Use The KETO DIET To Burn Body Fat & LIVE LONGER | Mark Sisson & Mark Hyman

You don't really need that many calories to get through a day. Ketones are not just a legitimate alternative energy source. They're probably a preferred energy source in many cases.

So humans are like hybrids, right? We can run on carbs or fat, on glucose or ketones.

Or ketones. So we're, you know, we are born with this amazing machinery that allows us to be metabolically flexible. The concept which I've tried to popularize over the past couple of years, metabolic flexibility basically means you can derive energy from the fat stored on your body, the fat on your plate of food, the carbohydrate on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen in your muscles, or the ketones that your liver makes. Those are some- so you've got a lot of options. You've got a lot of options. And if you become metabolically flexible, the body goes, you know what? I don't even care. where the energy comes from. I'm not at the effect of shifting my energy switch over from ketones to carbohydrates or glucose to glycogen. The body becomes adept and efficient at burning enough of these different substrates under different circumstances that it becomes irrelevant. I mean, the main thing is how do you feel? And if you feel great and if you feel good and energetic, then I don't care.

That's the clue that you're probably doing something good.

Exactly. So, back to what is a ketogenic diet. A ketogenic diet is a diet that basically recognizes that we have not set ourselves up to become good at burning fats, and so we need to eliminate that one fuel that we've sort of relied on relentlessly for 10,000 years, that regular supply of carbohydrate at every meal. And if we reduce or eliminate carbohydrates for a certain period of time, The body responds, the epigenetic response of the body is to turn on certain enzyme systems and upregulate certain gene systems that will build the metabolic machinery to burn fat at a higher rate and more efficiently. And what that looks like is that we have these little powerhouses in our muscles and other cells that are called mitochondria. And that's where the fat combusts. That's where the fat burns. Well, people who are what we call sugar burners and are reliant on carbohydrate every couple of hours to get through the day, They never really, the body just has no reason to build more of these furnaces, of these little powerhouses. And so you get by with, as long as you continue to eat, you know, a breakfast of waffles and/or pancakes and/or toast, and then you have a.

Big-- the American breakfast is basically sugar for breakfast.

It's sugar for breakfast, and you know, promoted by then the cereal industry and Anita Bryant back in the, you know, you gotta have your orange juice. That's right.

And then that sets you up for a horrible day. That's a prescription for early death, is.

Cereal and orange juice. Absolutely, and yet, and yet, that's how I grew up.

Me too.

Everyone, you know, everyone.

Captain Crunch.

Yeah.

So the American Heart Association says that Twix are actually a heart healthy food. I know.

And Cheerios and whatever. It's like Cocoa Puffs. No, it's, it's beyond. But by the way, the American Heart Association used to say that, you know, you can have your favorite dessert as long as you continue to take your meds, too. So. Right. It's, it's a great. Take more insulin. That's right. So, so we go back to this, you know, I want to, if I want to develop metabolic flexibility, I have to take away the carbohydrate as a source and kind of gently prompt my body to respond by becoming better at burning fat. And we call it fat adapted. And when you become fat adapted and your muscles start to get comfortable burning fat as the primary source of fuel while you're moving about your day, not just sitting around doing nothing, but while you're walking and then eventually while you're exercising, and you get to the point where you can derive 85-90% of your energy requirements from fat if you become good at this.

Your body fat or the fat you're eating.

Exactly, your body fat or the fat you're eating.

Exactly. So people talk about card loading, you only store about 2500 calories, but for fat you probably got 30, 40,000 calories of fat on your body.

Absolutely.

There's a lot bigger energy.

By the way, 30,000 calories of fat, that's just like 10 pounds. I got that. So I mean then I could walk 300 miles without eating, not that I'm going to or want to, but I could. You are, theoretically. So we The idea is to develop this metabolic flexibility.

Both those things don't sound fun to me. Walking 300 miles or not eating.

This is all hypothetical. But when you become metabolically flexible, you're able to derive all this energy from your stored body fat. And then an amazing thing happens, which is the liver, when you withhold carbohydrate, which becomes glucose eventually through the digestive process, when you withhold carbohydrate.

And just to be clear for people, When you say carbohydrate, you mean refined starchy carbs.

You don't mean broccoli, right? Okay, so we can make that distinction. I mean all carbohydrates, but I'm gonna put a big asterisk by broccoli and say that when you go keto, you can eat as much vegetables as you want.

That's right.

Okay, so green leafy vegetables. And they're all carbohydrates. They're all carbs. But they're low in fiber matrix. So what we're talking about is how accessible is the amount of sugar or the carbohydrate that you take in real time to the body. And if it's made less accessible because it's locked in a fibrous matrix, as in the case of broccoli. Or a vegetable. Any vegetable. I mean, but, you know, for picking on my favorite vegetable. So you not only become good at burning fat, but then the body starts to, you create these ketones in the absence of glucose. And people would typically say, well, you know, I'm feeling woozy because my blood sugar's low. My brain isn't working because my blood sugar's low. That's why they feel like they need to have a meal. that's why they feel like they need to have a snack because they have these wild blood sugar swings throughout the day because they've been so dependent on a regular supply of carbohydrate to keep their glucose up. Well, when you cease doing that for some length of time, the body gets wise and the brain goes, well, look, I know how to burn ketones. I just haven't done it for a long time. So the brain becomes quite adept at deriving energy from ketones.

The whole theory that you need glucose to fuel your brain, that's a false.

That's correct. You don't need, like one of the things that it's become kind of a-.

Because it's supposed to use 25% of all the glucose, right?

