Speaker 1 00:00

The new guidelines recognize that whole nutrient dense food is the most effective path to better health.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 00:07

How would you describe why we would have guidelines just in general?

Dr. Donald Layman 00:11

I think the origins of it came out of the end of World War Two, and people started getting more oriented to public health and the well being everyone and people realized that heart disease was a real cause of mortality, and so they started to look for reasons why. Also during World War Two, they were interested in the fact that there are a million people men overseas fighting a war, and they had to have some idea of how much food to send. So I think those were the two things that really brought nutrition to the forefront. How do we define what people need? Protein and healthy fats are essential, and we’re wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines. What Kennedy is saying is, what we need to base our science on is well controlled studies, and if we don’t have well controlled studies, we shouldn’t make conclusive answer.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 00:58

This is a monumental moment for Americans, the dietary guidelines.

Speaker 2 01:11

Dr. Donald Layman, welcome to the show. You are no stranger to this. You’re probably the most frequently returning guests. Welcome.

Dr. Donald Layman 01:19

It’s good to be back, even on the road show.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 01:23

This is, you know what? I think we should probably create a Dr. Don Layman and CO roadshow on nutrition. We’re actually in DC. This is a monumental moment for Americans, the dietary guidelines. I just have chills thinking about have changed, and the listener or viewer is thinking two things right now, Wow, these guys are total nerds. Like, who cares about it? Or, number two, maybe there is something more to nutrition for optimal health, and that the problems that we’re chasing begin on our plate, as opposed to looking for more medication to change obesity and heart disease and all the other chronic diseases with these changes, potentially with prioritizing protein, which, unbelievable, hasn’t changed the original guidelines at point, eight grams per kg, they haven’t changed in over since, what I mean, since ever have

Dr. Donald Layman 02:18

They No, that’s that’s been the RDA forever, and that RDA hasn’t changed, but we’ve highlighted the fact that an optimal range is probably about twice that 50% you know, 1.2 to 1.6 so 50 to 100% above the minimum

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 02:38

the and we’re going to and we should touch on what the old guidelines were for the people listening or watching the show that have never really spent time thinking about the dietary guidelines before we move to the new and improved, incredible upside down pyramid. What were the old guidelines? Roughly speaking,

Dr. Donald Layman 02:56

the old guidelines, in my mind, were more about what you shouldn’t eat than what you should eat. It was using the minimum protein intake of point eight grams per kg, which is just a minimum, to prevent deficiencies. But it was about not eating cholesterol, not eating saturated fat, not eating sugar, not eating any salt containing products. So it was all about what you shouldn’t eat. They did have some guidelines about eating a variety of foods and things like that and maintaining normal weight. But really, when they started structuring what people should do, it was really about avoiding anything that had fat in it, and eating things that had a lot of carbohydrates.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 03:37

Seems really counterintuitive that the guidelines, if we were to think about what the guidelines, what their use is, how would you describe why we would have guidelines just in general?

Dr. Donald Layman 03:47

I think the origins of it came out of the end of World War Two, and people started getting more oriented to public health and the well being everyone. And people realized that heart disease was a real cause of mortality, and so they started to look for reasons why. Also during World War Two, they were interested in the fact that there are a million people men overseas fighting a war, and they had to have some idea of how much food to send. So I think those were the two things that really brought nutrition to the forefront. How do we define what people need?

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 04:20

Would you say, and I don’t actually know this number, would you say that the majority of people follow the current dietary guidelines? I mean, I know that answer, but I don’t know the percentage. Yeah.

Dr. Donald Layman 04:30

People often ask me, you know, what difference does the dietary guidelines make? And for the average person, none at all. They totally ignore it. Most people don’t even know it exists, but the reality is they have a big impact on any group that gets any government support. So school lunch, daycares, nursing homes, even prisons or hospitals or the US military, they all have to follow these guidelines. So there’s a huge. Impact across the nation in terms of, do these guidelines really represent a healthy way to go?

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 05:07

They really haven’t changed. They re evaluate them every five years. Is that true? Right?

Dr. Donald Layman 05:12

But to your point about they don’t change. One of the guidelines, one of the one of the rules that have governed the process is you can never go back and look at the prior information. You can only change based on what has happened. So if you started in 1980 with a false idea about saturated fat, 45 years later, you still have that same false idea. And I think that’s one of the big changes. Is that when Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Rowlands came in now they said, No, we don’t care what has happened. We only care about what’s real. So let’s re evaluate all the science, the

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 05:50

new guidelines the high level. Can you share some of those recommendations now?

