LS 62 - More of Fernando's Journey and the Quantified Self

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Hey. I want to welcome Fernando back to the show for his second visit as we talk about his journey from an unhealthy lifestyle to a healthy lifestyle and what he did last time we left off at the end of 2013. We want to get into what happened to him on the journey in 2014, 15, and now 2016, and talk a little bit about quantified self and the bulletproof diet and bulletproof coffee and Dave Asprey in that area. So, Fernando, welcome back. How are you?

I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me back.

My pleasure, my pleasure. So your journey continued and it continues today. Tell us more.

Well, we discussed how the 2013 was a significant year in my journey where we had gone through the period of learning how to really change our lifestyles and how we approach foods. And we talked about the period where we did the raw vegan diet that last several months. And that was, again, a very important period because it allowed, in retrospect, for us to rebuild a healthy gut biome, which really determines a lot of your health. But as we were in this period for several months, we noticed that we were not eating enough healthy fats and really not eating enough calories. And our whole family was going through the raw vegan period, and we were still losing weight. I still had weight to lose, so it was not a problem. But, you know, for my wife, which was not as heavy as I was, it was becoming an issue. And for our kids, especially, as they were growing, we noticed that that wasn't as balanced as it should be, you know, especially for the long term. So we added more meats, fats, and, you know, good fats and carbohydrates to the diet in general to try to balance things out.

So you hadn't discovered the bulletproof concept yet, right?

No, that happened later on as 2014 started. There was some new learning, some adjustments that we went through. In the beginning of the year, I was still working for Apple doing chip design at Apple, and Apple has a very thorough medical exam that employees can take every year. And I used to take those exams every year. And they do a good job of testing all of your markers, blood markers. And what I noticed in 2014 is my sugar levels were still high after one year on this raw vegan diet, mostly a clean diet. And what I realized is, in reality, we are still eating plenty of sugar. You know, sugar is really the bad guy or the baddest guy in this story. And what we were doing is really having too many fruit smoothies and juices and dry fruits. You know, we. We were not having desserts that had added sugar, you know, but we were still having plenty of sugar in other ways. We replaced eating cereals in the morning, but three, four times a week. We were having smoothies with lots of fruits. My vitamin D levels were too low also. Actually, this was true for the whole family, so it wasn't as healthy as it could be. Interesting. That same year, we traveled to Brazil. I'm originally from Brazil, as you know, and we were there for about six weeks. And we noticed that our diets got really screwed up. You know, it's easier control and have a healthy diet when you're at home, but when you're traveling, as you know, you travel quite a bit. It's hard to maintain the same quality level. And we got exposed to MSG that was embedded in foods from restaurants. In lots of GMOs, it was difficult to find organic fruits and vegetables. Those industrial meats were the norm. Gluten, you name it. You know, the diet was not very good. We did get plenty of vitamin D. We were, at the time, we were renting a house very close to a beach. So that was a pl. But the diet in general was not good. So we came back from Brazil and we decided that we needed to do a small detox again to kind of reset and get back to where we were prior to the trip. So we did vegetable juicing for a few days. We didn't do a liquid diet like we did before. And we also decided to quit buying any food with gluten for our house. We had not made that decision before. I noticed the effects of gluten after being off of it for several weeks and then eating a few pieces of bread, for example, and you feel totally bloated. I mean, it is amazing. If you do this experiment, gluten is this protein with very tight bonds between the amino acids that make up gluten. And it's very difficult for our digestive system to break it down. It creates what they call leaky gut syndrome. And obviously People with celiac disease have a big issue with this because it leads to inflammation and an autoimmune response from the body.

Yeah, you know, celiac disease is a. That's a tough one. But is gluten bad for everybody, regardless of whether you have celiacs?

