PNTV: Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf (#384)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, Wired to Eat by Rob Wolf. Wired to Eat Subtitle Turn off cravings, rewire your appetite for weight loss and determine the foods that work for you. Subtitle 2 say goodbye to one size fits all diets with a seven day carb test. Rob Wolf is one of the leading thinkers in the Paleo ancestral health movement and this book is awesome. And I like to start these TV episodes with a disclaimer. Anytime I talk about nutrition and we share it on YouTube, we tend to get a lot of comments, often from people with very, very strong opinions about the subject. Obviously nutrition discussions can devolve into a religious like debate around certain ideas. A lot of dogma, a lot of cherry picking. For me, I view my role as exploring different philosophies, experimenting on myself with my family and sharing what I think makes sense and what I think is worth contemplating. So if you've figured it all out, congratulations. If you're open to some more information that I'm excited to share here again, Wired Yit. Rob Wolf, former biochemist, as I mentioned, one of the leading thinkers in the Paleo movement. But he talks a lot in the book about his disappointment and frustration with the fact that it's become dogmatic in its own right, that people get locked into a certain mindset, whether it's on the Paleo side or from a different vantage point. And his point is let's step back and let's see that one size does not fit all, which is our first idea and something we're going to talk about and, and the fact that we need to personalize our nutrition. As always, we've got a philosopher's note. Bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorites here. Let's jump in with our first idea, which is one size does not fit all. So whatever your nutritional approach, the idea tends to be that this is what will work for everyone. If it works for you or someone you know, then we like to think that it will work for everyone. But the research shows, and Rob walks us through it in a really compelling way, that that's just not the case. That yes, there are some general guidelines that we could follow that seem to be universally true for everyone. For example, sugar and refined carbohydrates just don't work. The body did not evolve to consume that, which we'll talk about in the next idea. That type of food, we did not evolve to eat that food. So that's a general guideline that's generally True, but at the same time, some foods that we may think are good for us actually don't work with different people. They might work for one person, but it doesn't work for another. So there's this real importance of understanding the fact that we have general principles on one hand, and then we have everyone's the same, but then everyone's also unique and different. We have different genetics, we have different stressors in our life, different environmental early histories in our lives, different microbiomes in our gut that impacts how something like a banana or a cookie affect our glucose. The research is stunning on this, revealing the fact that one size does not fit all. That's the primary theme of the book. He makes a very compelling case for it. And there you go. And in the note, I talk about the fact that in my work, one on one with Phil Stutz, on a psychological level, as he coaches me to coach you and to coach our optimized community, etc. He often says that we. The paradox is that we are all simultaneously exactly the same. We're human beings, we share the human experience. We're all the same. Now, on the other hand, in addition to being completely the same, we are completely different. We're all unique. We all have our own unique expressions and histories, and everything about us is different, yet it's also the same. So it's kind of that paradoxical coin, two sides of the same coin, general and specific. We're all exactly the same and we're all totally different. So we want to embrace that apparent paradox and remember that one size does not fit all. Whether we're talking nutrition or lifestyle changes, etc. You got to figure out what works for you. That's the ultimate moral of the story. As Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Bust out Nietzsche in the concept or the context of nutrition. He says people would come to him and say, hey, what's the way? And he says, there is no the way. I discovered my way. What is your way? That's the basic essence of the book as applied to nutrition. Second idea here is the discordance theory. The idea here is that there's a mismatch, right? So we evolved over hundreds of thousands, millions of years to respond to our environment in a certain way. That made sense. It was basically eat as much as you can when it was available and move as little as you could to get it. Now that made sense back in the day when food was scarce and you had to move to actually get food. You couldn't just dial up your local pizza delivery or press a button on your app and get the food delivered to you. You had to expend energy to get food and you couldn't over consume really. Right? Longer discussion. We'll leave it at that. So there's a mismatch between that environment and our ancient genes and modern society. And of course our genes have evolved a bit, but not enough to deal with that mismatch. The discordance between our genetic programming and wiring and modern reality. And there's a couple different phrases that Rob uses throughout the book I like to talk about. The phrases I underline and notice come up again and again thematically in a book. The two big ones in this book included the neuroregulation of your appetite, the neuroregulation of your appetite and the fact that it's disrupted from hyper palatable foods. Hyper palatable foods. They're super attractive to us. And again, we know food scientists are literally crafting the perfect