Scientists Found A New Way to Boost Metabolism (2026 Science)



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Description:

What if you could burn hundreds of extra calories per day, without changing your exercise routine or activity? It sounds impossible. But controlled human trials suggest that simply lowering protein intake might increase energy expenditure by up to 20%, even when total calories stay the same.

In this video, I break down a bizarre and fascinating metabolic story: from human trials showing massive increases in calorie burn, to my own self-experiment where I deliberately overate and still lost weight, to a brand-new paper in Nature that may finally explain what’s going on. The answer leads us to the gut microbiome and reveals a mechanism involving fat “beiging,” thermogenesis, and a specific microbial cocktail that may control how much energy we burn.

This is not a recommendation to follow a low-protein diet. It’s an exploration of a surprising scientific phenomenon that challenges how we think about metabolism, and a glimpse into a future where we might be able to engineer fat burning at the biological level.

Chapters
0:00 – How to Burn 600 More Calories Per Day
2:48 – Chapter 1: The Most Surprising Study of 2025
5:00 – Chapter 2: My Fat Burning Self-Experiment
7:40 – Chapter 3: The Breakthrough Paper
10:54 – Chapter 4: The Fat-Burning Cocktail
15:40 – Chapter 5: What This Means for Me and You
18:42 – Do Ketogenic Diets Boost Metabolism Too?
21:10 – My Principles of Gut Health

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21 Comments

  1. Thanks for watching! If you're hungry for more on metabolism biohacking, check out these recent popular resources from the StayCurious Metabolism community:.

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    I'd also very much appreciate if you give this video a thumbs up! It makes a difference.

    Now tell me, what do you want to learn next?

  2. How about looking into could exposure to increase brown fat? Doesn't require insane temperatures or amounts of time, according to Danish researcher Dr. Susanna Soberg. Would love your take on this.
    Loss of brown fat along with the large weight loss from glp1 medications is supposed to be the main reason why so many of us who've done this feel cold all the time after our weight loss. We've lost Brown fat in addition to the white / storage type of fat . My personal experience is that the extreme feelings of being cold improved markedly after I started taking cold showers for a few minutes several times a week.
    This despite my ultimate goal/maintenance weight being quite a lot higher than as a young woman, and the fact that I was always hot back then… So the cold is definitely not due to the lack of hauling around excess weight nor the insulation factor of fat. I also noticed that my collarbones and shoulder bones are very prominent for the first time in my life. That's the area where the brown fat is primarily stored. Since taking cold showers, those bones are slightly less prominent despite maintaining my weight.
    So this cold exposure strategy seems to have helped me, though it has not allowed me to increase my calorie intake, which still remains ridiculously low in order to maintain a quite reasonable BMI of about 23.

    A major factor in my adult obesity was due to my too-often successful teenage and young adult efforts to starve myself into underweight status, due to societal pressures for a certain type of female appearance. But let's not get me started on that rant.

  3. The Sugar plan is a great way to accelerate muscle loss. Starving the body of protein to burn fat is essentially forcing the engine to overheat so it burns more fuel. It is an emergency survival mechanism, not a lifestyle.

  4. Love your podcast. I also want to be a n=1 but, unfortunately, and disappointingly, Winnow labs only ship to USA and Canada and not to the UK. Can you ‘have a word’ 🙂

  5. Hey Nick, I have made natto. It is not hard to do. I bought organic soy beans and the nattokinase producing bacteria on Amazon. There are numerous videos on YouTube explaining how to culture your own. I have also bought some natto premade in a jar shipped with ice packs from New York. The quality was equal to what I made at home but the cost was far less by making my own. The taste is acquired over a long period of time. Traditionally, it is eaten with a raw egg on top and onions. It took me two years to learn to eat it plain. I have also dehydrated the beans with low heat. That tastes pretty good but I think since most of the gel that is richest in natto becomes flakes that I loose a good part of the benefit. I do highly recommend making your own natto since it is far more powerful than any commercially available nattokinase form of K2. This was evidenced by the strong anti-platelet activity. After having a third bought of Covid with resultant long covid, I was hypercoagulabile. Using natto, I found my clotting to return to a normal state.

  6. For a calorie intake of 2,000 calories per day, 180 of those calories should be protein. You divide by 4 and arrive at 45 g of protein. I'm somewhat skeptical but this could be interesting. 45 g is a bit on the lower side of protein intake but it's not crazy low so I don't know. Maybe this is the reason some people are naturally lean? I am somewhat skeptical.

  7. I did the sugar diet, I couldn't do it for more than a day. I felt very ill and super hungry. I then experimented by lowering protein and increase carbs no fat. Not going to eat butter or fat. I just lowered my cholesterol by removing fat.

  8. I am more confused than ever!!! Ive just got my diet to no sugar and carbs (except what is naturally available from fresh veg and some fruit). Now I have to change that? It feels like someone is lying. No matter how enthusiastic I am about nutrition Im not going to drop my protein and dive into gummies and ice-cream. According to this video I should have been ultra slim and in high energy before. Mmmm, maybe Im not clever enough for this doctor. Time to unsubscribe?

  9. Why it's misleading: Winnow Labs is an affiliate sponsor for Nick Norwitz, who uses his discount code ("StayCurious") to plug the product in his videos. It has zero connection to the low-protein fat-burning study or the HU4 bacterial strains. Pitching a sponsored microplastic-binding probiotic alongside groundbreaking metabolic gut research naturally leads viewers to conflate the two, even though the "fat-burning probiotic" described in the study cannot be bought in stores today.

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