Well, you know, it's certainly not good. It has a. A range of badness to different people and how much they react. And it's not something. If you look at the natural human diet. There's a movie, by the way, that I want to mention I watched not long ago. It's called the Perfect Human Diet, and it was made in 2012 by C.J. hutt. He's a journalist, and he did a beautiful job in this movie where, you know, he tried to stay away from the groupthink, you know, dietary fad diet concept, and instead he wanted to explore the modern dietary science through historical findings, you know, ancestral native diets, and look at the human evolution, you know, how diets evolved throughout, you know, millions of years. And attempting to review the authentic human diet. And certainly gluten was not part of it. Our body has been exposed to gluten for a long time, but when you look at it from a truly historical perspective of how long our species has been in the planet, it hasn't been that long. Maybe thousands or years or millions of years from now, we'll be adapted to breaking down the bonds between the amino acids and gluten, and there won't be an issue. But until then, it is an issue. And many people have a lot of vision and don't show symptoms until it's too late.

Yeah. Continue with the journey.

So in 2015, you actually mentioned to me this weird coffee that was blended with butter, MCT oil. MCT stands for medium chain triglycerides, and it's made out of coconut.

Yeah. Which is what you find in coconut. Yeah. Put the butter, the MCT oil, and the coffee. And some guys made an absolute bloody fortune off of that idea.

Exactly.

But. But it's really not. I don't know if it's actually his idea. You know, there are a lot of either copycats or maybe they're the originators before Asprey did it. I'm not sure.

Dave Asprey does mention in his podcast, the Bulletproof Executive Radio, that he was seeing the Himalayans when he noticed that the natives were drinking coffee with butter. He dove into it and try to find out what happens when you mix the caffeine with the butyric acid, which is really where the butter Name comes from butter is actually a short chain triglycerides. And what that means is that both the short and also up to the medium is that your liver process that very quickly, it breaks it down and it sends these ketone bodies to your brain. Your brain really benefits from these ketone bodies and make the synapses connections in your brain healthier and gives you more energy, allows you to burn fat more efficiently. So the combination of butter and MCT and coffee has a science behind it that really has profound differences in people's bodies. I remember you telling me about it, I tried it and I found it a bit unnatural to essentially drink butter. Of course, I've eaten butter and I eat butter with food, but to drink it was not very pleasant. I didn't like it at first. You tried it as well, right?

I've had it a zillion times. It doesn't taste very good, that's for sure. But it's interesting. I mean, what is the point in your mind of having bulletproof coffee? I mean, you know, in mixing your coffee, this, what does it do for you?

There's a whole science and lifestyle behind how to produce these ketones and be in what we call a mild ketogenic state, which essentially allows your body to burn more fat. You can have more clarity because these ketones go, you know, your, your brain benefits from heavy ketones, can essentially lose weight by having lots of these fats in your body. It goes together with other protocols that I use. One of them is called the intermittent training, intermittent fasting protocol that, that I learned through bulletproof. And you know, essentially I follow the protocol of drinking the bulletproof coffee in the morning and then having lunch, you know, at a normal time. So essentially I will eat dinner the night before and you know, around 7 o' clock or so, and then I won't eat until, you know, 17 hours later or more, which essentially will create this intermittent fasting. And then there's a lot of benefits for intermittent fasting. There's a lot of literature that looks at evolution and how our bodies are really adapt to not having so much food and so conveniently all the time. That's not what our ancestors were all about. Our body does perform better if there are these breaks between eating. So by doing the intermittent fasting portion along with the bulletproof coffee in the morning, the fact that your body is not full of glucose, you're not really eating breakfast in the morning and drinking the bulletproof coffee. Bringing in these fats that are short and medium chain will accelerate the Creation of ketones. It puts you into a mild ketogenic state and therefore it gives you more mental clarity and a better performance and allows you to again burn fuels more efficiently. So in essence, I'm training my body to be a better performer by reminding it of how we evolved and how our bodies are mostly adapt to not only burning glucose by eating tons of food, but by also burning fats, which is actually more efficient.

Yeah. Okay. And you're a believer in taking quite a few supplements, right?

