Protein First: How the New Dietary Guidelines Shift Nutrition

The new guidelines recognize that whole nutrient-dense food is the most effective path to better health. How would you describe why we would have guidelines just in general? I think the origins of it came out of the end of World War II and people started getting more oriented to public health and the well-being everyone and people realized that heart disease was a real cause of mortality and so they started to look for reasons why. Also during World War II they were interested in the fact that there are a million people, men overseas, fighting a war and they had to have some idea of how much food to send. So I think those were the two things that really brought nutrition to the forefront. How do we define what people need? Protein and healthy fats are essential and we're wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines. What Kennedy is saying is what we need to base our science on is well-controlled studies and if we don't have well-controlled studies, we shouldn't make conclusive answers. This is a monumental moment for Americans. The dietary guidelines. Dr. Donald Lehman, welcome to the show. You are no stranger to this. You're probably the most frequently returning guests. Welcome. It's good to be back even on the roadshow. You know what? I think we should probably create a Dr. Don Lehman and co-road show on nutrition. We're actually in D.C. This is a monumental moment for Americans. The dietary guidelines, I just have chills thinking about have changed. and the listener or viewer is thinking two things right now wow these guys are total nerds like who cares about it or number two maybe there is something more to nutrition for optimal health and that the problems that we're chasing begin on our plate as opposed to looking for more medication to change obesity and heart disease and all the other chronic diseases with these changes potentially with prioritizing protein, which is unbelievable, hasn't changed the original guidelines at 0.8 grams per kg. They haven't changed in over since, I mean, since ever, have they? No, that's been the RDA forever. And that RDA hasn't changed, but we've highlighted the fact that an optimal range is probably about twice that, 50%, you know, 1.2 to 1.6. So 50 to 100% above the minimum. And we should touch on what the old guidelines were for the people listening or watching the show that have never really spent time thinking about the dietary guidelines. Before we move to the new and improved incredible upside down pyramid, what were the old guidelines, roughly speaking? Yeah, the old guidelines in my mind were more about what you shouldn't eat than what you should eat. It was using the minimum protein intake of 0.8 grams per kg, which is just a minimum to prevent deficiencies. But it was about not eating cholesterol, not eating saturated fat, not eating sugar, not eating any salt containing products. So it was all about what you shouldn't eat. They did have some guidelines about eating a variety of foods and things like that and maintaining normal weight. But really when they started structuring what people should do. It was really about avoiding anything that had fat in it and eating things that had a lot of carbohydrates. Seems really counterintuitive that the guidelines, if we were to think about what the guidelines, what their use is, how would you describe why we would have guidelines just in general? I think the origins of it came out of the end of World War II and people started getting more oriented to public health and the well-being of everyone, and people realized that heart disease was a real cause of mortality, and so they started to look for reasons why. Also, during World War II, they were interested in the fact that there are a million people, men overseas, fighting a war, and they had to have some idea of how much food to send. So I think those were the two things that really brought nutrition to the forefront. How do we define what people need? Would you say, and I don't actually know this number, Would you say that the majority of people follow the current dietary guidelines? I mean, I know that answer, but I don't know the percentage. Yeah. People often ask me, you know, what difference does the dietary guidelines make? And for the average person, none at all. They totally ignore it. Most people don't even know it exists. But the reality is they have a big impact on any group that gets any government support. So school lunch, daycares, nursing homes, even prisons or hospitals or the U.S. military, they all have to follow these guidelines. So there's a huge impact across the nation in terms of do these guidelines really represent a healthy way to go? They really haven't changed. They reevaluate them every five years. Is that true? Right. Right. But to your point about they don't change, one of the guidelines, one of the rules that have governed the process is you can never go back and look at the prior information. You can only change based on what has happened. So if you started in 1980 with a false idea about saturated fat, 45 years later, you still have that same false idea. And I think that's one of the big changes is that when Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Rollins came in, now