HS 323 - FBF – Combating Stress and Anxiety Through Nutrition and Neurofeedback with Nora Gedgaudas

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It's my pleasure to welcome Nora Gedgaudis to the show. She is the author of Primal Body, Primal Mind. And we're going to talk about something that we are all faced with in today's world with far, far too many things going on and that is anxiety and nutrition and how they tie into each other from an evolutionary perspective. And think you'll really enjoy this. I heard Nora on another show and thought we've got to get her on the show as well. Nora, welcome. How are you?

Oh, thank you so much, Jason for having me. I'm doing great. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be here.

It's my pleasure as well. Your book, it's got four and a half stars with 82 reviews on Amazon and it just, it's a fascinating subject, it really is. I don't think we were ever built for this type of sensory overload that we have nowadays. Just the number of advertising messages we're bombarded with in one day is equivalent to an entire lifetime of maybe our ancestors just two generations ago. It is mind boggling. And nowadays with email faxes, text messages, Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, wow, how do we deal with all of this? We're just not built for it.

You're right, we're absolutely not built for it. What we're designed for is to be able to function in a calm, relaxed, what we call a parasympathetic state. For 99.9% of the time and maybe 0.1% of the time, the saber toothed tiger jumps out from behind the bush and chases us around. Hopefully if we survive that ordeal, then we get to go back to a place of calm, relaxed functioning again. Nowadays what's happened is this whole thing is flip flopped and now we're all being chased around by saber toothed tigers 24 7. And then the other point one percent of the time, if we're lucky, we get to take a trip to Tahiti. And all that really happens there is we end up stressing out the Tahitians and then, you know, coming back home again to be chased around some more by, you know, by the saber toothed tiger. So this is the way we're living and the implications for this in terms of our health, in terms of our brain function is pretty ominous. This is not what our brains were designed to handle. The primary hormone in the human brain that's designed to handle stress is of course, cortisol. Many people have heard of cortisol. It's an adrenal hormone. The part of the brain that has the richest repository of cortisol receptors are our temporal lobes. The part of your brain that's resting just over the tops of your ears. That's the part of your brain that mitigates stress response. One of the things that that part of your brain is very delicate. It basically is responsible for keeping your brain stable and also kind of modulating your circadian rhythms. Right. Your sleeping and wake states and all of that kind of thing. It's also where the part of the brain that moves short term memories into long term memories. So we need that very important for memory function. Well, what happens when this part of the brain is being marinated in cortisol 24 7?

Right, right. It's sort of like we have the fight or flight response all the time nowadays rather than just occasionally.

Right, right. But here's the really, really troubling implication because cortisol is what, what can be referred to as a catabolic hormone. I promise not to get overly technical on you, but what catabolic means there's catabolic and there's anabolic. Anabolic builds things up, catabolic builds, breaks things down. So what happens when that part of the brain is being marinated so consistently in that type of hormone is that that part of the brain starts to break down. And what radiologists are seeing now that are looking at films of brain scans of relatively young people are temporal lobes that look like Swiss cheese. And they're starting to refer to this as a normal variant of aging. I'm here to tell you there's nothing normal about it, just simply because it is becoming commonplace. And the implications are deep, troubling, because what this implies. Well, one thing that we know, when that part of the brain starts to break down, we lose our ability to mitigate stress response. Our brain goes into a state of overdrive, and now we're riding a horse with no reins. And the other part of the implication is that this is the first part of the brain to break down, the temporal lobes. The hippocampus of the brain is the first part of the brain to break down in brain degeneration diseases like Alzheimer's.

So say that again, though, what you said just a few moments ago about brain looking like Swiss cheese.

What? Yes. Yes, because the brain, the temporal lobes start to degenerate in the. In the. In the presence of that much cortisol.

You know, that's kind of interesting because I read something I don't know a couple of years ago when I had first heard about, like, all these young kids are taking ecstasy, and I heard that it puts holes in one's brain. And I thought, oh, my gosh, that's just scary, scary, scary.

Right. There become these areas of hypoperfusion. The blood flow can't. Can't flow there.

And so the brain tissues, they just die.

Cells start to break, break down and die. Yeah. And, you know, these nmda, you know, receptors, get activated and the brain goes into a chronically excitatory state and starts to break down. And these cells do. These brain cells do. And it. Yes, it's. It's very scary because, you know, past a certain point, you can't get it back.

Wow.

Wow. So one. One thing, you know, to ask yourself if you, you know, a problem for you or not is are you having memory problems? Do you remember things as well as you used to?

Right. But isn't that a normal sign of aging? You know the old saying, well, I'm having a senior moment. Exactly.

And we joke about it because we think it's funny. But it's really no laughing matter.

It's not funny. But my question though, Nora, is how much of that is just normal loss of cognitive function versus how much of it is due to the onset of these incredible amount of stressors we have? I mean, even in the olden days, say we're talking 1700s, for example, where people were still living sometimes a long time, not the average person, but people live to be in their 80s back then and even older, I guess, from now on then, and they would experience memory loss as they age, wouldn't they? Even though they didn't have this?

