Episode #152: If You Could Eat Fat All Day, Would You?

In this podcast, the Perfect Health Diet Training for a Triathlon, Eating for healthy kidneys, do endurance athletes live longer using a run walk strategy, man boobs, coconut oil, and the problem with a gluten free diet.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here and maybe the title of this podcast, podcast number 152 got your attention. If you clicked through from BenGreenfieldFitness.com because it's titled if you could eat fat all day, would you? And the reason for that is because in today's podcast I'm going to be interviewing the author of the Perfect Health diet book, Paul Jaminette. And in that Perfect Health diet book, the carb fat protein ratio that's recommended is 20% carb, 65% fat, 15% protein, which sounds like a pretty crazy diet. But the book is compelling and it's got a lot of really good information in it. So I was pleased to be able to get Paul on the show. Incredibly intelligent guy and I think you're really going to enjoy the interview and I would recommend that you consider reading the book. There's a lot of really good information in it. We've got some great questions that came through today, so we are going to have a few special announcements and then move into this week's content.

Special announcements.

Well, first of all, last week I taught a one hour long seminar called Eating for Endurance in which I kind of taught the idea behind how to use carbs, fats, proteins, electrolytes and water during endurance activities of about 2 plus hours in duration. And if you engage in those type of endurance based activities, you will want to grab the free download of that lecture and you can get it over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com in the show notes to this episode, episode number 152, I'll put with the free download to that Eating for Endurance seminar. Now a couple other announcements. First, my Shape 21 Lean Body Manual, the exercise and diet manual that's kind of a flip day by day, page by page to shed as much fat as possible in 21 days. That's available on Facebook as a downloadable app that you can access right there in Facebook. And all you gotta do is go to facebook.com, do a search for Shape 21, or go grab the link to that right there in the show notes to this episode at ben in greenfieldfitness.com and then finally, I know this is kind of early to be announcing this, but I also know that the winter and the holiday season tends to fill up pretty quickly. So I want to tell you right now that my wife and I just signed up for a triathlon in Jamaica in November. I would love to have you join us and meet us there. This is a blast. I've done this race twice. It's a great excuse to get away for the winter. Pretty short triathlon, Olympic distance. Just a fantastic time. Super laid back down there in the Caribbean. Anyways, I got a 20% discount code for you to register and if you head over to the show notes for this episode, you can get the discount code, the link to the race, and come join us in November. A couple other things first, for any of you in the Portland area, I'm coming down to Portland for the next week, July 3 through July 10, for that Portland Rev3 triathlon. So I will be down there all week. Stay tuned to twitter.com BenGreenfield if you want to know where I am. If you want to meet up with me, meet me. I'd love to meet you. I love to get together and meet listeners. So just look me up when I'm down there in Portland. And then finally, big thanks to all those of you who have donated the dollar to keep this podcast going. Very easy to sign up for a $1 donation each month. You go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com you press the $1 donation button on the right side of the page. And what that basically is doing is it's helping to support what I need to pay for everybody to go the podcast each week because I have to pay for all the transfer of that information and the payment is based off the number of people who download. So if you can go in and donate a dollar for your monthly digest of BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's huge. It really helps. So let's have one quick announcement and move on to this week's Listener Q and A. Get the Inside edge from Ben Greenfield Fitness delivered straight to your phone. Just text the word Fitness to 411247 and you'll instantly get exclusive VIP discounts and insider tips that no one else will ever see except you. Do it now. Text the word Fitness to 411247 and you'll be in Ben's VIP Text Club for free.

Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, this is Craig from Birmingham and I'm sitting here in my Ben Greenfield T shirt, about to head into the Y and had a question about training plans. I'm just beginning as a triathlete right now though. I'm training three days a week and on each of those days I swim, bike and run and all the training plans I've been looking at do it differently and do it looks like no more than two of the sports on any given workout. I was just wondering, am I thinking wrong? Is this good, is this bad? And wanted to have your opinion on that. Thanks. Bye.

