Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / "Broccoli Is Making You Fat!" (Why Single-Food Blame Is Nonsense) | Ep 471

Transcript

"Broccoli Is Making You Fat!" (Why Single-Food Blame Is Nonsense) | Ep 471 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Broccoli is making you fat.
• 0:02
  Philip Pape: I'm not kidding.
• 0:03
  Philip Pape: Eat too much of it, drowned in butter and cheese sauce day after day, and you probably will gain fat.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: That claim probably sounded ridiculous initially until I added some context to it.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: But I've actually heard the claim that broccoli is going to be a problem, just like seed oils are a problem, just like sugar is a problem.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: The list goes on and on.
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: Carbs, you name it, it's the same logical structure as every food villain claim you've heard.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: Lectins, gluten, dairy, processed food, take your pick.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: Today I'm gonna show you why this entire category of advice is a logical error called the composition fallacy.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: What the actual evidence says about the top demonized foods, and a three-question test that you can run on the next person who tells you that a single food is the source of all your problems.
• 0:53
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts popular fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: And if you are trying to lose fat, you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to eat healthy, you've been told for years that some specific food is the reason it's not working.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: Maybe it was sugar as far back as when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, then carbs in the 90s to the 2000s, starting with Atkins and then later on keto.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: Dietary fat before that, going way back to like snack well and olestra.
• 1:31
  Philip Pape: And now it's seed oils and ultra-processed food.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: Every few years, a new villain rotates in.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: The old one gets a little half-apology, like, eh, we weren't quite right about that one.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And then you're supposed to feel like, okay, now I know what's truly right as we move forward.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna tell you whether seed oils are good or bad.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna show you the logical structure underneath these claims.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: Because once you understand that, you can make the decisions for yourself from an informed position and not listen to a podcaster tell you what is right or wrong.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: Stick around to the end because then I'm gonna give you a three-question test I call the food villain test.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: So the next time anyone, usually a podcaster or influencer, tells you that a single food is insert claim here, making you fat, making you inflamed, causing you any sort of issue, whatever it is, you can turn to this three-second test and know whether to take that seriously or not.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: And hint, probably not most of the time, but it's good to know what questions to ask.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: All right, so for today, we are gonna talk about the logical error in every food villain claim and why it's so sticky from a psychological perspective.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: The actual evidence on the four biggest food villains right now, which it's it might surprise you on one of them, so stay tuned for that.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: And then a model for how food affects body composition.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let's start with the logical error.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: Philosophers call this logical fallacy the composition fallacy.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: Now, I don't know a lot about logical fallacies other than what I've learned from my own kids because we homeschool our kids.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: My wife has spent several years helping them learn about logic, and they are always calling out politicians and conspiracy theories and things that sometimes I don't even notice, like in marketing.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: And that's where these fallacies come from.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: So the composition fallacy is simple.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: You take a feature of one component of a system, and then you blame that component for the behavior of the whole system.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: That's the composition fallacy.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: So I'll give you an example that is outside of nutrition.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: Imagine I told you the steering wheel was the reason that a car crashed.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: The steering wheel is part of the car.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: Now, was it involved?
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: Of course it was involved.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: It's part of the car.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: Could a bad steering wheel cause a crash in some cases?
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: Of course, theoretically it could.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: But in most crashes, the steering wheel is probably doing what steering wheels do, and the crash happens because of how the car was driven or how another car was driving, or the road, the speed, the brakes, all of it working together as a system.
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: So it would take some investigation to understand if truly the steering wheel was the cause of the accident.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: Now, food works the same way.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: Your body's a system.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: Calories come in, calories go out.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: You've got your hormones that get modulated, you've got hunger that goes up and down, your sleep, which affects recovery, your training, which affects everything, insulin sensitivity, nutrition, partitioning, whatever you name it.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: And then the result of all of that stuff coming together is how you look, how you feel, how you perform, right?
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: Your physique.
