AMA #66: Optimizing nutrition for health and longevity: myth of a "best" diet, complexities of nutrition science, and practical steps for building a sustainable diet

**Peter Attia** (0:10)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything AMA episode 66 I'm once again joined by my co-host, Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we cover a topic that is generally one of the most talked about topics, and also one that comes with a lot of confusion, and that is nutrition. Given this, we wanted to do a special episode to answer any and all questions that routinely come in on this topic. In this conversation, we speak about nutrition and weight loss and weight maintenance, and how nutrition compares to exercise, the complexities of nutrition research, what, if any, is the so-called best diet, and how to think about choosing the right diet for oneself. We talk about protein, we talk about processed foods, and much more. We discuss what questions you as an individual can ask yourself to try to identify the best diet for you. If you're a subscriber and want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page. If you are not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 66

**Nick Stenson** (1:51)
Peter, welcome to another AMA. How are you doing?

**Peter Attia** (1:54)
Doing very well. Thank you for having me back.

**Nick Stenson** (1:56)
I haven't talked to you yet today, so what kind of mood would you say you're in today?

**Peter Attia** (2:01)
Oh, well, given the subject matter, I'm in a surprisingly good mood, and I've taken a couple beta blockers before, so I'm riding the cool wave, man.

**Nick Stenson** (2:12)
That's good. I was curious if we were gonna get Diplomatic Peter or Spicy Peter on this episode.

**Peter Attia** (2:19)
I don't know, actually.

**Nick Stenson** (2:21)
To be determined.

**Peter Attia** (2:23)
Yes, TBD.

**Nick Stenson** (2:24)
Perfect. So for today, we are covering a topic that as you hinted at is not one of your favorite, but we probably get asked the most amount of questions on in some form or another. It's a massive topic. It's nutrition. And we've done a ton of podcasts on this, ton of newsletters on this. And so we're not gonna be able to cover everything as it relates to nutrition. But what we did is we pulled the most common questions, themes that we get asked, and we pulled them together for this episode. So we are gonna talk about nutrition, its relationship in weight loss and weight management, how you think about it compared to exercise, the complexities of nutrition research, which is why often when we send e-mails tearing apart studies, they are typically on nutrition. What you think of as, quote unquote, the best diet. If we can even answer that, how that's different from a healthy person to someone who's trying to manage chronic disease, how people can think about choosing the best diet for themselves, obviously, we can't do nutrition without protein, which is one thing you do genuinely like to talk about, and we'll also hit some other hot button issues such as process food. So with all that said, anything you want to add before we get rolling?

**Peter Attia** (3:44)
No, let's jump into it.

**Nick Stenson** (3:46)
Perfect. Starting off, nutrition. Why do you hate talking about it?

**Peter Attia** (3:52)
Well, look, it wasn't always this way. There was a day when I really enjoyed talking about nutrition and writing about nutrition. In fact, you could argue I cut my teeth on that. That was my very first foray into doing anything publicly back in 2011 was blogging, and it was blogging mostly about nutrition. But I would say there are a handful of reasons that my interest in continuing to obsessively talk about it has sort of diminished. So you've alluded to some already. So the problem with nutrition research is that it doesn't really lend itself to having rigorous discussions on the topic. I read a really interesting and timely article the other day on LinkedIn, and it was titled something to the effect of food can't be medicine until we can research it like medicine. In fact, we should link to that article in the show notes. I mean, it was so spot on. It's like everyone loves to probably misquote Hippocrates with the let food be thy medicine line. And yeah, it makes sense in a way.