EPI 250: Ty Beal, PhD - Top Nutrition Scientist & Food Researcher That Advises Nations On Food Policy Ranks Top Foods By "Nutritional Value Score".

Welcome back to another episode of the Peak Performance Life Podcast. Today, I am very excited to have on the line with us Tai Beal, PhD. He is a nutrition scientist and the host of the Tai Beal show. He is a leading researcher in food and nutrition. He's published in the top journals. He's had more than 60 scientific publications. He's been cited over 7,000 times. He's got some really cool stuff that we're going to discuss where he's actually rated. He just came out to expose the other day where he rated 289 foods by nutritional value. So we'll definitely be talking about his nutritional value scoring system and how that relates to different foods. And we'll discuss some of the foods that are on the top and the bottom of those lists and get his opinion on it. So Tai, thank you so much for joining us here today. It's great to be here, Taylor. Amazing. Well, yeah, let's get started with a little bit of a background of how you got interested in the work you're doing today. Sure. You know, I got interested in nutrition from personal experience of having some health issues like digestion problems. I had a parasite from travel. And I just sort of was curious about how can I figure this out because I wasn't really satisfied with the conventional approach that my doctors were using. And so I sort of changed my diet to treat my condition. And I thought, this is amazing. I didn't know food could be so powerful. And I got fascinated by that. So I ended up going to school for it. And I've never really looked back. I'm sort of obsessed with all things food and nutrition. And I get to do it for my day job now, which I love. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, I know you've also advised many different organizations, many different countries and things of that nature. So we'd love to get into what are some of the things that you've learned and your overall sort of philosophy around health. We've had a lot of different people. We've had about 250 episodes on this podcast. We've had we've had vegans. We've had carnivores. We've had keto. We've had Mediterranean diet advocates. We've had it all. Would love to hear what's your kind of over overlaying philosophy here. Yeah. So I started with a sort of template of what did our ancestors eat? What were we sort of evolved to eat? And so that was my thinking early on. So even before I went to school for this. And so that sort of guided my thinking, okay, well, we have all sorts of chronic conditions today and we have nutrient deficiencies today. And where did those problems come from? So what changed from when we sort of had adequate diets, healthy diets to today where, you know, in my country in the U.S., we have 60% of the diet is ultra processed. And there's a lot of environmental factors. It's not just the food, but the food is a big factor that changed. And so that was my template of kind of where I started from. But since getting into that and getting into the research, I've since very much adjusted to sort of in general, just an in a way process whole foods diet. And for me personally, it's sort of like whatever works for me. I try to eat a variety of all sorts of foods. You know, that's meat, fish, egg, dairy, animal source foods, right? And then legumes, nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, whole grains on the plant source food side. So I'm fine with all those foods, but I think certain people need a different variety of those foods. Some people can handle grains and legumes just fine. Others have a problem with it, right? Maybe the problem is just temporary. You have it for a little bit and you resolve a gut issue and then you can eat whatever you want again, right? Some people have challenges with nutrients, absorption issues, you know, depending on the person, it's a, you know, for women, iron needs are much higher during sort of reproductive ages, right? So there's a lot of factors, I think that sort of account for this flexibility. And my general takeaway is let's just go for a minimally processed whole foods diet. If you're adding in ultra process foods and having that type of diet, I think you just want to do it cautiously. And if it works for you, that's great. Because I know a lot of people, you're my wife will eat a lot of more processed foods and she does great on that. And so there's nothing like I'm never saying, Oh, don't eat that. It's going to be bad for you. Right. It's like, I'm sort of, if you're healthy, if you're healthy and you have a great life and you're eating, you know, something that's quote unquote, not the best or most nutritious food that I think is totally fine. You know, Yeah, I'm jealous of those people who can do that. Honestly, I think a lot of us get into this kind of field of, of, you know, health and nutrition because we had some health issue ourselves or we're like ultra sensitive to like, you know, gluten and things like, you know, I see people like just eating bread, eating desserts, eating all this stuff every day. And I'm just like, if I ate that, I would feel so awful. But that's just me. And I'm kind of jealous. Yeah. I'm with you too. Like I can't have really, I can't have much gluten at all. I have, I have really bad reactions to it. I have trouble with milk. I can have yogurt or hard cheese, but I can't really have a lot of like the milk products. So remember enterprise, even soft cheese is a problem for me. And when I have some of these high processed foods where I go to a restaurant, I think I don't like it. Like you said, I'm jealous of other people, but it's like I can't just eat whatever I want and feel fine. I certainly notice a difference. Yeah, yeah. Eating out at the restaurants, it's such an interesting thing because like, even if it looks like it's somewhat healthy food, I just, it feels different in my stomach compared to when I eat at home and I just make it, you know, even last night, I mean, it was almost a little embarrassing, but I went out with a group of people and went to this restaurant where it was just all fried foods and soybean oil, highly fried, processed, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I just, I just didn't eat, honestly. I just kind of hung out with people and then left and ate when I got home. I wish I could, I really do, but there's something about, I don't know if it's the oils and I don't know if you have an opinion on the whole seed oil debate that we could touch on as well, but what do you think it is about kind of eating out versus eating at