I just had a huge protein shake, an entire rotisserie chicken, and I mixed Greek yogurt with canned tuna. Nicole, that’s still not enough protein. Says who? Says me. This is A Hot Dog Is A Sandwich. Ketchup is a smoothie. Yeah. I put ice in my cereal. So what? That makes no sense. A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. What? Welcome to our podcast. A Hotdog is a Sandwich, the show we break down the world’s biggest food debates. I’m your host Josh Scherer, and I’m your host Nicole Enayati. And today we have a very special guest. He’s a nutrition expert with a PhD in Sports Physiology and he co-founded the Diet Coach and hypertrophy app Renaissance periodization. He’s easily the tallest, richest, and handsomest. Dr. Mike on YouTube, Dr. Mike Israetel. Welcome to the show. That was a very rough intro, I feel in a very diminutive position and tend to react negatively. Such things. Kind of like if you, if you poke a miniature dachshund. Gently with a stick, you’re getting the teeth or My favorite dog, my favorite dog is a minute. The little, they’re adorable. The longhaired miniature dachshunds, but, but they can be mean. That’s okay. I don’t mind. Mike, you can do your own intro entirely. How would you like to be introduced? Oh my God. I was totally kidding. That was incredible. The fact that there are two very fit, very successful, very smart Russian Jewish Dr. Mikes on YouTube. I know. I love it. Is pretty incredible and we love that for representation. We sure do. I’m not Russian, but, and neither are you. What? You’re not Russian. Uh, do you think you’re Russian named Ovv? All Jews are Russian. Then the pogroms put ’em out to Lithuania. That’s not what we’re here to talk about. The Jewish diaspora. Me’s the only other Russian Jew here. Russian. Russian, yes. Yeah. Russian, Ukrainian, all that? Yes. Okay. What we are talking about, Mike today, the podcast is called How Much Protein Is Too Much Protein, but I wanna tell you how. We’re getting into that because we were talking about all the silly diet trends that say 20, 30 years ago. Right. Looking back at all the zero fat raspberry vinaigrette that are on shelves or the, uh, snackwell devil’s food cakes that we grew eating. Story of our lives as children. In the name of the low fat diet trends of the nineties and every era that humans have existed in was the smartest era of that time. Right. Roughly speaking. So we were thinking about what are the dietary trends today that we are going to look back on in 2030 years and cringe at. Yes. And the only thing. We could really think of was the incredible protein ification of the entire grocery store. Right? But what do you think about that? I think, I can’t say much because I don’t wanna call it a conspiracy, but if I speak out of turn, big protein will squash me under their. Chicken and Greek yogurt scented globalist thumb, they’ll find you. Right. And I just wanna say very nice, kind things about big proteins so that they don’t disappear me in the middle of the night. That’s how bad this trend has gotten. They are fully in control. You guys have no doubt heard the political assertion that there is a deep state underneath the actual democracy that we have. Mm-hmm. Right? Right. There is a deep protein state as well, and it’s 10 times bigger than the deep state itself. Think about that. What are we really up against? Well, I’m curious, is there, is there actual truth to what you’re saying or are you, uh — No, absolutely not. Well, well, no, no, no, because– He’s a little stinker, I like him. Think, I think they’re not, not to give validation. ’cause this is how this happens with conspiracy theories. Mm-hmm. But to me, if we are talking about, I, I heard you and Dr. Mike talk, Dr. To Mike Fki talking about, um, like the GLP one agonist and how that’s going to affect the food industry. Mm. You talked about how they’re gonna see new opportunity in creating these like very hyper palatable, but macro friendly, which is to say high protein foods. Sure. And we’re seeing so many of those. Every magic spoon cereal, I’m a big fan of, the macros are incredible on it for a bowl of cereal and it tastes pretty good right now. Every cereal company. Has come out with a macro friendly competitor to that, like a proxy of, of that kind of cereal. Kellogs, um, Post, they’re all doing this. Mm-hmm. And it’s all just soy protein isolate and the markup on it is incredible. So the way that they can combat, you know, a falling consumption of food is to mark things up with excessive protein content. So I think there kind of is a protein deep state out there. There is. It is, uh, that’s a very good point. The good news is that it is, there is zero conspiracy. Mm-hmm. And there is 100% reflexive adjustment to market demand. Mm-hmm. Companies are profit driven enterprises and they generally. Especially over the long term, and especially as an aggregate, as a whole, industry will respond very sensitively to their demands of their consumers. For example, if tomorrow, everyone who went to McDonald’s was a health nut and they just demanded healthy food, this is a joke, but the day after used as a, as an analogy, as soon as possible, McDonald’s would rearchitect their entire supply chain to bring you healthy food. Mm-hmm. There’s nobody at McDonald’s staff, anyone on their board, anyone in their company that when they discover that McDonald’s wants to serve healthy food or like. You know what? That just absolutely degrades the tradition of our company selling junk food. That’s how I brought up, that’s my America, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna go down fighting. They don’t care. They care that the customer is happy and the customer receives what they want. And so when human beings in the world. Essentially with their dollars and their opinions tell all sorts of companies, Hey, protein is important to me. I want more protein. Most companies don’t even really do the work of seeing, you know, is this like optimal nutritionally or whatever the downside is. Like they don’t do that work ’cause they’re not so incentivized to do that work. The upside is companies, uh, in a large capitalist society like ours. Just generally really trust their consumers. Mm-hmm. And they’re not gonna assume they know better than their consumers. If you tell me you want a, a red Ferrari, I say yes. If all of a sudden a. Poop brown Ferrari is in vogue. Ferrari’s gonna make their cars poop brown because that’s what people want. Mm-hmm. And so the