4 Ways To Eat Yourself Beautiful: Meat On The Bone, Fermented & Sprouted Foods, Organ Meats,...

Hello.

Hello. I'm Ben Greenfield.

Put down that anti wrinkle skin cream, will you? Because today you're gonna learn how to eat yourself beautiful.

That's right.

You can eat yourself. You can probably eat yourself ugly too. But today we're gonna focus on the.

Eating yourself beautiful part.

And it's with Dr. Kate Shanahan. She is brilliant.

She gives meals to folks like the.

Lakers and the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team has them eating things like bone marrow and raw milk and all sorts of crazy st. We have a great, great episode. But before we jump in, I want to tell you about this thing called shockwave therapy I've been doing to myself. That's right. I'm a complete masochist. I've been shocking myself. No, I haven't been doing it. Licensed medical professionals have been shocking me. No, seriously. They use these painless high frequency acoustic waves in my crotch to open up old blood vessels and stimulate the formation of new vessels. And men can do it and women can do it. And what happens is that down there, the vessels we. As you age, so you start to lose the intensity of your orgasm or for guys like your size or your firmness. And a lot of people turn to Viagra or Cialis or a lot of women just assume that they're just losing feeling as they age. So goodbye. No longer is that the case. There's this thing called Gainswave. They use this non invasive medical treatment called extracorporeal shockwave therapy, which uses high frequency acoustic waves to basically stimulate yourself back into action. Lasts for a long time, too. Some people will go in for several treatments. I just did one treatment, worked great for me. And you can get 150 bucks off trying this thing out. Just text the word GREENFIELD to 3131. 31. Text GREENFIELD to 3131. 31. Also, if you want to go get it done where I got it done down in Miami, then when you go to gainswave.com and click find a doctor, go see Dr. Gaines. I actually think his name is Dr. Richard Gaines, like Dr. Dick Gaines, which I think is freaking hilarious. Anyways, go to Gainswave and you can find the doctor down there. I went to Miami. They'll give you an even bigger discount if you go to the Miami clinic. So there you go. You're welcome. Also, speaking of shocking yourself, this podcast is also brought to you by more Electrical muscle stimulation. So there are EMS devices all over there. You can buy them on Amazon for pretty cheap. They, like, shock the muscle back into action or train your muscle or give you six pack abs or whatever. The problem is most of these things use modern microprocessors that generate what's called a static square waveform. Static square waveform.

Man.

What's up? What this does is it contracts all the muscles at full power and holds them at full power and then releases the muscle. That's an unnatural signal. It's harsh, it's uncomfortable, it's fatigue, it's not great for recovery. So what this thing called the Mark Pro uses is something called a brace yourself proprietary dynamic decaying waveform. So what that does is it contracts the muscles slowly and then slowly releases them over time. So fluids move in and out, inflammation moves in and out. I put a photo on Instagram the.

Other day of me using it on.

An airplane on my shoulder. So, yeah, the tsa, they don't care. They got bigger fish to fry apparently than you walking on an airplane with an electrical muscle stimulation device. They need to confiscate pens from old ladies instead anyways though. So, yeah, you can use on airplanes, buses, cars, bedrooms, you name it Mark Pro and you get a discount. You go to markpro.com that's with a C, not a K. For you people who read the Bible, MarcPro M A R C Pro.com and use the promo code BEN for 5% off. Promo code BEN for 5% off.

MarkPro.

MarkPro plus they got a couple slick models. Check them out. And now onto today's fascinating discussion with Dr. Kay Shanahan in this episode of.

The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

It's like a Trojan horse. It looks normal, but because you don't have the protective antioxidants in the amounts that you need, they just will degrade with time. We do know that these sorts of cellular transformations have been done in lab. So you can take a fat cell from somebody's hip and convince it to turn into a bone cell or a muscle cell simply by using hormones that would be present in your body at normal amounts and nutrients. You don't have to do like any kind of genetic engineering or anything to get that to happen.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power.

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and I am holding in my hands right now one of the nutrition books that I find myself recommending. Most often when people ask me, hey, what, what, what's like one of the books I should read if I just basically want to wrap my head around what kind of diet you'd recommend, Ben. Because frankly, I personally have never written a diet book. So this book that I'm holding right now is called Deep why your Genes Need Traditional Food. And actually, two years ago, the author of this book came onto my podcast as a guest. We did an episode called how to Use Food as yous Body's Fat Loss Language. And during that episode, we delved into how the way your body interprets the food you eat can make you either lean or fat, depending on your food choice. And we delved into a lot of the nitty gritty science behind that. Well, now she's back, because she just rewrote and published a brand new updated version of that book, Deep Nutrition. Her name is Dr. Kate Shanahan. She works with the LA Lakers. She runs a metabolic health clinic in Denver, Colorado. She's trained in biochemistry. She's trained in genetic. She is one smart cookie. I've hung out with her. She's pretty fun, too. She knows a lot about genetics and how food affects our cellular growth and our DNA. And we're going to talk about everything from how to eat yourself Beautiful to why vegetable oil is the brain's worst enemy and a lot more. So, Kate, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Ben. It's great to be on again.

Yeah. And by the way, if you're listening in and you want to access anything Kate and I talk about today, I. I'm going to keep track of all the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com DeepNutrition2 that's BenGreenfulFitness.com DeepNutrition number two. So, Kate, this book is a. It's a beast.

I mean, it's. How long?

It's like 460, 470 pages long.

Yeah, it's almost 500.

How long did it take you to do the rewrite?

About a year.

Wow.

We could have actually written a whole other book. And in retrospect, maybe we should have. But, you know, this. This one book now is just going to give you the entire picture. I think that'll really help people who really want to understand, you know, clear away the confusion and some of the noise. I Think that that can be out there and can get a little bit distracting for folks. And because my husband's a writer, we're hoping that you'll actually enjoy the reading. And for the first edition, we did have a couple people tell us that they were sad when it ended because it was like they were wrapped up in a story.

Yeah. And by the way, how long did you publish the first one?

End of 2008. So there's been a lot of science that's come out since, and we just tried to shove as much of it in there. It was just. It's also important and interesting and reinforcing of the general principle.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that that's relevant because I noticed in the beginning of the book you have a story from 2012, and I was trying to remember if that story was in the original book. And I don't remember seeing it in there, but it's kind of a shocking story. I think it's kind of a perfect place to start with this book is you went over to visit the CIA, not the Central Intelligence Agency, but the Culinary Institute of America. And it's pretty shocking, this story that you tell about oil in that discussion that you had with the Culinary Institute of America. So can you go into what happened in 2012 when you went into their offices?

Yeah. So we were called to the president's office of the CIA in Greystone, in Napa Valley, where we were living, because my husband and I, Luke, we had written an article called the Canola Blob. And we were warning people that canola is promoted as heart healthy, but don't believe it. It's very pro inflammatory and bad for your brain and so on. And we were writing it in part to the chefs in Napa Valley, because Napa Valley is like a great place to visit because there's so many restaurants. But we were disappointed when we moved there because we found that most of the restaurants, they use this crap oil instead of olive oil. Where, I mean, they grow olive oil there and they were using canola instead. So we wrote.

You mean like Napa Valley's like, isn't Napa Valley like the five star restaurant Mecca?

Yeah.

And they're using canola oil.

Why? Right, why? And so it just boggled our minds. And we found out why during the conversation.