bliss point so that we over consume these hyper palatable foods which disrupts our neuroregulation of our appetite. Things are haywire when you eat all of this refined sugar, flour, et cetera. He says there's something like 10,000 new food food products, thousands of new food products introduced every year. Food in quotes. Your local supermarket stocks 10,000 different types of foods that just didn't exist until very, very recently. That leads to again the mismatch between what we were evolved to consume and what we are currently consuming. You see this in the lab. David Ludwig, a Harvard MD PhD has brought people into a lab FMRI which we talked about in our episode and notes on Always hungry and some plus ones at Optimize me. Bring people into a lab, split them up into groups, give them fast acting refined carbs or give them slow acting carbs their brain centers. Those who consume the fast acting carbs will light up the same exact region that lights up for other refined things like cocaine, alcohol, heroin, et cetera in your nucleus accumbens light up like a laser, he says. When you have sugar, hyper palatability mismatch leads to a problem with the neuroregulation of your appetite. We talk about it more in the note, but short story, you need to get rid of the sugar and flour if you want to have a shot at optimizing your health and well being. That is the most consistent theme across all the discussions we have. You want to know why all these different diets work? Robert Lustig, who wrote Fat Chance, one of the leading endocrinologists in the world we're going to do an episode on him soon. He says that they all work because they eliminate sugar, right? That's one of the hallmarks of an effective approach, is they eliminate sugar. That's a longer chat. We'll leave it at that. Back to Wired to Eat specifically. So when we talk about the fact that we are generally all the same, there are general principles, yet we're also highly unique. What makes Rob's book unique is he offers a phased approach for both of those. There's a 30 day, two tools to deal with these challenges. A 30 day reset, where basically you follow his recommendations via his food matrix, which you could find@rob2bswolf.com FoodMatrix which is essentially paleo, right? You follow the paleo approach, you get rid of the things that might be creating inflammation in your body. And he jokingly says, I wonder what the response would be if we just called Paleo an anti inflammatory diet or an evolutionary diet. Again, longer chat, but we might be able to avoid some of the stigma and dogma associated with it. But this 30 day phase, general principles, right? We reset our metabolism, then we have a personalized nutrition plan where we figure out what works for us. And he talks about some fascinating research that I alluded to before, that you literally could give someone two people a banana and a cookie, and those two people, their glucose response to the banana and the cookie will be completely different. So different people have different responses to the same exact food. Now that might sound obvious to you, but people who believe that a calorie is a calorie period don't allow for that fact that one size does not fit all. Something that might be healthy for one person may not be healthy for another person. So he gives us a seven day carb test, which you can learn more about in the book and on his site and all that stuff where basically you give yourself a test after rebooting your system and you test does this particular carbohydrate work for me or not? Right. 50 grams, you do a glucose test, etc. Outside of the scope of this episode, but fascinating. 30 days general seven day personalized, and you figure out what actually works for you, which is incredibly important. Oh, I didn't mention one of the cool metaphors he uses in both the one size doesn't fit all and the two tools concept. Imagine this statue, David that Michelangelo sculpted and he says that Michelangelo reportedly said, whether it's true or not. It's a great story that when asked how he created this statue of David, Michelangelo said I simply chipped away, removed everything that wasn't David. You have this perfect statue, right? And he says, look, any sculptor or woodworker or any craftsman basically has a set of tools, right? They have different tools that they use at different phases of a creative project. There's the rough work where you're simply clearing off. In the case of David, the marble, right? You can just kind of chip away at it with a blunt tool, right? Then you get to more of a precise phase where you need more precise tools, right? So that's the idea of the 30 day phase and the seven day phase is you go from general to precise rough work to precise work. We want to embrace the fact that we're all the same and we're all different. Did I mention that? Yet one size doesn't fit all. Fourth big idea here is the Pillars of Health. So although the book is Wired to Eat, it really could be called Wired to Eat, Move, Sleep and Connect. Because he talks about the fact that we're just mismatched from our genetic kind of factory settings. Not just in our nutrition, but in our sleeping, in our movement, in our connection and how we deal with stress, etc. So quick look and he's got a great section on sleep. The book is worth it just for the section on sleep, which we talk about a lot. Check out Optimize Me Sleep for the class. And then we've got a ton of notes on sleep. But he points out the fact that we are sleeping 2.5 hours less America since the 80s, 1980s. We slept 2 1/2 hours more in the 80s than we do today. That's crazy. