How Much Protein is Too Much Protein? ft. Dr. Mike Israetel
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This is Mythical.

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What?

Welcome to our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, the show we break down the world's biggest food debates. I'm your host, Josh Scherr. And I'm your host, Nicole Inaydi. And today we have a very special guest. He's a nutrition expert with a PhD in sports physiology, and he co-founded the diet coach and hypertrophy app, Renaissance Periodization. He's easily the tallest, richest, and handsomest Dr. Mike on YouTube. Dr. Mike Izzertel, welcome to the show.

That was a very rough intro, I feel, in a very diminutive position. And I tend to react negatively to such things. Kind of like if you poke a miniature dachshund gently with a stick, you're getting the teeth. My favorite dog! My favorite dog is the long-haired miniature dachshunds. But they can be mean. That's okay. I don't mind. Mike, you can do your own intro entirely. How would you like to be introduced? Oh my god, I was totally kidding. That was a phenomenal intro.

The fact that there are two very fit, very successful, very smart Russian-Jewish Dr. Mikes on YouTube... I know, I love it. ...is pretty incredible, and we love that for representation. We sure do. I'm not Russian, but...

And neither are you. What? You're not Russian. Do you think you're Russian? All Jews are Russian, then the pogroms put them out to Lithuania. That's not what we're here to talk about. The Jewish diaspora. Meg is the only other Russian Jew here. Meg, you're Russian? Yes. Yeah, Russian, Ukrainian, all that. Yes. What we are talking about, Mike, today, the podcast is called How Much Protein is Too Much Protein, but I want to tell you how we're getting into that because we were talking about all the silly diet trends, let's say, 20, 30 years ago, looking back at all the...

zero-fat raspberry vinaigrettes that are on shelves or the Snackwell devil's food cakes that we grew up eating in the name of the low-fat diet trends of the 90s. And every era that humans have existed in was the smartest era of that time, roughly speaking. So we were thinking about what are the dietary trends today that we're going to look back on in 20, 30 years and cringe at. And the only thing we could really think of was the incredible proteinification of the entire grocery store. Right.

But what do you think about that? I think I can't say much because I don't want to call it a conspiracy, but if I speak out of turn, Big Protein will squash me under their...

chicken and Greek yogurt scented globalist thumb. They'll find you. And I just want to say very nice, kind things about big proteins so that they don't disappear me in the middle of the night. That's how bad this trend has gotten. They are fully in control. You guys have no doubt heard the political assertion that there is a deep state underneath the actual democracy that we have. There is a deep protein state as well. And it's 10 times bigger than the deep state itself. Think about that. What are we really up against?

Well, I'm curious. Is there actual truth to what you're saying? No, absolutely not. Well, no, no, no. He's a little stinker. I like him. I think they're – not to give validation because this is how this happens with conspiracy theories. But to me, if we are talking about – I heard you and Dr. Mike Varshavsky talking about like the GLP-1 agonist and how that's going to affect the food industry. And you talked about how they're going to see new opportunity in creating these like

very hyper palatable, but macro friendly, which is to say high protein foods. And we're seeing so many of those. Every Magic Spoon cereal I'm a big fan of. The macros are incredible on it for a bowl of cereal and it tastes pretty good. Now every cereal company has come out with a macro friendly competitor to that. Like a proxy of that kind of cereal. Kellogg's, Post, they're all doing this and it's all just soy protein isolate.

And the markup on it is incredible. So the way that they can combat, you know, falling consumption of food is to mark things up with excessive protein content. So I think there kind of is a protein deep state out there. There is. It is a very good point. The good news is that there is zero conspiracy and there is 100 percent reflexive adjustment to market demand.

Companies are profit-driven enterprises, and they generally, especially over the long term and especially as an aggregate, as a whole industry, will respond very sensitively to their demands of their consumers. For example, if tomorrow everyone who went to McDonald's was a health nut and they just demanded healthy food,

This is a joke, but the day after, used as an analogy, as soon as possible, McDonald's would re-architect their entire supply chain to bring you healthy food.

There's nobody at McDonald's staff, anyone on their board, anyone in their company that when they discover that McDonald's wants to serve healthy food are like, you know what? That just absolutely degrades the tradition of our company selling junk food. That's how I brought up. That's my America. And I'm going to go down fighting. They don't care. They care that the customer is happy and the customer receives what they want. And so when human beings in the world

essentially with their dollars and their opinions tell all sorts of companies hey protein is important to me i want more protein most companies don't even really do the work of seeing you know is this like optimal nutritionally or whatever the downside is like

