Over the past eight years, I've followed a ketogenic diet (low carb diet) for much of the year in a way of eating I call, Seasonal Ketosis. It is a part of my ancestral-based lifestyle to promote health, fitness, longevity, and joy. Seasonal Ketosis is a form of cyclic ketogenic diet based on seasons, where I'll have a season of feasting and a season of famine each year.
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Transcript
[00:02:48.920] – Allan Ras, how are you doing.
[00:02:50.130] – Ras Great Allan. How are you today?
[00:02:52.570] – Allan A little frustrated. The Panamanian government reneged on giving us our Saturdays back. So now it's the last time I thought I was going to get a Saturday off. And it appears that they decided that Bocas del Toro doesn't. And part of it is, you know, at least at this point, they're thinking in terms of states or provinces as we are. And we just happen to be associated with Bocas del Toro province, which includes the mainland. And so they are having some major outbreaks in on the mainland. But last we heard, there was less than twelve cases here on the island.
So, you know, it's under control here. But we, you know, living under more stringent rules. So they didn't open our curfew and they didn't give us the Saturday back. So,
[00:03:38.880] – Ras Wow, it's so sorry to hear that. That's awful.
[00:03:41.850] – Allan Well, it is what it is. It's just, you know, this, too, will pass.
[00:03:45.990] – Ras Yep.
[00:03:46.410] – Allan It just means I'm going to get more miles in during my five days I can walk then.
[00:03:50.690] – Ras That's true.
[00:03:51.390] – Allan Than I normally would.
[00:03:52.880] – Ras That's true.
[00:03:53.630] – Allan So how's your week been.
[00:03:55.340] – Ras Good. Good. Got a good run in this morning. Our weather's cooling off a little bit so running was great this morning and I've got a run club tonight so I'll be getting a few more miles with some friends tonight too. So that'll be fun.
[00:04:09.030] – Allan Cool. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and get into today's episode. I'm going to be talking about seasonal ketosis, and it's a term that, I coined the phrase and I talked about a little bit in my book, and I recognized that I've mentioned it a few times on a few podcasts and I briefly describe it. But I wanted to go into a little bit more detail because I was talking to somebody about ketosis and they're like, oh, I could never eat like that year round.
[00:04:36.420] – Allan You know, every once in a while I want some cake or bread or something like that. And so I said, well, you can have your cake and eat it too, with some stipulations. So let's go ahead and get into that episode.
Hello and thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness Podcast, I'm really glad to have you here today. Today's show is going to be a little different. I have talked about seasonal ketosis as the way that I eat a few times on this show and on some other podcasts, but I've never really broken down how it works and why it works and what it is, specifically for me and how it fits within my overall ancestral based lifestyle.
Now, when I started this effort to go from a fat bastard to healthy and fit. I was introduced to Paleo by a dietitian and she brought up the paleo diet, explained what it was, what I could eat, what I couldn't eat, and I loved it. So I stepped away from my high carb diet and started just eating meat, fish and vegetables. I'd never heard of the ketogenic diet or the keto diet, as it's often called, but because I was on such a low carb version of the paleo diet, it actually put me into ketosis.
So I had to figure out what ketosis was because something different was happening to me and, you know, my breath and other things you hear about. But the weight loss was dramatic. So I enjoyed a lot of benefits out of the ketogenic diet. My blood sugar got steady, I had higher energy, I had less brain fog and it felt great.
Now, over the past eight years, I've continued to follow the ketogenic diet for most of the year, and I call that seasonal ketosis. Now, most people that adopt the ketogenic diet, they do it full time and they start eating low carb and they stay low carb and they try to keep their body in ketosis all the time and they see the benefits.
They would ask, why would I ever go off the keto diet if I enjoy how I feel when I'm on it? And to answer that question, for me, it's really about balance. I enjoy beer, I enjoy wine, I enjoy fruit, I enjoy yeast rolls. And occasionally I want to have a hamburger with a bun. So I pick a specific part of the year where I would allow myself to go off of ketosis. Now, I mentioned a few shows back that I had not started my famine season on time and really kind of blew it for a while. But I am back into my famine season and I've lost 25 pounds plus and still going.
But that's, that's not all this is really about. So I use seasonal ketosis as a way to stay generally healthy, to keep my health in good check, to keep my weight in a healthy body composition range. It improves my fitness, longevity, and the joy I have in my life. So I've developed an ancestral based lifestyle. And I'm not going to get into the argument about what our ancestors would or would not have eaten. I'm not going to get into the argument of, you know, how long they lived and all that. I'll talk a little bit about that. But that science doesn't interest me. I know that there were no fruits available to my ancestors in the northern part of Europe. I know that they would not have been able to transport food all around the world, so I would not have been eating nutrients from different continents all at one time.
I would not always have access to vegetables and fruits and all this other gobbledygook. I just wouldn't there'd be periods of time when I wouldn't. So but before I really get into seasonal ketosis, I do want to talk about a few key things just so we're all on the same base. When I'm talking about ancestral living, there's a few just core tenets that I'm going to throw out there. One is understanding what ketosis is now. Ketosis is when your body is burning fat.
So that can either be the fat that you're eating or it can be body fat. And in doing so, you create ketone bodies. Now, these ketone bodies are something that your brain and your body can use as fuel. Most of the time people are running on glucose. OK, there's glucose in your blood, there's glucose, you know, in the form of glycogen, in your muscles and liver. And we use that for energy most of the time.
At least that's how it's been for at least the last probably six to seven years here in the United States now. And we've also got a lot fatter. Ketones, on the other hand, can do all of that fueling. And in many cases it's more efficient and it's cleaner. It doesn't cause as many problems for us. So our bodies actually perform better, operate better and are in better health when we're in ketosis. So that's just ketosis. Now, the ketogenic diet is also called keto or the keto Diet.
It is a low carb, high fat diet that forces your body to go into nutritional ketosis. Now you can induce ketosis with exogenous ketone bodies or MCT oil, which is a medium-chain triglyceride. But that's not what I'm after here. We want healthy food. We want a healthy diet of real food that puts us into ketosis naturally. And it's not that hard to do. You just got to get the macros right and push through. Now with me, seasonal ketosis is a cyclical ketogenic diet. Now, instead of doing just a week, I do my cycles running over months, OK.
And in fact, seasons. So I'll have a season where I'll go into famine and then I'm in a strict ketogenic diet at that point. I stay in ketosis almost the whole time and then I'll have some feasting seasons when, you know, I'll go ahead and allow myself to eat what I want. I don't have any no, no's. Now I do tend to continue to eat a little bit high fat, low carb at that time, but the rules are gone. I just eat what I feel compelled to eat and enjoy the food that I have.
Now, my approach to health, a healthy ancestral lifestyle really is about health and longevity, even though we may never actually answer that question how long our ancestors would have lived. What we do know is that child mortality was much higher. We know that they didn't have the medical Know-How of modern times and they had less access to food. And we didn't have access to what, you know, most of the experts would call healthy Whole Foods. I mean, we had what was there that was all that was there. So what we didn't how we did. That's all we had.
There were no McDonald's. There was none of that stuff. And we did a lot more physical activity every day. So whatever the evidence says, you know, if people weren't living as long, it was probably for different reasons. OK, now, during those times, there would be periods, particularly in the north, where we would have feast and famine. When we would spend part of the year eating a ketogenic diet and even some periods of fasting. We didn't have food preservation. So we would have to wake up in the morning and maybe not have any food around. So we would have to go get it. We could be traveling and walking for hours and not find that.
But what we would do is if you think about it from a seasonal perspective, we would have access to more food in the spring, through the fall. So there would be fruits, there'd be vegetables, there'd be things like that. And so we would probably put on some weight between spring and fall. We'd just be a normal thing. And it was good because body fat helps protect us from the cold, keep us warmer, and it also gives us food. I mean, when we don't have food, it provides us the energy we need.
Okay, now as we go into the winter, weight loss would be the norm as we started using that fat on our bodies to keep us alive. So if we didn't have access to food, our bodies adapted to stay alive, our bodies adapted to be able to continue to do what we needed to do. I also believe that we were opportunistic eaters and we didn't have a McDonald's or a Tim Hortons or whatever it is that you have on every corner.
We didn't drink sweetened beverages. We just had water. We ate whole foods. When we killed an animal, we ate it hoof to nose. As hunter gatherers, we ate well as we could and we fasted when we had to. So we were on the land. And I think that's one of the core tenets of this is that we knew what we should eat, what we shouldn't eat, and we got that through the tribal knowledge. So, you know, I think it's really important to understand that the things that we call food today are not food. You know, groceries, as they are today, are not as nutritious as what we had been. And we've got to fix that as a people. That's got to be a priority somewhere along the lines.
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Now, another big tenant I want to talk about is fitness. Now, we were not sedentary. You cannot survive as a hunter gatherer if you're going to sit and not do anything, you just don't. So we would have to be fit. We wouldn't be able to go to a gym for cardio and strength training, but we would have regular exposure to three primary movement modalities that were really, really important for us. We would do low intensity, steady-state or LISS, as I like to call it where we had to migrate.
So, you know, food's not always where we want it to be. And the animals were moving with migration patterns. We would have to move with them if we want to be successful hunters. So this would require sometimes days of us to walk and travel, hiking, basically, and we'd have to carry our stuff with us. So if we had shelter and coats and in different clothing and blankets and all the different things, we needed tools and weapons, we would be carrying those with us. So we would go on these long, low intensity, steady state movements.
Now occasionally we would have high-intensity interval training. And you could think of that in terms of if we were hunting or we were fending off other tribes, it would require us to have some power and some skill. So working with weapons, moving for short periods of time, quickly resting, moving again, that would be normal regular activity for us. So, yes, more movement. And then finally a strength in mobility when we killed a large animal or we stumbled across a berry patch, we would feast.
Now, that would also require, in some cases, for us to lift parts of the animal and carry it back to camp, or we'd have to squat down to pick the berries that we were going to be eating. So, again, more movement. And so you can see through this, just the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is filled with tons and tons of movement. Now, we also would have work life balance. We would be putting in long commutes. We wouldn't be doing a lot of the things we do now.
But while we're working to survive, we would also understand that we needed to rest. We would understand that, you know, we would need flow. And what I mean by flow is, you know, flow is kind of fitting in with what's there. You know, we would know that there's ways to hunt. There's ways to to move. There's there's times that we need to go. And so we would start following a natural pattern of days, months, seasons.
You watch some of the shows where they depict people and they live by the moon, the moon and the seasons give them the information they need to survive. Now, if they faced a threat and then they had a stressor, which, you know, basically what a threat would do is the stress response. It would be acute, immediate, it'd be life or death. So they would have that cortisol hit. They'd have, you know, that adrenal hit and then it would be gone. It wouldn't be this long, drawn out months and months and months of things that we do to ourselves now.
So we would have a very low stress life in a general sense, as long as we were able to successfully hunt and move and do the things we needed to do. Our stress levels were much lower. We also did risk management. And that sounds kind of weird talking about our ancestors.
But the way you stay alive, the way longevity happens, is understanding the risks associated with your life is a primal living being. We weren't worried about calories, blood sugar, vitamin C, processed meat, dietary fiber, or if we had a healthy microbiome, those concepts weren't even in our head. But what we did was we followed a path that was set by our ancestors.
My ancestors would go and they'd say, we know we go this direction. This is the way we have to go this month at the moon. And then we would go, but we would have to also understand what we're facing. If another tribe moved in to the area, we might have to change the plan, but we would do it. We had risk management. We were paying attention. So the biggest risks to us at that time was infant mortality and tribal warfare.
And the only biohacking that we would have done was just making sure that we were aware of the risks and then figuring out ways to avoid them or deal with them. And then relationship would be very important to us. We worked and moved as a tribe. And in a tribe, it works to our benefit because it helps everyone's survival. We hunted in packs and were hard coded in our DNA to be socially engaged. So that relationship, that closeness is really, really important to the nature of ancestral living.
And then finally within ancestral living. I want to talk about curiosity. You know, we did tend to follow the same basic patterns, seasonal patterns, year in and year out. But we were constantly engaged with what was going on. In the world around us, because our survival depended on it. You know, we couldn't go in and ask Google or Facebook what the weather was going to be like or if we were going to have an early summer or a late winter or whatever.
There was no groundhog to do it for us either. We looked to our elders to advise us and then the tribe had to learn and adapt, and that's how we would survive hard times. Now, I recently started a blog to dive into these issues in more detail. But full disclosure, I'm a terrible blogger. I can brag about this being episode 455 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. But you know, I've done several blogs over the years and I don't think I've ever gotten more than maybe 15 blog posts in any one blog I've ever started.
So they blog fade pretty quickly. You know, I hope that doesn't happen with this blog. But what I plan to do with that blog is explore a lot of these topics that I've talked about so far. So if you're interested in any of those, you might want to check out the blog. I'll do the best I can, but. What's probably gonna end up happening is I'll probably end up bringing some of those topics here to the podcast, so check out the blog as I get going on it. Probably not anything else on there now. But check it out. And that's where a lot of these topics are going to be discussed in more detail. And if you have any questions, feel free to join us on the Facebook group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/Group. And just ask I'm there. I mean, I'm there to participate and help you in any way I can. So if you're interested in this topic, I would like to carry on that conversation.
So for today's discussion and then I'll be gone already for quite a while. But I really want to dive into seasonal ketosis and share why I do it and the reasons that it may or may not be right for you. The first question I kind of have in my mind when I'm thinking about this is seasonal ketosis. The same thing is cyclical keto diet? You know, and technically it is it's you know, you're cycling in and out of keto. So it is a cyclical keto diet. However, when you talk to most people about this cyclical keto diet, it's a six days on, one day off, and they call that a refeed day. And I'm metabolically capable of doing that kind of keto diet, but I'm not a really good moderation type person.
[00:22:02.340] – Allan You know, I'm either all on or all off. So if I took a weekly cheat day, you know, or carb up day, I just don't know what that day after that might be like. And I might just go ahead and have a second cheat day. So when I start my famine season, you know, in my ketogenic diet, I start dropping weight relatively quickly and then I'll get to my set point and I'm good, you know.
I like seeing two to five pounds come off in a week. What I wouldn't be a fan of is seeing like four pounds down, then two pounds up. And I'm pretty sure that's how the cyclical keto diet would work for me. And I don't really like that. It's progress, don't get me wrong, it's progress. But that's just not me. I'm happy knowing that I can have a few more carbs on my high activity days without going out of ketosis.
So if I'm going to have more carbs, I'm just going to work out a hell of a lot harder that week to make sure that I can keep myself in ketosis and have the carbs too. So if I want some fruit, I got to earn it from a from a carb, blood sugar, muscle and liver glycogen model. Now, there are some positives to the cyclical keto over full time keto. In many cases, athletic performance can be better and muscle growth is better.
I'm not a bodybuilder and I perform fine without the refits. I can I can do as much as I want to do. I need to do so again, cyclical keto is just not for me. But if you're someone who's looking for a way to do keto and then have that kind of that refeed that break, you might want to check that out. Now, why does seasonal ketosis make sense to me from an ancestral perspective?
And I've gone into some of this already. You know, I when I started this and I was learning about the paleo diet, I came across Mark Sissons primal blueprint. And now Mark laid out a very reasoned case for how our ancestors lived and ate. I used to character I think he named Duroc. So rather, you believe in human evolution, creationism or intelligent design, I don't think you can argue that we we're not doing things right now.
We've got to change something. The standard American diet is killing us. You know, back then we didn't eat refined grains and we didn't have junk food. You know, we were hunters and gatherers. We were, like I said, opportunistic eaters. And we ate the nutrition that our body required, essential amino acids and essential fats. They came from animals, primarily red meat and fish. That's where we got our food. Most of our food was going to come in that form.
And then based on the seasons, you know, we had short periods of the year where it was either cold or dry. We were in ketosis because there just might not be any vegetables or fruits available to us during periods of time. And then, of course, because, you know, food availability and everything, we would spend a good bit of time fasting or intermittent fasting or maybe some extended fasting, depending on the nature of what's going on in the world.
You know, if if we got a good, cold, hard freeze and all the animals are moving and there's no, you know, no vegetation at all, we got to go with the animals. We got to catch up to them. And then we got to do the hunting. So just recognize that our diet would have been very keto for much of the year. OK, now I started doing this for weight loss. That was my my core reason. And I was very much drawn to the primal paleo diet because it made intuitive sense.
Mark did a really good job, because it was maybe the first article I read, that you can't eat what you don't have access to. So you wouldn't eat processed foods at all, ever. OK, everything we would have eaten. Would have been whole food. It would have been locally and sustainably sourced and the human body was designed to be a hunter. I mean, there's no doubt whatsoever when you look at our features, look at what we can do. We were designed to be hunters, but when there are fruits and vegetables available, we're probably going to eat those. But we would not have eaten a high carbohydrate diet year-round. It's just impossible for any of our ancestors short of just some very small areas, you know, in the tropical zones where people would have eaten primarily carbohydrate diets that just wouldn't have anyone from northern Europe, anyone pretty much if you're from Northern Europe or Europe at all, your ancestors probably didn't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.
That's just that's just part of it. Now, you can look at the current chronic diseases, obesity, heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And the health problems are associated with our food. There's something seriously wrong. In our modern world, most people have insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome. And it's it's so epidemic that it's just weird to me that this has become politicized. That, you know, we have the food companies telling our government what to tell us what to eat is kind of crazy. It's not animal products and saturated fat that are making us sick as much as those food companies want the government to tell us that it is. It's just not true. It's the fast food. It's the processed foods.
It's high, refined carbs and sugar. We're eating too much sugar. We're eating too many refined carbs. We're not eating whole food. So if the government was in our favor doing the things that it was supposed to do, they'd be focused on food quality. They would not be telling us to eat cereal and grains and refined carbs. They would be telling us to eat meat, fruits and vegetables, Whole Foods.
Now, I've interviewed experts across all spectrums of nutrition. I've had vegans on I've had carnivores on paleo, keto, everywhere in between. The interesting thing is, is every single one of them will tell you that their way of eating is the best because it is based on high quality whole food. And they'll be able to pull out the studies that show people eating their diet. Whole Foods are crushing it. They're doing great. But what's hard is that they ignore Whole Food studies that say the exact same thing about a different type of diet, because it doesn't fit their world view, it doesn't fit their paradigm.
They have a cognitive bias. So, I just really struggle when someone tells me that the quality of your vegetable matters, but the quality of your meat doesn't. It's just all meat is bad. Or and people say the same thing you know, the other way. Is the quality of the meat matters, but all vegetables are bad. You know, that doesn't make sense to me. Our bodies were designed to eat both. Quality is what matters.
That's why the paleo diet makes sense to me. I think everybody should be trying to eat more whole food. You know, the debates out about whether we would have eaten potatoes or, you know, and I don't think we would have eaten much dairy, to be honest with you, because we didn't have cows. You know, we didn't have goats.
We hunted them or something similar to them. But we didn't we didn't have any animal product like that. We weren't domesticating the animals, so we weren't doing dairy. Beans, you know, those are a little weird because yeah, there are some issues there where we have to be careful with them. But, you know, I like the primal experience of having a big, juicy steak. I just do. I love having a cup of blueberries or blackberries and the sweetness and the tartness and just, I love that.
I'm not going to give up either one of them, I'm just not. My diet is comprised of meat, fish, vegetables and some fruit. I did try the Carnivore diet for a few weeks and I started missing vegetables. I tried the vegetarian diet and then I adapted it into the pescaterian and diet to try to get my protein. And I couldn't do it. I gained weight because I was eating too many fruits and vegetables and grains, so I just started putting on weight. So there's not something that I enjoy. And, you know, when I when I do these did these little experiments, you know, I was typically doing them during my my feasting season. So, you know, was not a period of time when I had to worry about being in ketosis. I just did what I did.
I think it's important for you to understand that whole food is the answer. However, you choose to put that in a way of eating is really about you. But I will say this. If you're going to try seasonal ketosis, you do need to think about a few things. OK, one, I don't. Have any insulin resistance or diabetes or, you know, I don't have any of the the diseases or any of the issues that that people would would be suffering from, that they might be using this as a protocol. So if you have insulin resistance or diabetes, you know, or you're using the ketogenic diet for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, PCOS, or an autoimmune auto immune issue, I wouldn't necessarily cycle off of the ketogenic diet.
Those protocols are specific about staying in keto the whole time. And so that's not something where you would want to cycle out because you're just setting yourself up. If you're way above a healthy body composition and you want to use keto to lose weight, seasonal ketosis is also probably not something for you because your weight is going to fluctuate. I fluctuate 10 to 15 pounds each year as I go through these cycles. So that is, and then, of course, if you're prone to eating disorders, you know, you need to find a way of eating that you're comfortable with.
If it's sustainable for you, the cycling in and out is probably not in your best interest, you know, except for this slip up. I had recently did a covid-19 I've been able to manage my seasons stably for the last eight years. You know, going into my feasting season in late August, early September, and then coming out of it right after the Super Bowl or my birthday at the first week of February. That's my feasting season.
And then my fasting season or famine season, as I call it, will run the rest of the year. And as I said I might put on 10 to 15 pounds during the feasting season, but I ditch that weight pretty quickly and spend my famine season at my lower, lower range of my set point. Now, I love the metabolic flexibility that I have to be able to spend part of the time in ketosis and part of the time having a little bit more carbs.
When I say more carbs, I'm talking about beer and some simple carbs. You know, it's like I'll have a hotdog, I'll have a hamburger. Someone offers me a piece of pie at a tailgate, I'll eat it. So that's kind of that thing. You know, to me, the weight loss is relatively easy. Once I'm in ketosis, my body just naturally says, OK, you don't you don't need this. And some of what I'm flushing out from a weight perspective is water.
But a lot of it is body fat and it goes pretty quickly. And I'm pretty happy with that. Now, if you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, there's two ways that you can do this. I talked about the group earlier, you know, 40+ Fitness Podcast, dotcom focus group, or you can go to the Web site – 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/455. And there's a comment section under this post.
I put a post with the transcripts each week and that's why I tell you the full show notes are there. If you go there, there's a comment section, you can leave a comment there. I'm pretty passionate about the benefits that I get and the flexibility I get and the freedom I get with seasonal ketosis and my style of ancestral living. So I love talking about it. If you want to go into more detail with this, I encourage you to go check out one of those two places and let's continue the conversation there.
[00:34:12.300] Allan All right, Ras welcome back.
[00:34:15.510] Ras This is great. A lot of good stuff in the episode.
[00:34:19.320] Allan Yeah, you know, most people that will talk about ketosis, they talk about in terms of it being a permanent lifestyle. And it can be. But I think it's it's kind of easy for people to get roped into measurements or things and not necessarily doing it for the right reason. I knew that I was going to roll up on football season and want to go tailgating. You know, since I finished my Tough Mudder, I was like having a beer and I was out of ketosis that afternoon, that evening.
[00:34:50.880] Allan So, you know, just for my life style perspective, it just didn't make sense. They're going to be periods of time that I was not. But I found a manageable way that I could spend some of the year in ketosis and get the benefits that I wanted to get, but at the same time, spent some time doing some things that I enjoy.
[00:35:11.220] Ras That sounds great, I'm glad that you found this new way to work keto into your normal lifestyle. That sounds like it's flexible enough to work with the way that you like to live.
[00:35:23.000] Allan It does. You know, of course, you know, this year I had a little bit of difficulty getting out of the beast mode just with everything that was going on. I did put on a good bit more weight than I normally would have. But I've dropped almost all of that now and I'm back down to near a low for the last five years, I've been running at about two hundred and seven pounds.
And I'm right about there right now. I think I'm going to push it down a little lower because my muscle mass is a little lower than it was five years ago. So I'm probably going to push my weight down below two hundred before I kind of level things out again. So I do see some fluctuations with my weight and I know that can be challenging for a lot of people.
[00:36:11.350] Ras Yeah. That's what I wanted to ask you about that. As you watch the scale go up and down, how does that impact mostly how you feel? Because to me a few extra pounds can feel kind of yucky and sluggish for me. But for you, how does that feel when you're in the fisting mode versus the famine mode?
[00:36:31.660] Allan Yeah, well, first off, I'm but I'm about five foot 11, so I can I think I can carry 200 pounds pretty well and I can carry up to two fifteen I would say. I don't actually worry about the scale as much. I mean occasionally I'll step on it during my fisting mode just to kind of see where I am. I can usually just guess by looking at how my pants fit.
I before we move down here to Panama, I found a pair of cargo shorts that I liked. So I bought like four or five different pair and different colors of the same cargo shorts. And so they all fit me the same way. And so I can just pretty much tell when I put those cargo shorts on how I'm doing and where I am. And as I mentioned, I eat relatively low carb during my feasting season. So I'm not crazy on carbs.
It's just I don't really worry about it. If, you know, if I'm out with folks, we want to have some beers. I don't think about it. You know, if someone offers me something that I wouldn't normally eat like a hamburger with a bun, I'm going to eat it. I'm not going to worry too much about it, but I do pay attention to my size. You know, if I didn't start noticing that I'm getting bigger, then I'll I'll tap it down a little bit.
I won't I won't go as crazy. Well, except during COVID. But…
[00:37:54.320] Ras Yes, totally different rules for covid.
[00:37:58.930] Allan And so, you know, if you're someone that's really stuck on the scale and you just know there's this weight, your magical weight you're supposed to wear, your head tells you, this is my no, you're not going to like this. You know, the interesting thing is, like, you know, like I said, I'll put on ten, fifteen pounds in a swing. So from my feasting to that, I will put on up to fifteen pounds.
You have to recognize that about about five or seven of that is water weight. And I flush that the first week I go back into ketosis. Right. You know, so I'll literally sit there and say, OK, I'm going to go in ketosis, you know, drop five to seven pounds in a week or two. And then it then it tapers down and I'll lose a few pounds a week and then one pound a week and then my body will get to that homeostasis, its happy weight and I just go by how I feel.
Now I've mentioned this before on another episode I was talking about this a little bit. I don't feel as good during the feasting season, you know, because the foods I'm eating or not is healthy. You know, the beer is not a health food.
[00:39:11.260] Ras That's true. Sadly, sadly true.
[00:39:13.260] Allan As much as they'll try to tell you it's okay. It's really good. No, it's not actually really good for you at all. That's fake science. Someone wanted that to be true. They made the hypothesis and then they just said, well, it doesn't kill you, so it's got to be good for you.
[00:39:27.730] Ras Great. Great science.
[00:39:29.450] Allan Yeah. So, you know, don't if you're someone who's going to freak out about the scale, if you're someone who has issues with your eating, this is not that kind of thing. You know, find one way that works and stick with that would be my recommendation for that. If you really worried about the scale, stay in ketosis.
But I also want to preface it. You know, I notice I do feel better in ketosis. It's just a better state for me to be in. But I'm not all that tight end up being that way all the time. You know, I'm okay to have a couple bad, you know, days where my energy level is not as high or, you know, I feel a little frumpy. I'm cool with that. It's the price I pay for the detour I took, and I just accept that.
If you're someone who's doing it as a protocol for cancer, for diabetes, insulin resistance, any other metabolic issue, then it's something you're probably going to want to stay on. It's not something that I want to cycle through.
[00:40:31.030] Ras That's a good point.
[00:40:31.030] Allan You know, even the people that do cyclical, where they're taking one day off per week, I said that that would actually drive me bonkers because I would feel like I was making all this progress dropping, like I said, seven pounds in a week, only to pick four of them back up. Yeah, it would be like that's all I'm doing is flushing water. I'm not really losing any weight.
And so I would struggle with that kind of cycle. Whereas if I'm off, I'm off. If I'm on, I'm on. And that's another thing about my personality, you know, and I talk about in the wellness chips, you've got to know yourself. You got to be self-aware. And it's one of the things I know is I don't have a dimmer switch, the light switch, maybe I'm on or I'm off.
And so it's just easier for me to say, okay, flip the switch and I just do it.
[00:41:24.010] Ras Yeah, it's a good point. I think that the cyclical, you know, one day a week where you can have a cheat day or cheat meal or whatever, it's a slippery slope because food can be a trigger. And if you have that one serving of chips, that might become the bag of chips and then it might be one more serving the next day, in the next day. And it is a slippery slope. And if you're not confident in your ability to put it away and get back to it, then that can be dangerous.
[00:41:52.180] Allan Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I would like to mention is that, you know, we're starting to get anecdotal evidence and maybe some studies where we're looking at performance of someone who's in complete ketosis versus someone who uses carbs as a fuel along with ketones versus someone who's just a sugar burner. And, you know, I'm not going to say one fueling mechanism is best for everybody, but I would put this out there for anyone that is trying to do in terms sport, the heavier you are, the more weight you have to carry for the miles that you're traveling, the more wear and tear you have on your body.
And if you're eating refined carbs specifically and sugar, you're going to have inflammation and that inflammation is going to cause problems in your joints. And so from a health perspective, I would I would be the one that would air on the side of using ketones for for energy.
If I were doing endurance athletics, an occasional carb up here and there before a race might help your performance. But, you know, I'm not sure how much additional glycogen your body is going to be able to carry for that particular event. And you're always going to want to practice what you're going to race. So you would be eating carbs as a regular probably thing each week to carb up for your long runs if you're following the standard training protocol. So you would still be eating a good bit of carbs as a part of that.
So I'm not saying one is better than the other from a performance perspective. I'm just thinking in terms of wear and tear on your body inflammation and you just weigh a little bit less, you know, in carrying less water. So, you know, yeah. All of that's going to probably, in the end, help your performance. But I don't they don't have enough evidence right now where I would say there's one superior fueling way.
[00:43:55.510] Ras Yeah. And I think as an endurance athlete, that's what kind of attracted me to keto in the first place, was I needed to lose a few extra pounds that I was carrying around. Every time we've moved and and we've moved several times as a family, we set up the house. We have projects I can't get in the runs. I gained a few pounds and so I looked to keto for just something different, a way to just get those pounds off. And it actually worked for me.
The one or two times that I've actually ate something non kaido. It impacted me greatly. I was very sick so I can't really do too much cheating. I know I've got a limit. I probably can eat something that's bread or sugar, but not very much more than a bite of cake or something small because it will impact me. But as far as the endurance part of it, it has helped a lot in my running.
I'm not winning races or anything. I've never been fast either in the first place. But yeah, keto has been a real big help for me in the endurance field. But like we like you mentioned earlier and just a little while ago is that you really need to find what works for you as an individual and there's just a wide range of eating, I could give you a couple of names of some impressive vegan ultra runners. Scott Drake is probably one of the most famous vegan ultra runners.
And then to the exact opposite, Michael McKnight, just this summer or spring, actually ran a hundred miles and no calories, nothing, no food. One hundred miles. I want to say, he did it in 18 hours, if I remember right. But so he's he's definitely keto. But like you were mentioning, he is also carving up a little bit in the week leading up. So his body was fueled with carbs, but then he goes straight kitto so that his body is prepared with fat as well.
And I think that's probably how he survived it. But he's also a pretty famous keto ultra athlete.
[00:46:05.330] Allan Yeah, I as over the years I found I can get into keto pretty easy. I don't really do the of flu thing anymore since I go in and out, you know, each year I don't really have a kid, I feel a little less energetic for a day or two, but the switch over for me is pretty quick. So that's one of the things I like about doing it the way I do it. But that said, not everybody would you might not have the same experience that I had.
