Let's be honest, the whole best diet debate is exhausting. You just wanna know how to eat to stay healthy without the hype. In this video, we'll simplify the science and give you the practical takeaways for finding the best diet that works for you. Let's get started. And welcome back team to the Building Life and Life and Life of These Podcasts. Thanks so much for stopping by. If we haven't met yet, my name is Jordan Renneke. I'm a dual board certified physician in family and sports medicine. And the goal of this podcast is to keep you active and healthy for life through actionable evidence and form education. And today we're looking all at a study as looking into the topic of what diet is best to maintain your health. So let's get started. So first we're talking all about something called cardio metabolic disease. So cardio metabolic disease is this umbrella term includes a bunch of things, including type two diabetes, obesity, heart disease, all that fun stuff. Those are cardio metabolic diseases. Cardio metabolic meaning cardio is heart and metabolism essentially like your insulin sensitivity, adipose tissue, so all that stuff. So this whole spectrum of cardio metabolic diseases are the preventable diseases basically. Things like type two diabetes, obesity, overweight, potentially heart disease, all those things that have a significant lifestyle component, cardio metabolic disease, that's that umbrella. And that's what we're talking about today. And we talk about this a lot because they're really important, right? It represents a significant global burden causing over 17, 18 million deaths annually from cardiovascular disease alone. So just cardiovascular disease, 17, 18 million deaths. And over 500 million people worldwide are affected by diabetes and obesity. So a huge number. And beyond the human cost, there's a massive economic and societal impact as well. And the reason we care is because diet is highlighted as a modified risk factor for these diseases. And this gives us an opportunity for prevention. And that's the biggest thing, right? That's all I care about is how do we prevent these things? Not all I care about. Obviously if you have them, we deal with them. But if we can prevent something from ever happening, that is the Holy grail and that's what we care about. And this study is kind of looking at overarching saying, "Hey, what dietary approaches could we use to potentially prevent these cardio metabolic diseases?" So that's what we're going into here. And real quick, kind of looking back on where nutrition science has changed, it's kind of evolved from focusing on a single nutrient to kind of understanding there's a big dietary pattern. So it used to be like one big thing, right? You'd be like, "Okay, we're focusing on only saturated fat or only carbohydrates or whatever." And obviously there are still time and place for those things. They used to be the big thing. But now we're understanding it's a little more nuanced than that. And it used to be just as easy as like count calories. That's it. That's the only thing that matters, count calories. And once again, we understand the whole dietary pattern is complex and they've now turned the idea dietary patterns. And I say dietary pattern is because it's very nuanced. So it's no longer just a, I'm on this simple diet and I follow this one thing. It's like, well, there's a lot of options to do. And so when I'm talking about how to build a healthy dietary plan, part of the Necessary 9, I include the term dietary pattern because it's more than just the foods you eat, right? It's the amount of foods you're eating, the quality of foods, all these different things. And so that's what's going on. And the focus is now on broader food groups and food synergy. So how different foods work together. And we've got more and more research looking at randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, looking at the effectiveness of these strategies. So we're really learning a lot more about dietary patterns and how they really can affect your cardio metabolic risk factors. So moving on here, the big ones we're gonna talk about today, the big dietary approaches are gonna be caloric restrictions, what we talked about. So just cutting calories, fasting, the various types of fasting, healthy dietary patterns is kind of, or kind of these mixed patterns, things like the Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet, the NORTH diet, they have a lot in common. We'll also talk about modifications around specific food groups like low carb keto, plant-based and reducing meat intake as well. So these are the big ones we're talking about. And caloric restrictions, let's start there first. So traditional caloric restriction involves reducing total daily energy by some percentage. In this paper, they talked about 30% without focusing on specific macronutrients. So taking a step back there, macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates and fat. And for caloric restriction, you're saying, "Hey, I just need to decrease my