Rhonda Patrick: Hey, everyone, I'm sitting here with Doctor Lane Norton, who needs no intro. He is a scientist, he has a PhD in nutrition. He is a fitness industry influencer, and he is also a natural professional bodybuilder, powerlifter. He's an author, serial entrepreneur. The list goes on and on. And I'm super excited to be sitting here today with you. Layne. You and I, we've had interactions over the years on social media, and it's a long time coming that we get to sit down together, meet each other, have a discussion. I have a lot of respect for the things that you put out on social media on YouTube, the way you look at the evidence and really in particular, your overall view of health and fitness and how practical of a view you take, evidence based and really just. It's influenced me over the years, so I'll say that. So excited to have you here, Lane.

Layne Norton: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I think we had quite a few conversations off camera about. I didn't start out like 10,000 foot view. I started down as a biochemist in the weeds and thankfully just had a really great experience in graduate school where I had a PhD advisor who had the same background. BS in biochemistry, PhD in nutrition. His name's Don Layman, a legend in protein metabolism. And he just did a really great job of like, understanding the biochemical mechanisms, understanding how they fit together, but also understanding how did that look on a global level, what actually pans out in real life. And I just think I just got so lucky with that experience to be able to kind of like, synergize those things.

Rhonda Patrick: You know, you also have this very unique background because you are a professional power lifter, bodybuilder, and you have been for many years. You're coaching people, you've coached thousands of people. In fact, I kind of wanted to start with, I'm interested in understanding what are some of the common themes that you use in your coaching to help people be successful and what are some of, I would say, the misconceptions, the common misconceptions that you see you have to address in order for them to be successful.

Layne Norton: I think if we zoom way out again, people end up spending a lot of energy and time on stuff that just doesn't matter that much, instead of just really focusing on the big rocks, the big boulders. One of my favorite quotes is the magic you're looking for is in the work you keep attempting to avoid. For example, I did a post about red light therapy the other day, and the post was not, I didn't think it was negative towards red light therapy. It kind of said, hey, here's what it might do based on these research studies. Here's the limitations, but please keep in mind where this fits in the overall hierarchy of things. Like, this is a very small piece of a puzzle compared to sleep, proper nutrition, exercise, and I think there can be so much stuff floating around in the fitness sphere. Is that a way of saying it that you and I, as having the background we can pretty easily detangle, like what the kind of hierarchy of stuff is, like where the most important stuff is. But I think for the average person, they hear these things, they don't really know how to slot those things into order, you know, and I have found so many people, like, really have an issue of paralysis by analysis of I don't know where to start, so I'm just not going to start. And so a lot of what I do with my coaching and less so now I do less one on one coaching. Now I have a team of people who work, who work for me, is really just trying to get people out of their own way in terms of just saying, like, hey, you don't have to be perfect. We just need to get you to start doing stuff. And yeah, you're going to screw up, you're going to make mistakes, but we are going to learn to from those mistakes, we are going to see where your stumbling blocks are and we're going to help remove those barriers to you being able to be consistent. Because at the end of the day, really, that is the big, like, the biggest lever you have is consistency with nutrition and training. And we were talking yesterday on the phone, and I think a really good visual example was given by a guy on social media named Ben Carpenter, who's a dietician. And he had a, he had two bowls of marbles. One was, I think, colored blue and one was colored green. And he said, if the blue bowl, I might mix up the colors. But if the blue bowl represents, like, highly processed junk food and the green bowl represents, you know, good, whole single ingredient foods, if somebody's diet is the bowl of all junk food, and we take one marble from the bowl of, you know, quote unquote clean, good foods and put it in the other bowl, does it change the overall diet? And everybody say no, right? Like one, if you eat like junk most times, but you have one healthy meal, it's going to do very little. Right. So why do we think it goes the opposite direction where, like, you have one unhealthy meal also, you've just undone everything you've ever done right. And so I try to get. I try to meet people where they're at and get their mindset out of perfectionism and just get it into execution. I think that is the biggest stumbling block, is we have a lot of people who just really are afraid to try and fail and just get into execution mode. And I think one of the most liberating things for me was that background in being a competitor and failing a lot. And just. It just got me over that, like, oh, this is just part of it. Like, and as you like from doing a PhD, I'm sure you had plenty of stuff that just didn't work. You know, like the number of experiments. I came home with tears in my eyes because I couldn't even get the analysis to work. Like, I spent probably a year and a half going through every step of our analysis of, uh, muscle protein synthesis because I wasn't getting any data back. Trying to figure out where is the kink in this chain for those who aren't familiar, like muscle protein synthesis, to. To do like 50 samples, probably takes you a week to get actual data back because you're. You're grinding frozen tissue, frozen liquid nitrogen, and you've got to keep it under liquid nitrogen the whole time. Like, doing just 20 samples of that probably takes 4 hours. Then you've got to homogenize the tissue, then you've got to separate it. You've got to take it through various reactions so you can get protein bound amino acids versus intracellular amino acids because you need the precursor pool. And then you have got to take it through gcms, but you have to do several reactions before that because it's got to be detectable on the GCM. And so you go put all this work in and then a week later you find out, yeah, it didn't actually do anything. Now we got to go back to square one, right? And so probably did that for like 18 months. And it was actually a lab mate of mine who kind of figured out where the kink was. We had residual acid in the samples. But point being, with all that, it was like I never. If I wasn't willing to go in and fail repeatedly, I never would have gotten to the answer, you know? And I just think so many people are stuck in being so afraid to just go. And when I say fail, like, okay, you go out, you have a stressful day, you come home and you stuff your face with ice cream or something like that. Okay, well, and I had. I have a client I'm actually thinking of right now who was a hedge fund manager, and we started working together. He was probably binge eating almost every day. And I. Every time it happened, I said, okay, first of all, holding yourself accountable is good. Shaming yourself is not going to facilitate behavior change, okay? Because it makes you so sensitive to the behavior that anytime you get close to it, you're just going to be black or white, all or nothing. So. And then I said, okay, what's the antecedent to this? Okay, you have stressful day at work. You get home. There's not foods readily available that would be more conducive to your goals. So I was like, okay, hey, man, not everybody's like this, but I'm like, you have means meal prep service, right? Like, I'm not saying you have to eat these every meal, but, like, at least having them available. So if you're home, you're hungry, you have this available. And then he would end up night eating as well. So I said, okay, lock your door, your bedroom door on the inside, so that when you're going out to the kitchen, you have to unlock it and then put a little, like, lock. Put a little lock on the fridge or something like that, or whatever you tend to get into. Of course, it's not going to keep you out, but a lot of times, those behaviors, a lot of people like to think that their behaviors are all choices, and it's not. We're on autopilot for so many things. And just that moment of mindfulness, of having to actually, like, enter in a code or something like that, sometimes that's a game changer for people. And I even said to him, hey, if you have a stressful day at work when you're driving on your way home, say out loud, man, I just had a stressful day. This would be a situation where I'd be more likely to binge eat. Just identifying it is going to drastically reduce the risk that's going to happen. So over time, this guy, over the course of a year, I think he lost, like, 35, 40 pounds. And he got to the point where he was binging maybe once every two or three weeks, but he would still get really hard on himself about that two or three weeks or that. That interval. And I said, hey, man, like, look at how far you've come. Don't let perfection be the enemy of really good like this. If I showed you a snapshot of where you're at now versus where you were, and I said, this is where you're going to be in nine months. My guess is you would have taken that all day, every day, you know what I mean? And I said, listen, everybody has something they struggle with. May not be binge eating. Some people struggle with alcohol moderation, or gambling, or pick your poison. The likelihood that the inclination for just the impulse for that to go away, very unlikely. You're probably going to always deal with a little bit of that impulse. But learning tools to manage that, that's where it's at. And I think so many people are really hard on themselves. Not only do they, are they hard on themselves about the behavior, but they're hard on themselves for even having the thought, you know? And so, again, I really just try to meet people where they're at and try to just get them into execution mode. One thing I do say to people is, like, rhonda, if I said to you, I want you to go become the best three point shooter you can be, okay? Now you can't get any instruction, can't even watch YouTube videos. But if all you did every single day for ten years was go outside and shoot three pointers for 2 hours, you're not going to the NBA. But I bet you'd be pretty darn good at three pointers, you know what I mean? And just understanding that, you realize it is the mass action that makes the difference. And so I just try to remove those barriers for people to just go and start executing.

Rhonda Patrick: What about. You're talking about eating the whole foods versus the processed and junk food and bad stuff? What about people that are coming to you that are. There's so many different diets that are fad diets for weight loss. And if someone does want to, they want to lose weight, they want to increase their lean body mass and maybe body recomposition. And I know we're going to talk about training and stuff, but is there a calorie amount that you sort of start with? Is it based on their body weight? Like, is that something? Or do you, like, think about the actual composition. Are they doing low carb? Are they doing high carb below fat? How do you approach that?

Layne Norton: So the most important thing is calorie intake. Is it energy intake versus what you're expending? But how you get there is what's really important. People can kind of conflate a physical law of thermodynamics with tracking calories. Those are not the same thing. Right? Like, I can say, like, it's a rule. I don't think anybody disagree. If you want to save money, you got to earn more than you spend. But now keeping a budget can help facilitate that. But you don't have to keep a budget to save money. And just because you keep a budget doesn't mean you will save money. Right? So I kind of relate. I try to get people to understand and separate those two things. But yes, calories, the most important thing. But I. What I try to do is one figure out, okay, approximately what are they expending per day? And the best way, in my opinion, to do that is if they have been tracking, okay, what are you eating now, in general, what's your body weight doing? Right. Because if they're logging relatively accurately and their body weight's not changing, I mean, you can put whatever you want into a calorie calculator, but that is their maintenance calories, that is their energy expenditure. Right. And so I like to start there and then if people haven't been doing that, one nice trick I like to do, as you know, when you monitor behavior, behavior changes. And we know this, right, even down to, like, photons, right. So I'll say, okay, if you don't know it, would you just do me a favor? Just track for the next three days. I don't want you to change anything. Don't change a single thing you're doing. In fact, if you're eating junk food or if you're eating what you think is too much, that's great. Then we have a bigger shovel. Like your energy expenditure is higher than we thought. We have a big shovel to dig you out with. Right. So please don't change anything. But what invariably happens is it's a very instructive experience for them because they'll start tracking and realize, oh, man, I was eating a lot more than I thought because I was having a bowl of ice cream that I was thinking was a serving and it was three. Or I always tell people, if you ever want to be disappointed way out of serving of peanut butter, if you want to be depressed. Or they do track accurately or. Sorry. Or they see what they're consuming and they change their behavior already because they're tracking, because they're monitoring. If you look at studies, it's very consistent. People underreport their calorie intake by 30% to 50%. Yeah. There's a very classic study in 1992, New England Journal of Medicine, they had people who self reportedly were weight loss resistant. So these people claimed that they were eating 1200 calories a day. They specifically wanted this population. And these were obese people. And they said they put them in metabolic ward. So they're tracking their energy expenditure in a metabolic chamber, and they know exactly what they're eating. And they even told them, like, we'll. We'll know if you're. If you're eating more than you say. And they also looked at lean mass, bmr, total energy expenditure. So what was really interesting, this was one of the first studies that showed that obese people didn't have slow metabolisms. And, like, at first, you know, the first few decades of us trying to deal with the obesity crisis was us, like, looking on the metabolism side, how do they must have slow metabolisms, or we've got to increase metabolic rate? And now we know it's the appetite side that has a much stronger effect on body weight regulation. I mean, it's so funny when people say to me, well, I have a slow metabolism. That's why I want to take ozempic. I'm like, well, if you have a slow metabolism, ozempic not going to help because it doesn't increase your metabolic rate. It is a very powerful appetite suppressant. So in this study, they looked at bmr, total energy expenditure, and found that basically, people's lean body mass explained about 70% to 80% of the variance in bmr and total energy expenditure. You can almost draw, like, a straight line through it.

Rhonda Patrick: Can you explain that to people? Because they think it's important? Right. And that was kind of a follow up question, is, like, well, where training comes into this picture, where muscle mass comes into this picture, and why? How is that a really important lever that you can pull to help people, like body recomp, to help people lose fat?

Layne Norton: Yeah. So lean mass. Just to be clear, lean mass and skeletal muscle mass often get used interchangeably, and they're not. Lean mass is a relatively good proxy for skeletal muscle mass. But lean mass versus fat mass is a two compartment model. Like for Dexa, for example, you'll get fat mass. So literally all fatty tissues will go into a bucket, and then everything else goes into a bucket. So we're talking bone, skin, undigested food, fluid, like, all that kind of stuff. But in general, adipose is a relatively. It's not an inert tissue. We used to think it was inert tissue. We know that's not the case anymore, but it has a very low energy expenditure relative to other lean tissues. And actually, skeletal muscle doesn't have a super high energy expenditure for a lean tissue. It's actually one of the slowest, if not the slowest. Like, liver and gut tissues have a much higher metabolic rate. But your skeletal muscle is your, your biggest overall lean tissue and I would argue your biggest organ. And so its effect having an extra ten pounds of skeletal muscle because its so much, it does have a profound effect on your energy expenditure overall. So when they looked in this study, when they standardized for lean mass, they saw basically no difference, no statistical difference in anybodys metabolic rates or their total daily energy expenditure. And when they tracked their intake, what they found was they reported 1200 calories a day, but on average they were consuming about just over 1800. And they also over reported their physical activity by 47%. Now, I think a lot of people will look at that and go, so that when I present that data, a lot of people get really upset because no one likes being called a liarde. I don't think people are lying. I don't think that's what it is. I think we look at ourselves with rose colored glasses and we look at serving sizes and we tend to just give ourselves a little more grace than we probably should. Even yesterday, I did a day of eating while I was traveling and I showed, I went out to lunch, I got a salad, grilled chicken. I said, can you put the dressing on the side? Put the cheese on the side, right? And I just used a little bit of cheese. I used the dressing and. But still, like, after I added everything up, I'm like, there's over 30 grams of fat in the salad. A lot of you guys would have the salad and think, oh, this is low calorie, right? No, the salad was 600 calories, you know, and so if you think, and then look at, you know, take for example, like the cheesecake factory, you look at the salads are well over 1000 calories. I think many people do think they're eating healthy and just don't really have a great understanding of how quickly energy can add up if you're not very mindful about it. So this study kind of put the kibosh and it's been supported by a lot of follow up studies as well, showing whether type two, diabetic, obese, non obese, it basically boils down to lean mass. Explains like 78% of the variance in metabolic rate, and then the rest of the variance in total energy expenditures is physical activity.

Rhonda Patrick: Can I ask you a question about the lean mass? Let's say assuming a lot of that is skeletal muscle as well, right?

Layne Norton: Sure.

Rhonda Patrick: So what about the fact that your skeletal muscle is also a big sink for glucose? How is that, do you think you can, you can't really ignore that aspect as well, right. I mean, in terms of the big picture you're talking about.

Layne Norton: Oh, no. I tell people, like, exercise is one of the only things that you can do independent of weight loss, that will improve all your health parameters. You know? And we in layman's lab, the amount of exercise you need to get massive benefits is such a small. Like, I got in trouble because I called it a disgustingly small amount, but it really is. Like, there was a research study done looking at vigorous physical activity, not even continuous, but just, like, throughout the day, cumulative four minutes vigorous activity per day reduced cancer risk by, I believe, 20%. Okay. And then if you got up to ten minutes, I think it was 30%. Right. And so it's like, I'm sorry, you got four minutes, you know? And some people will say, well, it's a cohort study. XYZ. Yeah, but we have randomized control trials looking at very short bursts of exercise, seeing improvements in glucose metabolism, blood lipids, inflammation, and then now the cognitive stuff, too. There was actually a recent randomized control trial where they took people with major men with major depressive disorder or general anxiety disorder, and they had them do 225 minutes sessions of resistance training a week. That's it. And it was for eight weeks. And the improvements in major depressive disorder and general anxiety disorder. The effect size for major depressive disorder was 1.7. Now, for those who aren't familiar with effect sizes, 0.2 is a small effect size, 0.5 is a modest. And anything above 0.8 is considered large, 1.7 is massive. And SSRI's fall between, like, 0.3 to 0.8. Like, usually the best you see is about a 0.8, which, again, I'll tell people I'm nothing. What I'm not saying is that we should just get rid of SSRI's nobody exercise, because sometimes maybe somebody needs an SSRI just to get them out of bed so they'll actually go exercise. But, like, if we're looking at how powerful that lever is, it's amazing. And then you look at the effects on bone health. You look at the effects on, just, like, mental health, cognition, even short term exercise improves cognition. I think there was just a recent study showing that, that even acute bout of exercise can improve. I think it was memory formation. I could be wrong. And so I think, again, one of the limiters is I try to meet people where there are is like, hey, you see me train for two, 3 hours a day, but that's because I'm trying to be the strongest person in the world, in my weight class, you don't need to be doing that. Like, just, even if you just go walk vigorously for 30 minutes in a day, you're killing it, you know, like. But of course, I would recommend people resistance train because I think there are so many benefits with that. And, yeah, it just doesn't take that much.

Rhonda Patrick: First of all. Okay, I just want to say you are. We are speaking the same language. Like, all these intermittent. They're actually called the Vilpa studies. And Marty Gibala was part of that. I had him on the podcast, talked about that research, and it was, to me, it was just, it was amazing that they had these fitness trackers, like you said, it was like they went out and did these little short bursts of physical activity and it had a profound effect. Cumulative. Right. I mean, so how easy is it to do, like two minutes of sprinting up the stairs or whatever? I actually work out mostly for the brain benefits, by the way, if I don't get some form of exercise, whether it's resistance training or doing some more cardio, I am not in a good space in my head. The rose colored glasses are gone. I can see the negative in a lot of things, comparisons. I'm just in a bad mood. I am a very different person if I get exercise versus if I don't. And so it's like, for me, exercise is necessary. It is a part of my, I wake up in the morning, like, I brush my teeth. I have to do exercise. If I don't, then I'm not in a good position.

