 Today's episode, we have the pioneer of muscle science, Dr. Gabriel Lyon. She's the one that essentially coined the phrase, we are not over fat, we are under muscle. She studies, understands and explains how muscle mass, muscle itself is a healthy organ. How having too little muscle is probably the cause of most of our chronic health issues. Not that we have too much body fat, but rather that body fat or too much body fat is a result of having too little muscle and it gets much deeper. It's phenomenal. I learn a lot from listening to Dr. Gabriel Lyon. She actually helps me back up a lot of things I observed as a trainer over the last two decades. She has a new book in fact about this. It's called Forever Strong, a new science-based strategy for aging well and remember she is a doctor. She knows what she's talking about. Check her out. We're at Dr. Gabriel Lyon, so that's D-R-G-A-B-R-E-L-L-E-L-Y-O-N. So find her on social media. Give her a follow. She's amazing. Today's program giveaway is the Super Bundle. That's a lot of workout programs. Here's how you can win it. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel. Turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. We also have a sale going on this month. Maps Bands is half off and the Hard Gainter Bundle is half off. You can find both of them for half off if you click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. I want to know what inspired you to write your book. What was the inspiration behind it? Talk a little bit about the information that's in there. That's so strange to say this, but counter what is considered mainstream advice around things like health and longevity. We've been trying to fight an obesity epidemic for the last 50 years. When you have the problem correct, you assume that we get solutions. For the last 50 years, we've gotten sicker, fatter, weaker as a country. In my mind, we have to ask a different question and a better question. Actually, this book came out of personal experience. I don't think that I've ever told you guys this. In fact, I know that I haven't. I did my fellowship in geriatrics. Geriatrics is end of life. 65 and up. I did it at WashU. At the time, I was forced to do geriatrics. I actually don't think that I've ever really publicly talked about this, but I went to WashU to study nutritional sciences. The goal was I was going to do a fellowship in nutritional sciences. The catch was I was going to have to see people at the end of their life. You can imagine the impact that would have day after day in the nursing home, on the weekends, seeing 30 patients a day that are at the end of life. Then in the evenings, doing weight management clinic and in the early mornings, doing muscle biopsies and cardiovascular testing, doing research on obesity. I became really attached to one of these participants. She was a mom of three trying to lose the same 20 pounds after her last three kids. I imaged her brain. We were looking at the interface between body composition and brain function. I imaged her brain. Her brain looked like the beginning of an Alzheimer's brain. She was in her mid-50s. I knew what the trajectory of her life was going to be and whose fault was it. It was our fault because the information that we had been telling her was eat the food guide pyramid, further reduce your calories, do more cardiovascular activity. Don't train. Don't address skeletal muscle. Do all the things to treat obesity. Then I had this aha moment and I realized that the sickest patients all had one thing in common. It wasn't that they were over fat. It was that they had unhealthy muscle or they were undermuscled. This was the problem. If we began to shift the focus and we really cared about human health and doing the right thing for people, then we have to shift the conversation and begin to ask the right question. That's where this concept of muscle centric medicine came from. What is it about muscle that makes it so protective as an organ? I think the obvious thing people would think about is, well, I need mobility. I need to be able to move around. That's why I need muscle, but it goes a lot deeper than that, right? We need to all look jacked in hand like Sal, which is really what people think about. They think about muscle. Do not lie. People think about the 80s with the spray tan and the muscle teas. That's the problem. It is still bro science, no offense to the dudes in the room, but it is not. Skeletal muscle is an organ system. It is the largest endocrine organ in the body. Trump's the heart. It trumps the thyroid. I say it even trumps the gonads. Skeletal muscle from the framework of medicine and health is, this should come as no shock, is the site of glucose disposal. It is the primary site of insulin resistance. If we were to take a step back, what are we all wanting? We are all wanting to age well. You guys look great for 25. We are all wanting to age well and increase the quality of our life over time. Everybody listening has to be interested in outcomes. What do we know affect individuals? We are seeing, if you look at the CDC, we are seeing causes of mortality, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, cancer, all of which are rooted in what? Insulin. Skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle and obesity are not on that list. Wait, as a cause, as a cause of death, skeletal muscle is not on that list. So when we think about skeletal muscle, these are underlying principles that directly affect our capacity to age and have optimal wellness and vitality and strength. Skeletal muscle as a glucose disposal unit. Insulin resistance, we've all talked and all heard about insulin. Insulin is this peptide hormone released from the pancreas. As you well know, Sal, I've heard you talk about it, moves blood glucose from the blood into cells. Right? Well, insulin resistance, when you require more insulin for the glucose that you have, what do you think one of the first tissues affected is? Skeletal muscle. Decades before. There's information, some of the earlier studies out of Yale, an 18-year-old, quote, healthy sedentary, no visual excess body fat or abdominal fat, showing insulin resistance in skeletal muscle at 18. This begins decades earlier in skeletal muscle before we're even seeing adiposity, before we're seeing, you know, excess subcutaneous fat. So we have to address skeletal muscle as the primary site for all things metabolic. So from a doctor's perspective, I'm really curious to hear your opinion on this, because the way I used to explain it to clients, why, because we've known this and we've been communicating this message for a long time. But when I get questions from my clients, they'd say, well, my doctor doesn't tell me that. So I used to say, because this is what I believe or thought to is that it's because of the risk factor, because doctors don't want to tell people to go build muscle because they could hurt themselves. And so we push this narrative that cardio is the best form of fighting obesity. Is that not true? Why is it that we're, if you know this, we've known this for a long time, it's not like it's not known. Why is the messaging different? We have completely missed the boat as muscle as the pinnacle of health. When you go to a physician's office, they measure blood pressure, they measure temperature. They might even measure BMI. They might focus on body fat, although very rarely. When do they measure skeletal muscle mass? Not only that, but they're so off by the general recommendation. Yeah, I remember, well, I remember going in and getting measured. And according to their charts, I was obese because they don't even factor muscle in at all. And also, by the way, we also don't directly measure skeletal muscle mass. And I think that that's important to point out, DEXA doesn't directly measure skeletal muscle mass. We don't even have the tools to routinely measure these things at a population level. Well, we know that a simple grip strength test, which is a general proxy for overall physical strength can predict all cause mortality better than almost any other single metric. We're not using it yet, maybe because we don't have standards, but we are seeing now the conversation change a little bit. I think part of the problem was the studies done on exercise and longevity were all, none of them were done on any of the form of exercise and cardiovascular exercise. And I don't know if that's because it's easy to put a hamster on a wheel and it's hard to get, you know, mice to lift or if because maybe strength training was always relegated to, you know, first bodybuilders and then just athletic performance. So we had athletic performance studies, but there were no, I mean, 20, 30 years ago, when I first became a trainer, you couldn't find a study on strength training and longevity. They just didn't exist. Yeah. I think it's a really good point. And I think that we are slow to catch up and we are all seeing this in clinical practice and we're really slow to change the paradigm of thinking and the conversation. So I gave a TEDx talk, which in May was the second most viewed TEDx talk in the world. Wow. It was flagged. It was flagged as, yeah, they flagged it as this is information only of the person giving it. Do not take this as science advice. It was eight minutes. I sent in 52 references for each statement. So I sent in a total of 52 references. For eight minutes? For eight minutes. For eight minutes. What did they say was missing from eight? Hold on, that's weird. Who knows? Who knows? I said everything you know, everything you thought about obesity is wrong. That we don't actually have an obesity epidemic. That has to make your cackles. Just like a, you know, what we have is a midlife muscle crisis. You have an obesity epidemic. Yes. Do we have obesity as a problem? But okay, that's symptomology. Where, what is the cause? Cause is, and you know, I'm saying this blanketly. So I, I'm sensitive to that. I understand for the providers and the professionals listening, things are multifactorial, but you cannot discount the massive influence of skeletal muscle as this primary site. And that while obesity quote is a problem, why don't we address it at the root cause level and the root cause level of skeletal muscle. Dr. Line, I, I, when I wrote, so I wrote a book around this, uh, around just strength training, I tried to create it for the layman, right? Just to kind of create a narrative or change the narrative for the average person who wants to lose weight, who never really considered strength training. That's what it was about. But I did do a lot of research and looked at studies. And one of the studies that, uh, was shocking to me at first, and it makes sense when you think about it, was how they would take severely obese people, have them lose no weight at all. They would just have them build a little bit of muscle and their, their insulin sensitivity would dramatically improve. They lost no body. They were still massively obese. They just built a little bit of muscle. Let's talk about that for a second. Uh, maybe talk about insulin resistance, what that does to the body, how that can cause so many different diseases and then, and then how muscle can affect that. Yeah. I think that's a really great point. And I want to point out this idea that when we get excess body fat, we don't just get it on the, what you can see. We've all heard of visceral fat, right? Visceral fat, fat around the organs. We've all heard of liver fat. Well, fat also infiltrate, infiltrate skeletal muscle, skeletal muscle, which should look like a filet ends up looking like a rib eye steak. And it is this fat infiltration. And granted, you see some intramuscular fat from athletes as a source of energy, intramuscular triglycerides, but intramuscular adipose tissue really affects insulin sensitivity. It affects the quality of skeletal muscle. It affects this flux. So skeletal muscle, if you think about skeletal muscle, think about it like a suitcase and if you're going on a trip and you're a woman, let's say you're packing for four days, but you're really packing for a month. Shout out to all the women listening. You know, you're laughing because you know exactly what I'm talking about. So if you open the suitcase and let's say glucose is you want to pack some glycogen in there, you're eating carbohydrates, you're