priors. I love this shit. And it's, it's definitely not going to affect my blood lipids. And the more I learn about it, it does seem that like a high saturated fat intake is

probably not a very good idea. If you want to take care of your metabolic health or your cardiovascular health, what, what do people need to know about saturated fat intake? Mm-hmm. What people really should, should take to heart about the whole fatty acids conversation is that we eat foods and we don't eat isolated fatty acids. And so it's probably a more accurate and pragmatic approach to in quotes, judge the food rather than the fatty acids that it may contain. And so for example, there, there is heterogeneity of effects across saturated fat containing foods. Um, I'll give you a couple of examples. Butter. Let's start with butter. A lot of people love butter and for great reason. Butter makes everything taste better. Butter is a staple of the gourmet food community. Without butter, we wouldn't be having no Michelin stars.

butter, we wouldn't be having no Michelin stars. So now the problem with butter is that is when people start thinking, there's no limit to how much butter you can have and still optimize your health. And, and this is largely because of its effects on cardiovascular health. And so butter is a source of saturated fat and it is a dairy food, but you can look at a whole, a very kind of similar food in kind of the same food group with similar fatty acids within it. We'll, we'll look at hard cheeses for example or just cheese let's say all cheese except for let's say american cheese cheese whiz right all cheese except for cheese whiz um cheese while it's a saturated um fat source while it's a high fat food, it also has a very different in quotes food matrix than butter. So butter lacks this combination, this synergy of components that cheese happens to have that makes it a

vehicle of, of nutrients and fatty acids that results in neutral to positive health outcomes while butter kind of has the opposite effects butter results in unfavorable health outcomes despite being both made from dairy kind of softishish, usually rectangular. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, same color, same look, same, you know, they make everything taste better. But cheese happens to have much more neutral health effects than butter. And this is because of the, in quotes, food matrix. the in quotes food matrix, and we can define the food matrix as the sum of the essential and non-essential nutrients within a food in its in in quote, natural state. And so, you know, we can even and with in the case of cheese, you're looking at things like, well, the more obvious one would be protein differences between cheese and butter.

Less obvious would be calcium differences between cheese and butter. and largely neutral effects on blood lipids, while butter very reliably causes unfavorable changes in blood lipids. And I want to throw in a little wrinkle there by saying that I'm not saying everybody needs to avoid butter. You can include any food in your diet that you damn well like but with certain foods like butter you have to be somewhat judicious about the amounts that you consume you can't just drown everything you eat in butter and expect to live the longest healthiest possible life and paula dean is rolling in her in her i don't even know if she's still alive, but, uh,

I know that she got some pretty big trouble a few years ago. Yeah. Yeah. I do know that. Well, that, that, for, for people who are advocates of, you know, big butter or saturated fat, she, she is like as close to perfect evidence as you'll find for butter being fine. I mean, look, she's 70 something years old. She's still alive. How bad could butter be?

That's the lack of scientific rigor and thinking that you mentioned earlier. Anyway, continue on. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying to avoid any, any food. I'm not, I'm'm saying not not even avoid butter but it helps to be aware that certain foods warrant a a more vigilant degree of moderation than other foods with with respect to their risk potential and so butter is not this risk-free food where you can just take that block of butter and chew on it between meals and everything's in your life is going to be fine that's that's not the case and with saturated fats, with your original question, it can help to look at the food rather than reductionistically zeroing in on, okay, which foods have saturated fatty acids, I'm going to avoid them. And I'll give you another example.

Chocolate, dark chocolate, chocolate specifically another saturated fat source but lo and behold you'd be damned to find um adverse uh consequences in the literature for consuming dark chocolate unless you really dig for the you know yeah the heavy metal intake mostly healthy stuff if i understand correctly a lot of that coffee chocolate family is loaded with antioxidants and tons of great stuff yep um milk products full fat milk products another saturated fat source but you look at um whole milk and you look at things like yogurt you'll get that any type of fermented milk product, full fat, almost all positive health effects, both, um, intermediately on blood markers of health and also, um, long-term in the,

the hard health outcomes department, like disease and, uh, you know, cardiovascular disease and mortality, um, all neutral to positive effects, despite it being a saturated fat source. And then, you know, you have things like butter, you have things like processed meats, and then, you know, you have various other foods that don't, of a food that is saturated fat containing, but is kind of protected because of the food matrix. So we kind of have to get a little bit further away from looking at the individual fatty acids and more focused on kind of the food matrix and food selection. It makes a ton of sense.