They don't do that work because they're not so incentivized to do that work. The upside is companies in a large capitalist society like ours just generally really trust their consumers and they're not going to assume they know better than their consumers. If you tell me you want a red Ferrari, I say yes. If all of a sudden a poop

brown Ferrari is in vogue, Ferrari's going to make their cars poop brown because that's what people want. And so the protein overconsumption situation, which isn't really a big deal, and I can speak to that at length, and I'm sure I will in a sec, but it's like, why is there protein in foods? It is not top down at all. It is entirely bottom up. People want more protein, and I'm sure we'll cover this, but sometimes they don't know why, but it's one of those flexes. It's kind of like

organic or GMO free. Those terms are loaded, unfortunately, in other ways, but they communicate something to the consumer. They communicate, I want to be a healthy person and I care. And now recently high protein has also stood up to that pedestal and said, Hey, if I'm a consumer and I care for my health, you know, I had a late night at work. I'm just trying to buy some breakfast cereal for tomorrow. I get in, I'm red eyed. I'm looking around the shelves and it's

ooh, new high-protein cereal. I'm like, you know what? I looked in the mirror earlier today. I do care about me. I care about longevity and health and whatever else. And, you know, high-protein seems like it checks that box. And enough people doing that, a lot of the cereals are high-protein. And that's how it happens with protein products. Yeah, it's interesting even seeing the way that it shifted because I remember something like Kodiak cakes. Those were so hot, what, like seven years ago? I remember them on Target. And you look at the macros, and there's maybe an additional five grams of protein per serving, which is...

a reasonable amount of protein to add to a food, but then... Especially in the morning. But then now that actual macro breakdown isn't competitive. It's been escalating like crazy because I think people are so obsessed with this intake of protein. Mike, what would you recommend for people, say general population, people who aren't interested in hypertrophy as far as like protein consumption per day? What should they be eating?

Great question, Josh. Because I want to know too. I want to know. Because we both have the same protein goals despite living wildly different lifestyles. We do. We do.

Nicole, I'm going to give you the worst answer ever. It's going to be all nuance and fluff and zero anything you can pin to. You're going to hear 20 minutes of me rambling, and you're going to be like, I don't know what that means. I'm going to use a combination of metric and imperial units in the conversion. It's going to be terrible. Fantastic. Yes. All right. So for folks that are not trying to keep a high level of muscularity on their bodies, for folks that don't resistance train consistently throughout the week, two to four times a week and even more,

As a little as half a gram of protein per pound of body weight per day can fulfill all of your health and protein needs. That means if you happen to weigh, you know, let's say 160 pounds, even 80 grams of protein per day will keep you healthy and upright and everything's going to be totally fine.

that's the answer there pretty straightforwardly. Much less protein than that is going to probably, you're going to be okay until you drop to much, much less, and then you'll have some issues. But much more protein than that can be very, very beneficial if you would like to maintain a more muscular, leaner physique, and if you want to benefit greatly from the upsides of consistent resistance training. More protein is a good idea then, and I can speak to how much and what's too much in that whole situation.

For me, like, I mean, I've seen Josh consume at any given meal time 50 to 60 grams of protein. Right? Is that fair? I try and have—I don't even like the term meal anymore, but I try and do— Feedings. Four protein feedings. Feedings. At roughly 50 grams of pop, sometimes splitting them. Right. But then sometimes when you're in a rush, it just involves you grabbing fistfuls of lunch meat and weighing them on a baking scale. I've been there, too. You know? But—

I've been told that the human body absorbs, quote unquote, only what, like 30 grams of protein, 25 grams of protein. What is the actual stats on that?

That's a great question. That's one of those myths that's been with us for a very long time. Right, right, right. I grew up with that in the 24-hour fitness. Oh, yes. That's very classic. So it turns out those studies were done generally not after resistance training, and they were done with whey protein only, which digests really quickly. And so there's only so high the spike can go until your body just can't use it enough. It's almost like saying, okay, I have one minute to tell you about a topic that

How many words can I use? Well, if you're talking to ChatGPT 4.5, in a minute, it can crap out like a million words. You can't read that fast. So you can't utilize those words. And in just the same way, if you take whey protein, which is incredibly fast digesting by itself, which is what almost all the studies did,

Yeah, man, anything above 30 grams of protein for most folks who don't resistance train, the rest of it just gets burned as fuel for the rest of your day for calories. Your body can't incorporate it because it digests so quickly. It skyrockets into your blood and your muscle cells are like, listen, we can only incorporate this so quickly. So that amount changes if you have a meal that's slower digesting. If you have some lunch meat, if you have some turkey, if you have a mixed meal of carbs, protein, fats, and protein, all of a sudden your body can quote unquote use that

double that amount of protein. And if you are larger, if you have more muscle, and if you're actively resistance training, the demand for protein goes up. And then it's like three times that number. So if I give a strongman competitor, yeah, somebody who weighs 280 pounds, who's very muscular, very big, and I give them a burrito that has tons of carbs, tons of fats, and tons of protein, I mean, they can fully utilize four muscle growth

100 grams of protein at a time, no problem. But if it's just whey protein, if they are 160-pound recreationally trained 18 to 22-year-old collegiate male, and it hits the blood really quick by itself, then anything more than 30 or 40 grams isn't bad for you, but it's just going to get burned for fuel because your cells can only absorb it.