So, you know, the what's that they say in the ad is the results you see might not be your results right into it. So I'm not going to say everybody would have as easy of a time going back and forth. I don't have any insulin resistance. I don't have any blood sugar issues. You know, my awarenesses always been fine. So for me to switch back and forth seems relatively easy, you know, but like I said, most of the year, I'm eating this way anyway.
The difference is just not paying attention to my carbs, are not being worried about the carbs. And so that's why it works. And the other side of it is I don't stress about rather on that point five or point to five as far as what my ketone levels are, as long as I'm in ketosis, I'm cool. But a lot of people are like, no, I want to see that. No, I want to be one point five or better.
And I bought a Keto Mojo not long ago to replace my other ketone meter that I lost. I guess I can't find it after I moved. I'll probably find it when I go get the rest of my stuff. But anyway, so I bought it and they introduced this new where they measure your glucose and you measure your ketones at the same time. And we do that. It gives you a different measure relative so ketones relative to glucose. And so it's an index that they've created.
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And so again, it's just one of those. But again, it's that competitiveness of seeing a higher number that it seems to be pushing toward. And I'm not a big fan of that. You're either in ketosis or you're not. You're not. You know, you can say you're more in ketosis. I mean, there's just more ketones circulating in your blood. So I don't think you're in more ketosis. You just can't be more perfect.
You can't be more pregnant as you are. There are the days you might feel more pregnant than you did the day before. But you know that you're not in you know, you're not in more ketosis. You're in ketosis, you're not. And so it's for me, it's a good protocol. But I'm a little bit different in that I don't have a health issue. I do it to thin out, to lean out a bit, because if I did the feasting all year round, if I ate that way out of control, I would blow up, you know, so I know I can't do that and I have to be very cognizant of it.
I wasn't this year. I went and I stayed with it and just kind of proved my point of once I broke that that that barrier that I had my set point for my body, it said, oh, good, we'll just throw in a lot more weight. We don't have a problem with that. You gave us the fat cells years ago. We know how to use them. Just keep feeding us. And it did. So, you know, you got to turn that around.
And for me, it's when I said no dimmer switch just flipped the switch and let's go.
[00:49:25.580] Ras That's awesome. You must be very metabolically flexible then to be able to go on and off and in and out of ketosis. And your body doesn't give you the pain that a lot of people get with people it doesn't know, you know.
[00:49:38.780] Allan I'm very fortunate. I know a lot of people are not like that. They struggle to get into ketosis. And once they're there, like, I love this, I'm never going back. And, you know, that's cool. But, you know, you eat something bad like you said, you don't maybe you don't even know it has sugar in it or as many carbs in it as it does. And you eat it and you fall out of ketosis.
Now, people do that all the time and go right back into ketosis and never even know they were out of ketosis. So it's not this magical state. Where you're going to have to go through keto flu every time you go in and out, because people are going in and in some levels, most people are in a mild state of ketosis almost every morning they wake up because you've gone, you know, eight or 12 hours without eating. So your body is starting to produce ketones.
Now, is it using them efficiently as a fuel? No, because you're immediately going to put some more glucose in the system. You know, if you're very active, like you do your endurance sport and you're burning down some glycogen in your muscles and your liver. So when you do have additional carbs, some additional carbs, your body's going to use this insulin to restore that. So if you need it in the liver, if you need it in the muscles, then insulin is going to do its thing to do that.
If you didn't do any work and you're already topped up with glycogen, then it's only got one other choice and it's going to start making fat. So if that's something you're trying to avoid, you want a better body composition. I can't think of a better way to do it than keto.
[00:51:09.910] Ras Yeah, that sounds about right. That's what I've experienced as well.
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On this episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we sit down with Dr. John Jaquish and discuss his book, Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time.
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Transcript
[00:02:48.530] – Allan Rachel, how are you doing?
[00:02:50.250] – Rachel Good, how are you, Allan?
[00:02:51.500] – Allan I'm doing really good, doing really good. This is an exciting week for us here in Panama. You know, up until this point, we've been on a curfew and a weekend quarantine. And so what that means is from 7:00 at night till 5:00 in the morning, you're not allowed out. And if you get caught out, they arrest you. And then over the weekend, it's complete quarantine. So you're supposed to stay home and not go out on Saturday and Sunday. So from seven o'clock Friday night until Monday morning at five o'clock, you're not supposed to be out.
[00:03:24.840] – Allan And so, yeah, they will arrest you, but they're giving us back our Saturdays and they're raising the curfew from seven o'clock to 11 o'clock. So now the curfew will be 11 to five, which I'm already, I'm asleep then. Anyway, I do wake up sometimes before 5:00 but I'm not rushing out the door. Then I'm having some coffee,
[00:03:48.210] – Rachel Oh good.
[00:03:48.290] – Allan But I'm happy I got the Saturdays. It's going to make hitting my goal of 100 miles a month a little easier.
[00:03:54.990] – Rachel Oh yeah.
[00:03:56.010] – Allan When you add a whole extra day and it's a 20 percent increase in days and I'm pretty excited about that, I don't have to spend my Saturdays in my apartment.
[00:04:06.300] – Rachel Oh, that's fantastic.
[00:04:07.940] – Allan So what's going on in your world?
[00:04:10.770] – Rachel Same old. I don't have quite the strict curfew as you guys have, but not a whole lot new here, trying out some new planks or with your traditional planks. So I've tried some new variations this week. I've done the the walk down where you get up kind of in a push up position and put your forearms down and get back up and couple of reaching ones and side planks and yeah, it's been entertaining.
[00:04:38.590] – Allan OK, let me give you a couple more.
[00:04:40.630] – Rachel Ok.
[00:04:41.460] – Allan OK, so this one is called a three tap plank.
[00:04:45.320] – Rachel OK.
[00:04:45.540] – Allan OK. And so you get into the regular plank with your arms extended. So it's the push up style position. OK, and what you're going to do is you're going to take your you're going to take your right hand off the floor and you're going to touch your left shoulder.
[00:04:59.610] – Rachel Oh…
[00:04:59.910] – Allan Then you're going to touch your right shoulder
[00:05:02.050] – Rachel Oh…
[00:05:02.140] – Allan And then you're going to put your arm back on the ground.
[00:05:04.220] – Rachel OK
[00:05:04.670] – Allan And you take your left arm, reach up and you touch your right shoulder and then touch your left shoulder and put your hand on the ground. That's one repetition.
[00:05:13.880] – Rachel That's fantastic.
[00:05:15.260] – Allan OK, so that's a good one. And then if you're struggling with the standard plank, you know, some people will do them on their elbows, which is fine. Are you do it with your hands up, whichever works better, your shoulder strength, your upper body strength, both of them are fine.
[00:05:33.900] – Allan But if you struggle with both of those, or you just you just don't feel like you have the abdominal strength to do that. I recommend people do. And it's basically a yoga move. It's called the bird dog. Are you familiar with the bird dog?
[00:05:46.150] – Rachel I don't think so.
[00:05:47.290] – Allan OK, with the bird dog, you get on your hands and knees.
[00:05:50.430] – Rachel OK.
[00:05:51.040] – Allan OK. And then you want to raise your right arm and point it straight forward.
[00:05:55.110] – Rachel Mm hmm.
[00:05:55.560] – Allan And then you want to raise your left leg. You try to hold that position. Now, once you get really good at it, you should be able to hold that position for a full minute.
[00:06:04.730] – Rachel Oh, boy.
[00:06:05.430] – Allan You'll shake. You'll shake. It happened. I was I was using this in a class and the shake, shake, shake song came on and they were all kind of laughing because it's like this is appropriate. And then after you get on the right side, then, of course, you switch sides. So left arm out and then your right leg up and you hold that. So that's called the bird dog. So those are two planks that you can add to your repertoire.
[00:06:25.740] – Rachel I absolutely will give that a try. Thank you.
[00:06:28.170] – Allan Good deal. All right. So let's introduce our guest.
[00:06:31.770] – Rachel All right.
[00:06:32.750] – Allan Our guest today approaches health and fitness problems as a scientist and inventor, he invented the Osteo Strong to help fight osteoporosis, the X3 bar to help optimize strength training, along with several other products to help you optimize your health and fitness. With no further ado, here's Dr. John Jaquish.
[00:06:52.160] – Allan Dr. Jaquish, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:06:55.160] – Dr. Jaquish Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:06:56.960] – Allan You know, when you write a book, Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time, so is cardio. But there's a better way to have the body you want. You're going to get some personal trainers, hating at first until they actually take the time to read the book, which I did. And I agree. When I first saw it, I was like, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not, that's not entirely true until you actually start looking at some of the science behind what you're talking about and why you're saying the way we're doing weightlifting today is a mistake, the way we're doing cardio and what we're doing it for is a mistake. There are better ways to get the same results. And that's really what your…
[00:07:34.880] – Dr. Jaquish Better results.
[00:07:36.100] – Allan Yes. Yes, absolutely. You know, it's it's sometimes it's really hard. I'll talk to a woman. I'll say, OK, look, I want you to do some strength training because you want to get stronger. And their initial response is, but I don't want to get big and bulky and, you know, I just want to lose weight. I just want to lose weight. And in the book, you cite some studies which I think are critical, but you also go a little bit deeper to why doing strength training is important for weight loss and waist circumference and things like that, better so maybe than even cardio. Can you get into that?
[00:08:10.940] – Dr. Jaquish So. cardio, like your central nervous system, is going to make changes to your body to a degree based on your environment. Now if the environment you're putting your body in is to go long distances, run long distances or bike long distances. It's going to try and find a homeostasis that's going to give you some advantages and it's going to adapt to that environment. Well, if you adapt to that environment, you have to think about and let's just use the analogy of an economy car versus a Formula One car.
[00:08:51.910] – Dr. Jaquish So let's say you're a weightlifter, so you're more like a Formula One car. You're built for short distance speed explosiveness. So what do you have? You have a powerful chassis, very high bone density. Now, weight training is actually not heavy enough ever for bone density, but that's beside the point. And that has to do with a lot of its drawbacks. But so powerful, Chassy, bigger engine, more muscle, that bigger engine is going to draw more fuel and it's going to disable you from going as far even burning the same energy. When I run up a flight of stairs and like I was in the Munich airport recently out of the Munich airport, but it's up and down, running up. You run down, running up you run down, especially if you're like you have a tight connection because you've got to go through immigration.
[00:09:50.610] – Dr. Jaquish Like, I'm winded. And then my friend a guy I do some work with we're going to Moscow and and he says oh your, cardiovascular is terrible and I'm like, no it's not. It's better than yours. I just one hundred pounds more than you in that weight is muscle. I'm not just like taller and bigger. Like so my quadriceps are probably three times bigger than yours. And when they contract they draw a lot of blood.
[00:10:16.590] – Dr. Jaquish So I am not efficient for distance. It doesn't mean I have bad cardio health. The health of the heart and the distance you're able to run are two totally different subjects. So when when you look at what the body is going to do, when you start running long distances, it thinks that it needs to give you that output with the least amount of fuel used. So you lose bone density. Plenty of research on this. You lose muscle, cortisol gets up regulated, cortisol does two things. It lessens your muscle, it gets rid of muscle, and it protects your body fat so that you don't metabolize body fat, so cardio in essence, keeps you fatter longer.
[00:11:05.050] – Dr. Jaquish And sacrifices muscle tissue. So last I checked, unless you want to be a distance runner, it's giving you the opposite of what you think you're getting. Completely the opposite, and then you can look at marathon runners versus sprinters, the marathon runners are what's called skinny fat. So yeah, they don't weigh a lot, but you can't see much visible musculature. You see kind of slumped shoulders, exaggerated kyphosis, because they don't even have the muscle to keep their bodies upright. They've lost so much of the muscle, but then they're still soft like still kind of mushy, you can see cellulite in various places and then on these athletes. So cardio is just not the answer unless you just want to be a distance runner.
[00:12:00.380] – Dr. Jaquish And that's the thing. And that's fine. But if you're not going to be that, you got to know what that activity will do to you is not what you want at all, it'll do the opposite. So when it comes to strength training, muscle is an engine that's running all the time and influences your metabolic rate. So, you know, as I have gained muscle, I'm burning more calories all the time. And and so that's big. But also, as I lift I up regulate growth hormone. I up regulate testosterone, so to ensure that I have the building blocks for muscle growth and the growth hormone, is anti catabolic.
[00:12:51.760] – Dr. Jaquish So even if I go on a caloric deficit, which I frequently do, I'm not losing the muscle at all. And so when you do weight training and like I do push the point, variable resistance is more powerful in the weight room, but weight training in the most efficient way. Let's call it resistance training because it's not really weight training.
[00:13:14.590] – Allan That's the word I use.
[00:13:16.590] – Dr. Jaquish Right, right. Like I didn't say, resistance training is a waste of time. But weight training is a waste of time. So so when when you apply the resistance in the most scientifically proven way, you will have all kinds of anabolic effects, build muscle. And if you have your nutrition right, you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
[00:13:42.220] – Allan Yeah, now you were working on a problem. It's kind of what started you down this whole path your mother was dealing with with bone density issues. And so you started saying, what can I do to help her improve her life? And so you started working on a product to basically work on bone density that's been quite successful. And while you were doing that work, you not stumbled upon, but you started noticing the strength curve and you started noticing some things about the strength curve that I think we're missing in the past.
[00:14:16.930] – Allan So, for example, you know, novelists back in the 70s put these cans on their equipment so that you got a variable style of resistance as you worked. If we work with most of the resistance bands that are out there today or even like a Bowflex in the old days, I assume they're still using some form of band. As the band got longer, the resistance was variable. So I think that the concept of variable training has been out there for quite some time.
[00:14:44.290] – Allan But you've kind of come across something that says, look, we don't understand. We didn't understand the strength curve well enough to design that equipment well enough. Can you talk about the strength curve and why it's so important for resistance training?
[00:14:59.050] – Dr. Jaquish So what I what I documented in in some research that I ended up doing in a London hospital and this was for the bone density was going to be able to hear me a little bit better if I do this. But you have when you're back here, you have X amount of weight you can hold. When you're out here, you have seven X. So why would we ever work out with weight that's the same when we have different capacity?
[00:15:31.460] – Dr. Jaquish So the weights heavy and the weakest range of motion and then it's really not that heavy at all in the other range of motion. So I just. You know, like I said to myself, wow, weightlifting is so inefficient as a muscular stimulus. And then the next question was, well, maybe, maybe I should just train with bands, but then once you look at a band and what a band can do to you, once you get to a band that will deliver load that's relevant to strength.
[00:16:09.200] – Dr. Jaquish This happens, your wrists get twisted. And when the wrists and ankles, most specifically wrists and ankles get twisted. So now you're just causing a different type of injury than you would normally get from weight training. So the band's by themselves are totally useless. There is a couple of hucksters out there who see the success of my product and then they launched a different one. That's just like a bag of bands and it's like, OK, you can't get a workout from that, but you can certainly charge people money for it, but you're just not going stimulating growth.
[00:16:45.350] – Dr. Jaquish So what I did was I developed an Olympic bar that can hold as much or more than a regular bar. Solid steel on the inside connected, I'll show you this. So, you know, there's a solid steel core and you can see both hooks rotating. So the risk is always kept neutral, and then the exterior is anodized aluminum mill to the million like an iPhone, because I want people to grab it and realize that this is not just some other fitness product made out of cheap plastic or whatever like this is this is it. This is like the iPhone of fitness equipment.
[00:17:29.450] – Dr. Jaquish And now I have over 40 professional athletes using X3 as their main main strength development tool and a joint protection tool. Now, of course, professional athletes, they have to do like their drills and stuff like like skill training has become a lot more important with athletes. I was just on a podcast talking about this with a former NFL guy. And so, like they do their skill training but then X3 is their strength.
[00:18:00.380] – Allan And I think some of the things that you went into are really, really important is, one understanding, yes. I think anyone that's done just something as simple as a push up, they notice that as they go down and get to the bottom position, it's a lot harder than it was when they were up at the top because they can't recruit as much muscle. So they're much weaker there. And that's why a lot of people that that struggle with push ups just do half pushups.
[00:18:24.560] – Allan You mentioned that in the book, that that's the strength curve. That's our recognition of the strength curve and thinking if we go down any further, we're probably not going to come back up. That's just our mind turning off because it says you can't do this. So, you know, that's the one thing. The other thing I think that's really important is you've taken the time to think about how band work can be improved by making sure that the bar does what Olympic bars do, which is rotate. If you've ever had one of those screw cap kinds and they don't rotate, you feel it when you're trying to move that bar because the weights are static.
[00:18:57.860] – Dr. Jaquish You can't really lift, you have neural inhibition. It makes the joints very uncomfortable and muscles start to shut off. So your body's protecting yourself. Yeah. So it's you can't you can't exercise in any serious manner.
[00:19:12.590] – Allan Yeah, and then you have the footplate, which I think is also critical because that's going to keep the ankles from feeling that resistance, whereas a normal band set, you know it just like the handles. Someone's going to stand on the band and use their ankles and try to press overhead. Well, as they start getting stronger with that, that's that's basically going to start turning their ankles. So this gives them the capacity to work as hard as they want to and I think I saw the bands go up to 600 pounds. So there's there's not anyone I can think of that's not going to get a good workout with up to 600 pounds of resistance.
[00:19:48.110] – Dr. Jaquish Anything you do is high reps. So it's like six hundred pounds with, you know, thirty repetitions. Like, you're not going to bump into anyone, in fact, the NFL guys of the NFL guys, not a single one, uses the heaviest band. And it's not and it's really funny because there are fans of the product who do like you're supposed to do 15 reps minimum, but then they get the heavy band and they'll do maybe like 10 sloppy kind of reps or they're like twisting their body and stuff like that.
[00:20:22.190] – Dr. Jaquish And then they're like, oh, I'm stronger than guys in the NFL. That's a lot of attitudes online is it's not really about. How you perform, it's about how you look on or how you think you look on the video you post on Facebook.
[00:20:41.200] – Allan Yeah, and that's just that's just ego. And I'd say if you're over 40 and you're doing strength training, you're doing resistance training, you need to leave the ego at the door. You need to do work that's efficient and effective. You need to make sure that you don't enjoy yourself, because once you enjoy yourself, you're out of the game until you recover. And when you're over the age of 40, that's just much more difficult to do. So this checks off a lot of really good boxes. So I'm pretty excited about this product.
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[00:22:39.850] – Allan Now, you also got into the topic, which I think is really important, because I think when a lot of people want to build mass, they're thinking, oh, I've got to, you know, I've got to hit the carbs, I've got to hit the protein. And, you know, I go low fat. So, you know, I'm eating chicken and I'm eating rice and I'm just, you know, tuna and pasta and I'm just going after it. But you actually follow a plan of ketosis and intermittent fasting. Would you talk a little bit about your protocols and how you're able to build the mass that you have. Because I'm looking at your massive build, the mass that you have while still practicing ketosis and intermittent fasting.
[00:23:20.380] – Dr. Jaquish So the conclusion I came to had mostly to do with realizing protein recommendations and understanding protein quality. So like whey protein, it's easy to get your protein if you count whey protein. But the problem is only 18 percent of the whey protein is of the proper amino acid ratios. So, you know. 82% goes through you as waste. So it's really not worth it to just even bother with whey protein.
[00:23:55.000] – Dr. Jaquish People get so upset, probably because they have six months of whey protein in their in their pantry.
[00:24:04.720] – Allan Yeah, it's cheap, it's the most, it's the most cost less product you could have relative to actually eating some whole food. It's actually a little cheaper. Like if I look at and say oh I can get 30 grams of protein with this two dollar scoop of protein powder or I can go buy, you know, a steak and pay, you know, maybe four or five, six dollars for that at the store, you know, so, yeah, it's it appears cost effective.
[00:24:34.630] – Dr. Jaquish Well, whey used to be the byproduct of well, so it is the byproduct of pasteurizing processing milk and then it was thrown away. It was garbage. And so it was Dandi Shane who started buying it. And say, hey, can I have that trash of yours and I get like a buck every chemical drum or whatever, and then that's where that's really where protein whey protein supplements came from. It was garbage.
[00:25:12.170] – Allan There you go. But but you do follow ketosis, but you're just making sure that the quality of your protein is such that you're able to get the protein you need and that helps you maintain your muscle mass and continue to maintain strength.
[00:25:26.720] – Dr. Jaquish Right. I don't use the word I mean, I'm in ketosis all the time. But what's interesting is I don't use the word much because there's a lot of confusion around it. Like people think to get in ketosis, you need to eat fat. That is 100 percent not true. To get into ketosis, you need to not eat carbohydrates. Now your body turns to fat for fuel, but it could get that fat through what you're eating. This is true.
[00:26:07.060] – Dr. Jaquish But it could also get the fat from the Krispy Kreme donut you had when you were eight years old, which is in your gut. So let's get it from there. So that that's that's really where I want people to focus.
[00:26:25.950] – Allan Well, you definitely do a lot of research, and when you want to solve a problem, by God, you solve it.
[00:26:34.700] – Dr. Jaquish And then I document it because I tell people, people, and sometimes they get like a DM or something. And it says, what's your opinion on this or what's your opinion? And then I'm like, I don't have any opinions. I'll tell you, there's research on that. And what and how we could view that research and what the weaknesses and strengths of that research are, but there are no opinions. Like I wont volunteer my opinion on really anything from a biological standpoint.
[00:27:06.150] – Dr. Jaquish Like I can say, there's no research. Hearing things that might be happening. But I won't wait those one way or the other because, you know. So I guess my point is I'm always trying to be is referenced or I'm trying to reference other research as much as possible. So because I'm saying so many controversial things, nobody would believe it if it were just like this is what I think. If I can I can site a bunch of studies and go, well, you know, these researchers that Dr. Jaquish doesn't know. You know, and years before he launched his products came to these conclusions so they can kick and scream about it. Unfortunately, people are dogmatic about it. I actually get trolled for nutrition even more so than my product.
[00:27:58.720] – Allan I mean, I can understand that because and I was actually thinking about this, I'm working on another book, a little e-book that I'm going to put out. And I was actually thinking about, you know, why why does someone get so mad when you you have a food approach or a way of eating approach that is so different than theirs that, you know, they literally almost like politics, want to come to blows about how wrong you are. And it is just dogma.
[00:28:26.470] – Allan It's just they're tied married to their idea. You know, sometimes when you're looking at research even, which is cool because, you know, you made the comment that most of the research you're following, these guys just never figured out how to productize what they were finding. You have so, you know, boo-hoo on them if they feel bad about it. But you did. You're taking the time to think about it and come up with solutions, which is huge because that's what we need.
[00:28:54.520] – Allan We don't you know, science is great, but if it sits in a journal unread for 20 years, it's not really doing us a ton of good.
[00:29:02.570] – Dr. Jaquish Right.
[00:29:03.340] – Allan Occasionally something will come up, you know, like like Louis Simms at West Side, you know, put bands and cable and chains over the bars and his athletes got really freaking strong and everybody's like, what's he doing? And a few people went in there and basically spied on what is what he was doing, this conjugating method. And it got out. It's like, yeah, this is what he's doing. This is how his athletes are getting really, really strong. And all you've really done is take some of that same. You figured out exactly what the optimal strength curve is and said, OK, if we have an appliance that allows them to work out with this kind of strength curve, or at least as close to it as we can approximate with what technology we have today.
[00:29:45.210] – Dr. Jaquish Oh, I'm dead on. I measured.
[00:29:47.920] – Allan Yeah, I saw the curves online. I was like, yeah, he's right there. You know, it's not there's not much, much, little bit to get in there, but it's there. And so, you know, and you took the time to think about what are the other problems we're going to have with a piece of kit like this if we one, don't think about turning ankles and we don't think about the wrists and we don't think about the bio mechanics of how this is all going to work so that we're, you know, in a way optimizing without the injury. So, again, I'm really I'm really pleased with your product. I think it's I think it's really, really cool.
[00:30:20.980] – Dr. Jaquish Thank you.
[00:30:22.150] – Allan Now, if someone I'm sorry I jumped ahead. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?
[00:30:33.400] – Dr. Jaquish Well, so the easiest one is you grow when you sleep. You repair cells when you sleep. So don't compromise your sleep, which really means don't drink alcohol. Thats not the answer a lot of people want to hear or, you know, drink it at the minimum, but it really affects your sleep if you sleep monitor like a motion detector next to you in the bed and like you can use your phone to do this. There's a couple different sleep analysis apps and you'll notice you thrash around all night when you have a lot of alcohol in your system. When you don't, you don't. And you sleep much better and you can have a much better repair of damaged cells.
[00:31:25.290] – Dr. Jaquish And then, you know, the growth, just the muscle protein synthesis that comes with proper strategic strength training. Yeah, so like, that's the easiest one getting getting better sleep by cutting, cutting down or out alcohol. So the other two really have to do the two pieces of information we have that lead to long life, so the two greatest drivers of long life, despite what you read on, you know, nutritional facts.com, which should really be called nutritional lies.com, the two greatest drivers are high levels of strength and low levels of body fat.
[00:32:15.050] – Dr. Jaquish So if you want to live a long time, focus on those two things. So that means strength training or cardio. That means focusing on things like ketosis if you want a low body fat. Animal protein, because it's going to make you leaner, like a vegan nutrition plant based nutrition. From a vegan perspective, you know, there's not a lot of data on the pure vegan, but you notice their weak with a lot of body fat, so they have two things going on that are going to cause them to live shorter lives, longer lives.
[00:32:55.130] – Dr. Jaquish And then and then, you know, when you when you look at the Western diet, like right now, people are practically vegan. 70% of the Western diet is plant based because remember, vegans are not necessarily eating vegetables. Bread is vegan, right? So they're having all kinds of pastries and little nut bars that have nuts from every continent in the world that, by the way, if you want to talk about destroying the environment. There we go, sourcing ingredients from every corner of the world to make some little fake health bar. Like that's a stupid decision, so like some of the vegans I know, they brag about how Oreos are vegan and they eat like sleeves of Oreos for dinner or at dinner time, I'm sure they would call it dinner.
[00:33:56.830] – Dr. Jaquish But like, you're just getting fatter, like you're just getting fatter. That's all you're doing. And you're worsening your cellular health, your metabolic health, your hemoglobin A1C score all the things that they're saying on the news to do the opposite of. But then, of course, like the American Diabetes Association gives out cookies at their events. Like, that's like going to an AA meeting in pouring free shots. It doesn't make any sense at all.
[00:34:31.790] – Dr. Jaquish But, you know, like you can tell somebody they smoke too much, you can tell somebody, they drink too much, you tell somebody they eat too much, and it's like you insulted their ancestors. So unfortunately, that's the situation we live in.
[00:34:45.000] – Allan I've been doing I've been doing this for five years. And I can just tell you, it's like I have a guest on and we don't exactly see eye to eye on the nutrition front. It's never a pleasant conversation for either of us. So, you know, I don't push my own out there. You know, I'm like I'm agnostic generally. I say eat what I'm going to eat because it doesn't matter what I tell you to eat, you're going to still eat what you eat. But I'm just saying, you're right. If we're not paying attention to the quality of our food quality of our protein, we're not paying attention what we're putting in our mouths. It really doesn't matter what else we try to do for our health. It's just not going to happen.
[00:35:20.510] – Allan Dr. Jaquiss, thank you for being on the show. If someone wants to learn more about you, the X3 and the protein supplements and things that you have (Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time), where would you like for me to send them?
[00:35:31.660] – Dr. Jaquish Yeah, I made a landing page with all the links to everything, you know, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. So go to doctorj.com.
[00:35:45.780] – Allan Cool, well, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/454 and I'll be sure to have a link there. So Dr. Jaquish, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:35:56.120] – Dr. Jaquish Allan, thanks for having me. This was great.
[00:36:03.340] – Allan Well, Rachel, that was that was a really interesting talk. It's kind of interesting to see John on video. I took some videos and I'll be posting those promos for this episode. So I encourage you guys to go check those out on our Facebook group. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and that'll take you to a Facebook group. I'll have a couple of videos posted there of John and we're having this conversation.
[00:36:27.650] – Allan Now, the interesting thing is that when you see John, he looks like a bouncer. You quite literally looks like a guy. If you walked up to the club, you got the guy who's got his arms crossed in front of his chest. And you're kind of like, I'm not going to mess with that guy. He also is bald, but he just looks like a bouncer. But he's a really, really smart guy. He's an inventor. He's a scientist. He looks at data and he solves problems. And so his piece of equipment X3, I'm not I'm not joking. You know, right now, I'm not getting any money from John to say this, but I'm going to buy one and I'm going to check it out because I think it is important to optimize what you can get if if you're not lifting weights at all, or you're not doing any resistance training at all. Shame on you.
[00:37:13.510] – Allan Your bones and your muscles are not happy. I can tell you right now. And you're missing a big pillar of our health and fitness by not doing resistance training. But to start with something, you know, the resistance bands that you can buy on Amazon and I'll have a link in the show notes to some. Those are really great little tool for you to get some exercise at home and they fit in your in your suitcase so you can carry them anywhere you are.
[00:37:40.780] – Allan You can get your resistance workout done. And resistance bands are just a great adjunct to body weight movement because it just gives you an opportunity to do things you can't do, with just body weight. So but he has a specialized process, specialized tool. And I like gadgets and I like playing with stuff. So I'm going to I'm going to probably buy his equipment. So understanding that we can we can do better with science. I mean, in a lot of times I pooh-pooh supplements.
[00:38:09.640] – Allan I pooh-pooh. It's Arjuna's ketones last week. Forgive me, Dr. Lori and I pooh-pooh a lot of other stuff, but there's a time and place when those things matter. You know, I talked about the guys that were lifting at West Side and how they were using chains and bands to maximize their effort. They had a specific task to get really freaking strong. And you might not want to get that strong. But if you if you want your deadlift to get heavier or you want your squat, get heavier, training your body the right way will help that happen.
[00:38:45.850] – Allan And so what's going to happen for someone that does both. You're going to you're going to fatigue your muscles to the full range of motion a lot better than you would if you just did the exercise itself. So I see the tool as a great tool. And again, these were a tool and I like to use the same word twice in a sentence, but it is a tool and it's a tool for allowing you to get stronger. He put a lot of thought into how it's designed and how it's built.
[00:39:13.150] – Allan So it's it's a pretty cool thing and it's something that weighs like seventeen pounds. So it's something you can actually carry around with you. And like I said, just the same convenience you kind of have with bands, although these are probably and likely much better, is going to give you a gym in your hotel room and give you a gym at your house in a time when people don't necessarily want to get out and about around a lot of people and like in the gym, because our gym still closed here.
[00:39:41.770] – Allan Yeah, they basically lumped us in with discos and casinos and concerts and movie theaters. So, you know, we're just that important. But no gyms here. So if I want to do something at home, this is a pretty cool piece of kit to have.
[00:39:57.130] – Rachel Yeah, I'm actually really intrigued by his results with bands. Usually when I think of a big bulky guy, a bouncer type guy, I'm thinking big heavy weights, big Olympic bars, big fat plates. Yeah, serious weight lifting. And I'm pretty intrigued that he can get some really good results with this program or this tool.
[00:40:19.140] – Allan Yeah. And the interesting thing is he's got he's even got professional athletes working with it. So, you know, it's it's not a toy and it's not the little bands that you're buying on Amazon.
[00:40:28.130] – Rachel Right.
[00:40:28.300] – Allan Again, if you're not doing anything there is the start, that's where you go. You get those bands, you do body weight movement. And if you have any questions about it, email me. I'm here. You know, I'm here to help you figure that out. But if you're getting into the training and, you know, scary to get under a lot of weight when you're doing a bench press, it's scary to get under a lot of weight when you're doing squats and there's opportunities for you to injure yourself when you're moving a lot of weight.
