My take on both of them is that there’s a lot of research supporting positive health outcomes which they oddly tend to neglect, and I suspect they have strong biases. I should preface this with admitting I know nothing at all about this stuff.
There was one episode where Huberman had a guy on talking about how young men should drink milk to maximize free testosterone and thus maximize “health” outcomes like height. There is a fairly substantial amount of research suggesting this isn’t actually a great idea more generally speaking because maximizing body size doesn’t have inherent benefits and could even have long term disadvantages for health outcomes. Further, drinking a lot of milk appears to be correlated with increased likelihood of developing cancer. And worse still, there are other foods which deliver the benefits of milk without the same disadvantages. Yet this odd little bit was accepted freely and without any criticality. Finally, maximizing height is kind of a culturally motivated desire in my mind. If you’re happy and healthy, who cares if you didn’t milk your growth spurts to the utmost degree? Is being 5’10” a shameful thing? Or even 5’6”? It struck me as so bizarre to hear someone in health still bent on growing kids larger. We’re not cattle. If we eat enough, we’ll grow enough. Let it be.
Attia has been slowly shifting over, but he’s been very pro animal-based foods in a field of research where the greater body of work indicates that these foods should be more limited or emphasized quite a bit less than he has. Or maybe this has changed quite recently. I know in the last few years he has begun to mention more often that eating plants appears to be critical to health and performance, but when I’ve listened in, he still heavily encourages eating more meat than seems necessary. It seems weird given he has a book about longevity now (I’m only half way through so maybe he’ll surprise me still) yet he doesn’t seem to be on the cutting edge of this research in regards to diet.
They’re very smart (smarter than I am by a wide margin) and probably very current in their research but I suppose it seems like they ignore certain areas of research. They seem a little “old fashioned” at times when it comes to diet in particular.
I’m not saying people should never eat meat. It’s about moderation. Attia also emphasizes consuming protein in ways that a lot of research doesn’t support, but I’m not in the field so what the hell. I don’t know who’s more correct.