• 4:37
  Philip Pape: So when somebody points at a single food and says, ah, that's the reason that you're stuck, that's the reason you're fat, that's the reason you're inflamed, that's the reason XYZ, that is the steering wheel thing.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: They're taking a component and assigning it the behavior of the whole system.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: Now, sometimes a specific food is truly involved, the way steering wheel sometimes is, but you always have to zoom out and you have to look at it and understand the constraints.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: And far more often than not, it's more systematic than that or more complex than that.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: So, why is this so psychologically sticky, as we say sticky as in it just like something we just latch onto?
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: Well, the first reason is it gives you a villain.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: We love villains, we like boogeyman, it gives you an answer, it makes it simple.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: Before you've done anything else, you feel like you have something to go after, right?
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: That you've made progress, you have an enemy to go after.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: The second thing is it gives you control.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: So a single food is something you can avoid today.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: And this is something I've dealt with for many years in the past, right?
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: Cutting carbs, I can control that.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: Like literally just cut them out, don't buy them, don't put them in the fridge, don't go to the grocery store and get them.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: It's easy, okay?
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: But it's easy, and it's easy in comparison to the things that actually work, which tend to be harder.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: Like energy balance is harder to manage, hormones are hard to manage, sleep is difficult.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: So the simplicity of the action substitutes for the difficulty of the real problem.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: And then the third piece, which I think is underrated, is it gives you a tribe to belong to.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: And you know this is true.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: Like, am I really calling you out?
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: No, I admit myself, I've been in tribes.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: If I was in the CrossFit tribe and the Zone Diet tribe and the Paleo tribe and the keto tribe, right?
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: All the tribes, the cut the running tribe.
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: Once you are anti-seed oils, oh, you are with the other anti-seed oil people, and all the others are like, man, they don't know what they're talking about.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: Like, I feel I feel bad for them.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna pray for them.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: Or what they say in the South, bless their heart, right?
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: There's a whole community that is waiting to embrace you on villainizing seed oils.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: And then once you've publicly declared it, whether you're an influencer or even if you're just listening and you've told all your friends and neighbors, hopefully you're not, I don't know if you're talking to your neighbors about this stuff, but walking back from that is very hard to do.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: As human, we're it's hard to admit that we're wrong and it it costs you what's what's called social capital.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: And people don't want to do that, right?
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: So it's not, it's not people being stupid.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: This is a logical error.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: It's psychologically engineered to feel like it's correct.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: And calling people out or ridiculing people who fall for the claims.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm all for ridiculing people who who push them knowingly for the wrong reasons.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: That's not what I'm talking about.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: But ridiculing people who are just subject to them, like all of us, that just makes people dig in even harder.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: And the way out is to really understand the mechanism so well that the claims of food villain, food villains just stop being interesting anymore.
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: Like at this point, I and many of you who listen to this show, if you've listened to it long enough, you almost don't pay attention when someone says, Oh, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad.
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: You're like, Yeah, probably not.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: Like, you could pretty much eat any food on the planet and be fine as long as it's meeting your goals as part of a flexible dietary pattern, something we've talked about before on this show.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: So let's go through the four top villains, all right?
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: The big villain number one is seed oils these days for whatever reason.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: It's super loud.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: People are calling it out online.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: Um, and that includes soybean oil, canola, corn oil, all of that.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: Supposedly it's driving the obesity epidemic.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: It causes inflammation because of the linoleic acid or because of the processing or rancidity or whatever, name whatever reason you want.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: But what the actual evidence says, okay, through meta-analysis of dozens of randomized controlled trials, which is the best quality type of study, thousands of people looking at what happens to inflammatory markers when you increase your linoleic acid intake, which is comes from seed oils, the result is no effect on inflammation, like CRP markers, IL6, interleukin 6, TNF alpha.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: Those are the three big inflammatory markers that we're all worried about.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: There's zero effect.
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: And then on the other hand, to further compound the fact that seed oils aren't an issue, and in fact, might be better for you, there is just last year, 2025, JAMA Internal Medicine published a what's called a pooled cohort.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: 221,000 adults that were followed for up to 33 years.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: It doesn't get much better than that.