If you think about it, what we just talked about with seed oils, if you were to replace butter with canola oil in all of your cooking, you'd probably see positive health outcomes. But if you look at a lot of the food matrices and these processed foods that contain seed oils, that's where we give it a bad name because it's included with all these other hyperpalatable, hypertasty things. And so people go, oh, seed oils are bad. And it's like, well, the foods that we over consume that can oftentimes use seed oils are not health promoting. That's right. Independent of the food matrix, seed oils could potentially be okay. And in this context, saturated fat in the right food matrix

could actually be health promoting. It seems like to really maximize your nutrition, you need to take a zoomed out approach. That's correct. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. So then let me ask you this question, because this has been one that I've been thinking about for quite some time. If you were to, I don't want to say rewrite the food pyramid, say rewrite the food pyramid or come up with some type of broad strokes, generalized recommendation for the current state of affairs as it is with obesity and metabolic disease. If you were to give people some simple things that they should focus on, including in their diet, an additive approach, what would you say most Americans assuming they're, let's call them sedentary. We're, we're not going to ask them to lift weights yet. We're

just going to ask them to make these changes to their diet. What, what are the highest leverage changes people could make to live healthier that are additive? I was going to make a joke and say, let's bring back the paleo diet but just add dairy to it yeah add dairy and legumes to it yeah seriously the paleo diet is pretty nutritionally dense and as long as you don't have to do crossfit while you're doing it. I'm game. So if people ate more fruits and vegetables, drank more plain water, and ate more protein, then that would be doing a lot for people's health. Eat more fiber-containing foods. Eat more protein.

And, you know, we can get a little more nuanced than that, with a with a balanced diet, but just sort of a shotgun type quick answer, then, you know, that that would be it. And I realized that there's certain factions out there who don't like the idea of eating more protein, but the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of eating more protein as one of the pillars of improving not just diet quality, but also setting yourself up for optimizing body composition and the retention of lean body mass and muscle function like over time and into the later years how much illness would you say is either directly or indirectly caused by a lack of muscle mass oh boy a lot a lot of it a lot it, especially among adults who cross over into middle age and certainly north of 50. And it's just, it's just very common for people to slack off on their protein intake

in combination with their activity levels. And that is a recipe for all kinds of bad stuff. Um, that really begins with the loss of, muscle mass and strength. What's the most muscle centric way of eating that is reasonable for people? Yeah. The most muscle centric way of eating would be to number one, just ignore all the dietary fads. Uh, I I'm not a fan of, um, eliminating food groups just, just because you've read that you should. Um, I think that getting enough protein and enough calories to support the training program would be a good foundation to start. So, um, instead of, uh, focusing on just restrict, restrict, restrict, focus on support, support, support, you know, support, support the training program. If you've got to come from that angle, then everything else

seems to fall into place. What advice do you have for, uh, people who are in a situation where they want somebody in their family to begin eating healthier, but they're having a hard time getting them on board, so to speak? What can people do to encourage people closer to them to live a more health-centric way and to do better with making good food decisions? That is such a good question, Danny. And the answer to that in my observations is a very difficult answer to accept and, and, and actually accomplish because people, Because people, loved ones, I mean, unless you're living the life that they want to live, unless you're doing the things they want to do and they're observing you as something to strive for, they're not going to listen to anything you tell them. So if you're telling your mom or your dad, hey, you got to be more healthy. You got to train.

You got to eat better. You have to be a living example of not only that routine, but the benefits of that routine that they wish they had. And if they have this model that they can see in front of their faces that, okay, this is what this person's doing. This is the benefits that they're getting. And I want those benefits. Yeah. And this person loves me and cares about me enough to say, Hey, you can do this and I'm willing to help you do it. And then that's the perfect setup for it. It's just when, if they don't respect you and they don't respect your lifestyle and what you're doing, and in fact, they kind of sneer at you, it's going to be very, very tough to, to, you know, enact some, some changes within them.

Last question. What's one thing about your own diet that you think you should change? Whoa, buddy, buddy, come on, Danny, Dannyy we're talking perfection here man i don't know i don't even i i i resent that question man i resent it oh man um okay okay i'm actually gonna have to to think about this for a second. Um, occasionally, occasionally I will come up short on a plain water intake. And that's because I will go through phases where I'm sitting at the desk and completing my work stack and i'm in this flow and then the day will just go by i'm like okay i just kind of sat here and didn't drink anything

yeah and so um more plain water and and that's why i've been trying to be more diligent about keeping my you know my linus uh my Linus blanket here. And so I think that would be the one shortcoming that I do need to work on. The one. Yeah, the one. And getting that water intake earlier in the day and not just trying to slam it down late at night and ruin my sleep. It's harder to not wake up and go to the bathroom the older you get, I'm sure. And the more you backload your protein and the more you backload your water, you'll find your water.

Yeah. The more unloading needs to happen in the middle of the night. Alan, we'll do a virtual Zoom cheers here. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure to chat both off air and and on air what where can people find your work they need the light in this place of nutritional darkness let's go to alanaragon.com uh i am active on a few social media platforms my username is the alan aragon on each platform and um i've noticed danny that i am maybe one of the only dang uh folks in the old guard who responds to

social media tags like somebody says hey don't at me like i am one of the few guys who respond if you at me yes you are like i i always get tagged with uh in conjunction with with like lane and like a couple few other people right sure those dudes never come in and respond. And I'm like, okay, I'll be the one guy who comes in and responds. So I am active on social media because I still have a chip on my shoulder, man. Yeah. And you do. Everyone else is comfortable sitting on. You're doing a better job than ever. I must say your content is better than ever, my friend. I appreciate that, Danny. It really is big coming from you.

And it really is big coming from somebody who's been following my work since a long time ago, man. So I truly appreciate that. And I truly appreciate the work that you're doing in the space as well. Thank you so much, man. I'll catch you soon. Got it, man. Thank you so much, man. I'll catch you soon. You got it, man. Thank you.