 Why don't we give a big warm welcome to Dr. Michael Greger? Surely if there was some safe, simple, side-effect-free solution to the obesity epidemic, we would know about it by now, right? I'm not so sure. It may take up to 17 years before research findings make it into day-to-day clinical practice to take one example that was particularly poignant for my family, heart disease. Decades ago, Dr. Dean Ornish and colleagues published evidence in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world that our leading cause of death could be reversed with diet and lifestyle changes alone, yet hardly anything changed. Even now hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to needlessly die from what we learned decades ago was a reversible disease. In fact, I'd seen it with my own eyes. My grandmother was cured of her end-stage heart disease by one of Dean's predecessors, Nathan Pritikin, using similar methods. So if effectively the cure to our number one killer of men and women could get lost down some rabbit hole and ignored what else might there be in the medical literature that could help my patients, but just didn't have a corporate budget driving its promotion. Well, I made it my life's mission to find out. That's why I became a doctor in the first place and why I started my nonprofit site nutritionfacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships, nothing non-commercial, not selling anything, just put it up as a public service as the labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother. New videos and articles nearly every day on the latest in evidence-based nutrition. What a concept. Okay, so what does the science show is the best way to lose weight? If you want testimonials and before and after pictures, you have come to the wrong place. I'm not interested in anecdotes. I'm interested in the evidence. When it comes to making decisions as life and death important as the health and well-being of yourself and your family, there's really only one question. What does the best available balance of evidence show right now? The problem is that even just sticking to the peer-reviewed medical literature is not enough as false and scientifically misleading unsupported beliefs about obesity are pervasive even in scientific journals. The only way to get at the truth, though, then is to dive deep into the primary literature and read all the original studies themselves. But who's got time for that? There are more than a half a million scientific papers on obesity with 100 new ones published every day. Even researchers in the field might not be able to keep track beyond their narrow domain. But that's what we do at Nutrition Facts. We comb through tens of thousands of studies a year, so you don't have to. Very nice. And indeed, we uncovered a treasure trove of buried data, like today I'll cover simple spices. For example, proven and randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials to accelerate weight loss for pennies a day. But with so little profit potential, it's no wonder these studies never saw the light of day. The only profiting I care about, though, is your health. That's why 100 percent of all the proceeds I received from all my books and DVDs and speaking engagements are all donated to charity. I just want to do for your family what Pritikin did for my family. But wait, isn't weight loss just about eating less and moving more? I mean, isn't a calorie a calorie? That's what the food industry wants you to think. The notion that a calorie from one source is just as fattening as any other is a trope broadcast by the food industry as a way to absolve itself of culpability. Coca-Cola itself even put an ad out there emphasizing this one simple common sense fact. As the current and past chairs of the Harvard's nutrition department put it, this central argument from industry is that the overconsumption of calories from carrots would be no different than the overconsumption of calories from soda. If a calorie is just a calorie, why does it matter what we put in our mouths? Let's explore that example of carrots versus Coca-Cola. It's true that in a tightly controlled laboratory setting, 240 calories of carrots, 10 carrots, would have the same effect on calorie balance than the 240 calories in a bottle of Coke. But this comparison falls flat on its face out in the real world. You could chug those liquid candy calories in less than a minute, but eating 240 calories of carrots would take you more than two and a half hours of sustained constant chewing. Would your jog yet soar? But 240 calories of carrots is like five cups. You might not even be able to fit them all in, right? Our stomach is only so big. Once we fill it up, stretch receptors in our stomach wall tell us when we've had enough. But different foods have different amounts of calories per stomach full, right? Some foods have more calories per cup, per pound per mouthful than others. This is the concept of calorie density, right? The number of calories in a given amount of food, three pounds is about what the average American eats in a day. As you can see, for example, oil is a high calorie density, meaning a high calorie concentration. Lots of calories kind of packed into a small space. So drizzling just a tablespoon of oil onto a dish adds over 100 calories. For those same calories, you could have instead eaten about two cups of blackberries, for example, a food with a low calorie density. So these two meals have the same number of calories. You could swig down that spoonful of oil, not even feel anything in your stomach, but, you know, eating a couple cups of berries could start to fill you up. That's why, yes, biochemically a calorie is a calorie, but eating the same amount of calories in different foods can have different effects. The average human stomach can expand to fit about four cups of food. So a single stomach full of strawberry ice cream, for example, could max out our caloric intake for the entire day. For those same 2,000 calories, to get those same 2,000 calories from strawberries themselves, you'd have to eat 44 cups of berries, right? That's 11 stomach fulls as delicious as