 Next question is from Johnny Humber. Are artificial sweeteners as bad for you as sugar and how do they affect blood sugar, et cetera? Ah, the big, this one's always a debate, right? Always a big deal. I know Lane's head just exploded. Yeah, I know. Lane Norton and I have gone back and forth over this many, many times. Okay, so as far as blood sugar is concerned, artificial sweeteners don't seem to affect blood sugar and there are some studies that show that it may affect the microbiome and how it responses to glucose and all that stuff, but those studies are not very good. So I think we can safely say with current research, which is a lot of it, that artificial sweeteners won't affect blood sugar. Okay, so that being said, if all things being equal, sugar versus artificial sweeteners, you're eating an appropriate amount of calories, you're, everything else is healthy, doesn't make a big difference. Now here's why I like sugar better than artificial sweeteners for most people. It's because of the behavioral effects that we can get from, that we can develop from using artificial sweeteners. So let me explain what I mean, okay? When you eat something with sugar, if you're somebody that's working on your nutrition and you're becoming self-aware about the things you're eating and you're trying to eat in a healthier way, sugar has this natural barrier known as calories, right? So if I'm watching my calories and my macros and I'm trying to lose weight and I'm like, I wanna have that soda. I'm gonna look at the soda and be like, oh, okay, it's got 200 calories, X amount of grams of sugar. I think I can only have one. When I drink things or eat things with artificial sweeteners, I've eliminated that barrier and it feels like I can have as much as I want because there's zero calories, there's no risk, there's no problems whatsoever. I can drink 15 cans of this soda because it doesn't affect my macros or my calories at all. The problem with that is, yes, from a calorie standpoint, that's true, but from a behavioral standpoint, it's terrible because these things are very, very sweet. They change how, stuff still happens in your body when you drink these things. You're still perceiving sweetness. So your palate changes, other foods start to taste more bland, you start to develop this relationship of feeding whatever feeling you have, whether it's stress, anxiety or whatever with this sweet flavor and it's not a long-term approach. And I'm gonna say this right now, I've worked with clients for a long time. I've never had anybody lose weight long-term successfully by having artificially sweetened substances over sugar. It's never been a strategy I've seen to be successful. The only time I've seen it be a successful strategy was with competitors who- That's where I was gonna interrupt you and go because I do see value with it on that. And by the way, you were the one that got me to, stop drinking diet sodas and the artificial sweetener stuff and replace it with drinks like that had sugar in it. Like Hanson Rupier, for example, was like my switch from Diet Coke. And exactly what happened is what you said is I knew that drink had like 135 or 150 calories and I can't remember how many grams of sugar in it. And because I know it had that, it kept that at bay where I would be like, okay, I already had one today, that's all I get. Where what I've always noticed about my behaviors with Diet Cokes is once I allow it into the diet, oh, I have one every other day, and then it's one a day, then it's two a day, I'm gonna get up to three, four in a day really, really quickly. If I'm not paying attention, I can do that because you justified zero calorie and it promotes those behaviors. I do see though somebody who's competing and who is weighing and measuring and tracking everything that to me, that was something that I love to, that was like a treat. I was like, oh my God, I can't have any calories. I'm out of calories today, but boy, I'll go sip on a Diet Coke right now. And that will give me that kind of sweet feeling and feel like I'm getting a treat. I used it like that a lot and I liked it for that. But for the average person who is not tracking, it just promotes the bad behaviors. And it ends up, you end up craving something else to go with that diet drink or that zero calorie food. Well, it's interesting because the artificial sweeteners tend to really ramp up that sweet reward. It's like even more powerfully sweet, which throughout the day, you're constantly thinking about where can I get my next sweet? Like it's something that your body starts to really seek for that same feeling. And so behaviorally, I'm a lot more drawn towards providing that through maybe I'll have some cookies or maybe some things will sneak in my diet that previously wouldn't have otherwise. Well, so to that point, Justin, that was another thing that I noticed during when I was competing. So I've talked on the show before about, I did a show, a couple shows like this where I did all whole foods and I did no artificial sweeteners, nothing like that. And then I did