Layne Norton: And so I think what I'd like to point out in that is you have made it a habit as part of your lifestyle that it's not. Can I go exercise day? Do I have time for it? No. This is, this is on the top list of this is going to get done, right? Just like brushing your teeth. Right. And I think one of the things that I really try to hone in on with people is try to get away from something having to feel good to get you to do it. Okay. Like, sometimes I love to train, but it doesn't feel good all the time. Like, there, there. Last week when I was out in or two weeks ago when I was out in Ladenhead and I had long travel, I had missed the session because one of my podcasts ran really long. And so I was going to have to combine like a couple sessions and I hadn't slept well and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like sitting in the car, like, come on, you can do this, you can do this. But for me, I just got very used to my feelings are going to fluctuate based on who knows what. And so I'm going to go in and do the things I know are conducive to me being in good health, regardless of how I feel about it. Because if you're waiting for it to feel good, I mean, feelings are like the wind. And if you're kind of basing how you act based on that, you're just floating around. I mean, do you feel motivated to brush your teeth? No. You do it because you know if you don't brush your teeth, they're going to go to crap, right? The same thing happens with your body if you don't exercise. And again, it doesn't have to be a bunch of exercise. But speaking of the cognitive benefits, I mean, I was diagnosed at age six with ADHD. And honestly, the more like, as I look back just thinking about it now, the more I got into exercising consistently, the better my performance in school got. And, like, even now, even though I tell all the people, you don't need to train for two or 3 hours, I am such a hyperactive brain going 1000 miles an hour that if I didn't have that, my best friend tells me all the time, he's like, dude, I wouldn't want to see you if you couldn't train for 2 hours. He's like, I would not want to be around you. You'd be intolerable, you know? So for me, I think, you know, they say that the sport chooses the person, not the other way around, right? I think maybe subconsciously there was some of that that I just, like, felt better overall and loved doing it, you know, but for people out there who are struggling with it, whatever, listen, whether it's crossfit, powerlifting, bodybuilding, just going to the gym, doing machines, I don't care. Like, any of those are going to get you massive benefits relative to not doing anything. And actually, there was another study that just got published. I just covered it. They did a randomized control trial. I think it was in a nordic country, I want to say Denmark. And they had people over age 65 do a year of either high intensity resistance training, meaning they were getting them within a few reps of failure on each set. Moderate intensity, which was like bodyweight stuff. Bands, they were staying further away from failure, but they were doing some resistance or no resistance training, but they were active. Like, I think the average step count per day was like 9500 in this cohort, which is actually pretty high. So these were active older people. So they did that and then they had follow up. They had follow up at one year and then four years and then three years after that. So four years total. And they actually looked at people who stopped resistance training for the three years after. They still had better strength, better lean mass, better cross sectional area. Those like, yes, they had less than their peak after they'd been doing it for a year, but it had this protective effect against age related decline and sarcopenia, because the other two groups, the moderate group kind of probably didn't, wasn't statistically powered enough to pick out some of the differences. But the, they declined significantly. Of course, the group that wasn't doing exercise declined significantly. And even the group that did that one year of resistance training, four years after they started, had less visceral fat too. So it's like one of the things people ask me is, I'm this age, my tool to start, or I'm this, can I resist a trainer? I do this everybody. If your spinal cord works, you can resistance train and it's good for you. And in fact, right across the street at University of Illinois, where I did my PhD in the exercise phys department, they were doing a study in frail elderly. But basically we're talking about people who had trouble like kind of standing up, you know, and they started, their progressive overload was they started them sitting down to a high chair and doing reps with that after, I think it was twelve or 16 weeks, I can't recall the specific details of the study. They saw significant increases in lean mass, cross sectional area, muscle quality, you know, as imaged by an MRI. They got so much more functional. Some of them were able to squat down to like a chair like this and stand up or even lower. And so I think resistance training has gotten this bad rap because a lot of people view it as this like really aesthetic, narcissistic thing because of bodybuilding. And yes, there is that component to it, but like your body is so made to move against stuff that if you don't do that, you are drastically accelerating your aging and youre, your cognitive decline as well. It is pretty scary to see how quickly, and just look at the research on people over age 65, if they fall and break something and go into the hospital. I don't know the exact statistic, but I think it's better than a 50% chance that they're dead within a year. It's a pretty scary statistic.

Rhonda Patrick: And there's, as Stu Phillips likes to call the disability threshold where it's like, okay, then one of those things happens, or I. And then another one, they start to add up.

Layne Norton: You get an infection, right.

Rhonda Patrick: And then it's like all of a sudden they're not mobile anymore. You know, they're not independent anymore. And you're absolutely right, those things do add up. And I do want to add, there were some people that had some questions about aging as well. And, you know, with everything you just said, obviously it's doing something is important and sometimes not obsessing over the perfectionist type of program to do and all that. But I'm going to ask you some questions because people do ask these questions.

Layne Norton: Sure.

Rhonda Patrick: You know, first and foremost, training for strength versus muscle mass, is it like, do you train differently? Like, is there a different type of, are there sets and the reps different, do you think, for training for mass versus strength?

Layne Norton: Yeah. So the two are interrelated. All things being equal, if you have more contractile tissue, you'll be stronger. Right. But strength is not just muscle mass, it's also neural drive. It is, how many fibers can your motor nuance recruit? Like, there's a lot of things, it's technique. A lot of things go into it. And strength is a specific skill. If we're talking about strength as assessed by a one rep maximum, right. So if you take untrained people into the, into a lab and you have them like work up to, say, a squat max, right. What you'll find a lot of times is somebody will just smoke something. You go up five kgs and they get stapled with it. And it's like, wait, what happened? Because they haven't practiced that skill and they don't know how to, one, they just don't know how to grind a rep and be uncomfortable. But two, as you go higher to a one rep max, you're recruiting more muscle fibers. Fibers tend to be recruited in order. There's some challenge to this research, but they tend to be recruited in order from smallest oxidative up to, you know, middling kind of hybrid fibers up to your glycolytic large. Right. And so if you do high reps with low weight, you'll still eventually recruit those larger muscle fibers as you get close to fatigue. But if you're doing a one rep max, that's a true one rep max, you're having to get everything you possibly can, right? So it's a very specific skill. So when it comes to reps and sets for powerlifting, you do the number of sets. You let me go back. So let's talk about building muscle first, because it'll help frame it better. What seems to be important for building muscle is a few things. The first is mechanical tension and understanding that mechanical tension is cumulative throughout reps and sets. So when I say mechanical tension, I think a lot of people misinterpret that, as it's got to be heavy, you know? And I'm like, well, if you want max mechanical tension, just do the most eccentrically loaded exercise you can possibly do. That'll be the most mechanical tension for one rep. But it's really about what is the number of hard sets that you do? And by hard sets, I mean proximity to failure. Now, the research seems to suggest, for muscular hypertrophy, you have to get within a few reps of failure to really maximize the response, but you probably don't need to go all the way to failure. And this is probably conflated by the fact that if you're always trained to failure, especially compounds, your performance and the load you can use is going to drastically fall off. For example, if I did a ten rep max set of squats, like my absolute best, I actually remember the set. I did 530 for ten reps. I think something like that in squat. After it was done, I had to lay down for 15 minutes, and I couldn't move, like, physically could not move. If you asked me to do that again, I might have gotten, I don't know, two reps, something like that. And so if you're. If you're doing that big compound movements like that, it's gonna be hard for you to actually get a lot of effective sets in, because it's so fatiguing. Now, isolation stuff, a little bit different. Single joint movements a little bit different. You can kind of push those a little bit harder, and actually probably should push those a little bit harder. One of the best descriptions I heard was intensity is the medicine. So, hard sets close to failure is the medicine. The number of hard sets, or the volume we'll call it, is the dosage. So we have several meta analyses now and meta regressions, kind of suggesting that there's kind of a dose response between number of hard sets you do and muscular growth. I mean, we've even seen it, like, specifically in the triceps. There was a regression by James Krieger that even up to, like, 27 to 45 hard sets per week on triceps produced more muscle growth than, I think, like, 15 to 25 sets per week, something like that. So now, again, I want to couch that with. You're going to get most of the benefit. If I am always looking at things like, how can I be the most muscular, strongest human being I can. But for the average person, if you just want to grow some muscle, you don't have to do that many sets. But the point is, it does seem to be kind of a dose response.

Rhonda Patrick: How do you know if so, I'm sorry, going, you know, for someone that may not know what their failure is like, how do you identify close to failure? Like, what's so.

Layne Norton: And that's actually where practically, I think most people probably should train to failure at a certain point, because otherwise, it's really hard to determine what failure is. And actually, there are studies on this, and on average, intermediate and beginner lifters underestimate their I, their repetitions. They can achieve by about five to six. So, for example, in a study, they might have them say, like intra set, say on their 8th rep, how many do you think you have left? Two. Okay. Then the next set, they actually. They yell at them, they blare music, they're, like, hyping them up, and they'll get 15 or they'll get 1516 reps, right? And so I think a lot of people, if they've never trained to failure, they viewed failure as kind of like discomfort. And in fact, it's funny, because I've had people say, well, you. And I'm going to get into this about the strength stuff. I almost never trained a failure, especially on compounds, and say, well, you. I've had people say, you train like a wuss. You know, you stop. You know, I'm like, okay, so that, that set of ten with 530, that took me out, honestly took me out for weeks after that, to be honest. You're saying if I stopped two reps short of the 10th rep, that that was an easy set. I can tell you every single rep of that set was hard and felt uncomfortable. Okay. And so I think people, if they've never trained a failure, it probably is a useful experience to do with a spotter under conditions like be smart. Right? But I do think it is useful now when it comes to bodybuilding and growing muscle, whether you train to failure or stop shy, similar effects, but you probably want to stop on compounds. And again, I'm guessing based on some of these meta regressions, I could come out, I could be a little bit off, but I think I'll be pretty darn close on compound lifts. Big compound lifts probably need to get within two to three reps of failure to get the maximum benefits for isolation, probably one or two. But for powerlifting, this is where it gets quite different. And again, there are bodybuilders who train a failure in every set and are very strong. There are powerlifters who are very strong, who don't look super muscular. And so people will. There's actually, like some people in the scientific community who will say, like, things like muscle mass doesn't matter for strengthen, I think very strongly that they're incorrect. And there are people who will say, well, strength doesn't matter for hypertrophy. I think strongly that you're also probably incorrect, okay? Because all things being equal, let's take somebody who wants to grow muscle. All things being equal, if they are stronger, they can create more mechanical tension, they can do the same reps with more weight, okay? That's a bigger potential. Take somebody who's a powerlifter. All things being equal, if they have more muscle mass, they will be stronger. And one of the things I tell people is, well, if muscle mass doesn't matter for powerlifting, then I'm just going to lose 40 pounds, drop down to whatever weight class I need to hit world records. No, it matters. Mass moves mass. But I think people, for example, me, I held a world record squat for almost a year, hit 668 pounds in 2015 at IPF Worlds. And I don't, I've got good legs by most people's standards, but if you put me on a bodybuilding stage, I'll never have the best sets of leg on stage. And they'll see somebody who has really great legs, who only squats 500 pounds, and the conclusion will be, okay, well, muscle mass doesn't matter for strength. No, because that person, for them, because I don't know what their motor neuron recruitment is like. I don't know all that kind of stuff. But all things being equal, if they have less muscle, they'd be weaker. If they had more muscle, they'd be stronger, right? So same thing for me. Now, when it comes to strength, the purest expression of strength is force, right? You have to produce force, and that's mass times acceleration. Actually, mass times acceleration squared. I think physics people, please check me on that one. But there's a mass component and there's a speed component to it. So you can move a given load with the same force as you move a heavy load, you'll just move it faster, right? So now if it's a heavy load, you can apply the same force, but it's going to move slower, right? So then we call this the strength velocity curve. So one of the things that my coach Zach Robinson really kind of pioneered talking about, and he came out of Mike Zortos lab at FAU, was, he said, you know, a lot of power lifters or people who are trying to build strength train with a lot of fatigue, you know, they're training very close to failure. You know, they're doing heavy sets. And that is one thing that's very important for strength. If you want to get better at a one rep max, you have to be doing sets with, you know, heavy singles, doubles, triples, because that is a specific skill set. You need that to, one, learn how to grind hard reps, and two, just feel what heavy weight feels like and how to manage that under stress. So you need those sets. But then volume is also important for strength. There's quite a few studies that show that. But interestingly, he did a, I believe he did a meta regression looking at hypertrophy, showing that proximity to failure kind of is linearly associated with more hypertrophy. So the closer you got to failure, the more hypertrophy you got. The strength regression didn't show that it had no association with your proximity to failure. And so one of the things they said is with strength, you're always managing kind of expression with fatigue. So if you're training heavy a lot and going close to failure, you're doing a very specific skill, but you're also inducing a lot of fatigue, which is going to reduce the amount of strength that you can express. Whereas the way we kind of train, or he trains me is we'll, when I'm doing my compound squat, bench press deadlift, I'll do one set or maybe two sets of a heavy single, double, triple, maybe four reps, and then we'll do back offs that are much lighter. But we're doing multiple sets of them as fast as we can, like the speed of the rep as fast as we can. And they've actually shown that you get better strength results, not training to failure compared to training to failure. But you do have to do some heavy sets relatively close to failure. And it's probably because, like I said, failure just, it induces a lot of fatigue, and that's going to mask how much strength you can actually express when they test it. So, in general, this is kind of minutia that a lot of people don't really need to worry about. I always tell people, you know, I'm 90% sure that you're not training too hard. I'm almost sure of that. Okay. There are people who do train too hard. There are people who overtrain themselves. There are people who put in so much fatigue that it's going to mask their results. But for the most part, most people, there's so many people I see online who think they're overtraining, and I'll look at their training and I'll be like, no, no, you're not overtraining. And if you are, you're not sleeping well or your nutrition's crap or something.

Rhonda Patrick: Like that, for people that are not powerlifters or even professional bodybuilders, what are perhaps someone that would approach your coaching business or something like that, who are wanting to, they're wanting to gain some mass and function and strength, everything, not like a competitive level. But I, what would you say? How do you do exercise selection, like choosing a hack squat over a barbell squat or doing a bench press over dumbbells? And then also, are there certain, if you were to, are there the top five exercises for each muscle group that you would consider?

Layne Norton: Okay, so this is where it's gonna be a nice segue of us of talking about x's, no's versus practicality, right? So I realized within a couple years of coaching people that, oh, the X's and O's aren't really what matters. It's just getting people to do this consistently. Right. And so it took me longer to realize that for training, but it still applies. And what I mean by that is, when it comes to exercise selection, for example, if I was putting together a program for somebody and they weren't going to compete as a powerlifter and they just wanted to grow some muscle, I probably wouldn't program Barbell squats only because it's a, you know, relatively high fatigue exercise compared to something like a hack squat, which is still a compound. Um, it requires less balance and learning. And the research shows very clearly now that, that machines produce as much hypertrophy as, as free weights. We used to have this, like, feeling that, oh, no, you gotta, you gotta Barbell squat, and you gotta, you know, do these big compounds, builds mass. And, you know, we have the research to show that's not true. We have the practical examples to show it's not true, because Phil Heath won seven olympias, and I don't think I've ever seen the guy touch a free weight barbell. I'm sure he has, but for the most part, he trained with machines and built one of the greatest physiques of all time. And people might say, well, those guys are on drugs. Yeah, but all of them are on drugs. So if we see similar results, with different training styles. I mean, those, those sorts of things are equal, right? And so the research supports that. But here's where practical segues with that. So I trained very heavy with free weight movements. And for me, it was the best exercises for growing muscle. And here's why. Because that other shit was boring to me. Like high reps with isolation stuff put me to sleep. But you go load up a free weight barbell back squat. Now, all of a sudden I'm hyped up, I'm excited. I'm going to work harder at it, I'm going to be consistent at it. And so for me, even though training like a power lifter is not maybe how you draw up on paper somebody to be best for hypertrophy. For me, it was because it got me excited about training legs two, three times a week. To get in all that volume, I needed to actually build that muscle. And I had a client one time who loved Crossfit. He loved Crossfit. He's like, you know, I know it's not the best for building muscle. And I go, you know what? For you, it might be because, like, dude, you told me when you try to do bodybuilding training that you hated it and you just stopped going to the gym. So we have to start with compliance first, right? Like, you can have the best program on paper, but if you're not actually going to go in and do it, like, it's not going to work, right? And so I worry about, for the average person, what gets them excited to go, what exercises do they enjoy that they have low pain with, right. And what will they execute consistently? Because within that, for growing muscle, the world is your oyster. Basically, the things that matter, because I kind of got off track, but mechanical attention, number of hard sets and muscles at long lengths, meaning there does seem to be quite a bit of research that even when you equalize for proximity to failure, if you aren't taking a muscle to a long length under tension, you're probably not maximizing the benefits of it. And so there's, if you look at research where they do partials of, like, the contracted, the more contracted partial of a lift. So, for example, if you're doing a squat, so doing full range of motion versus a half squat, right, you get more hypertrophy doing the full squat. There's quite a few studies on this, but when they compare partials in a lengthened position, so say if you're just doing the bottom part of a squat in a partial, which, by the way, sounds horrible compared to a full range of motion, you see similar hypertrophy. So it appears that, that. That putting tension on a muscle in a lengthened position is important. So those are kind of the three things I look at is, you know, mechanical tension, number of hard sets, training at long muscle lengths. Within that, the world is pretty much your oyster as to how you do it. Now, I will say I was in the camp for a long time of this whole, like, you can't grow, like, regional portions of muscle based on, like, how you do exercises. Well, that was one that bro, science might have been right on. It looks like I was wrong on, right? Because there was actually, there was a study that just came out looking at, I think, leg press versus leg extensions, and they showed that leg extensions preferably activated the rectus femoris. So kind of that, like, the middle part of your quad, I think I got the muscle right, and then the leg press acted, preferably grew the vastus lateralis. So you probably want to do both, right, because there's some people out there. So all you need is the compound, so you don't need to do any isolation. Well, if you want to get the most out of your regional growth, it's probably good to mix it up. And I think, again, something I changed my mind on about ten years ago. I was very big on, like, daily undulating periodization, which is basically like, you're changing up your rep schemes workout to workout, right? Like, maybe if you're doing squats, you might do, like, day one sets of ten, day two sets of seven, day three sets of four, you know, and by one, two, three, I mean just your squat days. And I thought that the research suggested that that was going to be better than just doing, like, straight sets or linear periodization. And turns out it doesn't seem like it really matters. But what I will tell people is, practically, it might matter because people do well with variety. I mean, you know this about dopamine and variety, right? And if you get a new workout, you get excited about it, right? Like, and I. It's funny, as a scientist, I have a hard time getting myself placebo'd, which is actually really annoying because placebo is great. But even now, whenever my coach sends a new training block, there's a little bit of, like, you know, I get a little bit excited. So I think variety is important to, because if you're just doing the same thing over and over, it's too easy to fall into. Well, I do this weight for this many reps, for this many sets, and you stop progressively overloading, whereas when you change it up a little bit now, you have a little bit more motivation to kind of, you know, not settle into a normal routine, but that can go too far, too. I see people, like, change their workout up every single session, and I'm like, you're not actually getting as many benefits as you could because you're not getting used to an exercise for a certain number of reps, which allows you to get stronger, more mechanical tension, probably grow more muscle over time. So when it comes to people who aren't going to compete in bodybuilding, aren't going to compete in powerlifting, mostly what I look at is like, hey, do you know if there's exercises that you really like and have access to? Is there anything that gives you pain? Is there anything that, you know, motivates you more? Like, I know some people are like, I love high reps. I love the pump. I want to get cool. Let's do more high reps. Because, again, when we look at equated sets in terms of proximity to failure, when they compare low load training, and I think even down to like 40% of a one rep max versus high load training, they don't see differences in hypertrophy. Now, I could make a devil's advocate argument that perhaps those studies, because a lot of these studies are eight to ten weeks, maybe over time, somebody training with heavier loads might produce more hypertrophy because they'll get stronger. And so maybe by getting stronger, more mechanical tension. But I can't really say that now based on the research. But even if it was a difference, it'd be pretty darn small, which for practically, for most people out there, I tell them, you know, if you're just training hard, you're getting 95% of the way there. And I use this example because people will all the time send me videos of IFBB pro bodybuilders training. Like, look at how they're training. This isn't science, but how can you explain this? I'm like, yeah, but they trained really hard for 20 years, like every day, right? And so that mass action is gonna wash out a lot of these little differences. And most of the people who worry about these little differences are never gonna actually get to express them because they just don't train hard enough. And one of my favorite quotes was actually, somebody said, you can't out science hard training. You've got to do the work if you want to get the results.

