Biohack Your Plate: Genetics, Gut & Perfect Nutrition – Matt & Wade of BiOptimizers : 1101

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly Bulletproof Radio. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about something that's really fun in the world of nutrition, in the world of biohacking, we used to say, well, everyone needs 12 servings of grains and three servings of protein, which might include beans, which aren't really protein, and all sorts of stuff like that. And the idea is that everyone needs is total bs. What we're seeing now, and I'm seeing this in all of the work I'm doing, is personalization. There's genetics, there's the stuff that Viome is doing around what's going on in your gut bacteria. And it's different between different people. And at Upgrade labs we're using AI to figure out, well, what are the exact biohacks to use in what order to get you the result you want. And it's time to do this with nutrition so that instead of saying, well, I'm going to follow this one plan because it worked for this one guy. Well, if it worked for that one guy and you happen to be a 90 pound Asian woman who's 50, it might not be the same diet for you because you have different genetics, you have a different body size, you're a different gender. All that stuff matters. So what do you do about it? Our guests today are returning to the show. We've got Matt who was on episode 996 and Wade who's on episode 807. These are the guys from By Optimizers. They just wrote a book called the Ultimate Nutrition Bible and it's massive. I'm holding it right now. But the idea here is how do you create the perfect diet for your lifestyle, your goals and your genetics? And this is what matters because your lifestyle is part of it. So if you're eating a diet that's perfect for a crossfitter, but you actually just sit in a chair all day, maybe your lifestyle is a mismatch, maybe your genetics just aren't supporting that and maybe you have different goals. So like Wade here, he wants to be a balloon animal, right? Because, you know, he's a bodybuilder, you know, kind of thing. Right. Is that accurate?

Used to be, but then I became a marathoner recently just to throw a curveball at this.

Are you joking?

No.

So you're into self abuse, just straight up?

Yeah, it's a Canadian thing.

Right.

You can appreciate that.

I can. Now, you know the guy who ran the first marathon died as a result of doing it, right?

Yeah, he did. So they say.

So they say. Oh, well, I mean.

I mean, it was called a marathon, but I mean, who's to say that there wasn't a lot of people that ran a marathon before, but nobody reported it.

So there might have been someone who ran that far before and didn't die. That's a fair point. And maybe he was just running extra fast because, you know, his entire civilization was at risk. So.

Yeah, and he just fought a war, I think, too, prior to. So I didn't fight a war before I engaged in the marathon.

Greek people are not lazy.

Yeah, being lazy 2,500 years ago was probably a death sentence.

That's a good point. In fact, that's why we still have shame over the fact that our bodies try to conserve energy. And that's why running marathons actually kind of epic one time, because it's just showing that your mind can overcome the lack of inertia from your body. Are you doing lots of marathons or just one?

No, I just want to do one to actually prove some of the aspects of the strategies we outlined, because there's your goal, your genetics, and your lifestyle. So I was like, okay, how many bodybuilders do a bodybuilding contest and then decide to run a marathon? Virtually none.

It's supposed to be impossible. In fact, in Smarter, not Harder, you can kind of pick a goal that. Did you want VO2 max. And do you want to look like a marathoner, which is lean with big legs, or do you want to look like a bodybuilder, which is more muscle up top that you have to carry around and your knees have to support? So you're kind of breaking some rules to do that. And by the way, I just said Matt and Wade because I know them really well. Matt Gallant and Wade Lightheart is an important thing for you guys to know. And Bioptimizers is their company. They've been on lots of times, if you're a longtime listener, because they make really, really good supplements. But we're not going to talk as much about supplements today, really, about the ultimate nutrition Bible, because I have my perspectives on food. Don't eat certain toxins, especially if you're more susceptible to those. And I got a. I had a bone to pick with you guys. So I'm looking at the COVID of this right now, okay. And it says, let's see. I'm just looking at the picture here. We've got black sesame. We've got farmed salmon I can tell it's farmed with the way it looks because it's not red enough. And then we've got nightshade goji berries, and we've got white sesame. I think that's sesame, right? Yeah, I think so. White sesame, which is full of, well, both lectins and phytic acid and oxalic acid. And you've got oats, which are like one of the dumbest foods on the planet from a phytic acid and a blood sugar perspective. And you have a little bit of beef in the corner here. But why is the beef not somewhere better?

So one of the things we say in the book is there's no evil foods, which. I know, I just took a lot of air out of your balloon.

Right.

Twinkies are not evil.

Did you read about the Twinkie diet success story?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

They're still evil. They make you old.

Well, blood sugar. Elevated blood sugar will definitely.

And so will hydrogenated fat.

So we did some experiments in the lab recently, a couple months ago. And the thing that's bad about seed oils is something called maldialdehyde, which is mutagenic. So if you look at the research on cell culture experiments with maldialdehyde, which when you have rancid fats, you get a lot more of it is mutagenic. The cool thing is we tried breaking it down with Capex, which is a blend of lipases.

It's one that you make. It's one of your products.

Yeah. So. And you're able to break it down into fatty acids. So even. Even something like seed oils, again, there are solutions. And I think even mentally, there's so much fear being propagated around food, and a lot of people just. I mean, if you join Instagram for a week and you just get sucked into the food algorithm or nutrition algorithm, at the end of the week, you're going to be scared to go and buy almost anything.

You don't need fear, you need awareness. But there's a lot of evidence that linoleic acid, which is the fatty acid that even Capex, is going to break things down into. Right. Linoleic acid, when it's a higher ratio of what you eat, it goes into your white fat and it goes into your brain preferentially before it goes into your other tissues. And it's what animals eat to go into hibernation. Like, it slows your metabolism and it appears to change the membranes and cells, and it's probably the biggest cause of diabetes.

I think one of the core principles in biological optimization or Nutrition is the dose creates the effect.

That's a fair point. Right.

So if you eat a kale salad every week, which is one of your favorite enemies, and again, you're not genetically prone to have problems with oxalates, it's not going to affect you that much. If you drink one Coke zero a week with a little bit of sucralose, it's not going to impact you that much. But of course, if you're drinking a six pack every day or eating a massive kale salad every day, yes, the odds you're gonna have some issues go up. So even just being aware that you can have a pizza once in a while, you can have a donut once in a while.

I'm going to Turkey in a couple weeks for the harvest series. I'll be doing a five day workshop with a small group. It's gonna be really epic. I'm planning on eating a baklava every single day because it's made with European soft wheat instead of American hard wheat. And, and if you take some good enzymes, like the stuff you guys make, what's it called? The gluten something. Gluten guardian. Yeah, gluten guardian. Thank you. I always have a bottle of it with me whenever I go to Europe because I'm probably gonna eat a croissant. Right, so you certainly can do graceful degradation. I'm seeing a lot of people though who are saying, well, my joints hurt all the time and I have interstitial cystitis. And they're only having a kale salad or a spinach salad once a week, but they're having a bowl of raspberries every day and they're having almonds every day. And they're actually building up their oxalate levels to the point that it's causing crystals in the urethra. So they have to pee all the time. I talked to someone recently. I'm like, well, just lay off the raspberries for a little bit. Three days later, it's like, I've had this condition for 10 years and it's gone. So I'm working on helping people not be afraid, but just be aware. If you do a lot of this, it's a problem. How does that work out with the ultimate nutrition bible?