they said, no, we don't care what has happened. We only care about what's real. So let's reevaluate all the science. The new guidelines, the high level. Can you share some of those recommendations now? So the recommendations, I think, are very logical. They're very flexible. They start out with everybody needs to target their calorie intake. We have a huge obesity problem. So that's simple. So we need to get that under control. And that's partially food you choose, but partially portion control. The second thing, which is really a big priority, is prioritizing protein foods. Protein foods are the primary source of nutrients in our diet, whether it's amino acids or whether it's vitamins and minerals. Protein foods are where we get our 65, 70 percent of our nutrients. So you have to make a priority to that. From there, they went in and say typical things like fruits and vegetables, which is what you'd expect. Healthy fats, which is a big change, prioritizing natural fats, things that you would get from foods from animal sources, milk, eggs, meats, things of that nature, along with olive oil and other natural and less use of highly processed seed oils. And then into carbohydrates, people need to restrict that really in line with their energy needs, and particularly favoring more whole grains. So that's kind of an overview of the laid out. And it's really presented as bullet points, which are very easy to understand. Why do you think, from your perspective, has protein not been addressed previously? I think that the main reason is that most animal proteins, which are probably the most nutrient-dense proteins in the food supply, are also source of cholesterol and saturated fat. So I think they were trying to avoid it. There's been a longtime push that we needed a more plant-based diet. So that's sort of been an underlying. So I think that's really been the main issue. It's sort of been high in the cloak of that saturated fat issue. They increased the protein by 50 to 100%, which is extraordinary. And to highlight, the 0.8 grams per kg was based on the RDA. Well, it's based on nitrogen balance to inform the RDA. Can you just speak to that really quickly? So the RDA created back in the 70s, really, was trying to get a minimum number of protein that individuals would need. And what they did was they used 25-year-old, young, healthy, ideal weight, physically active males and fed them nothing but a dairy, high-quality dairy protein for seven days and looked at nitrogen balance. So they got a number, 0.8 grams per kg, which is very low, but probably only applies to physically active, healthy young 25-year-olds. And so I think it gives us sort of a basement number, but it has nothing to do with optimum health. And I was listening to the press conference, and Marty McCary was talking about how it was based on nitrogen balance and that we don't have any valuable health outcomes that we know of based on a nitrogen balance. Do you agree with that? Right. I mean, nitrogen balance is sort of an indicator for growth, which is where it really developed. It developed out of animal science is when an animal or a person is growing, they're gaining nitrogen. They're growing. They're gaining muscle mass. And so that's a meaningful number. But in a non-growing adult, it's not very meaningful. and I don't know of any health outcome that relates to it at all. One of the other things that I heard Kennedy mention was this idea of we're going to use rigorous science. So perhaps in the past, the old guidelines were not based on high-quality evidence. And what they were really trying to do is then think about health outcomes and then high-quality data to support health outcomes, someone in a macronutrient, from a macronutrient perspective. Thank you to Timeline for sponsoring today's episode. As we step into the new year, we're all thinking about routines, what to start, what to stop, and what to finally commit to. But the body doesn't respond to resolutions. It responds to consistency. And lasting health isn't built on trends. It's built on fundamentals, quality nutrition, resistance training, recovery, and cellular energy. Every second, your cells are producing energy. That energy determines how strong you will feel, how well you perform, and how resilient you are over time. And unfortunately, as we age, that system breaks down. The mitochondria, which we know are the engines inside your cells, wear out faster than the body can replace them. And that's where a timeline powered by Mitopure comes in. Mitopure supports mitochondrial renewal and has been shown to increase muscle strength by roughly 12%, even without changes in exercise, by improving cellular energy where it matters most. Muscle is the organ of longevity, and without strong mitochondria, you can't have strong muscles. If staying forever strong is part of your plan, get 35% off MitoPure subscription at timeline.com slash Dr. Lion. Yeah, and I sort of understand the dilemma. The public would like nice, clean answers, and so the people in charge would like to give them that. But the problem is in nutrition, we don't have nice, clean answers. And I think the difference that Kennedy's looking at between hard science is that we would like to have what we call random control trials, where people are