Evolutionary Diet
Dr. Stout provides an evolutionary explanation of why we want what is bad for us - and avoid what is good for us. Today's episode explores the co-evolution of our microbiome and our hunter-gatherer heritage.
Why we want what is bad for us - and avoid what is good for us.
Please scroll down for links below the transcript. This is lightly edited AI generated transcript and there may be errors.
Eric 0:09
Friday, April 19th. This is this is the beginning of what we're calling season three for this podcast.
Dr. Josh Stout 0:14
Yeah, we've come a long way.
Eric 0:16
Yeah. Amazing. Well done.
Dr. Josh Stout 0:17
Oh, thank you. Thank you. So I wanted to I wanted to start the season with sort of going back to the roots of the of the podcast and talk about evolution, evolutionary health, evolutionary diet, understanding how I we have been formed to live the way we live and how modern diets don't exactly copy.
Eric 0:47
Moving moving past what we've already discussed about about you know that we're built to gorge and then not eat for long periods of time.
Dr. Josh Stout 0:55
Right. All of these things and thinking about those things but getting into some real specifics of the science and particularly I wanted to talk about the the advantages of low carbohydrates. I want to talk about the advantages of high fiber. And I wanted to talk about how these things relate to things like anti-aging, how we can keep ourselves young and inflammation in general, fighting cancer and finally, how to deal with irritable bowel syndrome and other things like that that are directly related to our modern diets.
Eric 1:39
Wow. All right. Well, this sounds fascinating. So half of this is me.
Dr. Josh Stout 1:43
So so trying to hit some of these hot topics.
Eric 1:45
Yeah. All right.
Dr. Josh Stout 1:46
So, yeah, we as hunter gatherers clearly did not evolve to eat cheeseburgers. Right..
Eric 1:59
It feels, though, it tastes like we did.
Dr. Josh Stout 2:02
We more, like, evolved to eat like roadkill that we then, like, stuck on a stick and roasted a little bit but not not a cheeseburger. So you know what what is the difference between roadkill on a stick and a cheeseburger? It's it's the fats. It's the kinds of fats, you know, something that's been living free range before it got hit by the car is going to have a lot more unsaturated fats. You know, polyunsaturated fats is going to have omega threes. It's going to have those things that are easily digested and don't tend to lead to inflammation and have been associated with fighting colon cancer. So anything that is raised in a factory where you have basically a conveyor belt of corn coming to the to the cow who just stands there, that cow is going to get really, really fat with the worst kinds of fat. So lots of saturated fats, all the things that while they might taste good and feel good in our mouths, they they have a perfect melting point that really is perfect.
Just a quick aside, we like things that melt at almost exactly our body temperature, but a little bit below. So butter, chocolate, saturated fats, all of these things have in common that at body temperature they're melting. And so in our mouth they feel cool and they just give you a really nice sensation and somehow we've evolved to seek these things out. They're very high energy and they're they're what our, you know, ancestors must have thought of, like the perfect foods, things, you know.
Eric 3:34
That didn't require much work.
Dr. Josh Stout 3:35
Didn't require work. And and the maximum possible calories in the smallest package. And so, you know, we we were looking for these things.
Eric 3:45
I just remember I remember my kids sitting on the counter as I'm buttering their toast. And all they wanted was the butter.
Dr. Josh Stout 3:52
Absolutely. So we we love all the macronutrients. There's only three. There is. There's the carbohydrates, there's the fats, and there is the protein. Right. That's food. Yeah. And we like all of them, but we like the worst forms of all three. Right? So we we like the most saturated fats. We like the sugary is sugar. We don't want it, you know, mixed or slow or it's bound into some other molecule that we don't taste.
Eric 4:17
No, I want it immediately available now.
Dr. Josh Stout 4:19
Immediately available now. And we like our protein degraded and somehow cooked or dried in the sun or something that brings out a lot of glutamate or both. Yeah. So you want you want that that, that savory flavor, umami. Yeah. So we're we're looking for umami. We're not just looking for protein. We're looking for umami. Just like we're not just looking for carbohydrates, we're looking for sugar. And so all of these.
Eric 4:43
Does the umami signal what the body needs in the same way that sugar does? I mean, sugar means, ‘oh, you're getting energy now’.
Dr. Josh Stout 4:51
Uh, yes. Umami is the one… It's the one amino acid that we can both taste and actually go through the brain blood barrier. It's also the number one stimulatory neurotransmitter. It's it's glutamate, monosodium, glutamate. That glutamate, the the monosodium, the sodium goes away, and you're left with this ionic form of an amino acid that directly affects neurons and directly affects your brain. Um.
Eric 5:21
So it's beyond my control that I go, um.
Dr. Josh Stout 5:25
It's so good. Yeah, I know. It's just like the sugar and it's and it's something that's going to stimulate dopamine response that you found the thing you're looking for, just like the sugar does. So all, all three of these things, the macronutrients are our food, but we have key aspects of them that we're triggered to respond to the sugar, the the, the glutamate, the umami and those saturated fats that melt it, perfect body temperature, which will also make us want coconut oil and a chocolate the cocoa butter and chocolate melted exactly that temperature.
Eric 6:00
This must have something to do with the sensation of eating something like a Kobe beef or something.
Dr. Josh Stout 6:06
Yeah, the fattier the things are, the more amazing they feel in our mouths. Plus they carry the flavor with them. You know, I want these. Mom used to say, you know, put some fat and it'll make it more tasty. And the fat didn't change the flavor, but it carried the flavor. Yeah. Yeah. So these these are the things that we're we're seeking out evolutionarily, but they're not necessarily good to have in the amounts that we can now get them. So that cow sitting on the conveyor belt eating corn isn't just getting fat, but it's getting worse kinds of fat and it's having a higher percentage of them. So if you make a hamburger out of that cow and a hamburger out of a cow, that's just been eating grass, even if they weigh the same, they're going to be very, very different hamburgers.
Eric 6:54
They're going to. Yeah. And I'm going to prefer the one that was just eating corn. Exactly. The one that I want to eat.
Dr. Josh Stout 6:58
It's going to have so much more fat in it. It's going to satisfy you in a way.
Eric 7:03
I look at all this expensive grass fed meat and one time I buy it. I'm like, wait, no, this is a different product.
Dr. Josh Stout 7:10
Yeah. No, I cooked grass fed meat last night for my kids. And first of all, I started off with about a half cup of vegetable oil. Now, vegetable oil is better for you than saturated beef. Fat. So I was happy about that. But there was no way that it could just sit there and fry in its own juices because it had none.
