All right, welcome back everybody to episode two of the Building Lifelong Athletes podcast. I am your host Jordan Renneke. Thank you so much for tuning in, whether it's on video or on your favorite podcast app, that really means a lot. And today we're going to talk about nutrition and diet. Essentially last week we talked about the kind of the necessary nine or kind of my framework for the things we should be hitting for optimal health. And today we're going to talk a little bit deeper looking at nutrition and specifically, and we're going to talk about what it looks like to build healthy dietary patterns. So what I'd like to say is essentially I like to create a health-promoting diet. That's kind of how I label this, a health-promoting diet, meaning that we are moving towards goals and improving as many risk factors as possible with this diet. And I'll leave this very broad. You know, I want to say, what is a health-promoting diet? Well, it can look different for everyone. And honestly, it probably will look different for everyone. I'm not saying you have to eat one specific way. You know, I don't like to brand myself into that or kind of put myself into a corner. I'm just saying there's lots of different ways to reach the goal we're looking for with nutrition. But overall, a health-promoting diet is decreasing as many risk factors as we can while maintaining a consistent approach throughout. You know, like I said, it's no good if we're just eating something for two weeks and then we go back to what we're doing. We want to create a sustainable plan. So health-promoting diet means we're working towards that goal. We're improving things and we have objective measures, whether that is quantitative things like numbers that we can track or subjective things like our feelings. And we'll talk about those more in detail later in the podcast, but we want to have markers or ways to kind of check in and make sure, hey, is this going the right direction? Because the last thing I want to do is we start something, we're eating it, you know, in this specific way. And then we find out, oh my gosh, like my numbers are awful or I feel like garbage, but I'm continuing to do this. So we want to have checkpoints as well. But health-promoting diet is a overarching term that I like to say kind of way to describe is that it's, we're working towards eating better and it's not specifically worried about one specific way to eat. It's going to be finding the way that works best for you. All right. So the last topic we're going to talk about here is kind of even a little bit of history as to why we think nutrition information is so confusing. I mean, if you type in best diet, you're going to get a billion results on Google and it's going to be really confusing because some people saying, hey, it's this. Other people saying, hey, it's that. In reality, you know, life is very rarely black and white when it comes to the science. And so it's, there's kind of some nuance and some greater in between. That's where we tend to live in reality. And so the first thing is that it's challenging. You know, we started nutritional research coming from a lens of, you know, scarcity. So we're having nutritional deficiencies because we weren't eating X, Y, or Z. And so we actually didn't have enough. We were lacking in a lot of capabilities. And so what we essentially did was we found, okay, it looks like this miss nutrient causes this disease, so we should supplement there. So we really focused on like one nutrient, one macronutrient, something like that. And that was like how nutritional research really started and it made some incredible advances and it made, you know, in our Western society, we weren't having people having issues from nutritional deficiencies very often. But what that does is it kind of focuses in on single problems like this nutrient, this macronutrient, this is the problem. You know, this vitamin, this mineral, what have you, this is the problem. Kind of gave us this granular approach of like, this is where we're going. And as we've kind of moved over the years from an idea of scarcity to kind of now we have abundance and that's our main issue. The general approach of just focusing on one thing or one nutrient doesn't seem to be correlating with what we're seeing today. Obviously, there's lots of factors to why nutrition has changed in terms of policy, recommendations, all that. But we kind of, if you think about it, going from a scarcity mindset to now we have an abundance, we need to adjust how we frame nutritional research through that too and it's really challenging. Another reason it's so confusing is it's really, really hard to do good nutritional research. And I have so much respect for everyone who's out there doing that, but it's just so challenging. It's so challenging because, you know, if we're doing say a pharmaceutical study, right, you can give someone a placebo pill and another person the experimental pill and you can see the difference. Here, it's really hard to give someone placebo, you know, food. I guess you could give people like odorless, colorless pastes, maybe. I don't know. It'd be challenging either way you know, you would know what you're doing. And let's say even if you get a perfect world where you have completely control their food, how long can you really run that for? Maybe a couple of days, couple of weeks, maybe a month. I mean, that's a long time, but eventually