Episode 10: The Deal with Fad Diets

Welcome to Inside the Cure with Dr. Charles Moak from Allure Medical. Learn what it takes to cure diseases, not just manage their symptoms. Healthcare isn't going to save itself, so let's jump right in. Hello, I'm Cam Carman and I'm with Dr. Moak to talk about a very hot topic, especially lately, fad diets. What's out there and what actually might work. And I know you've tried many of them. Tell us which ones you've tried.

Kind of everything. And my whole life I've watched what I ate. My parents, my sister, brother, all diabetics, they had a heart attack at a young age. So I've watched it since I was a kid. I never had a weight, weight problem because I've been diligent. But I have all the genetics to get diabetes, heart disease. So I'm watching it. And I've done it scientifically, too. Like, I, I don't have it on right now, but I typically wear an implanted blood sugar monitor, and I've been doing that for about three months to see how foods affect me. But I talk about why do fad diets come around and why maybe they don't work for everybody? Well, they come around because any diet does work for some person. We have so many different factors that determine if we'll be thin or obese. We have what's called the microbiome, which is a bacteria in your gut. We know that has a huge impact on your body size. We have our genetics that might predict a higher metabolism or higher likelihood of developing diabetes or a higher likelihood of getting obesity or lower likelihoods. We have that going for us as well. And there's a huge interplay with our genetics and what's called epigenetics, how they express. And then we even have things like our hormones, our hormones optimized like some. There's a lot of subclinical called hypothyroidism. Subclinical means it's not obvious, but your metabolism a little messed up because maybe your thyroid's not working that well. And then we have women going to menopause and men going to andropause, which causes weight gain because now your, your sex hormones are diminished, which makes you put weight on. So there's a lot of factors. Then we get in the fad diets, like what is, what about the Atkins diet or the low carb d diet or the keto diet or the low lectin diet, high carb diet, low fat diets. And I mean, one thing is that, you know, if you look at it from a standpoint, what foods are healthy, you can probably try all the diets and see what kind of works for you from a lifestyle standpoint. But I'm gonna give you some general overviews. Okay. We know unequivocally that humans in history have not generally eaten as much as we do now. And we certainly did not eat processed food by our history. And we started not eating nearly as much animal products as we do now. Now it's actually very common, not very common. It's almost universal to have animal products three times a day. This has never occurred before the 50s. We didn't have that kind of food distribution and delivery. We didn't have a way to store it that well. So this is a new thing. So we know that we're eating just a lot of animal products which, this seems to have a link to obesity. We know there's certain meats that increase the risk of cancer, particularly red meats and processed meats. So that's something obviously we weren't designed to eat so much and we are, if we look at our gut and our teeth, we probably should be eating a lot more plant based based foods. Now there is a plant based diet where you're like what people call it vegan. That word almost sounds like you're like it's a culture or like a religious like that. But vegan just typically refers to no animal products at all. And that's kind of hard in American society. I did a vegan diet from March of last year till about, about two weeks ago. And I did it to sort of just see what it felt like for a long time doing it. And one thing is, which is interesting, I'm surprised. I, I did lose some muscle mass, about eight pounds and I'm just as strong. It's very weird because I was about £182 and I was pre lean, my body fat was low and I went down to the 170s and I've kind of stayed there. So now I'm starting to eat some animal products like fish a couple times a week. But my weight hasn't gone up in two weeks. But my strength didn't change. So at the gym, my bench press, everything stayed the same even though my muscles got a little smaller. So maybe the bones are less dense too. So that's something that people always ask, like, where are you getting the protein from? And I was always kind of like, well, you know, you get enough proteins and vegetables and you do, but there is a different quality or characteristics. And we do know people with higher metabolisms and higher muscle mass do have like potentially shorter lives. And being a little bit on the lean side and a little undernourished is actually healthy. So for me, this probably was healthy for my body, but I did do it for all those months. I'm going to measure a bunch of things right afterwards. I did do a bunch of tests and I'm going to add fish in two or three times a week and test it again