Not necessarily, no. This is not just because, again, just because it's commonplace does not mean that it's normal. We are supposed to go along just fine as we age. Our brains are not supposed to break down. We're not supposed to lose functionality as we age like that. What's happening is that this is occurring now at an accelerated rate. And of course, it's also occurring in relatively young people. But it's no laughing matter. What this implies is that your brain is degenerating, plain and simple. And there's aspects of this functioning that you might not be able to get back. It's not necessarily impossible to get it back. And one of the things that I do in my work and that I've been involved with now for a good 15 years, and it's something that. Well, my practice in Portland, Oregon, I do a couple of different things. I do something called neurofeedback in addition to the nutritional counseling. And neurofeedback is basically a process by which you gain kind of a functional regulatory control of your of your brain states by essentially learning to exercise your own brainwave activity. And it's a form of biofeedback, only we're dealing directly with the electrical activity in the brain. And I do a form of some form of temporal training with virtually everybody that comes in to help people get that excitatory activity wound down so that their brains have half a chance to recover. Because again, once that part of the brain takes off, it's very hard. It may not wind down on its own. It really may take something like neurofeedback or some really concerted effort to get that part of the brain wound down again. And if you can't get it wound down, then you run the risk of it degenerating again. Any form of loss of function like that at any age is not normal. Just because it may be common does not make it normal. Just like women get hot flashes and they can say, well, that's just normal with women age. No, it's not. It's not supposed to happen that way. It's supposed to, you know, woman stops having her period and that's supposed to be it. It's like, oh, okay, I guess I don't get those anymore. And then you go on to get the kinds of symptoms that women get as they age, as they go through menopause, the hellish time that women go through. That's not normal, folks. That's not supposed to happen. Just because it's common does not make it normal.

Right, right. So one can either, I guess, get out of the rat race and, and go lay on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean or they can. Can they eat? Can they change their nutrition as a way to regain cognitive function? You know, I hear Nora, these commercials on the radio for all sorts of vitamins and things like that. I guess ginkgo biloba. Isn't that a memory aid or something? I don't know. You know, I doubt these claims though. I never know if they're true.

Well, yes, there are some supplements that may be useful to some people, but I don't want to start with. Supplements are just that. They are supplemental to what should be a foundationally effective diet.

Good point.

An optimal diet. And there are dietary factors that have to be addressed long before you run to the health food store to buy supplements. The number one thing that is going to either generate or exacerbate these. Again, we have to consider what stress is. Right. Stress isn't what happens to us, it's how we respond to what happens to us. And absolutely, we see the world through this lens that is our blood sugar stability, our hormones and our neurotransmitters. And if those things are screwed up, then we are going to have unhealthy responses to stress in our lives and it will get the best of us. We really don't have any room for error anymore. This is one of the points that I make in my book, is that we're living in a time and under conditions that our primitive ancestors couldn't have even begun to fathom. We've got stuff going on in our environment now around us, and there have been changes to our food supply to almost literally make it non food, most.

Of it hormones, antibiotics.

Oh, genetically modified organisms.

Yeah. We've done shows on GMOs.

Yeah, good. Yeah. These are important things for people to be aware of and things like mst, which of course has excitatory and neurodegenerative Effects on the brain. And of course, that's in most processed foods. There are a lot of things like that. And, you know, the pollutants in our air and water and all kinds of other things, we can go on and on and on about that. What we have to do is, you know, there's so many things that we have no control over. What I believe we need to do is to take control of what we can. And what we can take control over is what we do put in our mouths. And it's. And it's not just. It's not just about avoiding processed foods, you know, the sort of Frankenfoods that are getting, you know, thrown at us in a prepackaged format. You know, our ancestors wouldn't have even begun to think about getting their meal out of the cardboard box, right? Or crinkle wrap. We need to start going out and purchasing food that looks like food and that would have looked like. Look, if it wouldn't have looked like food to somebody wandering around somewhere between 40,000 to 200,000 years ago with a loincloth and a spear or maybe a pair of mukluks for that matter. It's not food for us now either. And if you start purchasing food that actually looks like food, you're taking a step in the right direction. Of course, it could look like food and be genetically modified, right? Or it could look like food and be from an animal that was fed hormones and antibiotics and fed all kinds of unnatural things that made that animal sick before it actually wound up on your plate.

So do you really have the audacity to say that Chicken McNuggets are not food?

It actually takes audacity to say that.

Yeah.

Well, you know, something should be self evident, unfortunately. I think people get really cynical about all of this stuff because, you know, they hear different things from different people. Well, one day you hear, this is bad for you. Next day, here it's good for you. Heck, I'm just going to eat what I want. You got to die of something anyway. And that sort of cynicism serves no useful purpose. You know, you have to hear what you're saying. And people don't think about. They say, oh, yeah, you got to drop dead as something anyway. Are they really thinking that through? Because you might not. You might just not drop dead. What if you get a stroke? Or what if you get some form of cancer that completely bankrupts you and your family, who has to watch you die a slow, horrible death along the way, and then you get ripped apart by the treatments that are being promoted for that chemo and radiation and whatever else. Is it really not that big a deal?

It is a big deal. No question about it. Exactly.

It needs to be. We need to take this stuff seriously. It's not a joke. It's really not a joke. Doctor.

Well, you know, let's talk about that. So talk about carbohydrates, if you would for a moment. Seems to me, and I know very little about this, but that when one gets stressed out, they crave carbohydrates. Is that true? And if so, why is it the sugar we need to feed our brain or metabolism or what?

