SNR #10: Bill Lagakos – The Poor, Misunderstood Calorie

Danny: hello Bill, how are you doing man?

Bill: I'm doing good, thanks, how about you?

Danny: Excellent yeah, no complaints over here, so everything is going great, really looking

forward to today’s podcast, because you're someone that I've wanted to get on for

quite a while as we were saying off air, I've been reading lots of your stuff over the last

number of months and so really my hardest task was to narrow down into one specific

topic that I wanted to focus on, but before we get into that maybe if you just introduce

yourself to the listeners, what sort of work you're doing, and your research interests and

anything else that you might think might be valuable.

Bill: Ok, hi everybody, my names bill, I'm the author of the Poor, misunderstood calorie, and

the blog, caloriesproper.com. My interests are very broad, I have like studies things,

everything from intermediary metabolism to the nuero inter-chronological

abnormalities and obesity, and even things as different as how poor sleep quality can

impact out nutrient partitioning and body composition and how your body deals with

the food you eat.

Danny: Excellent, so as I was saying, I wanted to dive into one topic in particular and I think it

would have been how to look past this topic of calories, because especially as it’s such a

I suppose misunderstood thing as you would say for most people out there, especially

when you have conventional advice for people that are trying to reduce their weight,

and the conventional advice is reduce your calories out or increase your calories out

rather by exercise, and reduce your calories in by reducing the amount of food you take

in, so this is a really, really simplistic concept, cause you maybe talk about what exactly

is wrong with that idea?

Bill: Sure, sure I mean it makes sense in theory but I do agree its overly simplistic to actually

work in practice and I mean I can give a couple examples of how this could not work for

you, I mean for starters, when you start an exercise program, you really don't burn that

many calories during exercise so let’s say you manage to burn off a 100 calories, it’s just

way too easy to compensate for that energy deficit by eating an additional 100 calories,

I mean that’s just a couple of bites of food, it’s not really that much to…that’s like

increasing your calorie intake from 2000 to 2100, its 5% increase, and also if you

exercise, it might make you tired, you might just move around a little bit less during the

rest of the day, so that the total energy expenditure hasn’t changed. So that sort of just

a couple ways where the exercise itself where the calories out modification might not

result in weight loss. But then there’s the other half of the equation, calories in, so let’s

say you do mange to reduce the calories in, there’s something that everyone’s going to

be familiar with, is you just get hungry, and so after a couple of days of energy deficit

you're going to get hungry, then you might wait a little bit more just to negate the

energy imbalance. There’s also the problem that energy expenditure changes, so if you

do lose a couple of pounds by reducing your food intake, energy expenditure could

easily decline such that you're no longer in a negative energy balance act, that’s

just…that happens, that happens all the time.

Danny: Yeah, 3 really good points there and I'm going to dive deeper into each of those, one

thing that really interested me was in your book how you talk about how the calories in

food are not the same as those expended by the body, can you explain exactly to the

listeners what you mean by this, cause I'm sure some of them might be thinking what’s

going on here, surely a calorie just means a calorie.

Bill: Sure I mean this is what sort of inspired the title of the book, the poor misunderstood

calorie. I mean calories are calories, I'm not going to argue that it’s not, but when you

think about calories in food they come in form of the macro nutrients like dietary fat

and carbohydrates. In that form its sort of like potential energy, it hasn’t done anything

yet. Calories that are expended by the body, that’s sort of energy expenditure. Your

body uses that energy to synthesize proteins to help you walk around the block and

even things like breathing, all those things burn calories, so it’s more like kinetic energy.

You have dietary macro nutrients on the one hand and walking around the block on the

other hand, those are just 2 completely different things; they’re both sort of different

manifestations of the calorie. And I kind of think that they should have different names.

Danny: Sure so what you're really saying is for using this thing called the calorie to measure

energy, but were then not taking in to account the different forms of energy we have.