not exercising, you're packing carbohydrates into this skeletal muscle, and then you're not moving it. You're not creating any flux. Over time, the glucose has nowhere to go. It begins to go back into the bloodstream. You have elevated levels of glucose. You have elevated levels of insulin. Insulin over time creates a whole host of issues, whether it's the insulin in and of itself or the elevated levels of glucose that ride along with it. And then subsequent elevated levels of triglycerides, all of which, you know, can create low levels of inflammation and just a complete metabolic disaster. Elevated levels of aphelosclerosis and just, et cetera. So when you have an individual who is obese, there's this concept of, you know, there's, you can be metabolically healthy and obese or overweight. I think over time that's not going to be true. And one reason is we're not looking directly at the tissue. We are not directly imaging skeletal muscle tissue. So we have no way to assess the amount of fat that is now infiltrated into tissue. Over time, this affects the mitochondrial aspect of skeletal muscle. It affects strength. It affects contractility. It affects the muscle protein synthetic response. So skeletal muscle as this primary organ system, when it becomes dysfunctional, while it makes 40% of the body, maybe everyone in here, it's like 60%, but this is a huge tissue that over time, when not leveraged, becomes dysfunctional, also perpetuates low levels of inflammation. So now it becomes an inflammatory, a cause of inflammation rather than something that can reduce or modulate in an appropriate way, inflammation. Yeah, I think that's safe to say. It becomes unhealthy tissue that, again, exists as a massive portion of your body. Wow. I, does this also have to do with the reason why there was a study done in Australia, I believe, where they looked at strength training and the progression of the beta amyloid plaques that there seems to be a relationship with those and Alzheimer's. It was the only form of exercise that stopped the progression. All forms of exercise improve your health and seem to have a positive impact. But it was a strength training that had the biggest impact. And, you know, I've heard people refer to Alzheimer's and dementia as type three diabetes. That's actually what I did my, that's what I did my clinical fellowship. So in geriatrics, I spent time running in Alzheimer's memory and aging clinic. And the question was, was it made amyloid plaque? There's tau proteins. There's all kinds of hypotheses as to why it happens. But one thing is for sure is that metabolic dysfunction is a huge contributor to Alzheimer's. Just as you mentioned, type three diabetes of the brain. The other aspect is vascular dementia. And again, while they seem separate, they, it all rides together. And again, you have to ask yourself, what acts as a root cause mechanism? Skeletal muscle, the more healthy skeletal muscle mass you have. And actually we saw that the in some of the studies that that we did. And you'll see this now in subsequent studies. We looked at FMRI studies of the brain. And one thing that we saw routinely. And again, you see this now is that the more the wider the waistline, the more overall obesity, the lower the brain volume. And why is that one theory is this just metabolic implication over time? Let me, it typically with there used to be this belief. And I remember when I first saw an MRI of an obese person next to someone who was not obese, there used to be this belief that obese people would have more muscle mass because of their body weight. I'm so glad you brought this up. But the MRI show that not only do obese people not have more muscle mass, they actually have less muscle mass than the average person. So it could, and I, you know, I'd love your comment on that, but also the reduction in brain volume due to obesity. I'm going to hypothesize here, but do you think it has less to do with the obesity and more to do with the reduced muscle mass? Because, OK, all right, smart, very smart. One of the other things that they didn't look at is the quality of the tissue. Let's say, in fact, it was true that individuals that are carrying around more weight need more tissue to support that. Let's say that's true, that does not address the quality of the skeletal muscle at all, have no idea what that quality of that tissue is. Right. You could have more tissue. You could have a large cow and you might take this like rib eye cut and half that tissue is connective tissue and fat. Right. It's not as if it's just this filet of tissue. The other thing that you said is very important. And I want to just point out that we are not great at measuring skeletal muscle mass directly. And because of this fact, there is this disconnect, which seems logical. But in the research, as it stands right now, people will say, strength is much more important than mass, right? We all can agree that nearly all the data would support that. Right. There's a major flaw in the way that that is done. And that is that because when we look at mass, it's just people don't realize it's lean body mass is anything that's not fat. So it could be fluid. It could literally be oil like some bodybuilders will inject themselves with like oil to make the muscle. So how do we solve this in terms of measuring? So it's now come out. So a researcher named William Evans, he and and Heller said, his another researcher, they've come out with a D3 creatine where an individual will take a pill and it tags it's a deuterated creatine and it tags skeletal muscle. Oh, wow. That's cool. And that is what I believe. And so now with this research, there's a great paper. It came out in 2019. They've tested it in infants, neonates, all ranges of humans. And what they're starting to see is that muscle mass and strength correlate when you directly measure skeletal mass, skeletal mass and strength do correlate. Yeah. Yeah. And the reason, by the way, that you strength now is because strength by itself is a better measurement of lean of actual muscle fibers than what we do now, which is just look at lean body mass, which I can affect literally I could go, I could go on a keto diet, suck the water and glycogen out of my muscles and I'll measure lower lean body mass, even though my body mass might not be affected in the sense that I don't have less muscle contractile tissue. Now you're saying they can actually test and say, this is actual Yes. contractile tissue. And they're seeing differences in the DEXA. So where they would say, OK, well, DEXA is showing no relationship between muscle mass and strength, right? That they're seeing when you directly measure skeletal muscle. That's not true. There is a relationship. And you also said something else that's very important. It's not the gain of body fat. And this is by the same group, Evans, that it's not the gain of body fat over time that's more detrimental. It's the loss of skeletal muscle mass. You know, in aging research and in clinical practice, we never tell an older individual over the age of 65 to lose weight. Because if they fall, if they break a hip, we we do not tell them to lose weight. That is not the recommendation. Now it results in worse outcomes. It does result in worse outcomes. And not does it only result in worse outcomes. They might not die from the fall, but the subsequent metabolic consequences of that fall be having bed rest. They do see increase in insulin resistance. An individual on bed rest could lose two pounds of muscle in a week. Wow. And when you're young, you can gain that back. But as you age, it's much more difficult. This is what's known as a catabolic crisis. I used to train doctors and I remember one of them saying a statement that I thought was like I couldn't believe it. And then I confirmed it with every other day. I trained at one point, maybe like 13, 14 doctors. Did I say I'm sorry? No, no, they were great people, wonderful people. And I one of them said, oh, yeah, you know, break a hip, Diabneumonia. Yeah, exactly. That was what they would say. Like when people fall and get hurt, when they're older, their their life quality, their health, the client rapidly, because now they can't move and the body just degenerates at a much faster rate. And it was roughly what three million falls. Yeah. Yeah. The part of the part about muscle and brain volume. I want to go back to that because this one's an interesting one to me. And I want to hammer this home because I don't think people are making the connection. OK, if you look at body fat on the body, and I'm so glad you're here because you're going to be able to help me with this thought here. If you look at body fat on the body, it does. There are there are functions that are required within the body to preserve that body fat, nourish the body fat, sustain the body fat. But it's nothing like muscle, right? Muscle requires a lot from the brain. OK, so every time you learn a new movement, you're not just developing your muscle, developing the brain and the central nervous system. If you stop moving, we could do MRIs and notice parts of the brain that will actually atrophy because you no longer are contracting, controlling, balancing. Like people don't realize they take for granted all the movement we do, the brain has to be well developed to perform certain movements. And the more intricate the movements, the more strength is required, the more organization from the central nervous system. I mean, that's that's all CNS building. That's that's brain building. So when you lose muscle, do you think the connection with brain atrophy is just that there's less muscle, so there's less for the brain? That's a great thought. I don't know. I have not thought about that. Wouldn't like a test where you measure someone like before they got casted up with a broken limb be like the best way and you measure the brain. That would be very interesting. That would be a cool study. You know what I'm saying? Where you had like you'd measure all these people that broke a limb, their brains before and after. And then you obviously know that's going to atrophy because it's not being used. How are we very interesting? Yeah, I don't know that answer, but that is a seems logical. It does seem logical, which means it takes a long time to catch up in the science of the logic. Well, no, it's 20 years from now. So yeah, in about 20 years, they'll figure. But what you're also pointing out is that there are perishable skills. Yeah. That when we stop searching for things that require growth, both physically and mentally, then body parts atrophy, brain atrophies, we have to learn new skills because life and, you know, these are perishable, perishable skills. Yeah. You know, it's part of that. Well, the evolutionary reason behind that that I subscribe to is anything that requires energy, your body is going to need a reason to preserve. Otherwise it wants to be as efficient as possible. I mean, we evolved with scarcity. Muscle is expensive tissue. The brain even can be expensive. So if it doesn't need a skill, it's going to prune it off. There's no reason to have a V10 engine. If you're not going to be hauling a lot of weight, so your engine is going to modify itself to your needs. In other words, you're only as strong and as smart and as balanced as you need to be. And then there are studies where they will compare people exercising their brain with like, you know, word exercises and stuff, which does something to people that don't do that and just move more. And the brain responds better to the movement than it does. Not to say that they don't both have value, but it's like, you want to have a healthy brain move. Yeah. Well, there's an interesting phenomenon. When you think about skeletal muscle as an endocrine organ. So again, it's an endocrine organ. When you contract it, it releases myokines. And there's hundreds of different myokines. These are what would be considered hormones or, you know, peptides that interface with all organ systems. It myokines, for example, I'll just name a few interleukin six interleukin six, which we often think of as a cytokine coming from the immune system or macrophages or interleukin 15. These are released from skeletal muscle exercising skeletal muscle and have a influence and an interplay in the immune system. Balancing inflammation. Exercising skeletal muscle also releases something called capsepsin, capsepsin B and irisin, both which influence the increase in the brain BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, just by contracting skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle is so multifactorial as this pinnacle of health from the metabolic aspect, which we talked about, from the brain aspect in multiple domains, not just from connecting the brain to a movement, but also from the exercise capacity to then influence the brain above and beyond endorphins, but really these molecules that service to interface with the brain. And that to me is just so fascinating. So let me pose a question to you. Here's what I'm trying to solve. We can appreciate how important skeletal muscle is. We can all agree that it's the organ of longevity. Everyone listening, they can agree. 