Transcribed using AI transcription services, errors may occur. Contact Mikki for clarification.

00:03
Hey everyone, it's Miki here, you're listening to Mikkipedia, and this week on the podcast I speak to Dr Andreas Eenfeldt of Harvard about the satiety to calorie ratio and why this is the formula for dialing in your nutrient needs. So you might recall maybe a year ago or so I spoke to Dr Ted Naiman and he is one of the brains behind Harvard.co and he has long been promoting a higher protein to energy ratio.

00:32
in terms of optimizing and dialing in your nutrition. So Ted, alongside Andreas, have designed Harvard.co. And on the podcast today, I speak to Andreas, how he got interested in nutrition as a medical doctor, his own journey through low carb and ketogenic diets, which led him to setting up Diet Doctor, which is a wildly popular low carbohydrate and ketogenic site.

01:00
and then has transitioned to a more protein centric approach. We discuss why some are at odds with what Hava is trying to achieve. And I guess some of the nuances around satiety as well. Hava is an approach to eating that aims to fight back at the many forces at play that increase our desire to overeat. And this is how the app is set up. And Andreas and I also have quite a good discussion around some of the limitations of

01:28
you know, using algorithms and I guess food guidance systems for the general population purposes. Anyway, it's a really great conversation. I think you're really going to love it. So Dr. Andreas Einfeld is a Swedish medical doctor specialised in family medicine, and he's the founder and owner of the diet doctor website which advocates a low carbohydrate, high fat diets for health and wellbeing. Although more recently, Andreas has shifted gears somewhat as we discuss.

01:57
and he has launched harvard.co, and that was last year in 2023, which aims to help people personalize a diet with high satiety foods to help keep them fuller for longer. I have links to the Harvard app, the Harvard podcast, and Andreas on X, or Twitter, in the show notes for you to get more of an understanding and idea of what Harvard is about and to follow more from Dr. Andreas. And...

02:26
as I said I've included them in the show notes. Now before we crack on into the interview though, I would like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform because that increases the visibility of Micopedia and amongst the many thousands of other podcasts that are out there. So more people get to learn from experts that I have on the show like Andreas. All right team, enjoy the conversation.

02:59
Andres, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me this morning. I've been super interested in your work over the years, first with Diet Doctor and then of course with Hava and Satiety Per Calorie. And it never fails to amaze me actually, just the controversy that what seems almost like a really intuitively simple concept around food, how people respond to these sorts of changes.

03:27
I'm pleased that we get the opportunity to speak about it today too. Yeah, it's going to be fun. Thank you for having me. Great to be here. I mean, first of all, before we sort of dive into your work, I'm always really interested to understand how a medical doctor gets what their journey is in nutrition with regards to when it became a, I guess, a focus topic for them. Because of course, you don't go into your medical training with...

03:55
a whole lot of nutrition in there. So can you just share a little bit of that background, Andreas? Yeah, sure. No, like any doctor, we had almost no nutrition training whatsoever. We had one week that wasn't very memorable out of seven years or however you wanna count it. So yeah, for me, I got fascinated because I started reading some book about the glycemic index, some book by Monta and Jack actually,

04:25
started and then I dive into that rabbit hole because it all seemed so logical and obvious that what we eat influence hormones and influence how the body responds to food. That's not what we've been trained. We've just been trained about calories in and calories out and vitamins and such. This may seem like a small thing, but to me, it was very apparent, at least I think it's apparent,

04:55
This is not a small thing. This is massive because it's actually, it affects the biggest health problem in the world. This poor metabolic health connected to obesity drives all our top chronic diseases, heart disease, cancer, dementia, stroke, and the list goes on and on and on. Seven out of the 10 top causes of death. This is as massive as it could possibly be. And if doctors and the whole medical profession

05:25
is really missing the big picture and just completely ignoring it, then that's huge. That's 10 Nobel Prizes right there in medicine. So yeah, I got fascinated by it and go right in. This is more than 20 years ago and still has.

05:48
Fascinated today. Yeah. And who were your early mentors, András? Because of course, your first, or at least the work that I was aware of yours was diet doctor and the low carb approach. And I'd love to chat about the pivot from, not necessarily a pivot from low carb, but a change in focus. So who... Let's say on evolution. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly how I would describe it as well. So who were your early sort of mentors that got you interested in low carb keto initially?