25% of your energy.

Right, that's different than what I learned in medical school.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you're saying that's wrong.

No, so the brain, let me put it one way, which is that there is no dietary requirement for carbohydrate in human nutrition.

Yes. So you should just unpack that, because There are essential amino acids for protein. There are essential fatty acids from fat, but there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate and we don't need them.

Correct. Now, we don't need them and I'm not suggesting that we should never consume them, but the reality is we don't need them because we have this elaborate and elegant mechanism that takes stored body fat and in the absence of any food allows us to live for five, six, seven days, not just survive, but thrive and be mentally alert and to be willing and able to hunt for the source of food. Because remember, throughout most of human history, we didn't have three square meals a day. We had food and then we didn't have food. And so the design of the system, and again, this elegant system, phase one of the system says the brain When it comes across food, you got to overeat because you don't know where the next source of food is going to be. And so when you overeat, you take the excess amount of energy that is in the food and you store it as fuel that you get to carry around on your body. By the way, conveniently located right over the center of gravity, the belly, the butt, the hips, the thighs. It's such an elegant system that we would be able to to carry this fuel with us for long periods of time and not worry about, oh my god, it's noon and I'm gonna get hangry because there's no food around or there's no deli down the street. You had the ability to use that fat for energy. You just use that fat for energy and that's how the system's designed. So unfortunately, we get to today where we've lost the ability to, so we're very good at storing fat and we still are wired to overeat.

But because there's- yeah, there's like 200 genes that protect us from starvation. Yeah. But none that help us deal with abundance and excess.

So it's an artifact of civilization. So we kind of have to override that with our cognition. But one way to do that, again, is to use a ketogenic way of eating for some period of time. Again, not necessarily for the rest of your life.

What is keto? Define keto.

So keto to me is cutting carbs back to 50 grams a day or less.

Which is what is 50 grams in terms of a food? For like a bagel?

Yeah, pretty much like a bagel with some jam on it and you're already over the top. Or any, like if you got rid of bread, pasta, cereal, rice, cookies, candies, cakes, sweetened beverages, sweetened drinks, and all you had was, oh my gosh, real food. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, salads, you would be fine. You would be within that 50.

You'd be hard pressed to find a.

Person who would be within that 50. Could you have grains and beans? No. so you can't, you don't have grains and beans on a keto, on a true keto diet. Now we'll talk about what Peto looks like. Peto. Or paleo keto or what are we gonna call it? You know your Pegan version of keto, what's it gonna be? Keegan.

Keegan.

That's a Keegan diet.

So, like a keto vegan? I have a friend who's a keto vegan.

Yeah, yeah. So you can do it for sure. It takes some adherence to this. At the end of a couple of weeks though, you have shifted your metabolism to one of greater efficiency and-- so.

It takes like three weeks to adapt to it. You need to make sure you have enough fluids and sodium and magnesium, because otherwise you feel the keto flu.

And some people still get the keto flu, but it's not like the flu.

It'S just, you feel achy and tired.

That's your brain going, where's my glucose, dude? And until the brain kicks in and says, wow, these ketones are amazing. The liver can make up to 750 calories a day worth of ketones.

Wow.

Like chew on that for a second. That's unbelievable, right? So when you look at how we're designed for survival, if you look at--.

I mean, not from diet, but just from your fat stores.

Correct. Yeah, yeah. So, and you know, we have this stored body fat and when we cut off just theoretically, if let's say you do a fast, which we can talk about what that looks like, but you do a five-day fast, you become a closed loop. It's amazing that you, that you, that the body takes fat out of storage, combusts some of it in the muscles to get you through your day and people who do five-day fasts, they work out, they'll exercise, not hard, heavy, but so you combust, Some of that fat in the muscles, some of that fat, you know, as you take those triglycerides and you strip out the glycerol, becomes the backbone to make enough glucose through gluconeogenesis to supply whatever amount of brain cells do require some glucose. It's not a big number. It might be 40, 50 grams a day. The liver makes ketones. The brain thrives on ketones. The brain prefers ketones.

Yeah, the brain does way better on Fat than on sugar.

Well, on ketones, yeah, because the brain doesn't burn fat, but it burns ketones. Ketones are derived from fat. Are derived from fat. So you have this substrate, this fatty, this fat substance that then can become combusted by itself as fat, part of it can be used to actually make glucose if needed. That's why you don't have an external need for carbohydrate and glucose. And then you can make up to 750 calories a day worth worth of ketones. Now one of the best things that happens in this scenario is that, again, epigenetics at work turns on genes that cause the body to spare amino acids and spare protein. So whereas normally on a day-to-day basis you might eat a big meal and you might have more protein than you need and then your body has to kind of go through this work to deaminate it and pee it out because it's too much, you don't need that much. And so when you become this closed loop, this closed system, the only reason you need the amino acids are for structural, for repair, for building and repairing. You don't want to make sugar.

So people have a false idea about, you know, keto, that it's all like steak and bacon and cream and all this stuff. It's not necessarily that.

No. In fact, you can eat too much in the way of, well, I mean, a lot of people who first come to keto do so because they, I heard that I can eat 4,500 calories a day and not gain weight. And I'm like, well, yeah, some of the science shows that, but that's horrible because... That's a bad idea because first of all, if you want to burn off your stored body fat, eating 4,500 calories a day will never tap into your stored body fat. That's just trying to prime the pump with this external source of fuel that that's fat that's circulating through your bloodstream and that amount of calories because you're not generating insulin, which is a nutrient storage hormone, the nutrients have nowhere to go. The body has to figure out how do I burn this stuff off? I can't store it as fat. So the body undergoes this thermogenic, high heat kind of thing.