home? Well, first is that we don't know what's in the food. So you can't really be sure what's in there unless you cooked it or, you know, if maybe if there's an ingredient list, but even then you don't really know the amounts, you don't know how, you know, is there reusing stuff. So in general, I'm not a big proponent of or against seed oils. I think there are some risks, but in general, if you're having a seed oil like a canola oil on a salad, that's probably relatively fine. That's probably health promoting for a lot of people, but the issue is sort of that repeated frying. These are sensitive oils. You know, they're making them less sensitive with the, you know, high oleic versions. And so they're a bit more stable and they have antioxidants to prevent some of that, but they're being repeatedly fried, deep fried. That's an issue. I noticed in a lot of restaurants, they add a lot of oil, in fact, to the foods in general. So I can feel kind of heavy if I have too much of that in general. So, you know, if I go to a restaurant having steamed vegetables and just like a salmon, like a piece of salmon or maybe like a potato, that's sort of a safe way to know. There's not a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff is hidden in the sauces too. If you ask for stuff without sauces, I tend to do a lot better. So yeah, I think it's for those of us who are, who sort of are more sensitive to that, have trouble, I think there are ways around it, right? You can order, you can get certain foods, but if it's stuff where it's cooked, there's a sauce, you don't know what the ingredients are. There's a lot of additives that could be in there that may be aggravating your gut or whatever, and you're just, you don't know, right? So I think it's a bit of a wild card. Yeah, yeah. And on the seed oil thing, it's very interesting, right? We've had many people on this show who are like, no, seed oils are the worst, they're horrible, they're this and that. I've heard other, you know, fairly compelling arguments on the other side where there's not any, you know, or that seed oils could actually be good for cholesterol and, you know, compared to other things and whatnot. So it is kind of an interesting one, but I think it's a great point you made is that it's the repeated frying, right? So it's the frying. So a little, maybe a little seed oil in a salad dressing, which is not easy to find a salad dressing without seed oils these days, but a salad dressing with a little seed oil is not the same as, you know, french fries fried in seed oils that have been repeatedly used over and over for the day. And you also mentioned, that's a good point you mentioned as well. So high oleic, high oleic sunflower oil and those kinds of ones are better, less kind of processed or better for you than kind of just traditional ones. They're stabler. So when you're looking at heating these oils, they're less prone to oxidation. And industry has been working to create more and more of those versions. So they're becoming more commonplace. And I don't know the data on what proportion of restaurants have those. I think the cheaper your food, the more likely it's gonna be a cheap oil. It's gonna be reused a lot. It's probably not a high oleic version. I think that's a risk. So I think there's a range of healthy seed oils. I think there's like a range in the type of seed oil. And if you think about it, another thing that's interesting is like flax oil. You can say that's a seed oil, right? I mean, cause it technically is, but a cold pressed flax oil, of course it's not super stable. So you have to keep it refrigerated. You have to consume it pretty quickly, but that's a very different thing than something that's been, you know, industrially extracted with potentially having some solvents in there. I think there's probably minimal amounts left, but you know, heck saying things like that. And then they're repeated deep frying. That's where you get into trouble. Yeah, yeah, really good stuff. I want to jump into, this was an awesome ex post that you made the other day that you rated 289 foods by nutritional value. And here's what we found. And you kind of have the list out there. And so, and your handle on ex is at Ty Biel PhD. If anyone wants to check that out, but why don't we start with what is, what is a nutritional value score for a food? How do you come up with a nutritional value score? Like what are the factors that make that up? And then maybe we can get into some of the foods that are high or low on that list. Yeah. So we wanted to capture two aspects at a high level. The nutrient density of foods, that includes vitamins, minerals, you know, essential fats, protein, as well as factors that are protective of non-communicable diseases or against non-communicable diseases. So things like calorie density, fiber, nutrient ratios, which I can get into, but there's ways to sort of analyze foods from the compounds in those foods to assess their nutritional value. So it's supposed to be reflective of both of those factors. You're going to have nutrient dense foods that help get all the adequate, you know, all the essential nutrients you need, plus they're going to be hopefully promoting cardiometabolic health. So not just low and not just cardio, cardio, or sorry, not just metabolic health in terms of insulin sensitivity and blood sugar regulation, but also sort of these cardiovascular markers as well, which I know is an issue out there that people talk about cholesterol, but that's the idea. So if you look at it, it's just seven components. So it's vitamins. We have 11 vitamins that are sort of representative of public health significance. So they're vitamins like folate, you know, choline, vitamin D, things that are a public health issue, right? Minerals, iron, zinc, calcium, potassium, magnesium. Then when we look at protein, we actually include the amount of protein and the quality of protein using the DS. So we get into sort of how bioavailable is that protein? In the omega-3s, we look at just omega-3s because in the food system, we have, we already been talking about this, all the C-dol, we have a lot of omega-6 in the food system. So we're really not at risk of having an adequacy of omega-6. And there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we need more omega-3. So we look at the long-term fats like DHA, EPA, DPA, and ALA as well. And importantly, on these nutrients like protein and omega-3, iron, zinc, vitamin A, we do account for bioavailability. So you have some sense that this is actually being adjusted for. It's not just assuming they're the same between plants and animal source foods. And then