actually well-controlled, what they're eating is well-established, well-controlled. A lot of the nutrition right now is using what we call epidemiology, which is where you basically go out and ask someone what they ate yesterday and they give you some answer, probably make it up. And then 20 years later, you ask how their health turned out. And I, for one, don't remember what I ate yesterday. I don't remember what I ate this morning. And so I think the problem with it, in computer language, you always say garbage in, garbage out. If you start out with really bad food data, making conclusions from it 20 years later is not very good. So I think Kennedy is arguing that that's not the way we should do nutrition science. Back in the old days, epidemiology was good for something like smoking. You either smoked or you didn't. And 20 years later, you can say there was lung cancer. Okay, that's very clean. Nutrition is much more complicated than that. And so I think what Kennedy is saying is what we need to base our science on is well-controlled studies. And if we don have well studies we shouldn make conclusive answers And I think that where we at And I think that what the report reflects The science that used is pretty hard and fast and places where we don't have an answer, we say we need more research. And I think that will ultimately help guide HHS and NIH in terms of the research they fund. The protein conversation, when you say you feel that the data was good, the data that was examined to inform these decisions. Can you talk to me a little bit about what kind of data and what kind of science was used for the protein? I worked on one part of it. I worked on the protein part. Arguably the most important. As one might expect in this conversation. And so Heather Leidy from University of Texas in Austin, she and I went back and we had a relatively short period of time. We just started working on it in Argus. So what people do are, A, look for a lot of randomized control studies. How many can you find? They like to do systematic reviews to pull that all together. So we get a combination of systematic reviews and narrative reviews to pull it together, both in the topics of how much protein do we think is optimum for adults, and then also how much protein from a nutrient density standpoint. So we really looked at two main questions as we came to the conclusion about the protein data. You looked at how much protein was necessary for optimal health. How were you defining optimal health? That's a great question. And so there's a lot of different ways you could do it. Most people like what we would call more hard outcomes. So death or anthropometric measurements or whatever. So we actually used a lot of the weight management data. Since 75% of adults are overweight, we thought that weight management was a good target. So we looked at things like changes in body weight, changes in body fat, changes in lean mass, and things like that as our main outcome measures. And what we found was that in basically all the studies out there, and there are quite a few, somewhere in the 40s, most of them, pretty much all of them, show one of those factors that the higher protein is a better outcome, whether it's total weight management, weight loss, body fat loss, lean mass stability, all of those types of things. If someone were to argue and say, well, higher protein isn't good, because I've heard people, you know, there's a somewhat of a plant-based community that is really, that really feels, and I use the word feels, that we're eating too much protein or we're already eating enough protein. I imagine that as someone who is part of the committee, there's going to be quite a bit of pushback. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the great things about the dietary guidelines and the way we've written them is we have allowed for those different opinions. We have tried to put the best science as to where we think the optimum target is, but we've then allowed for if someone is a vegetarian, what does this mean? What's the liability to that? What nutrients are they likely to be low on? So the idea that there's too much protein, there's a lot of research that has shown that higher levels are perfectly safe. Lower levels, we know that there's risk to it, and food choices may be even the bigger risk. We know that as people go toward lower protein diets, they tend to be more likely to be deficient in B12, B6, niacin, iron, zinc, selenium. So those data are pretty clear out there. So your protein food choices make a lot of difference to your overall diet quality and nutrient density. You mentioned a few nutrients of concern. So you mentioned, B12, B6, niacin, zinc, selenium, and these are nutrients that are found in animal products more readily and also more bioavailable. Would you agree with that? Exactly. So they're at higher concentration. If you look at meats, for example, all of those are micronutrients that are exactly the same as we would have in our muscles. I mean, it's exactly the same role, the same metabolic role. So they're in the same concentration. And as you pointed out, they're all bioavailable. So iron might very well be in plants, but it's less than 10% absorbed. And so bioavailability and also nutrient form are all big issues. And the