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: And the main finding is that people who consume more plant oils had 16% lower total mortality.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: People who ate more butter had 15% higher mortality.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: If you could swap just 10 grams a day of butter for plant oils, there's a 17% lower mortality.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: So, and this is this is the finding I'm far more inclined to support because of the preponderance of the evidence for it.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: So, where does the seed oil panic come from?
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: Well, two places that I could identify.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: The first is rodent studies, where the mice are fed soybean oil for like half their lives in environments that have nothing to do with how humans eat.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: And the second one is people conflating seed oils, linoleic acid with something called conjugated linoleic acid, which is like a structurally different compound sold as a weight loss supplement, which does increase inflammatory markers.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: And so the name sounds similar, the molecules are different.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: I don't know how many people are going with the first one or the second one, but there is no evidence to support that seed oils are the villain that everyone wants to make them out to be.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: And in fact, there's strong evidence that reducing your saturated fat and supplementing with these types of oils on a one-for-one basis is actually correlated with far-improved health outcomes and actually is in line with the American Heart Association recommendations.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: So the data doesn't match the narrative.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: That's the first one.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: Villain number two is sugar.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: You've heard for years and years and years, okay, sugar is the cause or the source of all our fat, especially corn syrup, that, you know, because it's processed, it just bypasses your appetite regulation.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: It spikes insulin, makes you store fat.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna tell you about a guy named Mark Haub.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: Okay, Mark Haub is a nutrition professor at Kansas State.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: And back in 2010, he ran a 10-week experiment on himself.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: Okay, I love this guy for doing this.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: This time it's fun.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: I know it's like clickbaiting, it gets attention, but it's it's cool when people do this.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: So he ate Twinkies, little Debbie snacks, Doritos, Oreos, sugary cereals.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: Like 60% of his diet was just straight, let's call it junk food.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: He took a multivitamin and ate some vegetables on the side, but the bulk of what was going into his mouth was sugar and processed carbs.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: But the one thing he controlled was calories.
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: He ate about 1,800 calories a day, down from his usual 2,600 calorie maintenance level.
• 11:39
  Philip Pape: So that puts him in what?
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: Do the math, 800 calorie deficit.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: Well, what happens when you're in a deficit?
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: Well, you lose weight.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: He lost 27 pounds, but this is the cool thing.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: His LDL cholesterol dropped 20%.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: That's the bad cholesterol we call it.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: His HDL went up 20%, his triglycerides dropped 39%, his BMI went from 28.8 down to 24.9 while eating all of this junk.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: Now, is the conclusion go eat Twinkies as a diet?
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: He himself didn't recommend that.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: It was the principle of the thing that even on a diet that most would call the most awful diet ever, if you're in a calorie deficit, you can lose not only weight, but lose body fat and improve your health and blood markers because of the correlation between those.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: All that sugar didn't override physiology and thermodynamics.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: That's my point.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: Okay, not to eat Twinkies, but the fact that sugar is not the problem.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: There's also a 2020 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that looked at isocaloric swaps, that means one-for-one swaps of sugar for starch.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: And they found very modest changes in LDL cholesterol and really no differences in body composition.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: Sugar's role in obesity in the real world, IRL, as they as the kids would say, where it shows up mostly in liquid form like soda, you know, sugary sodas.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: This is why I recommend diet soda, so you can lower the amount of calories and sugar you get just in general.
• 13:07
  Philip Pape: But it's found in soda, juice, sweetened coffee drinks, you know, those big calorie bombs from Starbucks.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: The role of obesity there is absolutely real, but it's not because of the sugar.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: It's not because of the glucose.
• 13:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's because of the calories.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: It's because you're consuming too many calories in too easy a way.
• 13:23
  Philip Pape: And sugar does make it very easy to do that.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: So let's separate the fact from fiction there.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: All right, villain number three is ultra-processed food.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: I know you're thinking, Philip, are you gonna actually defend ultra-processed food?
