Joel Greene Podcast Part 1: How To Reboot The Gut, Eat Cheesecake Without Gaining Weight, Amplify Any Fasting Protocol & Maximize Fat Loss.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, there's a lot of things that will give you short term results that are very good and they come with massive long term consequences. And after about 10 or so changes, we had something that was a pure weight gain meal and it's gone to something that's very, very fat loss friendly. Just by making small incremental shifts in the way the meal will be metabolized, you have to embrace what's really true. And to get to what's really true, the answers are not in what you know, they're in what you don't.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, howdy, howdy ho. You guys have been asking me for it. You've been asking me and asking me when I'm going to release the podcast with this guy who I keep alluding to the guy who I recorded three and a half hours of Absolute Audio Gold with and his name is Joel Green. I split the podcast because it was so epic into part one and part two. Part one, you're listening to today. Part two is going to come out as the next episode after this episode drops. So don't worry, you won't have to wait too long for it. And get out your thinking caps, get out your notepads, anything you want to write stuff down with because this one is going to blow your mind. You may be hitting rewind a few times during it, but, man, you're, you're absolutely going to love this show. I guarantee. I fell in love with Joel after reading his book and I think you will too. All right, folks, this episode has been a long time coming and one that I've actually been pretty excited about because I, I feel like my guest today kind of sort of flies under the radar in the, in the usual, you know, PODC circuit. But I've had the pleasure of having dinner with him at the farm. What was that place we ate at, Joel? The Farm Shop down in Farmhouse, I think. Yeah. Farmhouse. Where was that at? It was, it wasn't Santa Monica. It's.

No, it was in kind of Beverly Hills area.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's on the tip of my tongue. The actual area that it's in. I'm sure people are, people who are familiar with la, know it well and I'll, I'll remember later on it was fan fantastic restaurant and I was, I was honestly a little bit interested in going out to dinner with you a. Because kind of like our mutual friend Ron Pena, who was also out to dinner with us and who's a, who's a previous podcast guest of mine. You're just chock full of really interesting information that not a lot of people are talking about. And so I was interested in that and I was also kind of interested to see just like what you'd have for dinner because you have a very, very interesting coach. So. So folks, if you're not familiar with Joel Green, so he has been around for, for a while back in the 70s he was already doing high intensity interval training and Olympic lifting. He started studying medium chain triglycerides back in the 80s before any of us were really into this, you know, now pretty popular ketogenic diet. And then in the 90s he was already deep into studying the keto diet and releasing articles and content about that. Same thing with inter fasting. He was, he was one of the first out in terms of actually creating content and research on intermittent fasting. And then in the 2000 he published one of the first nutrition websites with a ton of cutting edge nutrition research. And I'm going to link to all of his stuff. The shownotes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Joel Green that's, that's both an E by the way. Joel Green with AN E. So BenGreenfulFitness.com Joel Green because there's going to be a ton of links and extra goodies for you guys as we go along. Any anyways, so 2000s he he early 2000s, like 2001 I believe he had the first nutrition website where he was publishing a bunch of cutting edge research on diet and nutrition and kind of outside the box thinking regarding that. And then in the, in 2009 he really got into gut bacteria and his, his take on gut bacteria is just fascinating. We're going to get to dive into that today because I think it's intriguing. In 2010 he began activating the amp K way which we all really only started talking about if you pay attention in like 2017. And Joel was on this early in 2013. He had by that time the world's largest body of anecdotal outcomes for body composition, targeting and fat loss, specifically via utilizing alterations in your gut bacteria. And now he is in incredible shape on one workout a week, eating whatever, whenever. No drugs, no sarms, no pro hormones, no ergogenic aids. He is an old school biohacker that I'm incredibly happy to be able to bring to you. So he has just written a book that I think is fantastic. This book has so many pages folded over and so many little rabbit holes we're going to dive into today. And it's called the Immunity Code. The Immunity Code, the New Paradigm for Real Health and Radical Anti Aging. It's a beast of a book. It's fantastically written and just a real page turner for me being a nerd in nutrition and fitness and diet research and the type of things that Joel talks about. And so you guys get the pleasure of hearing Joel's brilliance on today's show. So, Joel, welcome to the podcast, man.

Oh, well, after that super kind intro, I think I can retire now. I'm good. I think that caps the whole thing off. I'm ready to go.

Well, by the way, your bio on your website says you do work out once a week and eat whatever, whenever. And I've seen you and been with you and you're in remarkable shape and well put together. You're not an unhealthy guy. So I'm just curious because that's going to perk a lot of people's ears up before we even delve into your background and everything for you, what's that actually look like, you know, in terms of, you know, like this morning if you're going to work out before we do this monster of a podcast and you know, have breakfast if you do that. What's like a typical morning look like for you going into a show like this?

Well, let's assume that this just happened to fall on the, you know, the day where I really, you know, make it a point to actually do what most of us would consider a workout. Preceding this day would have been a lot of what I would call fasting amplification, which would be taking all the signal pathways and all of the, you know, mechanistic actuators that make fasting work and just really supercharging those without actually having to fast, which we'll get into in a little bit. And then coming into this morning, be kind of a checklist of things in terms of the pre workout stuff. Mainly it's just making sure that all of the signal pathways for fasting are just getting supercharged, which we'll talk about probably later in the show. And it's the idea that you can, you can get results in terms of things like muscle gain and things like that by amplifying the opposing pathways. So if you want muscle gain, you can amplify starvation pathways because the body is set up to keep you alive, it's set up to defend against starvation and Anything that taps into survival is where all of the genetic bang for the buck is. So just really trying to tap into those pathways with things like timing of the workout, timing of the time I get up. So right around the genetic rush hour between 4 to 6am and in that period of time taking things like, nothing too esoteric but things like berberine, apigenin, you know, things along that line rotten. And then coming into a workout, mainly the main two things is to make sure that I get in some deadlifts and some sprints. And with that it's really just replicating starvation at the optimal time of day so that all the signal pathways of longevity and anti aging, the AMPK pathway are firing full strength and just really just mimicking what's happened for tens of thousands of years and just trying to take modern technology and tweak all that so that the signal strength is much, much, much stronger and so that I'm getting a bang for the buck return on the time that I invest and then anything else in the workout. So me typically I'll definitely get in one bodybuilding like workout a week. And that's, and that's my joy. In fact, I just went on a mission this past Saturday. I hadn't worked out in a gym like in two and a half months and I was dying and I just literally got in my car and started going down streets looking for gyms that, you know, had the windows all blacked out in the front and going aha. Pulling around the back and looking for an open door. And I found one and then I finagled my way in, paid the guy to let me use the gym privately for the next foreseeable future and got back into a gym that's amazing, just completely stoked.

So for you, if you're going to work out once a week with this so called bodybuilding style workout, what would that workout look like for you?

Well, again, the two main things that have to be in it are. Well, the bodybuilding thing that has to be in it is deadlifts and then the other thing is sprints. And I talk about this thing in my book called a young body and I don't know if I did a good job, but I tried to make the point of making a differentiator between a young body and what we think of as a fitness body. And in reality they're actually very, very different. And there's a test, the test for the young body is with no warm up, just go into a complete sprint and don't get injured. And that is something that all teenagers can do, all kids do it. And somewhere between 20 to 40, you can't do it without getting severely injured. And so keeping the body sort of in an athletic range of youthfulness via sprinting is at the top of the list because there's only one and only one exercise in all of the inventory of exercises that survival depends on. And that's the ability to go from zero to flat out immediately. And all mammals share that characteristic. So survival points for sprinting, reward points for the body for keeping the body young, are higher for that exercise, I would contend, than any other exercise. And you're just replicating chasing after game, and then the next step is just picking up game and carrying it back to camp, which involves deadlifts. So you've got to do those two things. And there's a whole bunch of good research on signal pathway activation and growth hormone and all that stuff from deadlifts and sprints together. So those two have to be in the picture and then everything else is just for looks.

That's interesting. That reminds me, and I actually haven't interviewed this guy in the podcast, but he runs this company called Ancestral Supplements, Brian Johnson, and he and his wife. This is a little much for me and my wife's like, you're never going to get me to do that. But they do, from what I understand, having read an article that he wrote about his protocol is once a month they do a five day water fast and they actually proceed that fast with a super hardcore workout they call barbarian and then maintain that fasted state after having completely exhausted glycogen stores and then kind of sandwich the fast and do a, do another hard workout on the other end of it to kind of simulate what our ancestors might have experienced going through times of stress to trigger this autophagy followed by anabolism. And it sounds like your approach is a little bit similar. And you get in the book into this concept of young muscle versus old muscle. And we're definitely going to talk about that when we get to the section of this show where I want to talk about aging. We'll return to that. So any of you who are scratching your head a little bit about this whole concept of young muscle versus old muscle that Joel briefly alluded to. We'll get back to that, don't worry. But before we do, Joel, I'm curious about your background. When did you actually begin this process of experimenting on yourself as a sort of early biohacker? And what was your original motivation? What's your history in this Whole field.