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So the concept of how much protein is too much protein, there's never an example where like that extra 25 grams that your body doesn't absorb doesn't like go into the ether, right? Your body just uses it as fuel. So what if you have like issues with like your kidneys and stuff and too much protein can like give you a kidney stone? Because again, I'm just regurgitating stuff that I've seen online. Again, I don't have any like...

Medical training or stuff. I'm just regurgitating what I'm seeing on the internet where people are like, if you have too much protein, be careful with your kidneys. Like, is there any basis in that? There is if you have diagnosed kidney disease. If you're down a kidney from donating it to someone, then you have very special instructions that are quite different from everyone else.

Outside of that, high-protein diets, even very, very high-protein to the point of absurdity, which they've tested for months on end with folks and some number of seminal studies back about 10 years ago, there just aren't really any measurable downsides and there's no theoretical downside. Got it. So the biggest downside of eating like

400 grams of protein per day is really can be a few. One of them is you get you have to miss out on all the other food because if you eat a lot of protein plus the rest of your food, you just eat too many calories and then you're just going to gain fat. And so you say, OK, if I want 400 grams of protein a day, it means after low carb and low fat to fit it into my lifestyle.

And then it's all of a sudden like, you know, you go out with friends and they're like, oh my God, like, what are you going to order? And you're like, do they have just slab of meat in here? No, this is a normal restaurant. Like, well, I can't have anything on the menu. So it's not great from there. Another thing is, especially if it's from meat, like at some point, and Josh might relate to this a little bit, as we've all done wacky stuff in our lifting history.

You try really high-protein diets, and it's like chicken and steak. And at some point three weeks in, you're like, if I have to chew anymore, I quit everything about this. No more chewing.

And also, let's be honest, I wasn't informed in the lead up. This is a family podcast, so I'll put this as mildly as I can. Pooping and farting are somewhat related to your protein intake. And if you like having friends around, then consider very high protein diets might not do so well with your friends. At some point, there's a couple of phases of your friends just fart too much from protein. There is shock.

Then amusement. Oh, he's so funny with his bodybuilding. Then there is confusion, like why is this still happening? At some point you get into the resentment phase of like, seriously, this isn't cool anymore. And then anger, grief, sadness, and then maybe recapitulation of that cycle. Hopefully at some point you catch wind of this so that your friends don't leave you. Catch wind. That's definitely a concern. No, this actually happened to me. It's not a problem, but like...

But like you've never heard. I'm dead serious. Is it because we're at work all the time? Like you don't like pass gas? No, you're meeting a very moderate version of me in my professional life. When I was 21 years old, I was doing some German volume training. Okay, can you explain to the

to the people that don't know what that is, what that is. German volume training. Mike, forgive me if I'm stepping on some toes here. To me, it is a system of exercise that only works if you are on copious amounts of Eastern Bloc steroids where you just do 10 sets of 10 reps. Exactly.

And me as a 21-year-old shot putter, I was like, maybe I am a perfect candidate for this. And so I was eating 450 grams of protein a day. How many calories in that 450? There's no tracking when you're dirty bulking. And I was doing something called carb cycling where one day a week I would just drink two liters of Mountain Dew. I don't know. What? This is dirty. Okay, dirty bulking. Bodybuilding.com. We've all done some wacky diets. This is great. This is ethnographic.

Truly. But also when you're talking about the people around you just being, they were at first amused and then they were like disgusted with the farts. And I remember my roommate, Andrew Rickards, you met him. Oh, Rickards, yeah. Just watching me eat a two pound slab of skin on salmon like an animal. Skin on salmon. And still being a chef, I put like caramelized fennel and like roasted tomatoes on it.

Such an edge. And he still brings that up to like 15 years later. And so, yeah, we've all done some wacky stuff. My question as far as like a general population is concerned, I think it was Michael Pollan who said never before has such an unhealthy society been so obsessed with health. Fair. Is this large amount of protein intake actually causing large scale health gains for the general population? Yeah.

I know it's too early to tell and there's no studies, but like what's your prognostication on that? No, it's not. And I can explain why. It's like too much sugar equals diabetes, right? Too much fat equals heart disease. Too much protein equals question mark? So I can rewind those. Too much sugar does not equal diabetes.

Too much fat does not necessarily lead to heart disease and mostly doesn't. Okay. And too much protein leads mostly just your friends having to sit you down and keep you seated because if you stand up, the farts just continue and just try to talk some sense into you. The thing is,

There is a, so just to quickly to the sugar thing. Yeah. There's nothing inherently wrong with sugar, but sugar is really tasty. And so when people eat a lot of it, they tend to overeat on their calories and the extra calories put on extra fat. And then people very, very overweight for a long time. That causes all the bad things. Diabetes, the whole, the whole lot of it.