Bill: Yeah exactly. And even when you're talking about the calories in food, they measure

that in a bom caloriemetery where they basically stick the food into a bom calorimeter

and electrocute it and measure how much heat it produces. For proteins for example

you get this sort of typical value that everybody has heard of, its 4 calories in a gram of

protein when its measured experimentally. However when you eat that protein, you

don't really necessarily get those 4 calories, because just specifically for the example of

protein, just the mere fact of eating it, your body’s metabolic rate will go up a little bit

and burn off some of those calories immediately, so I mean that just happens

automatically, so you just don't get those 4 calories. So it’s like a little bit misleading.

Danny: Yeah so really what’s happening inside the body is a completely different thing than

simply measuring the energy that comes off from burning a piece of food. Yeah. And I

think that’s really interesting because anyone that’s been aware of this from…been

involved in science, probably well knows how we actually get these calorie

measurements, but for someone that doesn’t know where we got these numbers from,

simply hearing that kind of then says maybe we’re on to something that’s not just the

calories people say, maybe our boys are doing something different.

Bill: Right.

Danny: So just on that, why then do most health organizations and government guidelines that

people will be looking at and they’ll be pointing this out, how come those things don't

really take this into account, how come they’re still saying that we have this concept of

move more and eat less?

Bill: Well, beats me! I'm a science guy, I do nutrition not politics, I think it’s a wrong

message, the message should be educating people about different foods and diet

quality as opposed to just telling people these abstract concepts like calories in, calories

out, which in practice don't really work out so well. I mean there’s been books written

about how this came to be, but I try and stay away from that and just stick more

towards the science and see what comes out in the studies, and take that as a fact.

Danny: In that then we can always say there is plenty of research and evidence to suggest that

we have clearly in front of us that there is differences in how metabolize different

nutrients and therefore the energy becomes…or the calories that we attach to those

things, become rather meaningless to an extent.

Bill: Yes absolutely.

Danny: So let’s maybe get into an example so it gets really clear for people. So if we take an

example of 2 isochoric meals, meals of the exact same caloric content as would be

written down for us, and if we look at how each of those would affect our body when

we eat them, so say maybe a piece of salmon versus… a serving of rice. That’s the same

calorie…

Bill: Ok, this is a great example because you probably couldn’t pick 2 more polar opposite

foods. The salmon you're basically talking about protein and fat, protein is composed of

amino acids, and when you have a big protein meal like this piece of salmon, these

amino acids are going to be used to stimulate synthesis of skeletal muscles, new

enzymes and proteins, some of them are going to be oxidized, some of the amino acids

are going to be oxidized, but this is going to basically build you up, build new tissue, the

body. And the fat also is interesting in salmon in particular, salmon is a good source of

the very long chain unsaturated fish oil fatty acids people commonly hear of EPA and

DHA, these have a positive effect on energy balance because they can stimulate certain

nuclear transcription factors that are involved in fatty acid oxidation, so in other words,

these fats enhance fat burning. So that sort of a nutrition partitioning affect, an

interesting nutrition partitioning effect. Beyond that, they’re also anti inflammatory,

excess inflammation is a pretty well known cause to make a lot of bad things happen in

your body, including pain, arthritis and even insulin resistance. And when insulin

resistance develops you can develop hyper glycemia, which can theoretically pre

dispose to more fat gain because when you become insulin resistant insulin levels tend

to rise to compensate and adipose tissue always seems to retain a little bit more

sensitivity to insulin than skeletal muscle and when you get high insulin levels, that sort

of tells the adipose tissue to grow. And it promotes fat storage, so with the less

inflammation and the amino acids from the protein, you're going to have this nutrition

partitioning effect in the body from the fish meal that sort of promotes the growth of

lean tissue and loss of body fat, and rice is sort of like the polar opposite. The

carbohydrates in the rice and digested to increase both glucose levels which increases

the insulin levels. Insulin promotes glucose uptake storage and oxidation and as

mentioned above it also promotes the growth of fat and body fat. So those are for the 2

totally opposite effects. Like you said by definition these are the same number of

calories, but the way they’re metabolized in the body produces polar opposite effects.