So about a billion years ago when I was a kid, a lot of people don't remember this, but there were only three channels. That was it. I would get up in the morning waiting for Captain Kangaroo and the Banana Splits and before that was Jack Lane. And so I had on my little Tigger Onesie and he had it on Onesie and next thing you know I'm just doing everything he's doing and I was just kind of hooked right from the get go. And I would just get up every morning at 5:36am and do my thing with Jack and you know, the organ music and the dog and all that, it was cool. So it just became part of what I did. And I started making up routines for my family like around seven, like exercise routines and trying to be the personal trainer of the house and nobody really paid attention to me. So that led into. I just happened to be sort of at the consumer inception point of what was first the running craze in the 70s where if you go back far enough, America was just basically a bunch of fat, lazy, like Ozzie and Harriet watching kind of like potato chip grabbing people. We had no idea what exercise was. And first came really like the Muscle beach movies in the 60s and people thought bodybuilding bodybuilders were disgusting and they just thought they were gross looking. So along comes Frank Shorter who takes a Silver in the 72 Marathon in the Olympics and next thing you know everybody in America is running. So I just kind of got into running right around third, fourth grade because I saw this segment on a show of kids running and I wanted to run and then I wanted to be fast. So I, in fifth grade I just started going to the blacktop every day and just running interval sprints and I didn't know what they were. I, I just wanted to get faster so I'd run these 50 yard intervals and this kind of led into. I just happened to be in San Jose. And a lot of people don't know this, but like San Jose, California, it's got an interesting history of like, of like Italians and building contractors and kind of kind of like rough and tough, you know, people that are really into fighting and sports. And I just happened to be right around the Mecca of track and field. So there were all these Olympic level track and field athletes like Bruce Jenner or Caitlyn Jenner and Mac Wilkins and Ben Plunkett and Millard Hampton and all these, all these Olympic level athletes. A lot of them trained at my high school. So I was just around that and I really got into like Olympic lifting and interval training and track and field. And the thing that really stuck out in my mind though was in the late 80s I was at UCI and there was kind of a big push of fitness into the mainstream throughout the late 80s. And I was just like you or just like a lot of listeners. I was just that overly curious information starved consumer who would do anything that a quote unquote like authority would tell him to do. So actually Ron Penn and I have had a laugh about this. There was this article that came out about doing gaining an inch on your arms in one day and all you had to do was work out 12 hours straight. So I was like 22 years old and I, you know, I went and did it and just got nothing but.

Sore arms and Wait, did you say 12 hours?

12, yeah, the workout was 12 hours straight of curls. So I just showed up at the gym with a bunch of bananas and started curling and my arms were like wrecked for. In fact, I don't think they ever.

I assume the theory here is massive eccentric based muscle tissue damage followed by long recovery to spark that type growth.

I think the theory was sell magazines, I think that was the theory. But one really interesting thing stood out from that whole era to me and it, and I never, I could never shake it. And it was this company called Champion Nutrition came out with a product called metabol 2. And it had on the label, it had the fatless fat mcts. And what a lot of people don't realize is that in this era fat is good, but in that era fat was vilified and everything you could think of had zero fat on the label. Like no fat, no fat, no fat. And that made it good. And so this was this company saying that these fats were good and not only that, that you can't store them as fat. And I was, I was floored by that idea. I just, I couldn't shake it. And I began doing everything I could to learn about, you know, how this worked, how did these. And it was very difficult to get information in those days. Like, you know, I was really just stuck in libraries and places like that. But I started studying as much as I find about these fatless fats mcts. And then really right about that time, a couple of big things happened. Number one, the keto diet took hold in. Vince McMahon started this bodybuilding federation and he put all these bodybuilders on a keto diet. And it was kind of a curiosity at the time in the gym everybody doubted, everybody was like, you're just all going to get fat. And he took everybody off steroids and everybody except Gary Strydum showed up not in their best shape. But I became fascinated with this whole fat thing because again it was the era of fat is bad and fat makes you fat. I was looking at keto diets and kind of tinkering and then Metrex came out. I read this article by Jeff Everson that said he was eating one meal a day and just doing metrics and it was revolutionary because it had glutamine in it and you know, and lactoferrin and all these cool things nobody knew about. And I was like probably number 98 out of 100 in line to buy the two cans of the stuff. And I got completely peeled, I mean like sub 5% body fat for like a number of years. And then what happened to me and this is really the thing that started everything for me. And again, keep in mind, I'm just a dumb consumer here. I'm just literally just, you know, going, okay, I'll do it, I'll try it. And taking everything and trying everything and I'm getting results. That's the scary part. And that really formed something in my brain that today, and I write about it in the book, that there's a lot of things that will give you short term results that are very good and they come with massive long term consequences. And that happened to me. So I was healed for several years and then I didn't know about leptin, the pyy and all the gut hormones hadn't been discovered and but what happened to me was after about four years I was just eating uncontrollably and I couldn't and I didn't know what I had done. And I had some idea it had to do with just essentially I was doing time restricted feeding. I was eating one meal a day in the evening and doing a couple Metrex things during the day. And that was what I did for years. And what happened was what I know now is that long term I had so pulled back the rubber band on the gut hormones and on leptin that I had activated these survival mechanisms that long term were going to ensure that I was going to survive. And so it took me years to fix this problem, like years of compulsive overeating. And when you're in the middle of it, it's very difficult to understand because all you're seeing is the benefits. All you're seeing is the fact that you're ripped and you're peeled and everybody's asking you what you're doing and wants to know how you got there. And what they're not seeing is the five years later sort of cost of the bill coming due on the credit card of all of the. I've talked about this with Ron, I call it time mapping. And it's really just taking anything and mapping it out over time and looking at the curve and it's interesting, the curve for just about everything is very similar. You'll see an upward spike in the beginning phase of anything, which is the benefit phase. And then the longer you go, it begins to look like a sine wave, which is sort of the credit card build due phase, the consequence phase. And so coming into the early 2000s, right about 2000, 2001, Pyy was discovered. And you know, and I was me, my interest was 100% purely just understanding what I'd done. And so I was just experimenting with everything I could find. I was experimenting with like fresh, whole, clean, organic. I'll just do that. And then it was just macros, just count my macros and make sure my. And then zone diet macro ratios. And I was just trying everything I could and I kept getting the same result. I would get super ripped. And then later on I would get sort of this out of control, kind of like bounce back from it. And all of those things for me really culminated in 2006, where I wound up running this tech company. And we had a nice run for a few years and revenue shot through the roof and you know, kind of your typical tech company boom thing. But I was working, I came into that job like just ripped. I was very low body fat, great shape, and then I was working these 15 hour days, tons of stress, tons of problems. And by the end of that I was 260 pounds and fat. And I just heard that story before. Yeah. And for me the, that was for me the end of the road for the classical fitness paradigm. So I'd given that paradigm for 30 years and I'd been just a consumer, just first in line, just always trying to educate myself. Just pretty much like everybody listening to this program just wanting to educate myself. And I reached the end of that road when everything that I knew to do just it required time I didn't have. And that's what happened. And I got fat. I didn't have an answer. And it really pissed me off, really bugged me because this was my passion in life and I couldn't make it work under real life circumstances. And that really bugged me. So Coming out of that was when all the whole gut biome thing started. And I did this article on Dr. Jeffrey Gordon's research in 2006, which was the first big gut biome article. And basically I just kind of from that piece together what's in the book that I call the Daisy Cutter. And the results were mind boggling for me.

Like I. Daisy Cutter. We'll get to that. By the way, folks. For those of you listening in, don't worry.

Yeah, we'll get to the Daisy Cutter. But for me, the results were incredible. I went from 229 to 212, and at the end of that I went to Fitness Wave down in Irvine. I immersed myself in water, got my body fat measured. I was 6.7.

And that transformation, by the way, was all inspired by the link that you found between the fact that the obese people in some of these research studies you were looking into had microflora or bacteria that was allowing them to extract more calories from food. And you figured out how to actually affect your gut flora so that your body essentially extracted fewer calories from food.

Yeah, that was basically it. And it was very surprising in a lot of respects. Like number one, I did not have the energy to work out. So I didn't work out once in seven days and my poop turned green and smelled like menthol. And it was very persistent. Like it was kind of a nice thing. It wasn't a room clearing thing. It was more like I went to the bathroom and everybody's like, oh, cool, big deal. But that was a game changer for me to drop that much fat that fast, get it measured, get the empirical data behind it, and do it with no exercise. And I was like, okay, wow, this is cool. So that really began what I would call the quote unquote, the biohacking phase. Like really seriously looking into. And my motivation was one thing, and I just, I really wanted to find out under real world ecosystems, real world circumstances, what would survive and persist and what would work. And it led me down this road that was really completely different from the fitness ecosystem. Just a completely different road in terms of looking at. If I had no time, I don't mean five minutes, I mean no time, what would I do? How would I do this? I liken it to a kung fu movie where at the end of the kung fu movie, it isn't just that they have a fight, it's that they're up on stilts and there's knives going back and forth horizontally and there's flames Coming up from the bottom and you got to fight with all that going on, you know, and replicating real life circumstances kind of became this thing. I was fascinated by the real life ecosystem. It mainly just came out of my own experience where, like, I. I couldn't make my stuff work. And that really, really changed me. And that became my thing for years. So.

Wow. And. And, you know, I know that, that since then you have been steeped in this stuff and getting tons of results from people. I mean, like, there was the article, I think I saw the article you published in Muscle and Fitness in 2015, where you targeted the bacteria L. Rooteri, which I still make yogurt with to this day, for stimulating testosterone. And again, targeting gut bacteria for a lot of these changes is one thing that it seems that you really specialize in. And that's actually where I would like to dive in today, when we're really going to get boots in the streets and start giving people practical examples and we get to educate people. One of the very first tips, one of the very first things that you get into in the book, because the way that you write a book, the book is almost like an adventure. Like every chapter builds on the next in terms of, okay, this week introduce this, and then this. Next week, all you introduce is this. And you just go on and on through the book. So by the time you've gotten to the end of the book, you have all these new habits. But it starts very simple, you know, very early in the book, all you're telling people to do specifically related to the bacteria Akkermansia, and to restore the gut lining is to eat apple skins. So why apple skins?

So. And by the way, if I may, before I dive into this, allow me to. You've been very kind about my book. Allow me to return the favor. You were kind enough to send me your book. And having just finished a book, I don't know how you. I don't know how you did that. I mean, like, I got to 370 and I was just done. I couldn't do any more page. I was, I was like, over it. I'm reading this monster. You sent me this.

