Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Layne Norton on the science of nutrition, fat loss, and muscle building
Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Layne Norton, a PhD scientist and nutrition researcher, about the fundamentals of eating for health, body composition, and performance.
Summary
Andrew Huberman hosts Dr. Layne Norton for a wide-ranging conversation on nutrition science, covering energy balance, macronutrients, protein quality, food processing, and supplementation. Norton argues that "calories in, calories out" is both correct and far more complex than most people assume, with significant variability on both the intake and expenditure sides of the equation. He makes a strong case for protein as the most important dietary lever for body composition, explaining that leucine content is a primary driver of muscle protein synthesis and that plant-based dieters can build muscle but require more careful planning. Norton also addresses minimally processed versus ultra-processed foods — citing Kevin Hall's research showing that access to ultra-processed foods caused spontaneous 500-calorie-per-day overconsumption — as well as protein timing (arguing total intake matters far more than the popular 30-gram-per-meal cap), seed oils, artificial sweeteners, and creatine monohydrate, consistently deferring to human randomized controlled trials over mechanistic arguments or epidemiology alone.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Complexity of Energy Balance
Andrew Huberman: Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Dr Layne Norton, thank you so much for being here. This is a long time coming, and I have to say, as a fellow PhD scientist, I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition in a number of areas. I'd like to start with something that's rather basic and yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy balance and energy utilization. What happens when we eat food of any kind and how is that actually converted into energy — as a way of framing up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight gain, and body composition?
Dr Layne Norton: It's a great question, and like you said, this is one of those things where people use the term "calories in, calories out" and they say, "Well, that's way too simplistic." And I'm like, if you look at what actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's actually very complicated.
A calorie just refers to a unit of energy — of heat, specifically. Really what you're talking about is the potential chemical energy that is in the bonds of the macronutrients of food. By digesting, assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we are able to create energy. The end product of that, mostly, is ATP — adenosine triphosphate — which is your body's energy currency. So a lot of metabolism is simply creating ATP.
Protein is a little bit different because protein gets converted to amino acids, which can be used for muscle protein synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. It also can be converted through gluconeogenesis to glucose, and there also are some ketogenic amino acids as well. Then you have fatty acids, which are able to create energy through what's called beta-oxidation, where essentially you're taking these fatty acids and lopping them off two carbons at a time to produce acetyl-CoA, which again can go into the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of the cellular level of how this stuff works.
But stepping back — what does that have to do with weight loss or weight gain? When you think about the balance of energy in versus energy out, it sounds very simple. But let's look at what actually makes up energy in versus energy out.
First of all, you've got to realize that the energy-in side of the equation is more difficult to track than people think. Food labels, which we like to think come from on high, can have up to a 20% error in them.
Andrew Huberman: Really?
Dr Layne Norton: Oh, yeah. The second aspect is there's what's called metabolizable energy. So if you have food with a lot of insoluble fiber, typically insoluble fiber is not really digestible. You could have quite a bit of carbohydrate, but if you can't extract the energy from it — and typically this is because insoluble fiber from plant material means the carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible to digestive enzymes — this is what adds bulk to your stool, but again reduces the metabolizable energy. And there's some evidence that based on people's individual gut microbiome, some people may actually be better at extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people.
So just starting off right there, there's quite a bit of play in the energy-in side of things. Now, one of the things people will say is, "Well, see, that's why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because the food labels can be 20% off." And what I'll say is, okay, I understand where you're coming from, but typically if it's off, it's going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent with how you track it, eventually you'll be able to know kind of what you're taking in.
Breaking Down Energy Expenditure
Dr Layne Norton: Now let's look at the energy-out side of the equation, which is actually way more complicated. Your energy out falls into a few different buckets. The first one and the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. Your RMR, for most people, is anywhere from 50 to 70% of your total daily energy expenditure. Sedentary people will be on the higher end of that — it'll be a bigger proportion — whereas people who are more active, it'll be a little bit lower. Not because their metabolic rate is lower, but because they're expending a greater percentage of their calories from physical activity.
Then you have something called the thermic effect of food, which is a relatively small percentage of your total daily energy expenditure — about 5 to 10%. It's very difficult to measure, and usually what researchers do when they're looking at this stuff is they just make an assumption about it and use a constant. That refers to the amount of energy it takes to extract the energy out of food. You can't just eat food and have it just appear in your cells. It has to be systematically broken down and put into forms that can actually produce energy.
