PNTV: Fat for Fuel by Joseph Mercola (#389)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes TV today, another great book, Fat for Fuel by Dr. Joseph Mercola. Fat for Fuel subtitle a revolutionary diet to combat cancer, boost brain power and increase your energy. As you may know, Dr. Mercola, a super popular alternative doctor who has a very popular website. And again, I got to kind of have a caveat here. Anytime I do a nutrition episode, YouTube comments tend to get a little bit feisty. So I get it. There's a lot of different vantage points. I try to avoid dogma experiments, et cetera, respect alternate viewpoints. And I think we can all agree we want to get rid of sugar, we want to get rid of flour, we want to look at our insulin, etc. And then we can play at the edges and explore some of the ideas like what Mercola is talking about here. We'll talk about some of the stuff that this book is based on, primarily mitochondria. In rehabilitating our mitochondria, which are energy powerhouses, he believes that is the future of standard of care and medicine. I agree. We'll talk more about it. Fat for Fuel as always, we've got philosopher's note, bunch of my favorite big ideas and five of them here. So MMT is the basic theme of the book. What is mmt? Well, it is mitochondrial metabolic therapy. Mitochondrial metabolic therapy. Again, as I just briefly mentioned, Mercola believes that mitochondria, in understanding mitochondria, is the future of the standard of care of medicine. Mitochondria, you might not have heard of them, might not have thought very deeply about them, but they're really, really significant and they're ubiquitous in your body. Guess how many mitochondria are hanging out in your body right now? Now, well, here's a hint. You have trillions of cells and most of those have mitochondria, which is their source of power. Not every single one of them, but most of them are going to use mitochondria to create energy for you. Get this, there are crazy number. Count these zeros. 16 zeros. There are 10 quadrillion. I'm just going to put it up here because it's blows me away how many zeros you can get in. 3, 6, 9, 12. I'm not done yet. 1, 2, 3. 16 zeros there. 10 quadrillion. That's how many mitochondria you and I have roughly in our bodies. Now you can fit a billion of those on a pinhead, yet those 10, quadrillion mitochondria constitute 10% of our body weight. So again, mitochondria, as you may recall from your high school biology class, are your energy powerhouses. It's how you actually create, literally how you create energy. So understanding mitochondria is a very, very important thing for us. We're going to do an episode on Yuval, Noah Harari's great books, Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He says that algorithm is the number one thing that we want to think about, the number one concept to understand in the 21st century, because our future is going to be created via algorithms. Okay, I agree. That's a powerful concept. Mitochondria are energy powerhouses. That's at least as important. Understanding that so we can deal with all the chronic diseases facing our world, et cetera. Again, Mercola's approach is mitochondrial metabolic therapy. The basic gestalt of his approach nutritionally is higher fat, lower carb, and adequate protein, which leads us to the next big idea. So again, fat for fuel. Obviously, Mercola is suggesting that we switch from burning primarily glucose for fuel, right, and excessive grains and sugar in our diets to fat as a primary source of fuel. We'll talk a little bit more about good fats and bad fats, etc. But if you believe these researchers, it's a much more efficient source of energy. As I experiment with it, I am finding that to be true. You need to experiment with it to the extent you feel inspired by it and look at the data, look at the research, etc. Longer conversation, we'll save for another time. But basic idea here is you have fat as your primary source of fuel, you're reducing your carbohydrates, and then you have adequate protein. Now, I'm going to emphasize this because it's an important distinction that Mercola and some other authors make. We're not talking about a high protein diet. Mercola goes off on the literature, and we know that, for example, calorie restriction, right, is actually one of the best ways to extend longevity in nearly all the animal studies they've done. Now, most people don't want to restrict their calories excessively, and this provides a way to reduce your calories and have a source of fuel via fat without going nuts about it. But what he found was that the real important thing to reduce and to restrict was your protein. Now, protein is important. It's literally how we repair and rebuild and grow. But you want to have enough to do that work, an adequate amount, and basically not much more than that. So there's kind of adequate. Then there's moderate protein and then there's high protein. In terms of diets out there, right? There's a high protein approach, there's a moderate protein approach, and then there's an adequate protein approach. Mercola comes in at the adequate level, which is arrived at via a simple calculation which is 0.5 times your lean body mass for the number of grams of protein he recommends you consume on a daily basis. So I'm 150 pounds, 9% or so body fat, let's call it 10%. 