Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1267 - Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet
Uploaded: 2019-03-20T02:23:52.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1267 - Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1267 - Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-20. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1267 - Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet

four three two one and we're live all right so to set this up um when gary was
on last
gary taubes stephan how do i say your last name stephan guinea guinea yeah guinea
it's like dna
like dna but with a g right got it okay um when you were on last stephan had uh
some opposition
to some of the things that you were saying we talked about getting him on and
you on together
we finally pulled it off took there was a lot of wrangling there's a lot of
back and forth and
cat wrangling but we got it we're here um give me your position on this is all
for folks listening
this is all about obesity and the the mechanism for obesity is that fair to say
yeah yeah so
essentially uh the main points that we want to talk about today are try to keep
this a fist from
your face okay sure just move it around um what causes obesity and what causes
insulin resistance
which is behind a lot of our um chronic diseases that are common in society and
please uh give us
your background yeah so i have a bs in biochemistry a phd in neuroscience after
getting my phd in
neuroscience i went on to study the neuroscience of obesity at the university
of washington and
particularly the brain circuits that regulate body fatness hopefully we'll get
a chance to talk about
those today and then i went on um to become a science consultant science
communicator and write a book called the
hungry brain that is um my attempt to explain for a non-specialist audience
what uh what causes obesity
and uh yeah so that's my background now what is your disagreement with gary's
position everything
everything yeah so uh how about how about i just can i start by explaining
please do what i believe
causes obesity i'm going to be long-winded here is that okay go right ahead all
right we have hours
okay cool so first uh a little bit of housekeeping i'm going to be citing a lot
of evidence today and so
i want please bring this up to your face okay sure just move it around sure
because you want to sit
back how's that day perfect okay i'm going to be citing a lot of evidence today
and i want people to be
able to follow along at home and so i've put many of the references that i'm
going to be citing
on that so it doesn't cover your face okay there we go all right i put a lot of
the references that
i'm going to be citing on my website stephan guinea.com or if you don't feel
like spelling my name you can
go to wholehealthsource.org and i have a numbered list of topics there and i'm
going to be calling out
numbers just scroll down to the number that i referred to and the references
are all there
second thing i want to say uh that i want to be really clear about today is
that i'm not here to
be the anti-low-carb guy okay um i think low-carb diets are a valid tool for uh
controlling body fatness
and controlling blood sugar i'm not here to talk anybody out of being on a low-carb
diet um what i am
here to try to talk people out of is some of the mythology that has accumulated
around the low-carb
diet okay so i want to get started with an analogy to help people understand um
why the brain is
important in obesity so imagine you're an alien coming down from outer space
and you want to
understand what's going on on earth and you notice that on the highway some
cars are traveling faster
than others some cars go faster some cars go slower and you want to figure out
why and so you go
and you start studying the tires of the cars because obviously the amount of
force that is exerted by the
tire onto the asphalt is the thing that determines the speed of the car we know
this this is just physics
and so you study the tires and you study the tires and you study them and you
never figure out why some
cars go faster than others now why is that the reason is that you're studying
the wrong part of the
system if you want to understand the uh why some cars go faster than others you
have to understand the
part of the system that regulates speed and that is the person behind the wheel
and so in this analogy
the tires are fat cells and the person behind the wheel is the brain there has
been tons of research
on fat cell biology on what factors put fat in fat cells what take it out there's
been tons and tons
of research on that and it's intuitively obvious that we should be studying
that to understand obesity
right but in fact all of that research has yielded very little insight into why
some people are fatter
than others that's because it's the wrong part of the system to study fat cells
do not regulate the size
of fat cells any more than the tires on a car regulate the speed of the car the
thing that regulates the
size of fat cells is the brain so let's talk about um first i'll give you a
little framework for
thinking about this the brain evolved over about 600 million years to promote
the survival and
reproduction of our ancestors and over the course of that time we evolved all
these different brain
circuits that have specialized functions they generate our hunger and our
cravings and our
fullness feelings they generate our eating behavior what and how much we eat
and they actively regulate the
amount of fat on our bodies and that's one of the things i want to talk about
and all these circuits
evolved and these are non-conscious by the way so you don't decide you want to
be hungry you don't decide
that you want to have a craving these are things that bubble up from non-conscious
parts of your brain
that you don't control so um these circuits are calibrated to an environment of
our ancestors not
the environment we're living in right now so these circuits all evolved to
function optimally in the
environment of our ancestors promote the survival and reproduction of our
ancestors so um what happens when
you put these brain circuits in the modern environment where you have abundant
