278 - What Science Teaches Us About Losing Weight and Boosting Energy With Stanford Nutrition Researcher Dr. Christopher Gardner

Episode • Apr 17, 2024 • 1h 5m

Today, we’re joined by Dr. Christopher Gardner, a renowned nutrition researcher and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. In this episode, Dr. Gardner shares his wealth of knowledge and valuable insights into nutrition science, from dissecting popular diets like ketogenic vs. Mediterranean to discussing his groundbreaking study on cardio-metabolic effects in identical twins randomly assigned to vegan or omnivorous diets, featured in the Netflix documentary "You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment."

Throughout the episode, we delve into Dr. Gardner's research, uncover the truth behind diet trends, and hear his practical advice for achieving optimal health.

“So the basic design is it's a randomized dietary trial. It happened to be identical twins, which was very unusual. I've never done it before. Identical twins are absolutely hilarious, but the two diet choices that they had to be willing to be part of either way, whichever way the coin was flipped, was a vegan or an omnivorous diet. And I want to clarify just for kicks here, a healthy vegan and a healthy omnivorous diet. There's a lot of bad ways to do any diet, and good ways, or better or worse, for any diet that you want to be on. When we looked at the metabolic risk factors, we had signed up on clinicaltrials.gov stating that LDL cholesterol was our primary outcome. And that dropped by about 15 milligrams per deciliter, more so in the vegans than the omnivores. We also saw a drop in insulin. We saw a drop in weight. Decrease in trimethylamine oxide. Their biological clocks got a little bit younger. Their telomeres stayed a little bit longer if they were vegans.” - Dr. Christopher Gardner

What we discuss in this episode:

- Telomeres, veganism, and longevity.

- Chronological age vs metabolic age.

- What fuels your brain?

- Healthy foods and weight loss.

- What makes a protein high quality?

- Dr. Gardner’s thoughts on intermittent fasting.

- Fermented foods and the microbiome.

- Microbial diversity and inflammation.

- Dr. Gardner’s recommendations for living a healthy life at a healthy weight.

Resources:

- Nutrition Studies Research Group | Stanford Medicine - https://med.stanford.edu/nutrition.html