protein, uh, over consumption situation, which isn’t really a big deal, and I can speak to that at length and I’m sure I will in a sec. Yeah. But it’s like, why is there protein in foods? It is not top down at all. It is entirely bottom up. People want more protein, and I’m sure we’ll cover this, but sometimes they don’t know why. But it’s one of those flexes, it’s kind of like. Organic or GMO free. Mm-hmm. Um, those terms are loaded unfortunately in other ways, but they communicate something to the consumer. They communicate, I want to be a healthy person and I care. And now recently, high protein has also stood up to that pedestal and said, Hey, if I’m a consumer and I care for my health, you know, I had a late night at work. I’m just trying to buy some breakfast cereal for tomorrow. I get in, yeah, I’m red-eyed, I’m looking around the shelves and it’s. Ooh, new high protein cereal. I’m like, you know what? I looked in the mirror earlier today. I do care about me. I care about longevity and health and whatever else. And you know, high protein seems like it checks that box and enough people doing that. A lot of the cereals are high protein and that’s how it happens with protein products. Yeah, it’s interesting even seeing the way that it shifted. ’cause I remember something like Kodiak Cakes, maybe those were so hot, what, 10, 15, 7 years ago? Yeah. Like I remember them on Target and you look at the macros and there’s maybe an additional five grams of protein per serving, which is. A, a reasonable amount of protein to add to a food, but then especially in the morning, but then now those, that actual macro breakdown isn’t competitive. It’s been escalating like crazy because I think people are so obsessed with this Right. Intake of protein. Mike, what would you recommend for people, say general population, people who aren’t interested in hypertrophy as far as like protein con consumption per day, what should they be eating? Great question, Josh, because I wanna know too well, because we were talking about this, because we both have the same protein goals despite living wildly different lifestyles. We do, we do. Nicole, I’m gonna give you the worst answer ever. It’s gonna be all nuance and fluff and zero. Anything you can pin to, it’s just gonna, you’re gonna hear 20 minutes of me rambling. You’re gonna be like, I, I don’t know what that means. I’m gonna use a combination of metric and imperial units in the conversion. It’s gonna be terrible. Fantastic. Yes. Alright. So. For folks that are not trying to keep a high level of muscularity on their bodies, for folks that don’t resistance train consistently throughout the week, two to four times a week and even more. Mm-hmm. As a little as. Half a gram of protein per pound of body weight per day can fulfill all of your health and protein needs. That means if you happen to weigh, you know, let’s say 160 pounds, even 80 grams of protein per day, I. We’ll keep you healthy and upright and everything’s gonna be totally fine. That’s the answer there. Pretty straightforwardly, much less protein than that is gonna probably, you’re gonna be okay until you dropped to much, much less, and then you’ll have some issues. Mm-hmm. But much more protein than that can be very, very beneficial if you would like to maintain a more muscular, leaner physique. And if you want to benefit greatly from the upsides of consistent resistance training, more protein is a good idea then, and I can speak to how much and what’s too much in that whole situation. For me, like, I mean, I’ve seen Josh consume. At any given meal time. Mm-hmm. 50 to 60 grams of protein. Right. Is that fair? I try and have, I don’t even like the term meal anymore, but I try and do feedings four protein feedings, feedings at, at roughly 50 grams of pop sometimes splitting ’em. Right. Um, but then sometimes when you’re in a rush, it just involves you grabbing fistfuls of lunch meat. Yeah. Weighing them on a baking scale. I’ve been there too. I’ve been there too, you know, but. I’ve been told that the human body absorbs, quote unquote only what, like 30 grams of protein, 25 grams of protein. What is the actual stats on that? That’s a great question. That’s one of those myths that’s been with us for a very long time. Right, right, right. I, I grew up with that in the 24 Hour Fitness. Oh yes. That’s very classic. Mm-hmm. So it turns out those studies were done generally not after resistance training, and they were done with whey protein only, which digests really quickly. And so there’s only so high the spike can go until your body just can’t use it enough. It’s almost like saying, okay, I have one minute to tell you about a topic. How many words can I use? Well, if it you’re talking to chat GPT-4 0.5 in a minute, it can crap out like. A million words. You, you can’t read that fast, so you can’t utilize those words. And in, in just the same way, if you take whey protein, which is incredibly fast digesting by itself, which is what almost those all the studies did. Yeah, man. Anything above 30 grams of protein for most folks who don’t resistance train. The rest of it just gets burned as fuel for the rest of your day. For calories. Your body can’t incorporate it ’cause it digests so quickly. It skyrockets into your blood. Mm-hmm. And your muscle cells are like, listen, we can only incorporate this so quickly. So that amount changes. If you have a meal that’s slower digesting, if you have some lunch meat, if you have some Turkey, if you have a mixed meal of carbs, protein, fats, and protein, all of a sudden your body unquote use. Double that amount of protein. And if you are larger, if you have more muscle. Mm-hmm. And if you’re actively resistance training, the demand for protein goes up and then it’s like three times that number. Really? So if I a strong man competitor. Yeah. Some, somebody who weighs a, you know, 2, 280 pounds who’s very muscular, very big, and I give them a burrito that has tons of carbs, tons of fats, and tons of protein. Mm-hmm. I mean, they can fully utilize for muscle growth. A hundred grams of protein at a time, no problem. Wow. But if it’s just whey protein, if they are 160 pound recreationally trained, 18 to 22-year-old collegiate male. Mm-hmm. And, uh, you know, and it’s, and it’s hits the blood really quick by itself, then yeah. Anything more than 30 or 40 grams isn’t bad for you, but it’s just gonna get burned for fuel because your cells can only absorb it so quickly. So the concept of. How much protein is too