We create more than a hundred new videos every year. They are the culmination of thousands of hours of researching, writing, editing, animating, and producing. We comb through thousands of scientific papers from the peer-reviewed medical literature so that busy people like you don’t have to!

In 2023, I covered a wide variety of hot topics. I released the erythritol reversal, a vegetarian stroke risk update, a whole series on yoga, and, of course, a lot on aging and anti-aging based on my research for How Not to Age. Which videos floated to the top last year?

 

#10 How to Treat Body Odor with Diet 

Deodorize from the inside out with food!

 

 

 

 

#9 The Best Diet for COVID and Long-COVID

Soon after COVID-19 emerged as a global public health threat, we paused our planned videos so I could produce a series on COVID-19 and write the book How to Survive a Pandemic. These resources concentrated on how pandemics arise and how we can mitigate future risk. As such, they remain as relevant as ever, but now that we have several years of data on COVID-19, I can finally answer the question: What is the role of nutrition in both preventing and beating COVID-19?

 

#8 Dietary Cholesterol and Inflammation from Abdominal Obesity

The optimal intake of dietary cholesterol may be zero. Hold on. Didn’t the U.S. Dietary Guidelines remove cholesterol as a nutrient of concern? No, just the opposite. Dietary Guidelines: “Eat as Little Dietary Cholesterol as Possible.” Even egg industry-funded studies show that the cholesterol we eat raises blood cholesterol levels. (For more on that, see my video Does Dietary Cholesterol (Eggs) Raise Blood Cholesterol?.)

 

#7 Fasting to Detox

During weight loss, pollutants stored in our fat spill out into our bloodstream. How might we help flush them? This video first appeared in my Fasting and Cancer webinar. You can now watch the recording of that webinar, which includes a Q&A. 

 

 

 

#6 Dietary Sources of the “Longevity Vitamin” Ergothioneine

Why may it be even more important to include mushrooms (or tempeh) in our diet as we age? Note that, unlike oyster mushrooms, white, crimini, portobello, shiitake, and morel mushrooms should not be eaten raw. I have a video coming out soon about this, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up.

 

 

#5 Are Beyond Meat Plant-Based Meat Alternatives Healthy?

The SWAP-MEAT study puts plant-based Beyond Meat products to the test.

 

 

 

 

#4 How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep Without Sleeping Pills

Taking less than just 18 Ambien-class sleeping pills in an entire year may triple the risk of dying prematurely.

 

 

 

 

#3 The Negative Effects and Benefits of Plant-Based Diets

What are the pros and cons of plant-based eating?

 

 

 

 

 

#2 Is Soy Milk the Most Nutritious Non-Dairy Milk?

Soy milk is compared to dairy milk and other plant-based milks.

 

 

 

 

#1 How Not to Age – Live Presentation

I was so thrilled to release this presentation based on my new book How Not to Age and am heartened that it’s already racked up hundreds of thousands of views. I hope it helps with your New Year’s resolutions! 

As always, all proceeds I receive from all of my books are donated directly to charity.

 

Thank you for being a part of this community. A few months ago, we surpassed one million subscribers on YouTube, and the number of people we can reach with this life-saving, life-changing information continues to grow. If you think it would help someone you know, please share this blog post.

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The sugar industry responds to evidence implicating sweeteners in the obesity epidemic. 
 
In terms of excess body fat, the “well-documented obesity epidemic may merely be the tip of the overfat iceberg.” It’s been estimated that 91 percent of adults—nine out of ten of us—and 69 percent of children in the United States are overfat, a condition defined as having “excess body fat sufficient to impair health.” This can occur even in individuals who are “normal-weight and non-obese, often due to excess abdominal fat.” The way to tell if you’re overfat is if your waist circumference is more than half your height. What’s causing this epidemic? As I discuss in my video Does Sugar Lead to Weight Gain?, one primary cause may be all the added sugars we’re eating. 
 
