FFF 083: What Everybody Should Know About Ketois & Low Carb Ketogenic Diets – with Brad Dieter PhD

This week, Brad Dieter PhD – research scientist and nutrition coach – is on the Podcast to chat about all things low carb and the ketogenic diet.

Brad’s experience, from the weight room to the laboratory, enables him to bridge the gap between science and real-world results.

In this episode you’ll learn the difference between low-carb dieting and the ketogenic diet, what the long term and short term benefits for weight loss are (if any), the negatives associated with the diet, the connection between ketogenic dieting and possible improvements in cancer and brain function and why you shouldn’t ditch the carbs and try to become ‘fat-adapted’ if sports performance is your goal!

Transcription

Scott: Hey, Brad, welcome to the podcast.

Brad: Thanks, Scott. It’s great to be here. I’m really excited to talk about this topic with you and I think it will be a fun conversation.

Scott: Let’s hope so. Brad, give us some background about you first. Who are you? What do you do? How did it all start?

Brad: I guess we can start where I’m at and kinda walk backwards through my journey. Right now I’m finishing up a post-doc fellowship at Providence in Spokane, Washington. My current research focuses essentially metabolism and kidney disease in diabetes. How does metabolism and inflammation and chronic disease kind of all intersect and cause a lot of these end organ problems we see. That’s the project I’m focused on now. I look at all aspects of it. Everything from, you know, the nutrition piece to, you know, the very basic cellular, molecular changes, epigenetic changes. That’s kind of where my research focuses at the moment and what I do on a daily basis in a laboratory. But my journey’s kind of been, you know, gone through the full iteration essentially. I started out in my undergraduate degree thinking I wanted to go to medical school and be a doctor. Just a lot of the experiences I had both in the classroom and on the job site, you know, being in the hospital and volunteering maybe and realized being a doctor, you know, a clinician probably wasn’t the best use of my skills and just the way I wanted to live my life. So I decided I’d go the research route and after probably, you know, I took a year off after undergrad and decided I wanted to kind of go into the research world from a different perspective. My masters and my PhD were actually looked at, you know, how does exercise mitigate the risk of disease and a lot of these chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease from a molecular perspective? One of the things that we know is, you know, physical activity is protective against a lot of these diseases. My dissertation was essentially, you know, in a diabetic state. How does exercises kind of prevent some of the bad changes that occur in diabetes and specifically in diabetic heart disease?

Scott: Okay. What then would you say your general philosophy towards training and nutrition is?

Brad: Oh, man. My general philosophy is do what works.

Scott: Yeah.

Brad: I think, you know, I think that’s one of the big things is there’s so many different ways to approach each individual problem and really the goal is, you know, if you’re a practitioner or even if you’re just trying to figure out, you know, for yourself is there’s really no one clear cut, perfect way to get where you wanna be.

A lot of it has to do with who you are and what you’re trying to do. Now there are some very basic general principles that we know that we can adhere to that we can get results, right. Obviously from the food in piece, it’s overwhelmingly evident that the calories are a huge dictator of scale weight and we know that scale weight is a big predictor of mortality and morbidity and a lot of these chronic diseases. So, you know, that’s a big piece that we know. We know that food quality is one of the easiest ways to actually control caloric intake. There’s usually a big debate of, you know, kind of if it’s your macros crag, you could eat whatever you want as long as the calories are controlled. And that’s true to a large part but one of the problems that we run into is how much easier is it to control your calorie intake, eating more what we would call high quality foods versus kind of the low quality food. So when talking about pragmatic reasons, I think those are two of the big philosophies that we try to use to get people to at least started on the path.

Scott: Yeah, I agree 100%. Okay. Let’s get into the meat shall we say of the podcast. Recently you’ve written about low carb dieting and ketosis. And I think a lot of the listeners have a general perception of what they think a low carb diet is and what it does. Some of them may have heard of ketosis or the ketogenic diet. But they might not fully understand it. Let’s go right back to the beginning. When we’re talking about a low carb diet, what’s the definition and also what is ketosis?