Dr. Donald Layman 05:55

So the recommendations, I think, are very logical. They’re very flexible. They start out with, everybody needs to target their calorie intake. We have a huge obesity problem. So that’s simple. So we need to get that under control. And that’s partially foods you choose, but partially portion control. The second thing, which is really a big priority, is prioritizing protein foods. Protein foods are the primary source of nutrients in our diet, whether it’s amino acids or whether it’s vitamins and minerals. Protein foods are where we get our 65 70% of our nutrients. So you have to make a priority to that. From there they went in and say typical things like fruits and vegetables, which is what you’d expect healthy fats, which is a big change, prioritizing natural fats, things that you would get from foods, from animal sources, milk, eggs, meats, things of that nature, along with olive oil and other natural and less Use of highly processed seed oils and then into carbohydrates. People need to restrict that really in line with their energy needs and particularly favoring more whole grain. So that’s kind of an overview of of the lay it out, and it’s really presented as bullet points, which are very easy to understand.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 07:18

Why do you think, from your perspective, have has protein not been addressed previously?

Dr. Donald Layman 07:24

I think that the main reason is that most animal proteins, which are the probably the most nutrient dense proteins in the food supply, are also source of cholesterol and saturated fat. So I think they were trying to avoid it. There’s been a long time push that we needed a more plant based diet. So that’s sort of been an underlying so I think that’s really been the main issue. It’s sort of been a high in the cloak of that saturated fat issue.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 07:55

They increased the protein by 50 to 100% which is extraordinary. And to highlight the point, eight grams per kg was based on the RDA. Well, is based on nitrogen balance to inform the RDA. Can you just speak to that really quickly?

Dr. Donald Layman 08:11

So the RDA created back in the 70s really was trying to get a minimum number of protein that individuals would need. And what they did was they used 25 year old, young, healthy, ideal weight, physically active males, and fed them nothing but a dairy, high quality dairy protein for seven days, and looked at nitrogen balance. So they got a number point eight grams per kg, which is very low, but probably only applies to physically active, healthy young, 25 year olds. And so I think it gives us sort of a basement number, but it has nothing to do with optimum health.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 08:53

And I was listening to the press conference, and Marty McCary was talking about how it was based on nitrogen balance, and that we don’t have any valuable health outcomes that we know of based on a nitrogen balance. Do you agree with that?

Dr. Donald Layman 09:06

Right? I mean, nitrogen balance is sort of an indicator for growth, which is where it really developed. It developed out of Animal Science. Is when an animal or a person is growing, they’re gaining nitrogen, they’re growing, they’re gaining muscle mass, and so that’s a meaningful number, but in a non growing adult, it’s pretty it’s not very meaningful, and I don’t know of any health outcome that relates to it at all.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 09:31

One of the other things that I heard Kennedy mention was this idea of, we’re going to use rigorous science. So perhaps in the past, the old guidelines were not based on high quality evidence, and what they were really trying to do is then think about health outcomes, and then high quality data to support health outcomes someone in a macronutrient from a macronutrient perspective. Thank you to timeline for sponsoring today’s episode. As we step into the new year, we’re all. Thinking about routines, what to start, what to stop, and what to finally commit to. But the body doesn’t respond to resolutions. It responds to consistency and lasting health isn’t built on trends. It’s built on fundamentals, quality, nutrition, resistance training, recovery and cellular energy. Every second your cells are producing energy. That energy determines how strong you will feel, how well you perform and how resilient you are over time. And unfortunately, as we age, that system breaks down. The mitochondria, which we know are the engines inside your cells, wear out faster than the body can replace them, and that’s where a timeline powered by mitopia comes in. Mitopia supports mitochondrial renewal and has been shown to increase muscle strength by roughly 12% even without changes in exercise by improving cellular energy where it matters most, muscle is the organ of longevity, and without strong mitochondria, you can’t have strong muscles if staying forever strong is part of your plan. Get 35% off Mito pure subscription@timeline.com slash, Dr

Dr. Donald Layman 11:12

Lyon, yeah, and I sort of understand the dilemma the public would like nice, clean answers, and so the people in charge would like to give them that. But the problem is, in nutrition, we don’t have nice, clean answers. And I think the difference that Kennedy is looking at between hard science is that we would like to have what we call random control trials where people are actually well controlled. What they’re eating is well established, well controlled. A lot of the nutrition right now is using what we call epidemiology, which is where you basically go out and ask someone what they ate yesterday, and they give you some answer, probably make it up, and then 20 years later, you ask how their health turned out. And I, for one, don’t remember what I ate yesterday.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 12:04

I don’t remember what I ate this morning.