Danny: Absolutely, I think that’s an excellent description for people and just looking at that kind

of clarifies what we’re talking about here. So just to touch on what you just said there,

you mentioned how the nutrition partitioning is going to be slightly different depending

on these 2 things just because of their makeup. Does mean frequency or the timing that

we would eat either of these two meals; have an effect on how the body would be able

to deal with the calorie intake as well?

Bill: I'm going to guess and say yes. There are a couple of rodent studies that show, if you

restrict access to the food to certain times of the day, you're going to have completely

different outcomes independent of the calorie intake. But there are also a few human

studies that sort of frame this question as intermittent fasting, which is basically just the

amount of time you spend in between meals. Normally when somebody eats 3 square

meals a day, they get maybe 2 – 3 hour of fasts, like between breakfast and lunch and

lunch and dinner, and one longer fast over night while you're sleeping. And there are a

couple of interesting intermittent fasting protocols which can tell, skipping meals one

day and not the next, that’s called alternate day fasting which has been pioneered by a

couple of researchers where they wrote a book about it, and also they published a study

showing that if you have people skipping 2 meals on one day and then on the next day

they can just eat whatever they want, it turns out that one, they don't totally

compensate for the calories so they do end up eating a little bit less, but the interesting

thing is, I mean they do lose weight, but just sort of the pattern…the meal frequency has

a positive impact on body composition such that they’ll lose fat and they can either

maintain or increase muscle mass a little bit, to a little extent. I found that to be pretty

interesting that it was a very robust effect on nutrient partitioning just by meal timing.

Usually in a weight loss study, people will lose both fat and muscle. So this was

interesting.

Danny: Yeah, very interesting. So, just while we’re on that topic, one thing I did want to ask you

about is, we’ve seen research that also suggests if more carbohydrates and partitioned

to the latter part of the day, so the evening onwards rather than the early part of the

day may have a beneficial effect. Would that be down to just our rhythm or hormones

or what times are elevated throughout the day? Or do we know if this is even the case?

Bill: Yeah there was one study a couple of years ago, I think it was…Israeli police officers

were told to just eat…It wasn’t necessarily a low carbohydrate diet, but they were told

to restrict their carbohydrate intake, just to dinner. And they did, they lost weight, they

lost body fat, it was a cool study and I think there is some sort of biological rationale for

that because over night you're basically fasting, while you should be fasting as long as

you're not sleep walking to the refrigerator, but…so overnight you're fasting and that

sort of seems to promote a little bit… a subtle insulin resistance, so then if you wake up

in the morning and have a high carbohydrate breakfast, which is the typical standard

breakfast, the cereal, oat meals, toast, orange juice, high sugar, high carbohydrates,

you’d be ingesting that at a time when your slightly more insulin resistant, so it’s going

to have a little bit more of a effect to promote body fat accumulation, whereas later on

in the day you seem to be a little bit more sensitive to insulin, so those carbohydrates

can be disposed off more into muscle tissue. So I mean I'm not sure if that’s what

happened in the initial study but that kind of makes sense from a biological perspective.

Danny: Absolutely yeah, I did find that interesting and as you said that was kind of the main

reason I was thinking that would be behind it, insulin and where our sensitivity would be

throughout the day. So again it’s one thing that does come up because I know,

especially for myself a lot of people are asking about this concept of carb back loading

because it’s got a lot of I suppose hype or attention drawn to it, and again that’s kind of

built on the same premise that you just mentioned there that our insulin sensitivity

would be low at the start of the day, so start the day with low carbohydrates, and then

later on in the day, they’re using basically a weight training to get the muscle cells to

receive glucose and our fat cells at that stage are still insulin resistant, have you looked

into anything to do with carb back loading and just how..Or I suppose the science in to it

and is it really all that it’s made out to be?