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: No, remember, today's episode is about showing you that you cannot name a single type of food as a universal villain.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: There's a famous study that everybody cites to prove that ultra-processed foods make you fat.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: And it's the same study I cite all the time, not to prove that ultra-processed food makes you fat, but to prove that having a diet that includes primarily ultra-processed food leads to overconsumption.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: Those are two different things.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: So this is Kevin Hall's 2019 inpatient study at the National Institutes of Health.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: And Kevin Hall is a researcher I do respect a lot.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: He is a smart guy.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: He's careful with his data.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: He doesn't overclaim.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: And he took 20 people for two weeks on ultra-processed food, two weeks on minimally processed food.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: So it's a what they call a crossover design.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: It was matched for calories for macros, sugar, salt, fiber, but people could eat as much as they wanted.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: And the result was that people ate 500 extra calories per day on the ultra-processed diet, and they gained about two pounds in two weeks.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: So ultra-processed food makes you fat, right?
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Let's now let's add the nuance, okay?
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: Which which Kevin Hall did.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: He looked at the why, he looked at the root cause.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: And the answer is how fast you eat and the energy density of the food.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: So on the ultra-processed diet, people were eating 48 calories a minute.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: On the minimally processed diet, 31 calories a minute.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: So the ultra-processed food was 50% faster to consume.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: Makes sense.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: It's processed, it's like denser, right?
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: It's more calorie dense.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: And people still felt the same hunger and fullness on both diets.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: They just ate faster before their satiety signals could catch up.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: Now that's a behavioral mechanism.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: It's not a metabolic mechanism.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: And so the conclusion here is the food environment makes it easier to eat more calories.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, so that's different than saying ultra-processed food itself makes you fat.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: Then we have a 2025 follow-up in Nature Medicine by Dicken and colleagues.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: And it was the same kind of crossover design over eight weeks, but with a little bit of a twist to it.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: Both arms of the study had to follow national nutrition guidelines.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: So that means the ultra-processed side got fiber-rich, uh, high-protein ultra-processed foods, as opposed to what we normally think of, which are hyperpalatable snacks.
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: And both groups lost weight.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: The minimally processed group lost 2% body weight, the ultra-processed group lost 1%.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: But but the researchers have predicted the ultra-processed food would gain weight.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: And they didn't.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: But they they lost weight just less than the other group.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: So ultra-processed food isn't something that just automatically causes cat fat gain.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: It's just a category of food that, in its hyper palatable form, makes it easy to overconsume.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: So if you structure your choices toward more fiber, more protein, even with ultra-processed food, it actually causes less of that.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: Now I'm not telling you go and eat just high protein, high fiber processed food.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying those are the things that matter, not the fact that they are ultra-processed.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:44
  Philip Pape: The last villain is gluten, and I want to keep this short because the data is super clean here.
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: Celiac disease affects 1% of the population.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: Those are people who absolutely cannot have gluten.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: Non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which is that broader category that everyone seems to have these days, for some reason, everyone has a gluten intolerance, apparently.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: The latest 2025 meta-analysis puts that at 6% of adults.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: And then when researchers do what's called double blind challenges, where people get either gluten or placebo and they don't know what it is, only 24% of self-reported gluten-sensitive people actually have reproducible systems, symptoms.
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: So that means 94% of adults have no clinical reason to avoid gluten.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: And of the ones who think they're sensitive, three-quarters are responding to something other than gluten.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: It's often FODMAPs.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: Sometimes the overall improvement they get will come from cutting something like refined wheat products because of the FODMAPs.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of reasons.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: This is why people go on carnival and they're like, yeah, I went on carnivore, it solved all my problems.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: Well, you know what?
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: You just did an elimination diet.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: You eliminated something that was causing you issues, but it's not all plants.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: So, and I feel bad for you if you think it is, and then you live the rest of your life just cutting out so many amazing foods and not getting enough fiber, et cetera.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: So if you feel worse with gluten or with any other particular food like dairy, don't eat it.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: Like I'm not telling you to eat it.
• 18:11
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying the universal claim of gluten is making us all fat, all inflamed, causing all sorts of other issues with our gut, whatever.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: It's not a real thing.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: There's a very small, small, small effect with people that may have an issue like celiac, but it's being scaled up to apply to everyone, and the evidence does not support it.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm very passionate about this episode for some reason.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: So let me take a pause and let me just take a breather here because a lot of you are thinking, okay, what do I actually do with all this information?