Rhonda Patrick: It also, I've had this conversation to some degree, I mean, a little bit of this conversation with Stu Phillips and Brad Schoenfeld about training failure, lifting heavy, and things that you've given some more details as well. But what's nice about it, what I like about it is there are a lot of people, a lot of older adults, women that have been scared of lifting because of the, like, oh, no, I gotta lift heavy, and I'm gonna injure myself. You know, I might bulk up too much. I mean, we can talk about that, but, like, it does give, you know, once I found out, it was like, you don't have to lift heavy. You just put the effort in fatigue yourself, you know? Now I'm lifting heavier, too, but I started, like, to get into, like, even starting to. That was my in where it was like, you know, okay, like, I don't have to, like, do this, like, scary thing. Although now I love it, and I'm, like, wanting to lift heavy, but being strong is fun.

Layne Norton: Anybody who can lift heavy, I'll tell you, if you can lift heavy and you don't have pain, it's fun. I haven't come across one person yet who doesn't like loading up a big squat for them, hitting it, and doesn't get excited.

Rhonda Patrick: I did want to ask you one. Follow up on the squat hack squat versus, like, a barbell squat.

Layne Norton: Yep.

Rhonda Patrick: Now, in terms of, you know, muscle growth, no difference.

Layne Norton: It's gonna be similar.

Rhonda Patrick: What about functional like function? Let's say an older adult, you know, getting up out of their chair, like, being able to avoid the fall. Do you think it's the same?

Layne Norton: It's hard to know one. It depends on how we define functional. Right. Like, how we test it if we're talking about preventing falls. And that's a great point that you bring up. Cause a lot of people get so focused on bone density bones, and we don't want to break bones. Well, if they didn't fall in the first place, you know? And by the way, the best thing you can do for bone density is lift weights. Like, anything you could do nutritionally pales in comparison as to what lifting weights does for bone density. It's a massive effect on bone density. So what I would say is, probably, all things being equal, the free weight will probably be better. I'm not aware of any data that actually assesses this, but if we have 65 year old woman who's never put a barbell on her back before, that's a big ask. Squats feel really weird if you've never done it before. Um, seeing a well executed squat now, like, after having gone through it so much and I'm sure you, too, you realize, wow, that's, that's actually a very technical lift. Like, that is a thing of beauty to do that well. And so I think a lot of times if I, if I really wanted to get somebody doing that, I'm probably going to start with them, like doing like a goblet squad or something like that to a box or, you know, something that they can execute with relative confidence to start. Because if I just put them on a barbell squat, it's going to feel weird. Maybe their back hurts, you know, whatever. But I mean, again, I look at that as I just want to get them back for more sessions. So if what they'll do is a hack squat or a leg press, hell yes. And then hopefully over time, you know, we can walk them into some more complex stuff. But I'm totally good with people and hey, if all they ever do is hack squats, they are still going to be eons better than somebody who's not doing anything at all, right? And even leg extensions, you know? So, yeah, don't let the enemy of good be perfection. And it's so funny. There's so many myths around lifting and heavy lifting, and I don't want somebody, what I will say is most people, if you progressively load correctly, lifting weights is going to reduce their pain. Now, when you're older, you're going to have pain. Okay. My dad is sedentary. I love my dad. He's one of the most wonderful human beings I've ever met. But he doesn't lift right. He has sciatica. He has more back pain than I do. I squat over 600 pounds. I deadlift over 700 pounds. And yeah, I get some, some aches and pains here and there. And I've dealt with some back issues. But you also got to keep in mind when you're trying to be the strongest person in like, your weight category in the entire world for your age, the amount of training dose I need to make progress is going to be almost right next to what is going to overtrain me and increase my risk for acute injury. And so I've always got to walk that line very carefully. But in studies looking at lower back pain and lifting, they show it decreases lower back pain because, one, you decrease your sensitivity to pain because you're progressively loading those tissues, those tissues. One of the worst things you can do is to not load tissues because then they do get really sensitive to pain. And pain is a whole nother. Like, that's another rabbit hole I went down. That's there's so much woo around what causes pain, injury. We talked about this a little bit of. But, yeah, in general, if you lift weights when you get older, you'll still have some pain, but you'll be strong and less sensitive to that pain than somebody who doesn't.

Rhonda Patrick: This kind of leads to some of the questions that I was wanting to ask you about. Again, you are obviously an outlier. You're a professional power lifter and bodybuilder. But generally speaking, how do you or how do you coach people to, as much as they can, prevent getting injuries? Or, I mean, lower your risk? I would say lower your risk of injuries. That's the appropriate way to say, yeah. And then also, like, warm ups, stretching. But then again, once you have an injury, how do you push? Like you were saying, pain. Like, you get better with lifting. So then how do you approach once you actually have an injury? Like, what do you do? Or what do you coach people to do as well?

Layne Norton: So I'm not a pain expert, but I've talked to a lot of pain experts. I've read a lot of the literature, and I have my own personal experience as well that lines up with literature. And I will say, man, this is something I really changed my mind on for a long period of time. The stuff I thought reduced pain and injury versus what actually did was so different in the research literature. And honestly, discovering the biopsychosocial model of pain was a game changer for me, because after I set that squat world record, I went through, like, seven years of really bad back pain, hip pain that pretty much prevented me from competing. I wasn't able to get back to worlds until 2022, when I won, because 2015, I just got a silver medal overall. And it was so the. So the things that are big levers for, let's just take injury first. Okay? One big increases in volume in training volume and load when you aren't prepared for it. So there's a lot of people out there who they'll get, you know, let's do this challenge. Let's do this thing. Bad idea. Bad. If you are drastically increasing your volume or your load, that is one of the big risk factors for acute injury. Okay? So when we say progressively load, like even my coach, if training is going well and I'm getting much stronger, we don't jump up, load very fast. We're still only increasing, you know, 510 pounds a week because we know it's possible that I get stronger faster than my overall recovery can tolerate. Right. So we're careful about how we increase load. Putting the tissues in under stress progressively is a big injury reducing factor. And now I was actually watching a quarterback on Netflix, which followed a few different quarterbacks. They were following Patrick Mahomes, and one of the things I did like that they were doing was his trainer was saying, you know, we put him in a lot of different positions under stress and load over time, so that the first time his tissues deal with this is not in the middle of the game. And so a lot of people think, for example, like, form is really important for injury prevention. There's not a lot of research that actually backs that up, to be honest. Like, take round back deadlifting. There was a study like a. I think it was a meta analysis looking at rounded back deadlifting versus straight back deadlifting, or degrees of flexion in the disc. And, I mean, everybody would think, okay, round back deadlifting, it raises your risk of injury. And it didn't really. And you see some top powerlifters deadlift with a round back, mostly rounded in the upper back. And so you go, how is that possible? And then even, like, knee cave, knee valgus on a squat, right? That's where your knees come in. One of my friends is probably the best female squatter in the world. Drug free. She squatted 496 pounds at 150 pounds body weight. Her name's Leah Bavoie. She's a french national champion. But her knees cave when she squats. But she's always done it that way, which means she started out doing it that way when the load was light. Her tissues adapted to that. And it's not really a risk, injury risk for her. And actually, I used to deadlift with a straight back and found that when I was fatigued, my back would start to round, and that's when I would get injured and have pain. And about five years ago, I changed. I said, okay, let's try this whole tissue adaptation thing and just pull the way I pull when I'm fatigued. Because if I'm training for powerlifting and trying to get stronger, I'm gonna have to train under fatigue. I've had way less back pain, and I don't think I've had any acute injuries on deadlift.

Rhonda Patrick: And so because you progressively.

Layne Norton: Because I progressively loaded those tissues. Now, if you're. I think all things being equal, if you can deadlift straight back, do that, right? But I think the. The idea that we, that we need this, like, perfect form to prevent injury, actually, the research shows people who believe they need really good form are actually more likely to have pain and get injured than people who believe that they're resilient and strong and actually people who get injuries mindset is actually a big factor for recovery. People who believe that they are strong and resilient, recover faster from injuries and have less pain than people who believe that they're fragile. And this gets into the really the biopsychosocial model. So the other big levers for injury risk are psychological stress. That is a massive, massive lever for acute injury and overall pain. So if you look at fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, in fact, a lot of autoimmune disorders are very tightly associated with psychological stress and psychiatric disorders, IB's as well. And they show there's this really classical pain study. I think they did a skin pressure test, and they had people, they standardized the pressure, and they had people rate it zero to 1000 being absolutely no pain whatsoever, didn't feel anything, 100 being most painful thing they've ever felt. And the average was like, I think it was around a 50, but the spread was four to 96, if I recall correctly. So for somebody, it didn't even hardly register for another person. It was almost the most painful thing they'd ever experienced. So pain is not what we thought it was, which is your body's a bag of meat hooked up to your brain. And if you poke the bag, cut the bag, burn the bag, cut the bag, your brain sends a signal and goes, owie. And now we know what happens in the mind affects the body, and what happens in the body affects the mind. I mean, look at the go in the opposite direction, look at the exercise studies on cognition, on depression. So what happens in the body affects the mind. It goes the other way as well. So psychological stress, that by far is the single biggest thing I changed in my life. That got me into a low enough pain state to actually get competitive again in powerlifting. And that started with getting better at stress management techniques, going to therapy, started doing hard work of setting boundaries with people in my life, and even left a very stressful relationship. And I'll never forget this light bulb moment. And again, I'm not saying negative thing about this person. It was stressful for her, too. It was not a good match overall. It was a very toxic dynamic. And two weeks after leaving that relationship, I'm like, what is happening? Because I was physically noticeably stronger in the gym, and I was even sleeping a little bit less, I kind of realized, wow, I'm not walking on eggshells all the time. My body isn't like, I'm not like, tensed up all the time. And this is backed up by the research that it's, there is a psychological, there is a physical toll that psychological stress takes. And so managing that has been huge. In fact, I joke with people that I have become much more zen, not because it improved the quality of my life, it improved my lifting. So I became even more zenore, which improved the quality of my life, which then had like a positive kind of effect on everything. Right? And the other thing is sleep. So sleep is a big, big lever for acute injury and for pain management. So there was a study in, I think, army where they looked at 4 hours of sleep a night versus 8 hours of sleep a night. So people either had to get, yeah, I think it was four versus eight. And I forget the duration, I think it was two or three months. And they found that people who were sleeping 4 hours a night had a 236% increased risk of acute injury versus people who slept 8 hours a night. That's a massive difference. And people who sleep more have less pain. And you can just bundle it up all into that kind of like stress management. The long story is it is about your overall recovery status and psychological stress, your beliefs about pain, your sleep, all that stuff impacts it. Now when you have an injury and you have pain, you know, we've all, not all, but a lot of us have gone to the doctor and they've been like, okay, that squat gave you an Owie, don't ever do those again. But you have to understand, a lot of doctors, especially gps, are not trained in modern pain science, and they're thinking about liability. If they tell you, you know, you can go back in and squat again, you just need to like start off slow and manage your, manage your pain status accordingly. And if he flares up, you know, back off on your volume, because if somebody goes back in and gets another Owie, they go, well, that doctor told me to go squat. I'm going to sue him now. So a lot of doctors are thinking about just minimizing their risk for litigation. But there's something called exposure therapy, which was the other game changer for me. So to explain it, let's take it from like, I'm sure you've heard of exposure therapy for like psychology, right? So for example, if I had a fear of spiders, if you just take me and stick me in a room with a bunch of spiders, that doesn't, that's not exposure therapy, that's like traumatic and it's going to make it worse, right? That's like, if you have pain and let's say, for example, I dealt with back pain that was triggered by me squatting below parallel and then having a fast and then accelerating the lockout. Okay, so it was only at the top, and it was after I squatted below parallel. So it was very specific pain. If I went in and tried to do heavy squats, it's just going to strengthen that pain while I'm, while I'm pain sensitive. But what you probably should do is exposure therapy. So that heavy squat, that's like sticking me in a room with spiders, right? It's traumatic, but if you wanted to manage somebody's fear of spiders, maybe you put them in a room with spider that's under a glass case, and they just sit there with the spider, and then over time, they bring it closer. Over time, they take the case off. Over time, you get better at managing that pain is kind of the same way. So when I dealt with this, so I was dealing with that as well as hip pain that prevented me from really doing any kind of heavy squats. And so I went in the gym one day after reading about exposure therapy, and I said, okay, is there a squat variation that I can do that's low enough pain that I can touch it without it getting worse? Because the research shows, like, if you're recovering from an injury, first off, you have to get the initial high pain sensitivity under control. That may involve rest and just walking or active recovery. But once it's under control enough, you kind of want to touch the pain without doing enough to make it worse. And the more you do this, the better you get at knowing when to walk that line. I found, okay, I can't do a full squat with my normal velocity, but I can do a slow tempo squat to a pin that's about six inches above parallel and then do a pause and do a controlled ascent. And I can do that. And that seems to be okay. So I started there, and every week, if I could, if I felt okay, I take the pin down, or I'd increase the weight or I'd increase the velocity. I pulled one of those levers, or a few of them, and it wasn't linear. Like, there were some weeks where I had to kind of just stay the same because I could feel that I was a little bit more pain sensitive. But after 16 weeks, I was back squatting below parallel with not no pain, but a manageable amount of pain. And then over time of managing that correctly, I got to no pain. Right. And so that was such a big game changer for me, and it really made me think about, man, everybody thinks if you got pain, it means there's, like, something wrong, you're gonna make something worse. There's a tissue injury, and the research doesn't necessarily support that. Like, yes, tissue injuries tend to cause pain, but soft tissue injuries heal within six to twelve months. If you're still having pain after that, it's because your brain has actually made a connection. And if you think about the purpose of pain, it's kind of a warning sign, right? It's signaling, hey, danger, danger. So I notice when I'll get pain is one, almost like clockwork. If I get stressed out about something. This happened a few weeks ago. I was overwhelmed, and here comes my back pain just rearing its ugly head and the trigger for that, I've also found just learning that I don't have to stop doing what I'm doing. I just need to try and adjust it a little bit. So I had that a few weeks ago. So I go, okay, I'm going to stop above, just like right above parallel. I'm going to do a slow tempo, and I'm going to slow down the ascent of my squat. And I was able to keep squatting, right? And now it's been getting better. I anticipate within a few weeks I'll be kind of back to normal. And then again, before nationals this year, I was hitting a set of 590 for a triple on squats. And on the third rep, I felt my adductor, like, tweak, and I was supposed to do back off sets after that, and I loaded my sets for back offs, and then I unloaded the entire bar, and I was like, I can't win nationals today. This is like six weeks out from nationals. But I went over to a belt squat, and I'm like, okay, can I get in a position here? If you ever used a belt squat, you can. You can play around a lot more with, like, your foot position and whatnot. Can I get in a position here where I can do a squat movement with, you know, not aggravating it? I could, and then I again, I found that, like, below parallel was aggravating for that, so I did a pin squat above parallel. The next time I was in some more belt squats, within three weeks, I was back squatting below parallel with no pain. And again, I'm like, okay, pain. The idea that it's a tissue injury, maybe, but also maybe not. Sometimes it's your body trying to send you a signal saying, hey, our volume's getting pretty high and we're not recovered enough, like, back off, back off. And so I've learned to kind of take pain more as a. Take it as it comes and not put so much judgment behind it. And it has made such an enormous difference in my training. And, yeah, I just. Long story short, the best explanation I heard, I think it was from Sean Mackey when he was on Huberman's podcast. I think he said, pain is an experience, and it's more like an emotion than it is what we would normally think of as like the old school brain connected to your body, that sort of thing. And so again, I've become big on what happens in the mind affects the body, and what happens in the body affects the mind.

Rhonda Patrick: You mentioned a couple of things I just want to ask you about. One, the sleep. Because, you know, there are many times when people, there's some people that get chronic, like 4 hours of sleep, their stress, their work schedule. I don't. Maybe they're like a new parent, whatever. You know, generally speaking, let's say you are getting poor sleep because of something social or just an event. It's not a chronic, chronic thing forever, but you get a couple of poor nights of sleep. That's when I think that really, you need to make sure you really do focus on getting a workout. I don't mean go and run a marathon, but go and do a 20 minutes interval or even ten minute whatever, something. How do you. So you said sleep is important for lowering the risk of injury, generally speaking.

Layne Norton: And pain.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, and pain, yes. But, like, if you are not getting. If you're getting a poor night's sleep or a couple poor nights sleep, do you still think people should go and train, or is the risk for, let's say, injury with, like, resistance training? Is it gonna be significantly higher or should you just go and lift some weights? Like.

Layne Norton: So I think everyone should auto regulate their training regardless of whatever happens. Okay. And so if you have a poor night's sleep and you come in and you're feeling like crap and it's not moving, well, then reduce the load and adjust accordingly. But that set of squats, my best ever set of squats, I hit that 530 for ten. That was after a night where I literally slept nothing. But I had the approach of, well, I'm going to go in and just see how it feels, and if it feels bad, I'll reduce my target load and we'll just manage it. And I felt a little shaky. I felt like, you know, I didn't feel great, but it was moving for whatever reason. And I think what people need to realize is when we talk about the risk of injury and sleep, it is. It's like that the bowl comparison I made, right? Like, if you've been sleeping great overall and you have one bad night of sleep, I very much doubt it raises your risk of injury. It's more about what you're doing. Just like, if you've been sleeping like crap, sleeping great one night is not gonna, oh, you're all recovered and everything's back to baseline. Like, no, that's not how that works. We know, like, sleep deficits are tough to make up, right? So I think it's fine to go train after a night of poor sleep. Just auto regulate, right? If you feel worse. And I tell this, I actually, I've had clients, I've had to have them stop wearing wearables like oura rings or watches or whatnot, because they end up nocebo ing themselves because, oh, my battery is low, or, like, my body battery is low, or my HRV is messed up and it's like, okay, well, maybe that'll have an impact, but you could just go test the thing, you know, like, you could just go do it. And so, and the same thing people, you know, talk about, like, for females, we kind of discussed this a little bit, like, training for your cycle. There's really not a lot of evidence that you need to train differently for any phase of your cycle. But if you personally feel worse during a certain phase of your cycle or even a certain day, who cares if it's the cycle, if it's the sleep, if it's the hormone, who cares what it is? Reduce your load.

Rhonda Patrick: I like that term, the auto regulate, because it's really applicable to so many different situations that people are in. But since you brought up the women, there's also a whole class of women that are postmenopausal, and some of them maybe, perhaps, haven't lifted weights before. They've noticed that even though they're eating the same calorie wise, that as they hit menopause, for some reason, they're getting a little more belly fat without necessarily taking in more calories. Like, you know, there's something. Something that's happening that they're not. It's not the same. Like, how do you approach that? Like, is it, like, do they need to, do they need to lift, is that the secret sauce? Do they need to lift more? If they're. If they are lifting and it's still kind of hard where the calories come into the picture as well. Again, like, I said even if they already haven't really changed their calories, they just hit menopause. And then, you know, they get that sort of belly fat accumulating easier.

