The Real-Life Diet of Mike Israetel, Who Doesn’t Understand the Fascination With Breakfast

That way, you don’t have to try to make all of your business meals as fun as possible or all of your fun meals as nutritionally optimal as possible. You just have to consider yourself with a ratio and have mostly business meals and a few fun meals. Then it’s kind of like a big hack. My business meals are typically ground beef, ground turkey, chicken thighs, or something like shrimp, though that’s quite rare. I tend to notice if I eat shrimp for a few days straight, I’m kind of like, “I don’t fucking ever want see shrimp again.”

When you start thinking about what shrimp actually are…

That’s enough of that, yeah. But those are my sources of meat. I must always have veggies with every main meal. I’ll have broccoli slaw, carrots, mushrooms, cabbage, broccoli by itself, kale. Lots of greens are a really good thing. Then for grains, I’ll have whole grain bread sometimes, oftentimes I’ll have pasta, sometimes whole wheat, sometimes regular. I will also have mashed potatoes on occasion and a lot of rice. We have a rice cooker—my wife is Asian. I didn’t know rice cookers existed until I married her. It turns out white people have been doing this shit in the pot for no fucking reason for generations, bro. It’s fucking wrong.

Those lean meats, those basic carb sources, and a crap load of veggies are the foundations of most of my whole food meals. Just for clarity, please, I do eat fruits as well! Plenty of fresh fruits like oranges, pineapples, apples, pears, things like that. Those are really awesome. Then just to finish that out, the most common sources that I use for extra added fats is either olive oil or canola oil.

Okay, two-parter: What is your relationship with sugar and alcohol?

The fear of sugar is entirely mythical and stupid and pointless and empirically wrong. The only thing about sugar that’s bad is that you tend to overeat foods that are sweet and then they increase your calories and then you gain fat and then your health goes to shit. Within the context of a calorie-balanced diet that’s otherwise very healthy, if you have some sugary foods—especially fruits, which are fucking loaded with sugar—you’re totally good. There should be a concern for really high-calorie, ultra-tasty food, because that basically causes the obesity epidemic and destroys lives all the time. That’s my statement on sugar.

Alcohol is a poison. It’s probably a poison at every dose. But what I have gotten into some trouble for lately in the podcasting space is being on a few podcasts and rendering my opinion on alcohol as being spectral. So, if you have one or two drinks a few nights a week, you’re paying such a low cost to your health, longevity, and quality of life that it’s undetectable on major meta-analytic scales. They don’t see a reduction in longevity from one to two drinks per night on average for folks. Now, two to three drinks, four to five drinks, it escalates on an exponential curve. Having eight drinks a night every night, you’re going to be in the hospital sooner or fucking later.

You’re an alcoholic.

Yeah, congratulations. A lot of undergrads are like, “Get the fuck out of here.” But usually after college, you realize, “Oh, my God, half my friends were literally alcoholic.”

Totally.

And a lot of them are proud of it! What I like to do as a science communicator is say, Look, if you have a few drinks here and there, and if you don’t have it close to bedtime, and you don’t tend to overeat junk food after you have the drinks, there’s almost no downside. If you’re concerned about minute levels of risk reduction, then just don’t ever drive on the freeway ever. That’s the deal with alcohol. If someone’s like, yeah, I have two to four drinks a night on average most nights, is that okay? I’d be like, it’s costing you. Now also, it’s not going to fucking kill you tomorrow. It’ll probably chop off a few years off the end of your life, maybe five, if you continue to do this all the time. Fve years scares the fuck out of people, but it’s the difference between 80 and 85. At that point, when you’re 80, you’re like, I would eat a ton of baby spinal cords to stay alive for longer.