06:16
Well, I mean, it started at the very beginning. There is this Swedish guy called Paul Lund who wrote a bunch of books about low glycemic index and such. So I was really into that in the first year or two. And then of course, Gary Taubes was very influential for me. You know, 2005, six, his articles and then the good calories, bad calories book, which I devoured the day I got it on.

06:45
pre-order. So that was a huge influence and all these low carb physicians that were around back then, the request men, Michael Eads, you know, on and on, lots of great people. So yeah, those were my early influences, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago. And then of course, more recently, as you just described, you've had an evolution of

07:15
and how you approach it. So what was the genesis for that? Well, after many years of learning about this, and also due to a bunch of new studies coming out in the last five or 10 years, it really became more and more apparent that while low carb works really well for a lot of people and while there is a lot of evidence to support that, it's not the final answer. Like it doesn't explain everything. Pretty far from it actually.

07:43
There are tons of exceptions, people doing pretty much the opposite, getting great results. Very hard to explain. And I mean, the old classic examples is people in Asia eating mostly rice and vegetarian diets, mostly carbohydrates and having no BCD and metabolic syndrome whatsoever. There are plenty of examples like that. Kind of hard to explain with a theory that says the opposite.

08:11
And then there were a few big studies coming out that also really challenged this approach, where for example, they did a very well controlled, as it can be over years, getting humans to eat either a low carb or a high carb diet and having virtually identical good results in both. This study by Christian Gardner.

08:41
Christopher Gardner. And that's also very, very hard to explain. How can you lose a lot of weight on low carb, but you lose just about the same, almost the same at least, by doing the exact opposite? And a bunch of studies by Kevin Hall as well showing similar things. It just it doesn't fit the carb insulin model theory there.

09:05
This idea that eating carbohydrates raises blood glucose, which raises insulin, which is a fat storing hormone, makes a lot of sense, but it doesn't match reality over and over again. It really doesn't. So it became clear that while what I was doing and promoting was helpful for a lot of people, it wasn't sort of the final truth, if you will.

09:34
there was something beyond that. That of course fascinates me because again, this is the biggest health problem in the world. It hasn't gotten any smaller in the last 20 years. Actually, it's gotten bigger. This is really, really important. It's hard to eat better. It's hard to follow a carnivore or strict low carb diet, just like it's hard to follow a vegan diet or

10:02
or just counting calories and restricting your calories, extremely hard, almost nobody succeeds with that long term. So there is a desperate need for better solutions. I mean, now we have these GLP-1 drugs, Osampec and such, which are, I think, super helpful for a lot of people. But most people don't get all the way they want even with those drugs. And really, should we medicate 90% of the population?

10:31
For life, of course, the pharmaceutical companies would love that because that would be like a money machine like none other. And maybe we will. But I have a strong belief that there is a better way. We shouldn't need to medicate the whole population. What if everybody was allergic to peanuts? Would we just medicate the whole population for life? Or would we get peanuts out of our food supply?

11:00
It doesn't make any sense to me to medicate this problem away. We need to solve it at the root cause. And then we would also get rid of a lot of side effects and just live better lives. So anyways, back to the question, how I evolved. Yeah, it just became apparent that there must be a better way and a theory that could explain more. All these black swans.

11:30
And it turned out, yeah, there is. And because obviously, well, I've spoken to Ted Naiman, who is, I think, one of your, who you work with. Yeah, we work closely together. I think he's brilliant. Yeah, I agree. I think he's really brilliant as well. So can we define for the listeners who might be unfamiliar, and of course, I'll pop in the show notes the conversation I had with Ted on his sort of protein to energy, but then shift to satiety, precarity. Sorry.

11:59
satiety per calorie model. Can we just define what the core concepts are of that Harvard satiety system, Andreas, and also how it came about, I guess? Sure. I mean, at the core of it is just a simple first principles based logic, right? Our modern ultra processed food supply cause people to eat more.