Layne Norton: So again, where x's and O's meets practicality, if you look at the mechanistic stuff of like bmR, total energy expenditure, you know, all the hard metrics, they don't really change with menopause. So your BMR doesn't change. Um, so I said total energy expenditure on average. But here's the thing, there's a lot of people who have sleep problems during menopause. Stress goes up, um, you probably don't feel as good, right, as your hormones change. Um, and so one of the big buckets for energy expenditure is actually subconscious or unconscious physical activity. Like spontaneous physical activity. People don't realize that. So if we think about total energy expenditure, so calories out, right? Everything you expend in the day. People equate that with metabolism. Well, metabolism is your bmR. That's basically the cost of keeping the lights on, right? Like that's the cost to run your organs when you're at rest. That is usually a pretty big chunk of your total energy expenditure. That's like 50% to 70% per day for most people. Then you have TEF, which is the amount of energy required to extract the energy out of food. That's usually a couple hundred calories per day. And then you have your physical activity, which people think about purely as exercise, but it's not. Physical activity can be broken up into two buckets, purposeful and non purposeful, which exercise obviously falls into purposeful. Non purposeful is also called neat non exercise activity. Thermogenesis, which is actually really modifiable. Really modifiable. And if you don't feel as good, you're probably not going to move as much without even realizing it. And so just looking at the research literature, not in menopausal population, but let's take dieting, for example. So we know if you diet lose like 10% of your body weight, it can decrease your bmr. We call that metabolic adaptation outside of what you would expect, just based on the amount of mass you lose. So it's about, on average, like 15% decline in bmR. But 10% weight loss can also induce a four to 500 calorie decrease in meat per day. Now let's take what that looks like practically, all right? So I'm about 210 pounds and my bmr is about 2000 calories a day. My total energy expenditure is about 3400 calories a day. If I start doing a diet that's a 700 calorie deficit for me. So 2700 calories per day on average, that's a good deficit. That's a healthy deficit. If I lose 10% of my body weight and my bmr declines by 20% or by 15% that's 300 calories. And if my neat goes down by 400 calories that's 700 calories total. What was the deficit is actually now maintenance for me. And so I think a lot of people conflate calorie deficits don't work with, they don't understand that well maybe you thought you were in a calorie deficit or what should have been a calorie deficit. But if you didn't lose weight you weren't in a calorie deficit at least sustained over time. And so that can feel very attacking for people. But again, the reality is like you're in menopause, you're sleeping worse and people will say, well I'm still doing the same amount of exercise. Yeah but if you're not spontaneously moving as much and, and I don't know what it is about neat. People view it as like a personal attack when I say physical activity. No, this might as well be BMR because you can't control it like your subconscious physical. Now you can try to make up for it by doing more conscious physical activity. And also I want to be very clear, it's not like you lose 10% body weight and then everything falls off a cliff. This is a very progressive thing over time. Right. But you knowing that you can make up for it. So for example, you can do more exercise or you can do more steps during the day, that sort of thing. But when it comes to menopause, I think and there is some evidence that like if you get like really low in estrogen and you replace that, that can have an effect on energy expenditure about 100 calories per day, something like that. And then theres obviously there are hormones that do make a difference for energy expenditure like thyroid hormone. Right. If youre hypothyroid it will reduce your bmr. But I think the biggest decline ive seen like the biggest absolute max ive seen in the literature is like 25% which is big as bmR. But it doesnt mean you cant get into calorie deficit. Youre not a perpetual motion machine that can create energy out of nothing like you have to if you didn't lose weight or you didn't gain or you gained weight, your body didn't create those carbons out of nowhere like they came from something. Right? And I think the disconnect between energy, calories, people go, well, calories aren't even real. You can't see them. It is referring to the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food that is captured throughout the course of metabolism. And so what I always say is, like, if you ingest carbons, your body does something with them and we can track that. And if you are gaining weight, your body is not creating carbons out of nothing. It has to get them from somewhere. So all that to say to come back to the menopause piece of it, it is the lifestyle changes that really make the difference. Trying to double down on sleep, trying to double down on stress management and also exercise, it may not feel good, but it is going to drastically help you. And I've gotten in trouble for some of these sayings because again, people will hear that and say, lane's gaslighting menopausal women, he's saying that it's their fault. No, I think that these changes can happen without you realizing it. And again, your subconscious decrease in physical activity, that's a big lever that can happen without you even realizing it or having any control over it. And again, people, it's why I'm almost so pedantic about terms, because it makes a difference. As Jack Reacher says, details matter. And when you. So people say, I'm going to take the stairs to get my need up, that's not neat, that's exercise, because you're making a conscious decision to do it. And so this reduction in energy from neat, it's not something you can control. So it's. I'm not saying it's your fault, but there are things, lifestyle interventions you can do to help. Correct for that.

Rhonda Patrick: Do you think that a postmenopausal woman, that increases their volume of resistance training versus, let's say, you know, getting on a peloton and doing spinous or, you know, endurance? Like, do you think there's a difference in helping compensate for some of those changes in their physical activity that they're not thinking about because you're getting more muscle mass, or does it.

Layne Norton: I mean, I'm always going to encourage people to lift weights in some form or fashion, right? But again, it kind of goes back to, like, practicality. If they love spin and that's. They hate lifting weights. Well, spin is going to be better than nothing. Right? But if I can get people to lift weights, definitely wanted to lift weights. And I mean, the research shows relative to your starting lean mass, regardless of your age or sex, you can build the same amount of muscle. So what that means people, just to put it practically. So there's studies showing that women build the same amount of men as a percentage of their starting lean mass. So what I mean by that is if your starting lean mass as a woman is 50, my starting lean mass as a man is 70 kg. We both resistance train, we both put on, let's say 10% lean mass. The woman will gain five kilos, the man will gain seven. The man gained more absolute lean mass, but they both gained the same percentage of their starting lean mass. So the potential for growth is actually similar again as a percentage. And we actually see that even with like strength too, that women kind of as a starting percentage of the one rep max gain similar strength as men. In fact, it might be a little bit better, to be honest. But that also could be that women have a lower baseline because they're not on a population level lifting weights as much. And so in elderly, we see that too as a percentage. Now, if you take somebody who's 70 years old and never lifted weights before, they're going to not have very much lean mass. But if they start, they'll still gain a similar amount as a percentage of their starting lean mass. Now, they're never going to get to the same peak that somebody who started when they're 20. But again, this why I tell people the best time to start lifting weights is right now. Regard like if you have a spinal cord that works, start now, it is the best time. And even if you're 50, 60, 70, it's still going to do what it does and it's going to have massive benefits.

Rhonda Patrick: It's never too late. What about, there's a lot of people that are older adults, so let's say they're 65 or older and maybe they are just starting out. And let's say they have joint issues. And I think you kind of address this with the pain. And I want to just confirm this. So, you know, for these people, let's say that are older, they have joint issues. If they just start with like lighter weights, just start, you know, with, with the low exposure where they're just doing something and training and their muscles are adapting, their joints are adapting. Is that sort of the approach you would take with older adults?

Layne Norton: Yeah, I'd probably start with lighter weights and also start with movements that don't cause them pain or cause them less pain. Right. Like trying to find stuff that whether it's exercises, tempos, range of motion, like just getting it started, because I know over time, as those tissues adapt a, they're going to be able to do more and more complex movements. They're going to be able to push harder and harder, and that stuff's going to take care of themselves itself. But if I just dogmatic about it, I'm like, no, you're going to squat. I put a barbell on somebody's back the first time they come in and they're 60 years old and they have a horrible experience with it and it hurts, they're not going to come back. So again, that's kind of where meeting people where they are is really important. So yeah, I'm going to try and find exercises that are low pain, that they enjoy, enjoy being relative. And then again, like, even when people are starting out, like we talked about, proximity to failure, I'm not taking somebody who's older close to failure the first time they lift weights. Like, no way, that's going to be weeks down the road. But just lifting something is going to have such a massive difference compared to doing nothing that it really almost doesn't matter what you do when you start, as long as you start, as long as it's not like a, such a low load, that there's no discomfort whatsoever. And so that's kind of how I'm going to start with people is just like, let's get them in. Let's have them not hate it and then also see themselves get stronger pretty quickly. That is a really good motivator to get them to keep coming in. Right? And so that's why, again, I don't want to change up exercises every week because I want to be able to say, oh, wow, I added ten pounds from last time. I had two more reps, you know, and it was, it was easier. And so I think practically you can, you can take all the research we have on long muscle links and proximity, and you just throw that all out the window. The first time you get somebody in it is about getting them to come back for the next one. That is where we got to start. And also, like, setting appropriate expectations with people of, hey, you're gonna notice, you get stronger within a few weeks. You're gonna notice this, but it's gonna take time before you actually see a difference in your body, but within a few months, you're gonna notice a difference in your functionality for sure. And so I think just like, starting there with people is really important because like you said, for whatever reason, people think either it's going to be a waste of time for them to lose weights or they're just going to blow up into this massive bodybuilder. And I'm like, you know, when you get in a car, you don't worry about turning into an NASCAR driver, do you? Like, and as somebody drug free who spent 25 years, their entire adult life trying to get as big and strong as possible in a t shirt, I look like an athletic guy, you know, I mean, I'm a big guy, but I don't look like some freak of nature, you know? And that's with me training consistently hard for 25 years. And I always tell people, hey, you know, if you're worried about, like, getting too big, if you start to get too big, you could just back off. It's not, this isn't rocket science. Like, it's like I said, I worry about people training not hard enough. I don't worry about them training too hard. Like, that's, that is a pretty small subsection of people. Although we end up having selection bias because we're in this industry which has a lot more people who do train too hard and get too restrictive with their diets compared to the average person. Right.

Rhonda Patrick: I think this is a good segue too, for the other signal of increasing muscle mass that we talked a lot about, the mechanical tension and the training, which is the biggest, most important, most important factor for not only just muscle mass and function, but like, we're talking about brain overall health, bone density. Just list goes on and on. Right?

Layne Norton: Protein, right. I think it's interesting because I'll tell people I'm a PhD in nutrition and I will be the first to tell you training is way more important. Yes, way more important.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, that's kind of, you know, I wanted to get your thoughts on. So I have had, you know, Stu Phillips and Luke Van Loon, Brett Schoenfeld, we've talked about protein requirements, talking about getting the biggest bang for your buck with your training. 1.6 grams/kg body weight. I know you've talked about that as well. I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on what do you think about earning your protein? There is this focus on protein intake right now. There's a lot of influencers talking about it. It's in the blogosphere, social media. But like, does someone need to focus on their protein intake as much if they're just sitting around not exercising, not training, what do you can make an.

Layne Norton: Argument that's actually probably more important if you aren't training, but I would say like get training, right?

Rhonda Patrick: What do you mean so like.

Layne Norton: Because if you don't have the training lever to preserve lean mass and get some metabolic benefits, protein doesn't do it nearly as much. But it does help. And so, you know, but it's, it is a small lever compared to actual resistance training.

Rhonda Patrick: Does it help? Let's say if you look at the NhANe studies and people on average, well depending on their age, but like younger adults, let's say people that are like 40 and younger, they're getting on average about 1.5 grams/kg body weight, right? I. Older adults, more like 1.2, but that's their average consumption. So do you still think focusing on the protein, knowing what they're. I mean, I guess for older adults, but I'd love to hear what your take is.

Layne Norton: So. And that's kind of like the lab I came out of, Don Layman's lab, that was a big, big focus for us was older population. And if you look in young populations, I mean one of the studies you sent me on protein distribution showed no difference in 30 year old women. Which doesn't really surprise me because when you're young and even like 30 wouldn't be considered young, but young enough that you still have the normal kind of translation initiation signaling. So the mTOR pathway as you get older, I want to say the study, I think it was out of Rennie or Wolf's lab, I can't remember which one this is like back in 2004. But they showed not only do you get a decreased sensitivity of that pathway, you actually get like less, I think less protein, less of the actual like mTOR and the machinery associated with protein synthesis. So the research basically showed you could restore a normal response of muscle protein synthesis, but you have to consume proportionately more protein. So I think really.

Rhonda Patrick: Are you talking about anabolic resistance in older adults?

Layne Norton: Yeah. So I think when you're young it still matters, but it matters less than when you get older. And the problem with that is it's kind of like going in both directions of older people have a lower anabolic sensitivity and they tend to consume less protein because it's more satiating, it's harder to chew in general, like if you're talking about animal proteins. And so people just kind of end up gravitating away from that. And that's also where you kind of start to see protein distribution probably matter a little bit more when you get into older age where if you're getting, you know, three meals where you're stimulating muscle protein synthesis versus, you know, just one big meal, which most people eat about 65% of their protein at dinner in America. And, well, what's the problem with that? Well, on a mechanistic level, there's not really a storage form for protein like we have for carbohydrate and fat. So fat, obviously, you can store as much as you need, adipose, carbohydrate, you've got liver glycogen, you got muscle glycogen, limited, but still a storage form. I mean, protein, you have the free amino acid pool, but it's very, very, very small. It's not what I would consider a storage form of protein at all. And some people will say, well, you know, skeletal muscle is a storage form of protein. That's like saying you build a house and it's a storage form of wood. Yeah, I guess you can tear the house down and get wood out of it, but that's not why you build the house, you know? And so because of that, there appears to be kind of a maximal. Well, new study out of Van Loon's lab has kind of challenged this. But in terms of muscle protein synthesis, it appears that it kind of caps out at a certain level on a per meal basis. And so if you're older, let me back up. For younger people, 10 grams of protein probably still does stimulate protein synthesis. But as you get older, you probably need closer to 2030, maybe even 40 grams, depending on your own lean mass and the source of protein that you're consuming. But, you know, it really protein quality distribution, that stuff matters more. The lower your protein intake is overall, the more you consume on a daily basis, the less all that other stuff matters. Your daily intake is by far the biggest lever to pull. And so what I'll tell people is like, hey, if you're, if for whatever reason, you can only get it in one meal and you can still get enough total protein, I mean, I don't think it's ideal, but it's better than not getting enough total protein, right? And I think some of the problems with this research literature as well is when you're looking at protein synthesis, you're only looking at one side of the equation. You're not looking at muscle protein degradation, which is really hard to measure. In fact, it's so hard to measure that protein researchers out there, please don't get too mad at me saying this because I was one of you, but we just kind of do this and we go la, la, la, and we just kind of follow muscle protein synthesis because degradation is so hard to measure because if you're measuring synthesis, you're using an isotopic label and you're just, you're looking at incorporation into the tissue versus the precursor pool. And then you have a very simple calculation that you can come up with a rate with degradation. It's much more difficult because you're looking at the dilution of that label from amino acids flexing out of a tissue. Much more difficult to measure. And to my knowledge, it's almost impossible to measure synthesis, degradation, and it's very hard to measure those two at the same time. And it's hard to measure them when it's not in a steady state. So, like, if you add exercise, you add a meal, like now, all of a sudden you're in a non steady state. It's much more difficult to measure. So all that being said, there may be effects on muscle protein degradation that make it where, okay, this explains why, you know, protein distribution is less important than we previously thought, because I was a big proponent of protein distribution, and I still think if you want to become the most muscular human, you can possibly be that getting multiple protein, high quality protein feedings per day is probably superior to one or two. But do I think it makes a massive difference? No, I don't.

Rhonda Patrick: What about, have you seen Luke van Loon's study the overnight muscle protein synthesis, giving protein before bed, and it's stimulating while you're sleeping, you're building protein. Does that add something to that?

Layne Norton: I tell people, okay, I'll tell you what I do, okay, so it's like, this is the, you inject me with true serum. What do I do? Because I want to do the best I can, right? Because people ask about pre training protein, post training protein. Does it need to be right after? How's the timing? Here's what I'll tell people. Probably a good idea to have some protein when you wake up because you've been fasting for 810 hours and so muscle protein synthesis will be depressed. We do know that it's also probably a good idea to have protein before you train because it helps with, we've shown that protein before training helps with recovery and protein after training helps with recovery. But it's not this, like, okay, you know, you don't need to be like, having a protein shake right as you finish your last, last set and, like, downing it, like, no, but it's probably a good idea to have a meal containing protein couple, you know, one to 2 hours before you lift or exercise. And it's probably a good idea to have it after you finish within a few hours. And so, yes, but your training will probably naturally fall between two meals like that anyway. You don't have to like accelerate one or the other. And the reality is if you're eating a meal an hour before you go train and you go train for an hour, those amino acids are still in your system for four or 5 hours after you originally had them, maybe even longer, depending on the source. So I'll eat, I eat four protein containing meals a day. I eat breakfast, then I eat lunch. Usually I'll train in the middle of the afternoon because when I feel best, then I'll eat dinner, you know, within a couple hours of finishing training. And then I'll eat a meal before bed because again, I'm gonna be going 810 hours without consuming protein. And that's just kind of how I do it now do I think, you know, again, I'm trying to be the most muscular person I can possibly be. If you're just, somebody wants to build a little bit of muscle, just focus on getting enough total protein per day and if you can divide it up a little bit better, fantastic, right? But that's probably the last like three to 5%.

Rhonda Patrick: And what do you think that total protein per day is? Would you?

Layne Norton: Yeah. So this is where I'll tell you what the literature says and then I'll tell you if you injected me with true serum, what I really think. So literature says, you know, 1.6 to 2 grams/kg body weight. Most literature tops out around that 1.6 number. What I really think is I don't necessarily know if there's a top end of protein where you stop getting benefits, but I do think it just becomes so marginal that you can't pick it out. Because with protein synthesis it's actually a really insensitive measure. Like you're dealing with looking, you are looking for small differences between small numbers. It is very difficult to pick out. And another like difficult thing to look at, especially when they're looking at lean mass and protein intake, is if you do an eight week study, I mean it's not like somebody builds so much more lean mass, even if they're resistance training versus somebody not. I mean, yeah, you build a few kilos, but it's not like this massive huge difference. And so I think a lot of times we just don't. It's hard to do really long randomized control trials. I always tell people when they say why didn't they do it longer? Why weren't there more subjects? Money money. And also, I think people have this view that, like, there's just this group of random people just sitting around waiting to be chosen for research studies, and they're just like, don't have a life. And they just do that for no, no research subjects are me, you, people watching. They're normal people. And guess what happens when you try to control aspects of their daily life? They drop out of studies. One of my favorites is when people go, why didn't they do it in bodybuilders? You know, bodybuilders say this, and I go, because you guys suck as test subjects. Because let's say I want to do a protein study on bodybuilders. As soon as I randomize you guys to the low, what? You guys, low protein, you're all going to drop out. If I do a high volume versus low volume study and I randomize people low volume, they're going to drop out. Like, you can't. It's almost impossible to do, or you've got to pay people to do it. So anyways, if we look at some of the meta regressions, if we look at the research on protein synthesis, and even stu did a study years ago of egg albumin intake, like 510, 20 and 40 grams of egg albumin protein. And the take home was that the 20 grams maximized the response. And it was no different than 40 grams. Statistically, yes, but I think 40 grams was still 11% higher in rate of muscle protein synthesis. But I think there was, like, six people per group, which, again, when you're doing muscle protein synthesis in human, you are taking chunks of flesh out of people. You are having them lay around getting infused with amino acids for five, six. Van Loon's recent study was like 12 hours. Like, people were literally laying supine for 12 hours, getting infused. Who wants to sign up for that? Like, I'm not doing that. You know, plus getting multiple chunks of flesh taken out. So it's really hard to get high numbers to do this.