berries are. I don't know if I could fill my stomach to bursting 11 times a day, right? So some foods are just impossible to overeat. They're so low in calorie density, right? You just physically couldn't eat enough to even maintain your weight. In a lab, a calorie is a calorie, but in life, far from it. Traditional weight loss diets focus on decreasing portion size, but we know these eat less approaches can leave people feeling hungry, unsatisfied, a more effective approach, maybe to shift the emphasis from restriction to positive, eat more messaging of increasing intake of healthy, low calorie density foods. But you don't know until you put it to the test. Very nice. Researchers in Hawaii tried putting people on more of a traditional Hawaiian diet with all the plant foods they could eat. Unlimited quantities of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans and the study subjects lost an average of 17 pounds in just 21 days. Calorie intake dropped by 40%, but not because they were eating less food. They lost 17 pounds in three weeks eating more food in excess of four pounds a day. How could that be? Because whole plant foods tend to be so glorically dilute, right? You can stuff yourself without getting the same kind of weight gain. They lost 17 pounds in three weeks eating more food. That's why in my upcoming new book, How Not To Diet, which I am very excited about, that's why low in calorie density is on my list of the 17 ingredients for an ideal weight loss diet. As noted before, Americans appear to average about three pounds of food a day. So if you stuck with mostly these foods, you can see how you can eat more food and still shed pounds. A landmark study set to be published next month found that even when presented with the same number of calories and the same salt, sugar, fat, fiber and protein, processed foods led to weight gain, two pounds gained over two weeks, and unprocessed foods led to weight loss, two pounds down in the same two weeks. Here's one of their processed food meals, which is probably healthier actually than what most people eat. Non-fat Greek yogurt, baked potato chips, sugar-free diet lemonade with a turkey sandwich has the same number of calories as this with the unprocessed meal food folks reading, the kind of a Southwest entree salad, black beans, avocados, nuts. That's the calorie density effect. Same calories, but there's just more food. No wonder it satisfied their hunger and they ended up four pounds lighter in two weeks eating more food. So how can you decrease the calorie density of your diet? Well just a quick peek is the two extreme should suggest two methods. Abandon added fats and add abandoned vegetables. Method number one, covertly put people on a relatively low-fat diet. They tend to lose body fat every day even though they can eat as much as they want, but if you instead give those same people the same meals, but this time sneaking enough extra fats and oils to change it to a high-fat diet, they gain body fat every day. In fact, in a famous prison experiment in Vermont, lean inmates were overfed up to 10,000 calories a day to try to experimentally make them fat. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Most started dreading breakfast and involuntarily threw it up. The researchers learned how difficult it was to have people gain weight on purpose unless you feed them lots of fat. To get prisoners to gain 30 pounds on a regular diet, it took about 140,000 excess calories per certain amount of body surface area. To get the same 30 pound weight gained just by adding fat to their diets, all they had to do was feed them about an extra 40,000 extra calories. When the extra calories were in the form of straight fat, it took as many as 100,000 fewer calories to gain the same amount of weight. A calorie is not a calorie. It depends on what you eat. In this case, lowering fat content effectively made up to 100,000 calories disappear. That's why low netted fat is on my list of ideal weight loss ingredients as well. There are however two important exceptions. Processed foods with reduced fat claims or often so packed with sugar that they can have the same number of calories as a higher fat product. Snackwells, fat free cookies, for example at 1700 calories per pound or as calorie dense as a cheese danish. The other exception to the low fat rule is that vegetables are so calorically dilute that even a high fat veggie dish like some oily broccoli with garlic sauce or something tends to be less calorie dense overall, which brings us to the second strategy for lowering calorie density. Instead of sneaking out fat, sneak in vegetables. The biggest influence on calorie density is not fat but water content. Since water adds weight and bulk without adding calories, the most calorie dense foods and the most calorie dense diets tend to be those that are dry. Some vegetables on the other hand are more than 95% water and not just you know iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, celery, turnips, cooknapa, cabbage, bok choy, summer squash, zucchini, bean sprouts, and bamboo shoots can top out at 95% water. They're basically just water in vegetable form. A big bowl of water rich vegetables is practically just a big bowl of trapped water. The effect on calorie density is so dramatic the food industry wants in on the action they figured they could use nanotechnology to structure a solid processed food similar to a celery stock with self-assembled water filled nano cells or nanotubes. No need as mother nature beat you to it. When dozens of foods, common foods pitted head to head for their ability to satiate appetites for hours, the characteristic most predictive was not how little fat or how much protein it had but how much water it had. That was the number one predictor of how filling a food is. That's why high in water rich foods is on my list too. Water rich foods like vegetables topping the charts with most more than 90% water by weight followed by most fresh fruit coming in around the 80s, starchier vegetables, whole grains and canned beans are mostly 70s meaning three quarters of their weight pure water. In general when it comes