That we had with the president of the Culinary Institute. And he had sent me an urgent fax actually requesting that I stop spreading what he called wrong information about canola. And during the meeting with him.

We talked about our different philosophies on the health of canola. And he was treating us to this wonderful lunch. Actually, when I say us, I mean my husband and I. And then there was actually a newspaper reporter there to document the conversation. And he started with a flight of olive oil tasting. And he was talking about, they have that there. I didn't even know they had that. So there's different kinds of olive oils and you pair it with different foods and different kinds of chocolates and oats.

Yeah, like the same as you would do as you do with like wine or whiskey or beer. It's like a. It's like a flight, but it's olive oil.

Yes. And he was talking about the olive oil and how much care they take to protect the oil from oxidation, even going to the extreme of topping the bottle with nitrogen, Nitrogen, which is an inert gas, to remove the oxygen, because oxidation is such a damaging process. And so with that opening, I. I said to him, you know, first of all, I was impressed genuinely, that he had such a deep understanding of what it is that damages oils and makes them taste bad and actually also makes them unhealthy. But why would everything that he said that applies to olive oil not also apply to canola oil? Because canola oil is also like olive, prone to oxidation, but actually even more so. And they don't treat it anywhere near as gently as they treat olive oil, which is a healthy oil, partly because what is available to the general consumer is kind of an artisanal product of, you know, very gentle treatment with pressure, just mechanical pressure and no chemicals. But they do chemicals and heat and horrible things to canola. So which is why it's bad, incidentally. So he agreed with that. But immediately he shifted the conversation from the facts, the health consequences and the reality to the politics, which is that we don't have enough olive oil to feed the masses. And he actually used the word the masses.

Oh, my God. So, so basically his argument was fine olive oil that doesn't actually rip your body apart in the inflammatory way that you describe in the book that vegetable oil does. He says that the. One of the reasons they don't recommend it is because they're just like, not enough to go around. So they need it for basically, like the rich people.

Yeah, exactly. The people who, you know, can afford it. So we want to lie to everyone else and tell them that this stuff is perfectly fine. That's really wrong.

Wow. Especially when you consider that the five star Napa Valley restaurants are using it probably to cut corners and save a little bit of Money, when in fact, I mean, it is, as you go deep into, in the book, and we'll get into this, a little bit, almost worse than sugar when it comes to the metabolic damage and the DNA damage it can wreak on your body.

Yeah, I would say that it is worse than sugar in the amounts that we are now consuming. It is much more of a health threat.

And it's much more important to reduce the consumption of this in the amounts that we are now consuming than it is to reduce sugar. And in fact, if you take vegetable oil out of your diet first, it's a lot easier to cut down on sugar because it makes your brain work better. And I explain how that translates to improved appetite and improved or less desire for sugar in the brain chapter in the book.

Actually, you do have that full chapter on the brain. This might be a perfect place for us to actually delve into that. You describe vegetable oil as your brain's worst enemy. Why do you say vegetable oil is your brain's worst enemy? And why did you devote an entire chapter to.

To.

The brain killer?

Yeah, so we call it brain killer because vegetable oil has so many different strategies that it uses to attack the brain. We listed seven of them. And the reason the brain is particularly vulnerable to damage from a high vegetable oil diet is that the fats in the brain are these essential fats that themselves are so prone to oxidation. The more than any other tissue in the concentrated with polyunsaturated fats. The essential fats, the omega 3 and the omega 6, actually in equal parts. We talk a lot about this is aside. You know, we talk about how you need Omega 3 for your brain, but by weight. You also need an equal amount of omega 6 for your brain. And the two together comprise 30% of the dry weight of your brain. So it's a massive amount and it's more concentrated than any other tissue. And those fatty acids in the brain are susceptible to something called oxidative stress. Oxidative stress deranges the fatty acids that your brain is made out of. And every single brain disorder is associated with. With higher levels of oxidative stress. And you know, the people who have this disease, they have higher levels of oxidative stress in their brains. And so vegetable oil promotes oxidative stress. Vegetable oil is oxidative stress in a bottle, in fact, you could say, because it's composed of all these polyunsaturated fatty acids that are so susceptible to reacting with oxygen in our bodies, in our bloodstreams, and even in the factory where they're produced, and especially in places like deep fat fires and restaurants.

Now, what about if you're taking in a lot of other healthy fats? I mean, let's say you're consuming fish oil or you're consuming sources of dha, you're eating a lot of wild caught fish things along those lines, would your brain not choose those type of omega 3 fats for the makeup of cell membranes and for neuronal health? And wouldn't that offset the damage for vegetable oil? Or does your brain kind of choose to use the fats from the vegetable oils to make up the membranes? I mean, how's this working from a selection standpoint as far as what the brain is using from a dietary standpoint to make up the fats that it's using for neuronal health, for example?

Right. Yeah, great question. So your brain has no choice but to use the fats that are delivered to it. And so if your diet has a lot of vegetable oils and you also throw in some beneficial fats, great, you'll have a few of the undamaged fats or the fats that contain the protective antioxidants that are required for them to actually make it to your brain intact. But if you have vegetable oil in your diet, and depending what else is in your diet and what else you're doing, all of those good fatty acids that were in the fish or the fish oil may get destroyed. Okay, so that.

It'S not really all or none, it's just that a higher amount of them get destroyed. And so that you are delivering relatively fewer of what you think you're delivering. And they don't just get destroyed. They don't just disappear, evaporate. When this oxidative stress alters the molecular shape, they become mutant molecules that are toxins. And we describe what some of them are also in the chapter. So you can understand that these are known toxins.

One of the toxins you get into is this thing called 4 hydroxy 2 nonenal. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly or 4HNE. What's 4HNE?

So it is a secondary breakdown product of non enzymatic oxidation. So what is all that? The oxidation reactions that occur degenerate or degrade these molecules, so they change their structure and they go through several phases of degradation. And it's extremely complicated.

That's okay. We got a lot of smart cookies listening and you can delve into the science.

You could take one molecule of omega 3 and there's. And you can like draw diagrams of many different compounds that it will break down into when it is non enzymatically degraded. So this goes beyond like the omega 3, omega 6 argument where omega 3 is enzymatically altered into anti inflammatory compounds and omega 6 is enzymatically altered into, into pro inflammatory compounds. That's a gross characterization. There's crossover in both of them. But enzymes control the outcome of these reactions. The non enzymatic oxidation is where we get these toxins. And there are many, many of them. So multiple arrows could be dozens. And one of the most well studied is this thing called 4HNE, which entire scientific journals have been devoted to the various toxic effects that this thing has. It is extremely powerful promoter of oxidative stress and promoter of DNA damage. It's cytotoxic to cells, and in amounts that we consume, it is cytotoxic to cells. And so when I say we consume, I mean, you know, the average American who doesn't know to avoid these things and who's getting dressings and in their chips and you know, the occasional french fries that they might go out to eat.

Okay, so this is actually coming from vegetable oil, this 4HNE.