on this sort of prevent chronic diseases side of things, we have fiber, which for some reason, a lot of people are hating fiber nowadays in the kind of our community. But fiber is, for most people, it's a really, really positive thing. And then energy density, one of the key factors when you look at randomized controlled trials of how people over-consume ultra-processed foods, it's calorie density, it's a big part. And then we have this nutrient ratio. So we looked at the ratio of saturated fat to unsaturated fat, which sort of reflects a cardiometabolic health outcome, right? Sodium to potassium. So this is really interesting. When you look at a food product, that's plants. Plants are great sources of potassium. But if you look at a really refined product on the shelf at a grocery store, and it's full of plants, but it's refined, and it has very little potassium or no potassium, that's because it's been extracted to such a point that the nutritional value has been lost. And oftentimes, you add the sodium. So you have a potato. You've got almost no sodium, tons of potassium, which is really good for your cardiovascular health. And if you process it into more further and further refined forms, you lose a lot of those good nutrients. So anyways, the sodium to potassium ratio gives you an indication of sort of how, what is the food quality? And then the carb to fiber in the same way, you can start with something that is, whether it's a grain or a legume, that has a bit of fiber in it. It has some carbohydrates, but it's balanced out by quite a bit of fiber. And when it gets really, really refined, these refined grains, for example, that ratio goes really out of whack, where you have tons of carbs, but almost no fiber. So that's not very satiating. It's bad for metabolic health. So that's the thing out of picture. We basically, there's a lot of nuance under there. You can read the paper. But that's the thing. We put the score from 1 to 100. One is the lowest score. It's like, this is the lowest nutritional value. It's like the sugar, sweetened beverages, and then you've got 100, which is like, this is the top scoring nutritional value for quantity that you eat, right? Yeah, really good stuff. I did want to ask you real quick on the protein topic. When you mentioned some protein is more bioavailable than other ones, does this get into the animal protein versus plant protein debate? And the difference is there? Or which kind of proteins have you found to be the most bioavailable or the best for, I guess, muscle building, which is what most people are trying to achieve with their protein? Yeah, first I should say, if you're eating a variety of foods, most people get probably enough protein or close to enough protein. It's not usually a big issue in the US and in countries where you can afford to eat what you want. But certainly, if you're going really plant-based, there can be an issue. And we see that if you're an older adult, right, certain populations. So we looked at the Diaz, which is the digestible, indispensable amino acid score, which just is like a holistic picture of the quality of the protein. And so animal source foods score at the top. It's like all of the essential amino acids are in high enough quantities in bioavailable form to meet all your needs. Then most of the plant sources are below that to some extent, with some exceptions. Because the soy products, depending on the system, they rate pretty high. So some systems sort of say, OK, soy is actually performing right up there with animal source foods. But most of the legumes and that seeds have one or more limiting amino acids. And so it's like, if you're not consuming the most diverse diet and you're not balancing, there's a reason like cultures have started eating greens and legumes together. It's like they balance out the lacking amino acids from each of those foods by themselves. So that's how we do it. I think it matters. And so we adjust for it. But it's not the most important thing. It shouldn't be the whole score. So you seem to be on the side of, right? There's a lot of talk about protein these days. It's probably the hottest topic. And you hear people talking about 1 gram per pound of body weight. Me personally, I weigh between 180 to 185. And for me to get 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, I'd have to pretty much force feed myself. And I don't think I quite need that much. If I get 140 grams of protein out of, and I weigh 185, I feel like that's plenty enough for me. But we'd love to hear your thoughts on the whole 1 gram per body weight, or are we eating too much protein in many cases? Or what do you think? Yeah. I think in terms of optimal intakes, when I think of it in grams per kilogram, I can't think of the exact value of translated body to pounds. But 1.2, I think, is really the sweet spot for probably most people. 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. And so for me, that's like it's sort of higher than the RDA, it's like the RDA is sort of this, you want to avoid deficiency. And so it's sort of a lower target. And so I think it's a 50% boost to 1.2. I think there's really marginal gains of any above that. If you're a competitive athlete, and you are bodybuilder, or you're trying to optimize performance, certainly you can go up to 1.6 to maybe. But I think once you get up to even 1.6 to 1.8, it's like very diminishing returns. I don't go out of my way to eat massive amounts of protein, but I do notice if I don't have a fair amount of protein in a meal, I do start getting hungry quicker, and I don't last as long before the next meal. So one of the things that I try to do is really try to get protein with that. And I was involved in these new dietary guidelines. And a lot of the there's been criticism and praise, and a lot of criticism is like, you don't need protein at every meal, it's not just from the plant-based community. And then there's others who say, this is great. This is exactly what we've been wanting. We've talked about optimal intakes, and it's above we've been having minimum intake. So whichever side you're on, I think in general, protein is more satiating when it comes from a whole food source. I don't think it's important to just add a bunch of protein powder or have protein bars. I don't think that's what is going to help most people. But if you get it from a whole food source, then that's great. And I'll just add, last thing, the quality of the protein, when we think about the benefits of plant proteins, I think we could consume more of those too. Nuts, seeds, legumes, as long as they're well tolerated, those provide a lot of