A lot of times people will say something like, "Not all calories are created equal." That's not true, because a calorie is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying not all seconds on a clock are created equal — yes, they are. All sources of calories may have differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite, but the calorie itself is a fixed unit.
So if we look at something like fat, for example, the thermic effect of fat is about 0 to 3%. Meaning if you eat 100 calories from fat, your net will be about 97 to 100.
Andrew Huberman: So the process of breaking down that fat essentially subtracts some of the calories away because you used energy in creating ATP by breaking those chemical bonds?
Dr Layne Norton: Correct. Fat is actually the easiest thing to convert into energy.
Then you have carbohydrate, which has a thermic effect of like 5 to 10%. So you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate — and obviously the fiber content makes a big difference — but you'll net 90 to 95. Protein is about a 20 to 30% thermic effect. So if you eat 100 calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80.
Now, people say, "Well, you can't eat too much protein." Can protein be stored as fat? The carbons from protein — it's unlikely they're going to wind up in adipose tissue, but if you're eating a lot of protein overall as part of a lot of calories, it has to be oxidized and it can provide a calorie cushion for other things to be stored as fat. But protein itself does provide a net positive for calories, just less so than carbohydrate or fat, and tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about whether all calories are created equal — yes, but all sources of calories may have differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite.
So that's the thermic effect of food bucket and the resting metabolic rate bucket. Then we go to physical activity. Physical activity is essentially two parts. There's exercise, which is your purposeful movements — you go out for a walk, you do a training session, whatever purposeful activity — and then you have what's called NEAT, which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis. For example, when I'm talking and waving my hands around, tapping my feet — that's NEAT. The calorie burn from NEAT is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100 or 200 calories per day. We're talking about in some cases hundreds to maybe even close to a thousand calories per day.
Tracking Weight and the Importance of Consistency
Dr Layne Norton: What's very interesting about NEAT is that it seems to be the most modifiable of the components — BMR, thermic effect of food, and NEAT. NEAT seems to be far more modifiable.
The next thing is that a lot of people weigh themselves very sporadically. I tell people: if you're going to make intentional weight loss a goal, typically weigh in first thing in the morning right after you go to the bathroom, do it every day, and take the average of that for the week. Then compare that to the next week's average. My own weight will fluctuate five or six pounds without seemingly changing much, and those short-term changes are fluid.
So if you're somebody who just randomly weighs in and you're eating at a calorie deficit, and you just happen to weigh in on a day where you're holding some more fluid, you go, "Oh, see, this isn't working" — when in reality, your average might be dropping. Weight fluctuations are actually identified as a major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in when they have a fluctuation up.
That's one of the reasons why early on, low-carb diets tend to work really well — because people lose a lot of water weight really quickly and they get that buy-in. "Oh, this is working."
People think about doing a diet and losing weight, and they give no thought to what happens afterwards. Think about if you have some kind of chronic disease — a diabetic, right? You can't just take insulin once and that's it. You have to take it continuously, otherwise you're going to have problems. You can't create a new version of yourself while dragging your old habits and behaviors behind you.
So what I'll tell people is — because people say, "Well, I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this diet or that diet" — I'll say, "That's fine. Do you see yourself doing that for the rest of your life?" And if the answer is no, you probably need to rethink what your approach is going to be.
Protein, Satiety, and Body Composition Goals
Andrew Huberman: Could you briefly talk about how macronutrients, including protein, impact satiety from the standpoint of somebody who would like to lose a few pounds, would probably be happy to gain a little bit of lean body mass in particular locations — directed hypertrophy, if you will — and how much they should focus on protein as a core component of creating this diet? And are animal sources of protein indeed more bioavailable — that's a tricky word — for the sake of muscle building, but also for somebody who just would like to lose body fat, doesn't want to lose muscle, and would like to bring their weight down a few pounds?
Dr Layne Norton: Of the macronutrients, protein is definitely the biggest lever that you can pull. Even though it doesn't take a ton of protein to get a lot of the muscle-building benefits — the benefits really start to plateau out around 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight — there's some evidence that maybe even up to 2.4 or 2.8 grams per kilogram may give a little bit more benefit. I think it probably looks something like an asymptote in terms of a curve, where as you put more into the system you always get a little bit more, but it gets to the point where it's so infinitesimally small a benefit that for all intents and purposes there's no benefit.