In two ways. So one, it's coming from the oil in the bottle, actually three ways. And then it's coming from, because of the processing steps that occur to get the oil in the bottle. Then you heat it when you cook with it, and there's more degradation. And so you get more of this transformation of the polyunsaturated fatty acids that would be healthy to us, they degrade into these toxins, including this 4H&E stuff. And then in the body the same thing happens. So if you have polyunsaturated fatty acids in amounts that are unnatural, which we now consume way too many of them, and you do not have the protective antioxidants, which we don't, because they're stripped out in the processing of these seed oils. Then even though you might have perfectly normal omega 3 in your brain and omega 6 in your brain, both of these molecules can degrade into 4hne. It's like a Trojan horse. It looks like normal, but because you don't have the protective antioxidants in the amounts that you need, they just will degrade with time. This is something, it's oxidative. Stress is a process that kills everyone eventually, but it just, it happens so much faster and with so much more disability and disease, the more your diet has these vegetable oils.

You know what I think is interesting is how Alzheimer's is often called type 3 diabetes because it is related to the improper metabolizing of sugars in neural tissue and rapid blood sugar fluctuations. But you go into how the destruction of microtubules in the brain by this 4hne is also linked to Alzheimer's. So this can actually cause not just, for example, oxidative stress, but actual cognitive damage. Actual gray matter damage.

Yes. And you know what I mean. This is part of the reason that I say it's more important to avoid vegetable oil first. Right. It's important to avoid sugar and control the amount that you have in your diet. But the first thing that we should be looking for to take out of our diets are these things, because the way that they affect our body is so diverse and so profoundly bad that it goes beyond anything sugar can do. And so, yeah, so Alzheimer's, one of the.

One of the cellular abnormalities that they find are. I'm gonna forget because I always get this mixed up. There's plaques and tangles, right? And so one is intracellular and one is extracellular. So it's the intracellular one that is composed of these degraded microtubules. And these microtubules are degraded faster in the presence of oxidative stress, and particularly this 4 hydroxy nonenol. And so what if they're degraded? Well, these microtubules are the highways that your neurons in your head use to. To ferry important things from one end of your neuron to the other. In other words, like, your neurons are, you know, centimeters long in the brain. They're very long. That's incredibly long for a cell. And so they need to have these highways that deliver the stuff to. From the. The cell body where the nucleus is. And a lot of enzymes are that manufacture stuff to all the way to, like the end, like the toes of the. The cell. They go up and down through those microtubules. It's like regulatory system of a neuron. And you break them with four hydroxynodol or other things that cause oxidative stress.

Now, there are other ways that you say that vegetable oils can damage the brain. That's why you have this whole chapter called the brain killer. You go into how they can serve as these trojan horses that distribute toxins to the brain and other target organs using something called lipoproteins. And you talk about how they can disrupt the regulation of blood flow through the brain by affecting arterial health, particularly arteries that feed a lot of our brain. We just talked about how they can damage nerve cellular architecture. You talk about how they turn our immune system against us, causing a white blood cell reaction, and also have, and we'll get into this a little bit later, mutagenic effects on DNA. I definitely want to explore that in greater detail. But you also, in this chapter on the brain, particularly focus on the gut and you go into how inflammatory reactions in the gut influence brain health just because of the brain gut interaction. But as you talk about that, you actually discuss a little bit about fecal transplants and about how people with excess weight, and we've talked about this on the show before, how they're getting poop pills to restore their microbiota. You have kind of your alternative to people getting fecal transplants or taking poop pills. Can you go into that?

Yeah. So it's in chapter nine, the brain killer chapter of Deep Nutrition, that we describe a study where.

That investigated the microbiome brain connection. And so what they did was they took microbes from healthy mice versus overweight obese mice, the two different sets of microbiomes that were transplanted into two different groups of healthy mice. But these groups of healthy mice had no more microbiome because they'd been blasted away with tons of antibiotics. So two different groups of mice got that were both healthy and otherwise identical at the start of this experiment. One set got the microbiome through this through essentially a fecal transplant from the overweight mice and the other from the normal weight mice. And their behaviors changed drastically in only in the mice that got the transplant from the overweight mice. And what happened was they noticed there's like lots of little mouse anxiety tests and things that sound adorable but tragic. Like the mice don't freeze properly when they hear a sound. Like they just, you know, they don't have like their normal alarm methods on and they do a lot of more marble burying, which is apparently a test of anxiety. They, the mice that got the overweight microbiome had more trouble with memory and learning tests. And so.

What I did when I was, I was like, this is a really interesting study. So what's with these overweight mice? Like, how, how, what could be affecting their microbiome, right? Is it, is it a primary thing or could it be related to their diet, in other words? And so I was finding evidence that it was related to their diet because these were mice, the mice that were overweight, that the, you know, the source of this anxiety provoking microbiome were not genetic, were induced to be overweight by their diet. So naturally I looked into what was it, what did they eat? And it Turns out that they, their mouse pellets were, they were high fat pellets that were loaded with poly oxidized, polyunsaturated fatty acids. So it was that food that bred the microbiome that made them fat and then carried over to make these other mice anxious. And if probably they had extended the study, they might very well have gained weight too, you know, depending on what they were eating. So to me, that, that is like a very profound idea because we have a lot of people running around worrying about what probiotic supplements they should be taking based on the, based on some of the studies like this. But if you don't ask, what was it in this, what are the details of this diet in the study that is creating these different microbiomes? Because you can breed your microbiome just by feeding, you're feeding it different things. It's like you're gardening it. Right. We've heard this analogy before. Depending on what kind of food you put in there, you're going to be breeding completely different microbiome, bacteria and organisms.

And so what you're saying is the main difference between the obese mice and the normal mice in these studies is basically all calories and sugar and everything else aside, the amount of oxidized fats that are formed between the sunflower oil and the lard in the pelleted chow that they gave the mice that became obese, it was basically the oxidized fats.

Yes. And you know, this is a major source of confusion in the nutrition world. And just like a short little aside here, I've been speaking recently with researchers who do this kind of work themselves. They have to design, if they want to really do a valid high fat diet study that is high in saturated fat, they have to specifically create.

The diet for the mice themselves. And they do not use pellets. They use like, because the dehydration process oxidizes the fats. So even though you might think lard that's not high in saturated fat and it's not going to be oxidized, that's not true. Because the lard that they use comes from pigs that were fed soy and corn and it's very high in poly, their fat is very high in polyunsaturates.

Yeah, that's the thing that gets me. A lot of times in these high fat studies that they do that discover problems that they do in rodents, they use this. I believe it has a, it has a name. It's called Megatrans. Right. Isn't that the, what the, what they call the actual fat that they feed these. These. These mice.

Well, we. We refer to it as megatrans because it's these. These oxidized fats are bad for us in the same way that trans fat is, but they're worse because they also promote oxidation. Yeah.

So basically, when we're trying to apply those type of studies to humans, we would assume that humans then are eating pelleted, oxidized chow made up of sunflower oil and lard and then saying that a high fat diet would be deleterious.

Exactly. So it really depends on the details.

Of the diet, but it also is interesting. So what you're saying is if you were to give me a shot glass of olive oil and a shot glass of vegetable oil, or let's say you were to give me a shot glass of olive oil and you a shot glass of vegetable. Vegetable oil, and that was going to be all our calories. Right. Like we were just going to take 12 shots a day. You would become obese. And I theoretically would maintain normal weight because I wouldn't be getting the same DNA damage and oxidation as you would from something like an extra virgin olive oil. Calories being completely equal.