total calories in the day by 30% and I don't really worry about where that comes from, whether it's fat or carbs or protein, you can kind of decide and that's what you can do." And this is kind of a traditional route. It still works, it's tried and true. It's not the only thing we have, but it's something we've definitely seen. In the paper, they mentioned one network meta-analysis that showed significant reductions in BMI and waist circumference in overweight and obese individuals with COVID who did calorie counting. They also saw a bunch of short-term benefits, including improvements in lipids, blood pressure, glycemic control and inflammatory markers. And in fact, they mentioned that it can be very, very good for those things short-term wise and longer term. Well, they also mentioned another study called the Calorie 2 Study. And what they did, they had a 12% calorie restriction over two years. Two years is pretty darn awesome to do a study. That's a long time to reduce calories. A lot of times you see like, you know, eight to 12 weeks. So two years is kind of cool. So they reduced 12% calories over these two years in normal to overweight BMI individuals. So these individuals either had a normal or overweight, and it showed improvements in traditional and emerging risk markers like lipoprotein profiles. So things I talked about before, like APOB, your cholesterol, inflammatory markers as well. And it showed a stronger effects in those with higher BMI. So more research is definitely needed with the use of caloric restriction in terms of long-term prevention and stuff. But we know that if you use this as a mean to keep you in a healthy weight pattern with improved metabolic markers, like your cholesterol and your blood sugars and blood pressure and all that stuff, then you're gonna have benefits, right? And yeah, that's just typically how it goes. So calorie counting is a thing. It still can be done. You know, in this category, I also put macro counting. So macro counting is a way of counting calories. It's just you're more specifically worried about macros. Like a lot of times it's in the fitness community and they're worried about hitting a specific percentage of protein, making sure we're getting that, and the rest can kind of fill in. But macros, calorie counting, you are counting how much you're eating and it works, unshockingly. Can it be challenging for people? Yeah, that's the big thing sometimes, but it works. And it can improve your cardio metabolic risk factors. Next, moving on to fasting. Fasting involves intentionally not eating or drinking calories except for water or sometimes coffee or tea, some people say, for a certain period of time. And it can be more sustainable for some people as it doesn't require meticulous daily calorie counting or weighing your food like macros. So that's just kind of where fasting has come in. And fasting can kind of be lumped into a couple of different things. So intermittent fasting is kind of, it's a popular alternative to calorie restriction and calorie counting. And there's two main ones they talk about in the paper that they break it down into. They talk about time restricted eating or TRE. This is where you're fasting for 14 to 20 hours in the day with a defined eating window. The most common is like a 16-8 where you don't eat for 16 hours and you have an eight-hour window to eat, usually like lunch and dinner potentially. Or some people do one meal a day where they fast for 20 hours and eat for four in that window. But that's what they're talking about with time restricted eating. And then also talked about alternate day fasting where you're alternating between 24 hours of fasting and 24 hours of eating whatever you want. Not necessarily eating what you want saying, go crazy, but more just like, hey, you're not counting anything when this is your eating window, which is a day. And alternate day fasting, it did show significant weight loss and improvements in cardio metabolic health factors in both healthy and overweight and obese individuals. So in both of them, they had improvements. And some studies suggest it might even lead to greater weight loss and fat loss than just time restricted feeding. So doing the alternate days fasting. And it seems to have a decrease in your blood pressure and lipids as well, all good things. But we have seen benefits from time restricted eating as well that can lead to moderate weight loss in overweight and obese individuals. And it appears to be as effective as traditional calorie counting for long-term weight maintenance. So there's no clear advantage though, over other approaches in terms of general cardio metabolic risk. But there may be benefits potentially for glycemic control, meaning your blood sugars. And that's kind of what they've seen. So taking a step back, what they're saying is, time restricted feeding, both the alternate day fasting and just the time restricted feeding, those can be helpful tools for you. Time restricted feeding, they didn't say it was necessarily that much better in