I'll tell you. And it's the same way that I'm writing a book right now. I write my books in chunks. So what I do is I'll think of an idea for a book, and then I give myself typically 2 to 3 years to write that book. This is what I did with Beyond Training. This is what I do with my current book, which is more about spirituality. And when I sit down to write, I treat each chapter as like a miniature article, meaning I do all the research, all the skeleton, the outlining, everything of that one chapter, that one article in the book. So for me, starting off and really getting my writing chops is almost like a blogger. That's a really good way for me to wrap my head around a book is I write it as almost like a series of blog posts and I edit as I go. And so just it's my same approach to working out. Unlike you, I, I work out every day in small, frequent doses rather than doing, you know, just like one big soul crushing workout a week. And that's the same way I write. Like I write tiny little doses every day, you know, sometimes 300 to 500 words. Typically if I'm, if I'm in a book writing phase for a giant book, my goal is, is to get a chapter done every two to four weeks or so. And then of course, you know, there's a ton of backend editing that happens. But for me it's, it's tiny bit bits of consistency day after day after day. Because otherwise, I mean, it's like anything in life. If you think about the end goal, the end project, whatever, a 600 page book, it's daunting. But if you take it tiny bit by tiny bit, chapter by chapter, and even break those chapters down into tinier sections, I mean that's just, that's how I've always written.

Man, that's amazing that you are already on to your next one. That blows my mind. I finished this one and I was like, ah, never again.

Yeah, well, it's actually going to be my second book since writing Boundless. And then we'll get back to Apple skins because we're rabbit holing a little bit. But I wrote during this quarantine the past 70 days I wrote, it's about a 300 page cookbook, massive recipe database on fermentation, soaking, sprouting, all my crazy kind of imposter syndrome esque ideas that have popped into my head regarding cooking and food prep. And just literally it's off at the publisher now. And then the one that I'm working on now is all parenting, spirituality, the spiritual disciplines, you know, meditation, gratitude, fasting. And so that book will be more like a two year project. But yeah, I mean that's what I love to do those. Right. So let's get back to Apple scans.

Okay. Apple scans, yeah. Yeah. So this gets to a much bigger question than one of the things I talk A lot about in the book is, is that we're in this age and this paradigm that we don't know that we're in, which is I liken it to baby talk. I liken it to knowing a word but not really putting sentences together. And I make this case in the book, however. Well, I might make it that it's just a way of seeing things. And there's a much bigger, much better way of seeing things, which is really asking, you know, the question what, when and how? And looking at the structure function of the thing that we're trying to do. So if we started with the gut and we asked the question, how can we build the perfect gut? You know, how can we build a perfect gut? We would come to a structure function question. We would come back to, well, how did the gut get built? That's what we'd come back to. And if we ask that question and we come back to how did the gut get built? Two things would pop out. Number one would be the need for substrate, and number two would be immunity. So the gut, the two requirements from scratch of our immunity and substrate. And if we ask that question, then right away a couple of things would just pop right to the surface. A couple of tool sets. One of them would be apple skins. And it's actually pretty interesting for a number of reasons. So, you know, kind of, kind of high level apple skins have a fiber called pectin. And pectin just by itself is sort of interesting. And it does some cool things. It's been shown to lower cholesterol when you're on a high fat diet. It's great for high fat diets. If you're on a high fat diet, pectin lowers cholesterol. It can increase certain enzymes in the lower part of the small intestine which help close the gut junctions up. And it can kind of redirect inflammatory factors that drive colitis and drive inflammatory markers like Interleukin6, things like that. So that's all good. But where pectin and apple skins get really interesting is there is a combination of things going on. One is there's a very, very unique kind of fiber or, excuse me, kind of phenol that is present in apple pectin. And that type of pectin holds what's called a polymerized procyanidin and a polymerized procyanidin. It's a flavanol, a phenol. But what makes it really interesting, very unique, is when you combine it with the pectin, that's in apple skins is it doesn't absorb. So when you look at it, it's gigantic. It's over 30,000 Daltons in size, and most phenols are about 100 Daltons. So they readily absorb, but polymerized, highly polymerized procyanidins, what happens is when they're combined with apple pectin is when they get to the cecum in the gut, they don't absorb. And so what happens is they cause the pectin to ferment. And by fermenting with the polymerized procyanidins, they produce eight times more Akkermansia than any other known food.

Wow.

So they're very, very, very useful in that sense. They also do some other things. They seem to target LPS directly, lipopolysaccharide directly. And at the same time, they seem to work on the gut junction proteins, specifically claudin 1.

You mean they act on lipopolysaccharides, which would normally be almost like a form of bacterial toxicity to downregulate formation of lipopolysaccharides?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They seem to work on a couple of levels. So one is they close up the gut junctions just by themselves. And then the other thing is they seem to also prevent lipopolysaccharide from doing its thing. So, you know, that on its own, makes this great case for, like, this giant. What, like. Oh, well, apple skins. Just take apple skins. But it gets quite a bit more complex than that when you come back to the basic question of, well, how do we build the perfect gut? How do we do that? So, again, we would have to come back to substrate. So apple skins are a great substrate for the gut. They're great to feed the raw materials. And then if we look at one other thing, which is human milk oligosaccharides, you kind of get. You can make a very good case that this is the perfect pairing for a number of reasons.

Human milk oligosaccharides, what you call HMOs in the book.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. So the reason those are included. So in the book, I start you off with one basic step, which is, hey, just start doing some apple skins. Okay? Super easy. And all that came out of my experiences of needing to have things that take no time, that are massively impactful. So the next thing would be if we ask about immunity in the gut, and we ask, you know, how does immunity. You've heard that, you know, immunity begins in the gut. The real question is, how did immunity begin in the Gut. When you were a baby, how did it begin? Because that's where you find the answers. And so if we go back to that question, what we find is that in mother's milk there's these specialized carbohydrates called human milk oligosaccharides. One third of mother's milk is just specifically these types of carbohydrates.

Okay, so in the milk itself, not necessarily the colostrum. Specifically.

Specifically, yeah.

And what you can do is actually get human milk oligosaccharides. And I actually know a lot of functional medicine docs are using this with their patients now, like my friends, Dr. Matthew Cook, Dr. Michael Ruscio is another. And you can isolate these HMOs in powdered form from. I'm assuming in most cases they're getting them from a cow's milk source, not a human milk source source. But you're combining these with the Akkermansia inducing benefits of the apple skins.

Yeah. So when you just look at the HMOs by themselves, they're very interesting. First of all, there's over 200 of them. It's not like there's just one. There's a bunch, but there's really just two that we've been able to isolate so far. And the Main 1 is 2 fucosal lactose. But in the coming years, there's going to be dozens of these things coming out. But right now we just have kind of really the one that we can play with. But. But just the one is pretty compelling when you look at what it does. There's a couple things. So these carbohydrates are basically glycans. Glycans are long chain sugars that are bound to proteins. And glycans are endemic to immunity. Wherever you look for immunity, you're going to find glycans at work because they facilitate binding in one way or another. And so what you're going to find with HMOs is that they are endemic to formation of the immune system in the infant gut because they act as decoys. What they do is they are able to bind both pathogens like bacteria like E. Coli or H. Pylori, and viruses. So like human Nova virus, they can bind. And the way they do that is for these pathogens to gain a toehold in the gut. There are very specific types of antigens in the blood. They're called histoblood group antigens, HBGAs. And structurally speaking, the HMOs are very similar to the HBGAs. So these pathogens in the Infant gut, they bind to, instead of binding to the antigens, they bind to HMOs. And so HMOs have a very, very strong presence in forming immunity in the gut. And they also bind to different classes of lectins. In fact, there's a class called selectins that are basically involved in helping human immune cells bind to the enterocyte surface, the colonocyte surface, and the HMOs actually facilitate just the right amount of selectin binding. You can't have too much, you can't have too little. If you have too much, you'll get a thing called basically rolling, where these immune cells just kind of roll down the immune tract and they don't bind. And so. And this gets into, like, a whole other thing. But far from lectins being bad, they're actually quite functional in a lot of ways. It just depends on the bacteria.

Lectins being what somebody like, you know, Dr. Stephen Gundry has, has really done a good job vilifying with, with books like the Plant Paradox. You're saying lectins actually serve a function in the human gut?

Oh, for sure, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. Lectins. Lectins are very selective with different types of bacteria and different types of carbohydrates. So in the presence of certain types of bacteria, like Bifidobacteria, there are very specific lectins that work to facilitate their entry into the gut. And it's a very positive thing. So again, that just gets back to the, you know, the baby talk of, you know, good or bad. Like, lectins are bad. No, they're neither good nor bad. They can be both. But HMOs. Getting back to that. Just for a sec. They also drive achiermansia production as well. So if we were to come back to. Okay, how do we build the perfect gut? We need to have immunity, we need to have substrate. And if we were to inventory a list of, well, what can we bring to the table that is going to have the biggest bang for the buck with the least effort at the top of the list, I would argue HMOs and apple peels are kind of right there, number one. And number two, because they hit both immunity substrate, and they both have unique functional properties that drive the production of the most important bacteria we need in the gut. Gut.

Okay, so. So the HMOs are helping to steer the gut towards immunity and, and steering the macrophages towards restoration of the gut lining, especially when combined with the, with. With eating apple skins. And then kind of like the Third component to my understanding, like, like, I guess the third part of this I'm blanking on, on the weapon, the trident. The third part of this trident would be, would be red phenols. And that's kind of like the last thing that folks add in when they're doing the apple skins and the HMO powder is red phenols. Why do you throw those into the mix?