There don't seem to be real downsides even up to very high levels of protein. Jose Antonio did a study that was a year-long randomized controlled trial, and they were looking at all sorts of different biomarkers. Basically, even up to four grams per kilogram of protein, they couldn't really find any negative health outcomes from it — other than people were just so satiated they ended up eating fewer calories.
So protein is a big lever because, one, it has a higher thermic effect of food, so you're getting a little bit more calorie burn per day. Two, you're getting the effects on lean body mass — it's going to help preserve lean body mass if you're in a caloric deficit, help build or preserve lean body mass if you're at maintenance, and help build or preserve lean body mass if you're in a surplus.
Andrew Huberman: If I'm going to eat, say, two grams per kilogram of body weight in protein and I'm eating two or three meals per day, should I worry about the 30-gram threshold that was thrown around for a long time — the idea that we can only assimilate 30 grams of protein per meal? Because balancing the 1.6 grams per kilogram threshold with number of meals, the need to exercise, work, live, and sleep — pretty soon you run into bottlenecks where you can't do it all.
Dr Layne Norton: You can't optimize all the things at the same time.
Most Americans get about 65 to 70% of their protein at dinner. Breakfast tends to be pretty minimal protein. So to answer your question, I do think that timing and frequency matter a little — not so much frequency, but distribution more so — but it's a much smaller lever than just getting enough total protein in.
Some of it is going to go towards the thermic effect of food. Some of that might be converted into glucose through gluconeogenesis. But the 30-gram cutoff is not something I'd be overly concerned about.
Animal vs. Plant Protein Sources
Dr Layne Norton: As far as animal versus plant protein, I used to be in the camp of "there's no way somebody can build as much muscle on a plant-based diet." Now I've come back to: you can. It just requires a little more planning. And it's very difficult to do without an isolated source of protein. Unless you're going to supplement with an isolated plant source of protein, it's very difficult to get enough without going over on total calories.
Take somebody who may be calorically restricted trying to get enough protein from whole intact plant sources. You've got a few different things working against you. One, the sources of protein you're consuming also have carbohydrate and/or fat. Two, it's a less bioavailable form of protein. And three, it's a lower quality of protein — it typically has less leucine, fewer branched-chain amino acids, and fewer essential amino acids.
Andrew Huberman: You answered the question I almost interrupted you to ask — does it boil down to the leucine content? And it sounds like that is one of the components, and that a lot of the vegan and vegetarian sources of excellent protein are co-packaged with calories from carbohydrates and/or fat that make it hard to stay under the caloric threshold, whereas a steak or a piece of chicken — or an egg, which has fat in the yolk but no carbohydrate along for the ride — is almost a pure protein or protein-fat source.
Dr Layne Norton: You can do it. It takes a little more planning, and if you're a vegan especially, you're almost always going to be better off supplementing with some isolated form of plant protein.
Now, this is where people say, "What about the limiting amino acids?" It's a consideration. Some of the better forms of vegan protein in terms of amino acid content are like soy. I can hear everybody screaming online about testosterone levels — but in terms of actual outcomes, there was a recent meta-analysis looking at soy, and it seems that if it's your only source of protein, the dosage might be high enough to cause some unusual effects, but if you're just using it once or twice a day, it doesn't seem to have an effect on testosterone or estrogen. So soy can be a decent source of protein because it is a complete protein source. It has a PDCAAS of one, which is basically a measure of protein quality based on whether it provides enough of all the amino acids so that none are limiting. Soy is one of the only vegan sources that achieves that.
Interestingly, potato protein isolate actually has a similar essential amino acid content to whey. It's just really hard to find.
Another reason using an isolated protein can be helpful is because it's more bioavailable as well when it's been isolated out. When the protein is bound up in the actual plant material, it tends to be less bioavailable. Cooking can help increase bioavailability because it breaks some of those bonds.