Well, what you're talking about is biofeedback and weight. I mean, you've been tuned into biofeedback since your early bodybuilding days. Maybe talk about how you use that because self awareness of what's going on in your body is a critical part of this whole Puzzle.

Yeah. Well, I do believe that bodybuilders are the original biohackers because they're overcoming two evolutionary biases. One, you know, having an excess amount of muscle is not biologically productive. And having, you know, suboptimal levels of body fat for what's aesthetic purposes for a bodybuilding competition are also counter to longevity, health, vitality, all of the things that we advocate for. However, because we're overcoming these genetic aspects, they developed a wide variety of strategies to overcome that. And then many of those strategies have been adopted and optimized in the biohacking space. And so when we started out, we didn't have all the tech that's available that you advocate for all these things. So we had to get really in tune to how we feel. Journaling, becoming, becoming intuitively aware of how food was impacting us both internally and visually, because that's what you're defined by in those contests. And what I can say is that's helped me understand the dietary cult dynamics. I think that like religion there is, you know, and you know, Patanjali has Yama Niyama, the do's and don'ts is the foundational aspect of yoga. And I think people become attracted to a diet because obviously what they've determined that whatever they've tried is not working. They're unhealthy, they're fat, they're sick, they're diseased, whatever that case is, and they gravitate to some personality that has created some sort of quote unquote religion that says do this, don't do that. And it works for a while.

Like the vegan diet. Six weeks, you'll feel great.

Exactly. Or raw food, you know, we've experimented.

Raw, vegan too. Good.

Yeah. And we've experimented. And the thing is, the raw food community is a great example. A lot of people who get into that community are really sick. And it is kind of the hyper reductionist version of dietary strategies.

So you're saying that the raw food movement is like the Charles Manson of diets? Is that what I'm hearing?

You could say that. You could say that. I mean, the point is, is for a lot of those people, and I was raw food for two years.

Okay, me too. So guys, we're making fun of the raw food diet, but not of you. We both did it for a reason, and the same reason you're probably doing it. So this doesn't meant to be mean spirited, it's meant to be honest.

And you start producing all these results because of the restrictive nature and then the benefits start to diminish. But you've been so indoctrinated with the cult dynamics is that you stop listening to yourself. And the good news is data came out to actually expose people's lack of trust in their own intuitive or observational patterns that help people break out of that. And that's kind of where we are today. I think most of the dietary experts, whatever they advocate for, have recognized that people fall within a bell curve. And you're going to have the people who are the major advocates in the top 2 percentile and the people that are the total haters are in the bottom 2%. And what we're trying to do is obliterate that and provide a way that you can optimize any diet based on these core principles.

And I have a crazy success story to share with raw food diets. He's a neighbor of mine. He's a good friend. His name is Dr. Eris Latham. You can go check him out on Instagram. He's 73. He's been a raw foodist for 37 years. Looks amazing, full of energy and vitality. But he's got Jamaican genetics. He's got. Obviously it's working for him now. That's a big point in the book, is that. And I learned this as a trainer, I used to think the ketogenic diet was for everybody. And I remember one of my clients turned gray. He lost a bunch of weight, but he looked horrible. People tell me he looked better before.

You get the gray skin, the sagging face, hollow cheekbones, you lose your minerals, so you turn gray.

Exactly.

So, so. And then I had some other clients that had digestive issues on a ketogenic diet. Wade, you know, struggled as well as he couldn't metabolize the fat store.

And Peterson's another great example. Here's a guy that went completely carnivore and corrected a wide variety of things. And I'm a plant based guy. So should I say that, oh, Peterson's bad because he's corrected all of his health issues with a carnivore diet? Of course not. I think that's a great thing.

And I think most people who go carnivore for long periods of time actually harm themselves as much as going vegan for long periods of time. And I did the carnivore diet. Didn't have a name back then, but when I was testing the corners of the bulletproof diet, I did about three to six months. But after about three months of just meat and eggs, and I had raw or not raw but I had grass fed butter as well and man, my sleep quality went away. I was waking up 20 times a night and something wasn't right. It turns out I had gotten leaky gut from it and gave myself an egg allergy during that time. So I would just say it's fine to do almost any diet for a month.

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Well, let's talk about that when. So when you switch diets, especially when you go from the standard American diet to any type of structured diet, one, you'll tend to fix some deficiencies and lower the toxicities. So no matter what diet you're on, whether it's plant based, vegan, raw food, carnivore, you, you need to be mindful of the potential deficiencies which change depending what type of diet you're on. And we cover that in the book. So, Wayne, we talk about some of the potential plant based efficiencies as an example.

Yeah, exactly. So there are some aspects of the plant based diet, particularly for myself, that are suboptimal and I embrace those constraints as an experimental side, especially being a bodybuilder because most people say you can't be a bodybuilder.

You take a lot of supplements because you manufacture a lot of really good ones. So you're kind of relying on technology to do that. But if you were living in a cave on a plant based diet, you'd be unable to reproduce.

Well, I think that if you look at the life expectancy for cavemen, they were much less than we have today. So we can abandon those ideologies based on what our ancestors ate.

Thank you.

I think we're living in a completely different environment nowadays. And for myself, for example, I would do pretty well on a standard bodybuilding diet of high protein, moderate carbohydrates, low fat, because I have the genetics that doesn't process fats very well. And I have suboptimal genetics for blood sugar regulation and I have a low satiety like delay. So in other words, I have a tendency to overeat. So understanding that aspect within my genetics, I can go, okay, I'm going to boost my protein content to be more suited for bodybuilding and for satiation. I'm going to eat a big, big ass salad every afternoon because that helps me with my satiety, because I'll overeat otherwise and then I'll supplement with the key elements that I'm not getting in my vegetarian diet so that I can optimize my dietary strategy for my goals.

So vegetarian though is different than plant based, Right? So you're vegetarian or you're entirely plant based?

Well, I would say that I'm be kind of a chigen in the fact that I will I eat eggs or dairy recreationally in social situations.

That's how he parties.

Got it. So you have no standards?

Yeah, I have very high standards, but most people wouldn't be aware of them. And I don't recommend people to follow my diet. I'm saying this is how I'd rather people understand. How did I optimize the diet for me based on my goals and my personal interests. That's what we're advocating.