and see, see if I do get more vanity getting a little muscle mass back. We kind of a muscular die. And that's something I did not expect. I thought I should be able maintain everything eating just plants. So plant based diet. I'm definitely a fan for having a plant based diet. So maybe you're not eating just plants, but you're thinking about mostly eating plants. I'm a fan of eating low processed foods because you know, when you process foods you make it much more easy to digest. So it does lead us to diabetes and alteration of blood sugar, particularly those are people are at risk. And though that's something that I'm really kind of a fan of, I'm also a big fan of intermittent fasting. So I'm going to talk a little bit about fandom, a little bit about science. So intermittent fasting, the concept is that we really weren't designed as a species to eat three meals a day plus a snack. In fact, we look at our evolution of mankind. There was no genetic advantage to living a long time because you had babies when you were young. But there was a genetic advantage to be able to go through periods of famine and not die. So the high metabolism, high metabolizer genes would have died out during famines in history, occurred in history, and the people that could survive long periods of time without as much food would survive. And this appears to maybe be the reason why we selected out people that had more risk for diabetes, because insulin resistance can protect us in a period of famine. So intermittent fasting has been studied along this lines. If you eat five days a week and two days a week, you eat very few calories, like 500 or less. Studies have shown that that is better than calorie restriction for weight loss. First off, you preserve more muscle mass, your metabolism does not slow down and you typically lose a little bit more weight than calorie restriction. And typically people keep it off after the diet's all over longer, probably because they learned an easy way to lose weight. So they've done studies where they put one group into A calorie restriction diet and a group into eat normal five days a week, two days a week, that basically just had 500 calories. And they lost more on intermittent fasting. And that's what intermittent fasting means. Now there's another thing called time restricted feeding. That's where you eat certain, certain hours of the day, like between 12 and 8. That's been shown in limited studies to be able to have people maintain leanness and lose a little bit of fat, but not quite as effective. So that definitely does work for somebody trying to maintain their weight is by time restricted feeding. And there's a lot of theories as to why this works. Appears to be probably linked to the fact that our microbiome, which is the bacteria in our gut, determines if we're heavy or thin. And the, the bacteria that constantly require feeding would die off if you fast. So you change your microbiome. And we're finding that people that have a messed up microbiome like leaky gut or other autoimmune things that did intermittently faster their gut bacteria kind of changes. So those are the things that I'm really kind of focusing on for personally and where I recommend most my patients and I'll talk about the other ones. One is eating more plants. When I say plant based diet, that means that you're eating mostly plants. So I might go out for dinner and not have any kind of meat stuff. I don't avoid cheese on the salad and avoid butter and then eat animal products sparingly, preferably fish and poultry over red meats and avoid processed meats altogether to be like ham and bologna and yeah, all the other because those are carcinogen. And then I do time restricted feeding so I only eat 12 to 8. And then I do intermittent fasting two days a week. But then I found out that if I ate first, like had a salad with some oil on it, like olive oil, and I drink beet juice afterwards, nothing would happen. And a few other things I learned. I learned I should not eat bread before dinner because my blood sugar goes high. But if I have dinner and have some carbs towards the end of it, no, no effect. You really want your blood sugar low for as long as possible because that leads to slower aging. We know that the current way we measure age is by what's called methylation of the DNA and that's occurs by usually higher blood sugar or inflammation. So I think like we don't have this now. I got it through the pharmacy and prescription cover covers a freestyle Libre if you have Diabetes, that's brittle. I don't have that, you know, so I just paid for it. But I'm going to see if we can get those things ordered here in our office. We can give them to people, but they can buy them, I think like 50 bucks or something for two weeks. They can learn patterns that they should avoid. So I was able to take my average blood sugar from the 90s to the 70s, which have a positive effect on my longevity just by changing my behavior, not eating less. And definitely for me, it was less snacking. I was at an interview and they had M and Ms. There.

You did not.

