Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Problem with Most Nutrition Podcasts

Transcript

The Problem with Most Nutrition Podcasts · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna get real today.
• 0:01
  Philip Pape: You probably love listening to nutrition podcasts like this one.
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: And if you've ever listened to a podcast like that and you thought, hey, this person sounds really confident, they sound like they know what they're talking about, but what they're saying doesn't match what I heard on a different podcast last week or today.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: That is not your imagination.
• 0:21
  Philip Pape: There is a study from just a couple years ago in 2023, the Brookings Institution, that looked at 36,000 episodes from 79 prominent podcast hosts.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: It found that more than 70% had pushed at least one unsubstantiated or false health claim.
• 0:38
  Philip Pape: This is the world we're living in today.
• 0:41
  Philip Pape: A BBC investigation of one of the top podcasts on Spotify counted 14 harmful health claims across 15 health episodes.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: And this is not uncommon.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: So today I want to talk about why most nutrition podcasts will probably be a waste of your time.
• 0:57
  Philip Pape: Not because the hosts are dumb, not because they're lying on purpose, but because there is this incentive structure that rewards a very specific kind of content.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: And I'm only talking about this today because I have unfollowed many podcasts recently and really tried to clean up my feed.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: And I'm sure you're thinking of doing the same.
• 1:17
  Philip Pape: And I want to help you do that.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: How to filter out your feed.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna tell you what to listen to, just talk principles here.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: Quick reminder: I am Philip Pape.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: This is Wits and Weights.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: This is a nutrition and strength training podcast.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: And today we're putting the genre of nutrition podcasts itself under the microscope, this one included.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: So here is the problem with most nutrition podcasts.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: They sell you specifics when the truth, that's capital T truth, is in the principles.
• 1:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, this is the thesis of most nutrition podcasts.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna explain in a second here.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: Specifics.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Specifics are foods, protocols, supplements, villains.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: They're very tangible.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: They get clicks, they make great titles, they can be argued about in comments, especially on YouTube.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: Ugh, I hate YouTube as much as I use it just loosely.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: And that that's what I mean by specifics.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: They're easy to create boogeyman from.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: And I get that because sometimes I will call them out as the premise of a show for the purpose of dispelling a myth, knowing that it's probably gonna get some attention as well.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: I'm human, of course I do that.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: Now, principles look different than specifics.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: Principles are okay, we need to eat enough protein for your body weight, right?
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: I'm not telling you exactly how much, I'm not telling you what kind, but there's a principle behind it supported by science.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: Be in the right calorie range for your goal.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: Lift weights, progressively overload them.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: And that gives you a lot of ranges of options for how to do it.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: Uh sleep enough, manage your stress, be consistent, boring, boring, boring, right?
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: Nobody fights about principles in the YouTube comments, but principles are what change your body.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: Specifics are far downstream of that.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: Specifics are gonna change in infinite ways, not only across people, but even for yourself across the days, weeks, months, and years of your life.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: And most podcasts have flipped that around because of the incentive structure of podcast attention.
• 3:21
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna give you three places where you're gonna notice this when listening to nutrition podcasts.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: And I want you to evaluate this show as well as others you listen to in this context.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Okay, so the pattern, pattern number one is the single villain podcast, where everything wrong with your body comes back to one thing.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: It's carbs, if it's a low-carb show, or carnivore or keto, something like that, seed oils, cortisol, if it's a stress show show, or they're trying to sell you hormone supplements, or your thyroid, or your gut if it's functional medicine, right?
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: Hormones in general, if it's perimenopause, toxins if it's if it's detox.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: Does this sound familiar?
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: And the tell is that the villain is always the thing the host can sell you something to protect against, right?
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: Functional medicine podcasters are probably the bane of this.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: There, there's a small amount of them that I like, but many of them, the there's there's this villain, you know, your gut is the villain.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: And here's a$400 gut test and a supplement protocol and a hair test and a blood test and lab work.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: And by the way, we have coaching, et cetera.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: Every time the villain is a perfect match for the product they're offering.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: Okay, and I'm not saying that carbs don't matter or that gut health is a fake thing, fake news, or hormones are irrelevant when it comes to perimenopause.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: What I'm saying is that real physiology never comes down to one thing.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: The body's a system, systems have constraints.
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: You have to figure out which constraint is binding for you today in your specific situation.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: And of course, if there's a podcast that appeals to you and seems evidence-based and you trust the host, and it is about one of those topics, that's perfectly okay.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: Just look for the villain product connection.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: Okay, pattern number two is the supplement as a fix podcast.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: So I recently started saying no to just about every pitch for someone who owns or promotes supplements.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: Even though there are plenty of great supplements, that's not the issue.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: In the women's health space, especially, especially perimenopause, menopause, which by the way, I love that space.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: I love that's most of you in my audience, that's many of you in my audience, the format goes like this the host or the guest spends a half hour explaining how complex your hormones are, how dysregulated your cortisol is, how your adrenals are exhausted, which by the way is not a real thing, how your gut is leaky, it's permeated, you know, your liver is not working right.
• 5:48
  Philip Pape: And this picture they paint is this cascading dysfunction across every single system you have.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: You are just a complete mess, you're totally broken.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: That is why you can't X lose weight.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: That's why, why you can't have enough energy, whatever.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: And then after those 30 minutes, boom, you get the answer, like manna from heaven.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: And it's conveniently the supplement that they're selling or the program they're selling or the test they're selling.