This is a really important conversation. You said something earlier that's, that's worth repeating. I also noticed that bodybuilders are very good biohackers. And the reason I started the biohacking movement is I wanted to get bodybuilders and my extreme longevity friends and neuroscientists all in the same room, along with a few NASA people and you know, special forces people and pro athletes because those are the areas where we're pushing the boundaries of humans. But they weren't talking before that. And I had Frank Zane on the show a while ago, one of the most conscious people I've met. I mean he plays the flute for an hour a day and is like this semi enlightened guy. But the stereotype is that is that bodybuilders are meatheads. And it's not true because you notice if I do this, I get this. And that is at the core of biohacking. And the reason I haven't published every single supplement I take or here's what you should do in a day. It's because I don't want people to do what I do because like you, I've been creating what works over 20 years for my biology as a 6, 4 guy who used to be obese and had chronic inflammation and fibromyalgia and all these things wrong with me and my goal too. I'm going to live to at least 180 and I want my brain to work amazingly well and I want to look reasonably good and have a body with enough muscle to keep me alive for a long time. I don't want to have massive bowling ball shoulders. It'd be kind of fun. But I'm not willing to do the work for that. The goals are so different. I would not feel comfortable if I said here's all the stuff I take because I know a whole bunch of followers and I'm sorry guys, I know you want me to do this. You would try to do the same thing and it would probably make you sick, right? So what I'm doing is very similar to what you guys are doing in the Ultimate Nutrition Bible. I'm saying if you're like this and you want this, you should use this supplement. So I'm working on a series of videos about different supplements and why I take that one and why you might want to take it. But I'm not publishing a list with doses for everything because your dose will vary by you. And I think it's the same with steak or salad or anything else. So you have a really good approach here. I would say it's a step beyond in the bulletproof diet. If you guys have ever seen the roadmap on it, these are more likely to be good, these are less likely to be good. So if you want to cheat, just cheat in the middle. Instead of going all the way to the Twinkie diet, Washington, dial Diet Coke to cancel it out. Right? So it's not like if you cheat on your diet, you have to just punch yourself in the face over and over and feel like crap for a week and have food cravings, which is what I used to do. Like, the cheat day was really a bad idea because that cheat day equals four days of cravings. So when someone opens the Ultimate Nutrition Bible, how do you start?

It's definitely a choose your own adventure kind of book. So depending on what you're interested in, what your goals are, you can kind of jump to that chapter and read that. Of course, if you want to read it cover to cover, go for really just depends on what your goals are. One thing I want to harp on, which has been proven with a Twinkie diet, it was proven with a guy doing a McDonald diet, is that when people lose weight, no matter what diet they're on, their biomarkers improve. And if people gain weight, no matter what diet they're on, their biomarkers get worse. So now hold on.

Gain fat, you mean? Yes, because you gain muscle or skeletal mass. Okay, right.

So that's a really important point. Again, if people want to lose weight again, your biomarkers will get better no matter what diet.

So you like Ozempic, I think.

Well, let's talk about that. So one of the key points we talk about in the book is starvation survival mechanisms. And both Wade and I have been victims of those, and maybe you have as well, where you diet too hard, too fast. And my experience of that was for my wedding, I've been losing weight steadily. I went from 220 down to 185, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to lose the last ten pounds and I'm going to do whatever it takes. Started literally sprinting in the jungles of Panama, doing crazy things up the hill and just push my body to the absolute limit. And after the wedding, I was hungry for about two years and regained almost all of it.

I did the same thing when I competed my first Mr. Universe contest. I gained 42 pounds of fat and water in 11 weeks after 11 months of extreme dieting on a.

42 pounds.

Yeah, 42 pounds. So I went from Mr. Universe to Mr. Marshmallow. And that was an aha moment because I realized the difference between a performance based diet and a health based diet. So I had literally suffered the consequences of a performance diet sacrificing everything. And I thought, this is not a good idea long term. And that really started me on the journey to understand your microbiome and its influence. And then going back to the book to kind of answer your question circularly, we basically outlined five basic goals that people can choose to start moving towards. And then we have a pyramid of nutritional decisions to consider at every stage. Once you reach your goal, even before you get to that goal, or if you're choosing another goal, because 97% of people who engage in a diet are going to regress backwards. So what, we want to invert that to make 97% successful. And people such as yourself and the people you bring on the podcast, the experts have created those tweaks for themselves so they can sustain it for life, and it goes into that nutritional pyramid of decisions.

And I very much appreciate you talking about that. On the bodybuilder side, I know so many fitness competitors who I've consulted with, and, and they're like, I never looked better and felt worse. It is a very standard thing, especially for women. I think it's worse for women than.

For men, especially as they're young. Yeah, when they're young, the girls that are attracted to that, it's, it's, it's. Scott Abel probably wrote the best books on that. So if you're a fitness competitor, I would refer to Scott Abel's work. I think he identified metabolic issues and, you know, he's trained more fitness competitors than anyone else and felt that that was really important because so many young girls are destroying their metabolisms, they're destroying their ability to have children or to be metabolically robust. And it's a real problem. Yeah.

So one of the things we talk about is you need to make your body feel safe as you're Losing weight.

Thank you for that.

And one of the strategies to do that is you can do refeeds, whether it's once a week or you can do diet breaks. Now, a diet break doesn't mean you're eating whatever you want or however much you want. You tend to go at maintenance. So calorie cycling, again, there's a lot of different ways. We have a whole chapter dedicated to that is one of the best strategies. Because when you go back to maintenance, your body's like, okay, I'm safe, I'm safe. And then once you're psychologically ready, you can go back into another dieting phase. And then once you reach your ideal weight, there's another diet you need to do, which is the reverse diet. So let's talk about homeostasis and breaking homeostasis. This is really important. So again, homeostasis means your body wants to be in balance. Your body, our bodies don't want to change. Change is a threat. If you gain too much weight, whether it's muscle mass or body fat, obviously it's more likely that animals are going to eat you. Right. If you lose too much weight, again with the starvation, survival mechanisms kick in and fight back. So your body's always striving for homeostasis. With reverse dieting, we're taking advantage of that. And let's say you're down to 1200 calories, which for you would be obviously an extremely low calorie intake.

I might as well just fast.

Exactly.

Well, and again, when people bodybuild, they'll, they'll get down to really extremely low levels because, you know, that's what it takes sometimes to get to that incredible conditioning. The strategy is to add 50 to 100 calories a week until you go back to maintenance. Now, I know that sounds extreme, but, you know, one of my coaches, she would reverse diet as for the same amount of time that she took to get into shape.

That's a bodybuilder, that's a fitness competitor shape, like a, you know, national level competitive.

And what's the body fat percentage for women as fitness competitors?

Usually if you can get down to 10% and then you get into single digits and that's where a lot of women. And it's going to vary. There's also set point data. So in other words, some people are just not predisposed to get to that. You know, single body fat percentages, like.

Boob size has a lot to do with that.

Right.

There's a substantial amount of fat. If you have large breasts, then you're never going to get as low for total body. But everywhere, everywhere that's not a breast cancer can do that.

And, and most, and most fitness competitors are using breast augmentation strategy to, you know, create the feminine characteristics and I would say suboptimal for health body fat levels for women. For a typical male competitor, you'll be in single digits in a natural competition, maybe between 8 and 10 if you get into, if you get into the professional level of, you know, the no restrictions on drug usage. So that's a natural competitor at 8% then you can get into that 5%, 4%, 3% range, which is really bad, is really bad for your health.

I'm doing strategies right now to increase my body fat because for longevity I think about nine is better. But with all the metabolic hacks like I effortlessly am maintaining this. So I actually pay attention for longevity because too low is not good.

I think everybody's got a sweet spot. And again, one of the things to pay attention to back to biofeedback is how much is your body fighting back? You know, is, is hunger out of control? You know, do you feel good? Is your energy low? Is your energy high?