Eric 7:26
Had no juice.
Dr. Josh Stout 7:28
Basically it was it was just bright red meat with no fat. And then I then I just kept putting in more and more and more spices. So I put in the the soy sauce and the and vinegar and I put in, you know, peppers and garlic and every kind of pepper I could think of and Sichuan peppers.
Eric 7:46
And you’ve already left most of the rest of us behind. But yes.
Dr. Josh Stout 7:51
And I would because I needed I needed to equal the meat flavor because the meat flavor was so intense.
Eric 7:57
Intense. Yeah.
Dr. Josh Stout 7:58
So yes, exactly. It's it is sometimes difficult to work with it.
Eric 8:02
And the mouthfeel of of of that product. Yeah. Of what comes from that animal is entirely different. And it's different than what you know, I thought it was different than what I was, you know acclimated to growing up. But what you're saying is, no, this is this is an evolutionary desire.
Dr. Josh Stout 8:20
Well, yeah, because we want we want the sweet fat is as as we might put it, I you know, if you if you think about the saying sit around and chew the fat, you don't have to sit around and chew fat. Sit around and chew the fat is when you've just killed something with a spear. And this fatty parts are all to its grisly parts. Right. And so you sit around and chew it.
Eric 8:39
That's what you get at first.
Dr. Josh Stout 8:40
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're, we're evolutionarily sort of dedicated to seeking out the worst possible things out there and specifically avoiding the things that are best for us. So this is something I think I've brought up before. It’s a certainly a theme when I think about diet as fiber is sort of one magic bullet we have in our diet that it makes everything better in every way. It, it, it, it swells up so you feel full more quickly. It blocks the digestion in the intestine so you don't actually get as many calories out of the food. It speeds up throughput. So your your your your your your you're sending that through food through faster and not keeping it in there. It has that means your food has less time to cause problems as it's sitting there in your intestine. It's not going to fester. It's less likely to have, you know, cancer is causing interactions and the things that can happen from oxidation of of of fats and carbohydrates. It's actually going to bond to sugars so that there's less sugar at any given moment entering your body so you have less of a glycemic reaction. The insulin levels stay lower. And it's it's so it's going to cause it to be released more slowly, but it's also going to catch that sugar and make it pass out of your body so you never even get it. So in every way it's helping you like that.
Eric 10:07
Does it not also feed the fauna that we have.
Dr. Josh Stout 10:10
Yeah, and that's something that I was going to get to and some of the really specific ways that I wanted to talk about.
Eric 10:17
The one thing I can say is, I mean, I have a while ago I added, I added fiber to my diet, just powdered fiber supplements and it's changed my skin. I can say that for sure.
Dr. Josh Stout 10:30
Yeah. And, and again, the the the fiber is what we specifically decided to avoid, even it's the thing we want most of the the Romans figured out how to make.
Eric 10:40
Need most not the thing we want what.
Dr. Josh Stout 10:42
The thing we need most. The Romans figured out how to make white flour. Why did they make white flour? Two reasons. Yum. Okay, three reasons. Yum. Sorry. And we liked it when it happened, but, you know, it was it was appealing to our senses, a bright white color and a nice flavor. But part of the nice flavor is there is there's these polyunsaturated fats in small amounts in the wheat germ, in the in the embryo where it's going to actually develop. That's the part we remove is the developing embryo where the protein and these polyunsaturated fats, the best part for us.
Eric 11:19
All the nutrients.
Dr. Josh Stout 11:20
All the nutrients. But those things go bad, particularly those positive, unsaturated fats. They start to oxidize and you get that musty flavor. And so you don't like that. So if you want to store something long term, you get rid of that. And the other thing is rats will eat it. Rats don't like white flour. There's no nutrition in it. They will eat it if there's nothing else there. But compared to a whole grain wheat that has all of these fats and proteins that they need to live, they're going to seek out the whole grains. So we made something that was essentially anti rat and also made a beautiful white loaf that was very, very tasty. But now we have something that has no fiber in it. It's it's almost pure carbohydrate and it goes into our stomachs and bad things start to happen. And I wanted to talk about this in the concept of the microbiome and in particular because I've been realizing that the microbiome isn't isn't just that we have things living in us. It's more like we have an organ that is a major portion of our body in our bodies health that we is is is inside us is part of us, but we have this sort of slow interaction with it so that our microbiome resembles the microbiome of the people around us because we're exchanging bacteria with them at the DNA level of the bacteria, the strains are going to resemble each other because they're particular strains. They'll actually start exchanging DNA between bacteria. The bacteria can do a lateral gene transfer, so they don't need to even be the same species of genes. So an E coli in your gut could be talking to a, you know, a bacillus serious in your gut and exchange genes between them. This is how antibiotic resistance happens. And so people who have become antibiotic resistant will then share not just the bacteria that might be resistant, the bad ones, but the good ones will start picking up that resistance as well, and they'll share that.
Eric 13:27
Oh.
Dr. Josh Stout 13:27
So that we can share - the microbiome genes are spreading through populations, even if it's not the specific strains of bacteria. And this can be bad or it can be good, you know, could be anything. It could be anything. Exactly. So, you know, you have to think about how your microbiome works. I don't know if I mentioned that on the podcast before, but I love to tell my students about…
People in Japan are able to digest some of the carbohydrates in seaweed that are essentially indigestible by any any life on land. They're there. Nothing has the enzymes to digest these particular carbohydrates that seaweeds make. This is why we this is why we make agar plates. Agar plates are a carbohydrate derived from seaweed discovered by the Indonesians making egg our agar. But of course, you know, Western scientists basically just stole it. Literally. Their Indonesian cook was making agar agar and the wife brought it to the scientist and said, You're looking for something jello that doesn't dissolve. What about this stuff? And he's like, Oh, this is great.
Eric 14:39
It's the exact same thing.
Dr. Josh Stout 14:40
Yeah.
Eric 14:41
Wow.
Dr. Josh Stout 14:42
Yeah, I agar-agar is agar. So our agar plates are coming from this, (just not flavored), yeah. Yeah. It's coming from this stuff that… the problem was several bacteria on land eat jello, and that's actually an interesting test for it, you start off with an egg plate or sorry, a gelatin plate, but if you turn it over, which is what you do when you're incubating plates, the whole thing just pours out as soup because all the bonds, the thing that makes jello solid is these tangled proteins. Once those all get sliced by an enzyme, there's no tangle anymore and it turns to liquid. So Agar is designed so that no bacteria can can dissolve it.
Eric 15:25
And slice it up.
