Porn, Sugar, Cookies, Bananas, Sweet Potato Chips & The Matrix: A Wired To Eat Book Review With...

Yo, yo. Porn, sugar cookies, bananas, sweet potato chips, even the matrix. We cover it all on today's show with Rob Wolfe. This that you're about to hear is a can't miss episode. But speaking of can't miss things to do, if you're a man or you're a woman and you want to enhance your sexual performance or go from good to great or even treat things like ed or let's say less than satisfactory orgasms, there is this company called Gainswave just like it sounds like, G A I N S wave. And what Gainswave does is not only do they have these really cool anti aging therapies and hormonal therapies that you can do, but they also have high frequency acoustic sound wave machines that they use on you when you go to any of their facilities. And it does things like breaks up old blood vessels and stimulates the formation of new blood vessels in your nether regions to turn you into a complete rock star in the bedroom room department. So to get advantage of the Gainswave treatment, you just need to text the word greenfield to 3131. And when you text the word greenfield the 3131, you get 150 bucks off any GainsWave treatment at any of their 60 places nationwide. And it's very, very simple. Waltz in and then waltz out as a complete rock star. You can also go to gainswave.com and click find a doctor to locate Gainsway facility near you. This podcast is also brought to you by some very, very, very delicious chocolate protein. So I've talked before about this company's green powder. It's called organifi. But they also make a protein that is designed with hemp, quinoa and pea. Really unique blend. But when you put all those three together, you get a complete spectrum of amino acids. Then they take it one step further. They add medium chain triglycerides, they add unique digestion, soothing digestive enzymes, Monk fruit co. And it tastes amazing. Tastes like a Wendy's frosty. So you can get a big discount on this stuff when you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Organifi that's BenGreenfieldFitness Organifi and use discount code BEN to get 20% off of their green juice or their delicious chocolate or their delicious vanilla protein. And now onto today's show with Robert. I call him Robert Robbie Rob Wolf. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, A1C is calculated off of an assumption that our red blood cells live about a maximum of 90 days. And so they will accumulate a certain amount of advanced glycation end products, which is usually reflective of an average blood glucose level. There's a thought that something happens with these modern processed foods, whether it's like a glycemic insult, whether it is a rewiring of the kind of hedonic cel centers and a down regulation of maybe dopamine production, like, I don't know how much we really understand on that, but something changes.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And the last time that I had the extremely entertaining and educational. I suppose that makes him an edutainment.

The last time I had Rob Wolf on my show, let's see, we talked about nicotine gum, we talked about a lactic training, binaural beats, small scale farming, and a whole lot more. And I'll put a link to that episode in the show. Notes for this episode, which you can access over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wired that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wired why Wired? Because Rob just wrote a new book called Wired to Eat. I read it last month and it's actually, it's really good. I know for those of you who are podcast junkies, perhaps you've heard Rob making the rounds on other podcasts talking about this book. I promise that I will try not to cover everything that you've heard before. And hopefully we'll even weave in a relatively detailed discussion of porn in today's episode. Because you talk about it in your book, Rob, so why not, right?

And, you know, it seems like that's just the way things are going, so.

Yes, yeah, exactly. And as Rob and I were discussing before we even got on the show just now, if you guys hear like the sound of what sounds like an air compression machine in the background, it's because I figured out how to wear my fancy space Ag compression boots while I'm podcasting to keep myself from dropping dead of a blood clot, I suppose. Or what's it called, Rob? When you're on the airplane and you.

Get, oh, the dvts. Thrombosis. Yeah.

Deep vein thrombosis is something you won't hear me experience during this podcast episode. If all else goes to complete, I at least am not going to have a dvt. So there you have it.

Fantastic. I'm excited for this.

Yeah, exactly. And for those of you not familiar with Rob, I'll certainly put his extensive bio in the show notes again over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wired but he's a former research biochemist, which means he actually knows the science. He didn't just read about it on a blog post. He is a best selling author. He wrote the book the Paleo Solution. He's a speaker. He and I run into each other quite a bit at all these fancy health and fitness and nutrition conferences around the globe. And also, Rob, you're getting into hunting now as well. We've had that discussion a couple of times the past few times we've met up.