Bill: I don't think there’s too much science on the sort of typical protocol that’s been hyped,

and the only thing that I don't like about that protocol is they tend to promote the worst

kind of carbohydrates. You know, they say you want to really get a huge insulin spike so

you want to take the high glycemic index sugars, the glucose and the rapidly digestible

starch to really jack up the insulin levels for the carb back loading protocol and I don't

see that as having the most favorable positive outcome.

Danny: Sure, yeah I totally agree and again it does make intuitive sense in a lot of ways, the

explanation of the mechanisms, but whether that’s really going to be beneficial given all

the piece together, I'm not too sure, so just while we’re there, from the research that

you have seen or that you would base your own nutrition on I suppose, are you there to

believe that there is an approach that will provide the greatest health benefits for most

people and if so what is that or what have you been using?

Bill: Ok, so the way that question was worded, like one approach, I don't know, like I feel like

obesity is very multi factoral, I mean some people have specific food cravings, other

people, hyper secrete insulin to the same carbohydrate load, some people have hunger

cravings when they smell something palatable. All of these different things could very

well mean, in my understanding, in my opinion I should say, that each of these different

classifications might have a different optimal dietary intervention. That said, if I was just

going to not have any specific information about the patient, I tend to think that the

reduced carbohydrate is a good initial approach because I mean without even going into

the mechanisms, if you just take a broad look at it, a lot of the dietary studies, looking at

a lower carbohydrate diet, versus the lower fat diet it seems like very consistently, when

people are assigned to the low carbohydrate diet, their food intake spontaneously

declines. So that is a major part of the picture, and that doesn’t happen when they’re

instructed to take a low fat diet, they’re instructed they have to cut the calories, they

have to count calories and they have to be actively restricting their intake. So one thing

is if the diet is associated with a spontaneous reduction in food intake, that’s something

that could work in real life, I mean you don't have to count calories, you don't have to

very mindful about what you're eating as long as it’s not carbohydrate rich foods, and I

like that aspect because it sort of seems like it would work in most patient populations.

And then secondarily there’s the effects on the insulin that we discussed earlier. It’s sort

of logical that that diet is going to promote fat loss.

Danny: Yeah absolutely, I think there’s 2 things there that really liked, first when you mentioned

that there probably is no one approach and how all these different things are going to

tie into really…I suppose where we’re going with nutrition is that we’re going to get to a

place where we have everyone basing their diet on individuality or nutria genetics or

nutria genomics and when we get somewhere down the line, hopefully that’s where

we’re going to be, but the second thing I liked is when you mentioned, like if we’re

taking a broad stroke, a broad information for people we don't really have much

background knowledge about. If we look at just the simple fact of lowering

carbohydrates, especially considering where they’re coming from, so someone’s been

on a standard diet for years that’s had too much refined carbs and sugars, has lots of

vegetable oil for example, they’re more than likely going to have a degree of insulin

resistance and pre diabetes, they’re also going to be highly inflamed, so straight away if

you put someone on a low carb diet, you're addressing those 2 by eliminating sugars

and eliminating a lot of pro inflammatory foods.

Bill: Oh yeah absolutely, its painting with broad brush strokes, you can get rid of a lot of the

soda, a lot of the junk food, and lot of the bad foods just simply by telling someone to

reduce their carbohydrate intake.

Danny: Absolutely, and I think that’s why I suppose the whole ancestral health scene has been

so successful and that you can take this approach to people, give them this new way of

looking at things, ok we’ll go, you're more than likely going to have reduced

carbohydrate intake compared than what you're used to, and most people see this great

therapeutic effect, let’s get that person back healthy and then we can start looking at

maybe you're better on carbs, let’s put them back in and see how they do and then start

tweaking…

Bill: Right but keeping in mind with the paleo principles, as you're re introducing the

carbohydrate, make sure it’s sort of the healthier sources and it’s not the high glycemic

index and it’s not the sugars or the sodas.

Danny: Absolutely and I think that’s again a pointing back that’s we’re going, we want things

that are not going to be causing inflammation and this chronic insulin release I suppose.