50% of Americans don't exercise. 50% of Americans don't exercise. 24% actually meet the exercise requirements, which are abysmal. What, 150 minutes and then two days a week of some kind of strength training, which could be what, any modality? How do we move the needle to get people to do this? How do we impart upon them that it's not about looking good? It's not about what you have to lose. It is totally about what you have to gain. I really think it's what we've been trying to preach to the masses. Well, one, I think part of the challenge is, unfortunately, in our space, we still, we're still viewed as the Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tan, and Jacked Bros. And so I don't think the communication to the average person is still appropriate. I think they think that in order to lift weights to be healthy and for longevity, it means you got to dip into being body obsessed and training super intense and hard. So I think the messaging is partly our fault. I just think that we've done a really bad job of communicating to the average person what health looks like. And unfortunately, the way our system works, the most famous or loudest people are that we highlight on magazines, on television, these shows. I mean, they're some of the worst people to probably be communicating health to the average person. And, you know, one of the things that we're always trying to say is like, man, you'd be so surprised how little it actually takes to move the needle when you strength train. It's not, you don't have to, it's not like you have to kill yourself. There's a silver lining here. So number one, we need to communicate what you're communicating more effectively and better and more often. I think the average person doesn't understand the true health and longevity and quality of life improvements they can get through strength training. So that's number one. It's still you ask the average person, you know, hey, what's a good form of exercise to improve your health? Most people are not going to say strength training. They just don't know. So that's number one. Number two, this is what Adam's talking about. You don't need much. Here's a silver lining. You talk about the benefits of muscles contracting. OK, bigger muscles produce that effect at greater, at greater intensities, at greater amounts, because they're bigger. So bigger muscle is going to make all of what you're talking about much easier instead of me having to constantly move. But there's nothing wrong with activity. I think it's great. You have to move, but bigger muscles buffer the the inactivity that daily life kind of presents itself as it doesn't take much to build muscle. Now it takes a lot to become a bodybuilder. Nobody wants to become a bodybuilder. And even if you tried, you probably would have become one. That's a whole other conversation. But if you took the average person, we did this for years. I trained people for years, two days a week, two days a week of proper strength training is going to give you pretty much everything that we're talking about right now. And it's not you're going to train so hard that you can barely crawl out of the gym. In fact, that's inappropriate. If people fun, if well, at our level it is. But if most people really understood what it felt like to have an appropriate strength training workout, they wouldn't be so afraid. They would leave the gym or whatever. And they feel like, Oh, this feels kind of good. You don't need my fact. When I used to train people in advanced age, I worked for a long time with because, because of the doctors that I trained, they would send me their patients, all of which were over 65. They strengthen training with me once a week. And we saw profound improvements one day a week. And it was like we could maybe do three exercises in that whole hour. Just because they're age and the capabilities. Well, in terms of answering your question to like, I think, I think we're trying to solve a problem from like your everyday average person of like just getting introduced to a better way to approach it. And that there actually is a scientific way to train your body and to get there with good result. But what I do think is doctors are still revered as sort of the gatekeeper of knowledge and in our culture. And I think like doctors like yourself, we need more doctors to speak upon this with authority and to have actual procedure and protocol. So when you go in to have like your checkup or, you know, just your, your, to see how you're doing, like this gets brought up in terms of like we can measure your strength. So if it's the grip test, or if we have some kind of like a standardized sort of group of exercises that we test your strength or, you know, something new you found in terms of being able to measure where we're at in terms of lean body mass, we need to get better at that. So they feel like this is coming from the top down. So I'm working on that. Yeah. Would you believe that? I just finished the first iteration. I work with a PhD. Her name is Alexis Cowan and she's a PhD from Princeton, who is now doing a postdoc at Penn. And we just created a muscle centric medicine certification course for providers. Oh, very cool. Awesome. What's in that certification? I will send it to you. Okay. Maybe one of you guys will come through it or just, I mean. Is it open to anybody or do you have to be a provider? So the first iteration is open only to for healthcare professionals. So they have to have a license. And then the second iteration, we're going to open to trainers and health coaches. Are you selling that now? Well, depending on when this comes out, yes. Because I want you back on. So we can go through that. I know, seriously. That's a big deal. So what we've done is we have compiled all these hallmark studies. So we've taken clinical practice. I've been in practice since, I don't know if you want to say Botox is good, 2006. Since 2006, but. Wow, you were 12 when you were coming. Yes, you're brilliant. Exactly. So we have compiled kind of the mechanistic, all the hallmark studies, all the ways in which things kind of need to change and ways of diagnosing, ways of treating, ways of implementing exactly what you're talking about. That's amazing. Because here's what happened. I gave this lecture at a conference called Obesity Medicine. No offense. It's great. And there were hundreds and hundreds of physicians in the room and it's a conference called Obesity Medicine. And you know what I talked to. So I got up there and I said, you guys got this all wrong. It's not about obesity. Let's just say that the reviews were split on the talk I gave, but nearly all of them came around by the end. Look, here's the bottom, this, here's the bottom. This is an overgeneralization, but it is the bottom line. Okay. When you look at the data, and the debt is clear on this, when you look at the data of the negative effects that, of what we eat on our health, I don't care if it's sugar, I don't care if it's, you know, seed oils, inflammatory fats. I don't care what it is. When you eat below what you burn, almost all of those negative effects go away. Now I'm not saying that they're innocuous. Obviously they affect your behaviors. They make you want to overeat, craving, all that stuff. There's other effects. I'm oversimplifying here. But if you can burn more calories, then you can consume, I can't think of a better way to buffer yourself against what we're dealing with out in the real world, including your body's ability to detoxify from all of the interesting and strange chemicals that we're constantly being exposed to. So then that begs the question, okay, do we just move a ton more? No, that's actually a terrible way to try to burn more calories. We have incredible studies showing that if you just try to move more, your body adapts in pretty interesting ways. One of them is to pair muscle down and make you more efficient calorie-preserving machine. You just got to build muscle. If you build muscle, you speed up. Like right now, if I had to solve the health epidemic right now with one thing that I could do, I would, if I could snap my fingers and boost everybody's metabolism, I would solve a lot of the problems through muscle. Yes. That's what I try to say, because I think people get that. Why do they get that? Because it's still connected to obesity, right? We're so fixated on the obese aspect. So it's like, okay, fine, you want to be lean, speed up your metabolism. How do I do that? Build muscle that tends to sell the message a little bit more. Back to Justin's point though, I really do think that we need all the doctors on the right side in this one, because I remember this was a long time ago on the podcast. One of the most controversial things I ever said was when I get a client or would get a client back in the days that needed to lose 30, 40, 50 pounds, I always added to their diet before I ever took away. And that was like, what? That's just that's not the law of throwing emics. That's not how. Why would you ever do that? I said, well, when you assess someone's diet that was overweight like that, many times they were lacking in nutrients over consuming all the bad ones. And so instead of me going from that point and like restricting, I focused on adding foods in their diet. Also did a like a psychological thing for them. It's like, I'm not telling them they can't have something. I go, this is what I want you to do. I want you to go target this. And it would pull and then I would focus on strength training and tell them, listen, we actually don't want to see the scale move right now. I actually, in fact, if it goes up one or two pounds, I don't care. Our goal right now is to get stronger in the gym, add these foods I'm telling you into your diet. Everything else that I've been letting you, I'm not worried about. And they would just look at you crazy. But what you would do is slowly over time start to speed that metabolism up. And then they were eating more food than they ever did. Then I'd bring them back down to the calorie intake they were doing and they would just drop them off. And that is a much more appropriate proactive messaging. Right now we are so focused on what we have to lose. Everything is about loss. What do you have to lose? If we can flip the conversation to it's all about what you have to gain. It's all about what you have to gain, whether it's skeletal muscle, whether it's adding dietary protein, whether it's who you have to become to impart these disciplines, the resiliency and the capacity that you earn by building muscle. I think that we would absolutely empower our society 10x. Dr. Dr. Lyon, you know, I'm going to open by saying you look phenomenal. And I noticed this in gyms when I manage gyms all the time. I would, I could see, I could always tell who focused on strength training and who focused on other forms of exercise. The strength training crowd always seemed to age better in this sense. They didn't, they didn't seem to display the same signs of aging as the other side. Now they were all healthier than the average person. Everybody's working out. But it was like the cardio bunnies versus the people that lifted. They looked very different. Let's talk about hormones for a second because now you mentioned insulin, very important to have to be sensitive to insulin. I think everybody knows that, but there's a lot of hormones in our body. And as we age, people are focused on, how do I get more youthful levels of hormones? How do