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: How do I structure my eating without falling into these food fear traps?
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: Like, what do I eat?
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: Tell me like what the alternative is.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: Well, that's why we have what we have.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: It's called Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: It's a program, it's a 26-week coaching program.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: It's mainly for women over 40 who have spent years cycling through all of these diets, all of these food rules, all of these villains.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: You know what I'm talking about.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: Cut this, add that.
• 19:05
  Philip Pape: This is poison.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: That's a superfood.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: Rinse and repeat.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: Well, what if we replace all of that with a structured, flexible, much more liberating approach?
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: You track your numbers for awareness and you learn to read your own data, but then you eat in a very, very flexible way, not only in terms of food, the food on your plate, but also how you go through phases of fat loss maintenance and muscle building so that it feels much more sustainable.
• 19:31
  Philip Pape: It's easy to do.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: You're excited about it, you enjoy it.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: I want you to go to eatmore liftheavy.com to check it out.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: It's called Eat More Lift Heavy for a reason.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: It's a great thing to do.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: Go check it out.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: And if you're tired of having to cut carbs or cut whatever else it is and feel like you're restricted, we've got the alternative.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: So if no single food is making you fat, what is?
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: The honest answer is energy balance.
• 20:02
  Philip Pape: Okay, nothing new here, folks.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: But if you're new to the podcast or you wanted a refresher, let's just get into it.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: The amount of energy you take in from food relative to the amount your body burns and expense.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: So if you have a net surplus over time, you gain weight.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: If you have a net deficit over time, you lose weight.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: That's the governing law.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: Every diet that has ever worked has worked through this mechanism.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: Whether the people running the diet acknowledge it or not, okay, even the carnivore people, the keto people, anyone selling you the seed oil-free lifestyle.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: Heck, people that are selling you you don't have to count calories or you don't have to track or whatever, it still comes down to calories.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: Now, it's not all about calories.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: Energy balance and losing weight on a pure physics and math basis is about calories, but food quality does matter.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: So this is the straw man people use.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: They hear calories in, calories out, and they're like, okay, so that you're saying food quality doesn't matter.
• 20:56
  Philip Pape: Nope, absolutely not.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: The actual position supported by what we have in the evidence is energy balance is the boss in terms of weight gained or weight loss.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: Food quality is helps you with your body composition, how you look, how you feel.
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: See, so they each do a different job for you.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: So when we talk about food quality, what does it affect?
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: Well, first, satiety, fullness per calorie.
• 21:19
  Philip Pape: So if you're eating more whole foods, vegetables, lean protein, fruit, beans, whole grains, all of these give you more grams, more volume on your scale, right?
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: More fiber per calorie.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: And by the way, fiber has fewer calories per gram than other carbs.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: And so they make controlling those calories easier.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: Okay, now we're getting somewhere.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: Second, micronutrient density.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: A long term diet dominated by low nutrient processed foods are going to be worse for your health outcomes, even if your body composition stays the same or stays in a good range.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: You can still be lean and still be unhealthy, is my point.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: And then third is the rate of eating, which is the research we talked about earlier.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: Hyperpalatable processed foods make it easier to consume more calories before your brain registers the fullness.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: But again, food quality doesn't override thermodynamics.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: You can't eat enough quote unquote clean food, but be in a calorie surplus and stay lean.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: And you can't eat dirty food in a deficit and gain fat.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: You're actually going to lose fat.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: Isn't that interesting?
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: All things equal, of course.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: We're not even talking about lifting weights and preserving muscle and all that fun stuff.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: I love a really good example here.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: It's sumo wrestlers.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: Okay, sumo wrestlers.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: So awesome.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: I haven't talked about them in a long time.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: So the staple meal of a sumo wrestler is called chanko nabe.
• 22:43
  Philip Pape: It is chicken, fish, tofu, vegetables, and rice.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: What is that?
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: Well, that's whole foods.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: It's some of the most nutrient-dense, traditional type of meals or cooking on the planet.
• 22:56
  Philip Pape: And they eat five to eight thousand calories a day.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: They are among the heaviest athletes on the planet Earth.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: So they eat what we'd call clean food in a massive calorie surplus.