Dr. Josh Stout 15:26
And so you put E coli from a human on it and the U. Coli can grow on whatever nutrients you put on the agar, but it doesn't slice it up. So it doesn't turn into jelly. It doesn't turn into into into soup and it stays in the plate. And so, you know, it's it's nice to work with that way.
There are populations in Japan. I think most of the population of Japan has E coli that can digest agar these these marine carbohydrates. Yeah. And what happened was probably around ten, 20,000 years ago, someone in Japan ate some raw seaweed that had marine bacteria that were able to digest seaweed because they live in the ocean. And something has to. And when they ate that seaweed, the bacteria lived just long enough to send that enzymatic gene into the E coli. Now, that bacterium was evolved to live in the ocean. It couldn't survive very long, but it lived just long enough that it exchange this information. And then they had E coli living in their guts that could digest these complex carbohydrates.
Eric 16:33
This is like a science fiction movie.
Dr. Josh Stout 16:35
Yeah, absolutely. Lateral gene transfer is wacky, wacky stuff. And then they're E coli because this was adaptive, because they had a lot of seaweed in their diet, passed it on through generations. So we've now had this for tens of thousands of years that other populations don't seem to have. There are probably other ones out there. This is probably happened more than once. It must have happened more than once. You know, it must it must happen relatively frequently, but particularly in microbiomes. And we know it's happening in our microbiomes in relation to antibiotic resistance. We we we we take antibiotics to to kill, let's say, you know, streptococcus for strep throat, and then we have it living in the rest of our bacteria, even if they didn't develop it on their own through evolution, they're just trading it back and forth. Now, the longer we stay away from antibiotics, the more likely they are to evolve away from it. Just lose that gene. I'm sure if for, say, the next 5000 years, the population from Japan stopped eating seaweed, they would lose that gene that is able to digest. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Eric 17:35
It just goes away. It gets lost. Yeah. Because it doesn't need it's not needed.
Dr. Josh Stout 17:39
It's an expense that the expense that E coli doesn't need to put up with. So, you know, this is this is something we have to keep in mind when we're talking about our microbiomes and how we keep them healthy is is the microbiome of everyone around us and how they're keeping their is healthy as well because it's it's it's not just obviously the genomes, but it's the strains what what genes are being expressed. So if you have E coli in the lab for the first three days or so, it behaves like textbook E coli. But after about a week, it does weird things. It digests things that E coli can't digest or stops digesting things that E Coli does digest.
Eric 18:21
It's been separated.
Dr. Josh Stout 18:22
Because it's been sitting there and people call it senescent, but it is far from senescent. It's still perfectly alive. It just doesn't behave the way E coli is supposed to behave.
Eric 18:32
Why does it change?
Dr. Josh Stout 18:33
Why does it change? It's probably eaten a bunch of the food it had available at the beginning. That food is now gone at eight, that now it has different foods, so it has to switch its enzymes to start now digesting proteins instead of just carbohydrates, or it maybe went to more complex carbohydrates rather than sugar. If if there's sugar available for E coli like glucose or sucrose, which it can easily turn into glucose and fructose, it's never going to eat lactose. But if there's no sugar, it'll actually turn out enzymes to start eating lactose. So the back grafting, yeah, no bacteria are very, very adaptable that way. And they will change in response to your diet in real time, you know, in matters of ours.
Eric 19:19
I mean, I guess we have we have all life on earth to thank for this property. Like, if they didn't do this, they wouldn't have survived.
Dr. Josh Stout 19:26
Right. But we tend to think of it as just some bugs living inside us. But it is not it's it's not that it is, again, much more like an organ.
Eric 19:35
You mean you mean the biome itself as if Earth were Gaia. Well, is is an entity within us. And yes, we're working as one. Yeah.
Dr. Josh Stout 19:46
So like the people who would think of Earth as Gaia, right? You should think of your little microbiome as a Gaia sort of within you. Yeah. Yeah. A little organ that is doing things in a really concerted way.
Eric 19:59
So where and how do we how do we recognize what is the manifestation of these interactions with this thing? That's very hard to suss out what it is exactly.
Dr. Josh Stout 20:10
Well, every neurotransmitter in your brain is also made in your stomach. Really? Yeah.
Eric 20:18
All of them. All. Well, there's there's a direct connection.
Dr. Josh Stout 20:22
These neurotransmitters are directly affected by the bacteria in your stomach. They tell the bacteria what to do, and the bacteria make also neurotransmitters to tell you what to do. The direct connection is between what the bacteria are doing and your vagus nerve. So your vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve coming out of your nerve x, which I love the idea for the ten coming out and spreading basically all over your body, right?
Eric 20:55
Yeah. Like your ears.
Dr. Josh Stout 20:57
Exactly. Yeah. Your tops of the ears.
Eric 20:59
Eyebrows all the way down.
Dr. Josh Stout 21:00
And it's related to everything from from digestion to, like, sexual response. It's like the reason why you. It's nice to have the top of your ear rubbed. You know, these, these, these things are directly related to the way our body functions. And then they talk to the brain. So some people, when they're looking at things like ADHD or autism, have been able to do studies, looking at probiotics that actually change the level of neurotransmitters in the brain and can change the way things are affected. Yes. So these are these are, you know, at the margins. This is not the genetic difference between people who might have a particular condition or another. But these are ways where we can see how our modern diets and our modern ways of living, where we've selected for things that eat lots and lots of sugar with no fiber on it, could also be explaining some of the rise of things like autism and ADHD and others of these things.
Eric 21:56
I would I would love if you did if you if you spoke more at another time on on you know, prebiotics and probiotics and enzymes and things like that because I have found a major help in my life by finding the proper probiotics, and putting them in there on a regular basis.
Dr. Josh Stout 22:14
Yeah, I’ll get back to it. The problem is, is there's not a huge… it's it's like cooking, okay? Cooking is science, but you can't just be a scientist if you're going to cook. Right. Each time. It's just once, it's like being a parent. Absolutely. There's absolutely an art to it so that when you cook, every time someone eats or every time a doctor treats someone, that's an anecdotal thing. It's not a study. And so you can't tell exactly what happened because you don't have two of them.
Eric 22:53
And you never will.
Dr. Josh Stout 22:54
And you never will. And so probiotics is still very much in this realm. They've done a lot of great studies. And no matter what or how they look at it, probiotics is good for you.
Eric 23:04
Yeah. And it's something that my doctor would not say one word about.
Dr. Josh Stout 23:10
But we don’t completely know how it works because every time you look at a way it could work, it works that way.
Eric 23:18
Yeah.