I get my growth hormone to be higher and my testosterone to be higher? And how do I get cortisol to be more appropriate? And also, can you talk to the, the, the effect that muscle has on the other hormones or even the process of building muscle, how that affects our hormones? So I think that this is somewhat of a complex topic. Let's think about how we frame it in something that would be very valuable for the listener. Deal? Number one, we know that obesity poses a problem with testosterone. Right? And I've heard Dr. Rand on here, Rand McClain. That's his last name, right? Amazing doctor. Dr. Rand, if you want to come on my show, we follow about hormones. So one of the things that we have to recognize is that with increasing obesity, especially for men, we do see lower levels of fertility. Actually, men and women, and I wrote about this in the book, whether it's men and women, whether it's PCOS, which is polycystic ovarian syndrome, can affect fertility via one mechanism is insulin resistance, insulin resistance of skeletal muscle. When we think about obesity and men, we do think about this increase in estrogen, right? Aromatase in fat cells causing an increase in estrogen over time. This is not ideal. This is not ideal for men. Therefore, I would say having an ideal or more optimal body composition, lowering excess body fat and improving skeletal muscle will help this. Does test does skeletal muscle directly influence gonadal production of testosterone? I would say I haven't seen data that I'm convinced about that. Have you guys I've I've seen data that clearly shows an increase in androgen receptor density. Yes. And that yes, that's what matters. Yes. The most absolutely increase in androgen receptor density. So like your same testosterone is now way more effective. But I absolutely. But would I say over time does resistance training in a meaningful way, increased testosterone production? I can't say that. Or does it increase growth hormone production in a meaningful way? I'm not sure. But it does. So my my opinion on that is because it's interesting, right? So does vitamin D reduce depression only if you have a deficiency and you take it? Otherwise, it doesn't do anything. OK. So does having muscle keep your testosterone levels higher than if you just let your muscle waste away? Yes. So when you compare strength training men in their 60s to non strength training men, what you will probably see is higher testosterone. So I don't think it's as much of a directly making it go up to that. Yeah. But rather a maintaining of a fertile level of testosterone. And then we talked about the receptors. Yes. They did a study to try to connect testosterone levels to strength and muscle mass. And these were all men within normal range, so lower end, higher end. And what they found was total testosterone and free testosterone. There was maybe a small effect. The big effect was androgen receptor density. Yes. Muscle, you build muscle, you get more androgen receptors more effective and you get more receptors for growth hormone and you are more sensitive to insulin. So whether or not your hormones change, they become more effective is what ends up. And you think the problem with that is because it's the example you gave of the six year old who lives versus a six year old doesn't. It's because we're not going to be able to tie it to one specific thing like, oh, you do that and then it's going to build this much more testosterone because although you would see that to your point, it's because it influences so many other aspects and behaviors of your life. That person who's trained trains probably sleeps better, probably has better energy levels, probably also makes better choices. So there's too many other things that we can't isolate to one and say, oh, strength training increases testosterone, but who fucking cares? Who cares if it if it does in positively influence all these other behaviors that collectively all together really make a difference on your testosterone. So you mentioned something about behaviors, which I thought this was very interesting. So this is out of the Galveston group and they showed one night of sleep deprivation suppressed muscle protein synthesis by 18%. Yeah. Didn't you just bring something that I did? Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's insane. You said PCOS. There was a study that just came out and when I see studies like this, what's interesting is studies will come out, people will see the smoke, but they'll they'll fail at noticing there's a fire. The smoke is the problem. It's like there's a fire over here. So we got to look at. They just did a study that showed that a ketogenic diet probably positively affects women with PCOS. So now everybody's like, oh, keto, that's the answer. Just like a ketogenic diet improves cognitive function. Is it was it that or was it the reduction in carbohydrates? That's what that's OK. So just like studies that show, you know, ketogenic diet, better for people with Alzheimer's. The root is the person has become so insulin desensitized that they can't use glucose properly. That going keto, which is kind of a band-aid at this point, is better because they have no carbohydrates. But the real fix would have been improve insulin sensitivity, right? Yeah. When you see studies like that, do you just want to tear your hair out? Because I mean, I really appreciate what you said that we are missing the big picture. And that's exactly why I wrote this book is to kind of bring it all back into perspective. I put a whole there's I mean tons of there's nutrition tracks in this book that make it very simple. You know, from my perspective, when I see these studies, I mean, I'm very interested in dietary protein just because of my training. I train under Don Lehmann, same guy who Lane Norton trained with. In fact, we trained at the same time we or we overlapped at the same time. And I think that if we really want to solve this dietary aspect, by the way, 100% of people eat. That is like the lowest hanging fruit ever. Exercise is optional. You could probably live your entire life and not exercise in a day, although no one in this room is recommending that. You cannot survive without eating. You have to nail that component. And, you know, from a dietary perspective, the research is clear. It's interesting because I think in the beginning of the bodybuilding age, the golden era, they really focused on higher protein. Body composition changes were pretty obvious. Is that fair to say? And over time, they have numerous, you know, hundreds of studies of showing increased dietary protein, how that affects body composition. Meanwhile, the recommendations for dietary protein have not changed since 1968. They haven't changed since 1968. Can I just mention one more thing that you guys might find interesting or not find interesting, but I find this interesting. So when I was doing research for this book, I was very interested in as to why we got to where we are. What is the history? Why every time we have a nutrition conversation, is it steeped in politics? Why is it a political, moral, and then maybe a little bit over here, a nutrition conversation, you know, empirical data conversation, right? It's never a straight conversation. So after World War I and this Great Depression happened, they were facing World War II and Hitler, losing the entire nation, right? I would say, do you guys remember that? But obviously, that would be out. That was only 17 back then. You look great, by the way. So when they drafted the first million men, right? So they called in a million able-bodied individuals, 38% were unfit for war. And this is what, again, I was looking at these historical papers. They were called flabby. So one of the things they said they all had flabby muscle. They all had nutrient deficiencies. They didn't really know how to define that, but they didn't have any teeth. There were all kinds of, they had really bad eyesight because of lack of vitamin A. There were all kinds of problems. At this moment, nutrition became a national fucking emergency. So they called this immediate congregation. They had three days. And, you know, this is like they're facing war and all of a sudden they have to start thinking about nutrition. Met for three days, they came out with what was initially the RDA, which that ended up changing in the 60s. And they came up with ways to educate the public, ways to educate the homemaker, ways to educate the worker because they needed, the goal was, how do we get people strong, able-bodied, and capable and vital, having vitality? This was their main focus. They came out with, I don't want to say it's a propaganda, but they came out with a strategy to how to educate. One group, they said, you're going to help Uncle Sam. And in order to help Uncle Sam, they had this picture of this strong, able-bodied worker, and they had a series of guidelines. You want to know what they were? Let's hear it. Make sure that you are eating high-quality protein at least two servings at lunch. This include liver, beef, chicken, eggs. This is in the 40s. Because of muscle strength, we need your muscle strong. Make sure you're eating unprocessed foods. Make sure you're getting enough vitamin A from places like liver. Did you know this? Yeah, I've never heard this. And I'm going to, I'll send you guys the, what they put out there, the pamphlets. And that's a great birthday present. If anyone is ever listening, if you guys want to find the original copies for me, I would love it. Make sure that you are eating vitamin A in the source of liver. Make sure that you are getting salt. So they have this whole list. How do you help Hitler? And then they actually put something on how the worker can help Hitler about how they can be irresponsible. Do not eat a high-quality protein diet. Do not increase your sodium in your diet. Do not eat vitamin A or bio available nutrients. Make sure that you are eating processed foods. Make sure that you are eating white bread, X, Y, and Z. And they show this kind of like decrepit soldier or this decrepit worker. You have to advertise this. Now, wait a second. But here is my point. Here is my big point. When the world was up against war, when we were at risk of losing everything and fighting a war out there, the government policy came in full force. How do we make people more vital and capable? And now, we might not be facing a war out there. How have our recommendations changed so much? Oh, I know. Right. I know what happened. They came out with those recommendations. They did have an impact. And just like a referee playing the game, everybody then decided to influence the referee is what happened. This is when, because you had other industries that would suffer from this kind of information. So what they did is they lobbied government to require fortification of nutrient devoid foods. They were required to put iodine and salt, fortify cereals and breads. This is why things now say fortified, right? This was actually government like they required. If you're going to make bread, you got to fortify it with these vitamins and minerals. And this is what they're compromise type of deal. And they continue to be influenced through these massive, very powerful lobbies, which still happens today. Actually, it's even worse today. Oh my God. Because you could say now that you could say now that, OK, back then the incentive was like we need strong man to go fight or we're done. The incentive now, if you look at incentives, I'm not saying that there's some evil like ruler that's pulling the strings. Who knows? I don't think that's what's happening. I just think the incentives go in the opposite. If you're sick and unhealthy, you're a better consumer with almost every powerful market that exists, every market in the grocery store is geared towards being on medicine for sure. Pharmaceutical industry profits from poor health, distracting services, profit from poor health, keeping you keep not allowing you to be vital and healthy actually means you're a better consumer across the board. And I don't know if people actually thinking about it that way, but that's where the incentives are. So that's where the money goes. It's interesting, though, when the government wants us fit and strong and effective, they actually know the right information. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah, I know, I know. I didn't know that. That's wild. And then one of the other things is, and the reason I'm bringing this up is because I think that if we are going to speak about these things, we have to put it into context because we have to question why do we believe the things that we believe and perhaps open the mind to the listener that potentially they've been indoctrinated by other ways of thinking. And by bringing this to the attention, then maybe they can understand that the lens in which they are viewing things potentially is skewed. Yeah, yeah. You know, potentially. Yeah. Well, I'm speaking. I want to give you I want to give you something else. Yeah. So again, what do I care most about? I care most about human health. I am a physician that has sat by the bedside of more dying people than I care to remember. Took me a long time to get over that. So that is why I'm here doing. I was talking to Adam before I'm like, gosh, you know, wouldn't it be great if I could just talk about my kids? But if you have the capacity to do something, you have a responsibility to do it. And I care about the information that gets out because I care about the human and I care about the influence on their families and what it is like at the end of life and who has to pay for that. I don't ever want my children to have to deal with that ever. Right. So the scope of the information that we're hearing when you think about Whole Foods. So we've got Whole Food Commodities. Whole Foods are like beef, chicken, dairy, corn, soy, whatever, like these Whole Foods Commodities. And they undergo they're under the jurisdiction of the USDA and the check-offs. So you don't know the individual milk farmers but they all collectively pool their money so that they have some kind of marketing budget which is under the USDA. Now that's very restrictive. And I'll give I'm going to give you an example. We're going to play a little game. You guys ready for a game? Yeah. OK, I'm going to say something, a commodity. You're going to tell me what the commodity slogan is. Yeah. As long as it's this is what you're going to do. This is what you're going to do. Just remembers all the toothpaste commercials from the 80s. This does not include toothpaste. Zestfully clean. Well, I'm ready. OK, ready? Ready? Here's the game. Yeah. Milk. Makes the body good. Does your body good, Ian? Does the body good. Beef. It's what's for dinner. What's for dinner? Pork. Yeah, white meat. Amazing. Do you think it's interesting that it's a one liner that doesn't say anything? Sure. Discriminating against any other food. Right. Yeah. OK. Now I'm going to now we're going to play another game. I'm going to say Oatly milk. Oh. And you're going to say it's better for the environment. Yeah. WTF. I'm going to say I'm with you. I'm going to say impossible burger. It's not meat. And you're also going to say, oh, this is a better source of protein and it has a lower carbon footprint than beef. It's better for you. It doesn't have any hormones. X, Y, and Z. Right? Yeah. So you're going to hear a processed food and then you're going to hear subsequent blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Barf out of my mouth. Hmm. Commodities are under jurisdiction of USDA. They cannot defend themselves. They cannot say actually agriculture collectively is 9% all of agriculture is collectively 9% of greenhouse gas. And this is a BS smokescreen that we are never going to eat our way out of climate change. They cannot say Meatless Monday is going to have almost no impact on greenhouse gas. They cannot say milk is a more bioavailable calcium than almonds, almond juice. They cannot say anything. Collectively, the marketing budget for a commodity is 750 million. One company, PepsiCo, has almost a $2 billion marketing budget. Yeah. Who controls the money controls the narrative. You're probably like, wow, we're not talking about politics. We're talking about nutrition. I agree. We're talking about nutrition. But we cannot dismiss that we have a mouse over here and this massive conglomerate that is influencing what the public thinks is healthy and influencing the information that comes out because they're under a different jurisdiction. And they can essentially be disparaging against foods and other things. Yeah, well, close my mind how many people don't think this is a big deal. Also, look, that's fucking crazy. Here's the bottom line, okay? If you look at the average American's diet, it's something like 75% heavily processed foods. What's left over is typically meat, milk, eggs. If we keep pushing this message that those foods are immoral, because that's the message, they're immoral, the bad for the environment, whatever, it's going to result in nutrient deficiencies. It's going to result in worse health. And our biggest weapon, our most effective weapon against any impending disaster, including climate change, is innovation. It's healthy people innovating. You're going to make everybody sick. Do you think that's going to help the climate? That's going to be the worst possible thing we could do. It is such a marketing slogan. It has zero basis in reality. And what you're talking about are foods that you can patent versus foods that you can't. That's the big difference, which, by the way, everybody's like, why are they making lab-grown meat to save the environment? No, it's not. It's because you can patent lab-grown meat. And so the question becomes, how can we at least have transparent conversations? That's what I care about. Whether you want to eat lab-grown meat or you want to eat drink almond juice, fine. Personally, I have that in my coffee, okay? But the reality is what becomes important is that we at least have to be on the same page with a transparent conversation. It has to be honest. It has to be honest. So if we are having a political discussion about nutrition, then let's do that. But if we are going to have an empirical discussion about the data, then let's just do that. And ultimately, let people choose and let them be in control of at least hearing information with an open mind to be able to make better choices for themselves and their families. Did you hear about all the doctors and practitioners that just took money from ABA? Did you? I did. It's fucking unreal. That's the problem though. It's like we have people that are supposed to be on the good side or the right side that are being influenced by lobbying groups like that. What do you think's happening? Because I've seen this in the last two and a half decades. I've been in the space. Protein slowly becoming demonized, which is interesting. And they'll say things like, it raises M-tor, M-tor causes cancer. That's not how it works, but okay, fine. So I'm seeing that now. Just give me one. Yeah, yeah. Protein is being demonized. Protein containing foods are what are largely becoming demonized. Yes. And we're now seeing the weirdest article. I never thought I'd see an article like this in my life, but strength training and gyms are becoming demonized. Is it like, it's almost like anti-muscle propaganda? Probably the same reason they were trying to pull your TEDx. Well, luckily it was published. So you guys go check it out. It's crazy. What's going on? I think at the end of the day, the question becomes who stands to profit? I hate for that to be the question, but it seems to be who stands to profit? Because at the end of the day, the idea of protein and M-tor is so ridiculous. Let's just cover something like that. So first of all, the data is very clear that anything below the RDA will create a deficiency. And that number is 0.8 grams per kg, 0.37 grams per pound. Yeah, nothing. If I were 115 pounds, that would be like 45 grams of protein. Yeah. In the longevity space, people are saying to go below that. I know, it's crazy. But wait a second. The nitrogen balance studies are marginal at best and they have underappreciated the role of dietary protein, meaning quite simply that we need more than the nitrogen balance studies have implied. Okay, so we know that. So we know that the minimum to prevent efficiencies, which again, 0.8 grams per kg, 0.37 grams per pound, that would be 45 grams of protein for a female, five pounds heavier than me. I'm not gonna call myself 115, I'll say 110. But the idea that in a longevity space, if you believe everything that we've spoken about skeletal muscle, there's only two ways to support skeletal muscle. You cannot support skeletal muscle without dietary protein, okay? You are not going, it is going to be very difficult to maintain skeletal muscle mass with that minimum amount of dietary protein. It just is, especially if you're in a caloric deficit. And there's multiple studies. I was just looking at one that compared 0.8 grams to double the RDA, to triple the RDA. Those that had double the RDA, their body compositions always did better. Always maintained scale, I mean, always. At least with all the studies that I have seen, they've all done better from a body composition perspective, from a metabolic perspective. And not to kind of go down that rabbit hole, but we can. This idea that we should further reduce our dietary protein because it affects longevity and the mechanism of action that they're talking about is a mechanistic target of rapamycin. Okay, mechanistic target of rapamycin is a protein complex that is in every tissue in the body. It is necessary for growth. It is in the brain, it is in the pancreas, it is in the liver, it is everywhere. Mechanistic target of rapamycin is sensitive to insulin, especially in the liver and the pancreas and other tissues. And in skeletal muscle, mTOR, mechanistic target of rapamycin is exquisitely sensitive primarily to dietary protein, in particular this amino acid called leucine. Okay, so this idea of, and by the way, resistance training also stimulates mTOR. Yeah. So if people are saying, well, we don't want to stimulate mTOR because of this growth factor and it's somehow is going to have a genomic derangement and cause cancer, well, then you're right, people shouldn't be resistance training. Yeah. But if you really cared about mTOR, then you would care about a high carbohydrate diet. And you wouldn't pinpoint skeletal muscle as the problem. Yeah. That makes no logical sense. No, and also it would be like making this comparison right here. It would be like saying testosterone causes cancer in the prostate. So we should all have no testosterone. Okay, but did you know that that, I love that you said that. Have you seen the more recent data? Yeah, yeah. No, that's where I'm going. So if you have prostate cancer, testosterone can fuel cancer growth because they're testosterone sensitive cancers. In other words, if you have cancer and it's growing, anything that can fuel any cell could potentially grow cancer cells. Wait, wait, wait, time out. So I, okay, so listen, I'm going to throw my husband into the fire about this. So I don't know if you guys know this, but my husband is a surgical resident in urology. One of, he's at Baylor. So you know, Mohed Kera, do you have you guys heard of Mohed Kera? He's like the guy of testosterone who is doing the research. And he challenged this paradigm of thinking that those individuals with prostate cancer could be on testosterone. And in fact, many of them, of course it is dependent, many of them did better. Yeah, wow. And so again, so this is now questioning the paradigm. Wow, wow. Also, he published something called the Traverse Trial, which came out, you know how everyone was talking about, well testosterone will perpetuate cardiovascular disease. There was no impact on cardiovascular disease. No, in fact, if you go from low testosterone to high within normal ranges, you probably improve your, because of its effect on skeletal muscle. But what about this idea? So nobody with prostate cancer had been given testosterone for decades. Yeah. In fact, some of them were put on blockers. I bet you though, paired with exercise training, strength training in particular and that I bet you'd be just fine. So then this guy went back and he challenged that. And he found that many individuals with prostate cancer did better. Wow. Wow, that's amazing. How the hell did he get away with even being able to test that? I have no idea. I asked him the same thing. I was like, how did he do