Rhonda Patrick: You're bringing up a really, what I think is a really important point, lane, because, and particularly coming from you, who you do really look a lot at randomized controlled trials and the meta analysis and evidence, but the reality is, is that in many cases, they're almost. They can be set up to fail from the beginning because they're underpowered, like you said. And we have this obsession with statistical significance. I mean, we had to do something, right? But at the end of the day, as you said, it's like, well, there's a trend, 11% maybe if we had 40 people instead of six, probably we'd see, you know, but then it comes down to then, okay, well, how I like how you're speaking about it, where it's like, okay, well, this is what the evidence shows. This is my truth serum. This is what I really think. And I think that's important, too, because even people that are influencers, that are interpreting studies, randomized controlled trials, we can be very harsh on the results, but at the end of the day, these randomized controlled trials were designed for drugs wherever people don't have any of this in their system before the drug.

Layne Norton: This is a very black and white.

Rhonda Patrick: Very black and white.

Layne Norton: We see this go up 50% because they're doing this drug, whatever, which is why whenever, you know, people, when they do meta analyses in nutrition and they're like, look, the quality of evidence was graded as low to moderate. I'm like, yeah, that's going to be every nutrition randomized control trial. Because one, you can't blind it effectively, right? Like it's, you can't, you can't blind it to the person because they're going to know that they're eating less, like say, animal protein products, right. But that doesn't mean that these are bad, right? It's just we have to understand the limitations of them. And I think where I get really, like, people know me for screaming randomized control trials, really when I get like that is when somebody makes a claim and the randomized control trials actually show the opposite. That's when I'm like, come on, guys, you know what I mean? Like, you can't make that claim based on this because, okay, even if we don't necessarily believe these randomized control trials are perfect, theyre going the opposite direction. So at minimum, youre, it doesnt have an effect, and it probably has the opposite effect of what youre saying. Its like, I saw something the other day of like, im going to come back to your protein question, but I saw something where it was like, dont take whey protein because it has nue five gc and thats going to increase your inflammation. Okay. Does whey protein have nu e five gc? Maybe, I guess. Maybe. Sure. Possible. Is there a pathway where nue five gc increases inflammation? Sure. But what happens when we actually give people whey protein in randomized controlled trials? Oh, wait. It's either a neutral or positive effect on inflammation. So just because a pathway exists doesn't mean there's an outcome for it, right? But if there's an outcome, a pathway absolutely exists but when you're dealing with outcomes, you're dealing with the summation of multiple, dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of biological pathways, all summing up to that particular outcome. And so, sure, I like to use this example of aspirin. We know aspirin is an anticoagulant, but it also activates pro coagulant pathways as well. But the overall effect is it's an anticoagulant. So we have to be very careful. And that's, as you've seen, there's a lot of content out there now that it's, well, this thing is in this food and it's going to cause this. And it's like, I mean, I saw something about cruciferous vegetables, right? Like, don't eat those because they have isocyathanates and that's going to bind to iodine, that's going to lower your thyroid function and that's going to cause your metabolic rate to drop and you're going to gain weight. I'm like, wow, we kind of skipped over BCDEFG and went from a to z, didn't we? And that's a pathway, that's a biochemical mechanism. Does it all exist? And is it all at least partially true? Yeah, but what happens in studies where we just have people eat more cruciferous vegetables, it doesn't impact their thyroid function at all, doesn't impact their metabolic rate, and if anything, they lose more weight from satiety. So obviously we can say, okay, well, that pathway exists, but it's obviously not a dominant pathway or even something that really makes a difference based on dosage and all these other things. So bringing it back to the protein question, you're familiar with an asymptote, so I think the response to protein is probably asymptotic. So you're going to get, and if you look at Stu's paper of the egg albumin, you're almost starting to see it. It's this curve going up where your initial zero to 20 grams is a pretty steep climb, starting to kind of top out, but continues to go up. And so I think practically there was a meta regression a few years ago that suggested up to 3.3 grams/kg of protein still has improved benefits, or, sorry, it still has benefits for muscle protein synthesis and lean mass. But again, meta regressions aren't perfect because you're kind of like extrapolating all these numbers that are in different kind of heterogeneous studies and you're trying to come up with a dose response. But I think based on what I know about protein synthesis, also what we saw with Luke van Loons recent study of 100 grams of protein after exercise. I think there's enough kind of smoke to suggest that, okay, you probably don't ever truly max out the benefits of protein on anabolism, but when you get up to that 1.6 or 2 grams/kg body weight, you're probably 98, 99% of the way there, right. And so the benefits going up more are so incremental, you're never gonna be able to really pick them out in a study.

Rhonda Patrick: What about for people, two things. One, like endurance athletes, like really just training hard like marathon runners. And then two, people that are in a caloric deficit trying to lose body fat. Does increasing their protein, I mean, I don't know above two, but above the 1.6. And maybe to the two, like, are there situations where increasing that protein does make a difference in.

Layne Norton: Great question. And Eric Helms, a few years, I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's a researcher in exercise science and nutrition in New Zealand and he did a systematic review and I think it was a meta regression as well, showing that in a calorie deficit, possibly up to 3 grams/kg of lean mass. So different than body weight, right, but still higher than what we typically see that up to like, I think 3.1 lean mass had improvements in lean mass retention during a calorie deficit. So yes, there may be evidence that more protein is better than a calorie deficit. And for endurance athletes, you know, this is where the segue of one of my favorite quotes is, there are no solutions, there are only trade offs. What I mean by that is you see better recovery from exercise with more protein and endurance athletes up to about that 1.6 grams/kg I think I saw one study was like up to 1.8 saw a benefit as well. But when do you get to the point of where practically now, because you're consuming more protein, you're consuming less carbohydrates and fats, which are fueling your exercise, and so does performance start to drop off because of that. And so that's where that Segway has to happen of, okay, we can keep packing more protein in here and even for resistance training people, right? Okay, I might have some bodybuilders to say, well, you know, 1% difference is the difference between winning the Olympia and finishing in last place. So I'm gonna eat 1000 grams of protein per day. I'm pulling out like a fake example that doesn't exist. But what I would say is, well yeah, maybe you're getting a little bit more muscle protein synthesis, but your training is probably going to suck, right? Because you're not getting in carbohydrates fats. You probably feel like crap. And so guess what? Training is the bigger lever. So you're better off taking some of that protein, aligning it towards carbohydrates and fat so that you actually feel fueled and can train hard versus just continuing to try to pump more protein in. So for me, I consume. So I'm probably about, I'm 94, 95 kilos, I consume like 200 and 3240 grams of protein per day. So I'm like probably like two and a half grams around there, two and a half grams per kilo of body weight. And then my lean mass is probably high eighties, so probably 87, something like that. So I'm right just under that like kind of 3 grams/kg of body weight. But again, like I'm concerned about like how do I build the most muscle possible? I think for the vast majority of people, 1.6 grams/kg of body weight, which is like 0.7 grams per pound. Perfectly appropriate. And you're going to get the vast majority of protein by doing that. But for those meatheads out there, if you want to consume more protein, I'd say consume as much as you like up to the point where you still feel like you're getting enough carbohydrates and fats to be properly fueled for your resistance training sessions.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay, this is, I want to kind of shift gears and talk about some hot topics, I guess, in the foodness and health world. Yeah, you know, starting with seed oils. And I do think that this will.

Layne Norton: Be the most commented section of this podcast.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, it's an interesting one. I avoid them. I try to mostly avoid them. I mean, at home, olive oil is what I use for cooking, for everything. But I also think they've been overly demonized in the fitness and health world. And I know that many of our listeners that are listening, watching have heard a lot of conflicting information about seed oils, but maybe you could start with just summarizing what seed oils are and why are they such a controversial topic?

Layne Norton: Yeah, so seed oils are generally polyunsaturated fats, which means they have multiple double bonds and versus monounsaturated fats like olive oil, which is a single double bond, or saturated fat, like say butter animal fats, typically saturated, where you have no double bonds. Let me start with this. I don't think seed oils are innocuous from the perspective that in the last few decades added oils are one of the biggest source of increased energy in the american diet. And so I just want to set the stage appropriately as well. Talking about leverse will say, well, it can't just be the calories. Let me give you the data on calories right now. So if we people say no, calories have actually gone down in the american diet, I've heard this argument. They're looking at self reported data from people which puts it at like 24 2500 calories a day for Americans. The more accurate way to look at it is you look at the food production, you look at food waste and you look at food availability and you can calculate approximately how many calories per capita people are consuming. Okay, that is objective data. That's not, well, yesterday I think I had, like, I don't even remember what I had for to eat yesterday. Like, I mean, I can look at my app and I know, but if you ask me to recall it off hand, like, God, I don't really know. That data is over 3500 calories a day on average per person and the average person gets less than 20 minutes of physical activity per day. So yeah, I think like a big chunk of it is energy toxicity. Now, seed oils can contribute to that for sure because even right down to like, hey, you have a salad. What does it take for a chef just to, you know, put more oil on it? Or, you know, if you've ever had a dish, you know, I can approximately guesstimate like how much rice is on there, but how are you going to know how much oil somebody put in? Like, I mean, I guess it tastes a little bit slimier in your mouth, but good luck quantifying that, right? And then I think also seed oils are probably a proxy for poor overall diet quality because they are in a lot of processed foods. So the question to me, there's two questions practically. Are they contributing to the health crisis? Yes. But is it for the reason that the really antiseetal people claim? And what's interesting about this anti seed oil movement is I've noticed it's kind of popped up out of the low carb carnivore sphere. And I've seen this progression over the years, which at first the kind of low carb, hardcore keto folks were carbs are bad, just blanket carbs are bad. And then over time that kind of shifted to, well, we think it's refined sugar is what's, you know, insulin. And then, I mean, we've had so many randomized control trials now and meta analysis that kind of show that, like, sugar isn't good for you. But if you're equating energy, like, I mean, I have several meta analysis to show that it doesn't affect inflammatory markers, doesn't affect blood glucose metabolism as long as you're getting in the same total calories per day compared to other diets and substituting out different carbohydrate sources. So then it shifted to, and I think it coincides with there's been a lot of low carb people who also push for saturated fat to be healthy. Because again, I think this is like confirmation bias. We like animal protein, we want saturated fat to be good for us because then we can justify more animal protein. And hey, listen, I always find it funny when people accuse me of bias on this because my research was funded by the National Dairy Council, the egg Nutrition center and the National Cattlemen's Beef association. There is nobody with a stronger bias towards animal protein than me, right? And I can remember when I did the debate with a carnivore person one time, I said, never in a million years. I think I'd be on a podcast defending the virtues of plants, you know? So I'm not saying that there isn't some benefits to animal protein, everything's trade offs. But if we look at the literature, if you say seed oils are uniquely deleterious to health, then you have to say saturated fat is uniquely deleterious to health because for every level of evidence for seed oils, there is stronger evidence for saturated fat to be deleterious on health. So mechanistically, we know saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol. We know LDL cholesterol penetrates the endothelium. We know LDL cholesterol is a causative risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Now, we can argue about particle size and all that kind of stuff, but we know regardless of particle size, LDL can penetrate the endothelium and cause damage. Okay, mechanism, right? And then people say, well, inflammation. Okay, well, if we look at the studies where they just have people eat more polyunsaturated fats, sometimes you see an increase in inflammation, sometimes you don't. But if we look at the studies where they're substituting polyunsaturated fats in place of saturated fats, we see neutral or positive effects on inflammatory markers, blood glucose regulation, liver fat. In fact, one of the things I tell people is if you're worried about liver fat increase from fructose, you better be worried about saturated fat, because they compared them straight up, equating calories, overfeeding, fructose versus saturated fat. Saturated fat increased liver fat 70% more than fructose in a randomized controlled trial. So again, all right, you want to make the argument that seed oils are bad for you, you have to make the argument that saturated fat is bad for you, too. And usually it's kind of the opposite, where they're trying to push that polyunsaturated fats are what's causing a lot of our health problems, when in reality, at every level of evidence, whether it's animal mechanistic, human randomized control trials, or epidemiological, looking at polyunsaturated substituted or saturated substituted for polyunsaturated, it's either neutral or positive. I have yet to see one study where they really show the opposite. The one study that they'll cite is the Minnesota coronary experiment. And there were some strengths to that experiment. They provided all the mules participants, and they did either they were controlling their intake, either high polyunsaturated fat diet or high saturated fat diet. And it was a randomized control trial for several years where they're looking at outcomes, symptoms like heart attacks and whatnot, which is great. Here's the downsides. When they reanalyzed that data with more modern statistics, they found that, I mean, really, there was no difference. But originally there was a claim that, okay, the polyunsaturated group was actually having more cardiac events than the other group. But here's the weaknesses of the study. One, this is back when hydrogenated oils and trans fats were very prevalent in the food supply. And they. Those were considered polyunsaturated fats, and they were getting a lot of their polyunsaturated fats from that. This wasn't from canola oil. This wasn't from, you know, some of these other oil. This was from hydrogenated, literally, probably some of the worst source of fat you can get. Like, you'll get no argument from me that trans fats are uniquely deleterious to health. You'll get no argument there as bad, probably worse than saturated fat. So that's one major weakness. The other one is, yes, they were controlling their calories when they're inpatient, but these people were in and out of these facilities because they were psychiatric facilities. So what did they do beforehand? What did they do after? What did they do in between? It wasn't controlled. And you also have to consider, two years is a long time for a randomized control trial. Actually, the overall study, I think was five years, but the average length was two years of a person being in it. And I think the average age was like late forties. How many people have heart attacks, even bad health, in their late forties? It's a pretty low number. And so how many people are going to have heart attacks in a five year time window? Probably pretty low. And if we think about, like the mechanism, LDL cholesterol, that we think is why, you know, saturated fat might be more a bigger risk factor for heart disease. It is about lifetime exposure risk. And this is something I changed my mind on when I got to grad school. I was very much of the opinion, well, it's more about the particle size, it's more about ldl to hdl ratio. I don't think LDL really matters that much. It's more about the overall. And then about ten years later, here come all these mendelian randomization studies, which basically look at people who naturally secrete more or less ldl, looking at lifetime exposure to ldl. And that is what matters, because a good example I like to use is investment. So, Rhonda, if you and I do each invest the same amount of money in an investment, and I invest in something that gets 7% and you invest in something that gets 8%, if we look two years later, you'll have a little bit more money. But statistically, probably not, right? But if we look 40 years later, you're going to have a lot more money than me. And so, just looking at a sliver of time, this is where, yes, randomized control trials are the gold standard, but they also have limitations that we have to consider as well. And so these mendelian randomization studies, I mean, when they came out, you look at the lifetime exposure, you can draw a straight line through it. I mean, you can literally draw a straight line through amount of LDL exposure throughout the course of someone's life and the risk for heart disease. So to me, I had to change my opinion on that. Now I think I'm making a little bit of a leap from saturated fat to ldl, because there are some forms of saturated fat that don't raise lDl, like stearic acid doesn't appear to raise ldl, but overall, if you eat more saturated fat, you raise your ldl. We see this in the carnivore community. There's people like bragging about having ldl levels of three 4500 milligrams per deciliter. And it's like, this is going to get people killed. The I think where there gets to be a conflict here. I'll come back to seed oil. Sorry. I know I'm kind of going down the rabbit hole, is people might do a carnivore diet, lose 30, 40 pounds, their blood glucose regulation gets better, their hdl gets better, but their ldl goes through the roof and they go, that's a medical number. Yeah. And they go, but I'm so much healthier now. One, you don't feel heart disease until it's knocking on your door, and two, you may, on balance, overall, yes, be healthier than you were before, but you are not as healthy as if you'd gotten all those benefits and also not raised your ldl. You would be healthier having all those things and also your ldl lower. So that is, again, we have to be very careful when we talk about independent risk factors.

Rhonda Patrick: Can I interrupt for a second? Because you're talking about the mendelian randomization studies, and I do want to talk about carnivore diets in a minute, too. But I've heard a lot in that community. These studies that are cited, low ldl is actually a higher predictor of all cause mortality.

Layne Norton: Yeah. After age 65. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. But those studies that you were just talking about to me are the argument against that, because they're showing people with natural p three csk nine, like, when they're having a lower level of it, and they have naturally just lower levels of ldl throughout their life, they have a lower all cause mortality, they have a lower cardiovascular related mortality. And that. So to me, it's like, well, you know, the low ldl because they got sick or old or whatever is causing their ldl to drop, it's, you know.

Layne Norton: It'S a correlation that's a reverse causality issue. Right. Like, people who have higher lDL later in life when it's like, your risk of dying is much more related to wasting problems. People who have high ldl during cancer, you're looking at a proxy for just, they're not malnourished. And I very much doubt that. If we actually looked at the raw numbers of LDL, I'm not familiar with it, but I doubt we're talking about elderly people with, like, 250 levels of LDL. I bet we're talking about people who are LDL looking at levels of 40 versus 100 or 90, where getting so far down, it's because they're so malnourished and they're wasting. Right. And you got to be careful about picking up these transient levels of LDL because we know LDL transiently, if you fast, your LDL can go up because you're getting more efflux out of the liver. But that overall, over the course of time, it goes down. So, yeah, I think, again, a mendelian randomization study is basically a lifetime randomized control trial. I mean, it is for that, the highest quality of evidence that we have. And people will say, well, there's pleiotropy, whatever, okay, nothing's perfect. But again, we have. Mechanism penetrates the endothelium. We have animal studies showing a dose response. We have, actually, some human randomized control trials that do show an effect, and we have the cohort studies that show an effect when it's long enough and they use appropriate covariates. So we have all those things lining up, and we have the long term randomized control trials. So I'm just like, I don't need. I don't know what other kind of evidence you need to, like, convince you. Like, there's just not any. Like, I don't know what else we can give you. You know? And so, again, with the seed oil thing, if you were looking at just, yes, it adds calories, but is it independently increasing inflammation? Like, if we're talking about actual polyunsaturated fats, like, not trans fats. I mean, if you're overeating it, sure. But if you're replacing saturated fat with that, the evidence suggests it's neutral or positive. And so they're talking about a mechanism. Well, those double bonds can oxidize, and there can be x, y, z. Okay, but what happens when you just feed it to people? And then you see, now, some people have said, and we talked about this, like, heating and reheating. It's probably not even, like, one time heating. It's probably, like, multiple times heating. Depends on the smoke point, all that kind of stuff. But, again, that's confounded by the fact that, okay, if you're heating and reheating, you're frying stuff. And fried food is a proxy for really poor diet quality. So, again, is it the seed oils that they're frying it in, or is it the fact that these people just eat really poorly overall in these cohort studies who are eating a lot of fried foods?

Rhonda Patrick: Certainly in the cohort studies, yeah. So the seed oils so far, the randomized controlled trial evidence doesn't suggest it increases cardiovascular disease, doesn't suggest it increases inflammatory biomarkers, at least in the randomized.

Layne Norton: Gene, CRP or CRP.

Rhonda Patrick: And some of the. Now the heated versus the non heated. And this is where I kind of think seed oils can be bad and that it does have to do with what you said about cohort evidence is true. Right. Because you're right, you can't know are they just frying all this like terrible food and there's too many confounders, right? There's too many confounders, but there are very few, three or four studies that have interestingly compared heating some seed oils. A lot of times it's safflower oil, they'll heat it or even do repeated heating. Once I did 20 and did not and then made muffins, the same muffins with either the, like, I thought it was a great study, you know, the 20 times heated oil versus just the cool, like not heated oil. And the heated oils did increase inflammatory markers and they increased oxidized ldl. And like I said, too few studies really comparing just non heated with heated because essentially a lot of those randomized controlled trials showing no effect on inflammation with seed oils, they were giving them pills that were, they weren't cooking the seed oil.