fiber, phytochemicals, and they're generally associated with a lot of positive health outcomes. So I think if we're having whatever your favorite protein is, like have a lot of beans and lentils, that's great. Like there's nothing wrong with that. I think you're going to do better if you do well on those, having a lot of those in your diet is going to be good. Yeah, and that's really cool that you were involved in sort of these new guidelines that have come out now recently. And what was the increase exactly in protein from previous guidelines to the new guidelines? How much was it raised, like 50% raise or something like that? So the previous guidelines did not say the quantity because the recommended amounts sort of have been historically developed by the Institute of Medicine in these dietary reference intakes. So the RDA was sort of used as the target, which is 0.8, on average, 0.8 grams per kilogram. Depends on your age and sex. So that was kind of what was implied from the previous guidelines. I think we, on average, consume around 1.2 grams per kilogram. So I think there is this idea of like most people are getting plenty of protein. We don't really need to worry about it, right? Now, the thinking behind the protein and the new guidelines, which was the section was written by Don Layman and Heather Lighty, they were trying to look at what are the optimal intakes when you look at sort of body composition and for weight loss because thinking was three-fourths of the population of adults are overweight or obese. So protein can help with that if we're trying to restrict or not consume as many foods, consume more satiating foods. And so with that framing, they created a suggestion of 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram. So if you interpret it literally, you could say that's 50% to 100% more protein recommendations. I don't think it necessarily is, it has to be that. I think that there's plenty of flexibility depending on your preferences and what you do well on. But that was sort of like the recommendation going along with this idea of I've heard this feedback up, but that's only if you're working out and lifting weights and doing resistance training. And my sort of response is exactly, we should be doing resistance training and working out. And so I think to say, don't consume more protein because most people don't work out is sort of a copa. It's like, OK, let's say what's optimal. Also recommend the physical activity and resistance training. And then we'll be closer to optimal health. So I'm not really like, I'm not a big protein proponent necessarily, but I also think like 1.2 is a really sensible target. Yeah. And then there's certainly something to the fact that protein is more satiating. And I knew someone who was actually underweight at one point and they hired a nutritionist. And I thought the nutritionist would say, yeah, make sure you're eating more protein and this and that. And the nutritionist said, you need to gain weight. Carbs eat carbs. Like if you want to gain weight, eat 300, 400 grams of carbs a day. If you want to lose weight, eat more protein. Generally, I'm not saying I'm personally, I am more of a lower carb person myself. I just feel better on low carbs. So I'm typically always under 100 grams of carbs per day. That's just what feels right for me. I know every person is different there as well. But I think certainly in terms of weight loss, I have certainly seen that people who increase their protein take, they're more satiated. They're not always hungry. Whereas carbs, you eat carbs, you're still hungry, right? Or it can spike your blood sugar, all sorts of different things that can make you hungrier with it. So I think it's good advice with so many people being overweight and needing to lose weight, you increase the protein intake, which would minimize some of the carbs and other things that may be causing you to gain weight. Yeah. I think that's pretty true. I think my only adjustment to that would be the combination of carbs and fat, so low protein, is really often what we see as weight gain. If you think about the only natural food basic, there may be some exceptions. But the main natural food out there that has been around for a long time, that contains both carbs and fat, it's breast milk. What do you need to do when you're an infant? You need to grow rapidly, faster than at any other point in time, right, in your whole life. And so that just kind of tells you right there. And we have designed these foods to be combinations. I'm talking about these ultra process, highly processed foods. You have refined starch, carbohydrates, right, added sugars with the refined oils put together, not a lot of protein. The food matrix is disrupted, so they dissolve in your mouth rapidly. They have flavors, colors, additives, textured in a way that's just the right amount of crispy, right, crunch. They have salt, so just the right amount of sweet, savory. And you eat them really fast without feeling full. So I think it's approaching. It's like they're low protein and they're ultra processed, right? So if you want to gain weight, it's a very easy way to do that. Right, exactly. Well, let's get into some of the most nutrient dense foods there or the foods that scored highest on your nutritional value scoring system here. Yeah, so OK, so if we're going to look at food groups, let's start there. Yeah. They're less controversial. Now, whenever I post something on X, I know there are going to be the crowds who say, oh, why did I leave your green score so high? I hate oxalate. Oxalate ruined my life. You worked for big oxalate, right? The spinach. Spinach and OK. So I get that. And then at the same time, I think this is very favorable to animal source foods compared to most scientific literature. So you have the people on the plant-based side saying, oh, we eat plenty of animal source foods. Why do we need more? So hopefully this is sort of a reasonable output here. But the food groups, dark green leafy vegetables, OK, those are at the top. These are things like spinach, kale, chard, romaine lettuce. Very nutritious. They're low in calories. They're high in fiber. They're high in phytonutrients, high in minerals, high in vitamins. They score well for a reason, right? And I think for most people, these are really good. We're not eating too much salad as a nation. I don't think that's a big problem. We can agree on that. We're eating our salad. And if you have problem with oxalates, low oxalate greens, right? You can have those. Yeah, the romaine lettuce, like you just mentioned, would be a great alternative to a spinach and kale, right? Or arugula, stuff