to water rich foods most whole plant foods float towards the top most animal foods fall somewhere in the middle and most processed foods sink to the bottom. In a famous series of experiments researchers at Penn State decided to put water rich vegetables to the test. Study subjects were served pasta and told to eat as much or as little as they'd like and on average they consumed about 900 calories of pasta. Now what do you think would happen if as a first course you gave them 100 calories of salad composed largely of lettuce, carrots, cucumber celery and cherry tomatoes? Would they go on to eat the same amount of pasta and end up with a thousand calorie lunch 900 plus 100 or would they eat maybe a hundred fewer calories of pasta effectively canceling out the added salary salad calories? It was even better than that they ate more than 200 fewer calories of pasta thanks to the salad 100 calories in 200 calories out right so in essence the salad had negative 100 calories preloading with vegetables can effectively subtract 100 calories out of a meal that's how you can lose weight by eating more food of course the type of salad matters the researchers repeated the experiment this time added a fatty dressing extra shredded cheese which quadrupled the salad's calorie density now eating this salad as a first course didn't turn a 900 calorie meal into one with less than 800 calories instead it turned it into a meal with calories in the quadruple digits right it's like you know preloading pizza with garlic bread right you can end up with more calories overall okay so what's the cutoff studies on preloading show that eating about a cup of food before a meal decreases subsequent intake by about 100 calories so to get a negative calorie effect the first course would have to contain fewer than 100 calories per cup right as you can see in the chart this includes most fresh fruit and vegetables but you know having something like a dinner roll would not work but hey give people a large apple to eat before that same pasta meal and rather than consuming 200 calories less it was more like 300 calories less so how many calories does an apple have it depends on when you eat it before a meal an apple could effectively have about negative 200 calories you can see the same thing giving people vegetable soup as a first course hundreds of calories disappear one study tracked people's intake throughout the day even found that overweight subjects randomized to pre-lunch vegetable soup not only ate less lunch but deducted an extra bonus hundred calories at dinner to a whole seven hours later right so the next time you sit down to a healthy soup you can imagine calories being variably sucked out of your body with every spoonful even just drinking two cups of water before a meal immediately caused people to cut about 20 percent of calories out of the meal taking in a more than 100 fewer calories no wonder overweight men and women randomized to two cups of water before each meal lost weight 44 percent faster two cups of water before each mouth 40 percent 44 percent faster weight loss that's why so-called negative calorie preloading is on my list of weight loss boosters which are all the things I could find that can accelerate weight loss kind of regardless of what you eat the rest of the time negative calorie preliving just means that that starting a meal with foods containing less than 100 calories per cup that can include many fruits vegetables soup salad or simply a tall glass of water anything we can put on that first course salad to boost weight loss even further well in my amping ampk section I talk about ways to activate an enzyme known as the fat controller its discovery is considered one of the most important medical breakthroughs in the last few decades you can activate this enzyme through exercise fasting and nicotine but is there any way to boost it for weight loss without sweat hunger or the whole dying a horrible death lung cancer kind of thing well big pharma is all over it after all obese individuals may be unwilling to perform even a minimum of physical activity wrote a group of pharmacologists thus indicating that drugs mimicking endurance exercise are highly desirable so it's crucial that oral compounds with high bioavailability are developed to safely induce chronic ampk activation for long-term weight loss and maintenance but there's no need to develop such a compound since you can already buy it at any grocery store it's called vinegar when vinegar acetic acid is absorbed and metabolized you get a natural ampk boost enough of a boost to lose weight at a typical dose you might use dressing a salad well I mean vinegar has evidently been used to treat obesity for centuries but only recently has it been put to the test randomized double blind placebo control trial and the effects of vinegar intake on the reduction of body fat in overweight men and women the subjects were randomized to drink a daily beverage tending one or two glasses one or two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar or a controlled drink a beverage that developed to taste the same but as the vinegar drink but prepared with a different kind of acid so it didn't have any actual vinegar in it three months in the fake vinegar group actually gained weight as you know overweight people tend to do whereas the genuine vinegar groups significantly lost body fat is determined by CT scan a little vinegar every day led to pounds of weight loss achieved for just pennies a day without removing anything from their diet that's why one of my 21 tweaks to accelerate weight loss is two teaspoons of vinegar with each meal either sprinkled on salad or even just added to tea with some lemon juice or something the beauty of the vinegar studies is that they're not just randomized controlled trials but placebo controlled trials in some studies aren't controlled at all women asked to eat a ripe tomato before lunch every day for a month lost about two pounds but without a control group you don't know if the tomato had anything to do with it just being enrolled in a weight loss study where you know they're gonna come back and weigh you in a