The Role of Leucine in Muscle Protein Synthesis
Dr Layne Norton: The other thing to consider with vegan sources of protein is the leucine content. One of the studies we did looked at wheat, soy, egg, and whey — isonitrogenous, meaning we equated protein between the groups, isocaloric, we equated calories — and we looked at muscle protein synthesis. The meals were about 15% of total energy from protein, so a food-guide-pyramid level of protein. We saw that in the wheat and soy groups, they did not increase muscle protein synthesis, but the egg and whey groups did.
What's really interesting is we went back and took wheat and added free leucine to it to match the leucine content of whey, and the protein synthetic response was identical.
Andrew Huberman: So leucine appears to really be driving this.
Dr Layne Norton: A few different options for the vegan folks out there. You can use an isolated source of protein — and there are going to be good options coming, because plant-based whey alternatives are going to be a great option for folks. You can add free leucine to whatever your source of protein is.
Andrew Huberman: Just buy supplemental leucine. Now, it tastes horrible — it's completely nonpolar, doesn't dissolve in anything.
Dr Layne Norton: Capsules. It can't really be put into capsules easily. But you could take a capsule — for example, if you're eating your normal meal, you could just take a capsule of like one gram of leucine. It's probably going to bump you up enough that you're going to be good to go.
There are also options like blends, especially with corn. Corn is actually very high in leucine as a percentage of its protein. Now, you go eat corn on a cob and you're getting like two grams of total protein, so it's not that much leucine. But if you isolate out the protein and put it into a powder, now you're getting like 80 to 90% of the weight as protein. Corn is actually about 12% leucine in terms of its protein composition — a great source of leucine. It is almost frankly deficient in some other amino acids, but you can blend it with a few other sources like soy and pea, and you can create complementary blends that would actually have quite a bit of leucine but also some of the other essential amino acids.
There are options out there for plant-based folks. We have seen people who are plant-based build impressive amounts of muscle. There are quite a few bodybuilders who are plant-based.
Minimally Processed Foods and Why They Matter
Andrew Huberman: Can we come up with a relatively short summary of the following — tell me if this is correct or not: that most of us should be focused on ingesting non-processed and minimally processed foods?
Dr Layne Norton: I would 100% agree that trying to focus on minimally processed foods is very important. The one caveat I would say is I think it's important to understand why processed food gets people to spontaneously eat more. Kevin Hall showed this in his study — and he designs some of the most elegant studies in nutrition. They basically took people from a minimally processed food diet and then gave them access to ultra-processed foods with very few instructions — just eat till you feel satisfied — and they spontaneously increased their calorie intake by 500 calories a day. That's massive.
Now, that being said, it depends on the individual and their goals. If your goal is to build muscle or maintain a high body weight for a sport — like an NFL offensive lineman — your protein, your fiber, your micronutrients are your responsibilities. But those become much easier to hit when you have higher calories. If you're eating 4,000 calories a day, you're probably going to have some left over. And good luck eating 4,000 calories from minimally processed foods — you'll be miserable because you'll have such gut fill that you'll feel like you can't even move.
So that's why I'm a stickler about saying: yes, it's a good idea to eat minimally processed foods and try to avoid processed foods, but not because processed foods are bad per se — rather because of the outcome that tends to result from a lot of processed food consumption, which is over-consuming calories and therefore energy toxicity negatively contributing to your health.
Artificial Sweeteners and the Evidence
Andrew Huberman: This is a perfect segue for something that first brought us together, which was this thing about artificial sweeteners. I'd like to talk about their effects on blood sugar in the acute sense, and then the gut microbiome data, which I think are interesting enough to discuss. I have changed my view on artificial sweeteners based on what you've taught me. This is a case where I've completely changed my view — I don't have any problem with them whatsoever based on the current data. Not to say that I'm gulping down cupfuls of sucralose, but I feel okay ingesting some stevia and some aspartame and I'm not too worried about it.
Dr Layne Norton: We have to think about the hierarchy of importance, and what are you replacing them with? There is no situation where it is not a net positive to take somebody who drinks sugar-sweetened beverages and have them drink an artificially sweetened beverage. There was a recent network meta-analysis looking at markers of adiposity, HbA1c, and a bunch of different health markers, and when you substitute non-nutritive sweeteners — since stevia is not artificial, I'll call them non-nutritive sweeteners — for sugar-sweetened beverages, you see improvements in a lot of different things.