animal products just provide more nutrient-dense foods. Do you anticipate, it highlights animal-based proteins, which is, again, extraordinary. Do you anticipate pushback on red meat? That seems to be a topic of conversation that has a resurgence every, I don't know, three months, three weeks, three days. Yeah, I think that there will be individuals and groups who think that's inappropriate, just like there are individuals like me and groups who think that the previous guidelines were inappropriate. I think what is important about these guidelines is they allow consumers to make choices. They provide the science and people can make their choice. Before they were kind of social prescriptive type of things that government knows best and you should follow what we tell you. I think the guideline should be this is what the science tells us and you are free to make choices. And I think that's a big difference. The protein has increased by 50% to 100% from 0.8 grams per kg, now to 1.2, up to 1.6 grams per kg. Are you aware of any data that would suggest that the 0.8 number is more valuable for human health than, say, the higher number of protein? Yeah, that's actually part of the report that Dr. Leidy and I put together is that we looked at that specifically comparing all of the RCT type of really rigorous research, comparing values of studies that used above 1.2 versus something around 0.8. And uniformly, the higher ones who are always better. Once in a while, there wasn't a statistical difference, but out of all of the studies we ever looked at, we never found a single one where the 0.8 was better on any outcome, whether it was things like inflammation and glutathione peroxidase, or whether it's body composition or anything else. There's no studies that ever say that's a better choice. It's really important because, again, this landscape, while amazing because of the velocity at which information spreads is extraordinary. On the same hand, if someone has a large following with a lot of opinion, it doesn't, it can sway the population and also sway people's perspective as opposed to being a bit more objective in, say, the data. Yeah. I mean, my perspective on all of this is that I think what we want to do is empower consumers to make their personal choices. And unfortunately, the guidelines haven't really allowed that. Back to the original food guide pyramid, it's one size fits all. You do what we say and you're going to be healthier. And obviously, that was a miserable failure. We've got epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Heart disease really hasn't changed. We have 40 million people on statin drugs now. There's nothing about the guidelines that have worked. And so I think it's time to empower people to look at the science. We've tried to give them the science to think about, and they can then make their own decisions. And for me, what I look at and think about, what's the guideline that restricts animal products to a 10-year-old in school lunch? What's the logic behind that? Is that what was happening before? I know many of you fast forward through these ads. I don't blame you, but here's why I want you to listen is because that is how we make free content for you, is that we support these small businesses like one of the sponsors, Manicora Honey. 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Hopefully longer than that, but, you know, at least till the next guidelines. It hasn't changed for the last, I don't know, what did you say, 40 or 50 years? Yeah, 1980. So 46 years. Okay. We're changing it. Hopefully people will see the benefit. We know the other pattern wasn't working. Again, I think these guidelines are very straightforward. I think they're very fair and reasonable. I think they will be harder to argue against. What does that look like in daily practice for someone? At least the protein. You know, what I hope people will learn is that when they think about their meal, when they think about their orientation to food, they should always think about a protein choice first. If you want to be vegetarian, that's a protein choice. If you want to be a carnivore, that's a, or if you want to be in the middle, that's a protein choice. But once you make that, everything else has to line up. Your nutrients are now being determined by what that choice was. How many, how many other fats or how much carbohydrates you're going to eat is all determined by that protein choice. And we've been doing it the other way around. We've been avoiding fat, using carbs, and we probably need some protein. We're basically flipping the script to protein choice first. Now, this is a spoiler alert, but you did write the nutrition chapter in the Forever Strong Playbook that's coming out January 27th. We did not plan this at all. I hounded you to write the nutrition chapter, And I would say that 90% or probably even more, it seems very reflective of implementation of the new guidelines. Yeah, it's... You haven't read the book? Hopefully more than a coincidence, but the research we did at the University of Illinois was based on basically what these new guidelines look like. And so part of what we based them on is the research that we did We have first knowledge of how these diets work and we compared it to the old food guide pyramid We