month can't have people change their diets in other ways I mean it's certainly possible I mean tomato is 95% water so you'd be filling up a fist-sized portion of your stomach with only about 15 calories before a meal so I mean certainly possible but we'd need a better study to prove it for weight loss stronger studies have control groups at least for example randomized people to a weight loss diet with or without one to two cups of low sodium vegetable juice and those drinking the vegetable juice lose significantly more weight or split people into two groups and give half about two tablespoons of goji berries a day and 45 days later the goji group appeared to cup two and a half inches off their waistline compared to no change in the control group but anytime you have one group to something special you don't know how much of the benefit is due to the placebo effect and drug trials it's easy right you give people that you have to people the actual medication the other half a placebo identical looking sugar pill placebo both groups are then doing the same thing taking identical looking pills so if you see any difference in outcomes all right well then we can suspect it's due to the actual drug right but what would placebo broccoli look like right that's the problem you can't stuff cabbage into a capsule but there are some foods so potent that you could actually fit them into a pill to pit them against placebos spices want to know if garlic can cause weight loss give people some garlic powder compressed into tablets versus placebo pills and garlic worked resulting in both a drop in weight and waistlines within six weeks they used about a half teaspoon of garlic powder a day which would cost less than four cents four cents to steep how about two cents a day a quarter teaspoon of garlic powder a day about a hundred overweight men and women randomized a quarter teaspoon worth of garlic powder a day or placebo and those unknowingly taking that two cents worth of garlic powder a day lost about six pounds of straight body fat over the next 15 weeks now if you can splurge up to three cents a day there's black cumin a meta analysis of randomized control trial shows weight loss efficacy again with just a quarter teaspoon a day not regular cumin this is a completely different spice known as black cumin you say well what is black cumin you obviously haven't been reading your bibles described as a miracle herb besides the weight loss there are randomized control trials showing daily black cumin consumption significantly improves cholesterol and triglycerides significantly improves blood pressure and blood sugar control but i use it just because it tastes good i just put black cumin seeds in a pepper grinder grinded like pepper with more than a thousand papers published in the medical literature on black cumin some reporting extraordinary results like dropping cholesterol levels as much as a statin drug why don't we hear more about it why weren't we taught about it in medical school right presumably because there's no profit motive right black cumin is just a common natural spice right you're not going to thrill your stockholders selling something that you can't patent that costs three cents a day or you can use regular cumin the second most common popular spice on earth those randomized to half of a teaspoon at both lunch and dinner over three months lost four more pounds and an extra inch off their waist found comparable to the obesity drug known as orlostat that's the anal leakage drug you may have heard about though the drug company evidently prefers the term fecal spotting to describe the rectal discharge it causes the drug company's website offered some helpful tips though it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants and bring a change of clothes with you to work you know just in case a drug causes you to crap your pants at work i'll stick with the cumin cayenne pepper can counteract the metabolic slowing that accompanies weight loss and accelerate fat burning as a bonus ginger powder over a dozen randomized controlled trials starting at just a quarter teaspoon of ground ginger a day sewing significantly decreased body weight at just pennies day proven in placebo controlled trials to work by you probably never heard about any of this because they can't make enough profit don't get me started let me go back to the coke versus carrots example a calorie it's not a calorie because drinking this is not the same as eating this but even if you consume the same number of calories chewed for hours to pack in all those carrots a calorie may still not be a calorie because it's not what you eat it's what you absorb and as anyone who's ever eaten corn can tell you some bits of vegetable matter can pass right through you a calorie may still be a calorie circling your toilet bowl but flush calories aren't going to make it onto your hips right that's where fiber comes in if you bump people's fiber intake up even to just a recommended minimum daily intake they start losing weight because they experience about a 10 drop in daily caloric intake why should more fiber mean fewer calories well of course first it adds bulk without adding calories cold pressed apple juice for example it's basically just apples minus fiber and you could chug that you know chug a bottle of juice in a couple of seconds but i mean to get the same number of calories you would have to eat about five cups of apple slices and that's the difference fiber can make but it's not just a calorie density thing imagine what happens next right the apple juice would get rapidly absorbed as soon as it spilled out of your stomach into your gut right spike your blood sugar where is the sugar trapped in the mass of chewed apple slices would be absorbed more slowly along the length of your intestines right nutrients can only be absorbed when they physically come in contact with the side of your intestine with your gut wall right um now fiber never gets absorbed right so it can act as a carrier to dilute or even eliminate calories out the other end and fiber doesn't just trap sugars it acts as a fat and starch blocker too those on the standard