Dr. Donald Layman 12:06

And so I think the problem with it in computer language, you always say garbage in, garbage out. If you start out with really bad food data, making conclusions from it 20 years later is not very good. So I think Kennedy is arguing that that’s not the way we should do nutrition science. Back in the old days, epidemiology was good for something like smoking. You either smoked or you didn’t, and 20 years later, you can say there was lung cancer. Okay, that’s very clean. Nutrition is much more complicated than that. And so I think what Kennedy is saying is what we need to base our science on is well controlled studies. And if we don’t have well controlled studies, we shouldn’t make conclusive answers. And I think that’s where we’re at, and I think that’s what the report reflects. The science that’s used is pretty hard and fast, and places where we don’t have an answer, we say we need more research, and I think that will ultimately help guide HHS and NIH in terms of the research they fund.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 13:04

The protein conversation. What when you say you feel that the data was good, the data that was examined to inform these decisions? Can you talk to me a little bit about what kind of data and what kind of science was used for the protein

Dr. Donald Layman 13:18

I worked on one part of it. I worked on the protein part, arguably the most important, as one might expect in this conversation. And so Heather Leidy from University of Texas in Austin, she and I went back and we had a relatively short period of time, we just started working on it in Argus. So what people do are a look for a lot of randomized control studies. How many can you find? They like to do systematic reviews to pull that all together. So we get a combination of systematic reviews and narrative reviews to pull it together, both in the topics of how much protein do we think is optimum for adults, and then also how much protein from a nutrient density standpoint. So we really looked at two main questions as we came to the conclusion about the Protein Data.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 14:12

You looked at how much protein was necessary for optimal health. How were you defining optimal health? That’s a

Dr. Donald Layman 14:19

great question. And so there’s, there’s a lot of different ways you could do it. Most people like what we would call more hard outcomes, so death or anthropometric measurements or whatever. So we actually used a lot of the weight management data. Since 75% of adults are overweight, we thought that weight management was a good target. So we looked at things like changes in body weight, changes in body fat, changes in lean mass, and things of that like that as our main outcome measures. And what we found was that in basically all the studies out there, and there are quite a few, somewhere in the 40s, most of. Them, pretty much all of them show one of those factors, that the higher protein is a better outcome, whether it’s total weight management, weight loss, body fat loss, lean mass stability, all of those types of things.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 15:15

If someone were to argue and say, well, higher protein isn’t good, because I’ve heard people, you know, there’s a somewhat of a plant based community that is really, that really feels, and I use the word feels that we’re eating too much protein, or we’re already eating enough protein. I imagine that, as someone who is part of the committee, there’s going to be quite a bit of

Dr. Donald Layman 15:37

pushback, yeah. I mean, I think one of the great things about the Dietary Guidelines and the way we’ve written them is we have allowed for those different opinions. We have tried to put the best science as to where we think the optimum target is, but we’ve then allowed for, if someone is a vegetarian, what does this mean? What’s the liability to that? What nutrients are they likely to be low on so the idea that there’s too much protein, there’s a lot of research that has shown that higher levels are perfectly safe. Lower levels, we know that there’s risk to it, and food choices may be even the bigger risk. We know that as people go toward lower protein diets, they tend to be more likely to be deficient in B, 12, b6, niacin, iron, zinc, selenium. So those data are pretty clear out there, so your protein food choices make a lot of difference to your overall diet, quality and nutrient density.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 16:41

You mentioned a few nutrients of concern. So you mentioned B 12, b6 niacin, zinc, selenium. And these are found, these are nutrients that are found in animal products more readily and also more bioavailable. Would you? Would you agree

Dr. Donald Layman 16:57

with that exactly? So they’re, they’re at higher concentration. If you look at meats, for example, all of those are are micronutrients that are exactly the same as we would have in our muscles. I mean, it’s exactly the same role, the same metabolic role, so they’re in the same concentration. And as you pointed out, they’re all bioavailable, so iron might very well be in plants, but it’s less than 10% absorbed, and so bioavailability and also nutrient form are all big issues, and the animal products just provide more nutrient dense foods.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 17:38

Do you anticipate there is a high it highlights animal based proteins, which is again extraordinary. Do you anticipate pushback on red meat that seems to be a topic of conversation that has a resurgence every I don’t know, three months, three weeks, three days?