One of the interesting things about this is that the primary model for inducing diabetes in laboratory animals is overfeeding of saturated fat, not sugar. Interesting. Because they gain a lot of fat weight, they just get diabetic. Right. And so fats, especially if you have healthy fats like monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, olive oil, canola oil, nuts, nut butters, avocados –

then you can eat like almost all of your diet and fats and just be the healthiest person that's ever lived. It's awesome. Too many saturated fats aren't great, but you can eat a lot of them if your calories aren't overdoing it. You're good to go. The problem is you go to McDonald's and each burger has 50 grams of fat in it and you have three of them. It's the calories that end up kicking you.

No one's saying, hypothetically, you could overeat green salads and veggies and get fat. But no one's doing that. Nothing, hypothetically. Theoretically, it's possible. But nobody's going to do that because they're so filling and so low in calories. Sugars and fats are so not filling and so high in calories and so tasty, we tend to overdo it. That's really the problem. With protein, now the good news is protein doesn't have that problem. So if someone's going to be overeating sugar, overeating fat, or overeating protein,

I would prefer the over-rate protein because it's unlikely they're going to be able to gain weight. Josh, something you can probably speak to is when you're having a high protein diet, it's actually harder to

to get in a ton of calories because you're like, I could just do this with Taco Bell, but I have to labor through this three chicken breasts. And after that, your rice is like, they don't even want to eat anything else. This is terrible. And so protein, it tends to be pretty satiating compared to most of the other foods you could eat. It's not the most satiating because green veggies and fruits are actually more satiating calorie for calorie, but it's not excessive.

There's not like, you know, no one's like, you can imagine meeting someone who's just morbidly obese and you're like, how did it come to this? Like, she had all these protein shakes, you know? You're like, what? Really? They're like, no, I'm kidding. It's, you know, milkshakes that did this. So protein at least isn't very palatable in that sense, hyper palatable. So that's cool. But the problem is,

If you're resistance training, very hard, and you are really organizing your diet super well, you can get up to about a gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. So if you weigh 200 pounds, 200 grams, there is a theoretical and somewhat literature-based argument that up to maybe about 250 grams, 1.25 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day can have additional marginal benefits. Anything beyond that,

has no upsides. And a lot of these, now no downsides, but no upsides. And so a lot of the folks that end up doing this thing where they eat a lot of protein foods off the shelf at Kroger when they go shopping, but they're not resistance training. They don't have a lot of muscle. They're like, more protein's good, right? And you're like, you passed the good part like 80 grams of protein ago. And while that's not bad, there is this illusion to your guys' kind of suspicion that there may be something wrong with it to

To me, the biggest problem is people have this sort of idea kind of vibe in their mind that their health behavior, the things they do to support their health is like a little list on an iPhone with little green check marks next to it, little boxes you can check. And people generally tend to have an idea that there may be three to five of those. Like I'm active.

I resistance train, I get good sleep, I have good stress management, I eat healthy. If I check all those, I take the medications doc says I should take, I'm good to go. And the problem is because that context window is real small for most people. Well, for many people, it just doesn't exist because they're like, what's health behavior? Like, you know, nevermind. But for those that does exist,

What they get from that eating super high protein way beyond their needs vibe when they go to the grocery store and all the cereals are protein cereals, they get to have this green check mark, take one of those slots. They go, see, I'm eating protein. And then they don't fix their calorie intake. They're still eating too many super tasty foods. They're still underactive. They're still eating a lot of crap. They don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. They don't pay attention to their sleep or their stress levels. They go to the doctors two years later.

And the doctor comes back with their blood work like, listen, Phil, you're just not looking so good. And what's the first thing you hear? But I've been eating the protein cereals. And it's like, it's just a dud. You know, it's kind of like if you have, let's say, 30 bullets in your gun and you're shooting it into battle and you're killing bad guys and stuff. And then you run out of bad guys to kill, but you still have bullets. You just shoot them up into the sky. Someone's like, what are you doing? You're like, I'm helping. I'm shooting bullets. Like, what? But they're not going.

going anywhere. And so after a certain while, enough protein is just like, but you feel like you're doing stuff. So in your video game stats, you're like, you shot 50 bullets, but only 25 of them went somewhere. So I don't want people to feel like I'm eating a lot of protein. This is great. It's awesome. But after very, not so much protein, you could be using that health behavior

elsewhere. Does that make sense? Of course. 100%. And I feel like I thought that all of this protein debate was a very, very new thing, but I've been reading a great book called Revolution at the Table by Harvey Levenstein, going through how America ended up with our sort of dietary predilections. Back in, God, the 1860s, I think, Justice von Leibig, the one who discovered macronutrients effectively. Are you looking at me for confirmation? Mostly. He's also the guy who...