Well, if you think about it, the red phenols are already present in the apple peels. Like, you know, you've got red phenols in the apple peels, but the phenols themselves come in varying sizes. And so the apple peels have the gigantic non absorbing polymerized procyanidins. But as you look at other classes of phenols and look at their size in terms of daltons and function and what they feed, you get a great inventory of substrate that ultimately feeds both bifidobacteria and achromansia. And I make this case in the book. Those are the two bacteria that you really need to focus on. Bifidobacteria and eckermansia.

Yeah. I mean, you even argue that throwing all probiotics aside, and we'll get into probiotics and why you may not be such a huge fan of those momentarily, but pretty much if you were gonna reboot your gut specifically to steer yourself towards fat loss, pretty much the two that you want to focus on are Akkermansia and bifidobacteria.

Yeah, 100%. And there's some fantastic reasons why that's so. Now, again, again with everything in the book, I devoted an entire chapter to the notion of balance. That really the key truth of physiology in general is homeostasis and balance. Things need to be balanced so that really anything can be bad, anything can be good. Okay. And it's really more about understanding the order of operations so that you get the right amount of the right thing at the right time in the right way. So coming back to the phytobacteria and achromansia, generally speaking, what we find is that they're common to people who are lean. And there's very good reasons why that's true. Number one, achromansia contracts the surface area of the gut. So it seems to be common to all lean people. And there's good reasons for that. Achromancy is the bacteria that really maintains most responsible for maintaining the mucin layer of the gut surface. And so it acts as a calorie controller or calorie dial. And it also lends itself out to a really fascinating discussion, which is probably tiring, but interesting nonetheless, of do all calories matter? And when you pull in akromansian, you realize that there's always that person, you know, who just eats whatever and they stay lean. Well, the reason they stay lean is because they're lean in the first place, because they have Akkermansia, because they're not absorbing calories in the same way that other people are. And you could, I think would be a really interesting experiment would be to kill off all the achromancy and a really lean person that can eat anything and watch them eat anything and watch them get fat. So to the notion that all calories matter, we got to factor in the gut surface area and the dials that control that. And then bifidobacteria is kind of hand in hand with that. So bifidobacteria activates a number of human genes that are involved in keeping you lean. One of the most important, and I wrote about this about 10 years ago, is fasting induced adipose factor. And fasting induced adipose factor is potentiated by bifidobacteria. And essentially what it does is it impairs or rather stimulates lipoprotein lipase. So what you find is that there is a protein mediator that's common to lean people that helps them stay lean by stimulating lipolysis, and it is potentiated by bifidobacteria. And so these two bacteria together seem to be common to lean people, and not just that, seem to be common to the longest lived, healthiest people in the world. And again, structure, function wise, it makes sense. You're not going to live long or be lean without the gut mucus layer intact. And then in terms of living long, we'll get into this later. Energy production in the cell directly correlates to long life. So cells have a energy gauge within them. And when energy production within the cell falls below a certain level, it's a trigger to kill the cell. And when that happens across the entire body, you die. So keeping the body's ability at a cellular level to produce energy intact is directly correlated to living a long time. Energy production and life go together. And bifidobacteria is intimately associated with energy production on a number of levels. It drives B vitamin synthesis, all kinds of things. And it's easy to prove just in sort of an anecdotal sense. If you look at little kids, they're loaded with bifida bacteria. They have crazy energy. And as you become an adult, Your bifidobacteria dies off and your energy dies off with it. And the funny thing with that is that if you do some of the like. For example, I've put people on the Daisy Cutter protocol where they just drive bifidobacteria through the roof and their energy goes through the roof.

Yeah.

Now that that's correlated to being lean also, there's a lot of things that work there. But what we probably can say and be on safe ground to say is that higher populations of bifidobacteria seem to correlate to long life, seem to correlate to energy production, and seem to correlate to being lean.

Now, bifidobacteria will also stimulate the production of butyrate, to my understanding, which kind of begs the question, why wouldn't you also throw something like butyrate or butyric acid into the mix, which I know a lot of people are doing for their gut, you know, especially people who are on like a low carb or a ketogenic diet.

Well, it doesn't so much do it directly, it does it indirectly through cross feeding reactions. So bifidobacteria makes metabolites, poops out metabolites, and then other bacteria pick those metabolites up and feed on those. So it's kind of like a top predator in a sense, or a reverse top predator. It makes the things that the other fish need to feed on and then those fish poop out butyrate. So it indirectly drives that and, and by virtue of indirectly driving butyrate production, it indirectly drives akromanciate production. So the two kind of work in a cycle. But with respect to the question of, well, why wouldn't you just supplement directly with butyrate, there's some very interesting reasons to put the brakes on before you do that. One reason has to do with the type of transporter for butyrate needed in the oral cavity versus being made endogenously in the gut and in the. So when you're taking butyrate through the oral cavity, there are very specific transporters utilized that are activated by the presence of butyrate in the mouth. That there's some research that suggests that that combination of things may be oncogenic. So it may be cancer promoting to do that. The next reason has to do with dosing and it just has to do with how do you know that you're getting the accurate dose. So there's very good research that suggests that if you get too much butyrate that cancer cells can develop A resistance to it, particularly in the colon. So that's a little scary.

So your argument then would be to equip the bacteria to produce their own butyrate, the butyrate being beneficial because that will steer the macrophages in the gut lining towards a more anti, anti inflammatory profile. But rather than supplementing with butyrate, what you're proposing then is to generate the production of Akkermansia through the consumption of something like these apple skins to feed the bifidobacteria or to I guess allow for the propagation of more bifidobacteria along with the gut healing with the use of these human milk oligosaccharide powders. And then then finally the red phenol powder would be the actual, the prebiotic food source for the bifidobacteria. So those three in combination, you're essentially amplifying bifidobacteria and akkermansia, which is going to produce butyrate. And so you've got those three things, bifidobacteria, akkermansia and butyrate, all working their magic in the gut, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good way to say it. Yeah. And, and the key is food. So the key is just using food because food does things that are very difficult to do using non food sources. Food does the right thing in the right place in the gut. Food has structural properties not present in supplements. It's bulky, it coats the inside of the digestive tract in a radius of 360 degrees versus supplements can't do that. And food gives the right, the right dosing in the right compartment. And so that's a very, those are critical things that are very difficult to get around. And the more that we learn about going back to time mapping, there's that big benefit at the front of something. And then long term, the negative, the longer that we are present with protocols that are, well, just take these probiotics or just take this. The more we are seeing that time mapping play out, the more we're seeing, oh gosh, it was amazing in the area going, but now I'm having all these problems. And one way to avoid that is.

With food and obviously red phenol powder in someone who might be watching their consumption of total carbohydrates or fructose intake. Yeah, you can get that in fruits like raspberries and grapefruit and apples, etc. But I know that's readily available as like, like an organic powdered mix. There are, there are tons of companies where you can get organic red phenol powder. If, if you were going to take a supplementation approach rather than just like eating tons and tons of berries along with your apple skin, are, are you opposed to that? Would you, would you classify organic red phenol powder as kind of falling into the category of something like food?

It's probably most a prebiotic at best. And in fact we can make a, an exacting case that apple peels and HMOs and red phenol powder are prebiotics. But that again gets back to are prebiotics good, are they bad? And that's just sort of like a baby talk question. What we've been doing here this whole time is really mapping out an order of operations. So it's very much like the engine on a car. Like if you want to restore the engine to perfect function, well, you don't go, are pistons good? I don't know. Are fuel injectors good? Yeah, fuel injectors are good. Are they? Well, no, it's like, okay, step one, you got to replace the fuel injectors. Step two, you got to clear all the carbon scoring from, you know, there's, there's an order of operations and in that order of operations, these things are fantastic. Outside that order of operations, well then you get varying results. And so that's, that's the, I guess the way to understand like, like, yes, these are prebiotics and in conjunction with food they can be very powerful. But a, there's a specificity to what they are and when you use them and how you use them.

Okay, got it. And then the two other follow up questions related to that concept of food versus supplements. One probably relatively small question, but I'm curious about this. For human milk oligosaccharides, I would imagine you're not actually drinking human breast milk. Do you have a source you like for human milk oligosaccharides?

Yeah, great question. I get asked this one a lot. And by the way, in my book I put in an early draft, which I think is still in the book. I put. Now you can go to our website and get it. And then as the book got published I decided that in the first year I just, I really wanted to stay away from supplements. I just really wanted the book to stand on it. On anyone?

Anybody, Right? So sometimes it can come across as like Foxgard in the henna house type of stuff. I run into that like in my book when I talk about proteolytic enzymes. I'm super self conscious, not Just, I own a company that sells proteolytic enzymes. And so it's difficult to maintain some amount of ethics in your journalism when you also have the supplements that, that are available to people. And so I, I respect that. But regarding human milk oligosaccharides, you. Do you guys, you guys actually have those at your veep nutrition company?

Not right now, no. Probably sometime at. Probably a year from now. I just want the book to get out and kind of do its thing without anybody, you know, pointing fingers and going, oh, you know, that kind of thing. So the simplest and easiest source is just to use babyformula and baby formula with HMO on the label. It has some really great pros. It has some cons. The pros are that you can be sure that the legit thing is in there because these companies, these gigantic companies.

Like Gerber Baby Food sells hmo, right?