12:29
That's just, it's been proven in very well controlled studies. For example, in one where participants ate 500 calories more every day on ultra-processed foods versus unprocessed foods without noticing any difference in, you know, they just ate as much or as little as they wanted in both arms. But when they got the ultra-processed foods, they ended up

12:58
proves what is sort of intuitively obvious. In the US, for example, let's say people go from a less developed country and they go visit the US and they live there for a couple of months. Almost everybody has the same story. I gained five pounds, I gained 10 pounds. I don't know what happened. So what's going on there? There's something in that developed environment and of course it's spreading all over the world now. So it's...

13:27
It's not that much better in Europe. But yeah, there's something in the food that causes people to eat way more and it's been proven in studies. So that's sort of at the core of what we're trying to do here is to try to figure out what is it. And then it becomes really interesting because different scientists, different studies point out different things. So carbohydrates is one theory.

13:57
It's all about the refined carbohydrates. It's all about the sugar. It's all about the refined fiberless carbohydrates. But yeah, then there are other theories. Maybe it's the cedars. Maybe it's animal foods. If you ask a vegan, it's probably animal foods. Or maybe it's something that affects the microbiome. Maybe it's these hyper palatable foods, foods that are addictive.

14:25
There are all kinds of explanations. Some people say, and there's good science to support it, saying that it's about the energy density of food. If you concentrate calories, then people tend to eat more. Which is what ultra-processing usually does. You remove the water, it becomes more addictive to eat, and it also becomes more shelf-stable and cheaper. And it's all good things for the food companies. They sell more.

14:55
and it costs less. So it's all good for them, but obviously bad for people's health. Yeah, that's the situation we're in. We know it's something in the food environment. It's something that is connected to ultra-processing of foods. But there are all kinds of theories about what it is. What's become, I think, completely obvious is that this isn't about one thing. The reason why people point...

15:23
to different factors is because there are multiple factors that affect this. It's not just one thing. So when I was growing up into the nutrition world, I started from a low carb angle. And of course, if you exclude carbohydrates from good diets, you do a lot of good things. You tend to actually get rid of most of the ultra processed foods because most of it does contain a lot of carbs. So immediately you're going to be free of all kinds of things.

15:51
You also raise the protein percentage of your food, because if you exclude carbs, well, you have to eat more of something else. And protein is one of the things you're most likely going to eat more of. Pretty much every successful low carb study ended up with people eating more protein, which is satiating and causes people to eat less. And then you exclude all these ultra processed, hyper palatable foods like chocolate, regular chocolate.

16:17
ice cream, potato chips, all these things that are addictive in nature, you're excluded. So a clove carb is a very simple approach that works and it's a simple piece of advice. Just don't eat carbs. Very easy to explain. Most people know what carbs are, at least. Easy to say, easy to understand, relatively straightforward to do. So I mean, it's a good option, but again, it doesn't really touch on all of these factors.

16:47
It's easy to overeat with low carb as well for some people. There are just some people who for when they go low carb, they start swapping out their carrot afternoon tea for nuts or cheese. They stop eating apples and they start having keto chocolate or something like that. Even on whole foods, people can still overeat because it doesn't...

17:13
If you're not focusing on some of the things which the satiety per calorie model thinks about like protein leverage as much or the energy density, then you can still consume plenty of calories and not necessarily make the progress that you expect to make. And from a clinician perspective, I would see that all of the time actually. Yeah, 100%. I mean, the low carb simple generally works, but it's missing big pieces of the puzzle.

17:42
And that results in a lot of people failing to reach their goals because of being not aware of the potential mistake that they're making, such as low carb tends to put a blind eye to added fats that are highly energy-dense and lowers the protein percentage of the food and...

18:09
in various ways lowers the type of calories so that you tend to eat more. So if you pour oil on everything, if you have a constant butter in everything, if you eat lots and lots of nuts and the high fat cheese, or even worse, the low carb desserts that are high fat with artificial sweetness in them. I mean, you're not going to get the results that you could have had for sure not. Yeah. And Daya, it's interesting looking at one of the original books I read on it.

18:39
from Steve Finney and Jeff Volek. They were like the keto Bibles actually, like keto for high performance sport and then keto just for healthy living. They're not the titles. The titles are escaping me right now. But I do remember in the healthy living one, they mentioned that the ketogenic diet isn't necessarily a high fat diet because the ketogenic, because the energy that your body will derive and burn.