much protein. There’s never an example where like that extra 25 grams that your body doesn’t absorb, doesn’t like go into the ether, right? Your body just uses it as fuels. So what if you have like issues with like your kidneys and stuff and too much protein can like give you a kidney stone? ’cause again, I’m just regurgitating stuff that I’ve seen online. Again, I don’t have any like medical training or stuff. I’m just. Re regurgitating what I’m seeing on the internet where people are like, if you have too much protein, be careful with your kidneys. Like is there any basis in that? There is if you have diagnosed kidney disease, okay? If you’re down a kidney from donating it to someone, okay? Then you have very special instructions that are quite different from everyone else outside of that. High protein diets, even very, very high protein to the point of absurdity, which they’ve tested for months on end with folks in some number of seminal studies back about 10 years ago. There just aren’t really any measurable downsides and there’s no theoretical downside. Got it. So the biggest downside of eating like 400 grams of protein per day is really, can be a few. One of them is you get, you have to miss out on all the other food because if you eat a lot of protein plus the rest of your food, you just eat too many calories and then you’re just gonna gain fat. And so you, you say, okay, if I want four oh grams of protein a day, that means I have to low carb and low fat to fit it into my lifestyle. Mm-hmm. And then as all of a sudden. You know, you go out with friends and they’re like, oh my God, like, what are you gonna order? And you’re like, um, do they have just slab o meat in here? Slab O meat? No, this is a normal restaurant. Like, well, I can’t have anything on the menu. So it’s, it’s not great from there. Another thing is, especially if it’s from meat, like at some point, uh, and Josh might relate to this a little bit, as we’ve all done wacky stuff in our lifting history. You try really high protein diets and it’s like chicken and steak and at some 0.3 weeks in you’re like, if I have to chew anymore, I quit everything about this. No more chewing. And also you, let’s be honest, uh, this, I wasn’t informed in the lead up. This is a family podcast, so I’ll put this as mildly as I can. Mm-hmm. Pooping and farting are somewhat related to your protein intake. Yeah. And if you like having friends around, then consider very high protein diets. Might not do so well with your friends is at some point there’s a couple of phases of your friends just fart too much from protein. There is, um, um, shock, then amusement. Oh, he’s so funny with his bodybuilding. Then there is, um, uh, confusion, like, why is this still happening? At some point you get into the resentment phase of like, seriously, this isn’t cool anymore. And then anger, um, grief, sadness, and then maybe recapitulation of that cycle. Hopefully at some point you catch wind of this so that your friends don’t leave. You catch wind. That’s definitely a concern. Uh, no, this, this actually happened to me and it’s not a problem, but like you’ve never I’m dead. Seriously? Is it because we’re at work all the time? Like you don’t like pass gas? No. You, you’re meeting a very moderate version of me am. Okay. In my professional life, when I was 21 years old, I was doing some German volume training. 10 by, okay. Can you explain to the. To the people that don’t know what that is, what the, what that is German volume trade. Mike, forgive me if I’m, if I’m stepping on some toes here. To me it is a, uh, a system of, of exercise that only works if you are on copious amounts of, uh, eastern block steroids. Okay. Exactly. Where you just do 10 sets of, of 10 reps. And me, it’s 10 sets of 10 reps. As a 21-year-old, uh, shot putter, I was like, maybe I am a perfect candidate for this. Mm-hmm. And so I was eating 450 grams of protein a day. How many calories? In that 450, there’s no tracking when you’re dirty bulking. And I was doing something called carb cycling where one day a week I would just drink two liters of Mountain Dew. I don’t know, um, what this is dirty. Okay, dirty bulking. I got this. Bodybuilding do com. I love this. Josh. We’ve all books. Some wacky diet. This is great. My goodness. This is goodness ethnographic. Truly. But also when you’re talking about the people around you just being. They were at first amused and then they were like disgusted with the parts. Right. And I remember my roommate, Andrew Rickers. You met him. Oh, Rickers, yeah. Just, just watching me eat a two pound slab of skin on salmon like an animal and him just skin on salmon and still being a chef. I put like caramelized fennel and like roasted tomatoes on. Such an Edgewood and he still brings that up to like 15 years later. And so yeah, we’ve all done some wacky stuff. Yeah. My, my question as far as like a general population is concerned, I think it was Michael Paulin who said, never before has such an unhealthy society been so obsessed with Health Fair. Yeah. I, is this large amount of protein intake actually causing large scale health gains for the general population? I know it’s too early to tell and there’s no studies, but like what’s your prognostication on that? No it’s not. Um, and I can explain why, but like, it’s like, it’s like too much sugar equals diabetes, right? Too much fat equals heart disease. Too much protein equals question mark, so I can rewind those. Too much sugar does not equal diabetes. Too much fat does not necessarily lead to heart disease. Okay. And it, um, mostly doesn’t. Okay. And too much protein leads, mostly just your friends having to sit you down mm-hmm. And keep you seated because if you stand up the farts, just continue and just try to talk some sense into you. Um, the thing is. There is a, so just to quickly, to the sugar thing. Yeah. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sugar, but sugar is really tasty and so when people eat a lot of it, they tend to overeat on their calories and the extra calories put on extra fat, and then people very, very overweight for a very long time. That causes all the bad things. Diabetes, the whole, the whole lot of them. Um, one of the interesting things about this is that. The primary model for inducing diabetes in laboratory animals is overfeeding of saturated fat, not sugar. Interesting, interesting. ’cause they gain a lot of fat weight. They just get diabetic. Right. And so fats, especially if you have healthy fats like monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, olive oil, canola oil, nuts, nut butters, avocados, then you can eat like almost all of your diet and fats. Mm-hmm. And just be the healthiest person that’s ever lived. It’s awesome. Too many saturated fats aren’t great, but you can eat a lot of them. If your calories aren’t overdoing it. Right. You’re good to go. The problem is you go to McDonald’s and each burger has 50 grams of fat in it, and you have three of them. It’s the calories that end up kicking. You got it right. No one’s saying like, hypothetically, you could overeat like green salads and veggies and get fat, but no one’s doing that. Nothing. Hypothetically. Theoretically, it’s possible, but. Nobody’s gonna do that ’cause they’re so filling in solo, in calories, right? Sugars and fats are so not filling and so high in calories and so tasty. We tend to overdo it. That’s really the problem with protein. Now the good news is protein doesn’t have that problem. So if, if, if someone’s gonna be overeating, sugar, overeating fat, or overeating protein. I would prefer the overate protein because it’s unlikely they’re gonna be able to gain weight. Josh, something you can probably speak to is when you’re having a high protein diet, it’s actually harder to get in a ton of calories because you’re like, I could just do this with Taco Bell, but I have to labor through this three chicken breasts. And after that you, rice is like, I don’t even want to eat anything else. This is terrible. And so protein, it tends to be. Pretty satiating compared to most of the other foods you could eat. It’s not the most satiating because green veggies and fruits are actually more satiating calorie for calorie. Mm. But it’s not excessive. There’s not like, you know, no one’s, like you can imagine meeting someone who’s just morbidly obese and you’re like, how did it come to this? Like, chili, these protein shakes, you know, you’re like, what? Really? They’re like, no, I’m kidding. It’s, you know, uh, milkshakes that did this. Mm-hmm. So protein at least isn’t very palatable in that sense. Hyper palatable. So what, that’s cool. But the problem is. Is if you are a resistance training very hard and you are really organizing your diet super well, you can get up to about a gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. So if you ate 200 pounds, 200 grams, there is a theoretical and somewhat literature based argument that up to maybe about 250 grams, 1.25 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day can have additional marginal benefits. Mm-hmm. Anything beyond that? Has no upsides and a lot of these, and now no downsides, but no upsides. Hmm. And so a lot of the folks that end up doing this thing where they eat a lot of protein foods off the shelf at Kroger when they go shopping, but they’re not resistance training. They don’t have a lot of muscle, they’re like, more proteins good. Right. And you’re like, you passed the good part, like 80 grams of protein. Right. And while that’s not bad, there is this illusion to your guys’ kind of suspicion that there may be something wrong with it that mm-hmm. To me, the biggest problem is people have this sort of idea kind of vibe in their mind that their health behavior, the things they do to support their health is like a little list on an iPhone with little green check marks next to it. Little boxes you can check mark. Sure. And people generally tend to have an idea of, there may be three to five of those. Like I’m active, I resistance train. I get good sleep, I have good stress management, I eat healthy. And like if I check all those, I take the medications. Doc says I should take, I’m good to go. And the problem is because that context window’s real small for most people. Well, for many people it just doesn’t exist. ’cause they’re like, what’s health behavior like, you know, nevermind. But for those that does exist, what they get from that eating super high protein way beyond their needs vibe when they go to the grocery store and all the cereals are protein cereals, they get to. Have this green check mark. Take one of those slots. They go see, I’m eating protein, and then they don’t fix their calorie intake. They’re still eating too many super tasty foods. They’re still underactive. They’re still eating a lot of crap. They don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. They don’t pay attention to their sleep or their stress levels. They go to the doctors two years later. The doctor comes back with their blood work like, listen, Phil, um, you just not looking so good. And what’s the first thing you hear? But I’ve been eating the protein cereals and it’s like, it’s just a dud. You know, it’s kind of like if you have, let’s say 30 bullets in your gun and you’re shooting it into battle and you’re killing bad guys and stuff. And then you run outta bad guys to kill, but you still have bullets and you just shoot them up into the sky. Someone’s like, what are you doing? You’re like, I’m helping, I’m shooting bullets. Like, what? But they’re not going anywhere. Great analogy. And so after a certain, while enough protein is just like you, but you feel like you’re doing stuff. So in your video game stats, you’re like, you shot 50 bullets, but only 25 of ’em went somewhere. Right? So I don’t want people to feel like I’m eating a lot of protein. This is great, it’s awesome. But after very not so much protein, you could be using that health behavior. Elsewhere. Mm. Yeah. Does that make sense? Of course. A hundred percent. And I feel like. Um, I, I thought that all of this protein debate was a very, very new thing, but I’ve been reading a great book called Revolution at the Table by Harvey Levinstein, going through how America ended up with our sort of dietary predilections, um, back in God, the 1860s. I think Justice von Liebig, the one who discovered macronutrients effectively. Are you looking at me for confirmation or? Mostly he’s also the guy who remember when we made the Quick Aside, Uruguay’s, national Pasta Dish Pasta Caruso. Sure. From, remember that has that very specific meat extract in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was also invented by Justice von Leic, the father of macronutrients. Shout out to justice, also the father of Uruguay’s national pasta dish. But anyways, um, Fletcher Rising, does that mean anything to either of you? Fletcher Rising. Fletcher Rising in the 1880s has a dietary trend. It was chewing your food for so long that it