calorie dense tasty foods
rich in carbohydrate and fat is these same brain circuits push us to over
consume and they push our
bodies to accumulate and hold on to fat and then what you see as a result is
the three hallmarks of
obesity first of all the obvious you see elevated body fat mass second of all
you see elevated calorie intake
people with obesity consume more calories than people who do not have obesity
after correcting for
height and sex and physical activity level and third you see that people with
obesity defend
their higher level of body fatness against changes and so there's actually a
regulatory change
that happens it's not conscious defense you know they're not trying to remain
obese it's these
body fat regulatory circuits and this is where gary gets it right is that
people with obesity are not
just lean people who eat more calories there's actually a change in the
regulatory activity that regulates
body fat in the body and we can get back to how that happens but i'll just
leave it there for now
so up until this point i've basically just been telling a plausible story right
i mean i haven't
actually cited any evidence yet to support that my story is correct um and so
let's get into that
let's talk about what some of the evidence is that supports this idea that i've
just laid out
so i want to start with um the genetics of obesity i think this offers some way
can i interrupt for one
second uh as long as it's very brief just a question i don't i still don't
quite understand what the
model is okay i understand the dysregulation of the brain environment if you
don't understand the
model how about i lay out how about i finish laying it out and then you can ask
a question
because i may answer your question over the course of uh continuing so let me
just finish
um okay so now the genetics of obesity offers us a lot of insight into the
biological mechanisms that
drive differences in body fatness in the general population so you get these
studies like
the the most interesting studies are the genome wide association studies they
get hundreds of
thousands of people together and they um sequence or they they measure all
these markers in their
genomes and they figure out what parts of the genome make some people fatter
than others so if you have
version a in this particular location you end up a little fatter than if you
have version b and when you
look at all the places where this is happening you can see the genes where it's
happening in and that tells you if you look at
what those genes are doing that tells you what the mechanisms are that underlie
everyday differences
in body fatness in the general population and so to kind of warm ourselves up
let's start by talking about height
genes so height has a strong genetic component so does body fatness
um and researchers has figured out a lot of the genes that underlie differences
in height between people
and when you look at what those genes do they tend to be involved in the growth
and development of the
skeleton and the connective tissue which is what you would expect right because
growth of the skeleton
determines your height so genes that determine diabetes risk type 2 diabetes
are all about insulin
sensitivity all about insulin secretion and the function of the insulin secreting
pancreas which is what you expect
expect because diabetes is a disease that is all about insulin so these studies
are really good at getting at the underlying
biological mechanisms that are driving these phenomena so what do these studies
have to say about obesity
if gary's model is correct we should see a bunch of genes popping up related to
fat cells and insulin
if my model is correct we should see a bunch of genes popping up related to the
brain and in fact that's
exactly what we see the genetics of obesity are overwhelmingly related to
differences in brain activity between individuals
and um okay so that's one piece of evidence another piece of evidence there are
five fda approved
weight loss drugs four of those act in the brain one of them reduces dietary
fat absorption in the digestive tract
there are no effective fat loss drugs that i'm aware of that target insulin or
fat cells
third piece of evidence um if you look at some people get really unlucky in
life and they end up with these horrible
genetic mutations that you know knock out some biological pathways some of
these people end up with extreme
obesity people and also animals we see this in mice and rats just occasionally
you get unlucky and you get
really really fat and researchers have been cataloging what are these mutations
when we find people who are
genetically really obese what are these mutations that are making them fat what
is the biological mechanism
that's getting screwed up that's making them fat and what they've found is that
all of these mutations that
they've identified to date a number of them are occurring in the leptin
signaling pathway and this is the leptin
is the primary fat regulating hormone in the body gary avoids this never talks
about this in his writing but leptin is the primary fat regulating hormone
hormone in the body and these mutations either knock out leptin they knock out
leptin receptors or they knock
out the leptin response pathway in the brain and um so that's the third piece
of evidence okay
so now we haven't really gotten around to talking about what it is exactly
about the bad interaction that
happens between our ancient brains and the modern food environment that causes
us to become fat
we've established that the brain is central to obesity but we haven't really
established what it is
exactly about that interaction why does our modern food why does our modern
environment promote obesity
right so um basically there are three different ways that i'm gonna look at
this from um but first i want to
say that the probably the best way to answer this question is to start with the
question what is the
most fattening diet in the world what is the diet that is more fattening than
any others and the answer to
that is it's human junk food in a variety of non-human species and humans it's
human junk food that is more
fattening than any others and i'm going to skip over some o