• 6:13
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 6:13
  Philip Pape: And again, I'm not saying, look, I'm a capitalist.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: I have coaching programs, I promote and sell things, I have sponsors as well, things that I believe in.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: So again, you have to put this into context.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: If if there's a one-to-one connection with something that makes sense, fine.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: But to lay it all out as if everything is just a huge mess for you, and this is the the source of all your problems, and then we have the one fix, that's the red flag.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: So, what are the odds that a single supplement is going to fix your quote-unquote hormones if they are complex, as they just described for the first half of the episode?
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: I want you to think about that a lot.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: Now, some supplements, as I mentioned, have plenty of evidence behind them: creatine, caffeine, vitamin D, fish oil.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: If you're deficient and you need things, absolutely take supplements if you're not able to solve it through, for example, real or whole foods.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: But the functional medicine medicine podcast space is often selling, you know, adaptogenic blends where they've privately labeled some combination or stack.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: That's that's kind of the concern that I have, is that the podcast is purely a marketing funnel for supplements.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: And the quote unquote science isn't really science, it's really just all the supplement.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: Pattern number three is the foods and protocols over principles.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: So I alluded to this already, you know, when we before we got into these patterns.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: Most nutrition podcasts spend a lot of the time on specific foods and specific protocols.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: Should you eat eggs?
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: Should you fast?
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: Are oats bad now?
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: Or maybe they focus on organic versus not, whatever.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: And by the way, there's some great podcasts on the other side of this that handle it, the nuance so well, okay, so well.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: And that's what I look for.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: So the listener of these podcasts is getting stuck in like a tactical loop.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: Every new episode is a new specific idea, and you never resolve it, right?
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: There's a new idea, a new idea, a new idea.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: You binge the show, you get all this information flooded into your brain.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: I think that's where a lot of the confusion from comes from.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: The problem is there's not a universal answer.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: And that's a good thing.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: That's a good thing that there's not a universal answer because otherwise, you're constantly chasing the universal answer instead of the principle of, hey, do you tolerate certain foods?
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: Are you including the things that you need for your goals?
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: Are you getting enough energy?
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: Are you lifting weights?
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: Like the principles, and then the food is like a vehicle for the principle for you specifically.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: So if you put this in the context, an analogy of like building a house, would you spend most of the time arguing about what types of nails to use, or whether the foundation is square, whether the load on the house is balanced, the walls are plum.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: Now you may be like, yeah, I don't even know what you're talking about because I'm gonna hire, I'm gonna buy a house or hire a contractor.
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: But nonetheless, I think you get the idea that principles are like the structural questions about the foundation.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: And then the specifics are like the nails of the house.
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: And I would say most nutrition, most podcasts are episode after episode after episode about the nails, about the nails.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: That is why most of you I talk to, you find my show, and you're like, I've been listening to podcasts for years and I still don't know what to do or even what to eat.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: And now, if you come to me saying, What do I eat?
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: you'll get an answer like, I'm not gonna tell you what to eat.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna help you figure that out for yourself based on the principles.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: So the only other thing I'm gonna throw in, and this is more of a personal preference for you in terms of like what you enjoy.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: A lot of podcasts I've noticed spend a lot of their runtime on banter, joking around, telling stories about their week, their training, hyping each other up.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: Nothing wrong with any of that.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: If that is what you're looking for, like a form of entertainment.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: We've done surveys most years for this show, and one of the things people say they do like is the lack of banter.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: Now I'm by myself, of course, but sometimes people take a lot of time talking about things that are not relevant.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: And I know I like to get to the point, and you do too.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: So to get the depth we need on principles, I'm usually 30 minutes almost exclusively talking about the principles, understanding the mechanism, saying what I don't know versus what I think I know based on the evidence, and then teach you what you're trying to walk away with.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: Hopefully there's a little bit of entertainment there, of course, but you're also trying to learn and then apply that information.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: So, how do you tell which nutrition podcasts are worth your time?
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: Just to wrap this in a bow.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: Three things to listen for.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: Number one, does the host ever say, we don't know yet, or I'm not sure, or the evidence is mixed?
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: If so, that's awesome.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: That's what you want to hear.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: This phrase of we don't know everything is a marker of credibility because real science has always has unresolved questions.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: Hosts who never say that, who just act 100% confident all the time, are selling you certainty that doesn't exist.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: This is why I reference studies all the time, as well as my opinion, my anecdote, uh, my clients.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: I kind of pull it all together to let you know that we never have a perfect set of information, but we're doing our best to move in that direction.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: Number two is do they teach principles or just hand you protocols?
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: Now I know you want to learn what to do, but be careful that the the what they're telling you isn't so narrow in scope that it's not for you, that it's not a model you can apply across other situations.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: It's just this one specific thing, and then you get caught in a trap that sends you in the wrong direction.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: Number three, do their incentives line up with your needs and progress?
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: Or are they just always trying to sell something very specific, like a supplement?
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: And again, this is hard to tease apart because there's a lot of great podcasters who have coaching that they sell.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: And the coaching is fantastic and it lines up with their principles and helping you make progress, but many others do not.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: All right, so that is the bonus for today, kind of short, but maybe longer than I wanted.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: If this resonated, just hit the follow button.
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: That's all I ask you.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: Hit it.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: Um, as a bonus, share this with another listener of podcast episodes just to say, hey, you know, I'm curious what your feed looks like.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: Like, who do you listen to?
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: Maybe get some ideas going there.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: And that's all I ask.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: Just hit follow, share the show.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: This was just a quick bonus for the weekend.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Ape.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: This is Wits and Weights, and I'll talk to you next time.