general, but they did definitely see some improvements. And the effectiveness of this fasting seems largely driven by creating calorie deficit. So when calories are matched, so meaning if you took one people, instead of group who just ate a certain amount of calories, like 1800, let's say, and or if you did intermittent fasting and you had the same amount of calories, 1800 or whatever in the intermittent fasting group, it didn't really see to have any difference, right? So if you match these calories, they had similar effects in terms of their weight loss and cardio metabolic disease risks. And that's really the big thing, like spoiler, that's what pretty much all of these diets do, right? That's kind of the big takeaway is these dietary patterns, whether it's counting calories or intermittent fasting or the other diets we'll talk about, the big thing is they get you into a caloric deficit most of the time. And with that comes weight loss and weight loss means lots of improved things. And so fasting can be a viable option, but it's not by something magical. And that's not to say there aren't benefits to that. There's some data out there that maybe specifically just intermittent fasting in and of itself may have some benefits outside of weight loss. People talk about autophagy and all that stuff, that's for a whole other podcast discussion, but there might be some benefits independent of weight loss. Meaning if you don't lose weight, you might get that from fasting. And that's a reasonable thing about in terms of glycemic control potentially, other things there. But on the whole, it seems that the vast majority of the benefits you get are from limiting your eating window and reducing your calories. And that seems to be consistent with most of these diets. But that's fasting there. Next, moving on, let's talk about the mixed dietary patterns, kind of all these ones we talked about earlier. Specifically, we'll start with the Mediterranean diet and all these diets we're gonna talk about for the mixed dietary patterns emphasize nutrient dense whole foods, ideally locally sourced as they say, but really trying to limit processed foods. And Mediterranean diet, everyone's heard about the Mediterranean diet. It's like the most talked about dietary pattern in all the literature. The ideal pattern there is it's rich in vegetables, legumes, fruits, whole grains, dairy, specifically lower fat, oily fish, nuts, and extra virgin olive oil. That's a big thing. And there's strong evidence to support the health benefits of this dietary pattern. And it's recommended for reducing cardio metabolic disease. If you look at a lot of the big societies, they say we recommend a Mediterranean type diet 'cause it just does seem to really improve cardio metabolic risk factors. And it seems to be the most studied as well. One study they mentioned inside the paper we talked about was the PREDIMED trial. It showed a 30% reduction in major cardiovascular events compared to a low fat control group. So one low fat group versus the Mediterranean group, there was a 30% reduction in cardiovascular events in this Mediterranean diet group. There was another study called the CAR-DI-RISK. It was a RCT that showed effectiveness in preventing further cardiovascular events in those existing heart disease. So what that means is those who've already had established heart disease, if you went on a Mediterranean diet, you had a higher chance of preventing future damage from that if you were on the Mediterranean diet, which is pretty cool. They also mentioned another network of meta-analysis, found it was the only diet that actually reduced cardiovascular death compared to control groups. So yeah, lots of that. And they saw the cool things. They saw these benefits across multiple ages. So children's and adolescents to older adults, and it was linked to better blood lipids and profile. And overall, this is probably the best, like I said, best studied and shows lots of improvements. And this is a solid dietary pattern. If you're like, hey, if I had to pick one to like just blanket, say, take one, like this one, because it seems reasonable, right? Like you get a mix of everything. You get meat and fish and you can get dairy and you can get whole grains. I mean, really it's just a healthy dietary pattern and it's not fancy. It's not anything like one specific thing, but it's overall seems to be very helpful. And the data seems to back it up time and time again. Moving on to something called the Nordic diet. This is actually kind of new for me to read about, which is interesting. The Nordic diet is based on a traditional Scandinavian dietary pattern, right? So focusing on leafy greens, root vegetables, whole grains like rye and barley, berries and fatty fish. And yeah, it was kind of interesting. There's a growing research for this that it seems to be beneficial. But once again, let's step back. What do they have? It's just non-processed foods, traditionally lots of vegetables and fruits and like all the good things. So it's no surprise that