[00:40:56.710] – Allan So here's a band that's going to work within your strength curve so that you're getting stronger through the full range of motion and he's built it to be generally safe. So again, I think it's really cool toy.
[00:41:09.930] – Rachel That's something I can see having in our gym, too, especially when if I'm working out by myself, I don't want to be crushed by some heavy Olympic bar.
[00:41:19.320] – Rachel But I'm also interested in the strength curve and the kind of the specificity behind using bands to get kind of a different workout than your basic dumbbell, barbell type move?
[00:41:33.450] – Allan Well, the the equivalent, because, you know, I'm kind of been in this lifting mode for a long time in my life. But one of the core things that comes out is when you do push ups, you can watch someone doing push ups or watch someone doing pull ups and you'll notice how they don't go all the way down.
[00:41:50.850] – Rachel Mm hmm.
[00:41:51.330] – Allan And the reason they don't go all the way down is because it's so hard.
[00:41:54.120] – Rachel It is.
[00:41:54.870] – Allan You know, it's like I go to the bottom. I might not make it back up to the top. You know, I'm not going to take a deep squat like I'm supposed to. I'm going to take those little half squats and risk my knees because it's hard to get back up. Whereas with this piece of equipment, you're working that weak part hard enough for that weak part and you're working your strong parts as hard as your strong parts can work. So you can find that equilibrium where you're getting the best work.
[00:42:23.340] – Allan So, you know, understanding that having that variable resistance is going to help you get a better workout is, like I said, really, really cool. And there are, the way we used to do it as bodybuilders would be this. Is we knew that we could lift a lot more weight within that strong zone. So we would do partial reps there. And we knew we couldn't lift as much in those weak ranges. So when we found our sticking points, we would work lightweights through heavier, heavier but lightweights there.
[00:42:53.060] – Allan You know, lightweights, but not as heavy as our strong. So you would do these partial reps, you know, and that's cool if you're trying to build muscle. And, you know, look, Buff, you know, once when I was doing it was kind of the goal. But, you know, that's not practical for a lot of people to say, OK, I'm going to do, you know, partial reps in this zone and then I'm going to go change the weights and do more reps in this zone, and then I'm going to do more weight in this zone.
[00:43:22.890] – Allan That's not a practical workout for most people. And it's not strength training. It's that's bodybuilding. It's very different kind of lifting approach. But what he's allowing to do is within the strength area for you to use that same concept and just work the whole range of motion. And you don't even have to change bars or change weights. Just just do the work. So I think it's a great adjunct to a normal weight lifting program. I'm not going to go as far as as John went as to say lifting weights is a waste of time, cardio too. I'm sorry John.
[00:43:58.930] – Rachel Bold. It's a bold statement.
[00:44:00.780] – Allan As I told him. I said, you know, of course I'm getting you on this podcast because I've got something to say to you. But he's a big guy, so I probably wouldn't say it. I would just say good job. But anyway, it's you know, I feel good moving weight, you know, and I don't get the exact same satisfaction moving band. So, you know, there is a motivational factor for me to to get under a bar to to pick up a bar from the ground.
[00:44:31.190] – Allan I love deadlifts, love, love, love, love, love, love deadlifts. It is my favorite thing. But besides steak and oysters and a couple of other things. But it's it's up there anyway. So yeah. I love I love moving way. I love about the feeling of being able to functionally do something and so bands can be a great adjunct if I, you know, maybe I, I don't want to move that much weight or want to know, maybe I'm sticking in my tall, you know, sticking at the right and, you know, sticking at the bottom and I'm just not getting a good start on my left.
[00:45:04.940] – Allan I'm like, OK, I know I can get this weight, but I just got to be able to build strength in that zone. Now, there's ways I could do that. You know, I could put it on rack and I could lift partials. I could do boxes and I could elevate my feet and I could do some things to kind of change those angles and change that weight within those angles. But again, not my favorite thing and too much time dedicated to something like that.
[00:45:27.650] – Allan And it means not adding a tremendous amount of value to my life other than just feeling good about what I'm doing. Bands are going to be a great adjunct to what I'm doing.
[00:45:36.550] – Rachel Yeah, I think so. I think it'll keep things interesting in the gym and give you something different to do and you won't be stuck in a rut or doing get bored doing the same thing all the time.
[00:45:46.990] – Allan All right. Well let's go ahead and call it a day and we'll see you next week.
[00:45:53.700] – Rachel All right. Take care.
Patreons
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In her book The Ketogenic Key: Unlock the Secrets to Lose Weight, Slow Aging, Stop Inflammation, and Prevent Disease, Lori Shemek shows us how to use the ketogenic diet for optimal wellness. Most of the health issues we deal with today are caused by poor nutrition choices. With all of the health and fitness information available, it can get really confusing. Lori helps us understand how to make keto an everyday lifestyle that gives us better health.
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[00:02:55.110] – Allan Rachel, how are you doing?
[00:02:57.160] – Rachael Great, how are you, Allan?
[00:02:58.430] – Allan I'm doing really good. How's your week been?
[00:03:01.710] – Rachael Good. Had a good week, got in a couple of good runs. One was in total rain, but it was awesome. Yeah.
[00:03:09.360] – Allan Good. Good. Yeah. I actually on Monday put in 13 miles walking. So it was a little over three and a half hours of walking.
[00:03:21.470] – Rachael Wow.
[00:03:21.750] – Allan I loved it. Almost got hit by a truck. A friend of mine was coming around the corner. You know, I think he was going a little too fast and I was wiping the sweat off my forehead because I was somewhere around mile 11 and I was just a little tired. I wasn't quite paying attention and I had my headphones on and just about, smack. But, you know, other than the initial cortisol hit that I got, that gave me a little bit more energy to finish that about walk. It was a really good walk.
[00:03:49.800] – Rachel Good, Glad you're OK.
[00:03:51.840] – Allan All right. So let's go ahead introduce today's guest. Our guest today is a doctor in psychology with a certification as a nutritional consultant and a life coach. She's written several books, including the book we're going to talk about today, the Ketogenic Key. And she's been featured on TV, on the Doctors, on various radio shows, speaking and helping clients, companies, and others optimize their health, reversed inflammation, and create weight loss success. With no further ado. Here's Dr. Lori Shemek.
Transcript
[00:04:22.230] – Allan Dr. Lori, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:04:25.080] – Dr. Shemek Hey, Allan, thank you so much for having me. You know, it's an honor.
[00:04:29.160] – Allan Well, I'm really excited to talk to you because it's actually been a while since we we talked. I was on your podcast, I think it was about three, three years ago. Maybe. I don't know.
[00:04:41.290] – Dr. Shemek Wow, a lot has changed in three years, hasn't it?
[00:04:43.770] – Allan It absolutely has. A whole different world.
[00:04:46.830] – Allan Now, your book is called The Ketogenic Key, Unlock the Secrets to Lose Weight, Slow Aging, Stop Inflammation, and Prevent Disease.
[00:04:56.730] – Dr. Shemek Right.
[00:04:57.420] – Allan That's a pretty big key.
[00:04:59.380] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, it is. And, you know, it's it's actually ketosis, which promotes all of those wonderful benefits. And so, like you and I were discussing earlier, I should have named the book The Ketosis Key, because it is the driving factor in all of these wonderful things like weight loss, you know, slower aging, longevity, inflammation, reduction, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it's it's definitely the key ketosis. So it's not just the ketogenic diet either. It's the ketogenic diet. It's intermittent fasting, it's exogenous ketones or supplementation and exercise. And the great thing is you can do them separately or together. And if you do even two of them together, it's very powerful.
[00:05:48.420] – Allan Yeah, I guess I'd sit there and say I do what I call seasonal ketosis. And so I'll spend a year in ketosis, which I am right now, and then I'll spend a good part of the year out of ketosis because I like tailgating and drinking beer and eating crap food and just watch a football game and then, you know, the first Thanksgiving and Christmas come around and my birthday's in February and so that's my feasting season.
[00:06:16.650] – Dr. Shemek Clean up month.
[00:06:17.200] – Allan Just let it go.
[00:06:18.020] – Dr. Shemek Yeah.
[00:06:18.250] – Allan Just let it go. And then after after my birthday in February, then I'll say, OK, now I'm going to hit by my fasting season. So my famine season like ancestors would have had when it was colder weather and there wasn't access to any vegetation to eat. And so now they're having to eat more fatty foods to get the sustenance and they're going into ketosis. In many cases they're fasting because you can't keep meat without a refrigerator and other means so they had to eat what they kill pretty quickly.
[00:06:54.440] – Allan But they'd wake up in the morning some mornings and there would not be any food there. So they'd get up and they go, you know, do their hunts and they find their food and then they have maybe a pretty nice lunch, then a really good dinner. And so they're in a natural, you know, intermittent fasting mode. And I found every time I get into ketosis, I just naturally fall into intermittent fasting it's just a natural thing.
[00:07:19.770] – Dr. Shemek Right. And that's what's so beneficial about all of these is that, you know, you do enter a state of ketosis and it's even more powerful if you do intermittent fasting, in fact. So if you can tag on intermittent fasting to any of the other options that we list in the book, then you're even, it's even more powerful. So it's all out there, all powerful in and of themselves, which is a really wonderful way to look at your health.
[00:07:50.460] – Dr. Shemek But when you combine, like I was saying earlier, just even two of them, you're doing incredible, power stuff.
[00:07:59.850] – Allan I'm doing three of your four right now, ‘m eating really low carb. And so that's putting me into nutritional ketosis. And I measured it the other day. I'm also doing exercise. So I do these long haul walks almost every morning that I can. I'll walk for two, three hours and then, you know, that puts me a little deeper into ketosis and I'll do that fasted. So, you know, waking up in the morning.
[00:08:24.760] – Dr. Shemek Oh, perfect.
[00:08:25.430] – Allan My last dinner was at seven o'clock, six thirty seven o'clock. We tend to eat a little early and then, you know, so it's then I got at least two, two and a half hours before I go to bed. So I go to bed then.
[00:08:37.320] – Dr. Shemek Thats even better.
[00:08:38.370] – Allan I wake up in the morning. I wait until, you know, about eight o'clock and that's when it's a little warmer than I think most people want to walk, but I don't care. I'll Honey badger that and do a good long walk. And so by the time I get…
[00:08:52.740] – Dr. Shemek Well that's a good…The heat is a good hormetic stressor as well. So another powerful factor.
[00:09:01.900] – Allan Well, there was definitely some heat today, but so so, you know, here I am. I guess I'm sitting here at 12:30 as we're recording this. And I haven't eaten a thing today. I had some I had some coffee in the morning, but nothing in it. Just black coffee and did my long walk. And I'm going to do this and do a couple other things. And I'll probably be about two o'clock and I'll go ahead and have my first meal of the day.
[00:09:25.540] – Allan So I'm putting all three of them together, which really works well for me. I had a kind of a setback and I'm going to I talked about this in an episode a couple of weeks ago about, you know, I think everybody talks about the covid 15. And I was a victim of it, too, you know, just being locked in our house because it was we were not allowed to go out at all. And so being locked in the house, I just really tapped my motivation and I was down. So I wasn't moving. I wasn't eating well. And, you know, I was taking in a little bit more alcohol than I should have and so I put on…
[00:10:01.510] – Dr. Shemek You're not alone.
[00:10:02.530] – Allan Yeah, I know.
[00:10:03.490] – Dr. Shemek It's rampant right now. Yeah. And it's better in the States. It's better. You know, I think the world at large is getting a little bit better with covid, but yeah, it's, it's, it's rougher in some areas. But nonetheless many people have paid the price in one way or another with this horrible virus. So. Yeah, and it's and that's the, well the irony of the thing is that in order to get through it in a healthful way, we want to be you know, we want our immune to be stronger.
[00:10:39.070] – Dr. Shemek And we do have that innate immunity. But with the, I guess, emotional eating and the lack of exercise, it puts us down a notch in terms of our immune strength. So, yeah, it's it's a tough road.
[00:10:53.320] – Allan Yeah. So enter into the picture nutritional ketosis. And I'm happy to say that I started so really eating low carb in May, May 1st and since May 1st, I have lost all of that and more. So now I'm into my…
[00:11:09.940] – Dr. Shemek Wow!
[00:11:10.600] – Allan Because I kind of pushed off. I didn't do my famine season when I had planned to because of everything that was going on with, you know, issues and, you know, all that and then getting locked in. I was like, so that just didn't happen the way it would have normally happened for me when I got around to February. So I stepped up and said, OK, here I am in May, I need to start now. And I started and I've been generally in and out of ketosis for the last couple of months. And then this this last Monday or so I said, OK, that's it, I'm going deep. And that's when I started, you know, putting together those three.
[00:11:45.940] – Allan But one of the things I wanted to get into, because I know the benefit of nutritional ketosis, because I can I can drop twenty pounds in three months really easy when I'm in ketosis. So the weight loss is that's a no brainer. That's going to happen for all of us. If we if we have the fat to lose, we will lose it. But I tried exogenous ketones when they first started coming out. They were nasty.
[00:12:15.360] – Dr. Shemek Yes, I know. Right. Oh, I've heard some names you don't want to hear.
[00:12:20.930] – Allan Oh yeah, I was like…
[00:12:20.960] – Dr. Shemek It's like, oh thank God I've never had to try it and the delicious ones. Right.
[00:12:27.940] – Allan OK, yeah well so I tried one, I tried them when I first, started coming out and I was like, oh my God. And I said, well I need to do this. I want to try. It's an experiment. You know, I'm on the podcast and I want to be able to talk about them. And, you know, I was thinking, OK, that really, the concern I had was if you go into if you start doing a ketogenic diet and your body's not used to using ketones, then you're peeing them out. And that's why we're able to measure them with the urine stick.
[00:12:57.500] – Allan So my concern was if I just throw exogenous ketones on my body as a sugar burner, aren't I going to do the same thing? So I was really concerned about whether I was, I had spent,because they were expensive also.
[00:13:10.620] – Dr. Shemek Right.
[00:13:11.610] – Allan So I spent a lot of money on something that was really nasty. And I didn't, you know, other than saying maybe it would help me transition to keto or if I were doing a long distance endurance sport, then exogenous ketones would seem to make sense. But in the book, you put forward a case that it's even better than that, that there's a lot of use cases for them. Can you can you talk about that?
[00:13:35.860] – Dr. Shemek Yeah. You know, and that's the thing when you use supplemental ketones, it really does put you into a state of ketosis within 30 minutes. That's the advantage. The problem is, is it doesn't stick around as long as if you were to be, say, on a ketogenic diet. Right. And so this is really one of the wonderful things about ketones in terms of a beta-hydroxybutyrate BHB, as it's referred to often. This ketone is powerful and that it can really mitigate all sorts of inflammatory conditions and other areas in terms of optimizing your health.
[00:14:14.230] – Dr. Shemek So what we want to do is we want to up level our, you know, our physical fitness, our ability to to utilize these ketones. And when you become metabolically flexible and even if you're not, you're still utilizing them. Right. Your body really loves ketones. And it's just that it's just not equipped at that moment to say when you're, you first embark on a ketogenic diet to use them. And so, you know, the reason that people are feeling so good and wonderful and athletes do so well on it is because you're up leveling, you're boosting your mitochondrial health, your cellular health.
[00:14:59.680] – Dr. Shemek There's more ATP going on. There's less glucose machinations, if you will, within the cell, which produces a whole lot of oxidation ROS. And that means it's similar to like a a car, an electric car which burns clean versus gasoline powered car, which burns dirty exhaust. Right. That's what happens when you burn glucose. But when you burn ketones for fuel, you have a better form of energy, a more therapeutic, if you will, form of energy that really optimizes every part of your health, including brain health.
[00:15:39.770] – Allan So, yeah, so I guess as I look at exogenous ketones, I still go back to I think, you know, they're good, if you're when you're first trying to get in to ketosis, they're probably a pretty good thing to help you through the keto flu a little bit.
[00:15:53.190] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, it will.
[00:15:54.470] – Allan Making sure you're getting your electrolytes and plenty of water.
[00:15:58.790] – Dr. Shemek Your potassium, right. Magnesium.
[00:16:01.310] – Allan So I have the I have the the supplements and all that to try to make sure that particular as I go into this, losing my water, I'm going to be cool. I also, like I said, if you're an endurance athlete, there's some I think there's a lot of benefit to having them because at some level.
[00:16:17.010] – Dr. Shemek Oh, yeah Allan.
[00:16:17.610] – Allan And as a long distance thing.
[00:16:19.730] – Dr. Shemek But you have to be careful because you know and now if it's if it's a for example, it's a high energy sport, one that, you know, say high intensity interval training or something. You have to be careful in terms of, you know, hitting that wall, if you will. But if it's an endurance sport, you're really good to go. Part of the reason is the steady state of energy that we have when we're using the supplemental ketones.
[00:16:47.690] – Dr. Shemek We don't have that spike in blood sugar. So it keeps our glucose stable. And I'm not sure if you're aware that the Tour de France, the team there was one team that used exogenous ketones and they did, it was an incredible win using these ketones. And so that was in 2018. And then in 2019, a large number of these teams were using them. So there's still the competitive factor. But nonetheless, that first 28 go round, that team won simply with the exogenous ketones.
[00:17:26.510] – Allan And that's what I'm saying, you know, when I when I was when I was training heavy, I was trying to get ready for a Spartan. I had hired a coach. And, you know, I go in there and the cool thing was, you know, of course he's a fitness geek and I'm a fitness geek and I'm going to be working out and he's training me and is like, you don't really need, he says you don't really need a trainer, and I'm I like absolutely need a trainer.
[00:17:46.040] – Allan And he says, well, you know you know more about this stuff than I do. And I said, well, so. Give me a program. Let's talk about the programming. Let's talk about what's going on. And so, you know, he's trying to…
[00:17:55.690] – Dr. Shemek Let me tweak it for you.
[00:17:57.320] – Allan Well, I did very little tweaking. I actually did his program. It was built it was built a little bit more towards the being a 20 year old than I would normally have done. But it was still cool. And but we were talking about me being in ketosis and he was like, well, why are you doing that? You need the carbs to be able to get through the workout. I'm like, I can get through the workout just fine. I said, you know, I'm going to probably, and I did, when I, if I do a heavy deadlift session because I'm not relying on APT for energy, I huff and puff, I get exhausted because it's, you know, that exertion that I go through and a good set of ten on the deadlift is going to take me past thirty seconds.
[00:18:36.590] – Allan And so that is a struggle. Even exogenous ketones would not push me past that struggle.
[00:18:42.710] – Dr. Shemek Yeah.
[00:18:43.060] – Allan With the weight lifting, the way I was doing it, very heavy and I because it was very heavy, very slow. So you know, I understood that being in ketosis kind of put me at a disadvantage for that. But I could still push through every set. And I got really, really strong anyway because I also didn't have to deal with inflammation or any other things that were going on.
[00:19:02.870] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, and that's exactly true. You know, it's it really is. The bottom line is that Ketones really offer the average athlete, right, a lot of benefit. And like, you know, you just mentioned the inflammation, which we can get into in a little while if you want. It just but it gives you these these exogenous ketones, give you more energy, it mental clarity, focus, and we make our own. If you're on the ketogenic diet, we have endogenous ketones, meaning they come from within. Right. And so when you combine the two, it's really amazing what the amount of energy you have.
[00:19:42.630] – Dr. Shemek But I would venture to say that even though even if you were taking ketones with your power lifting, it helps you in some way because they really do help create more ATP within the mitochondria.
[00:19:55.010] – Allan Yeah, you know, and I would say if it was helping me with anything, it was the fact that my my total workout time was an hour and while it might had been in sprints. You know, dead lift and go, dead lift and go, you know, and then I'm breathing heavy. When I got into the lighter lifts later, I still had the energy and those were less like that. And so, yeah, I absolutely agree that it helped.
[00:20:17.780] – Allan But I actually think probably the best benefit and we'll get like I said, I do want to get into it is inflammation. Because every time we talk about a chronic disease, heart disease, cancer, you know, diabetes, you just, you know, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, you just keep going on and on and. They take you back to the beginning, in the beginning is chronic inflammation, and you called it silent inflammation and I actually like that because it's scarier.
[00:20:52.880] – Dr. Shemek It is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:54.620] – Allan What what causes silent inflammation and how does the ketogenic diet help us address it?
[00:21:01.160] – Dr. Shemek So we have, I'll just start off by talking about the two different types of inflammation. And the first type is called acute inflammation. And it's not so cute because it hurts. It's uncomfortable. It's that sprang, black and blue swollen ankle. It's that cut on the finger. It's that terrible sunburn or awful head cold. Right? So that is acute inflammation. We need it in order to heal. Without it, we're sitting ducks. Really. So let's take that cut on the finger.
[00:21:31.910] – Dr. Shemek When you cut your finger, an enormous amount of inflammatory molecules are released. And soldiers, if you will, rush to the site to repair the wound. They repair the wound, the wound heals, the soldiers go away, the inflammation goes away and all is well. So that's acute inflammation. And, yes, we need it, even though it seems unreasonable because it doesn't feel good. But but we need it.
[00:21:56.970] – Dr. Shemek So then the next type of inflammation is silent or chronic inflammation. And the name silent really suggests danger, doesn't it, because we don't know it's there until the symptoms start to occur. And so 75 percent of all Americans are walking around with silent inflammation and don't even know it. It is really such a sad situation, really, but it is the core underlying cause of most illness, disease, faster aging and weight gain. And you can look at silent inflammation is like having a sore on the inside of your body that never heals unless you intervene.
[00:22:38.540] – Dr. Shemek And unlike acute inflammation, which emits just a trickle of inflammatory molecules, silent inflammation emits just acute inflammation emits an enormous amount. Silent inflammation emits just a trickle. Okay. And so you would think, well, this is better, right? And it isn't because it goes on 24/7 every single day, unbeknownst to you, where acute inflammation goes away. Once you're healed, it's gone. But sometimes the immune system goes, it becomes haywire. And this is what causes this over abundance, this overstimulation of the inflammatory pathways. And why it's called chronic inflammation is because it never goes away.
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[00:24:56.390] – Allan Now, whenever you bring up the ketogenic diet around someone that really hasn't heard about it or they've heard about it, but they've heard it's deadly, it's going to kill you, you shouldn't be doing that because that's the worst way to eat, because it doesn't buy into the fat is bad mantra. But the reality of it is that when we eat a ketogenic diet, it actually can help improve the ratios and the things that we should be most concerned about when we're talking about fat and cholesterol. Can you get into that?
[00:25:31.250] – Dr. Shemek Yes. And I'd also like to address the inflammation factor that at the ketogenic diet reduces inflammation in the body. It actually reverses inflammation. And that's because we are we are signaling NFR2, that is the master regulator of antioxidants signalling within the body. Right? And the ketogenic diet prevents the NLRP3 inflammasome from doing its dirty work within the cell. So it's just a very, very important way to eat. And a lot of people have misunderstood its benefits.
[00:26:16.250] – Dr. Shemek They hear the word ketosis and they think it's keto-acidosis, which is a very harmful effect that happens to people who have diabetes and go into a state of ketoacidosis. So it's much different. But yes. So the the fat and the cholesterol, all of that has really been misunderstood. In fact, the ketogenic diet improves HDL and triglycerides. And this, you know, this is due, the improved HDL is due to a reduction in triglycerides that are created within the liver, which is a really good thing.
[00:26:59.930] – Dr. Shemek You want a low triglyceride level for heart health. Right? Triglycerides really, really alert you to inflammation in your body. And if it's high, then you know that you need to do something different. And so they're an indication of your heart health as well. And there's the HDL triglyceride ratio that you can do to if it's one or under, you're good to go. If it's higher than than one, you need to do some work.
[00:27:34.850] – Dr. Shemek But there's also an increase in LDL, which happens to some people on the ketogenic diet. And it's but generally it's not the LPa form which is or can be the most harmful. So it's the big fluffy cholesterol that's roaming around versus the little ones, the little dense lipoproteins. So that that is part of the the reason that the ketogenic diet is so great for your heart health. And, you know, there's also the misunderstanding about people think the ketogenic diet is a high protein diet when in fact it's a moderate protein diet. And, you know, they're afraid of of eating eggs. They're afraid of saturated fat. And it's really sad because we've, you know, really, you found out that there was a researcher's, his name was Ancel Keys, and he did a seven country study and cherry picked the data.
[00:28:36.770] – Dr. Shemek Right. So blamed everything on saturated fat versus what really is causing the heart conditions. Heart disease with people we now know is the overconsumption of carbohydrates, especially refined sugar. And you know me, Allan, I really recommend people stop eating sugar. Eliminate it from your diet. And so it's the sugar, the process, simple carbohydrates, but it is not the saturated fat. In fact, there was a study I don't know if you recall, it was called a pure study.
[00:29:12.770] – Dr. Shemek It was published in The Lancet in 2017 and it studied over 135,000 people across 18 different countries. And it turned out that those who ate the least saturated fat had the highest amount of heart disease and mortality. And those who ate the most saturated fat, of course, then had the lowest rates of stroke and heart disease.
[00:29:37.370] – Dr. Shemek So right there, you know, you see it's a large study and you see the the correlation or the the amount of health with saturated fat. And so eggs were demonized and still are demonized, saturated fat is still demonized, but I think they're starting to come into their own. People are starting to understand and even reputable high ranking health experts in cardiology are saying, yep, you know, saturated fat is necessary for heart health, in fact. And and we do know that every time you take a bite of an inflammatory food, sugar, refined flours, etc, processed junk foods, crackers, cakes, cookies that you are eating, creating inflammation.
[00:30:30.720] – Dr. Shemek And that's unfortunately sad because what's happening is up from a cellular level, you are harming the mitochondria within the cell. The more mitochondria you have, the healthier they are, the healthier you are in every way. And so you see people who are older and frail. They have very little mitochondria going on, OK, they're not really healthy mitochondria. And so if you're tired all the time, that's a sign that maybe you need to start boosting your mitochondrial health, your cellular health.
[00:31:08.130] – Allan Yeah, unfortunately, the signal of fatigue is go eat some more sugar.
[00:31:14.950] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, exactly.
[00:31:15.160] – Allan So they actually get the opposite message out of that. Oh, if I, if I have some sugar I'll feel better, you know, and they yeah. They get the dopamine and they feel good but it's not really helping. And you know, I'm, I'm a perfect example of you know, when I check my cholesterol and triglycerides is when I'm in ketosis my HDL triglyceride ratio is off the charts. Good, even though my total cholesterol is high. So I'm one of those responders that, yes, my LDL goes up, but it only goes up about 30 points.
[00:31:50.950] But my triglycerides can can I can get them down to 50. But if I'm you know, when I'm in my low feasting mode and I'm drinking beer and eating what I want to eat, they'll usually pop up to 150, maybe even 200 if I'm not careful. And I can actually get my HDL higher than my triglycerides when I'm eating a strict ketogenic diet. So it really can help you improve your lipid profile if you're if your doctor doesn't lose their mind about what the total number and the the LDL number is, because that that seems to be their focus more so than than triglycerides and the HDL.
[00:32:33.190] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, it's true and you know, and a lot of people panic when, you know, I have family members calling me up and saying, Lori, my LDL is really high, it's 250 and they want to put me on statins. And, you know, it's that's it's really important for the patient to look at the numbers, the breakdown of the type of cholesterol. And that has been a big myth as well. So we're learning so much about heart health and what what produces a healthy heart. And so if you take anything away from this show, it should be that, you know that saturated fat is not going to hurt you. Now, if you are in, if you're 10% of the population who has a genetic condition that doesn't clear cholesterol from the body and cannot, then that's another issue.
[00:33:29.590] – Dr. Shemek But that's 10 percent. So it's really important to make sure you're not you will you will know when you get your blood test if you are or not, it will be sky high. I mean, it won't be your typical high number. But again, if you take anything away from this show, make sure that you stop eating sugar, eliminate added sugars from your diet and refined junk foods that we spoke about earlier, because that is the key to optimal health in many cases.
[00:34:00.860] – Allan One of the areas that, and I'm going to admit I'm confused when it comes to ketosis, because there's two there's two concepts, OK, so on one hand, a lot of people are looking at ketosis as a potential protocol to help with cancer treatment. They're not saying it can cure cancer or perhaps even prevent cancer, but particularly the cancers that rely on glucose. If you're keeping your overall blood sugar, you know, in control and you're doing ketosis, that will slow the growth of the cancer.
[00:34:37.130] – Allan And then I go on the other side of the conversation and I say, OK, an individual that's trying to perform long distance athletic performance. Is this still going to be burning glucose and glycogen, so like where I went on a trip, you know, went on a run or a walk and I'm you know, I'm a 1000 calories in now, the human body can carry about 2000 calories.
[00:35:02.360] – Allan But for my body to keep going, maybe even further, which people do you know they go hundreds of miles, it's crazy, but they do. And that but their body and they do it while they're in ketosis. So there's something happening there where our body is taking what it gets out of fat and it's turning it into blood sugar. And ketones, because we still kind of need both, your blood sugar is not going to zero is staying fairly stable, so we are producing some glycogen from somewhere, some glucose from somewhere, because at some point it burns out, it would burn out the muscles.
[00:35:40.230] – Allan And so Ketones are producing the APT, but I guess I'm losing it as is if our if our body can produce with, say, zero carb, our body could still produce and keep our blood sugar stable. So when we're breaking down fat, we create the glysol, I guess its a black hole and we produce the ketone. So I guess I'm trying I'm having a hard time balancing those two things out to say that, yes, you're going to have enough sugar in your blood and in your muscles and in your liver for the athletic performance. But then it's also going to slow the growth of cancer because you're going to have less sugar. You understand what I'm saying?
[00:36:22.680] – Dr. Shemek I do. I understand exactly what you're saying. And so what happens a lot of times is that the body is able we always have some glucose in storage in the liver. We always have it, you know, for those emergency situations and also to, the body can break down muscle for glucose as needed if it wants it. Right? So that's that. And then in terms of the the you know, the cancer and the sugar, you know, one theory is that cancer feeds on the sugar that you eat and a high fat diet, like the ketogenic diet starves as tumors.
[00:37:01.720] – Dr. Shemek OK, and but one thing is for sure that you are with ketones in the mix, you are definitely balancing you're creating cellular homeostasis. Right? You're balancing your blood sugar. The insulin is low. And but yet you still have the the ability to make glucose within the body and it stores, glycogen within the liver and can be can be used for any type of situation necessary. Does that help?
[00:37:34.380] – Allan Yeah, it does. I guess the question is it sounds bad whenever you say burn muscle for energy. I always thought that the ketogenic diet was muscle sparing. Well, so this, it has the ability to do it, whether no matter, you know, whether you're on a ketogenic diet or not, so it's called Gluconeogenesis and the body is able to utilize glucose by breaking down muscle, if that makes sense.
[00:38:04.600] – Allan Yeah. OK.
[00:38:05.380] – Dr. Shemek So, yeah no matter what.
[00:38:06.850] – Allan If I chose to do these long distance things, I'm going to probably sacrifice some muscle along the way.
[00:38:16.180] – Dr. Shemek Gluconeogenesis occurs.
[00:38:17.260] – Allan And when I get past that point where, you know, I've used up my liver and muscle glycogen and my brain's going to still want a steady supply of blood sugar, at some level, it's not going to let you.