Brad: Yeah. The first question is a very good one is a low carb diet really essentially means intake of carbohydrates that low enough to kind of change the way your body metabolizes things in a large part. Now the exact number of how many grams a day constitutes a low carb diet really can depend on the individual based on height, weight, activity level, just their natural–basically their genetic predisposition how their body metabolizes carbohydrates, all those kind of dictate what would be a low carb diet for you versus somebody who’s a five foot, 130 pound female, et cetera. The basic principle of it is a carbohydrate intake that is substantially low. For most people, we could say less than 50 grams a day, we could consider usually a very low carbohydrate diet. That’s probably the best place to start with what is a low carb diet.

Scott: Okay. And then ketosis then, is this again, the ketogenic diet is obviously a low carb diet but are there any considerations or differences between what we would classify a general low carb diet like the one you’ve just described compared to the ketogenic diet?

Brad: Yeah. This is one of the big distinctions that we really should make because there is a difference between a low carb diet and a ketogenic diet.

Really the way to define it is having a carbohydrate and a protein intake sufficiently low enough and a fat intake sufficiently high enough that you get an elevation in your blood of what we call ketone bodies. Ketone bodies are essentially molecules that result from when you have either an absence of carbohydrates coming in by starvation or lack of food or you selectively restrict carbohydrates and to a certain extent protein from your diet that fat metabolism is so high to provide energy for your body that some of the–we can talk about the details later. But some of the fat metabolism machinery starts to actually, it can’t keep up with demand of ATP in certain areas of your body so you actually start producing ketones as essentially leftovers from fat metabolism or the better way to think of it is fat metabolism is so backed up and it starts doing other things and creating other molecules with the fatty acids that you’re consuming.

Scott: Okay. Then this begs the question of why would someone go that low with their carb intake as to induce ketosis. What are some of the benefits that either people associate with the ketogenic diet that’s potentially different from the ones that have actually been shown to be beneficial?

Brad: Yeah, the motivation behind it is several fold. One, probably the first one that we all think of is if you have carbohydrate intake low enough that you will have lower levels of insulin present, right? That’s kind of the idea. The thought process is in some aspects, insulin essentially signals your fat molecules to start storing nutrients. If you don’t consume carbohydrates and you don’t have releases of insulin, your bodies never gonna store fat. That’s kind of the under arching theme or idea of what the ketogenic diet really has been used for for the fat loss piece. That’s probably the first thing that we think of and we’ll talk about whether that’s true or not in a minute. The second piece is regulating blood sugar. A lot of people who have issues with controlling blood sugar, excursions and hypoglycemic events, there is some of the other motivation for the ketogenic diet is if you consume a low enough carbohydrate diet that it is ketogenic, your blood sugar levels don’t go up and down as much as if you are consuming carbohydrates in boluses and you don’t have proper insulin signaling. Some of the other reasons its become more popular recently and we’ll talk about these probably towards the end but the role that ketones play in brain metabolism is much different than the rest of the body. There are some thought that it can be beneficial for neurocognitive function and things like Alzheimer’s and stuff like that. Those are probably the three main reasons. And then the fourth one is there’s been some talk about ketogenic diets in cancer and hopefully at the end, we’ll kind of wrap up with talking about that but those are kind of the four main reasons that people prescribe it or try to adhere to it. That’s usually what we hear when people say this is why I’m on a ketogenic diet.

Scott: Okay, and then in reality for weight loss, is it any more effective than say a general calorie controlled diet whether we’re looking at the Mediterranean diet and the deficit or intuitive eating that results in a calorie deficit. Is it any more effective for fat loss or perhaps we need to look at it from two angles saying is it more effective for fat loss in the short term but also is it related to greater increases or rebounds afterwards? Is it if any more effective in the long term as well?