like that, right? Arugula. Yeah, there's end cooking, too. So yeah, if you want to do that, there's plenty of ways to do it. And then the second top-scoring fruit is organ meats. So these are from a variety of animals. But liver is the most common one we talk about. Very high in iron, vitamin A, vitamin B12, just about everything. Foli, it's like a powerful multivitamin, mineral vitamin, right? Very high in, obviously, protein as well. They're lean, so they're not containing a lot of fat. So organ meats score well. There's also things like people don't talk about as much but kidney, heart, even spleen. Some of these ways to have these foods. I took my organ complex here today. I don't know if I took my organ complex. But I know I should be eating the organs. I don't know that I like the taste of them or will enforce myself enough to eat them. So I just kind of supplement with them. What do you think about that? Just you can hit me with the truth. I also don't like the taste of organs. I can chicken liver. I can stomach. But generally, I think so there's a couple of products I'll just mention that I think are easier ways to do it. US Wellness Meats has the liver worst. I think that's good. I used to get that pretty frequently. It tastes pretty good. You put some mustard on it. It has a combination of organs and regular beef. And I think it tastes pretty good. It's all minimally processed. So it's not like one of these highly processed meats. And then the other one is force of nature. So force of nature puts out these. They're often frozen at the grocery store, but they're these ground meat products, whether they're beef or bison or venison. And they combine organs with their ground meat and tastes really good. Like I think it's subtle enough where it's not a huge problem. So those are ways to get realings. But I think the point is that you don't need a lot to get a lot of nutrients from those foods. So if you're taking the supplement, I think that's a good way to get it. So third food, fish and seafood, very high in Omega-3s, the long chains, right? The DHA, EPA. If you're eating small fish, you got a lot of calcium in there. You actually have vitamin A from the eyes, small fish as well. So there's a lot of nutrients in there. I won't go through all the lists, but down at the bottom, you have sort of the usual suspects, soft drinks, sodas, right? Grain-based baked sweets. We have instant noodles like ramen, packaged salty snack foods like chips, refined grains in general, other sweets, things like that, right? So that's at the food group level. When you get into the individual foods, now keep in mind, these are, this is out of 289 foods. We're just showing a sample here, but I showed the highest growing food, which is dried okra, which many people were surprised by. But if you actually look at, and often in Western Africa, and many contexts, dried okras consume, so you can actually dry it with little or no oil, typically often doesn't even have salt added to it. So you have this really high potassium, you know, a lot of fiber, a lot of minerals, a lot of nutrients. So it's really packed with nutrition. So it's maybe surprising to some, but then when you think about it, if you look at the nutritional content, you kind of understand why it's gross so well. And then you have small dried fish. So these are something that a lot of other countries eat, not in the US as much, but it's dried. Again, it's like you package all these nutrients there. You're eating the whole fish, so it contains so much of the nutrients that are often lost when you just take a fillet of a fish, right? You have the skin, you have the bones. What's a small dried fish? Like what's an example of that? Well, I think there's terms in other countries, like Omena is one of them called, it's called that, but it's things like, think of like an anchovy, like in our, if we had an anchovy, that was dry, right? Like just a really, really small fish. And the eat it like as like a snack or something in other countries, just kind of dry like that or? All sorts of ways. So you eat it as a snack, you eat it grinding it up and putting it into stews. You eat, what is the other way that people eat these things? You often sometimes have to rehydrate them, so you kind of add moisture back into them and prepare them in foods. So yeah, they're eating a lot of different ways and they're incredibly nutrient dense. And so we don't of course have a lot of small dried fish, but we have small fish and canned fish are great. So one of the other high scoring foods is sardines. So if you take sardines in a can, you're getting the bones and they've been softened so you can eat them, right? Still have the skins. You have all that omega three that's in there. You have the eyeballs, that's a vitamin A. You have a lot of vitamin D in these, right? So a lot of nutrients in those foods. So I won't go through everything, but then you got, basically you've got a lot of these sort of nutrient dense foods. Then you got animal source foods in general, like the unprocessed meat scores well, beef actually scores pretty well. You got 59, you got edamame, which is around the same. It's about 63, I think or 65. Shellfish, soy products, which people love attacking soy products, right? Unsweetened soy milk, oh my gosh, it's 61. But actually soy is one of the most nutrient dense plant source foods and it is a very high in protein and protein quality. And all of the studies, like I've looked at this, just so I can take a little detour here. Yeah, please do, cause I know it is. Soy is like, you hear, as a man, you hear soy, you're like, no, soy is gonna lower my testosterone and increase my estrogen or something, you know, you hear all these things over the years. So please enlighten us. Okay, so for almost every study out there that I've seen that looks at, and I just want to say really quick, I did this review, took two and a half years, just came out last month in Lancet Planetary Health. We looked at, we reviewed, we screened 26,000 studies. I included 247 met the criteria. And we basically compared direct replacements with an animal source food. Okay, so if you held everything else, you did a randomized controlled trial and you designed it so that you just replaced, you know, calorie per calorie, the foods. Soy product versus the animal product. And other studies would do a modeling where you adjust for it all basically in the model itself. And pretty consistently, soy does well. Like, you know, oftentimes performs better and with a lot of outcomes, with the cardiometabolic outcomes, okay? Reduce cholesterol is an obvious one, but even some of