Dr. Donald Layman 17:57

Yeah, I think, I think that there will be individuals and groups who who thinks that inappropriate, just like there are individuals like me and groups who think that the previous guidelines were inappropriate. I think what is important about these guidelines is they allow consumers to make choices. They provide the science, and people can make their choice before they were kind of social, prescriptive type of things that government knows best, and you should follow what we tell you. I think the guideline should be, this is what the science tells us, and you are free to make choices. And I think that’s a big difference.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 18:45

The protein has increased by 50 to 100% from point eight grams per kg now to 1.2 up to 1.6 grams per kg. Are you aware of any data that would suggest that the point eight number is more valuable for human health than, say, the higher number of protein,

Dr. Donald Layman 19:04

yeah, that’s actually part of the report that Dr Leidy and I put together. Is that we looked at that specifically, comparing all of the RCT type of really rigorous research, comparing values of studies that used above 1.2 versus something around point eight, and uniformly, the higher ones were always better. Once in a while there wasn’t a statistical difference, but out of all of the studies we ever looked at, we never found a single one where the point eight was better on any outcome, whether it was things like inflammation and glutathione peroxidase, or whether it’s body composition or anything else. There’s no studies that ever say that’s a better choice.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 19:52

It’s really important because, again, this landscape, while amazing because of the velocity at which information spreads, is extraordinary. Mary, on the same hand, if someone has a large following with a lot of opinion, it doesn’t, it can sway the population and also sway people’s perspective, as opposed to being a bit more objective in say, the data, yeah.

Dr. Donald Layman 20:16

I mean, my perspective on all of this is that I think what we want to do is empower consumers to make their personal choices. And unfortunately, the guidelines haven’t really allowed that. Back to the original food guide pyramid. It’s one size fits all. You do what we say, and you’re going to be healthier. And obviously that was a miserable failure. We’ve got epidemics of obesity and diabetes, heart disease really hasn’t changed. We have 40 million people on statin drugs now. There’s nothing about the guidelines that have worked. And so I think it’s time to empower people to look at the science we’ve tried to give them the science to think about, and they can then make their own decisions. And for me, what, you know, I look at and think about, what’s the guideline that restricts animal products to a 10 year old in school lunch? What’s the logic behind that?

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 21:10

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Dr. Donald Layman 23:04

Absolutely, these guidelines dictate school lunch, and so they had to restrict animal products in it to make sure they met that 10% saturated fat. And so they were getting high carbohydrate, low protein meals. And with a lot of, you know, refined foods on top of it. So now we’ve changed that landscape

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 23:26

for the next five years,

Dr. Donald Layman 23:28

hopefully longer than that, but you know, at least till the next guidelines, it

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 23:35

hasn’t changed for the last I don’t know, what did you say? 40 or 50 years?

Dr. Donald Layman 23:39

Yeah, 1980s so 46 years, where we’re changing it, hopefully people will see the benefit. We know the other pattern wasn’t working again. I think these guidelines are very straightforward. I think they’re very fair and reasonable. I think they will be harder to argue against.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 24:00

What does that look like in daily practice for someone, at least the protein, the protein

Dr. Donald Layman 24:06

you know? What I hope people will learn is that when they think about their meal, when they think about their orientation to food, they should always think about a protein choice first. If you want to be vegetarian, that’s a protein choice. If you want to be a carnivore, that’s a or if you want to be in the middle, that’s a protein choice. But once you make that, everything else has to line up, your nutrients are now being determined by what that choice was. How many how many other fats or how much carbohydrate you’re going to eat is all determined by that protein choice. And we’ve been doing it the other way around. We’ve been avoiding fat, using carbs, and we probably need some protein. We’re basically flipping the script to protein choice first.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 24:52

Now this is a spoiler alert, but you did write the nutrition chapter in the Forever strong playbook that’s coming out January 27 We did not plan this at all. I hounded you to write the nutrition chapter, and I would say that 90% or would you probably even more. It’s, it seems very reflective of implementation the new guidelines. Yeah, it’s,

Dr. Donald Layman 25:17

you haven’t read that book, hopefully more than a coincidence, but you know, the the the research we did at the University of Illinois was based on basically what these new guidelines look like. And so part of what you know we based them on is the research that we did, we have firsthand knowledge of how these diets work, and we we compared it to the old food guide pyramid we used that was our control, and we did it and and you know, as you just pointed out, and in your your new book, basically the diet is exactly how we planned it. We you decide on your calories, you target your protein first, then you go to your vegetables and fruit, and finally, you decide on what grains you can tolerate. And that’s exactly how you plan it,