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: So they have massive body weight.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: Just a very simple example.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: Now, what's interesting is we can go into the fact that they have healthier blood markers than you would expect for their weight because they have a massive amount of muscle.
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: Totally different topic, but worth maybe worth doing an episode sometime, right?
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: And I the the example of Mark Hobb with the Twinkie diet, that was kind of like the opposite of the exact same thing, right?
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: He was eating a totally junk diet and then losing weight.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: Again, it came down to energy balance.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: And we're not saying that that's a good thing, depending on your lifestyle and the quality of the food, right?
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: Just what we talked about.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: So at the end of the day, I would say the dose matters when it comes to these foods.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: There's a saying from a physician back way back in the 1500s, a guy named Paracelsus.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: I think it's Celsus or Paracelsus, I don't know.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: He said, the dose makes the poison.
• 23:55
  Philip Pape: That's where we get that phrase from.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: Water can kill you if you drink too much of it.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: It's called hyponneutremia, and people died from that.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: If you have too much oxygen in too high of a concentration, it can damage your lungs.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: So nothing is safe at every dose, and nothing is dangerous at every dose.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: The dose in the context of the system, that's what determines the outcome.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: So seed oils at say 7% of your calories in a diet rich in vegetables, lean protein, fiber, there is zero evidence of any harm, and there's possibly some benefit if they're replacing saturated fats.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: Whereas if you have seed oils at 35% of your calories in a diet full of full, you know, fried foods, low fiber calorie surplus, which guess what?
• 24:36
  Philip Pape: That's like the standard American diet.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: And that's the problem, is we're we're comparing apples and oranges.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: Just because you eat a lot of seed oils and you're fat doesn't mean it was the seed oils.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: You're probably getting them from ultra-processed foods and you're drinking lots of soda and you're over consuming calories, et cetera, and you're not lifting weights.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: I could go on.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: Okay?
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: It's not the seed oil that's the cause, it's the dose in the context of your overall diet and your dietary pattern.
• 24:58
  Philip Pape: Same with sugar, same with ultra-processed food, same with everything.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: And that is, in my mind, very liberating.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: Like to me, that's the essence of flexible eating.
• 25:09
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about that.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: What is the framework that you can use that has worked with the hundreds of clients that I have coached?
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: It's very simple.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: Roughly 80% of your calories from whole, minimally processed foods that you enjoy, about 20% from whatever you want.
• 25:23
  Philip Pape: Now notice how I said that.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: The 80% are whole, minimally processed foods, but you're still gonna enjoy them.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: You're gonna pick the ones that you like.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: Okay, don't force force yourself to eat quote unquote healthy or clean foods that you don't like.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: There's plenty of foods that you should or or will like.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: And then 20% whatever you want with nothing off limits.
• 25:42
  Philip Pape: There is no villain on your list.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: There's no moral hierarchy of foods.
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: And the evidence supports this.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: There's a randomized controlled trial from 2021.
• 25:52
  Philip Pape: Conlin and colleagues published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: They took resistance-trained adults, put them on a 20% calorie deficit for 10 weeks, and they randomized them to either flexible dieting or rigid dieting.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: So the same calories, the same protein.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: The only difference was the rules around which foods you were allowed to eat.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: During the diet phase, both groups lost similar amounts of body weight and fat.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: But then they did something smart in the study.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: They followed both groups for 10 more weeks of free eating.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: And that's where they saw differences.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: The flexible eating group gained 1.7 kilograms of lean mass back.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: The rigid group lost 0.7 kilograms of lean mass.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: So flexible dieting ended up with more muscle and better long-term outcomes.
• 26:44
  Philip Pape: And the reason is because rigid dieting predicts binge cycles.
• 26:49
  Philip Pape: Decades and decades of eating disorder research has shown this.
• 26:53
  Philip Pape: When you label foods as bad or forbidden, those foods become psychologically supercharged in your mind.
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: The all-or-nothing mindset kicks in.
• 27:01
  Philip Pape: You're either perfect or you're a failure.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: And then eventually, guess what happens?