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, millions of years evolution, and we're going to just lop off two and a half hours of sleep. He jokingly says I could write a whole book called Sleep youp Way to Skinny. And if you simply just took care of your sleep. What not getting enough sleep does to our insulin response and sensitivity to so many different factors in our lives is huge. He says that might be the biggest shift that our species has gone through is losing so much sleep. So getting your sleep back is key. We know that one of the number one things we can do is to reduce digital stimulation at night. I like to relentlessly say that you need to be committed to actualizing and prioritize that more highly then then your entertainment. If you're blowing yourself up with blue light stimulation via your smartphone, computers, video games, movies, TV shows, whatever you do at night, realize and make the connection between your actualization and that poor trade you're making. Sleep matters a ton. Movement. His big thing there is do something you love to do. You don't need to go nuts, but do be consistent. And that you can't out train a bad diet. Not possible. As we'll talk about in another note soon, where the authors say that exercise is an amazing wellness tool, but it's not principally a weight loss tool. You want to make that connection. Our nutrition is what's going to drive the weight loss. But movement, super important. Sleeping, movement, connecting to others. The research is unequivocal. That's obviously super important. Prioritize that. And then stress. He talks about similar ideas to what we talked about in our notes on the upside of stress by Kelly McGonigal. How you perceive a stress dictates to a large degree, an astonishing degree, how it affects you. If you see stressors in your life as a challenge, right? Calling out the best within you rather than as a threat, and it might destroy you, you're going to have a different physiological response and these things matter. We want to wire ourselves properly. We can talk about that for a whole weekend. But moving on to lotteries, Rob has a great number of sections in the book where he talks about his own personal history, right? And he jokingly says, look, I lost the genetic lottery and the early environment childhood history lottery, right? And now if you were. And I did too, right? I was a super sick kid. He was a super sick kid. I was never breastfed. He was not either. Or for a very limited period of time, I was given formula which is by definition refined, right? Tons of sugar didn't work for me. I had constant chronic ear infections, antibiotics all the time, tonsils removed this. And that just wasn't a healthy kid, right? That destroys your microbiome in your gut. It leads to a lot of different challenges in our lives. And he says, look, if you grew up in the perfect environment, you won the genetic lottery and your parents were super healthy. Their parents were super healthy. All the way back. Super healthy, right? And you did everything that was right in your early childhood development, which all these long lived cultures did, by the way. A lot of people ignore the fact they look at what they ate, but they miss the fact that their parents were healthy, their parents were healthy, their grandparents were healthy, et cetera. They did everything right. They were breastfed, born naturally breastfed, never had sugar, never had flour, never took an antibiotic, and they lived for this long period of time, then we just look at their nutrition and say, well, just do what they do? Well, yeah, if you had exactly that genetic endowment and then that early childhood history, then sure, you can probably get away with doing what they did or use it as an optimal tool. And if you had the perfect upbringing and your health is awesome, then you can probably do that. If not, and if your microbiome has been disrupted via antibiotics and all these other things we've discussed and your insulin levels have been compromised, then you need to pay more attention to the things we're talking about here, the generalized tools and then the specific tools, because you aren't among that cohort that didn't have exposure to all the different things that we had. So anyway, he describes it as losing the genetic lottery. He says he swims in the shallow end of the genetic pool. But the good news is when you recognize your vulnerabilities, you can turn that weakness into a strength. You can turn that poison into medicine again. I was super sick as a kid and that challenged me as a young adult. I'm vulnerable. I have same exact challenges of a disposition to all of the things I don't want to have, which forces me and challenges me to work harder, which then makes me healthier than I would have been had I not had the same challenges. So we want to look at it through that lens and realize it's hard work to figure out what works for us. We don't want to be passive about it. We want to do our best. 2 recognize the pillars of health. It's not just eating. It's moving and sleeping. It's social connections and dealing with stress. We have our two tools, the general and then the specific personalized nutrition. What works for you is different than me. We want to recognize the discordance through theory. There's a mismatch between how we evolved and the hyper palatable environment we have now. Not just food, but everything is hyper stimulating. Your smartphone is giving you constant stimulation and these guys are hacking behind every screen, right? There's a thousand people trying to hack your mind and get you to spend more time there. That's hyper palatable. We want to recognize that and match ourselves to our genetic endowment. And then our final idea was our first idea. It's our final thought here. One size does not fit all. What works for you? That's the ultimate question. That is a quick look at Wired to Eat. Thank you, Rob. Appreciate your hard work and hustle over the years and decades, and I hope that you guys enjoyed what's an idea that jumped out and landed? How can you make it a more applied, integrated part of your life today. Get on that and make today another awesome day. See you.