[00:38:31.390] – Dr. Shemek And if you're fat adapted your metabolic metabolically flexible, then you can do either, OK. You can use your body can utilize glycogen, it can utilize fat for fuel, your own fat stores for fuel, dietary fat. So that's what, you know, we didn't mention. But that's what ketosis is, is your body takes dietary fat and your own fat stores breaks them down in the liver and it produces ketones. And one main ketone that I mentioned early on is called beta hydroxybutyrate BHB that produces all the magic, if you will, of the ketogenic diet. So, yeah.
[00:39:17.050] – Allan Those are those are the ketones you're going to measure in your blood. So they're the ones that we used.
[00:39:22.330] – Dr. Shemek Right.
[00:39:22.390] – Allan We're breathing out, you know, in our breath, you can you can measure those out of the breath and then of course. And I forget the other one, but there's urine strips that pick up that that third one, I'm forgetting, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the third. But, you know, so that's how we're measuring those. And yeah, the one what's in the blood is what gets you. So.
[00:39:42.030] – Dr. Shemek That's right. The BHB is the most important one. Yeah.
[00:39:47.560] – Dr. Shemek Now, you talked about intermittent fasting, and as I said earlier, I, you know, just I just fall into these things. I did paleo and because I was eating relatively low carb, I didn't realize that I fell into ketosis the first time and realized what was happening. It was wonderful because in Paleo I lost 25 pounds and then in keto, I lost another 35.
[00:40:09.290] – Dr. Shemek Wow.
[00:40:10.020] – Allan So it was, you know, so boom. Yeah, it's just awesome. Over 11 months, you know, I knew something was going on. My breath was stinking and I was losing a lot of weight. And I was like, this is interesting. So I found out what ketosis was. That's how I actually discovered ketosis. And then, you know, I just naturally started getting into intermittent fasting because I wake up in the morning and I forget to eat because my body was using my body fat to keep me going.
[00:40:37.450] – Dr. Shemek And you were satiated.
[00:40:39.310] – Allan Oh, completely. Completely. And I tell the story, I, I got up one morning and I went out to my property to do some work. I had this, had some acreage in Florida and I had some ponds on it. So I went out there to clear and do some work and I worked out there pretty, pretty hard clearing the land work with, you know, what a sling blade is to cut down weeds and grass and such. I was using the sling blade and going for a few hours.
[00:41:02.250] – Dr. Shemek Wow.
[00:41:02.680] – Allan I said, OK, I'm going to go ahead. I did have a tractor out there to mow it down after I beat it down. And so then I get on the tractor and I cut a few things down. Then I take the tractor back up on my trailer and I still came to haul this thing home to my actual house. And I say I'm going to haul this out of here and my truck got stuck in my front yard of my property.
[00:41:23.000] – Allan And I was like, this is ridiculous. I can't get out. So I had to call AAA. Well, AAA shows up and they the truck breaks while they're trying to pull me out. And so it was four hours later when they got the part, got everything fixed and got me out of the mud. So there's like I'm rolling on about six o'clock and I'm realizing I haven't eaten in 24 hours.
[00:41:44.680] – Dr. Shemek Oh my goodness.
[00:41:45.760] – Allan I didn't even think about it. You know, while he was out at his truck, I went fishing and I just sat there.
[00:41:51.070] – Dr. Shemek Isn't that amazing? That's a really great example.
[00:41:52.790] – Allan Yeah, I didn't catch anything but.
[00:41:53.530] – Dr. Shemek A lot of people mean a lot of people are afraid not to eat. And that's that's it's really a it's a headset, it's a mindset, if you will. Because, you know, we've all not eaten. Intermittent fasting is simply not eating for a period of time. However long you want that time to be is is just fine. But the problem is most Americans are eating 24/7. We eat breakfast. We have snacks sometimes all the time.
[00:42:24.190] – Dr. Shemek We have lunch, snacks, dinner, snacks, dessert until we go to bed. Right. That's not the way the human body was designed to evolve. The human body was designed on intermittent fasting, actually. So during those periods of time when you're not eating is when all the magic happens because this gives the body time to do the things, the cellular clean up, if you will, that it normally can't do while it's processing your food. It's the digestive process takes up a lot of energy, most of the energy outside of brain function in the body.
[00:43:01.480] – Dr. Shemek And so when we don't eat this, this allows ourselves to go into cleanup mode. And it's called autophagy, and that's cellular housekeeping, essentially. It breaks down things, it's autophagy really mean self-heating, meaning that it can, you know, get rid of dying cells, it can remodel cellular parts. It can just really improve mitochondrial health, which we talked about before. And for those of you that don't know what mitochondria are or don't remember, they're little tiny organelles in the cells of our body that are crucial and vital not only to keep us alive, but to keep us healthy as well.
[00:43:45.670] – Dr. Shemek So as we age these little organelles, these mitochondria, they begin to falter. They begin to lose their robustness, their health, and we lose a number of them. This just happens naturally as we age, right? Unless we intervene and do something about it. Well, intermittent fasting does this. The healthier you are, the better mitochondrial health you have. An intermittent fasting does is the ketogenic diet does this. Exogenous ketones, supplemental ketones do this. And exercise does this very effectively as well.
[00:44:21.900] – Dr. Shemek So those are the four options you have and that I talk about in my book, the Ketogenic Key to get into ketosis, and that's what you want. So intermittent fasting is an easy way because if you don't like the ketogenic diet and you don't like to go very low carb, which, by the way, is 50 grams or less, 25 grams or less for even deeper ketosis, you don't have to. You can do intermittent fasting and then eat your your carbs later. OK, so that's what is so wonderful about intermittent fasting. Why I'm such a big fan of it.
[00:44:57.160] – Allan Yeah. Now one of the things I did have a question about is because I was interviewing someone else and he mentioned fasting and autophagy and we got into it and his his opinion, I guess I haven't really seen any science on it is that intermittent fasting wasn't long enough to actually create autophagy that you had to really kind of be fasting two or more days before you'd really start to see those benefits. But so does intermittent fasting really get us that far?
[00:45:30.910] – Dr. Shemek Intermittent fasting does. And so you're you are, you go into some autophagy while you sleep for eight hours. There's some. You do if you if you desire to fast for you know, you extend your breakfast, say by two hours, you're still you're going to incorporate more of it. But the sweet spot is really about 16 to 18 hours is when autophagy kicks in. But he's talking about deep autophagy. When you get into deep autophagy, this literally resets your metabolism.
[00:46:04.990] – Dr. Shemek It resets your cellular health. So if you fast for 24 hours or longer, then you're really doing a great benefit for your body. But I don't recommend doing it more, you know, 48 hours or more, very often, once a month, maybe at the most, because you don't want to stress your body too much. It is a hormedic stressor, as it's referred to. And so you, you know, having a daily 12 hour, 16 hour fast is just fine. And then once in a while, doing the longer fasting.
[00:46:42.970] – Allan Yeah. You know, I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting, but I always, always tell people if you're wanting to do something more extended, you need to you need to be talking to a doctor, particularly if you're on meds.
[00:46:53.680] – Dr. Shemek Agree completely!
[00:46:53.720] – Allan And if you're going to try the ketogenic diet and you're on metformin to control your blood sugar. You're on insulin. You know, this is going to help with your metabolic syndrome and your insulin resistance. But at the same time, you have to let your doctor know this is going on because this is going to change your blood sugar.
[00:47:13.950] – Dr. Shemek Yeah.
[00:47:14.860] – Allan Your medications are going to they're going to have to change and you have to be able to adjust to that. So when you're going to do something like this, the health benefits are huge. And when you're cutting inflammation down, when you're getting your blood sugar under control, you know, a lot of my clients, I'll get them down to start to start lowering their sugars. Let's just cut the sugar down. Nothing crazy. Just a little bit here, a little bit there.
[00:47:38.160] – Allan And they're you know, they're watching their their overall blood sugar go down. They're like, oh, I need to call my doctor and get my metformin dose changed. And then, sure enough, they get on the doctor's like, what are you doing? I just changing what I'm eating, keep doing it, you know, because it's working.
[00:47:53.740] – Dr. Shemek And that's part of intermittent fasting as you are, you're creating ketones. And it really is a superior fuel compared to glucose. And once you start using this fuel and your body becomes used to eating and using glucose and using your own fat or creating ketones, you will markedly you will feel the difference big time. So many people were relying on the toxic Western diet, which again is is highly processed with refined food, which is really an inflammatory diet. The keto diet focuses on eating very few grams of carbohydrates and eating more healthy fat. Right? And some protein.
[00:48:40.470] – Dr. Shemek And intermittent fasting, which keeps, by the way, keeps insulin low and glucose low. But intermittent fasting flattens insulin and flattens glucose. And again, when there are no digestive processes essentially going on that the cells have to worry about, then the cellular inflammation begins to heal. It begins, the tissues begin to heal. You, you know, you have there's something called cell danger response that happens to people. If this inflammation becomes overwhelming to the body and the brain senses it. The mitochondria senses it, the cells around the in the body sense it.
[00:49:25.950] – Dr. Shemek So when the brain gets the message that you've turned off this type of inflammation, the cell danger response or CDR, then things heal within the body. So it's really a wonderful tool to actually heal yourself.
[00:49:44.340] – Allan Dr. Lori, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:49:54.150] – Dr. Shemek Just three. OK.
[00:49:58.550] – Allan Just give them something until they get the book, OK?
[00:50:00.860] – Dr. Shemek OK. So I think it's crucial to keep inflammation low, as we've been talking about throughout. And we do this by being very proactive and mindful of every single choice we have the opportunity to make. Right. And I underscore the word opportunity. So I would say living in antiinflammatory lifestyle, whether it's with the ketogenic diet or a Mediterranean type diet, will boost your health span and your life span, which in and of itself generates a really a better quality of life for you.
[00:50:36.680] – Dr. Shemek And so I think that is, you know, when you are living without excess inflammation, we want a little bit because we want to be protected. Right. We want ourselves to be on guard. But we we don't want it to be an excess, which, as I mentioned earlier, 75 percent of our population is walking around with. And so it affects your mindset, your mental well-being, your fitness, your ability to move and and function freely and easily, and your health span, your immune system is all up regulated.
[00:51:10.010] – Dr. Shemek So it's a really I think it's really important. So you want to remove excess carb intake, you want to use nutrients as well for to target specific situations, such as increasing mitochondrial density, like the supplement P2Q with your doctor's approval and you want to keep inflammation low. So exercise is another is another option, which is one of the most underutilized ways to increase mitochondrial health and uses as an antidepressant even. My two cents.
[00:51:49.410] – Allan Thank you, Dr. Lori.
[00:51:50.730] – Dr. Shemek You're very welcome.
[00:51:50.820] – Allan If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, the Ketogenic Key, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:51:58.830] – Dr. Shemek I would love for your listeners to go to Amazon. On Amazon, you'll find all my books there, including this last one called the Ketogenic Key, and I think you'll find it a wonderful tool to help optimize your health and life as well.
[00:52:15.890] – Allan You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/453, and I'll be sure to have the links to the books there. Dr. Lori, thank you for being a part of 40+ fitness.
[00:52:25.900] – Dr. Shemek Thank you so much. Really. It's been fun.
[00:52:32.110] – Allan All right, Rachel, now you're one of the neat people that does endurance running and you do keto, that used to not be a thing. We used to carb up the night before, you know, how much pasta can you shove in your mouth. You get up in the morning and you make sure you're still eating carbs and you carry carbs with you in these little packets. Or when it first came out it was these bars that were really hard to chew when your mouth was dry.
[00:53:02.950] – Rachael So true.
[00:53:03.910] – Allan But you're able to do endurance work and not have to worry so much with fuel.
[00:53:11.590] – Rachael That's true. I've been keto for about two years now, a little over two years now, and it's helped my endurance quite a bit. I can tell you I could probably run 15 miles, fasted, well just on a cup of coffee. I drink coffee every morning no matter what, but I think the longest I've gone without needing any fuel has been 15 miles. But I don't do that on a regular basis. On a long run day I will eat something before I go out. But that's been one of the huge benefits of keto is not relying on a constant sugar load throughout a long day.
[00:53:51.930] – Allan Yeah. And, you know, we talked about exogenous ketones and other things that you can use. So there are some strategies that you can put into it. But and I think I've said this before, if you're if you're going to try a strategy for a race, do it on your long runs practices, practice.
[00:54:08.550] – Rachael That's right. Absolutely.
[00:54:09.930] – Allan Make sure your body is going to react the way you want to. Yeah, I'm good to go for a good long time with without fuel. That fasted walk I did on Monday. I mean, the 13 mile walk on Monday. I did it completely fasted.
[00:54:23.800] – Rachael Wow.
[00:54:25.270] – Allan You know, when I came home, I took a nap because I was, you know, roughly I was going from about eight o'clock in the morning until close to noon by the time I stopped sweating and got a shower. And then I just went ahead and took a little nap about an hour or so, got a good sleep cycle in, and then, boom, I'm bouncing up, ready to eat and feeling like I earned it.
[00:54:47.140] – Rachael Fantastic. Isn't that incredible?
[00:54:49.720] – Allan Yeah.
[00:54:49.900] – Rachael That is something.
[00:54:51.250] – Allan And so, you know, I had I had kind of fallen off of the the wagon, I guess, as you will. I Normally do, a seasonal ketosis. And I'm just going to have an episode on that coming up in a couple of weeks. A few weeks, a couple of weeks, I guess. And, you know, I will normally go into a famine mode for this time of year around February. So I would have started around February. But with the pandemic and the stress and everything that was going on around that time, you know, like closing my gym and hoping I'd get to reopen it, just not knowing a lot of things, I didn't I kept feasting and put on the covid 15, you know.
[00:55:29.410] – Allan So now we're going into the period of time when I would normally go into a feasting season, but I'm not ready to do that right now. I have lost all the weight and some. I'm back down to my fighting weight, what I normally run at during my my famine season. But I want to I want to push it a little bit further. And so I'm actually not going to to do what I normally do. I'm actually going to try to go through this next period and stay in ketosis.
[00:55:57.070] – Allan And it'll be a challenge and probably a podcast episode about how to travel in keto, because I'm going to be traveling back to the States. It looks like they're going to be opening things up here to let us travel home and back, but they keep changing the rules so we won't really know till we get on the plane what we're supposed to do and hope that we did it right. But, yeah, I mean, I try to do the holiday season in the United States traveling around and try to make sure I stay in ketosis that time.
[00:56:26.050] – Allan So food choices will be a tough selection, you know, just because there's a lot of foods that come out in the fall that we just really, really tend to enjoy and want. And many times they don't really fit our eating style.
[00:56:42.150] – Rachael That's right. And it's hard to eat out unless you know the menu really well. It would be a good experiment. And looking forward to hearing what you experience with that.
[00:56:51.640] – Allan Well, like everything it comes down to being prepared, you know, plan, plan, plan and plan some more. Have strategies. You know, if there's a food that you just love and it's the fall food and, you know, you're just going to want some of it, you have a strategy for it. So, you know, I'm going to make sure I carry some food with me. You know, when I go into a restaurant, there'll be a certain way that I'll order.
[00:57:16.680] – Allan Sticking to the protein and, you know, vegetables that aren't coated in sugar, you know, and then and then with my mom, you know, it's like we do a meal. It's like I'll just go ahead and do some of the cooking. So I'll make a keto cranberry sauce because I love cranberry sauce and I'll do the chicken. I mean, the turkey and make sure it's a little bit more fatty cut the way I cook it. So it's going to be a little bit more fat added to it, which will make it juicy and delicious. And then you were saying, you know, we're getting into, I guess, the pumpkin spice season. I'm not I'm not that kind of person. I'm a black drinker. I just trained myself that way as when I was getting off of the diet sodas. But you found a recipe that you're pretty eager to give a shot.
[00:58:06.060] – Rachael Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the pumpkin spice, but I do love cinnamon and nutmeg. And this fall season, when the weather gets crisp, I actually do like to add a dash of cinnamon to my coffee, but I will be making some keto snickerdoodle muffins later on this afternoon. I found this recipe from Kirbie's Cravings and I've tried it several times and even my non-keto family members enjoy it as well. So it's a really nice fall treat.
[00:58:35.280] – Allan Well, good. Well, we'll have a link in the show notes so you can find that. Just scan to the back of the show notes section and we will be sure to make sure that a link to that recipe is there.
[00:58:46.290] – Rachael Absolutely. Yep.
[00:58:47.650] – Allan Cool. All right. So Dr. Lori is a really cool person. I've known her for a while. I was actually on her podcast years ago. And, you know, so glad to see her out and writing this book because it was I think it was an awesome book. And I really enjoyed the conversation with her because I think, you know. We don't equate keto with much in the athletic field, we think of it in terms of, oh, I want to lose weight or oh, I've got diabetes and therefore I need to cut my sugar and then keto gets the bad rap, you know? And it's partially I think it's partially deserved because the initial people that were pushing keto kept talking about bacon.
[00:59:31.450] – Rachael Yes.
[00:59:32.400] – Allan You know, and I'm like, it's not the bacon diet. Stop the bacon. You know, it's not the bacon. Bacon's fine, it's a condiment. It's something you have with your eggs. Eggs is the main entree. And then the bacon just happens to be something you have on the side. Don't fill your plate up with bacon and then have a couple, a little bit of egg. It's that's not the way this is supposed to work. That's wrong. But, you know, I think people are upset with, you know, they don't know because they've been told for decades to stay away from the saturated fat that it's going to kill you. But the science is coming out now is un-refutable. It's the sugar that's killing it.
[01:00:09.700] – Rachael Yes. And that was part of your discussion with Lori that I really enjoyed, was that it's not the bacon and egg diet, but that's getting into ketosis involves a little bit of diet and exercise, some intermittent fasting and the Exogenous ketones. So it's not just the bacon diet and there's a lot more to it and it has a lot of benefits.
[01:00:36.130] – Allan Yeah. And I'd say if you're looking at it as a protocol. So first we're talking about diabetes or we're talking about Alzheimer's or epilepsy and those types of things then I do think there's a good place for the endogenous ketones. But just like I'll say with supplements, just like I'll say with medications, same thing with this. That's not food. You know, it's not what your body needs. We don't have a ketone deficiency because our body is going to make the ketones and eventually our body is going to learn how to use the ketones.
[01:01:09.760] – Allan So if you're giving it more ketones than you use and you need, you're just going to pee them out. So, yes, you can spend thirty dollars to get the high end ketone little drinks that you can get on Amazon. They're little over thirty dollars for a two or three ounce bottle. You can get the ones that clear the salts that aren't quite as high octane and you can pay seven or eight bucks for about a two or three ounce thing of that, and they make them delicious.
[01:01:37.510] – Allan So that tastes great. Now, they were horrible, horrible in the beginning, but they taste better now. You don't have a deficiency now if you're in an extreme endurance athlete. So you're looking at saying, OK, I need to make sure that I have fuel for this marathon or this ultra. And you're concerned that, you know, yeah, your body's not going to be able to burn enough body fat because maybe you just don't feel like you have that much body fat to burn. Then there's a place for them and you can factor that in.
[01:02:06.950] – Allan But just recognize that you're investing in your performance and you need to know that they're working for you and then you're not just wasting your money. So I know there's people who are huge fans of them. It was interesting that Dr. Lori was a fan because she's not selling them, you know.
[01:02:26.910] – Rachael Yes.
[01:02:27.260] – Allan The fans, most of the big touting fans are the ones that are actually making them and they'll tell you how wonderful they are. But that's that's anything. Any supplement, anything. But the guy making it loves it.
[01:02:40.000] – Rachael Yeah. For you. But there's a time and a place and as an endurance athlete myself, you know, if I have a rest day, my nutritional needs are going to be far different from when I'm on my long run day. So if I'm running 20 or 30 miles, I need way more nutrition and fuel as well as hydration that I would maybe on a rest day or just a day at the gym or something. So, yeah, there's a time and a place for all these different things.
[01:03:08.910] – Allan Yeah. And I again, I look at exogenous ketones and I can't help but kind of lump them in with the term biohacking, you know, how do we hack this, how do we had that. And the human body was not meant to be hacked. It was it was meant to be treated well, nurtured and babied and given what it actually needs on a regular basis. When you're doing that, you've made up 95 percent of you being optimal.
[01:03:34.790] – Allan And then these other little things you can do, you know, be at Infra-Red, be it taking glutathione or exigence ketones or any of those things. They're a little incremental steps past that now. Yes. If you're trying to take a minute off your marathon time. Yeah. Something like that might help, but you've got to be doing that other 95 percent first.
[01:03:56.420] – Rachael For sure, yeah, we got to put the work in, get the muscles ready. Yeah, there's a lot to it than just what you're going to eat or drink that day.
[01:04:03.550] – Allan Yeah it's not like I'm just going to go and take some endogenous ketones and run a marathon, you know. It's just not going to happen. I can definitely walk a half right now, but I could probably jog or run a half if I put my mind to it. But
[01:04:17.680] – Rachael I'm sure.
[01:04:18.620] – Allan But you know, I'm not going to just sit there and start taking a supplement or taking something like this and becoming a super athlete.
[01:04:25.590] – Rachael Right.
[01:04:26.120] – Allan But, you know, just the cool thing about keto and it's just something to pay attention to is the science is coming out and there's more and more of it that you can use ketosis as a protocol to cut down the inflammation. And I think that's the core of it. What is getting us sick is the food and the things we're doing to our body. It's creating inflammation.
[01:04:49.350] – Rachael Absolutely.
[01:04:50.810] – Allan The more we can heal our body by getting the proper rest, stress management, diet, exercise, the more we can get ourselves in balance in pretty much those four areas. And then relationships and family and everything else just, you know, get all of that balanced out and working for you and you're going to make up that 95 percent.
[01:05:09.920] – Allan And then at that point, you can make some decisions if you want to do the tweaking and and twisting of knobs and just, you know, play mad scientist with your body. And then that's when it makes sense.
[01:05:20.480] – Rachael Yeah, absolutely. I was resistant to try the ketogenic diet initially, but about three years ago I had a pretty bad ankle injury and I had a tendonosis. I had this inflamed tendon, and I was researching everything I could do to get my ankle back in the shape and the more I read about the ketogenic diet and reducing that inflammation, I thought, well, what's the what's the harm? I give it a try and see how it goes. And two years later, I'm still doing it and feeling better.
[01:05:56.600] – Allan Yeah. And you know, the core reason I do seasonal ketosis is the reason a lot of people don't do ketosis at all. Those of them say, oh, it's unsustainable. You know, I like beer. You know, and if I have a beer or two beers, I'm going to fall out of ketosis. And if I'm doing that, you know, a few times a week as I'm, you know, going to football games and watching football, because, you know, of course, there's a football game on Sunday, there's a football game on Monday, there's a football game on Thursday, then there's another one on Friday, then there's one on Saturday.
[01:06:29.510] – Allan And let's start the week all over again. I'm going to have a few beers during the season. Well, I guess I'm not this season, but normally I would. And then we roll right on into Thanksgiving or, you know, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and all the parties in between New Year's Eve. And then my birthday is right around the same week as the Super Bowl. So we just roll and, you know, roll into that part of the year.
[01:06:54.770] Allan That's just too much for me to sit there and constantly tell myself, no, no, it's it just feels restricted. And that's the reason a lot of people fail at diets as diets are restrictive. But if you have a program like ketosis and you know how you're going to manage it and when you're in it and you're not completely tied in the fact that you're ketones, have to measure one measure, one point five every time you do it, then it becomes a really good, easy, sustainable way to eat and you get this huge amount of freedom.
[01:07:25.290] Allan Because like you said, you go on a long training run, you don't have to carry three pack packets of Guu with you.
[01:07:31.440] That's right. You can just go do the run, you know, have a little bit before and just go do the run. And when you get done, all you have to really worry about on the run was hydration.
[01:07:41.440] Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely.
[01:07:42.440] They don't have to do all this extra stuff, you know, stop at a fast-food restaurant along the way just to get it right.
[01:07:51.270] Rachel It does give me a lot of freedom, but it's also for me, it's still an easy way of eating. And and you mentioned Thanksgiving. It's it's my favorite eating day of the year. I love everything having to do with Thanksgiving. And my parents and my husband, they're always they're fantastic cooks. But we have had Thanksgiving the last two years and it's been just as delicious as as any other Thanksgiving meal I've ever had. So, I mean, it's totally possible to still eat the foods you love, just making them a little bit more healthier than normal.
[01:08:27.390] Allan Cool. Well, I'm going to I'm going to challenge you. OK, we're coming up. You know, this is we're going into this this fall season and we're coming up on the Thanksgiving season soon. So why don't we do an episode where we where we're at the end of an episode where we do keto recipes, we drop a couple Thanksgiving keto recipes on folks so they'll have some things they can fall back on.
[01:08:50.740] Rachel Absolutely. That would. Great.
[01:08:52.740] Allan So that's my challenge. Get your favorite Keto recipe together for Thanksgiving or one or two of them. And then once we get into October, November, we'll start sharing some of those recipes.
[01:09:53.820] Rachel Sounds great. I'm on it.
[01:09:06.300] Allan Well, let's just say goodbye and we'll talk next week.
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On episode 448 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we ask the question: “Is the Carnivore Diet good for you?
Dr. Saladino is the leading authority on the Carnivore Diet. He has used this diet to reverse autoimmune issues, chronic inflammation, and mental health issues in hundreds of patients. He is board-certified in psychiatry and completed his residency at the University of Washington. He is also a certified functional medicine practitioner through the Institute for Functional Medicine. He attended medical school at the University of Arizona, focusing on integrative medicine and nutritional biochemistry.
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You may or may not know that I am a fan of the ketogenic diet. I regularly make bone broth to get collagen and minerals from the bone and bone marrow. And I'm definitely not someone to discard the egg yolk. Ketosis is an excellent way to improve your body composition and fight chronic disease.
I've always dismissed the Carnivore Diet as an extreme elimination diet, which it is since it limits you to just animal products. But after reading The Carnivore Code, I decided to give it a try. I went three weeks with this way of eating and it's not so bad. I got off of it for two reasons:
1) I could get enough liver and kidneys and I don't feel like buying supplements was the way to go.
2) I missed vegetables. As the doctor mentioned in the show, if how you're eating is working, then maybe carnivore isn't for you.
With all of the scientific evidence Dr. Saladino presented in the book and during this interview, I'm less concerned about eating meat regularly and a little less enamored with vegetables overall, but I'm glad I tried it for a bit.
Transcript
Allan Dr. Saladino, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Saladino Thanks for having me on. It's good to be here.
Allan I have had someone on about the carnivore of diet before. His name is Craig Emmerich, Maria's husband, you might know him. And it was really fascinating. I've been interested in the diet, but honestly, it seems pretty extreme to me to just eat meat and organs. I've read a lot about it. I've heard a lot about it. But I think your book, The Carnivore Code, is really kind of the first book I've seen that basically power drives any other way you'd want to eat, I mean, for lack of a better word, it's like, boy, you just pulverized all the vegetables I like and you did it with science.
Dr. Saladino Well, I tried. And the goal of writing the book and we can get into what I do and why I do it, my goal is not to convince everyone to stop eating all plants for the rest of eternity. The idea with the book and I'll tell the listeners a little of my story as well in a moment, but there are really two main thesis in the book. There are two things that I'm hoping to achieve and the first is to exonerate, red meat to undo the bad science that's been done around red meat and ruminant animals, cows, bison, lamb.
Dr. Saladino These kinds of foods are some of the most vilified foods on the planet. And yet I strongly believe and I think that the medical literature strongly supports the fact that they are the most nutritious foods on the planet for humans. So what we have is this completely upside down ideology this completely reversed mainstream idea around fear of red meat. And that doesn't need to be that way. And I talk about in the book why that is and evidence for red meat being essential in the human diet.
Dr. Saladino And we can get to both of those things. The second point of the book is to explain and to suggest to offer that plants exists on a toxicity spectrum. They're rooted in the ground. They've been co-evolving with animals for four hundred and fifty million years. And so in order for plants and animals to co-exist in an ecosystem, they have had to develop defense chemicals. This is really not conjecture or opinion. This is botanical science. And these defense chemicals can harm humans. And so plants exist on a toxicity spectrum and understanding which plants are the most toxic in the least toxic is crucial for every human to achieve optimal health.
Dr. Saladino It's really just it's another tool in the toolbox for people. If people are listening to this and they are thriving, they're just crushing it, kicking, butt, don't change a thing. I respect anyone who's crushing it. And I will give anyone an electronic high five for making an intentional choice with their diet. Whatever that choice is, that's the first step, is making an intentional choice of diet, thinking about your food.
Dr. Saladino But there's a lot of people that are suffering and no one has really gone to these lengths. No one has uncovered these questions. Nobody has turned these stones over and said maybe some of these plants are harming us. Maybe this is the reason that some of us suffer with eczema like I did, or asthma or psoriasis or depression or mood issues or libido issues or weight gain that won't reverse or tons of other autoimmune issues.
Dr. Saladino And it's just exciting to be able to do to try and do those two things to say, hey, this red meat don't fear this. Very valuable for you, very critical for you, your family, your children, for their health, for your parents health, everyone. Wrongly vilified based on bad science, which is epidemiology. And the second part is you're not thriving, realize that plants exist on a toxicity spectrum.
Allan Yeah. Now in my book, The Wellness Roadmap, I brought up a concept that I call opportunistic eaters. And what it is, is as humans, you know, if we're hungry, we're going to go for food. I think I got a little backward and so I got opportunistic eating today is pulling up to the McDonald's drive-thru. It's easy. It's quick, low cost for me from an energy perspective, I don't even have to get out of my car and there it is. Not good for me, but it gives me the energy it did what it was supposed to do, I guess. But then when I thought back to our ancestors and the way that they would look at the opportunity, I think I had it backward. And you rightfully said something in your book that that made me turn that around. You call it the Carnivore Code Hypothesis. And that would be where we would effectively favor meat, particularly red meat, over other sources of food for the nutritional value of them.
Allan Whereas I thought it's easier for me to pick blueberries in the blueberries, not actually attacking me back. Well, we're going to find out later. Maybe that blueberry is but, you know, I feel safer picking blueberries than I would hunting a water buffalo. Now, even if you and I and a few other guys together with spears and went out there and started working, it would be a little safer, but still risk. We take every time we wanted this food. But what you brought up in the book. There's a good reason why we would take that risk.
Dr. Saladino There's a very good reason why we would take that risk and why we have taken that risk. The beginning part of the book is really about where we've come from in humans and looking at fossilized evidence of human cranial vault size, the growth of the brain. And there's pretty good evidence that one of the key, if not the critical factor in the massive growth of the human brain, was the advent of hunting in our ancestors and the procurement of meat and these unique nutrients that occur in meat.
Dr. Saladino So if you look at what's in meat and this goes back to the idea of exonerating red meat and understanding how valuable these foods are for humans. There are many nutrients in red meat specifically, but in all animals really that only occur in animal foods.
Dr. Saladino So often we're told, of these phytonutrients, quote-unquote. And I really think that's a fairy tale, that's not true when we can talk about that as well. But there are unique nutrients. There are unique nutrients that only occur in appreciable biologically available quantities in animal foods.
Dr. Saladino But we've never heard about these. So you kind of allude to this in your description. And I think most people and our ancestors were really after the calories, but it worked out when they were seeking the most calories in the largest animals and the largest repository of food, they were solving this energetics equation. Per energy invested, the return on a water buffalo is much better than a blueberry. And it just so happens that when you get that water buffalo, you are getting so many more unique nutrients that are so much more bioavailable. Because we know that in order for humans to be optimal, we need micronutrients. These are things like vitamins and minerals, and I'll talk about those in a moment. In order for our ancestors, or you or I to survive until tomorrow, we need calories.