Layne Norton: Right.

Rhonda Patrick: They're just putting it in the pill. So I do think there's a strong possibility based on the very limited evidence so far that heated seed oils might cause more inflammation compared to consuming them. Certainly in whole foods. But even just like putting it on a salad or. I don't know, what are your thoughts? Do you.

Layne Norton: So it's kind of like if we look at the priority of what's important, that's some of the last stuff I'm worried about. Just because I'm like, again, most people are eating over 3500 calories a day doing less than 20 minutes of physical activity. Okay, let's get that under control first. And if you happen to be eating some seed oils while you're getting your calories to down to, I don't know, 2500 a day, not really that worried about it. Right. But you know, do I think it's a good idea to eat a lot of highly processed foods that have had seed oils that are heated and reheat? No, I don't think it's a good idea, but I don't.

Rhonda Patrick: We have options too, right? What about avocado oil or olive oil? Do you think that maybe just getting.

Layne Norton: Options, you know, there was one really big cohort meta analysis that was done that kind of showed that monounsaturated didn't have as big of an effect as polyunsaturated as decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease. That monounsaturated was still positive and saturated was negative. But polyunsaturated was kind of better in a dose response. But I mean, I think for the most part, if you're worried, use olive oil. Use avocado.

Rhonda Patrick: What about the phenol polyphenols and olive oil? There's some studies showing, like randomized controlled trials showing a beneficial effect just from on cardiovascular disease with olive oil.

Layne Norton: Yeah, I think olive oil specifically, there's some evidence that it may have some unique benefits for cardiovascular disease and whatnot and metabolic health overall. But again, I look at that and go, okay, well, it still has one double bond that can be oxidized, that can be, based on your mechanism for polyunsaturated olive oil, still be worse than saturated as well. And you can't, like, they never make that argument, or at least not that I've seen, you know. So, yeah, I mean, I think again, we agree. I might agree for a different reason, in that I don't know if I've seen enough to really. I think if you're heating and reheating, yes. Like, once you get to the point where you're oxidizing those double bonds, I mean, now you're. Who knows what's happening downstream of that. But I think it's probably people who are eating a lot of heated and reheated oils are just eating really crappy foods overall, I'm not really worried about somebody who's, they spray their pan with canola oil and cook some eggs on it. I'm not worried about that. It's the person eating fries that have been refried in the same oil overdose the course of time. But then again, it's like, all right, well, is it the oil or is it overall, they're having a really poor quality overall diet. So I think for me, yes, I hold very much open the possibility that there could be some deleterious effects. But I think for most people, it's one of the reasons I say have guidelines, don't have rules. Right. Because if you say things like, I don't eat seed oils, well, as a guideline, that might be okay, because you're probably avoiding a lot of, like, ultra processed, hyper palatable foods, fried foods. But when you're like, you know, cooking in a bunch of butter instead of like, canola oil or olive oil or, well, I guess not olive oil, but, like, you're kind of missing the point, you know? And so I just want people to be a little bit more sane with how they handle this. Unfortunately, I think a lot of this boils down to there's a lot of conspiracy theories around all this kind of stuff. I mean, I've been told I've been paid off by big pharma, by big food, you know, name your list. I think at a fundamental level, people don't like the idea of responsibility, of personal responsibility in this. And it's much more palatable to kind of say, well, you know, the food industry did this to us because they put all these things in our food supply, and that's what made us all sick. And, you know, XYZ, and there's all these, you know, nefarious backroom deals being. I tend to think that most stuff is much more practical than that, which is food companies want you to eat more stuff because they make more money and their shareholders get more profits, and that's good for business. And so if tomorrow people stood up and were like, we're not eating this processed junk anymore, and we want fresh fruits, vegetables, and that's all they bought, guess what food companies would do? They would stop producing all that stuff, or they would focus on the other stuff, right? And so I think a lot of people like the idea of having this nefarious, evil bad guy in the food world. And I think it kind of takes, it feels nice for the ego because it takes that personal responsibility away. But then it's also very disempowering as well. And so what I'll tell people is, I want to empower you that you can make change. And it doesn't have to be like these crazy diets. You can make some really small changes and have huge benefits just by. Again, whatever gets you there, whatever decreases your energy, whether it's low carb, intermittent fasting, tracking your calories, omitting certain foods. Fine, fine. Whatever gets you there. But I just don't see some of these narratives being super helpful overall, because it gets people focused on the wrong stuff, and it's just a very confusing overall narrative. Right? Because you got, for every camp that says this thing is bad, there's another camp saying it's the best thing ever, right? And so people like to think they make decisions based on logic. Most people make decisions based on emotion. And most people debate is actually a really poor. It doesn't really do much. There's a small sliver of people who will change their minds. And I go back to this very classic study in politics where they took a group of Democrats and a group of Republicans, and they showed both information that would either refute or support a pre existing belief that they already held. Same thing for both groups. What they found was it didn't matter. Democrat, Republican, both things that, like, objectively refuted, like, here is the, here is the hard evidence. It shows that what you believe is wrong. That was just of as effective as proof that they were right as reinforcing their personal beliefs. So I tell people when I, like, debate this stuff online, I'm not doing it for the person I'm debating with. I have no doubt. I'm not going to change their mind. I'm doing it for the small sliver of people who are open minded enough to think, hmm, maybe I was wrong about my opinion. So I just think so much of this stuff, these tribal wars in nutrition are so much based on emotion and kind of creating a bad guy to blame stuff on because we don't want to look in the mirror and see our own personal responsibility in the role of this. And I say this for, I'll give one more comparison and I'll let you ask me another question. The news, everyone says, you know, I hate the media. The media, like, gets people spun up and it, like, stressful and all this. Yeah, but you watch it. You watch it. You know what? The media doesn't care if they put on good news or bad news. The only thing they care about is your eyeballs. That's all they care about. If every single person in the United States stood up tomorrow and said, I'm not watching this crap, I'm not watching negative news anymore, I promise you, within six months, the entire news cycle would change because they don't care. They want your eyeballs. That's it. But we know negative news gets people more engaged because they got spun up. They get fired up, and emotion sells. And it's the same thing with health advice. I'm sure you've seen people who talk about things that are dangerous or things that will increase risk of death, that gets more attention than talking about the stuff that helps. Right? And when you consider also why it's hard to talk to some of these diet tribes, people who have ingrained this as part of their, well, one, their personality, but also their beliefs. When you bring them evidence to the contrary, what you're actually doing is assaulting their, their belief about their own mortality. Because if you are right, then they might be actually killing themselves faster. And most humans would rather endure cognitive dissonance than believe, oh, maybe I wasn't doing something that was good for me. I mean. I mean, God, we got people who will justify, like, chain smoking or like, any other thing. Most people end up believing what they want to believe, what they wish to be true, regardless of the evidence.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, let's talk about the other thing you mentioned that is definitely a hot topic, which is the refined sugar. And I know you've delved deeply into this topic. It's a lot of reading of the evidence. It's something that you've talked about. I want to ask you if you view consuming refined sugar, particularly in the form of sugar sweetened beverages, you know, like something that's just liquid and sugar, if calories are the same, if people aren't over consuming calories, do you think that's something that is still inert, not that harmful? Or do you think perhaps there's a reason to say maybe we shouldn't drink sugar sweetened beverage? I know you don't like to say that because then there's the whole psychology part, but there's diet sodas, right?

Layne Norton: Yep. So they're certainly not good for you. I think, first off, I want to be clear, we're probably talking about a subset of the population that's really small, right. In terms of, okay, they drink sugar sweetened beverages, but don't over consume calories. That's very small. If we look at the meta analyses of substitution studies where they look at, okay, sugar sweetened beverages, and we don't control for intake, absolute increases fat mass, makes metabolic health worse, 100%. No question about it. If they look at studies where they substitute isocalorically, they don't really see a difference on sugar sweetened beverages or fructose containing beverages, I think was one of the meta analyses I looked at, which I guess you could follow fruit juices under that as well.

Rhonda Patrick: So again, substitute with what?

Layne Norton: So they're looking at isocaloric exchange. So, in randomized controlled trials, where they're having people either consuming, say, glucose versus a fructose containing beverage, but they're both sugar.

Rhonda Patrick: So what about not consuming, just consuming water?

Layne Norton: Oh, okay, good, good.

Rhonda Patrick: Water versus any sugar. Like, it doesn't have to be glucose or fructose.

Layne Norton: Okay, so if we look at sugars versus, okay, sugars versus other form of carbohydrate. Okay, so substitution studies have other forms of carbohydrates.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, I'm talking about a specific type of sugar without a food matrix, right. It's a liquidity, 40 grams in a can. If you have two of those, it's 80. Right. So I'm just saying, like consuming a high sugar beverage with no food matrix, not like substituting a carbohydrate food because it's different.

Layne Norton: Right, right. I mean, again, and I believe one of the meta analysis I sent was like, again, it's hard to get into it, but it was sugar sweetened beverages. When they control for calories, they don't see some of these deleterious effects on inflammation or body weight or whatever. But again, I think that's probably a really small percentage of the population, because most people don't go, they don't drink a coke and go, well, that was 40 grams of sugar. So that means I'm not gonna have a bowl of cereal. I mean, they're just drinking it on top of whatever their normal diet is. Right. So it's a very, very small percentage of the population. Now, is it possible at a higher dose of. Of several cans of this stuff a day, could there be some uniquely deleterious effects? Sure. I mean, I hope it will hold open that possibility. I think the issue is more so when you're consuming so much of it, whatever negative deleterious effects are probably lost in the wash of so much energy toxicity. Right. Because you're getting so much negative effects from that. So, yeah, I hold open the possibility it could be uniquely deleterious. But. But, I mean, I would tell anybody, I mean, one of the first things I look for in people when we're working with. All right, do you drink sugar sweetened beverages? All right, let's cut those out right now. When we come to, you know, I know we've talked about artificially sweetened beverages because people will say, and here's where, again, messaging can have unintended consequences. People say, well, you don't want to have artificial diet sodas because they're just as bad as regular sodas. And they come up with a bunch of different mechanisms to try to validate that. No, objectively, not like in the human randomized control trials, where they have people say, either drink soda or use diet soda very consistently, people lose weight and, like, actually a pretty good amount of weight. There was a year long randomized controlled trial, I think, where people lost, like, seven and a half kilograms just by substituting diet soda for regular soda. And, I mean, when I do content on this, I'll get people all the time comment, like, all I did was stop drinking rare soda and substituted in diet soda, and I lost 50 pounds right now. But usually the next thing that people say is, well, why don't they just drink water? Okay, again, I'm trying to meet people where they're at, okay? Some people have developed a habit behavior, whatever it is, of drinking a soda water is great. If I can drink water, fantastic. But you have a hard time convincing me they're not better off being 15 pounds, 20 pounds, 50 pounds lighter by using diet soda compared to regular soda. Right. And in several randomized control trials and meta analyses now, where they compare substituting regular soda with either water or diet soda, they actually see diet soda produce more weight loss than water. Now, it's not because diet soda is a fat burner or anything like that. It's probably because people are seeking out that sweet taste somewhere else when they have water. Right. They still lost weight with the water group, and it wasn't a big difference between the water and diet soda group. But you can't really say, you can make all the arguments you want about brain signaling and whatever, but obviously it doesn't matter enough because these people are losing weight. And the other thing I've heard is, you know, well, it causes an insulin response. Okay. There's several meta analyses now to show that that doesn't happen with any of the sweeteners that we know of. There was one study where they gave sucralose alone, sucralose plus carbohydrate, or carbohydrate alone, and saw sucralose plus carbohydrate caused a greater insulin response. But in my opinion, that study was not an appropriate control group because they were matching sweet taste between the sucralose plus carbohydrate group and the carbohydrate group, because I think their primary measure was actually, like, sweet tastes in the brain, looking at that. And then this other stuff was secondary measures. So they did the right thing by trying to match taste or sweetness level. But the problem is, I believe. I think they used sucrose for the carbohydrate only group, and they used maltodextrin for carbohydrate plus sucralose, because maltodextrin is not as sweet as sucrose, but it has a much greater glycemic response than sucrose does. And so I don't think you can really say it's like saying it's carbohydrate plus sucralose. No, it's maltodextrin plus sucralose. And so if we look at the meta analyses, they just don't support, like, any kind of insulin response. And what I would say is, okay, if you're getting a significant insulin response, why don't we have people just passing out left and right who are having diet sodas from hypoglycemia, because if you're having increased insulin with no glucose coming in, your blood sugar is going to drop. Or the other explanation is, well, maybe if there is an increase in insulin, there must also be a corresponding increase in glucagon to offset that, which means all that stuff is going to be washed out, since those two counteract each other. But again, there's no real data suggesting it increases insulin. And then the other thing that gets tossed around is the gut microbiome, which I am interested in. Most of the studies show no effect, but sucralose in particular does appear to have an impact on the gut microbiome. I have, Suzanne Defkota came out of the same lab that I did my PhD in, and she's a microbiome expert. I've talked to a few other experts and looked at the research data, and my take was pretty similar to their take, which was, hey, we know the gut microbiome changes. We don't really. We only have a rough idea of what a good, bad or neutral change is. And like, for example, in one of the studies looking at sucralose, they actually saw an increase in the proportion of a bacteria. And I'll probably butcher the name blockadia cocoitus. I want to say it is something like that. You know how these latin names are, but that species of bacteria is actually associated with better insulin sensitivity, less fat mass, and better overall blood glucose regulation. And so. Okay, well, I can kind of make the argument that maybe sucralose is a positive effect on overall health based on that. Now, I don't know, and I'm not ready to say anything like that. My point being is we don't really know. Now, if you're worried, use something different than sucralose. I know you like stevia. You know, there's. Aspartame is actually very safe and people say, what about cancer? Okay, so here's the thing again, negative new selection bias. You are much more likely to hear about a study where something causes cancer than has no effect. How often do you hear a study of like x showed no effect on cancer? I can't think of, like, the last time I heard a study get propagated in the news about that. Like, the null hypothesis just doesn't pop up that much. So 80% of the studies on aspartame show no effect on cancer. I think something like 11% are a possibly and 9% are a yes. You're talking about animal studies, but the ones that say yes are all the ones in animals at high doses, or you have some of these cohort studies where it pops up here and there. But for me to feel confident that something, for me to feel confident of something with cohort data, I want to see it like really consistently like fiber, very confident that fiber is good for health, cardiovascular disease, cancer mortality, because I am not aware of a single study looking at fiber intake in a cohort that did not show protective effects and in a dose response manner. So I'm pretty confident in that data. But if you look at, like, for example, aspartame in a study of the. You familiar with the NutriNet-Santé cohort, it's a 100,000 person study out of France from like probably three, four, five years ago. And I think it was, I want to say it was a 20 year cohort. And they, one of the big headlines was aspartame increased the risk of cancer. So I went into the data and looked at it. So what the headline left out was, from non consumers of it to low moderate consumers, it increased cancer by, I think, a relative risk of like 15%, which was significant. And then the high consumers were not significantly increased risk of cancer. The high consumers were like a relative risk increase of a non statistical four or 5%. I'm not aware of anything that's actually carcinogenic, that is carcinogenic at a low level and then not at a high level.

Rhonda Patrick: No, that doesn't make any sense.

Layne Norton: Right. I think, again, for me to be convinced by some of this stuff, it would need to be. It's just not consistent. And it's kind of like, I mean, I use this example too, carnivores. Now you're going to be happy. I'm going to make you more happy. I'm not convinced that red meat is an independent risk factor for cancer, because these studies are confounded by the fact that red meat typically is kind of a proxy for poor diet quality. Because most people's sources of red meat in the american diet are fatty, they're processed. The studies looking at unprocessed red meat and cancer risk are all over the place and when they control for diet quality. And there was a really, in my opinion, elegant study, a cohort out of Canada, and I think it was by a researcher named Maximova, I want to say maximov maximova, max something. And they looked at tertiles of unprocessed red meat intake and tertias of fruit and vegetable intake. So you had, you know, low, medium and high of each at low intakes of fruit and vegetables, meat, red meat had a negative impact on cancer. At high intakes of fruits and vegetables and high intake of red meat, there was actually a protective effect of red meat on cancer. I think it was like a relative risk of 0.78. So like a 22% relative risk reduction. I can't remember if it was statistically different. But the point being, you're looking at overall diet quality, because if you're eating a lot of unprocessed red meat and a lot of fruits and vegetables, you don't have much room for junk. Right. So again, you don't see that stuff pop up consistently in the cohorts or in, like, the dose response that you would expect. And again, I've kind of had this debate with feet, with more people, more on the plant based side, who have said, well, you know, shouldn't you, like, that's just showing that high fruit and vegetables can offset the negative effects of red meat. And I'm like, hmm, if something's an independent risk factor, it's going to raise the risk at every single level of everything else. Right. So take ldl, for instance. Yes. If you have high hdl and low ldl and low inflammation, you have a lower risk than somebody who has high ldl and high inflammation and low hdl. Right. But at take inflammation. At low inflammation, high ldl with low inflammation still has a higher risk than low ldl at low inflammation. And at high inflammation, high ldl, still increased risk above low ldl at both those levels. That is when we determine something as an independent risk factor, because independent of everything else, it raises the risk, and we just don't see that. So again, coming back to aspartame, diet soda, wrapping this all together, I view diet soda as, you have to be careful, like, people demonizing it, because what they think will happen. Okay, well, people will just drink water. No, people will just keep drinking soda. And so why not give them this tool that appears to really be a pretty big lever for not much cost.

Rhonda Patrick: What about, okay, so non nutritive sweeters. There's definitely, you know, there's the artificial sweeteners, which you're talking about, the sucralose, the aspartame saccharin. Right. And there's the, the more natural ones. Monk, fruit stevia. What I'm getting from you, and I just want to make sure it's clear, is that people that are consuming these sugar sweetened beverages, if they substitute them with, like, a diet soda, which has aspartame, is that right?

Layne Norton: Usually aspartame. Some have sucralose okay. Like ace sulfate, k as well, like that sort of thing.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay. Then it's clearly a benefit. Studies show it they're losing weight. I mean, you know, getting more metabolically healthy. More metabolically healthy. Let's talk about someone who doesn't drink sodas that are sugar sweetened and they're lean and they kind of just like, there's some people out there that like Diet Coke a day. Like, not because they are getting off of their coke habit, but because they like Diet Coke for whatever reason. Maybe it's the caffeine, maybe something about the taste. I don't know what it is, but those people exist, sure. So Diet Coke a day, you know, what is that? Do you feel confident that you talked a lot about the aspartame data, and it definitely seems a little bit all over the place. Cancer does take, of course, decades to occur, and there's a cumulative damage and dose may matter, maybe one a day. But is there an uncertainty there that you might say, well, maybe we don't really know at the end of the day, or do you feel like one.

Layne Norton: A day is, well, now I'm gonna get meta on you and say, I don't believe anything for certain, but I have data. I bet my life on. Bet my leg on, bet my foot on, bet my toe on, you know.

