How to Reduce Your Food Cravings | Dr. Casey Means & Dr. Andrew Huberman

one concept I have for food that really helps me is really thinking about the body's always trying to help me be satiated and trying to help reduce my Cravings I literally just have to give the body what it needs I have to stimulate the body in a way that it will serve me in giving me satiety hormones to basically regulate my hunger and again with visuals I think it's so helpful I think about these cells lining our small intestine that literally have nutrients sensors like and literal receptors on the cell membrane in the luminal side

of the gut that's facing all the food that are just sitting there like waiting to bind with these things in our food that will stimulate the cell to make the satiety hormone that poof effortly makes us not hungry gets rid of that grip of attachment to Cravings that all of us are so plagued by and like I think you know we have this intense conversation happening in society right now about glp1 analoges zic and mjara and all these things gp1 Agonist but like you know we rarely talk about the fact that like we have nutrient

C sensing cells of the gut the L cells of the gut that when stimulated appropriately will make glp1 and when stimulated the way they want to be will secrete hordes of glp1 for us and so how do we actually think about just literally giving the body what it needs to stimulate the society hormones and the processed foods aren't giving us those things you know the things that are going to um stimulate those cells well well the things that will I mean this is kind of fascinating if you don't mind going down a little road talking

yeah please with the gp1 conversation I feel like so missing from the conversation is the idea that like from a first principal perspective there's three ways our body could make more gp1 we make more cells that make it l cells of the gut each of those cells makes more gp1 and importantly we can also inhibit the enact activator of gp1 which is an enzyme called dpp4 so gp1 actually gets rapidly degraded by dpp4 in the body so if we can figure out how to inhibit dpp4 we can raise our gp1 levels what is dpp4 it's

an enzyme that breaks down GP you said that and I missed I apologize so fascinating and so how often have you seen in the headlines oh here's some strategies to inhibit your dpp4 never because OIC is is you know on track to be the highest grossing Med in human history just like we talked about in the beginning of the episode the whole industry this $4 trillion doll health care industry is desperate for not us to not understand how to do the things that drugs could do for us so when we look at those three first

principles approaches of how do we make more L cells get them to produce more glp1 from each L cell and then inhibit the breakdown through the inhibition of dpp4 for the first one we know that short chain fatty acids which of course are the byproduct of microbial fermentation of fiber in the diet stimulates the differentiation of more L cells in the gut so more short chain fatty acids more L cells can we translate that into to support the gut microbiome eat more fiber eat more fiber and um we had Justin sonenberg from Stanford on a

world expert in gut microbiome and he was a big proponent of based on work he's done um with Chris Gardner and others at Stanford so happens of ingesting one to three servings of low sugar fermented foods each day things like sauerkraut kchi again low sugar variety is probably best yeah maybe not you said not kombucha yeah cuz that's going to be like the highest sugar of the fermented foods which people often go to but now and pretty costly the sauerkraut you can actually make your own sauerkraut Tim Ferris had a great recipe for this in

the 4our chef you have to be careful because you know that you can create some unhealthy ferment you have to do it the way he describes so check out the the recipe it's online um or you can buy sauerkraut and the brins um drinking the brine off the sauerkraut or off um seems to be good for the gut that's such a great point which is that ultimately we want the short chain fatty acids which is the the the medicine that the microbiome are making for us through the microbial fermentation process and we can basically do

that in three ways one is we can eat more fiber which is prebiotics we can also eat more polyphenols because we're now learning that the microbiome actually processes they ferment polyphenols from our which is basically ly you'll find those in colorful fruits and vegetables um spices teas cocoa things like that so fermentation of polyphenols and fiber to short chain fatty acids which then we absorb um and then like you just said in a fermented food the bacteria in that food will be making short chain fatty acids by fermenting the food in there and then if

we drink that we're getting the short chain fatty acids directly so that's the kimchi sauerkraut uh Greek yogurt kava which I'm obsessed with which is like low sugar cucha it's like made with fermenting beets basically it's such good stuff uh miso NATO so that's one that has been shown to differentiate more L cells in the gut we also know that people with type two diabetes have much fewer L cells in the gut and it's hard to know what the causality is there but I think a safe assumption is like if we keep our blood sugar