the insulin sensitivity things that's performed well. Did you see any effect on hormones? Did you see any effect on like hormones or anything like that when it comes to soy? So okay, hormones was not an outcome. But from my look at the data, like unless you have a, unless you're a very unique person who has like a particular issue and you're sensitive to soy, the vast majority of the population is not gonna have a hormone issue. It's just not gonna just, it's not gonna, you're not gonna be growing man boobs if you have soy. It's just not, okay? I'm not saying there aren't examples of where you can have somebody who may be soy is not the best, but you could do that with any food. So I don't think soy is an outlier. It's been blamed for so much. So on the shortcoming side, there are some differences, right? Like, you don't have any B12. So if you're looking at a soy milk versus a cow milk, you're not gonna get any of that B12. Calcium content is gonna be much lower, right? But it also provides iron and milk doesn't provide any iron. It can hinder iron absorption. So you got these kind of trade off. So anyways, soy is actually, it does great. So if we're talking about unsweetened soy milk, it's just soybeans and water. It's nothing else. We're not talking about, you know, ones with tons of added sugar. So then you have sort of these nuts and seeds. You got sunflower seeds. You got lentils, a squirt pretty well too. And then you got some of these non-starchy vegetables. And then lower down, I think what some people may be surprised by is the fruits didn't score as well. There's not as nutrient dense and they contain a lot more sugar. It's not to say they're bad, but if you're looking at like, how much nutrition value they contain, you know, they're not comparing with the vegetables, right? There's also a range. So one of the things I think compared to other scoring systems, food compass was a big one that was very, that made a big splash a few years ago. And food compass found, you know, it showed watermelon and kale basically the same. And to me that's showing, okay, that's not really capturing the nutritional value because clearly there's a big nutritional difference. There's a lot more fiber and kale. There's a lot more nutrients and kale than watermelon. So what we actually found is that there's huge differences. Like when you look at, it's, you know, kale scores around in the 80s, 86 or something when I looked at it and watermelon's at like a 35, right? So it's two to three times higher in nutritional value. And even within the same fruit group, right? You've got like an eggplant or cucumber typically scores lower than a leafy green. So again, that's the sort of the general findings. There's all sorts of controversial foods you can, you can get into. But if you have any system, you're gonna have that. Last thing I'll say, we are, we've expanded this already to about 1500 foods and we're building more foods into this. And the hope is to really make this available to score all the foods in the, like the US food supply and in other contexts where we need it to. So there are some plans to try to do that and make it more available so that people can understand. But at the moment there's about, you know, in this paper there's 289 and we have scores, another dataset that's published online where you can see about 1500 foods. Very cool, very cool. I love that you're creating this scoring system and gonna have so many foods on it. That's exciting. Yeah, the fruits one is another, fruits is a controversial one. My personal opinion is that fruits are a little overrated. I think because they always get bucketed, like you said, it's like people are like, oh, eat your fruit and vegetables. And I'm like, well, eat your vegetables. You know, I wouldn't say don't eat fruit obviously, but it's obviously a whole food. It's better than eating some sort of processed food. But again, if people are, right, like, you know, if you wear a continuous glucose monitor, you know, you can see sometimes, hey, I ate a banana. Boom, I got spiked up pretty high there. I mean, so there's different things there that, and we've had a few people on the podcast also that were kind of against the saying that the sugar from fruits is not much different than the sugar, that, you know, other kinds of sugars. Obviously there's fiber in fruits and things like that. So I think it's a little bit different. But yeah, certainly many people could debate that. But I think there should be sort of a layer where it's like vegetables are above fruits, right? And so I think your scoring system is starting to show that a little bit. So I think that's cool. Yeah, I agree. And keep in mind, this is the nutritional value. It's not preference, right? Like I like fruit more than vegetables. I mean, I don't know if- Sure, they taste better with sweeter, yeah. It's much easier to eat fruit than it is to eat vegetables. But we're talking about the nutritional value and the nutritional content in these foods, right? And I think that's what an important distinction. Yeah, yeah, really good stuff, really good stuff. So what's some general advice then for people listening now? They want to obviously be healthier. All of our listeners here want to improve themselves, want to better their lives. Kind of general advice. Most of our listeners are in the United States, hopefully not eating the standard American diet. But yeah, that and as well as, I'd also would love to hear any other stories you have or anything related to kind of creating these new guidelines and working with the government and any challenges or stories you might have around that. Sure, I think at a high level, there's a few things I would do and maybe your listeners are doing this, but this is the simple low hanging fruit. So reduce the ultra processed or the highly processed foods in general. That's a huge, huge lever because like I said, the majority of our diet is ultra processed. Cut these things out. So if you're going to cut out. Yeah, I was just going to say real quick. So I think we throw around the word ultra processed food a lot. And I think a lot of people don't realize like, that means bread, that means pasta, right? Like that you're buying in the store and they don't think of it as that a lot of times, right? They hear ultra processed food and they think, oh, that's like a Twinkie or something like that. And that's like a cookie or a Twinkie or something. But I think there are things like bread that so many people are just eating every single day over and over and that is an ultra processed food, right? Are there others that are very common like that that you