Yeah. They have enormous buying power. So they are able to get HMOs at price points, bulk, that are very difficult for supplement companies to touch. So that's a pro. And I've given them to people. In fact, Mark Bell was kind of a shining example of the power of these things. He went from lactose issues to none in 30 days and has never had them since just by using these things. So they work. The drawback is if I live long enough to get to this, I will. Which is nutrition for both. Both babies and old people. It's. It's all the other junk that they stick in there, you know, just horrible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I found one company called Pure HMO that does a pretty decent pure human milk oligosaccharide. That was one that I was able to find. There's a few other brands on, on Amazon and there's one that, that Matt Cook sent to me. I, I think that one's only available through physicians. I don't have it on me, the, the brand. But you're right, it's not difficult to hunt down HMOs even if you're just like eating some of these baby food formulas that have it added in. Obviously, check the label if you're going with something like Gerber to make sure that you're Getting good Pure HMOs without a bunch of added fillers and ingredients. But, yeah, they can be found and related to this idea of food. Also probiotics. So you're not really a fan of taking probiotics and say, an encapsulated form versus the use of real foods, such as fermented foods or these prebiotic fibers. Why is that?

Well, let me give you the experiential anecdotal and then I'll dive a little bit into research. So the experiential anecdotal is kind of in the early going here, maybe four or five years ago, six years ago, I was recommending probiotics. And then really what I started seeing a lot of was after a couple years, just almost to a point, everybody was getting issues with brain fog and sibo, and all these kind of issues really related to that. And when they went off the probiotics, all that stopped. And the issue with probiotics, generally speaking, not always, but generally is that it's very difficult to control exactly where they're going to open up in the gut. And so you get good bacteria in a bad place in the wrong place. And so really, lately there's been newer research coming out that seems to confirm that. There was a paper in the Journal of Gastroenterology that basically connected lactic acidosis, brain fog, bloating, sibo, all these things to probiotic use. And what they found was that when they pulled people off probiotics, the symptoms went away. Now, that being said, I do believe there is a place for probiotics. There are very symptom specific conditions that show a lot of promise under a very skilled practitioner who really knows their stuff, to use very specific strains to ameliorate different types of conditions. And so I think that that's a great place for probiotics. I think the indiscriminate use of them long term is probably causing more problems than it helps. That would just be my opinion, based on what I've seen over the years.

Well, I kind of like the way that you explain things in terms of. Of. And this really made sense to me, this idea that probiotic capsules may kind of like sprinkle the gut with some bacteria here and there, versus the passage of fiber bulk through the gut, such as you might get from apple skins or some of these powders, for example, passing as a bulk through the gut, essentially almost like painting the lining of this garden hose that passes through your body rather than sprinkling the gut. Is that kind of an appropriate analogy?

Yeah, that really just speaks to a unique. So there's a section in my book where I talk about specifics, like why can probiotics never mimic the power of food? And it's because you have to come back to structure function. So if we look at what this thing we call the gut. Well, what you're talking about is a tube okay. It's a tube. And in that tube, in a radii of 360°. That sounds more cool saying radii than radius, doesn't it?

Does sound smart.

Yeah.

You finally sound smart for the first time on the show.

Oh my gosh. Thank you. So in a radius of 360 degrees, my internal, my internal dork meter, like when I said that went dork. In a radius of 360 degrees, you have cells in all 360 degrees. Okay, so if you're, if you have a capsule that you take and it pops out a little bit of stuff. Well, what you're probably not doing is the analogy is like a pipe cleaner, what a pipe cleaner does is, you know, you shove it down a pipe and the brushes of the pipe cleaner are bigger than the pipe. And so there's this kind of pushing against all 360 degrees of the pipe to clean the pipe. Food does that. Food has the property of bulk and bolus. So food in the right amount can do things that probiotics can't. And by its very nature, it's going to handle the correct ph, it's going to handle the correct type of fermentation based on the bacteria that are in each specific section of the digestive tract.

Okay, it seems to make sense. But why would so many companies still be saying, you know, our probiotics, seeds, the gut, or you're going to find that you actually get changes in the bacterial profile of the gut upon consumption of this probiotic? I mean, it would, it would seem to me that they're doing something and we obviously have some data that they can do things like affect mood or affect appetite. So are, are you saying that the, the potential for them to cause things like the small intestine, bacterial overgrowth and the fact that you could get the same thing via real food dictates that those just aren't your. Your go to option.

They're not the first thing that I would go to. I, me personally and, and also in my experience with corporate wellness engagements and stuff that we've been doing for a number of years, I've seen food do just mind boggling, remarkable things not possible with other things, not possible with probiotics, not possible through any other means when it's done correctly. And that is something that food is boring. It's kind of a boring topic to most of us. It's just food. But when you really apply an order of operations and do things in the correct way, food is capable of incredible things. Incredible things. I mean, things not possible that I have not personally experienced from anything else. Now, that's not to say that there are not benefits to probiotics. And again, I really believe the future of probiotics will probably be there are practitioners who are gaining skills year by year, month by month, who really know their stuff and know the right type of probiotic for the right issue. And I think that's a great place for them them. And it's not to say that in all cases that there may not just be sometimes a jump start that you need to them. I think that the continual dosing of them all the time just kind of like probiotics are good, we should take them all the time. I think that's a bad idea.

Okay, got it. Now, prebiotics, you're obviously a big fan of those. And when someone has kind of begun to jumpstart their akkermansia, bifidobacteria and butyrate production with red phenol powder, with apple skins and with, with these human milk oligosaccharides, you then encourage people to begin consuming these prebiotic foods such as semi green bananas. And another one that you talk about for stimulating amp K, one of the master regulators of aging is grapefruit. And you say those are two synergistic foods just throwing in something as simple as grapefruit and semi green bananas. At the same time, you encourage folks to begin to consume things like asparagus and onions and even olive oil and some of these other things that can feed the bacteria in the gut. And I think that one thing that some folks might push back on here is in functional medicine there's this big discussion about FODMAP issues about bloating, gas, constipation and even aggravation of gut issues upon the consumption of some of these prebiotic rich foods like the, the semi green bananas and some of the super fiber rich foods, and especially the high fodmap foods like onions and garlic, et cetera. Have you run into that issue with folks like bloating, gas, even aggravation of sibo when they're introducing these type of prebiotic rich foods?

This is a fascinating question and it opens up a universe of things. I'm going to try and really succinctly encapsulate here as best I can, but let me net it out first and then we'll. I'll do my best to break into the fine details. The reason that you're seeing those types of things has been conflated into an incorrect notion of why those a causally incorrect notion, which is that, oh, it's the food, the foods are bad. That's the net of that current sort of groupthink. But if you delve into structure function of how things work, you're going to get a very different answer. The answer that you're going to get is that there's an order of operations that's missing. And that order of operations is related to structure function of the gut itself. So, first of all, let me try and break this down a little bit. When you look at the gut mucus layer, okay, in the gut mucus layer, there are very specific transporters for butyrate, okay? There's monocarboxylase transporter 1, MCT1, and that's the transporter needed for butyrate. What happens is, when you have gut issues, what you're going to see is that the mucosa of the gut is inflamed, okay? And so there's an order of operations here. When the mucosa is inflamed, the MCT1 transporter is not going to work, okay? It's not going to work because TNF alpha, tumor necrosis factor alpha, is impairing the function of it, okay? So in the order of operations before, before butyrate production can be restored or butyrate transport can be restored in the inflamed mucosa, in other words, before fiber can work, TNF alpha has to be cleared first, okay? So what you see a lot of is people with gut issues and then they take fiber and it makes it worse. Well, the reason is not that fiber is in itself inherently bad. The reason is that there's actually an order of operations that we really haven't identified. And so to come back to structure function, order of operations, what you're going to see is that there's a receptor in the gut GDP 109 that is shared by butyrate and niacin, okay? It's also expressed quite a bit in adipose tissue as well. We'll get to that later. So. So in the impaired gut, one of the things that we see is that niacin applied into the butyrate transporter. Impaired inflamed mucosa seems to go a long way towards helping to first restore function in the mucosal lining. And then there's a number of other things that we can do in the gut to clear TNF alpha first. So order of operations would be, if you have gut issues, like you've got, you know, IBD or things like that, before you can have Fiber, you've got to clear all of the inflammatory mediators first, and you've got to rescue butyrate transport again. Now, what happens is in the enterocytes and the colonocytes when they begin to use glucose instead of their primary substrates. So the enterocytes, you know, the large intestine, small intestine, what you're going to see is that when the enterocytes stop using glutamate and switch to glucose, what happens is the gut mucus layer gets inflamed. Okay, they can use glucose, they can use it just fine, but the gut layer gets inflamed. Now, that sort of goes a long way towards explaining why. You'll see people who have gut issues, they try eating fiber, it irritates them, and then they switch to meat and they go, oh, my issues are solved. Well, it's not that you've solved your issues, it's that you've ceased to aggravate them because the butyrate transporter is working. And a good analogy would be that you've got an engine that has a dual drive. You've got an electric drive, you've got a gas drive, and the pistons are fouling in the gas drive, but the electric drive works great. Okay, so every time you use the. Every time you try and put gas in the car, the car fouls. You're like, oh, well, gasoline's bad. We shouldn't use gas. No, it's not that gasoline's bad. It's that you need to fix the engine. You need to fix. You need to pull it, you need to pull the pistons, you need to do some work in a specific order, put them back in, and then you can use gasoline again. Okay, that's, to a very large extent, kind of a broad analogy, a lot of what's going on.

Okay, so. So like in the book, when you, when you say it's not the food, it's the bugs, and that you can actually acquire the ability to digest things like lactose and gluten. What you're saying, specifically referring to, for example, one study that you cite in the book, is a 2017 study summarizing the root cause of gluten intolerance that states that it is aggravated by a dysbiotic gut bacteria profile characterized specifically by decreased butyrate production or decreased butyrate producing pharmaceuts more specifically, and. Or bifidobacteria leading to low levels of intestinal butyrate, which then leads to things like gluten intolerance or lactose intolerance. And what you're proposing is then by resetting the gut using some of these specific compounds we've been talking about, one would then be able to induce a scenario in which they are A, harnessing fewer calories from things like carbohydrates, thus being able to spark fat loss through targeting gut bacteria, and B, even inducing a state where they might actually be able to do things like digest lactose or digest gluten due to the actual presence of bifidobacteria akkermansia and butyrate in the gut.