that? Well, yeah. I mean, these are the studies that are being done. Yeah, okay. Renegade, yeah. So we talked about, you know, we're talking a lot about muscles, positive effects on overall health, but let's talk more specifically to other parts of the body that seem, that are closely connected to longevity. How does building muscle help with bone health? How does building muscle help with brain health and other organ health? Yeah, I think that when you think about skeletal muscle as this focal point and what you have to do to maintain and build it, there's no greater influence on the physiology in the body, right? There's no pill that is going to be as effective, not just having muscle, but training it. So the impetus of training and this crosstalk of myokines, this crosstalk of just the massive influence, this inter-organ crosstalk, I think is really the key. The inter-organ crosstalk with these myokines plus the metabolic effects and also the cognitive central nervous system effects, I think that it's just all encompassing. Specifically for bone, there are some studies coming out that are actually linking more specifically this bone muscle crosstalk, which I think is really fascinating in the idea that it's not just the loading mechanism. So obviously you need to load bone, right? We see that in space. Astronauts, they have rapid declines in bone health, but the mechanical loading is essential for bone health, which we all talk about that, but also the interfaces. And other than these myokine crosstalks, there's other mechanisms of action which I couldn't go into because I haven't looked at it recently, but all of which potentially bone health. And there's something to be said for the loss of muscle as a predictor for the loss of bone. Of course, an anchor's a bone. But these are all, but all of this, we think as this is common sense. Yeah, yeah. I talk about a client that I trained. I talk about her all the time. I trained this woman who hired me because she, osteopenia, moving into osteoporosis was very scared, very healthy. Otherwise did lots of walking and they put her on. I don't remember what the drug was, but it was a pretty harsh on her to try to stop the bone loss. She hired me. We strength trained once a week, okay? Six months later, she got her bones scanned and the doctor re-ran the test because he didn't believe what it said. And then he called me. And he said, what are you doing with her? I said, we're just doing traditional strength training. But you probably also had her on dietary protein. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I had her- So there's this myth that protein leeches calcium. Right? But actually, when I was in my geriatric fellowship, we saw those with the lowest protein diets had the greatest risk of hip fractures. Protein and bone is made from protein. Yeah, yeah. Obviously calcium, vitamin D, and these other matrix food that come within a food matrix, but- The theory is so stupid. It's so ridiculous. The theory was eating a lot of protein, your body needs to buffer the acidity of it so it's gonna release calcium to balance it. It's such a ridiculous- They die really hard. They die really hard. And I am really worried about this anti-protein narrative because these things like, for example, cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol was taken out of the guidelines in 2015. And I started to watch everyone's talking about this blue zone thing. So I started to watch it. I had to turn it off because the third sentence was these people ate lower cholesterol. And after that, you lost me. I mean- You know how dangerous this narrative is because we talk about this from our experience, right? Collectively, we've trained thousands of people, either in person or by proxy. And I have trained athletes and high performers, but 95% of my experience is with just average Joe and Jane that don't even really care for exercise, but they know they need to do it. I have never, not one, had a client who eats enough protein. That is like the number one. In fact, if I've been asked, like, you have one tool, you got nothing else you could do, what do you go do to an average? It's, I just tell them that increased protein because I know what it does, not only for them muscle-wise and health-wise, but also what it does as far as the choices of food they'll make. I know how to impact behavior. So I wanna touch on this. This is super important. We, and this is where I think the next couple years is going to go. I don't know if I have anything to do with it, is that we talk about protein in this generic term. And when we talk about protein in a generic term, it really does it a disservice, okay? So stay with me here. Protein is made of 20 different amino acids, nine of which are essential. Each should be considered its own nutrient. Each, so we should no longer look at protein, but we have to look at and understand that each amino acid has diverse biological roles. It's true. For example, we just talked about leucine. Leucine not only helps with muscle protein synthesis, but also laying down with, it also stimulates mTOR. So leucine stimulates mTOR, it has an impact on certain fatty acid mechanisms, has diverse biological roles. Phenylalanine. Phenylalanine is a precursor for dopamine. Tryptophan is a precursor for serotonin. So we have to, arginine is a precursor for nitric oxide. Mucin production is, there's another amino acid that is dependent on the levels to produce mucin, but yet we continue to talk about dietary protein as if it's one thing. So if we are not keeping up with protein turnover, for example, and the body turns over anywhere from 250 to 350 grams of protein a day, those other amino acids, there will not be enough to have, to kind of delegate to, for example, focusing on mucin production in the gut, right? So threonine, threonine might not, there might not be enough threonine to produce mucin in the gut because it will want, because the body will want to maintain tissues first. Yeah, the reason why what you're saying is so important, because there's only one place to get the most diverse. Well, look, how difficult it will be to get all those from without meat. Well, either you eat a lot of protein, like a gram of protein per pound of body weight, and then you'll probably cover all your bases, but knowing the average person, and actually how challenging that's so, this is the other part about protein that's amazing for the average person, it produces satiety like nothing else. You want to not overeat, eat a high protein diet, you will naturally not overeat, okay? It just happens that way. But if you don't eat that massive amount of protein, which is what we always recommend, and you miss that, which most people will, now protein quality, as measured by bioavailable, essential amino acids, becomes imperative. So let's say you eat 50 grams of protein a day, it really matters where you get it from now. That's right, and the evidence supports that. And it supports it, again, not just based on this protein number, I think we've become hyperfixated on protein as a macronutrient. So if you're getting all your protein from plants, that's okay, I can appreciate that, but what about the food as a food matrix? What about creatine? What about torene, which is really important for aging? What about carnitine? What about these low molecular weight molecules that ride along with a food matrix? And also bioavailable iron and zinc and selenium. So it's not overarching, the baseline is protein, but again, it's these individual amino acids that need to be thought of as individual nutrients. And when you look at the back of a food label, all you see, like if you look at the back of a food label, all you see is protein, which by the way, that number can be totally inflated because that number is based on nitrogen. We wouldn't have to get this complex, I feel, if we weren't also simultaneously demonizing meat. So we wouldn't, or any high quality protein source. So let's just say it's not meat. I mean, I don't know, it seems like fish just kind of skated by, damn it. They're not cute, that's why. But again, we wouldn't have to get this granular, but we do have to have these transparent conversations. You can choose to eat however you want for any ethical reason, but you cannot say this is better for you than this. And you should cut back on high quality dietary protein because you're gonna get cancer. I'm gonna cut back on high quality dietary protein because it's better for the planet. Like you cannot have these conversations. You mentioned creatine. I said this nine years ago on the podcast. I mean, I was a kid when creatine first hit the shelves and it was like this performance enhancing supplement and it built muscle, lots of controversy. And as I saw the data, I remember, it was like at least eight years ago, I remember saying this is gonna be, one day it's gonna be a longevity supplement. They're gonna give it to everybody and the data now completely supports what I'm saying. Do you think it has, it's a pro longevity ingredient because it helps build muscle and that's the main mechanism or because it supports the mitochondria or all of the above? Or because we're just so deficient. So that's what I think. That's actually what I think. And I have been trying to look for these calculations. What would a, if some were eating a high animal-based protein diet, what, how much creatine would they actually get? I just have been thinking about this in my own mind. How do we calculate actually what we would get naturally versus what we would get from a supplementation? And I believe that part of it, and I'm not a creatine expert, but I believe that part of it is because that we aren't eating enough in general. So it's the same thing with arginine. Arginine, when an individual is deficient in arginine, we may see that they have improvements in blood pressure. Yeah, they're vascular. But why? But you don't see the same improvements if they're eating a diet sufficient in arginine. It's a deficiency. That's a great point. So the question becomes, how do we then become very intelligent about the deficiencies that we are treating? And it would be nice to say, well, you have a deficiency in glycine, so we're gonna give you this, or a deficiency in creatine. We're gonna give you this. But again, if we begin to think about these whole foods within individual nutrients, I think that's where longevity is going. Dr. Lyon, I'm gonna back you up. When you look at the studies on creatine and cognitive performance or IQ, okay? When vegans add creatine to the diet, we see a measurable improvement in IQ. We don't necessarily see this with omnivores, especially high protein eating omnivore humans. That, I think, points to what you're saying. Because it's more of a feeling a deficiency than it is a magic supplement. That's what I think. Yeah, because vegans are going to have the lowest amount of creatine. And I actually saw, I was looking at, there was a recent meta-analysis, and I think it's surveyed, I'll have to send it to you guys. I wanna say it was at least 17 studies, and it looked at vegans over across populations, and their average protein intake from was around 60 to 68 grams, but 60 to 68 grams of plant protein. Yeah, that's like 30 grams of animal protein. And so how do we kind of improve their health over time? And again, that's just protein. That doesn't address other deficiencies. You know what I did with my vegan clients? Because I had clients that were vegans, and the most consistent vegans are the ones that do it for moral reasons, so, and that's fine. And the reason why I'm saying that is because vegans who do it for dietary reasons, they end up falling off the wagon like any other diet. But what I used to do with my vegan clients that had profound effects, like I would do this with my vegan clients, it was like life-changing. They all took an essential amino acid supplement, so I had them take essential amino acids with their meals, and I had them take creatine, and they were all like, what did you give me? This is amazing, I feel incredible, but I need it like, yeah, I'm like, well, you're not getting a lot of essential amino acids, and your body's having to produce its own creatine through synthesizing through the amino acids that you're not consuming a lot anyway. What is the percentage? Do