physically broke down to sugar in your mouth. You chewed every bite for a hundred Yeah. Times or whatever. Ugh. It wasn’t called Fletcher Rising, but I literally remember my mom saying, remember to chew your food on 25, 25 times this side, and then 25 times on this side. What so would digests swelling in your stomach? Yeah. And, and Mark, mark Twain, he had a lot of intellectuals, but he would also, part of his thing was consuming less protein because at the time they measured all the health markers of like their biggest lads in the 18 hundreds, which were all upper class people, and they were eating a lot of beef and bread. So they sort of retrofit the idea of, well, it looks like a, a grown man should have 150 grams of protein per day. Hmm. Meanwhile, you also had the vegetarian movement that, um. You know, uh, battle Creek Sanitarium and Corn Flakes coming out to try and get people to eat vegetarian. So you had this sort of vegetarian carnivore dichotomy back then, and then people debating proteins. But my dad, I remember eating low, low fat Cheez-Its because at least he was eating a low fat food. Right. He, I mean, just had, you know, uh, he was pre-diabetic, had heart disease, but at least he was eating low fat. Cheez-Its, and it like Right. It gave him that thing. It was like the write off. Yes. Like people saying, at least I’m getting my protein. Mm-hmm. Which is why I am generally dubious of, um. You know, one of the problems today is that we’ve just made food taste too good with science, hyper palatable, ultra processed. We’ve made it taste too good, so annoying it, it goes down easy. Like Mike said, when you’re just chewing a massive steak or piece of chicken, you get tired of it. It doesn’t taste that good, but I never get tired of it. You get Quest protein chips if you have the Taco Quest protein chips. If I could ra well. Are you asking me if I, if I could eat a Ribeye or Quest protein chips, I’d eat the ribeye. Sure. But the Quest protein chips go down easy. Nicole, you may think that this is what you want. Tell people want about 18 meals straight later. Sure. It doesn’t taste the same anymore. I am. I totally agree. I think just like, yeah, keen instinct. I’m like, yeah, I’m obviously gonna pick this steak, but in reality, I’m, if I’m sitting at my desk. If I’m at my job, if I have a lot of work to do full, I’m not going to take out the steak knife, knife and a fork and get to it, you know? So grab the fist full of lunch meat. You know, you wanna, but my question is, are we just. The same evolutionary evolutionarily, and we have the same wants and same needs as all of our ancestors and all of our future ancestors. We all just want to eat carbs in salt, and we’re just sort of kicking the can down the road with new dietary trends every couple decades and humans are just sort of doomed to eat ourselves to death. Wow, that take got dark. I thought this was a family program. Family stuff gets dark sometimes. I. I guess I could just see, you know, Lindsay, the 8-year-old being like, mommy, are we doomed to eat ourselves to death? They’re like, no, Josh and Nicole’s podcast, no more of this. So true. Um. What you’re saying resonates and has a lot of truth in it. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Humans are largely the same that we were a hundred thousand years ago and 10,000 years ago, and 10,000 is when agriculture started to kind of become a thing. Slowly but surely, and agriculture was the first time in which humans were able to industrialize the process of the production of food. Before that, it was like. You found food in your environment in the literal sense of you stumbled upon it while searching for it, voraciously hungry. And so we have all these neural network subsystems in our brains that are designed to nearly instantly adjudicate whether or not a food is a good idea or bad idea to eat. And it also grades it on how good of an idea it is to eat. And so. When we have foods that are hyper palatable and very high in calories today, it’s like an evolution, something we’ve basically almost never seen. It’s like an extremely amazing thing. It’s like if someone was to come up to you and say, Hey, I have a mansion and trillions of dollars for you. Are you interested? You’d be like, who? Who says no to this thing? I mean, other than it being definitely a scam, let’s say, it was very, like Elon Musk literally came down the real Elon Musk, a press crew, and they’re like, you wanna sweepstakes? Here you go. You wouldn’t be like, oh, well, you know, money doesn’t buy happiness. You know, we’re pretty wired to think. Yeah. Like value is a good thing. And just the same way we’re, we’re wired for an ancestral environment of mostly pulsatile starvation and plenty when there was plenty. Guess what you did with it? You ate as much as you could so that you could develop as much body fat as possible. So when inevitably starvation was the next cycle, maybe for days, maybe for weeks, maybe for months, then you had had a high probability of survival. So why we’re in this environment now where capitalism and industry have made food, like, I don’t wanna say free, but. Mostly demonetized, like, uh, comparatively to all of history. Certainly, yeah. Oh my God. Oh my God. And so, you know, when in our nation and in almost every modern nation of the world, the poorer you are, statistically, the more likely you are to suffer from obesity. This is something that would, can you imagine going back to Benjamin Franklin’s time and explaining to him like, you know, our poorer people are actually the fatter ones and he’s just gonna be like. What, how you’re like, well you see food basically costs almost nothing. It’s really weird, but we have other problems. He’s like, like what? Like social media disagreements. He’s like, what? And, and that’s just to say we really are out of our time. You know, we evolved on biological timescales. The new paradigm of evolution is technological and technology evolves, orders of magnitudes faster. Mm-hmm. That because technology evolves so fast, we’re in a hyper palatable food environment and we’re sinking instead of swimming because it’s really hard to resist all these super tasty, super convenient foods. Mostly because. We want them. Right? Like imagine if it was really bad for you physically to spend amazing time with your closest dearest friend, family, and children, you’d be like, well, okay, so I’m supposed to res resist that. And I’m like, Ah-huh. Like when grandpa calls and he is