american diet lose about five percent of their calories through their waste every day but on a higher fiber diet we double that it's not what you eat but what you absorb so you can lose weight on a high fiber diet eating the exact same number of calories simply because some of those calories get trapped get flushed down the toilet and never make it into our system and it's not just the calories in the high fiber foods themselves that are less available high fiber foods trap calories across the board right so eat a twinkie on a high fiber diet and you absorb fewer twinkie calories it's like every calorie label you look at gets instantly discounted when you're eating lots of fiber rich foods which is why it makes it onto my list my section on other fat blocking food starts out with a command to eat your thylakoids doctor's order what on earth is a thylakoid just the source of nearly all known life and the oxygen we breathe no biggie thylakoids are where photosynthesis takes place the process by which plants turn light into food thylakoids are the great green engine of life microscopic sac-like structures composed of chlorophyll rich membranes concentrated in the leaves of plants when we eat thylakoids when we bite into a leaf of spinach or something those green leaf membranes don't immediately get digested they last for hours in our intestines and that's when they work their magic thylakoid membranes bind to light paste light paste is the enzyme in our body that our body uses to digest fat so if you bind the enzyme you slow fat absorbs it but if all the fat is eventually absorbed what's the benefit location location location there's a phenomenon known as the ileal break the ileum is the last part of the small intestine before it dumps into your colon and when undigested calories are detected that far down in your intestines your body thinks i must be full from stem to stern and puts the brakes on eating more by dialing down your appetite this can be shown experimentally insert a nine-foot tube down people's throats and drip in any calories fat sugar protein and you can activate the ileal break um so then you sit that i'm down to uh to it all you can eat meal and compared to the the placebo group who had just gotten a squirt of water down the two um people eat about a hundred calories less right you just don't feel as hungry you feel just as full uh eating significantly less that's the ileal break in action this can then translate into weight loss randomized overweight women on a diet to green plant membranes in other words just covertly slip them some powdered spinach and they get a boost in appetite suppressing hormones a decreased urge for sweets yes i need spinach can cut your urge for chocolate and boom accelerated weight loss all thanks to eating green the actual green itself the chlorophyll packed membranes in the leaves now the researchers use spinach powder just so they can create convincing placebos but you can get just as many thylakoids eating about a half a cup of cooked greens which is what i recommend people eat two times a day in my daily dozen checklist of all the healthiest of healthy things encourage people to fit into their daily routine in the journal of the society of chemical industry a group of food technologists argue that given their fat blocking benefits thylakoid membranes could be incorporated into functional foods as a new promising appetite reducing ingredient or you can just get them the way mother nature intended which greens have the most you can tell just by looking at them because thylakoids are where the chlorophyll is the greener the leaves the more potent the effect so go for the greenest green greens the darkest green greens you can find where i shop that's the lasonado aka dinosaur kale now if you overcook greens too long right you know they turn that drab olive brown that's the thylakoids physically degrading but blanched for 15 seconds or so in steaming or boiling water you know greens can get even brighter green that actually translates into a boost in the fat blocking ability so you can gauge thylakoid activity in the grocery store in your kitchen with your own two eyes by going for the green though thylakoids eventually get broken down fiber makes it all the way down to our colon well it's technically true that we can't digest fiber that's only applicable to the part of us that's actually human most of the cells in our body are bacteria or gut floor which weigh as much as one of our kidneys as a metabolic reactive as our liver has been called our forgotten organ and it's an organ that runs on mac microbiota accessible carbohydrates so when you see me right you know eat lots of big backs i don't want anyone to get the wrong idea mac is just another name for prebiotics right what our good gut flora eat in other words fiber there's that fiber again what are our good bacteria do with the fiber we feed them and they feed us right back they make short chain fatty acids that get absorbed from the colon into our bloodstream circulate to our body and even make it up into our brain right that's like the way our gut flora communicates with us dialing down our appetite all the while increasing the rate at which we burn fat and boosting our metabolism at the same time all thanks to fiber check this out put people on a brain scanner show them a high calorie food like a doughnut and the reward centers in their brains instantly light up but if you repeat the experiment but this time secretly deliver fiber derived short chain fatty acids directly into their colon you get a blunted reward center response and subjects report that high calorie foods just seem less appetizing and subsequently ate less of an all you can eat meal right but fiber supplements like metamucil don't work which makes sense because they're non fermentable meaning our gut bacteria can't eat them so yeah they can improve bowel regularity but can't be used by a good bacteria to make those compounds that can block our cravings for that we have to actually eat real food our good gut bugs are trying to help us right but when we eat a diet deficient in fiber we are in effect starving our