Well, that's so powerful because people don't understand that if you don't have insulin, which is only produced by eating carbohydrates or protein, can also include insulin. If you don't have insulin, you can't gain weight. So if you're a type 1 diabetic, the classic symptoms are polyphagia, meaning you eat everything in sight and can't gain. And you lose weight. So they could eat 10,000 calories a day and lose weight because they have no insulin, which is required to store the fat on your body. So the best way to get your insulin down is to cut out the starchy carbs and to eat more reasonable.

Amounts of protein and more fat and reasonable amounts of protein. So you don't make it up with, you know, you don't make the calories up with extra amounts of protein.

Yeah, so 20%.

Okay, I mean, I prefer to deal with hard numbers, like what's a good number for protein? Maybe it's 75 grams a day for a man as a minimum number and maybe it doesn't exceed 120. Within a range there, you're going to be fine. Because the body is so efficient again at conserving amino acids, protein, that it doesn't even matter meal to meal or day to day. It might be on a four-day cycle if you get 300 grams of protein in a four-day cycle, you're good. Because it'll just figure out with different various protein sinks that we have in the body how to keep it and not you know, pee it out. So back to this closed loop that I'm talking about. So you're combusting fat in the muscles, you're making a little bit of glucose through gluconeogenesis, you're making ketones. Now we figure out that you don't really need that many calories to get through a day. Like we assume if we do that math that's online, you know, you plug in your number and your height and your weight or whatever and your activity level from one to five. you come up with some number, oh, sis, I can have 2,700 calories a day or 3,200 calories a day for maintenance. No bearing whatsoever on reality. We probably, again, if you do the math, if we, for long periods of time, if we say that protein, protein shouldn't even have a calorie assigned to it. It's structural. You don't burn protein, so why would you even assign a value of four calories per gram to protein.

But it can turn into sugar.

It can.

To eat excess amounts.

It can. So, you know, and I guess if you burn it in a bomb calorimeter, you know, you get some amount of thermic effect.

So, how do you know if you're doing a ketogenic diet properly?

Well, the main thing is can you go a meal or two, skip a meal or two and just feel just fine? And if you can, it cuts hungry.

Hunger. So, yeah, ketones, it cuts your hunger.

The number one benefit from all of this is getting control of hunger, appetite and cravings. That's what everyone reports when they finally hit that keto zone.

So, it's not bad willpower that people want to crave and eat other food? It's just biology, right?

It's biology. It's absolutely biology. And people come to this point pretty quickly where they go, Jesus, Mark, three meals a day is just too damn much food. I just don't feel hungry. I feel like I'm overeating at three meals a day. and so typically what they do is skip breakfast. They wake up in the morning, I have a cup of coffee, I go about my day, I do a hard workout. I'm like, not only do I not need to eat, I don't feel compelled to eat, I don't want to eat, and I might have my first meal.

At 1 o'clock or 1:30.

It's like time-restricted eating. It's what it is. And so then you get to the point where you're eating maybe two meals a day, and then from there it's like even those two meals feel like if I have two Regular, what would have been in the old days, regular meals. Now it's like, I'm gonna have lunch, kind of a smaller lunch because I want to enjoy a regular dinner. If I have a regular lunch, then I won't be hungry for dinner.

It's amazing how hunger dissipates in this context.

It is.

But you don't get super skinny. I mean, you look good, right? I work to keep my weight on. Although I notice, Mark, is I actually have a problem. If I don't have things like sweet.

Potatoes or some... Yeah.

Like black rice, like that, I will lose too much weight.

Do you lift weights?

I do, I started.

Lifting weights is what causes you to keep muscle on. If you don't lift weights, especially as you get older, like when you get to be 45, you'll see what I'm talking about.

I'm 60. I passed that mark long ago.

I'm just messing with you.

But I'm biologically 39, 'cause I did my telomeres.

As you get older, the importance of lean tissue becomes more and more critical. Muscle is the forgotten organ. It's the forgotten, and people think, well, if I'm, if I'm jogging in my 50s and 60s and 70s or, you know, riding a bike, that that's accomplishing what I need to accomplish. And it's not. It's actually, it's much more important to spend some time in the gym lifting heavy weights, like the heaviest weights you.

Can lift without getting hurt.

Yeah.

Without getting hurt is a key component. I don't want to. So my trainer tells me I should do, like, more reps. Like, I do three sets. Yeah. And I do, you know, it's pretty hard.

But it's not like my maximum that I can do.

Sometimes it is, but is that the same or is it more better to do heavy weights?

How many reps do you do?

Are we talking six or 10 to 12? And then I do it three times.

That's fine. That's a standard, that hasn't changed in decades. And there's no right answer there. There's no magic. It's like whatever you feel good with.

Is that building enough muscle or should.

I do more heavier weights? Sure, you know, heavier weights and fewer reps builds more muscle. strength over time, but there's no, I can't tell you that that's where you need to go, but I'll give you an example. It's sometimes the type of weights you're doing. So if you're just doing bicep curls, you know, that's, you know, for the, for the beach, but that doesn't really impact bone density, you know, muscle mass throughout. So hex bar deadlifts. You ever do those? Yeah. Yeah. That's the best thing you can do.

What about just a regular deadlift?

Yeah, they're good, but they're, I'm too concerned with my back. So I lift heavy with a hex bar deadlift.

Oh, really?