see that people don't really realize? Yeah, actually most of the breads in the market are probably ultra processed, but some of them aren't, of course. So it's the same thing with pastas. You can get, I mean, in general, pasta is not an ultra processed food. So just the pasta itself is not, it's a processed food. However, there are, if you have the mixed dishes, almost every mixed dish is gonna be an ultra processed food. But I would say this, when you're cutting out ultra processed foods, think of the worst offenders. So think of those products. I think there's a reason why those are named. They are the worst offenders, the Twinkie, the Donuts, the chips, the crackers are a big one. They're crackers and pretzels, right? What would you say about these avocado oil potato chips or olive oil potato chips that are just on the label, they just have potato, olive oil, salt? Sounds good. Still, still bad. So here's the thing. The chip, okay. I think the olive oil potato chips are gonna be better, slightly. But it's not a huge difference because the main issue is that these are, they're fried with tons of oil on them. So, and they're very crisp, they're very palatable, right? Like I can't eat a chip and put it down. So if you're trying to, I mean, I don't think a little bit is gonna be a problem. And in fact, if you're gonna have an ultra processed snack food, I would do a potato chip. Like it's the potato, there's a lot of potassium there. It's not the worst offender. But these refined grains, like these, they're cookies, crackers, cake. The sugar sweetened beverages, sweetened beverages in general are really bad. They're liquid calories. Liquid calories have just repeatedly in every study shown to be the worst offenders, worse for metabolic health, over consumption. They don't satiate you at all. Right, so there's all those foods, I think that, so reduce the ultra processed foods. Next thing is really reduce refined grains. So this is, I think, more what you're getting at. So there's a lot of refined grains that are not ultra processed. White rice is not, right? White bread, if it's just flour, even refined sugar, so added sugar is not ultra processed. It does not make a food ultra processed to have refined sugar. So there's a huge, I think, opportunity to cut back on these refined carbohydrates. Those are big offenders too. So reducing the refined carbohydrates, switching them for whole foods, right? Or whole grain if you're eating grains, right? In other words, I think eating these two principles, which we talked about the guidelines, I think that eating, having protein and fiber rich food, whole foods in every meal is good for satiety. It's going to help you feel satiated. So just having a lot of, you know, having, making sure you have a non-starchy vegetable and a protein rich food in every meal is gonna go a long way. So those are the basics, that's what I would kind of focus on. I think there's a lot of other nuance you can get into, but in general, you know, if you're more plant-based, you can do that with plant-based. You still can cut out the most problematic foods and have a lot of legumes, nuts, and seeds, get your protein needs met. If you're more animal-based and you're keto, or you're low carb, you can do the same thing, but replace them with nuts, seeds, avocados, meat, dairy, fish, eggs, right? There's ways to do it, and depending on your preference, and I think that's the most important thing that allows room for people to sort of eat what works for them, because the key thing about sort of a healthy diet has to last long term. You can't just do it for a few weeks, and you're not gonna just be cured of your, whatever it is that you're going through, right? It's really about what can you maintain. So I would not try to fight your natural preferences too much, right? You gotta sort of accept what works for you and find something, you know, that you enjoy and that you can keep, stick to. Okay, guidelines. I was involved specifically writing the vegan-vegetarian section, which was about how do you do this in a way that makes sure you're nutritionally adequate? I also wrote this brief section on nutrition throughout the life course, so how do the needs vary when you're an infant, you know, child, adolescent, you know, adult, getting into older age, et cetera. So I loved the process, like for me it was an honor. I think I was expecting, anticipating a lot of controversy because that's what has happened, like the whole thing has been controversial, the fact that we were not taking up the previous report. And I, you know, I spoke with Christopher Gardner, who was on the previous report at length. We had a three hour conversation on Simon Hill's podcast, you can check it out, just came out last week. So there are plenty of, I think, things to debate, but I think the big message of eat real food variety of minimally processed whole foods, prioritized protein and non-starchy vegetables at every meal, reduce the ultra processed foods, reduce the refined grains, those are two unique things. Previous guidelines did not call out these highly processed foods and refined grains the same way. We really called it out, added sugars, stricter limits on added sugars. So I think those are all positives. Now, if you get into like, you know, butter and beef tallas listed, I don't think those are health foods, like I have butter for flavor, but I don't think you're fooling anyone. Like I think an olive oil is going to be better than, you know, in terms of health wise, probably than a butter or a talla. But yeah, I think they're in general a big step forward. And hopefully, hopefully they start moving the needle. I think a lot of people don't follow the guidelines, but these influence policies. So what people eat at school, what kids eat at schools, right? I have two kids in public schools, their foods are pretty bad. And so having improving quality of the diet, if they can, if we can do that, that's going to be great. You know, changing incentives, you know, what people purchase with SNAP. Yeah, we got to get soda off of there, man. We got to get soda off of, like you just said, the sugary drinks. And we're subsidizing, you know, the most vulnerable population and they're getting soda. You know, I think in the book, Food Fixed by Dr. Mark Hyman, he mentioned a stat, I may be getting it a little bit wrong, but it was something like 10% of Coca-Cola's US revenues came from food stamps or something crazy like that, which is why. Obviously, they're probably lobbying very hard to keep it on there. But yeah, those are things that, man, we got to make those changes. Such a huge problem. Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest profits, yeah, I don't know the exact number, but it is true. Coca-Cola gets a huge amount of profit from SNAP purchases. So it is our tax dollars funding Coke and facilitating diabetes and obesity and the associated health care costs, right? So I think that's a pretty no-brainer. A lot of states have started to do this. They've already proposed policies to restrict sodas in SNAP. I was, you know, asked by a few different legislators. I spoke to one, we get feedback about how to make a certain policy. So that's happening. It's, I think it's a big step forward. And hopefully at the national level, if there's enough buy-in, that can sort of happen. Military meals, what people eat in the military, even in prisons, that can change. So lots of levers. I hope that it's implementing. Now, the main sort of thing I want to highlight is we need to have funding for it. Like there are, there is a lot of savings in getting people healthy, but you got to invest upfront to make sure everyone can come up, can, can, all the schools, like they're not going to have cafeterias. They're not going to have kitchens necessarily where they can prepare all the food fresh. So we need to have investments to help every school or every, you know, population be able to get the food that they need. Yeah, 100%. And last question for you, I wanted to get your opinion on this. So I was in a group yesterday and, you know, these are guys who are all, you know, kind of like successful entrepreneur type of people and they're sitting around, they're all talking about how they want to be healthier and health is so important. And they weren't drinking sugary sodas, but I look around the room and I see five Coke zeros, you know, in front of five different people there. So this seems to be one where it's like, oh, it's zero calorie, it's not going to make me gain weight. What's your opinion on the diet soda Coke zero, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think that it's better than the sugar sweetened beverage. So I think that if you're going to drink a soda, diet soda is better. But there is some concern, you know, the WHO just put out guidelines looking at this and they actually recommended to limit the non-caloric sweeteners. And it depends on the one like, monk fruit is not going to be the same. I think it's probably much safer than some of the other ones like aspartame and others. So it depends on that. But in general, I think if that's what you need to, you're just like, you're really like you can't do without the soda. I think going to a low calorie or non-caloric sweetened Coke zero, I think that's probably a step in the right direction. I just think that there's a lot of hidden phosphorus in those now. Debate about how bad that is, I don't know, but there is some risk there, maybe with bone health. In general, it's not usually, they're still part of like these dietary patterns where you're having junk food. So it's like, I don't know if it's like you associate that, but you're going to have fries and a burger with it or pizza or something. Like there's potential that risk. And then there's a little bit of a risk with the sweet taste preference. So you're sort of being sensitized to really like the sweet flavor. So it could prevent you from just being able to appreciate less sweet things. So I think that that's, it's a reasonable thing. So in general, I think it's optimal to have water, right? I think that that's a better, it's better for you. But I would say that the risk of, okay, there's also some cancer risk. I don't want to get it all, I don't know the evidence very well, but in general, there is an increased risk for some of these for cancer as well. So I would say if it works for you and it's what helps you get off of sugars and beverages, that's great, but aim for water if you can. Yeah, yeah, I really agree with that. Water is obviously the best. I do perfectly fine. I seem to do perfectly fine with both Stevia and monk fruit. Those are definitely my two favorite sweeteners if I have to sweeten anything. And in fact, the products that we put out on peak performance, any of the protein powders or things like that, any kind of sweetener, it's always going to be Stevia or monk fruit that we use. And I have no issues with those ones. But again, water is the best, obviously. No question about that. Ty, this has been awesome. I'm sure people are going to want to follow you and learn more. Shout out where people can follow you and your show and all that. Yeah, I mean, you can go to tybeal.com. That's T-Y-B-E-A-L.com. All the links are there. And then on socials, it's Tybeal-P-H-D. And yeah, check it out. Thanks for having me on, Talora. Oh, this has been great, man. I really appreciate what you're doing. Really appreciate the transparency. Love the scoring system that you're putting out there. I think this is really important work. Love the work that you're doing with the government. We need more people like you helping to advise on our food and health policies. So really appreciate you. Thanks so much for coming on. Highly encourage people to follow you and check out your stuff and listen to your podcast as well. And yeah, I hope we can do this again sometime. Sounds good. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would really mean a lot to me. If you would forward this episode along to any friends, family members, anyone that you think that would get value out of it and learn something important, the mission at Peak Performance is to help people prioritize and transform their health. And so if you think someone will get value, please, please, please do forward this episode along to them. Also, if you could please rate and review and subscribe on whatever podcast player you are listening to this on, we would greatly appreciate that as well. It means a lot. And I want to tell you about a couple of new products that we just released. You can get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com. That's B-U-Y peakperformance.com. We just released a brand new grass-fed beef protein isolate. This is my favorite new protein powder because it's great for muscle building and recovering and all that kind of stuff. But it doesn't give the stomach discomfort and gas that a lot of people get from different types of proteins, like whey protein, some types of plant proteins, you can do the same as well. It seems to be really, really easy on the stomach while still giving all the great benefits of muscle building and everything else that you want from taking in adequate protein. 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