microbial self less than five percent of americans reach even a recommended minimum daily adequate intake of fiber no surprise since the number one sources are beans and whole grains and 96 percent of americans don't even reach the recommended minimum intake of legumes which are bean split peas chickpeas and lentils and 99 percent don't reach the recommended minimum for whole grains most people don't even know what fiber is more than half of americans surveyed think that steak is a significant source of fiber however by definition fiber is only found in plants there's zero fiber in meat eggs or dairy and typically little or no fiber and process junk and therein lies the problem but I mean wouldn't at least the protein in that steak fill you up surprisingly even a review supported by the meat dairy and egg industries acknowledged that protein intake does not actually translate into eating less later on whereas you eat a fiber rich whole grain for supper and it can cut your calorie intake more than 12 hours later at lunch the next day you feel full 100 calories quicker the following day because by then your good gut bugs are feasting on the same bounty and dialing down your appetite today even our meat could be considered junk food more for more than a century one of the great goals of animal agriculture has been to increase the carcass fat content of farm animals take chicken for example 100 years ago the USDA determined chicken was about 23 protein by weight and less than 2% fat today chickens have been genetically manipulated through selective breeding to have about 10 times more fat chicken little has become chicken big and maybe making us bigger too meat consumption in general is associated with weight gain but poultry appeared to be the worst even just an ounce a day which is like a single chicken nugget or like one chicken breast every 10 days was associated with weight gain compared to eating no chicken at all you know it's funny when the when the meat industry funds obesity studies on chicken they choose for their head to head comparison foods like cookies and sugar coated chocolates this is a classic drug industry trick to try to make your product look better by comparing it to something worse apparently just regular chocolate wasn't enough to make chicken look better but what happens when chicken is pitted against the real control like chicken without the actual chicken chicken chickens out both soy based proteins and corn which is a plant-based meat made from the mushroom kingdom were found to have stronger satiating qualities than chicken feed people a chicken and rice lunch and four and a half hours later they eat 18 percent more of a dinner buffet than had they instead been given a chicken free chicken and rice lunch these findings are consistent with childhood obesity research that found that meat consumption seemed to double the odds of school children becoming overweight compared to the consumption of plant-based meat products whole food sources of plant protein such as beans did even better though associated with cutting in half the odds of becoming overweight so that's why i consider these kinds of plant-based meats more of a useful stepping stone towards a healthier diet rather than the end game goal ideal part of the reason plant-based meats may be less fattening is a cause less of an insulin spike a meat free chicken like corn that causes up to 41% less of an immediate insulin reaction it turns out animal protein causes almost exactly as much insulin release as pure sugar just adding some egg whites to your diet can increase insulin output as much as 60% within four days and fish maybe even worse why would adding tuna to mashed potatoes spike up insulin levels but adding broccoli instead cut the insulin response by about 40% it's not the fiber since giving the same amount of broccoli fiber alone provided no significant benefit so why does animal protein make things worse but plant protein make things better plant proteins tend to be lower in the branched chain amino acids which are associated with insulin resistance the cause of type 2 diabetes you can show this experimentally give some vegans branched chain amino acids you can make them as insulin resistance as omnivores or take some omnivores and put them even through a 48 hour vegan diet challenge and within two days you can see the opposite significant improvements in metabolic health why because decreased consumption of branched chain amino acids improves metabolic health check this out those randomized to restrict their protein intake were averaging literally hundreds more calories a day so they should have become fatter right but no they actually lost more body fat restricting their protein enabled them to eat more calories while at the same time they lost more weight more calories yet a loss in body fat and this magic protein restriction they were just having people eat the recommended amounts of protein so maybe they should have just called this group the normal protein group or the recommended protein group and the group that was eating more typical american protein levels and suffering because of it the excess protein group given the metabolic harms of excess branched chain amino acid exposure leaders in the field have suggested the invention of drugs to block their absorption to promote metabolic health and treat diabetes and obesity without reducing caloric intake or we can just try not to eat so many branched chain amino acids in the first place they are found mostly in meat including chicken and fish dairy products and eggs perhaps explaining why animal protein associated with higher diabetes risk whereas plant protein appears protective so defining the the appropriate upper limits of animal protein intake may offer a great chance for the prevention of type 2 diabetes and obesity but it need not be all or nothing even an intermittent vegan diet has been shown to be beneficial if there was one piece of advice that sums up the recommendations in my upcoming book it would be wall off your calories animal cells are encased only in easily digestible membranes which allows the enzymes and are got to