Here's the deal. So there are two different forms of fuel. We're told that we need to depend upon sugar as our primary source of fuel, that glucose is what our brain absolutely has to have in order to run, and that we need that for our organs and tissues and whatever else. Well, that is sort of the mainstream, mainstream line on that. But what the real reality of that is from a physiological perspective is that that is only conditionally true. It is only true that we are dependent on glucose as our primary source of fuel if we have unnaturally metabolically adapted ourselves to that dependence. So we're actually designed to run on is ketones is fat, the energy units of fat and free fatty acids, which is a much more abundant and steady source of fuel. Sugar is an extremely volatile source of fuel. It's also quite damaging to us. But if that's all you're giving your body to run on, then your body kind of adapts to that and it learns to expect it. I talk about it a little bit from this perspective to help people understand a little better what I'm talking about. Of course I'm from Minnesota, where it gets a little bit cold this time of year. Originally I'm from Minnesota. Anyway, I don't live there. Now, wood stove analogies work well for me when we're talking about the kind of fuel that we run our metabolic fires on. If you were just talking about these nutrients strictly from the energy that they provide us with. Sugar is basically the equivalent of kindling. And your so called complex carbohydrates, your whole grains, your beans, your rice, things like that, your legumes, those are basically the equivalent of twigs on that metabolic fire. Now your white rice and potatoes and pasta and bread and junk like that are basically the equivalent of throwing paper on that metabolic fire. Alcohol is like throwing gasoline on that metabolic fire. Now if you had to heat your house using that wood stove with nothing but Kindling. Well, you could do it. You could do it. You could sit there, but you would.

Well, that's what they did. A funny thing. I'll just tie it in with economics for a moment. That's exactly what they did in the Weimar Republic, Germany, in those inflationary times. They found that it was more efficient to burn the Weimar marks, the currency in the fireplace, than it was to actually go out and trade that currency for wood because it was so worthless. But I have a feeling you're going to say that protein is the wood, right? That is the sustainable thing. Okay, okay.

No, it's not protein.

Okay. Veggies.

What? No, no, no. Well, so again, if you're, if you're depending on that kindling, you're basically, you're a slave to that wood stove. You're going to be constantly preoccupied with where that next handful of fuel is coming from and you'll be spending all day and God forbid you should go and take, you know, run an errand or do something else, or God forbid you should try to sleep. And yes, there is a correlation here. And then you come back and oh my God, the fire is going out. And then you cram it full of paper again, right, to try to get it going, or you squirt some lighter fluid on there to try to get it going again. This is how people live their lives. And by the way, who do you think profits when we're dependent on that kindling? Anybody who happens to be in the food industry business. You have the food industry, you have big agribusiness, and of course the petroleum. Petroleum industry.

I was going to say Monsanto. Profits for sure.

Well, yeah, yeah, the M word, yes. I mean, but, but it goes so far beyond that. I mean, it's so far beyond that. The pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry. Because when you have people depending on carbohydrates, their primary source of fuel, you also have people who end up becoming metabolically deranged as a result of this. This is, this is something that has far ranging implications for your entire hormonal system. What is the alternative to this? What if instead of using kindling all day long, suddenly now you have a nice big fat log you can throw on that fire? Dietary fat is actually the fuel that we are designed to run on. This is why we're not able to store more than maybe 2,000 calories of glucose in our bodies at any given time in the form of glycogen in our livers and in our muscles. That's not a lot. That's like A day's worth of energy at best. Most people are not more than who are depending on carbohydrates for their primary source of fuel, which is better than 90% of our population. Most people are not more than about two meals away from a state of total chaos. Two missed meals away from a state of total chaos, because you've got to keep replenishing if you're going to be running on that kind of fuel. But dietary fat is actually. We're Ice Age beings. We're creatures of the Ice Age. Fat, to us means survival. The one macronutrient of the three macronutrients, proteins, fats and carbohydrates that our hypothalamus is attuned to is fat. Not protein, not carbohydrates, but fat. The hormone leptin, which is maybe the single most important hormone in the entire human body, is actually, at base, a fat sensor. It is trying to decide whether or not hunting is good. That's what tells us whether hunting is good or not. And so when we consume sufficient fat, of course, even the slender person listening to this show probably has enough body fat stored somewhere to be able to, if you absolutely had to, you could live for close to a month. I'm not saying you'd be happy to do that, or that it would be easy or fun or that you should consider that, but it could be possible. And the more efficiently you're able to make use of fat, in other words, the closer you keep those logs to the fire, the easier it is to keep that fire going with a minimum of effort. And if you're able to metabolically convert yourself to a dependence on dietary fat rather than sugar as your primary source of fuel, now all of a sudden, you're free. You throw the log on the fire and you can go off and live your life. And suddenly you're not preoccupied with where that next handful of fuel is coming from. You don't crave things anymore. You don't have big ups and downs. And by the way, if you are metabolically adapted to that carbohydrate, bringing back to the topic at hand, and your blood sugar gets low, that's a state of crisis, because that's what your brain is expecting.

Okay, so just to simplify, because there's a lot in there that you've been saying, I want to make sure people hear that one thing and just come back to that one key thing, which is how do you end the cravings and the rollercoaster dieting and blood sugar and so forth? How do you do that?

You've got to get away from the sugar and starch in your diets to the extent that is possible.

And replace it with what?