Brad: Yeah. Let’s tackle the short term piece first. There’s kind of two sides of this coin, right? There is the scientific thing of what we know about the ketogenic diet and then there’s the kind of the real world pragmatic implications. When you look at all of the really well controlled studies, in a scientific world, we talk about things like randomized, double blind trials especially when we’re talking about diets where we can control food intake very closely, we can control energy expenditure and we can just basically control all the variables and look at, “Okay. Does this diet have any additional benefit over another calorie controlled diet?” In the two studies that have been done in the last few years that are controlled enough for me to make some sort of claims about is it doesn’t appear that the ketogenic diet has any benefit on fat loss or weight loss over any other diet that’s very similarly controlled for calories and protein. A) there’s no theoretical mechanism and B) there’s no scientific data that support that it’s more beneficial. Two papers came out of the NIH, a group from the NIH over the last year that really put this idea of low carb beats low fat for weight loss. It’s not true based on what we can tell from the data.

Now from a pragmatic perspective, when you look at a lot of the trials that are not well-controlled, they don’t really do a great job of controlling food intake and energy expenditure is in some of these trials, a very low carb ketogenic diet appears to have maybe a little bit of a benefit on weight loss. Now the key to those studies is in almost all of those that show that it’s got any potential benefit is the groups on the ketogenic diet took in less calories. They were what is referred to in the science world as spontaneous core reduction. They were just eating less food. Now there’s usually why they eat less food has been a lot of debate. Some people say it’s just the magic of ketones not making you as hungry. I think it’s more when you’re just basically eating a ton of fat and no carbohydrates and very little protein, there’s only so many food you can eat. You can eat the same thing over and over, your food selection is really low, your enjoyment from your food is really low. You just start to naturally eat less food. I think those are kind of the two things. In the science perspective, short term. It appears to be no real benefit. From the pragmatic term, in the real world, if you adhere to a diet that strict, usually just based on the nature of the diet, you’re gonna eat less food and you can sometimes lose more weight than if you are having a more wide variety of food. That idea is pretty well substantiated by a lot of the psychology of eating literature.

Scott: Yeah. What we’re saying then is when the low carb people is saying, “Oh, yeah, the low carb diet, it was so effective. It must have been carbs that were again tagging them with the label that the carbs were bad. While we know it’s again, if you’re being more conscious of what you’re eating and if you are trying to follow a ketogenic diet and perhaps your carbohydrate intake previously was highly refined, hyper-palatable, and very calorie dense. And of course if you’re cutting them out then you could be in bare foods in general probably in a calorie deficit and bingo, weight loss happens, same old that what they’re attributing their success to isn’t really what’s causing the results.

Brad: Yeah, exactly. I think your other question was what are the long term results?

Scott: Yeah, sure.

Brad: From my understanding, we’ll follow a theme breaking in into the science and the real world is the scientific literature seems to suggest that the long term success of it is not any better than any other diet which we know for most people the long term success of dieting especially when we adhere to kind of this more strict dieting paradigms is not very successful depending on the paper you look at. If you look at the way lots of literature and most studies, people within the first six months will lose a substantial amount of weight. And then by 18 to 24 months, most people are close to being back to baseline. Most of the studies that have just the dietary component, even if it’s a ketogenic diet show a very similar trend, so the long term results are just about as successful as most other dietary modalities. The piece that makes those successful if you look at the studies that actually do have long term benefit is they’re always combined with something else. They’re always combined with either behavioural modification, lifestyle modification or exercise. It’s kind of one those things where just like every other diet, the ketogenic diet doesn’t appear to be some magical formula for even short term fat loss let alone long term sustainable fat loss.

Scott: Yeah.

Brad: Now from a kind of practical real world standpoint is we see a lot of people who do the rebound thing. We have a lot of people who go on a ketogenic diet and they can lose some weight but that lifestyle becomes unsustainable for a lot of people.

There’s very few people who can say, “Okay. I’m only gonna eat 50 grams of carbohydrates, 15% of my diet from protein and the rest, I’m gonna get from a bunch of fat for the rest of their lives.” And then it becomes kind of unsustainable.