Exactly. And we should qualify it with I'd be more likely to become obese. Some of this is going to depend on your genetics. Like, you don't know exactly what these fats are going to do to a given person, but they're going to do something bad. Like, you don't know what oxidative stress does. Some people are prone to developing arteriosclerosis and they won't necessarily get overweight. Some people are prone to developing diabetes and they'll really gain a lot of weight. Some people are prone to developing Alzheimer's. Some people are prone to becoming lethargic from these things, and that also promotes weight gain. So you just don't know exactly what's going to happen, but you know it's bad.

Let's get into genetics a little bit. Like. Like you. You have a part in the book where you talk about, like, this buffet that you went to in Kauai, one of my favorite islands, by the way, where you and Luke used to live. I'm jealous. I freaking love Kauai. I go there almost every year now. Thailand used to be my Mecca and now, now it's Kauai. But anyways, you guys went to a buffet there with a bunch of Filipinos. And you have a little story in the book about that. Tell me about this story and why'd you include it?

Yeah, so at this Filipino buffet, I was presented with an incredible spread of exotic dishes that were made with every part of the animal. And I realized then and there that there was more to meat than meat, right? So my diet at the time, which I thought was, you know, great because it's what I learned in medical school that we're supposed to eat was lots of sort of boneless, skinless chicken breast and ramen and frozen peas. And I realized how bland the flavors were compared to what I was seeing at that buffet. And, you know, even though I didn't have, like, the. The daredevil ness that Luke did, as he just dove right in and ate all this stuff, I was like, I need to have something a little more familiar looking. So I think I found, like, a chicken soup or something. But. But it was really. It was an eye opener. And I developed a case of nutritional and cultural fomo. You know, I felt like I was missing out on all this, like, other world of flavor and potentially nutrition.

Oh, you mean, like, soupy chunks? And you talk about, like, deep maroon liver and chicken gizzards and pork meat braised. And I think you even talk about, like, knuckles and sweet potato soup and all these things that we kind of delved into the last time I had you on the podcast, where you talk about meat on the bone and organ meats and a lot of the things that we would normally throw out as being these things.

That can help us quite significantly. But you say that you think you would have looked different or, like, your body would be different had you grown up eating those foods. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, I said this because shortly after that buffet, I got sick, and I started just thinking. Thinking more deeply about, like, the connection between nutrition and health. And I noticed that my patients, who had, like, just more of an ideal bone structure, which we also define where they had. They didn't need glasses, they didn't need braces. They. They had beautiful cheekbones and strong jaws, and. And they were just physically strong. Like, their whole bodies were stronger. They were, you know, into their 60s. They'd be able to do heavy labor, like housekeeping, which is really heavy labor. You know, they have to do 14. 14 suites a day that they would clean, scrubbing the bathtubs. So it's really hard work. And I was noticing that those people who were talking more about what they ate and at home being like, you know, these traditional foods, they tended to be the ones that looked. That had this look and had this strength to them. And so I. And then I look back at, you know, in my own family history, my grandparents, they that look that same look. The, the strong jaws. They didn't need glasses. None of them needed braces, whereas all of my siblings, except for me needed braces. And also three out of the four of us needed glasses. So it's, it's a degeneration of health that you get when you get away from these culinary traditions because it's getting away from nutrition that we need in order to be optimally healthy and grow optimally healthy.

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Ziprecruiter.com first.

Now, you actually have an entire chapter about this called dynamic symmetry. And I want to delve into how what we eat actually affects our symmetry, our beauty, because I found this fascinating. We touched on it the last time that I interviewed you. But I want to dive into this a little bit more about how we can more or less eat ourselves. Beautiful. Can you talk about the link between symmetry and the foods that we eat?

Yeah. So the type of symmetry we're talking about is called dynamic symmetry. And you see it everywhere in nature when something, when you're generally, when you're oppressed with. It looks beautiful, right? So like oak trees, they grow with these spreading branches, and it's just, they're almost like mesmerizing to look at because they grow according to this same principle of dynamic symmetry. It's actually a ratio called phi phi, and it's related to the Fibonacci sequence. And it helps architects build buildings that are more strong and attractive. It's a universal principle. And you can get it, like, you can start to visualize how nutrition relates with this by using an analogy of like a plant, right? So you plant two plants, and one, you give the kind of soil, the kind of sunlight, the kind of fertilizer that that particular breed of plant wants. And you see that it, you know, it grows normally, right? It grows, it looks, it's strong, it doesn't bend over. The leaves aren't wilting. It'll. If it's a flowering plant, it'll have a nice flower. But the other one that's the same seed, could be genetic clone. And you give it just slightly wrong. You know, soil where there's, say, not enough minerals or something. You don't give it enough sunlight, the temperature's wrong. You are not going to get that same kind of optimal growth. It's going to maybe, you know, be stunted or it may be really long and skinny. It may never flower. So this is the, this is the difference that we can actually see when something gets the optimal blend of nutrients for its genetics versus suboptimal. We can see it. And the best way to measure it objectively is through this principle. Of geometry called phi. And so we just devote a whole chapter to describing what that is and.

How that principle of geometry called phi, like PI, like phi, or it's. Or I guess it would be PI. I got to remember, back to math. Spelling.

Yeah. So they're both like constants that appear in mathematical equations all the time, but they're different. So PI is 3.14 and on and on and on, and phi is 1.618, and then it goes on and on and on. They're both like irrational, infinite numbers.

Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. It is phi, like phi.

Right.

Okay, got it. And you describe phi phi as beauty's secret code, meaning that what you're saying is that when we look at symmetry and the ability to actually apply mathematical equations to symmetry, that this number, this 1.61 number, is called, like, the golden ratio. And like the Greeks and the Egyptians would use it in structural art and architecture to create perfectly symmetrical works of art. And what you're arguing in the book is that the human face, a perfectly symmetrical human face, relies upon that same mathematical structure.

Yes. It reflects that same mathematical structure as well. And it's not just like a matter of, oh, okay, now you're pretty. Right. So you have that benefit in life. And, you know, you can decide to be a movie star or model if you want. It's way beyond that, because that same ratio also optimizes function so that, you know, movie stars didn't have to wear. Most of them didn't have to wear braces or not for not as long. And what. Why does it matter if you had to wear braces or not to your health? Well, it's a reflection of.

Optimal geometry of your jaw structure and that, you know, before we had dentists and stuff like that, if your teeth weren't straight, if they didn't come in straight, you could die. And another. Another thing that happens when you have ideal geometry is that your ear canals and your sinus passages drain better, so you're way less prone to infections. And if you didn't have antibiotics, if you got a sinus infection or ear infection could die. And another thing that happens is your eyeball is. If you have this ideal geometry, your eyeball is much more likely to be able to perfectly focus light onto the back of your eye. In other words, you won't need glasses. And before we had glasses, if you couldn't see what you were doing, you would die. You know, you couldn't survive. You wouldn't hunt. You'd be almost blind. So every single One of these things that we gauge as attractive has a implication in terms of health, and it happens throughout the body. So that when you look at the pro athletes like the leak, whether they're basketball players or tennis players or swimmers or you, you're going to see this geometry throughout the whole body as well. So that it affects the ratio of the length of the spine, for example, to the length of the lumbar spine, particularly to the ribcage. And a lot of us walking around have what we call short waists where we don't have that nice, graceful length of lumbar spine that actually is really essential for athletic performance because it helps your torso rotate properly and it reduces injuries to the hips and to the low back.