Eat a moderate amount of protein and make sure that some of that protein is coming from animal sourced foods, because that's complete protein. All of the essential amino acids are there and in those types of proteins you don't have starches coupled with them so that you're getting an efficient source of protein. And make sure you eat enough fat to satisfy your appetite. And you can eat as many fibrous vegetables and greens as you want in order to, because there are antioxidants and phytonutrients there that I think are more important to us now than they ever even used to be.

Okay, but hang on a second. So the animal protein is the highest quality protein. What does that say for the vegans, the vegetarians?

It's a problem. It is a very serious problem.

It seems to be a problem because I tried that for a while and I didn't feel so bad.

So did I. Yeah, no, no, again, we're not, we don't have, I think.

We'Re meant to be omnivores, aren't we?

We don't have the digestive tract of an herbivore. I don't know about you, I don't have four stomachs. I don't know anybody who has four stomachs. The animals that are designed to make use of a carbohydrate based diet, what are they doing all day long? Their faces are in the bushes, they're on the ground, they're eating constantly and they're designed physiologically to handle that kind of a diet. But they have a bacterial based digestion that is working on that stuff all day long to help them meet those metabolic and caloric needs. The irony is that where a cow actually gets its calories isn't carbohydrates. Even a cow isn't dependent because what's actually happening is the bacteria are actually transforming, transforming that carbohydrate based food into saturated fat, butyric acid. That's where cow gets. Over 70% of its caloric intake is actually coming from fat. But we are not designed to make that conversion so efficiently. We're just not for us. We need to get those things more directly and we need to be getting our fats from a variety of natural sources. Animal fat would be, would be one of the things, certainly. But the thing is that people hear the word fat and they panic. Fat is not one thing Fat is many things where I will say that there are two or three instances where fat is a very bad thing. Artificial fats that come from test tubes, in other words, hydrogenated oils. Trans fats are the fats that we all need to be avoiding at all costs. I'm here to tell you that even some products that say trans fat free have trans fats in them. Them you have to look very closely at the label. Anywhere you see soybean oil or canola oil, I'm here to tell you that all commercial soybean oil, all commercial canola oiland by the way, these are vegetable oils people don't realize are partially hydrogenated as part of their deodorization process. That's not on the label necessarily. You're getting trans fats if you're consuming those foods. Right now, the number one source of fat calories in the American diet is hydrogenated soybean oil. Oil. It's in all the processed foods and it's in fast food. So those are the first things we have to get out of there. Then also the highly processed vegetable oils, your safflower oil, your corn oil, your canolas, of course, and soybean I just mentioned. But most of the processed vegetable oils that people are used to cooking with, our ancestors would never have thought to take a sunflower seed and mash it down to squeeze the oil out of it so they could fry up their woolly mammoth steaks. That's not what they did. If they found a seed, they ate the whole thing. When you remove the oil from the seed, what you do is you create something that's very unstable. And these oils are really, really prone to going rancid in a heartbeat. They go rancid very, very, very easily. They're also very high in a form of fat called omega 6. We need a little omega 6, but it's not hard to get. But these oils, the vegetable oils, are so dominated by them. And what Omega 6s do in your body is they make inflammatory compounds. If you want to suffer in a state of chronic inflammation, then eat all the vegetable you want. But it's a problem.

Right, okay. So would it be fair to say, you know, I want to just try and make this as clear and simple for listeners. First of all, would it be fair to say that. Are you a believer in the Paleo diet?

Yes, I believe that that is an important starting place. And of course, my book, the subtitle of my book is beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life. Because I Think we have to take some steps beyond that. And I talk about why in my book.

And what is the paleo diet? Just in a sentence, what the paleo.

Diet basically is, is a diet that looks at what the evolutionary history of the human diet has been. How have we been eating as a species for close to 3 million years? What are the dietary principles?

It's more meat oriented, isn't it?

Well, basically, what is true about us, that 99.99% genetically, we are all hunter gatherers. This is how we evolve.

More than agricultural agriculture only came about. Agriculture is 5,000 years ago.

Well, you know, we started 10,000 years ago. Areas in Europe didn't adopt it for until maybe a couple thousand years ago. And there are some people groups, you know, more native people groups that it's only a couple hundred years old for them. And so yes, this is something that is. Agriculture is very new to the human species. Grains and legumes, folks, are new foods to us and we are not designed to consume them. They contain antinutrients, nutrients that certain compounds that, that had extremely detrimental effects on the functioning of our bodies and on the functioning of our brains. Nobody wandering the earth anywhere has any such thing as a grain deficiency. There is no such thing. And right now, gluten sensitivity is literally a pandemic. And what is a pandemic? Right alongside it are autoimmune disorders. And I'm telling you, those are going to be exploding in the air.

Where is the gluten sensitivity thing coming from?

Well, we know that gluten is either going to generate or it's going to exacerbate autoimmune processes. And one of the things that, of course, gluten is a protein that is found in many grains and it's very large, very difficult to digest molecule. And one of the effects that it has on the human body is it stimulates an enzyme in the human body called zonulin. Now, I know that sounds like something from a Star Trek movie.

It does. Zonulin.

It really does.

Is that something the Romulans? Watch out.

