Hi SELF Family,

Tomorrow night I go live, free and open to everyone, with 6 studies that were all published in the last 2 months. I have read every one of them, and 4 of them come down to the same uncomfortable idea.

The label on the food, the number on the scale, and the name of your diet tell you less than you think. Your body reads the ingredients.

This letter is the preview. The live is where I show you the numbers and take your questions.

Start with the one that surprised me. Researchers in the Netherlands took 72 healthy adults, all 65 or older, and had one group switch to a vegan diet and plan their own meals. After 12 weeks that group had lost about 2 and a half pounds of muscle from their arms and legs. The group that changed nothing lost none. I recommend eating mostly plants, so tomorrow I am going to walk through exactly what went wrong, and the one change that cut the damage roughly in half. It is not the change most people would guess.

Nobody told these people to eat less protein. It happened on its own.

Then salt. A study pooling 160 earlier studies asked who actually benefits from cutting it, and the answer depends on 3 things you already know about yourself. For one kind of person the same advice does about 15 times more good than for another. I will tell you which one you are.

A kidney study followed 2,661 older adults for about 7 years and asked whether plant-based ultra-processed food is any safer for your kidneys than the animal kind. Some people will not like the answer.

A review in the Annals of Internal Medicine put every weight-loss drug on a single page, including the new pills and two drugs you cannot get yet. I will read you the whole scoreboard, and the column no headline prints next to it.

By one number, fewer than 1 in 3 of these people counted as obese. By the other, 19 out of 20 did.

That is the tape measure study. Same people, two ways of measuring them, and only one of the two predicted the next heart attack or stroke. You can check yourself with the rule I will give you in one sentence.

And I saved the last study for the end, because it is the one I most want you to act on this week. It takes a few minutes a day, needs no equipment, and a lot of people who already do a version of it are doing it in the one way this study found does not work.

If you have been doing your best with the advice you were given and the results have not followed, none of this is a verdict on you. Most of the advice was never written with you in mind. Tomorrow is about which pieces of it actually are.

The live is Thursday, September 10, at 6 PM Pacific, for one hour. It is free and there is nothing to sign up for. Bring your questions and put them in the chat any time. I stop 4 times during the night to answer them. Tap the link below now and set a reminder, and YouTube will nudge you when we start.

With gratitude,

Dr. Sean

Channel members get a second, smaller live on Thursday, September 24, at 6 PM Pacific, where I take questions one at a time. Membership details

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