Yeah. So, but I do it once every week and I do three sets of that. I keep adding weights and time.

How much do you do?

I do up to 300 pounds. I do one, you know, to two rep max on a 300.

Oh, one to two.

Yeah, I can do 335 on one, but it's too much. I wind up taking too long to do it and I'm afraid, again, I don't want to hurt myself. Yeah. So I do, but that's like, that one exercise impacts the entire body. You know, it's not just what you would see obviously from doing the weight of the glutes and the lower back and the hamstrings and the quads, but it's pulling on the shoulder muscles like my grip strength is sometimes the thing that gives out more than anything else. But that one exercise then has an effect on the pulse of growth hormone and testosterone through a, you know, it involves so many muscles and including major muscles that then when you go do the pull-ups and the push-ups and the dips and the squats and all the other, the lunges, then you get the impact is greater. The effect, the muscle building effect is greater because you did that.

Yeah, I like that. I like that. So you did that first.

Or last or whatever.

That's amazing.

If you do it first, a lot of times you'll like, you know, you won't have the strength to complete the other stuff.

So what is the biology of doing it? You mentioned you can burn fat, but why is that better? Like, what does it do in terms of longevity? What do the signs show? Well.

As we... So burning sugar is in and of itself, it produces reactive oxygen species at a greater rate than putting combusting fat through the mitochondria. So, the more energy you can derive through this metabolic pathway that uses the mitochondria, the better off you are. A lot of times people burn sugar.

In the cytosol of the cell, not even six. The way I think about it is interesting. So, when you eat a lot of sugar calories and starchy calories, it burns dirty in your mitochondria and releases a lot of waste products, which is these reactive oxygen species or oxidative stress or free radicals. Free radicals are driving aging. And when you burn ketones, more like hybrid, like an electric vehicle, it burns clean, right?

Like a 93 octane.

Yeah, it burns much cleaner. Is that true?

That's true. I mean, that's the simplest way of looking at it. Then there are other nuances to this, which are when you become good at burning fat, then when you skip a meal or when you have this very easy to manage compressed eating window, All the good stuff happens when you're not eating. So, the longer you can go, and that's why fasting has become the rage. The longer you can go without eating, the more your body says, oh, this is a great time to do some house cleaning. And the term autophagy is thrown out probably too much now, but the body does tend to want to clean up and consume damaged proteins.

Autophagy means you're literally eating yourself. So, eating all the waste products.

Eating the waste products.

The Pac-Man goes around and cleans up.

Correct. And if you never fast, you just become this increased collection of garbage in your body.

The whole three meals, three snacks, eat late at night, night after dinner snack and wake up eating right away. That's a bad idea.

It's a bad idea. And what's ironic to me is that even going back 15 years ago in the bodybuilding and the weight lifting in the general health community, the mantra was don't go more than two hours without eating. You bring your Tupperware little meals with you with some amount of protein, some amount of carbs, no fat, skinless chicken breast, and all that stuff. It was a horrible concept. And yet, the thought process was, you don't want to cannibalize your muscle tissue. And if you go more than three hours without eating, you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue. Now, all of that was predicated on an assumption that glucose was the primary fuel that we needed. We ran out of glucose. it would cause the brain to go into a state of, oh my god, send a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol so we can basically melt some muscle tissue and send some amino acids to the liver to become glucose.

Exactly.

It was a horrible, again, it was all based on the wrong, on a concept that somehow assumed that glucose was the muscle fuel that we needed and if we didn't manage glucose, all hell broke loose. Now we know that fat is the preferred fuel for human movement and human activity and that ketones are not just a legitimate alternative energy source, they're probably a preferred energy source in many cases.

As a doctor, I see a lot of patients and I test them and I see the results. And it's humbling because you can come up with all these great theories, but then you see the individual in front of you and I've had patients I put on a ketogenic diet eating butter and coconut oil all day and they lose 20, 30 pounds, their cholesterol comes down 100 points, their triglycerides drop, their good cholesterol goes up, somebody else does that and all their numbers go terrible and they start getting really bad cholesterol numbers. And I'm one of those guys. If I eat too much of saturated fat, I get in trouble. And I think, how do you understand sort of how to personalize this?

All right, so a couple things. First of all, You know, we've never had this conversation, so I don't know what your stance is currently on this, but, you know, I've been pushing for 15 years to take the weight off cholesterol as a bad guy. You know, cholesterol is not the problem. In the blood or in the diet?

Both.

But let's just talk blood cholesterol right now. I don't think cholesterol's a bad guy. Cholesterol's one of the most important molecules in the human body. It's integral to life. The body makes 1,300 milligrams a day, whether or not you have any in your diet. and to vilify it and spend a trillion dollars for the last 15 years to try and eradicate it in humans is absolutely unconscionable.

Through statin medications.

Through statin medications. So, and I shared with you before the show, so I just had some blood work done. I'm between 245 and 290 on my total cholesterol. But my HDL is 98.

That's the good cholesterol.

That's a good cholesterol. You know, and my triglycerides are always below 75, sometimes 45 or 50. My A1C is 4.9, which you know to be.

Your average blood sugar is really low.

Really low. Fasting insulin is between six and seven. It can be as high as 45 in some people. So all my markers are great, except that if you didn't ascribe to that whole cholesterol theory, you'd go, oh my God, Mark, we gotta put you on a-- everything looks great. By the way, I had a full scan of my carotids and all my blood supply to my coronary arteries, my liver. I mean, they were digging in so deep, I thought, oh my God, they're looking to see if I have colon cancer. But they were trying to get at my kidney supply. And they said, you're clean. You got like the blood supply of a 30-year-old. It's clean as can be. That's all that counts, Mark. I don't care what my cholesterol numbers are. But aren't some people more at risk though?