We're being attacked by the zonulin. But zonulin basically controls intestinal permeability. It also controls blood brain barrier permeability. What happens when we produce this enzyme is it opens up these normally very tight channels, these normally very tightly controlled channels that are very selective about what they take into your bloodstream and what they don't, it just opens them wide open so that now anything can get through. And when you have poorly, maybe digested peptides, and things like that slipping into your bloodstream. Your immune system goes on high alert and says, wait a second, this stuff, this isn't on the list of, okay, things that are coming through. And therefore, this is an unrecognized invader and we need to tag this thing and we need to destroy it. And so your immune system goes on hyper alert. Part of what that results in is inflammation, and part of what this also results in is the production of antibodies. This is where many people have. You know, you hear about people who have multiple food sensitivities. I would say probably most of your audience has food sensitivities that they are unaware that they even have.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of amazing because I'll tell you, Nora, when I was a kid, I never heard about all this stuff. Gluten and, you know, all this stuff is like a new thing. I never heard of anybody with a peanut allergy.

Right. Allergies and sensitivities are actually two different things. It's two different types of immune reactions. With an allergy, there's also the risk of anaphylactic shock, and that's where you're being rushed to the hospital and all that kind of a thing. Sensitivities have more of a delayed response and have different types of immunologic response. Actually, for some people, it may be quite immediate. They may notice they suddenly have brain fog or that they suddenly feel inflammation, or that they're getting aches and pains in their joints, or they may have digestive distur, or they may suddenly get a migraine, that kind of thing. So it can affect you all the way from your hair follicles down to your toenails. But I'll tell you, for instance, with respect to gluten sensitivity, 73% of celiac patients, and by the way, no more than 1% of everybody walking around with either celiac disease or gluten sensitivity.

What is celiac disease?

Celiac disease is a form of gluten sensitivity that it's actually identified by the genetic markers that get activated for it. And it tends to be a direct reaction to alpha. Well, they look usually at just alpha gliadin, but it could be alpha, beta, omega, or delta gliadin. What it tends to result in is the erosion of these little finger like projections in your small intestine called villi that absorb your nutrients. Only when then those little finger like projections that look like shag carpeting in the inside of your small intestine, when those get worn down to Berber, that's when you are diagnosable with celiac. If they're only partially worn down, your doctor says, oh, you're fine. Go home, have some bread. So this is another problem is the standard of diagnosis with these things needs to be revisited because most people are not diagnosed with autoimmune disorders until so much destruction has occurred to the tissue. Use that now that there's no choice but to give it a label and give them a diagnosis. But many people are walking around with autoimmune processes that are unaware of the fact that their bodies are actually attacking themselves. And these things can result in everything from dementia to not just gastrointestinal problems, but joint degeneration. These things can result in every manner of disease process, including things like, for instance, a very high percentage of people with, for instance, bipolar disorder or depression have antibodies against their own serotonin. Parkinson's patients are producing antibodies against their own dopamine.

Okay, so that's a common one. Can people actually cheer themselves up or overcome depression with food and nutrition?

I believe that that is an essential place to start, and I think you can cover a lot of ground with that. Look, 73% of celiac patients have clinically diagnosed trait anxiety disorder, and 63% of them have clin diagnosed depression. That's right out of the American Journal of Medicine that has stated that celiac disease is just the tip of the gluten sensitivity iceberg. This gluten sensitivity is not a benign thing. It's a lethal thing because there is no human dietary requirement for carbohydrates, actually of any kind. We can make all the glucose that we need from a combination of protein and fat in the diet. It we can manufacture all of it, every single molecule of glucose that we need for running our brain, for running our organs. Actually, the only tissue in the human body that has to have glucose all the time as its primary source of fuel are our red blood cells. They feed anaerobically in order to preserve their precious cargo, which is oxygen.

What do you say about. I mean, something like 70% of the planet lives on a base diet of rice.

Yes, that's right. And they become dependent then, don't they, on kindling? I mean, again, you kind of have to recognize that this, if you want to, you can manage your blood sugar, you can do that. You can sit in front of that wood stove and you can throw handfuls of things in all day long if you want. That is an option. And that's basically. This is the reason why most mainstream nutritionists will say Always eat a big breakfast, eat every two hours, don't skip meals. Right, because you're having to manage that blood sugar. Well, I have better things to do with my time. I would rather that for me, I would rather remove blood sugar from my mood and cognitive equation altogether. Now I don't have to worry about what my blood sugar is doing ever. Because I'm not dependent personally on blood sugar for my primary source of fuel. I've metabolically adapted my body to a dependence on ketones, ketones and free fatty acids to run my metabolic stove. And as such, I eat a lot less. So I actually get fewer calories in the course of a day. And my moods and my energy remain stable throughout the day. I don't have to worry about if I happen to skip a meal, I might get hungry, but I'm not going to get a funky mood. I'm not going to have snakes start growing out of my hair. I'm not going to become irritable or brain fog or shaky the way some people do. The way you know whether or not you have a blood sugar problem. Okay, whether this is really an issue for you, ask yourself, how do you feel before you eat? Are you tired? Are you really fatigued? Are you crabby? Are you shaky? Are you really reactive to things? And also ask yourself, how do you feel after you eat? Are you more energized or are you more fatigued and tired?

Should people have that dip after they eat?

If you answer yes to any of what I just said, you have a problem. That's not the way it's supposed to be.

So I just want to clarify though, Nora, There should be no loss of energy due to digestion after eating immediately after. The common thing is the afternoon laziness after lunch for the next hour or two, people get tired after lunch. Shouldn't happen.

