Lessons from a talk with world leading obesity scientist
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the One Day at a Time podcast. Now, today's one is going to recap a talk that Nick Wareham does. He is one of the top 30 most scientists in the world. He's currently at the University of Cambridge, and he's been working with us on LeanShield.
Speaker 1:He's been giving us advice. He's been looking into it, and he's been someone that I look up to and what he's trying to do. You know, when you look at his story, he's worked across many parts of health, and really, he wants to help at a population level because that's going to make the biggest impact, but has looked at the limitations of how do we help people at a population level. And there's some interesting kind of like insights he's given on this talk he did that I want to share. And I think it's important that we talk because I love how he talks about stuff practically as well.
Speaker 1:So, the first thing is he says, like in clinical trials, when you're on very low calorie diets on clinical trials, which is like 800 calories a day, Yes, of course, people get amazing results on the clinical trials if they stick to it. They're highly motivated. People who tend to do research studies or opt in are motivated people. You've got extra motivation because there's eyes on you. There's a lot of this psychological element to it.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, especially if these kind of weight calorie shakes or meals are prepared for you as well, it makes it a bit easier and you've got the support. Yeah, the results are amazing. Very low calorie diets in the research gets just as good results as the Ozempic GLP-one drug trials in terms of like 20% body weight loss as a percentage is crazy. Like these very low calorie diets work. The reason is because Ozempic and stuff actually put you in a very low calorie diet, right?
Speaker 1:That's kind of why they work so effectively. They just reduce the calorie intake so much. But because of the success rate in them and the real world is messy, they don't typically translate. So say there's a fifty percent reduction in diabetes risk from a clinical trial, right? Nick is saying in a real world, it's just a six to twenty percent reduction.
Speaker 1:So what we learned from the trial, when we try and apply it to the masses, you see less of an impact, right? And it does make sense when you think about it. Of course, that makes sense. And another one of these examples is when we look at the research on weight loss and fat loss, what actually matters in some short term studies, it seems to be that when calories and protein are equated, so the same calorie deficit, the same protein intake, diets lower in fat actually see a bit more net fat loss than the diets low in carbs. But when you stretch it out over from like a two to three week study to an eight week to a twelve week, you start seeing the differences diminish.
Speaker 1:And it diminishes to the point where it's a few pounds in a few months, maybe, and that's if someone strictly follows the exact diet in our study. So like super low fat every day sticking to it, right? Is that relevant real world? Is that how we live as humans more? So, is it practical to be like lower fat is best when actually, even in a study, there's only a few pounds at the end of many, many months?
Speaker 1:Practically, for someone trying to follow this, there is no difference. So, it doesn't matter whether it's low fat or low carb, it's the deficit and the protein that matters. Therefore, practical output of that is do not worry about your percentage of your calories coming from carbs or fat if your calories deficit and protein is the same between both options. Does that make sense? So, that's kind of how we're starting to translate these things.
Speaker 1:And that's why I think it's important when you do read studies or see headlines of stuff is to say, Is this a practical takeaway for that study? How long was How small was it? And how bang on did people have to be in that study to get those results? And is it practical for day to day human being, basically? So, something to think about.
Speaker 1:My kind of work right now is about this. You know, building LeanShield is about how practical can we make giving people a score and from the score to help you improve your LeanShield score, how practical can we make the workout suggestions? Like, can we give it so that it can be ten, fifteen, twenty minute workouts, whenever you can do it, told to you by the LeanShield coach that knows all your stats, your age, your training experience, the deficit size, any injuries you have, any of that stuff. It will tailor the equipment you have, the energy you have at that moment. Can it keep tailoring so you have motivation and you can do that exact workout because it's in your grasp, right?
Speaker 1:And if we think of BJ Fogg's behavior model, you can have the same motivation to do two things. So, can have a motivation. Say your motivation is five or 10 to work out or to just do something, improve your health. But then I say to you, right, you've got to do a sixty to ninety minute compound exercise workout. You've got to go to the gym and you've got to train till you are nearly crying.
Speaker 1:Your motivation might be five out of 10, but it's very hard to do. So, you've got to travel there, it's a long workout, energy is low. So, you are not going over what the PG4 calls the action line. I mean, if you're watching this video, I'll show it on the screen. For the same motivation, but giving you something much easier to do, you can do this in your house.
Speaker 1:It's going to take you fifteen minutes. And if you do these exercises, it's going to boost your LeanShield score by 15 points. And you can use the equipment you have, which is just a dumbbell or band. Can you do it? That's way easier to do.
Speaker 1:And even though your motivation is the same, because it's easier to do, you go above this kind of action line and then you actually do that behavior. So, it's important that we are very practical about this. We can't be saying just do workouts, just do strength training. Obviously, people know this. It's got to be personalized, it's got be actionable, it's got to be in your grasp.