Dr. Josh Stout 23:19
So? So, you know, it puts off. I mean, okay, there's a couple of things it doesn't do, but, you know, it it changes the the white blood cell ratios in your body. It tends to inhibit autoimmune responses, again, particularly having to do with things in the colon. So, you know, like Crohn's disease and things like this, probiotics are going to help a lot with that for a number of reasons. One of them is, is is simply giving your body something to chew on. Instead, it releases enzymes, you know, directly that also have, you know, and antioxidants, things bacteria can't handle.
Eric 24:03
Now, not just any probiotics does this for any person. It's like.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:06
Well, it's it's both and both. Yes. And so so they're all good. But the strains are really important. That's what I mean. Like it's like cooking where every test for any disease shows that almost any group of probiotics is going to help.
Eric 24:24
In some way.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:25
In some way. But but there are really specific ones and even within that, there's really, really specific ones.
Eric 24:31
Well, we don’t we don't need to do that today.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:32
But that's that's part of what I was trying to get at is that our diet is going to change on an hour to hour basis. What the bacteria even given a set of strains that we already have, what those bacteria are doing, the way they're going to be responding to us and us to them, it's going to change everything. The way we digest foods, the way the way, the way we we feel it's going to change our emotions.
Eric 24:57
And this combined with fiber.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:59
Well, see, this is sort of what I'm trying to think about is how are our microbiome is interacting with us the way, you know, say, our liver would, right. So our liver is governing so many things in our body, right? It's it's filtering our blood. It's it's dealing with our sugar balance. It's it's it's keeping our energy going. It's a it's a major store of of fats. You know, our liver is a command center of our body. Our microbiome is also a command center of our body. It it runs the way we are.
Eric 25:39
Well, which organ is not a command center? Like each one is a command center.
Dr. Josh Stout 25:43
Right. We don't have extra organs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm trying to say, is that the microbiome is one of these things.
Eric 25:50
Right, right, right. Okay. Understood. Now.
Dr. Josh Stout 25:53
And it's not a just sort of thing that's happening within us, right?
Eric 25:57
It's not just these little things that are running around. It's a whole system.
Dr. Josh Stout 26:01
It's a whole system. Like our other ones. Some of them, yeah. And some of them are really diffuse, like skin or pancreas. Like you can't find a pancreas easily. It's sort of like a blob of fat and connective tissue that kind of sits around in amongst the viscera. And you're like, I think I see an organ here, but, you know, it doesn't look like the way a heart does or…
Eric 26:21
I never knew that.
Dr. Josh Stout 26:22
Yeah, it's it's really diffuse. I've been looking at them for years before realizing what I was seeing. Just, you know, because I'm like, Oh, I guess that thing's the pancreas, you know, it's sort of. Anyway, so organs are, you know, collections of functions as well as collections of cells and collections of, you know, tissue. You know, together. And that's what and that's what the microbiome is. It's a collection of kind of cells all doing something together. And we're responding on a essentially, you know, hour by hour, minute by minute basis to our food and then communicating that with everyone else in our families and in our community. So whatever we're doing to ourselves, that's also happening to everyone else and vice versa.
Eric 27:05
But what a wonderful way to think about life if we could just just internalize that concept. But anyway, please continue.
Dr. Josh Stout 27:11
Absolutely. And so, you know, you have to you have to think strongly about, you know, who in your family is taking antibiotics and realize that this is affecting everyone in your family when that's happening - and, don't not take antibiotics. Antibiotics are great for you, but when you do it, understanding that you're taking a serious decision, you want to do it when you really need to, and then you want to do it until everything's dead.
Eric 27:36
Yeah, don’t mess around. Complete the antibiotic.
Dr. Josh Stout 27:37
Complete…
Eric 27:38
Is there any anything that the rest of the family can do to deal with the possible effects?
Dr. Josh Stout 27:43
I would suggest probiotics of, you know, really any sort.
Eric 27:46
So, every one.
Dr. Josh Stout 27:48
You have yogurt, you know, not nothing, nothing too extreme. You know, you don't need a fecal suppository or something, but, you know.
Eric 27:57
Although, I hear they work wonders.
Dr. Josh Stout 27:59
Yeah, it's it's it's a good idea to get back to sort of a more balanced microbiome. And the weird thing is, is what you're putting into you isn't then what becomes your microbiome. It just sort of helps balance it. You don't end up with yogurt inside you living, you know, you, you, you end up with something that is is a mixed and diverse microbiome, but the yogurt helps it develop.
Eric 28:24
Although what you were saying about fiber is that fiber will actually change what stays inside you.
Dr. Josh Stout 28:32
Yeah, it's it's really it's really interesting. It's not just this mechanical thing. It's also the habitat for much of the microbiome. So if you want a diverse microbiome, make a diverse habitat. So just like, you know, if you just had a pavement, you might have a few things that could live there, but it wouldn't be a lot. Whereas if you have grass and trees and bushes, you've got a lot more diversity. Broccoli Yeah. And so the more things that are going into you that give little nooks and crannies for the for the bacteria to live on something that's in digestible that they can sit there and colonize, which will then once you have a colonized piece of fiber, that's something else that other bacteria are then going to go and try and eat because some of those bacteria are working on the fiber or working on the outside other parts of the people that graze on that. So you have multiple layers of of bacteria working together when when when you have that happening. Now, obviously, any food is going to be somewhat like that. But the fiber were soluble with all kinds of fiber. And you want you would want a balance. Again, it's it's a lot of it's about diversity. And the more diversity of bacteria you have inside you, the more resistant you're going to be to other diseases coming in. And again, strangely, not just bacterial diseases. This includes viral diseases that your immune system begins to understand how to target things better when the bacteria are there. Now, I would not be surprised if we didn't find out that the bacteria are not just sort of passively giving your immune system something to think about that. They're also signaling your immune system and telling it what to do. Right. Bacteria don't want to be killed by your immune system.
Eric 30:15
The communication between the stomach and the brain have to go, has to go two ways.
Dr. Josh Stout 30:19
It absolutely goes two ways. Yeah. So so there is there is this constant interaction.
Eric 30:24
Brain and what you call the microbiome on the body.
Dr. Josh Stout 30:26
Yeah. Now back to the vagus nerve. Vagus nerve is, is super popular these days. People are into like jumping into, into ice baths and things here.
Eric 30:35
For the vagus nerve.