Yeah, so I was eating M and Ms. And my blood sugar went sky hammock, of course. Okay. There goes that fantasy that can eat M's once in a while. I guess I probably shouldn't, right? So I was surprised at how much. But I mean, again, everybody in my family has diabetes. I don't, I've always watched it, but I had that gene, you know, so I gotta really watch it. So now we'll talk about the intermittent fasting. I'm definitely a fan of. It clearly works scientifically, the plant based diet. Definitely plant based diets lead to less cancer, less heart disease and weight loss if plant based diet is not all processed. So like a bread based diet would not be a plant based diet, but you know, vegetables and stuff would be. Dr. Joel Kahn, he's a friend of mine, he talks about get things made by a plant, not made in a plant. Right. That's kind of simple, very good for most of your food. Right. He's 100% plant based. Then there's the keto diet. So the keto diet is a ketogenic diet. Ketones are things in your body that your body burns when you don't have much sugar. So when you're fasting, your body's got to get calories from somewhere. And it uses up the sugar in your liver. And you fast long enough, you start breaking down fat that you've stored in your body and the free fatty acids, and eventually it gets broken down into an energy form called ketones. And most cells in your body can function just fine in ketones alone, with the exception of your liver and your blood cells. Your brain loves ketones, your organs love ketones. And they started using the keto diet in the 30s for children with seizures. So it appears that children with seizures have an impaired blood glucose blood vein barrier, the barrier between the blood and the brain. And sugar wouldn't get through really well. And they found out they Put them on a keto diet, ketones get through easier and they would have less seizures. Then they started using it for neurocognitive decline, Alzheimer's disease, other mental conditions. It seems to work well. Then they found that people had a little bit better performance mentally on keto diet. And now they're showing that even better physical performance in ketosis. And the principle of ketone diet is you're basically eating principally fats and very little protein, less than 25 grams a day and almost no carbohydrates. And I've done the keto diet. It's very hard if you're plant based. It's extremely hard because where do you get the fats from? It's got to be plant oils and plant oils, some of our healthy, but most of them probably, probably not avocados actually have a lot of other stuff in them besides oil. So having a plant based keto diet is just very, very difficult. So people are substituting a lot of bacon and butter, which we know bacon is a carcinogen. We know that these saturated fats cause inflammation. So I think that's probably long term going to backfire. The longest study ever done is in children that were on keto diet from seizures in about 10 years. It did not have a negative effect on their lipids. But we look at people who are increasing their coconut oil and butter intake. That does have a negative effect on their cardiac lipids like cholesterol and stuff. So I think the keto diet is fine for short term for fat loss. If you're a nutritional ketosis and you're mostly eating plant based and you carry it off, that's perfectly fine. I did it for a long time to see what happened physical performance wise. And I didn't get the performance benefits that I've read about, but you can actually buy ketone esters in a bottle and drink it and put you in ketosis immediately. And I did that couple days. It's 39 per bottle for a shot. And I actually was able to run faster on the elliptical. I noticed it because I do the same thing every day. That was kind of a surprise to me. So when you're putting yourself into ketosis or starvation and fat, you might not be getting there all the time, whereas you can take these ketones and get there. That's a little diversion of the subject, the keto diet. I think when people try that, they should do it with understanding that it might have different implications in their body. The people that are talking about being aikido diet When I see them eat, they're eating a lot of bacon and butter and things that we really shouldn't be eating. So I think that that's an expensive way to lower your weight. But if you did a plant based keto diet or did it occasionally, like when I told you I fast two days a week, I'm definitely in ketosis then. And then when you go back into eating, I do add more oils in at first and sort of bring myself out a little slower and it doesn't maintain my weight. I don't have any problems with my weight because I strictly eat and I do watch things. So when you're looking at fad diets, I would probably test things and see what works best for you. The ones that seem like nonsense probably are the meal substitution diets where you drink things like a liquid. Those typically fail in the long term because they don't replace the behavior. But if we start focusing on eating a whole food based diet, more plants, less animals, very low processed foods, you'll have a healthy life and you find out what works for you. The intermittent fasting does change behaviors. My son had gained weight in the army and a lot of weight and he was kind of surprised at how much it happened. And I started doing the intermittent fasting with him and he lost all the weight and kept it off. But what it did for him is it made him not brainwash himself to think he's got to constantly eat. And you know, people are always thinking I'm hangry or something like that. These are terms that we've made up, but our bodies were designed not to eat. It's interesting, we have a dog at our house that's obese. We inherit him from a friend and that he's one time a day. So instead of like the restricted time for he eats all his food like in one minute. Oh yeah, 24 hour day. And he's still right. He's got the obesity gene and he doesn't want to do much activity or anything like that. And he survived. But really, am I making a joke about. Tommy really is obese and he doesn't eat much, but if we this constant feeding of ourselves, we're going to have worse. Microbiome does seem to lead to things like autoimmune problems and what's called dysbiosis, where the bacteria and the gut are messed up and does lead to weight gain. So just taking a break and see how you do without eating all the time is a good idea. Try fasting one or two days a week. I wrote a book this weekend, and I put myself in ketosis for it because I can think better when I'm ketotic. And if I'm doing deep thinking, I always make myself ketotic. In the. The hack to making yourself ketotic, that works for most people. You can buy the keto strips at the drugstore. They're like for diabetics. And you urinate and see if you can get ketotic. Not the best marker, but it gives you an idea. Basically, you stop eating the night before, and then you get up in the morning. Don't plan to eat till, you know, later in the day. And then you do. What is known commonly by Dave Asprey is a bulletproof coffee. Where you get your coffee and you put in ghee, which is unrefined butter without the carcinogen protein in it, and coconut oil, and then you blend it and they've shown. When you emulsify the coconut oil, you get ketotic much quicker. And you'll be using ketotic within a couple hours of that. And then I, for me, I just fast until I'm done, whatever the project is. But I do use that hack to get myself there quicker by emulsifying the fats. And I haven't really tested how that affects my lipids, but I'm planning to do that in the future. I think that's a really good idea to start testing stuff. I recommend people get the Freestyle Libre. It's like a little complex now. Pharmacies don't know how to sell it outside of your insurance, and your doctor might be reluctant to prescribe it to you. They're not supposed to unless you're diabetic, but they can prescribe it to you. This shouldn't go on your insurance, so we'll crack that code and let you learn. And I think, you know, checking your baseline lipids, which are not a good indicator if you're gonna have a heart attack or not, but it's a good way to check and see if your stuff changes based on what you're eating. So if you got your trust, triglycerides got a little better. You're probably going in a good direction. So that's the summary. And we could talk about this all day.

