The High Carb vs. Low Carb DEBATE: Which One Wins For Your Metabolism? With Dr. Eric Westman & Jay Feldman

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

Eric Westman (0:05)

Lowering the metabolic rate lets us live as long as possible.

Jay Feldman (0:08)

If you look within the species that the animals have the lowest metabolic rate, they live the shortest and age the fastest.

Eric Westman (0:13)

Why then do we go into ketosis after two or three days of not eating? You call it starvation.

I call it, that's the way humans evolved. We didn't have food like now as a commodity. Some cultures where they just ate meat and never got carbs, how did they survive?

Ben Greenfield (0:30)

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.

In this episode of the Boundless Life podcast, I'm bringing back one of the more heated conversations I've hosted on the show. I'm re-airing it because the carbs are bad, carbs are good, conversation hasn't gone anywhere, it seems like. If anything, it's gotten louder and this is still the best version of it that I've heard. On one side, I've got Dr. Eric Westman. He's professor of medicine at Duke, board certified in obesity medicine and the guy who founded Duke Keto Medicine Clinic. And then on the other side, I've got Jay Feldman, neuroscience and exercise physiologist out of Miami and a proponent of the so-called bio-energetic approach, which is about as opposite as you can get from Dr. Westman. They disagree on almost everything, whether fat or glucose is the better fuel, whether a slower metabolism means you live longer or age faster, whether animal research is applicable to humans.

And I mostly stayed out of the way on this one, so you can make up your own mind after hearing. So bengreenfieldlife.com/lowcarb, high carb is where you can find the show notes. Low carb, H-I-G-H, low carb, high carb. Here we go. I think I'd love to hear from you first, Jay, as far as how you describe just your approach to how you think a human would best be served in terms of their macronutrient composition and how they eat or how you eat or what you recommend.

Jay Feldman (2:07)

Well, thanks for the introduction. And as you mentioned, sugar diet is gaining a lot of traction. That's not me. So I just want to start off there that that's not what I'm going to be advocating for here today. But I also want to first thank you, Dr. Westman for agreeing to come on here. I'm looking forward to our discussion.

But yeah, so as far as my approach to health, obviously, well, a little bit about my background and my story. I was interested in health from a young age, fitness, nutrition, and just trying to be the best version of myself and be as healthy as possible. And so as a result, I went through a number of different dietary iterations, everything from the classic eat less, exercise more, to whole grain standard American diet, or kind of the more healthier, low fat, vegetarian versions. And then got interested more in low carb and paleo for several years. And this was around the time that I was in college. I was studying as pre-med at the time. And this was a pivotal moment for me. It was something that allowed me to recognize that maybe some of the things I was reading in the textbooks was, some of those things might have been a little outdated, maybe didn't have the full picture. And I recognized that I wanted to shift gears and focus on a way of helping people that allows me to help people improve their health as opposed to manage symptoms, which is kind of the general orientation when it comes to, when it came to at least what I was learning about in my pre-med studies. And so I shifted gears at that point. And it was around that time, several years into different low carb variations, ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting, cyclical ketogenic diets, where I was always looking for optimal health and didn't feel like I was quite there yet. There were still some nagging issues. And at that point came across this idea called the bioenergetic approach to health, which centers on the idea that the energy that we produce in the mitochondria of ourselves is really the primary determinant of our function and of our health.

And as a result of that, one of the conclusions there was that consuming carbohydrates was actually going to be something that was really supportive of health.

Ben Greenfield (4:19)

And describe me exactly what the bioenergetics approach is.