Rhonda Patrick: Would you drink a diet coke a day?

Layne Norton: I drink diet coke.

Rhonda Patrick: You drink a Diet coke a day.

Layne Norton: I feel like you're, I wouldn't even.

Rhonda Patrick: Feel increasing your mortality or cancer.

Layne Norton: I don't present it to my kids. My kids drink water because that's what they asked for. But I wouldn't feel worried about them having one diet soda a day. I mean, if we look at, you know, take aspartame, for example, by the way, I'm sure that comment's gonna get me in trouble. We take aspartame for nothing worse than parent shaming. We take aspartame, for example. I mean, we know what it's metabolized into. It's two amino acids, and it gets metabolized into phenylalanine and aspartate and then methanol, whichever, right? Well, it's a very. The amount of diet soda you'd have to drink to get up to a level of methanol that would cause problems is you would die from electrolyte depletion, first from basically drowning yourself. People say, what about bioaccumulation? Well, as far as I know, methanol doesn't really do that. There's a way to process it out of your body unless you're consuming so much consistently that your body never starts getting rid of it. Just like ethanol, there's a way to process it out of your body unless you're exceeding your body's rate of capacity to eliminate it. So, yeah, for small, for like, those levels of diet soda, I'm just not worried about it. I mean, again, one thing my professor really hammered home into my head is you can never be certain about anything when people say there's proof. I don't think you're speaking scientifically because you can never really prove something in science. You can support hypotheses with data, you can disprove stuff. You can have some things that there's so much overwhelming data, we just accept it as true. But, you know, we have had things that we have held very closely to, we thought were true that ended up we were slightly off. Or, you know, I will say, like most my things that I ended up changing my mind on, I never planted my flags super strong about it. Like, even with protein distribution, even though I was a big protein distribution guy, I never saw, if you're not distributing protein, well, you can't make gains. I never said something like that. And so I think, actually, that was one of the major issues with COVID and the distrust in science is science is supposed to be a very behind the curtain thing. Us scientists debate about stuff. We do studies, and, like, 30 years after that, we come to a consensus and we go, we think this right? And instead, everybody got to see the scientific process play out in real life, which was, well, this study says this and this study says this, and, well, that control wasn't appropriate. Well, this here. And we were trying to sail the ship while we were trying to build the ship, you know, and I said right at the start, I said, 20 years from now, I'll be able to look back and say, we should have done this, but we couldn't. And unfortunately, it's led to, like, this really pervasive distrust in science. In fact, whenever I get into, you know, presenting people with evidence, what they end up defaulting to is, well, I just don't trust science because it can just be. It's just be faked. It'd just be bought. You know, I'm like, that's. Do studies get faked? Sure. That's much less that happens than just poor design and or designs or p hacking or designs that are designed in such a way that it looks like you're testing two things, but you're not going to actually see a difference so very rarely. And I tell people this almost without fail, when I see a study where the headline is something I don't agree with or is contrary to what I think the evidence says. When I go in and read the methods and I read the results, 99.9% of the time, I go, oh, I see why they found what they found, right? And you have to remember, conclusions from studies are just an author's opinion. And you kind of alluded to this earlier, but people ask me what kind of accused me of, like, being in an ivory tower. Like, well, do you really need a PhD to read research studies? And I'm like, no, I guess you could figure it out. But I tell you what, you might as well go get a PhD by the time you had enough experience to actually do it. Well, because it is very difficult if you don't have the experience to understand these studies and the practical limitations of them as well. And I'll give you one more example. There was a study done looking at resistance training. It was in a certain circuit, and I knew the researcher, right? And he's giving this presentation, and it was a certain order of exercises. I said, hey, Chad, why did you guys do them in that order? Is there something special about that? And he goes, oh, no, it was a ten by ten. Room is the only way we could get two people in at the same time by doing that order. So you realize, like, scientific studies are so limited. They are big, blunt instruments. And that's why I just don't get excited about, like, a couple studies anymore. I wait till there's a lot because I always hold open the idea that I could be wrong on some of this stuff. But again, I tell people I don't plant my flag real strong, usually. And if I do, you probably should pay attention, because I used to believe, again, that diet sodas were bad for you. I used to believe that. I used to believe that LDL cholesterol wasn't a respecter for heart disease. I used to believe that intermittent fasting was bad for muscle, that, like, you wouldn't be able to build much muscle. I've changed my opinion on all these things, you know, because I just saw enough data. But again, I was never super strong. My flag on the front end, it was more like, I don't think LDL is a risk factor because of this, but, you know, like, it wasn't. The LDL is actually good for you, and you should try to pump those numbers up. But I think people just fall into such black and white thinking, like, the carnivore diet.

Rhonda Patrick: I definitely want to talk to you about that. You talked about it a little bit. You know, it's kind of like the seed oil thing, you know, where it's like, you've taken it head on. And I like talking about. I really want to talk about it with you because I don't think people can accuse you as the anti meat guy.

Layne Norton: Clearly, I get accused of it. I get it from both sides. Vegans and carnivores hate me. Not all vegans.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, that's ridiculous.

Layne Norton: Rational vegans like me.

Rhonda Patrick: There's clearly a lot of people that experience benefits from going on a carnivore diet, an all meat diet. I also hear them say things like, plants are bad for you. You mentioned that fiber is bad for you. Interesting. I'm trying to figure out what that's coming from. You know, what's your take on it? Like, in terms of why they're experiencing the benefits? You kind of talked a little bit about it. Why they're experiencing. They're experiencing some of these benefits. Autoimmune disease is a big one. Right. Their autoimmune issues kind of resolved, but, like, long term for some people. Yeah, but long term, we don't have. Do we have even data on this? No, there's no data. So there's a lot of belief in this based on how you feel, I guess, or perhaps some biomarkers. But, you know, plants are bad for you. Fiber is bad for you. Like, what's, what's your take? Clearly, there's something going on. People are experiencing things that are real.

Layne Norton: So I'm big on symmetrical application of logic. If you were going to use a certain line of logic, you have to apply it symmetrically. You can't just apply it asymmetrically. But asymmetrical application is usually what people do. What I mean by that is, let's take the plants are toxic thing. Right? There are people out there who will say, well, broccoli has this compound in it, which is a carcinogen. I think I saw some physician doctor saying, there's 76 known carcinogens in plants. And I'm like, if you extracted, like, the chemical composition out and, like, over fed them in high doses, maybe, okay, but what actually happens when people eat plants? Like, if plants are trying to kill us, they're doing a really crappy job. Like, they are failing miserably. Because people eat more, plants tend to live longer. And so, okay, why are we not applying that towards compounds in meat? Heterocyclic means heme, iron, polyamide hydrocarbons, and you eat five gc. And when you bring that carnivore, I was debating, well, that's just hormesis. I'm like, well, how convenient that the compounds that might be carcinogenic are hormetic for the stuff you like, but the stuff you don't like to eat is toxic. But this is like the olympic level mental gymnastics they have to do to convince themselves, because, again, they believe that they're actually doing something healthy for themselves. Now, I want to be very clear. Some people do carnivore and they get healthier. I am not saying that can't happen. I am simply saying you would be even more healthy if you also included fiber in that, if you also included fruits and vegetables. Now, I think a lot of these people are people with undiagnosed IB's, people with gut issues, digestive issues. And what is carnivore? It is an elimination diet. And so what happens when people who have gut and autoimmune disorders go on elimination diets? A lot of times they feel better. Okay, but an elimination diet is meant so that you can then add back things and see what you tolerate versus not tolerate. Many people, I mean, FODMAP sensitivities, many people have FODMAp sensitivities, aren't even aware of it. So they cut out fruits and vegetables, which are, which can be high in fodmaps, and they feel better. Okay, so then start adding them in one by one and see what you tolerate. And I think the other thing to point out is there is a lot of selection bias that goes on here, which is, if you look at these carnivore groups, because I've been in them, because I watch, they're really people who are getting positive benefits are the ones that allowed to. And the people who don't, they get, like, gaslit, bullied. They get accused of, like, sneaking in carbohydrates or plants. And the response is, well, just add more fats. Add more animal fats, you know, if they're having problems with constipation or whatever it is. And it's funny, I was on a debate with Paul Saladino on Mark Bell's podcast years ago, and I think I actually came across poorly on that podcast because, one, I wasn't super familiar with his entire position, and I was so flabbergasted by it, it took me, like, an hour to just recover and, like, get my wits back about me. And he pulled up this. His postulation at the time was fiber is toilet paper. Your body doesn't digest it. Like, why would you put that in you? Well, fiber isn't just like toilet paper. Like, there's this thing called soluble fermentable fiber that actually is the main fuel for the gut microbiome. And of all the things we know that actually help with the gut microbiome, that's, like, the biggest lever is fermentable soluble fiber, and that produces things like butyrate propionate, which have positive metabolic health benefits in many randomized control trials. So that's one. But he pulls out this study that I never heard of before, and it was a study where people who had constipation eliminated fiber, and a lot of them reported improvement in their symptoms. So it's self reported, and there's no control group. I'm like, okay, but the meta analyses show, overall, that fiber helps with, like, going to the bathroom with pooping. Like, it helps. Okay, maybe some people feel better by eliminating it. Right? Okay, I can see a place for that. But again, it's not that carnivore has this magic. It's that you're taking things out of your diet that were probably aggravating you. They were aggravating your digestion, producing excess gas. You having pain, bloating. And again, this is another one where people go, I was very inflamed. I'm like, yeah, what was your CRP? What was it? What's that? I'm like, well, that's what you use to measure inflammation. Well, my gut hurt. I was bloated. No, no, that is localized inflammation in response to something going on there. That is not the same thing as the inflammation that raises the risk of heart disease and cancer and that sort of thing. So what I would say to people is, hey, if you want to eat, like, a meat based diethouse, I still don't think it's a great idea. But, like, you don't have to have, like, four rib eyes a day. You can choose leaner cuts of meat. You can have fish, you know, and why not work in some fruits and vegetables? And if you have digestive problems with those, add them in one at a time and see which one doesn't give you digestive distress. And I I think, unfortunately, this becomes so much like a religion for people, because they just. I think a lot of them don't like eating vegetables, and so it becomes an excuse to not eat vegetables. You know, we believe what we want to believe. And again, the asymmetrical application of logic is very interesting to me. So there's a lot of carnivore advocates out there that say epidemiology is garbage. In fact, Paul Saladino had a video titled epidemiology is Garbage. Like, okay. And then when he was on another podcast, he was citing epidemiology. And I'm like, so epidemiology is garbage, unless it's epidemiology that you agree with. But he's not alone in that. There's a lot of people who did that. And then here comes this, like, Internet survey that was published by Harvard about people. I think it was in Harvard, but it was like a self reported Internet survey of people reporting certain things, improving on carnivore diet. I'm like, wait, so 20 year cohort studies with appropriate covariates are garbage, but a self reported Internet survey, that's high quality evidence? Okay? I mean, again, it's like, if you're going to apply a certain type of logic, you have to be consistent with that. And again, what I'll say is, hey, I just laid out how I don't think red meat is an independent risk factor for cancer. I'm not convinced about that. Very unconvinced about that. But if red meat had the data that dietary fiber had about reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease, and mortality, you carnivores would lose your absolute minds if anybody dared suggest that it wasn't good for you. And so it just very clearly points out the asymmetrical application of logic. And getting more into dietary fiber. It fulfills almost every single aspect of what we. What I need to be considered strong evidence, which is we know the mechanisms, you know, in terms of insoluble fiber, decreases gut transit time, decreases the risk of diverticulitis, which probably is a risk factor for developing colon cancer at some point. There's some idea that by having less gut transit time, that the toxins that are in our digesta, that wind up in stool, that they have less time to interact with those intestinal cells. And so by getting rid of it faster, that reduces your risk of colorectal cancer. Soluble fiber, the effects on the gut microbiome, the production of short chain fatty acids, and also the lowering of ldl cholesterol. So we have an improvement in glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity. We have those mechanisms, not to mention.

Rhonda Patrick: The micronutrients, vitamins and minerals that are co ingested in those plants and fruits. Yeah.

Layne Norton: In the food matrix. And actually, what's interesting is one of the first seminars I went to as a graduate student, there was a professor there talking about lycopene and tomatoes and all this kind of stuff. And at the end, we're asking questions and he goes, you know what? You have a really hard time beating Mother Nature's kitchen. And I really like what he said, which is, you know, whenever we try to extract these individual compounds out of food, we never, not never, rarely do we see the same beneficial effects as consuming the whole food itself. To your point about the food matrix. Right. So, yeah, there's a, there's a pathway there, there's biochemical pathways there. We may not ever be able to, like, really pick them out in terms of priority of what it. But the thing to remember, and I tell this to people, every food you eat probably activates something positive and negative. The question is not whether or things in it that will activate positive and negative pathways. And even that I get the heebie jeebies about because, you know, a pathway is probably only negative if it's dysregulated because your body evolved to keep you alive, but it can activate good and bad things. The question is, what is the overall outcome of that? Right. Like we said, aspirin activates procoagulant, anticoagulant pathways, but the overall effect is anticoagulation. Plants, fruits and vegetables, do they have some compounds in them, right.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay.

Layne Norton: Told you I was long winded, so I'll wrap this up. So both any food may activate positive and negative pathways, but the question is, like, what's the overall effect? Right. Because we try to tease apart every individual biochemical pathway, it's really hard to wrap that back together. And again, with fiber, there's also a dose response. We see a dose response in these cohort studies. And again, if we do a forest plot of studies showing benefit or showing harm, literally every single study is on the side of benefit. So I just don't know how much more data you need. Just because fiber might. Some sources of fiber might make your tummy hurt doesn't mean fiber is bad for you. I don't know how else I can lay that out.

Rhonda Patrick: You know, I 100% agree that there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence that fiber is beneficial. Beneficial. Plants, vegetables, fruits, beneficial. There's randomized controlled trials. There's the observational data. I mean, you just. You can't ignore that.

Layne Norton: I don't even like eating vegetables either. I just do it because I know it's good for me.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay, we're running out of time. I do. There's another topic I want to cover. I also want to ask you about personal routine, but the topic is something that you and I have probably butted heads with a little bit, at least on social media in the past, years ago. I don't know, that's like been recent. And that has to do with time restricted eating and, you know, a form of intermittent fasting. So my question to you is, well, first of all, I want to say this. Over the years, my view of certain benefits of what I think of time restricted eating has changed as more data has come in. And specifically referring to the fact that there are studies out there that have calculated if people are just in their free living environment and they're naturally doing time restricted eating and they actually are doing it, they do decrease their calorie intake, correct? Between 200 to 500 depending on how short of a time window they're eating their food. And so if you don't consider the calories that they are restricting, the weight loss benefits seem to go away when you then consider the calories. So in other words, if they don't, restricting, aren't restricting calories, the time restricted effect on weight loss seems to go away.

Layne Norton: That's correct.

Rhonda Patrick: Now. So I didn't always believe that, but as more data came out, I now say, okay, well, this seems to be real for sure. There are a lot of types of time restricted eating. There's like six hour window, you're eating in eight hour window. There's even 10 hours, which I don't think you're going to get a big difference if you're comparing ten to twelve. But other effects of time restricted eating. Do you think, you know there is a circadian component to time restricted eating? Right. There is a circadian component. You are eating humans or diurnal creatures. We're eating within our time window when our circadian rhythm is more metabolically inclined to process glucose and fatty acids and everything. Right. Do you think there is a possibility of a benefit of time restricted eating, like independent of calories?

Layne Norton: I think there's a possibility, but I think based on the research I've seen, if it does exist, it's probably pretty small. You do in some studies, I actually posted about this, I think yesterday. You do in some studies, see some of the more transient markers have an effect with like, especially like early time restricted eating versus like continuous feeding. But you don't, at least to my knowledge, I haven't really seen one that shows a difference in HBA, one c or homa ir, those sorts of things. What you tend to see is, like, fasting blood glucose, fasting insulin, maybe a little bit lower in the early time restricted eating, which I think it's possible. It's possible that is a real effect. It is. I think it's also possible that. Okay, well, if they're early time restricted eating and they finish eating at, like, 01:00 p.m. and they're not eating until, you know, 08:00 a.m. the next day when they're doing a blood draw, whereas the person who is just regular eating eats right before bed, gets a blood draw the next day, I think it's possible that that might explain that small difference. Now, I could be wrong, and so there could be. There could be a small extra benefit to it.

Rhonda Patrick: Blood pressure. Have you seen the blood pressure?

Layne Norton: One, I haven't seen the blood pressure.

Rhonda Patrick: That's the six hour, I think it was Varaday from Chicago. So, blood pressure was. It was that. Again, calories were equated, so there was no weight loss. There was the fasting blood glucose, but the blood pressure was. That was the thing that was most interesting to me, because it was, like, side effects that you get with anti hypertensive treatment drugs, which was very interesting. And so that's something. I mean, there's, again, you're getting into the potential cardio metabolic effects. There needs to be more research, but I just wanted to see if you are the. What your stance is.

Layne Norton: And I think, again, that would be one where I'm like, I'd like to see how the timing of the measurement affects it. Right. So I would like to see. What I would like to see is somebody do a study just like that. But when they do their final blood draw and blood pressure, they do the same length fasted from the day before. Right. So that you're equating that fasting period before those things, because, again, I think, you know, blood pressure responds relatively acutely to a lot of different things. Stress. You know, if you just ate, you'll have a higher blood pressure due to solutes in your blood. So, you know, I think it's possible. And I hold open that possibility. I think what I tell people is, like, practically, it's probably very little difference. And so I look at, practically, is this something that you can implement in your life and make a lifestyle? And if the answer is yes, by all means, it's a great tool, right? Like, it's a great tool. It's one of your only levers. The levers you have are dietary restriction, like low carb, low fat, plant based, whatever, calorie tracking restriction. Right, where you're tracking stuff or time restriction, those are your three levers you can really pull in terms if you want to put things in the buckets, right. And you can combine them if you want to, but whatever gets you consistent. That is the, that is the biggest thing. And so for some people, they love time restricted eating. You know, I've had people say, like, hey, I eat in this eight hour window, six hour window. I don't feel hungry. I'm good. And so I think where people, the messaging can get confusing, again, is like people say, well, there's some evidence that early time restricted eating is better, okay? But what happens if somebody is, like, not being adherent to that because they get hungry at night and then they end up binging at night because they're, well, I already screwed up my feeding window. Might as well just have whatever I want, right? And so I think the messaging, it's important to understand why these things work, right? And so we would both agree, okay, if there's a benefit, it's probably small. And the biggest lever is making sure you're just being consistently controlling that calorie intake. And so the benefit of time restricted eating is for many people, they don't have to track and they'll limit their calories that way. But I have met people who they use, time restricted eating is basically an excuse to binge eat during their feeding window. And for them, that's not going to work very well. Right. And so the other thing that gets brought up a lot is kind of, you know, autophagy and then longevity. And so what I'll say is, yes, time restricted eating raises autophagy, but so does calorie restriction and so does exercise.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, all true.