So to be perfectly honest with you Craig, you won't see many triathlon programs that actually have you swimming, cycling and running every single day for each of your workouts, especially if they're for like longer say triathlons, because it's very difficult to get a high quality workout in that's really devoted to one of those sports, swimming, biking or running, and, and still be able to squeeze the other two sports in. Now that being said, there's certainly a great deal of sports specific training that occurs if you're training for a triathlon when you swim at the gym pool and then you get out of the pool, you run upstairs to the bicycle and you get on the bicycle and you ride the bicycle and then you run outside and you run for 20 minutes. Those are the type of workouts that really get your body used to the type of training that you're going to do during a race. And in fact, in the last couple weeks leading up to a race where my, my workouts get shorter and shorter as I taper, a lot of times I will do that and squeeze multiple workouts into one day and sometimes swim, bike and run all in one day. But more often than not, in my own program and the program of the athletes that I'm working with, we'll do something like say bike and lift on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then swim and run on Tuesday and Thursday, do some type of long workout like a long bike ride followed by a mid to run on Saturday and then take the day off or do a really easy swim on Sunday. And that type of scenario allows you to focus more on the quality or the length of the sessions, the latter especially being important if you're training for say like a half ironman or an ironman distance triathlon without having to worry about trying to squeeze all of the different disciplines into one day. Now if you're training for a shorter race like a sprint distance triathlon or an Olympic distance, then you could probably get away with doing most of your workouts at kind of like a combination swim, bike, run workout every single day. Just make sure that you lay it out properly so that you're not doing high intensity interval training on one day and then following that up with more interval training the next day. So for example, if you're swimming, biking and running all in one workout, your Tuesday and Thursday workouts might consist of simply skills and drills and a high amount of aerobic work. And then Monday might be kind of like long slow intervals, and Friday might be long slow intervals, and Wednesday might be short, very intense intervals. And maybe Saturday is short, very intense intervals as well. So there's a few different ways you can do it, but ultimately I hope that clears up the air in terms of how you should be structuring your triathlon training workouts. And remember, if you have an audio question to leave, you can simply call toll free to 877-209-9439. Now the next question is from Mario, who says, I like to listen to music and podcasts, but is there a set of headphones you would recommend for use both to indoors in the gym and outdoors? I especially hate it when they snag and rip out of my ears. What do you use that term, ripping out of the ears? That kind of makes me shudder because I literally like an hour ago I just got back from the doctor and I was about two years ago flying back from a race that I did and right before I got on the airplane I went in the ocean and I went for a swim and the water ended up getting pressurized into my ear, inner ear during the airplane flight. And I got an ear tube put into my ear and it wouldn't come out. And so just about an hour ago I went into the doctor and he kind of did like surgery without anesthesia and just kind of ripped it out of my ear. And that was some of the worst pain I've experienced in a really long time. So when you say ripping out of the ears, I literally did have something ripped out of my ear about an hour ago and I asked to keep it. He gave it to me a little tissue paper and it had blood and wax on it and it was kind of nasty, but I wanted to keep it as a souvenir. My kids thought that was pretty cool when they saw that I had an ear tube that had been pulled out of my ear. So anyways, back to Mario. Mario I recommend these earphones called urbuds. It's Y U R B U D S. I'll put a link to those in the show notes for you. But first of all, they allow you to hear noise while you're training and so it's not quite as dangerous to be riding your bicycle or running on a road with headphones on. And second of all, you can yank the heck out of those things and they don't come out, but they don't hurt when you yank on them either. So they're kind of a newer headphone. They've only been around for about a year, but they're called earbuds and I'm a big fan. They work really well. I came across them at kind of a fitness expo last year. And yeah, super nice headphones, good sound. They allow you to hear what's going on outside. They don't come out. So that's what I recommend. Alright, next question is from Alan, who says, I eat low carbohydrate foods, but my father is having kidney issues and is being told he cannot eat much in the way of protein or potassium. He's being told to eat everything I have learned is bad and will lead to weight gain and insulin issues such as white bread. He's also on blood pressure medications, etc. This is certainly beyond me and the doctor nutritionist are advising and do not seem concerned about what seems to be an extremely unhealthy diet. Do you have any thoughts on what he could do or where to look for better advice? Well, first of all, before I answer your question, Alan, let me clarify something. High protein diets are not bad for healthy kidneys. Okay. And that has been proven. There have been numerous studies. The more recent one was a study on well over 1,000 women who are part of an ongoing nurses health study. And what the investigators in that study found was that the danger of kidney problems from a high protein diet is limited to people who have existing kidney problems. Okay. So if you've got some type of renal insufficiency or kidney issue going on, that's when we might want to discuss potentially limiting protein. And I'm going to kind of give a caveat to that in a minute here. But if you've got healthy kidneys, don't think that a high protein diet is necessarily going to destroy your kidneys because there's not a lot of evidence for that. And although kidney function will certainly decline with age and a lot of older people will get that like 40 to 50% kidney function, usually it's related to this gradual loss of the kidneys filtering units or their nephrons. And that just naturally occurs as you age. But it can certainly be accelerated through long term use of pharmaceutical drugs, you know, painkillers, even something like aspirin. Untreated high blood pressure is another primary cause of loss of kidney function. Heart disease due to poor blood circulation through the kidneys can be another issue. And you can even harm your kidneys through chronic dehydration or just not drinking enough water. So all of these would be bigger issues in terms of causing some renal problems in contrast to a high protein diet. But I think it's certainly possible to delve even deeper into some issues that really aren't talked about in the medical mainstream when it comes to kidney function. So we take something that's been discussed on this show before, which is age or ages, which stands for advanced glycation end products. And remember, this is typically something that's going to form when you've got a lot of sugar in your diet, particularly a lot of free glucose in your diet can stick to proteins, it can stick to circulating fats or lipids in your body, and it can change the way that these structures actually function. And when you've got chronically elevated blood glucose levels, you get a lot more advanced glycation end product formation. And this can eventually kind of overload the enzymes in your body that help to regulate the formation of these advanced glycation end products and keep them from doing damage. We look at the diet again from a carbohydrate perspective and you have fructose and fructose, which as we've talked about on this show before, is mostly processed by the liver. So it's kind of hard to get out of blood circulation. And it tends to be able to alter liver function, especially when you're consuming it in high loads and you're in a sedentary state when you're consuming the fructose. So it can contribute to insulin resistance. And not only that, but it's structurally a lot more reactive than glucose or a lot more likely to produce these advanced glycation end products compared to glucose. And because of that, both high levels of elevated blood sugar or chronically elevated blood sugar levels as well as fructose consumption, especially in a sedentary individual. What can happen is you, you can have some problems with kidney function. And it's specifically related to the ability of these advanced glycation end products. If I can say that one time correctly on this show, these ages to be able to Damage some of the structures, particularly in the glomerulus of the kidney, which is part of your kidney that is responsible for the function of the kidneys, the reabsorption process and the filtering process that the kidneys are doing. So that's a big issue. And that's kind of a red flag with, with your father being prescribed this higher carbohydrate intake diet. Inflammation can be another issue. And inflammation is definitely problematic for kidney function. And one of the main ways that this actually happens is again related to fructose consumption, interestingly. And there's a protein that is increased when you're actually consuming high amounts of fructose. And it's called a monocyte chemoatrex protein, or mcp. And that can actually deleteriously affect kidney function. And in particular, these monocytes can attack part of the nephron, which is part of the kidneys, and it can decrease your renal function. Autoimmunity is another issue when it comes to kidney function. And there are a lot of autoimmune diseases or autoimmune reactions that again cause damage to the nephrons in the kidney. And a lot of these are related to gluten, particularly the activity of something called transglutaminase. And so a high gluten based diet, consuming a lot of wheat based products, specifically those that are higher in gluten, like eating a lot of pasta, eating a lot of bread, that could also cause some kidney damage when in excess. So another issue when we look at the kidneys is that when we have these chronically elevated insulin levels, which can be related to like a, like a high sugar, high carbohydrate diet, not only can it produce these advanced glycation end products, the inflammation, but the other thing that can happen is you get an elevation of what are called growth factors. And what can happen when that occurs is you get a decrease of the production of something called sex hormone binding protein and an increase in epithelial growth factor and also in something called vascular endothelial growth factor. And both of those can damage your kidney function. So once again, we see that carbohydrate or elevated carbohydrate intake can be something that affects this. The other thing is that aldosterone, which is a hormone that is intimately related to the kidneys in terms of regulating the electrolyte balance, regulating blood pressure. Aldosterone, insulin can cause sodium retention, it can cause you to excrete potassium. We talked about this a little bit when we talked about adrenal fatigue, but Basically what happens is it increases your blood volume or increases your blood pressure. And when you're consuming a lot of carbohydrates, you get a lot of insulin and you have what's called hyperinsulinism. It can cause this increased blood volume, which when combined with the aldosterone production, can really step up the blood pressure and once again, push, put increased risk or increased load on your kidneys. Interestingly, and we talked about this a few weeks ago, cortisol, or that stress release hormone is something else that can have similar effects to aldosterone. So the kind of the paradox here is if you can't eat a bunch of carbohydrate like your father's currently being recommended to do, then what do you eat? Because we've all heard that, you know, if you are eating a lot of protein, you can get a lot of these ammonia based byproducts from the breakdown of protein and these could increase the amount of filtering that has to be done by the kidney. And that's certainly true, even though, again, like I said, that's not an issue in healthy people, but could be an issue when it comes to people who have reduced renal function. And that's where I thought that this would be a good question to answer, particularly in the podcast that we're talking about today, because we're talking about a high fat diet today. And we even mentioned the term ketogenesis today or the primary burning of ketones or fatty acids as a fuel. And there was actually a really interesting recent article that appeared a couple months ago about how a low carbohydrate diet can reverse kidney failure, particularly in people with diabetes. And what these folks were actually metabolizing were ketones or fatty acids. And the diet that they were on was described as a low carbohydrate and moderate protein, high fat diet, very similar to the one that I'll be talking about with Paul Jaminette today. And what happens is that when you're eating that diet, the cells are using ketones instead of glucose for a fuel. Glucose isn't metabolized. And since a high amount of glucose metabolism can cause kidney failure, the idea was that the ketogenic diet would block the toxic effect on the kidneys of glucose. And it was found that they could actually reverse diabetic kidney failure with this ketogenic diet. So it's very, very interesting and we'll delve into some of the chronic disease management capabilities of something like a low carbohydrate, high fat diet later on when we talk with Paul. But it's interesting that this really plays into the kidney issue. And perhaps you should listen to the interview with Paul Jaminette and read the book that we're going to talk about. And that might be something to look into introducing to your dad. Not to be given as medical advice from me, but this is just something that I would certainly explore. Okay, the next question is from Sam, who says, I just read an article and then he links me to the article. And the article that he links me to is one about Tour de France riders and a study that they did on Tour de France riders. And specifically the article that he links to is called Increased Average Longevity among the Tour de France Cyclists. And what they did was this research study that was based off the fact that it's widely held among the general population and health professionals that moderate exercise is healthy, but long term, high intensity exercise is not. So they went out, they took all these Tour de France riders, and they looked at their survival period and compared the survival period of these Tour de France riders that were riding between 1930 up into the 1960s with other people who were of similar age, from similar locations, who were alive at the same time, but not doing that same type of training. And they found that the average age with 50% of the population died, who was not a Tour de France Rider was 73 years old. And the Tour de France rider average age of death was 81 years old. So almost like an eight year increase in lifespan or an observed increase in lifespan among these Tour de France riders. And so what Sam asks is, he says, what do you make of it? Are these Tour de Front cyclists exceptions to the rules, or how does this assessment compare to yours? And I'm sure that Sam is referring to my thoughts about the amount of inflammation and excessive body use that something like an ironman triathlon can put onto the body. And my proposal that it is indeed not necessarily healthy, even though I do it, and it is instead potentially damaging, even though it is a pretty cool thing to be doing. So my thoughts on this Tour de France study kind of go into a few areas. First of all, from what I can tell in terms of the statistical analysis, it actually is a good statistical analysis that shows a very clear trend that would suggest that people who are riding in the Tour de France actually lived longer than people who weren't riding as much as these guys were. But there are definitely some confounding factors or some potential confounding factors. For example, we know that right away being a former athlete would put you In a category where you're going to tend to probably eat a little bit healthier, you're probably going to drink a little bit less alcohol, you're probably going to smoke a little less. And so those could have certainly affected like a selection bias for these Tour de France riders actually living longer. There are certainly genetic variables that allow for someone to be successful in a competitive race like the Tour de France that may also put them into the category where they're also predisposed to just live longer. So there's another kind of selection