people leave those controlled environments, go back to their home and that's where we tend to see issues. But it's so hard to do really good controlled nutritional interventions because the timeframe is also super long. You know, it's not like, hey, let's eat here. Then we're checking in a couple of weeks and see what's going on. I mean, it usually takes months and years to see changes from nutritional changes. So it's really challenging. And a lot of our information that we do get is from epidemiologic studies. So epidemiologic means we're kind of looking at a big data, you know, a big amount of data and looking to try to find trends. And obviously from that data, we can't find causative, you know, conclusions. We can't say, hey, this definitively caused that. We can see associations, which are incredibly helpful. But typically nutrition has lots of epidemiologic studies looking at large things. And a lot of times what we'll find is it's really hard to control for all those variables. Like let's say for an example, a common theme we see is that vegetarian diets, people tend to have better outcomes on those. And could it be the diet? It absolutely could be. I mean, there's lots of health improving and health promoting things that are inside a vegetarian diet. But the question is, do those people who eat a vegetarian diet, do they exercise more? They probably smoke less. They probably move more. They probably, you know, take care of themselves more or kind of really health conscious. So it's kind of these conflicting things and it's difficult to understand and pull from that. Was it the diet that did the change or was that lifestyle or that person who cares about that healthy lifestyle? And so that's really challenging. And so that's just one thing I want to mention as well. And then the third thing is this stuff is really tricky, you know, in terms of, you know, we think of calories and everyone talks about like calories in, calories out, like that's everything. Like if you just eat fewer calories, you're going to lose weight. And you're right. I mean, the math doesn't lie. And if you take in fewer calories, then you burn out, you're going to lose weight. That's it's that simple, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, from a mathematical standpoint, no, from a biological, hormonal, psychological standpoint, it's really tricky. We used to think that, you know, fat wasn't metabolically active. Now we know that does. We know that obesity can lead to a whole milieu of hormonal and psychological changes that make it very difficult to, you know, decrease our eating or caloric consumption. So it's just a lot trickier than we thought it was. And so that just adds another layer of complexity. So not only is it tough to do the research, it's tough to kind of change what's going on in our body and our understanding is changing constantly too. So long story short, research is really tough to do here. It's a really complex subject. So of course it's going to be confusing to talk about this topic. Okay. So the question you might have is, well, Jordan, what diet is best for overall health? And that is like saying, Hey, what is, you know, the meaning of life? That's a really challenging thing and a topic up for debate for, you know, for generations that people have talked about over and over again. But saying what is the best diet for health is really opening a huge can of worms. You know, there's specific ideas that we talk about in terms of what diet, you know, there's a bunch of different diets that they talk about. There's lots of literature on certain things. One article that I linked to specifically kind of gave a nice overview of, you know, what are these specific diets? Are there any evidence for them? They looked at things specifically, I'm gonna read it off here is low carb, low fat or vegetarian, low glycemic, Mediterranean and vegan. And those are the big ones that they talked about. And essentially long story short, the findings were that all of them had benefits in some way, shape or form. And so there was no one specific diet that seemed to be the best for one specific thing. I mean, if you look at it, it can kind of make sense that they all have certain things that we see together, kind of grouping these ideas together. If you look at these diets, they are, you know, not very high in refined carbohydrates, added sugars, lots of trans fats or saturated fats. So like these kind of common things here, you know, and things that they do have a lot of are typically fruits and vegetables, nuts, things like avocado, olive oil, and less red meats or processed meats. And so using this kind of framework, those are kind of the ideas that we're looking for in terms of like, what are the overarching ideas behind these diets. And so these diets all have a lot more in common than they do indifferent from each other. So if you like take a step back, yeah, I know some are different. Obviously, if you look at a low carb approach versus, you know, maybe a high fat or high carbohydrate, low fat approach, obviously there's very different macronutrient ratios. But we see time and time again that people can be successful on these different things. And so it's not so much what you're doing, it's more what's right for you, can you implement it, and do these certain traits kind of line up together in terms of eating these whole foods unprocessed, that's kind of the general framework you'll