Remember when we made Uruguay, the quick aside, Uruguay's national pasta dish, pasta caruso? Sure. Remember that has that very specific meat extract in it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was also invented by Justice von Leibig, the father of macronutrients. Shout out to Justice. Also the father of Uruguay's national pasta dish. But anyways, fletcherizing. Does that mean anything to either of you? Fletcherizing? Fletcherizing. In the 1880s, it was a dietary trend.

It was chewing your food for so long that it physically broke down to sugar in your mouth. You chewed every bite for a hundred times or whatever. It wasn't called fletcherizing, but I literally remember my mom saying, remember to chew your food on 25 times this side and then 25 times on this side. So it digests well in your stomach.

Yeah, and Mark Twain, he had a lot of intellectuals, but he would also, part of his thing was consuming less protein because at the time they measured all the health markers of like their biggest lads in the 1800s, which were all upper class people and they were eating a lot of beef and bread. So they sort of retrofit the idea of, well, it looks like a grown man should have 150 grams of protein per day. Mm.

Meanwhile, you also had the vegetarian movement that, you know, Battle Creek Sanatorium and Corn Flakes coming out to try and get people to eat vegetarian. So you had this sort of vegetarian carnivore dichotomy back then and then people debating proteins. But my dad, I remember eating low-fat Cheez-Its.

Because at least he was eating a low-fat food, right? He, I mean, just had, you know, he was pre-diabetic, had heart disease, but at least he was eating low-fat Cheez-Its. And it, like, it gave him that thing. It was, like, the write-off. Like, people saying, at least I'm getting my protein, which is why I'm generally dubious of, you know, one of the problems today is that we've just made food taste too good with science. Hyperpalatable, ultra-processed. We've made it taste too good. So annoying. It goes down easy. Like Mike said, when you're just chewing a massive...

or piece of chicken. You get tired of it. It doesn't taste that good, but you get Quest protein chips. You get the taco Quest protein chips. Are you asking me if I could eat a ribeye or Quest protein chips? I'd eat the ribeye. Sure, but the Quest protein chips go down easy. Nicole, you may think that this is what you want, but

Tell me what I want. About 18 meals straight later, it doesn't taste the same anymore. I totally agree. I think just like keen instinct, I'm like, yeah, I'm obviously going to pick this steak. But in reality, if I'm sitting at my desk, if I'm at my job, if I have a lot of work to do, I'm not going to take out the steak knife and a fork and get to it. Grab the fistful of lunch meat you know you want. But my question is, are we just –

The same evolutionarily, and we have the same wants and same needs as all of our ancestors and all of our future ancestors. We all just want to eat carbs and salt, and we're just sort of kicking the can down the road with new dietary trends every couple decades, and humans are just sort of doomed to eat ourselves to death. Yeah.

Wow. That take got dark. I thought this was a family program. Family stuff gets dark sometimes. I guess. I guess. I could just see, you know, Lindsay, the eight-year-old being like, mommy, are we doomed to eat ourselves to death? Like no more Josh and Nicole's podcast. No more of this. What you're saying resonates and has a lot of truth in it. Absolutely.

Absolutely, humans are largely the same that we were 100,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago and 10,000 is when agriculture started to kind of become a thing slowly but surely. And agriculture was the first time in which humans were able to industrialize the process of the production of food.

Before that, it was like you found food in your environment in the literal sense of you stumbled upon it while searching for it, voraciously hungry. And so we have all these neural network subsystems in our brains that are designed to nearly instantly adjudicate whether or not a food is a good idea or bad idea to eat. And it also grades it on how good of an idea it is to eat.

And so when we have foods that are hyper palatable and very high in calories today, it's like an evolution, something we've basically almost never seen. It's like an extremely amazing thing. It's like if someone was to come up to you and say, hey, I have a mansion and trillions of dollars for you. Are you interested? You'd be like, who?

Who says no to this thing? But other than it being definitely a scam, let's say it was like Elon Musk literally came down, the real Elon Musk, a press crew. And they're like, you want to sweepstakes. Here you go. You wouldn't be like, oh, well, you know, money doesn't buy happiness. You know, we're pretty wired to think, yeah, like value is a good thing. And just the same way we're wired for an ancestral environment of mostly pulsatile starvation and plenty.

When there was plenty, guess what you did with it? You ate as much as you could so that you could develop as much body fat as possible. So when inevitably starvation was the next cycle, maybe for days, maybe for weeks, maybe for months, then you would have a high probability of survival. So we're in this environment now where capitalism and industry have made food like, I don't

mostly demonetized like uh comparatively to all of modern history certainly yeah oh my God oh my God and so you know when in our nation and almost every modern nation of the world the poorer you are statistically the more likely you are to suffer from obesity this is something that would can you imagine going back to Benjamin Franklin's time and explaining to him like you know our poor people are actually the fatter ones and he's just going to be like what

How? You're like, well, you see, food basically costs almost nothing. It's really weird, but we have other problems. He's like, well, like what? Like social media disagreements. And that's just to say we really are out of our time. You know, we evolved on biological timescales.