Dr. Saladino And you can get those calories from a Slurpee or a Big Mac or a Frosty or french fries. You'll survive till tomorrow. But if you want to survive decades from now and have vital health and healthy children and multiple generations and play with your grandkids, you need micronutrients. And that is the real difference. But by seeking out the highest sources and the most efficient sources of calories, our ancestors also sought out the unique micronutrients. So what am I talking about here?
Dr. Saladino I'm talking about things like creatine, carnitine, choline, carnitine, vitamin K and B12. The list goes on and on. These are nutrients that really only occur in animal foods in any appreciable quantity. And they are necessary. They are absolutely essential for optimal human health.
Dr. Saladino But you really can't get creatine from plants. We know that it makes builder stronger, but we also know that it makes us smarter. There have been interventional experiments where they'll do trials without giving vegetarians and vegans creatine. And they get smarter. They do better on memory tasks and card sorting tasks and cognitive processing tasks.
Dr. Saladino And then there's choline, an essential nutrient for the formation of the brain to make new baby brains to make our brain strong. It really doesn't occur in appreciable quantities and plant foods, but it's absolutely abundant and very biologically available in animal foods. Carnitine, carnitine, these are unique amino acid forms that are used in the antioxidant process in the human body. Vitamin K2 is a form of vitamin K that's absolutely essential for proper calcium partitioning in the human body and higher intakes of vitamin K2, which is a series of Menaquinones, have been associated with much better cardiovascular outcomes.
Dr. Saladino But where's the vitamin K2 In-plant Foods? It doesn't exist. You can't get vitamin K2 from Plant Foods. You can vitamin K1, which is Phylloquinone. But humans are really, really bad at converting Phylloquinone to medical quinone and an intake of Phylloquinone in Plants is not associated with any of these improved outcomes from heart disease or calcification or sclerosis. So the list goes on, right? Vitamin B 12. Most people know about that, but these are all critical nutrients, trust to be optimal and they were critical for our ancestors brains to grow.
Dr. Saladino And the statement I make in the book is that I strongly believe and I think the evidence absolutely corroborates the notion that eating meat made us human. It's essential for humans to eat this. And so the investment is slightly higher danger hunting a water buffalo is going to be repaid in spades, it's going to be repaid over and over. As you get that hunt, you get that kill graciously, thankfully, and you share it with your tribe and you are nourished so deeply also by eating organs, if we can talk about.
Dr. Saladino But that's really what allowed our ancestors to thrive, that it was so easy to get the nutrition from animals. And you can survive on plant foods, but they've got these toxins and you have to detoxify them. They're good for survival. But our ancestors really would have sought out animals first. And if they had to, they would use these plant foods as a fallback. If you can't get a buffalo, you might gather some blueberries.
Dr. Saladino Now, fruit is kind of a specific thing that I'll talk about. I think our ancestors would have eaten fruit in season, but blueberries aren't available year-round. And you don't make a baby out of blueberries, you know, but you can't just you can't make a human out of the nutrients in blueberries, but you can make a human out of the nutrients in water buffalo that's got almost that's got basically everything you need.
Dr. Saladino Blueberries, It's got some calories and a few things that we can use, but not great. Now, the fruit stems, leaves, roots and seeds of plants are much more highly defended with these defense chemicals. And that, I think, would have been absolutely way down on the list for humans. If you cannot get you cannot get an animal, then you're going to eat those things to survive. But our ancestors favored animal foods. They made us who we are. And by really forgetting that wisdom today, we are forsaking our ancestral birthright to much, much deeper levels of human health.
Allan Yeah, and kind of following along with that as we develop and you start thinking about, OK, why is a human-like a human? Because we do have some teeth that allow us to eat some vegetables, but they're not all of our teeth are animal or plant teeth. So it's obvious that we have a little bit of diversity opportunity there. But there are other things about the human body that makes it clear that we're hunters, we're meant to be carnivores. Can you talk about some of those changes physiologically that have happened as humans have evolved?
Dr. Saladino Yeah, so this is quite a fascinating story and it starts in the mouth. And really, as you go, as you said, the teeth argument always gets brought up a lot. But we clearly have teeth for both chewing fibrous material. Probably we held on to those because we needed that during times of scarcity of animals. And we have lots of teeth for biting into meat and eating animals. The digestive system of the digestive tract is one of the more fascinating parts of our physiology that distinguishes us from plant-eating herbivores.
Dr. Saladino The acidity of our stomach is much more. It's much greater. So we have a lower PH, which means a more acidic stomach than many other species, many other primates, many other herbivorous or even omnivorous species. That's a strong suggestion that as we begin eating meat, we were eating rotting meat. So we were eating carrion just to prevent our guts from being damaged by bacteria that might have been growing on the meat. We don't have to eat rotting meat today, but there's a clear evolutionary blueprint there of our ancestors eating meat that was rotting or eating meat in general and the stomach acid protecting us from it and the stomach acid also breaking down that meat.
Dr. Saladino The shape and distribution of gut regions is also very different in humans. And this is one of the other things called the expensive tissue hypothesis that probably allowed the human brain to grow so big. And we see this in other animals and other species as well. But energetically there is a ceiling on how an animal can change throughout its evolution and as a species.
Dr. Saladino And so if you want to grow a bigger brain, which uses a lot of your energy, you're going to have to trim the fat, so to speak, from somewhere else. And it looks like the tradeoff for humans was in the gut. We have a much smaller, large intestine. So there's a stomach, a small intestine and a large intestine. The small intestine is 20 plus feet, goes from the end of your stomach to the ileocecal valve, which is where your colon starts. And your colon is your large bowel and these these parts of the intestine serve different purposes. But humans have a slightly larger small bowel and a much smaller, large bowel than primates.[00:17:48.710] – Dr. Saladino So what appears to have happened in the very compelling hypothesis is that as we were able to eat more nutrient rich foods, we were able to shrink the size of our colons because we didn't need the colons to do the massive fermentation that primates do. So if you look at a gorilla or an ape, they have both a very protuberance stomach. They have a rib angle, which is much more pointed outward than humans. Our ribs kind of go straight down and an ape goes way out to accommodate this very large colon.
Dr. Saladino The colon now for humans is really just to reabsorb the last bits of water from our stool as it passes through the small intestine. And the small intestine is where we do most of the absorption of nutrients. So there's this real change and that allowed our brains to grow big because we have smaller energy needs in our gut. We can then redistribute the caloric availability to growing a big brain in a very metabolically expensive brain. There's a fascinating fish in Africa that I talk about in the book called The Peters' Elephant Nose Fish.
Dr. Saladino People can Google this. It's a really cool looking fish. But you see the same thing here. The expensive tissue hypothesis plays out in this fish as well. It has the biggest brain of any species or fish relative to body size. So it's a pretty smart fish. And in order to do that, it has the smallest gut. So it has this trade-off between gut and brain. Again, not surprisingly, that fish is a carnivore as well. And in the fish world, Carnivore is a little different than in the human or land mammal world. But that fish doesn't eat plants, that fish eats other fish or smaller, smaller animals that it's consuming.
Dr. Saladino So that allows it to consume higher nutrient density food and have a smaller gut. And so it gets a bigger brain energetically in the trade-off. So there's all sorts of other things that suggest that we're hunters. We've got these shoulders that allow us to pitch, and no other species on the planet can throw a fastball like a human can throw a spear.
Dr. Saladino Primates can't do this. Nobody else can do this. We have these articulated fingers. We're very agile on our feet. And even the whites of our eyes are fascinating. I should have, the book is it wouldn't have shown this picture very well, but I should have put a picture in the book about this. If you look at a chimp's eyes, I didn't know this until I was researching the book The Sclera. So the part of the eye outside of the iris is brown.
Dr. Saladino And a human, it's white, and so if people look in the mirror, you'll see that center part of your eye, that's the iris and the white stuff to the side. That's the sclera. And a chimp sclera is brown. So if you look at the chimp eye, versus a human eye, it looks very different. And the hypothesis here, advanced by Bill von Hippel and others, is that humans became cooperative rather than competitive. That if I'm in the tribe with you and I'm looking to the right, you can tell which direction I'm looking because you can see the contrast between the iris and the sclera.
Dr. Saladino But if you look at a chimp, you can't really see which direction they're looking because it's all the same color. So it was advantageous for them to not signal their intentions, what they were looking at, potential mate, prey, escape route to other chimps. But humans became cooperative.
Dr. Saladino So we were hunting in groups. We were signaling danger and we were becoming this cooperative species. Well, you don't need a whole lot of cooperation to pick blueberries, but if you're hunting a water buffalo, you probably want to cooperate, right?
Allan Yeah, let's send Derrick in there.
Dr. Saladino If you've been in the military, or you've seen these adventure movies, you know, you can communicate with somebody across the room with your eyes without saying anything. Or if someone sees danger, you can see where that person is looking immediately.
Dr. Saladino So there's all these adaptations that make us look a whole lot like hunters. There's also fossil evidence that we've been hunting. I mean, two million years ago when the human brain began to grow is when we see these fossilized remains of Shuli and tools, these by facial by facial stones, which look kind of like big arrowheads. They were used for spears and for butchering. And we start to see bones that are dated to two million years with cut marks on the bone from the butchering.
Dr. Saladino And we see hunting injuries to animals and we see mass graves where our ancestors apparently herded animals into blind corridors or drove them off cliffs to harvest them in mass. So right at the time we see the human brain start to grow. We then begin to see evidence for hunting and looking at the fossil record, we can see these changes in the human physiology, suggesting, humans are hunters. First and foremost, we're hunters.
Dr. Saladino Everybody says we're hunter-gatherers. Well, we're like hunter-gatherer. You know, we're like mostly hunting a little bit of gathering if you can't get an animal. And then the question is, what are the foods our ancestors were really gathering? It wasn't kale, I'll tell you that. You can get into it.
Allan So since the 70s, you know, you don't eat fat, don't eat fat, don't eat fat, low fat, low fat, everything, and with paleo coming up, I guess mid two thousands and so and it was growing and then that went to Keto. So I was I was into ketosis. I was was feeling better than I've felt in forever. And then this news report comes out, you know, that red meat you're eating is going to cause colon cancer. Your chance of dying just went up dramatically. You know, I'm reading the article and I'm like this can't be true. But, you know, well, there's a study and everybody took off with that study. Can you tell us a little bit about that whole story of how that happened and why it's wrong?
Dr. Saladino Yeah. So based on what you already laid out, I'm sure the listener can imagine how evolutionarily inconsistent it would be for a food that was at the center of the human diet for the last three to four million years would be bad for us. That doesn't make any sense. OK, but there's, quote, science. So let's talk about why this is so misleading.
Dr. Saladino So what you are referring to is a 2015 IARC report from the International Association for Research on Cancer, which is a WHO/FAO type of committee on cancer. And they met to review all of the studies that they could find connecting red meat and cancer. So it wasn't an actual experiment. It was a consensus decision by a group of scientists, which can also be valuable. But, and they came out in 2015 and said red meat is a class to a carcinogen, which means that we're pretty sure it's a or maybe it was 2B, 2A or 2B.
Dr. Saladino They give gradings to the recommendations based on the strength of the evidence. And so then they said that processed meat was a 2A carcinogen and red meat was a 2B carcinogen, meaning there was a little bit less evidence that unprocessed red meat was a carcinogen and there was more evidence that processed meat was a carcinogen. So they're making these recommendations.
Dr. Saladino And you said, OK, well, how do they get these recommendations? They didn't do an experiment. They're reviewing the data. Well, they're super smart scientists, right? We should trust them. Well, in 2018 and this caused a huge hubbub in 2015. In 2018, the actual explanation of how they arrived at those decisions came out.
Dr. Saladino And when you read that, it paints a very different story. So these, there were many scientists, I think over 20 scientists that sat down and I think it was in France and they had over four hundred studies to review and they excluded all the studies except 14. So that decision is based on 14 studies. They just took everything else. They said that's not valid. It's not that experiment wasn't done well enough. It doesn't it's not an appropriate model.
Dr. Saladino They excluded all the animal studies. So there were no animal models. Right. And every single one of the studies they looked at was epidemiology. So in that consensus report, they used 14 epidemiology studies. Now, this is worth diving into because it causes so much confusion and consternation. Epidemiology is observational research. There is no experiments done. Most of us from science class imagine that all the studies we hear about on the news are interventional. You combine two chemicals, you get a color change, you take a group of rats, you give them more sugar or more fat, and you see what happens.
Dr. Saladino You take a group of humans and you give them a drug and you see what happens. This isn't what this IRC report is referring to. There have been studies done in which people have replaced carbohydrates with red meat. And in fact, those studies do not show any harm for red meat. They show decreasing CRP and no changes in other markers of inflammation. But was that an interventional study included in this decision? No. No interventional studies were included in this decision.
Dr. Saladino They were all epidemiology, which is survey-based research. And so what these researchers did was look at 14 different types of, 14 different studies. And all of these studies were either prospective or retrospective cohort study. So they take a group of people and they give them a survey. And they say, how much red meat did you eat over the last 10 or 15 years? And then they looked to see how healthy these people are and they try and correlate those two. Or they'll take a cohort of people and say how much red meat you eat now and then follow them moving forward for 10 or 15 years and see how many of them develop health problems. And at first glance, that sounds reasonable, right?
Dr. Saladino Except here's the problem. Epidemiology, observational studies can only tell us about correlation. You can't make a causative inference from that because just because somebody eats more red meat, it doesn't mean that the red meat caused the problems.
Allan I think you had a really good example. You had a really good example in the book about divorce rate in Maine.
Dr. Saladino Yeah, there's a great website called SpuriousCorrelations.com, where people can see these sort of the hilarity that ensues when you try and connect correlation with causation. Many things correlate. The divorce rate in Maine correlates with the per capita margarine consumption over the last eight or nine years to a very, very high degree. Does that mean that as people ate less margarine, they got divorced less? No, but it makes absolutely no sense. But you can correlate these two things.
Dr. Saladino You can also correlate things like deaths by getting tangled in the bedsheets with per capita cheese consumption and the number of movies Nicolas Cage has appeared in with, I think something with pool drownings or something. You know. You can correlate all kinds of things that don't have any connection. And in the case of red meat, you've already really alluded to the problem that for the last 70 years the narrative has been fat is bad for you, red meat is bad for you. So who eats red meat over the last 70 years?
Dr. Saladino People that are rebels people that also probably are less likely to go in the sun, less likely to play tennis on a Tuesday morning, less likely go to their doctor to get a colonoscopy or mammograms, less likely to get pap smears, less likely to do other types of health behaviors. Exercise, meditate. These are just these are the types of things more likely to smoke, more likely to drink alcohol.
Dr. Saladino These are the type of things that are very hard for epidemiology to control for. But the people who eat red meat consistently do worse in the United States because they are the people who are rebels. In the book, I call them the James Dean types. And the converse is also true. Who has eaten more vegetables over the last 70 years?
Dr. Saladino Well, it's the people that I gave a high five to at the beginning of this podcast who are making intentional choices with regard to their diet. Now, they're also doing other healthy things. You don't just listen to health advice on diet, you also listen to health advice on exercise and go out in the sun and you do other things that are good for you. You're more likely to be of a higher socioeconomic status because you have the ability to do those things.
Dr. Saladino So it creates this really confounded story regarding what are these studies actually telling us. But really the narrative doesn't end here. If you look at those 14 studies considered by the IARC, are you ready for this, only 8 of the 14 to start with, 8 of the 14 did not show any association between red meat and cancer. And if people are just kind of like scratching their head right now, OK, so 8 of the 14 studies showed no association between red meat and cancer. Granted, these are epidemiology. But 8 of the 14 association, the majority of the studies, no association between red meat and cancer.
Dr. Saladino 6 of the 14 showed association between red meat and cancer. But of that six, five of them, that's association was not statistically significant. So not only is epidemiology confounded by these biases and does it not allow us to make a causative inference from correlation if we do the math and the correlation is not even statistically significant, we can't even actually say that it's a real correlation.
Dr. Saladino It could be due to other errors. It's not a big enough difference. So what I'm saying is that 1 of the 14 studies, 1, showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And we can dig into that one study even further and say, what was that one study done? That one study was done in a population of Seventh Day Adventists, which is a religious group that shuns meat. So in that group, the people that eat meat are really going to be rebels because the rebels not only at a social level, the rebels at a religious level, and the whole Zygi, the whole environment of a Seventh Day Adventist community is a group that's mainly vegetarian.
Dr. Saladino And if you're eating meat in that community, you are definitely an outlier and definitely sort of bucking other health norms. Likely they found that the people who ate more red meat in that study were also much more likely to be obese. This is the problem with epidemiology studies. Was it the obesity that led to more cancer or was it the red meat? Well, the study can't say, which is why you have to do interventional research. And as I said, there are many studies that have been done with red meat that are interventional.
Dr. Saladino Take a group of people, give them more red meat, see what happens. They don't show any problems, no inflammation. It's very hard to study people at an international level for cancer. You'd have to give people more red meat for years and years. The epidemiologist is done for years. But at a molecular level, we can see that giving people more red meat does not. Lead to increases in inflammatory markers, which is what you would expect if it were going to trigger a cancer, it was going to do something bad if it's going to trigger a cancer.
Dr. Saladino But this is really what the notion that red meat is bad for humans is based on. Badly done epidemiology in which 8 of 14 studies showed no correlation, 5 of 6 not statistically significant. Only 1 of 14 showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And in that study, it was badly confounded by unhealthy user bias. The last thing I'll say here to really drive this point home is if you look at epidemiology, again it's all flawed, none of it's perfect. But you can look at epidemiology from other countries like Asia, and you don't see the same correlation that you do in the West because the narrative is different there.
Dr. Saladino There's very large epidemiology studies from Asia looking at over 180,000. Another one is 220,000 individuals followed for 5 to 15 years. And where they find the men who ate more red meat had less cardiovascular disease, the women who ate more red meat had less cancer. But they didn't think about that study at the IRC. and no one can explain that the only way then you could say is what? Red meat is good for Asians but bad for Westerners. That makes absolutely no sense. That's silly. It's possible. But that's not even that's really not a hypothesis anyone is going to entertain.
Dr. Saladino The more plausible explanation is that the narrative is different. In Asia, We know this red meat is associated with athletes. So who eats more red meat? The same people that eat more vegetables in the US, the people that are more likely to exercise, they have more financial resources. The more people, people that are more likely to do things, go see their doctor, less likely to smoke, less likely to be obese because they have more of an investment in their health.
Dr. Saladino So this is really how we get misled about red meat and cancer, red meat and heart disease, red meat and longevity. It's all the same story over and over. And I go through all of these in the book and debunk these myths one by one and give tons of references. The book has over 650 references. And I show, hey these things you've been told you've been misled. These are based on observational epidemiology. And when I have it, which is most of the time I share interventional studies with argue, which argue completely against it and say, hey, look, this is much more valid.
Dr. Saladino Very savvy listeners will know that in 2019, another study came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine that was super controversial. A separate group of researchers looked at the IARCs findings in 2018 and said, that's hogwash. You guys excluded all these studies. You didn't weigh them properly. You didn't use any interventional studies. In the Animals of Internal Medicine. Two studies came out in 2019 saying red meat is not bad for humans. We're going to look at this evidence again. Red meat is not bad for humans, but we get this like propaganda in our heads. And now we're so scared. We're fearful as humans.
Dr. Saladino Nobody wants to die early. Everybody wants to see their grandkids grow up. We don't know what to do. And I think as humans, it's been part of our consciousness for 70 years. And we suddenly are just it's very hard to get it out of our out of our out of our paradigm, out of our perspective and really look at the data. And we have Ancel Keys and originally very bad epidemiology from the 1970s to think that that's a whole separate story.
Allan Yes, it is. Now, one of the other things I found kind of fascinating, frustrating, terrifying, was that the advice at one time was to tear your kale and let it sit for about 10 minutes. So the toxicity that would happen would be at the highest level. So we would get this hormesis this effect from the kale, and it makes it that much better for us. I can't tell you how many times I tore the kale and let it sit for 10 minutes before I ate it. Can we talk a little bit about plant toxins and why you know, that kind of hormesis might not be what we actually really need.
Dr. Saladino Yeah, so this is a little bit of a complex point, but I'll try and break it down in the simplest terms for me. Hormesis is a word that basically means what doesn't kill you makes you stronger up to a point until it kills you. Hopefully most of your listeners have seen The Princess Bride where Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and they're having this battle with iocane powder and maybe people haven't. But he says, you know, he give he says he gives them two cups of water to put iocane powder in one of these cups. And it's a poison. It's obviously a fictitious poison. And I'm going to, you get to choose, you know, the Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and saying, you choose which one.
Dr. Saladino And he puts it in both, right, and they both drink, and so the Sicilian dies and he goes, Oh, how did you you tricked me. He said, Yeah, I tricked you. I put it in both. I've been slowly developing this this the strength to iocane powder over the years. That's how hormones this is supposed to work. But it doesn't quite work like that. You know, a little bit of poison is supposed to make you a little stronger. But it does and it doesn't. So here's the problem. The concept of hormesis, I believe, conflated between what I call in the book environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis.
Dr. Saladino Environmental hormesis, this is a pretty well-established concept. It's the idea that a little bit of sunlight, a little bit of heat stress, like a sauna, cold plunge, ketosis. These are environmental hermetic, so not molecules, they're experiences. I could have also called it experimental hormesis, but these are things that we encounter in our life that our ancestors always encountered fasting, starvation for a short amount of time, leading to ketosis.
Dr. Saladino These are things that we've always encountered evolutionarily that cause our body of stress going to the gym and lifting weights, going for a walk, going for a jog. These are hormesis. Exercise is a experiential or environmental hermetic. A little bit of that makes you it gets a little bit of a toxin. You know, that if you lift weights too much, you're going to be sore. If you go out in the sun too much, it's going to you're going to feel it. You go in the sauna, you're like, whoa, that was intense, right?
Dr. Saladino You feel it. It causes a little stress, but what is your body do in response to that stress? It gets stronger. Anyone who's ever exercised to lose weight or lifting weights and seen their muscles grow, will realize the stress makes you stronger. Now, at a certain point, it's going to break you. If you lift too much weight, you're just going to tear the muscle or break a bone. If you run too much, you're going to stress fracture, etc. But there is a concept that a little bit of a poison makes you stronger when it comes to experience or environment.
Dr. Saladino Now we have applied this concept to plant molecules incorrectly, I believe. And the reason it's incorrect is we've forgotten that molecules come with side effects. If you look at the research on Sulforaphane for instance, which is the glucose scintillate, which becomes an Isothiocyanate, in kale when you when you rip it up, it has been shown to increase glutathione in the human body. But it's also been shown to do many other negative things that we're never told about. It's just like when any of the listeners go to the pharmacy and you get a prescription for a medication. That medication comes with a package insert, in the package insert tells you, hey, this medicine is metoprolol or lisinopril or a statin. And I hope that, I don't prescribe those medications much at all in my practice anymore. And I hope that most of your listeners are healthy enough to have avoided them.
Dr. Saladino But we all know this. If you go to a pharmacy and get a medication that comes with side effects, antibiotic, whatever, all the molecules that are foreign to human biology have this. They all have it. sulforaphane has it, curcumin has it, resveratrol has it. All of these plant molecules, we've been told are so good for us also have package inserts, but we're never handed them because they're not considered to be pharmaceuticals. But they are.
Dr. Saladino They are definitely pharmaceuticals. And many plant molecules are used and developed into drugs. Most of the chemotherapy that we use for cancer is from plants, paclitaxel, etc. There's lots of chemotherapy from plants. Well. In the case of chemotherapy, it's pretty clear the chemotherapy might kill some cancer cells, but it's also going to kill your cells and chemotherapy has very clear bad side effects. But it's the same with other plant molecules.
Dr. Saladino So if the plant molecules have a bad side effect in the case of sulforaphane that Isothiocyanate in the kale you're eating, that one has a side effect of inhibiting the absorption of iodine at the level of your thyroid and causing damage to cellular membranes and oxidizing your DNA, which can also lead to problems and cancers. And people who have eaten too much kale may also get GI effects, you know, gas bloating or other issues. And so it's pretty clear that sulforaphane or other compounds in these vegetables are also harming our gut.
Dr. Saladino But we're never told about those things. We're only told these are good for you. Eat more of this. Well, it's pretty clear those are plant toxins. We're told they're antioxidants, but they're not. They're pro-oxidants. And they cause our body to increase its own endogenous antioxidants.
Dr. Saladino But here's the kicker. You don't need any more antioxidants if you are doing the environmental hormesis, if you are doing experiential hormesis, exercise, cold plumbing, sauna, being in the sun at a healthy level, fasting occasionally. There are many good studies that I show in the book that suggest vegetables don't do anything extra for you from an antioxidant perspective. There are many studies in the book that I share in reference that show inclusion of massive amounts of fruits and vegetables don't improve markers of oxidative stress, inflammation or DNA damage.
Dr. Saladino And what they do do is cause you all these harm on the back end. They cause all this collateral damage because of the side effects. So when you're ripping that kale, you're thinking I'm getting, quote, antioxidants. Well, no. Sulforaphane is a pro-oxidant and it's very clearly a plant defense molecule. It doesn't participate directly in any human biochemistry. Sulforaphane causes free radical production, Sulforaphane causes oxidative stress. You can get it to bump up your glutathione a little bit, which is this endogenous antioxidant.
Dr. Saladino But you can also bump your glutathione, this molecular policeman in the human body by doing cold plunge, by doing sauna, by doing exercise. And then you won't have any of the side effects from the so forth thing and you'll probably have a lot less gas and your thyroid will be much healthier in the long run. So this is essentially what I'm saying here. There's a real difference between molecular hormesis and environmental hormesis, and we don't need plant molecules to be optimal.
Dr. Saladino That's been demonstrated over and over and over. And we must not forget the side effects that these molecules have in human physiology. And that, I fear, is where many people are suffering unnecessarily.
Allan Yeah, I think one of the points I had early on when the Carnivore diet started getting a little bit more popular is just like ketosis. They come forward with an idea. And everybody thinks of the keto diet now as the bacon diet, people that are going to keep the “bacon! bacon!” And yes, you can have bacon, but not just bacon. Something else, please. A lot of people that are in carnivore are doing something very similar, like 30 days, just eating rib-eye steaks or they'll go 30 days just eating bacon. And yeah, they lose weight. They say they feel great because they do get into ketosis, but they're not getting everything they need either. There's a right way and a wrong way to do Carnivore.
Dr. Saladino Yeah. And I think it goes back to what we spoke about earlier. Just how did our ancestors do it, both out of respect for the animal and just from an environmental sort of caloric perspective. They ate the animal nose to tail. So I'm a really big advocate for this. This is understanding that you cannot just eat steaks and be on a carnivore diet in a healthy way that's going to cause a folate deficiency.
Dr. Saladino So I talked about all these micronutrients earlier in the podcast and they are found throughout the animal. A cow is not just animal meat all through the cow. A cow has a liver and a stomach and a spleen and heart and a kidney and intestines. And you know what most of us will think of it is gross. And that's one of the reasons that I'm so interested in developing some adjuncts to help people get more organs in their diet, which I'll talk about in a moment, but it's something that our ancestors have always done. And so anyone that's listening to this, that's from an ethnic background, your family probably ate heart or liver or kidney or spleen.
Dr. Saladino And, you know, maybe as a kid, you were like, I don't know about that, but it's relished by indigenous people. Liver is sacred. It's not even touched by human hands in a lot of cultures. It's the first thing you eat. If we look at the way animals who are carnivorous eat other animals, they always go for the viscera first, they'll eat the liver. And it sounds morbid, but it's like, hey, look, we're just trying to appreciate the sacrifice that animal has made for us and get all the nutrients we can. I've seen video of ORCA's eating sharks and they just eat the liver. They don't eat the animal meat. They just eat the liver out of the shark. All these animals realize the liver and these other organs are super beneficial for nutrients.
Dr. Saladino The liver is a very rich place for folate, choline, vitamin K2, Riboflavin. If listeners are unsure of this, I'll ask them the question, where do you get your riboflavin? I think riboflavin is the most commonly deficient nutrient in human populations in 2020 that no one knows about. Vitamin B2, you really can't get it from plants and you can't get it from muscle meat in enough quantity, but you can get it from the heart or liver.
Dr. Saladino So and I realize this is a very hard thing. This is probably the biggest piece for people that's challenging is how do I eat organ meats. So it's so exciting to be able to I wanted to build a company to help people do this. This company is it launched at the beginning of August and this podcast is coming out later in August. It's called Heart and Soil, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. What we do is we take organs from grass-fed grass, finished animals in New Zealand, and we desiccate them with low temperature, dehydrate them and we encapsulate them into a pill. We're basically making organ meat pills to help people get the organs. If they don't want to eat the liver.
Dr. Saladino I think the best thing is to eat real liver or not even. It's not that the pills aren't real liver. Just the best thing is to eat fresh liver or fresh heart. But if you can't do that, that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about being able to do this for people in this business at Heart and Soil is to get them desiccated organ pills. But there's a real option for people now because you can take them in a pill that's been low temperature hydrated to get the organs.
Dr. Saladino But if you're not eating the organs, whether you're eating plants or not, you're missing out on nutrients. It's not just for carnivores. They're for everyone. It's for you and your grandma and your kids. My sister has a two and a half-year-old and an eight-month-old, and both of them get these organ meat pills. She just opens them up and sprinkles them on the food, mixes it with hamburger. Neither of them can swallow a pill, but she can open the pill and sprinkle the powder onto something and put it mixed in with ground beef for Luke, my nephew and Michaela.
Dr. Saladino And it works great. And they get these nutrients. But that's what kids need and that's what adults need. Even if you're eating plants, you still are not getting enough choline. You're still not getting enough folate. You're still not getting enough riboflavin. What about zinc? What about copper? What about selenium? What about manganese or about boron? What about K2? There's so rich in the organ meats.
Dr. Saladino The other piece of this equation is methionine and Glycine. And this comes in with collagen. Collagen is thankfully specifically kind of quote, an organ meat that has become much more in vogue recently. People are all about bone broth. They understand the incredible benefits of this for skin, hair and nails health. But a lot of people in the Carnivore world don't even do bone broth. They just eat steak and you need to get the connective tissue.
Dr. Saladino So one of my favorite things to do every day is to make bone broth. I don't make it every day, but I eat it every day and I make it just by putting bones and tendons in an instant pot and then drinking that it gets collagenous and kind of jelly in the fridge. And then you're getting tendons. Well, the tendons are rich in glycine, it's an amino acid that complements with thymine and which is rich in muscle meat.
Dr. Saladino And so together these helper biochemistry run in the best way to get too much thiamine without enough glycine. And there's a real problem in human biochemistry. So but again, it all works when you eat like your ancestors. If you eat the animal nose to tail, there are no nutrient deficiencies that will develop in humans. So I will repeat that, because that's a very important statement. Eating animals nose to tail provides humans with all of the nutrients they need to thrive. End of story, full stop, period. That's it. That's why it was so easy for our ancestors if they had to go hunt and gather a blueberry, a little bit of this route, a little bit of that plant to get all their nutrients. It's really hard. I don't know if anyone's done a plant based diet, but I was vegan for seven months. I was Rovi for seven months. About fifteen years ago. I had to work so hard to get all the nutrients I needed.