I feel great and I'm never hungry. Like I have to make myself eat.

I'll give you a great example for myself. So I don't have awesome genetics for bodybuilding. In fact, I have very poor genetics by the sport. And getting into an 8% body fat level for me is difficult. My body would regularly feel the best at around 12%. And recently when I did the. I decided to make a comeback and did the Olympia at 50. And afterwards I wanted to see how much weight would I gain post contest before I would start adding lean body mass. And that was, I was like, what's really, what's my safe zone? And here's a shocking fact. I went from 8% body fat to 15 before I gained a single gram of lean body mass tissue on a DEXA scan.

I hate to. There's one word that comes to mind, vegetarian.

I think it's most mostly understanding your set point. Now. I have friends who stay in single body fat percentages but have a very difficult time gaining weight. So they're on the inverse of that equation. So it really comes down to for me that 10 to 12 range is optimal. I feel really good at that range. My brain operates, I think at its optimal level at that range. And when I start getting into those single digits, my body starts creating these fighting mechanisms. And that's something to become aware of in your own dietary journey.

Okay, and let's talk about the other side of breaking homeostasis. So the one strategy with reverse dieting is we want to maintain it. And as, again, as you're increasing calories and you're kind of fooling your body, your body's not noticing and people tend to not gain any body fat or very little. So you can kind of rebuild your metabolism. For anybody who's got a destroyed or damaged metabolism, again, reverse dieting is amazing. But on the flip side, let's say you want to lose body fat or gain muscle mass, then you need to break homeostasis. So bodybuilders, you know, of course there's the stimuli which from comes from resistance training, but you also need a calorie surplus and we Recommend Typically about 300 calories a day of surplus because your body needs that extra energy to synthesize the lean muscle mass. Of course you need enough amino acids in your body, you need MTOR activation. So typically four meals a day is a good sweet spot. I mean some bodybuilders back in the day used to do six meals. And your lifestyle, I did that in.

The, in the 90s when I worked in tech and I was just so trying to lose weight, I was going to the gym all the time. And so I'll go into starvation mode if I don't eat six times a day. And it didn't work.

One caveat too, I think that needs to be clarified when I'm doing this. This is with no trt, no hormone optimization, no exogenous hormones of any level under, under that condition, why wouldn't you.

Take care of yourself?

Because under the, the, the rules of natural bodybuilding, you're not allowed to use those agents. You're under WADA testing. So that is an isolated aspect of non hormonal manipulation. Because I think once you add hormones, you know, say if I was to optimize my testosterone as a, as a 50 year old, and I'm, I'm an advocate of people using TRT and hormone augmentation and stuff. Bodybuilders go to super physiological dosages. But I think for the average 50 year old at my age, I'm probably a great candidate for hormone replacement therapy. I just wanted to do the experiment with these constraints so that I could give you legitimate information for the general public and say, yeah, that's what you can do. As a 50 year old guy with suboptimal genetics, suboptimal testosterone levels, suboptimal muscle mass, what can you do with augmentation? That are advocated in the biohacking space a lot better. So I suspect, you know, as my 60s and 70s, I can be in superior form than I am now. With all the tech that's available right.

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I went off of testosterone, so I've been on testosterone since I was 26 because I was tested and I had lower testosterone than my mom and I had excessive white fat. My testosterone very quickly turns to estrogen. Still does if I don't block it. And that's probably a genetic thing. And so. Okay, got it. So like if I stop taking, I use an herb called Crizan. If I Stop taking that for three days. I'm like, oh, look, tender nipples that are perky. And like, that's not the look I'm going for. I've had moves, like, most of my life. It was kind of embarrassing. All the guys in my family do. I don't have them now, right. Because I learned how to block it.

But.

So I've been on it, but I went off it for almost three years when I was testing the bulletproof diet and I was getting my lab tests and I could get my testosterone up to about 700 if I did everything perfectly. High fat diet, enough protein, proper sleep. But I'm also starting a company that's done like half a billion in revenue and I'm a dad, and so I don't think it's particularly sustainable for most people. But you should test, and if you don't need it, don't do it.

Your psychological aspect to, you know, everyone and Wade is a rebel. So we have a whole chapter on the psychological side of. Of dieting. So for Wade, when he creates an incredibly challenging goal, like being a vegetarian, competing naturally in a bodybuilding show, it really motivates him. It creates this incredible challenge that he gets excited about. Now, I'm a questioner, so for me, I need to understand all the scientific nuances. I want the proof, I want to understand the mechanisms. So those are just some of the differences between us. And you're probably also a little bit on the rebel side.

There's a condition called oppositional defiant disorder.

It's called thinking.

Yeah, it's called thinking and acting. And I actually had that because I had Asperger's and ADHD and ODD and OCD as a kid.

You had all the acronyms.

I had the whole. The whole list. I didn't have a D student. No, actually, I was an A student, which was surprising.

D attitude.

Yeah, exactly. And in fact, they wouldn't let me be valedictorian in high school because my attitude was so bad. But I'm like, I have the higher scores. Like, yeah, but you're an asshole. And it was all true. Right? So, yeah. And I think actually I can tell you that was partly toxic mold and partly strep throat grows when you have toxic mold. And if kids get strep throat a lot, they develop antibodies to one of the strep things, and then that creates changes in the brain that makes you more OCD and odd. So I used to have to scrunch my face and I'd have to stim all the time and There were certain things I had to do three times, all that kind of crap. But it also meant that Rage against the Machine song. Fuck you, I won't do what you told me. So, yeah. So for me doing the bulletproof diet, I tried all this shit that was supposed to work, and it just didn't. And so I thought it was my fault. And then I realized, well, maybe it's just dumb. So then eating way more fat than is supposed to work did work. And it's worked for a lot of people as long as it's the right kind of fat. And that leads me to this next question, though. You're talking about calories. This is what big food does to tell you that you could drink 10 calories, Cokes a day because has X number of calories. And the old Weight Watchers, you can swap a scoop of ice cream for three graham crackers, whatever the hell they did. Calories are stupid. Why are you guys counting these?

I'm super excited to debate this one with you. So there's two camps. There's the Calories in, Calories out camp, which tries to simplify everything to just pure thermodynamics.

Doesn't work. Right.

We'll get to that. Okay, there's another camp which I think you're part of, which wants to believe in other variables that change the equation. Now, here's what I'm saying, or here's what we're saying in the book. Both camps are right. And there's a whole chapter called the Optimized Metabolism, which we present, let's say a more accurate version of calories in, calories out. First of all, no animal can escape the laws of thermodynamics in this reality. Meaning that if you have a calorie surplus, you're going to gain weight. If you have a calorie, you know, if you're burning more energy than you're eating, you're going to lose weight. However, here's the part which you've been talking a lot about on the calories outside, there's a lot of sub variables that can increase or decrease the amount of energy you're burning. I mean, one of the big ones, which you know, we've been, we've experienced many times, is anabolism. So when you're really anabolic, your metabolism can go up 20, 30, 40%. I mean, I've seen as much as 100% increase with some extreme bodybuilder experiments which, you know, we're not going to talk about.

