Reset Your Body's Metabolism for FASTER Weight Loss & LESS Hunger In An Era Of Ultraprocessed Foods, With Dr. Jason Fung.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, do you wanna know how to stop hunger in its tracks, control how many calories you're eating, and understand how to really reset your body's thermostat for better hunger management, better weight loss, then keep listening. I'm interviewing Dr. Jason Fung, author of The Hunger Code, and all the show notes are at bengreenfieldlife.com/hungercode. This one is great if you just can't seem to stop eating. All right, here we go. Welcome to The Boundless Life, with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.
Well, in preparation for today's guest, I've been fasting for 38 hours. I injected a few GLP-1s. I threw out all my ultra-processed food. And just doing everything, all the things. I'm kidding. My guest is Dr. Jason Fung. Jason has been on the show before. He's the author of the international bestseller, The Obesity Code. I don't think I even interviewed you about that book, Jason. I know I interviewed you about The Complete Guide to Fasting, which I still consider to be the Complete Guide to Fasting. But now you've written this book. Hold it up for those of you who are watching the video version. The Hunger Code. The Hunger Code. People get hungry. People sometimes wonder if they should be hungry. Some people don't want to get hungry. Some people like to get hungry. You explained it all in this book. So welcome back to the show, Jason.

**Dr. Jason Fung** (1:49)
Thanks. It's great to talk to you, Ben. Yeah. Yeah.

**Ben Greenfield** (1:53)
And by the way, for those of you listening in, everything that Jason and I talk about is going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/thehungercode.
And I think a really good jumping off point here, Jason, is this idea that calories are the single biggest reason that we gain weight or lose weight. And then I'm reading your book and I get to page eight, and there's like this table of countries and the number of calories eaten per day versus obesity. Tell me about this table.

**Dr. Jason Fung** (2:33)
Yeah. So, you know, what we're all taught, what we're all think is that everything depends sort of 98% on the number of calories, right? Rather than the types of calories or whatever.
And it's really what's taught to everybody. So, if you look in the past sort of 20 years, it's what the doctors were taught, it's what the dieticians were taught, it's what all the scientific conferences say, all this sort of thing. But it's actually not true at all. So, you can, you know, simply look at the number of calories that a country eats, for example. So, that takes away all their sort of individual will and all this sort of stuff. And say, who eats the most calories in the world, right? And it's, you know, it's actually not the United States. It's Buran, for example. And there's a huge discrepancy. Yeah, the US is second.

**Ben Greenfield** (3:21)
You've never been there. They must have pretty good food, though.

**Dr. Jason Fung** (3:25)
But, you know, there's a huge discrepancy in obesity rates. You know, so people will eat similar numbers of calories. So, if you look at Ireland, for example, they're actually right behind the United States. So, the United States, on average, will eat 3868 calories per day. And in Ireland, it's 3851 So, really, a miniscule, miniscule difference. But the obesity rate is 30.8% versus 42.9% in the United States.

**Ben Greenfield** (3:55)
17, let's see, 3851, 3856, a 17 calorie difference, and about a 12% difference in the obesity rate. That's crazy.

**Dr. Jason Fung** (4:04)
It's crazy, because if you go from 30 to 42%, you're talking about an increase in 33%, 35% increase in the rate of obesity based on this minuscule difference in calories, like I don't think so, 17 calories, like you know how little that really is? Or you can compare two countries like Austria and Germany, for example. So again, very, very close in the number of calories, very close in terms of the people, right? Their neighbors, right?
And it's like 37, 39 versus 36, 48 So again, probably about 80 calorie difference, but a difference of 17% versus 24.2%, right? So 7%, huge difference, right? 17%, you're talking about an increase of about 40% to get to that rate. So the whole point is that it's not simply the number of calories, there's actually a lot more to it. And you can do something like a correlation coefficient, which basically takes two variables. So calories you eat per day and obesity rate. And you can take them and make do a simple correlation coefficient. And I did that for all 162 countries that were listed in this.