Dr. Saladino Where do you get your zinc, pumpkin seeds? Well, I don't really like pumpkin seeds. Like that's the only source of zinc I could find in any appreciable quantity on a plant-based diet. So to get adequacy on a plant-based diet, you have to eat 37 different foods that are never all in season at the same time that never would have grown together at one time. You can't get all the nutrition you need from eating plants, period.
Dr. Saladino All the nutrients I mentioned earlier and even just to get basic nutrients, you have to eat twenty-five different plants that never occurred together on the face of the earth. Evolutionarily it's really hard. You want to get all the nutrients you need eating animals, eat a steak, add some liver, you're pretty much done. Add some bone broth steak and liver. Now you can add other things for variety, but you'll get everything you need. The first thing people think about is vitamin C, and I address this in the book.
Dr. Saladino There's plenty of vitamin C in animal foods that are fresh. We know that animal meat has vitamin C, animal organs have more vitamin C than the muscle meat. No one has gotten scurvy eating animal foods when they're fresh. This doesn't happen. There are thousands of people doing this. I don't believe vitamin C, I don't have scurvy, but vitamin C level is just fine. You can get vitamin C in whole foods. That's a whole other rabbit hole.
Dr. Saladino But even beyond vitamin C, you don't need fiber. I address that myth in the book. You can definitely poop without fiber and multiple poop, even better without fiber. So again, this leads us to so many of these rabbit hole, whichever one you want, but eating from the nose to tail is so critical, and that's why I think the supplements can be helpful at heart and soil or just eating the organ meats that you get from a good farm is critical along with bone broth. And the only other thing I'll say here is that a carnivore diet also doesn't have to be ketotic. I think that low carbohydrate states would have happened. I think humans would have been in ketosis absolutely frequently, but I don't think we were in ketosis all the time.
Dr. Saladino And so if ketosis is a stumbling block for you know, that in the book I talk about tier one through five carnivore diets and have a stepping stone. And in the Tier 1 diet, I outline which plant foods are the most toxic and which plant foods are the least toxic. And I think the least toxic plant foods are the fruit. They're the part of the plant that the plant wants you to eat. So things like squash or avocado or olives or berries or even apples and oranges, I think these are reasonable for most people.
Dr. Saladino And you can get carbohydrates in your diet on a, quote, animal-based diet on a Carnivore ish type diet. So don't fear this. If ketosis is scary, if you want to do a ketogenic diet, you absolutely can. I found for myself and most people, cycling in carbohydrates in the form of low toxicity fruit works best. It's probably what our ancestors would have done and things like Honey, so raw, organic honey is a great adjunct that people think about all the sugar.
Dr. Saladino I have a podcast. It's called Fundamental Health. I've addressed all this on the podcast. We talk about it in the book. You don't want to overeat fructose and fruit, but reasonable amounts look pretty darn safe for humans. You know, if you're eating less than seventy-five grams of fructose a day, which is a lot of fruit, your liver can handle it just fine. You'll be fine. That's even a very large amount. Most people don't get more than twenty or thirty grams of fructose a day.
Dr. Saladino And so reasonable intakes of fruit and honey, totally safe for humans, not type of naturally occurring sugar is not bad for us. You don't have to fear it in any way, shape or form.
Allan Dr. Saladino, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
Dr. Saladino So I think that you need to understand food. Food is a big lever, right? So that's what we've been talking about this whole time. Understand what foods nourish your body and understand what foods harm your body or are causing problems for your body.
Dr. Saladino So that's what the book is about. And again, it's not it's not about convincing the world to stop eating plants. It's about helping people understand that animal foods, red meat critically vital for humans, very nutritious, not harmful, wrongly vilified, plant foods exist on a toxicity spectrum, can be harmful for a lot of people. Eat the least toxic ones if you need variety, color, flavor. But understanding which foods help your body thrive will be the first step.
Dr. Saladino That's critical. And then at the end of the book, I also talk about how to live like our ancestors. And we've hinted at this previously with our discussions of environmental hormesis. It's also sunlight, community, cold plunging, sauna, exercise outside, occasional fasting. These are all normal things. I think if you do those things. And then the third piece for me would be doing something that you care about finding meaning in your own life.
Dr. Saladino And I'm so grateful to be able to do this work. It's it's been a challenging road for me because so many of these ideas are so controversial. But I really believe that this knowledge needs to be out there. There are a lot of people who are being misled and their lives are suffering because of it. And so doing something that you find meaningful in your life is probably the third critical piece.
Allan Cool. Well, thank you. And if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, The Carnivore Code and that supplement company you were talking about, where would you like for me to send them?
Dr. Saladino So the book is TheCarnivorecodebook.com. That's the website. You can check it out. It's out now. It's, I imagine I really think it's going to sell really well and hopefully we're going to affect a lot of lives positively. The website for my company, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. So heartandsoilsupplements.com, you can find all those organ pills if you want to include more liver or bone marrow or heart or spleen, any of the organs in your diet. We've got them on there for you. And my website is Carnivoremd.com.
Allan So you could go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/448 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Saladino, thank you for being a part of 40+ fitness.
Dr. Saladino It's my pleasure.
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Allan (01:45): Dr. Cabeca, welcome to 40+ Fitness. Again.
Dr. Cabeca (01:48): Great to be here with you, Allan.
Allan (01:50): I'm pretty excited to have you here because you know when, when keto first came out, people started calling it the bacon diet and of course all the people that were on keto were like, yeah, you get to eat bacon, isn't that great. But it's not a bacon diet and your book, Keto Green 16 I think really is a good guideline for how you can eat keto and eat healthy at the same time.
Dr. Cabeca (02:15): Yes. And the intention was that through my experience going keto and then really struggling and going keto crazy as I like to say, was finding a really healthy way to do it because really getting keto in the healthiest way possible after, during perimenopause and well beyond is essential, is essential for women.
Allan (02:37): Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that is kind of a differentiator out there is whenever something like this comes up, be paleo or keto or even vegan, we like to batch everybody together and say, this is the diet, this is how you need to eat and keto is very much that way too. It said, okay, you eat this amount of fat, you eat this amount of carbs, you eat this amount of protein, go. And it really didn't give anybody any guidelines on how to get proper nutrition.
Dr. Cabeca (03:04): Right. Exactly. And one of the things I've done is, create a keto calculator, especially again for women. Women have to do keto differently than men Allan. And it's important to understand that because men have 10 times as much testosterone as women. But looking at our healthy fats and the kind of fats we eat, but always balancing it with high quality protein and lots of fiber from low carbohydrate greens that just, that's a shift. There's so many physiologic and chemical reasons for the shift. But for me it was game changing. And this was, gosh, way back when I was 48 and I was hitting what I like to call my second menopause because I was diagnosed with menopause at age 39. I have not had an easy medical, personal life, but at age 39 diagnosed with early menopause and then reversed it to go on and have a baby at age 41 and then at 48 experiencing these really harsh symptoms of weight gain despite not doing anything different. That weight gain, despite not doing anything different. Man, it is a complaint that patients would come in and tell me about. And until I experienced it myself humbly, I admit this to you, Allan, is that, you know, I was like really sure. How could that be possible? Right? But that happened to me,
Allan (04:26): right? And I think that's one of the kind of the misnomers out there. I guess myths out there is that, Oh, if you're, if you're gaining weight, you must have obviously be eating more. But the reality is that's not necessarily true in many cases. It just means that some of our key hormones are out of balance and we're not managing those well. But The keto green diet that you have, it can really help us manage these hormones in the book you identify and the 13 key weight loss hormones. And I would love to go back through those cause I think most of them I've talked about at one point or another on the podcast, but it'd be really nice to just kind of have them like wrapped in a bow right here. Could you take just a few minutes to go over what I call it, the weight loss hormones?
Dr. Cabeca (05:08): Yeah, absolutely. And I think like, you know, we just go over, these hormones work intricately individually and so they're so interconnected. They are so interconnected and we start with cortisol, and so really call it the weight gain hormone versus a weight loss hormone. But it is when we get cortisol and balance that can really help trim us down. But cortisol being our, it's the hormone of precedence right now during our stressful times and our stressful situation that we're in right now. And this is the stress hormone that increases glucose in our body because we need more fuel when we're stressed to survive, thrive, Brian move. And also it is, you know, whether it's a physical stress or mental stress or perceived stress, that inreases, increases cortisol and that will also cause weight gain. Cortisol will affect our thyroid and will affect our decrease our progesterone or neuroprotective hormone.
Dr. Cabeca (06:10): So we can have more emotional swings during this time, more moodiness. And it can also be when cortisol goes up, oxytocin goes down and that's one of the other hormones. Now oxytocin is one of my favorite hormones. It is the love connection hormone bonding hormone. It's the hormone we experience in abundance with orgasm, with pleasure, with laughter, with play. And it is a powerful alkalinizing, anti-inflammatory and regenerative hormone. We've looked at studies and older population looking at oxytocin on muscle cell growth and increased oxytocin, increases muscle cell regeneration, which we need, especially as we're getting older. So that hormone oxytocin, it's really important to understand. And in my first book, the Hormone Facts, I spent a whole, I spent a lot of time discussing the interrelationship between cortisol and oxytocin. And it's worth mentioning now, Allan, because in this stress time we're often, we're increasing cortisol, which also breaks down willpower.
Dr. Cabeca (07:27): So if we're experiencing cravings or I've had some clients who have relapsed and we have this discussion was like, look, this is a function of the physiology of what you're experiencing. So let's, you know, right back on, let's create the practices and principles that are going to keep us healthy, sane, and on course during this time. So it, you know, it's really that big, it's really a big deal. And when cortisol goes up, oxytocin goes down. It's kind of like the Seesaw. Cortisol goes up, oxytocin goes down. And so we feel more disconnected, less enthusiasm. And you know, we're really struggling already. Our healthcare providers are really struggling with burnout. And so add on the added stressors, we're experiencing that even more. But when cortisol is up for a longer time period, and this is really important, is that cortisol is up for a long time period an area in our brain are basically is saying, okay, shut down, you're frying me out.
Dr. Cabeca (08:28): So cortisol goes low and oxytocin goes low at the same time and we get into this dangerous disconnect, this dangerous cortisol. So I went oxytocin, slow burnout. It's the physiology of divorce, it's the physiology of burnout, it's the physiology of trauma and PTSD for a long period of time. And you know, and so it's often what I see very much in my clients who've experienced trauma or PTSD. I see this physiologic condition and oxytocin though as far as when it comes tying it back into weight loss hormone, we know when we fall in love, like we're not hungry, we lose weight, we feel better. That's oxytocin and we want to keep that stronger. And so the next hormone that I talk about in my book is insulin. The more insulin sensitive we become, the more resilient we become. And this is needed now more than ever.
Dr. Cabeca (09:27): Blue coasts can affect your immune system negatively. Too much sugar in your system. Yeah, and insulin. As we become more insulin resistant, that also negatively affects our immune system, but the more insulin sensitive we become through going Kito, Keto Green and intermittent fasting and extended fasting. That impact that again increases insulin resistance. What I've seen in my clients in that following my new book, the keto green 16 plan I've seen in in just as little as one month a woman at 50 year old woman's hemoglobin A1C go down from 60 to 5.4. 6.0 sorry, 6.0 to 5.4 in just one month, which is huge because if we move a point like a 0.1 if we move that work static, she went down six points in just one month so..
Allan (10:28): And so she's no longer diabetic.
Dr. Cabeca (10:30): She is no longer pre-diabetic. This is exactly right. Exactly right and just one month and so what a shift and the lower hemoglobin A1C, the less inflammation in our body, a gold target number for hemoglobin C is 5.0 and again a huge marker of insulin. So in Keto Green 16 we've really come a long way and to creating this in, you know, this increasing insulin sensitivity and the more insulin sensitive we are, the less hungry we are too, the more willpower we have, the less inflammation we have.
Allan (11:05): And that's because our body's able to pull our own body fat to basically give us the energy to do the things we're doing. We don't necessarily need that sugar for fuel to do it.
Dr. Cabeca (11:15): Right. Right.
Allan (11:17): Now you also talk about the other sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, can you talk a little bit about those?
Dr. Cabeca (11:25): Yeah, it's estrogen, progesterone, testosterone and DHEA. These are really well known as our reproductive hormones, our sex steroids, such as estrogen and testosterone specifically. But these are all involved and these are the hormones that we think about predominantly when we're thinking about reproduction. And as a gynecologist and obstetrician, these are hormones that I spent, and their pathways, I spent years studying. But this is where it kinda, you know, when I think about when it goes back to it, you know, cortisol, insulin and oxytocin are the major hormones and these kind of in under those. And so with all of these hormones, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone and DHEA, they all have a role in our metabolism and are, you know, they either they help to build us up, especially testosterone and DHEA, our more androgenic hormones and DHEA being pro- hormone that is needed to make testosterone and estrogen. So, and DHEA is a hormone that is depleted in times of stress, in favor of producing cortisol. So when we need to make cortisol, we're going to make cortisol over DHEA.
Allan (12:38): Yeah. Because we don't need to reproduce. If we're, if we're running for our lives, then we're not thinking about offspring at that point in time.
Dr. Cabeca (12:45): Exactly. Our body is conserving our reproductive potential. It's conserving everything to go towards the production of cortisol. And cortisol also will cause the depletion of progesterone because cortisol is made a derived from progesterone. So as we make cortisol, this very important progesterone is one of our mother hormones, not as it only, it's in men and women pro. It's comes from the words pro life essentially pro gestation, pro pregnancy, pro life. And progesterone is a neuroprotective hormone in both men and women. There have been many studies with progesterone in traumatic brain injury. Initial studies were done at my Alma mater, at Emory university in the ICU and the intensive care unit at Emory's, the neuro intensive care unit and looked at giving IV progesterone in clients with traumatic brain injury. And what the preliminary research showed is that when given bioidentical progesterone, patients who had traumatic brain injury fared much better. It's really fascinating on this aspect. This is a little tangent, but you don't mind Allan, do you?
Allan (14:00): Not at all. Not at all. I'm always out to learn something new.
Dr. Cabeca (14:04): Well it's so fascinating about this experience with pedestrian is that when they noted that women who were pre-menstrual had and had a traumatic brain injury, fared better than others who were not. So that's where the original research, a very observant clinician, made the observation and that led to the study of progesterone as a resuscitative measure, essentially in traumatic brain injury, both men and women. And from there, there's so much research on progesterone. We are in the infancy. I have no doubt that progesterone will be used and more highly recommended in the perimenopause menopause time period as well as a little bit for men. As we get older, for neuroprotective ability. It also boost our immune system supports TH2 immunity. So I just thought that was a fascinating point about progesterone in the brain.
Allan (15:04): It is. It is.
Dr. Cabeca (15:06): And so, so that's, that's pretty much that. And then when I talk about other hormones in the book, it's also the hormones of Thai tea and hunger. So leptin and Ghrelin are two other hormones that I talk about and we can be them resistant. I mean leptin resistant. So just like with insulin, like we never satisfied there in that song. Have you seen the musical Holton?
Allan (15:31): I'm sorry I haven't, no, I'm not a big, I'm not a big musical guy.
New Speaker (15:38): Oh my gosh, you've gotta listen to this musical. The music is bull and actually the producer perform for the white house for a bog, you know, and, and it's been, see, so it is, it just spending way, there's a song that I will never be satisfied that that's leptin resistance. That's leptin resistance. So that feeling of never actually like, okay, I've eaten. Why am I hungry again?
Dr. Cabeca (16:05): I'm never feeling satisfied. And that's kind of where leptin resistance comes in too. And then Ghrelin is our hunger hormone. When we start fasting, we can get really, really hungry and we know we're not going to die, right? We know that we're not going to die. We can go a long time without food. We can really go months without food, not without water. But we can go months without food. And Ghrelin hormone though when you're fasting peaks at day two of your fasting. So just like anything else, when we start doing more of the intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting, note that that is like increasing Ghrelin sensitivity so to speak is a muscle. Like anything else that we're going to exercise, we are going to work to build up to do longer and longer fast. But day two, Ghrelin this hunger hormone is peaking, making us think that we're going to die because we're, we're so hungry.
Dr. Cabeca (16:55): Just take some deep breaths, drink plenty of water and, do you know that will go away by day three you're like, Oh man, I continue fasting for quite awhile. So that's that Ghrelin hunger hormone. Okay.
Allan (17:09): And then you also in the book, I think you talked about adiponectin?
Dr. Cabeca (17:14): Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I left adiponectin now. I love adiponectin. This is really fascinating. I really just began to learn, I think there's so much to learn about adiponectin, but just like our sex hormones, adiponectin decreases as we age. There is an internal clock somewhere that manages adiponectin secretion because I think this is the reason why we gained weight as we're getting older without doing anything different. I mean there's a combination, but adiponectin to play right into this. This has to relate to our metabolism. And the higher adiponectin is the higher our metabolism is. So intermittent fasting can, and getting Keto Green, getting into ketosis in a healthy way can really help improve levels of adiponectin to we're actually increasing our metabolism.
Allan (18:05): Now, one of the things about the Keto Green 16 is that it's an alkaline style of eating. Can you explain why that's important.
Dr. Cabeca (18:15): Yes. Well, you know, it goes back to kind of my story. As I turned 48 and I was gaining weight without doing anything different, I knew, and I had been well over 240 pounds in the past. I've lost 80 pounds, kept it off for nearly that decade and just started gaining weight and anyone who's lost a significant amount of weight and starts gaining weight, often you feel like, Oh my gosh, when is this ever gonna stop? Like, I'll be 300 pounds before this weight gain stops because I, nothing I'm doing is causing and I'm not, you know, I'm like, I'm not going through Starbucks. I'm not going through Dunkin donuts. I'm not doing anything different than what I've been doing. And it's very frustrating. It has to do a lot with these hormones. And also again, the stress hormone, the stress hormones as well.
Dr. Cabeca (19:03): But I went straight keto. I'm like, okay, I've used this for my patients with neurologic symptoms and basically a modified form for my patients on candida protocols and, or who have had chronic yeast infections. And so I just really restrict carbs, increasing fats and protein. And within a few short days, I was feeling very, you know, it's not keto flu. It was really, I call it keto crazy. I was irritable, agitated on edge, and I was a single mom of teenagers. There's no way that I or my daughters could survive me going keto. And I was very interested. I'm a scientist. I was a scientist for the us Navy before I went to medical school, I studied metabolism and I worked in research and metabolism and I was like, well, what is going on here? Really what is going on here? And so I started doing what I asked all my patients to do when I detox them.
Dr. Cabeca (20:00): And as part of like a principle for like another vital sign is to check urine pH. And as I was checking my urine pH, I was acidic as the pH paper would read. And this is something everyone listening really should do. It tells us so much about our body, how we're nourishing our body and how we're controlling our stress. Cause lo and behold, the more stressed we are, the more acidic our urine pH is. So it's not just about what I, what we eat. But you know, I did not study that. I observed it. So as I was, you know, as I've recognized how acidic I was, I added in all these very low carbohydrate greens based on science for hormone balance. So the dark leafy, the charred, the collard, the kale, the beet cranes, and then the cruciferous vegetables. This is part of my Keto Green, 16. 16 key foods, scientifically studied and shown to help with hormone balance.
Dr. Cabeca (21:00): And so, you know, the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage and cauliflower. Oh my gosh cauliflower mash. So good. Yes. And so incorporated these in. But I also noted that on the mornings I walked on the beach or did my gratitude journaling and had my prayer time. My urine pH was more alkaline all day. So I recognized quickly like, okay, well what's the connection here? And that's where I found out that cortisol create by increasing hydrogen ion secretion across the renal tubules, it creates an acidic urine pH. So here we can use urine pH as a vital sign for how, we're affecting ourselves basically epigenetically even. So just that concept of how we are interacting with our environment, not just with what we eat, but with how we think about how we're living, how we're perceived, perceiving life, how we're appreciating each other and how that affects our physiology.
Dr. Cabeca (22:06): So the alkaline piece, I started shifting, getting more of the greens and becoming more alkaline and then pushing into ketosis. And that was like a light bulb moment because I felt so clear that, you know, the keto crazy went completely away. I felt like what I call energized enlightenment. I felt a higher connection to God. I felt just the sense of peace and calm and nothing in my external environment had changed, still had teenagers. Still was a single mom raising kids, solely supporting my family. But my peace and biblically we talk about the peace that surpasses all understanding the peace, which surpasses all understanding. I have a glimpse of that for the first time. And the first time I would say, yeah, basically a decade since I lost my son, I experienced this peace and profoundly so I also got my memory back cause from stress and you know, acidity.
Dr. Cabeca (23:07): I had brain fog and was thinking I felt like this early signs of dementia and as so many of my patients would come in and say this to me, right. But, like they were experiencing these symptoms. So that's this combination of getting an alkaline urine pH, getting more alkalinizes in your body, using it from the nutritional and lifestyle approach and getting into ketosis, getting into ketosis. Oh my gosh. That combination, energized, enlightenment, clarity. I could never have written a book, let alone two. And you know, I probably, you know, and even run my business. I just want to say exponential from near broke to a very, very purposeful and profitable business.
Allan (23:54): Yeah. And, and I'll also attest if you're, you know, writing a book is not an easy task in and of itself, but doing that while you're also running a business and doing the kids and everything else and trying to keep it all together that is a huge, huge thing.
Dr. Cabeca (24:12): Oh, I second that too. And I know you're writing a book right now too. I mean, it is a challenge. Kudos to you. Because for 10 years, for over a decade, I wanted to write a book. I never was able to get a page done. And this state of being and this clarity is just hugely transformative. And which is what we need. And especially for women. That's my area. Women are my area of focus and my priority, sorry Allan and all you men who are listening, but when women are better, you guys are better too. You know that.
Allan (24:44): True story. True story and I think the other thing that I'd like to mention is the foods that you're talking about, the leafy greens and the cruciferous and you also in the book you talk about some of the fermented foods as well. All of those are feeding your gut, which is a big, huge, I mean, it's a huge part of our immune system. So in addition to the clarity and the other things that are going well for you being in this keto alkaline state, you're also making sure that you're giving your body what it needs to protect us.
Dr. Cabeca (25:19): Absolutely. Absolutely. It comes down to the micro nutrients over the macro nutrients.
Allan (25:25): Now this diet, I mean, I again, I look at keto and I say, okay, you can't, I don't like to call keto diet because in effect it's, it's, it's more than that if you, if you want to stay this way. I mean, if you want some short term results, yes you can get it. But in the book you talk about 16 days and I see that as a kind of a bite size start where we're going to really learn some things about our eating and our health and our body. Can you talk about why you said 16 what's, what's the key there to 16 days.
Dr. Cabeca (25:55): Sweet 16. I love that number. 16 candles. All girls. All girls.
Allan (26:03): Well girls. Okay. Okay. All girls. Okay. There you go.
Dr. Cabeca (26:07): All girls, one son. Yeah. And and so the 16 has a lot of, like I was thinking about what number would really characterize this plan the best and how quickly can we get results. Right. And also something that's different. So we don't have like patterns of your 14 day or 21 day, so 16 is different. But also from a numeral logic perspective, it's a time of new beginnings. Really. It's time of like claiming your own strengths. And you know, for me it just resonated in a really way that in 16 days, you know, what's the shortest amount of time? Cause we always hear 21 days to change a habit. But I didn't buy that. So I went to the research and I also played around with all different types of programs and lacks of programs. And in 16 days we can get really tremendous results. And so that's my 16.
Allan (27:05): Yeah, and, and I completely agree. If you, if you get past two weeks eating keto and at that point you're keto, somewhat fat adapted, your body's starting to use body fat for energy. You're giving your body that the micronutrients that needs to do the style of eating here. Basically, yes, you're going to start seeing the initial results for this. And most people that I've worked with that go into keto and myself, when I go in and out of ketosis, when I go into ketosis, I'm almost guaranteed to lose five pounds the first week. And then by the 16th day I've probably lost anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds if, if I'm really on it and doing what I'm supposed to be doing. So I agree with you. I think you can see some tremendous results in just the 16 days. In the book you get into keto, clean and keto dirty. Could you take just a moment to get into those two concepts?
Dr. Cabeca (28:02): Well, yes. So when we, as you started this podcast with, you know, the concept of when we think about keto, keto dirty eating bacon, bacon and butter and processed foods and processed cheeses, it certainly will get us into ketosis, but it's not providing our bodies the micronutrients that we need to thrive on. Yes. Can we survive? Sure. But will we thrive, no. And so that's what I call keto, dirty. So there's again, so, so many ways to be keto right? We'll go into ketosis by eating nothing. Right. That's fascinating. We'll go into ketosis by eating nothing but with keto I say Keto Green, keto, dirty versus keto clean, which clean eating healthy food, ideally free range, wild caught, fresh, organic, grown in your backyard. Now I don't know about you, but I'm growing a garden and it is keto. So keto clean is Keto Green and that's the concept of a really balanced, nourishing approach to keto.
Allan (29:03): Yeah. Now you define those other way. I saw you list them in the book, I think you called them the 16 sexy, slim younger foods. Could you take just a minute to kind of go through those really quickly?
Dr. Cabeca (29:14): Yes. Yeah. Happy to. So the 16 foods that really can help support our bodies. Definitely the, I'm a fan, it's an omnivore diet, but in Keto Green 16, I also have a 16 day vegan plan. So substituting out my first three foods, which are B for bison, chicken and fish substitute and got out for black beans, white beans and chickpeas in my vegan plan or Tempe or tofu can always be a non-GMO, can always be substituted. So B or bison, chicken, fish are the key protein sources. And for healthy fat we're looking at our oils. So as another ingredient, for example, our olive oils or nuts or seeds, oils are fine, but olive oil in particular has so many great oleic acid is good for our heart. It's good for our flexibility or blood vessels. So I incorporate that in there as well as healthy fats from avocados.
Dr. Cabeca (30:12): Avocados get a special place in my heart. They're just amazing. They go from making a hearty sandwich to like a key lime pie dessert. I should share my key lime pie avocado recipe. It's really amazing. And so, you know, avocado put into your smoothie just makes it so creamy and delicious is seriously a super food. So, and then nuts and seeds, so nuts specifically that I recommend are Brazil nuts cause they're rich in selenium or pinoli nuts, which are high in fat and fiber. But zero, low, very lowest carbs. And it's just a really delicious nut, and so the certain nuts are available, but also then the cruciferous vegetables and then the dark leafy greens and they each get their own category because I really like the incorporation of a variety of foods. And then we have some citrus lime or lemon as another key ingredient.
Dr. Cabeca (31:12): And I'm missing, and then of course the alliums for sulfation such, so allium such as onions and garlic and the different groups to understand the reasoning for my composition of my recipes as well as choosing these foods. I wanted to cover every pathway for our body to helpfully detoxify our hormones. And so again, whether we're getting hormones exogenously through like hormones we're taking or Xeno estrogens from, even pesticides, herbicides, plastics, parabens and cosmetics and stuff that we're detoxifying them as safely as possible and efficiently as possible. So the food groups I chose were to help with these detoxification pathways, methylation, sulfation and glucuronidation. So that's the, the bulk of the 16 sexy, slim and younger foods.
Allan (32:12): And you do, you have recipes in the book, you have a full meal plan. So it's, it's all out there laid out for us. And again, the vegan version as well. So it's not like you have to go through and decide that you're going to eat the beef and the chicken and the fish if you prefer. You approach us from a vegan perspective, which I think is a new relatively new concept when we start talking about keto. Is that they don't seem like they get along, but you can in fact be keto and vegan.
Dr. Cabeca (32:39): Yeah, you can. And it's, it's really good periodically to lay off the, you know, animal meats, I say at least once or twice a year. I mean, we can all do that, you know, and its just to give your body and a chance to rest and increase the fiber to help with Kalanick health and that can make a big difference too, to do periodic fasting from meat in general.
Allan (33:04): Well, there you go with that. There you go with that F word again. And I just want to explain why you have another F word in the book. So you do talk about fasting, but you also talk about feasting.
Dr. Cabeca (33:14): Yeah.
Allan (33:15): Because we don't just fast or we don't just eat keto. You do have periods of time when you kind of, I guess for lack of a better word, the way we would say it in the bodybuilding or the exercise field is, is that you basically carb load or you actually do bring in more carbs for a period of time. Can you, can you talk about that process?
Dr. Cabeca (33:33): Yeah, that's essential. It's essential. That's what bodybuilders know, right? The importance of carb loading, but also metabolic flexibility and that's the reason we feast metabolic flexibility. Plus I'm a natural glutton. I love my feasting. I love it.
Allan (33:52): Now you are a big fan also of measuring, so measuring your glucose, measuring your ketones and as you mentioned earlier, your pH. You talk a little bit about that measurement and how we should go about that, particularly during these 16 days.
Dr. Cabeca (34:05): Yeah. You know if anyone has access to get the freestyle Libra prescribed by their physician, it should be over the counter, but it's not, it's a continuous monitor that goes in your arm. It's like a patch basically that sticks on your arm. It has a small filament that goes into the tissue and stays there for two weeks. But that's a way to continuously monitor your blood sugar. I wore that, I've worn that basically on and off for the past year, almost continuously for measuring the food and the food choices and the menu combinations and my plan for Keto Green 16. And it's so fascinating to see how, what increases your blood sugar and what doesn't. So in the keto world, you'll often hear, we'll have a cup of coffee while I had, you know, also in where, you know, I knew that coffee was impairing me from weight loss.
Dr. Cabeca (34:58): It was creating a plateau and I struggled with it. Cause every time I would take my coffee break, I would easily lose three to four pounds in a week. And I was like, how does that make sense? Coffee has no calories. But yes, in some of us it increases and most of us it increases cortisol, which will then increase glucose. So that was by theory. But when I started wearing this patch, Allan, I saw my blood sugar in the morning just drinking a cup of coffee. And even if I was reading or whatever, but just to drinking a cup of coffee, my blood sugar was going up 20 to 30 points, easy in the morning. Isn't that fascinating?
Allan (35:32): You're right and it's taxing your insulin because now your pancreas has to pump out a bunch of insulin to say, Hey, let's fix this problem. So the brain doesn't freak out because you know, no one wants to get mom mad. So we gotta clean up this mess. And yeah, so you, you're not losing any body fat at that point. And it's actually probably then putting you back into a point where now you're, your blood sugar drops too fast because you didn't actually eat anything. And then now you're wanting to, you know, now you're hungry now, now you're hangry. You're wanting to actually add that sugar. So yeah, I could see that being a big trigger for folks to know. And so measuring your blood glucose, measuring your ketones, measuring your pH will give you kind of the, the general scope of knowing that you're on track with this.
Dr. Cabeca (36:19): Yeah, it absolutely will, and you know, I'm a big fan of exactly what gets measured, gets managed. And so periodically, you know, weighing and definitely measuring urine pH and ketones to start is essential to discover what's working for you and what's not working for you and personalizing your nutritional and lifestyle plan.
Allan (36:44): Yeah. And you actually have on your site, I think you have, you sell some strips that you can measure your pH and your ketones all at the same time.
Dr. Cabeca (36:54): Yeah, I made them, I had them manufactured for me because I didn't like having two separate strips. And what's really unique about these, then I found out because ketones and pH, that's an acid and a base. They were running into each other. So I had to put a blank strip in between, blank pad. So on one strip you can measure both your urine ketones and your urine pH.