Some are. But Again, is lean mass hyper-responder phenomena?

Yes, and it all, I think, comes down to, and I'm not a doctor, so I'm only giving you my opinion. You can opine with greater I guess you have more liability for saying it than I do. I have no liability as long as they say I'm not a doctor. But it's inflammation and oxidation that are the primary culprits here. And so if you have an otherwise inflammatory lifestyle, inflammatory diet, we can talk about sugar, we can talk about stress, we can talk about, you know, and then we can talk about some familial predisposition. Yes, but in general, so back to your two people, some succeed wildly on the ketogenic diet and some not so much. But the not so much, if you're evaluating just on short-term blood markers, I'm not going to say it's not working. I'm just going to say that's, you know, if you're keto and you're good at burning fat, you've got to transport the fat somehow to the muscle cells. You've got, there are a lot of things going on here. Yeah, we just don't know. And we just don't know. Now, some people having said all of that, some women in particular are not.

Good responders to keto.

It may be-- who shouldn't be on it. Well, so I think pregnant women probably, you know, you you just work with, if you're gonna, if you want to do this and you insist on doing this, work with somebody who knows what they're doing, right? And I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't introduce a three-year-old kid to, to a ketogenic diet.

Right.

You know, I think it's something everybody should be on, or. I think at some point in their lives, everybody should be on it because.

It'S the human, the human experience. So you think cyclical keto, this whole idea. Yeah.

So do you, do you ever go above the 50 grams of carbs? Oh, my God, I, I have Last night, I'm visiting here in Los Angeles. My daughter is a great chef and she made a lasagna last night. Like, I'm not gonna not eat two servings of that. I mean, you know, and it was somebody's birthday and we had some pie. And, you know, I didn't sleep as well as I would have had I not done that. But I also, like, I'm totally comfortable.

In-- so then you go in and out.

In and out.

And that's- that's what we historically did.

That's exactly. So when we talk about, you know, we're humans, you know, always keto, no, there were periods of time when we were, there was no access to food, you were like automatically, you were obligatory keto when you didn't eat. Yeah. But because you didn't eat processed crap and industrial seed oils that would infect your insulin sensitivity and all these other things, even if you came across a treasure trove of bee honey or it was late in the season and you had a bunch of fruit, you'd store it as fat, but then you'd go right back to being keto when the food supply was cut off. Yeah. And you didn't go, as some of these people do, well, whenever I have more than 60 grams or 70 grams of carbs, I get kicked out of keto. I was kicked out of keto means nothing to me. I don't even care what your keto numbers are.

So you don't think about measuring it or tracking it?

I think it's a parlor trick. What'll happen is people who are new to keto will go, they'll chase the numbers, right? So they'll say, well, I didn't eat any carbs today and I just had MCT oil and I had my bulletproof coffee and whatever, and I'm showing 4.5 millimolar or six millimolar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, baby, I'm keto. Well, you're keto, you're producing ketones, but one of the things you gotta look for is you're just pissing those out. So your body's not has not become good at using them yet, you'll get there, but right now your liver is going crazy trying to make ketones and you don't know how to burn them. So once you build the metabolic machinery to burn ketones and once you build.

The facilitators- It doesn't go away when.

You have a pie and lasagna. No, exactly, exactly. So let's talk about that. Once you built that, you spent three weeks, four weeks building that metabolic machinery, you reset your metabolism to one of metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency. Then, if you go off the wagon, you know, one meal or eat one day of 300 grams of carbs, you might feel bad, but you just come right back to where you were. It doesn't shift all the way back to being a sugar burner. Now, if you did it for three more weeks of just doing sugar, the body would say, well, I guess we don't need this expensive machinery lying around burning fat all the time now, I guess. we're gonna just go back to burning sugar. So we'll, we'll let all of these things atrophy.

You dropped a little bomb earlier. I want to come back to which, as you said, you had the lasagna and the pie and you didn't sleep as well. So you've hacked sleep. Yeah. And, and what does eating lasagna and pie have to do with sleep? And, yeah. Tell us how you figure out the.

Sleep, because 70 of Americans have some trouble sleeping. So, I mean, I, I typically sleep great. I go to bed at 10 30 or 11, wake up at 7:07 every on the right, like with certainty every day. No matter, by the way, no matter what time I go to bed, I wake up at 7:07. But I have a dark blackout curtains in the room. Keep the room at, if I'm away from home, I keep the room at 67. When I'm home, I have a chili pad. Do you have a chili pad?

Your wife likes it warmer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And softer. So, softer. So we literally have a half of a, like a pad on her side that's three inches of just foam.

Yeah.

And then, so my side of the bed is like down, like, yeah, I.

Have a chilly pad too. It's a game changer. It's a game changer. That's like a pad that puts cold.

