Unlocking the Secrets of Whole Foods | Dr. Stephan Van Vliet

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
Welcome to The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, where cutting-edge science meets innovation and practical application for everybody. In today's episode, I sit down with Dr. Stephan Van Vliet. This episode is so fascinating, and here's why. He educates us on information and nutrition from in the womb, how food that we eat during pregnancy can affect the choices of our children. And beyond, how those nutrients are impacted from the cattle that we eat. Beyond macros, we're talking about the phytonutrients in cattle, things that you haven't thought of before. We learn all about the food matrix. Please join me in conversation with Dr. Stephan Van Vliet.
Stephan Van Vliet, welcome to the show.

**Dr. Stephan Van Vliet** (0:57)
Thank you so much, Gabrielle. I really appreciate it.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:00)
I cannot believe how much we have in common. You went to the University of Illinois and you also went to WashU. You were in Bettina Mindorf's lab, which, well, I guess she was with Sam Klein, so we were all together. Amazing.

**Dr. Stephan Van Vliet** (1:16)
Yeah, that's right.
When I arrived at the University of Illinois, Dr. Don Layman had just retired, but he often visited the lab still. I worked with Dr. Nicholas Byrd, and so another name in the field of protein metabolism. Yeah, it's a small world.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:35)
It is a small world. Actually, I didn't know that you were in Nick Byrd's lab. He published one really, I mean, many interesting papers, but he published that paper about muscle protein synthesis and obesity. There's a potential blunting effect which I have found fascinating. So that's truly amazing. I want to tell you why I wanted you to come on the show. Number one, you are a fine scientist. You are well-rounded and just very seasoned, and the work that you produce is thoughtful, and puts into perspective not in isolation the nutrients that we eat. There's protein, and there's leucine, but really thinking about the food matrix, the practicalities of how we consume food. We eat a burger, or we eat some blueberries, we don't eat anthocyanins with a side of leucine.
You've really paved the way in changing perspectives, and the way in which you come about it is deeply intelligent. So thank you so much.

**Dr. Stephan Van Vliet** (2:45)
Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate the kind words. Yeah. I think you're going to make me blush.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:52)
Well, I'm going to work on it. I'm going to throw in mom jokes, probably really bad humor, and a little bit of science. For the listeners, I'd love for you to bring us up to speed on some of the current work that you're doing, it and why you're doing it.

**Dr. Stephan Van Vliet** (3:10)
Well, let's start with the reason why I'm doing it, because I want to know it for myself, for my family, for my friends. But luckily enough, there's also other people that want to know it and were able to get funding for it. But just to take you back, it started as a passion. I got into weightlifting when I was around, I think it was about 16, 17 years old or so.
I did that throughout the latest years of high school. Then I actually went to business school because I didn't know what I wanted to do and going into business is a logical step, I guess. You will be well-rounded. But during business school, I really started to develop an interest in how nutrition can help, in that case, sports performance as I was lifting weights. Caught myself reading physiology journals, nutrition journals instead of business journals. I did finish business school, but after that, I made a career switch and I volunteered in a lab in the Dutch Muscle Physiology Lab under Dr. Luc van Doorn. Then I did my masters in England, exercise nutrition science and did my PhD in kinesiology. I worked my way up through that. What initially started with interest in sports performance is then, since then in our current work, morphed into also linking the fields of agriculture and human nutrition. During my PhD, we did some interesting work on egg whites versus whole eggs. I actually found that whole eggs, because of the food matrix, which you can talk about what we exactly mean by that, it actually resulted in a higher muscle anabolic response that could not be explained by the protein content of the eggs because the egg whites and the whole eggs had a similar, they were matched for protein. What that told us is that there's other foods or other compounds within the food that can impact our metabolism, in this case, muscle proteosynthesis, which we were measuring. What is the most obvious way to maybe increase those bioactive compounds in an egg by what you feed a chicken? Later on, as that work evolved, we also naturally flowed into work feeding chickens different feeds, and then with now the current concerns about the sustainability of food production and climate change, we started to blend the fields in our most recent work.