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 26:00

and that from a practical perspective, which we do cover in the book, the first meal, we typically say is very important. If it’s between 30 and 50 grams of dietary protein, there’s a reason as to why we believe that that is it’s the first meal. You’re coming out of a catabolic state. The muscles are primed for nutrients. You want to stimulate them, either through amino acids, ie protein or physical activity. Did you teach me? Well, yes, and what that would look like is, it could be a protein shake. It could be eggs. It now could be eggs and steak. Amazing. There’s a many different choices. I always like to

Dr. Donald Layman 26:40

buffer that comment just a little bit is that it’s more important the older you get.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 26:47

We don’t define older, yeah,

Dr. Donald Layman 26:49

when someone’s young and growing even into your 20s, up to around 30, the meal distribution doesn’t seem to make as much difference. It’s more about how much protein for a total day. But as we get older, the body gets what we call anabolic resistance. We’re a little less efficient with protein. And we think the amount per meal becomes more important. And our research shows that that first meal seems to be probably the most sensitive

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 27:17

when you say that the meal distribution. And there’s a lot of controversy, again, this isn’t really, actually, really, actually related to the guidelines. This is more in the nuanced and in the weeds. People will say protein distribution doesn’t matter, as long as you’re getting your overall protein. What would you say if someone is 55 getting 1.6 grams per kg, does it matter how they distribute their protein?

Dr. Donald Layman 27:43

I would say that the issues then become related to physical activity and overall health. You know, if someone is pretty physically active, they’re going to the gym three days a week. They’re doing some resistance training two meals a day that exceed 35 grams of protein is probably fine. Probably doesn’t matter. The more stress they’re under, if they’re trying to lose weight, or if they’re taking a drug for weight loss, if they’re bed fast, anything that puts them under stress, then I think that distribution becomes more and more important. So we used it during our weight loss studies, and we found it very effective to make that first meal a focal point. So again, perfectly healthy, physically active individual in their 50s probably doesn’t make much difference. Are they better off having one massive protein meal or distributing through the day? I think there’s quite a bit of research to suggest that you probably have your efficiency of use of protein at a meal. Probably tops out around 60 grams at a meal. So, you know, is an eight ounce steak the optimum. You probably don’t need a 16 ounce steak. So I, you know, I think distribution as you go to higher and more protein, I think having it in multiple bills is probably makes sense.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 29:08

I want to pause on that for a second, because it’s that you guys might have tuned out, which I hope you you didn’t. But there, there is a component to distribution. When I say distribution again, I’m a practicing physician from dietary compliance, we see that when people are having more robust meals, and I’ll define that between 30 and 50 grams, there’s a level of satiety that helps, as opposed to the traditional bodybuilding diets, that there’s five meals you’re eating every two or Three hours of 20 grams of protein. Again, does that change body composition for a younger person? Probably not, but I do think that if someone is more mature or older, that there just may be benefit of having a higher distribution in one or more meal from body composition retention over time. Yeah.

Dr. Donald Layman 30:00

I mean, as we said earlier, nearly 75% of Americans are overweight, and so the satiety aspect of protein is important. The thermogenic aspect of protein is important. I think meal distribution does come into play on that. What people have looked at is purely lean mass. Does the distribution directly relate to lean mass? Not very well, but it probably does relate to body composition. It relates to Heather lighty has shown it relates to snacking, desires, we think is really important, associated with weight control and things like that, and the thermogenic effect people don’t really understand it. I’m pretty convinced that the thermogenic effect is a meal based effect, basing the response of protein synthesis after a meal is where that extra thermogenic, that burning of calories, comes from,

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 30:58

from the protein perspective. I want to bring up one other point that I’m curious is if you anticipate these changes, and that is looking at individual amino acids,

Dr. Donald Layman 31:07

wow, that is definitely sort of out of the strike zone of dietary guidelines. At the moment, I would hope that nutrition begins to get more focused on that. We’ve written a number of papers, sort of highlighting that one of the things that I think will be an outcome of the dietary guidelines is that the USDA has used something they call ounce equivalents, which basically was designed to allow people to substitute plant proteins for animal proteins. And so the guidelines were that one ounce of chicken breast was equal to a fourth cup of beans or lentils or a half ounce of almonds. Well, we’ve gone in and looked at that, and that’s not they’re not equivalent at all. A fourth cup of of beans has less than has barely a third of the protein of a of a chicken breast, and almonds are even less, and almonds have a digestibility factor of less than 60% and so they’re not equivalent. So we have basically emphasized that if you if you want to substitute beans for chicken breast. It’s three quarters of a cup. It’s not, you know, three fourths of a cup to be an equal substitution

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 32:31

if you want how many carbohydrates is that? Right?