bias there. However, the authors did bring up this bias in their article and they cited another study that compared the genetic profiles of 100 different world class male endurance athletes. And they found that of all these different risks, like risk for cardiovascular disease, risk for high blood pressure, risk for insulin resistance, risk for cancer, et cetera, they didn't find any difference in these risks genetically between these advanced endurance athletes and the general population. So it's kind of interesting. A couple other thoughts that I have are that a, it's possible that the diets of these individuals training back in the 1930s through the 1960s were a lot healthier than the diets of many endurance athletes these days. Specifically in the realm of the amount of processed and preservative laden foods that they were likely not consuming consuming compared to athletes these days. Obviously that's a pretty simple fix. You can eat more whole real raw food if you are an endurance athlete. The other thing is that I do not think, and I do not know this, this is something that I would love to be able to find out, but I wasn't able to find it out in time for this podcast. I would be interested in their actual training protocol back in the 30s, and I would not be surprised if cyclists back in the 30s were not training anywhere near as hard as a modern day Tour de France cyclist or say, like a modern day Ironman triathlete. And that would simply be an issue of me being able to see a typical training protocol of someone who is training in the 30s, the 40s, or the 50s for the Tour de France. So if you have access to a training protocol like that and you're listening in, let me know. That'd be really interesting to see. So it was an interesting article and those are my thoughts on it. Okay, we've got a question from Craig, who says Jeff Galloway's philosophy of run, walk, run has helped me in my runs. Could this apply to triathlon? Well, first of all, Craig, a guy who is really, really well versed in the whole run walk run protocol is a guy named Bobby McGee. And over at another website that I run called enduranceplanet.com we have a really fascinating four part video interview series with Bobby McGee. It's totally free, but I would suggest you go over to enduranceplanet.com and I'll link to this in the show notes to this episode. And you watch that interview series with Bobby McGee, who's got some really good insight into the run walk run protocol. And what the run walk run protocol is, is you go out and you do a half marathon or a marathon or a triathlon or whatever and you are following a specific run walk ratio. So like your run walk ratio might be a nine to one ratio of running and walking, where for every nine minutes that you run, you're doing one minute of kind of like a fast paced walk. And the walk allows you to not only do something like fuel or hydrate, but also decrease your body's core temperature and then pick the running pace back up. And as long as the running pace between each of the walks is faster than the running pace that you'd be able to sustain if you weren't walking, the idea is that you can complete an event more quickly. And there are certainly people who are incorporating this type of strategy to run a marathon in less than three hours or a half marathon in less than an hour and 20 minutes. So it's certainly a strategy that can work. It's one that I personally have done in half Ironman triathlons before, where during the run portion of a half Ironman triathlon, I will walk for about 60 seconds, just a very fast walk at the 5k, the 10k and the 15k mark. And I've done that a couple times in very hot races to allow my body temperature to come down a little bit. And there are certainly different types of philosophies for the run walk one strategy. But yes, it can certainly apply to triathlon, especially for like distance triathlon. And it would be something that may be beneficial for you to play around with. So go watch that Bobby McGee video interview series and if you have any more comments or questions about that, just leave them in the comments under the show notes of this episode, episode number 152. Okay, we've got a question from Andre who says, is there really such a thing as beer gut? Well, I think that there certainly is, Andre. And the reason that I say that is there's basically two main areas where you're going to store fat underneath your skin. And that's called Subcutaneous fat. And the other place you're going to store is in your abdominal cavity, and that's called abdominal fat, or it's also called visceral fat. And visceral fat, which is what you see when you're looking at a beer gut or a beer belly, is what gives people that large waist circumference, the big waist to hip ratio. And interestingly, visceral fat is a highly active type of fat from a metabolic point of view. So what I mean by that is it produces or can produce a lot of what are called cytokines, which are inflammatory molecules. Visceral fat is also a little bit easier to rupture and to cause inflammation. And visceral fat is actually one of the predictors that can be used to predict your propensity for things like insulin sensitivity, impaired glucose tolerance, or a lot of blood sugar fluctuations, high blood pressure, high circulating blood fat, or triglycerides. So if you've got a lot of visceral fat, you are definitely at a higher risk of a lot of chronic diseases. Now what's even more interesting is that when they, when they look at visceral fat in rats, if they surgically remove visceral fat from rats, those rats do not develop insulin resistance or elevated insulin when they age. And so it's very, very interesting that visceral fat is one of the ways that your body develops insulin resistance. And when they've studied this, once again in rats, what they can do is they can increase the rate of glucose release into the fat tissue of rats by injecting either glucose or insulin into the bloodstream. And when you inject these or put these into the bloodstream, you get this increased glucose uptake by fat cells. But what happens is when you get this increased glucose uptake, visceral fat amps up its production of what are called fat derived peptides a ton compared to subcutaneous fat or that fat underneath the skin. And these fat derived peptides that are produced by the visceral fat, they promote insulin resistance. So once again, you put a bunch of sugar into visceral fat cells, which is the type of fat cells that are produced by like a beer belly. And those cells upregulate the production of these fat derived peptides. And the fat derived peptides can significantly increase your risk for insulin resistance. And remember, when you get insulin resistance, that means that your body eventually is not able to take blood glucose and use it for energy, and you instead get high levels of circulating blood glucose, which means you get that vicious cycle of producing more fat, you can get nerve damage, you can get blood vessel damage, you can get inflamed cholesterol particles and a lot of the other things that go along with insulin resistance. So the reason that something like beer, or really any food that increases blood glucose is going to be an issue is because any of these foods will lead to the greatest increase in visceral fat. Anything that causes an abnormal release or a large release in blood glucose, especially if you're in a sedentary, non exercising state, followed by that large release in insulin is going to cause visceral fat to grow. So fructose can trigger visceral fat formation. So if we're talking like high fructose corn syrup syrup, agave syrup, maple syrup, honey, high carbohydrate consumption, beer consumption, wheat consumption, any of these are going to lead to that visceral fat formation. And as many of you know, I consume a lot of those foods that I just listed off. If you looked over my shoulder at a restaurant, you would certainly see me grabbing a piece of bread, having some rice or potatoes with dinner, that type of thing. But you have to remember that I am a proponent of timing your carbohydrate while you're in an insulin sensitive state. So you'll see me eating the majority of my carbohydrate when I am within two hours of having completed an exercise session, when I'm about to go out and do an exercise session, or when I'm right in the middle of an exercise session. And aside from that, I'm very, very careful. And I don't know if you noticed recently, but I have a six pack and I don't have very much visceral fat at all. And one of the reasons for that is that I do really control my carbohydrate intake. I also don't really like beer, but I do like wine. So that's really what's going on with the beer belly. And I'm not against alcohol. I think that alcohol is really given too much of a bad rap. I think part of that might be because of an article that I wrote about how alcohol makes you fat and how it gets converted into acetate by the liver and how that acetate, the use of acetate as a fuel kind of takes precedence over other things like carbohydrates. But the fact is that the consumption of alcohol or the production of acetate alone isn't going to cause you to get fat. It's all the other stuff that you consume along with it. It's the nachos and the peanuts and usually the junk foods and the carb foods that we're eating when we drink, or just the fact that drinking causes us to drink more than we would normally consume when we have our wits about us. So it's very easy to drink four beers once you've already had, you know, two beers. And that's where you start to get the beer belly issue. So I really don't have much of an issue with alcohol consumption in moderation. I personally probably average about two to three drinks each week. So that's kind of where we're at with the whole beer belly thing. So hopefully I didn't confuse you or cause more questions than I actually answered with that. Got a question from an anonymous listener who says, my whole life I've had lumps or nodes of tissue under my nipple. I'm a 32 year old male. I never had any issues with this and I'm in great health. However, what are these and is there a way to make them go away? Well, typically when you see something like this, it's known as gynecomastia or man boobs. I did an episode about this over at the Get Fit Guy podcast and what this is is it's an abnormally large development or abnormal development of these mammary glands, glands in males. And sometimes it manifests as breast enlargement, sometimes it can manifest as, you know, funny shaped areola or lumps under the nipples, puffy nipples, that type of thing. And some guys are genetically predisposed towards or higher degrees of gynecomastia. But male estrogens can certainly affect too much production of this mammary tissue. And estrogen load could be increased through anything from chemicals in the environment, like a lot of the chemicals you'll find in plastics and cleaning products, even some of like the benzene based molecules you're going to find like sunblock and soaps and perfumes and colognes. There are certainly foods that contain higher amounts of estrogen. Soy is one, interestingly, beer is also one. And there is some relationship between this drop in testosterone that occurs naturally as you age and the conversion of that testosterone into estrogen. There's an enzyme in your body called aromatase that converts testosterone to estrogen. So if you're kind of going through andropause and have lowered testosterone levels, a lot of times that testosterone is getting converted into estrogen and that can cause increased formation of these man boobs. And if you have really high levels of body fat from just high calorie consumption or lack of exercise. What happens is you do have higher activity levels of this aromatase and so you get more of your testosterone converted into this estrogen. Now I am not a boob expert and I am not like a physician who checks up on guys nipples. Nipples. So I realized that you said that you've had this for a long time and that it's not something that has gradually come up. You say you're in great health and you say your whole life you've had these lumps or nodes of tissue under your nipples. You know, I would, I would think that possibly it could be more gynecomastia related if it had just started developing or was related to dietary changes or lack of exercise or something like that. But since, since I'm not sure about that, I would say that my last piece of advice for you would be to go see a doctor and ask them. And that would probably be your best bet if these things are really bothering you, especially if you're convinced that you are indeed living a very healthy life. So definitely look into some of those estrogen issues though, if what I just said about male estrogens made you think that maybe there were some in your diet right now or in your lifestyle right now. Okay. Chuck says, I've heard that taking coconut oil can increase your metabolism up to 48% over 14 hours. Is this true? Also what I'm more interested in is I've heard that it can increase energy. Is this true? And how much coconut oil should I eat to accomplish this? Once again, a good question to be asking during today's interview because I know that the author of the Perfect Health Diet, Paul Jaminette, he kind of endorses coconut oil in that book. A lot of this research or a lot of this argument about coconut oil increasing your metabolism is based off of studies that have done that have shown that when you consume a source of medium chain triglycerides, which are a type of fat that your body can burn as a fuel, there is an increase in what is called thermogenesis and an increase in metabolic rate compared to the consumption of other food. Foods specifically the study that's cited most used a type of fat called a long chain triglyceride. And compare that to a medium chain triglyceride. They certainly did find an increase in energy expenditure. It was definitely not as high as that 40 some odd percent that you just talked about. It was kind of up there like in the low teens. I think it was like 12 to 14% that it actually improved the thermogenic effect of food or the metabolic rate after consuming the medium chain triglycerides. So it's really not, you know, it's not one of those things you want to eat to boost your metabolism as much as it's something that you'd want to eat for. Some of the other good properties of coconuts, and what I'm talking about would be, first of all, what you've already brought up, Chuck, and that would be their ability to be used during exercise for energy, for fuel. Compared to a lot of other fats, they do burn pretty well during exercise. So what a medium chain triglyceride is, it's a type of saturated fat, it's got shorter chains of these carbon molecules, and that can cause the medium chain triglycerides to be digested or metabolized more quickly by your liver. And they specifically don't need this transporter called L carnitine to enter into your mitochondria to provide energy so they can act kind of similarly to carbohydrates. And so they could possibly even cause you to not use as much carbohydrates during exercise, have access to a more dense energy source, and even help you to mobilize some of your body's own fat stores for energy. And you're usually going to find medium chain triglycerides in coconut oils or palm kernel oils. The issue is that to take them in the amount that would you give, that would give you a large amount of energy is going to cause some diarrhea and going to cause some cramping if you're exercising at higher intensities. So if you're going on a 50 mile ultra run up in the mountains, kind of chugging along at a slow pace, not a big deal to have a trail mix bag with some almonds and some unsweetened coconut flakes. I definitely don't recommend tossing whole coconut milk in your bike bottle for a bike race or something like that, simply because it's too difficult to metabolize at those intensities. But it is certainly something for low intensity exercise that you can experiment with and use. And it is burnt very, very well as a fuel. Now, in his book that we'll talk about later on today, Paul Jaminette talks about some other really important properties of coconut oil. And I'll kind of save some of that for the interview because I do ask him some questions about coconut oil and he's got some good things to say about it. And just so you know, inside the inner circle The Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle. Our next seminar, which is actually coming up this Saturday, July 2nd, and you can get into that over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com innercircle is how to take a coconut and just go buy a coconut at the grocery store. And my wife and I are going to teach you how to make coconut milk and how to make your own coconut water, coconut oil, coconut butter. We're going to teach you just basically how to take a coconut and get everything out of it that you can. It's pretty cheap, pretty easy to do. That's what we've been doing now for our coconut. And you bypass a lot of the issues with potential for PCBs and guar gum and a lot of other stuff that you get in canned coconut. Plus it's less expensive.