Dr. Josh Stout 30:36
Yeah. Because it creates what's called the vagal response and that slows your, your heart rate and slows your breathing. And it's what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. So you've got two sides to your nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system. That's the fight or flight one and the parasympathetic that's what they call rest and digest. So you can imagine that would be useful for your stomach. Right. So it's your vagus nerve is going all over your body. But the key communication is between your stomach and your brain with the vagus nerve. It's almost like a secondary spinal cord, and that there's this direct communication between the two. And when your vagus nerve is being stimulated, you rest and digest. So after a meal it you, you, you feel sort of tired and you lie down and it encourages digestion. And that's a good thing, right? You want to be able to digest. But what what has happened to us with our superabundance of of food and our superabundance of the kinds of food we like, but that are not good for us is we have developed an interaction that causes irritable bowel syndrome. It's really direct and it's starts off by just simply eating too much food. Okay, so that's the first move. So the first move is we're hungry and our bodies are not will evolve for knowing when to stop. It takes a bit for the insulin to climb up and tell you that you're done. It takes a bit for ghrelin to respond to pressure in the stomach, telling you you've you've got enough food.
Eric 32:15
All of this is by design.
Dr. Josh Stout 32:16
All of it is so that we gorge as much as possible every time we have the opportunity for.
Eric 32:20
To get it in there before we stop.
Dr. Josh Stout 32:21
Yeah. So, So we have an extra supply of fat to keep the brain going and we'll be fertile. Right? Evolution is all aimed at that. And so while we're eating, we have a tendency to not just eat enough, but to kind of go over the top. And so now we've got a volume problem and that's where everything starts to go wrong. Now we have too much food inside us, and there's only two ways for it to come out and usually you're not going to throw it up because your body wants to keep onto it and it's a hold on, so you're going to poop it out. And the more volume there is, the more pressure there's going to be. So then you've got secondary problems and tertiary problems. So let's say you've eaten a bunch of bread, okay? So a lot of people for a while now have been trying to avoid wheat products. They talk about it because of the gluten, but it's a very small population of of the very small percentage of the population that actually have gluten sensitivity. And yet people avoiding bread seem to get a benefit. And so assuming that they're not all crazy people, they're actually feeling better and having health improvements by avoiding bread. What's going on? I don't think they need to be as concerned as someone with a real allergy. And I think maybe that is a little bit over the top sometimes. But what happens first thing is anything pasta, bread, all of these things, when they go in your stomach, they start to expand water starts to get in there and they start to get bigger. The next thing that happens is those those the carbohydrate, the starch molecules start to unravel and those hold more water as well. So the volume continues to go up. Then you have all of these very simple carbohydrates that are great food for bacteria, but these bacteria are not necessarily ones that are going to be selecting for slow and careful digestion. These are ones that are like like you know, mice in a silo of grain. They're going to go they're going to expand as quickly as they can. They're going to dedicate themselves to enzymes that break up these these these carbohydrates, and they're going to just go crazy eating all this stuff. And what are they going to produce? They're going to produce gas. They're going to produce hydrogen and methane and carbon and carbon dioxide.
Eric 34:34
They are the ones that are going in there slicing everything up.
Dr. Josh Stout 34:36
They're slicing everything out. Yeah. And so the more more simple carbohydrates you have, the more of that kind of population you're going to have. And this can be thought of as long term, right? You could be breeding for this stuff inside yourself and your family. And it can be thought of as in short term. Right now you have something that's responding immediately to what you just ate and it's decided to turn on those enzymes rather than other one.
Eric 35:00
Mouthful turns into two.
Dr. Josh Stout 35:02
Something like that. And you need more water because you're taking all of the water out of it. So you keep drinking more water. And so this creates even more volume problems. Now, what do we do? We often combine this with salt, which makes us drink even more water. So I don't tend to think of salt as directly bad For us, salt is sort of a side issue, but salt definitely sucks water out of our bodies, so we need to drink more water. If you have dehydration problems, which a lot of us do. So salt is bad in that way, right? My my doctor says for my heart I need to drink more water so less salt will my heart not because salt is bad for my heart, but because water is good for my heart. Salt is the the opposite of water. Exactly. But when you eat a salty meal now you have all that salt in your stomach, You have more water rushing into your stomach. So that increases the volume. And then you drink more water, which also increases the volume. So like you're starting to explode at this point and this is just a normal meal. So this is why it all goes wrong so quickly. You can see how this happens. So then what we combine this with, we combine this a bunch of fat. Now.
Eric 36:09
If you've eaten steak and potatoes.
Dr. Josh Stout 36:12
Yeah. So the potatoes are doing all of this, this carbohydrate stuff, the fat in the steak fat is itself a natural laxative. And so the fat is just greasing everything along and it's just going to pour through you really, really quickly. So there is there is I mean.
Eric 36:30
Considering the pressure, having it pour through, you might not be a bad thing.
Dr. Josh Stout 36:33
It might not be a bad thing. You're not going to absorb as much of that fat, but you're going to feel not so great and you're going to need a bathroom about 15 minutes after eating.
Eric 36:41
I'm very familiar with all these sensations.
Dr. Josh Stout 36:42
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Recently. But yeah. And so. So there's really simple, simple answers to these things. Right? Straight Try to lower the amount of fat in any given meal. Try and have more complex carbohydrates, less just a loaf of bread. Have smaller meals.
Eric 37:00
Yeah. How about just eat more slowly?
Dr. Josh Stout 37:03
Eating more slowly is going to help. But if you keep eating really slowly for an hour and a half, you're still going to have a lot of food in you. Yeah, yeah. But eating slowly helps because then your body is going to notice that you're full. Exactly. Yeah. You time you take this time for that insulin response gives time for the ghrelin to respond to the, the stress receptors. And those stretch receptors are going to notice. But you know, all of the other things that are sort of the opposite of eating out at a nice restaurant, you know, avoiding a stick of butter in every, you know, serving of mashed potatoes.
Eric 37:34
I want a stick of butter in every serving of mashed potatoes.
Dr. Josh Stout 37:35
I know.
Dr. Josh Stout 37:37
But that’s just going to, you know, be greasing you right on through. And the amount of salt they put on as well. I'm so thirsty. It's delicious. Exactly. You know, we we evolved on the Serengeti where there was no salt. Right. And we needed it to live. And the only salt we could really get was by eating meat that we, you know, found dried on a bone somewhere. So we really, really like salt and we seek it out and we associate it with the good flavors of meat.
Eric 38:04
But we get enough. We don't need to salt our food.