under better control and sort of stay out of that diabetic range it probably lends itself I don't know what the chicken in the egg is there but blood sugar stability more L cell differentiation and then actually ginsing has been shown to um to improve l l cell differentiation so that's just sort of one one set of things and I don't think the dose on jins sing has been has been settled but um very high antioxidant component plant when we look at actually stimulating more glp1 you've talked about yate I think having like a a mild

effect on glp1 but there's actually a lot of other things um in the liter protein of course Very potently stimulates these nutrient receptor cells and specifically like veine and glutamine seem to have a potent stimulatory effect on glp1 so you're going find that in like meat and turkey and eggs and things like that what are your thoughts on supplementing El glutamine it's controversial I know that some people do it um in an effort to relieve leaky gut but that's but there aren't any randomized control trials for that so the um depending on one stance on

what's required for uh uh kind of a threshold for for adopting something you know some people say that's crazy other people really swear by supplementing L glutamine maybe it's through this this route of increasing um L cells um that some of the gut relief might might exist I guess we'd have to explore it so that's speculative folks um so this is interesting these are ways to increase the cells that then make gp1 so fiber Prebiotic probiotic fiber and fermented antioxidants lowering blood sugar gin saying so those are kind of the L cell ones the actual

secretion of more glp1 the one of the most potent ones and the study that looks at this like the bar graphs are very clearly statistically significant lots of asteris is actually thids thids tell me more about thid thids are so fascinating thids are actually a structure imp plants that are part of the chloroplast so you know chloroplast and this also is fasting because chloroplasts are basically the plant version verion of mitochondria essentially and thids are a molecule in the chloroplast and there's actually been research that shows that when you eat about 100 grams of spinach

which gives you five grams of straight thyl covid over 12 weeks daily it led to a a significant increase in glp1 and again I don't remember the exact it was two or threefold higher um secretion so this is in part so so so that's a direct simulator effect of the the L cells and so this is this equates to 3.5 oun of spinach a day which is like nothing so just getting spinach or cooked spinach I think I actually I don't think it actually it might have said in the methods but I would I would

imagine raw because you want to get those undenatured thids in the gut so just kind of another and actually thids do a lot of other interesting stuff they inhibit lipase in the gut and so actually help more fat get down to the distal small bowel and promote satiety so this is one of the reasons why you talk about oh the people who eat all these healthy foods and greens they're less hungry it's like it's biochemistry like there's stuff happening in there that is making the hunger signals go down through things like inhibiting lipas you know

in improving glp1 secretion so other things for glp1 secretion the thids also Fiers been shown specific amino acids so high protein foods things that involve a lot of veiling and glutamine uh green tea and specifically the uh elic the EC um ecgc that uh is one of the compounds in green tea that's been shown to simulated glp1 curcumin um so there's several things that are all in that like Whole Food you know basically things you would associate with a healthy diet but we actually know they stimulate glp1 so I you know those are all things

I try to include in my diet and the last one is inhibition of dpp4 and that one there's just actually when you look at the research there's some kind of random foods that tend to inhibit dpp4 um black beans Mexican oregano other forms of oregano Rosemary guava and um I wrote this one down because it's a word I hadn't seen very much before I started digging into this but mtin which is found in berries cranberries and peppers and and Swiss chards so all that is to say ultimately many of us are gripped by cravings and

the idea of have you know just sort of not being constantly driven to eat more which I would argue that about 80% of Americans are feels really hard to overcome but a lot of it is literally just communicating to your cells in a clear way through food to help you be satiated and the science can show us how to do this and a lot of it comes down to eating essentially what you were talking about how you eat omnivorous protein um healthy sources with nutrient you know density and lots of colorful fruits vegetables um spices

herbs things like that thank you for tuning in to the huberman lab Clips Channel if you enjoyed the clip that you just viewed please check out the full length Episode by clicking here