used that as our control and we did it And you know as you just pointed out in your new book, basically the diet is exactly how we planned it. You decide on your calories, you target your protein first, then you go to your vegetables and fruit, and finally you decide on what grains you can tolerate. And that's exactly how you plan it. And that from a practical perspective, which we do cover in the book. The first meal, we typically say, is very important if it's between 30 and 50 grams of dietary protein. There's a reason as to why we believe that that is. It's the first meal. You're coming out of a catabolic state. The muscles are primed for nutrients. You want to stimulate them either through amino acids, i.e. protein, or physical activity. Did you teach me well? Yeah. And what that would look like is it could be a protein shake. It could be eggs. It now could be eggs and steak. Amazing. There's many different choices. I always like to buffer that comment just a little bit is that it's more important the older you get. We don't define older. Yeah. When someone's young and growing, even into your 20s up to around 30, the meal distribution doesn't seem to make as much difference. It's more about how much protein for a total day. But as we get older, the body gets what we call anabolic resistance. We're a little less efficient with protein. And we think the amount per meal becomes more important. And our research shows that that first meal seems to be probably the most sensitive. When you say that the meal distribution, and there's a lot of controversy. Again, this isn't really actually related to the guidelines. This is more in the nuanced and in the weeds, people will say, protein distribution doesn't matter as long as you're getting your overall protein. What would you say if someone is 55, getting 1.6 grams per kg, does it matter how they distribute their protein? I would say that the issues then become related to physical activity and overall health. You know, if someone is pretty physically active, They're going to the gym three days a week. They're doing some resistance training. Two meals a day that exceed 35 grams of protein is probably fine. Probably doesn't matter. The more stress they're under, if they're trying to lose weight or if they're taking a drug for weight loss, if they're bed fast, anything that puts them under stress, then I think that distribution becomes more and more important. So we used it during our weight loss studies, and we found it very effective to make that first meal a focal point. So, again, perfectly healthy, physically active individual in their 50s probably doesn't make much difference. Are they better off having one massive protein meal or distributing through the day? I think there's quite a bit of research to suggest that your efficiency of use of protein at a meal probably tops out around 60 grams at a meal. So, you know, is an 8-ounce steak the optimum? You probably don't need a 16-ounce steak. So, you know, I think distribution, as you go to higher and more protein, I think having it in multiple meals probably makes sense. I want to pause on that for a second because it's that you guys might have tuned out, which I hope you didn't. But there is a component to distribution. When I say distribution, again, I'm a practicing physician from dietary compliance. We see that when people are having more robust meals, and I'll define that, between 30 and 50 grams, there's a level of satiety that helps. as opposed to the traditional bodybuilding diets that there's five meals you're eating every two or three hours of 20 grams of protein. Again, does that change body composition for a younger person? Probably not. But I do think that if someone is more mature or older, that there just may be benefit of having a higher distribution in one or more meal from body composition retention over time. I mean, as we said earlier, nearly 75% of Americans are overweight. And so the satiety aspect of protein is important. The thermogenic aspect of protein is important. I think meal distribution does come into play on that. What people have looked at is purely lean mass. Does the distribution directly relate to lean mass? Not very well, but it probably does relate to body composition. It relates to, Heather Leidy has shown it relates to snacking desires. We think it's really important associated with weight control and things like that. And the thermogenic effect, people don't really understand it. I'm pretty convinced that the thermogenic effect is a meal-based effect, basing the response of protein synthesis after a meal is where that extra thermogenic, that burning of calories comes from. From the protein perspective, I want to bring up one other point that I'm curious is if you anticipate these changes, and that is looking at individual amino acids. Wow, that is definitely sort of out of the strike zone of dietary guidelines at the moment. I would hope that nutrition begins to get more focused on that. We've written a number of papers sort of highlighting that. One of the things that I think will be an outcome of the dietary guidelines is that the USDA has used something they call ounce equivalents, which basically was designed to allow people to substitute plant proteins for animal proteins. And so the