"Broccoli Is Making You Fat!" (Why Single-Food Blame Is Nonsense) | Ep 471
Can broccoli make you fat? Or cause inflammation? What about sugar, carbs, seed oils, dairy, gluten, lectins, fructose, or ultra-processed foods?
Why does every fitness influencer blame a different food for your health problems? Learn about the composition fallacy in nutrition, where we blame one food for what the whole diet (or lifestyle) is responsible for.
This episode covers the logical error underneath every single-food blame claim, the evidence on the 4 loudest food villains right now, and how to think about food without organizing your diet around fear.
We examine studies on linoleic acid and inflammation, plant oils vs. butter, ultra-processed foods, flexible vs. rigid dieting, and the prevalence of orthorexia. If you're over 40 and navigating fat loss, body composition, and decades of contradictory food advice, learn to avoid rigid food rules, binge cycles, or wellness panic.
Join in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life, WITHOUT restrictive food rules.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Food villain claims
2:57 - Composition fallacy
8:01 - Seed oils, linoleic acid, and inflammation
10:36 - Sugar and the Twinkie diet experiment
13:28 - Ultra-processed food and how fast you eat
16:44 - Celiac, gluten sensitivity, and carbs
18:48 - Skills vs. food rules
19:56 - Energy balance and food quality
22:30 - Sumo wrestlers and Paracelsus
25:10 - 80/20 flexible eating framework
27:30 - Orthorexia and binge eating cycles
29:16 - Bonus: 3-question food villain test
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Philip Pape: 00:00
Broccoli is making you fat. I'm not kidding. Eat too much of it, drowned in butter and cheese sauce day after day, and you probably will gain fat. All right. That claim probably sounded ridiculous initially until I added some context to it. But I've actually heard the claim that broccoli is going to be a problem, just like seed oils are a problem, just like sugar is a problem. The list goes on and on. Carbs, you name it, it's the same logical structure as every food villain claim you've heard. Lectins, gluten, dairy, processed food, take your pick. Today I'm gonna show you why this entire category of advice is a logical error called the composition fallacy. What the actual evidence says about the top demonized foods, and a three-question test that you can run on the next person who tells you that a single food is the source of all your problems. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts popular fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape. And if you are trying to lose fat, you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to eat healthy, you've been told for years that some specific food is the reason it's not working. Maybe it was sugar as far back as when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, then carbs in the 90s to the 2000s, starting with Atkins and then later on keto. Dietary fat before that, going way back to like snack well and olestra. And now it's seed oils and ultra-processed food. Every few years, a new villain rotates in. The old one gets a little half-apology, like, eh, we weren't quite right about that one. And then you're supposed to feel like, okay, now I know what's truly right as we move forward. I'm not gonna tell you whether seed oils are good or bad. I'm gonna show you the logical structure underneath these claims. Because once you understand that, you can make the decisions for yourself from an informed position and not listen to a podcaster tell you what is right or wrong. Stick around to the end because then I'm gonna give you a three-question test I call the food villain test. So the next time anyone, usually a podcaster or influencer, tells you that a single food is insert claim here, making you fat, making you inflamed, causing you any sort of issue, whatever it is, you can turn to this three-second test and know whether to take that seriously or not. And hint, probably not most of the time, but it's good to know what questions to ask. All right, so for today, we are gonna talk about the logical error in every food villain claim and why it's so sticky from a psychological perspective. The actual evidence on the four biggest food villains right now, which it's it might surprise you on one of them, so stay tuned for that. And then a model for how food affects body composition.