Yeah, I would say that that is the highest level of the pyramid. The bottom layer of the pyramid is you've got issues like you have compromised gut, gut, mucus layer issues. You've got, you know, ibd, you've got colitis active. You've got something going on there. And so that is a specific set of protocols apart from, you know, putting butyrate, because butyrate's not going to work at that point. So you've got to clear inflammation. You got to do some things first. But once the. Again, the gas engine analogy is you got to get the pistons cleaned up and working again. But then once the car can use gas again, then the next step to that is, well, how can we make a, it go better? And so then, yeah, all the things you just said come into play. And then at the very high level, there is a small but very compelling and emerging body of research that strongly suggests that. And I use this quote in the book. It was a very funny study. It said that people, long story short, people that spin up bifidobacteria in the gut seem to, quote, unquote, sidestep issues of gluten intolerance and gluten sensitivity. And I just thought that word was really, really kind of funny. Sidestep. Sidestep. Meaning they don't have those issues. Meaning those issues are not endemic to the foods. They're an issue of missing bacteria. And if you dive into this, it makes a ton of sense because there's this chapter in the book, I talk about the three genomes, and there's kind of this lesser of a greater, which is the idea that the lesser is that the human genome runs your body. And while it's true, it's not the whole truth. The greater truth is that three genomes interacting run your body. And when it comes to things like fiber and carbohydrate metabolism, the genes you need are not in the human genome. They are in the bacterial genome. And they can be acquired. You can acquire the genes you need. And lo and behold, the research strongly suggests that that's exactly the case, that there is again, a growing body of research showing people who seem to be acquiring the genes needed. In fact, one of the key genes has to do with production of a protein called guyadin, which, when bifidobacteria is present, seems to work on this protein and helps you sidestep gluten intolerance issues.

Yeah, the interesting thing also, and this is probably the last kind of piece that I want to talk with you about regarding the gut, because you also some really fascinating things regarding fat loss, sleep and this so called young muscle concept. And that is this idea that with a leaky gut or an inflamed gut or a worn gut that would normally be fixed or at least the inflammation would subside with the introduction of things like akkermansia and butyrate. One of the things that appears to be able to help with that is something you refer to as hesperitin. And you get into the consumption of orange juice and the fact that you're a huge fan of combining orange juice with kind of like a morning, I believe it's like a morning protocol. And I thought that was really interesting too, because once again, we see, at least in the community, community that listens to this podcast often the vilification of things like orange juice due to the high fructose content, the high carbohydrate content, et cetera. Yet you're saying, definitely drink orange juice as part of this gut healing process. So explain to me how the orange juice is working and where that fits in, and whether you again, get concerned at all about excess sugar intake versus just supplementation with hesperidin instead of drinking orange juice.

There's a foundational notion that this touches upon that, if I may just is probably worth expounding on for a minute or two. It's something I put forth in the book and I think it needs to be kind of elucidated, which is that I put forth this idea trying to get past grams, calories, macros, that kind of school of thought that unique foods possess unique functional properties and that they work independent of calories. Okay, now the really interesting thing about that is that what we have today is these polarized camps of belief sets, you know, regarding, you know, plants, meats, fats, all that stuff. And it's very reminiscent of 90s martial arts, you know, where you had like one school that was karate, one school that was like kung fu, one that.

Was jiu jitsu, or you or you have early UFC, the. The karate artist versus the sumo wrestler.

Yes, 100. And it's like a kung fu movie, you know, it's like, you know, Wang Yu, you know, Tiger man sucks. You know, Swooping Crane is best. You know, you get, you get kind of this thing going on. And so you have these camps that are in these polarized viewpoints at war with each other. But what's really interesting is with regard to their beloved food source, they 100% agree with that. Like 100%? Like yeah bro, 100%. Yeah, dude, meat heels for sure, dude. You know, in other words, you get this thing of like. Yeah, we agree our beloved food source has unique functional properties not found in other foods that work independent of cows. We agree. But where you get this interesting differentiator is when it comes to the opposing schools. So they're not just neutral, they're not like. But other foods don't, they're negative. But other foods are bad. You know, plants have anti nutrients or meat is bad, meat causes cancer. You get into this stuff. Okay, but that's neither. None of those things are the great. The greater is that across all classes of foods there are foods that have unique functional properties that work independent of calories. It's true in the plant kingdom, it's true of meat, it's true of fats. It's true in all of these different schools. And I believe that we're in an era that's passing, that's very reminiscent of the 90s where what we have today is something much more. If you look at mixed martial arts, you see that really you use the right move in the right situation. So if you're on the ground, there's a certain set of moves you use. If you're on your feet, if you're standing, if you're trying. And I believe that we're moving to that with food, that there's sort of the appropriate what, when and how for every food. There's a time, there's a place. It doesn't mean that that food is good or bad. It just means that it has a function that's useful under certain situations. And that's kind of the approach that I think I put forth in there.

So you do a good job outline outlining that in the book about the effects being unique to the whole. I mean, even with something like orange juice, you talk about experiments that show that hesperidin in whole orange juice is different in terms of the way that it raises blood serum levels of phenols compared to just like hesperidin supplementation. And that's probably due to the unique fibers and sugars and proteins and fats that when you combine them, creates a distinct functional entity that. That's very unique to the whole versus the pieced out compounds.

You know, just hesperidin is interesting stuff just by itself. One of the things that. So it seems to have a lot of unique function in terms of, you know, benefiting the gut and in combination particularly with ascorbate. So what you see in the inflamed mucosa is that ascorbate levels, particularly in people with IBD, are reduced by as much as 70, 80. And when you restore scorbate into the inflamed mucosa, that the inflammation seems to go away. So you have kind of this sort of push pull going on of, well, you know, so you've got kind of this carb load, so to speak, in orange juice. But at the same time, there's ascorbate with it. And the ascorbate and the aspartum together are extremely beneficial in the inflamed gut. And, you know, I've done this protocol with people who like, it works. It's. It just seems to work. Hesperidin gets really interesting in this age because it does a lot of things above and beyond in terms of, like COVID 19. It inhibits some of the enzymes that you need for coronavirus replication. It seems to impair the S spike docking mechanism.

We should clarify, by the way, just so we don't get in trouble. We're not recommending you drink orange juice to cure coronavirus, right?

No, 100% not. No. Yeah. No, no, no, no. I'm just saying that there seem to be. I'm using the words seem to be and may and suggest. It seems to be that there's some research that suggests that it may have properties that are very interesting with respect to the spread of things like, you know, COVID 19. And if you just back up and look at it from a vitamin C perspective. Okay, I could probably buy that.

Yeah. So this is all super interesting. And obviously the actual protocol for combining a lot of these things together is laid out in the book. And I just think this whole idea of resetting the gut specifically to target things like changes in body composition is fascinating. So if you're listening in again, I'm gonna link to all this stuff. If you go to BenGreenfulFitness.com Joel Green. That's Green with an E in terms of the notes that I'm furiously taking and Heading to the show notes as we go. So, the gut stuff aside, I want to jump now into something I found intriguing in the book regarding fat loss. Obviously, the bacterial profile things we just discussed are going to influence fat loss. But then you also get into actual food timing and specifically how a meal that would normally cause you to gain weight significantly can actually be transformed into a fat loss meal. And one of the examples you give is actually that of cheesecake, which I'm sure will be very popular for people. So using, using something like cheesecake as an example, get into how this works. Like, how can you turn a weight gain meal into a fat loss meal?

Yeah, so all of this came out of my need to make stuff work in the real world, which is an ecosystem. And in that ecosystem there's certain parameters. The parameters would be you have no time to meal prep, you have to eat everything on the go. There's social eating, socializing, alcohol, no time to work out. Those are the parameters that crush people in real life. And all of this stuff came out of my frustration, ie, being pissed off, failure during the mid-2000s, running a company. So this is where this stuff came out of. And there's a foundational idea here. It's the idea that you're actually burning fat and storing fat multiple times in a day. If you just think about it. And I have this exercise I like to go through, which is just taking times of day and asking, are you burning fat, storing fat? What are you more likely to do? Like, you know, middle of the night, Are you more likely to store fat, burn fat? You know, and people will give varying answers depending on what they think. But what the exercise illustrates is that we, we gain fat and we store fat multiple times in a day. So the, the core idea is just imagine a sine wave. The upward part is when you are storing fat. The downward part is when you are burning fat. And just imagine that you're gonna, you're gonna push down the wave where it's storing fat and, and then accentuate the wave where you're burning fat. And that's the basic idea. Okay. And I also want to stress there's no panacea. There's, there's no panacea. There's nothing that works like 100%. Instead, what we want to do is we want to, we want to take a combination of 5% improvements and then just add them together. So if we can come up with 10, 15, 5% improvements, then we can make a pretty serious dent over time. And that's the idea. Okay? So when you talk about something like cheesecake, there's nothing I can think of that's more, you know, energy dense, calorically dense, that. More likely to put body fat on, like, nothing. Okay.

And by the way, I have a very popular cheesecake recipe on Instagram. It's technically a. A raw cake made out of. Made out of nuts. But yeah, I mean, it's. I. I would approximate even a slice of that is likely around 450, 500 calories. And then, of course, Cheesecake Factory, I think the average slice. Correct me if I'm wrong, you might know better than I, but I think it's up around like 1500, 1600 for one slice from the Cheesecake Factory?