So.

Good question.

All right, one more question from Tony who says, I have been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome and I'm experimenting with a gluten free regimen. I am now struggling with blood sugar highs and lows and I'm concerned that the relatively high glycemic index foods that I'm now eating, such as rice and potatoes, are causing these issues.

All right.

So first of all, this is kind of one of my pet peeves is people who switch to a gluten free diet and you start consuming all these gluten free grains or these gluten free, I guess I shouldn't call them grains, gluten free processed foods. And if you do a nutritional analysis of like standard gluten free foods that are sold as gluten free foods at most supermarkets, they're still incredibly processed, they're highly refined, they can still be loaded with calories and loaded with preservatives and really not give you much of an advantage other than potentially not causing the same type of irritation of your irritable bowel syndrome. If you're going to go gluten free, don't do it by going and getting a bunch of packaged foods and products, but instead do it by eating real whole foods, stepping up your consumption of meats and proteins and to a limited extent, seeds and nuts. And some of the foods that we talk about today when I interview Paul Jaminette about the perfect health diet book. But if you're struggling with blood sugar highs and lows, it's really not as much to do with gluten as much as it has to do with the macronutrient content of your diet and the timing of your carbohydrate intake. One of the best things that you could be doing would be to skew your diet towards lower carbohydrate intake and higher protein and fat consumption and to time your carbohydrates like I just talked about a little bit ago, in conjunction with activity levels. And that will really help to contain your blood sugar levels because post exercise, during exercise you're going to be more insulin sensitive and more likely to take that glucose and use it as a fuel or store it away. And if you're sitting around eating rice and potatoes, no matter who you are, whether you're eating gluten free or a gluten containing diet, you're going to have blood sugar issues. So one of the best things you could do is go out and get a blood glucose monitor and monitor what's going on in terms of what you're eating, what it does to your blood sugar levels. And I think that you're going to find if you're moderately physically active and you time your carbohydrates around that physical activity and fuel that physical activity accordingly and then switch to lower carbohydrate containing gluten free foods that preferably aren't refined, preservative laden foods during the times that you're not exercising, it would really help with the issues that you're having. So I hope that helps. And we're going to go ahead and have one quick announcement and then move on to this week's interview with Paul Jaminette.