Yeah that’s 2 things that I really liked that you mentioned there. Just before I move on

slightly from the topic of calories, you mentioned there how people on a low fat diet

traditionally are told to count calories or mind the calorie intake, is there certain

circumstances, cause I know a lot of the time when I talk with issue of calories and say

we have to focus on other things first, so let’s get your food quality down, let’s get your

sleep down, let’s get your digestion down and then worry about calories, you always

have people mentioning. But if people just were able to stick to their calorie counting, it

does still work for weight loss. So are these people right? Are there certain

circumstances that calorie counting would be helpful or even necessary?

Bill: Well, I would argue against the premise and say that its very., very difficult to measure

the calories and energy expenditure, and the calories and energy expenditure they can

change day to day, so if you think that you're expending 2000 calories a day and then

you count the calories in the food up to 2000 and then you induce a calorie deficit, so

now you're only eating 1800 calories. Even if you very rigorously track those calories, if

you're energy expenditure declines by 250 calories, you're no longer energy deficit but

you're now actually in energy surplus and you could be gaining weight. I mean that said,

calories are by no means irrelevant. I mean if you're in a positive energy balance you're

probably going to gain weight. If somebody really wants to count calories, I mean,

before I say this I like to have people try and find a diet which normalizes appetite,

normalizes your hunger signals so that they don't have to count calories. For the people

that really do want to count something, I mean, food journals could be effective, if I

were oppressed to say, you know people that should really watch their calories are

either with obesity, or people that have lost a significant amount of weight and are

trying to keep it off, then they should probably try and estimate as closely as possible

their fat, protein, carbohydrates and also their calories, I mean because that’s

somebody that probably does need to monitor it a little bit more closely.

Danny: Sure, yeah, makes a lot of sense. So we’ve discussed earlier how 2 isochoric meals

would exert different effects on the body, and due to what happens once those nutrient

types are metabolized. One thing I did want to ask you about, because I know you’ve

done a lot of research into this on the area of ketosis, does this same kind of idea extend

over to ketosis and dietary protein intake. So by that does significantly dietary protein

restriction have to be present in order to get the deep ketosis because I have seen that…

Bill: Ok, so that was sort of a 2 parter. I mean, by ketosis by definition it’s a very high state of

fat oxidation, so if you're on the ketogenic diet you have very low insulin, very high fat

release from the sites and a high rate of fat oxidation. Regarding the macro nutrients,

the most important consideration is carbohydrate restriction. The ketogenic diet is sort

of a very, very low carbohydrate diet. And the second consideration would be fat intake.

The calories have to come from somewhere so the ketogenic diet is very low

carbohydrate and it tends to be rather high in dietary fat. For adults using people that

are generally healthy trying to use this diet to lose weight, they really don't need to

restrict protein, and I don't advise against protein, I don't advice protein restriction,

because protein is sort of…it’s an important macro nutrient, it’s an essential macro

nutrient and it seems to help you to maintain your body tissues, helps maintain muscle

mass, and by lowering protein intake we’re going to end up losing a bit of muscle mass,

especially if you're on a diet that like the ketogenic diet, that results in spontaneous

reduction in appetite. So when your appetite goes down, your total calorie intake is

going to go down and this actually increases the protein required to keep you in…to

maintain nitrogen balance. So if you do cut the protein, you're going to end up losing

some muscle on that. That said, can it be…should it be limited to maintain deep ketosis,

I think that is primarily a concern for young children that have sort of epilepsy, for them

it’s very necessary to maintain a very deep level of ketosis, and you need to be feeding

them a high calorie diet so that it’s not too growth restricting and in the hyper choleric

state you really need to have a very high percentage of the calories coming from fat to

maintain deep ketosis. And I mentioned energy balance there because that’s sort of, of

relevance, there are a couple of good studies in adults, in healthy adults that show

protein intake can be quite high, up to and even over 1.5 grams per kilogram as long as

there’s an energy deficit. So…and the intense energy deficit on the ketogenic diet,

because it does usually cause spontaneous reductions in appetite.