Yeah, I hunted a decent amount as a kid and really got pretty geeked out on kind of traditional archery and definitely love it. Like it, it's kind of that zen flow state similar to spearfishing or jiu jitsu for me. Like there's just not a lot of things. I'm not much of a yoga city meditation type of guy, but you know, getting out and doing some planking around, like trying to get some rabbits and stuff like that around my house is a ton of fun.

Yeah. Are you. Shouldn't shooting traditional bow when you're going after a rabbit recurve?

Yeah, because that's more of a challenge. It is. But you know, it's interesting the, the.

If you have something that potentially is a moving target or it pops up and runs. The, you know, some people do a good job with the, you know, like the compound bow setup and stuff like that, but there's a lot of folks that, that do remarkably well with this instinctive shooting. And we do a fair amount of practice where like we'll take a kind of Frisbee type things and throw them up. And I use a special type of arrow called a flu flu, which has some really large flet on it, kind of slows it down.

Right.

And so you're able to get some pretty good eye hand coordination. It's interesting. Like you, it is a very perishable skill. Like you do need to practice it, but if you kind of relax into it and let that, let that instinct take over, you can get a remarkable degree of proficiency with it. So it's a ton of fun.

Oh yeah. When I was a kid, that's what I used to shoot. You know, growing up in the hills around Lucent, Idaho was the, was, you know, just like a little recurve that my parents bought me. And I'd go after a little squirrels and rabbits and stuff like that. But I've, I've since moved on to the, the Ferrari of right of bows. The, the compound bow. And you should have I told you before about that train to hunt competition which is basically like obstacle racing with a weapon.

Yes, yes. And it sounds amazing.

Yeah, they, they have, they have a recurve division in that so. Oh, interesting to transfer your jiu jitsu and your powerlifting skills and merge those with your archery skills and your, your extreme knowledge of fitness hacking. You could probably do pretty well. Maybe they, they have a.

My knowledge of all that. I would realize how horrible, how much pain is involved in that.

Right.

But that's fascinating. That's awesome.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, in, in the book, which I guess we're supposed to talk about on today's show, according to.

You can, but we don't have to.

Promise that I made you actually talk about. Let's start here. You talk about porn. You actually have a section in the book where you discuss Gary Wilson's book, which is really good by the way, called your brain on porn. So tell me why you decided to talk about Gary's book.

As a part of a book about eating. Not that porn and eating don't go hand in hand, but I suppose we could make some dirty hand washing.

Nacho cheese on your fingers jokes here.

But you know, and it's funny because I think the subtitle for that chapter is porn with the side of nachos actually if memory serves. But you know, it, you know, if I pat myself on the back about anything in, in the work that I do, I'm pretty good at synthesis. Like I will, you know, spend some time reading or watching material that seems to be out in a completely, you know, non related field. And I feel like I do a decent job of kind of pulling that stuff in. And Gary Wilson's book and all the work that they've done on this kind of sexual dysfunction from porn is really interesting. And if folks aren't familiar with it, back in the early 2000s, sex therapists and just people in the healthcare scene started getting reports of young men, both heterosexual and homosexual, who started developing pretty profound sexual dysfunction. Like they couldn't attain an Erection at all. They couldn't have normal sexual relationships with, with living human beings. And this got progressively worse as the Internet bandwidth got faster and faster. And what guys figured out how to do, they would get kind of one flavor of porn open in a tab, and then they would get another flavor and another flavor, another flavor. And they would just kind of bounce through these things. And what appears to be happening is they get exposed to something that we would call a super normal stimuli, a stimulus that it just goes above and beyond anything that our genetics are really reasonably wired up to have. Unless I guess you're like a rock star or like the head of some obscure religious cult or something like that.