guidelines were that one ounce of chicken breast was equal to a fourth cup of beans or lentils or a half ounce of almonds. Well, we've gone in and looked at that, and they're not equivalent at all. A fourth cup of beans has barely a third of the protein of a chicken breast, and almonds are even less, and almonds have a digestibility factor of less than 60%. And so they're not equivalent. So we have basically emphasized that if you want to substitute beans for chicken breast, it's three quarters of a cup. It's not, you know, three fourths of a cup to be an equal substitution. How many carbohydrates is that, roughly? I'd have to think about that. Forty-five, maybe. Forty-five grams of carbs. Yeah. So it's, I mean, that would get about nine. So it'd be times four. Yeah, it'd be around 40 grams. This episode is brought to you by Bond Charge. Now, my husband looked at me the other night and said, should I be scared? And honestly, fair. 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And some of it would be fiber. and in in almonds it's it's even it's even worse it would take to be equal to one ounce of chicken breast you'd have to eat three full ounces of almonds and that's that's in the neighborhood of you know a hundred almonds I mean it's just it's their volumes that you can't deal with easily so hopefully one of the things that will come out of it is that the way we look at these equivalents will change. And so that's all based on amino acids, you know, that they're not equivalent. Just because it says it's protein, it's not really protein. All proteins aren't equal. And animal proteins tend to have about what we've, you know, essential amino acids, non-essential. Animal proteins are around 50% essential amino acids. Plant proteins are around 35%. So they just have a lot less of them. So you have to eat more total protein. Talk to me about the saturated fat. Saturated fat has, the recommendation has always been eat less than 10% of your diet coming from saturated fat. Now, you and I have spoken at length about this. If saturated fat was indeed dangerous, then we should have a number as to what that looks like. If someone has a 4,000 calorie diet and 10% is 44 grams of saturated fat versus someone has a 1500 calorie diet and the saturated fat is roughly, I don't know, 16 or 14 or 16 grams. There are two very different diets with two very different amounts of saturated fat. Talk to me about the changes in that recommendation. Yeah, my concern about that 10% is that it has really been used and certainly been used by a lot of the food industry to demonize foods. An egg, for example, has very little saturated fat, about 1.5 grams, but it's 19%, and so therefore it would be deemed unhealthy. 2% milk is almost 20% saturated fat, but it has very little in it. Meats can be very low. So the issue is it's really been used to demonize foods. If it's really biochemically dangerous, there should be a number to it. Like with minerals, we say parts per million. It's safe above this or below this. So why can't you do it? And the problem with it is if they put a number on it, the hypothesis, it would be proven wrong. And so as long as it's a vague number like 10%, it's a very vague thing to try and track. You track it with these survey studies, and it kind of looks like saturated fat makes a difference. But when you put it into an actual controlled study, it doesn't ever seem to make a difference. And so that's why the science is softer than what they would like to imply. What about now? Because would there have been a possibility of removing that percentage? I, for one, certainly lobbied for it to be gone. You know, I think this is where politics comes into play in the food system. And I think that was just a leap too far that people weren't ready to totally abandon that. But I think when people read the guidelines, what they're going to see is that there's a lot of statement about you should eat healthy fats. And at the top of the list are animal fats. That you should actually go out in search of that or just allow that to be as... Allow it to happen. So again, prioritize your protein foods and let them be natural and then decide where you're at. If you have a quarter pound hamburger that's 85% fat at lunch, that has a certain amount of saturated fat. But it's well below the guideline. You know, it probably only has six or seven grams in it. So if your goal, let's say a 2,000 calorie diet, 10% would be 22 grams of saturated fat. So if that's the number, let's use it. And then if I want to get my saturated fat from two eggs in the morning, so be it. Is that better than getting it from a candy bar that has artificial fat in it that saturated I would say it a lot better than having these hydrogenated vegetable oils In our current food system, where are the saturated fats coming from in our current diet? So the number one source in the current diet is cheese. So pizzas. I think the number two probably is meats. but 35% of the saturated fat in the American diet now is coming from hydrogenated vegetable oils, from seed oils. And so that's all coming in in baked goods. Number one source of calories in the American diet is baked goods, pastries, donuts, pies, cakes, things of that nature. And then number two is breads, is breads. And so we're getting