see for most of these diets. I think on top of that, there's another paper that I'll link to talked about, are there any name brand diets that are better like the Ornish diet, the Atkins diet, Jenny Craig, and long story short, no, they didn't find anyone was specifically better for particular markers. It really came down to adherence where people adhering to it, and they all had benefits in terms of weight loss, maybe some low carb had a little bit better weight loss in the short term, but by a year kind of evened out. And so there's nothing huge or groundbreaking there saying like, hey, this name brand diet, that's probably an expensive way to eat. If you're buying their packaged meal plans, there's no evidence that say that's better than other diets that you can just follow at home. And so overall, it's kind of confusing to say, okay, well, if you say nothing matters, then like, what can I do? Well, I want to break it down here, kind of think about a framework. This is a framework that I've learned from Peter Tia, he's a fantastic physician and podcaster as well, and I really respect his information. He kind of put it very eloquently that at any given time, there's three main levers we can control in our diet, whether that is, you know, when we're eating, what we're eating, or how much we're eating. And so we think we'll break it down one by one. And we talk about when we're eating, we're talking about things like intermittent fasting. I didn't specifically mention fasting here, I think it's kind of a whole different topic, but it's definitely an option. Like, let's say you're like, no, I'm not changing the way I eat. Like I enjoy how I eat, and I like the food that I'm eating, but you still want to make a change and then maybe you want to lose weight or kind of limit or at least stay neutral where you're at. Intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding is a way you can do that. So you're essentially controlling how much of the day you're allowing yourself to eat. A super common one is to give yourself an eight hour window, you know, to eat and then you have 16 hours of fasting. That can be one. There's obviously a bunch of different ways. Some people do one meal a day where it's kind of condensed down to four hours. Other people, you know, do intermittent day fasting. There's a whole bunch of stuff. That's not what this is about. But that's kind of our first thing where if you say, hey, I'm not willing to make any change in like what I'm eating, or I don't want to count on a meeting, then potentially restricting down our feeding window as a way to do that to kind of self restrict yourself in some way, shape or form. Next, we're going to talk about the food quality. So when I mean food quality, we're going to talk about, okay, I don't want to eat X, Y, or Z. And this is kind of where those individual diets come in, right? So we talk about I don't want to eat animal products. Okay, that's our vegan diet comes in. You're kind of self selecting out of that. Others will say I want to, you know, carbohydrate restrict, meaning I don't want to eat too many carbohydrates. So you're kind of doing that as well. And so that's another way we can control diet by eating specific food items or you know, macronutrient quantities. And then the third lever that we're looking at is how much reading and that's kind of where we're counting calories. You know, intermittent fasting kind of limits you just from time you're not counting. There's another way to limit what you're doing is just by counting your calories or counting your macronutrients and kind of limiting yourself that way. It's been very successful for a lot of people. I've done it with a lot of success as well. And that way you know how much you're doing but essentially you are calculating out your daily total daily energy estimate and you're kind of figuring out how much you're spending in a day and kind of going from there whether you need to gain, stay the same or lose weight. There's kind of there but those are the three main levers and I think it's a really good framework of thinking about hey, at any given time, I should either be thinking about when I'm eating, what I'm eating or how much I'm eating. And at any time you should have at least one of those lever pulled. If you want to be locked in entirely, you know, you can think about three of them meaning hey, I know when I'm eating, I know how much I'm eating and I know what I'm eating. It's down to the minute detail. That's possible but for an average person we should at least be thinking about one of those three levers because if you're not, if you think about it, if you're not worried about when you eat, what you eat or how much you eat, that's essentially our standard American diet where you eat whenever you feel like you're maybe hungry, maybe you're bored, I don't know and you just go ahead and you eat. And so it's really tricky and if we're not thinking about it, it can be challenging. I mean there's data out there that shows that the average adult gains about one pound per year. But one pound per year does not seem like a lot and you know what that means is day by day you have a very small increase in calories and we're talking like maybe 50 calories or something like that. I mean I have to run the actual math but it's not a lot but it adds up over time and it adds up over 20 years and we got 20 years. And so a lot of times what we think about is