Philip Pape: 02:57
Okay, so let's start with the logical error. Philosophers call this logical fallacy the composition fallacy. Now, I don't know a lot about logical fallacies other than what I've learned from my own kids because we homeschool our kids. My wife has spent several years helping them learn about logic, and they are always calling out politicians and conspiracy theories and things that sometimes I don't even notice, like in marketing. And that's where these fallacies come from. So the composition fallacy is simple. You take a feature of one component of a system, and then you blame that component for the behavior of the whole system. That's the composition fallacy. So I'll give you an example that is outside of nutrition. Imagine I told you the steering wheel was the reason that a car crashed. The steering wheel is part of the car. Now, was it involved? Of course it was involved. It's part of the car. Could a bad steering wheel cause a crash in some cases? Of course, theoretically it could. But in most crashes, the steering wheel is probably doing what steering wheels do, and the crash happens because of how the car was driven or how another car was driving, or the road, the speed, the brakes, all of it working together as a system. So it would take some investigation to understand if truly the steering wheel was the cause of the accident. Now, food works the same way. Your body's a system. Calories come in, calories go out. You've got your hormones that get modulated, you've got hunger that goes up and down, your sleep, which affects recovery, your training, which affects everything, insulin sensitivity, nutrition, partitioning, whatever you name it. And then the result of all of that stuff coming together is how you look, how you feel, how you perform, right? Your physique. So when somebody points at a single food and says, ah, that's the reason that you're stuck, that's the reason you're fat, that's the reason you're inflamed, that's the reason XYZ, that is the steering wheel thing. They're taking a component and assigning it the behavior of the whole system. Now, sometimes a specific food is truly involved, the way steering wheel sometimes is, but you always have to zoom out and you have to look at it and understand the constraints. And far more often than not, it's more systematic than that or more complex than
Philip Pape: 05:06
that. So, why is this so psychologically sticky, as we say sticky as in it just like something we just latch onto? Well, the first reason is it gives you a villain. We love villains, we like boogeyman, it gives you an answer, it makes it simple. Before you've done anything else, you feel like you have something to go after, right? That you've made progress, you have an enemy to go after. The second thing is it gives you control. So a single food is something you can avoid today. And this is something I've dealt with for many years in the past, right? Cutting carbs, I can control that. Like literally just cut them out, don't buy them, don't put them in the fridge, don't go to the grocery store and get them. It's easy, okay? But it's easy, and it's easy in comparison to the things that actually work, which tend to be harder. Like energy balance is harder to manage, hormones are hard to manage, sleep is difficult. So the simplicity of the action substitutes for the difficulty of the real problem. And then the third piece, which I think is underrated, is it gives you a tribe to belong to. And you know this is true. Like, am I really calling you out? No, I admit myself, I've been in tribes. If I was in the CrossFit tribe and the Zone Diet tribe and the Paleo tribe and the keto tribe, right? All the tribes, the cut the running tribe. Once you are anti-seed oils, oh, you are with the other anti-seed oil people, and all the others are like, man, they don't know what they're talking about. Like, I feel I feel bad for them. I'm gonna pray for them. Or what they say in the South, bless their heart, right? There's a whole community that is waiting to embrace you on villainizing seed oils. And then once you've publicly declared it, whether you're an influencer or even if you're just listening and you've told all your friends and neighbors, hopefully you're not, I don't know if you're talking to your neighbors about this stuff, but walking back from that is very hard to do. As human, we're it's hard to admit that we're wrong and it it costs you what's what's called social capital. And people don't want to do that, right? So it's not, it's not people being stupid. This is a logical error. It's psychologically engineered to feel like it's correct. And calling people out or ridiculing people who fall for the claims. Okay, I'm all for ridiculing people who who push them knowingly for the wrong reasons. That's not what I'm talking about. But ridiculing people who are just subject to them, like all of us, that just makes people dig in even harder. And the way out is to really understand the mechanism so well that the claims of food villain, food villains just stop being interesting anymore. Like at this point, I and many of you who listen to this show, if you've listened to it long enough, you almost don't pay attention when someone says, Oh, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. You're like, Yeah, probably not. Like, you could pretty much eat any food on the planet and be fine as long as it's meeting your goals as part of a flexible dietary pattern, something we've talked about before on this show. So let's go through the four top villains,
Philip Pape: 08:01