Dr. Josh Stout 38:05
Oh, yeah, In modern, modern society, we get way more than enough. Again, I'm not against salt in and of itself, but we have to understand what it's doing to us. And it's mostly about the water. And it's it's, it's, you know, it puts a strain on our kidneys and it it puts a strain on your heart if you don't have enough water. And it's going to, you know, basically cause bloating and all of these things that are related. I, I wanted to get even to more details of some of the diets that are out there to fight irritable bowel syndrome. I don't think are wrong, but I think they're they're not really understanding sort of the larger picture. So there is there is the oh, I can't remember the exact I initials. There's the nice diet. And I see. And it's like the Fodmap diet or something.
Eric 38:58
Yeah. Yeah. The Fodmap that's Yeah.
Dr. Josh Stout 39:00
Fodmap diet. Now these things start off with no bread. So again, like the anti gluten people, they have the same idea and it probably worked for some of the same reasons, but they're specifically looking at things that are related to the oligosaccharides. The oh, what's short?
Eric 39:20
The what? Say that word again?
Dr. Josh Stout 39:20
Oligo - meaning meaning small and saccharides, sugar.
Eric 39:24
So oligosaccharides. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Josh Stout 39:27
Oligosaccharides. Yeah. Okay. These these these are not quite starches and not quite sugars. They're in between the two.
Eric 39:36
You mean the chain.
Dr. Josh Stout 39:37
The chain. But the size of the chain. Yeah. So they're small, they're smaller, they're starch but they're larger than a sugar and so we don't absorb of these things very quickly through our intestine because they're not like glucose, which we just absorb right away. But we can break them down pretty quickly because they're already pretty short and they're they're, they're relatively easily digested, not just by us, but also by our bacteria. And so we associate these things again with gas production. So one of the things that is very commonly associated with the oligosaccharides are the beans. And so beans and gas production are well known. Association Musical fruit. Exactly. And so these are things that are part of the Fodmap diet. These are things you what you want to avoid.
Eric 40:21
What is the what is the purpose of the Fodmap diet to avoid gas, what it’s?
Dr. Josh Stout 40:28
All about irritable bowel syndrome.
Eric 40:29
But which what is the what is what are they trying to do?
Dr. Josh Stout 40:33
They don't really have a thesis, just they just decided it was a bunch of things that were really easily digestible by bacteria and yeah. And they and they think it has something to do with the way your intestines work, but there's no there's no double blind studies on this.
Eric 40:47
But the idea is that you're eating easily digestible foods. Is that the idea?
Dr. Josh Stout 40:53
Well, it’s hard to say because they have no problem with meat and they do have a problem with an apple. And so I don't agree with them. Okay. I think that any of the things on the Fodmap diet in excess are going to cause a problem. But that's true of a lot of stuff. Sure, if I eat a bucket of apples, I am going to be running to the bathroom. It's clearly not just bread that causes problems too.
Eric 41:20
Too much of anything.
Dr. Josh Stout 41:21
Yeah, so but but the Fodmap diet does not include fats and does not include meat as a part of a problem. Right. And I definitely see fatty meat as part of the problem. Okay. And so that's why I'm trying to sort of differentiate nice diet is also very similar in these ways.
Eric 41:37
So you're going back. And so it used to be that the fats were the problem and now it's sugars are the problem.
Dr. Josh Stout 41:42
Sugars are the problem. But it's it's it's really you have to think about, again, the ecosystem that you're entering into.
Eric 41:50
Back to the, right, back to the microbiome.
Dr. Josh Stout 41:51
And and in the Fodmap diet they're trying to avoid, they actually recommend avoiding some of the fibers. Right. And seeking out meat.
Eric 42:01
Because fibers are hard to digest or indigestible.
Dr. Josh Stout 42:03
Exactly and and I could see how this would work right if you have problems because you poop 15 minutes after eating putting a bunch of fiber in your diet is not going to slow that rate down.
Eric 42:17
Okay. I mean, it actually might. It depends.
Dr. Josh Stout 42:20
It might. It depends. Exactly. So what I'm saying is that a healthy diet, plenty of fiber in it means that you're not going to be going down this road in the first place. But you can't just take a bacon cheeseburger with fries on the side and pour some fiber on it and think that that's going to, like, solve your problems. It might actually help a little bit, but it's not. You're you're your time to the bathroom is not going to go down. Right.
Eric 42:51
I mean, maybe if you had broccoli with that burger instead of think fries.
Dr. Josh Stout 42:57
Exactly. Yeah that's going to lower the grease amount which is also not part of the Fodmap diet, but I think is part of the problem. Right. If you if you lower the amount of grease, if you if you give your body something more to chew on while you're.
Eric 43:08
Giving making it easy to digest. I mean, I thought I was under the impression that that part of what the whole thesis, your thesis is that what you're trying to do is make everything harder to get at in the from the harder to get the body lower to work and take time to digest the food right, to get what it needs out of it. It's easier to digest then everything is immediately available. And those are the problems you're talking about.
Dr. Josh Stout 43:33
Absolutely. So there's a sort of long term versus short term. Long term, a more difficult to digest diet is going to make you feel satisfied for longer because it'll stay in your stomach longer. Short term, you're going to feel hungry because you don't getting any nutrients from it right? They're taking longer to get to.
Eric 43:50
The Fodmap diet. Like what is that prescribed for? Is that for diabetic specifically.
Dr. Josh Stout 43:55
Irritable bowel syndrome?
Eric 43:56
Oh, it is an irritable bowel syndrome, right.
Dr. Josh Stout 43:58
And there's there's that one and there's the nice diet. They're both relatively well-studied in that They seem to help, but not well studied in that they've been done been done double blind that they did they exactly looked at all the details.
Eric 44:11
Some people do get some relief from these diets. That's why they're a thing.
Dr. Josh Stout 44:15
Right. So if you just picked everything on a fodmap diet and ate like an onion and an apple and a bunch of bread and a bunch of soft cheeses, you would start - followed with glass of milk that might be hard on your stomach. And you could see how how things would be going wrong. Whereas if you instead replace this with, say, rice and some lean meat. Mm. That would probably go down pretty easily. And you know, you could see how there's a difference between these two things. I just don't think that the entire thesis of the Fodmap diet is right. I think they're not looking at things correctly because they don't include the kind of meat, how much fat you're having. They are they tend to be on the anti fiber side. I'm pro apples, all right. But, you know, I don't want to eat again an entire bushel of apples because I will feel terrible for IBS. I would be, you know, a variety of of raw foods. But the first number one, absolutely. On the Fodmap diet agrees with this. Smaller meals.
Eric 45:13
Right.
Dr. Josh Stout 45:14
Smaller meals, as you say, more slowly.
Eric 45:16
Reduce the stress on the body.