Allows for activation of glute extension, too, with the glutes being the most important muscle for athletic performance in most situations. I guess, unless you're.

I don't know.

I'm trying to think of a sport where you wouldn't use your glutes. Even swimming, you use your glutes very extensively. I was actually over in Finland, and I was talking with this guy who I've had on the show before, this guy named Vessi, and he's trying to convince the Finland swim team to begin swimming naked based off of analyses that he's done on activation of gluteal muscles and the fact that the tightness of the swimwear around the glutes can actually deactivate glute muscles and decrease the propulsion of the kick. So, yeah, the lumbar spine is pretty dang important. And you even go into. In the book, I mean, in this whole chapter on dynamic symmetry, how we think that we're sexually attracted to beautiful faces and we're sexually attracted to symmetrical bodies, but it appears that our brain actually is naturally attracted. All sexual considerations aside, you actually show some EEG patterns that show that we have blood flow to the pleasure center of our brain that gets increased and more normalized. EEG patterns when we gaze upon folks who have symmetrical faces or folks who have symmetrical bodies, which is probably why people with good symmetry tend to get better jobs and make more money and have an easier time in life because of that. That symmetry that just basically makes people want to be around them more.

Yeah, it's like a drug, right? Just looking at it, it literally has a drug effect.

And, of course, all this has a purpose, us talking about this, because you can actually eat yourself or your children, your offspring, into a more symmetrical state, which I think is super interesting and close to my heart, because My wife grew up on fricking braces and all sorts of teeth issues and jaw issues and not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but our kids are pretty beautiful. Like, they don't have any of these teeth issues or these jaw issues or any of the things that my wife especially had. And they've grown up on sardines and egg yolks and liver and a lot of these things that you talk about in the book. But I actually want to talk to you a little bit about that, about how facial and body symmetry is influenced by nutrition and even by what a mom eats while she's pregnant. Can you go into that a little bit?

Yeah. So, you know, we have this idea in our culture that women have a biological clock that's tick, tick, tick, ticking, and we better pump out babies quickly.

Before.

We get, you know, something happens and our clock expires. We maybe can't have kids or something. But so we don't talk about how important it is to replenish the mother's body between babies. If you just go like nine months, you have a baby, and then you get pregnant again next month, then that second baby is at a disadvantage compared to the first because mom's body was relatively depleted with some of these basic building blocks for the baby by the act of building that baby number one. And so as a general trend, I see that if there's closely spaced children, the second, third, more and more of the deviation away from that ideal geometry. Now, this is a generalization, right? You know, some. There are actually even advantages to going second I talk about as well. So there's some modifying factors, right? It's not like you're doomed if you're baby number two and your mom only gave you the bare minimum because a lot of it is influenced, continues to be influenced by what you eat as you are a child, too. So if you get a really optimal diet there, that can potentially you can regain some lost ground, you can undo.

Some of that damage. Bo, what you're saying is, and I think you call it second sibling syndrome in the book, like, you show a photograph on one of the pages of Matt Dillon versus his brother, who's like 18 months younger, Kevin Dillon, and how different their facial symmetries are. And then you discuss how when a mom is pregnant, it draws down maternal stores of things like iron and folate and DHA and a lot of these essential fatty acids. And so you get children, if they're spaced too closely together, the second child experiences deficiencies in those nutrients, and that directly affects a child's bone growth, you know, their lumbar spine, which you hit on earlier, the jaws, the teeth, a lot of the things that you know. For example, Weston A. Price, right. Who traveled around the world and found that as soon as you introduce westernized foods and vegetable oils of all things into other cultures, you tend to see all of a sudden generations with less symmetry. What you're saying is that when women don't space out their children far enough apart or don't have a high intake of these type of nutrients during pregnancy, or both, you wind up creating generations that are less symmetrical and less beautiful.

Exactly. And it's something that is.

Very, very powerful in impacting the rest of that child's life. And so I just like to. I don't want to focus on the negative. I want to focus on the positive about how much control mom have and how that when you are actually, if you're worried about your biological clock ticking, there's all kinds of evidence that getting these vegetable oils out of, you know, giving yourself six to 12 months of getting these vegetable oils out of your, your diet and sugar out of your diet as well, and replenishing your body, there's all kinds of reasoning why that would actually improve your fertility. We actually have people who, you know, many, many people now who've gone on like, lower carb diets that eat healthy fats that have had been told that they were infertile, that suddenly they get pregnant. And so that you're reversing your biological clock by going on this better diet, and you're just definitely setting your children up for a lifetime of success, a greater chance of a lifetime of success by giving yourself that a little bit of time and lots of nutrition between babies and really making a focus. We talk so much about saving money for college and saving money for our children, but what's worth more than that, what is priceless.

Is a beautiful, super healthy, super intelligent, strong child.

Not just women, but also men. I mean, you talk about why men should take preparation for pregnancy as seriously as women and about how the sperm, and especially the motility of the sperm and the health of the sperm is affected by these nutritional parameters in the same way. I mean, I know it's also affected by things like cell phones and hot tubs, of course, but this doesn't mean, guys, that you can eat vegetable oils while your significant other is forced to consume liver pate. And I say forced to consume because most people think about it that way. Although I freaking love liver pate and so do you Kate. And we can get into why briefly. But, yeah, this is for men and women alike. And I think one of the interesting things about this, you get into this in the book, Kate, is how we just talked about how beauty and symmetry could potentially give you a step up in life, allow you to make more money, get better jobs, allow other people around you to feel more pleasure when they look at you or hang out with you. But then you also talk about how some of the world's elite, some of these rich people, some of these folks who are really killing it in life, they wouldn't touch the food that the rest of us eat. It's kind of related to, like, what you were saying about the olive oil, how canola oil is saved for the masses. And like the rich people at the Culinary Institute of America, they get the extra virgin olive oil. You also talk about, for example, President Obama's inaugural lunch and what they're eating over at the White House. What are they eating at the White House?

Oh, it's all the good stuff. And they don't even have to know that it's good because they're surrounded by chefs. And the chefs are the original nutritionists. These are the people who create flavorful dishes from, you know, the most nutrient intense animals and plants that they can get a hold of. So, like.

Actually, I just looked at what Trump had for his inaugural dinner because he's like, famous for. Oh, I eat junk food. Right. Well, his inaugural dinner was right in line with everyone else's where they've got like the lobster, Maine lobster, Gulf shrimp, some kind of a fancy peanut crumble, Angus beef with bone stock juice, and just course after course of like the best of the best kinds of foods. And even with Trump, you know, who's famous, right?

But not just the best of the best foods, but I mean, we're talking about like, you know, fatty sour creams and artisan cheeses and like these big fatty cuts of beef and tenderloin and veal and lobster tails and chowder cream sauce and. And these foods that we've been told are going to give us heart attacks that folks who are rich and famous are consuming. And not that every president has been the cutting edge picture of health, but it is kind of interesting how wealthy people aren't necessarily eating or drinking skim milk and eating French fries and fat free foods.

Yeah, certainly not, you know, fat free foods, because even Trump, I mean, he doesn't have the best diet, but he's going after fat and flavor and, you know, you don't see him having boneless, skinless chicken breasts, brown rice, frozen broccoli with some kind of heart healthy spread. And you've never seen any president doing that, not even Clinton when he was, when he was vegan there for a little while. He didn't have those kinds of fake spreads. And he had, you know, lots of spices in his vegan food. So. Yeah, so you just don't see anyone with means eating the way we're supposed to now.