Scott: Yeah, I mean, even things like can’t go out for a beer and then when you get a hard core low carb dieters are avoiding social events like birthdays because there’s cake involved. That just, again, you look at the social aspects that are missing out on for the sake of well a few extra pounds possibly over the course of several months. It doesn’t seem worth it to me. I mean I’m not a proponent of low carb dieting for that very reason. I try and get people to almost lose weight on the highest demand of carbs that they can because of the associations with training performance, general society, enjoyment, variety, convenience, all these things. I think, yeah, these are stuck up in favour of higher carb dieting. You talked about some of the other benefits or connections with ketogenic diet like brain metabolism and cancer. What are the links there? Is it be shown to be promising or more research needed? What’s the take there?

Brad: I think probably the brain disorder thing is probably the most interesting. When you really look at the organs in our body is they’re all very different, right? When we look at how your heart metabolizes fatty acids and sugar and ketone bodies, it’s much different than your muscles or your liver or your pancreas. And your brain is especially special. Its metabolism is much, much different for a lot of reasons. I think a lot of it is just due to the cell types in the brain, due to the vascularity, just a lot of evolutionary mechanisms of why it’s different. But your brain metabolizes things much differently. There’s a lot of research to show that your brain uses up a lot of glucose but it doesn’t really do a great job of oxidizing fatty acids. But for some reason is it can metabolize ketones fairly well. A lot of the research right now that’s looking at whether it’s recovery from like a traumatic brain injury or things like Alzheimer’s or some of these other neurodegenerative diseases. There’s a lot of interesting animal work right now that’s looking at ketogenic diets and neurocognitive function and things like that. That’s interesting and promising. I think of all of the research on it, that’s probably the most interesting in terms of what’s possible. I don’t think where at a point where we can really say anything definitive about humans. I think it’s one of those areas where we’ve got some runway to do some research where we could find some cool things. When we look at the history of the science behind the ketogenic diet, it was first initially used to treat essentially intractable epilepsy in children, right. Kids who had tried all sorts of treatment strategies and weren’t having any success, there is a decent amount of science showing that if we put kinds on a very, very strict ketogenic diet where essentially they’re eating 90-95% fat in their diet, they have better control over their epilepsy than on a standard diet. Now the interesting thing is we don’t really know why that is. We haven’t figured out the mechanism of how is this diet helping these children? I think that’s a big red flag in terms of if we’re prescribing this for a neurological issues and we don’t have a fully define mechanism yet, how are we gonna translate that into more advanced human diseases, neurocognitive diseases? It’s gonna be very interesting.

Scott: Yeah. One of the things that people talk about ketogenic diet is the safety involved and people saying, “Oh, it’s not safe. And producing ketones is when you get to say that again, it’s not safe.” Are there any safety considerations or is that sort of general scare mongering hogwash that surrounds it?

Brad: I think it’s a little bit of both, right. I think there’s a big difference between what most people think of ketoacidosis which is a very serious life threatening condition that happens when ketones accumulate in your blood to really high level. And this usually occurs when insulin itself isn’t present at all. This is usually what happens in people who are diabetic, right, where insulin is not working at all and you get this build-up of ketones to a lot where people go into a ketoacidotic coma and then they die. Now that is a completely different scenario, physiologically than somebody who is eating a ketogenic diet and has ketone bodies. Mainly goes down to there’s a massive difference between if you have no insulin present and even a little bit of insulin present. Insulin does things to regulate the production of ketones. It does things to regulate the inflow of ketones into cells and things like that. From the acute perspective of I think we need to define ketoacidosis from the medical condition from dietary ketosis is two different things. In a very acute setting, a ketogenic diet doesn’t appear to be harmful at all.