Dr. Josh Stout 45:18
Overall. Right. Because it's a volume issue. It's overall a volume issue within that, there's some there's some interesting things where the the fodmap people are against things that are really good for you that I, I get it. I see why they're saying it, but I think they're long term, they're actually advocating something that is unhealthy. So some of the bacteria that are really good for you are able to live predominantly in on on on fiber and kinds of fiber that the Fodmap diet is trying to minimize the kind you get in in, you know, raw fruits and, you know, the the cell walls of plants. And these bacteria are producing a number of chemicals. But one is really, really important. It's called butyrate and Butyrate. As far as I can tell, is is approaching kind of a fountain of youth effect. You mentioned your skin got better when you started eating fiber. I think it's related to this in particular. Okay. We need to get into some sciency science now for just a moment. Okay. So the DNA in each of your cells, your body is over like a meter long. So to get it into a which is obviously not a meter in size, it has to be balled up and compacted and it has to get even smaller, has to get into the nucleus. So it's balled up and compacted in the nucleus. And then to keep sense of it, it's tends to be organized into coherent batches that the chromosomes and each of those coherent batches itself are further condensed into a smaller, you know, shape that can sort of hold itself together. And it's not just a tangle because it would just a tangle, it would be difficult for the DNA to get copied. There are enzymes that come in and just copy copy the DNA. Exactly. So how is it organized? It's really, really tight, but also able to be copied. It's wrapped around protein called histones. And so it's like beads on a string. The string goes around the histones and it goes to the next one and goes around that histone goes the next one goes around that histone. So you have little bits of DNA between it and then the DNA wrapped around the histones. So the stuff that's between the histones is pretty easy to read.
Eric 47:45
And what is the histone?
Dr. Josh Stout 47:46
It's just a protein. It's actually a bunch of proteins together making this whole thing. But it looks like a like like a circle. And if you look at an electron micrograph, it looks like beads on a string. Mm hmm. And so it wraps things up really, really tightly this way. And the stuff between the histones, where the DNA is just out there is easy to read, and the stuff on the histones is kind of difficult to read. And so if you want to slow down the expression of a gene, you wrap it more tightly around your histones. And if you want something to be read, you have to kind of loop it out there.
What keeps things tightly wrapped is called acetylation. And so you can actually pass this down from I one person to the next. So if you have high levels of acetylation, your offspring can have high levels of acetylation. So this means less DNA replication. This means fewer things made more slowly because you wrap things so tightly. Stress, for example, increases acetylation and can be passed on from generation to generation without affecting the genome itself. It just is affecting the way things are expressed. So this is what's called epigenetics, how things can be passed down outside the genome. And so acetylation is one of the one of the key things. There's other ones as well, but it's one of the key mechanisms.
Eric 49:06
It would seem that with less DNA exposed, there's less chances for negative outcomes. But it seems like what you're saying is that with less DNA exposed, it seems like that is a negative thing, not a positive thing. Yes.
Dr. Josh Stout 49:21
No, I mean, the DNA would still get broken if something went wrong attacking DNA. So it's not it's not, you know, protected. What we're talking about is something where it's very difficult for it to make things right. So DNA generally we're about makes proteins enzymes, and there is less of that. And definitely something that happens as you age is expression of DNA gets slowed down. So all of the proteins in your body don't work as well. And so we want to do the opposite of acetylation. And so we have we want de-acetylation.
Eric 49:57
So, so stress, which makes things wind tightly actually accelerates the aging of the proteins that your body needs to…
Dr. Josh Stout 50:08
Yeah. All over. Yeah. So, so.
Eric 50:11
And you’re saying that stress can cause, can cause this acetylation to be passed down the generations?
Dr. Josh Stout 50:17
It’s inheritable. Yeah. Generally from the mother.
Eric 50:19
Stress experienced, in life?
Dr. Josh Stout 50:21
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Eric 50:24
That's terrible.
Dr. Josh Stout 50:25
Terrible. Exactly. So yeah, avoid it.
Eric 50:29
So avoid stress.
Dr. Josh Stout 50:31
So what you want is de-acetylation.
Eric 50:33
Yes. de-acetylation.
Dr. Josh Stout 50:34
Okay. And the general rule for enzymes is you just add A's to the thing that it destroys. Right? So if you want de acetylation deacetylase is the one thing you don't want, right? Because Deacetylase is going to break the things that cause de acetylation. Okay? And so everything's going to be tightly wound, right? So deacetylase is an actual enzyme that you don't want.
Eric 51:04
Right.
Dr. Josh Stout 51:05
The more of it there is, the more tightly, tightly wound. The DNA will be.
Eric 51:11
More tightly wound.
Dr. Josh Stout 51:12
You are. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you'll respond worse to stress, etc.. Bacteria living on carbohydrates, external carbohydrates on the fiber in your body. There's a particular class of them. Make a chemical called butyrate. Butyrate inhibits deacetylase.
Eric 51:31
Really.
Dr. Josh Stout 51:32
Really Butyrate will actually keep you younger. So what do I mean by this? So when your skin changes, it has something in it called elastin. Elastin literally is what it sounds like. It's like an elastic band. As that elastin goes, you get wrinkles in your skin because it's not as taut anymore. Same thing with your vein. So it's not just appearances. This is what causes varicose veins, etc. Is the the the proteins in your veins start to go and you start to leak blood. You get varicose veins. So all of these effects of aging that are just really bad blood clots, etc., are directly related to degradation of protein formation. Butyrate fights that. And so the fiber is actually going to help with DNA expression and the anti-aging.
Eric 52:30
Is this any fiber or is this particular because there's many different - at least there’s the soluble and the insoluble.
Dr. Josh Stout 52:36
It’s diversity of fibers and it's a class of bacteria that live on them.
Eric 52:41
I okay.
Dr. Josh Stout 52:42
And so it's.
Eric 52:44
I take psyllium husks at night and then I take wheat dextrin in the morning.
Dr. Josh Stout 52:50
Yeah. And they're also going to like they're going to like more complex carbohydrates as well. Broccoli. These are these are the things that slowly digest. These are the things that are not designed to cut the carbohydrates really, really quickly. BROCCOLI Yeah, again, but there's a variety of things and. Rice, right? Rice is the opposite of irritable bowel syndrome. It doesn't expand in the same way, even though it's a relatively simple carbohydrate. It's going to slow down the throughput throughput, you know, of of the simple starches. I'm not advocating simple starches in general, but of the simple starches, rice would be the one to go for. And brown rice obviously better than white rice. But rice in general is going to be the opposite of the breads and the potatoes and all the things that, you know, the Western diet is really dedicated to that make all of these things worse. So, you know, if you're going to eat simple carbohydrates and we really want to rice is the direction to go into just because of the way those carbohydrates work. They're a little bit slower. They don't tend to absorb water and they don't untangle and make the stem starches. The rice starch is a starch, but it doesn't it doesn't gel as much as as well as starch does.