Allan (37:14): Okay, good, good. Now I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
Dr. Cabeca (37:24): You know, we just talking about test don't guess, and I'm going to tell you that especially now in times of increased stress is really getting control of our mental and personal mental atmosphere by testing, testing, urine, pH. I mean, it's just easy to do. It's so enlightening. So that's number one. And number two is that second part is gaining control of our mental atmosphere. Where we direct our thoughts is where we go physiologically. So shifting that to being the healthiest, most brilliant, sexiest selves we can be is key for resilience and managing cortisol and increasing oxytocin. So that's key. And the third part is regarding a strategy or tactics to get and stay well is it's, you know, so many, but you know, I'm trying to debate between sleep and, and movement. And I would just say movement, movement, flexibility on a regular basis, working out, dancing, exercising, getting up and moving together is so critically important. And especially now as the first couple of weeks of quarantine, I was like, I was, you know, definitely not moving so much. And now I've made it a principal to get on my walking desk treadmill to get outside when I can and to really make sure that in my life and in my children's life, we are moving and moving together.
Allan (38:55): Cool. Well, Dr. Cabeca, thank you so much for being on the podcast. If someone wanted to learn more about you and your book and all the things that you're doing, where would you like for me to send them?
Dr. Cabeca (39:06): Ooh, I would love them too. I would love them to, so come to my, DrAnna.com. That's my website. And there's lots of good information plus the book bonuses and information you can get Keto Green 16 anywhere books are sold. But one thing that I do encourage also is creating this healthy community. So join me on my Instagram page and in Facebook where I have my, keto green community and it's just likeminded people working through this together.
Allan (39:37): Okay. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/433 and I'll be sure to have links there. So Dr. Cabeca, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Cabeca (39:48): I'm honored. Thank you for having me.
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In his book, Lies My Doctor Told Me, Dr. Ken Berry explores areas where your doctor might be misleading you.
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Allan (02:12): Dr. Barry, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Berry (02:15): Hey Allan, thanks so much for having me.
Allan (02:17): You know, I've read your book, Lies My Doctor Told Me, I've heard you speak a few times about it as well, and I follow you on social media. So I'm really familiar with your messaging and your approach, which I think is really comfortable. You're a down-home kinda guy. And this book was written in that same kind of style that I would expect from you. This is a, you know, here's some things to think about. Here's some things to do. And I really like the approach you took with this book. Thank you. Now the title, Lies My doctor Told Me, it's a compelling title. It's, you know, it's out there. It's like, okay, well why would my doctor lie to me? Or, you know, is my doctor really lying me? What's going on there? You know, why, why do our doctors had it wrong?
Dr. Berry (03:03): Well, if you go to get a haircut and your barber tells you, you know, you should eat more whole grains, then your barber has no fiduciary duty to your health, to your nutrition. He just has to cut your hair well. Right? And so that would just be a myth or misconception or a misstatement. But when someone is taking notes to do no harm and who has taken it upon themselves to drape the stethoscope over their shoulder, I believe they should be held to a higher standard. I believe that they should go over and above and go out of their way to actually know about the care and feeding of the human animal. And that's why I chose to use the word lie instead of myth because it's actually, it's legally a lie if your doctor gives you bad medical advice.
Dr. Berry (03:56): That's legally looked upon in the eyes of the law as a criminal act. And that's why I chose to use that word. Even though the first publisher I thought about going with did not like that. He wanted me to change that. And that's why I initially self-published the book and then Victor Bell publishing later was happy to put out a second edition. But that's why I use that word and I understand strong language. But I think at this stage of the game, at this stage of metabolic disease where it's actually more common in the United States to have at least some of the precursors of metabolic syndrome, thats not. It's actually more common to be overweight or obese or morbidly obese than it is to have a normal body mass index. I think the time for kid gloves and, and syrupy sweet messages are over. I think it's time to be real and be honest and call things what they are.
Allan (04:51): Yeah. You know, I was an auditor in a previous life and when I first came through, they didn't want to use the word fraud because they felt it was too out there. So we use the term irregularities and after things got bad with the WorldCom and all that kind of stuff, there was this fundamental switch where we said, no, we actually have to start using the word fraud because people are not paying attention. They think in irregularities where someone just made a mistake and we're like, no, and irregularities where someone actually did something wrong, yeah, on purpose. So let's call it fraud. Now my doctor, when I go to him and he tells me I need to get rid of the egg yolk because that's got cholesterol and it's bad for me, still believes that in his heart of hearts that I don't need the dietary cholesterol.
Allan (05:35): So in a, in a sense as I'm talking to them, it is, it is a lie. Okay. It's a liable mission or a lie of just him not getting the education. Now doctors, they're responsible to go get CPE or I don't know what you guys call it, continuing education units, as a public account I had to do that. I had to do at least 40 hours a week, a year as well. Personal trainer, I have to go for about four days of training. Pick what training I do, why, why are doctors not looking at this crisis of obesity and saying I might want to go to a few things that are going to help me answer these questions and why my patients are getting sicker.
Dr. Berry (06:15): Probably the main reason that your doctor thinks that he's doing an okay job is because we're taught in medical school and residency as physicians that all patients are noncompliant. And so when he tells you, you know, you need to avoid the egg yolks and eat lots of whole grains and lots of fruits and vegetables, he doesn't think you're actually doing that. He thinks you're laying on the couch eating honey buns and Doritos. That's just the physician mindset. We don't think that patients actually follow our advice, although we're duty bound to give advice. And so I really think positions, they should start falling into two camps. And I think both of both camps are perfectly moral and ethical. And so camp one would be a doctor who's just not interested in nutrition, who doesn't care what I owed her about it. That doctor should just tell patients, look, I don't know anything about human nutrition. All I know how to do is prescribe the medicine and order tests, and order, you know, diagnostic imaging exams.
Dr. Berry (07:17): I don't know anything about what you should and shouldn't eat. I mean, look at me, I'm 20 pounds overweight, you know, I'm pre diabetic, obviously, I don't know. So if a doctor prefaced any conversation about health and nutrition with that, that'd be perfectly moral and honest because patients look up to their doctor and they expect that their doctor knows. And I think that's a reasonable expectation that your doctor should know about the proper care and feeding of of human beings. And so if you're a doctor and you're listening to this and you're like, I just don't care about nutrition, I don't care if ketos right or again, I don't care, then tell your patient that. Disclose that at the beginning of the interview so that if you do give nutrition advice in the future, they'll know, Oh Hey, this guy doesn't even care about that.
Dr. Berry (08:03): He's not going to eat. Bro. This is probably wrong. But if you don't put out a disclaimer like that as a doctor, then your patient, there's a bit of blind belief because when it all comes down to it, the patient either has to believe you or not. And if their health is at risk they're going to believe a trusted health expert, which is what a doctor's considered to be. And so the second school of doctors should be doctors who are actively reading and researching and looking and studying about human nutrition because obviously the reason that we're all overweight and metabolically ill is not because we're laying around. I mean there's actually research that shows that we're just as active now as we were in the 18 hundreds back in the 18 hundreds there was no obesity. I mean, you'd have to search all over town to find the one guy who's overweight back then.
Dr. Berry (08:58): So you can't say it's like an activity. Some people want to blame it on food additives, some people want to blame it on jet fuel in the water. You know, there's all these, these scapegoats. But in the end it's the food we're eating. That's what it is. And the doctor needs to be knowledgeable about that or shut up about that.
Allan (09:14): Yeah, it was interesting. My doctor, I really liked him, but he had a nutritionist on staff so he would just say, you know, we're gonna look at your blood work and this and this, but here's a nutritionist to talk to you about the nutrition side of this.
Dr. Berry (09:29): Yeah, that's much more ethical and much more consistent to just admit, I don't know a damn thing about nutrition. I'm going to send you to a nutritionist. Hopefully they do cause that should be the message because often they do not.
Allan (09:41): Well, he's still put a little bit of tidbits in there. Like, you know, the egg yolk thing. And so he had his own kind of methodology is on approach. His own thought process that was actually in conflict with what his nutritionist was saying, but at the same time I had the information presented to me and I felt like that was a pretty good deal. So if we don't feel comfortable getting that information, we need to, we need to stick it out ourselves or find a better doctor.
Dr. Berry (10:05): Yes.
Allan (10:06): You know, over the years, you know, things will come up and then they'll rise back up, they'll go back down. And so kind of the two, I'm going to call themwarring sides because it almost is tribal is you have one camp and then I'm calling both of these Olympic elimination diets. That's kind of how I look at them. One is the vegan and the other side is the carnival.
Dr. Berry (10:28): Yes.
Allan (10:28): And both of them, you know, they'll put science out there and say, this is why our diets right. Can you kind of just walk us through, I know you're a little bit more over to the carnivore side of this conversation. So that's why I wanted to have you on here. Cause I just had a vegan on a few weeks ago. And so I wanted to kind of bring this in and say, okay, let's talk about what the science is really telling us.
Dr. Berry (10:49): Yes. And so I think that a real whole food vegan diet is better then the standard American diet. And so, but now if the vegan or vegetarian diet you're talking about is including lots of processed whole grains and lots of industrial vegetable seed oils and lots of sugar where they're added sugar or natural sugar, then it can be almost as bad as the standard American diet.
Dr. Berry (11:17): I think that since the beginning of humanity as a species, we have eaten as much fatty meat as we can get our hands on. This is a, this is documented in the paleo anthropological record without doubt. We're able to go back and look at bones, whether they're 10 years old or a hundred thousand years old and look at the bones and the teeth. And we can actually do something called stable isotope analysis. And we can look at the carbon, the nitrogen in the strontium and other elemental analysis. And we can tell without doubt what these people ate. That's not up for debate. And so if being vegan says that we've always eaten a plant based diet and we, we've eaten animals if we were starving or had to, that's exactly backwards. And the anthropological record is very, very clear on that. That's really not up for debate at all.
Dr. Berry (12:11): If you ask any paleoanthropologists, they'll tell you, we ate as much fatty meat we can get our hands on only we ate vegie but when we wanted to or when we had to. And so is a vegan diet less inflammatory than the standard American diet? Yes, absolutely. Can someone switched from the standard American diet to a vegan diet and improve their health markers are less than inflammation? Absolutely. No doubt about it. But the problem with the vegan diet is they always compare their results to somebody eating the standard American diet. And so that would kind of be like somebody, you know, comparing crack addicts to marijuana addicts. Yeah. Marijuana is a little less bad, but that doesn't make, it good at least for most people. Does that make sense?
Allan (13:00): Yeah absolutely.
Dr. Berry (13:01): I think the problem is with their paradigm. I think vegans are very earnest and honest and I think they fully believe what they're saying and I do think there are benefits of removing all the added sugars and the soft drinks and all the grains and all of the highly processed highly inflammatory industrial seed oils from your diet.
Dr. Berry (13:23): Huge benefits from that. And so vegan may be where you land up. But I don't think you're going to find optimal health there. I think you're going to find health improvement, but unless you continue to move along the nutrition spectrum until you add enough fatty meat to your diet, enough liver, enough bone marrow, enough things like that to get all of the vital nutrition that a human body needs, and the human mind, you're just not going to have optimal health. And indeed we've seen in the last few years, many high level vegans come out and say, you know, I had to add some salmon back to my diet or I had to add eggs back to my diet because although some things were doing well, I just might, mentally I wasn't doing well or energy wise, I wasn't doing well. And you've seen that multiple, multiple times, but I haven't seen many high level fatty meat, heavy Kito influencers or carnival influencer say, you know, I had to add some kale back into my diet too. I just wasn't feeling good. You just don't say that.
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Allan (14:25): Yeah. You know, every time I see a study, they love throwing out the cancer word. Vegans really love that when they're talking cause they're like, read meat's going to give you cancer. But every time I've seen a study that even goes close to that, it says, you know, red meat and processed meat, they have to pair those together. They don't ever kind of segregate those out to see that one might be a confounder of the other. And then they'll go into the, well, when you cook your meat on a grill. Your doing this thing to it. So there's this, this battle there of do we include red meat in our diet? Is it bad for us?
Dr. Berry (15:04): Yeah. And I actually have a chapter in the book about red meat and about processed meat. All of the nutrition data that's been collected, all the nutritional research that's been done is based on food frequency questionnaires, which I'm sure you and many of your followers are familiar with. And so you would go and ask a person, how many cups of ribs have you eaten in the last six weeks? How many, how many pounds of brisket have you eaten? And so the average person who survied in these studies is not a carnivore, right? Allan? So they're not just, so when they hamburger, they're not just eating hamburgers. When they eat a hot dog, they're not just eating hot dogs and nothing else. They're also eating the ketchup and the bun that's from just highly processed wheat, they're eating the French fries, which is pure starch fried in the inflammatory industrial seed oils.
Dr. Berry (15:56): They're eating all of the accompaniments of that hamburger because there's not many people like me who would just go to Wendy's and order six hamburger patties and put some mustard on them and that'd be their meal. Most people in these surveys are not doing that, and so you cannot tease out, okay, yeah, this person ate more meat, but what that really meant was that person was going to Wendy's or McDonald's more and getting the super Whopper jumbo supersize meal and drinking a 40 ounce Coke or diet Coke with that little piece of meat that they were eating. That doesn't prove anything about meat. Does that make sense? I mean, that question is totally cloudy and there's no way to tease that out.
Dr. Berry (16:37): The only way to ever do this is to just take 50 people and put them on just a pure carnivore diet and 50 people and put them on a pure vegan diet and then 50 more and let them eat just whatever the hell and then follow those people for 10 years or 15 years. That's the only way this question's ever going to be settled. And I doubt seriously anybody really wants to do that study. The carnivores don't have, we don't have the millions of dollars needed to put on that kind of study. The vegans, I guarantee you don't want to put on that study because they're afraid of what the results will show and that's why you don't see that type of study done by Harvard school of public health or any of the others huge plant based nutrition authorities. They're never going to do that study,
Allan (17:19): Which then puts us in this, in this paradigm of okay, there are people who've been carnival or for a number of years. There are people who have been vegan for a number of years and if we start paying attention to their health health outcomes, that should give us at least some data and then we can do the experiment ourselves. If we feel comfortable that we're not doing something to harm ourselves, you know, we don't want to run out there and start a way of eating when we start watching other people, you know. And one of the things you brought up earlier, which I think is really, really important is ah, fueling our brain are actually building our brain. The brain is not made out of plant matter.
Dr. Berry (18:01): Right, not at all. It's made out of pure fat, cholesterol and some collagen to hold it all together. I mean, the brain is a, is a fatty organ and the brain uses 20 to 25% of your total energy each day, even though it's very small in comparison to other huge organs like your liver and your muscles and your skin. But so much of mental disease comes from diet. So much of suffering, so much of fatigue, so much of mental fog, forgetfulness, early onset symptoms of dementia. All of this stuff is coming from the diet. And one of the Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations just published a kind of an alert saying, Hey guys, to doctors, the incidents of dementia in 30 and 40 year olds is up 300% over the last few years.
Dr. Berry (18:56): Could you guys maybe look into that and see what's going on? Cause you know, Blue Cross is a huge health insurer and they're looking at this like there's no way we're going to be able, I mean if this becomes common for people in their forties and fifties to be disabled with dementia, everybody's going to go broke. And so you might want to look into this. So what went from being a very rare thing a hundred years ago? You know, great grandmother might have a little bit of forgetfulness, but there were not 30 something and 40 something year old people running around with Alzheimer's dementia a hundred years ago. That just did not happen. So even if you went back and ate what I just called the a hundred year diet, literally went back and found a couple of cookbooks from 1920 and ate only what was in those you would do better then you would do with the standard American diet.
Dr. Berry (19:45): We've really got to wake up or we're going to be faced with not only a personal health crisis, both mental and physical, but a nationwide in a worldwide just health catastrophe where there is no amount of money that's going to help keep people well. It's just, it's going to all fall apart if we don't start feeding the human animal the proper human diet. That has to happen at some point or the problem will become unsolvable.
Allan (20:14): Yeah. You know, it is something that, you put your head around this idea that what you put in your mouth is a building block for what your body is going to be made out of.
Dr. Berry (20:26): Yeah.
Allan (20:26): And if you're not getting well, we obviously know if we don't give ourselves adequate nutrition then we start seeing those deficiencies and that usually manifests in some form of problem for us. But there's this kind of thing going on in the background, particularly like with building our brain, with building our bones, with building our muscles with building all of us. If we're not putting the right material there, we're making ourselves out of fluff.
Dr. Berry (20:50): Exactly. If I took you Allan and I locked you in my barn, and this is a common analogy I use, and I fed you nothing but ribeye, steak and beef liver and that's and water and salt and that literally is all I gave you. Fresh meat, fresh liver and water and salt. You understand you could live in my barn for decades and you would not develop any vitamin or mineral deficiencies. And I'm happy to talk about vitamin C if you want to because there've been carnivores for 20/25 years whose skin and teeth look amazing. They don't have scurvy. And so there's more to the vitamin C story, then you have to eat lots of fruits.
Dr. Berry (21:30): But if I took a, took you again in an alternate life and locked you in my barn and fed you nothing but plants and on either one of these diets you can't have supplements. You can only eat food. So you could have any plant from anywhere in the world, from the, from Australia to Panama to the Himalayan mountains, any berry, any herbs, any roots you wanted. It wouldn't be many months if not maybe a year. You would start to develop serious fatty acid deficiencies and serious amino acid deficiencies. You would start to get sick, you would suffer and you would die early from eating that diet that was restricted of the vitamins and minerals that you can only find in meat, in any meaningful quantity. And so again, that's another research study that will never be done. We're never going to lock 50 people in our barn and feed them carnivores and 50 and feed them vegan cause it's very unethical to lock people in your barn first and foremost, you can't do That.
Allan (22:26): Well, If you have a gym in there. And I get Netflix, I'm probably good to come.
Dr. Berry (22:31): Yeah. If you had a gym and wifi. Exactly.
Allan (22:36): Well, you know, one of the things, I was interviewing one week, one vegan and one of the concepts he came up with is because I on the one side, you're like, well, you're not getting B12 you supplement with, and he's in his response was, well, carnivores have to supplement with statins.
Dr. Berry (22:52): No. Yeah, there is n such thing is a Staten deficiency. Statin medications are one of the most dangerous medications that a doctor can prescribe. And I'm not saying there's never an instance where a statin might have more benefit than harm, but 99% of the time a statin drug, and this is Levacor, Zocor, Crestor, and there's a couple of new ones, 99% of the time they do more harm than good. If you take your statin faithfully for 20 years, you might add three days to your life. In the process of that, you've lowered your testosterone, you've raised your blood sugar, you've raised your levels of inflammation, you've increased your muscle fatigue, your muscle aches and pains. Your life has gotten worse. Just the, just kind of your wellbeing measurement has gotten worse. You've lowered your testosterone, which is uniformly bad. You raised your blood sugar, which is uniformly bad. And really, the only way that the statins work is with an antiinflammatory effect that they also appear to have, which is well known in the literature. It has nothing to do with load lowering, total cholesterol. That's not how they give you those three extra days of life that you got for paying 20 years worth of copays.
Allan (24:12): Yeah, I don't, my cholesterol naturally runs kinda on the high end. And so that, you know, when those scares come out, you know, my doctor sees my cholesterol, he's, he's always kinda trying to push me in that direction and I just, I just always kind of pull back and say, you know, I've tried them. I don't like how I feel on them. They mess with my muscles. He says, well, we'll just try a different one. I'm like, no, I'm not going there anymore. I've seen enough. I don't believe that's going to be, I don't believe my cholesterol numbers is really a big deal because my high cholesterol relative to my total cholesterol is actually really, really good. My high cholesterol relative to my triglycerides, really, really good. So those ratios to me are what I want to see versus just this big number.
Allan (24:55): Now doctors in their standard of care are probably still going to have that conversation with you. And you have to talk to your doctor and realize, you know, there are some things that you could probably do to lower it, but it's a building block for testosterone. It, statins, also don't they affect the CoQ10, which damages the heart?
Dr. Berry (25:13): Yeah.
Allan (25:13): So if you're going to be on a statin you probably gonna want to supplement with COQ 10, just to make sure.
Dr. Berry (25:19): Yeah.
Allan (25:20): So you know, like you said, there's not an absolute for any one of us to say that we wouldn't benefit from it, but it's just something that you're putting a foreign substance in your body and it's causing some other side effects and you have to weigh that and let that pay.
Dr. Berry (25:36): And just the, the vegan argument of, well, those people are going to develop a statin deficiency. A statin is a patented molecule that's made in the factory. And so you understand their mindset a little bit. They're like, either you're going to have to take supplements made in a factory or you're going to have to take a statin made in a factory. What about a hundred thousand years ago? I mean, how did we get by? How did, how did we prosper and flourish? I mean, we became the alpha species on this planet a long time before people started advocating just eating plants or started advocating patented fake molecules like Lipitor, Zocor or Crestor.
Allan (26:16): I agree. Another thing that we do now that we didn't do then, we avoid the sun. We slather on sunscreen because we don't want to get the skin cancer. But we need sunshine.
Dr. Berry (26:33): Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I have a chapter in the book about that sun lights and getting a healthy tan is in no way a risk factor for skin cancer. Absolutely not. The research done on this is just laughable. It's embarrassing that when, I mean dermatologists are some of the smartest doctors out there. In med school, you had to have almost a perfect 4.0 to even be considered for a dermatology residency, so these people started out, they were the cream of the cream in medical school and now just to say something as dumb as stay out of the sun or you'll get skin cancer. It's just, it's ludicrous. A lot of the research done on that was done on donated foreskins, so when a little baby boy is circumcised. They would do little research studies on that. Looking for markers that they decided were markers of a precancerous condition.
Dr. Berry (27:31): The little foreskins didn't develop skin cancer. That's not what happened. They just had this marker that marker go up a little bit when exposed to UV radiation. And so they decided that meant that it's going to cause skin cancer. I mean all, there's just so many things I talk about in the book that just make this a ridiculous lie that doctors tell patients the sun protectors, the blockers, the SPF, what is it, up to 250 now SPF two 50 or something, I don't know. These things are full of, some of them are full of very worrisome chemicals that if you put the size of these on your small child, you can actually detect these chemicals in your child's bloodstream minutes later. There's a study published just recently about that. You're going to slash your child's ability to make vitamin D if you slather this sunscreen on them.
Dr. Berry (28:21): Maybe exposed them to chemicals that are not good for them. And I definitely don't want your child to get a sunburn. Absolutely not. Because first of all, it hurts and pain is a feedback that we have developed to show, yeah, that's dumb. Don't do that anymore. But getting a healthy tan, getting your vitamin D from the sun, and who knows what else we get from the sun Allan. Because basically back in the late sixties and early seventies when it became the trope, Oh, skin sun exposure causes skin cancer. Just imagine if you'd been a young researcher at Harvard and you'd went to your chairman said, Hey, I want to do a study. I think that we probably use the sun for other things besides just making vitamin D. I'd love to expose people to UV radiation and see what that does to other levels in their body. Do you understand you would have been kicked out of the chairman's office and probably released from your duties?
Dr. Berry (29:13): It was just, it's an studyable at this point in the, in the higher institutions of learning because it's considered central science that the sun causes cancer, but nothing can be further from the truth and so many of the carnivores play in the sun in their loine cloth every day in their skin looks amazing. They don't have skin cancer. Actually. People who work at the equator, and this is not dark skin people, this is even light-skinned people. They have less melanoma, which is the worst skin cancer, than people who are fully clothed and live in Norway. So you can't say, you just can't say that sun exposure causes cancer. It's a dumb thing to say. And I in the, in the chapter in the book actually give people the email address for the two largest dermatological societies. And I said, email them and ask them, send me the research study that shows that sun exposure increases my risk of cancer. And so many people have messaged me and said, you know, I didn't get anything or I got the foreskin study, which doesn't prove anything. And so literally that's what it's based on.
Allan (30:17): Yeah. I had dr Dallas Harwich on not long ago, and one of the things that he kind of gets into is that, you know, we talk about light exposure at night being a problem for our sleep, but he proposes that getting out into the sun, getting out into open air, blue skies, on a regular basis during the day is actually very important for us to maintain a good solid circadian rhythm.
Dr. Berry (30:42): Absolutely.
Allan (30:42): You know, and so that in and of itself is just saying you need to be outside getting some of that light exposure to set everything in place for you to get a good night's sleep, for you to build your hormones and all the good stuff that happens to us when we go through really good sleep cycles. So that's even another thing, is get outside and do some things. Now what I've found is, is yeah, if you go out there the first day and you stay out for six hours in the sun, you're going to get a sunburn. But if you get some exposure and pull back, get some exposure and pull back, you tan and you get used to that exposure and it's like, like a muscle. You just build a capacity to be out in the sun longer and longer and not burn.
Dr. Berry (31:25): And I'll tell you something very interesting, Allan, that I've noticed in my own personal health journey. And then hundreds of other people have said, you know, that same thing happened to me. I thought I was crazy, but maybe not. Back when I was just eating just the standard American inflammatory diet, I couldn't stay out in the direct sun on a beach at, at the latitude of, you know, Florida, Tampa Bay, Panama city. If I stayed out for 10 minutes, one minute longer, I was going to get a sunburn and I almost could not build up, I couldn't build the extra melanin and build up the tolerance. So the sun and I was the guy who would tell my phone, hey, wake me up in 10 minutes. And then I would go play with the kids for 10 minutes and then I had to go get to the umbrella or the rest of the vacation would be ruined because I'd be crybabying about my sunburn.
Dr. Berry (32:12): As I converted to paleo and then to real whole food Tito, I'm not a big keto product fan. I want you to eat real whole one ingredient foods. I noticed that I could stay in the sun longer without burning. I noticed that I tan better and I'm like, maybe it's all of the bright green colors, all the beta carotene or something in the vegetables, but back, what's it been 15 months now when I, did that first carnivore month challenge on my Facebook group and said, Hey guys, let's see nothing of fatty meat for a month and see what happens. When I started the carnivore diet, I can stay out in the sun five times longer now without burning. I can develop a radiant tan and I just, I thought I was permanently fish belly color. I didn't think I can tan back in the day. Now I can develop a good healthy tan. It's much harder for me to burn in the sun now than it was 10 years ago.
Dr. Berry (33:12): And when I started, when I said that on a podcast, I had multiple people reach out to me who were eating fatty, fatty meat, heavy keto or carnivores, and say, yes, 100% that happened to me too. And so now my current theory is, is that basically every cell in your skin has a cell membrane, right? And if you're eating enough fatty meats to build that cell membrane out of good cholesterol and good fatty acids, then that sale is actually able to function better than a sale that's built out of canola oil and all the other inflammatory crap that we eat. And I've noticed that personally and have had hundreds of other people verify, yep, I had the same thing happen to me. And indeed, if you look at most carnivores, they're always very tan and it looks like that their son is just much more able to use the powerful tool of sunlight to actually optimize their health instead of burning them.
Allan (34:10): There's, there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about before you have to go. I was sitting there with this guy. I mean we were talking and of course it comes up who I am and what I do. I own a gym and I do fitness stuff and so that's going to be where the conversation, 99% of the time it's going to go when I'm sitting down with someone and he said, you know, you said I was exercising and I lost all that weight and then I stopped exercising and I've gained it all back and he says, I need to get back to exercising. So I'll lose that weight. And you know, I put up my hand and I said, its what you're putting in your mouth, exercise. And you talk about this in the book. Can you go into a little bit more detail there?
Dr. Berry (34:50): Yeah. Exercise. I think exercise is like sunlight, Allan. I think it does hundreds of beneficial things for the human body and the human mind. It's a powerful, powerful tool that we should all use regularly. But if you are overweight, obese or morbidly obese, exercise is a terrible method for losing fat. And that's been born out in multiple huge studies, the women's health initiative study, like calorie restricted for a long period of time. And so calorie restriction can either be from burning more or from eating less. So either way that's you're supposed to wind up with a calorie deficit. That's how weight loss is supposed to happen. And indeed, if I lock in that barn of mine Allan, and I starve you, you're definitely going to lose weight. But it's not going to be just fat.
Dr. Berry (35:44): You can also lose muscle mass. You're going to lose cartilage density, you're going to lose fast or density, you're going to lose bone density. But nobody wants that. When, when we all say, when every one of us say, I want to lose some weight, what we actually meant to say was I want to lose some of this stored energy, some of this fat. That's what I want to lose. To do that, you have to change your diet. And I applaud you for being a gym owner and saying, Hey, Bubba, exercising aint going to help you lose fat. You go fix your diet to lose the fat. Now if you want to increase your endurance and you want to increase your your muscle, then yeah, get the gym. But if you're just trying to lose fat, step one is always, always, always without exception, fix your diet. That's how you lose the fat and how you lose most of the inflammation.
Allan (36:31): Yeah and I'll tell him then the next step is whole foods. You know, just, just whole food. I don't know many people who eat a whole food diet that really have a weight problem.
Dr. Berry (36:42): Exactly right. And that's, and you see this often in the vegans, especially now not in the vegetarians are eating lots of whole grains and lots of processed crap. But in a true whole food vegan, they're just not obese. Now they may still be pre diabetic or type two diabetic. They may still be quite inflamed, but they're skinny. And that's because you just can't eat enough whole foods to get fat. It's just, it's very, very difficult to do that. You have to eat to discomfort in order to do that, but eating processed foods, Oh, it's very easy to eat and put on too much fat.
Allan (37:16): Absolutely. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and well?
Dr. Berry (37:27): You got to fix your diet first and foremost. If you're not prepared to eat a proper human diet, then just forget all the rest of it and go watch TV. I don't know what to tell you, but when you're ready to actually achieve good health, then you've got to fix your diet. Number one. That's 90% of the battle is fixing your diet .and whether that is an OVO lacto pescatarian ketogenic diet or whether that is a 100% fatty red meat carnivore diet, I consider all those to be on the spectrum of what I call the proper human diet. That's number one. Number two, then you work on your lifestyle. You work on getting that morning sun, you work on getting your bedroom exactly perfect so that you can get the best sleep of your life. You start working out whether that's going for a walk or whether that's trying to beat your PR on the, on the deadlift, the lifestyle's number two. And then number three plus or minus maybe a few supplements if you're up in, you know, I recommend almost everybody over 40 should probably take a little coenzyme QT and unless they're a carnival workers, you're, you're to get plenty of that.
Dr. Berry (38:35): Especially if you're a nose to tail carnivore. But most people probably need some coenzyme QT after the age of 40 a lot of people who live at the Northern latitudes probably need some vitamin D. but, so a lot of people want to start. Alan was step three. Oh, let me buy a bunch of supplements. Yeah. Waste of time. Waste of money. A lot of people want to start with step two, let me join the gym. Let me, cause I feel like if I'm paying that monthly fee that will make me…no, no, that's, that's, you're just, that's not ever gonna happen. Step one, every single time is fix your damn food. Eat only real whole one ingredient foods. If it has more than three ingredients on the package, don't even pick it up. And really, if it has a package, don't pick it up.
Dr. Berry (39:22): That's not real food. That's a food like product that a big food corporation has manufactured to get your five bucks. That's all that is. Okay. And I've been saying for a few years now, I don't, I think that the food, big food manufacturing is going to crater. There's gonna be tons of bankruptcies because there is no real whole food ketogenic product that you can stock on a store shelf that's going to, that you can make in China and ship in a container ship that's going to be shelf stable for two years. Real food don't act like that. And everybody in the keto and carnivores space right now are, they're just trying their best to come up with a keto product or a carnival product. But every single time they do it has to be processed. It has to have extra crap added to it and it's even got a very short, short half life, which means it's still real food or it's turned into a Franken food like product that's just they're after your money.