We're told now, of course, you know, if we're consuming foie gras and fresh oysters and lobsters and crab and caviar and butter as, you know, organ meats and cold water fish and everything else as our main staple, some folks will say that's going to shove the LDL levels through the roof. Right? Like that's one of the main concerns is, hey, my LDL is above 200. I should not be doing this. I need to step back on these foods and eat more whole wheat bread and buy more kale. But you actually go into LDL in the book a little bit and you say that LDL is basically irrelevant. Why do you say that LDL is irrelevant?

Yeah. In Deep Nutrition, we have a chapter called Good Fats and Bad and we really explain why we've got it totally wrong with our viewpoint on cholesterol and LDL and saturated fat and where all this nonsense came from.

What we talk about now, doctors will talk about is your total cholesterol and your LDL number. But what we don't talk about, that we should be talking about, is whether or not your LDL particles are working, are doing their job. They have a job to do. They're not created by nature to just line our arteries with plaque. They're created by nature to deliver fats. That's what they're supposed to do. And if they are working well, they will deliver fats. They will take fat from your diet and carry it around to tissues in your body that need or store fats. And if they are able to do that, then it does not matter how well or how many of them that you have or how high that total LDL number is. If they are not able to do that and they cannot deliver fats, that's where you have problems. And it does not matter how low your LDL number is, because that fat that's in those LDL particles is not going to be able to get out of your bloodstream. And that's where.

Because when the LDL particles don't function, they can't deliver and they'll just end up lining your arteries.

And it's oxidation that would keep an LDL particle, a lipoprotein from functioning.

Yes, oxidation and another process called glycation, both. So the glycation comes from sugar and we explain how that works too. But focusing on the oxidation, you know, the vegetable oils, they I cite a lot of studies by one particular chemist who has been doing just groundbreaking work on how vegetable oils oxidizing in the LDL particles go through different stages of damaging the ldl. And he even says that one of the reasons that we think polyunsaturated fatty acids is bad is because it drops LDL particles. It reduces the count of LDL particles, which as I said is all wrong headed thinking. But what it does is it oxidizes them beyond recognition. So they are not gone. The particle counts don't go. I'm sorry the LDL doesn't get out of your bloodstream better because you've got polyunsaturated fatty acids. It becomes so oxidized that it's unrecognizable. And we're not measuring it, but it's still in your bloodstream and it's causing fatty streaks and arteriosclerosis.

Wow. And you talk about glycation and sugar of course, a little bit too, but it's less. And correct me if I'm wrong here, because this is what I focus on in my own life. It's not exactly the sugar itself that's the issue, but it's the amount of time that that sugar spends in the bloodstream. Correct. So it's like if you're constantly spiking your blood sugar levels throughout the day with frequent snacking, even if the snacking is on good foods, but foods that keep on introducing glucose into the bloodstream or keep on causing gluconeogenesis from constant feedings of whey protein or, or chicken breast or whatever. Or that sugar is spending a lot of time in the bloodstream because you're not physically active. That's where glycation becomes an issue. Glycation wouldn't really be an issue from like eating an apple after a workout.

Exactly. So yes, because it's a matter of how well you can control your blood sugar level. And so for years, even on a terrible diet with lots of carb and lots of sugar, we have hormone systems that can control our, that can keep our level normal. Ultimately they get worn out and then that's when we are really become really have to sensitive to sugar and get that glycation Happens faster and we really have to start watching our diet. But it's vegetable oil is bad, like from the get go, right? This sugar is bad after years when your hormone systems can't handle it anymore.

Right. So what that be, would. Would mean then is for dinner I could have a bunch of sweet potatoes, especially if I've been doing squats and deadlifts before dinner. And that's going to be just fine. But say I dumped a bunch of canola oil on those sweet potatoes. Even if the glucose is getting shuttled into muscle glycogen and liver glycogen stores, for example, the vegetable oil is going to stick around long after and just oxidize the crap out of my body and as we've just learned, also make me ugly and give me bad teeth and give my sperm a bad time as well. So you also, in a fascinating chapter about how we can actually enable fat cells to get converted into other tissues, kind of delve into the science of why calories don't always count and how fat cells really can become something other than fat cells. Which I find intriguing because, you know, for me, growing up in the stereotypical personal training industry, it's like, hey, once you get fat, you're stuck with the number of fat cells that you started off with or that you built. And they're always just like waiting there to grab calories and balloon up again. But that doesn't really, it's not really true. You get into in the book about how fat cells can differentiate into other tissue and how we can actually enable our body to be able to do that. So the first question that I have for you about this, Kate, is why do you say that calories don't always count? What's your reasoning behind.

Yeah, so food is so much more than just the amount of energy it contains, and that's what calories reflect. But food is also chemical information that, you know, each one of the molecules in there has potential for being a building block. And also some of them interact directly with your DNA and instruct your cells on what to do next. Like if they should divide, for example, or if it's time for a cell to. Cells can commit like a neat kind of suicide where they just sort of shut themselves down and disappear when they feel that they're no longer needed for that tissue. And that's what we want for our fat cells to do. We also want, you know, cancer pre cancer cells to do this. And so the first inkling that we had as to the power of different compounds in our Food to do this was the Omega 3 and the Omega 6, right. So I actually met with a woman who wrote the book on this. She wrote a book called the Omega Diet after interviewing a researcher in a lab who was studying Omega 3 versus Omega 6 and how it affected cancer cells. And she was fascinated because she saw that the two different piles of cells on a slide, one had been fed omega 3 and that cancer tumor cell pile of cells was smaller and one had been fed Omega 6 and that one was much bigger. And so this is the information, right? So there's no more calories in omega 3 fats versus omega 6 fats. They're equal or roughly equal, but the main difference is how they interact with our enzymes and our cells and our DNA. And so this applies to every nutrient. So, you know, sports nutrition is kind of like the worst field of nutrition because they're pushing sugar. And their idea is that a calorie is a calorie and athletes feel energized when they get sugar, so it's gotta be good. Plus, coke funds their research, so sugar's gotta be good. But there's so much more to it. It's a ridiculous oversimplification when we just talk about calories and the whole calories in, calories out model and just restrict your calories and poof, automatically you're going to lose weight very easily. I mean, calories do matter, they are important. But what's more important is the information in your food that controls everything about even your appetites and your cravings. So the same amount of calories in. There was a study that recently came out. Same amount of calories in soy versus coconut chow fed rats. And the rats that got the soy gained something like 30% more weight and were obese compared to the rats that got the coconut. Same amount of calories.

Interesting. Okay, Soso, part of this comes down to the. What you're saying is if we were going to look at calories in general, and this kind of returns to what we were hinting at with the olive oil versus vegetable oil deal, a big, big part of your body's ability to be able to. Able to take calories and use them comes down to the omega 3 and the omega 6 fatty acid ratios.

That's just one example. There are so many other very important factors, some of which we understand and some of which we don't, which is why we say that the most important thing to do in terms of diet, why we we define a healthy diet the way we do just simply by going back to Doing what we used to do before the government started telling us to avoid saturated fat, cholesterol, and all this nonsense which obliterated our respect for culinary tradition. That had been, you know, what kept us alive for thousands of generations.

Got it.