our body is very good at self-regulating but we tend to have this creep and that's our standard American diet. If we don't watch what we're doing, if we're not conscious of what we're eating or the quality of food we're eating, that is almost the norm to expect that we will gain weight just because that seems to be the trend that we see in the literature. Alright so I've kind of been talking all over the place about this specific diet, that specific diet and I'm not going to mention them necessarily by name because I don't think it's really worth it. I think we can find an approach that works for you and we can talk about that more, we can talk more about individual diets later if we want to but at the end of the day it's kind of a framework. Most people have an idea going into it you know. Most people don't come to me and talk about weight loss and just say like, "Oh yeah I haven't heard anything, I don't know, what do I do, what do I do?" Most a lot of times I say, you know, eat less, move more, those are what they hear or they say, "Hey I want to try this diet, I want to try that diet." And so that's kind of half the battle and so I always say, "How do I know if a diet's working?" Well the number one most important thing is are you able to stick to this diet? So kind of adherence is the term I talk about that. If you're able to stick to a diet, man I am so much more excited about that diet than any other perfect diet. You know maybe it's not ideal, maybe it's not by the letter what the diet recommends but at the end of the day if you can stick to something, man you're going to have way better chance of success if you're doing that as opposed to, "Oh I want to try this," and you do it for two weeks and then you fall back and then, "I want to do this for a month." So finding something you can stick to, like adherence is by far and away the number one most important thing. So that's why when patients say, "Hey I've heard about this, can I try this?" I mean half the battle is already there, we're already coming in saying, "Hey they want to try this, so cool, we already got buy-in from the patient or the client so we're excited so let's ride that wave." And then from there we can kind of tweak things but if someone has an idea, I'll usually run with it unless it's a terrible idea or I think it's dangerous idea, then I'll say, "Uh maybe not," and kind of think about it. But adherence is number one most important thing. Number two thing we can do to kind of see, "Hey is my diet working?" is looking at quantitative measurements. So quantitative meaning numbers. We can look at things like blood pressure, we can look at our lipids, we can look at our blood sugar, and those are kind of like the big three that we're looking for. Additionally we can talk about body weight or body composition as well and so if you think about those four I guess tie them together so body weight, blood sugars, lipids, and blood pressure. I mean those are definitively quantitative numbers that we can look at. You can trace it. You know if your blood pressure starts off 150 over 90 and on this diet you start going down and down then you're 120 over 80. Well we've made an awesome improvement. You know and then conversely if you've started with lipids of with an LDL of let's say you know 100 and then all of a sudden your LDL is up to 500. You're like, "Okay well that's something to consider. We might have to look at it and kind of tweak it from there." And then the third thing too that we talk about is that we can look at is qualitative differences meaning how are you feeling. Are you feeling like you have a lot of energy? Are you feeling good? Are you feeling really tired all the time? Do you feel sluggish? Do you just you know feel off? And those are kind of the things that we're looking for and so kind of combining those. Those are harder because obviously it's subjective but if you go to a diet and you start having some improvements but you feel like garbage that's probably one that you're not going to want to stick on long term. You know maybe it's a short term thing and stick through it you'll be fine but just something to consider as well. And so it's kind of tricky to say, "Hey well something's looking good and other things aren't." And that's really where the nuance comes in and that's kind of the next section I want to talk about is well like what if some things are getting better and some things are getting worse. You know I talked about before the LDL number. That's a common one I see a lot is you know people who are eating low carb some people respond to that fantastically and all their markers and everything looks good and you're like, "Oh all right you're doing great." Other people their LDL tends to shoot through the roof and if you're losing weight and your blood sugar is getting better but your LDL goes to the roof then we you know it's time kind of that question is, "Whoa what do we do?" And that's really where the nuance comes in and talking with your physician is I think super beneficial to kind of figure out, "Hey what's most important to you?" Have a informed conversation about what the risks are what the benefits and you know going for what you feel is most important. Other people you know it's kind of talking about like I said subjectively if their numbers are getting better but they feel like garbage you know that's not a sustainable thing you might have to tweak some things. And so