effortlessly liberate the calories in a steak for example plant cells on the other hand have cell walls that are made out of fiber which present an indigestible physical barrier so many of the calories remain trapped now processed plant foods however fruit juice sugar refined grains even whole grains if they've been powdered into flour have had their cellular structure destroyed their cell walls cracked open and their calories are free for the taking but when you eat structurally intact plant foods chew all you want you're still gonna end up with calories completely surrounded by fiber which then blunts the glycemic impact activates the allele break and delivers sustenance to your friendly flora so bottom line try to make sure as many of your calories as possible your protein your carbs your fat are encased in cell walls in other words from whole intact plant foods that's what nature intended to happen millions of years before we learned out of sharpened spears and mill grains and boiled sugarcane our entire physiology is presumed to have evolved in the context of eating what the rest of our great ape cousins eat plants the paleolithic period when we started using tools only goes back about two million years we know the great apes have been evolving since back in the myocene era more like 20 million years ago so for the first 90 percent of our hominoid existence our bodies evolved on mostly plants it's no wonder then that our bodies may thrive best on the diet we were designed to eat so maybe we should go back to our roots with enough force and control anyone can lose weight right lock someone in the closet you can force them to lose as much body fat as you want chaining someone to a treadmill probably have a similar effect but what is the most effective weight loss regimen that doesn't involve calorie restriction or exercise or a felony i scoured through the medical literature and all the randomized controlled trials and the single most successful strategy to date is a diet of whole plant foods the single most effective weight loss intervention like that ever published in the peer reviewed medical literature a whole food plant based diet that works better than anything else studied to date and no wonder given what we just learned about fiber and branching amino acids and all that okay now i i i mean we've known for more than 40 years that those eating predominantly plant based diets way on average about 30 pounds less than the general population but you don't know if it's the diet itself until you put it to the test in 2017 a group of new zealand research has published the broads that a 12-week randomized controlled trial in the poorest region of the country with the highest obesity rates overweight individuals randomized to receive either standard medical care or semi-weekly classes offering advice and encouragement to eat a low-fat diet centered around fruits vegetables whole grains and leg goons and that's all it was just empowerment and information empowerment with knowledge no meals were provided the intervention group was merely informed about the benefits of plant based living and encouraged to fit it into their own lives at home no significant change in the control group but the plant based intervention group even though there were no restrictions on portions be able to eat freely all the healthy foods they wanted lost an average of 19 pounds by the end of the three month study 19 pounds sort of kind of respectable weight loss but what happened next right at the end of those 12 weeks class was dismissed and no more instruction was given the researchers were curious to see how much weight the subjects had gained back after being released from the study so everyone was invited back in the six month mark to get reweight the plant based group had left the three months to the 19 pounds lighter on average but you know six months later they were only down about 27 pounds they got better the plant based group have been feeling so good both physically and mentally have been able to come off so many their medications they were sticking to the diet on their own and the weight continued to come off what about a year later even in studies that last a whole year where people are coached to stay at a particular diet for the entire year's time by the end of the year any initial weight loss typically tends to creep on back the prod study only lasted three months yet after it was all over those who were had been randomized the plant based group not only lost dozens of pounds but they kept it all they not only achieved greater weight loss at six and 12 months than any other comparable trial that was months after the study had already ended right a whole food plant based diet achieved the greatest weight loss ever recorded compared to any other such intervention published in the scientific literature you can read the record breaking study yourself for free in full at nature.com slash articles slash NUTD 2173 or you can just point your phone camera up at the screen and pick off the QR code any diet that results in reduced calorie intake can result in weight loss I mean dropping pounds isn't so much the issue the problem is keeping them on right and a key difference between plant based nutrition and more traditional approaches to weight loss is that people are encouraged on plant based diets to eat ad libitum meaning as much as you eat as much as you want no calorie counting no portion control just eating right the strategy is to improve the quality of the food rather than restricting the quantity of the food you put people on a diet packed with fruits vegetables whole grains and beans that allow them to eat as much as they want they end up eating about 50% fewer calories than they might have otherwise just as full on half the calories wait how can you keep people satisfied cutting more than a thousand calories from their daily diet by eating more high bulk low calorie density foods vegetables fruits whole grains beans and fewer calorie dense foods like you know meats cheeses sugars and fats right but it may not just be the calories in side of the equation those eating more plant based appeared