Well, look at the calorie Consumption of, say, wide receivers in the NFL who are just doing sprint after sprint after sprint all day long. They're consuming massive amounts of 10,000 calories, and they're at, you know, like 5%, 4% body fat. These, like, gods out of speed. And they're like slamming McDonald's every day because the metabolic output that they've put forth regard to their sport, and then you see them after they retire and they just balloon up and can't figure out what happened. Of course, many of those guys have superior genetics to even be in the NFL. But again, as you age your metabolism, these factors he's talking about on the calories, I start, start to diminish excessively, unless you're engaging in the biohacking practices, which you've been advocating for years, to, you know, invert the metabolic decline. So calories in, calories out is a general concept with a lot of assumptions inside of it. And we're trying to break down those assumptions because eventually, if you follow a diet strategy and just go with the calories in, calories out, eventually you're going to fail.

So one of the things we talk about is it's better to. You don't want to basically be decreasing calories constantly and get down to, as one of my clients got down to 800 calories on a Bernstein diet and her metabolism was destroyed. It's better to focus on increasing calories out and getting to a reasonably, you know, a reasonable amount of calories. So let's talk about some other things. Thermic effect of protein. One of the reasons why diets work so well is because people increase their protein intake, which the general ballpark for thermic effect of protein is 25 to 30%. So here's another concept.

Net calories, just to translate that, that thermic effect, it takes about 30% of the calories in protein to digest the protein.

Exactly.

There you go.

And there's an anabolic effect from the protein. So now you're getting the anabolism, calorie burn. On top of that, here's another big one. And you wrote an entire book on mitochondrial function. That's another metabolic boost, right? And anything you can do to improve your mitochondrial function will help improve your calories out. Here's another one, which I've experienced many times doing 40 years of Zen, pushing your brain hard and deep. I mean, when I'm doing a 40 years of Zen, I almost need to double my calorie intake and I won't gain any body weight because that's how Much energy, the brain's burning.

There's an executive chef and kind of unlimited food when people are spending five days at 40 years end because I found they couldn't do the intense mental work to reprogram themselves unless I fed them crazy amounts of food. And so the brain can do what, about 20% of your calories if you're pushing it hard. So I say it's kind of like running a marathon with your brain or doing CrossFit every day with your brain. And there's some other things though. Okay.

Yeah.

Is there one more big variable?

We do that one. Then I got some questions for you.

Which I got, which you do as well. Cold exposure.

Thank you. Yeah.

So cold exposure does two things. One, there's heat loss while especially in a cold plunge, that you know anywhere from 300, 500 calories that your body has to replace. And then there's the brown fat activation. And brown fat is mitochondrial rich fat. And the more cold exposure you do, the more brown fat you build. So those are all variables that you can again manipulate to increase calories out. So again, calories in, calories out is, is accurate. It's scientifically true. But where a lot of people miss the boat is they don't focus on improving the calories outside.

So if it's scientifically true, my favorite drug is Xeronol. Xeronol is an extract of zearalenone, which is a mold toxin that's 10,000 times more estrogenic than human toxins. And it's not a drug that humans take. But what we do is we manufacture it in little waxy pellets and you put it in a cow's ear and then it basically melts into the fat in the cow. And that cow will get fat on 30% less calories than a cow that hasn't been treated.

So what's the mechanism? It's destroy. It's again, it's decreasing calories out. Do you know how it's doing that?

I don't believe it's decreasing calories out. The cows are just as active. Right. So there is no evidence that there's.

A calories out oxygenization of the cow, which is going to lead to increased body fat, such as females have a higher level of body fat than males. So testosterone, and this is an issue for men, as your testosterone drops now, your estrogen to testosterone ratio becomes suboptimal and you're eating the same diet and you're like, oh my God, how come I'm gaining so much weight? I haven't really changed anything. And this is something that virtually every middle aged guy experiences.

Yeah. And they're doing the same workouts they did before. Estrogen levels are higher, even if their movement isn't lower. They haven't heated up their house, so they're not changing calories out in a meaningful way.

The anabolism piece is changing. And again, when you're on TRT and if you use steroids and you're keeping your estrogen in check, I mean, the amount of calories you're burning is incredible. And of course, if your estrogen is too high and your testosterone's low, it changes the anabolic environment. So that to me is the variable that's changing in those situations.

When I was 23 and I decided I was going to lose that hundred pounds of fat no matter what, I went on a low calorie diet. It was always less than 2,000 calories a day. And I went to the gym six days a week.

You were doing cardio?

I was doing 45 minutes of cardio. I couldn't run because of the arthritis and knee surgeries, so I would get on a treadmill at a 15 degree incline carrying a weighted pack for 45 minutes and then I would lift legs or arms or something. So half weights, half cardio six days a week. I took Sundays off and I did this for 702 hours or 18 months. And I literally had a 46 inch waist when I started and when I was done.

So let's talk about metabolic adaptation. When you're losing weight or decreasing calories, again, our bodies want homeostasis. So it's always adapting cardio, especially, you know, doing excessive cardio, is it exas. It just increases the speed of that metabolic adaptation. So in our opinion, you know, cardio, as far as just cardio machines in that repetitive motion, doing the same thing over and over again, your body adapts to that and it just doesn't work like, let's say that week one of walking a treadmill, doing an elliptical. Whatever the amount of energy you're burning compared to, let's say week 12, doing the exact same thing is completely different. Your body has adapted and decreased the amount of energy. So we're big believers. And of course, weight training being the foundational type of exercise you can do, swimming is great because you've got the heat loss, plus you've got a good cardio form and some breath work too, if you're holding your breath.

Yeah, yeah.

Rebounding is great.

Go ahead.

And just to further extend on that conversation, so recently did the Olympia and then went into endurance training. Completely different training. So I knew that I had suboptimal mitochondrial VO2 max, which is an essential point. So what did I do? I went to the labs every day.

Upgrade labs.

Yeah, I went to upgraded labs and I actually moved to close to the lab so I could leverage all the tech there.

Thank you.

And I was doing adsel and I'm doing the lymphatic drainage to handle the inflammation in my legs from the increased running. And I'm doing cryotherapy every day to help reduce the inflammation from my training. Now what's interesting is I'm now doing an excessive amount of cardio than what I was doing preparing for a bodybuilding show. And even though my mitochondrial function, my VO2 max went up so I could run a 4 hour marathon, my body fat was actually increasing during that time. So this is inversely, it's inverse to the idea that a lot of people think, well, I just need to exercise more to get to lose the body fat. As I exercise more, my body became a fat storing machine. So the body becomes its function, I think is something people have to recognize. So manipulating these components based on your goals and outcomes I think becomes a key factor. And we've identified how to do that specifically for whatever your goal is inside the book.

So what I'm hearing here is that there is no way to know how many calories you burn every day, it's.

Changing all the time.

There is, and it's simple observation, am I gaining body fat or am I losing body fat? Because a calorie surplus is required to gain body fat.

Unless you're on estimate estrogenic drugs.