Finally, a solution for healthy living that actually makes sense. Ben Greenfield and his wife Jessa have cracked the code on healthy living and revealed their entire system inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle where you'll get instant access to to 24.7forum interaction with Ben and Jessa, a live monthly webinar, meal plans, videos, Ben's Body Transformation Club archives, and much, much more. If you or your family want to learn how to achieve the ultimate healthy lifestyle on a budget, then the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle is for you. Get four free videos to get you started and full access to the Inner circle@Ben greenfieldfitness.com inner circle that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle we'll see you inside. Featured Topic.

Hey folks, this is Ben Greenfield and and one book that's been getting quite a bit of press, especially among the audience here at Ben Greenfield Fitness. And the questions I've been receiving reflect that has been a book called the Perfect Health Diet and this book was written by Paul Jamenette is the co author of the book and he wrote it with. I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing this correctly, but Shu Qinginette and Paul is on the call today and Paul and I are going to be discussing this very unique diet called the Perfect Health Diet. It's got a lot of things in it and I have read the book that I hadn't seen before in other diet books. And so Paul is going to kind of outline the idea behind what makes this perfect Health diet different and how it all began and how you might.

Be able to implement some of the.

Technical techniques in this book in your own life, in your own training and your own nutrition to help to improve your health, your performance, your longevity and many of the other issues that Paul.

Discusses in the book.

So Paul, thank you for coming on the call today.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me Ben.

Well, Paul, you have an interesting story about how you began this book and you didn't exactly come from a pristine background of healthy living, did you?

No, I'm afraid not. I actually had some health problems from the time I was born. My mother had cancer and I picked up some infections very early in life. I had ear infections through my first five years or so. I had some surgeries related to that and but was reasonably healthy until in my twenties I underwent a long course of antibiotics and then Accutane for acne and started developing some more chronic conditions and they just kept gradually deteriorating over the next 16 or 17 years. And I was always very busy. I was a scientist and then I became a software entrepreneur and so I was always working like 60 to 70 hour weeks and grabbing whatever food was most available. You know, I would drink a lot of soda and so on and so none of that was good. And that certainly promoted the progression of my diseases. And eventually by the time I was in my 40s this was starting to get a little disabling and I decided I had to focus on my health and I started working on that nearly full time trying to figure out doctors hadn't been able to help me and so I had to start learning about health. I had a big advantage that my wife is a biologist at Harvard Medical School, a cancer researcher and vascular biologist. So I had a lot of expertise in house. And what really helped me was starting to experiment with what you eat. It really started with experimenting with Chinese medicine and then grew to experimenting with diets and I tried the Paleo diet, Artadeni's version, and that really made a big difference and made a lot of things better. And it made some things worse. But that was very encouraging to me because medicines hadn't made any real difference to me in the past. So that was the start. And as I said, some things got better, but some things got worse. But that led me into a long period of experimentation and study and research, and it took us probably about four or five years. My wife also had some chronic health problems, and so we were experimenting together, and we just spent four or five years searching through the literature, trying to understand all the ways in which diet influences. Influences health. And we ended up going through it very systematically and figuring out a lot of things that aren't really out there in other diets. This was also helped by my background in economics. So I had some tools for analyzing how nutrients interact with each other that helped me to make sense of the medical literature, because on certain ways of interpreting it, things can seem very paradoxical. A lot of doctors and nutritionists have a very hard time making sense of all the results in the literature.

I see. So let's go ahead and jump into the nuts and bolts. What is kind of the overview of the perfect health diet? If you and I were trapped on an elevator together and we're going up to the 20th floor, how are you going to explain the perfect health diet to me? In a nutshell, no pun intended.

Well, in a nutshell, it's oriented toward getting you all of the nutrition that your body can use and benefit from and avoiding, as much as possible, any toxins. So food, especially plant foods, are full of toxins. Toxins are how plants defend themselves from animals and from insects and from bacteria and fungi. But also they have a lot of nutrients. And if you're deficient in nutrients, you're not going to be in perfect health. And some nutrients become toxic if you take too much.

So.

In general, what we have tried to do is figure out for every nutrient, both macronutrients and micronutrients, what's the optimal range? We call it a plateau range, where you get all of the benefits but none of the toxicity. And also, what are other toxins that people commonly get in their foods? And how can you arrange the diet to minimize its toxicity?

I think probably one of the most unique parts of this diet is the carbohydrate, fat, and protein ratio. And in your book, you list several reasons that you think that the ratio that you recommend in the book is ideal. And the ratio that you recommend is about a 20% carbohydrate, 65% fat, 15% protein diet, obviously skewed very much towards Fat intake compared to many other diets. But what are the reasons in your book that you kind of list.

That.

You believe make this ratio ideal?

Yeah, well, I should say that's sort of the middle of our ranges and a good recommendation for the average person. I think athletes, depending on what kind of athlete they are, might want to eat a little bit more carbs and protein. But basically it gets back to what I was saying. What does your body utilize? And typically an adult human will use about 600 calories, so glucose a day and a modest amount of protein, which varies depending on some other factors. But typically for good health, we want to get on the order of 300 or so calories of protein. And so if you want to give your body the least amount of stress, then that's about what you should eat, around 600 calories of carbs and 300 calories of protein. Now, there's some reason to believe that being slightly low carb may be beneficial. And we talk about reasons for thinking that in the book. And what happens if you reduce the amount of carbs you eat is that you substitute to some macronutrients derived from protein and fat. Either protein gets converted to glucose in your liver or some fats get converted to something called ketones, and those substitute for glucose a little bit. So we tend to recommend to the average sedentary American to get around 400 calories of carbs. So that's slightly low carb, a little below what your body needs, and force your liver to manufacture, supplement glucose and ketones and keep the protein around 300 to 400 calories. And that's a pretty good diet for longevity, for avoiding bacterial and viral infections. It's not so low carb that your body has difficulty meeting its needs for glucose. So you'll be well nourished and you'll be well defended against the typical diseases that strike at mid latitudes and higher latitudes.

And how do you know that about these ratios, that they derive these type of benefits?

Well, again, like I said, our starting point is always to look at what the body needs and what it's going to utilize. And we can estimate glucose needs and protein needs pretty directly. So glucose in general is primarily used by the brain, the nerves, the immune system, and some other types of cells like the gut or red blood cells. And we know more or less how much each one consumes. And, you know, so we can, we can estimate pretty well how much, you know, need. And so then it's a question of, you know, do you want to meet those needs. Exactly. Do you want to be a little bit lower? Which can sometimes have some benefits, especially for people who aren't good at handling glucose, for instance, diabetics. Or you might want to get a little extra just to be safe. But then you'll force your body to dispose of the extra glucose, say by converting it to fat.

Okay, gotcha. So glucose isn't really the body's primary fuel that it uses for day to day activity.

No, it has some specialized uses in certain tissues that don't burn fat. Well, and it's also used in intense exercise. So typically glucose is never burned directly and it shouldn't be. Burning glucose directly in most tissues is a phenotype that's associated with cancer. It's a pathological type of process. Ordinarily, glucose should be converted to glycogen, which is a storage form that has the glucose is attached to a phosphate molecule, which can easily be donated to make ATP, which is an energy molecule. So glycogen is a much healthier way to metabolize glucose and that's what we use in intense exercise. So if you're doing intense exercise, like sprinting, resistance exercise, those kinds of things, then you'll be using some glycogen. And elite athletes can use significant amounts of it. Hundreds of calories a day. Typically, an elite athlete may use 100, 200 calories of glucose per hour of training. So that can add up depending on how much training you do and how intense it is.

