#315 Main Causes of Obesity and What to Do About It - Dr James DiNicolantonio

Siim Land (0:00)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast, I'm your host Siim Land. Today, our guest is Dr. James DiNicolantonio, with who we wrote our next book together with The Obesity Fix. You can get The Obesity Fix from Amazon. This episode is brought to you by BluBlox, my favorite light and sleep optimization companies. Artificial light at night exposure is associated with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. BluBlox provides the highest quality blue blocking glasses that filter out the specific wavelengths that have been shown to suppress melatonin in studies. Melatonin is more than the sleep hormone, it's also vital for longevity, anti-aging and immunity. Artificial light exposure suppresses melatonin up to 99% and makes your brain think that it's daytime before bed. That's why I love using BluBlox, to guarantee my body is making high amounts of melatonin prior to sleep. They also have daytime lenses that you can use to reduce digital eye strain and retinal damage when working in front of a computer all day. You can get a sweet 15% discount of all the BluBlox glasses, red light light bulbs, red light devices and sleep masks if you head over to blublox.com forward slash SeamLand and use the code Seam15. That's blublox.com forward slash SeamLand and the code is Seam15 S-I-I-M-15.

James, welcome back to the show.

Yeah, so another podcast, another book.

And yeah, I think this is what's our fourth book together that we wrote, The Obesity Fix. And yeah, I mean, the title is pretty self-explanatory about obesity and losing weight. So yeah, maybe let's start with, you know, because I mean, most people have heard about like that there's the obesity epidemic, that there's many people who are overweight. But what's the actual like, I don't know, statistics and what's the actual situation right now?

James DiNicolantonio (1:45)

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, everybody gets that, you know, nowadays, most people are like overweight rather than being fit. So like about two thirds of US adults are either overweight or obese, which is obese is essentially a BMI of 30 or higher.

But I think the real, the real reason, compelling reason why we wanted to write this book is because there's sort of like a debate between, okay, do you just want to be in caloric restriction to lose weight or is it all about just like quality of food? And like this book is sort of blends both ideas together and in fact says actually both are important. And I think we did a pretty good job in sort of summarizing the data on that.

Siim Land (2:25)

Yeah, I agree that.

Yeah, I think there are like two echo chambers. One is the kind of calories in, calories out and the other one is the, I don't know, like, you know, that you only need to focus on the whole foods or you exclude carbs or certain foods, et cetera.

I mean, both have like some good, let's say, ideas and both are, you know, have things right. But there's also things that are missing in the context. And maybe like, in my opinion, they've always like just talked past each other. Like they actually like, you know, agree on some of the principles, et cetera. But they, you know, one side doesn't listen to the other and vice versa. And there's this like echo chambers and a lot of confusion for the average person who is, you know, not in like the social media sphere of looking at influencers or talking about that. And so like the actual regular person who just, you know, wants to improve their health and wants to go his way to their kind of, you know, confused of, you know, what am I going to do? And actually just end up not doing anything because of that.

James DiNicolantonio (3:24)

Exactly. Yeah. And I think, you know, both sides are correct. Like one side sort of gives the how, how to get to a calorie deficit in the correct way.

And talks about hormones and talks about metabolism and intricacies and the other side just hyper focuses on calorie deficit no matter what, even if you just eat M&Ms, as long as you're in a calorie deficit, you'll lose weight. And so, ultimately, though, we want people to be healthy, we want it to healthy, sustainable weight loss. And really that's what the obesity fix is about. Like basically, so you're not hungry all the time, you're nourishing the body with nutrient dense foods, and you're supporting muscle growth at the same time, which basically is effortless fat loss once you have more muscle, because muscle burns more fat.

And so, you know, we lay out pretty easily the strategies, the foods, the macro ratios to do to lead to effortless weight loss.