And whenever I post about non-nutritive sweeteners in the comments, there are always one or two or three people who say, "All I did was cut out soda and drink diet soda instead, and I lost 50 pounds" or "I lost 75 pounds." I even had one person say they lost 100 pounds. That's the only thing they did.
Andrew Huberman: Wow.
Dr Layne Norton: That's a pretty massive lever to pull if you consider somebody who might be having five or six Cokes a day. We're talking a serious amount of calories. Is that obese person who lost 100 pounds by doing that — do I really care about maybe a small alteration to their gut microbiome? No. Because their gut microbiome is actually much more healthy now by virtue of them having lost all that excess adipose tissue.
So I think it's one of those things that again depends on the situation. If somebody's obese and this is going to help them eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages — why would you want to take that tool away from them? That's a great lever to pull. If somebody can literally lose 100 pounds from just one change in lifestyle that's not even really that inconvenient, that is powerful.
But again, is it the most healthy thing they could do? We don't know. Is it healthier than water? Probably not. Maybe as healthy — who knows. I make all those caveats because you don't want people who could use this as a tool to think, "No, I can't do this because it's actually bad for me." If it helps you lose 50, 75 pounds, or whatever it is — trust me, it's not bad for you.
Seed Oils: Evaluating the Evidence
Andrew Huberman: Seed oils — there are a number of folks out there who are arguing that seed oils are the source of the obesity epidemic and everything. And then there are those who would argue just the opposite, that meat is the source of all problems. I think we've appropriately framed things such that it's never that black and white. Are there any data on seed oils?
Dr Layne Norton: The first thing I'll say is seed oils have negatively contributed to our overall health because what people have tended to add into their diet over the last 20 to 30 years that has increased the overall calorie load is oil, mostly from seed oils. But when we look at one-to-one replacement with other fats — if you look at the epidemiology, yeah, you can find some epidemiology showing people who consume more seed oil have more negative health outcomes. The problem is that's tied up with a multitude of other behaviors.
And then you can find mechanisms — the idea is that they're polyunsaturated, meaning in the fatty acid chain there are multiple double bonds, which can be oxidized when exposed to heat and some other things. So the idea is that when you cook with these things, they may get oxidized and that's going to cause inflammation in your body. That's a plausible mechanism.
As always, I defer to the human randomized controlled trials. What you tend to find when you substitute saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats is that inflammation is basically neutral. There are some studies that show a positive effect of doing polyunsaturated fats, but it probably depends on the individual polyunsaturated fat. And that's the other difficulty — you're categorizing everything in one bucket, and there are some differences between individual fatty acids. Even with saturated fat, for example, stearic acid doesn't tend to raise LDL cholesterol, whereas saturated fat as a whole tends to raise LDL cholesterol. So we're putting things in buckets and it's a little more nuanced than that.
If you look at the effects of polyunsaturated fats on markers of cardiovascular disease, it tends to either be a neutral or positive effect when you substitute saturated fat for polyunsaturated fat. Now, if you want to get into monounsaturated versus polyunsaturated, there's quite a bit of disagreement between the studies. What I would say based on the human randomized controlled trials is that you're probably better off consuming monounsaturated and polyunsaturated in place of saturated fat.
But again, if the idea is "polyunsaturated are good for me, so I'm just going to dump a bunch of oil on everything" — now you're upping your calories, and that's a negative because you have to deal with the bigger problem of overall energy toxicity.
I'm not somebody who likes to demonize individual nutrients. I just haven't seen really compelling evidence that seed oils are the root cause of the problems being suggested. I think this is a good example of what tends to happen in the fitness industry — whenever something pops up, there's always an opposite reactionary extreme. And I think that's what we're seeing with some of the seed oil stuff. It's mostly people who are trying to expose the virtues of saturated fat. I think it's fine to consume saturated fat, but limiting it to seven to ten percent of your daily calorie intake is probably wise based on the consensus of the evidence I've seen.
Once again, we're struggling with epidemiology and mechanisms that sound good, but then what actually happens when we do human randomized controlled trials? So far I just haven't seen the evidence to suggest that seed oils are independently bad for you, independent of the calories they contain.
I think we all have this idea that there's one iconic diet out there that is going to be the best diet for building muscle, burning fat, and preventing cancer and heart disease. The reality is there are overall healthy dietary patterns that are good for those things, but when we get down into the weeds, there's probably some push and pull as well.