Allan (40:21): Yeah, I would, I would just put my money into something like Maria Emmerich's keto cookbooks or something like that.
Dr. Berry (40:30): Start raising chicken, start raising cows that there'll be some money to make in that, but there won't be billions and billions of dollars to be made in that, and that's what everybody's looking for is a product that can scale up and make $1 billion. It's just not going to happen in the keto carnivores space because we real food here. We don't want your products.
Allan (40:50): Yeah, I completely agree with you. So thank you doctor. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book, Lies My Doctor Told Me, where would you like for me to send them?
Dr. Berry (41:02): Lies My Doctor Told Me, is available as a paperback, as a Kindle and Audible wherever fine books are sold. I have a little YouTube channel that I've got I think over 270 videos that you can watch for nothing that's absolutely free to watch them all.
Dr. Berry (41:19): If you just go to YouTube and search for Dr. Berry, you should find me. Dr. Berry Keto, Dr. Berry Carnivore, Dr. Berry, thyroid, testosterone. I talk about all this stuff on the YouTube channel, even toenail fungus. That's one of my biggest videos is how to reverse and cure toenail fungus and never get it again. And that video has been viewed over 2 million times, so it must be, there must be some truth in it. I've got a Facebook page where my wife, Nisha and I, we go live every Monday night. So this is, we're doing this on a Monday, so it's 7 PM central. We go live and talk about the latest news articles and the latest silliness in the news and in the media. And then we all answered a bunch of people's questions. I'm also on Instagram. I'm on Twitter. I'm even on Tik Toc Allan cause I'm trying to go grab those young kids before they develop metabolic syndrome.
Allan (42:09): That's perfect. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/430 and I'll be sure to have links there. Dr. Barry, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Berry (42:20): It was a pleasure. Allan, I'll be back anytime you need me.
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Dr. Arthur Agatston inventer of the South Beach Diet, has added a new twist to the wildly successful diet making it even better. His keto-friendly version should help you drop the weight for good. We discuss his new book, The New Keto-Friendly South Beach Diet on this episode.
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Allan: 01:00 Dr. Agatston, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Agatston: 01:03 Great to be with you Allan.
Allan: 01:04 Your new book. It's called The New Keto-Friendly South Beach Diet and I want to say, okay. I knew about the South beach diet, but it came out at a time in my life when I didn't really have to think about what I was eating or what I was doing, so I was familiar with it being, you know, kind of a more of a whole food protein style diet. Not dissimilar from some of the other stuff that was out there like Atkins and whatnot, but still very effective. A lot of people that I knew that did the South beach Diet really got good effect.
Dr. Agatston: 01:33 Yes, and I must say you weren't that interested the I was not that interested in diet. I was always thin until I realized I was, well I didn't realize it then, but I was addicted to sugar and I was pre what I call pre pre-diabetic even though my blood sugar is, everything appeared normal. But I, once I got off the bad, carbohydrates and sugar, I lost weight and it was I guess in my early fourth reason. I know, I love your show that 40 plus fitness because things change as we age, we get more fat, less lean body mass, less muscle and bone and exercise. The proper diet becomes more and more important as we age. Although our youth today are in big trouble with their diets. So it starts early, but it is tougher, is tougher as as as we age.
Allan: 02:35 Yeah. And I definitely want to get into some of the warning flags and things that we can look to before we get there. Because again, yeah, the doctors are going to say, Oh, you're a A1C is fine. Keep eating the way you're eating. That's not necessarily the answer. Because historically, I mean if we look back and you think about it and you, you talked about bears hibernating, but you know, in a, in a sense, human beings, we went through feast and famine ourselves, you know, and we would get into that. We get into that same season when when the bears fattening himself up and we're finding the berries and the nuts and we're, we're just gorging on that stuff. So our, our bodies were kind of pre-wired to put us into, for lack of a better word, what you call it. You were doing it like bingeing like you would eat a part of a blueberry pie and then you'd go back and eat the rest of it. I think that's just natural for us to do.
Dr. Agatston: 03:28 Yes, I love the, I do love the grizzly bear analogy. We're always either storing food for either an overnight fast when we're going to sleep or you know, in our history it was more often for times of famine and it's all mammals, but it's really almost all living. Ever since we became multicell cellular organisms, we had a, have a way of storing energy to use when there was no energy available from the environment. And so the fat storage mode where when we eat, whether carbohydrates, sugar turns into fat, other than what we're burning for our immediate needs and it's stored as fat and to some degree has starch or glycogen in our liver and our muscle. And usually we needed that not only when we slept and more eating, but we never had the luxury of three meals a day.
In most of our history. We were in a sense doing intermittent fasting, which gave us time for our insulin levels to go down when we ate our insulin levels go up, we store, we store storage in fat, and when it goes down, we burn it for energy. And that important survival mechanism has been totally upside down. When we have only the feast, we don't have famine. And so we're storing fat indefinitely and really creating physiologic problems that we never had in our natural existence. And it's most recently it's the abuse of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, which is, has been important because when it was introduced, it was ubiquitous really in everything and often a hidden killer in a sense. And our intake of sugar went up tremendously, really starting in the 1980s at the beginning of our obesity epidemic.
And people didn't realize they were consuming all the sugar and it was turning into fat being stored for a famine that never comes. And that's what really messed up our physiology, caused all the modern diseases. Yeah. We think of obesity. We think of diabetes, we think of heart disease, but it's cancer, it's depression, it's Alzheimer's. And every time we bring our standard American diet called the sad diet to another country, whether it's Dubai, Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, they get all the Western diseases, not just diabetes and obesity, but increased rates of cancer, again in Alzheimer's, autoimmune disease, all our chronic diseases. And when, what we often see now is when people came from more traditional diets like Asians, the Japanese had been studied carefully when they moved from Tokyo to Hawaii, to San Francisco. The rest of the United States, they, we've known for years, they get increased heart attacks, but they also get increased cancer, particularly breast cancer has been very well studied in Japanese women from Tokyo to the to the Midwestern United States. And so the cancer goes up as well as the obesity, the diabetes, and the heart disease.
Allan: 07:25 Yeah, so one of the things that you got into in the book is, okay, so you had, you know, we had the South beach diet and for a lot of people that was very useful because they went through a phase where they kind of allowed their body to change its insulin mode and effectively. Then after that short phase, they could go on and start reintroducing some of the food, say before until they kind of found that balance of a whole food diet that was basically much more nutritious for them. But you've adapted that so that the new South beach, new keto friendly South beach diet is just a little different. Can you kind of compare and contrast those and and why you use the term keto friendly versus just making it a keto diet?
Dr. Agatston: 08:05 Yes. I'm one of the first things that in the original South beach by the first phase, which was the low almost Keto phase only went for two weeks and what we know now, once it did get rid of cravings, the other thing that happens when you're low, you're low carb, low sugar, low processed foods is when you run out of your starch, your glycogen stores in your, in your liver and your muscle. You then have to get fat adapted, which means you really turn on the hormones, the enzymes that break down fat and make it useful. One of the best examples is the traditional marathon lovers who get hydrate loading on the night before the marathon and the idea was to fill their livers in their muscle with as much starch glycogen, that's the storage form of sugar if they could, because within two to three hours running the marathon, they would run out of the sugar glycogen stores and they had to burn fat and they weren't good at it, so that was called hitting the wall and they ran out of energy.
Now long-distance runners have learned to be fat-adapted and that takes one to many months and it continues. And I've had that experience myself. So instead of just the first phase being two weeks, we'd go for one to many months of low processed carb, low sugar so that we can learn to use our fat for energy. And the first fat that goes is the belly fat. And today it's interesting the long endurance runners, the people doing triathlons and even more than marathons are going low carb and they don't hit the wall, they burn their fat very well. Now for the rest of us, you know, it takes 12 hours to a day. It's individual where you, you deplete your Icogenics stores and you begin to burn more, more fat and become fat adapted and allowing for that is very important.
When I first became really strict and good, it's when I realized I, I was truly addicted to sugar and I went cold Turkey once. Once, by the way, I understood that I was truly addicted to sugar, that when I cheated, it wasn't a lack of self-discipline. And what would happen to me is I could lose my cravings on the first phase of the South Beach Diet. But when I went to the second phase, I would invariably have a fruit or maybe even a whole grain bread, but I would, or a dessert and I wouldn't sop and now we know it's not a lack of self-discipline. It's truly and addiction and many Americans, especially overweight Americans are addicted. But once I got off that addiction and stayed on sort of the traditional phase one the South beach diet, I did my first, I was, I started the diet while on vacation and I came back and I returned to my, to my boxing, which I did regularly. And I still, I recall vividly, it was a Tuesday morning in late September, hot in south Florida. And normally I would take a round or two off when I did my boxing and all of a sudden I didn't have to take around off. I went continuously for eight rounds and now I can 12 rounds, three minute rounds with a minute and a half rest.
Allan: 12:12 I do have to say this, if you haven't done boxing as a workout, three minutes is an eternity. I have some clients I do some boxing with and you know, we'll go for a minute. I've gotten one, I'm up to about a minute and a half and they're, they're done. You know, like I need a break. And so going, just even going a three minute round is saying something. But for you to have the endurance to be able to, you know, go round after round with what about a minute rest between rounds. That's, that's pretty impressive.
Dr. Agatston: 12:40 For my tender young age, I take an answer 30 seconds in between rounds.
Allan: 12:45 No, but still three, three minutes is a lot of time to keep moving.
Dr. Agatston: 12:49 Yes. And I couldn't in hot, difficult conditions, I would always take rounds off and since I'm fat adapted, I don't, I feel better physically and mentally and that much more than the cosmetics of losing my belly. And then remember I was a diet doctor. My wife used to say, Author, no more TV for you only radio. You get rid of that little belly and so, but it's much more the way I feel and since we've been, we've been more flexible with our patients. The results we see are incredible and besides the fat adption, the longer sort of phase one, the other idea is you don't have to be in full ketosis. Actually, when we're in the fat burning mode, we're often in ketosis. It's the levels we can't measure easily by current methods, but you can, you can lose the belly.
You get all the benefits without actually being in ketosis. The big advantage of ketosis, particularly for people who are diabetic, who really want to jump into something strict, is you can measure your ketosis and you can document compliance and that's, that's good for us often and our patients. But to make the diet a lifestyle, there still has to be more flexibility. We also encourage either time-restricted feeding or intermittent fasting. And we do suggest that with full keto, with fasting that you do it with a nutritionist, to health coach or your physician, your physician so that you can avoid problems such as what's called the keto flu. But so we are flexible in our approach depending on our patient, the needs, the desires and you can even be a vegetarian low carb as long as you're having whole foods and not having other process carbs. It's tougher but you can do it. And of course traditional societies that like the Asians with rice and not the Okinawans with with sweet potatoes, they were some of the, well particularly the Okinawans were some of the longest lived populations in the world, but they didn't eat snacks all day frequently. And now to the degree that sugar has shown its ugly face in all these societies, they are becoming overweight, diabetic and all the Western diseases that had been in the United States for decades.
Allan: 15:48 When you put this together, I mean cause like one of the things you said and I think that's really important is, well a couple of different things, but one that I thinks is really important is that we all are gonna have different needs. We're all going to be slightly different from a biology perspective of how we want to apply this. So there's, there is a lot of flexibility to this to say, I know, okay if I need to lose 30 pounds or I am diabetic, I'm probably gonna stay in phase one and be a little bit more strict and probably get to a point where I am in ketosis if not completely, at least most of the time I'm eating at that low of a low carb. But you have 12 rules for what you call keto friendly eating. Could you just kind of go through those rules with us? Cause I think that'll make a lot more sense to folks when they see, okay. It is really kind of flexible. It 12 rules sounds like a lot, but they're just the basics of if you're eating this way, you're going to be much more healthy.
Yes. And by the way, yeah, you got it exactly because the flexibility is we all come with different degrees of we call the thrifty gene and the tendency towards becoming diabetic ultimately. And so the rules are first minimize sugars is number one. And we might say no sugars, but you know, our parents and grandparents who had the sugar cube in their coffee was a lot different with the amount of sugar we're getting today. And so you can burn some sugar without having stored it. It's the volume that is totally off the charts today. And refined carbohydrates are absorbed more rapidly than whole grain or high fiber carbohydrates. And by being absorbed more rapidly, they, it's called the incorrect in effect, but they increase our insulin levels out of proportion to just the increase in blood sugar, blood sugar alone.
So if you give blood sugar a certain amount intravenously through the vein, the blood sugar goes up a little bit and the insulin goes up a little bit. But when you consume it, then you stimulate hormones. It's something called GIP, which causes an exaggerated increase in insulin. And that's, that's the problem with frequent feeding. And snacking, which we used to say, like everybody said, when you went to the South Beach Diet, have frequent snacks to stabilize your blood sugar, your insulin levels. That was just plain wrong. So the third rule is, is limit snacking. You want to give time for your insulin levels to drop and that's where having very low glycemic foods, whole foods or nothing for breakfast and lunch, that allows your insulin levels to go down. And that's when you can start burning fat. When your insulin levels are high, you block the burning of your fat stores.
So you can be once the, insulin levels stay high and you can't access your fat stores, you can be starving and you run to the fast-food restaurant or you have a coke that doesn't even suppress, doesn't even, doesn't even fill you up. So you want to give time for your insulin levels to drop by not snacking, having fewer larger meals, which is the next in the 12 rules or having foods that are absorbed further down in the intestine and don't increase your blood sugar and your insulin levels. We say maximize the healthy fats and one of the things is while some people I know don't like dairy cause they're sensitive to it, well saturated fat in meat, in dairy, we now know raises your large LDL bad cholesterol particles and they do not cause heart disease.
This is relatively recent knowledge but it's done. It's been repeated in several large studies. It's the small LDL particles that cause heart disease and they come from sugar and bad carbohydrates. And one other point that out the bad carbohydrates is again, it's volume. Because when you have a bad carbohydrate, you either burn it or if it's glucose, not sugar, you can store it as glycogen, as starch, but only so much about 700 calories. Then you then it turns into fat.
Allan: 20:50 Yeah. But that's part of the problem is these processed carbohydrates are process to basically make us eat more. That's what the food manufacturers are doing. If you don't eat, let's just say you're not going to eat one Pringle. You could eat one Pringle and maybe you'd love the taste of it and that would be all you needed. Your body could absorb that and you'd be fine, but invariably it's a long sleeve and you're not just going to eat one.
Yes, absolutely. And one of my favorite books by Dr. Robert Lustig from UC San Francisco, the Hacking of the American Mind, and he talks about how the food companies make us addicted. And yeah, I mean sugar. I seen another friend, Dr. David Ludwig, did a study where they gave Cokes to teenagers before they ran into a fast-food restaurant and they ate more, not less because fructose, the sugar in the cokes does not suppressed. There's not suppress your appetite. It actually increases. And again, those processed carbohydrates including sugar are absorbed at the beginning of your small intestine or you get that bad incretin effect where your insulin goes way up, and sugar is not turned into starch or glycogen in your liver. It's either burned or it's turned into fat right away. So a high sugar diet is a high-fat diet. And then we say, you know, limit the Omega six vegetable oils.
Of course, the original vegetable oils, and they're not made from vegetables. They're made from, from seeds. The first were made from cotton seeds now soybean and many other types. And they originally they were hydrogenated for shell finding and that was shown not to be healthy, to be very unhealthy. They were outlawed. But instead of going to just traditional saturated fats such as lard, butter, coconut oils or olive oils there going into nonhydrogenated vegetable oils. And Americans were never, humans, in general, were never exposed to naturally. We need small amounts of these or else they're called on your Omega six oils, which today are the vegetable oils and small amounts are fine, but when you process them and create the salad dressings, the cooking oils, we were never meant to have that many oils and it throws out our Omega six inflammatory measures to Omega three oils which are anti-inflammatory.
So where our ratio of omega six to omega three should be from one to four to five to one in most Americans its greater than 10 to one. And so you should be avoiding all vegetable oils as far as I'm concerned, it's proinflammatory but your vegetables and you know the nonstarchy vegetables, asparagus and brocolli, Brussels sprouts and green leafy vegetables, the spinach, those are all good. Yet when the problem is when we always talk about fruits and vegetables because a lot of fruits have a lot of fructose, particularly the tropical fruits, so fruits have anti oxidants that could be good for us when it's a whole fruit in the form of a Berry, but a lot of people think they're being healthy cause they're having a lot of fruits and they can overdo it because of the sugar and the fructose that makes the fruit sweet so we shouldn't be always loving vegetables and fruits and fruits together and then a wide variety of needs, poultry, seafood all very nutrient-rich and eat primarily whole foods.
The best example of this I think is the field cut truly whole grain oats versus instant oatmeal and with actually the same amount of fiber when you have the steel-cut oatmeal, the sugar or the or the starch core of the oat is surrounded by fiber. It takes a while to digest and releases the starch, the sugar into the blood stream slowly and you stimulate the enzymes further down the intestine that are good when you have processed instant oat meal. Even if you have the same amount of fiber, it's not surrounding the starch core and so it's absorbed much more rapidly. The enzymes, the hormones have direct access to the starch, it turns to sugar instantaneously and that increases your insulin levels rapidly and you're much hungrier. The studies have been done, you're much hungrier sooner than if you have the steel cut true oatmeal.
So, and that's true of eating whole foods and that means whole foods adding the fiber in separately. There's just a lot less evidence that that's helpful. And flexibility. It's more important not to be snacking and not to be eating frequently often than sometimes what you eat if you're eating in a relatively small window or during intermittent fasting. I hate to say, you can get away with more because you do increase your starch stores and your insulin, but then you have a long period of time to burn off that starch and the fat that's been consumed. So we prefer whole good foods all the time. But if you're going to be, if you're going to cheat, cheating in a short window is much better than if you're grazing and eating all day. That's disaster. There were snacking very well documented where we're eating many more times per day than we were in the 1970s and it's cause we're walking around hungry all day because our blood sugars are swinging around and our insulin levels are high and we don't have access to that big store of fat in our bellies.
Allan: 27:38 Well, and I think flexibility is important, but this is not, we're not talking about a license to just say, okay, I'm going to allow myself to have a piece of cake every night because I can, I'm only having, you know, two big meals a day and therefore I know I can have, and that's great. But if you're wanting weight loss, if you're diabetic or prediabetic or as we're going to get into in a minute pre pre-diabetic, then you have to understand, or you no you're addicted to sugar. You really have to think hard about how you can approach this and use this diet as a tool to get yourself healthy, to get yourself off that addiction because it's possible. But if you're going to start the game cheating, you probably not going to get there very fast.
And by the way, I mean that is the mistake that I frequently made without knowing. But even now, I mean, in the holiday season, if I'm acting in a fair, and this has happened and I, you know, and I eat the wrong food, the addiction comes back so quickly. And other than that, knowledge of I I can't do this or I can't keep doing this and I can get back on the wagon pretty quickly. But you're, you're, you're absolutely right. This is not a license to be cheating every night. I mean, the good thing if it's once a month or you know, somebody loves their pasta meal and there's a good amount of protein with it. And that's, that's again, depending on the individual, some people will immediately fall off the wagon and get into big trouble. Others, I always have patients who don't have the sweet tooth I have and they can have a bite or something and have a bite, you know. In Miami we have, we have Joe's stone crab and their key line pie. And I generally can that have just one bite. So I don't have it at all. And others can, including my wife. So that's knowing how each of us are as individuals.
Allan: 29:44 And that's one of the things I liked about your book was it took that into account and said, you know, because now you've dealt with thousands of patients and yourself and it's like we're all going to have to approach this slightly differently and we're going to figure out what works for us and we're just going to have to be self aware that you know, if we have this addiction, if we have this issue. One of the things you had in the book, which I thought was really, really important because by the time you go to the doctor and your A1C is over six and they're going to start now diagnosing you with diabetes, you're way down the road and you talk about some tests, some things we can look at before we even get to that point. And so these are tests I'm actually kind of interested in having done because my A1C is great. My blood sugar is great, but that doesn't mean I'm out of the woods. It just might mean that right now my body's creating a ton of insulin and it's able to shuttle all of that blood sugar away so I don't stay in a high blood sugar state. So one of them you call was, it was basically the insulin resistance test or you know, insulin. And then the other one was called the Atkinson calcium score.
Yes. The first, as far the points you've made about insulin are so, so important. So in fact, if we take in America healthy young, 20-year-olds, not overweight today versus the 1970s their hemoglobin A1C, maybe five are they're very normal. They're fasting. Blood sugars are absolutely, absolutely normal. They give a glucose tolerance test where you take a drink of 75 grams of sugar, glucose and wait two hours, their blood sugar comes down. But if you measure the insulin levels, it's taking four times normal insulin levels to keep their blood sugar normal. And that's already hacking fat into their liver, if you anybody, even teenagers, if you see a belly on anybody, a little protrusion, it means they have high insulin levels and they have excess fat in their liver. That's where it all, it all starts. So the test that we do, we call it the insulin secretion test, your insulin-resistant test.
It was actually developed by Dr. Joseph Kraft in the 1970s he died recently at age 94 and unfortunately, he did great work. Unfortunately, it was not recognized by the nutrition establishment, including the American diet. I thinks its an association. Partly, you can only measure insulin levels. In the 1960s the developers undercut the Nobel prize and hasn't been measured clinically until very recently. But he did the measurements when it was very expensive, but on 15,000 patients and he found that he called it diabetes insight too. I call it, it's kind of a medical term, I call it pre prediabetes because anybody with high insulin levels is having problems already, whether they know it or not. Including depression. There is an epidemic of colon cancer in young people, breast cancer, which are related to high levels of insulin. And so the real tests you need, which I'd like to give Kraft credit, called the Kraft test, is you take the insulin, the glucose drink, which was given in the traditional oral glucose tolerance test.
All pregnant women today get the oral glucose tolerance test, and instead of just measuring blood sugar, you measure insulin levels. And so, so many people who have bellies and some, are what do you call it? TOFI. There's thin on the outside and fat on the inside. If you look with a CT scan, cat scan of their belly, they have belly fat. Even though from the outside you would never realize it. And so you can really only tell, you could do it if you do a special MRI of the liver, but that's too expensive and not practical. The Kraft insulin secretion test, it's not expensive. The main thing is it's done over two hours. You do a fasting in some level, then you drink the glucose and then you repeat it at 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes and two hours. And so we see patients who already have plaque in their coronary arteries, they have all kinds of chronic illness and their A1C is normal.
And so the fact is it takes years to develop. The fat is not only in your liver, it's also in your pancreas, and it's not till your pancreatic beta cells that make insulin, that synthesize insulin, become injured by the fat in the pancreas and you can't make enough insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. That's when your A1C, your fasting blood sugar goes up. And that's when we diagnose you have a problem pre diabetes or diabetes. But in fact, 10- 20 years before you can measure high insulin levels and people are suffering from again, skin problems to having cancer to heart disease when they're told your blood sugar is normal, don't worry about it. So that's, it's so important to understand. If you have a belly, you have high insulin levels, you're at risk of having heart disease, diabetes and cancer and Alzheimer's. Even though your doctor say your blood sugar is normal. So it's very important to get that word out right.
Allan: 35:43 And then the calcium score is basically going to tell us how much plaque is built up already.
Dr. Agatston: 35:50 So yeah, the calcium score I developed with my colleague Warren Janowitz. And if you're heading for a heart attack, if say you're 40 years old and you're heading for a heart attack when you're 50, 55, 60, you already have plaque in your coronary artery. And with the calcium score, it's inexpensive. In Miami, it's $99. At Johns Hopkins, it's $75 to have the test. You can,uand it's essentially no radiation. It's a cat scan that has some radiation, but you get more radiation when you, when you fly in distance. So the radiation is not an issue for cost is really not an issue. And even though your cholesterol might be normal, things can look normal.
But again, if you have a lot of small LDL particles and other problems that are hidden, you may be developing plaque and you can't tell with a cholesterol test, LDL test or any other tests. Here you're looking directly in the coronaries with a safe, inexpensive test and that tells you what your risk is of a future heart attack. But it also, it predicts all cause mortality because it indicates how the various risk factors for chronic disease are mixing in you as an individual. So the one thing that we see now is we see people whose hemoglobin A1C, their blood sugars are normal, but they have high insulin levels. They may have some other genetic markers that we look for cause you're my practices is cardiac prevention. But those tests are not so difficult to get either. But the main thing is that with the high insulin levels, the sugar and bad carbs they're consuming is turning into fat in the liver and they're overloading the liver with fat.
That causes a lot of problems. But one thing it does is it turns the normal LDL in to small dense LDL, small LDL particles that are not cleared by the, in the bloodstream easily. They don't fit into the usual receptors. They become oxidized and the oxidized LDL sticks to the vessel wall. It gets underneath the vessel wall, builds up the plaque and we again can see with the calcium score, you can see the build up of that plaque and the result of the high insulin levels years before you get chest pain or a heart attack and you can monitor it and then can prevent it.
Allan: 38:36 And I think that's huge. You know, so many of the tests and the things that we get diagnosed with, we're already sick and this is an opportunity for you to catch it much, much earlier, even if the other tests are coming out relatively clean these are really cool. I, I really appreciate this cause I was having, I mean I remember interviewing Dr. Fung and his, his book about the Obesity Code, and back then and he's like, you know, it didn't make any sense to measure insulin because you're doing it fast and you're doing it one time. But you know, here's some advancement where we're saying, well let's, let's go ahead and test the other side of this. The sugar is glucose equation. Basically using the same test, just looking at the actual insulin response, which I again, I think that's just brilliant.
Dr. Agatston: 39:17 And I yeah, I admire Dr. Fung a lot. And but you can't just measure the fasting insulin. We have people with normal fasting insulins and I'm particularly young people are at at 30 minutes after the glucose load their, I mean their insulin levels are in the hundreds, whereas their fasting glucose is normal. In older patients, you get more and more of the delay in the insulin, which indicates dysfunction of the beta cells in the pancreas that are making insulin. And that's because fat, we know that you get a fatty liver years again before you're diabetic or, or even pre-diabetic. And the fat is also going into your pancreas and interfering with the beta cells. And so you get a delay in the insulin secretion. So we can see both the degree of insulin resistance and the degree of what we call beta cell dysfunction, the pancreatic dysfunction that eventually is going to lead to the high blood sugars when you can no longer make enough insulin to keep the blood sugar normal.
And the other thing with this delay in the production of insulin is the insulin peeks hours after a meal and it stays high and that's that high insulin level that is locking in the fat after a meal. So when people get up in the middle of the night starving, even though they have all these fat stores in their belly, in their liver, in their muscle, the problem is they have sustained high insulin levels that blocks the enzymes that breaks down the fat and gives you the energy in the hibernating bear late in the fall. The bear is, they're eating the fruit that's become ripe. That's why fruit is seasonal and they are ravenous, depleting the forest of blueberries and other berries, even though the bear has already put on 400, 600 pounds of fat, but they don't have access to the fat because their insulin levels high. So they can continue to put on the fat for the winter hibernation.
Once they're hibernating and they're not consuming that fruit and the fructose in the fruit, then their insulin levels drop. Now they have access to the fat and that's how they hibernate the whole winter without eating because its that fat that is helping their brain, their kidneys, their heart to continue to function while they're asleep. So normally when we sleep every night we're not eating, so we're accessing our storage starch and fat. But what our insulin levels are high, we can't. So the blood sugar falls and we may wake up in the middle of the night starving and go to the refrigerator and have whatever sugar and carbs are there to bring our blood sugar back up. So it becomes a really vicious cycle.
Allan: 42:36 Yes it does. And so I think this is, you know, we're, we're into January here and I think, so this is kind of a great time to look at something like the Keto Friendly South Beach Diet because it's going to help you regulate your insulin. It's going to help you kind of go through a good period now where you can be thinking in terms of the bear or humans and what we would and wouldn't be eating. The rules are pretty simple. You do have meal plans in there and recipes so it's all put together very well. So again, I think this is an excellent opportunity to take something that worked. The South beach diet definitely was one of those things that people, when they follow it, it worked and you've improved it, which I think again is just wonderful.
Dr. Agatston: 43:16 Well thank you. Thank you so much. And Allan, I mean you obviously you really got it. And it's part of the book is certainly understanding the principles because even for me, who was the cardiologist diet doctor telling, putting my patients on diets for years, but I didn't understand the addiction aspect. Once I did it made such a difference for me and it is, it is for my patients. So this was not necessary eating differently. I mean it was the understanding that made me stick to principles that I already knew. So understanding the role of insulin and how it's different for all of us and understanding flexibility, understanding that America is not overweight because we all of a sudden lost our discipline or for that matter have stopped exercising. Exercise is very, very important. But what causes, what's caused the obesity and chronic disease epidemic is mainly, it's mainly the way we're eating.
Allan: 44:22 I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and sta well?
Dr. Agatston: 44:32 I would say understand insulin, keep it down, don't snack between meals, try some intermittent fasting and others is getting a good night's sleep and this enters in. Of course, if you're overweight and have sleep apnea, you may not be able to sleep proper, but we know a lack of sleep. Again, it stimulates enzymes and hormones that lead to high insulin levels and the other is regular exercise. And exercise is not going to be a solution from the calorie burning aspects. They prove that on the Biggest Loser for your, for your brain, for insulin sensitivity, for keeping up lean body mass. And you know I, you know, I love your podcast and the and being well over 40 plus that we have to keep our muscle and our bone. And you know, when we weigh ourselves, it's the weight, the BMI doesn't really mean anything because that includes, muscle, bone and fat under our skin, when we call the subcutaneous fat, it's only the fat in and around or origins.
That's the dangerous fat that we have that we have to worry about. And regular exercise, it improves our brain function, improves our sensitivity to insulin. So it decreases insulin resistance and it helps us age. We sustain lean body mass and on balance and so many things that's part of healthy aging. And I agree with you. Wellness, we use the term optimal health and it's, it's your vitality. And again, what's kept me on the changes in the diet that I made is I vitality, my ability to exercise, my ability to concentrate, get rid of the brain fog. And it's all those things. My belly was often hidden, people couldn't see it where I was wearing clothes but I knew it was there, but it's because I feel so much better with this and this type of lifestyle. So sleeping right, my exercising right and eating right.
And as you age you have to be more and more concerned about each of these elements. And so I really applaud for what you do with 40 plus as we age, we do become more insulin resistant and it becomes tougher and tougher and you have to get enough sleep, enough exercise and eat the right foods and not eat too often.
Allan: 47:18 Great. Thank you for that. So Dr. Agatston, if someone wanted to learn more about you or learn more about the book, The New Keto-Friendly South Beach Diet, where would you like for me to send them?
Dr. Agatston: 47:30 South beach diet website changed recently.
Allan: 47:36 Okay. That's good. Yeah. Just send me the link and I'll make the show notes so you can go to…
Dr. Agatston: 47:41 Agatstoncenter.Com is our office, our website. It has all of information too.
Allan: 47:48 Cool. Well you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/416 and I'll be sure to have those links there. So Doctor, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
Dr. Agatston: 47:58 Thank you Allan so much. It was really enjoyable.
It's that time of year. It's the time of year when everybody is thinking about health and fitness. Maybe you've set some resolutions, maybe this is the year that you want to get healthy and fit and if it is and you need a little bit of help, check it out at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/coach you can come on as a group client and I can help you lose weight, get stronger and make 2020 something special. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/coach.
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[00:02:55.110] – Allan
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