Sure.

And they come and go. I mean, there's an ornish diet, and Dr. Grundy, he's a cardiologist, talks about the no Lectin diet, and he's really a real big believer of this. The problem is, I don't think it's universal. Like if we, if you don't go, if you come off lectins, it doesn't really affect everybody because I don't think we're all affected by the same plant toxin as he was when he had a problem. But it's worth trying a lectin free nitis, basically eating, avoiding things with a seed or a shelf because those seeds and shells are actually, they're poisons to our body. You want the quick story on the lectures?

Sure, absolutely.

All right, so all plants have proteins and toxins. They have to like all our bodies interact with things. So imagine you're a cherry tree and you have babies which are a bunch of little cherries. That's your ovum. And you'd like birds and animals to eat your cherries and go poop somewhere. The seed in different areas. Okay, now imagine if you're a cherry tree and one raccoon cries, crawls up on you and eats every single cherry. All your babies, there might be 500 of them and poops in one spot. You can't really spread your species so they made the skin of the cherry toxic. And if you try this at home, go eat 500 cherries, see what happens. You'll throw up and have diarrhea because it is a toxin. That's the lectin talking to you. Okay, so it's things that have a seed and a shell contain lectins, which is a toxin to our body. Okay, but it's a low grade toxin. Okay, so I find for example, if I eat a bunch of peppers, green peppers, I get an upset stomach, but I can have them on my salad. Right. Because there's a certain amount. So we all have some intolerance to them all nightshades and tomatoes, they all have these lectins in them. And what Dr. Gundry is stating, he wrote a book called the plant paradox is that this is the cause of obesity and a lot of other conditions. I think it is in certain people. So to find out if you have lectins sensitivity or not, just go lectin free for six weeks, which would be avoiding a lot of things. Pretty much all the vegetables that make you full. I like this. But if you go without six weeks and something that you had that was problem gets better. We probably are lectin intolerance to start cutting those down, they send everything lectin. So you can't go like and for let's say low lectin. And you read Dr. Gundry's blogs about how to do that. But lectins are just natural plant poisons that some of us are probably more sensitive than others. I found when I did lectin free for six weeks, I didn't really notice anything. So I. I don't really go lectin free. But the flip side is when I started paying attention to it, my wife would make spaghetti for us, and I don't eat spaghetti anymore. But when our kids were little, I always had kind of an uneasy stomach. Afterwards, I was eating all kinds of lectins, you know, spaghetti and the tomato stuff. And, you know, she put eggplant and stuff like that in it. So a lot of lectins, and she made such good spaghetti. She's a wonderful cook that you would eat a lot. And back when I was my 30s, I would eat, you know, 3,000 calories a day is kind of what's typical. And a lot of that could come from spaghetti. Right? I'm sure.

