#1267 - Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Four, three, two, one.

And we're live. All right, so to set this up, when Gary was on last, Gary Taubes, Stephan, how do I say your last name?

Stephan Guyenet (0:18)

Stephan Guyenet.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

Guyenet.

Stephan Guyenet (0:20)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Guyenet.

Stephan Guyenet (0:21)

It's like DNA.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

Like DNA but with a G.

Stephan Guyenet (0:24)

Right.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Got it.

When you were on last, Stephan had some opposition to some of the things that you were saying. We talked about getting him on and you on together. We finally pulled it off. There was a lot of wrangling. There was a lot of back and forth and cat wrangling, but we got it. We're here.

Give me your position on... This is all for folks listening. This is all about obesity and the mechanism for obesity. Is that fair to say?

Stephan Guyenet (0:56)

Yeah, yeah, so essentially, the main points that we want to talk about today are...

Joe Rogan (1:01)

Try to keep this a fist from your face.

Stephan Guyenet (1:02)

Okay, sure.

Joe Rogan (1:03)

Just pull it, move it around.

Stephan Guyenet (1:05)

What causes obesity and what causes insulin resistance, which is behind a lot of our chronic diseases that are common in society.

Joe Rogan (1:13)

And please give us your background.

Stephan Guyenet (1:16)

Yeah, so I have a BS in biochemistry, a PhD in neuroscience. After getting my PhD in neuroscience, I went on to study the neuroscience of obesity at the University of Washington, and particularly the brain circuits that regulate body fatness. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to talk about those today.

And then I went on to become a science consultant, science communicator, and write a book called The Hungry Brain that is my attempt to explain for a non-specialist audience what causes obesity, and yeah, so that's my background.

Joe Rogan (1:55)

Now, what is your disagreement with Gary's position?

Gary Taubes (1:59)

Everything. Everything?

Stephan Guyenet (2:00)

Yeah, so how about I just... Can I start by explaining what I believe causes obesity? I'm going to be long-winded here, is that okay?

Joe Rogan (2:09)

It's okay, go right ahead. We have hours.

Stephan Guyenet (2:11)

Okay, cool. So first, a little bit of housekeeping. I'm going to be citing a lot of evidence today.

Just please bring this up to your face.

Joe Rogan (2:19)

Just move it around. If you want to sit back, just take it.

Stephan Guyenet (2:21)

Perfect, beautiful. Okay, I'm going to be citing a lot of evidence today and I want people to be able to follow along at home.

And so I've put many of the references that I'm going to be citing on...

Joe Rogan (2:31)

Just do that so it doesn't cover your face.

Stephan Guyenet (2:34)

All right, I put a lot of the references that I'm going to be citing on my website, stephanguyenet.com, or if you don't feel like spelling my name, you can go to wholehealthsource.org.

And I have a numbered list of topics there.

And I'm going to be calling out numbers. Just scroll down to the number that I referred to, and the references are all there. Second thing I want to say that I want to be really clear about today is that I'm not here to be the anti-low carb guy.

I think low carb diets are a valid tool for controlling body fatness and controlling blood sugar. I'm not here to talk anybody out of being on a low carb diet. What I am here to try to talk people out of is some of the mythology that has accumulated around the low carb diet.

Okay. So I want to get started with an analogy to help people understand why the brain is important in obesity. So imagine you're an alien coming down from outer space and you want to understand what's going on on earth. And you notice that on the highway, some cars are traveling faster than others. Some cars go faster, some cars go slower, and you want to figure out why. And so you go and you start studying the tires of the cars. Because obviously the amount of force that is exerted by the tire onto the asphalt is the thing that determines the speed of the car. We know this, this is just physics. And so you study the tires and you study the tires and you study them and you never figure out why some cars go faster than others. Now, why is that? The reason is that you're studying the wrong part of the system. If you want to understand the, why some cars go faster than others, you have to understand the part of the system that regulates speed and that is the person behind the wheel. And so in this analogy, the tires are fat cells and the person behind the wheel is the brain. There has been tons of research on fat cell biology, on what factors put fat in fat cells, what take it out. There has been tons and tons of research on that and it's intuitively obvious that we should be studying that to understand obesity, right? But in fact, all of that research has yielded very little insight into why some people are fatter than others.