it's starting to show that, but it is kind of cool to see. And there was a CIS diet RCT, a randomized controlled trial, that showed benefits for glucose metabolism and blood lipid profiles and individuals with metabolic syndrome. So people who had metabolic syndrome went on this diet, seemed to have improvements. There's another meta-analysis that looked at this diet as well and showed improvements in lots of biomarkers. So LDL, HDL, APOB, insulin, all the big ones we talk about all the time. And they also had reductions in weight and BMI and blood pressure went down as well. And yeah, so as I mentioned before, we're gonna find these things. When you take out these components, right? And the reason I'm talking about and kind of going through generally, I'm not diving too deep, is you start to see things that are repeating. If it is repeat, we should pay attention, right? If you find one thing, it's like, oh, okay, the general idea, like whatever is kind of not liar. But if you start to see things over and over and over, we should pay attention. And what are we seeing over and over? Unprocessed foods. That's like the main thing here. And then specifically looking at lots of vegetables, fruits, all those things. That's what we're looking at. But Nordic diet, definitely coming up and see more research on which is cool. Next is the DASH or the dietary approaches to stop hypertension. This is a big one. A lot of the medical societies have recommended this. It was originally developed to lower blood pressure by reducing sodium intake. So that's the big thing. But it shares a lot of similarities with Mediterranean diet. They recommend lots of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, some dairy, fish, poultry, beans, nuts, limited saturated fats. So once again, pretty much like Mediterranean, but just even more control on your sodium or salt. And once again, we do see lots of benefits, but we see benefits outside of just blood pressure. You know, a men analysis they mentioned showed improvements in body weight, waist circumference, and lipids, meaning total LDL cholesterol in patients with either hypertension, overate obesity, or type two diabetes and lots of stuff. And also may have impacts on glucose control as well, which is a big one. And there was the big talk we talked about is, hey, does this matter? Like, is it only for blood pressure? No, it's not. It can have lots of stuff. It can, yeah. We see improvements in these numbers, even if we don't improve blood pressure. So even if we try this diet and we try to lower blood pressure, but don't, you still may see benefits and that's the big thing. So you can still see these improvements without sodium reduction, kind of indicating that the overall dietary pattern plays a key in this, right? So there's lots of nutrients. You think about potassium. Potassium is what we talk about with blood pressure. Sometimes that can be increased potassium can help decrease blood pressure. Eating lots of vegetables, you're gonna have things like that. So once again, what's the common thing to see here? Unprocessed foods and we tend to have good results. Moving on to our specific food groups now, we're looking at specifically to start here, low carb and ketogenic diets. And low carb, they have some sort of carb reduction, although it's kind of variable in the data, what they actually defined as, right? So it's very, very hard to define what it actually is. In this study, they talked, they said low carb diets involve the carb reduction with either less than 26% of total calories or less than 130 grams a day in carbohydrates. And yeah, that's the main thing. But you'll see some people say, "That's not low carb. It doesn't even count." Don't yell at me, I'm just a messenger. That's what they've said in these studies. And the goal is to improve metabolic health by controlling insulin levels. That's the big thing, right? You'll see people online saying like, "This is the absolute key to metabolic health is controlling your insulin." And that's like the idea behind the low carb or ketogenic diets. Is that true? I think that's definitely debatable. It's definitely not as clear as a lot of people make it seem like it is, but that's the general idea behind that. And what does the evidence say? Well, the evidence suggests that low carb diets can actually definitely help with glycemic control, weight loss, and especially in patients with type two diabetes and obesity. Another meta-analysis they looked at showed reduction in weight, C-reactive protein or inflammatory markers, or IL-6 and other inflammatory markers when compared to lower fat diets. And then to contrast the low carb, we have the keto diets or ketogenic diets. They typically are eating drastically reduced carb levels. So less than like 50 grams a day. Some people will go even lower than that. And trying to get into this ketosis, right? Where you think about there's pathways in your body for how you get energy. A lot of times it's glucose first. And when you get rid of glucose, you start turning