like, do you want to gather around the dinner table and share wonderful stories? And the kids would be laughing like, oh, sorry grandpa. No can do. It’s bad for my health. Oh my God. It would feel like someone is ripping a part of you away, but. That drive to be social is actually newer in evolution than the drive to consume calories. Mm. Starvation is a known entity from the time when we were just DNA fragments swimming in the soup. It predates everything. Fighting your ability to eat food. That’s delicious. Is it just so an uphill of a battle, it can’t be exaggerated. That being said, technology adapts so quickly that it can help us get completely out of this entire mess. In the next probably 10 years, we’ll lift all of us entirely out of it, and that transformation has already begun. Do we think it’s only technology that can lift us out of it? Or is there any cultural, uh, play at this point? Because I, I make fun of Italians a lot for having very hard and fast rules about food, right? Don’t mix cheese with fish do with this. But, but, but I think there is something, uh, within having these cultural norms around food. It’s the reason Starbucks is not in Italy because they would get run out of town because they have the cultural norm of going to their local coffee shop. It’s the reason that if you try and. Stand up and eat a meal in France, people will shout you down. Mm-hmm. ’cause their cultural norm, really, God, the French are so new, you gotta sit down. They are. But, but I think something about these cultural norms rooting people to some sort of behavior that is objectively healthy and also slightly, at least slightly impervious to specifically American industry and capitalism. Mm-hmm. As in Italy shutting Starbucks. I think there’s something to that, but is that just like shooting BB guns at the tank of American industry, putting a KFC into your town? I think we should take over the whole world and install puppet. KFC governments. Oh, Jesus Christ. Not the colonel. The colonel. You not eat fried chicken. Um, no. Um, you, you’re totally right, Josh. The, um, it’s a tough battle. Can cultural practices gain traction? Yes. Can they have marginal effects? Yes. Does hyper palatability adapt faster in the consumer environment than culture takes root or can even at maximum sustain itself? Yeah. By like a factor of 10. And so there are differences that you can instantiate right now into your own cultural practice that will 100% help you resist being, you know, over overwhelmed by this and. There’s an even more powerful tool in cultural practice. It’s called knowing what your body needs and nutrition. Mm-hmm. And just not buying everything at the store. Listen to your body. I mean, the dark side of capitalism is like, if you want it, they’re gonna give it to you. Yeah. And it could be toxic for you, but you got dollars and they got the product. The really wonderful thing about capitalism and very different from most other systems, nobody. Forces you to do anything. You know, people say the junk food industry is this crazy thing, guys, have you ever seen a junk food pusher or a junk food dealer? Someone’s like, Hey, try, try this Pepsi. You’re like, well, no, sir. With a, with a, with a coach’s nasty. I’ve got it all. He’s got like. Pepsi’s regular full sugar Pepsis on one side and full fat Cheez-Its on the other. And you’re like, I, I went to school. McGruff the crime dog told me I’m, I should be talking to you. But that does look, does look tasty. Although I guess Cheez-Its inside of a man’s coat is kind of like, I don’t know. Yeah, they’re gonna get steamy in there, but at the same time, other, it’s bad marketing. Other countries, I think, in fact, most other countries in the world do have strong regulation against. Junk food marketing to say children. Yeah. Which America doesn’t. So I think there are practices that we’ve let in that do Yeah. I, I honestly don’t understand that because children don’t have purchasing power. Children don’t have money. Yeah. It is illegal for children to acquire money because we have child labor laws, which I think are very good laws because exploitation, exploitation of children, workforce is crazy. But because we don’t like. That’s the thing is mom and dad make the choice. Yeah. Yeah. And if the children are screaming about they want McDonald’s, guess what you can do, mom and dad, you just don’t get a McDonald’s. Right? Because if your kids don’t learn today that they don’t get everything they scream about how is college gonna work? I mean, my God, probably not. Well. I mean, gee, right? Like at some point you gotta grow up to the idea that there are things you want, there are things you need, and the intersection of those is contextual. Sometimes the intersection is like, yep. And sometimes it’s like that’s just not how this works. And I do feel for parents that have a lot going on and the extra noise of their kids clamoring for McDonald’s and sometimes it just shuts them up. And the thing is, there’s nothing wrong with a few days a week taking your kids to McDonald’s and getting them a happy meal so they can be happy. Absolutely. It’s when it’s happening. Three meals a day, the. I don’t wanna say excuses, but the reasoning for that starts to become a little bit wacky. And the advertising problem is, well, mom and dad, you’re, you’re the people going to the store. You have 100% purchasing power. One of, um, my, uh, well, geez, my, my, my partner in crime, co-founder of R-P-C-O-A, Mr. Nick Shaw, he was messing around with his son. He has little kids. They’re grow growing up now, but a few years back he was like, Hey buddy. How much money do we have? And the kids started speculating and he’s like, no, you don’t have any money. I have the money. Mommy and I have the money. It was hilarious. But that’s really the thing. Mm. And so at the end of the day, it’s really tough to have a regulatory environment that prevents people from accessing. What they want. Yeah. And what they’re gonna buy anyway. Like there’s one interesting fact in economics of this kind of thing, which is that as you raise junk food prices, the elasticity is actually such that I. A lot of people just keep buying it, even though it’s more expensive and they complain that it’s more expensive. Mm-hmm. But they’re still gonna buy it. Obviously if you make Cheetos a thousand dollars a pack, no one would buy them anymore except Elon Musk or something. But, uh, within normal boundary layers of what is politically feasible to regulate as far as price controls, this stuff has very much less of an effect than you would think. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with just brutal evolutionary drives like. This is how humans are wired, and luckily the way to fight those is through. This is gonna get creepy. I am the evil mic of the two Dr. Wakes. After all, pharmacology. Now obviously education and determination to eat well are always gonna work. Cultural factors are amazing. Mm-hmm. Um. They need help. Yeah, they need help. Machine guns are cool. Little cannons are cool, but when the main battle tanks roll up, you’re like, all right, now we’re in the war. The main battle tanks and the super fighter jets here are going to be pharmacology and eventually genetic engineering, and that’s gonna be a huge deal because with genetic engineering, we’re gonna be able to modify ourselves to be more reflective of our modern environment instead of having to struggle desperately against an environment that just kind of left us behind. You wanna move off the grid, go to a commie and raise some goats. I’ve been telling you I wanna do this for months. That’s the only move. I think that’s weird. And now, and now you tell me you wanna do it. Well, thanks for spurring us on Dr. Mike. Are they gonna be genetically engineered goats that you, they’re hyper intelligent. How? You have no idea how you could do that part. You wanna do that part that’re useful? Niles 18 nipples on these goats. Whoa. The cheese will be incredible. You know, Nicole, life gets busy sometimes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a new language. That’s right Josh. And with Rosetta Stone, you can fit language learning into your schedule on your desktop, on your phone, wherever you are. Rosetta Stone’s immersive method makes learning feel natural. There are no English translations, just real world language that actually sticks. Uh, so I’ve actually started learning Spanish with Rosetta Stone. No way. I programmed it into my sundas. Oh my gosh. Which is really nice. So now I have like my own little. Scheduled learning time. Uh, I’m really amazed at how quickly I’ve picked up useful phrases as, as Mo fae Nicole, whether I have five minutes or an hour. Uh, it’s cool ’cause I can learn on my own time at my own pace. That’s so wonderful. I’m glad that you kind of like quelled the scary sundaes, you know, that we all have by learning a new language. See Gras. Rosetta Stone is a trusted language expert with 30 years of experience, millions of users and 25 languages offered. Rosetta Stone is the go-to language learning solution. Their list of languages include Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Dutch, and so much more. Don’t wait. Unlock your language learning potential. Now a hotdog is a sandwich. Listeners can grab Rosetta Stone’s lifetime membership for 50% off. That’s unlimited access to 25 language courses for life. Visit Rosetta stone.com/hotdog to get started and claim your 50% off today. Don’t miss out. Go to rosetta stone.com/hotdog and start learning today. I think I forgot to use our own discount code. No matter you’re paying full price like a schmuck. Schmuck, well use the discount code. Be smarter than me. All right, Nicole and Mike, we’ve heard what you and I have to say. Now it’s time to find out what other wacky Eddie of rattling out there in the universe. It’s time for a little segment. We call opinions are like Cass. Alright, first up we have, she’s making me say this at Lana Condor. The number one fan of a hot dog is a sandwich. Has written, is she written? Has written in Keto isn’t as healthy as people think. Dr. Mike, what Say you. There’s a lot of truth in that. Mm-hmm. Keto is plenty healthy if it’s in a calorie controlled context. And if you’re eating mostly healthy foods, you can eat very low carbohydrates and be very healthy. The thing is, it’s that same thing we were talking about earlier. People say, I’m eating keto and it’s this magic checkbox, but for a lot of people, the magic checkbox is like, it’s not just one check mark. It’s like three of the five or four. They think keto as a panacea. So once I’m doing keto, I just have to care about anything. So you’ll see them eating like, well, literal hot dogs and dipping them into like cheese sauce. Yeah. And someone’s like, gross, no, I don’t know much about nutrition, but like that seems not like the best thing to eat. I’m like, no, no, it’s okay. I’m keto. You’re like, okay. What? I, I think Keto says that carbohydrates is quite a unique poison and they’re not. For some folks, can keto be an excellent way to manage their hunger signaling and, uh, make sure they don’t overeat? Absolutely. And if you eat mostly healthy foods and get some greens in there for the vitamins and minerals, ketos amazing. But is keto one of those things that you’re just gonna do it and it’s gonna be magical, like mm-hmm. It’s not enough, man. You get rid of your carbs. You’ve just gotten rid of your carbs and accomplished almost nothing outside of that. I, I didn’t, were you carb phobic? Would you consider yourself carb phobic? I, I think we have all, I think we all have internalized carb phobias. Mm-hmm. Especially growing up in Orange County. And literally a soccer mom in a yellow H two Hummer after a sick, after a basketball game, drove us through the In-N-Out drive through, and she ordered a a four by four, uh, protein style and looked at me like a 9-year-old and said A fat 9-year-old, by the way. And just said the bun’s the only bad part for you. Yeah. She had a southern accent in Orange County. ’cause they’re just kinda like so Republican that they talk like they’re southern. Excellent. Um, but yeah. But that’s, that’s the thing that I think we all grew up with in our era. Yeah. Um, I don’t know. I feel like whenever I was doing keto, I was, what was it? I would say I’m keto, but I drink I, which was Yes. Isn’t that great? It was great. Um, it did help me, like you said, surprisingly, it helped me realize what hunger was. Which I wasn’t aware of before I was doing it, so I don’t think it’s quote unquote healthy, but for someone who you know is in the food industry and is constantly surrounded by the most ridiculous, crazy foods. Yeah. Literally our tagline of Mythical Kitchen is dreams become food. Literally the Disneyland of food is where we work. I think doing keto, it’s tough me realize, of course, it made me realize what Hungry Nicole and Satiated Nicole was. Mm-hmm. So it helped me a lot. But I will