a lot of our fat in those kinds of artificial places. And these guidelines definitely target restricting those two groups. Increased protein, saturated fat overall is the same, but it's replaced from artificial fats, found in baked goods, and moving the recommendation over to saturated fats from animal products. What about as we go down the list, the fruits and vegetables, you had said we were talking off camera, they're actually a little bit lower than was previously recommended. And I honestly can't speak to exactly why, but the old recommendations were five servings of vegetables, it's three, and two servings of fruit, which, you know, that's a very reasonable target. I think five is just so high that most Americans look at it and shrug their shoulders. You know, I think that there are reasonable guidelines. We know that the majority of Americans aren't eating many fruits or vegetables. That certainly needs to be an emphasis, and it's in the guidelines. We know that 95% of Americans are eating too many refined grains. That's in all the surveys. So those are two directions we need to shift. The acknowledgement of a lower carbohydrate diet, how are carbohydrates approached in these guidelines? I think they're approached mostly from a fiber standpoint, that there's a specific guideline about whole grains. But the serving sizes, I think if you look back at the Food Guide pyramid, it was 6 to 10 servings per day. Now I think it's two, and I might be wrong on this, I think it's two to three servings of whole grains and two servings of refined grains or less. And so it's a much lower number. So basically, carbohydrates are an energy source that relates to your physical activity, something you and I talk about. What's your carbohydrate? Working on a paper. Kind of got a little sidelined lately. I'm going to work on a paper called Carbohydrate Tolerance, in that basically everyone has a tolerance at about 130 grams per day. That's sort of your requirement. And that's kind of in the three servings of vegetables, two servings of fruit, two to three servings of grains. That's kind of that level. Everything above that really is used by your muscle physical activity. And so currently Americans are eating almost 300 grams of carbohydrates per day. That would relate to needing about three hours of physical activity per day to burn that. There's no reason why, I mean, I think that's a major reason why people are overweight. And we're seeing the issues with diabetes. When you address, was carbohydrate tolerance addressed in the guidelines? No. No. No. But hopefully eventually, yeah. Simply the guidelines now recognize much lower carbohydrate. The old guidelines sort of started with, oh, you should eat a lot of carbohydrates and then what else? Now these are basically restrict your carbohydrates to what you need to eat. Meaning the 130 grams. Again, it doesn't mention that, but that's if you look at the serving numbers and things, that's kind of what is revolving around. And where does the RDA come into all of this? When we think about... RDA for carbohydrates? Well, the RDA, there's the RDA, and then there's the dietary guidelines, and then there's the reference intake. So there's a lot of numbers that become confusing. You're smiling at me. Well, that was kind of an interesting part of the politics of this process, because within government, there's a lot of turf protection. And so the dietary guidelines are the consumer-facing food part of the government recommendations. The ingredients, what's in food, is the FDA's jurisdiction. So there's no discussion really about dyes or things in the food guide, per se. And the numbers, 130 grams, is the jurisdiction of the dietary reference intakes, which is the National Academy of Science, the Food and Nutrition Board. And so there are each of these turf areas that have to be protected. And so when we waded into looking at numbers for the protein, we got a lot of pushback from the DRI folks that we couldn't talk about numbers. And so we said, well, every time we talk about protein, one of the first questions we always see is, well, how much should I have? So we thought that was a very important consumer-facing piece of information. What's the range you're talking about? People say, well, people have too high a protein. We think that's a very safe and normal range that we gave. How do you, you had mentioned early when we started this conversation that you are hoping that people choose, that here's the science, you now decide. Where do you think the other institutions are going to come in? So you've got the American Heart Association and you just have various other medical associations that have been in alignment with the old dietary guidelines. Wow, there's a lot of politically correct things to say there and things that are less politically correct. You can find that in our Supercast version. Just kidding. I'm kidding. So, yeah, you know, I don't know. I would hope that they would see the guidelines as having the flexibility. So in terms of people who are at risk for cardiovascular, we know that as far as people who have high LDL levels, it's less than 7% of the population. So should a recommendation... 