either one of you know the percentage of people that choose to do a vegan diet are doing it for moral reasons versus- The ones that stick to it? That's a great question, I don't know. It'd be interesting how many are doing it for thinking it's a healthier diet or thinking it's going to save the planet versus people that actually are against killing animals. Yeah. Neither one of you have an idea of what it did with the percentage. But I have to say, I do really get concerned about this anti-animal narrative, and here's who I get concerned for. I get concerned for the people that are in the middle and trying to figure it out. That's right. And that's actually why I reluctantly got into this space. I actually didn't want to do it. I didn't want to go out there. It's very weird going from being a physician to then being vocal about something. But over time, the more influencers that I started to see coming out saying these things, and I became concerned for the people in the middle where they don't know where to go and what to think and what to do. And those are the most at risk for misinformation. And rather than them having to crash and burn because that window of opportunity closes, you and I both know that because we've seen it with aging individuals. You can't spend, dietary habits are hard to kill over no pun intended, over time. And so if we at least don't lay out these conversations, then I think we're gonna see epidemics of sarcopenia and osteoporosis like we have never seen. You know worries me the most. By the way, it's 34% that do it for ethical reasons. You know what worries me the most, Dr. Lyon, is there's a certain level of plasticity in the brain and I don't know, I guess you could say in the body that children have that eventually goes away as you get older. So like an example is like a kid can learn four languages, speak all of them with no accent. But if you try to do that when you're 20, you're gonna have an accent because there's a certain amount of plasticity that's gone. What I worry about is how this message is affecting children. So now you're getting parents. Who are feeding their kids this way and because they're lacking these nutrients that are essential for development. And their pets. We could be permanently, and I would argue we are, permanently negatively affecting their cognitive potential and their physical potential because that window is gone. Once you hit a certain age, you can make improvements but you can't, we can't go back to where we were. So you are absolutely right. I actually interviewed on my podcast, a PhD named, do you know who Peter Baller said is? And he is actually an agriculturalist and he is big into ruminant agriculture and he's very interested in global effects. That is exactly what he said. He is so concerned about the children, their iron needs and their ability to get these amino acids that if they do not get it when they are younger that that cognitive window, that that brain development window, that physical development window closes. And again, that's why he does what he does. Wow. Very interesting. You combine that with what's going on with our kids and putting them in front of iPads and not interacting with each other and the social aspect is fucking scary time to be a parent right now. Yeah, because we don't have an ability to, all these things are new, right? We don't have this ability to modulate ourselves like with these devices and the way that we're becoming more sedentary. They are new to even us. There's no rule book as to how to navigate this environment both with the information overload. I mean, when I was studying, I had to go to the library and we had to go through the card catalog and pick up the journals. They would yell at me, Gabrielle, did you, you just checked out like 17 journals and you better put those back, right? But now it's so easy to just go to PubMed and just amount of information that is being turned out can overshadow really good science. The worst part about it, I think, from talking about the tech is what it's replacing. Dr. Peterson talks about this. We've got to watch him live and really get into this was a really good conversation. And the ages two to four is such an important time and their development of social skills and interacting. We think of, I think we dismiss play that kids have as like this really like, oh, they're playing on their iPad but it's not the same as playing. I also want to bring up something here. Yeah, and this is like, and then you don't get this back. If you miss this from two to four and it gets replaced with playing on an iPad versus socially interacting and playing, role-playing with kids, that's them practicing how they need to act in real life. And so we're seeing this manifest now in these teenagers and young adults right now. So in my book, there was another myth that kids shouldn't be exercising or doing exercise or resistance training to get a little stunker. That's not true. The girl plates, right? So that's actually not true. Wow, we know that. But again, for the moms out there listening, I have two very little children. In fact, I've already married one off to Adams. So I have a four year old. Oh, you guys already have a plan? They don't know this, but yeah, I have a plan. Hey, arranged marriages are very successful. I got a son too. We're gonna have them compete. So my daughter is a, I mean, she is a beast. She's in Taekwondo and she's in Jiu Jitsu. She's like a phenom. And then I have Leonidas Michael, my little one, he's funny. I'm just trying to get him to not pee on the walls. But anyway, when I wrote this book, I was very curious in terms of what the recommendations for exercise was for children. And the amount of kind of misinformation about being able to stimulate their tissue and letting them exercise. And we're not talking about a max deadlift. We are talking about priming this muscle tissue for memory and potentiality over time. My kids work out with me. You better believe it. One is four and one is a little over two. By their own little weight sets. This whole myth, this is, I hate this myth. It's one of my favorite myths to debunk. The myth was if you lift weights as a child, you'll damage your growth plates and then you won't be able to get any taller. The amount of weight that child- I did that. I did that. That's what happened. That's why I'm five months. Yeah, yeah. No, the amount of weight that a child would need to lift to damage their growth plates is an amount of weight that they are incapable of lifting. So unless your four-year-old could deadlift 500 pounds, you're fine. You're not gonna, it's not gonna happen. Their body is as strong as it would be. I was deadlifting five, this is again, this is why I'm five months. That's why, wow. Now you all know my secret, yes, thank you. No, I think we're battling a lot of things here, Dr. Lyon. We're battling the fact that there were lack of studies because there just were none on strength training. There were none on muscle mass and strength and its connection to longevity. We're also battling media. Whenever muscle was presented through media, you look at the original movies and media around muscle. What do they present? A bunch of dumb muscle-bound people, right? That are super narcissistic. You look at the Muscle Beach movies and it's like these guys that just wanna flex and oil themselves up and aren't very smart. Muscle-bound was a myth that actually had to become overcome for a while. And that one was overcome quickly because sports teams are profit-driven. And so very quickly they're like, oh, wait a minute, if they lift weights, we win. Now everybody lift weights. Preventing injuries. But still we have the myths of like the pro-female bodybuilder. And so the women are like, I don't wanna look like, you're not going to. Still to that day, that's one of my most common questions. I don't wanna get muscle. I used to tell my clients, listen, if you wake up tomorrow and you look at muscle. You'll get all your money back. You'll get all your money back. Don't worry, it's real easy to get rid of it. Yeah, don't worry. Twinkies and just chill out for a week. So there's culture and then there's the medical community and that's kind of what we're battling. I think we're starting to make headway. I really am. You mentioned something else too earlier. Dietary cholesterol. How familiar are you with how dietary cholesterol in the short-term can positively affect muscle strength? Have you seen this? It's pretty remarkable. Really? Oh yeah. Dietary cholesterol. If you ever wanna experiment. So this is old muscle-building wisdom. If you ever wanna experiment with this, triple your dietary cholesterol intake, go ahead and control everything else. Keep your macros the same if you wanna make it a controlled study and watch how much stronger you get within a week in the gym. There's a very interesting, it is one of the most... I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try it. It's one of the most anabolic things that I've ever done. You have to eat raw eggs. I mean, you do whatever you want. You do liver, you do eggs, you do whatever you want. It's wild. But I mean cholesterol is a building block for testosterone. It also has a very interesting effect on the central nervous system. But doesn't the body regulate the amount, whether you'll make less if you're eating three times more? It's short-term. So if you do it, it's like a four to eight week like crazy boost in strength and then it kind of levels out. But yeah, test it out. I'll try it. I've talked about this so many times on the podcast. He wants to make a supplement. Like somebody make a cholesterol supplement please that you could take cholesterol. Dude, you do it. Yeah, no. No, he's not allowed to. Adam will let me. He's not allowed to. The margins are great on supplement. He's a business guy. Yeah. Yeah. 15% for all kinds of things. We like being very profitable, so. Yeah, supplement's not a very profitable space. So what's the push-back been like for someone like you? Because you're not saying what most doctors say. Wait, before you get there, I actually, which sets the table for that question. I actually, you've mentioned something about, you know, moving out from just a clinical setting. Was there like a tipping point for you or was there like, do you have like a story or a single moment where you're just like, that's it, I gotta fucking. Yes, yes. Okay, so I wanna hear that first. So I, by the way, I still have a full concierge clinic. We were just talking about, I take care of them. And these guys are all public about it. Badger's Koolian is a long-time patient, Edmai Led, I take care of them. Oh, cool. And I still, we treat a lot of war fighters. My husband's a seal, was a seal. We take care of a lot of war fighters in the practice. And anyone, it's not like a physical demographic, it's a mental demographic. Oh, yeah. I mean, the people that come to the clinic, are they are hard charging, they want the best, like that's just how we roll. But anyway, I remember I had 6,000 followers on Instagram, I was wearing a little white shirt, maybe there's flowers kind of behind me, totally different than I actually am. Cause I never was on there. It was just so stupid in my mind. Love you Instagram, I'm not saying anything bad. And then I started seeing just this huge push about protein and cancer. And I was just like, holy shit. And so I trained with Dr. Donna Lehmann. This guy is the concept of protein distribution, leucine, mechanistic target of mTOR, this idea of meal dosing of protein. This is the guy that really put it on the map. He's been doing it for 40 years. I mean, he is. He's the authority on this. He's the authority. And he's trained me for 20 years. My book is dedicated to him. And I was just on Instagram, I was in my clinic, so I had a clinic on Fifth Avenue in New York City, across from the park, super beautiful. Everything is going great. And I pick up Instagram and I'm just looking at it and they are just bashing protein. Now I'm a trained geriatrician who trained with Dr. Donna Lehmann. I did seven years of nutritional science studies, professionally, okay? I've been in school for 17 fucking years. And I picked this up and they're talking about how bad protein is for your health and how it's gonna cause cancer and all of this stuff. And so I