Or maybe some ancestral king laid out on a couch with women feeding you grapes.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, and what, what appears to happen is the brain, the hedonic centers of the brain get so jacked up, like literally just, just, you know, driven over the top with stimulation that then you need another dose that's even greater than that. And at some point there's nothing left on the Internet that is weird enough that won't get you thrown in jail, that is able to, to get you, get you what you're looking for. And then the flip side of that is out in the real world, nothing really is interesting or capable of kind of getting your rocks off. And the younger individuals are that go down this path, the more severe the dysfunction is. Like, it literally appears to be kind of a form of brain damage. Pretty hard to recover. It looks very similar to kind of the extinction methodology that's used in drug addiction and stuff like that. But the, the interesting parallel for me is looking at our modern hyper palatable food environment where we have substances like, you know, sea salt and vinegar potato chips that are effectively supernormal stimulus. They are so above and beyond what you would be able to find in any reasonable approximation of not even just like an ancestral diet, but like 1950s America. Like, you know, there's, there's stuff that's been engineered in the last, you know, 10 years that has just been unheard of. And when people get habituated to these types of foods, anything that, that is less refined than that literally takes on the appeal of like cardboard. And people kind of paint themselves into a corner with this and they find it pretty difficult to make diet changes in particular because just nothing really is appealing other than like a hot fudge sundae draped over, you know, sea salt and vinegar potato chips with an almond Roca chaser, something like that. Like that kind of becomes the norm and so suggesting that they eat like, you know, some, some pork spareribs, you know, cooked in olive oil with ginger and some broccoli and maybe a sweet potato. They're just like, are you mad? So this is the parallel that I draw with this kind of porn dysfunction. And, you know, the neuroregulation of sexuality being somewhat analogous to the neuroregulation of appetite in that we're probably genetically wired for some kind of like exposure and frequency band to that exposure and whatnot. And if we're consistently using some sort of modern technology to jam our experience out into the stratosphere, that there may be some downsides to that interest.

So you see, you're basically equating like chili cheese nachos to some fringe Asian horse wearing high heels draped over rose petals in a giant king sized bed next to a heart shaped hot tub type of scenario.

At a minimum. Yes, got it. Okay, cool.

So, so essentially from, from like a neurotransmitter standpoint, is there actually something going like, like from a chemical standpoint, are our brains actually changing when we get exposed to these more hedonic foods?

It appears so, yes. And this is one of the interesting things that, you know, where a ketogenic diet may shine in certain circumstances in general, and man, there's so much contention around this and you deal with it every day, as do I, but there's a general trend towards the more fat in the diet, the greater tendency to overeat and some stuff like that. And like, there's caveats to that. But I mean, Dan Pain Party, who's really brilliant with this stuff, like, he, he can speak on this at a, at a very high level. But interestingly, there is a point where when we kick over into this ketogenic process that we actually get a really profound appetite suppression kind of activity. And it appears, you know, the ketogenic diet has been studied for a long time for, for different neurological conditions like epilepsy. More recently, people have been looking at it for traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. So quite an interesting variety of, you know, kind of neurodegenerative states. And there's a thought that something happens with these modern processed foods, whether it's like a glycemic insult, whether it is a rewiring of the kind of hedonic centers and a downregulation of maybe dopamine production. Like, I don't know how much we really understand on that, but something changes. But it appears that a ketogenic diet might be pretty helpful in Restoring that, that situation for certain people. So yeah, I mean there definitely seems to be something going on there and it may be at the level of actually a change in neural architecture. There's certainly something happening at the neurotransmitter level and then there's kind of knock on effects from there.

Interesting. I hadn't thought about a ketogenic diet before as being something that would stabilize neurotransmitters or reset something like the hedonic centers in the brain. I would imagine that the type of ketogenic diet would matter. Right? Like a, like a plant rich diet, chock full of coconut oil and olive oil might be far different than say like chicken wings and coconut manna and grass fed butter, I don't know, drenched over some other type of high fat substance like say bacon.