A century ago, sugar was heralded as one of the cheapest forms of calories in the diet. Just ten cents’ worth of sugar could furnish thousands of calories. Dr. Fredrick Stare, “Harvard’s sugar-pushing nutritionist,” bristled at the term “empty calories,” writing that the calories in sugar were “not empty but full of energy”—in other words, full of calories, which we are now getting too much of. The excess bodyweight of the U.S. population corresponds to about a daily 350- to 500-calorie excess on average. So, “to revert the obesity epidemic,” that’s how many calories we have to reduce, but which calories should we cut? As you can see below and at 1:33 in my video, the majority of Americans who fail to meet the Dietary Guidelines’ sugar limit get about that many calories in added sugars every day: Twenty-five teaspoons’ worth of added sugars is about 400 calories. 

There are die-hard sugar defenders. James Rippe, for example, was reportedly paid $40,000 a month by the high fructose corn syrup industry—and that was on top of the $10 million it paid for his research. Even Dr. Rippe considers it “undisputable that sugars…contribute to obesity. It is also undisputable that sugar reduction…should be part of any weight loss program.” And, of all sources of calories to limit, since sugar is just empty calories and contains no essential nutrients, “reducing sugar consumption is obviously the place to start.” And, again, this is what the researchers funded by the likes of Dr. Pepper and Coca-Cola are saying. The primary author of “Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?…,” Richard Kahn, is infamous for his defense of the American Beverage Association—the soda industry—and he was the chief science officer at the American Diabetes Association when it signed a million-dollar sponsorship deal with the world’s largest candy company. “Maybe the American Diabetes Association should rename itself the American Junk Food Association,” said the director of a consumer advocacy group. What do you expect from an organization that was started with drug industry funding? 
 
The bottom line is that “randomised controlled trials show that increasing sugars intake increases energy [calorie] intake” and “increasing sugar intake leads to body weight gain in adults, and…sugar reduction leads to body weight loss in children.” For example, when researchers randomized individuals to either increase or decrease their intake of table sugar, the added sugar group gained about three and a half pounds over ten weeks, whereas the reduced sugar group lost about two and a half pounds. A systematic review and meta-analysis of all such ad libitum diet studies—real-life studies where sugar levels were changed but people could otherwise eat whatever they wanted—found that reduced intake of dietary sugars resulted in a decrease in body weight, whereas “increased sugars intake was associated with a comparable weight increase.” The researchers found that, “considering the rapid weight gain that occurs after an increased intake of sugars, it seems reasonable to conclude that advice relating to sugars intake is a relevant component of a strategy to reduce the high risk of overweight and obesity in most countries.” That is, it’s reasonable to advise people to cut down on their sugar consumption. 
 
Findings from observational studies have been “more ambiguous,” though, with an association found between obesity and intake of sweetened beverages, but failing to show consistent correlations with consumption of sugary foods. Most such studies rely on self-reported data, however, and “it is likely that this has introduced bias, especially as underreporting of diet has been found to be more prevalent among obese people and it is sugar-rich foods that are most commonly underreported.” However, one can measure trace sucrose levels in the urine, which gives an objective measure of actual sugar intake and also excludes contributions from other sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup. When researchers did this, they discovered that, indeed, sugar intake is not only associated with greater odds of obesity and greater waist circumference on a snapshot-in-time cross-sectional basis, but that was also seen in a prospective cohort study over time. “Using urinary sucrose as the measure of sucrose intake,” researchers found that “participants in the highest v. the lowest quintile [fifth] for sucrose intake had 54% greater risk of being overweight or obese.” 
 
“Denying evidence that sugars are harmful to health has always been at the heart of the sugar industry’s defense.” But when the evidence is undeniable, like the link between sugar and cavities, it switches from denial to deflection, like trying to pull attention away from restricting intake to coming up with some kind of “vaccine against tooth decay.” We seem to have reached a similar point with obesity, with the likes of the Sugar Bureau switching from denial to deflection by commissioning research suggesting that obese individuals would not benefit from losing weight, a stance contradicted by hundreds of studies across four continents involving more than ten million participants. 
 