19:07
the fat is the fat that you're stored on your body and it's not fat that you add to your diet. So from their perspective, when you were using a ketogenic diet, which obviously is different from low carb, but they definitely focused more on the removal of carbohydrate to get into ketogenesis rather than just offloading and putting a whole lot of fat in, particularly if you were someone with metabolic problems or required weight loss.

19:35
point got missed quite a bit along the way when we're talking about low carbon keto for weight loss, et cetera. Yeah, for sure removing carbohydrates, that will always work. Yeah, for sure. And they never suggested putting lashings of cream or butter or oil because of the fact that the fat that you would utilize would be fat that you would store.

20:05
What I love about the satiety, the harvest system is that you sort of bring in concepts like the protein leverage theory, like this is something which seems to be considered obviously, and the energy density piece. So how do you come up with a score for a food? And I think this is where from a public health standpoint, it's challenging to have one system that gets it right for all foods. So what are the elements that...

20:35
that are considered undress? Yeah, so just tying it all together, we're in a situation where the food causes us to eat too much. Multiple factors cause this and it's not just one thing. And all the existing dietary approaches, they're sort of, they give simple advice, avoid carbs or avoid meat or avoid this or that, but they become somewhat ineffective and

21:03
bit too strict and hard to do because you're just trying to do one thing to an extreme. And what you could really imagine to be more effective and more sustainable, more easy to do, simple to do, is if you can affect all of these factors, whichever one fits you at any particular time. The problem is it becomes very, very complex because how do you keep all these factors in your

21:32
look at the nutrition panel and see how do all these things interact. It becomes almost impossible and certainly not simple. It would be an approach for, I don't know, not humans at least. But we can solve that with technology, with a smartphone, with an app. We can solve that. What we can do is we can build an algorithm that works in the background. You don't have to understand it. You don't have to use it.

22:01
But what it does is it takes into account all of these core factors that affect how much a food, particular food makes you want to eat. And then it can guide you to the foods that cause you to eat less. And you can select the foods that you like. Maybe the foods that you are currently eating that are already helping you eat less, but maybe you don't know it and you could eat more of those foods.

22:28
And then you can see, oh, these foods that I regularly eat actually caused me to eat more. And I don't need this so much. I can eat less of that. Maybe I can stop doing that. I can switch that to something else. So I think what you end up with is a, it's an approach that is so much more flexible and easy to do and, and, and easier to do in social situations and easier to do in normal life, right? You don't have to switch your entire.

22:58
diet. You don't have to change everything, stop eating a ton of foods forever. You don't need to do that. You can just look at what you eat today, what's working for you, what's not helping you, and just tweak it. So eat a bit more of the foods that help you, eat a bit less of the foods that do not, and maybe do some substitutions, some additions on top of that. And then you can end up with something that feels very familiar to you.

23:27
It's very convenient and that still makes you want to eat an amount of food that causes you to have a normal weight, you know, fingers crossed, and a normal metabolic health and a low risk of diseases like heart disease, cancer, dementia, and that causes you to be more fit, stronger.

23:55
more energetic, but basically a diet that causes you to be a better version of yourself, feel better, look better and perform better and hopefully live longer and healthier. This is not unrealistic at all. I think this is what the existing science and data points to. So what we've done with the satin per calorie model, like that's a SPC or it's a diet. It's a little bit complex to wrap your hand around.

24:26
the concept. But once you do, it becomes super simple. So every food gets a score from 0 to 100, which is attempting to rank foods. Rank all common foods from 0 to 100. How much do they want to eat? So that means that foods that are very low are the foods that cause you to eat more, like cookies, potato chips, candy, you can imagine, right? Soda.

24:56
And foods at the top, close to 100, are the foods that cause you to eat the least. So leafy green vegetables, lean proteins, etc. And in the middle you have everything else spread out on this scale. And what that allows you to do is to see, okay, these are the foods I eat that are low on the score. I can eat less of them.

25:24
These are the foods that are high on the score, I can eat more of them. But it's not about, you don't have to go to a hundred. I mean, that would be too effective. Actually, you know, this approach I would argue is so effective that you can't do too much or you will have too much of an effect. Like for me, at least it may not apply to everybody. Some people are genetically different, et cetera, have different challenges.