So we just aim to go back to that because it's the fastest, most efficient route to doing all the right things, just reproducing what worked before.

It's amazing how much of a difference they can make when they're so similar. You say in the book essential fatty acids, omega 3 and omega 6 are nearly identical to the chemists who draw them on their chalkboards, but to our cells, they're as opposite as night and day. And the takeaway from this, from this guy Robinson, who you interviewed about cancer and the fatty acid imbalances that might set us up for cancer, he basically says we need to eat more omega 3s from things like eggs and cold water, fatty fish and plants. And those are all things that people just don't eat as much of anymore compared to corn, corn and soy and animals that are fed corn and soy and all the vegetable oils on the package on food store shelves and now, as we know, in fancy restaurants. Even so, I mean, it's simple on the face of it. It's just. It's so hard when you're eating packaged foods.

To have that happen. And that's why, I mean, I think that if you're eating 2,000 calories a day of liver pate and eggs and kale and fish, you can stay lean. Whereas your friend, who's eating whatever healthy packaged food from the grocery store that's got vegetable oil and cane sugar as the primary ingredients, they're eating the same number of calories, but they're still having weight issues and a whole host of other issues as well. I mean, it all makes sense, but it's just. It's so hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around still, which I find is a real head scratcher, personally. You go into fat cells, though, which I touched on a little bit earlier, and how fat cells can leave adipose tissue and migrate to become new muscle tissue or bone tissue or brain cells. What would keep fat cells from being able to do that?

The signals in your diet that might be saying, we need to keep building fat. And the most powerful one is the signals in your diet, like the wrong kinds of fats and too much carb that are going to cause something called insulin resistance and keep your levels of insulin really high. So insulin is a hormone that your body uses to shove sugar into fat cells and a few other cells that have insulin receptors and the insulin at high levels, higher than like, say what you might have waking up in the morning, is going to be high enough to block fat burn. And if cells cannot, if fat cells can't burn fat, they're not going to empty out. And that's step one to convincing a fat cell that it's time to stop being a fat cell and either undergo apoptosis or revert to a more primitive form called like a pre adipocyte, which is very similar to a stem cell, which can become, you know, another kind of cell, theoretically.

Okay, so a fat cell can revert to a stem cell, and that's called redifferentiation, and that makes it pluripotent, and that means it can again, redifferentiate and then become whatever other cell type is needed in body tissue. Like. Like muscle cell, for example.

Yes. I mean, probably what we, you know, what happens when somebody loses weight is that many of the fat cells just simply empty out. And when they lose weight in a way that's sustainable, they. They stop being fat cells, either by going through that apoptosis, which is the cell suicide, they kill themselves, there's no more cell, or they become a pre adipocyte and then possibly can from there go back to becoming a stem cell like cell and become a fibrocyte or even a muscle cell. You know, we don't really know. We do know that these sorts of cellular transformations have been done in a lab. So you can take a fat cell from somebody's hip and convince it to turn into a bone cell or a muscle cell by just simply by using hormones that would be present in your body at normal amounts and nutrients. You don't have to do like any kind of genetic engineering or anything to get that to happen.

Yeah, and you go into. Well, in the book, you have six different factors that can keep this actual conversion from taking place. You just mentioned insulin and how that's going to be one thing that will keep this redifferentiation of stem cell or of fat cells from occurring. And of course, sugar goes along with that. That's a second variable you talk about. Omega 6 fatty acids and inflammation, of course, are another one that you discuss. And then another couple that you go into, just for those of you listening in who want to enable yourselves to turn fat into other tissues. One is glucocorticoids, which I know go through the roof with stress and sleep deprivation basically. So you can, in the Absence of any of the nutritional variables, just through stress and sleep, sleep deprivation, keep yourself from turning fat cells into other cells. And then these, these mega trans fats that we already talked about, right? Like, like high omega 6, low omega 3 fatty acids or, or versions of trans fatty acids. So, so read that chapter if you're listening in and you want to. You have a very, very potent method for getting rid of fat. A few other things I wanted to ask you about, though, Kate. Well, while I have you on, first.

Of all, before we get to that, Ben, I just want to clarify that.

Oh, go ahead.

The vegetable oils also have omega 3 in them, particularly canola. This is why we pick on canola, because it's promoted as being healthy. The reason it's bad is not because it has the wrong ratio, but because omega 3 fats break down just the same way as omega 6 into these megatrans fats. So omega 3 is also, when it is processed the way that, you know, through the vegetable oil processing process, it is actually worse than Omega 6 because it is more susceptible to this oxidation. It's the first thing that will break down and become some of these toxins. So I just wanted to clarify that because that's a, that's an important point where folks talking about why vegetable oil is bad, they'll, they'll sell, they'll focus on the Omega 6, which is true for some of the vegetable oils, but not all. And it's really not just the Omega 6 content. It's the fact that all polyunsaturated fatty acids in these vegetable oils, the 3 and the 6, break down in ways that create toxins. And that's the different issue. So there's also the 3, 6 ratio, but that only applies to the intact 3 and 6, which is, you know, which would be, it would be great if we had intact 3 and 6.

And in fact, and that's because the Omega 3 has three different places for oxygen to react. So it's really, really reactive.

Yes, exactly. Well stated. Yes.

Okay, got it. Cool. That makes sense. So even if something has omega 3 fatty acids in it, you're kind of even more screwed if it's been exposed to heat and pressure and a lot of the ways that they actually process vegetable oils.

Yes, exactly. And that's why it's kind of like a roulette if you're taking a fish oil capsule. Because they, fish oils are those omega 3s that are, that have like 4 or 5 or 6 in some cases of the double bonds. And, and they're, they don't last 30 days.

Which is why taking a bad fish oil is worse than not taking fish oil at all.

Yes.

Yeah.

And that's why, that's why I always like smell fish oil. I make sure it's been shipped to my house. It's never gotten like warm or anything. Like, like that's really important. You want to buy it from bottles that aren't clear or you don't want to keep it in like Ziploc bags when you travel. Yeah, that's, that's all super important.

I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit about the way that the LA Lakers eat, because I know you've worked with them and you have like certain snacks that they get and you have what, what I know you call the pro nutrition program that, that they go through, but can you go through? You know, because I know a lot of these guys are busy. They aren't necessarily like making liver pate, I don't think. But, but what, how would, how would a, like a sample kind of like snack or meal program for an LA Laker go?

So the chef at the facility handles their breakfast, their lunches, and then their post game dinners. And what we do is have a, for a breakfast buffet. You know, breakfast is kind of like the worst meal for most people because we, we just want to have it in such a hurry and it usually ends up being really starchy and processed so we don't take anything away. We still have like the French toast and we'll still have waffles and pancakes, but it's just going to be like not the front and center thing. We also have lots of other meats and even you know, omelets and yogurt and stuff like that for breakfast. And then of course the, when she makes waffles or French toast or anything, she's going to be using butter and other totally natural fats and pastured eggs and you know, well sourced meats like this. And then for lunch they'll have, mostly they don't do a lot of salads, they just take too long. So we, we kind of gave up on, on that for most of them, unless they specifically request something.

But you mean they take too long to eat.

They take too long to eat. Yes. These guys have lots of things to do.

