How Different Diets Impact Your Health | Dr. Christopher Gardner

Raw milk did not resolve lactose intolerance in study

Dr. Gardner describes a controlled study he conducted testing raw milk versus pasteurized milk for lactose-intolerant individuals using hydrogen breath tests. Despite popular claims, raw milk produced identical symptoms to conventional milk.

"So I had an opportunity to work with a guy who raises raw milk products in California. And he was convinced this raw milk would heal lots of people of lots of things."

Removing seed oils would eliminate 60% of the grocery store

Gardner highlights the practical impossibility of simply eliminating seed oils - it would wipe out 60% of grocery store products. He argues we need replacement solutions that meet families' real constraints of budget, time, and accessibility.

"Yep, it sure would. And that would wipe out 60% of what's in a grocery store right now."

The protein myth - Americans already eat more than enough

Gardner debunks protein anxiety by explaining that the average American already consumes 1.2g/kg of quality protein from food alone, well above requirements, and that plant proteins contain all essential amino acids in sufficient quantities when eating a varied diet.

"And the average intake is like 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight per day or higher of quality protein just just food so just food so let's let's stop here just food so the fun thing was that stew and i got together i said you know stew you hate that 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight and you're saying people should have one gram per kilogram body weight, or maybe even 1.2, which would be 1.2 would be 50% higher than 0.8. That's the average American intake. And he said, well, that's true too. So he hates the 0.8, but he realized it's almost an irrelevant number because most people get more than that. I just served on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, and we looked at those same data, and it's still true. Americans eat more protein than the RDA on a general basis, without trying, without knowing about it. It's just in more foods than you think. So the second issue is, well, if so many people are eating more, is there anything bad about the extra? Like, what do you do with the extra? And so there's sort of infinite capacity to store fat in your body. You probably know this, in your belly, in your butt, in your underarms, everywhere. There's limited capacity for carbohydrate store. You can store, I actually heard Gabrielle Lyons talk about how much is in your liver and how much is in your skeletal muscle. But if you are a marathon runner in four hours after 20 miles or so, you bonk because you've exhausted all your carb stores. You can exhaust all your carb stores in four hours where it would take days and days and days with fat. But there is no storage depot for protein. At the end of the day, if you ate more than you needed, you're not storing any for the next day. It's not in your big toe. It's not in your spleen. It's not in your liver. It's nowhere after you made all the enzymes, hormones, hair, fingernails, and muscle tissue that you wanted, you break off the nitrogen. You have to eliminate that as ammonia in your kidney. And you turn the carbon skeleton into carbs, which if we do get back to the keto diet, is throwing the meat eaters on the keto diet out of ketosis because you just turned the protein you were eating to avoid the carbs into the carbs that you were avoiding. But we won't go there. For the moment, we'll just say there's no place to store it. So you're not really getting any benefit about it. I was very interested to hear you just say you're fine eating the protein for the calories, the energy. Well, because I need a certain amount of calories. I would also, and I'm not just playing devil's advocate here. I feel, first of all, lucky that at a very young age, I started paying attention to what I ate, not in a neurotic way. I've just did that. And I will say that when you have a certain amount of caloric need, everyone does, you ask, where's it going to come from? and you know, you eat enough vegetables, great, but it's hard to get your rational calories, fruits, quality protein. So I'm referring to that as um you know let's just put the taste taste good to you uh so you know beef fish chicken eggs um and i guess for the vegetarian some combination of like beans and rice that type of thing or that we get enough leucine this sort of thing but the the key thing i believe is that you that one – I'll just speak from my own experience. I can eat those and feel satiated. Most starches on their own don't taste good enough. I mean I like oatmeal with some salt and some cinnamon. But most starches don't taste good on their own unless you add lipids. You add fats. And so I would argue that most people are struggling with too much body fat because they overeat starches combined with fats, not because they overeat steak or they're overeating. It's not the hamburger. It's the hamburger bun that includes sugar, the cheese, and then we don't even need to talk about sugary soda. It's just kind of a duh now. It's loaded with all sorts of things that aren't nutritious. So I think that the key issue with this, you pointed to this idea, and I'm not trying to protect the protein crowd, but I think that one of the reasons that they are proponents of one gram per pound of body weight roughly or lean body weight is that we need to eat something. we ideally should eat something that tastes good, that provides some nutrition for us. And that is not, um, is not something that requires a bunch of other things in order to make it palatable. Yeah. And, and, you know, I love fruit, but you can't just live on fruit, you know, and I love vegetables in their raw form, but, um, they taste better with some olive oil on them. It doesn't take much to make a vegetable taste really good because I love vegetables. Same for fruit. I'll eat them on their own all day. But the starches are a problem because of the quote-unquote requirements and preferences they bring with them. The problem isn't a loaf of sourdough bread. The problem is the immense amounts of butter and olive oil get sopped up and brought down with it. Most people, I would argue, are overweight not because they eat too much protein. That's the point I'm trying to make. Okay, fair. But, okay, so weight is a little separate issue. And if you're getting that for meat, you're getting more saturated fat and not fiber. And we're destroying the planet with the amount of meat and the kind of meat that we're getting right now. But parking lot for now. Unless it's sustainably sourced. Which is such a small proportion of meat grown in the U.S. It takes attention. It takes attention. Most people cannot access that right now. Unfortunately. I completely agree with you there. So that is a great comment. I would love it if we went there. Okay, but let me move on. So one was the two standard deviations. Two is there's no place to store it. You're going to convert it to something else. And three is your quality thing. So here's another myth that we need to bust. So the myth part is that plants are missing amino acids. They're not complete. I'm sure everybody listening today has heard quinoa, the only plant with all nine essential amino acids. Bullshit. So I don't know if you can look at my paper in your podcast or show it. And I have it on my computer. We can provide links on the show note captions. So we wrote a paper in 2019. and this actually was pretty fun for me."

Individual variation within diets matters more than diet labels

Gardner's research revelation that the differences between individuals on the same diet were far more interesting than the average differences between different diets, suggesting personalization matters more than choosing low-carb vs low-fat vs plant-based.

"The difference within the diets is way cooler than the average difference between the diets."