Right, right. You know, I honestly I would assume that the food quality piece like always is a really important issue here. If we're, if we're nutrient deficient, micronutrient deficient, we're not really set up for remodeling anything, whether it's a broken bone, a pulled muscle or trying to redo some element of the brain. One interesting feature. And again, there's no randomized control trial on any of this. It's all review papers, speculation, proposed mechanisms. So definitely take it with a grain of salt. But maybe also don't just, you know, folks jettison it out of hand. But there is some great research that suggests that the, the neurological benefits of exercise appear to be derived from the release of brain derived neurotropic factor bdnf.

Right.

And interestingly, the main signaling mechanism in BDNF release is dependent on the presence of ketone bodies, specifically beta hydroxybutyrate. So if we don't get a BDNF release or if we don't get a threshold of beta hydroxybutyrate at a certain concentration, then we just really don't see BDNF release. And so that's another piece to this, that if we are goosing things by increasing the circulating levels of ketone bodies, then maybe that alone is enough to augment that BDNF process. Certainly that plus exercise may augment that process. And again, you know, oftentimes we're mitigating some of the damaging effects of like blood sugar swings, substrate, you know, in availability and so kind of a stress response, we're mitigating some of the kind of glycemic damage that can occur. So there's a lot of different possible mechanisms going on There. But you know, the practical takeaway is, you know, it's best to just not get too far down that path. Once you are far down that path of, you know, potentially kind of altering your neuroregulation of appetite, it may take some significant work to pull you back. And for people that coach others healthcare providers, you know, if you're stumped or frustrated by the difficulty of changing this, like if you looked at this more as like a, a neurotrauma, you know, on par with like a traumatic brain injury, then I think it could remove some of the frustration and the.

The expectations that this is quote, just a behavioral issue. You know, at the end of the day all behavior derives out of the brain and the neuro architecture and you know, neurotransmitters and whatnot. So I mean, you know, at the end of the day this stuff does ultimately have some sort of an organic or biological underpinning. But if you understand that there might literally be something on par with effectively brain damage or brain alterations, then we can be a little bit more understanding, forgiving of both of ourselves and of the people that we're trying to caretake with this process and kind of understand that it might be a lot to unpack.

Yeah. From that neurotransmitter standpoint, I know that Stephen Guinnet has a new book. I actually have him slated to come on the show, I believe in a month or so.

Outstanding. The Hungry Brain.

Yes, the Hungry Brain. And he really delves into that hardcore the neurotransmitter and hormonal response to some of these hedonistic foods. And so for those of you who want to take a deeper dive into that, definitely stay tuned because I'll certainly be interviewing Steven about that Hungry to Eat book soon and I'll put a link to that in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wired if you want to check that out. That's interesting though Rob, what you say about ketosis and brain derived neurotrophic factor. Because one of my go to strategies when I have a, a mentally intensive day, which might happen once every few weeks or so, I try not to think too much and generally just better that way.

It's better that way.

Try to have more beefcake days than mentally intensive days. But ultimately on those days when I know I need to call upon more cognitive superpowers, I do try to do a fasted morning aerobic workout to jack up blood ketones. And based on newer research last month it turns out that it appears that Both intense interval training as well as weight training seem to allow for increased levels of BDNF just as well as aerobic exercise. I've just gotten into the habit of, based on the research leading up to that point, of relying upon aerobic exercise as my primary stimulant of bdnf. But, yeah, like a facet morning workout, especially like if I'm at a conference before I'm going to go on stage a couple hours later, you know, something easy, 20, 30 minutes, but definitely in that ketotic state, it seems to really trigger quite a bit of, I guess, mental superpowers. I suppose I could just probably pop some modafinil. But the fasted morning workouts really do seem to give you an edge from a cognitive standpoint. So that makes sense what you say about ketosis and bdnf. I just didn't know that the two were correlated.

Yeah, and I have to give all credit to my understanding of that to Ken Ford, who runs the Institute for Human Machine Cognition. That guy.

Does that guy run the podcast stem. Come across it a few times. The STEM Talk podcast? Yeah, that's actually a really good podcast.