effectively be burning more calories in their sleep the resting metabolic rate of those eating more plant based maybe 10% higher or more a boosted metabolism that can translate into burning off hundreds of extra calories a day more without doing a thing eating more plant based you burn more calories existing so no wonder why those who eat more plant based tend to be slimmer start packing your diet with real foods that grow out of the ground and the pounds should come off naturally taking you down towards your ideal weight okay so that's what I spent the first half of the book doing laying out the optimum weight loss diet plant yourself then I spend the second half of the book on all the tools I unearthed to drive further weight loss for any stubborn pounds that remain we already learned that a calorie is not necessarily a calorie 100 calories of chickpeas right has a different impact than 100 calories of chicken or chicklets based on factors like absorption and appetite but in this second half I go a step further and explore how even the exact same foods eaten differently can have different effects even if you eat the same amount even if you absorb the same amount a calorie may still not be a calorie it's not only what we eat but how and when just to give you a taste the exact same number of calories at breakfast are significantly less fattening than the same number of calories at dinner what I mean that's just mind blowing right same calories different weight loss a diet with a bigger breakfast causes more weight loss than the same diet with a bigger dinner so my recommendation to stop eating after 7 p.m it's not just because you know I'm afraid people are mindlessly snacking on the couch or something the same snack at night is literally more fattening than eating the exact same snack during the daytime all thanks to our circadian rhythms our chronobiology something I spend a whole chapter about some of the sleep data is really crazy to overweight adults were randomized to eight weeks of either a calorie restricted diet or the same diet combined with five days a week of just one less hour of sleep a night now they ended up sleeping an hour later on the weekend so overall just cut three hours of sleep out of their week now surely I made quite three hours a week is of sleep difference is not going to change how much weight they lost right and on the scale that was true but in the normal sleep group 80% of the weight loss was fat whereas in the group missing just a few hours of sleep it was the opposite with 80% of the loss being lean body mass so you snooze you lose a few hours of mislead seemed to totally flip fat loss on its head but just looking at the scale you wouldn't know it it's like when people fast stopping eating completely for a week or two can cause more weight loss than just restricting your calories duh right but paradoxically it may actually lead to less loss of body fat wait how can eating fewer calories lead to less fat loss because during fasting your body starts cannibalizing itself and burning your own protein for fuel the scale made it look as though they were doing better when they were fasting but the reality is they were doing worse they would have lost more body fat if they have kept eating they would have lost more body fat eating more calories right short term fasting can interfere with body fat loss not accelerated and you see the same thing with the keto diet body fat loss actually slows down when you switch to a ketogenic diet just looking at the bathroom scale though the keto diet seems like a smashing success losing less than a pound a week on a regular diet to boom three and a half pounds in seven days after switching to keto but what was happening inside their bodies told a totally different story on the ketogenic diet their rate of body fat loss was slowed by more than half so most of what they were losing was water but they were also losing protein they were also losing lean mass that may help explain why the leg muscles of crossfit trainees placed on a ketogenic diet can shrink as much as eight percent within two months of course even if keto diets work the point of weight loss is not to fit into a skinnier caskets and people whose diets even tend to trend that way appear to significantly shorten their lives on the other hand even just drifting in the direction of eating more healthy plant foods is associated with living longer right those going the other way though those who start out more plant-based but then add meat to the diet at least once a week not only appear to double or triple their odds of diabetes stroke heart disease and weight gain but may also suffer an associated 3.6 year drop in life expectancy that's going from no meat to just once a week meat or more low carb diets have been shown to impair artery function and worsen heart disease whereas whole food plant-based diets have been shown to actually reverse heart disease that's what ornish use right so it appears to be the most effective weight loss that just so happens to be the only diet ever proven to reverse heart disease in the majority of patients right my grandma didn't have to die like that no one's grandma has to die like that if that's all a plant-based diet could do reverse the number one killer of men and women shouldn't that be the kind of the default diet to prove another one and the fact that it can also be so effective in treating arresting or reversing other leading killers like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure would seem to make the case for plant-based eating simply overwhelming only one diet has ever been shown to do all that a diet centered around whole plant foods you don't have to mortgage your health to lose weight the single healthiest diet also appears to be the most effective diet for weight loss after all permanent weight loss requires permanent dietary change i mean healthier habits just have to become a way of life and if it's going to be lifelong you want it to lead to a long life thankfully the single best diet proven for weight loss may just so happen to be the safest cheapest way to eat for the longest healthiest life thank you