all right? The big villain number one is seed oils these days for whatever reason. It's super loud. People are calling it out online. Um, and that includes soybean oil, canola, corn oil, all of that. Supposedly it's driving the obesity epidemic. It causes inflammation because of the linoleic acid or because of the processing or rancidity or whatever, name whatever reason you want. But what the actual evidence says, okay, through meta-analysis of dozens of randomized controlled trials, which is the best quality type of study, thousands of people looking at what happens to inflammatory markers when you increase your linoleic acid intake, which is comes from seed oils, the result is no effect on inflammation, like CRP markers, IL6, interleukin 6, TNF alpha. Those are the three big inflammatory markers that we're all worried about. There's zero effect. And then on the other hand, to further compound the fact that seed oils aren't an issue, and in fact, might be better for you, there is just last year, 2025, JAMA Internal Medicine published a what's called a pooled cohort. 221,000 adults that were followed for up to 33 years. It doesn't get much better than that. And the main finding is that people who consume more plant oils had 16% lower total mortality. People who ate more butter had 15% higher mortality. If you could swap just 10 grams a day of butter for plant oils, there's a 17% lower mortality. So, and this is this is the finding I'm far more inclined to support because of the preponderance of the evidence for it. So, where does the seed oil panic come from? Well, two places that I could identify. The first is rodent studies, where the mice are fed soybean oil for like half their lives in environments that have nothing to do with how humans eat. And the second one is people conflating seed oils, linoleic acid with something called conjugated linoleic acid, which is like a structurally different compound sold as a weight loss supplement, which does increase inflammatory markers. And so the name sounds similar, the molecules are different. I don't know how many people are going with the first one or the second one, but there is no evidence to support that seed oils are the villain that everyone wants to make them out to be. And in fact, there's strong evidence that reducing your saturated fat and supplementing with these types of oils on a one-for-one basis is actually correlated with far-improved health outcomes and actually is in line with the American Heart Association recommendations. So the data doesn't match the narrative. That's the first
Philip Pape: 10:36
one. Villain number two is sugar. All right. You've heard for years and years and years, okay, sugar is the cause or the source of all our fat, especially corn syrup, that, you know, because it's processed, it just bypasses your appetite regulation. It spikes insulin, makes you store fat. So I'm gonna tell you about a guy named Mark Haub. Okay, Mark Haub is a nutrition professor at Kansas State. And back in 2010, he ran a 10-week experiment on himself. Okay, I love this guy for doing this. This time it's fun. I know it's like clickbaiting, it gets attention, but it's it's cool when people do this. So he ate Twinkies, little Debbie snacks, Doritos, Oreos, sugary cereals. Like 60% of his diet was just straight, let's call it junk food. Okay. He took a multivitamin and ate some vegetables on the side, but the bulk of what was going into his mouth was sugar and processed carbs. But the one thing he controlled was calories. He ate about 1,800 calories a day, down from his usual 2,600 calorie maintenance level. So that puts him in what? Do the math, 800 calorie deficit. Well, what happens when you're in a deficit? Well, you lose weight. He lost 27 pounds, but this is the cool thing. His LDL cholesterol dropped 20%. That's the bad cholesterol we call it. His HDL went up 20%, his triglycerides dropped 39%, his BMI went from 28.8 down to 24.9 while eating all of this junk. Now, is the conclusion go eat Twinkies as a diet? Of course not. He himself didn't recommend that. It was the principle of the thing that even on a diet that most would call the most awful diet ever, if you're in a calorie deficit, you can lose not only weight, but lose body fat and improve your health and blood markers because of the correlation between those. All that sugar didn't override physiology and thermodynamics. That's my point. Okay, not to eat Twinkies, but the fact that sugar is not the problem. There's also a 2020 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that looked at isocaloric swaps, that means one-for-one swaps of sugar for starch. And they found very modest changes in LDL cholesterol and really no differences in body composition. Sugar's role in obesity in the real world, IRL, as they as the kids would say, where it shows up mostly in liquid form like soda, you know, sugary sodas. This is why I recommend diet soda, so you can lower the amount of calories and sugar you get just in general. But it's found in soda, juice, sweetened coffee drinks, you know, those big calorie bombs from Starbucks. The role of obesity there is absolutely real, but it's not because of the sugar. It's not because of the glucose. Okay, it's because of the calories. It's because you're consuming too many calories in too easy a way. And sugar does make it very easy to do that. So let's separate the fact from fiction
Philip Pape: 13:28