fat into ketones and you power off of that and you can do that. Ketosis is that setting where you're burning your fat for energy predominantly. And meaning like that's like your main, main energy source. And ketogenic diets, there are definitely lots of studies that there are more are becoming there. A recent meta-analysis in healthy individuals showed positive effects of keto diet on triglycerides, HDL, blood pressure, weight, and glycemic control. But in the same time also saw an increase in LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol. And yeah, there's lots of hot topics and debates on that. We won't necessarily dive into that. But that is a pretty common thing where sometimes when people go on these low carb diets and they're doing a lot of fat and in saturated fat and other protein and whatnot, they can have an increase in their LDL and their APO-B. And yeah, I have other podcasts. I have plenty of podcasts talking to you all about that. Whether that's a good thing long-term or not, you know, that's kind of to be debated, but yeah. That's a classic pattern you will see. I will see people who go on this though and think everything gets better. Like all their lipids get better and blood pressure is better and that's great. Cool, that's awesome, that's right with that. But there are some people who, when you go on this, it can flip and your LDL can go way up. So just something to look at as well. And there have been studies on keto and blood pressure. Those are kind of mixed as well. And they've also found in some of the studies that the quality of the fats in proteins may have an impact on things as well. So not just like eat anything you want. Like I've heard people talking, you can just do like hot dogs and whatever and probably not recommended, just eat like hot dogs all day for a keto diet. But yeah, sometimes the actual ratios matter. But like the overall bottom line is that low carb diets or keto diets can help manage some cardiomyabolic risk factors. Particularly in patients with type two diabetes, it seems to be a really good approach. But we need more long-term data to see kind of long-term what's actually going on. Next, we're gonna talk about plant-based diet. So plant-based diets is kind of umbrella term. There can be multiple ones there, but they prioritize shockingly plant foods, right? So vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds and they either minimize or eliminate animal products depending on which diet you're talking about. And the potential benefits for cardiomyabolic disease include reductions in weight and fat, improved lipids and inflammation, lower blood pressure and better blood sugar control and insulin levels. These benefits are thought to come from lower calorie. As I mentioned before, most everything is lower calorie, but this one specifically, yeah, we see that quite frequently. You also have high fiber and antioxidants when you're taking lots of plant materials and that it may be helpful. And then also typically having reduced saturated fat and cholesterol intake, which can be that. But yes, calories, it's really hard when you're eating lots of vegetables and fruits to eat like way too much. It's just really, really hard. And yeah, these diets also seem to work. Higher quality plant-based diets, meaning whole foods, minimally processed, they're linked to lower risks of obesity, cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes and all that stuff and yeah, that's what it is. But one cool thing they mentioned in the studies, they saw the high quality diet, so like this whole process, those are linked with improvements, but lower quality diets with high processed substitutes, refined foods, all that stuff, they may not be as beneficial. So a lot of people say, hey, we're going plant-based, right? And you're eating a processed meat-based substitute here and then super processed chips here, why not? So plant-based doesn't mean it's healthy. The most common things that consistently show benefits are whole foods, so whole foods. And when you see that minimally processed, there we get the bigger benefits and not necessarily just because it's plant-based, right? So you can have an incredibly unhealthy diet that's plant-based and yeah, I just thought that's worth mentioning. There are subsets of plant-based, right? So we have vegan and vegetarian. They show definitely improvements as well in a lot of those factors as well. So we're vegan, the kind of teaser there is that this excludes all animal products, right? So can't eat anything, whereas vegetarians will sometimes eat meat occasionally, but usually it's more like fish sometimes allow, but specifically true vegetarian will be like, then maybe it will allow dairy or eggs. And then some people will go to pescatarian or eating fish. So it's a little more flexible, but vegans like no animal products at all. But once again, both are generally good 'cause they lower calories and they're very nutrient dense, so lots of stuff. But you have to think about if you are going on a vegan