When you say up to 100 calories of glucose, you aren't counting glycogen, like.

Storage carbohydrate in with that, right?

No, I am counting that. The glucose is converted to glycogen and then the glycogen is utilized for energy.

Well, how could somebody who's burning, for.

Example, if I go out on a.

Hard bike ride, I'm burning 800 to 1,000 calories an hour. How could that come out to just.

100 calories of glucose? Is all the rest of it fat.

Or how is that working?

Well, I don't think you can easily. Well, first of all, a majority of the energy is still going to come from fat, not just glucose. But also it's not that easy to burn a thousand calories in muscle during exercise in just an hour. Your whole body utilization is typically more like 200 calories per hour. And five times metabolic rate is pretty intense. So you can do that in an hour. You could get up to maybe 400 calories of glycogen. But remember, the total body Storage of glycogen is not that large. I'm forgetting the numbers now off the top of my head. They're listed in the book.

Okay.

But, you know, you can burn through them pretty quickly. So, you know, typically people in marathons may exhaust their glycogen in two hours. And, you know, so that's about, you know, that's about the total body stores of glycogen is 2 hours, hours of intense exercise.

So if you take somebody who's exercising, say, every day, let's say you take somebody who's pretty into physical activity, and they're out there for anywhere from 60 minutes to two hours on a daily basis engaged in physical activity, can they really eat up around that 60 to 65% fat intake and still experience adequate energy?

Yeah, so there's a couple of factors that come in. And again, part of this is an issue of how intense is the exercise. So the more intense it is, the higher the fraction of energy that you're getting from glycogen rather than fats. And so the more the intensity of your exercise, the more you want to eat carbs and the less you want to eat fat. So you may, well, as an athlete, want to elevate carbs. I still wouldn't have a very high carb diet. So, you know, as an athlete, you might go up to maybe, you know, probably the most I would go up to would be 800 carb calories a day and 600 protein calories a day. And for comparison, the average American eats more like 1500 carb calories a day.

So.

You know, it's. You can get sufficient carbs, but at the same time, you know, that is a fair amount of plant food. So, like, potatoes are about 300 calories per pound, you know, so that's almost three pounds of potatoes per day. Cooked white rice is about 600 calories per pound. You know, so that would be over a pound of cooked white rice, which is quite a bit. You know, typical fruits are around 200 calories per pound. So I. So that would be like four pounds of fruit. So people should know when I say that our diet is low carb, I just mean that it's low carb in the sense that I think you should slightly under meet the body's glucose needs and force the liver to manufacture just a little bit. But it's not low in plant food foods. So you should expect to eat several pounds of plant foods a day in order to be well nourished.

Got it. Now, when it comes to protein, I think that many people would be concerned that eating around 15% of daily protein intake might not give the muscles what they would need for repair or recovery. And how, how do you feel about adequate protein needs? Do you feel that 15% is enough in terms of, say, helping someone to recover from exercise or to provide the body with adequate protein to maintain muscle mass?

Yeah, well, protein is a fairly complex question because the body can make a lot of adaptations. And now it turns out that people have some innate appetite regulation which leads people generally to eat around 15% protein. And almost all people around the world eat about that amount. And in fact, protein has a much stronger impact on appetite than others. So you're in short term diet studies. People tend to get satiated as soon as they've eaten around maybe360 calories of protein a day. And if they have a low protein intake, they tend to have a high appetite. If they have a high protein intake, they tend to have a very suppressed appetite. And that's much stronger for protein than for either carbs or fat. So that's kind of one clue. And then another clue is that people's nitrogen balance. So whenever you metabolize protein, you release nitrogen atoms, and we can measure how much nitrogen is being excreted in urine and compare that. And it turns out that, that the body can adjust its metabolism over quite a wide range in order to match its protein metabolism to your protein intake. So if you look at, for instance.

The.

World Health Organization recommendations for adequate protein, they only recommend that a daily intake of around like 0.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, which is about half the USRDA. But people can adapt to that and they can preserve muscle with low protein intake. Now, at the same time, if you have high protein intake, if you have an excess of protein amino acids circulating in your blood, that does promote muscle growth. So although you can preserve muscle.

With.

A low protein intake, you're not going to be as strong as you would be if you ate more muscle. And if you want to maximize muscle, then you should eat somewhere around 600 protein calories a day, which is above what our natural appetite regulation leads us to eat. And you should also try to be, you know, moderate, moderately high in your carb intake, at least 600 calories of carbs, because eating carbs preserves protein, since if you have a deficiency of glucose, it has to be manufactured from protein. So, you know, if your goal is maximum muscle, then you do want to eat a relatively large amount of protein and a fair amount of carbs, too. But it's not. If you just want to be kind of an ordinary healthy person, it's not that necessary. You can still have what an ordinary person would consider strong muscles, eating 300 protein calories a day and eating 400 carb calories. Gotcha.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, in the book, because I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the things that people may want to think about avoiding to optimize health or longevity or possibly even physical performance. And you actually have four food kind of food groups that you say are some of the more dangerous food groups. Can you kind of briefly outline what those four most dangerous food groups would be?

Yeah, well, the most dangerous food groups are, first of all, they're all things that come from plants. So animals in general, especially mammals, have biology very similar to ours. And so we're not going to get toxins from eating them because anything that would poison us would poison them too. The danger in terms of toxins largely comes from plants. The main place it comes is in the calorie rich seeds of grains and legumes. These are plants which produce seeds that have a lot of of calories in them. So they're very attractive things to be eaten. There are also plants that are generally eaten by mammals, herbivorous mammals adapted to grasslands. And the two species co evolve. So grains, which are the seeds of grasses like wheat, corn, corn, barley.

Many.

Others, are used to having their seeds get eaten by cows and other mammals. And they've evolved a lot of toxins to sabotage mammalian digestion and get the seeds out the other end with some manure so that they can grow new plants. And these toxins are effective against humans and they not only sabotage our digestive tract, but also other parts of the body too. So that's one big set of danger, is grains.

Can I ask you a question about grains? Because this is something that I think is kind of controversial and it's about soaking grains and seeds and things like that. When you soak or when you sprout a seed or grain product, how much do you remove some of that danger?

Well, that's a great question. And you do detoxify the grain to a great extent, but not completely. And every grain is a little bit different. So typically soaking at the time of germination, when the seed has to grow a lot of shoots, it has a lot going on biologically and it doesn't want to produce a lot of toxins which would detract from all the other things it needs to build divert resources. But also some of Those toxins can also be toxic to the plant. Generally right at germination, there's a minimum level of toxicity, fermenting. If the bacteria bear the brunt of a lot of these toxins, the bacteria have digestive enzymes which help start digesting the plant and breaking down some of those toxins. And so that's. Sorry about that.

Well, that's okay.

I think I had that ring once.

Yeah. So fermenting definitely helps detoxify. And then cooking is actually very effective at detoxifying some toxins. So, for instance, rice toxins are almost completely eliminated by cooking. And that's why we call rice a safe starch. Whereas wheat toxins aren't very well eliminated by any of those methods. So sourdough bread, which may be sour because of fermentation, traditionally it was. Is less toxic than other kinds. Beer is less toxic than bread because of fermentation, but it still has a fair amount of toxins. So I personally would recommend wine over beer. I'd recommend rice over wheat, even if it was soaked and sprouted. Now, some things, like some beans, can be almost completely detoxified with soaking, sprouting and cooking. So if you really like beans and you're willing to put in the effort, then you can eat those. I personally. Everybody's busy. It takes time to soak things overnight and prepare them. One of the advantages of eating a relatively low carb diet is that you don't need quite as much in the way of plant foods. So one of my fellow bloggers, Stephane Duyune at Whole Health Source, it's a pretty similar diet to ours, but is higher carb. And he spends a lot of time soaking, sprouting, cooking different kinds of grains and beans. And, you know, I think if you're going to eat a high carb diet, then that's the kind of thing you would do because otherwise it would be very short in variety. There's not enough stock, starchy foods that are safe without those kinds of detoxification efforts that you probably get bored with them after a while. Unless you just like eating rice and potatoes and sweet potatoes and taro and things like that every day.