there. All right, villain number three is ultra-processed food. I know you're thinking, Philip, are you gonna actually defend ultra-processed food? No, remember, today's episode is about showing you that you cannot name a single type of food as a universal villain. There's a famous study that everybody cites to prove that ultra-processed foods make you fat. And it's the same study I cite all the time, not to prove that ultra-processed food makes you fat, but to prove that having a diet that includes primarily ultra-processed food leads to overconsumption. Those are two different things. So this is Kevin Hall's 2019 inpatient study at the National Institutes of Health. And Kevin Hall is a researcher I do respect a lot. He is a smart guy. He's careful with his data. He doesn't overclaim. And he took 20 people for two weeks on ultra-processed food, two weeks on minimally processed food. So it's a what they call a crossover design. It was matched for calories for macros, sugar, salt, fiber, but people could eat as much as they wanted. And the result was that people ate 500 extra calories per day on the ultra-processed diet, and they gained about two pounds in two weeks. So ultra-processed food makes you fat, right? Let's now let's add the nuance, okay? Which which Kevin Hall did. He looked at the why, he looked at the root cause. And the answer is how fast you eat and the energy density of the food. So on the ultra-processed diet, people were eating 48 calories a minute. On the minimally processed diet, 31 calories a minute. So the ultra-processed food was 50% faster to consume. Makes sense. It's processed, it's like denser, right? It's more calorie dense. And people still felt the same hunger and fullness on both diets. They just ate faster before their satiety signals could catch up. Now that's a behavioral mechanism. It's not a metabolic mechanism. And so the conclusion here is the food environment makes it easier to eat more calories. Okay, so that's different than saying ultra-processed food itself makes you fat. Then we have a 2025 follow-up in Nature Medicine by Dicken and colleagues. And it was the same kind of crossover design over eight weeks, but with a little bit of a twist to it. Both arms of the study had to follow national nutrition guidelines. So that means the ultra-processed side got fiber-rich, uh, high-protein ultra-processed foods, as opposed to what we normally think of, which are hyperpalatable snacks. And both groups lost weight. The minimally processed group lost 2% body weight, the ultra-processed group lost 1%. But but the researchers have predicted the ultra-processed food would gain weight. And they didn't. But they they lost weight just less than the other group. So ultra-processed food isn't something that just automatically causes cat fat gain. It's just a category of food that, in its hyper palatable form, makes it easy to overconsume. That's it. So if you structure your choices toward more fiber, more protein, even with ultra-processed food, it actually causes less of that. Now I'm not telling you go and eat just high protein, high fiber processed food. I'm just saying those are the things that matter, not the fact that they are ultra-processed. Okay.
Philip Pape: 16:44
The last villain is gluten, and I want to keep this short because the data is super clean here. Celiac disease affects 1% of the population. Those are people who absolutely cannot have gluten. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which is that broader category that everyone seems to have these days, for some reason, everyone has a gluten intolerance, apparently. The latest 2025 meta-analysis puts that at 6% of adults. That's it. And then when researchers do what's called double blind challenges, where people get either gluten or placebo and they don't know what it is, only 24% of self-reported gluten-sensitive people actually have reproducible systems, symptoms. So that means 94% of adults have no clinical reason to avoid gluten. And of the ones who think they're sensitive, three-quarters are responding to something other than gluten. It's often FODMAPs. Sometimes the overall improvement they get will come from cutting something like refined wheat products because of the FODMAPs. There's a lot of reasons. This is why people go on carnival and they're like, yeah, I went on carnivore, it solved all my problems. Well, you know what? You just did an elimination diet. You eliminated something that was causing you issues, but it's not all plants. Okay. So, and I feel bad for you if you think it is, and then you live the rest of your life just cutting out so many amazing foods and not getting enough fiber, et cetera. So if you feel worse with gluten or with any other particular food like dairy, don't eat it. Like I'm not telling you to eat it. I'm just saying the universal claim of gluten is making us all fat, all inflamed, causing all sorts of other issues with our gut, whatever. It's not a real thing. There's a very small, small, small effect with people that may have an issue like celiac, but it's being scaled up to apply to everyone, and the evidence does not support it. Okay, I'm very passionate about this episode for some reason. So let me take a pause and let me just take a breather here because a lot of you are thinking, okay, what do I actually do with all this information? How do I structure my eating without falling into these food fear traps? Like, what do I eat? Tell me like what the alternative
Philip Pape: 18:48
is. Well, that's why we have what we have. It's called Eat More Lift Heavy. It's a program, it's a 26-week coaching program. It's mainly for women over 40 who have spent years cycling through all of these diets, all of these food rules, all of these villains. You know what I'm talking about. Cut this, add that. This is poison. That's a superfood. Rinse and repeat. Well, what if we replace all of that with a structured, flexible, much more liberating approach? You track your numbers for awareness and you learn to read your own data, but then you eat in a very, very flexible way, not only in terms of food, the food on your plate, but also how you go through phases of fat loss maintenance and muscle building so that it feels much more sustainable. It's easy to do. You're excited about it, you enjoy it. I want you to go to eatmore liftheavy.com to check it out. It's called Eat More Lift Heavy for a reason. It's a great thing to do. Go check it out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. And if you're tired of having to cut carbs or cut whatever else it is and feel like you're restricted, we've got the alternative. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All
Philip Pape: 19:56