It's a phenomenal podcast. And Ken is just an amazing guy and has his, his so many different pots that he. That he stirs, from robotics to elite human performance. You know, the IHMC is, is tied in with like, Dom d' Agostino and a number of other people that do some of the, you know, research around ketosis for, you know, hyperbaric oxygen situations. They work closely with naval special warfare and do DOD on, on a lot of this research. So they. Ken's just a brilliant guy and, you know, I'll throw this out there. I know this might, might get out in the weeds a little bit, but he also just shot me a paper that suggested that elevated ketone levels are a pretty potent myostatin inhibitor. And that's interesting when, when we're thinking about effective aging and, you know, there's a lot of back and forth about, like, you know, is a ketogenic state amenable to, you know, muscle gain? And Ryan Lowry just did a really interesting paper that, that was looking at that, and it seemed to paint the ketogenic state as at least as good as a. A standard mixed diet and with possibly some other benefits. But if there is, in fact, some sort of a.

You know, myostatin uncoupling kind of process where you're kind of suppressing that activity in addition to, you know, just generally, you know, doing A smart, smart strength training program or whatever that, that could have some really interesting knock on effects too.

Interesting because one of my goals is to actually look like the myostatin knockout bowl.

Exactly.

You can find via a simple Google image search, those of you who have not typed in myostatin knockout bowl or myostatin knockout mice or mouse into Google image search, you're missing out on, on a pretty interesting phenomenon of super duper swole animals. So you're saying we could achieve the same thing potentially through like ketone bodies.

It can goose it that direction in theory. And I will throw one other kind of, kind of wacky side note with that. Theoretically, and I haven't dug super deep on, on any of the papers on this, but sildefinel Viagra theoretically is a potent inhibitor of myostatin.

Really?

So put that one in your pipe and smoke it.

Interesting. You know, I've actually, yeah, I've taken, I've taken Viagra and also Carmegra, the Asian generic version. That might be the Indian generic version. I don't know, whatever they gave me in Thailand before some bicycling workouts before, just to see what would happen. And it actually does have a pretty significant performance enhancing, in fact, banned by wada, by the way. For those of you athletes listening in, you can actually do this as a daily habit if you're racing in a sanctioned sport. But it does seem to have a pretty interesting performance enhancing effect in places other than the bedroom. I wasn't aware of the myostatin inhibiting effect of it though. That's interesting.

Is that VO2 max type stuff or vaso?

Just exactly what you'd expect with nitric oxide like lactic acid buffering blood flow, boners, if a hot girl happens to run by while you're on your bicycle, that type of thing.

That could be problematic though.

It could be.

You know, you just have to make sure.

Yeah, you just make sure your spandex is, is of a high quality and you're good to go. That, that or a little duct tape. Okay. Anyways, though we, we digress. Although so far we've covered porn and Viagra, so I'm going to call this podcast a success already.

You kind of like the meat of the book, Rob. You get into these fascinating kind of like cookie and banana type blood sugar studies that were done, I believe, over in. Was it, was it Tel Aviv or somewhere in Israel?

Yeah, Weizmann Institute in Israel. Yeah.

Okay, so, so go into what they looked at in that study because it really, I think kind of kind of lays down the, lays down the foundation for people understanding some of the recommendations that you give in the book.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean this, this, it was really fascinating study. I, I think it's been published maybe two, two and a half years now. And it's looking at personalized nutrition and the glycemic response around that. And the study design started off group of 800 people. They fitted these folks with a CGM continuous glucose monitor, check their blood glucose once a minute for the whole duration of the study. They did it. Then did a full gut microbiome analysis and a genetic analysis on these folks as well as like your standard kind of lipidology panel, you know, fasted glucose, total cholesterol, triglycerides, et cetera. And then they started feeding folks different meals. And what was really fascinating about that is the blood glucose response to these meals were all over the map. Like they're just at the surface level. Didn't appear to be a ton of rhyme or reason to what was going on. And they had some really interesting, you know, occurrences like the cookie and the banana example that you mentioned. Like one person would eat a banana and they would have a beautiful blood glucose response. I mean, it looked like they drank water, barely went up. There wasn't, you know, much of a crash at all because there really wasn't much, much delta in that, that number. And then they would eat a cookie. And these things were matched. They did a really good job. These, these meals were matched for carbohydrate content. You know, they had accounted for the fiber and everything. So it was.