The new paradigm of evolution is technological and technology evolves orders of magnitudes faster. But because technology evolves so fast, we're in a hyper palatable food environment and we're sinking instead of swimming because it's really hard to resist all these super tasty, super convenient foods, mostly because we want them. Like imagine if it was really bad for you physically to spend amazing time with your closest, dearest friends, family, and children.

You'd be like, well, okay. So I'm supposed to resist that? I'm like, uh-huh. Like when grandpa calls and he's like, do you want to gather around the dinner table and share wonderful stories? And the kids would be laughing like, sorry, grandpa. No can do. It's bad for my health. Oh my God. It would feel like someone is ripping a part of you away. But that...

That drive to be social is actually newer in evolution than the drive to consume calories. Starvation is a known entity from the time when we were just DNA fragments swimming in the soup. It predates everything. Fighting your ability to eat food that's delicious is just so an uphill of a battle. It can't be exaggerated. That being said, technology adapts so quickly.

that it can help us get completely out of this entire mess in the next probably 10 years will lift all of us entirely out of it. And that transformation has already begun. Do we think it's only technology that can lift us out of it? Or is there any cultural play at this point? Because I make fun of Italians a lot for having very hard and fast rules about food, right? Don't mix cheese with faith. You cannot do this. But,

But I think there is something within having these cultural norms around food. It's the reason Starbucks is not in Italy because they would get run out of town because they have the cultural norm of going to their local coffee shop. It's the reason that if you try and stand up and eat a meal in France, people will shout you down because they're a cultural norm. Really? God, the French are so rude. You've got to sit down. They are. But I think something about these cultural norms rooting people to some sort of

behavior that is objectively healthy and also slightly, at least slightly impervious to specifically American industry and capitalism as in Italy shutting Starbucks. I think there's something to that, but is that just like shooting BB guns at the tank of American industry, putting a KFC into your town?

I think we should take over the whole world and install puppet KFC government. Jesus Christ. Not the colonel. Not the colonel. My chicken. No, you're totally right, Josh. It's a tough battle. Can cultural practices gain traction? Yes. Can they have marginal effects? Yes.

Does hyper palatability adapt faster in the consumer environment than culture takes root or can even at maximum sustain itself? Yeah. By like a factor of 10.

And so there are differences that you can instantiate right now into your own cultural practice that will 100% help you resist being overwhelmed by this. And there's an even more powerful tool in cultural practice. It's called knowing what your body needs and nutrition and just not buying everything at the store. Listen to your body. The dark side of capitalism is like, if you want it, they're going to give it to you. And it could be toxic for you, but you got dollars and they got the product.

The really wonderful thing about capitalism and very different from most other systems, nobody forces you to do anything. You know, people say the junk food industry is this crazy thing. Guys, have you ever seen a junk food pusher or a junk food dealer? Someone's like, hey, you're going to try this Pepsi? You're like, well, no, sir. With a coat? Yeah. See, I've got it all.

He's got like Pepsi's regular full sugar Pepsi's on one side and full fat Cheez-Its on the other. And you're like, I went to school. McGruff the crime dog told me I should be talking to you. But that does look tasty. I guess Cheez-Its inside of a man's coat is kind of like, I don't know. Yeah, they're going to get steamy in there. Mm-hmm.

But at the same time, other countries, I think, in fact, most other countries in the world do have strong regulation against junk food marketing to, say, children, which America doesn't. So I think there are practices that we've let in that do. I honestly don't understand that because children don't have purchasing power.

Children don't have money. It is illegal for children to acquire money because we have child labor laws, which I think are very good laws because exploitation of children workforce is crazy. But because we don't – like that's the thing is mom and dad make the choice. And if the children are screaming about they want McDonald's, guess what you can do, mom and dad? You just don't get a McDonald's. Because if your kids don't learn today that they don't get everything they scream about, how is college going to work? I mean, my God. Probably not well. Yeah.

I mean, gee, right? Like at some point you got to grow up to the idea that there are things you want, there are things you need, and the intersection of those is contextual. Sometimes the intersection is like, yep. And sometimes it's like, that's just not how this works. And I do feel for parents that have a lot going on and the extra noise of their kids clamoring for McDonald's. So sometimes it just shuts them up. And the thing is, there's nothing wrong with a few days a week taking your kids to McDonald's and getting them a happy meal so they can be happy. Absolutely.

