Why Most Diets DESTROY Your Gut w/ Nutrition Scientist Dr. Jessie Hoffman

Añadido: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Jesse. So, the biggest question that I have right off the bat is it >> Yeah, >> I see carbs make me fat. Saturated fat might cause heart disease. You know, if I have a dairy issue, I can't consume dairy. Uh I saw apple cider vinegar can get me to lose weight quickly. And the biggest question I have then is where as somebody who's a normal person, where can I start in regards to nutrition or what's the first step as far as understanding what is necessary and actually important with getting my health together so that I can then, you know, train as an athlete or just have a normal life that I don't feel like crap all the time. Yeah, I think that's the biggest then the biggest thing that trips people up in terms of nutrition is because the messaging that you see online is so polarizing and so complex and like you should worry about saturated fats, you should worry about seed oils, you should you're getting too much protein, you're not getting enough protein. It's so confusing, but from the grand scheme of like what actually makes what actually gives people the most health benefit, it actually ends up being kind of boring of eating making sure you're fueling yourself adequately.

[00:01:09]You're eating, you know, relatively consistently throughout the day day.

[00:01:14]Each meal has, you know, a solid amount of carbs, protein, fat, and fiber. Um, you don't have to like really do anything that crazy for overall health.

[00:01:24]The bulk of the research evidence is in that like balanced eating pattern versus like going through intermittent fasting or ketogenic or carnivore or low carb or high carb or you know all of these different strategies that you can use to eat. it ends up being the most simplest ends up being one the most sustainable for people um and two the most impactful for people's overall health because when you start to as just an average person you know January we're in January right now and like looking to change my diet looking to better my health all the messaging out there if you latched on to something like oh my gosh I need to go on to this carnivore diet it's so extreme that it is going to be unsustainable and therefore you're not going to reap whatever health benefit they're they're saying that that offers which I'm not really for carnivore if we're going to go down that that rabbit hole because I'm a GI dietician and carnivore is not great for your gut but yeah so I think people miss the forest for the trees because they get so focused on like the little nitpicky things that have this marginal impact on your health potentially and they get so focused on that that they're actually missing the things that could be the most impactful.

[00:02:42]Um, not to mention the stress that comes alongside of that. That's not good for your health either. How do you how do you handle that then when you're talking to somebody who is so focused on so so okay here's here's my question is that like so people will come to me and they'll be like oh you know I'm bloated or whatever I'm going to go carnivore I'm going to go low carb I'm going to go paleo right >> how do you in a conversation sort of nip that in the butt without coming across like dude that's stupid like let's focus on the bigger picture >> I have to it's it's an art form and I don't do it well all the time because especially like working one-on-one with clients. It's it's easy when I'm in the classroom. When I'm with students, I don't care about saying like this is BS, like whatever. But when you're one-on-one with clients, you want to respect someone's autonomy and that they can make their own decisions. And so I can tell them like based on the research evidence, this is not something I would recommend doing. However, you have full autonomy in your in making your own decisions. these are the risks that are associated with making that decision. These are the marginal benefits. This is why I would or would not recommend what you're doing. Um, and so it is a little bit of an art form and I can't say that everyone like is happy with me afterwards because I, you know, in the GI space we deal a lot with like, well, I'm going to detox or I'm going to fast for a really long period of time because I'm just so bloated when in reality like things like fasting for long periods of time when you're dealing with chronic bloat, it just compounds the problem. It's just putting a band-aid on a problem that once you start eating again, it's going to come back. And so I try to have some of those conversations with people of talking about like one is this sustainable for you or two is this just putting a band-aid on a bigger problem without addressing what's underlying. Um and so trying to allow them to have that autonomy and make their own decision but hopefully make it in a more informed manner.

[00:04:35]>> Remember our podcast is sponsored by our own strength training app peak strength.

[00:04:39]If you're a football player, a basketball player, a baseball player, click that first link in the description. Head over to peakstrength.app. Go to the Google Play Store or you can go to the Apple iOS store, download Peak Strength, put your email in, and then look for your specific sport. If you're tired of doing a lot of work and not really getting anywhere, we want you guys to get to the next level. All you have to do is download Peak Strength, and then submit your email, click on the specific sport, and when you sign up for one full year, you're going to get 38% off. And I'm going to challenge you right now. I'm gonna give you this challenge. If you sign up for one year, imagine where you're going to be one year from today.

[00:05:19]If you're training three to four days a week, imagine where you'll be focusing on the things that actually matter one year from today. All you have to do is head over to peakstrank.app, Google Play Store, or the Apple iOS store. Start committing to yourself. Now, let's get back to the podcast. I mean, I was going to bring up right off the bat there, you had mentioned, you know, protein, fat, carbs, fiber, and there's very few, if any, people that I've listened to that have really gone into those adding fiber on top of that. And I I guess I wanted to go into what do you see as like a baseline starting point for a normal person and maybe even if you have an athlete that would reach out to you as well >> where it's like you this is a good starting point as far as like macros would be concerned and factoring fiber into like how do you factor fiber into that as well?