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: You crack, you let go, you binge, you swear off the food again, you start over.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: It is a vicious loop or cycle.
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: Flexible dieting prevents that loop because you're including the foods you enjoy at a small dose regularly.
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: It is not a moral issue, and it loses its status as this forbidden thing.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: It becomes just food.
• 27:27
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 27:28
  Philip Pape: So when I push back on food demonization on wits and weights, the what's underneath it is this idea of like orthorexia, this obsessive preoccupation with eating pure and clean foods, the binge eating cycles, the eating disorders, that's what I'm concerned about for folks.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: Okay, it increases food fear, it increases social anxiety around eating, it predicts these cycles.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: So the fix is to lower all of those moral stakes around food, knowing how the human brain works, and instead raise the stakes around the system itself, like energy balance, protein training, recovery, the big levers that you can work around that actually align with your goals.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: All right, before I wrap up, remember I'm gonna give you the food villain test.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: Three questions takes 30 seconds, coming right up.
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: But if this episode made you realize, hey, the problem isn't a specific food.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: It's not carbs, it's not sugar, it's not seed oils, whatever.
• 28:20
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're on carnivore right now and you're like, ah, I can't do this the rest of my life.
• 28:24
  Philip Pape: The problem is really a lack of a structured system that does work for you.
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: That is why we built Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: That is the 26-week coach program.
• 28:33
  Philip Pape: You learn a skill one week at a time.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: And if you're done cycling through all this food nonsense, if you're done with worrying about what's poisoning you and your hormones and starting over constantly, this is going to fix that with you because it is super sustainable.
• 28:48
  Philip Pape: It's skill building, it's positive.
• 28:50
  Philip Pape: We empower you, we support you along the way.
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: It's very flexible, and you're gonna come out the other side feeling so strong, empowered, able to do whatever you want to do for your physique and health for the rest of your life.
• 28:59
  Philip Pape: EatmoreLiftheavy.com.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: That is the whole point.
• 29:03
  Philip Pape: I want you to fire us when you're done.
• 29:05
  Philip Pape: Okay, you don't need a coach forever.
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: You need to build the skills and the structure so that food is not ruining or running your life anymore.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com and we'll see you there.
• 29:15
  Philip Pape: All right, here's that 30-second food villain test.
• 29:19
  Philip Pape: It's three questions.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Question one, at what dose?
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: At what dose?
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: If someone cannot tell you a dose where the food becomes harmful versus a dose that is fine in context, then they don't understand the food.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: If they say seed oils is harmful at any dose, sorry, that is not true.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: Question two, in what context?
• 29:41
  Philip Pape: So if the claimer on the food doesn't account for the rest of the diet around it, calorie balance, training, the individual's health, that's the composition fallacy we started with in this episode.
• 29:52
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: You're pointing at one thing and blaming it for the whole.
• 29:55
  Philip Pape: And then question three, what human studies support this?
• 29:59
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not a big fan of like calling people out and saying, tell me the study, link the study.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: You know, it's more of hey, the preponderance of evidence should be there somewhere.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: And I'm fine if you, instead of asking the person, because you might be talking to a regular person as opposed to like a quote unquote expert, go ahead and look it up yourself.
• 30:15
  Philip Pape: Like go to scholar.google.com and start looking up.
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: Try to use AI and really do your searches.
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: Try to avoid, you know, you want to avoid cherry picking here, but at least ask for the studies that support it so that you can look into those.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: If the studies are just like a mouse study over here, a testimonial over here, a case study over here, a documentary on Netflix, okay, that's not really the evidence we're looking for.
• 30:36
  Philip Pape: So those three questions can really help you decide.
• 30:38
  Philip Pape: Which at the end of the day, do you even need to ask these questions?
• 30:41
  Philip Pape: I don't know.
• 30:42
  Philip Pape: I would say probably not, because just about any claim about a single food being a villain is probably false, but it's worth going through the exercise.
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 30:52
  Philip Pape: And remember that no single food is making you fat, causing you inflammation, or anything else.
• 30:57
  Philip Pape: The dose, the context, the system are where it's at.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.