Danny: That’s very interesting cause I had been looking a lot at kenos and just from some of the

readings there’s a couple of components I suppose of ketogenic diets you mentioned

capping protein intake at a certain level with the argument that being a safe ketosis is

protein sparing enough to mitigate the muscle loss and it was something that I wasn’t

used to, I was used to more of a high protein intake. So it’s good to hear that there is a

way to get higher protein intake, and the second thing that you mentioned there is

being on the calorie deficit, because I know a lot of the research tends to look at ketosis

and calorie deficits together, especially in terms of the research that looks at it as a

therapeutic to cancer or for looking at longevity. Is that why we have most a soft based

around restricting protein?

Bill: I don't know, in my perspective the only time I really see a critical need for protein

restriction just comes from the studies in the epileptic children where they simply just

won’t be able to get into the therapeutic ketosis if their fat intake isn’t high enough. And

fat intake has to come at the expense of something else and carbohydrate is already

very, very low so you can’t really reduce that very much.

Danny: Sure, just while we’re on the topic of ketosis if we take one step back for a second,

because I know there is…we’re talking about ketosis and protein intake being important

and there is probably a lot of people who’ve always just thought, once you're on a very

low carbohydrate diet, that you're going to be naturally ketosis, and we know that to a

certain extent that may be true but we also have to be mindful of protein in some

instances like you just outlined. So with that, what are the key benefits or differences

between someone simply being on a low carb diet or extending that further and going

into a ketogenic diet.

Bill: Well I think there’s probably not a huge difference for the obese patient that wants to

start losing body fat, both are good options. Some people report, this is sort of

anecdotally…or actually not anecdotally, there are cognitive benefits to ketosis, I mean

there are initial come pilot studies showing that the ketogenic diet seems to improve

cognition and people with mild cognitive impairments, and even early stages of

Alzheimer’s disease, and they show improvements, so I'm not objecting to that, I think

that there are some potentially interesting effects on the brain and brain function and

there are even some studies showing that people that can supplement their kenos with

something like dietary medium change glycerol’s, that’s sort of an oil that’s rapidly

metabolized to ketons in the body that too seems to promote a similar enhanced

cognitive state which sort of confirms that if you go transition from a non ketogenic low

carbohydrate diet to a ketogenic low carbohydrate diet there could be some additional

benefits on brain health.

Danny: Yeah that’s interesting. That’s certainly something I know personally, whether it be

placebo or not I don't know, but when I was going through this kind of little experiment

with ketosis and in the mornings I would have table spoon or two of the MCT oil that

you mentioned and again I used to feel very sharp in the early part of the day. Those

were one thing that I was kind of attributing to, so it’s interesting that you do mention

those. I know I can’t move on without asking you one more thing about ketosis that lots

of people tend to ask me, and that’s, ketosis for people that are athletes, or who are at

least training very intensely, so a lot of the things that I've been pointed out, where

ketosis come from, the work of (inaudible 00:34:21) who talked about using ketogenic

diets for athletes, where do you stand on possibly what type of athletes could make

benefit of this, and this there certain things to keep in mind if people are considering

using a ketogenic diet while doing different types of training.

Bill: Sure, sure, I really love that initial works of Finny and Bolluck, I would say, there’s no

reason not to. There’s only been a few good studies on the ketogenic diet and athletic

performance and actually there have been a couple, a lot and the key thing is duration.

If a study comes out and they say they tested the ketogenic diet in athletes and they fed

them the diet for a week, I'm probably not even going to read the paper because I know

that someone who is on a ketogenic diet for one week is going to have poor

performance, they’re basically just in a energy reduced state, they have a low ability to

the oxidized fatty acids at a high enough rate to generate peek power output and then

they’re glycogen depleted. So there are out of all fuels. If you find the studies by finny

and Bolluck, that show, once you feed this diet for 3 weeks or longer I mean, one of

their studies went on for a month, performance comes completely back up to baseline

and its even increased in certain parameters. There was a more recent study by

someone name Paoli that showed…I think he went out to just beyond 3 weeks with the

diet and showed something very similar out. All the performance measurements were

either back up to baseline and some were even enhanced. So I don't think this diet…if

run long term, I think that it’s probably going to be perfectly fine for athletes. Finny did

speculate at one point that it might be a little troublesome for people that are requiring

higher intensity, but I haven’t seen any of that data.