right. So if no single food is making you fat, what is? The honest answer is energy balance. Okay, nothing new here, folks. But if you're new to the podcast or you wanted a refresher, let's just get into it. The amount of energy you take in from food relative to the amount your body burns and expense. So if you have a net surplus over time, you gain weight. If you have a net deficit over time, you lose weight. That's it. That's the governing law. Every diet that has ever worked has worked through this mechanism. Whether the people running the diet acknowledge it or not, okay, even the carnivore people, the keto people, anyone selling you the seed oil-free lifestyle. Heck, people that are selling you you don't have to count calories or you don't have to track or whatever, it still comes down to calories. Now, it's not all about calories. Energy balance and losing weight on a pure physics and math basis is about calories, but food quality does matter. Okay. So this is the straw man people use. They hear calories in, calories out, and they're like, okay, so that you're saying food quality doesn't matter. Nope, absolutely not. The actual position supported by what we have in the evidence is energy balance is the boss in terms of weight gained or weight loss. Food quality is helps you with your body composition, how you look, how you feel. See, so they each do a different job for you. So when we talk about food quality, what does it affect? Well, first, satiety, fullness per calorie. So if you're eating more whole foods, vegetables, lean protein, fruit, beans, whole grains, all of these give you more grams, more volume on your scale, right? More fiber per calorie. And by the way, fiber has fewer calories per gram than other carbs. And so they make controlling those calories easier. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Second, micronutrient density. A long term diet dominated by low nutrient processed foods are going to be worse for your health outcomes, even if your body composition stays the same or stays in a good range. You can still be lean and still be unhealthy, is my point. And then third is the rate of eating, which is the research we talked about earlier. Hyperpalatable processed foods make it easier to consume more calories before your brain registers the fullness. But again, food quality doesn't override thermodynamics. You can't eat enough quote unquote clean food, but be in a calorie surplus and stay lean. And you can't eat dirty food in a deficit and gain fat. You're actually going to lose fat. Isn't that interesting? Okay. All things equal, of course. We're not even talking about lifting weights and preserving muscle and all that fun stuff. I love a really good example here. It's sumo wrestlers. Okay, sumo wrestlers. So awesome. I haven't talked about them in a long time. So the staple meal of a sumo wrestler is called chanko nabe. It is chicken, fish, tofu, vegetables, and rice. What is that? Well, that's whole foods. It's some of the most nutrient-dense, traditional type of meals or cooking on the planet. And they eat five to eight thousand calories a day. They are among the heaviest athletes on the planet Earth. So they eat what we'd call clean food in a massive calorie surplus. So they have massive body weight. Just a very simple example. Now, what's interesting is we can go into the fact that they have healthier blood markers than you would expect for their weight because they have a massive amount of muscle. Totally different topic, but worth maybe worth doing an episode sometime, right? And I the the example of Mark Hobb with the Twinkie diet, that was kind of like the opposite of the exact same thing, right? He was eating a totally junk diet and then losing weight. Again, it came down to energy balance. And we're not saying that that's a good thing, depending on your lifestyle and the quality of the food, right? Just what we talked about. So at the end of the day, I would say the dose matters when it comes to these foods. There's a saying from a physician back way back in the 1500s, a guy named Paracelsus. I think it's Celsus or Paracelsus, I don't know. He said, the dose makes the poison. That's where we get that phrase from. Water can kill you if you drink too much of it. It's called hyponneutremia, and people died from that. If you have too much oxygen in too high of a concentration, it can damage your lungs. Right? So nothing is safe at every dose, and nothing is dangerous at every dose. The dose in the context of the system, that's what determines the outcome. So seed oils at say 7% of your calories in a diet rich in vegetables, lean protein, fiber, there is zero evidence of any harm, and there's possibly some benefit if they're replacing saturated fats. Whereas if you have seed oils at 35% of your calories in a diet full of full, you know, fried foods, low fiber calorie surplus, which guess what? That's like the standard American diet. And that's the problem, is we're we're comparing apples and oranges. Okay. Just because you eat a lot of seed oils and you're fat doesn't mean it was the seed oils. You're probably getting them from ultra-processed foods and you're drinking lots of soda and you're over consuming calories, et cetera, and you're not lifting weights. I could go on. Okay? It's not the seed oil that's the cause, it's the dose in the context of your overall diet and your dietary pattern. Same with sugar, same with ultra-processed food, same with everything. And that is, in my mind, very liberating. Like to me, that's the essence of flexible eating. So let's talk
Philip Pape: 25:10