Yeah, 1500 16. And some of them topping 2000. So it's incredible how much energy you can compact into such a small piece of food. Yeah, it's crazy. So there's this concept in the book that I introduced called Eating Meals in Sequences of Three. And the idea with that is to just tap into a natural rhythm of burning fat and storing fat. So the basic assumption is there's no hope with the cheesecake meal you're going to put fat on. The best we can hope for is to reduce the curve that we can take it down. And then in the meals preceding and the meals after, what we can do is we can accentuate the curve of fat loss in those meals. And so using all this together, we can mitigate a pretty significant amount of weight gain. And to introduce the concept, I introduce a baked potato, and I just sequentially step through what the research has shown. So I start with a basic baked potato, and I show the glycemic index, and I show the area under the curve and glycemic load and all that stuff. And then we make one small change. We just add in a whey protein shake with that. So we add calories. But the area under the curve, glucose area under the curve, decreases by about 20% and the length of the curve stretches out. So in other words, your insulin spikes going down, it's taking longer. You're actually less likely to store fat from that. And then we make one more small change. We introduce timing. So we push the whey protein shake back 30 minutes. And now by doing that, we get another 10% bump in the curve, meaning.

Protein or amino acid consumption 30 minutes prior to starch consumption.

Yeah, well, specifically whey protein, too. Whey protein seems to have some very interesting effects on insulin signaling and the large neutral amino acids and a bunch of other cool things. So we add that in there and then we make one more small change. We let the potato cool down 15 minutes. Okay. So now the starch in it condenses from starches into resistant starches. And then we another 5, 6, 7% bump in the curve and the curve stretches out again. And then we just keep doing this, we just keep going down the trend. We add a little bit of butter, we add a little bit of cinnamon, we add a little bit of alt. We just keep making incremental little 5% changes. And after about 10 or so changes, we had something that was a pure weight gain meal and it's gone to something that's very, very fat loss friendly, very, very weight friendly. Just by making small incremental shifts in the way the meal will be metallic metabolized.

In the book, you refer to this as as basically like a preload, where if you're going to eat a meal that, you know, let's say you got a big night out, date night, steakhouse, whatever, what you're trying to do prior is to consume certain things that are going to either shift the biome in the gut or enhance fat oxidation. Like with the cheesecake example, you get into like eating jello before you have the cheesecake or consuming like green beans or red phenols to help to offset the sugar fermentation in the gut and speed up the gut transit time. And these are just like little strategies that you would use to offset the actual caloric density of the food.

Yeah, I mean it's jujitsu. It's just jujitsu for food now.

Now a ton of, a ton of people who are calories in versus calories out are gonna flip out over this.

Yeah, but, but again that, that paradigm does not reflect what's really true. And if you're gonna spend 20, 30, 40 years of your life chasing something that's not really true, you're gonna at the end of it, not be very happy happy. You have to embrace what's really true. And to get to what's really true, the answers are not in what you know, they're in what you don't know. And so the real truth is that calories and that whole sort of thing, there's a number of factors that impinge upon calories. We talked about achromansia, contracting the surface area of the gut. And there's a laundry list of these things that can, that can impact the weight, that energy is utilized and absorbed in the body. So, and the cool thing is these are all like, I'm not Making stuff up. I mean, these are all measurable. You can measure this stuff.

Yeah. Okay, well, I'm gonna try this. I don't know if I'm gonna do Cheesecake Factory, but maybe somebody listening can use themselves as a guinea pig. But basically like 20 grams of whey protein like a half hour prior and you recommend steel cut oats as well. And then afterwards, after you have the cheesecake, doing something like raw cauliflower or raw green beans, a little bit of this red phenol powder and a little bit of jello.

Yeah. So typically, if you're going to have cheesecake, it's going to be, you know, at night. That's when you're going to go out and do something like that. And then if you just took each one of those things by themselves, you would have a very interesting. You could do an article on each one of those things. Like glycine at. At bedtime does some really interesting.

Well, I got this trick from you. I got the jello trick from you. So I was going to talk to you about sleep later on, but let's just jump in right now. Why the jello trick? How's that work?

So glycine is interesting stuff. It's very much involved in the utilization of serine within the body. And so by its very nature, when you look at all the kinases in the body, these are serine kinases. And glycine has a very specific action in terms of its effects on adiponectin, seems to potentiate. Adiponectin, seems to help you burn fat when you sleep. It seems to be involved in inflammatory signaling, does a lot of really cool things. So just glycine. And Ron, if he's listening, he's just flipping out right now because he's just like, don't share this with anybody.

Ron Pena. Well, you guys should share with me at dinner. Now, I've been eating my own homemade jello that I make. I just use Great Lakes gelatin, a little bit of coconut water. You know, heat up the coconut water, put the gelatin in and let that set in the fridge. I've been doing a big square of that before bed at night. It's amazing in terms of the appetite satiation and the enhanced sleep quality.

Yeah, I actually, we have a mini cleanse in my veep system that we've used for a number of years. And it's not fun. You know, it's a cleanse. But one of the tricks is to add in some glycine at the hardest part part of the day. Right about 4:00'. Clock. And the glycine helps with knocking out all the, all the hunger issues and it also helps speed up fat loss. So it's pretty cool stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we've got jello as a trick for offsetting some of this weight gain, but it kind of begs the question, why wouldn't you just like. And this is a strategy that I began implementing after noticing the profound impact it had on blood glucose control when experimenting with this and a continuous blood glucose monitor. And that's cold. Why not just like take a cold shower or, you know, go for a brisk walk in the, in the cold weather rather than eating all these random things before and after the meal. Do you, do you incorporate cold thermogenesis much at all in. As part of this strategy?

Okay, so this gets to a what, when and how question and order of operations and structure function kind of question. And it's just super, super fascinating. So here's the thing with coal, cold is a, is a foundational tool set to do a lot of things. So what I want to do is move us from listening into the cold is good thing, and move us into cold works here, cold works here, cold works here, and here's when you do it. Okay, so the first thing about cold to understand is that it seems to potentiate macrophages, which are. I built my book around two concepts. An immune cell called a macrophage and then a protein called hypoxia. Inducible factor. Okay. And they're both related. What cold seems to do is particularly in adipose mass, is it flips macrophages from the inflammatory state, I call them the red team, to the non inflammatory state. The blue team. Nod, the halo. Okay. And so when we apply cold to adipose mass, there's a bunch of things that happen. Okay? So we can use cold very strategically timed to periods of fat loss for very specific effects. Okay. A couple things to know before you start. One is that cold induction is one to one related to proliferation or inverse proliferation of achremansia. So the reason Eskimos are fat is that cold induction drives down achromansia. And it makes sense, okay, from a survival perspective if you're enduring a lot of cold. Like if you look at people who live in northern climates, okay, northern latitudes, you need to make more energy. So the body has a mechanism built in that makes you make energy. And that is cold induction spins up, eating spins down. Achromansia increases the surface area of the gut. Okay, so achromansia goes down, but the other thing that cold induction does, particularly in adipose mass, is it induces uncoupling. Okay. And the really interesting thing that it does is it induces FGF21. So FGF21 is fibroblast growth factor 21. It's a starvation enzyme made by the liver. And FGF21 is neither good nor bad. It's useful. It's extremely useful in certain places. What FGF 21 does is it seems to adapt the body to starvation, adapt the body to fasting, and it can induce what's called a futile cycle in adipose mass, meaning that it can potentiate both the release and the storage of fat mass. And so if you map it out over time, in the short term it's fantastic, and the long term it's bad. But where this gets great is at the end of a period of fat loss, one of the. Which we'll get into later. I'm sure one of the problems that you're up against is that I call this in the book the fat loss paradox. The act of shrinking fat cells potentiates long term weight gain through a number of mechanisms. So we have to hack those mechanisms. One of the ways we hack those mechanisms is to hack FGF21 at the end of a fat loss period. And the way that we do that is through timing cold induction to the end of a fat loss period for a certain period of time and timing that to the production of agromansia. So at the end of a fat loss period, you want to. You want to induce cold in adipose mass specifically. And what this is going to do.

And by the way, to jump in, when you say at the end of a fat loss period, let's say someone has done like a cleanse or a fast, or gone through a period of calorie deprivation or something like that, that.

Or just reduce their body fat substantially.

Like you got cut or exercise.

Yeah, right. Yeah. If you don't want it to come back, there's a series of steps you have to do.

Okay. That's gonna be super important for people, because we know that. And you get into this in your book. The shrinking of fat cells can trigger changes that cause a regain of that fat pretty readily unless you do what you're about to explain.

Right. So one of the emerging ideas in preventing weight regain after a period of fat loss is to induce FGF 21 and also at the same time to flip types of immune cells from the, from the red team, the inflaming guys, the killers to the healers the blue team. Okay. So cold induction kind of checks all the boxes. So post fat loss you've kind of got where you want. You need a week of cold induction targeted specific specifically to fat mass. Okay. And what it's going to do is it's going to flip macrophages in your fat mass to the anti inflammatory kind. So it's going to help resolve the injury that fat loss induces, which we'll get into at the same time. It's going to drive FGF 21 right when you need it. Now what you don't want to do is continue this like for, you know, the research seems to suggest right around between 7 to 10, 12 days. You don't want to keep doing it like for 30, 40 days because what happens is you're going to spin down achiemansia, you're going to increase surface area of the gut, you're going to increase energy intake, you're going to aid the weight regain. But this is a specific example of kicking cold induction as an idea and then applying it in an extremely targeted, extremely efficacious way for a specific functional outcome.

So the cold then would be something that you do for a brief period of time after you've lost weight, but then you're not a fan of continuing the cold on a regular basis.

I think it's very good strategically. I don't think that it's something you should do all the time. What I have 10, what I have seen is that people who do cold induction all the time is they get kind of this barrel chest look going on. They get kind of this kind of weight concentrate.