It's still, it's still relative. It's still relative because what you're saying is, okay, you've sub optimized your metabolism and now whatever calories you're taking at that point, based on those metabolic manipulators, you're now in a body fat gaining situation. As opposed to, let's say I went on high levels of testosterone and growth hormone, maybe I could eat the same amount of calories and all of a sudden be gaining muscle and losing body fat. So without the complete understanding of this picture, the average person is caught in a paradigm of blindness which will lead them to fail. That's why 97% fail.

The really important point here is that if you're gaining fat, just cutting calories is probably not the strategy unless you do something else. And that's present in your book. And I want everyone hearing this Especially women. I know so many women who are just always low calorie. They're constantly hungry all the time, they're eating the wrong stuff and they're saying, well, I'm still fat, I have to eat even less. And I fell for this when I was £300. I was starving myself and I was working out really intensely, which changes cortisol, which changes fat deposition, changes how anabolic you are. So you can talk about calories in and calories out. And I acknowledge what you're saying there. However, if you cut your calories and assume, well, that's what's going to make a difference. And it might not. And it doesn't make a difference because your body adapted and then the calories out. You can measure how many potato chips on the treadmill you're allowed to eat and you get six potato chips for an hour of running or something, which is nonsense. But what you also don't know is, well, today it was snowing and I was outside for two hours and you just burned another 300 calories. So calorie burn is completely unknown for everyone.

Now let's talk about another huge variable, which is great sleep. So they did experiments again comparing people that slept eight and a half versus five and a half hours of sleep. And when they were losing weight, this is a really important point. When they were losing body fat, the amount of lean muscle mass that the five and a half hour group lost was exponentially higher than the eight and a half. Because again, when you get that first stage of sleep, you're getting growth hormone production and then you're getting testosterone production during your REM sleep. So if you're not getting high quality sleep, your ability to burn body fat gets extremely compromised. So for anybody on any diet, whether it's muscle building or fat loss, you got to get your sleep in order. And again, that changes the anabolic equation.

And there's two variables there. One is the amount of sleep and the other one is the quality. Quality of sleep. And I think it's healthy and normal for people doing excessive training or maybe even excessive dieting to get more sleep than is normally necessary. And the studies that I've seen, there's now three of them looking at very large, like millions of people. The longest lived people are getting an average of six and a half hours a night. But that doesn't mean that they're doing that during intense training. So the more you train, the more you're dieting, the more your quantity and quality has to go up. And I'm still, at six and a half hours a night on average, I get about an hour and a half of REM and deep every night. And over the past year or so I've gotten substantially leaner. Right. And so I'm, I'm, I'll end up writing another book or some other stuff about, about that, just maybe share it on the blog. But the, one of the big variables there for me is thyroid. I had Hashimoto's since I was 26. And if you're new to this world, Hashimoto's is an autoimmune condition where your immune system basically lowers your thyroid function. And thyroid is what determines how many calories you burn. So I've been treating this with thyroid hormone since, I don't know, 25 years or something. And it absolutely changes your brain, changes your life. I think Most people over 50 would do really well on an eighth or a quarter grain because all people lose thyroid as they age. And like it's an anti aging hormone unless your tests are high. Like you should test it before you do that. But what I'd found was that I was being lazy. So thyroid will stick to almost anything, even electrolytes. It'll stick to. So I was lazy. In the morning I'm like, I'll just wash it down with coffee. And I knew it was a bad idea, but I'm like, how bad could it be? So I hadn't measured myself in a while. And for anti aging purposes, and just for metabolic purposes, you want your tsh, which is how loud is your body asking for more thyroid, you want it to be at one or below. And a lot of times you go to the doctor, you're at two, like, oh, you're fine. No, you're not fine if you want to live a long time or be lean. Well, mine was at 4 because I wasn't absorbing the thyroid. So one of the things I did is I became religious about having thyroid next to my bed. I take it right when I wake up and then I don't have anything for 20 minutes. So I was a chance to absorb. And that is one of the reasons that worked. And then I made some nutritional shifts as well. And so I just, I want people listening to understand if you're gaining weight, fat for no reason, just cutting calories probably isn't going to work unless you have the stuff that's in the nutrition bible, unless you're, you're manipulating the type of calories eating because there's a huge anabolic effect. And that's why I'M still in the calories. In calories out isn't very useful because you don't know what percentage of the calories you ate was used to process the calories. As we said, protein, 30% of it doesn't get absorbed. It gets basically used to absorb the rest of it. And likewise, if you're having an equivalent amount of chocolate cake, it's a completely different equation. And a super biohacker biochemist can probably make some estimations. The thing I like about the ultimate nutrition bible is that you don't have to be a biochemist to do that. You're sort of providing basic heuristics to say, well, do this or do that. And so the reality is that calories in calories out is complex and calories out is almost unknowable. And at the end of the day, there will be people on low calories who gain weight. And that was my thing. But you fixed the metabolism. And then the body burns more calories. So you're right, the body burns more calories. Just we don't know how many it's burning. So to match the two, one thing that I've measure, and when you go into upgrade labs, you do the cell health analysis, and we'll do a pretty accurate basal metabolic rate. And last time I checked, mine's 2400ish, and I've had mine as high as 3000 with various things. That means I need 3000 calories a day to maintain my current state. If I don't do more activity or do a cold plunge or think really hard at 40 years of Zen or any of that stuff. So at the end of the day, there's this amazing thing called hunger. As long as it's not a craving. And if you're hungry, you probably should eat. You should eat the right stuff.

I want to talk about what we call the simplest secret. It's in the book and Wade uses successfully almost every pro athlete. And it's something you probably do. Most people do this unconsciously. And we talk about the power of eating the same thing on a regular basis. Because this solves what you just mentioned. Yes, you're eating the same thing almost every day on a weekly basis, and you're using even something as simple as a tape measurement in a scale. You're able to see if you're succeeding or not. And just before I queue it up to Wade, the cheapest way to see if you're making progress is a scale and a tape measurement.

And a mirror.

Yeah, the mirror is the most important Nutritional tool. Because even the scale can lie.

Yeah, but the scale with the tape measurement doesn't lie.

That's true.

So if you're measuring your waist, or if you're a woman with wider hips and you're measuring your hips and your hips went down or your waist went down and your weight stayed the same, then you probably gained some muscle mass and lost some body fat.

Fat.

But let's talk about the simplest secret.

I will. I want to qualify that. For months I've watched manipulations that I can. Bodybuilders are great at manipulating their physiology. I've seen myself fluctuate 6 to 7 pounds in lean body mass in a 24 hour period through hydration, carbohydrates, restriction, dehydration, all of these components. So you can game lean body mass.

Gain as a percentage. You can, but not by pounds. Pounds?

Oh yes. Oh no, by pounds. And I've got the data rate up. You can go check it at your labs. It's all in the computer. Where I actually.

Water free lean body mass.

Yeah, absolutely. It'll blow your mind. So you can game those things, you can't game the mirror.

Right.