And so they'll, she'll make like some kind of a vegetable soup or, or like vegetable. Like she'll do like a healthy version of Chinese takeout, for example, or Thai food. And she's really doing a lot of exotic things like with quinoa and ancient grains and stuff like this. And, and of course there'll be, you know, some kind of meat. But we really just do like the familiar, the foods that they're familiar with that, that like some of them grew up on. We'll even do a healthy version of Mac and cheese or you know, chicken wings or ribs and.

Okay, I gotta ask, what's the healthy version of Mac and cheese and chicken wings?

So with chicken wings you just use past your chicken if you can. You keep, obviously you keep the skin on and you, if you're going to like make buffalo style wings, you just don't use any of that nasty vegetable oil either as, you know, for crisping up the skin or for the dip. Right. So when she makes like a ranch dip, it'll be with real buttermilk and not like, you know, what you get in the store and then the other one, oh, Mac and cheese. So like you'll use real cheese instead of like Velveeta or something and just have more, you know, more cheese and cheese pastured. Use pastured butter and relatively less, you know, more of the cheese and all that and less of the pasta.

It's so simple. Like when you think about it, it's just like those little things that add up. I mean you get into. And in the book, you know, you'll do like kale chips instead of regular chips and you know, you'll do like real yogurt instead of fake sugar filled yogurt. And you know, but you know, it's not like you're eating that much differently. It's just like you're eating kind of like you mentioned, like, like the rich people in the White House eat rather than. Than how and part. I'm not trying to like insult anybody here, but like how poor ugly people would eat because they've eaten themselves into asymmetry. Like it all makes sense.

Food stamps.

So.

Yeah, especially those.

Okay.

But of course, you know, not everybody is walking around buying lobster and caviar every day. So can you go into. You got five easy ways to get started in the book. To get started with all these concepts, you know, 500 pages of concepts. But five easy steps that you have in the book. Can you go into those, those exact five steps so that people have some takeaways here.

Yeah. So probably the first thing to do is, you know, have like a big colorful salad for to a week with some homemade dressing, you know, or not at least a non vegetable oil dressing. And in the salad I always talk about having four Total cups. It's like a rule of fours. Four days a week have four cups of salad. And there should be four colors in there as well. So that's like one really simple rule of getting a lot of antioxidants and.

Diversity, which, which I started doing after the first time I interviewed you. By the. By the way, I always have at least four different vegetables in the fridge. And I always have a salad for lunch at least Monday through Friday. And I always just make sure it's a rainbow. Oh, without, without, of course, you know, so. So a whole bunch of different kind of vegetables. So it's never just lettuce or just spinach or just kale. It's like I grab and it adds like an extra five minutes of chopping or whatever. But honestly, I kind of like it. I get into Zen mode, chopping the vegetables and it's kind of fun. So. And then in the winter I, I heat it in a cast iron skillet instead of eating it cold. So yeah, I like it.

I like the chopping too. It's easy. And then Luke does the harder stuff cooking. And then another really simple swap is just getting grass fed dairy fat in your diet. So like grass fed butter or yogurt that's been, you know, from cows that were raised on grass. And if you go to a health food store, you're generally going to find some kind of local product where they have these grass fed.

Butters and yogurts. And sometimes you'll also see milk and cream and stuff like this cheese getting that grass fed that can be imported from places like Ireland or New Zealand where most of the cows still are getting grass. So real simple swap, you know, you can still get your cheese and your familiar foods as long as you can do dairy.

Right.

Super, super simple thing. It's really healthy.

Which by the way, a lot of people can't do dairy from the other sources that have been pasteurized and homogenized, et cetera, where a lot of the probiotics that help you to digest lactose have been eliminated. Can digest these foods that still have the probiotics active.

Yeah. And also cheese in particular because the lactose has been fermented away by the microbes that made the cheese. So.

Yeah, good point.

And then another really important, relatively simple thing is to get bone stock. Now if you're, if you're not going to just make it yourself, you can actually buy it. You can go to Costco and they tend. Most Costcos that I've been into lately have both chicken stock and beef Stock. It's organic, I think. It's Pacific organic, I think, is the brand.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that brand, by the way.

It's not as good as homemade, but it will. It'll do the job. Right. And. And I use.

I use kettle and fire.

Oh.

I think it's way better.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know if you've tried kettle and fire before, but it. But it's real. They use, like, the feet and the knuckles. Knuckles and everything. And they've got zero preservatives. And just send it straight to your house. I used to buy that Pacific broth, but then if you look at the ingredient label, it's not only is it not that great, but they don't put. The bones that they use are really basic. So I don't know if you've looked into the kettle and fire stuff, but I swear by it now. I always have a few boxes of that in the fridge.

Oh, yeah. Awesome. I have to check that out. Thanks. Yeah. So. And then, you know, what do you use that for? Well, one of the things that I like to do is kind of use it as a base for an instant lunch. So I'll just heat up the broth and then tear, like, deli slices of meat into the soup and throw some stuff in that might be good in soup. Like, I throw frozen peas in, and I'll throw some mozzarella cheese and just whatever. I mean, you can just, like, soups are so easy to make. And that broth sort of magically blends everything together in a way that actually tastes good, even if it's the weirdest combinations.

Got it. Okay, cool. So we got broth. We've got real dairy. We've got eating four to five salads a week that are colorful ones and couple others. Yeah.

So one thing that's potentially simple depending on your appetites is getting organ meats at least once a week. And probably the easiest way to do that is like liver pate, liverwurst, or bratwurst. And on my website, I have a couple of resources that I recommend. One of my favorite bratwurst is from US Wellness Meats. And you can can order that online as well. It's actually really tasty.

I do an order from them about once a quarter. Because you pay for shipping. You do pay for shipping. But yeah, I mean, I interviewed them on the podcast. I'll actually link to it in the show notes, the interview that I did with them. But yeah, I order pemmican, the rib eye, and then like their Braunschweiger and their head cheese and like some of their, like, more ancestral meats. And they just come in a package and toss them in the freezer, thaw them out when you want to eat them. Easy.

Yeah, it's fast food, really healthy fast food. And then once a day, the last thing I recommend is just once a day, get some kind of probiotic rich food, like whether it's yogurt or fermented pickles or fermented sauerkraut or kimchi, once a day. That really helps your gut health and your immune system.

I love it. I do all of those things. And a lot of this stuff I learned from you and your book. It was one of the first nutrition books I read that was kind of like a little bit more, I guess for me, me advanced and I started incorporating a lot of this stuff. So I guess I have you to thank. If my kids wind up growing up and making a lot of money, I'll just, I'll send you a check because it was right about the time they were born, I think I read your, your first book, so. So there you go.

Oh, my gosh, it's amazing. Yeah. Well, that's. Highest praise I could ever hope for is. Yeah, just send me a picture.

Of course, the catch 22 is that as they make more money, their dad's going to be spending it all on lobster and caviar and trying to eat like the White House people eat. So There's a catch 22. That's right. That's living, baby. Well, cool. K. This is a fantastic book. I'm linking to everything that we talked about over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com DeepNutrition2 that's BenGreenfulFitness.com DeepNutrition 2 where you can also access my first podcast with Kate, which would be a perfect accompaniment to this one because we delve into some things we just discuss in today's podcast. So thanks for rewriting this book, adding so much, and also for coming on the podcast and sharing this stuff with us.

Kate, thanks so much, Ben. It's always great talking to you.

All right, cool. Well, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Kate Shanahan signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Go to BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.