about that. What is the framework that you can use that has worked with the hundreds of clients that I have coached? It's very simple. Roughly 80% of your calories from whole, minimally processed foods that you enjoy, about 20% from whatever you want. Now notice how I said that. The 80% are whole, minimally processed foods, but you're still gonna enjoy them. You're gonna pick the ones that you like. Okay, don't force force yourself to eat quote unquote healthy or clean foods that you don't like. There's plenty of foods that you should or or will like. And then 20% whatever you want with nothing off limits. There is no villain on your list. There's no moral hierarchy of foods. And the evidence supports this. There's a randomized controlled trial from 2021. Conlin and colleagues published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. They took resistance-trained adults, put them on a 20% calorie deficit for 10 weeks, and they randomized them to either flexible dieting or rigid dieting. So the same calories, the same protein. The only difference was the rules around which foods you were allowed to eat. During the diet phase, both groups lost similar amounts of body weight and fat. But then they did something smart in the study. They followed both groups for 10 more weeks of free eating. And that's where they saw differences. The flexible eating group gained 1.7 kilograms of lean mass back. The rigid group lost 0.7 kilograms of lean mass. So flexible dieting ended up with more muscle and better long-term outcomes. And the reason is because rigid dieting predicts binge cycles. Decades and decades of eating disorder research has shown this. When you label foods as bad or forbidden, those foods become psychologically supercharged in your mind. The all-or-nothing mindset kicks in. You're either perfect or you're a failure. And then eventually, guess what happens? You crack, you let go, you binge, you swear off the food again, you start over. It is a vicious loop or cycle. Flexible dieting prevents that loop because you're including the foods you enjoy at a small dose regularly. It is not a moral issue, and it loses its status as this forbidden thing. It becomes just food. That is it. So when I push back on food demonization on wits and weights, the what's underneath it is this idea of like orthorexia, this obsessive preoccupation with eating pure and clean foods, the binge eating cycles, the eating disorders, that's what I'm concerned about for folks. Okay, it increases food fear, it increases social anxiety around eating, it predicts these cycles. So the fix is to lower all of those moral stakes around food, knowing how the human brain works, and instead raise the stakes around the system itself, like energy balance, protein training, recovery, the big levers that you can work around that actually align with your goals. All right, before I wrap up, remember I'm gonna give you the food villain test. Three questions takes 30 seconds, coming right up. But if this episode made you realize, hey, the problem isn't a specific food. It's not carbs, it's not sugar, it's not seed oils, whatever. Maybe you're on carnivore right now and you're like, ah, I can't do this the rest of my life. The problem is really a lack of a structured system that does work for you. That is why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. That is the 26-week coach program. You learn a skill one week at a time. And if you're done cycling through all this food nonsense, if you're done with worrying about what's poisoning you and your hormones and starting over constantly, this is going to fix that with you because it is super sustainable. It's skill building, it's positive. We empower you, we support you along the way. It's very flexible, and you're gonna come out the other side feeling so strong, empowered, able to do whatever you want to do for your physique and health for the rest of your life. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. That is the whole point. I want you to fire us when you're done. Okay, you don't need a coach forever. You need to build the skills and the structure so that food is not ruining or running your life anymore. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com and we'll see you there. All right,
Philip Pape: 29:16
here's that 30-second food villain test. It's three questions. Question one, at what dose? That's it. At what dose? If someone cannot tell you a dose where the food becomes harmful versus a dose that is fine in context, then they don't understand the food. Okay. If they say seed oils is harmful at any dose, sorry, that is not true. Question two, in what context? So if the claimer on the food doesn't account for the rest of the diet around it, calorie balance, training, the individual's health, that's the composition fallacy we started with in this episode. Okay. You're pointing at one thing and blaming it for the whole. And then question three, what human studies support this? Now, I'm not a big fan of like calling people out and saying, tell me the study, link the study. You know, it's more of hey, the preponderance of evidence should be there somewhere. And I'm fine if you, instead of asking the person, because you might be talking to a regular person as opposed to like a quote unquote expert, go ahead and look it up yourself. Like go to scholar.google.com and start looking up. Try to use AI and really do your searches. Try to avoid, you know, you want to avoid cherry picking here, but at least ask for the studies that support it so that you can look into those. If the studies are just like a mouse study over here, a testimonial over here, a case study over here, a documentary on Netflix, okay, that's not really the evidence we're looking for. So those three questions can really help you decide. Which at the end of the day, do you even need to ask these questions? I don't know. I would say probably not, because just about any claim about a single food being a villain is probably false, but it's worth going through the exercise. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that no single food is making you fat, causing you inflammation, or anything else. The dose, the context, the system are where it's at. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