And that's what everybody kind of is really referring to. But the simplest secret, basically, the average person has about 25 meals in their recipe that they like their regular going. So the idea of diets are restrictive, it's a bad idea. But I've crafted about 12 specific meals that fit my calorie components, that satiate me, that feel good, that deliver the required nutrients in the right amounts to sustain me for my objectives. And that's what we're advocating is pick your, go to 12 meals and then you can rotate in and out. I do four meals a day. That works for me. And, and so I got some variance in each one of those meals. And I'm happy and it's easy and I don't have to think about it, I don't have to worry. Because if you get into that situation where you're thinking about your food, it's a quick spiral down to the hell with it. And you blow the diet and then you go through all the negative self.

Talk and all of that. You never know, right? If you're not doing the same thing, you go to a restaurant. The calorie counts at restaurants are off by 100% quite often. And you know, the, the quality of the oils and things like that, the quality of the protein, it's completely different.

No, and I think as Wade mentioned, it gets rid of decision fatigue. But there's another huge advantage. It makes it really easy to decrease calories. I mean, let's just do a simple example. Let's say you're eating six eggs for lunch every day. You're having an omelette, and you, you're not losing body fat or not losing weight. And you want to lose weight. You can go from 6x to 4 eggs. And it makes it really easy. You don't need to calorie count, you just need to be reducing the portions. And one guy that's been incredibly successful with that strategy has been Stan Efforting. His vertical diet's a really great diet. He works a lot of top strength athletes, powerlifters, et cetera. And one of the main things he manipulates is just literally the amount of rice they eat, white rice. So when they want to gain body weight, they just keep increasing the amount of rice. And when they want to decrease their body weight, body fat, he just lowers the amount of rice. So it makes it really easy to kind of change one thing or two things. And again, you're just looking at the scale tape measurements, and then you're just changing the amount of, you know, from the meals you're eating.

So there's also something called the Randall cycle, right? And when you get the percentage of fat in your diet above about 30%, you store fat more likely, right? So what I found is that most people today have broken cell membranes because of eating oils in far excess, the omega sixes. So it usually takes about two years to replace half the fat in your body. So you go on a 50% fat diet for two years, eating only saturated fats and some monounsaturated. And after two years, you wake, you wake up one day and you're like, you know, I just don't want a half a cup of butter in my coffee anymore. Like, the cravings went away. And at that point, you can start doing things like increasing protein. And all of a sudden, for me, after I did that, the dieting stuff that's supposed to work started to work. But when I had broken metabolism from just fat in my body, the wrong kinds of fat, no matter what I did, I wasn't getting the results. So talk to me about percentage of calories from fat versus meat and rice.

Yeah, let's talk about again. This is really applicable to anybody on a ketogenic diet. So the first phase of a ketogenic diet, you know, let's call it phase one is the first two weeks. You go from not ever having to force your body to use fat as energy to adapting and building what's called lipolytic pathways. And people go through the keto flu, which MCT oil or ketones completely solved for anybody.

And maybe some charcoal too.

Yeah, yeah.

From there there's phase two. It lasts typically, like maybe three months. And that's really where your body's learning to use fat as fuel. And that's where you really want a high percentage of fat. Now, when you get to phase three or phase four, you can start decreasing the percentage of fats and increasing your percentage of protein. Now, what does that do? Again, you're going to decrease your net calories because of the thermic effect of protein increasing anabolism. And one of my coaches, Kevin Weiss, who used to compete against Wade, who's a world record holder in powerlifting and bodybuilding, that's what was his strategy. So he would use a ketogenic diet to get absolutely shredded on bodybuilding stages. And all he did was increase the percentage of protein and you can go up to even as high as 50, 55% protein. And in the book, I created this chart which gives you all the different types of protein, of animal proteins in terms of percentage of fat, percentage of protein. So all you need to be doing is lowering the changing the type of animal protein or fats you're getting. For an example, last night I went to Daidu, had some barn and things like that. But as you're increasing the amount of protein and shifting to lower fat cuts, you're going to find it a lot easier to burn body fat. So that's one thing. Another thing I want to talk about, which is personal to me, and again, we talk about in the book, if you're on a ketogenic diet and you don't do a nutrigenomic test, again, you're doing yourself a disservice. I don't have, and this is a relatively new discovery for me. I don't have good genetics for saturated fats and my lipid profile hasn't been great. So now what I'm doing is I've decreased the amount of saturated fats. I'm still eating some, but not as much, and I'm increasing my monosaturated fats toward olive oil or macadamia nut.

That's a recommendation that I've made since the bulletproof diet is that if after two years of high saturated fat, you're still having higher LDL and it and you think it's a problem, you can measure if it's a problem by looking at LP PLA too Then what you do, especially of the APOE situation, we'll call it that, then you would increase your olive oil and macadamia and maybe some avocados, but not avocado oil because it's largely fake and because it's largely oxidized. And avocados have relatively high omega 6. So I like what you're doing there. What I wouldn't want to see is people with more normal genetics going all monounsaturated. It's way better than doing polyunsaturated. In fact, there's a company that I've been backing since their very first starting called Zero Acre Farms that's now making a monounsaturated oil for restaurants. And you saw the post on that. So this is really cool because I'd rather always have olive oil than crap oils. But if I ate only olive oil, it would slow my metabolism and it wouldn't do well for me. And again, this is. There's some genetic things in here as well. And the reason I talked about that two year window is a lot of people, when they go keto, they go bulletproof, they go carnivore, their LDL goes up. And that's happening because they're clearing liver fat. My liver Fat's under 1% now, so I have like, you know, all my visceral fat is, is at the low end of the range for an 18 year old and it typically goes up as you age. So the way you do that though is if you go on these diets, it can be really scary. But it doesn't have to be scary, right? It's one of those things, okay. If it's temporary and if it's causing damage, you can see if it's causing damage. So for you, you've dialed in the right kind of fat and you're doing that with testing or people can just try it. But it takes a couple years of being consistent. And if you're saying, well, I'm consistent, but I really like the french fries in totally rancid canola oil twice a week, it doesn't work.

Yes, right.

So you have to be kind of religious about it. There's something else I wanted to ask you about, and it's Charles Poliquin, who was a good friend. I dedicated one of my books to him. He noticed that people will deposit fat in different parts of their bodies based on hormone levels. So if you have the round belly, that's a cortisol problem. And if you're putting fat in the back of your arms or on Your hips. It's a different hormonal thing. What do you guys think about that?

Yeah, I totally agree with Charles. I think Charles was a complete genius. And he's observing the elite of the elite, the most ritualistic and regimented athletes. So the variants and, and practical applications that he was able to develop, I for myself fall exactly in that category. I will deposit body fat in my area, in my stomach area, and I'll swell, actually, if my adrenaline goes up. So if I go on the road and I'm doing a lot of trips and I'm doing stuff, I'll see a fluctuation of anywhere is between 5 and 10 pounds.

And that's mostly water from aldosterone or what?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because again, that estrogenic pathway, so it becomes suboptimal. My testosterone goes down, my estrogen goes up. I start to feel this bloated, you know, that little fat. It's kind of like a. It's not like a regular fat.

It's kind of a weird like, like jelly.