25:53
But if you're someone who's a little bit average, like me, I'm kind of average. Tall, but average. Yeah, I'm very tall, but apart from that, when I go too high on this score, I just get too lean. And when you're very tall like me, you don't want to be ultra lean, you know, like that kind of thing. Right.

26:18
I can't go too high, but I can very, very easily eat at a level that gives me the weight I want to have where I feel my best and perform my best. So I think this is super helpful and super useful and also crucially simple to do. I've been close to keto, more or less keto, sometimes very strict keto.

26:48
15 years plus. And I mean, it's doable if you're really into it. But wow, this is so much easier. Yeah, so much easier. It's insane. Really. Andreas, how did the shift for you personally sort of change your physique or change your appetite? And how quickly did you sort of notice that?

27:16
Was it something personally that you were experiencing that made you dive a bit deeper or was it really just the whole idea that actually carbs cannot explain at all? Or was it a mixture of both? Yeah, I started getting into it through protein, realizing how big of a role protein plays in insulin and how actually all the low carb approaches that really work well for people that tend to be higher in protein.

27:45
all the low carb studies that have been successful have resulted in people eating more protein. So it started for me seven, eight years ago, I guess, started eating more protein, doing a low carb high protein diet rather than a low carb medium protein diet, if you will. And I suppose I immediately noticed that I lost more weight, I got stronger.

28:14
It just became easier to do it that way. And then looking at all the studies, seeing how, yeah, this seems to work well for people. So we, I mean, at the time we were still focused primarily on the diet, Dr. Wells, like now, and we started tweaking it a bit, tweaking our advice a bit towards a higher protein version of low carb, tweaking our recipes a bit to make sure that it was not excessively high in fat. So that's kind of how it's...

28:44
started this transition. But then it became more and more apparent that while protein and this PE diet approach that Ted was championing at the time, while that is most likely a good step in the right direction, it's still not the whole answer because there are more factors. And I'm trying to see, for example, energy density is a pretty powerful factor actually.

29:14
and also this hedonic thing where, for example, salted nuts, people tend to eat much more salted nuts than unsalted plain nuts. It's just more delicious and it causes you to eat more, causes you to eat these for meat, eat the whole bag, not just part of it. And that doesn't factor into low carb or doesn't factor into this PE diet. So there are things that get missed.

29:44
So then the question became, can we include all these key core most important factors? Can we build an algorithm to do that? And that's how we ended up with the Satec per calorie algorithm. And then we've kept updating that and we'll keep updating it. So I think that the beautiful thing with it is just based on first principles, what works, what studies prove. And then...

30:11
we're not locked into any particular exact way of calculating it. If a study comes out tomorrow that proves that, I don't know, yellow foods cause you to eat less, we can just potentially include that in the algorithm. I don't believe that will happen, but it's just an example, right? Yeah. I mean, there are, right now we have four key factors. So it's protein percentage.

30:40
And then there is energy density, the fiber content of food, and then the endonic potential of food, how rewarding foods are. And that's probably the one that we have the most potential to keep improving because the evidence, the science there isn't perfect. Science is never perfect. We have something good to get started with, but it can certainly improve. So for example, we...

31:09
we calculate that if you have a lot of carbohydrates, concentrated carbohydrates and fat together without much protein, that tends to be highly rewarding such as chocolate or ice cream or things like that. But then you also have combinations of fat and salt together like salted nuts or salt and concentrated carbohydrates together like crackers, salted crackers.

31:39
There are various sort of combinations that tend to be highly rewarding and there's decent evidence and certainly everybody's experienced it. So it just feels intuitively obvious that while the science isn't super strong, what exists today really supports what everybody's experienced. And so we have been keeping it because we think it's going to improve it. It's going to improve overall effectiveness.

32:08
But they were extremely ready to update it and tweak it based on more well-controlled studies in the future that can tease out exactly what kind of combinations really trigger our reward system and really cause us to overeat massively. Yeah. And Andreas, any surprises for you as you were like, obviously, over the course of tweaking the algorithm? I'm sure there were foods and you were like...

32:38
hang on, we've got to do this a bit differently because that isn't what I sort of assumed. But any sort of like surprises in terms of satiety that you, that regardless of how you tweet the algorithm, this thing still comes out as actually being, having a higher score or actually a lower score? I mean, there are lots of surprises. I mean, coming from a low carb angle, you're kind of assuming that fruit would be pretty bad because it's all sugar and that's what they say.