Layne Norton: And, and also with autophagy, I think, again, this is where it's like, using terms as blanket good, bad. I mean, autophagy is elevated in some cancers. It's elevated in some wasted diseases. I mean, we're talking about lysosomal protein degradation, essentially. And so I just try to remind people, like, thinking about stuff in black and white is probably not the way you want to do it right now. I think the issue with trying to understand something like autophagy is really you'd have to almost do studies looking at autophagy where you're equating, like, weekly calories, like, if you want to get more extreme versions of fasting and then looking. Okay, what is the overall net effect? Because, all right, let's say you're doing alternate day fasting, right? Like a more extreme version of fasting. Absolutely. I've no doubt that on your day of fasting, your, your autophagy is going up. But then if we are equating calories, right, you're going to be eating much more on your feeding day than a person who's just eating the same amount of calories every single day is if we're equating apples to apples. Right. And so when you're eating more, that tends to reduce autophagy. And so what's the overall net effect? Right. I don't know. I don't know the answer. But I would suspect based on other things I've seen, that it's probably going to be really no difference, that it is a tool to control calories. And that would have was what affects autophagy on longevity. I mean, really, there's some animal studies, there's some in vitro stuff as well, I think. And even the calorie restriction stuff, I think I have a kind of a unique take on this because ive done animal research. So theres nothing Im aware. I mean, theres a couple rodent studies looking at time restricted eating where they suggested a longevity benefit. I think rodent model is probably a poor model for longevity because rodents grow throughout the course of their life. Humans kind of peak at like around 20 and then they kind of stay level, I mean, obesity notwithstanding. And then they start to decline later in life. Very different growth curve from rodents. Now rodents are good models for other things like protein metabolism, decent model for glucose metabolism, but for longevity, I'm not convinced. Now if we look at the monkey study, the primate studies, we see the calorie restriction effects on primates, right. And so I think, but I'm not even convinced it's calorie restriction. And here's why. Because I know how these studies are done. Because when you're looking at lab animals, you just look at what they normally eat and then you cut 20, 30% out and you go, that's calorie restriction. But I pulled up these studies and looked at the charts of these animals weights. They don't like keep dropping, there's like maybe a little drop and then it just kind of plateaus, right? Like they don't really lose much weight if at all. Animals tend to overeat in captivity. And when you look at the odds ratios of what obesity does for longevity, what I think is happening and what I think you're seeing is these animals just don't become obese and they don't gain excess amounts of body fat. And so calorie restriction, it's probably more, probably better put as it's just like preventing excess body fat, right. Because, I mean, if you take that at face value, I mean, if you're truly in a calorie deficit, you're entirely, you'll die eventually. You'll die, right. So I think a lot of this is literally can be boiled down to just don't become obese, don't have excess body fat, and you don't have to be super lean either. Like, actually, the mortality data suggests if you're super lean, that's probably not good either. There are some aspects of that that I tend to think that people who are very lean are probably extreme in other ways, and those aspects of their life probably contribute to the mortality rate. But, like 15, 20% body fat if you're a male, appears to be a very protective effect for mortality compared to being 30, 40% body fat. And so again, I am very convinced that excess body fat is really bad for metabolic health, cardiovascular disease, cancer and mortality. But how you get to a normal body weight or lean body weight, I think is way less important than actually just getting there.

Rhonda Patrick: Got it. I think a lot of people are interested in what Lane's weekly routine is in terms of your, you know, the workout, your diet supplement. Is there like a supplement that is, you know, in the fitness industry. Industry you think is like a no brainer, like, should be taking. So I'd love to kind of end with your personal routine.

Layne Norton: Yeah. And full disclaimer. I own a supplement company, outward nutrition, and so I have some bias here, but I feel relatively, I tell people I don't put anything in it that I wasn't using beforehand and wasn't pretty, felt pretty strong about. So routine wise, it does vary because I travel a lot for things like this. And I have my kids week on, week off because I share custody, split custody. And so weeks I have the kids. You know, it's summer now, so it's a little bit different. But usually I'm up early, getting them ready for school, taking them to school, get back. Work day starts around 830. Usually, like, you know, I'll wake up if I'm taking the kids to school, I'll just pound a protein shake or something like that, just so I get some protein in, hold me over, take to school, get back, have some caffeine, whether it's coffee, energy drink, whatever, which, by the way, caffeine is the original, like, nootropic cognitive enhancer, pretty consistent data on that. And then I'll start work, whether it's emails, recording content, reading, research, a lot of actual my time as I look on social media for what people are talking about and see if it's something I want to talk about. I handle all my own social media, so that is a lot of what I do on a day to day basis, posting. You know, I like to read the comments to see what people are talking about, other questions they have. And then usually, like, I'll have lunch and then I'll go train in the afternoon and that will last 3 hours depending on, like, I've got world championships coming up in eleven weeks in South Africa. And so, yeah, like, my training time per week is like twelve to 15 hours. Like, it's a lot of time. And so I'll usually on weeks out of the kids, I try to train Monday through Friday and then take the weekends off so that I can just spend the time with the kids on the weekend.

Rhonda Patrick: Is there a reason you train in the afternoon? Is it?

Layne Norton: I just feel better. I just feel better. And usually if I haven't had great sleep, if I have some time to kind of wake up, I go better. But like, if I go early in the morning, I just notice that my performance isn't as good. I like getting a few meals in before I go train, so. And then like once I finish training, I'll get back. I have a nanny who helps me with the kids. So she, like, I take the kids to school, but then she picks them up. My son is on the spectrum, he's ASD and so she takes him to Aba therapy and then she'll pick my daughter up, she'll do like homework with her and she'll do tutoring and whatnot. And then both kids will come back to my house at like 05:00 which is about the time where I finished training and finished all my work. And then I'm dad for the evening, right? And then once they go to bed, I might like any emails I gotta fire out or something like that. But mostly I'm just unwinding. I'll watch the sunset, I'll watch a tv show, whatever, right? Weeks I don't have the kids. Usually if I, if I travel, that's when I travel. Still try to train in the afternoon, but obviously, like, it can be kind of wonky depending on how things go. And pardon me, only because I don't have the kids. If I'm in Tampa, usually I'm working a little bit longer in terms of I'll wake up a little bit later. I try not to wake up too much later because I don't want to get off. I've just noticed that being consistent at the time I wake up actually helps a lot, even if I get less sleep. But I'll wake up. I'll start work after breakfast. I'll get mostly through my work, go train, get home, have dinner, watch a sunset, then I'll go do some more work. And then usually, like, finish up the night watching a tv show or playing a video game or just something to like, de plug my mind.

Rhonda Patrick: What kind of meals do you eat? I mean, is it protein?

Layne Norton: Honestly, I usually batch cook protein, so I'll cook a lot of chicken breast up just so I have quick, easy, accessible protein because carbs and fats are pretty easy, you know, but sources that you would expect, you know, for proteins, chicken breast, greek yogurt, lean red meat, lean pork, fish, eggs, those sorts of sources of protein for carbohydrates. Again, what you'd expect, fruits and vegetables, rice, oatmeal. One of my favorites is I love popcorn. That's like my treat because it actually is very high in fiber. People don't realize, especially if you air pop it or there are some brands who actually are, are really high in fiber and not super high in fat. I love that. So I'll have that. It's a great way to get in 10 grams of fiber and it takes you a long time to eat it, so it's very satiating as well. And then, like, I actually do use quite a few frozen meals. Again, I don't let the enemy of good be perfection because, I mean, if I spend all my time cooking, it's just, or I'm hiring like a personal chef. I mean, that's a lot of expense. And so I do use some frozen meals that are higher in protein, higher in fiber, and usually at night I'll have like a small bowl of ice cream or maybe a cookie or something like that. And that's like my little treat that I enjoy sometimes before training, if I'm like, kind of rushing, I might have like some gummy bears or something like that just to give me some quick glucose. So I make sure that I've got know, got something in circulation. But for the most part, you know, my diet's about what you'd expect supplement wise. I mean, if I had to build my Mount Rushmore of supplements, it is very clearly three supplements. It is creatine, monohydrate, caffeine, whey, protein. The amount of research data on all three of those is enormous. And honestly, especially for creatine, I just can't see an argument at this point not to take it because of the cognitive benefits. There appear to be benefits on memory formation, even short term. There was a study that just came out showing, like, 30 plus grams of creatine at a sitting, actually acutely increased memory formation, which I was very surprised by depression. There was a study that showed that creatine helped a little bit with the symptoms of depression. Again, cognition, possibly cognitive decline, and then, of course, all the lean mass strength benefits, performance benefits that we talk about, and it's very, very safe. I mean, if you take creatine, you might see your creatinine levels go up your. It doesn't mean your kidneys are failing or anything like that. Again, there's so many long, randomized control trials looking directly at kidney function, showing the creatine does not negatively impact kidney function. The one thing that I hear pop up consistently now, as well, it causes hair loss. No one study in 2009 showed that increased DHT, okay, which is a metabolite of testosterone. It didn't show any changes in the precursor or the thing that comes after DHT. And so how is this happening? Right. Like, where is this happening? I mean, it must be directly affecting the enzyme that catalyzes the conversion, if we believe this. Right. But again, even if it was true, an increase in DHT is not the same thing as showing hair loss. Right. You're showing a surrogate marker, you're showing a mechanism, and it's never been replicated. And again, very, to me, a suspect mechanism, because you're not seeing the. Either the precursor or whatever came after. I figured what comes after DHT, you're not seeing a difference in those. And so how is this effect happening?

Rhonda Patrick: And more importantly, hair loss wasn't measured.

Layne Norton: They didn't measure hair loss. Yeah. And so I tell people, I'm like, you know, I'm just not worried about it. Again, it was 15 years ago. I would think by now, if it was a legit thing, it would have come back. So that's, like, my tier one of supplements.

Rhonda Patrick: What kind of dose for the creatine?

Layne Norton: 5 grams a day, plenty for people, 3 grams for small women. Probably enough.

Rhonda Patrick: Do you think it caused. Does the water, is the water gain?

Layne Norton: So the water is all intracellular. It doesn't increase extracellular water. People who feel bloated on creatine. Creatine can be a gut irritant for some people. So what I recommend is splitting the dose and taking it morning and night if you find it's a gut irritant, but it doesn't increase, like, extracellular water. All the. All the water that we see, it does increase total body water and intracellular water, which is a good thing. That actually makes you visually look better. Like, if you're full with glycogen, for example, your muscles look better. There's a reason bodybuilders load carbohydrates before competition, because you look more volumized, your muscles look fuller. So, creatine, whey protein. I just take as needed to get my total protein intake. I don't think it's anything magical about whey protein. I think it's just a very high quality, tasty, relatively inexpensive way to get in high quality protein.

Rhonda Patrick: People are worried about an insulin response from protein powder. Are you like.

Layne Norton: Again, this is where it's important to have guidelines, not rules. Right. Okay, well, let's look at the randomized control trials. Okay. Yeah, it does seem to have an insulin response. It does. But does insulin sensitivity get worse? No. If anything, in the studies, it gets better. So, again, I'm not worried about an acute insulin rise. Right. One of the things I'll tell people is, if we're going to worry about acute changes and stuff, you're not be able to eat anything because fat impedes flow, media dilation after a meal. Carbohydrates raise blood glucose, which is, you know, blood glucose is toxic over time, and protein stimulates mTOR, which is involved in formation of cancer in some cancers. Big difference between acute rises in these systems versus, like, long term dysregulated signaling. Big difference. Then my tier two of supplements would be things like, I really like rhodiola rosea as a cognitive enhancer, as an adaptogen, it improves time to fatigue and improves perception of fatigue and appears to be pretty consistent mental fatigue. Yeah. So, like, even in exercise, like, their perception of fatigue. But, yes, it also, I think it's task completion is how they measured it. I could get that wrong. So if any experts are out there and want to correct me, please do.

Rhonda Patrick: What dose? I recently got interested in this in rodeo, and I ordered it, and I have it. And it was because of the mental potential, mental effects.

Layne Norton: So depends on the standardization of the saliva sides. There was a veins in the saligicides. I think it's like, you want, like, 3%, but the dose that's usually used for most people is, like, anywhere from, I think, like, 100 to 600 milligrams. But if you go above that, they actually show, like, it actually starts to fall off. So there appears to be, like, an optimal curve. So, like, in our pre workout, I believe we have 150 milligrams and so. Or maybe 150 milligrams per scoop. I have to go back and look, but it's an amount that's kind of, like, right in that middle range to get the benefits. And anecdotally, I find it takes the edge off caffeine, too. So, like, you don't have as much of a comedown off caffeine, so I like that. Ashwagandha. I'm very bullish on ashwagandha. There's a few meta analyses now showing improved lean mass, improved strength, improved sleep, better stress management. There's been some worries about, I think, liver, some people said, or also depression and mood. I haven't seen it pop up in any of the randomized control trials. And so I just don't. I don't really. It's not something I worry about. That seems to be another adaptogen that kind of, like, helps, really, with stress management. And interestingly, none of the. It raises testosterone, too, but not an amount that would. It doesn't raise the testosterone or lower cortisol enough to where it explains the changes in lean mass. So this could be like a matrix thing again, where there's, like, acting on multiple. Multiple pathways, summing up to an outcome. Now, I am a little bit. It's in our. It's in our recovery product, but it's tier two because I just want to see more studies over a longer period of time. Like, if you look at creatine, caffeine, whey protein, there are thousands of placebo controlled trials showing the benefits to this across multiple labs over decades in different countries. Very strong evidence. I just want to see more from things like Ashwagandha rhodiola over a longer period of time before I would move that into a tier one. Right. And the mechanism isn't really understood yet of ashwagandha. And so I just want to see that flushed out a little bit more. Right. And then there's things like betaine or trimethylglycine, which may improve power output during exercise. You have things like beta alanine, which if you're exercising, like, intense, between 30 seconds and ten minutes, that appears to have some benefits. Citrulline may have some benefits, and at least if you're. At least if you're getting, like, 6 grams in terms of, like, fatigue resistance. So those. Those are some like. And then fish oil, melatonin, those things. We kind of go into my tier two, actually. Melatonin has shown an increase in lean mass as well. Yeah, there's some studies now, randomized control trials showing an increase in lean mass. So some people might say improved sleep is improving lean mass, but there's actually some evidence that it may act outside of the improved sleep. I'm not sure the exact mechanism. So, again, I want to see more of that.

Rhonda Patrick: It's a hormone. I mean, it changes 500 different genes.

Layne Norton: Right? So those are kind of my tier two. I'm sure I'm missing some stuff. You know, multivitamin. Probably go in there somewhere, you know, insurance. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just make sure you're covering your bases right. If you have a real hard time eating vegetables, you know, always tell people fruits and vegetables, whole foods are better. If you need a fiber supplement, okay? Fiber supplement, you know, you could take metamucil and betofiber, so you're getting soluble insoluble. You know, again, I think it's better to get a diverse array, but let's not let perfection be the enemy of good, right? So if you need a fiber supplement, by all means. So those would kind of be, like, the thing that I'm having and stuff, and that's the supplements I sell. We sell a sleep supplement. There's other things in there. There's a few other ingredients that have been shown to improve sleep, but melatonin is the big hammer in there. And then there's our recovery supplement, which has creatine, it has ashwagandha, it has betaine. You know, so some of the stuff I'm talking about.

Rhonda Patrick: And then what do you think of glucosamine and the.

Layne Norton: Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably in a tier two, if you want. I think the evidence is. I haven't looked into it super specifically. I think there's good evidence that it does a little bit, is what I would tell people. It's. It's a small effect, but it seems to have an effect.

Rhonda Patrick: So if you're throwing a kitchen sink.

Layne Norton: I mean, yeah, if you want to do that, that's fine. And, you know, other things that fall into, like, people are like, what's tier three? I'm like, tier three is where it's. There's just not a lot of consistency in the data. Right. You know, or you got stuff like, you know, ectosterone, which there's a couple studies out there that show, hey, an increase in lean mass in ectosterone. And I'm like, it doesn't stimulate protein synthesis, doesn't do anything to protein degradation. Where is this increase in lean mass coming from? Right. So that HMB, probably something in tier three where like, in specific populations there might be a benefit, but for most people does nothing. So that's kind of how I categorize my supplements. But I really like, we only have four supplements in my entire line. You know, we have a pre workout, we have a recovery, we have sleep, and we have whey protein. And our whole deal, we're probably going to come up with an electrolyte supplement as well. But our whole deal is basically like, the line is not going to do the work for you, you got to do the work, which is why we call it out work. And we're just going to help you be able to train a little bit harder, recover a little bit faster. But it's your training that's going to move the needle totally.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, I mean, and you're going to help them get the information people can find you. You have a YouTube channel, social media book. You want to call out everything. I'm sure a lot of people already know where to find you, but for those few that don't, sure, yeah, I.

Layne Norton: Mean, you can find me on Instagram as biolane. That's kind of my digital business card, and I'm on most platforms as biolane, but yeah, I do everything. So, you know, we have one on one coaching. If people are looking for that, we do coaching through team biolane, which is a team of kind of like experts that I've handpicked to be one on one coaches. We've trained them in our methods. If you want to be a better coach, you want to learn how to do this stuff, want to learn methods and don't want to go back school. I have an academy called physique coaching Academy with professor Bill Campbell where it really is like, it's over 600 pages of written material. But if you want to learn how to be the best coach to help people build muscle and lose fat body composition, we synergize resistance training, nutrition, supplementation, and cardiovascular exercise around all that. And there's not really anything else out there that does that right now. So there's that then, you know, for people who can't afford one on one coaching, that's. We developed my app, Carbon diet coach, which is $10 a month, and I basically wrote a algorithm that will essentially coach you, like, do accountability coaching. So if you're, you know, you're doing fat loss, you weigh in, you know, each day we, we tell people it's, the more data points it has, the better you weigh in each day. And based on how you progressed, the app will adjust your nutrition recommendations to make sure that you're going towards your goals. And it will even, like, give you some feedback messages, like when you check in and whatnot, to tell you what you're doing well or what you can improve on. So that's been really successful for us. A lot of people like that because obviously not everybody can afford one on one coaching. But, you know, this thing does everything that my fitness pal does, except it actually, like, gives you feedback week to week, and it adjusts your nutrition as you progressed. So it's a great option for people who can't afford one on one coaching. And then my supplement line, I work nutrition, got a couple self published books. And then I also have a research review called Reps, where myself and my team of writers, we pick out five studies that are in, like, fitness and nutrition every month, and we break them down in, like, a really practical way. There's, like, there's some really good research reviews out there, but I found most of them were still, like, too highbrow. I really wanted to get something that was very, very practical. So reps is research explained with practical summaries. And so that's a great tool for people at $12.99 a month to, like. Like, if you're confused about some of this research, we'll break it down for you, you know, and then also have what's called a workout builder on my website, which is where people can go in and get, you know, kind of semi customized programming for, like, $12.99 a month as well. So I really try to, like, from top to bottom, like, build out stuff to help people at every different level of their fitness journey.

Rhonda Patrick: A lot of options there for someone, for anyone.

Layne Norton: Yeah. Yeah. I got a lot of stuff going on. I tell people, I'm like, I tell you one thing, I ain't boring.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, that's for sure. I absolutely enjoyed having a conversation with you, Lane. It's too bad that it had to be cut a little bit short. We could keep going for another couple hours, but I think that means we have to do this again. I would love to, because.

Layne Norton: Anytime.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. And again, thanks again for coming on, for everything you do, and I look forward to continuing following you and seeing what's up. And again, possibly around to you soon. That'd be fun.

Layne Norton: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of fun to be able to do this stuff. Awesome.