Danny: Yeah that was the next thing I was going to talk about, because typically we see a lot of

the research is in endurance athletes, marathon runners, cyclists, so I know a lot of the

learning I've kind of done is looking at peter’s self experimentation that he’s done which

is really almost at clinical level when you look at the legs he’s gone through. But then I

suppose, do either on the concerns of the more glycoletically demanding sports, if

someone like an MMA fighter or they’re training for the cross fit games twice a day,

how that would affect them, but again as you say, it’s probably a lack of research in that

area that’s letting us down.

Bill: It is to an extent, but I do have this one example, and it was from that paoli study, and

you mentioned MMA fighters and I'm just going to take this to the sort of the other end

of the spectrum, they were measuring it in gymnasts and I'm not a gymnast, but I

imagine that gymnasts are sort of swinging upside down from bars and that seems to

require a pretty high degree of intensity. Maybe not so much as power lifting, but

actually I take that back…they very well could. But that study used the ketogenic diet in

gymnasts and showed that It had no detrimental effects and it seemed to work, but that

said just like you were saying, that’s sort of one isolated study and I’d like to see it

studied in a more broader context in different types of athletes to see if we get a similar

effect.

Danny: Yeah and I think the problem there again is taking athletes who are at that level and

having them go through a study where they may have to go 8 – 9 – 10 weeks with a

drop off in performance before they get that fat adaptation. So getting people to

participate is one issue among many.

Bill: Yeah, if I was the one running that study it would be hard to tell people, like ok, for the

first month of this diet, all of your strength is going to decline, your performance is

going to decline, I'm sorry but you just got to deal with it.

Danny: Sure, and even I remember listening to Peter talk about his experience as well, and he

mentioned after the initial period of adaptation, even after the first year he was seeing

more enhancements in performance, so it’s possibly even maybe a longer stage before

we get the benefit upturn really. So it’s just a really, really interesting concept, and one

thing I suppose is are we looking at a athlete who truly has only one goal and that’s to

increase their athletic performance, or are we looking at someone who has this big

interest in their training and loves to train and doing all the things, who wants a cross

over with health outcomes as well?

Bill: Right. Right. I think the ketogenic diet can have benefits in that latter example as well.

Danny: Sure, in terms of getting the benefits from this ketogenic diet possibly where do you

look at it form in terms of having someone who is going through a cyclical ketogenic diet

for example and they’re trying to keep their glycogen levels up with a carb re feed every

so often, but at the same time they’re…for enough of the time they’re still dipping into

ketosis, may that be a even more beneficial for athletes?

Bill: I know that this is a touchy area, some people are on one side of the argument, and

some people are on the other. I tend to see no major benefit to a big carb re feed,

because I think that once you are on this sort of diet for an adequate duration, you will

have sort of increased mitochondrial proliferation, you’ll be able to burn fat at a fast

enough rate to generate ATPA at a high rate, so that your power output is adequate,

where it’s supposed to be. I don't really know…I mean if you are in the ketogenic diet

you might even develop a bit of insulin resistance, so that carb re feed is going to end up

causing hyper glycemia, I mean it’s not going to be terribly bad if you go back to the low

carbohydrate diet for most of the time than any damage caused by the hyper glycemia,

which could be, you know, should be attenuated.

Danny: That’s interesting you say we have this ability then after being in ketosis for a certain

period of time to burn through the fatty acids at a higher rate for ATP production

because that was probably my own big concern about being in ketosis long term and

doing kind of intense exercise, and I wasn’t aware of what you just said there, of

increase in ATP production.