I think that’s the best thing, right. If you have somebody who’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna go out of ketogenic diet.” Don’t think that they’re gonna go into ketoacidosis and die. Those are two very, very different scenarios, right? Now from the chronic long term perspective, I think there’s a few things we need to consider. One is a lot of people who go on very low carbohydrate diets for a long period of time and who are avid exercisers oftentimes can have some hormonal disregulation. A lot of times we can see changes in thyroid, changes in cortisol that aren’t beneficial. Those are things that people I think who decide they’re gonna adhere to a very low carbohydrate diet for a long period of time and are also very active people, it’s something they need to keep an eye on. We just know that the way the body metabolizes carbohydrates and exercise and the way hormones interact, if you’re gonna go the low carb route for whatever reason is it’s gonna be long term, make sure that you’re getting at least blood work done to make sure that you’re not making any substantial changes to your hormonal mileage to make sure that that’s not being compromised. Because the long term repercussions of that are something to consider.

Scott: Yeah. And then that also ties in as well to some of the other negatives associated with extreme low carb dieting like this like people saying, “Oh, it leads to muscle loss and poor performance in the gym. It hampers recovery and so on.” What does the science saying that are some of that are proven negatives of a low carb diet? Oh, sorry, no. We’ll cover low carb–I know you differentiated low carb and ketogenic but yeah, in this sense, low carb in general or specifically ketogenic, what’s the science is saying that’s detrimental?

Brad: Yeah. One of the things that is very well documented is when you go on a ketogenic or even a really well carbohydrate diet is you have a substantial decrease in your muscle glycogen, right? If you go on it for a couple of months, several months down the road, your muscle glycogen stores are gonna be depending on the research. You’d look at anywhere from at 40%, 70% capacity. That A) Decreases the amount of work you can do, right, if you don’t have enough muscle glycogen stored, you just can’t perform. That can kind of change your muscle metabolism. We know if we just go back to super basic chemistry, right. The amount of a substrate there controls how fast the reaction goes and what happens to your muscles. It can change the basal level of metabolism in your skeletal muscle and then probably the biggest thing and something I’ve really started to appreciate as I work more and more with people who have used the ketogenic diet is most people use the diet for weight loss, right. And so they think, “Okay. Well I’m gonna go on this for 12, 14, 16 weeks. I’m gonna lose some weight and then I’m gonna start reintroducing carbohydrates.” Let’s say over the 16-week period, somebody has really great results, loses 20 pounds. And then they go, “Okay. We’ll now can start adding carbs back in.” Let’s say the first week they added pretty decent amount of carbohydrates back in and they see a 5-6 pound increase on the scale or a lot of that is probably just you restored this half full muscle glycogen tank you have and so you see a big uptake on the scale and that enforces that negative feedback, right? They go, “Oh, I was right. I eat a carb, I gain weight.” There’s also that aspect of it that when we work with people, the psychology of dieting and weight loss is also something we really need to consider because as we walk people through this, changing their dietary habits and they see a big increase on the scale, that’s gonna cause a lot of problems for people from the mental aspect of how do I handle this?

Scott: If we’re looking in at ketosis at the moment, it’s like with any dieting trend it comes back in and out of fashion. I mean, people could see they start off back in the days of Apkins and then it went out of fashion and it came back in again. But at the moment, this idea of fat adaption is being pushed by some sectors in the performance for nutrition with the idea that we don’t–this whole idea that you need carbohydrates to feel endurance in performance, you can take this and you can get the same effect from carbohydrate. What’s your take on that and what’s the science saying? Is this something that yeah, there’s some grain of truth or just isn’t enough science there yet or like the low carb crew are saying that, “Oh, it’s this big conspiracy. All scientists are blind to the fact that they’ve been pushing their high carb agenda for all these years.” What’s the fact?