It's when it's happening three meals a day. I don't want to say excuses, but the reasoning for that starts to become a little bit wacky. And the advertising problem is, well, mom and dad, you're the people going to the store. You have 100% purchasing power. One of my, well, geez, my partner in crime, co-founder of RPCO, Mr. Nick Shaw, he

He was messing around with his son. He has little kids. They're growing up now, but a few years back he was like, Hey buddy, how much money do we have? And the kids started speculating and he's like, no, you don't have any money. I have the money. Mommy and I have the money. It was hilarious, but that's really the thing. And so at the end of the day, it's really tough to have a regulatory environment.

that prevents people from accessing what they want and what they're going to buy anyway. Like there's one interesting fact in economics of this kind of thing, which is that as you raise junk food prices,

The elasticity is actually such that a lot of people just keep buying it, even though it's more expensive. And they complain that it's more expensive, but they're still going to buy it. Obviously, if you made Cheetos $1,000 a pack, no one would buy them anymore except Elon Musk or something. But within normal boundary layers of what is politically feasible to regulate as far as price controls, this stuff has very much less of an effect than you would think. At the end of the day, we're dealing with just price.

brutal evolutionary drives. Like this is how humans are wired. And luckily the way to fight those is through, this is going to get creepy. I am the evil Mike of the two Dr. Rikes after all pharmacology. Now, obviously education and determination to eat well are always going to work. Cultural factors are amazing. Um,

they need help. They need help. Machine guns are cool. Little cannons are cool. But when the main battle tanks roll up, you're like, all right, now we're in the war. The main battle tanks and the super fighter jets here are going to be pharmacology and eventually genetic engineering. And that's going to be a huge deal because with genetic engineering, we're going to be able to modify ourselves to be more reflective of our modern environment instead of having to struggle desperately against an environment that just kind of left us behind.

You want to move off the grid, go to a commie and raise some goats? I've been telling you I want to do this for months. That's the only move. And now you tell me you want to do it? Well, thanks for spurring us on, Dr. Mike. Are they going to be genetically engineered goats that are hyper-intelligent? You have no idea how many. You can do that part. You want to do that part? That'll be your useful. 18 nipples on these goats. The cheese will be incredible. All right, Nicole and Mike, we've heard what you and I have to say. Now it's time to find out what other wacky ideas are rattling out there in the universe. It's time for a little segment we call Opinions Are Like Casseroles.

All right, first up we have, she's making me say this, at Lana Condor, the number one fan of a hot dog is a sandwich has written in, keto isn't as healthy as people think. Dr. Mike, what say you? There's a lot of truth in that. Keto is plenty healthy if it's in a calorie controlled context.

And if you're eating mostly healthy foods, you can eat very low carbohydrates and be very healthy. The thing is, it's that same thing we were talking about earlier. People say, I'm eating keto, and it's this magic checkbox. But for a lot of people, the magic checkbox is like,

It's not just one check mark. It's like three of the five or four. They think keto is a panacea. So once I'm doing keto, I just have to care about anything. So you'll see them eating like, well, literal hot dogs and dipping them into like cheese sauce. And someone's like, no, I don't know much about nutrition, but like that seems not like the best thing to eat. And like, no, no, it's okay. I'm keto. You're like, okay. Well, I think keto says that carbohydrates subscribe to a unique poison and they're not.

For some folks, can keto be an excellent way to manage their hunger signaling and make sure they don't overeat? Absolutely. And if you eat mostly healthy foods and get some greens in there for the vitamins and minerals, keto is amazing. But is keto one of those things that you're just going to do it and it's going to be magical? Like, it's not enough, man. You get rid of your carbs. You've just gotten rid of your carbs and accomplished almost nothing outside of that.

Were you carb-phobic? Would you consider yourself carb-phobic? I think we have all, I think we all have internalized carb-phobia, especially growing up in Orange County. And literally a soccer mom in a yellow H2 Hummer after a basketball game drove us through the In-N-Out drive-thru and she ordered a 4x4 protein style and looked at me like a 9-year-old and said, a fat 9-year-old by the way,

and just said, the bun's the only bad part for you. Yeah, she had a southern accent in Orange County because they're just kind of like so Republican that they talk like they're southern. Excellent. But yeah, but that's the thing that I think we all grew up with in our era. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like whenever I was doing keto, I was, what was it? I would say, I'm keto, but I drink. Yes, isn't that great? It was great. Um,

It did help me, like you said, surprisingly, it helped me realize what hunger was, which I wasn't aware of before I was doing it.

So I don't think it's quote unquote healthy, but for someone who, you know, is in the food industry and is constantly surrounded by the most ridiculous, crazy foods. Literally our tagline of Mythical Kitchen is dreams become food. Literally the Disneyland of food is where we work. I think doing keto made me realize, of course, it made me realize what hungry Nicole and satiated Nicole was. So it helped me a lot.