That's not normal. That's not supposed to happen. You know how you're supposed to feel before you eat. If anything, hungry. You know how you're supposed to feel after you eat. Not hungry. That's what's normal. Your energy is supposed to run pretty evenly. There shouldn't be this roller coaster ride. You're only having a roller coaster ride if you are metabolically adapted to sugar as that primary source of fuel. And I'm here to tell you sugar is very, very volatile. Again, sugar has a lot of damaging effects in your body. It attracts a lot of free radical activity to your tissues and to your bloodstream. Your body is pretty much obsessed with maintaining the lowest amount of blood Sugar necessary at any given time. When you eat a meal that has a lot of carbs in it and you spike your blood sugar up, that's an emergency because it's doing a lot of damage. Your body produces insulin, which by the way is not supposed to be a blood sugar hormone, but it acts by default that way. It grabs that sugar and it, it tries to drive it into your cells, it drives it out of your bloodstream and tries to drive it into your cells to the extent that it can and whatever it can't, that then it converts to triglycerides in your liver and then converts to body fat. That's where most body fat, unwanted body fat, comes from are these dietary carbohydrates. It's not fat that makes us fat. It's usually carbohydrates that make us fat. Then now your blood sugar drops down really low. Well, if you're dependent on that sugar, that's an emergency. And guess how your body, your body gets that sugar back up again. Your adrenals fire. You produce adrenaline. Adrenaline drives the sugar back up because it thinks you're being chased by a saber toothed tiger, right? This is a crisis, this is an emergency. What is that associated with feelings of fight or flight? If you have chronic anxiety, I promise you, you need to take a good hard look at what's happening with your blood sugar because that is a very, very powerful influencing factor. It is the first thing to get under control because you're on this roller coaster ride all day long that is going to put you in a very. The other thing that happens with blood sugar surges is this also stimulates with surges of insulin and leptin. Sympathetic overarousal, again, sympathetic over arousal is fight or flight. It also generates inflammation and inflammation is a stress response. So that stress response is basically creating more anxiety. And so it's a vicious, vicious cycle.

We'll be back in just a minute.

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I heard someone say once that basically what everybody dies of is inflammation, right?

Absolutely. Inflammatory disorders right now are. Most of the disease processes we look at have inflammation as a base issue. And if we look at the things that dietarily, that chronically generate inflammation, what are we looking at? We are looking at carbohydrate based diets. We are looking at things like artificial, like trans fats. We're also looking at these omega 6 vegetable oils which generate inflammatory compounds in the body. We're looking at food sensitivity issues, use, which is epidemic. It's absolutely pandemic, as is autoimmune. We're going to be hearing more and more about autoimmune in the years to come. The field of immunology now is just exploding with literature and it's deeply disturbing because we realize the extent to which these inflammatory compounds are hidden in our food supply. And we're being told by the U.S. department of Agriculture to make some of these foods of the foundation of our diets.

You know, I want to ask you about that with the food stuff and just, I'll call it the debasement of our food supply in so many ways. It's just, I mean if you watch Food Inc. King Corn, any of these documentaries, you read Diet for New America, which again, I kind of don't agree with that now, but I used to years ago, you just realize that the food supply is being so centralized the government and I have to say, oddly enough the seemingly worst offender has been the Obama admin. Is centralizing, controlling and passing laws against people growing their own food. And it's so hypocritical with Michelle Obama setting up a garden in the White House. It's just complete, it's a complete hypocrisy.

But I totally agree with you.

But you know, are they just doing this out of, for economic purposes? Is it just because it's cheaper to make the food and, and that kind of stuff or is it a more ominous and evil motive?

Well, basically this has nothing to do with politics in any way, shape or form. And this is basically this is American, isn't. It's not a democracy, it's not a republic, it's a corporatocracy.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's a form of feudalism or fascism combined with socialism.

Agree. And this is true. You know, it doesn't matter who ends up in the major political offices. This isn't about.

There are two sides.

It wasn't about Bush basically getting the same policies, no matter who's in office. And this has been a progression over the last several presidential administrations to the state that we're in now, you know, and what we're seeing is this. Part of what we're seeing too is this really. And it's heartening to see this new spark of consciousness and sort of recognition of our own collective power. This sort of Occupy movement that's starting to sparkle all over the place.

That's great. I don't agree with everything, but I think that the fact that they're creating awareness is great.

I have an article about that actually on my blog right now at primalbody-primalmind.com people might want to go take a look at it. But basically I'm here to say that there's nothing in this world that is more important than owning and occupying your own body and mind and your own food supply. Because without our health, we have absolutely nothing and we can never possibly be free. We're completely vulnerable and completely malleable. And yes, the ultimate tyranny is the deterioration of our food supply in the name of profit. And this is what has happened. So what we need to do is go out of our way to find food that is unadulterated food. People think of meat as being, you know, animal food as being an unhealthy thing. The health of the meat that you eat is directly correlated to the health of the animal that meat came from. Go out and make sure that you are getting your meat from exclusively 100% grass fed, pasture fed sources. Look for pastured poultry, look for pastured eggs. And what you might have to do is not go to the grocery store. What I actually recommend you do is go to the stores and demand that that's what you want. You let them know that that's what you're going to spend your money on and you let them know what you're not going to spend your money.

But then you never know if you can believe it anyway, the labels, you know.