The polar bear swimmer. High amounts of brown fat deposition on the collarbone, bone, shoulders, etc type of look. Yeah, but, but, but we should, we should clarify too. Like, like that's some pretty hefty cold thermogenesis. Those are like 10 to 20 minute doses on a daily basis. You know, like, like my own strategy is, is quick, you know, jump in a cold pool before I start my day or a quick cold shower. And, and I found that to be fabulous for maintaining, you know, a lean body. But I have found not only endocrine disruption and some kind of significant sympathetic activation and even like mild what you might call some adrenal exhaustion or some symptoms of adrenal fatigue from people who overdo the cold thermogenesis, but these longer bouts of cold thermogenesis or cryotherapy chambers or something like that would be appropriate for a short period of time following something like a weight loss protocol after which you'd want to dial it back.

Yeah, I think you really hit it on the head. So what you brought up is you brought up the duration, you brought up the timing, you brought up very important things that it's neither good nor bad. It's the order of operations. The way you do it the other way that I find it just incredibly powerful is really very similar to what you're doing. And in my own sort of lexicon of how I do things, it's on day two of the two day pattern in my program where you're amplifying fasting signals, then cold induction before the workout on the day, you're doing sprints on the day. The more you can replicate the ancestral dawn hunt, the better. And I think I talked about this one in the book. It's the hardest one to do. People are game for everything else. Until it comes to the cold induction at dawn. I'm not doing that one.

You get used to it. You actually have a hack to amplify the effect of the cold thermogenesis. And it's like, is it a menthol type of topical cream or lotion?

Yeah. What you find is that you'll get a similar effect. You'll get uncoupling by topical application of menthol, where adipose mass is, which is really one of the places you really want it. And so by adding the two, adding all three, actually adding, adding fasting, adding early morning time of day, cold induction and menthol all in one spot. There's this new word in the science called combination therapy. And it's just kind of the smart word for just throwing everything at it but the kitchen sink. And it's kind of that.

Okay, got it. So in addition to being careful with the excess amount of cold to ensure that you're not not cycling the fat loss improperly, you also get into this idea that leptin can get dysregulated. If you have been cycling back and forth from weight loss to weight gain, a lot of people deal with this issue. Can you get into what that problem is? Like why we need to be careful with cycling fat loss? Kind of a little bit of a beast to unpack. But what's going on hormonally and what would you do to kind of reset leptin that might be dysregulated from someone who's doing like yo, yo dieting or. Or weight loss weight gain cycles such as you would see in bodybuilding figure competition or even just people who are on and off the weight loss Bandwagon.

So unpacking this kind of big picture, and I'm speaking here from just having seen this happen over 40 plus years of this stuff, what you see is there's kind of this long, long term trend that really hasn't been talked about much. And it's what you see is early 20s, early 30s, no problem getting lean every time just works every time like a charm. And then as you get into the 40s and 50s, every trip to the well, it gets harder and harder to drop fat until finally all the things that used to work don't work and you can't drop fat at all. And the thing I talk about in my book is that in order to bring fat loss into the 21st century, an immune centric paradigm is necessary. Because what ultimately governs fat loss are immune centric mechanisms. And the first place we have to start is to understand that the old paradigm has programmed your mind with words. These words are things like, you know, fats just stored energy. All you gotta do is lose it. Just lose the weight, you'll feel great. You know, all this kind of hype has nothing to do with the reality of what happens when fat cells shrink. Okay, if you go back thousands and thousands of years, okay, fat cells shrinking always, for the most part, corresponded with periods of food deprivation, that is starvation. And your body has all of these survival based mechanisms, and they're multiple and multiple layers that are designed to ensure that you survive by after a period of fat loss, or what we call starvation by another name, or dieting, or getting ripped or getting in shape, or getting jacked after a period of that, the body has all these compensatory mechanisms that kick in. And they're cumulative, they're cumulative over time, and it's now actually quantifiable. And so when we come at this with an immune centric point of view, the first thing to understand is that fat loss is an injury. You are injuring your adipose mass.

It's an interesting way to put it.

And we can quantify it. We can actually get in and begin to look at the suspects in the injury. So the first is to understand fat is not fat. Fat is a system. Fat is a system of multiple components. It's not just fat cells. So in that system, you have very specific types of collagen fibers embedded in what's called the extracellular matrix. You have what we think of as fat cells. And then fat cells are essentially a mothership that harbors all the, these little ships. And these little ships are different kinds of immune Cells. In fact, I lost count somewhere. There's over 15 of them. There's tons and tons of different kinds of immune cells, and you're fat. On top of that, you have essentially stem cells, pre adipocytes. And the thing about pre adipocytes is they don't have to differentiate out into fat cells. They can differentiate out into other kinds of cells, even immune cells, based on the configuration of your fat. So the very first thing that happens, and I use this analogy in the book, imagine a house that's made of bricks and mortar, okay? And you shrink the bricks away from the mortar. So what happened is what's called mechanobiology, a transfer of physical forces took place. Shearing stress changed from the mass as a whole to the mortar. Well, the mortar we call the cm, the extracellular matrix. So the physical forces impinging upon your fat mass as a whole were transferred to just the mortar. Now, if you did that in your house, you'd be lucky if it didn't collapse. It would injure your house. Well, something very similar happens in your fat mass when fat cells shrink. So in the book, I make this big, big case that the fat loss paradox is the reality that the act of shrinking fat cells enact long term weight gain. And then I just go through and I just tick off the mechanisms. Why? Okay, so when fat cells shrink away from the extracellular matrix, there's a whole bunch of things that happen. Okay, the first is that there is shearing stress on the adipose mass and particularly on the extracellular matrix. Now, the extracellular matrix we think of as just kind of this dumb thing. It's just like collagen, right? It's just collagen. No big deal. Well, that's not how it works. It turns out that specific types of collagens basically work like artificial intelligence. They reprogram fat cells based on the type and the tension between them and the fat cell. And then the fat cells in return reprogram the collagen fibers. In fact, there are very specific types of collagen fibers that we see in obesity. For example, collagen 6 that are cancer drivers. And when you understand how these fibers work, the presence of these fibers works on very specific proteins. I use 1 fatty acid binding protein 4 to signal changes in the types of immune cells that are in your fat. Okay? The types of immune cells in your fat, the macrophages in your fat govern resolution of the injury that happens when you lose fat. And so what we see long term is there's a short term benefit in terms of the immune cells, they seem to improve, but then long term, there seems to be, in a lot of cases, and it's genetically dependent. There seems to be a shift in populations of immune cells towards the red team, towards the inflammatory type post fat loss. So this has massive, massive complications, not just, just for your fat, but for the immune status of your body in general and for how your body ages. There's a second kind of injury that takes place, okay? This one is called a traction stress injury. So what happens is when adipose cells pull away from the cem. Okay, well, there is a very specific protein. It's an actin myosin protein. It's the same protein found in muscle. Okay? It's the protein that allows muscle to contract. Well, fat doesn't work like muscle. So in order to contract, in order to pull the fat cell back to the ecm, these proteins make fibers. Okay? There's a protein called coughlin that attaches back to the adipose mass and pulls the adipose cell from a single point. And I use this analogy in the book, Think about something. If your house got knocked off its, its foundation, and then a bunch of workers showed up and they attached a cable to the house from a single point and pulled your whole house back onto the foundation from a single point, they might succeed, but you're going to be repairing structural damage to that house for a long, long time. And that is exactly what happens when fat cells are reduced. There's a injury to the cell, and we can measure that injury. It's measured in terms of things like heat shot proteins that are, are produced post traction stress injury. So what we see is these inflammatory mediators in the cell spin up post shrinking and post traction stress in the cell. And then the thing about heat shock proteins is they stick around a long time and they potentiate sort of inflammatory reactions within the cell. So as we dive into this thing we call fat loss and we look at it, what we see is that when the ECM and the fat cell create a misfit, meaning that they're not tightly fit together, just like bricks and mortar, the fat mass, your adipose mass, has two options to fix this. Okay? Option one and the easiest and the best is just refill the fat cell. Okay? That solves the problem. And this is potentiated by leptin. So what happens is when fat cells shrink, you'll see leptin, leptin output goes down, not making as much leptin.

Right?

And there's all these other things that are going on at the same Time. So number one is called the energy gap problem. And this means that essentially, so leptin goes down, garland goes up, skyrockets. So in essence, you want to eat more, but then at the same time, it's harder to get full and you have a lower metabolism, you've lowered your metabolic needs. So this is called the energy gap. It's kind of a classical problem of fat loss. It's not the latest stuff, but it's like a 50% problem like this just defeats 50% of your efforts. And it's mediated by the act of shrinking fat cells, which, if you just think about it, historically speaking, before the modern era of fitness, the reason fat cells shrunk was you were starving. So it makes sense. The body has some mechanisms to prevent that from happening. And the really, really important thing that we see is that there's an emerging view in the science that what's called ECM fibrosis, or stiffening of the ECM over time is not exclusive to obesity. That in fact, it may just be what happens to fat mass the more you mess with it. So the more times you take it to the shrinking, to the fat loss, well, your body's survival mechanisms have mechanisms in place to prevent you from starving to death. And if you view fat loss from a starvation historical perspective, the narrative makes a lot of sense. I think about it, the more you starve, every time you starve, your body wants to get better at not letting you starve. So it gets more thrifty with releasing fat, and it doesn't release fat as easily. And the ability of fat cells to, to shrink and the ability of the ECM to deform and adapt to fat loss is 1 to 1, correlated with the ability for you to lose fat in the first place. So the stiffer the ECM gets, which is a problem we see with obesity, the less able you are to lose fat. This has never really been looked at, but there's no getting away from it because it's actually how things work. And it brings fat loss out of fitness and brings it into the much larger umbrella of an immune centric approach. Because at the end of the day, it's immune cells and signals from immune cells that are just dictating all this stuff.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Reckoning Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.