Stanford Nutrition Scientist Reveals How to Build the Perfect Diet for YOUR Body | Dr. Christopher Gardner

Shawn Stevenson (0:00)

You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson.

Welcome to The Model Health Show. We are all human beings. We're all the same species. We share pretty much the same genetic information with some minor variations here or there. But being that, we are so similar. Couldn't we ascertain that there is a perfect diet for us as human beings? There are certain foods that just help us to thrive, that help us to work better than everything else.

Does that perfect diet exist? That's what we're talking about today. And for this purpose, I sought out someone who's arguably the most prestigious expert in this subject. Somebody who has decades, decades of experience in nutrition science, in teaching at the highest levels at Stanford University, and running clinical trials. The most well-constructed studies ever with human subjects to get the data.

All right, so, if there's a perfect diet for us, this guy's gonna know about it. And so I'm very, very grateful and excited to share this conversation with you today. And without further ado, let's dive right in with our special guest and topic of the day. Dr. Christopher Gardner is a renowned nutrition scientist and professor of medicine at Stanford University. For more than 30 years, he's been a key faculty member at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and he's led over 25 human nutrition intervention studies, including trials of the Mediterranean diet, ketogenic diet, vegan diet, low-fat and low-carb diets, and their effects on cardio-menabolic outcomes. He's a frequent contributor to major media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and more for his expertise. And now he's here to share his new project, Food Sense, so we can finally understand what to eat and why. Let's stop in this conversation with the incredible Dr. Christopher Gardner. Professor Gardner, good to see you.

Christopher Gardner (2:28)

Shawn, happy to be here.

Shawn Stevenson (2:30)

Awesome. Big question, have we finally discovered what the best diet is for human beings?

Christopher Gardner (2:36)

Oh, actually I have it in my back pocket. I'm gonna tell you what it is.

Shawn Stevenson (2:39)

Let me see it.

Christopher Gardner (2:40)

Yeah, so in the back pocket, let me read, I have this perfect breakfast, and I have a perfect lunch, and I have a perfect dinner. And let's say if I had that, would you eat that every day for the rest of your life? Oh my God. Same breakfast, same lunch, same dinner every day. No, that would be so boring. Okay, so some people want the super food elixir of longevity. So I'll just have chia seeds, or I'll just have soy, or I'll just have something.

And then they use it as an excuse to eat crap the rest of the day. So that won't work either. And even if we did find that fountain of life, longevity diet, you're still going to have to exercise and sleep and be social and fit it into everything else. So no, you should stop looking. It's not out there. But if it were, what would be nice is there wouldn't be one. There'd be a Mediterranean one, an Asian one, an African, a Latin American, a Middle Eastern.

You know, they talk about paleo diets. There's a really good YouTube from several years back where somebody says there was never a paleo diet. There were like eight paleo diets. If you looked on every continent, there were paleo-lithians living on whatever was local and seasonal. And that worked for them while they lived there until we got here today and got super foods and longevity diets and miracle cures. So actually, I don't have that in my back pocket. Sorry, I lied.

Shawn Stevenson (4:11)

Well, I appreciate you even considering this because this is what... And you know this, a lot of people are looking for that thing. Like, what should I eat? Just tell me what to eat and I'll do it. And you are really helping us to understand that there isn't this kind of one perfect cookie cutter diet that if you eat this diet, you're going to get all the health benefits that you can imagine.

There are a variety of diets. Humans have tried, I say, tried to eat everything at some point, and they figured out what works in the context of the environment that they were living in, right? And so this is one of the things I really admire about your work as well. It's like, there aren't these hard and fast rules. There are more of these pillars that you talk about. And I want to talk about some of those pillars if that's okay with you. I want to ask you specifically about context. Context matters. Let's talk about this pillar.