What the Science Really Says About Nutrition | Highlights of 2025 (Part 1)

Alrighty, friends. Welcome back to The Proof, and welcome to the best of The Proof 2025 part one. Before we jump in, I want to wish all of you a merry Christmas if you celebrate Christmas, and if not, a very happy festive period. And I wanna say a heartfelt thank you for your engagement, your encouragement, and for sharing these episodes with friends and family over the course of 2025. Because of you, the show continues to grow across Apple, Spotify, YouTube, all the places. And for that, I am tremendously grateful. Most importantly, we continue to attract world class scientists, and I already have an incredible lineup locked in for 2026, including several roundtable episodes where we'll deep dive major topics with multiple experts in person at once. Today, we're revisiting some of the most meaningful clips of the year, from protein and the plant versus animal debate to seed oils. Yes. We snuck seed oils in again. Longevity, nutrition, the microbiome, and more. Let's dive into the best of the proof of 2025 part one. In this episode, we'll evaluate doctor Lyon's claims about protein sources, specifically the role of leucine, and whether or not we should be making value judgments about protein containing foods based on their leucine content. We'll also double click on this idea that animal protein is superior to plant protein due to differences in amino acid profile and or bioavailability and this insinuation that you'd need to overconsume calories to get enough protein from plants. But first, please make sure you hit like below and subscribe if you're not yet subscribed here on YouTube. We've hit 100,000 subscribers recently. Who knows? We could hit 1,000,000 subscribers in the next few years. So doctor Lyon starts out saying that sometimes she wakes up and chooses violence and is going to give us hard, fast biological numbers. It's the hard, fast biological numbers that I want us to pay attention to today. Doctor Lyon sets up the conversation by establishing that it's important to consume two point five grams of leucine to trigger what's known as muscle protein synthesis, the process our bodies use to build new muscle tissue. She then uses this to make value judgments on foods. If they contain two point five grams of leucine for a small amount of calories, that equals good and seemingly is worthy of being in her recommendations. And if not, well, the insinuation is that they're not good, at least for building muscle. It sounds like a straightforward framework for evaluating foods and ranking them. Right? If a food contains 2.5 grams of leucine for x number of calories, you're in this list. 2.5 grams of leucine for x calories, you're in that list over there. Go to your room, quinoa. You've been a bad boy. Let's entertain doctor Lyon's premise for now that we need to focus on getting 2.5 grams of leucine from single isolated foods to grow muscle. And then let's take …