Well, right, so which what I recommend that people do is develop as much as possible a firsthand knowing of where your food comes from. Go to the farmers markets, get to know the farmers, go to the farms, look into the eyes of the animals that might end up on your dinner plate and look at how they're being raised, how they're being treated, what they're being fed so that, you know, either grow your own food or get your produce from locally grown sources. As much as possible, go to farmers markets like I say, or grow your own if you're able to do that. Some of this may end up boiling down to civil disobedience. I mean there are people that are, are now creating these private co ops all over the country where you know, they are following these principles and going directly to the farmers and then developing these supplies and they have like food buying clubs and things like that with friends and family.

Well, and you know I've done shows on that. Actually Nora, it's interesting you bring that up because the government is trying to shut those down so that they're not forced to get illegal.

Of course they're not, because they're competing with corporate interests.

They're trying to keep us in the corporatocracy and force us to eat this crappy corporatized food.

I totally agree with you. And this is where it basically this is where we have, this is where we need to be putting the Occupy energy folks. Because if they get us, if they get our health, they get you. If your health is suffering, what do you care about what the banksters are doing if you're in the middle of a health crisis?

It's all tied together because they say the average chemotherapy patient is worth half a million dollars.

I was going to say the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country right now is a health care crisis. So this is where we have to start. We have to occupy our food. This is where it has to begin. And you just have to start. Nobody's going to fix this for you. Nobody will ever care more about your health and well being than you. You have to start understanding that you are responsible at base for your own health and well being. And that means you're going to have to go out of your way. I'm sorry it's not easier than it is. I'm not being extreme in telling you to go out and go to all the trouble to find these food sources. But the extreme isn't, isn't what I'm telling you. The extreme is in the marketplace. Extreme is in what we're being forced to accept as food when it isn't even close to being food. And so you have to go and figure this out. And it may take people becoming basically taking on a state of civil disobedience in order to make what needs to happen happen. But you know, you've got to, you've got to basically take your health by storm.

Yeah, well, one, one, one last concept I want to just ask you about. And I have thought this for maybe seven, eight years and that is the concept. I noticed there's a chapter. So I have a feeling you're gonna agree with me on this in your book on adrenal exhaustion. And for a long time I have thought about the caffeine culture and caffeine not being that bad because coffee, I don't know, I think coffee is actually good for you. But maybe you'll disagree with me there in moderation, of course. But, but it's the, it's the whole thing of these energy drinks. And I just think these, these especially young people that consume those in mass are going to find 10 years from now that their adrenal glands just don't work anymore. They're just blowing them out.

Well, here's, here's the thing that, you know, we were presented with this whole adrenal model of things by Hans Selye back in, you know, the 1950s. And you know, he was, he was a great researcher and he presented this whole model of progressive adrenal exhaustion. Whatever. Well, guess what? There's a little bit of a myth associated with that that's not really accepted anymore in the literature. Adrenals are just a factory. What regulates our adrenals and what people call adrenal exhaustion isn't our glands 90% of the time. It's not a gland problem. It is a brain problem. There are different areas of the brain, brain that control and mitigate our adrenal response. Those temporal lobes we talked about at the beginning of the show, that's what controls our adrenal rhythms. If that part of your brain is damaged, then those rhythms are running amok. And you're waking up at 3 o' clock in the morning and you can't go back to sleep. And then 4:00 clock in the afternoon, you crash and you can't get your energy back.

Yeah, it ruins the circadian rhythm.

Those circadian rhythms are controlled not by your adrenaline adrenals, but by the temporal hippocampus of your brain. Also. The amount of cortisol you produce is largely controlled by your hypothalamus. In your brain, there's something called the HPA axis, right? Hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. And the amount of cortisol that you produce is totally controlled by those signals. Those signals can be dampened by things like inflammation. If you have chronic inflammation, you're going to, going to haveyour energy levels are going to be in the toilet because your hypothalamus gets dampened and can't produce, doesn't give proper Signals to cortisol. And so you're going to feel fatigued and out of it and like you can't get anywhere. And that may be due to inflammation. Could be due to many, many different things. Chronic infections, lots of people. One of the things I do in my work is I do look at functional blood chemistry panels in people. And one of the things I'm seeing that seems like absolutely epidemic is immun depression. People have really depressed white blood cell counts now and they're suffering from chronic infections of all different kinds, viral, bacterial, parasitic. And you have that kind of thing going on. You're inflamed all the time and you have no energy. So that's not adrenal exhaustion. That's not exhaustion. That is your adrenals not getting the right messages or getting messages, I should say, that are suppressing you instead of enhancing your energy levels. There's also this midbrain, this sort of mesentery midbrain that we have that is a very, very primitive part of our brain. That part of your brain is all about survival. That's the part of our brain that produces the brain's version of adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine. It also has the richest repository of inflammatory receptors. It's the most prone to inflammation. Basically when you get emotional shocks and things like that to your system, that's the part of the brain that becomes overactivated. What that part of the brain controls is the amplitude of your stress response. That's not adrenal stuff, that's brain stuff. Our brains are really at core, the thing that we need to manage. The things that are very important for the brain are dealing with those blood sugar issues. I prefer eliminating blood sugar from my mood and cognitive equation. Our brains are made up of more than 80% or roughly 80% fat. We're fat heads, folks. And your brain needs fat in order to function and it needs fat from a variety of sources. Half of the fat content in your brain is actually made up of saturated fat. And that's very important. It needs to be there because it's inherently resistant to oxidation. It helps protect the more delicate polyunsaturated fats like Omega 3s in your brain.