diet, you have to consider really get enough nutrients in terms of B12, you should be on a B12 supplement. And yeah, and that's really what we find time and time again is that they're helpful for you overall, but they just take a little more thought, specifically if you're excluding an entire food group, meaning meat, or you're gonna have to look at potentially getting B12, but the data will show time and time again, improvements in cholesterol, APOB, blood sugars, all that stuff, yeah, we see it a lot. So that's kind of what it is. And at the end of the day, it's unclear if the benefits of these plant-based diets are solely due to the diet itself or 'cause of weight loss, 'cause this is once again, very hard to fill up when you're eating enormous amounts of plants, and so that's one thing. And then another dietary pattern they mentioned at the end here is talking about reducing meat intake. So there's observational studies that link higher red meat intake to a greater risk of cardiometabolic disease, but the randomized controlled trials are actually mixed, right? So it's not that easy saying like, yep, you're definitely gonna have a increased risk for cardiometabolic disease. If you eat too much meat, that's not that clear. There are benefits of reducing red meat sometimes in some studies, but not all the time, and may also depend on what you replace it with, right? So one of the analysis that looked at found positive changes in cardiovascular disease risk factors only when red meat was replaced with high quality plant protein. So once again, if you're just mixing it with other garbage, going from eating lots of red meat and substituting with plant, fully processed meat alternatives, that may not be helpful at all. And so, yeah. But they've had some studies show that there's impact. Others found no impact on markers of diabetes risk or inflammation. And current evidence is insufficient to definitively say whether or not unprocessed red meat is good or bad for cardiometabolic disease. More research is probably needed. And when you think about it though, like what are the common things, right? We look at red meat intake, what does it associate with a lot of times? People are eating processed stuff with it. So you're eating like processed meats, lots of things that are hyper-processed through, and you'll have long stable shelf lives, and you're eating with other processed foods and so that's probably the most common thing. But yeah, we just have to kind of think about that. And so take the big takeaways here. The main takeaway is the importance of focusing on overall dietary pattern and food quality, not just individual nutrients for cardiometabolic disease prevention. That's the big thing. My 20,000 foot view is like, you need to worry much more about the pattern which you're eating with as necessarily specific things you're eating. I think you can have multiple approaches, right? We talked about Mediterranean, Nordic, and Dash. They are highlighted as kind of the gold standard with strong evidence to support their benefits. And once again, what are they? Just diets with lots of whole foods. That's pretty much what it comes down to. Chloric restriction does help in weight loss, also benefit immigrant fasting. Benefits also seem to be created once again when we get in that calorie deficit. The low carb and keto diets, they definitely show promise, and specifically in type two diabetes patients seem to be very, very helpful, but we need some longer term ones. And in plant-based, we also know can be very, very helpful. And at the end of the day, all these strategies can potentially work together. And personalized nutrition is kind of like the new frontier. You know, we used to talk about, you need to be on this diet, this diet. I think those days are done, quite honestly. You know, you'll see people online still saying, "Hey, you need to go keto. That's the way, you know, it controls your insulin levels. It controls your blood sugar. That's the key to optimal health." I tell you what, there's gonna be people who can't do that or don't wanna do that. And so if you're saying that people who aren't willing to do that or can't do that, you're just saying like, "Well, like you're screwed." Like that's not the right approach, right? So we need to have a more personalized idea. And the common theme through all these things, right? The common theme is have minimally processed foods and most likely creating either a eucalyptus, meaning we're not having too many calories, or a hypocaloric diet, so we have a decrease in our calories. And that's kind of the key. Minimally processed and either keeping us at weight neutral or mild weight loss. Like that is the sweet spot. Like that is what a healthy dietary pattern essentially is going to be. Minimally processed and making sure we're not having over nutrition, 'cause over nutrition is the key. And I think overall you should emphasize a balanced nutrient intake, right? So high quality food sources and strategies to support long-term adherence. 