Water through it so you feel cooler at night. Yeah, it uses cold water. It doesn't, it's not wet, but it uses cold water circulating through microtubules to keep the surface, your sleeping surface cool. And it's so, once again, if we look at primal ancestral man, we slept on a cold ground covered with a heavy skin. Right? And that's what we're doing. I love a big duvet cover on top of me, but I keep that thing at, you know, I keep it at 64 and 65 when I'm in Miami. So, but I've hack sleep, so I'm really good at sleeping, except when I have, when I go off the wagon. And so last night, again, we had a, it was grandma's birthday, and grandma made a blueberry pie, and my daughter made lasagna, and I'm not gonna be that guy who goes, I'm keto, I can't do that. No, I'm just, I'm like, I ate it, I loved it, it was fantastic, had two glasses of wine, and then I went to sleep great, but then I woke up at two o'clock and my liver says, you know, now's the time we're gonna make you pay for it. So my heart was racing a little bit more, you know, I had a little bit more, you know, higher insulin promotes sort of a higher cortisol response, and I had that standard, you know, kind of thing that the body- the cortisol keeps you awake. When you clean up your act, this is good news, bad news, Mark. you know, when you clean up your act, you burn fat, you feel better, you have energy all day, you don't get sick, you look great, you feel great, but then when you screw up, you pay for it.

You really notice it.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's exactly what I've noticed as a physician treating patients when they clean up their act, they go, you know, I.

Used to feel all the time, I.

Don'T feel as bad.

I'm like, I think you felt bad all the time. You just didn't realize it.

You got desensitized to it. Exactly.

Yeah.

Amazing. So talk about this whole trend of fasting, intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, fasting mimicking diets, they seem to all do the same thing. And keto is part of that because it activates these healing responses. So tell us about what those healing responses are, why they're important, why we should care.

Well, I mean, I would want to care because, again, as a vain older guy who's facing an inevitable decline over time, I want to slow that stem that decline as much as I can. So, as I said earlier, this was first put in my head by Art Devany. Do you know who Art Devany is? He's the original Ancestral Health guy. Brilliant, brilliant mind. And he basically said, All the good things happen. We're most human when we're not eating. All the good things happen when we're not eating. So eating, and again, if you look at it from a historical context, eating is just like pulling the train over to the side and filling it full of coal, and it's just resting and getting energy stores taken in. And in the case of humans, it's overeating in most cases and loading up the energy. And then all the good stuff happens when you head down the tracks again and you've stopped eating and now you're basically metabolizing food, you're using your muscles to move through different planes of motion, you're using your brain to create, you're using your heart to love, and in not eating, your body is recognizing that this is a state where the best opportunity to repair can happen. If you just think about two sort of cells that are surrounded by a lot of nutrition, a lot of nutrients, Or let's say one cell surrounded by a lot of nutrients, the cell goes, Man, my job is to pass the genetic material along to the next generation. That's my only job. Just to pass the genes along down. There's so much cool stuff around, there's so much nutrition, I'm going to divide and make two of me. That's the telomere thing, by the way. And then those two cells go, Man, this is awesome. Let's divide again. What the hell is plenty for everybody? Meanwhile, that same cell when faced with not a lot of nutrition around goes, Jesus, I mean there's not enough for me, let alone two of me. So, I'm going to take some of that damaged protein inside the cytosol. I'm going to take some of the damaged fats and I'm going to consume those. I'm going to burn those. I'm going to combust those. I'm going to use those for fuel. And while I'm at it, I'm going to fix some of the DNA that's been kind of not working recently. I haven't had reason or time to fix it, but I'm going to fix that DNA. And so the cell cleans itself up.

Yeah, it's amazing. It turns on the right genes for healthy aging. It builds your own stem cells. It reduces inflammation. It turns on antioxidant systems. It improves your brain function. It's super powerful. And you can kind of play with all these different approaches to eating and see what feels good to you. And I like how you talk about keto not being a permanent state. thing that we used to go in and out of. So it's such a powerful strategy for healthy longevity and aging. And you're 66, you look amazing. I love that. You are an inspiration for me and your books are so great. The latest book, 21 Day Biological Clock Reset is just something you have in your new book, Keto for Life, which is great. And I think it's good to know that keto for life doesn't mean keto all the time. It just means a way of eating that turns on all the mechanisms that control our aging, that regulate our blood sugar, that help us have better cognitive function. I've had a patient who was in early dementia and we put her on a ketogenic diet. It was like the lights came back on. It was just amazing to me. I've seen it in kids, little kids who are autistic or had really autistic aggressive behaviors, put them on keto and they literally stop having all those behaviors and wake up a little bit. And of course, weight loss, diabetes, we see Increasing studies showing that, I mean, you can cure diabetes. Type 2 diabetes can cure it. 60% are cured with a ketogenic diet in a year. It's pretty amazing. And I think, you know, your work is not only on that bringing the science to life, but you actually created food products that help people enjoy delicious, yummy food. That's amazing. And you know, you're 66 years old. You know, physically, you look about 30 or actually, the truth is you look better than probably 90% of 30-year-olds who these days are pretty flabby, considering 75% of us are overweight. and you always were focused on exercise. You were always an athlete. You were extreme cardio guy, an endurance athlete, and you had a really big high carb diet, which was the thing at the time, carb loading.

Absolutely.

It was a big deal, and I was a high carb guy back in the day because everybody was low fat and that was just what you did. But it led you to a big wake up call. What happened?

Well, I started running in my teens. I was interested in longevity for some bizarre reason as a 12 year old. Really? Seriously. And I started running, I read a lot about running and how it was supposed to be good for you. And then in '68, Cooper's book came out on aerobics and assigned some metric to the more miles you ran, the healthier your heart would be. So you would get points for putting time in and I like points. So I started accumulating the miles. It started with my just jogging to and from school. It was just a convenient way to beat the bus to and from school.

That's what I did in medical school. I ran four miles each way every day, four miles there, four miles back.