agree that it’s not necessarily the healthiest thing. If you’re eating cheese and bacon and hot dogs every day, you’re gonna have a bad time. Yeah. But if you know you’re incorporated, like you said, your veggies and your, your proteins and a little bit of fat and avocado every now and then. Yes. I loved it when I was doing it. I really, but also to me, to me, that’s any diet, right? Like I’ve known people who are, who are, are jacked and fit, who are keto, who are vegetarian, who eat eight times a day, who eat one time a day. Sure. And I think anytime you change a stimulus and do. Keto lean gains diet. God, that’s a throwback. Uh, paleo, any of these when you change the stimulus on your normal diet of I’m just eating whatever. Yeah. You learn what it actually means. Sure, sure, sure. To think about your food. Yes. So I think any of these diets being thoughtful could have had that same effect for you. I totally agree. You know? Yeah. That’s very well put. I have another opinion here. Um, gluten says everyone is obsessed with protein when they should be obsessed with fiber. This is resident fiber. Dad, Noah, gluten. We love him. Oh. You know, obsessions are maybe worse than casseroles. So fiber is awesome and it’s super healthy. And it’s amazing because a lot of the high fiber foods like whole wheats, veggies, and fruits come stock not just with fiber, which is awesome. But with tons of vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, which are certain kind of plant chemicals that are really good for you. Mm-hmm. And they’re really very filling for very few calories and very satiating for a long period of time. Right. So if you’re getting your fiber through those foods, I think a little junior league fiber obsession is a wonderful thing. If you’re coming home every day with a can of metal musel and a can of. You know, Jack Daniels and getting to, getting to work on getting through that can, one way or another, then, um, gee whiz, you know, fibers like protein at a certain level you’ve had enough. Mm-hmm. And unlike protein, when you have a lot, a lot of fiber, the digestive situation becomes. You guys familiar with the term gastric motility, like how speedily things are going through your GI tract? I can like kind of pick out the words and what they mean. Yeah. What mean? Yeah. Yeah. Imagine, imagine those commercials for like a draino where they show the, the visualization of the clogged pipe and the draino makes it all sparkly clean. Well, fibers like super draino. And at some point, guess what happens to the draino goes out the other end, right? And so if you overeat fiber, you can actually experience bloating. Farting. Pooping, which scares people who are sitting in stalls next to you because they think World War II began, oh, you gotta do it with headphones so you don’t hear the noise. That’s what I do. You just have like classical music on and everyone else is suffering. Oh, Tarantino movie. Terrible. No, no, no. Terrible. That’s how I do it. So fiber, I think is, is almost exactly like protein now, to the gentleman’s point who commented that? Mm-hmm. More people should get more fiber and if it’s through Whole Foods, I think that’s wonderful, but mm-hmm. Obsession. She was, you know, maybe we have too many obsessions nowadays and not enough concerted efforts to do better, but that’s just me being an old curmudgeony man and shooting people’s dreams down. Do you remember the TikTok trend quote, internal shower? Where people would drink a bunch of chia seed. This is the thing that, well, I know it from, from the girl that did the protocol with the cabbage water. That’s what she called. Do you know what I’m talking about, the Dr. Phil lady? No. She would make a cabbage solution out of cabbage, salt, and water. Oh, and she would call it internal? Yeah. She would literally feed people sauerkraut and it would make internal showers. The one that I saw was a just a ton of chia seeds, which are just loaded with. Fiber. Yeah. And then people would just get massive diarrhea and they called it internal shower, which is way grosser than gastric motility. Um, anyways, they had the, uh, U-S-D-A-I think had to like, put out, or the Department of Health had to put out a warning, like, please don’t do this. Yeah, I, I like fiber. I mean, listen, do I take, eat an apple, eat some blueberries? Do I take more fiber supplements than I do like protein supplements? No. Yeah, like I have more protein shakes than I do a benefiber, but I still like sometimes have a benefiber just to like remind or like a, or like an apple. Mike, you’re watching me transform into the old curmudgeon. You’re such a curmudgeon, uh, in real time because my solution for almost everything is if, if you could just be 40% more, more normal about everything, that would be really, really cool. I think that’d be really, really cool. Uh, well, that’s our time. Dr. Mike, man, I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. This is an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. You were great. Thank you so much guys. This was a wonderful experience. Of course. Uh, where can people find you? You got anything to plug? Yeah, so we have a new product actually. Plug away. It is called the Genius Shot. Yay. It has 23 grams of protein, zero grams of fat, zero grams of carbs. It is really tasty. It doesn’t go bad for months and months outside of refrigeration. And it passes TSA clearance so you can travel with it. It makes pretty much anything including soda and juice and it is wonderful in every single way. So check that out. Genius Shot. Just shoot it a Google something should come up. And also Renaissance prioritization, if you can’t spell that ’cause I can’t RP strength on YouTube. You’ll see my giant ugly head and, uh, click on my head and, uh, maybe I’ll say factual things, but, uh, we are not a family show, so make sure the kids are in another room because holy crap, some of the stuff I say I wouldn’t have said. Holy crap, if you know what. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, click on his head. God, I’m gonna rip so many of those genius shots. Uh, that note. Thank y’all for listening to A Hotdog Is A Sandwich. We got audio only episodes every Wednesday, video version out on YouTube on Sunday. If you wanna be featured on opinions or like casserole, hit us up at 8 3 3 Dog Pod one. Our number again is 8 3 3 Dog Pod one. And for more Mythical Kitchen check out our other videos, we launch new episodes every week. See y’all next time.