'Cause that's the big thing, right? Cool. How many times have we heard someone going whole 30, right? Like, "I'm doing whole 30, I'm doing whole 30." And then next year they're doing whole 30 again. And next year they're doing whole 30 again, because it's not sustainable for them. So the biggest thing is how do we personalize this and make it so sustainable for people long-term? That's like my biggest thing. And that's why people, maybe there is one best diet for everybody. Maybe there is like the one best diet that's absolutely perfect for this one specific person, but they can't follow that. So then what do we say? Like, do we scrap it? No, we go to the next best thing where they can hit most of the things that we want, but it's sustainable for them. 'Cause if it's not sustainable, then it quite frankly doesn't matter at all. And so the challenge really for us as clinicians and our mouth there is to kind of, how do we translate this information about all these different diets into patient ideals, preferences, cultural backgrounds, lifestyle, all that stuff. And for me, I think the good news of this, this is kind of freeing, right? You see things online saying, "You have to eat this way. You have to eat a whole food plant-based diet. You have to eat a keto diet." All that stuff. And this is cool and good news that we can step back and understand we don't have to be as dogmatic as we used to be, right? So if you find someone saying, "You have to do this. This is the diet." I give you permission to stop listening to that person to continue to explore. If it works for you though, here's the thing. If it works for you and you're like, "Hey, I'm on this diet and I've never felt better and I'm doing better and I love it. And this is like, my eyes have been opened, right? I've taken the red pill and it's great. Great, man. I love it. Keep going. I'm never gonna say stop that." But if you then say that this is the way and everyone must conform to this way, then I don't love that. So if you're following someone who's saying, "You have to do that." I give you permission to step back and explore. If you're struggling to meet that, right? If you were like, "I really wanna follow this, but it's not working." Okay, cool. I don't care what your ideal, quote unquote, ideal thing is. If that's not working for you, then it's not working for you. And then let's step back and try another approach. That's kinda what I think about. And I think you have to take in all the different pluses and minuses, right? 'Cause if some of your risk factors go up, like if you read a low carb diet and then your LDL and APOB go up, I don't think it's ideal. I think you can have a dietary pattern where all those things are good and so we can take out one of the risk factors. But if you're saying, "Hey, I can't do anything else. Like literally this is it and it's all I can do. And I can't sustain any other diet, but this is what I can sustain." Then maybe the risk of having elevated LDL is worth it for you in that setting, right? That's just one risk factor as opposed to, if you can't eat that diet, then maybe you have multiple risk factors in terms of your cholesterol is still bad and you have bad blood pressure and bad blood sugar. So there's lots of different things. But really the take home I want from you is that you can find something that works for you. The problem is we're on the cusp here of if AI coming and precision nutrition, I think eventually we'll be able to figure out personalized diets for us, which will be awesome and wonderful. We're not there yet though. If people are selling you personalized nutrition things based off of your DNA, they're essentially gonna be guessing too. And you can guess without spending thousands of dollars on your DNA. You can try multiple things and find what works for you. So I'm big on that, but we'll get there. But I really want you to just have the liberty and freedom to step back and try things and say, "Hey, let's try this approach. If it didn't work, we can try something else." And yeah, we work whatever we need to do to make it work for you, that's the goal. I like having as many tools as possible on toolbox. I think if you're going to someone who is a hammer, then everything's a nail, right? And if they're a low carb person, then it's gonna be low carb no matter what, 'cause that's all I think about. But if you have someone who can walk you through low carb and plant-based and overall generalized mixed ones, then I think that's a better approach 'cause it works for a lot more people. But that's my ranting there. I appreciate you listening, but that's gonna do it for today. Thanks so much for stopping by. If you did like this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you either liked the video on YouTube or subscribed in your podcast platform of choice, or if you just share with a friend. That's really the highest compliment you can have, you can give us and we'd appreciate that. But that's it for today. Now get off your phone and get outside, have a good rest of your day.