Dr. Donald Layman 32:34

I’d have to think about that. But

Speaker 2 32:37

45 maybe 45 grams of carbs, yeah,

Dr. Donald Layman 32:41

so it’s, I mean, that would, that would get about nine, so it’d be times four, yeah, I’d be around 40 grams

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 32:49

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Dr. Donald Layman 34:05

And some of it would be fiber. And in almonds, it’s, it’s even it’s even worse, it would take to be equal to one ounce of chicken breast. You’d have to eat three full ounces of almonds. And that’s, that’s in the neighborhood of, you know, 100 almonds. I mean, it’s just, it’s, they’re volumes that you can’t deal with easily. So hopefully, one of the things that will come out of it is that the way we look at these equivalents will change. And so that’s all based on amino acids. You know that they’re not equivalent. Just because it says it’s protein, it’s not really protein. All proteins aren’t equal. And animal proteins tend to have about what we’ve they’re, you know, essential amino acids, non essential animal proteins are around 50% essential amino acids, plant protein. Is around 35% so there’s have a lot less of them, so you have to eat more total protein. Talk to

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 35:06

me about the saturated fat. Saturated fat has the recommendation has always been, eat less than 10% of your diet coming from saturated fat. Now you and I have spoken at length about this. If saturated fat was indeed dangerous, then we should have a number as to what that looks like. If someone has a 4000 calorie diet and 10% is 44 grams of saturated fat, versus someone has a 1500 calorie diet and the saturated fat is roughly, I don’t know, 16 or 14 or 16 grams, there are two very different diets with two very different amounts of saturated fat. Talk to me about the changes in that recommendation.

Dr. Donald Layman 35:45

Yeah, my my concern about that 10% is it has really been used, has certainly been used by a lot of the food industry to demonize foods. An egg, for example, has very little saturated fat, about 1.5 grams, but it’s 19% and so therefore it would be deemed unhealthy. 2% milk is almost 20% saturated fat, but it has very little in it. Meats can be very low. So the issue is it’s really been used to demonize foods if it’s really biochemically dangerous, there should be a number to it, you know, like with minerals, we say parts per million, you know, it’s safe above this or below this. So why? Why can’t you do it? And the problem with it is, if they put a number on it, the hypothesis it would be proven wrong. And so as long as it’s a vague number, like 10% it’s a very vague thing to try and track. You track it with these survey studies, and it kind of looks like saturated fat makes a difference, but when you put it into an actual controlled study, it doesn’t ever seem to make a difference. And so that’s why the science is softer than what they would like to imply,

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 37:02

what about now? Because would there have been a possibility of removing that percentage?

Dr. Donald Layman 37:10

I, for one, certainly lobbied for it to be gone. You know, I think this is where politics comes into play in the food system, and I think that was just a leap too far that people weren’t ready to totally abandon that. But I think when people read the guidelines, what they’re going to see is that there’s a lot of statement about you should eat healthy fats, and at the top of the list are animal

Speaker 2 37:36

fats that you should actually go out and in search of that, or just allow that to

Dr. Donald Layman 37:40

be allow it to happen. So again, prioritize your protein foods and let them be natural, and then decide where you’re at. If you have a quarter pound hamburger that’s 85% fat at lunch, that has a certain amount of saturated fat, but it’s well below the guideline, you know you probably it probably only has six or seven grams in it. So if you’re if your goal, let’s say a 2000 calorie diet, 10% would be 22 grams of saturated fat. So if that’s the number, let’s use it. And then if I want to get my saturated fat from two eggs in the morning, so be it. Is that better than getting it from a candy bar that has artificial fat in it that’s saturated? I would say it’s a lot better than having these hydrogenated vegetable oils

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 38:32

in our current food system, where, where are the saturated fats coming from in our current diet?