You've mentioned the fat thing several times. Where do we get the good fat?

Good fat comes from natural sources. Good fat comes from naturally raised grass fed meats. And so animal fats, yes, are very important. And they make. Omega 3s are a form of animal fat.

Okay, so high quality animal fat.

Right. And wild caught fish, extra virgin Organic cold pressed olive oil, that's fine because that's actually relatively stable. Coconut oil is wonderful. That's a great way too to kick start the whole ketogenic process, because coconut oil actually converts to ketones very, very quickly. You can start burning ketones very quickly by using coconut oil. It's also very, very stable. So you can cook with it much more safely than you can any vegetable oil. I never cook with olive oil by, I only use it as a flavoring olive oil.

That's what I've heard. I heard olive oil, I used to cook with it, but it turns out.

It comes very quickly. Dried fats are another very, very bad fat. You don't want to overcook fats. Nuts and seeds are another wonderful source of fats. Avocado are a wonderful source of healthy fat. Olives, things like that. There are many great natural sources of fat. And fat is made up of many, many different compounds that have many different roles to play in your body. The kind of that you make from carbohydrates is basically palmitic acids, one type of fat. And it's what you store in a way that you would rather not have. But when you consume fat, fat has so many roles to play. And by the way, fully a fourth of your body's cholesterol, 25% of all the cholesterol in the human body is actually in the brain. And it gosh darn well better be. Because we need cholesterol for health, healthy, natural brain function. And if you have cholesterol levels that are too low, you run the risk of cognitive dysfunction in addition to the risk of cancers and many different immune compromises. Because you need cholesterol for healthy immune functioning. You need it to make your hormones, you need it for proper neurotransmitter functioning. It plays so, so many important roles. And so don't be afraid of these dietary sources of fat and cholesterol. We've been consuming them, folks, for nearly 3 million years. They didn't all of a sudden become problematic to us. Many of the so called diseases of modern civilization have only become problematic in the last hundred years or so. It's not like animal fat suddenly became going concern in terms of creating disease for us. Unless of course you're talking about the kind of animal fat that comes from animals that have been fed nothing but grains which are not natural to them, and shoved full of hormones and antibiotics and gum wrappers and cement dust and all that. The other crap that they feed, feed a lot of animals. I give no argument to the person that says that kind of meat is unhealthy, it's not food, it's just not. And so what we need to do is understand the way we evolved and apply those principles to the way we feed ourselves now. That way of eating for nearly 3 million years is what established our physiological and nutritional requirements. And the more we're able to meet those needs by applying those principles, the better off we are. It's a foundational place to start. I also talk in my book about how you can kind of go beyond that and apply some new discoveries in science and in human longevity research to actually take those principles and make them even more effective so that you can live a longer, healthier life than even would have been possible for our ancestors. It's very, very expensive, exciting information. And the really, really cool thing is that this is affordable by virtually everybody. There's a myth that we have to, that somehow in order to eat well means you have to be wealthy. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's an ebook available through my website. I didn't write it, but I actually somebody wrote it who sort of basing many of the principles on my book. And what they do is they show how you can make this way of eating almost 100% affordable by virtually anybody. I don't care what your economic problem is, if you're on food stamps or what. This is affordable by everybody. And one of the things that she did in the book was she created a week's worth of menus based on the standard American diet, what people typically do, their hamburger helpers and their fast food and all that kind of thing. And she broke it down to the last penny. What you spend on these different meals, created a week's worth of meals and then put the cost next to each meal. Then she went and she took a week's worth, created a week's worth of meals based on the principles in my. And it was not only was it cheaper to eat the way I'm advocating, and we're talking about 100% grass fed, totally organic food. Right. That everybody thinks is so expensive, but it was not only cheaper, but it was literally roughly $1,500 per person per year cheaper. Can you imagine what this could save a family?

Sure, sure. Yeah. You could buy a couple rental properties, you know, with, with that extra money every four years or so, maybe.

Yes. If you go to the resources page on my website, you can find that book, it's called Primal Title wad. And you can click on, you can click on that link It'll show you how to, how to purchase that book.

Fantastic.

It's amazing. It's brilliant.

That's great. Well, Nora, this has been very, very, very interesting. Tell people, give out your website one more time and, and, you know, maybe tell them where they should buy the book and so forth.

Yes, my website is www.primalbody-primalmind.com. i encourage everybody to go there, sign up for the newsletter. I'm going to be creating a member site, by the way, in the near future, too, where I'll be doing podcasts where people will get a little bit better access to me. And I'm also going to be releasing a workbook soon that is like a quick start guide to Primal Health that will help people kind of handhold them a little bit more toward making some good dietary changes for themselves. The other thing is that my book right now has its own display at all the Barnes and Noble stores around the country and they're offering my book at a 20% discount. You can also buy my book through my website and I encourage people to do that. That helps me out a little bit. But any way you do it, it's available, of course, on Amazon and all the bookstores.

So fantastic. Well, excellent. Well, Nora, thank you so much for joining us today. This is a huge topic. The book has numerous entries in its table of contexts as well as appendices. So a lot of data there and it is very, very scientific. So thank you again for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so, so very much for having me. This has been totally great. Great.

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