With a backpack of my books and my clothes. Yeah, it probably took you less time than if you'd been in traffic or something, you know, so. And then, you know, I went out for the high school track team because I was too scrawny to play football, basketball, baseball, hockey. And lo and behold, I started winning races. I started, you know, this little bit of training that I was doing running to and from school was enough to, had me win the mile and the two mile. Through college, I started, well, even before then, I started looking at ways in which I could enhance my performance such as it was through diet. Like how could I fuel all the miles that I wanted to run? Because, you know, if you run enough miles, you sort of, you get tired and you have to do it again the next day and the next day and the next day. And the mantra of the day and of the time and for generations was carboloading. You know, like you've got to refill those glycogen stores because if you exhaust them in the run today and you want to run tomorrow. So, what's glycogen? Glycogen is the storage form of glucose in your muscles. So the assumption was that your muscles need a lot of glucose to run efficiently and you can't keep much glucose in your bloodstream as you know, there's probably a tablespoon or teaspoon worth of glucose in your bloodstream at any point in time. So the body takes glucose and it.

Stores it as glycogen in the muscles.

And you can store, you know, 500, 600 grams of glycogen in the body. It's like 2,500 calories. It's a decent amount of calories. if you allocate some for the brain and you allocate some for basic survival functions, you wind up with about 1,800 to 2,000 usable calories in the muscles that you can use as fuel. Now, ideally, and we'll talk about this as we get into the nuances here, ideally you want to burn as much fat as possible and spare the glycogen. But we didn't really know about that at the time, and we thought that Again, if you remember Covert Bailey who wrote a book, I forget what the name of the book, but the line was fat burns in a carbohydrate flame. So you had to eat carbohydrates in order to get the fat to burn. That was, again, the sort of science of the day. And then Tim Noakes, who wrote a book called the Lore of Running, was the guru of carbohydrate management.

So everything-- and he became a low-carb guy.

Oh my god. It was actually-- one of the great shifts in science. It's one of the great He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vilified in South Africa where he started. He got vil then, then I weigh now, and I'm, you know, same body fat. So you'd think that all of this stuff would be like trending toward a healthier, lean, fit, you know, happy, productive body. And my race times came down and I was very if I was turned out to be a pretty good brother. I finished fifth in U.S. national championships in 1980 and eventually went on to fourth at Ironman in Hawaii in the early days. But I was falling apart. I had osteoarthritis in my feet, I had tendonitis in my hips, I had irritable bowel syndrome that literally ran my life. Like if I were driving to the studio today to do this podcast, I'd have to think about how many bathroom rooms there were open at gas stations on the way here. Yeah. Like that kind of thing.

Wow, that's bad.

It was horrible. And since from the age of 14, I suffered from that. And then I had, you know, Multiple upper respiratory tract infections every year. I'd get sick a lot. I thought it was a training, but turns out, you know, it was a combination of that and this, the amount.

Of sugar that I was consuming.

Yeah, sugar suppresses immunity. Yeah, and it's, you know, it competes glucose and competes with vitamin C for, you know, the glucose receptor and it's like, you know, if the sugar's there, the vitamin C can't get in. Anyway, all these things became clear to me and obvious to me years later, but at the time, I literally fell apart. I had to quit running. My injuries were debilitating.

How old were you?

I was 28. Wow.

Going on 68.

Yeah, no, exactly. I couldn't walk right in the morning for an hour. It would take me that long for my feet to sort of warm up and the arthritis in my feet to allow me to move without limping throughout the day.

You were having what, bread, rice, pasta stuff?

Yeah, all the healthy whole grains, you know, all of the, you know, all the stuff you were supposed to be eating.

You weren't having Twizzlers, right?

No, I was not eating sugar and can't, well, I shouldn't say that. There was a point at which I had a half gallon of ice cream every night for like six years.

Nice.

Because I could. But at some point pretty early on, I just realized that this was not a sustainable life. I was falling apart. The irritable bowel syndrome was ruining me. You know, I was sick a lot. And even when I stopped training, I realized that I needed to do something about my diet. And so I started researching food. And the first thing that I realized was that whatever that I was consuming that was converting to glucose so quickly was effectively the same as eating sugar, as eating Twizzlers. I mean, I would say that, you know, the difference between a bowl of rice and a bowl of Skittles is, you know, one has artificial colors, but they both convert to glucose pretty quickly in the bloodstream.

Yeah.

So below the neck, they're the same. Yeah, exactly. So I started down this path of looking, really my goal was to be strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, disease, and all this stuff. Was there a shortcut? We call it a hack today, right? But was there a way to do this that was much more efficient and effective at achieving what had been my original goal, was to be healthy and live long? And that kind of again started the process of multiple years of research, decades of research. I was pre-med in college, so I had gone down that track initially. I was a biology major. I was focused on evolution. So when genetic studies started to point to all the good stuff and bad stuff happening in our body, happening at the level of gene expression, that was the most exciting thing for me. It's like, are you telling me that we have these Hidden genetic switches that we can figure out how to turn them on or off based on some of the behaviors that we choose to undergo.

Our genes aren't fixed, they're actually able to be changed in their expression.

Single most empowering thing I think that a person can realize, can understand. So I dedicated my life to kind of figuring out these hidden genetic switches and doing the research and giving people Not like my way is the only way or the best way or the right way. It's a way that has been well researched and if you're frustrated at the amount of success or not that you've been getting in your attempts at losing weight or attempts at reducing pain or attempts at increasing your energy, then I've got a nice little template that I call the Primal Blueprint within which you could craft a lifestyle that would work for you.

And what is the Primal Blueprint?