Dr. Donald Layman 38:38

So the number one source in the current diet is cheese. So pizzas, the I think the number two probably is meats. But 35% of the saturated fat in the American diet now is coming from hydrogenated vegetable oils, from from seed oils. And so that’s all coming in in baked goods. Number one source of calories in the American diet is baked goods, pastries, donuts, pies, cakes, things of that nature. And then number two is breads. Is breads. And so we’re getting a lot of our fat in those kinds of artificial places, and these guidelines definitely target restricting those two groups.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 39:26

Increased protein saturated fat overall is the same, but it’s replaced from artificial fats it found in baked goods and moving the recommendation over to saturated fats from animal products. What about as we go down the list the fruits and vegetables you had said we were talking off camera, they’re actually a little bit lower than was previously recommended,

Dr. Donald Layman 39:49

and I honestly can’t speak to exactly why, but the old recommendations were five servings of vegetables. It’s three and two servings of fruit. It which, you know, that’s a very reasonable target. I think five is just so high that most Americans look at and shrug their shoulders. You know, I think that they’re reasonable guidelines. We know that the majority of Americans aren’t eating many fruits or vegetables, that certainly needs to be an emphasis. And it’s in the guidelines we know that 95% of Americans are eating too many refined grains. That’s in all the surveys. So those are two directions we need to shift

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 40:35

the there were the acknowledgement of a lower carbohydrate diet. How are carbohydrates approached in this guideline, in these guidelines, I

Dr. Donald Layman 40:45

think their approach mostly from a fiber standpoint, that there’s a specific guideline about whole grains, but the serving sizes, I think if you look back at the food guide pyramid, it was six to 10 servings per day. Now I think it’s two, and I this, I might be wrong on this. I think it’s two to three servings of whole grains and two servings of refined grains or less. And so it’s much lower number. So basically, carbohydrates are an energy source that relates to your physical activity, something you and I talk about, what’s your carbohydrate

Speaker 2 41:23

working on a paper kind of got a little sidelined lately, but

Dr. Donald Layman 41:27

work on a paper called carbohydrate tolerance, and that basically everyone has a tolerance at about 130 grams per day. That’s sort of your requirement. And that’s kind of in the three servings of vegetables, two servings of fruit, two to three servings of grains. That’s kind of that level. Everything above that really is used by your muscle physical activity. And so currently, Americans are eating almost 300 grams of carbohydrates per day that would relate to needing about three hours of physical activity per day to burn that. It’s no reason why. And I mean, I think that’s a major reason why people are overweight, and we’re seeing the issues with diabetes

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 42:11

when you address was carbohydrate tolerance addressed in the guidelines? No, no, but hopefully

Dr. Donald Layman 42:19

simply, the guidelines now recognize much lower carbohydrate. The old guideline sort of started with, oh, you should eat a lot of carbohydrates, and then what else? Now these are basically restrict your carbohydrates to what you need to eat,

Speaker 2 42:35

meaning the 130 grams.

Dr. Donald Layman 42:39

Again, it doesn’t mention that, but that’s if you look at the serving numbers and things, that’s kind of what is revolving around.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 42:45

And where does the RDA come into all of this? When we think RDA for carbohydrates? Well, the RDA, and there’s the RDA, and then there’s the dietary guidelines, and then there’s the reference intake. So these a lot of numbers that become confusing. You’re smiling at me.

Dr. Donald Layman 43:00

Well, that was kind of an interesting part of the politics of this process, because within government, there’s a lot of turf protection, and so the dietary guidelines are the consumer facing food part of the government recommendations, the ingredients, what’s in Food, is the FDA ‘s jurisdiction. So there’s no discussion, really about dyes or things in the food guide, guide per se. And the numbers 130 grams is the jurisdiction of the dietary of the dietary reference intakes, which is the National Academy of Science, the Food and Nutrition board. And so there are each of these turf areas that have to be protected. And so when we waded into looking at numbers for the protein, we got a lot of pushback from the DRI folks that we couldn’t talk about numbers. And so we said, Well, every time we talk about protein, one of the first questions we always see is, well, how much should I have? So we thought that was a very important consumer facing piece of information. What’s the range you’re talking about? People say, well, people have too high a protein. You know, we think that’s a very safe and normal range that we gave.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 44:20

How do you you had mentioned early when we started this conversation that you are hoping that people choose that here’s the science. You now decide, where do you think the other institutions are going to come in? So you’ve got the American Heart Association, and you just have various other medical associations that have been in alignment with the old dietary guidelines.

Dr. Donald Layman 44:47

Wow, there’s a lot of politically correct things to say there, and things that are less politically correct.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 44:54

You can find that in our Super Cast version. Just kidding, I’m kidding.

Dr. Donald Layman 44:58

So, yeah. Know, I don’t know. I would hope that they would see the guidelines as having the flexibility. So in terms of people who are at risk for cardiovascular we know that as far as people who have high LDL levels, it’s less than 7% of the population. So Should a recommendation

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 45:20

7% of the population have elevated LDL levels.