Bill: Yeah actually I wrote a blog post about this called Keto adaptation showing that sort of

once you get this sort of extended duration of this diet you do get the increased

mitochondria and that seems to be what’s rate limiting for the speed that you can

synthesize ATP which seems to be one of the major mediators of power output and for

athletic performance.

Danny: Sure, sure. So Bill, now we’re coming up just nearly on the 45 minute limit here so,

before I do let you go I want to maybe summarize some of the things we said today and

especially in the early parts, we’re talking about this issue of calories and how we have

this misconception about the role in I suppose our diet and body composition. Could

you maybe just really quickly give us the cliff note summary of how we should be

viewing nutrition rather than simply focusing on calories?

Bill: Sure, I think, just to re word what you say, I think you got to look at diet quality, you got

to look at the foods you're eating, how that fits into the big picture, I think all of those

things are more important than the calorie number which even in itself is usually

notoriously inaccurate. It’s very hard to calculate the calories in food, and it’s also

virtually impossible to know the calories in energy expenditure, so there’s a lot of

unknowns when it comes down to that, so I think sticking with whole foods and food

high quality that seems to be in my opinion sort of a better solution.

Danny: Perfect, I think it’s a great guideline for people and simply saying that one kind of key

thing you said, food quality with whole foods, it’s very hard to go wrong from there, so

bill I'm sure there’s going to be people wanting to look at some of your stuff, and what is

the best way for them to find your work online and what’s the best way for them to

interact or contact you?

Bill: Ok, yeah I try to make myself as available as possible, I interact a lot with social media,

I'm at caloriesproper.com, on twitter and Facebook, same handle, caloriesproper, if you

go to my website and just sign up for the newsletter, we’ll send you a little welcome

thing and if you just reply to that, that comes right back to my inbox and I get it so if you

have questions you can hit me up of Facebook, twitter or email. I try to make myself as

available as possible.

Danny: Excellent. And then I'm sure people will probably want to get a grab of your book as

well, so where can I find that, and maybe just…maybe run down of your premise of the

book?

Bill: Ok, the book is called, the poor misunderstood calorie, you can get it at amazon.com,

and it’s basically a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about here, it’s a lot of different

examples about how lifestyle factors can influence the way your body metabolizes foods

and that’s basically independent form the calories. You know, if you're in a stressed

condition you could have the same exact meal as someone else and that’s going to

affect nutrient partitioning, if you’ve had poor sleep quality, these are all things that

need to be in line, but one of the major focuses of the book is the foods, how you can

improve your diet to improve your body composition and quality of life.

Danny: Advice people to go pick that up and certainly would love to have you back on the show

to talk through some of that stuff, cause as I said, there’s so much things that I could

have asked today if we had I suppose 3 times the time. But before I do let you go, I'm

going to finish with the final question. If you had to pick one thing to recommend people

should do each day, that will have a positive impact on their life and their health, what

would that be? This can be to do with anything; it doesn’t have to be nutritional or to do

with calories or whatever, anything, one thing that people should do each and every

day.

Bill: Ok, I’ll stick with the nutrition for one, because that seems to be the easiest, it’s hard to

tell somebody to reduce the stress levels in their life, that’s sort of complicated, so

nutritionally I would say, nix the junk food. I like the little carbohydrates and the paleo

diet for the simple reason that they…well for a lot of different reasons but among those

reasons, there’s no junk food, there’s no soda, it’s usually filled with a lot of whole foods

and so that would be it.

Danny: Perfect. Bill we’re up on time here, I just want to finish by saying thank you so much for

coming on, I think talking about this issue of calories is so important because the

misconceptions out there are still rampant, so I think people to take that in is really

going to be helpful to them, and then the second after the show kind of one of my own

big interests we looked at ketosis which I suppose I selfishly got a few questions in

there.

Bill: No I'm interested in it as well…

Danny: Yeah so I got back in to that, so I want to say a big thank you for coming on the show

and hopefully we can talk again.

Bill: Great, thanks for having me on. It’s been great.