33:08
salt sugar, but they actually end up being pretty average in our algorithm because of very low energy density, low fiber, not excessively hedonic. It's not like chocolate or ice cream at least. It doesn't promote that kind of over eating. So they end up being in the center. That's coming from my perspective that...

33:35
is a bit surprising. And then another thing that surprised me, I guess, a bit because of my pre-existing bias is processed meats like sausages and salami and things like that. I knew they were not great, but they were worse in our scoring than I would have predicted. Interesting. That it became pretty low because the very, very energy down is mostly fat and pretty low in nutrition and protein.

34:06
I also remember reading a study showing how potatoes were one of the highest satiety, had the highest satiety factor. I can't recall how they, maybe the satiety index of any food. And this was like quite an early study done maybe in the early 2000s or maybe it was even the 90s. I can't even recall. Yeah, it's 1995. It's a snow study. It's a great study.

34:31
It's pretty impressive that a study from 1995 is still cited over and over. People keep bringing up this potato. It's the most satiating food. I mean, it's a great study. I love it. I think it's great that we should do more studies like that. I don't quite buy that one particular thing because first of all, it's only 38 foods. So it's not the most satiating food out of everything in the world. It's just out of 38.

35:00
The second key thing is, while it's interesting, it's only a two hour result. Oh, that's a very good point. You measure the satiety after two hours. And this is actually what we would predict as well, that potatoes do pretty well early on because they have a very low energy density and a lot of fiber and they don't claim potatoes with no fat, no salt, nothing.

35:26
They certainly don't promote a lot of overeating. Like you're not going to go crazy on that, I think. Plain boiled potatoes. So yeah, under those circumstances with only two hours, measured only two hours, I find that very believable that they would do great. Yeah, interesting. But if you look at it a little bit longer term, and especially if you try to look at it like people regularly eat potatoes.

35:55
not plain boiled without salt or fat, but probably some fat there. And the problem with potatoes, the weakness is they're quite low in protein. So that means that if you look at over a longer timeframe, you tend to see that higher protein diets always do better long-term when it comes to eating less and becoming stronger and leaner. So when we...

36:24
put this into our algorithm, we get again a pretty average score for potatoes or even low average. So like 45 or something out of 100. Now, to be clear, in our system, a good place to be might be 50 plus, 50, 60 or something. The goal is not to get to 100 because that would be too effective. Like for me, I mean, you would just get too lean.

36:51
and not feel your best at all. You can't live on broccoli and egg whites. It doesn't really work. So you have to find the right balance for you. And the balance might be around 50, around 60 if you're an overachiever. Yeah. And I wonder actually, it'll be interesting to see sort of moving forward. I'm not sure if this is in your plans, but to actually have cohorts of people who like, so athletes, for example, might be better on a lower satiety. So they're able to get the

37:20
energy or the calories they need because they've got higher energy requirements. Whereas someone who is more sedentary might be better at say 70, who don't have the luxury of calories in order to get that satiety. So do you have any sort of research? Obviously the algorithm itself will be updated according to research that is published, but in the future for Harvard, like is that in your...

37:48
wish list to be able to be involved with studies to assess the effectiveness of satiety per calorie? Yeah, absolutely. What we do, first of all, what you say is absolutely correct. So if you're a lean, very, very active athlete, let's say an ultra marathon runner or something like that, or you're a cyclist or something where you train an enormous amount of time, and you certainly don't have obesity or metabolic syndrome or anything.

38:17
you would actually, if you were using a system, you would be aiming for a slightly lower satiety score, maybe 35 or 40, depending on your goals. Depending on... You could use this to help you get leaner if you need to. But if you're already lean and you need a lot of energy for hours and hours of exercise, then yeah, you're not going to do well on broccoli and egg whites. You're going to have to...

38:47
eat a lot of energy and that means going a bit lower on the satiety scale. But yeah, on to the science side, I think that what we do now is, is unique in the sense that nobody else has built anything like this for this particular problem in the world. The biggest health problem in the world. Nobody has built a system to make this simple for that purpose, for weight loss, for metabolic health, you know, diabetes, blood pressure, all of these things, for body composition and fitness.

