English teachers complain the literature guides produced by the CliffsNotes Company allow students to skip reading such classics as Melville’s Moby-Dick, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or The Misanthrope by Molière. The company says that’s not so.

They claim these guides encourage students to “establish a unique connection” with these works and take a “more active part” in their education. But before you sneer and say the company’s full of it, don’t forget what you’re full of.

Information that comes from social media.

And far more often than not, you get it in a whisper-down-the-lane sort of way instead of from the original source - just like CliffsNotes.

There’s really nothing wrong with that, provided the person whispering to you is reputable. Like Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine whose work has resulted in numerous awards, a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster, and weekly podcasts so helpful that he now has more than 3.5 million YouTube subscribers.

Last week, I called Huberman Lab Podcast number 97 with Dr. Layne Norton especially insightful and particularly worthy of discussion since it supports several of my strongest health-and-fitness suspicions. One being that the gut microbiome plays a crucial role in our overall health despite the fact we know so little about it.

Norton jokes about our collective ignorance, explaining that when he asks a friend who’s an expert on gut health about it, she tells him to“talk to me in 20 years.”

But he does cite the end result (pun intended) of one rather powerful study where the fecal matter of lean mice was transplanted into overweight mice and - across the board - they lost weight. As well as the fact that a similar human study found essentially the same though Norton acknowledges that could be in part a result of the placebo effect.

When Huberman asks Norton what one should do to support gut health, he says exercising, not consuming too many calories, and consuming lots and lots of fiber are “the three biggest levers.” As testimony to the third, he references a “recent really large meta analysis of over a million subjects” that showed for every 10-gram increase in daily fiber ingestion, there was a 10% overall reduction in the risk of mortality.

So one thing Norton asks people when they tell him about any sort of diet plan is “Are you eating like over 50, 60 grams of fiber a day?”

That’s more than four times what the typical American adult ingests daily, far more than the government’s recommendation to receive 14 grams of fiber from every 1,000 calories consumed - but rather similar to previous advice you’ve read here. Norton believes that unless you eat so much fiber that it causes gastrointestinal discomfort (I regularly consume 100-plus grams a day with no problem), there really isn’t “a top end,” that the more of it you eat, the greater the health benefits.

He also believes something about fiber that’s a lifesaver if you have a sweet tooth. That the more you eat it, the less of an adverse effect consuming sugar has on your health - provided you’re not over consuming all kinds of calories.

To support this, he cites a “classic” 1997 study led by Richard S. Surwit and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition where two groups ate a “tightly controlled,” 1,100-calorie-per-day diet in which 71 percent of the cals came from carbs. One group, though, consumed 110 grams of sugar per day and the other about 10 grams per day.

At the end of the six-week study, both groups had lost the same amount of body fat. More importantly, there were “no real differences” in other important health biomarkers, such as blood lipids and blood sugar.

As a result, Norton tells people to focus less on sugar and more on fiber. That as long as you’re eating a large amount fiber and controlling you cals, you don’t have to be “that worried” if you’re consuming 80 or 90 grams of sugar per day.

One other thing he stresses, however, is that eating is ultimately an “exchange.” That consuming sugar often comes at the expense of not ingesting healthier carbohydrates, and that consuming 80 or 90 grams of sugar “probably doesn’t have any positive health effects.”

One thing I want to stress is that today’s article doesn’t come close to covering all the interesting stuff discussed in the aforementioned podcast. So if you’d like to know what Huberman and Norton think about protein, tracking calories, fitness trackers, or artificial sweeteners, access the video.

To get immediately to what interests you the most, use the topic timestamps provided when you click on “more” in the gray highlighted info box below the video.