another show where I allowed like the quest bars and diet drinks and stuff in there. And one of the things that I noticed about when I was eating whole foods versus the artificial sweeteners was the taste of fruit. And when I'm allowing the diet cokes and all these drinks and quest bars, things that are all that utilize a lot of the artificial sweeteners, the taste of a strawberry or an apple is extremely bland. When I eat nothing but whole foods, now all of a sudden a strawberry, a grape, an apple, it tastes like candy. It tastes sweet, it tastes incredibly sweet. But when you're always pumping in those artificial sweeteners, then you go have natural sugar and fruit, it ruins fruit. They're sweeter than sugar. In fact, and look, I guarantee you, someone watching right now, if you have lots of artificially sweetened sodas, let's say you have a lot of diet cokes, you probably find the taste of a regular coke to be bland. And I've talked to many people. No, I prefer the taste of Coke Zero because the sugar one doesn't taste as sweet to me. They're extremely sweet, they're still in effect in the body, changes how you perceive foods. And then look, let's look at the studies. The studies that are controlled, and what I mean by controlled is, they put people in a lab and they give them everything measured out. So here's your food and that's it. Does replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners cause them to lose weight? Yes, their calories drop. But that never happens in real life. In real life, when they do studies on people living their lives, when people cut out sugar and replace it with artificial sweeteners, they never lose weight. Almost no studies show people lose weight except for when things are super controlled. Well, don't they actually show they eat 500 more calories? That's what happens. They replace it with other calories because it causes those behaviors to happen. It is a terrible long-term approach to weight loss. I've never, in my life, have I had success? Have you guys ever had success with a client? Hey, replace all your sodas with artificial sweeteners and it just doesn't work. So that's the thing about it. The promise with artificial sweeteners was people are gonna lose weight, they get to get the sweetness and they're gonna lose weight. It's never worked, it's never worked. And so that's the problem. So yeah, if everything's measured and you're measuring everything in your pre-contest, you already have dysfunctional eating anyway. Fine, go, throw some artificial sweeteners in the fire. Well, you know, because we're talking about behavior stuff right now, right? So if you're tracking, there's your accountability. You know, you have the accountability, there's no mistake when you have those two diet cokes and you measure everything out, you're like, oh, I can't have anything else. Versus the person who's like, oh, well, I had zero calorie drinks today so I can go have this dessert, I should be okay. Or I can go ahead and have two, 300 calories here. They're guessing, they're going based on how I feel. Sweetness or a change in flavor, it overcomes palate fatigue and allows you to eat more. So in fact, I've talked about this before, what's that show called, Man vs. Food? Yeah, the ice cream thing. Yeah, it was a contest where I'd eat a kitchen sink full of ice cream and he got like, I don't know how far, 70% of the way there. Potato chips in between. Yeah, he started- French fries. French fries, he started gagging, he couldn't eat anymore. So how did he get himself to eat more ice cream? He ate a big plate- Yeah, he ordered like 3,000 calories of French fries. Yeah, super salty French fries. And he had to eat more to eat more. And what that did is it made his palate fatigue, it overcame it, was able to eat the ice cream. We all know this, right? You eat a big dinner, it's Thanksgiving, you're like, oh my God, I'm so stuffed. I can't eat another bite of turkey, I'm a throw up. Then they bring out something with a completely different flavor. Pumpkin pie. Yeah, I can eat more all of a sudden. So here you are drinking more sweet than sugar. Artificial sweeteners are far sweeter than sugar. You're drinking that while you're eating, you're gonna eat more. This is what happens, it actually, it hijacks the body. What is that, Doug, is it 10X? What is it? Thousands. Is it? No. It's incredibly sweet and comparison. Yeah, how much sweeter is artificial sweeteners than regular sugar? I just go aspartame to sugar, you could just look that up. I know it's high. Very high, and they put a tiny amount in there to try to make up for it, but it's still far sweeter. You know how you can always tell too? Like so if you ever messed around with, I don't know if you guys ever did sugar in your coffee or not, but if you do like regular sugar. You gotta add way more. Oh yeah, then versus like sweet and low, it only takes like one or two packets and a sweetener. And even then, it's too much. Right, it's sweetened your coffee up like crazy. 200 times sweeter. Wow. It's sucrose. Yeah. Wow, that's a lot. There you go.