you know if we hit a point where we're confused at all and I think it'd be time and wise to kind of reach out for help and say, "Hey you know this is what I'm going through these are my experience what are your what are your thoughts? Should I keep going with this? Should I not?" And just kind of working on a conversation you know you're going to know yourself better than anyone else. So if you're feeling off or you feel uncomfortable or you have specific desires and goals like let that be known so that we can work together you know as as a team and kind of figure out hey what's the next best step for you. All right and then another question that I ask about as well okay if I'm going on this diet do I have to be on a diet forever? And I was tweaked that mind frame mindset and I kind of say well the goal is not to be on a diet because diet is something that you're going to do for a short amount of time right. What we want to do is change your dietary patterns and that's why I kind of talk about this you know building a health promoting diet meaning and this is a diet to kind of catch all term for what you eat but I don't want necessarily to be a diet I want to be a lifestyle. So I want you to do something that you can be you know see yourself doing for years and years and years and able to sustain it and so I don't want to just be okay I can do this for the month and then I'm be done. You know there's a time and place for that if you're a bodybuilder cutting for a show or something like that or you need to make weight I get that and we deal with it but I think that I don't want this to be a diet feeling like it's overly restrictive and you're like oh I can't wait for this to be done. What we really want is this to be a lifestyle because we found time and time again with research if you can incorporate something into your lifestyle make it a habit make it a part of your routine you're going to do it just go through the motion every day you're not going to think about it it's going to become second nature to you and that's what we really want. You know we want to build these lifelong habits because if we want to be healthy for life and want to stay active it's going to be so much easier if you just incorporate this into your lifestyle rather than having to fight against that every day. It seems like we have a limited amount of willpower so every day it becomes a you know a fight against your diet or your nutrition then that's one less area of your life you're going to be focused on because you're going to be so focused on that so really the big thing is not making it about today or tomorrow or the next day it's building something that's sustainable for years and years to come. So thanks so much for tuning in I know this is a very broad overview of nutrition but once again the take home from today I really want you to think about is thinking about those three pillars in terms of when we eat what we eat or how much we eat that's kind of a good framework from there if you know if you start to think about OK like I don't want to give up anything I don't I want to eat what I want you know my mother's perfect example of this and that she wants her ice cream which is fantastic and she intermittent fast and it works for her. That's one example let's say OK next example is and I want to change up what I want to eat I want to try a low carbohydrate diet or vegetarian diet. OK that's fine too or if you say hey I want to go and count macros that's great but of those three levers that we talked about one of those should probably be pulled at any time and with that general framework of those levers then underneath that is where we start fitting in those specific diets say OK inside that lever framework I want to try this diet or that diet and that's what's really important and when thinking about hey is this diet working for me number one thing about adherence is this something you can do for a long time because that's really really really important to me is getting you on to something that's sustainable. Number two is hey quantitatively how are my metrics doing my blood pressure my lipids things like that and number three how am I feeling how am I performing. That's kind of what we're looking for and then from there we iterate right if we're not there we tweak some things go back but this is going to be ever changing ever evolving you know the way now is not the way I ate you know 10 years ago no will it probably be the way in 10 years from now and so we're always kind of changing but I really want to encourage you to kind of incorporate this into your lifestyle and so if we think about that take home for the day that we think about this overarching principles how can we implement it and help me make it last for life I think we're on the right path to making you a lifelong athlete but thank you so much for tuning in today I really appreciate it I can't tell you how much it means to me that you're listening to this I know there's so many things you could be listening to so I really appreciate it if you found this helpful or you enjoyed it in the world if you would like comment or subscribe I think that would help tremendously to help get the world out your word out on this and if you have friends or family might find this interesting or you might be beneficial to them please share it that would mean the world so thanks so much for stopping by I really appreciate it and we'll catch you later.