39:17
strength and energy, just something that's tailored for that huge problem and huge use case. Nobody's done it. So we're stuck with all these separate things that just focus on one factor, or you're stuck with trying to make sense of all these complexities on your own. Nobody's made it simple until Hava, until this system. And I find that fascinating and also really, really exciting. We made our app free, by the way.

39:45
So anybody can use the basic functionality for free forever. Yeah, hoping to really make a big impact. What we do now is to the best of our ability, we balance all these factors that are proven by the best available science. We balance them as well as we can. I think that most likely we end up with something that's already better, more effective, than approaches that you can't.

40:13
just focus on one thing and ignore everything else because it's pretty weak. And we also end up with a system where any new science that comes, we can keep updating it, making it every year, it will be better. Every month, it will be better. So very exciting. Totally exciting. Andres, a couple of questions. Obviously, well...

40:41
obvious to me, but I'm thinking in terms of clients I have and just people that I interact with who say they've got food addiction or that is something that they really struggle with. How does the SPC or how does Harvard help those people, I suppose? Because for some people, foods to my mind are off limits, I guess. And I don't think this is a failing of the individual, but literally there are foods that they just cannot turn the noise down in their brain if they have them. So...

41:10
Yeah. Yeah. So do you have thoughts on that? I have a lot of thoughts on that. So, AltynBros foods is often designed to be addictive. Yeah. You know that many of the biggest, several of the biggest food companies in the US were bought by tobacco companies a number of decades ago. And then they sort of brought their expertise in getting people addicted to cigarettes and constructed foods that

41:40
people get addicted to. Yeah. That's pretty scary. Yeah. And we know today that a lot of foods are highly, highly rewarding, highly potentially addictive. People do get addicted to ultra processed foods of various kinds. No doubt about it. And the foods are actually designed for that because it's profitable. I mean, there is nothing more profitable, right? Get someone to be addicted to the thing you're selling. Yeah. And then you can sell more.

42:09
How that connects to the satiety model? Well, we build that into the hedonic score. So often these addictive foods are combinations of fat and sugar. Sometimes people talk about sugar addiction. Sugar is certainly part of it. But usually people don't get addicted to plain sugar. It is much more addictive to eat sugar and fat together like chocolate or ice cream or... Yeah.

42:39
Even soda, you know, you have the whole experience of you have caffeine, which helps make people addicted. And then you have the carbonation and the flavor profile and everything. It sort of boosts. If it was just sugar in water, it wouldn't be as addictive as a soft drink can be. And this is pretty well reflected in the hedonic scoring.

43:06
have also if you go for lower satiety foods, they tend to be not addicted. But it's actually something we could build into our program where we could help people predict specifically what kind of foods they should really stay away from if they have a food addiction. I think that's really an exciting area for the future. I mean, obviously people may know most of this after some time, but I think we can still build a product that

43:36
that could be helpful in predicting and guiding people to make it easier to stay away from not just what you're already addicted to, but what may have a similar effect for you. Yeah, no, I agree. I think there's huge potential there. It would be amazing. Andres, finally, I mean, I could ask you a million questions, but I mean, I'm really fascinated by the response and reaction out on Twitter and social media.

44:05
to the development of Harvard. And I'm not sure whether it is based on people feel betrayed that you will no longer sort of a flag bearer for low carb specifically, or whether they disagree with the very notion that anything other than low carb could be helpful. So like, what are your thoughts on why people, there's so much vitriol, I suppose, directed towards what you're trying to do? Yeah, it's interesting.

44:33
Really, I do have the same goals as I used to have, and I think most people have, is helping people live better lives, helping people eat better, helping making it simple to eat better. It's the biggest health problem in the world. Obesity, poor metabolic health, dry solar, top chronic diseases. I think that it makes sense to try to find better ways to make this simple for more people.

44:59
Not everybody is able to stick to a keto diet for life. Not everybody is reaching all the goals on a keto diet. I think we should be open to new tools, new approaches that can help more people. So it's a bit sad. But I know that it's to be expected because this whole thing is very tribal. You know,

45:27
We have our, as humans, we tend to sort of want to belong to this tribe of like-minded people. And if you believe very strongly in a certain approach, then everything else looks wrong. I don't think there is enough objectivity, unfortunately. I think it's very based on...