For more on Big Sugar’s influence, check out Sugar Industry Attempts to Manipulate the Science. 
 
You may also be interested in some of my other popular videos on sugar. See related videos below.

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You may lose a pound of fat by skipping just 10 calories a day or as many as 55, depending on whether you’re improving food quality or restricting food quantity. 
 
If the 3,500 calories per pound of weight loss rule is bunk, what’s the alternative? To lose a pound of fat, how many fewer calories do you have to eat or how many more do you have to burn? That’s the topic of my video The New Calories per Pound of Weight Loss Rule. 
 
There are validated mathematical models that take into account the dynamic changes that occur when you cut calories, such as the metabolic slowdown, and they’ve been turned into free online calculators you can use to make personalized estimates. For instance, one is the Body Weight Planner from the National Institutes of Health (http://bit.ly/NIHcalculator) and another is the Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Weight Loss Predictor Calculator out of Louisiana State University (http://bit.ly/LSUcalculator). 
 
The NIH Body Weight Planner has been found to be more accurate because the LSU model appears to overestimate the drop in physical activity, but they both have their own pluses and minuses. The NIH Body Weight Planner tells you how many calories you need to restrict and/or how much more you need to exercise to achieve a specific weight-loss goal by a specific date. If you click on the “Switch to Expert Mode” button, you can get a graph and exportable chart showing your day-to-day weight-loss trajectory. See below and at 1:15 in my video to see the Body Weight Planner. 

For instance, if you are a middle-aged, sedentary, average-height woman who is obese at 175 pounds and wants to be closer to her ideal weight within a year, consuming 2,000 calories a day would prevent future weight gain and taking in about 1,400 calories a day would bring down your weight, and you could maintain that lower weight at 1,700 calories a day. If you also walked a mile a day, you’d have a little more calorie leeway.

The LSU Weight Loss Predictor, however, doesn’t allow you to tweak physical activity, but its advantage is that you don’t have to choose a goal or time frame. Just put in different calorie changes, and it graphs out your expected course, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:00 in my video. 

Is there an easy rule of thumb you can use? Yes. Every permanent ten-calorie drop in daily intake will eventually lead to about one pound of weight loss, though it takes about a year to achieve half the total weight change and around three years to completely settle into the new weight. So, cutting 500 calories a day can cause the 50-pound weight loss predicted by the 3,500-Calorie Rule, but that’s the total weight loss at which you plateau, not an annual drop, and it takes about three years to get there. A 500-calorie deficit would be expected to cause about a 25-pound weight loss in the first year, followed by an additional 25 pounds lost over years two and three, but that’s only if you can maintain the 500-calorie deficit, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:38 in my video.

If you’re eating the same diet that led to the original weight problem but just in smaller servings, you should expect your appetite to rev up by about 45 calories per pound lost. So, if you were cutting 500 calories a day through portion control alone, even before you were down a dozen pounds, you’d feel so famished that you’d be driven to eat 500 more calories a day and your weight loss could vanish. For this reason, if you’re dead set on eating the same diet with the same foods, just in smaller quantities, you have to cut down an additional 45 calories per pound of desired weight loss to offset your hunger drive. 
 
So, to take off that one pound, instead of consuming just 10 fewer calories a day using the 10 Calories per Pound Rule, you’d have to eat 10 fewer calories on top of the 45 fewer calories to account for the revving up of your appetite. Thus, it would be 10 + 45 = 55 fewer calories. Indeed, just by changing diet quantity and not quality, it takes 55 fewer calories per day to lose a pound, so that daily 500-calorie deficit would only net you about a 9-pound weight loss over time instead of 50 pounds. That’s why portion control methods can be such a frustrating failure for so many people. 
 
If you missed my first two videos on calories per pound, check out The 3,500 Calorie per Pound Rule Is Wrong and The Reason Weight Loss Plateaus When You Diet. 
 
I have loads of other weight-loss videos, which you can see here on the topic page, and there are gazillions more coming soon, based on my book How Not to Diet.

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