Hmmm, where to start. There are some good thinking points in this podcast.
Here are some opinionated observations.
The Joe Rogan podcast previous to this one with Chris Kresser and Joel Kahn. It is excellent in the context of listening to the way the information is provided by Layne Norton in this podcast. Layne is based in a calories-in, calories-out (CICO) education, which he uses to contextualise his points. He does rubbish Gary Taubes’ hormone/insulin hypothesis of the cause of obesity. But Layne does not do it convincingly.
Layne is a cherry picker across the range of types of studies. In one segment of this podcast both guests define when they are citing science from animal studies compared to the variety of human studies. That clarity is rapidly lost as the blokey bro talk increased in volume. Layne picks his cherries without clear references. Joe pulls him up once in a while to ask where he gets the information, and it’s often a confounded single observational study, Chris Kresser clearly explained that single studies that had not been reproduced could be found to support any side of a nutrition science debate. We witness it ad nauseum in this podcast.
Layne has a PhD and a world record and says some very interesting things to contemplate. A main point that grabbed my attention was that apparently all this nutrition debate has no benefit, or maybe even relevance, unless it is combined with exercise. Implying that exercise is more important than nutrition for health. In Layne’s case, that exercise seems to be based in lifting weights. That point, and Joe Rogan’s repeated references to “discipline” (aka willpower) and people being ‘weak’ (presumably mentally when it comes to eating food), took me back to thinking about an alternate proposition presented by Gary Taubes that I found to be observationally (n=1) true:
Without the energy being physiologically available, as blood ketones or blood glucose, the mental drive motivation to be active is absent in a sedentary person. If energy is stored in the body as fat and is hormonally inaccessible, then the body remains sedentary conserving energy. However, when blood ketones are available, when body fat stores are made available in a low insulin environment, it is hard to sit still. The activity is a consequence of the available energy. Rather than activity being a factor of willpower. The egg before the chicken. Nutrition precedes activity. The nutritious egg comes before the active chicken.
Another observation is to see the expression of personalities in this panel. It may be just personalities. But for the sake of anecdotal spice, I agree that Keto Dom seemed clear thinking and clear, calm communicating, whereas carbed up Layne was a bit shouty, foggy and mixed up in his story telling.
Layne has a cool base platform that seemed to attract Joe’s invitation, that being that Layne calls out things that he sees as BS (not Bachelor of Science). Self-labelled skepticism is an admirable trait for a curious scientist and makes for entertainment value in a podcast panel. But I wished Layne could have been a bit clearer on how he identified that an interesting pile of brown was indeed a bovine turd rather than a collapsed keto friendly mudcake.
Layne and Joe are from a different health place than my experience and I enjoyed their discussion, from which their may be some nice fermented cherries to pick.