Brad: Yeah. I think the first place we’ll start is I get a lot as you can imagine writing articles on ketogenic diets and low carb diets. I get a lot of hate mail from people saying, “These studies having people are fat adapted.” And that’s one of the big words that gets thrown a lot is people say, “Oh, you just have to be fat adapted.” And my usual response is, “Well, what does that mean? What does fat adapted mean?” We don’t have a definition for that. I mean, there’s really no–I have not found anybody who said, “Okay. This is the definition of fat adapted. My guess would be most people say, “Oh, well, your body is just not used to a high fat diet and a ketogenic diet.” Well, when you look at the studies specifically the one that Kevin Hall did last year is basically what he did is he indirectly tested this fat adaptation idea. He basically took people from a normal diet, put them on a ketogenic diet and almost within 24 to 48 hours, these people on a ketogenic diet worked–they had elevated ketones that were at a level where we would call dietary ketosis. The free fatty acids in their blood was increased. All those things that we would typically call markers of fat adaptation from just how your bodies using food for energy occurs fairly quickly. From the layperson’s perspective in the dieting perspective, if we talk about just how your body uses food is for most people your body is pretty flexible, that fat adaptation of metabolizing what you eat occurs fairly quickly from what we can tell. Now from the exercise performance standpoints, that’s even more ambiguous and less defined, right. A lot of people say, “Well, nobody’s done any long term ketogenic diets in the lead athlete studies so we don’t really have a definition of that adaptation.” But I don’t really know what that even is gonna mean. I think that’s a word that’s thrown out to try to defend a position that doesn’t have any evidence to defend it at this point. Right, all of the studies that have looked at ketogenic diets in the high intensity type of training were essentially high levels of ATP and a fast rate for a long period of time are required. All of the ketogenic diet studies have not shown it to be effective. I think at this point, we can really kinda say that fat adaptation probably isn’t the defense to go to in terms of the future research looking at the ketogenic diet.

Scott: We’re saying then keep the carbs in, but then again, it’s one of these things intake when you talk to runners and they say, “Oh, well, I spoke to my friend in the running club who has been paleo and now he’s on the ketogenic diet and he’s seeing PBs all the time. If he’s doing it then I’ve got to to do it”. That’s sort of the one that I get the most from people is essentially trying to defend their friends rationale for going on a low carb diet. It’s a tricky one.

Brad: I think that’s a perfect example, right is we use our life stories and our anecdotes to really drive a lot of our decisions. So imagine we were back in the late 70s, mid 80s where the high carb diet for performance was the thing. You had all your runner friends who said, “Oh, I’m eating a really high carb diet and I’m getting personal best.” Now we’ve got just depending on what decade you live in, the anecdotes completely change. We can’t really rely on anecdotes to tell us the truth.

That’s kinda one of the hard parts about science is even as a scientist, I have things in my personal life that I’m like, “Oh, this seems to be working.” But then when you look at the actual science, you go, “It was probably just my skewed subjective perspective.”

Scott: Yeah. Another one I always say is, “Okay, your friend has done this low carb diet, how is that being controlled? Have they made any other changes, training, whatsoever.” They say, “Oh, yeah, actually they’ve got a new coach. At the same time they’re starting to get sports massage and blah blah blah and more sleep.” And I’m like, “Uh-hmm. Here we go.”

Brad: Yeah.

Scott: Again, the attribution is flawed. What we’re saying then is that for long term weight loss, the ketogenic diet probably isn’t the most sustainable so what would then be your key points for someone who does want to lose weight and keep it off in a long term.

Brad: My personal philosophy is I think so many people need to take a long view. We have too many quick fixes and too many mind sets of I’m gonna be in and out in 12 weeks and I’m gonna get where I wanna be. That never works. We know that for most people, for a large majority of people, the 12-week, 2-month, what whatever mentality is not the best approach. Really the goal is to get long term sustainable results and that usually comes from finding the diet that matches your lifestyle, changing your lifestyle habits and really being thoughtful and careful about how you go about your training and your diet plan. If you’re somebody who’s fairly inactive, doesn’t really wanna train a lot but want some long term weight results, a lower carbohydrate diet, if that’s the way you like to eat, you were great. If you’re somebody who’s starting to do cross fit 5 days a week, you are training to become a better athlete while losing some body fat and all those sorts of things, a low carb ketogenic diet is probably gonna be the worst approach for you right off the gate.