Creatine Monohydrate: Benefits, Dosing, and the Hair Loss Question
Andrew Huberman: I'd like to ask you about supplements for a moment — one that I'm very familiar with, which is creatine monohydrate, not just for muscle building but maybe for any other purposes.
Dr Layne Norton: It is the most tested, safe, and effective sports supplement we have. There are thousands of studies on creatine monohydrate now. I would say very clearly: if you're using any other form of creatine, I think you're wasting your money. Creatine hydrochloride has some hype around it — it's apparently a little more soluble, and the claim is that you need less — but there are only a couple of studies on it and it's more expensive. So I tell people just take creatine monohydrate. It is tried and true. It's been shown to saturate the muscle cells 100% with phosphocreatine, and that's what you want.
Creatine works through a few different mechanisms. One, through increasing phosphocreatine content, which helps improve exercise performance. It appears to improve recovery, and it increases lean mass — a lot of which is through bringing water into the muscle cells. When people say, "Well, it's just water," that's what muscle cells mostly are. It also increases strength and some other metrics.
Now, it's also been shown in studies that people tend to get a decrease in body fat percentage. That's probably because they're getting an increase in lean mass, so the relative proportion is a decrease in body fat percentage. But there are a few studies that show a decrease in fat mass as well. I don't think creatine is a fat burner per se — I think people are able to train harder, build more lean tissue, and that's probably having an effect on fat mass. And more recently, they've shown some cognitive benefits to creatine, which I find really interesting.
The only knock on creatine that anybody's been able to come up with — because they've debunked the kidney stuff, they've debunked the liver stuff, there's no evidence that it harms healthy kidney or liver — is hair loss. There was one study in 2009 that showed creatine increased DHT. But they didn't really show an effect on any other sex hormone, which is kind of strange — you would think if there was an increase in DHT there would be something else that changes as well. And it's only one study, never been replicated to my knowledge, and it was looking at a mechanism rather than an outcome. So I am not convinced. It's only one study, never been replicated, and it was measuring DHT rather than directly measuring hair loss.
Andrew Huberman: Do you emphasize the classic loading of creatine — taking it a bunch of times per day and then backing off — or just taking it consistently at, say, five grams per day?
Dr Layne Norton: No solutions, only trade-offs. You can load it and you will saturate your phosphocreatine stores faster — usually within a week. If you just take five grams per day, it'll take two, three, four weeks, but you will get to the same place and you're probably going to have a much lower risk of GI issues. Some people find creatine can be a gut irritant. If it is, I would recommend splitting it into multiple doses — maybe multiple one or two gram doses per day — and definitely don't load it if you're somebody who has GI issues from it.
Hard Training, Confidence, and the Limits of Optimization
Dr Layne Norton: The more into the weeds people tend to get — and again this is just my own anecdote and observation — the less hard I see them train. One of the things I really like that Mike Israetel said, who has a PhD and is a bodybuilder himself, is: "You can't outscience hard training." If you're looking to build muscle and improve your body composition, the main thing is just doing the work over time.
And I think a lot of that is getting the confidence that comes from doing something hard and finding there's a payoff at the end. I get asked a lot in my Q&As: "How do I get more confident? How do I become more confident?" And I'll tell people: there's no hack, you can't read about it — you've got to get in the arena. I don't mean compete in sports necessarily, but doing a PhD, or doing something hard where you're putting yourself out there and saying, "This is my goal and I'm going to go for it." You just learn so much by doing that about yourself.
Andrew Huberman: I must say this conversation has been tremendously rewarding. The amount of knowledge that you contain is astonishing.
Dr Layne Norton: There's a lot of stuff rattling around up there.
Andrew Huberman: Your ability to pull from the mechanistic side — related to your background in biochemistry — all the way through to the impact in humans, animal studies, being able to understand where those sit relative to one another, and then you're obviously a practitioner — you practice what you preach. And what you talk about pertains to men, to women, younger people, older people, people who are vegan, keto, carnivore. You really are able to net a tremendous number of ideas while staying nuanced and data-driven. On behalf of myself and the listeners, I really appreciate you coming in here today and sharing your knowledge. Thank you so much for your time.
Dr Layne Norton: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.