Rudy Leibel, M.D.: Finding the obesity gene and discovering leptin

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
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The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey, welcome to this episode of The Drive. On this episode, I interview an amazing scientist and a very dear friend, Dr. Rudy Leibel. Rudy's a professor at Columbia University, where his work has focused primarily on type two diabetes and obesity. I've known Rudy for quite a while, probably about six years now, maybe a little longer. We worked together very closely back at the Nutrition Science Initiative, where he was one of the very important collaborators in one of the more theoretical experiments that we did. Rudy and I have always just had a ton of fun just hanging out over great meals and great wine and great beer, talking about science, and so I thought it might be fun to try to reproduce some of those discussions here. A couple of things. First, we recorded this on a Friday afternoon on the Upper East Side, and you'll probably notice a little more noise than usual just on account of the street noise, so apologies for that.
Second point is, we spend quite a bit of time, probably about the first hour and 10 hour and 15 minutes, just talking about the discovery of Lepton, for which Rudy played arguably the single most important role. Obviously, many people played a role in the discovery of Lepton, but in many ways, Rudy was the chief architect of that, and certainly inside of the scientific community, he is largely regarded as that, though unfortunately, history may write that story a little bit differently.
So for those of you listening to this, who don't really, really get off on geeky science and knowing the nuts and bolts of all of the experiments and how one found this gene and the difference between a southern blot and a northern blot in a DNA sequence, you might just want to skip to about an hour 15 when we get to the other stuff. But that said, if you really are interested in science, I think there's a lot to be gained from listening to these discussions because, you know, that's certainly something I plan to do a lot of is interview scientists. And part of that is kind of understanding their stories. Again, a lot of what we talk about in this post is technical. I'm hopeful that in the show notes, we'll be able to provide a lot of sort of the necessary glossary to make it a little easier to ingest. I don't do a great job. I apologize of trying to clarify terms. Occasionally, I remember that not everybody knows what hyperphasia means, and I explained that that means eating too much. But again, I apologies for that, and just look to the show notes if you want clarification on anything.
We get into a lot of discussion around obesity, the genetics of obesity and the regulation of obesity. How much of this is regulated centrally, meaning in the brain, versus peripherally, everywhere outside of the brain.
We talk a lot about energy expenditure, and for those of you who are really interested in this science, Rudy gives a great explanation of the two techniques that are used to measure energy expenditure, known as indirect calorimetry and doubly labeled water.
We talk about a number of genes that are known to predispose to obesity, some very acutely and some very crudely, like the FTO gene. And we of course talk a lot about insulin resistance, which in many ways is sort of a bit of a paradox, because on the one hand, if you're insulin resistant, you technically shouldn't be able to get fat. But of course, many insulin resistant people are able to get fat. They do accumulate adipose tissue. What else can I say about this? I guess those are kind of the most important things I'd say to guide you. So in summary, if you really don't want to hear about how leptin was discovered, skip to an hour 15 If you do, sit back and relax. The other highlight of this was it was the first time I ever gave Rudy a Topo Chico. He loved it. And I think I've got another convert. So anyway, hope you enjoy this. And without further ado, here is my lovely discussion with the amazing Dr. Rudy Leibel. All right, Rudy, how are you?