Yes, yeah, we are. I mean, supplements. You know, it's interesting. Organic vegetables, they're in fruits, they're a key component of our daily meals. You know, we eat it as part of big salads for lunch, dinner, either raw or cooked. But the thing is, the organic foods, they do not have the pesticides and herbicides. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they have all of the nutrients that we need. You got to remember that it's now difficult to find soil, especially in farms where they might have a history of non organic farms nearby. It's difficult to find soils that contain pristine ingredients, you know, the nutrients that we need, all of the 60 minerals and 60 vitamins and so on that we need. So if you're eating just organic vegetables and expecting that you're going to get all of the nutrients that you need, you are not. I mean, as an example, that's why I take supplements. As an example, vitamin D, it makes a case for this. It's not directly related, but vitamin D used to not be a problem for humans because we used to be in the sun all the time. Well, nowadays the environment has changed. People are indoors a lot more. So we do not get enough vitamin D. Vitamin can only be produced in our bodies when we are out in the sun. If you don't take supplements, if you don't take vitamin D, you will be deficient as I was, even though I had a healthier diet. You have to take supplements. It's definitely the right thing to do. In combination with the quantified self approach, where you're measuring your levels and making sure that you're not taking multivitamins, that might give you a lot more of a particular nutrient that you might not need. And you should be taking something more specific that you are missing.

Okay, so tell us what you're doing to measure and how you're measuring.

I go online, I use a site called Direct Labs. It's kind of a la carte shopping for different tests that you can order. And they have dozens and dozens of different tests and you can just pay online, sign up and go to a local lab where they take a specimen or draw your blood and then they send you the results. It's all online. And then what I do is through the resources I've learned, through the learning that I've made over the last few years, I go and I look at these levels and see if they're healthy levels and then I adjust, try to take supplements or make changes to my diet accordingly.

Yeah, and you're just taking charge of your own health care. I mean, this is what people should be doing. Why aren't we doing this? It's amazing that this isn't really more popular. So with direct labs, they have a list of locations for labs and then you just find one and you just walk in there. Maybe you're fasting because maybe you need to fast first and, and you tell them what you want tested, they take the appropriate amount of blood and send it off and send you back the results, right?

Yeah, it's very convenient. They have doctors in the background that will do the approvals for these tests which unfortunately, you know, some of these you still need to go through. It's really seamless. You can very easily get these tests done now.

They don't have though. And I've wanted to get these people on the show, but I haven't yet. They don't have like a back end tracking system on their website, do they, where you can sort of track your progress and it puts it all in a nice pretty graph and says, hey, your vitamin D was here on the last test and now it's here. And you know, whatever your blood sugar, A1C, whatever it is, I don't think they do.

But there's another company called WellnessFX.

Yeah, that's the one.

Yeah, they do. I remember having, having graphs and an interface. I think both work similarly. I think that they're very good choices for people that want to quantify themselves.

But wellness, do they refer you to the lab and all that stuff?

I think it works similarly. I haven't used them, but I think they work similarly.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay, good, good stuff. What else do you want people to know? You know, touch on the quantify. You only have breakfast sometimes, I guess. Right?

Yeah. So here's what I do from this journey, from the progression that we've made so far and tell my kids that we only know what we know up to now and it's definitely not the end. There will be new findings and new science. But if we understand the science now and we do the best with what we know, we're certainly going in the right direction. So I try to apply what I've learned in my life now and adjust as I go. But what I do now is essentially follow or mostly follow the bulletproof diet and lifestyle, which is essentially the paleo based diet, which is high in fats, some protein, but not very heavy in proteins, but it's low in carbohydrates and certainly low in sugars. The blueproof diet is very watchful of toxins and anti nutrients. It's not so much the foods that you eat that have nutrients, but also be aware of foods that will actually make you weaker. Meats that we eat are all high quality grass fed beef. This has been the norm for several years. We buy organic and free range chicken, wild caught seafood, bacon that we eat has, you know, no hormones, no antibiotics, no nitrates, no nitrites, etc. I've mentioned that I try to keep my body into this mild ketogenic state by doing the combination of intermittent fasting, bulletproof coffee, the fats for breakfast most weekdays. That's what I do. Organic vegetables are a key component of our daily meals and that is definitely something that we do for breakfast. As you mentioned, my wife and kids and sometimes for me eat omelettes that are made with these very high quality eggs, you know, from organic chickens grown by my neighbor and delivered to our house, you know, every week.