Scott: Don’t say that in some boxers of you get throw ahead.

Brad: Yeah. I mean, long term sustainable results one need to come from some sort of lifestyle change. It’s almost silly to think for most of us that if I don’t change anything else but even small dietary things that I’m gonna end up losing the substantial amount of weight, really isn’t true. At this point in my life, I’ve coached thousands of people and I can tell you that the people who had the best success, they don’t come from, “Oh, I’m gonna reduce your carbohydrates by 50 grams a day and we’re gonna have results.” Now we’ve got to start changing the whole structure of your life. How active you are in general, how sedentary you are, you’re training at the gym, the way you look at food, the relationship you have with it, all sorts of things. I think for a lot of people, the diet piece of what diet you choose is a really small part of the success. I think one of the quotes that I’ve heard so many times is there’s an inverse proportion of the number of books written on the subject to the amount we really know about it. I think that should really tell you the dieting world of how many diet books are out there. I mean, there’s probably millions of different diet books published at this point yet we still have a very substantial obesity, chronic disease, issue in our society. At this point, I mean, how many more diet books–do we think one more diet books can solve the problem? I don’t think that’s really the solution. I think it’s getting down in the trenches of people and trying to find something that works for them and create these sustainable lifestyle changes.

Scott: Yeah, word. Last question, Brad, and I asked this to everyone who comes on the show and we’re trying to keep this as a little concise one to know some people go off on this one. What’s the biggest thing that you know now that you wish you knew when you started out? What you define as the starting point can be up to you whether it’s in academia or in treating or whatever. It’s just what’s the big thing you wish you could have told yourself some time ago that would have made a big difference?

Brad: I think probably the biggest thing is no matter where you’re starting is just be consistent and do the work. If you’re willing to say, “Okay. I know in 30 days, I’m not gonna get where I wanna be but if I just keep working, I’m gonna get there.”

I think this applies, my academic career is a perfect example of that. Nobody starts graduate school and goes, “Okay, I’m gonna knock out my masters and six months then I’m gonna be done.” It’s like, “Okay. If I wanna solve this very big complex problem, it’s gonna take me 30 years to do it and it’s gonna take just chipping away day by day.” I think the same thing applies to whether it’s your training, whether it’s your relationships with people, whether it’s you where your dieting is just consistently working hard and getting a little bit better every day is really the best approach. There’s really no substitute for hard work and consistency no matter what you’re doing.

Scott: My buddy, Karl Williams, who probably listens to this podcast and I’ve stolen one of his quotes and I’ve copied it so often that people mistake it’s one of mine but he’s the founder of it, and that’s, “You want to be consistently good and not occasionally perfect.”

Brad: I think that’s fabulous.

Scott: It’s probably not even his. He probably stole it from someone but it’s one of those quotes that I’ve heard, “Yeah, I like that. I’m glad that that’s one of your key points there.” That technically was the penultimate question because the ultimate question is therefore, where can people find out more about you? Are you most active on social media channel than another or should we direct them at your website? Where do you want to send people?

Brad: Yeah. Most of my writing lives at sciencedrivenutrition.com. That’s kinda where I put all my blog posts. It’s been quite probably three weeks on there. I’ve had a ton of grants and projects too but there’s years’ worth of reading and content on there that people can go to. Everything from the very layperson article to the super, super technical. The nutrition coaching we do is through eattoperform.com. That’s where our coaching services lives and it’s kind of like we talked about earlier is that the approach we take is the long term sustainability and how can we let people thrive and not just try to diet down at a time.

Scott: Sounds good. Perfect! Well, Brad, thank you so much for your time coming on the podcast. I’m sure the listener got a lot from it and it’s been really great chatting with you.

Brad: Yeah, you too. If anybody wants to chat, just find me on Facebook and I’m always happy to have conversation.