150 times 10% is 15 pounds of that is body fat. So my lean body mass is 135, which is the number you want to find for yourself to follow this model. Times that by 0.5 you get the number of grams of protein that Mercola would recommend you have as an adequate level. If you're an athlete who's doing intense vigorous work, workouts, etc. Increase that by 25%, you're pregnant, increase that by 25%. That's the rough measure, obviously. Check out the book for more on it. But that's the basic idea and the important emphasis here is adequate protein. If you have too much protein, a lot of things happen. But a couple primary things happen. One, you flip a switch on something called mtor, which is something you do not want activated if you do not want cancer. Cancer cells tend to be associated with high levels of mtor, which tends to be associated with high levels of protein. Cancer cells also tend to preferentially burn sugar for fuel, by the way. So flipping from sugar to fuel to fat for fuel is a key tenant to this whole mitochondrial metabolic approach to overall well being and cancer treatment. Again, a longer discussion, we'll leave it at that adequate protein. So check in on your protein consumption, see what's right for you, blah, blah, blah. Fats is our third big idea. So key here is fat's going to be your fuel. A couple things to note. One, if you're going to increase your fat, you want to simultaneously decrease your carbs. If you're going to do tons of fat and tons of carbs, you're obviously not doing it quite right. But you also want to get the right types of fat into your body. So as we've discussed, in different contexts, we tend to over consume the wrong types of fats. There are omega 3 essential fatty acids, omega 6 essential fatty acids, right? We have a mismatch or a kind of inappropriate ratio between the Omega 3s and the Omega 6s. They're both important. One's anti inflammatory, the other is inflammatory. You need both, but you want them in the proper ratio. These days, we're over consuming vegetable oils. Obviously, you don't want to have hydrogenated fat in your diet, period. But then the less obvious is the vegetable oils. So things like soy oil, soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, Mercola and others in this camp say, get that out of your diet, period. They do not belong in your body. They didn't exist a hundred years ago. We've been pressing olives forever, thousands of years. Vegetable oils, soybean oil, that's brand new in the overall spectrum of things. They create an inflammatory response in your body. Not good. So if you go high fat, low carb, but all of your fat is from the wrong fat sources, you're going to have, you're not going to see the benefits that you want to see. And that Mercola advocates, He's very clear on that throughout the book. Good fats include things like he loves olives, olive oil, coconut oil. What else? We have avocados. He's a huge fan of avocados. We eat a ton of algae oil, perilla oil. There are some other oils you can get. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Natural fats. Stay away from the vegetable oils. That's the basic discussion on the fat side of things. And then our fourth idea here is intermittent fasting. And I put an asterisk next to this one because this, any of this stuff, if you are on medications to treat diabetes or other issues, particularly diabetes, and regulating your insulin, when you start making shifts, reducing your sugar or eliminating your sugar or reducing your flour and all of that, and you get your insulin under control via your nutritional strategies. You can change your underlying biochemistry very quickly. So it's really important to, to work with your medical professional if you are on medications and especially if you're going to think about doing something like intermittent fasting, which again, Mercola and others in this camp strongly recommend. They tell us that two of the primary things that accelerate aging. We're going to talk about this again in our next episode on Mark Sisson's the Keto Reset Diet. He says the two things that accelerate aging are overfeeding we eat too much. Right. And insulin lack of insulin control. So one of the ways to reduce the amount of frequency and quantity we consume is to eat in a narrower window of time. And you can practice something you may have heard of and check out the book and online intermittent fasting. So he advocates something he calls peak fasting. And and he basically reduces the window in which he eats his food to 6 to 11 hours. You want to have a nice stretch of time where you are not eating. And what happens during that time is your body can actually do the repairing. It needs to do something called autophagy. Always a tongue twister for me, autophagy, which basically means self eating your body when it's not constantly eating, it takes that energy that would go into digesting food, which is a ton of your energy, and it puts it into basically repairing your body. It's kind of like little garbage men going through your body and cleaning up. Now, if you never slow down