But I will agree that it's not necessarily the healthiest thing. If you're eating cheese and bacon and hot dogs every day, you're going to have a bad time. But if you incorporate, like you said, your veggies and your proteins and a little bit of fat and avocado every now and then, I loved it when I was doing it. I really did. To me, that's any diet, right? I've known people who are jacked and fit, who are keto, who are vegetarian, who eat eight times a day, who eat one time a day. And I think anytime you change a stimulus and do keto regularly,

Lean Gains Diet. God, that's a throwback. Paleo. Any of these. When you change the stimulus on your normal diet of I'm just eating whatever, you learn what it actually means to think about your food. So I think any of these diets could have had that same effect for you. I totally agree. That's very well put. I have another opinion here. Galutin says everyone is obsessed with protein when they should be obsessed with fiber. This is resident fiber dad Noah Galutin. We love him. You know,

Obsessions are maybe worse than casseroles. So fiber is awesome and it's super healthy. And it's amazing because a lot of the high fiber foods like whole wheats, veggies and fruits come stock not just with fiber, which is awesome, but with tons of vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, which are certain kind of plant chemicals that are really good for you. And they're really very filling for very few calories and very satiating for a long period of time.

So if you're getting your fiber through those foods, I think a little junior league fiber obsession is a wonderful thing. If you're coming home every day with a can of metal Musil and a can of, you know, Jack Daniels and getting to get no work on getting through that can one way or another, then, um, gee whiz, you know, fibers like protein at a certain level, you've had enough. And unlike protein, when you have a lot, a lot of fiber, the digestive situation becomes

You guys familiar with the term gastric motility? Like how speedily things are going through your GI tract? I can like kind of pick out the words and what they mean. Yeah, imagine those commercials for like a Drano where they show the visualization of the clogged pipe and the Drano makes it all sparkly clean. Well, fiber is like super Drano. And at some point, guess what happens to the Drano? It goes out the other end. And so if you overeat fiber, you can actually experience bloating,

Pooping, which scares people who are sitting in stalls next to you because they think World War III began. You got to do it with headphones so you don't hear the noise. That's what I do. You just have like classical music on and everyone else is suffering. Oh, gosh. Terrible. That's how I do it. So fiber, I think, is almost exactly like protein. Now, to the gentleman's point who commented that…

More people should get more fiber. And if it's through whole foods, I think that's wonderful. But obsession, gee whiz, you know, maybe we have too many obsessions nowadays and not enough concerted efforts to do better. But that's just me being an old curmudgeon-y man and shooting people's dreams down. Do you remember the TikTok trend, quote, internal shower?

Where people would drink a bunch of chia seeds? This is the thing. Well, I know it from the girl that did the protocol with the cabbage water. That's what she called... Do you know what I'm talking about? The Dr. Phil lady? No. She would make a cabbage solution out of cabbage, salt, and water. And she would sell it internal... Yeah, she would literally feed people sauerkraut and it would make internal showers. The one that I saw was just a ton of chia seeds, which are just loaded with fiber and...

And then people would just get massive diarrhea and they called it internal shower, which is way grosser than gastric motility. Anyways, they had the USDA, I think, had to like put out or the Department of Health had to put out a warning like, please don't do this. Yeah, I like fiber. I mean, listen, do I take an apple? Eat some blueberries. Do I take more fiber supplements than I do like protein supplements? No.

Like I have more protein shakes than I do a Benafiber, but I still like sometimes have a Benafiber just to like remind or like a or like an apple. Mike, you're watching me transform into the old curmudgeon in real time because my solution for almost everything is if you could just be 40 percent more normal about everything, that would be really, really cool. I think that'd be really, really cool. Well, that's our time. Dr. Mike, man, I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. This is an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. You were great.

Thank you so much, guys. This was a wonderful experience. Where can people find you? You got anything to plug? Yeah. So we have a new product, actually. Plug away. It is called the Genius Shot. Yay!

It has 23 grams of protein, zero grams of fat, zero grams of carbs. It is really tasty. It doesn't go bad for months and months outside of refrigeration. And it passes TSA clearance so you can travel with it. It makes pretty much anything, including soda and juice. And it is wonderful in every single way. So check that out. Genius shot. Just

shoot it at Google, something should come up. And also Renaissance Periodization, if you can't spell that, because I can't, RP Strength on YouTube. You'll see my giant ugly head and click on my head and maybe I'll say factual things, but we are not a family show. So make sure the kids are in another room because holy crap, some of the stuff I say, I wouldn't have said holy crap if you know what I mean.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Click on his head. God, I'm going to rip so many of those genius shots. On that note, thank you all for listening to Hot Dog is a Sandwich. We've got audio-only episodes every Wednesday, video version out on YouTube on Sunday. If you want to be featured on Opinions or like Castrols, hit us up at 833-DOG-POD1. Our number again is 833-DOG-POD1. And for more Mythical Kitchen, check out our other videos. We launch new episodes every week. See you all next time.