45:55
instinctual feeling, just feel. If you feel that low carb is the one and only true way for everybody, then anything that challenges that must be wrong. And if you feel that, for example, since ultra processed foods as a group are bad for us, then every ultra processed food must be bad for us. That's a sort of a natural thing to believe. I don't think it's true. If you analyze it, you see that there are always exceptions.

46:25
to every rule and you could actually produce ultra-processed foods that are not bad for metabolic health. Maybe they're even helpful. A good example might be protein powders with maybe with some additives in them. They would be counted as ultra-processed, but a lot of people use them to get stronger and leaner and certainly metabolically healthier. This is hardly controversial. There are lots of studies proving you can reverse diabetes with...

46:54
meal replacements that are mostly protein powder or to a high by example, certainly ultra processed. So I think that's also something that upsets people that we try to analyze and see most ultra processed food is bad for you, bad for metabolic health, sure. But are there exceptions? Are there things you could eat that are less bad or even beneficial? We try to do that in an unbiased way.

47:23
try to look at first principles, what does the studies show? What does our algorithm predict? But wow, some people get upset. If you were to suggest that, let's say some low energy density high protein ice cream could be better than an avocado for metabolic health or making you eat fewer calories, which is what it's saying. We predict that this very special ice cream product...

47:53
with a lot of protein, low energy density fiber, will cause you to eat fewer calories than this avocado. It's certainly part of a healthy diet, the avocado. I'm not saying it's bad for you. I'm just saying if you're going to lose weight, maybe you should base your diet on 100% avocado because it's still low in protein and such. So we try to look at it objectively, but this really pisses people off. Yeah, it really does.

48:22
Were you surprised to buy it? No, I kind of expected this. I think every new approach in the history of the world has always been violently resisted at first. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, the famous quote allegedly by Gandhi, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fuck you and then you win. And I think that's sort of...

48:49
summarises the cycles that every new idea goes through in a way. I think the problem is more if nobody cared, if nobody got upset, that would be a... if nobody paid any attention, that would be bad. But if some people love it and some people hate it, that's a stage every new good idea goes through. Yeah, nice one. And how far along that cycle are you?

49:19
A long way to go. But I really think that this is the future. We're just getting started, but the future is coming. If not our approach, then something else similar will be the future because from first principles, it seems obvious that an approach like this will be more effective and simpler to do, more enjoyable.

49:49
more easy to fit into a normal life. So if it's more effective, people reach more of their goals and it's easier to do, then more and more people are going to use it. Yeah, nice one. Andreas, obviously we'll put links to where people can find the app in the show notes and of course, connect with you on Twitter, X, whatever it is, and have an app.

50:13
But can you please just let the listeners know where they can find out more? Yeah, they can just go to the App Store and download the Hava app. It's free. Premium functionality is free for right now. Three months. Amazing. And yeah, they can go to Hava.co. It's a website, ArmonX. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah, that's awesome. Andreas, thank you so much for your time this morning. I really appreciate it. That was great. Thank you so much.

50:53
Hopefully you enjoyed listening to Andreas and hearing his journey through diet, which to be honest is very similar to a lot of people who sort of started out in that low carb ketogenic space, moving to I suppose what you could call a more moderate, if you like, approach. However, having said that, a ketogenic diet, as you know I am of the opinion, that is a very therapeutic approach for some people, so certainly am not washing my hands of that

51:23
anytime soon. Next week on the podcast I speak to my friend Hanson Murphy who is a registered dietitian about a carnivore-kidivore diet. So I think anyone interested in that space is really gonna enjoy that conversation and I'd like to remind you that if you are picking this up on Wednesday when it drops I have my webinar running today at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. New Zealand time that focuses on

51:50
unlocking metabolic mastery and the science-backed tools for fat loss. It is the perfect time of year for anyone who is just wanting to really dial in their nutrition for the new season. So I'll put a link in the show notes so you can sign up to that. And if you can't make it today,

52:07
but you are interested, sign up anyway because I will be sending the recording out after I have finished this evening's recording. Other than that though, please you can catch me over on Twitter, threads and Instagram @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com and you know, book a call with me, why not? Alright team, you have the best week. See you later.