and stop eating, it's as if the garbage guy doesn't come and clean up your cells, right? So by giving yourself this window of time that's more narrow to eat and broader when you're not eating, you allow your body to do the autophagy that it needs to do in order to keep you nice and young and healthy, etc. I practice this. I love to eat within a very constrained window. One of the things I'm excited to work on, as I was preparing for this, I realized again, what Mercola does that I'm not currently doing, I want to do more of, is create a longer window between the time that I eat my last meal and the time that I go to sleep. And he does something like four to six hours before he goes to sleep, he'll eat his last meal, which is extraordinary. He says three hours before you go to sleep, you want to eat your last meal. He thinks this is a really important thing, that over fueling, overfeeding before you go to bed doesn't allow you the time you need to do the work, your body, the energy it needs to do the work overnight to repair you, etc. So we know how important sleep is when. Well, if you're overloading yourself with food, you're making yourself work on digestion when it should be working on other important things. So anyway, that's the idea on intermittent fasting. And then the fifth idea here is winning the urge war. Winning the urge war. So all of these teachers and everyone who says anything about nutrition, you get to the end of the book and you get to the plan of how you're actually going to implement it. The first thing they all say is you need to ruthlessly get rid of the food that no longer belongs in your body. You just have to. That's how you're going to win the urge war. Which is again, what all willpower scientists say. Number one, Rule is get it out of sight. As James Clear says brilliantly in Atomic Habits. He says, if you want to break a habit, the first thing you have to do is make it invisible. If you want to break a bad habit, you have to make the cue invisible. Well, the best way to make a food cue invisible, whether it's your salad dressing that has soybean oil in it or the Oreo cookies or whatever cookies or junk food in your pantry, the best way to make it invisible is to throw it away, donate it, give it to friends, whatever. Don't put it into your line of sight, whether it's directly or behind the pantry. The next thing that James tells us, he says, number one is make it invisible to make it break a bad habit. Number two is to make it hard, and number three is to make it miserable. If you do do it right. And you should make the connection between how you feel when you eat all these foods, right? And make that connection between, well, that habit makes me feel a certain way, not just psychologically, but physiologically, but by making it invisible and hard by purging your pantry. That's step number one to breaking the bad habit. That's how we win the urge wars. In our last pntv, we talked about bright lines, right? You don't want to negotiate with yourself, am I going to have this food or that food? Make some bright lines for yourself. Whether it's just starting with sugar and flour, going a little bit more all in on this type of approach, whatever it is for you, we want to find ways to make it easy to win and harder to not. Intermittent fasting was another idea, limiting your window. And again, I didn't mention, but that's almost impossible to do on a standard American diet. When I used to eat reasonably healthfully. But for me, when I was a low fat, high carb vegan at the time, for a decade, I was always hungry. I was burning that glucose, basically the sugar for fuel, and I was always hungry. So I couldn't go extended periods of time without crashing. I would often get hangry if I skipped a meal, et cetera. You may experience that now when you switch from your primary source of fuel to being sugar and glucose to fat. It's actually astonishing how long you can go in this window of time without food and you skip a meal and it's just not a big deal. It's truly amazing. But it's going to be tough to do on a standard American diet. Give yourself a couple, two, three weeks to adjust, et cetera, good fats versus bad fats. The vegetable oils. I keep on hammering that one. We want to get our Omega 6 Omega 3s right? Check out your salad dressing, look at the number one ingredient and know that the amount of soybean oil alone we consume now is a double digit percentage of our total caloric intake. Which is insane for a substance that didn't exist 100 years ago. I wonder if that's contributing to problems. Second idea, just to recap was the adequate protein. We're not talking moderate, we're not talking high. He's talking adequate, right? We had that little equation 0.5 times your lean body mass. Check in on that. And then finally mitochondrial metabolic therapy. 10,000,000,000, Little Organelles in your body cranking out energy. I think this is such an important thing to consider. I'm looking forward to the future standard of care of medicine and I think mitochondria is going to be a central theme in that. There you go. Hope you enjoyed. Here's to if you feel so adventurous making fat your preferred fuel, make today another awesome day. See you.