How to Eat for Strength, Metabolism, and Longevity

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:00)
What is the truth about nutrition is three things. One, we should eat food. Most of what Americans and increasingly the world is eating is technically not food. Food is medicine. It's information, it's instructions, it's code. It literally interacts with your body in so many different ways. And the third principle is personalization. Everybody different.

**Layne Norton** (0:22)
If you're getting in that one gram per pound of body weight, for the vast majority of people, that's gonna be more than enough for you to really maximize the benefits of protein.

**Michelle Shapiro** (0:32)
Just cutting things for the sake of cutting them is usually really harmful. So when people are learning about something online and they're like, oh, all carbs are bad or all fat is bad or women don't need that much protein, just arbitrarily cutting an entire macronutrient from your diet, I think it bears a lot of consequences.

**Alan Aragon** (0:51)
Is this the right kind of diet that's gonna get me to my goals? And what people don't realize is that once you get certain things down, there's elements there that are highly flexible.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:04)
I have one final question. What does Forever Strong mean to you? You know, one of the things that I was thinking about for this Forever Strong Experience is people have hundreds, not hundreds, that's a gross exaggeration, lots of health and wellness books on their shelf. You know, I probably have, I don't know, 75 And the question is, what makes it so difficult to follow, and where do people go wrong?

**Alan Aragon** (1:37)
Okay, well, first of all, the body is just complex.
The bodily systems, biological science is totally complex. It's not necessarily a one plus one equals two type of thing all the time. And so that's one of the big reasons is that the human organism, we just haven't figured it out completely. There's a lot of gray area, a lot of learning to do, a lot of research to do. And the second reason is that people don't necessarily have the skills or the tools to sniff out the stuff from what's solidly evidence-based. And even learning what does evidence-based even mean, that's a whole thing unto itself. And then I guess the third reason for confusion is nutrition is a very sort of personal and emotional type of thing. And so when people do well for themselves, they figure that, okay, well, hey, I've gotten in shape or I've gotten really healthy. Therefore, I'm an expert at nutrition because I know myself. And so people have this tendency to figure, hey, if it works for me, it's got to work for everybody else. And then they basically start evangelizing. And that's just not an objective way to go about things. And I think it's a mix of those things as to why everybody is so confused.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:07)
Do you think that there's... So basically what I'm hearing you say so far is that the human body is complex and there's probably a ton of different ways to do it right, whether it's keto or whether it's carnivore, who knows, right? Everyone can do it their own way. But the mass of information out there, there's probably a really big challenge in identifying the good information versus someone of the hype information. Is that fair to say? That's fair. Okay.
If that is like our baseline understanding, do you think that once people identify the direction that they're going to go, do you think that there is one thing that holds people back in general from making progress?

**Alan Aragon** (3:58)
I think it's a dual matter of knowledge and priorities, really.
I've worked with so many people, worked with so many different groups of people, from just elite types of competitors, to just regular soccer moms, soccer dads type of thing. And the big thing that separates them is kind of knowledge, knowing what they're doing, and also how far up in their priority list is the transformation of their bodies or their health. So unless people can put that as the very top priority, they're always going to have things in their lives, whether it's work-related or whether it's home-related, that are going to distract them from the goal. So I think those are the two things that need to be in place. Some basic real knowledge, some effective knowledge, and then just the prioritization of what needs to get done. Because I always say that it's really tough to change a single habit. Like one single habit is tough to change it. When you want to change the body, you have to change your entire schedule. You have to transform your schedule. You have to transform a whole set of habits. So it is a colossal project to change the body. And people don't have an appreciation for that when they're just kind of walking into it and expecting things to just happen.