Yeah, it's like a jelly hangs out over your pantry going, God, I better go home, you know, and you get back home, you get some good sleep, you stop the caffeine for a few days, you stop the drive, and then within five or six days, you deregulate back. And that's kind of what I think all biohackers at the highest level get to do because of testing, personal observation and understanding the tactics to go along with the strategies. You start getting tactics to mitigate the strategic goals that you've outlined within the diet strategy that you're using.

I've said this a lot. If you wake up with love handles that weren't there the day before, they're probably not fat, they're inflammation. And that means it's your fault. It's something you did. Maybe it was pulling an all nighter. I did that at Burning Man. I wasn't really strong the next day. Or maybe it's flying all over the place, or you ate a really bad meal or you were just too stressed or you got in a fight. But something life sounds like the average.

Trip that we do.

And there are also ways to, to handle that. Like I actually increase my cortisol intake. I use cortisol as an anti aging bioidentical herb. I also don't make enough cortisol so I can. Oh, look, I'm going to be, you know, crossing. I'm flying to Turkey for this, this thing that's coming up here, the Harvest series. And then I'M I'm going to go to Dubai. So I'll bump my cortisol by 5 milligrams a day, which gives you a lot more resilience, which means I don't have to make adrenaline. Right, because cortisol does something different than adrenaline. I'm not raising it above where it should be. I'm just making it where I want it to be. So all these are variables if you're a professional biohacker. So there's so much nuance in this, and I think you guys captured it really well. Something that I can see you try to do in the book is you're sort of saying, well, you can kind of do any diet you want. Like, here's how to succeed on a vegan diet. I don't think you're going to live as long or be as fertile. No matter what you do as a vegan, you can be a vegetarian and pull it off. I just haven't seen very many. I know basically three vegans who are older who haven't broken bones and aren't having all this weird aging stuff. And so it's exceptionally rare and probably genetically based. So I wouldn't want a listener to say, okay, well, I have ascribed to this philosophy for whatever reason, whether it's vegan or zone diet doesn't really matter, but I've identified my personality with his diet, so I have to succeed on this diet. Dude, either your diet works or it doesn't work. And if it does work, as a vegan, you're getting all the results you want. You're exceptionally unusual. And I still predict that within five years you'll most likely have oxalate kidney stones from all of the plants you're eating.

So there's that. So here's the. Here's the challenge that I'll put out there because I've been vegetarian for, what now, 20 some years?

Vegetarian you can do.

Yeah, sure. But I would say that my diet is 95% plants. So you said. And what we'll do is we'll say, hey, the person who wins will give the eulogy at each other's funeral. So if you outlive me, they're about the same age. You can give the eulogy at my thing and say, I told you and inversely write it the other way. How about that? Is that.

Is that a fair.

Like, I think having constraints realize a.

Man who was wrong.

Yeah, exactly.

I beat your ass.

I won.

So again, you know, the book's about ending the diet wars, and Matt and I have what would on the surface appear polar opposite strategies. You're somewhere in between the two of us. And I think robust discussion in the experimentation of what is optimal is important. And I'm on the extreme side. I think you're on the extreme side, Dave, and I think Matt's on the extreme side. And our listeners are probably somewhere in the aspirational stage of one of those strategies. And that's the idea behind it, is you don't have to be like me. I've got my own set of goals, my own set of rituals, my own set of plans. And I like constraints, I like extremism, I like ridiculous experiments that may be suboptimal. And maybe inside of that we discover some things that'll be really extraordinary.

And to be really clear, all of us are willing to take risks to do that. And if you're listening, you may or you may not be. Like, I did 4,500 calories a day for almost a year when I was testing the bulletproof diet and I was actually planning to gain weight. I cut my sleep, I stopped exercising. I'm like, I'm just. I'm going to only gain this much, but I'm going to have this huge calorie surplus. I should have gained 20 pounds, but I actually grew abs during that time. And I put them up on social media. And then Joe Rogan said it was fake, which was kind of funny. But, yeah, I think he might have had a bone to pick at the time. But it wasn't fake. It was like, what just happened? And you could say it's because, you know, you were eating, you know, more protein or whatever it was. But, I mean, I was. I was forcing myself to eat this incredible calorie surplus and like half a stick, like the Kerrygold sticks, like a full stick of butter every day. And I took Lipase. I couldn't buy Capex at the time. He didn't make it. So I took Lipase to make sure I was absorbing all the fat. I wasn't having greasy stools. All the stuff that happens if you don't absorb fat. I'm like, this shouldn't be possible, but it's working. So that was a risk. In fact, it probably made me older. Like, I don't think it was good for me in the slightest. Um, so if you're listening, you don't have to go to extremes. What I think you want to do, though, is start looking at results, whether, as they say in the book, you know, get a tape measure in a scale or come into upgrade labs and do the whole cell health analysis or you work with your doctor and all that. But if you're not getting the results you want, if you look at the Ultimate Nutrition Bible, I think there's a lot of new knowledge in here. You guys think about it in a different way.

So there's 875 scientific research preferences.

That's it?

Yeah, that's it.

Slacking off.

Let's talk about where people can get it. So. Ultimatenutritionsystem.com Dave not only have we written this book, we spent a week in the Hollywood Hills. We filmed the entire course, filmed the entire book. Not only do you get the book and the entire video series, the original draft of the book was a thousand pages. So we took all the supplement content. People get an instant downloadable PDF, there is a summary of every scientific reference in another PDF, another book that people get for free. You get three cookbooks for free, including a plant based one, including a carnivore one, including a paleo one, and you get some other goodies. So you get all of that@theultimatenutritionsystem.com Dave.

Dave all right, so you guys heard that the book is called the Ultimate Nutrition Bible and The website is ultimatenutritionsystem.com Dave and I mentioned earlier, these are the guys behind bioptimizers who make really, really good supplements. In fact, I use your gluten supplement. I take math times with every meal. And that might be one of the reasons that I'm succeeding because I actually absorb everything I eat and a lot of people don't.

We just, we have the data, it turns out protein into a pool of amino acids and peptides in 30 minutes. We test it against every other enzyme. It just destroyed all of them.

It's a really good one. And also I actually had an occasion to take antibiotics recently, which I'm generally, I don't like to do that. It was the right call for me. I was actually at Burning man and started getting like, it got some mold in an rv. So I was getting a little bit of a throat infection. I'm like, I'm just going to take it. So predictably you get the runs after that, right? So when I went off the antibiotics, I had the things. So I took P3OM, which is your probiotic, and I took a bunch of fiber and stuff like that, but it resolved in one day. And I actually tried another kind of probiotics. The first day didn't work. So it was the P3OM that really did it. And that's what you design that for. So guys, I just want you to know Matt and Wade are are solid in the the work that they're doing in the world. You guys make cool stuff and go to ultimatenutritionsystem.com Dave and pick up their book and get all that cool stuff. Oh yeah, there you go. Use Code Dave and they'll give you 10% off and like tons of freebies. Way more freebies than what I do with my books. I film courses, but I haven't written like five extra books to just give them. So congrats on being highly productive if you look like this episode. Well, you know what to do. You probably should read the book. It's worth it. And maybe you're lazy. Just buy the book and then just watch the videos. That works too. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosis, diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media. A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for a statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.