Do you kill them yourself?

These are the eggs, right? So they just bring the eggs to us.

Oh, okay. Not the actual chickens.

Not the chickens. No, the chickens. We have a different supplier.

I want to mention something that I thought was kind of interesting. I believe it was Mark Zuckerberg, obviously the founder of Facebook or the maybe co founder, depending on, if you're listening to the Winklevost ones. Just had to throw that in there. He said only eat meat I kill. I guess that doesn't mean he's a complete vegetarian. He just wants to earn it when he eats it.

Well, that's probably a good suggestion. We would do that if we grew chickens here at home. But we mix it up with salmon, you know, again, wild caught and lots of avocados. You know, David Wolf is correct. Avocados are awesome.

I love avocados.

Excellent fats and you know, lots of nutrients. So yeah, it's interesting you talked about the quantified self. My weight is about 175 or so. One interesting aspect of what I've done is that I eat a lot. I do not count calories. There are Books about the calorie myth and how there's a whole industry that tries to make people feel guilty by trying to make them exercise while they eat all this crap.

Yeah, I always thought that was a scam because calories are energy. I mean, in fact, if you go to Europe and you look on the label, that's what it's called, is called energy, not calories.

Yeah.

And so why would you want to count calories? You want calories and diets always count them. And it's just. It just seems really stupid. But Fernando, I gotta tell you, you did not eat that much, at least in proportion to what we were being served on our Dubai Venture alliance trip. Because when we were there and we had these incredible buffets, you could eat for a month and a half and not finish.

That is true.

It was absurd how much they were feeding us.

That is true. But I am very aware of what I'm eating and I try to control the quality of what I'm eating. If I see a lot of varied foods and unfortunately, if there is a dish that has a lot of ingredients in there, a lot of sauces and that sort of thing, it's very difficult for you to know what ingredients they used and if they have MSG in there or if they have some chemicals that are conservatives. And it's difficult. So I try to stay with, again, with foods that are closer to the sun, that are simpler, and you are almost always better off doing that than trying to eat, you know, too much. And unfortunately, when you travel, sometimes you're definitely challenged, but it's definitely a good way to go.

Yeah. Good. Okay. Well, hey, let's wrap it up. Anything else you want to say or you want people to know?

A few things. You know, we talked about the calorie county as being a myth. The other part that is a myth is this whole, you know, idea that eating low fat foods is a good thing for you. It's not. They usually have lots of sugar to make up for the fats. Fats are needed. Good fats are needed. As a matter of fact, I eat a lot of fats. Bulletproof coffee and lots of healthy fats and animal fats. And I just did my body spec scan, which is a company that, that does a low level x ray scan of the body to determine body fat and exactly where the fat is stored. And it came in at a healthy 16 point percent, which is in the lowest percentile for my age. So that's very good. My cholesterol numbers, again, the industry talks about trying to lower cholesterol by reducing saturated fat. So I do the exact opposite. I do the opposite because the literature is there. If you listen to the right people. Cholesterol numbers for me have improved on my last blood test, and I did this about three months ago. I have my HDL level at 92, which is very good. It's a negative risk Factor. Anything above 60 for any type of coronary heart disease, and the ratio between Total cholesterol and HDL is 2.0, which is well below the risk. I still need to work on my glucose levels, though. I can lower the amount of sugars that I eat overall, but it's not too bad. I'm below my diabetes risk.

Yeah.

Wow.

You still need to work on that. I'm really surprised.

Yeah.

Sugar.

It just sneaks into a lot of. A lot of things that we do. It's unfortunate, but it's a process. It's a journey. So, you know, it's something that will definitely do better. I'll definitely work on it for the next year.

Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, hey, thank you again for sharing part two of your journey. We appreciate it. Keep up the good work.

Oh, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

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