Sure, I'm sure. Now, tell me what you think or what if people ask you about diets like WW or Paleo or Mediterranean, what advice do you give them? Do you say, no way or do you?

Okay. Weight Watch is by far the best thing you can do. So if you look at statistically, who's most likely to benefit, it's the person that's Weight Watchers, because you have a community accountability. Okay? So of all the different ones, Jenny Craig and everything else, Weight Watchers comes out on top. So that's a good start if you're trying to lose your weight. And that's also an opportunity to have a community of other people that are thinking about healthy stuff. The Paleo diet, the idea would be this is how our ancestors ate. It's just that we're not really sure what they eat. What people call Paleo diet, what they're doing. I see they have Paleo bars, right? Paleo meal replacements. There's no way in hell our ancestors were eating stuff that came in a package. So it's really bullshit. So I think that's an opportunity for them to make stuff. And I remember when I was reading about this, Dr. Grundy's Things is that we Paleo didn't eat a lot of beans because you had to process them in a certain fashion. And beans do have a lot of lectins in them. But the Paleo diet is probably a reasonable way to test yourself and see how you do with it. Again, if you really want to know what the Paleo is eating, you have to do a little study. Was not eating a lot of red meat and bacon and fat, butter. They were not eating that stuff. They're eating mostly vegetables. Okay. So our ancestors did that. So you said Paleo, Weight Watchers, Mediterranean. Well, that's the best. So the Mediterranean diet is the best diet. So the Weight Watchers is the best system. And the Mediterranean diet is probably the healthiest diet. One of our doctors in Minnesota, he's a cardiologist. He has a concierge cardiology practice. And he's been very effective at getting people to lower the risk for cardiac disease by just changing to a Mediterranean diet. And if you notice in the Mediterranean diet has very little animal products in it. There might be a little bit of fish, but it's not. With every meal, unrefined carbohydrates. Okay. So they're eating greens or whole grains and a lot of vegetables. Olive oil. There's even studies showing that the olive oil intake is inversely related to heart disease. So it looks like we probably need a lot more. You can actually test your olive oil level. My olive oil level is where I need to take at least four tablespoons a day to get my oleic acid and my blood up, because my body consumes it a lot. I didn't know this. It was called a spectracell test. And see, but the Mediterranean diet would be like the healthiest diet. Then there's steps past that. So can you do a Mediterranean keto diet? Yes, actually you can. More avocados, more olive oil. Cutting down other things. Can you do a Mediterranean diet with intermittent fasting? Yes, you can. For surely you can still fast two days a week. But we're talking about what peoples eat. The healthiest Mediterranean diet. There's something called the blue zones. Have you ever heard of the blue zones? No. No. So there's areas in the world. One of them is in Loma Linda, California, where people just outlive everybody else. And they have something that they do in their culture where they eat differently. And it might be that they're. They're a. Like. I think it's Seven Day Adventists that are vegans. They just live longer. And there's areas throughout the country or the world rather, that the community just lives longer than general. And they call the blue zones. They see, what they eat is generally whole foods, mostly plants, and they stay away from refined foods.

That's really incredible. A lot of good information there. Appreciate your time, Dr. Moak.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to Inside the Cure with Dr. Charles Moak. See you next time.