7% of the population have elevated LDL levels. And by elevated, I use the word high, so that's above 160. That's the original definition. But if you look at triglycerides, it's over 17% have high triglycerides above 200 milligrams per deciliter. So basically, carbohydrates are almost three times the risk of fats. And so those are the kinds of things I hope the medical people come to grips with. I know companies love to sell statins, 40 million prescriptions on that. But I think we need to come to grips with not everybody needs those. and, you know, there are other dietary approaches that we can go after. And I think that the guidelines provide the flexibility to do that. Your work is really important and you've spent a lifetime working on this and now we're seeing it into practice. And I will say what I've noticed is I expected you to be emotionally charged, very excited, but I kind of got that wrong. And that's, I would say, the mark of a good scientist because you're very careful about the statements that you're making. You're calculated in the words that you're using for the interpretation to the general population as well as what the data shows, what it doesn't, as opposed to, say, perhaps someone less skilled or mature or whatever, however you want to put it. And I think that that's really valuable. We're going to need more of that, especially as these guidelines come out and people have reactions to them because it is flipping the pyramid upside down. We have a way that people can tackle these guidelines. It is in the Forever Strong playbook. It brings to life these guidelines, which is just so happen. I mean, it wasn't happenstance, but the timing ended up really working out. And I think that the playbook is a tactical field manual and has the potential to really change the way nutrition is done. So thank you. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And, you know, we sort of went down a path back around 2000 where we sort of brought together a lot of biochemistry and thought we had the idea of how. And we've sort of worked on that and worked on it. And I think the science that people are going to find in these guidelines is very solid. It's not really opinion driven. It's not, you know, you know, I believe in a certain kind of diet. I eat a certain way, but that's not there. What's there is these are the issues that are out, and when you make choices, these are the ramifications of it. So what we've tried to lay out is how to make those choices in a flexible way. So, you know, we haven't went out to demonize foods. We haven't gone out to demonize certain kinds of approaches. We've tried to provide the science that consumers can make legitimate choices. If someone wanted to look at these guidelines, they're freely available online. Is that accurate? Yeah, as of like four hours ago. I was writing them for the last six months, and I only saw them four hours ago. So yeah, they are freely available. And the science is laid out. It's available for people to be able to look at the studies, how it was thought about, what is available, what other studies are. My understanding is as of today, it's not. But the guidelines are laid out in basically the bullet points, which everybody maybe has seen. Then there's like a 40-page discussion of the science, which one of the cool things is that it poses the questions. It says in the lipid area and the fat, saturated fat area, this is not very well known. We need a lot more research to define what healthy fats really look like. I think that's great. It helps define the research agenda. And then there will be a series of appendices that I think maybe eight of them that have the reports that we wrote. So Heather and Leidy and I wrote one on the protein topic. And so there's a, I don't even know what it was, 40-page report with 100 references based on what we did. Sounds like a walk in the park, just did it over a normal, did it over, did it over a lunch. You said something else that I think is extremely important, and you said that you were very clear that it wasn't about biases and opinions. Was that hard to do? You know, I think, I mean, one of the things I always told students in class is that when you go into nutrition, one of the things you have to remember is we all have our biases. We all eat, and nobody says, well, I have a really lousy diet. And so we're all inherently biased. So how do you deal with that? You know, can you look at the science and evaluate it as it is? And a good scientist can do that. They can get beyond their bias. And I think the report does that. Again, I haven't read every one of the individual reports, but I'm pretty sure that's the way they're laid out. This is the science. This is the weakness of where we're at. These are the conclusions we can make with strong science, and these are the things we don't know. What you're saying is very transparent. Yeah, that's what we went for. We wanted to be based on hard science, random control trials that we know what they mean. And where we don't know, we want to admit we don't know. Thank you for all the work that you've done. Endlessly grateful. Guys, you can find the science and how to implement in the Forever Strong Playbook that is coming out January 27th. Don Lehman wrote it. You guys can find it there. Don Lehman is on Twitter and a frequent guest on the podcast. Thank you again so much. Thank you.