So the Primal Blueprint is basically my distillation of all the behaviors of, you know, in human history for, you know, two and a half, going back two and a half million years as humans and then 60 million years as proto-hominids before that and then 100 million years of mammalian evolution before that that got us to where we are today. This concept that our genes are a recipe that rebuilds, renews, regenerates us, recreates us every minute of every day based on certain inputs. It's not, as you say, it's not a fixed, like it's not done doing--.

You- have a predisposition but not a predestiny.

Correct. And so in understanding, you know, where, how the genes work and what turns them on or off, you know, we can understand what the genes expect of us. Like we have this recipe that expects us to be strong and lean and fit. It doesn't expect us to be diabetic, it doesn't expect us to be grossly overweight, it doesn't expect us to be arthritic.

That's not the normal human condition.

It's not the normal human condition.

Just for now.

Correct, and so we messed it up. We overlooked some of these simple little fixes and not anyone single person's fault, but as a society we sort of crafted this strategy where we want things to be easy so we don't have to work so hard. We want to eat stuff that's crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet and quick and we've.

Kind of taken us down this path.

So what are the bullets of the bullets? Eat lots of plants and animals. Full stop. But it means the subtext is don't eat processed crap. Move around a lot at a low level of activity. It doesn't mean train for marathons, because that's a high level of activity. It means move, it means walk, like walking is still one of the best things you can do. Or ride a bike easy, or swim a little bit, but move around a lot throughout, move your body through different ranges of motion and planes of activity throughout the day, because that's what the body expects. If you just sit at a desk.

Crouched over a keyboard, you will become that hunched up.

See people have that body type so much. You know, the chiropractors talk about kyphosis, you know, and everybody's, Necks forward and all this stuff. So, I got that problem. Everybody has that problem. It comes with the territory of being a modern human. So move around a lot of activity. It's lift heavy things once in a while. So our ancestors didn't just move around a lot. They actually had to log logs back to the campsite or carry carcasses that they just came up across or killed or log babies or climb trees to get a lookout. or take rocks and build whatever. So there was a lot of lifting. And then sprint once in a while. And that's one of my favorite ones. It's one of the most effective exercises we as humans can do. Sprint once in a while. And it's not every day and it's.

Not even every other day.

It's like once a week or once every seven days. Just run as fast as you can till you throw up and then-- no, pretty much. It's like six or eight seconds. Could be 20 seconds. Could be an orchestrated kind of track workout if you're a if you're that kind of an athlete. But it's basically-- Going all out. High-interval training. Yeah, yeah, high-intensity training, which is now.

A thing, but it's been a thing for millions of years.

We had to run really fast from the tigers. And somebody had to figure out that in a scientific context of how we can make that part of your lifestyle, even though it's always been part of our lifestyle. Get plenty of sleep. I mean, sleep is huge. And as I know, you know, it's one of the most overlooked bypassed lifestyle things that people say, well, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Well, you'll be dead soon enough if you keep that attitude up. You know, play, engage in play. Humans are designed to play. Our brains require play. It's one of the reasons that we're able to figure out complex things later on in life because we spend time actually playing and sort of practicing, whether it's, you know, as an animal practicing escape routes or whatever. Avoid trauma, it's an easy one. Avoid traumatic incidents, but as a early human, if you broke your leg or twisted your knee, you were off the back. Man, you were like dead weight for the tribe. So avoiding just being smart about wearing a seat belt, not smoking, not over drinking, all these things are- Basic common sense. They basically are common sense, and yet I think people still need to be reminded of it. now and then.

So, so you've been focused a lot on longevity since you were 14, which is impressive.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's funny because I have two. I, I had a, a gym teacher named Mr. Gibson in the eighth grade, and he was very into physical fitness, and he showed us a movie, which I still literally can see the entire movie in my head. It was so impactful. And it was all these different people who were exercising and what it did for their lives. There was this guy, Larry Lewis, who was 105 years old, and he ran five to work every day as a waiter and five miles back. There was this guy who ran the Boston Marathon on stumps. There was one story after the other and I'm like, you know, this is amazing. And I started running then. I started exercising and became a runner. And so we're all really focused on aging. It's $140 billion a year industry. We want that special pill, that lotion, that supplement, that diet that's gonna fix us. We're all sort of scared about getting old and dying and decrepit, which is, you know, really a threat because we now have six out of 10 Americans who are chronically ill and it's true and a lot has to do with our food. But what you talk about a lot is how we can actually reverse the aging process, how we can sort of unlock our full longevity potential and you think the best way to do that is through a ketogenic diet which is essentially the hottest diet trend out there right now.

Well, you know, what is it and.

How does it work?

So that's a bit of an oversimplification that the one way to do that is a ketogenic diet. I think the way to do that, and if you go back and look at some of the sort of industry leaders, Michael Eades and Ron Rosedale, Protein Power. Yeah, and these are guys who early on recognized that the less sugar we eat in a lifetime, the better off we are. So if you kind of use that as a guidepost, like if you can figure out a way to get by with eating less sugar throughout your life, you'll probably be healthier and live longer.

100%.

Yeah. So how do you do that? Well, you do it by developing what we call metabolic flexibility. Most people are so dependent on every meal, three meals a day plus two snacks, to keep their blood sugar up, to keep their energy up, to get through the day because they're good at burning sugar but they're terrible at burning fat. They've never really prompted the body to develop the mechanisms to tap into fat stores and burn stored body fat as the primary source of fuel.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. A lot of the diseases that we see that are causing disability, loss of productivity, loss of quality of life are brain disorders, whether it's anxiety, depression, the opioid epidemic.