Speaker 1:And then it's very, very easy to do. And then you don't need much motivation to do it. You just need to be there,
Speaker 2:well, it's easy, you might as well do it.
Speaker 1:All right. Next thing Nick mentioned is genetics are overrated in a sense that they did this complicated DNA test to check things above age, weight, and blood sugar to improve the prediction accuracy of diabetes risk and stuff. And he said the improvement was clinically irrelevant, decimal point. So basically, the fundamentals tell us the picture. We can do all the fancy stuff on top, it doesn't quite move the needle.
Speaker 1:This is exactly what Pareto's principle is. What are the main inputs that tell us the outputs? The main inputs that tell you if you're going to lose fat, a calorie deficit, protein intake, and your general activity through steps. Everything else on top is the fancy DNA testing that doesn't quite move the needle because that's where you're going get the majority of the results from. Yes, you can tweak your carb intake if you wanted to around training.
Speaker 1:Yes, you can tweak your fat intake, you know, you can do those things, but it's not going to really make that much difference beyond the fundamentals. And when it comes to strength training, it's the same. It is the same. Is the set you're doing hard for you to do? Like, did you push her to maybe you couldn't do any more than a few more reps?
Speaker 1:And are you doing enough sets per muscle group a week? That's it. You don't have to do complicated five day workout splits. You don't have to do super complicated exercises. You can do the machine, you can use resistance band, you can do dumbbell body weight, whatever gives attention.
Speaker 1:Beyond just doing the sets needed per muscle group with a hard enough effort, it's all again noise. P90X, remember that crazy P90X where there's people going nuts training like hardcore? There's so many worker programs that have come out trying to say that their system is superior. Actually, did you work that muscle group hard enough for the set you did today? And how many sets have you done over a week per muscle group?
Speaker 1:I know it sounds a bit weird when you're probably trying to figure out what the hell you want about it. Per muscle group of sets per week, you know, if I'm thinking of my legs, my quads, I'm going to do if I do 12 sets of squats a week, no matter how I do them, whether it's lunging, you know, bodyweight squats, whether it's a leg press, right, or the machines, you know, just doing 12 sets and Scott, were those 12 sets hard? Or did you just sit there on your phone and you just did like 12 reps and you didn't even break a sweat? I'm sorry, if you didn't break a sweat, you're not giving the body the reason to say, Hey, mate, hold on to that muscle now.
Speaker 2:You got to you got to
Speaker 1:give enough stimulus, got to give the signal, buddy, hold on to the muscle we need it, basically. Next point he made was stop blaming patients as well. And he said about a story about someone that said to him, He's doing 10,000 steps a day, lost 37 kilos, and a doctor said she wasn't trying enough and the tests were coming back about pre diabetes and basically she had this genetic inability to store fat in her legs and is forcing it into her organs. So yeah, he was mentioning, look, sometimes you don't need to judge people. There are edge cases and you can't just say, you know, try more, try hard enough.
Speaker 1:We know about GLP-one drugs that blaming people for being overweight and obese because of their willpower is ridiculous because this environment, luckily for some people, doesn't shape them to be overeating stimulus. You know, you've people with ADHD and everything like that. And for some people, it's seizures. Some people, it's not. You know, I'm very fortunate that I've been able to drink alcohol and not become an alcoholic, right?
Speaker 1:I haven't got an addictive ness to alcohol, but there are some people predisposed to be very addicted to alcohol. So, the two same people have gone through the same drinking alcohol when you're younger, going out, and someone's got really addiction to it and then someone hasn't. I haven't tried to not be addicted to alcohol. You know what I'm just not. And some people are just, ah, so we have to be careful.
Speaker 1:We have to be careful on that. He mentioned as well this trap of like personalization in terms of nutrition in the future. And he says there was an algorithm that beat a dietitian basically. And basically, it turned out the algorithm was just a low carb, fancy way of doing low carb, which probably meant low calorie and getting results. So, this is where it's important that people say, Well, I lost all my weight because I cut my carbs out.
Speaker 1:No, no, like you cut carbs out and then you went into a deficit and then you lost probably a lot of water, but then maybe lost fat. It's not the carbs that caused it, it's the deficit caused by cutting carbs. You could have cut calories from fats and you would have had the same results, protein were the same. So we sometimes mistake the mechanism we use to get thing we needed to do to get results as the thing that caused it. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yes, it was the cutting carbs that cut your calories, but that doesn't mean it's the carbs that's the answer. It's this energy you cut. You cut energy through carbs. You've got to cut energy through fat. So yeah, it's important that we realize that the foundations are to be We have to understand and really live and breathe the foundation so we don't get fooled by loads of things that come online because you're going to see a million and one things coming up to January now about these, this, it's going to be crazy, guys.