Right, okay. Well, in addition to cereal grains, you obviously mentioned legumes as well, but there's a couple other foods that you talk about as being dangerous foods. What are those?

Vegetable oils. Basically, omega 6 containing oils are the next biggest danger. And then fructose sugars. So in general, in terms of fructose, I would say limit yourself to maybe a pound of fruit and berries a day. But don't get any other added sources of fructose.

And why is that?

Well, well, fructose is especially bad in combination with omega 6 fats and also omega 3 fats. So it reacts with polyunsaturated fats and causes, you know, creates a lot of toxins in the body. And fructose is not. It's not a nutrient. It's sort of a nutrient because it can be converted to glycogen if you're glycogen depleted. But apart from that, it doesn't have any use. So whereas glucose enters into millions of compounds throughout the body, in our connective tissue, we have long polysaccharides made out of glucose and galactose. But there's no structural compound in the body made out of fructose. So, you know, its only possible use is to be burned for energy. And it's not burned for energy very well. It's in most people, you know, drinking sodas made with fructose. They're just converting the fructose to fat. And you'd be much better off eating the fat directly.

I'd never heard of that before. The fructose interacts deleteriously with omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids. What's the deal with that?

Well, those fatty acids are chemically fragile. They are very readily oxidized. And when they're oxidized, they're converted to various toxic compounds. And actually, you mess up a lot of the body systems because they're so fragile that the body actually makes use of that and intentionally oxidizes them in certain circumstances and uses the oxidation products as signaling pathways. And those are very important in all kinds of immune function and other diseases. So you tend to activate those, create a lot of inflammation if you oxidize them. And the combination of sugars with these fats, these fragile fats, leads to a lot of oxidative damage, chemical modifications that are problematic. Now, the fructose tends to react directly with proteins. So you get what's called fructation of proteins. And the proteins are damaged. They often may be hard to clear. So there are several pathways of damage. But the fructose is especially bad in combination with the polyunsaturated fats. And that can lead to liver damage. So, in fact, the way to create a fatty liver and give yourself metabolic syndrome is to combine either fructose or alcohol with polyunsaturated fats. So if you eat a lot of soybean oil, corn oil, something like that, and then you drink a lot of soda or Anything else with high fructose corn syrup or you drink a lot of alcohol, then those things will combine in your liver to damage it.

Well, how about people who aren't say, drinking soda and booze in large amounts, but maybe let's say somebody who's having some blueberries with breakfast and maybe a banana in the mid morning and an apple in the afternoon and maybe at some other point during the day some raisins or something like that. When we're talking about fructose consumption like that, do people need to be concerned about that being poisonous?

Well, not so much, but it also depends on the rest of your diet and what you're combining it with. So keep in mind that fruit and berries typically have only around 200 calories per pound. And about half of that is fructose. That's only 100 calories per pound. So you have to eat quite a bit to get a good dose of fructose. And then other things to consider, first of all is are you eating a low carb or a high carb diet and have you been physically active? So if you have room in your glycogen reservoirs to add more glycogen, then the fructose can be disposed there. If you don't, then the only way to dispose of fructose is by converting it to fat, which takes longer. So first of all, if you're eating a low carb diet, it's then the fructose from food is less dangerous. And then secondly, if you're eating a low omega 6 diet, because most of the polyunsaturated fats in the standard diet are from all these vegetable oils that we have around in almost every supermarket food and almost every restaurant food. So if you're not combining them with polyunsaturated fat, then they're fairly safe. Your body can dispose of them before they react with anything. So for instance, if you're going to have fruit, the safest times to have it would be at breakfast because your glycogen reservoirs are low. So you can dispose of it and you're not combining it with polyunsaturated fats. Usually if you just have a couple of bananas for breakfast or with a dessert, if you combine it with saturated fat rich foods like for instance, cream. So if you have berries with ice cream, there's very few polyunsaturated fats in cream or any kind of dairy milk product. If you have strawberries with whipped cream, that's good, you can sweeten the whipped cream with rice syrup or something. Else that's primarily glucose. And then you're not getting very much fructose, you're getting very low polyunsaturated fats. So it's very healthy, there's no toxicity from it.

Interesting, interesting. I actually really like coconut milk with bananas. It's a good breakfast. Coconut milk, bananas, a little bit of cinnamon. Anyways, I want to go on to a few kind of little things that you talk about in the book. For example, you say that you actually do eat conventional supermarket meats. And I saw you say that in the book, but wasn't quite sure. Does that mean that you don't actually, you don't eat like organic grass fed meat or choose that or what does that mean?

Well, we do eat both. I think that the grass fed is better. So you're always better off eating a healthy animal than an unhealthy one. And if the animals have been eating good diets and they've been able to exercise, you know, get out in the sun, eat their natural diets, then you know, they're going to be, they're going to be healthier. And a lot of the, you know, the mass produced agriculture, they, you know, the animals are fattened just before they're killed. So you're eating an obese animal at least, and it could be sick in other ways. You know, some are diabetic and so, you know, but it turns out when you, when you analyze these meats at a molecular level, they're not really altered that much. So and particularly for the red meats, like for beef, it's still pretty healthy. The supermarket meats now some places it makes a bigger difference. So for instance, in eggs, there's a more significant difference in healthfulness between organic eggs and regular eggs. Now as far as our advice, a lot of that is driven by cost. And you know, we want to have a diet that's accessible for everybody, even people on limited budgets. And so I don't want to, you know, recommend for perfection and everything and make the diet become too expensive for a lot of people. And for ourselves, we live in Cambridge, near Harvard Square. We don't have a lot of real estate and so we don't have a big freezer. And so it's not that easy to buy like, you know, a quarter cow or something like that. And you know, but I would say we definitely endorse grass fed meats, but you know, also we don't think people should feel like they're, you know, sabotaging their health if they eat supermarket beef.

Gotcha. I was just curious about that based on the, on the idea of the omega 6 fats kind of being, you know, unpreferable and their higher ratio in the conventional meats. You know, interestingly, and this is something a lot of people don't know about, in your book you list vegetables as a fat source.

How exactly does that work?

Well, I'm not sure I recall specifically what we said there, but vegetables are very low in calories. Some of them are extremely low. Like, spinach has only like 3 calories per pound, I think, and some of them are relatively richer in fiber than in stray carb calories. So actually, when you're eating certain of these low calorie plant foods, a large share of the calories may come in terms of fiber, which is digested by gut bacteria. And the gut bacteria cannot burn fats in the digestive tract because there's not enough oxygen for them. So they have to digest carbohydrates. They digest these carbohydrates that we can't, and then they release extra fats which we can absorb. So they tend to produce a lot of short chain fatty acids like butyrate and some others. And those can actually provide 5 to 10% of calories for us. And a lot of those short chain fats are very helpful. And people may actually get more calories from the fiber than they do from directly from the plant foods. And in fact, in the digestive process, the digestive tract consumes some glucose just to digest these things. So even if you absorb some glucose from the vegetables, the net contribution of glucose may be zero. But you may be getting. A typical ratio quoted in the literature is like, like 2.3 calories per gram from fiber, which compares to like 4 calories per gram from starch or from protein.