call my best friend, Teresa DePisquale, who was like this big influencer at, she actually has a social media agency now, but she, at the time, when people didn't have a ton of followers, had the blue check and was just, this whatever influencer, high T, she's the godmother to my kids. And I called her, I was like, I cannot believe this. I have to say something. And she's like, yeah, you have to. I'm like, oh, but they're gonna cancel me. I can't just go out there. Everyone's gonna come after me. You know? And she's like, well, you have a responsibility to do it. And if you do not do it, then all these people are gonna believe this. And even if you help a handful of people, you can do something good outside of your clinic. And then it was game over. My armpits were sweating before I like posted that first thing. I was like, I do not wanna do this. I do not wanna go head to head with people. I don't wanna do that. I wanna be able to take care of people's lives. How effective is that gonna be? Yeah, so I remember my first post when I started down, I do that. And I was so nervous, again, sweating. And that's what happened. Mm-hmm. How's the reception been? Yeah. What's the pushback like? I think the more visibility you get, the more good and bad comes with that. So I think if you're one of the first female physicians through the gate, you're gonna get a little bloody. Yeah. Do you, what would you say is the most common argument that you have to debunk or that you're so tired of hearing like that somebody comes on to try and debate what the messenger presents? So what I think is really interesting is that people take things out of context, typically like a conversation like this. This is a long conversation. Right, right. There will be a sound bite from this where somebody tries to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like super, whatever. And what I have noticed the most that in the academic world is not like this. So if in an academic world you have a disagreement or you want clarity, you go to that person. This is how academics are done. You go to that person, you say, well, this is, you know, the data shows this here. How did you come up with this? Let's go through your thought process. In social media, people will make videos of you. Yeah, yeah. And do these things, but it's not because if the end result is to really move the needle of health and wellness versus a narcissistic form of self-serving, of I want the attention, that's what I've seen. Yeah, we just got it. We have two doctors that we allow to actually have conversation in our community and one of them actually came out and made a stupid video like that about the other one who we- See, yeah, they should never do that. Yeah, no. Of course not. But that doesn't happen in academics. Unbelievable. And it's also unprofessional. It's so childish and it shows you how insecure you are, how little you are that you have to try and- Starving for attention. And do something that like I feel like kids do on social media to gain traction because that's the trendy thing to do. Human beings are human and you will make mistakes. You will say something, I've said stupid things. I have two little children and a husband that works a hundred hours. I have a full practice and multiple businesses. There are days where I get four hours of sleep for the week, four hours each night because I'm a caretaker for little children. I am going to be tired and I might screw up. Yeah. It might be one of those days or maybe I have a sick kid at home and I just got off a red eye and I might make a mistake. We are human but now fully exposed and what you say becomes like again, then it's locked in because you've said something. So the question I ask is, what is the ultimate goal of that person? If the ultimate goal is to really, if that is the truth, then actions will always trump words. That's right 100%. So always look at the actions. You will never see me do a video about another person. Yeah. It's also a cheap way to build a following and it doesn't really build any value as well. You know, I wanted to bring something up to you that I read a while ago that I thought was really fascinating. So studies will show that muscle is incredibly anti-cancer. It's actually one of the most anti-cancer things. Yeah. It's also very protective if you get cancer. Right. So it's like strength training is the most effective anti-cancer form of exercise because of that. And I read this study on the life expectancy of pro bodybuilders and they measured them all the way back from those that competed in the 60s and so on. Now pro bodybuilders are in no way, shape or form a healthy group of individuals. I mean, they're very extreme. This is extreme. Like all extreme performance, it's not healthy. When you train for extremes, you're sacrificing longevity. I don't care if you play pro football, if you race cars and if you bodybuild. And bodybuilders don't live healthy. They eat. Yeah. And they just have a lot of tissue. Just so you know, they got a lot of pressure and all. Crazy amounts of drugs to look the way they do. They train. They over train. They eat insane. They live crazy lifestyles. And yet. They have sleep apnea. But when you look at the, when I looked at the data on pro bodybuilders, their rate of cancer, their life expectancy, by the way, was the same as the average American, which isn't saying a lot because the average American isn't very healthy. But their cancer rates were substantially lower. Here are people taking insane amounts of hormones, including growth hormone, not healthy at all. And they have lower rates of cancer than the average person. I think that speaks to the anti-cancer effects of muscle alone. That they actually get lower rates of cancer even though they live a totally unhealthy life. I have not seen that study, but I'm not shocked by that. And in fact, cancer catechia might kill 22% of individuals that get cancer. And it's cancer catechia is this hyper catabolic state that destroys skeletal muscle. And that kills people. Not saying that you can treat it necessarily, but again, the higher your amount of skeletal muscle mass, the greater your survivability against nearly all cause of morbidity and mortality. And we see that. I'm gonna put a cherry on top of all this because someone's listening is like, okay, wow, this is amazing. This is great. My mind has been pumped. Yeah, what do I do? I don't know, that's what we named it. What do I do now? Here's the beauty. The benefits you get from strength training come from the muscle that's built. That's an adaptation process. All you gotta do is send the signal. Doesn't require a lot. That's a plus. You don't need to go to the gym every day to get the effects of strength training. The beneficial longevity effects of strength training. In fact, most people will get it with a couple of days a week of well-programmed structured exercise. Number two, we live in a world where food is plentiful and hyper-palatable. That's a tough thing. That's a hard environment to live in. Well, a faster metabolism is one of the best buffers you can have against that. Guess what strength training does? Builds muscle makes your metabolism faster. So that's number two. Number three, our hormones play major roles in our health and muscle makes all your hormones work better. So strength training not only gives you the muscle that we need for this longevity, but also in the context of modern life, it's probably, it is, it's the form of exercise most people will most likely be able to do consistently because it requires the least amount of time to do. And can be modified no matter what your condition or issues is. It's the most individualized, actually you cannot take any form of exercise and individualize it like you can with strength training. I never thought about that actually. I never thought about that. Oh, you need to rehab someone who's had a major injury or an accident. I never thought about that. You do strength training. And you can, you can choose any other, there's so different, like, I never thought about that. It's the number one tool for rehab specialists. But I mean, just that the amount of different choices that you have versus you're gonna run or sprint, the way in which you move your body would be totally individualized. It also trains the brain better than most forms of exercise, all forms of exercise or activity that train the brain. But they tend to, like running looks like running, swimming looks like swimming, you know, there's repetitive motions over and over again. Your body learns that motion and that's that. Strength training just trains proprioceptive ability. It trains, why? Because you're with strength training, you can move in any plane with balance, with technique, with variables. And it will increase survivability. You have to be able to interface with your environment. God forbid there's something that happens. I need to be able to pick up one child and the other and be able to run. There has to be translational movements in real life. Yes, yes. And can you also think of a more empowering form of exercise for women? No. Who you... I mean, you're tiny. No. You're tiny. That's because I lifted 500 pounds when I was four. Imagine if you weren't strong, okay? And you went traveling and you had to lug your kids in some big ass suitcases. I've had female clients tell me this. Well, they say, you know what's crazy, Sal? I didn't have to ask somebody to help me put the luggage in the overhead compartment or help me carry stuff. She told me, she's like, it's one of the most empowering feelings ever. Heck, I've always had to rely on some dude that was around me to help me out. Personal strength is a personal responsibility. Strength is a personal responsibility. I've never had someone regret saying, I got strong. I've seen thousands of patients. No one has ever said, oh man, that sucked, I'm stronger. All right. We haven't really touched on very much. And I just think that our society is riddled with it. But what are your thoughts on strength training, building muscle in relation to things like anxiety and depression? I mean, you move your body, you move your mind. You know, I mean, you move your body, you move your mind. They've done a study where they compared different forms of exercise. Strength training for depression and anxiety outperformed other forms of exercise. Yes. I mean, that was, they already did that. That's why I asked because I mean, it's, we're, we still, the go-to move is to put somebody on a medication when they're suffering from something like that, even though the research is showing that strength training is actually as good or better in many cases. Yeah, I know. One last question. When this cert is ready, when this program is ready, can you please come back on and work with us because we would like to push this out there. We need. I would love to. We need the medical community. We have a huge audience of trainers and coaches and they trust us. So they'll, for sure, if this is available to them at some point, I'm sure they'll be interested. But I would love for you to use our platform to get this to as many doctors as possible. Thank you so much, guys. Because this needs to happen because I know my parents' generation and they listen to their doctor. Yeah. That's the, that's God. We're not really breaking through. Yeah. And they, so they need their doctor to tell them. My aunt, my aunt has been listening to me, her hearing me talk about strength training forever. She just started strength training because her doctor told her. And I'm like, fine. I'm glad you're doing it. But geez, you know, I've been telling you forever. So please come back. I would love that. I really appreciate the sport, you know, and my book forever strong is really great for the trainers, for anybody. It has a lot of these foundational principles. Every single trainer needs to own your book because this will arm you to be able to discuss the longevity and health effects of strength training with all your clients. And most trainers listening right now train everyday regular people. And you're gonna have these conversations constantly. And with physicians. Yes, yes. So this book has hundreds of references in there. Awesome. So. Awesome. All right, beautiful. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, you guys.