Speaker 1:Godspeed to all of you on your journeys through social media until Christmas and all the January chaos. Nick then mentioned an interesting piece of information about the sugar tax loophole. So, The UK's sugar tax worked before it even started, right? It says, The threat of it forced companies to slash sugar content just to avoid pain attacks, right? Forced them to do that.
Speaker 1:They wanted to keep their margins, let's get rid of sugar, replace it with sweeteners. The result was less sugar consumed and a measurable drop in kids hospitalized for tooth decay. Now, that's interesting. It's quite obvious when you connect the dots looking back, isn't it? Obviously, you remove sugar from drinks, which causes a lot of tooth decay, then you replace it with sweetener, you know, with little sugar.
Speaker 1:But would have you had that result if you had told the parents, sugar is bad in a sense, like added sugar for sure in Coca Cola is bad for the kid's teeth? Would have it caused them to change behavior? Probably not. I mean, they probably already know a kid drinking Coca Cola every day is going to be bad for their teeth. We all know that.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting that the change was forced through economics, through the companies, and then they changed our behavior. So how much of our behavior and the behavior of our kids and our kids, I'm saying our kids, one day, will change based on food companies changing, and it's quite an interesting thought experiment. How much of your decisions today are because the food companies have got their policies versus what you actually want out of your own life? And this is why the environment, which includes the food produced and offered in supermarkets by these companies, shapes us. So when we come into obesity rates and stuff, we know, of course, the simplicity of being able to order food online, to get 2,000 calories delivered to your door in fifteen minutes, to eat high sugar, fat, salt foods, which are high in calories, right?
Speaker 1:Like these are easy to consume. So obviously it's been easier to consume more calories as human beings in the last fifty years. And we've seen that the average calorie intake as a human has gone up like probably now seven eight hundred calories a day on average in the 50s on average per person. So of course, that gain over years of gaining one pound, two pounds, three pounds, four pounds builds up. A thought experiment is if all the food companies in the world were forced for one year to only make foods that were like maximum 100 calories in terms of a serving size or something.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I think about like, removed all the high calorie foods, only whole foods are available. You couldn't buy chocolates anymore and crisps and nothing. It was impossible. You could only eat like bread and grains and rice and lean meats and all that and plants and veggies. Obviously, would all be changed.
Speaker 1:We would have to be forced to adapt. Mean, it's quite hard to overeat on whole foods. It's very difficult. So yeah, it is interesting how we have to understand the relationship between us and the environment, the environment and we are the environment, environment, and And how much control do we have? Or really thinking about how much control do you have over shaping your environment.
Speaker 1:You can't shape the outer world. You can shape the environment in your house, for example, are you afraid and all that? But it's important not to judge yourself on this because judgment causes you to feel guilty and then spiral into eating foods. Anyway, and he mentioned as well, signs of spring improvement. He says the turning point total cases look bad.
Speaker 1:The rate of new diabetes cases in The UK is actually falling, which is awesome. So, he's seen hope. And I think that's a beautiful way to end this podcast is that I think with the tools we have, with the GLP ones, with people understanding nutrition, maybe more fighting back against misinformation, even though I see a lot of it all the time, you guys listening to this podcast, talking about lean shield, muscle preservation, fat loss, the tide is turning, the tools we have now, we're able to fight back against this real tsunami of the environment that goes against us when it comes to wanting to remain So, it is hard in this world. There is hope. You guys are doing the right thing, and I hope this podcast was useful.
Speaker 1:Remember, do the practical things. Don't worry too much about trying to do everything. It doesn't work. So, eating more fibre, you should be doing that. Yes, eating more whole foods, you should be doing that.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, if you're not doing that, that calories, steps, working on all that, just factor it back just to focus on one thing, one big thing today. Can you just get into your deficit today? Can you just hit your protein today? Can you just do one short strength workout that LeanShield provides you today? Can you just do one of them today, build back momentum?
Speaker 1:You don't have to do everything all at once all the time. Some weeks, you might be hitting your protein every day. Some weeks, you might hit the net four days out of seven. Some days, your calorie deficit is there for a week, sometimes it's not. Sometimes your training is awesome, but then you've been eating a maintenance for the week.
Speaker 1:You know, it's a mix. It's a mixed bag. We're humans. But over the year, you know, when you look at it as a whole, training, calorie intake is good, protein is high, it's going to result in a different person, a different change in you. So keep up with it.
Speaker 1:Do your one big thing today, and I'll see you back here tomorrow.