[00:06:07]>> Yeah. So um I'm only going to clarify this because I heard a different uh professional on a podcast get a lot of like questions about this aspect. So I think the public has a little bit of of confusion around this. fiber is technically a carbohydrate. So when I say carb, protein, fat, and fiber, it's not that fiber is a separate macronutrient. It's just that we think of it differently um than like a starchy carbohydrate and it behaves differently in our body. So structurally um from a chemical standpoint, it is a carbohydrate, but what it actually does in our body is not quite the same. So it could be kind of its own macronutrient.

[00:06:42]Um, and to get more at your question of where do you kind of start, everyone is so different in terms of their macronutrient needs and also their eating preferences. Some people may prefer a higher fat eating pattern.

[00:06:58]Some people may prefer a higher carb eating pattern. If you are an endurance athlete, higher carb is probably going to benefit you more than higher fat, unless you want to go down the like let's get fat adapted route and we can utilize fat at a greater extent, especially for like your long-distance runners, doesn't always help um people, but um where fiber kind of fits in the picture and I like to think about think of it as um the recommendations from like a dietary standpoint, we have a couple of ways we look at it. Um so standard recommendation for women 25 grams per day for men 38 grams per day.

[00:07:34]What I like to utilize more as a target is um what is another way of looking at it is the AI which is 14 grams per thousand calories. I think that's more scalable because there's really nothing that inherently different from the GI perspective between a male and a female.

[00:07:53]What they're really getting at the difference between the 25 and 38 is just the amount of food you're eating. And so you could have a female that is highly active and eating 3,000 plus calories a day or trying to regain her cycle or something like that and having to push food. You don't necessarily want them undereating fiber. Just, you know, they could scale a little bit higher. Um, and when it comes into how much fiber an individual will need, it's going to be really based on tolerability. So, some people that I work with that have IBS can't quite even tolerate 25 grams of fiber a day. And so, we start much slower and see if we can increase. Um, but um research has really shown that those recommendations of 14 grams per thousand calories is really a baseline and that there's not really that high that clear of an upper limit of fiber intake um that people can consume. where I start to get into upper limits is thinking about is fiber displacing overall calories. So, are you undereating everything else that you need to be eating because you're eating too high of fiber or are you having GI distress from it? That's where I start to say like, okay, we've maybe hit the upper limit or we need to evaluate the types of fiber that we're consuming. Um, so it's very individualized, which I'm sure is a pretty political answer.

[00:09:07]>> The Garage Strength podcast is sponsored by our own strength training app, Peak Strength. You don't have to be an athlete to train like an athlete. If you're a former athlete or if you're someone who wants to focus on their overall coordination, we have the perfect programming just for you. All you have to do is click that first link in the description. Head over to peakstrength.app, the Google Play Store, or the Apple iOS store. Download Peak Strength and then submit your email.

[00:09:33]Once you submit your email, I recommend clicking on something like athletic fitness. Once you get into athletic fitness, select what you want to focus on and then you will get a customized program specifically for you. One of the big aspects that we see around training is having a specific program on a consistent basis, having yourself be held accountable, committing to yourself longterm so that you can be as consistent as possible. And that's why when you sign up for a year, we're even going to give you 38% off. Click that first link in the description. Head over to peakstrength.app, the Google Play Store, or the Apple iOS store. I'm in athletic fitness. Time to get your feet under you. And you can use this new found microbiome from eating more fiber to get more athletic. Now, let's get back to the podcast. Is there is there a point or is there a difference between insoluble insoluble fiber as far as health benefits and even as as far as um like gut health uh or or the GI space?

[00:10:34]Like is is there any >> substantial difference as far as what the the the impact of insoluble versus soluble would be? Yeah, from a broad stance, soluble fibers tend to be more healthpromoting. Um because soluble fibers tend to have other properties alongside of um their solubility and their ability to absorb water. So a lot of times soluble fibers are also fermentable. Not all the time, but a good chunk of the time they're fermentable, which means our gut microbes can digest them. So think prebiotic. Um so they're producing compounds that overall benefit us.

[00:11:09]soluble fiber. Soluble fiber also um absorbs water in the GI tract, helps like slow digestion, so it can regulate like glucose spikes, different things like that, regulate hunger and satiety a little bit better than insoluble fiber.

[00:11:24]Um it also helps pretty well with both constipation and diarrhea depending on the types of soluble fibers that you're eating. So in general from a GI perspective, soluble is t tends to be what we recommend more than insoluble, but both have their benefits. Um, and insoluble, you can really think of it as just like roughage. Um, like plant matter that or your celluloses that are like the plant walls of like when you eat celery, it's very fibrous like that stuff that you just don't even like you can visibly see that it's not going to break down in your body or you see it in the toilet later. That's those are your insoluble fibers. um and they have the benefit of adding bulk to stools and making you feel fuller longer. Um but from a like metabolic standpoint, soluble fiber has a little bit of a leg up. It also is the type of fiber that impacts your cholesterol to a um greater extent too because it helps um helps to bind bile in your GI tract. Um and it helps you excrete that bile instead of reabsorbing it, which is what we normally like to do. And bile is made from cholesterol. And so when we force our body to excrete that bile, we have to make new bile and we pull from our blood cholesterol to do so. So it has an indirect association with um lowering cholesterol through some other cool mechanisms with the microbiome as well.