Okay, now, you also very, very much recommend the use of coconut oil. And at one point in the book, you say that coconut oil leads to.

A naturally slim waist.

And of course, I'm sure when people are grabbing a big tablespoon of, of fat from a coconut oil jar, that may not be the first thing you're thinking about. But how does that actually happen?

How does coconut oil lead to a naturally slim waist?

Well, about 58% of the calories in coconut oil are from shorter chain fats, which are not, which are metabolized differently from longer chain fats. There are. They're typically diverted to the liver and they're converted to ketones, which are an alternative fuel for a lot of the body. Ketones are small molecules that are Water soluble, they can diffuse throughout the body, cross cell membranes, enter mitochondria, and they can be burned everywhere. They're typically taken up, up when they're present by the brain and nerves, by the heart and by other tissues with high energy requirements. And ketosis does have a slimming effect. So actually, one of my top weight loss tips is to do intermittent fasting, maybe fast for 16 hours a day and, and do all of your eating within an eight hour window. And that 16 hour fast tends to also put you into ketosis toward the end of it. And so being in ketosis for a few hours a day can be very helpful for weight loss. And, you know, so that's an interesting observation, but people who tend to eat cultures that tend to eat a lot of coconut milk, like Southeast Asian cultures, tend to be relatively slim. And in weight loss studies, when they've compared coconut oil to other oils, people tend to lose more weight on the coconut oil.

Now, what are the, when it comes to supplements? You have a section in the book on supplements. You have some supplements that you recommend people take and supplements that you recommend people avoid. And one thing I noticed was that you recommend that people avoid calcium. And why is that?

Yeah, well, it's not so much that we recommend avoiding calcium is that we recommend taking less than what most other authorities recommend. So. Basically, I think, you know, the medical community and the government went a little calcium wild and they very often recommend, you know, particularly older women take like 1200 milligrams a day of calcium. And the RDA is, There have been recommendations to take you know, like 1,000 milligrams a day. But what people have found is that heart disease rates go up the more calcium you take. And I think that's, you know, the mechanism seems to be greater calcification of arteries. So in atherosclerosis, when your arteries get hard, that's because they get calcified. So normally just bones and teeth are calcified and soft tissue should be calcium free. But in heart disease, people end up getting calcified arteries throughout their body, but especially in their heart. And that's what often leads to heart attacks. And if you're depositing calcium into your arteries and you eat an excess of calcium through supplements, then this process can accelerate. So calcium just hasn't done well in clinical trials. And I don't think we need a huge amount in order to maintain our bones once we're adults. So we need a bit more when we're growing, when our bones are growing. If you're recovering From a broken bone, you know, but in general, if you're, if you're an adult, your bones are fully formed, you don't need a huge amount of calcium. You know, probably around 600 milligrams a day is a good amount, you know, so that it depends on what kinds of foods you're eating. If you eat green leafy vegetables and dairy foods, then you'll probably get enough calcium just from food. Also, I recommend taking a multivitamin every day. Our multivitamin has 200 milligrams of calcium, so that's like one third of your daily needs. So that gets you a long way toward it. So I personally think for most people there's no need to supplement calcium beyond a multivitamin. But, but if you're worried about might not hurt to do some nutrient analysis on your diet, and if the foods you eat don't have calcium, then you might benefit from some more. But in general, I wouldn't recommend following the advice to take very large amounts of supplemental calcium.

I thought it was interesting that you also recommended for supplementation as something to take iodine, and you recommend a high dose iodine as one of the ways to optimize health and diet. Why would that be?

All right? Well, that's a very controversial issue. And one thing I would say is that we recommend about eight supplements. You can see our supplements on our website perfecthealthdiet.com we have a recommended supplements page. And of those, I would recommend doing all of the other seven before you do iodine. And with the iodine, you should increase the dose very slowly. So start low and increase the dose, but no more than doubling it every month. That's in order to give your thyroid time to adapt to different levels of iodine. So if you, you know, the thyroid is a very sensitive organ to levels of multiple minerals, including selenium, copper and others. It's also affected during infections and some other things. And it can very easily be thrown up at the. You suddenly change the amount of it has to make a lot of adaptations to the level of iodine in your diet. And it takes typically three weeks or more, three to four weeks to adjust to a new level of iodine. And you don't want to make sudden changes. You want to let it adapt slowly and gradually. But in terms of why do we recommend it? Well, deficiency is very bad. Iodine is a very important molecule. Thyroid hormone is very important. It's important for immune function as well as for regulating energy. And it's much better if you, you know, Your thyroid can adapt to low levels of iodine, but that's not optimal. It leaves you vulnerable to toxicity from other environmental halogens which, which compete with iodine, like bromine. It impairs your immune defenses, so it puts you in a more fragile state. So if you can consistently take a moderate level of iodine that's beyond what the minimum amount your body needs, you can have much more robust health, much more robust thyroid function, better immune function, resistance to environmental toxins. So you want to be careful getting up to higher iodine doses, but it's beneficial to be there if you can do it consistently.

Now, in our personal diet, for example, my wife and I eat a lot of seaweed and we eat a lot of sardines and cold water fish. You know, in a situation like that, do you think that someone needs to.

Supplement with iodine or is that type.

Of dietary intake sufficient?

That's a good question. I still think it's beneficial. Now, again, I'm coming from the background of someone who's had some chronic infectious diseases. So, you know, my illness has turned out to be due to infections and, you know, so, and, and I believe that most of what we consider aging is actually due to the buildup of chronic infections. And I think, you know, even in terms of athleticism, a lot of people lose their athleticism due to chronic infections long before they would lose it due to natural aging. So, you know, I personally believe in optimizing immunity. And I think now seaweed can be a good source of iodine, but it also, you know, seaweed tends to collect a lot of other compounds, including toxins like bromine and heavy metals. And in general, the more iodine it collects, the more it collects those other things too. So actually, supplemental iodine in the form of potassium iodide. The other issue with seaweed is that the dose can vary quite a bit. And like I said, it's good to be consistent in your iodine intake. So I think if you supplement potassium iodide, work your way gradually, up to maybe 3 milligrams a day would be a good dose. I take 12 milligrams a day, which I think is also a good dose. That way your body has a good amount of iodine. Your thyroid is adapted to plentiful iodine, so it's not trying to absorb a lot of stuff from the blood. It's not going to absorb bromine or other problematic things. I think you'll be in good shape. I think relying on seaweed, you risk getting some toxins in with it.

Gotcha. I just thought that was especially interesting in light of the fact that there have been studies that have shown endurance athletes in particular, which comprise a large number of people listen to this show to be low in white blood cell activity. It's an interesting, interesting supplement. The book, for those of you who have been listening in and find this discussion fascinating, is Perfect Health Diet. Paul and I have really only scratched the surface in this past hour of what's in this book and I do recommend it as a very good read. It's incredibly insightful. Lots of good research studies on each chapter so you can be guaranteed that there actually is evidence to back up what the Jaminettes actually say in this book.

So I will put a link to.

The book in the show notes as well as to perfecthealthdiet.com where you can get recipes and really some very good articles from Paul as well as others over there. So Paul, I'd like to thank you for coming on the call and talking with us today.

Thank you, Ben. It's a pleasure.

All right, folks, so until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and that was Paul Jaminette from the Perfect Health Diet book signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com alright folks.

Well that's gonna wrap up today's podcast. If you have questions about the stuff that I talked about with Paul, leave them as comments on the show notes for this episode. Episode number 152, please remember to leave us a ranking and a review in itunes. It really helps the show out. Just go to itunes or search for Ben Greenfield. Leave the show a ranking or a review. And if you're able to, those donations really help. $1 donation. You can do that@bengreenfieldfitness.com and over there you can also access some of the special announcements about joining me in Jamaica, grabbing that free and eating for endurance seminar and checking out Shape 21 on Facebook. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldFitness.com wishing you a healthy week.