How To Optimise Human Nutrition - Max Lugavere

There is no long-lived population on Earth for whom which seed oils make up a, a significant calorie contributor. You might not believe that these oils are harmful to you. And, you know, I'm always willing to adjust my stance when new data presents itself, but there's no reason to consume them.

Max Lugavere, welcome to the show.

Chris, honor to be here. Thanks for having me.

Look at you, fresh from the dentist.

(laughs)

So smiley.

Dude, I chipped a back tooth on a cacao nib.

(laughs)

The irony. It's a super food.

(laughs)

And it was super effective at chipping a, uh, a tooth in the back of my mouth.

What was that thing that you shared a little while ago that had, like, sh- frosted shredded wheat as the-

(laughs)

... the greatest super food on the planet? Take me through that.

Yeah. So, that was something that was published by Tufts University, the Friedman School of Nutrition over there. Um, there's great, uh, interest in developing what's called a nutrient profiling system among scientists and, uh, ultimately to be used for the public good. And so the Food Compass, which was Tufts', is Tufts' sort of best take on what a, what an idealized nutrient profiling system, um, would look like, uh, came out and, um, it had all of these various different food items ranked. The, the, the supplementary material that came with the paper was, I don't know, it was like a couple, it was like a hundred pages long or something like that. And, um, it ranked every possible food in the supermarket. And basically, the, the, the reason why it's in the, why ultimately it's in the public's interest to create a food profiling system like this is because the public is confused, right, about nutrition. The public doesn't know what to eat, right? For decades we were told via the USDA food pyramid to load up on something like seven to 11, six to 11 servings of grains per day, right? And that's been replaced by the MyPlate paradigm with, which still implores us at every meal to include grains, um, to utilize vegetable oils and things like that. So, the public is confused, right? And so, uh, Tufts University thought that it was in the public's interest to create this, this food profiling system called The Food Compass. And, um, it had a lot, a lot of flaws that were illustrated by a separate group headed up by, uh, a researcher named Ty Beal, who teased out various food items and put them on a hierarchy. So, this was not an extrapolation. This was data taken from the supplementary material provided with The Food Compass paper. And it showed these completely asinine relationships between various foods that even a four-year-old would say, "This is absurd." Right? It ranked frosted Mini-Wheats above a poached egg, for example. It put ground beef at the bottom of the, of the chart, for the most part. Um, and it was just completely ab- absurd, right? It, it ranked egg substitute fried in vegetable oil above actual egg. Which, you know, eggs, ground beef, dairy, these are some of our most nutrient-dense foods. And so this chart went viral, which was basically a chart that was created by this separate group that published a reaction critique to The Food Compass paper, uh, which, by the way, went completely ignored by the journal that it was submitted to, and also ignored by Tufts. Just to show the ridiculousness of, of this Food Compass, and really, you know, again, uh, I don't think that it was like created out of, out of malicious intent. But, uh, it, it completely under-weighted foods for, uh, their, the nature of their processing. So it, it basically didn't penalize foods appropriately for being ultra-processed, which we know are a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic and the obese, the epidemic of chronic disease. Foods that are ultra-processed now make up 60% of the calories that your average American consumes every single day. So, this is a, a major problem. We know that, that only 10% of Americans have good metabolic health. The rest are struggling with some type of metabolic illness, m- manifest as either a dysregulated lipids or an oversized waistline, or what have you. And so, you know, you, you fail to penalize ultra-processed foods, which Americans are already over-consuming. You don't properly credit foods for containing protein, which is a very important, um, macronutrient, or, uh, dietary fiber. I think actually protein and fiber were given the same weight and they were both under-weighted relative to other, um, uh, features. So yeah, so it was a mess. It was just a complete mess. And they've since, um, I've, I've actually had a conversation with, uh, Darry, who's the, the lead researcher behind it, and you know, we just, we have different views on, I think, the value of protein. Um, but, you know, at this point I've communicated and, and I've done, you know, I've written three books and I've, uh, had many protein experts on the podcast, and I think protein is, is incredibly important. And so, um, you know, I think it's, it's kind of odd that we have such divergent viewpoints on that. Um, and, you know, again, I think, I think there is value in, in creating a nutrient profiling system but that ain't it. The Food Compass ain't it.