Eric 53:58
If you are, though, thinking about something like a glycemic index, though the brown rice would be much, much better because white rice absolutely does cause a spike.
Dr. Josh Stout 54:04
Yeah, I know. Absolutely. And and again, the brown rice is going to give you more fiber for these good things to live on. Yeah, but you just kept saying broccoli and I like broccoli, but this is not a show about we all have to eat broccoli. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I agree with you. I'll just say that there's there's there's. There's ways to not eat bread that are not just broccoli. Yeah, but the the the fodmap diet has a lot of weird things that it's against for it. So for example, it's against watermelon as well as apples. And watermelon is a ton of fiber. I think watermelon is really good for you. Watermelon has a lot of very easily accessible sugars, which is why it's sweet, but you don't get a ton of them in your body. You know, if you're eating and you're a little bit full, have some watermelon for dessert. It's going to be perfect, is going to give you a little bit of sugar so you're going to feel satisfied. Your it has a very high glycemic index in that you very quickly take the sugar out of it. You're going to get a a spike. But the spike is not going to be very long lasting. And it's going to be limited.
Eric 55:06
So you also suggest it after a meal. Well, right. The first thing that you eat.
Dr. Josh Stout 55:10
Yeah. I mean, there are diets out there that say eat, eat a piece of sugar before a meal so that you actually get the insulin spiked so that you don't feel as hungry. But that's super playing with fire, you know. Yeah. Yeah. You're you're getting all of the problems of the sugars, you're getting that insulin spike your body.
Eric 55:27
Have a cube of sugar before each meal and after six months see what you're A1C is.
Dr. Josh Stout 55:32
Exactly. No, no, it's not going to go away, you know. Exactly. Because you're going to start building up insulin resistance and you're actually going to go down a really bad path. Yeah, but after a meal, you have something where the sugar is bound to a whole bunch of other things, like a watermelon, where you get a lot of volume that's no calories. The water, you have a lot of fiber and watermelon, all of all of those, you know, cell cell walls of a plant are going to be fiber. And they have a little bit of really tasty sugar that is going to be appreciated by your body. It's going to make you feel full. And it's you've done a bunch of favors to your body. The Fodmap diet would say, don't do this. You know, if you go to a cookout and you have like a quarter of a watermelon and a whole bunch of potato salad and a bacon cheeseburger and you feel ill, it wasn't the watermelon and the bun on the cheeseburger. That's just what I'm trying to say right there. There are a bunch of problems with that diet. It was all the carbohydrates in the potato that was really easy to digest. It was all the fat in the burger and the cheese and the bacon. All of those things were going and getting you. You have to think about everything together. And you can't just say, I'm going to eliminate some stuff. It appeals to sort of the Puritan side of our culture when we say we're just going to forbid a bunch of foods and I'm going to be in control of my life and my body by forbidding these things. And again, it would make you feel better if you follow these diets, they will actually work. I'm saying that there's a better way and you don't have to be living in this strict diet if you understand, you know, limiting the amount of bread in your diet, replacing some of it with rice, limiting the amount of potatoes in your diet, none of these diets mentioned potatoes and potatoes are a tremendous push on the glycemic index. All of these things also relate to metabolic syndrome, your insulin resistance, etc., And you know, they're directly related to your digestion, which is so important. And we don't think enough of, you know, we, we, we you get forced to as you get older. But, you know, we really need to slow down the amount we eat, as you mentioned, eat it more slowly so you feel time to have time to feel full, have time for the insulin to go up and tell you your fall. Have time for those stretch receptors to respond to all those things starting to expand in your stomach. All all of that, you know that our grandmother is knew is absolutely true and is is definitely something we can think about. But these these restrictive diets that a lot of people are on, again, I think they do work because they eliminate bread and that's really an important factor to it. But if you eat a piece of bread with a healthy meal, you're not going to feel sick. You know, if you if prickly, if you have a, you know, a slice of of of of whole wheat bread with a tiny bit of butter on it, with a bunch of steamed vegetables, with a tiny bit of meat and a side of rice, you've had a good meal and you're not going to feel ill. You know, lactose intolerance doesn't help. Right? If you have a glass of milk with a lot of lactose in it, you're going to have that same problem we were talking about. The bacteria are going to start switching from eating, eating sugars to eating the lactose. They're going to produce a lot of gas. And you can have that same bloating and the same problems. So it's reasonable to be, you know, careful with your dairy. People suggest hard cheeses versus soft cheeses. Why would that be less fats, that same thing, which if you're basically greasing your system, you're just pouring the food straight through and you're going to feel terrible all the time. Also, those fats of saturated fats in particular that you get with really fatty meat are associated with with cancer and are associated with with a whole bunch of other bad outcomes. They're very, very high in calories, etc.. So what we know is a healthy diet is healthy for a range of reasons, and it really is the diversity that matters. I don't think you can become healthy by, just as I said, pouring fiber over your bacon cheeseburger or eliminating bread from your diet. Neither of these, you know, single answers is going to do for you. But increasing fiber and reducing bread are going to make you start much healthier, increasing the amount of complex carbohydrates. As you mentioned, broccoli is going to be really good for you. But don't avoid apples. Eat an apple. Apples are really good for you. Yes, they have some sugar in them, though. Your bacteria are going to eat those sugars and produce some gas, but just eat one apple. You can stop there. You know, eat, eat, eat, eat watermelon. Don't don't eat a whole watermelon. You're not going to feel well. All right. So anyway, that was my my take home message. I think we're we're finishing up. But I just really wanted to think about people talking about mindful eating. This is what I would like to think about mindful eating. You know, understand portion size and diversity of foods and what healthy foods are and.
Eric 1:00:32
Why we want what we want. Yeah, and that why we it's.
Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:36
Okay to want those things. Yeah, it's okay to want those things.
Eric 1:00:39
It's like my doctor says, you know, sometimes I have a milkshake.
Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:43
Yeah, you're not going to die. But maybe not every day.
Eric 1:00:47
Maybe even less than that. Anyway, let's go have a milkshake. Thank you. Josh, that was fascinating.
Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:52
Oh, thank you, Eric.
Eric 1:00:53
Yeah. All right. Till next time, everyone.
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