Dr. Donald Layman 45:24

And by elevated, I use the word high, so that’s above 160 No, that’s the original definition. But if you look at triglycerides, it’s over 17% have high triglycerides above above 200 milligrams per deciliter. So basically, carbohydrates are almost three times the risk of fats, and so those are the kinds of things I hope the medical people come to grips with that. I know companies love to sell statins, 40 million prescriptions on that, but I think we need to come to grips with not everybody needs those. And you know, there are other dietary approaches that we can go after, and I think that the guidelines provide the flexibility to do that.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 46:10

Your work is really important, and you’ve spent a lifetime working on this, and now we’re seeing it into practice. And I will say what I’ve noticed is I expected you to be emotionally charged, very excited, but I kind of got that wrong, and that’s, I would say, the mark of a good scientist, because you’re very careful about the statements that you’re making. You’re calculated in the words that you’re using for the interpretation to the general population, as well as what the data shows, what it doesn’t, as opposed to say, perhaps someone less skilled or mature or whatever, however you want to put it. And I think that that’s really valuable. We’re going to need more of that, especially as these guidelines come out, and people have reactions to them, because it is flipping the pyramid upside down. We have a way that people can tackle these guidelines. It is in the Forever strong playbook, it brings to life these guidelines, which is just so happened. I mean, it wasn’t happenstance, but the timing ended up really working out. And I think that the playbook is a tactical field manual, and has the potential to really change the way nutrition is done. So thank you.

Dr. Donald Layman 47:26

Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And you know, we sort of went down a path back around 2000 where we sort of brought together a lot of biochemistry, and thought we had the idea of how, and we’ve sort of worked on that and worked on it. And I think the science that people are going to find in these guidelines is very solid. It’s not really opinion driven. It’s not, you know, you know, I believe in a certain kind of diet, I eat a certain way, but that’s not there. What’s there is, these are the issues that are out and when you make choices, these are the ramifications of it. So what we’ve tried to lay out is how to make those choices in a flexible way. So, you know, we haven’t went out to demonize foods. We haven’t gone out to demonize certain kinds of approaches. We’ve tried to provide the science that consumers can make legitimate choices. If someone

Speaker 2 48:20

wanted to look at these guidelines, they’re freely available online. Is that? Is that accurate?

Dr. Donald Layman 48:25

Yeah, as of like, four hours ago, I was writing them for the last six years, for the last six months, and I only saw them four months, four hours ago. So, so and they are freely available,

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 48:39

and the science is laid out. It’s available for people to be able to look at the studies, how it was thought, about what is available, what studies

Dr. Donald Layman 48:46

would be. My understanding is, as of today, it’s not but the guidelines are laid out in basically the bullet points, which everybody maybe has seen. Then there’s like a 40 page discussion of the science. Which one of the cool things is that it poses the questions. It says, in the lipid area, in the fat, saturated fat area, this is not very well known. We need a lot more research to define what healthy fats really look like. I think that’s great. It helps define the research agenda. And then there will be a series of appendices that, I think maybe eight of them that have the reports that we wrote. So Heather and Lydie, Lydie and I wrote one on the protein topic. And so there’s a, I don’t even know what it was, 40 page report with 100 references based on what we did.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 49:36

Sounds like a walk in the park. Just did it over to normal. Did it over did it over lunch, you said something else that I think is extremely important, and you said that you were very clear that it wasn’t about biases and opinions. Was that hard to do,

Dr. Donald Layman 49:51

you know? I think, I mean, one of the things I always told students in class is that when you go into nutrition, one of the things you have to remember is we all have. Have our biases. We all eat, and nobody says, Well, I have a really lousy diet, and so we’re all inherently biased. So how do you deal with that? You know is, can you look at the science and evaluate it as it is? And a good scientist can do that. They can get beyond their bias. And I think, I think the report does that. Again, I haven’t read every one of the individual reports, but I’m pretty sure that’s the way they’re laid out. This is the science. This is the weakness of where we’re at. These are the conclusions we can make with strong science. And these are the things we don’t know.

Speaker 2 50:37

What you’re saying is very transparent. Yeah, that’s what we

Dr. Donald Layman 50:40

went for. We wanted to be based on hard science, random control trials that we know what they mean and where we don’t know. We want to admit we don’t know.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon 50:51

Thank you for all the work that you’ve done. Endlessly grateful guys, you can find the science and how to implement in the forever, strong playbook that is coming out January 27 Don Layman wrote it. You guys can find it there. Don Layman is on Twitter and a frequent guest on the podcast. Thank you again. So much. Thank you. Bye.