So the only, the only difference was really the, the type of food or the, or the glycemic index of that food.

Right, right, right, right, yeah. And so what, you know, one person would have a great blood glucose response to a banana, a terrible blood glucose response to a cookie, which some people would be like, okay, that's not surprising. Processed food versus non processed food. Well, another person would have a terrible, I mean, horrible blood glucose response to a banana. At that two hour mark, they are at peri. Diabetic levels of blood sugar. And a cookie again, you know, it was like, did they eat a cookie or did they have a glass of water? Like this thing barely went up. And when I was putting together the book proposal, I mentioned this stuff and so the publishers jumped on it. They're like, oh, there's cookie and banana profiles. And it's like, no, it's not that, not that simple. Like there's not six buckets of People out there that, you know, some of them are great with cookies, some of them are good with bananas. This stuff is incredibly random, you know, from one person to the next. One of the consistencies. And I know one of the questions you have later is, you know, what are some universally good and some universally bad foods? One of them that was really interesting was hummus, which, you know, even though I'm like the Paleo guy, like hummus.

Hold on, hold on, Rob. Back up. It's hummus, Hummus, hummus. And by the way, by the way, tahini. It's actually tahina. You know how I know this, Rob, is because for a very long time the Israeli Chamber of Commerce was under the impression that I was a Jewish.

Oh, really?

Well, with the name Benjamin Greenfield. You know, how can you go wrong? And so I would get these emails and they would fly me over to Israel to do food tours, to do blogging food tours. So I've been all over Israel and Galilee and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem eating hummus. And so I'm an expert in not only how to pronounce these, but exactly how much you can eat before basically your entire explodes. So anyways, I have experience and I can tell you right now you need to begin to pronounce it hummus.

Well, I'm going to do some cultural appropriation and still make it. Make it sound like it's just rotting leaves. That's right.

Anyways, back. Back to universally appropriate foods.

Yeah, so. So the, the, the tahini and garbanzo bean mix formerly known as hummus. It. About 50% of the folks that, that had, it had a great blood glucose response, which you really wouldn't be surprised by that because it's protein and fat and fiber. I mean, there's really not many carbohydrates to speak of there. But then about 50% of the people that they studied in this process had a really remarkably high blood glucose response. So it was kind of like a coin toss. It was about a 50, 50 proposition. And the researchers are really wonderful people. They were very forthright with information and kind with their time. I got to interview about six of them, I. For some kind of backstory on all this stuff. And I asked them, do you think this elevated blood glucose response, I mean, it's greater than really what the carbohydrate content of the food could account for. It's almost like we created matter or something. And I said, do you think that this could be an immunogenic response? Could this be kind of a stress response? And they said we didn't study that specifically because we weren't even contemplating looking for this. But clearly that is a likely mechanism and some of their follow on work is going to investigate that. And so now when you say stress.

Response, do you mean like someone might be allergic to a food or might have some kind of like a, I guess like an allergenic or a protein based response that would cause a cortisol release and subsequently mobilization of liver glycogen?

Exactly. Yeah. And, and we don't like, is it directly an issue with a protein in the food? That's a possibility. Is it an issue with this food encouraging some growth of specific types of bacteria and then maybe some endotoxemia? Like there's a couple of. It's funny, you know, it's kind of, you could say, yes, it's an immunogenic response, but then we still don't know exactly what that mechanism is. But you know, the, the black box model is food causes some sort of an immunogenic response that causes likely a release of cortisol and adrenaline noradrenaline that pings the liver. The liver releases glucose to elevate blood sugar levels, which is a normal part of that fight or flight response. But this does appear to happen in some people. It doesn't happen always, but it's, it's likely a mechanistic description of what's going on when you have a food that you see a blood glucose response that is really kind of off the Richter relative to what the carbohydrate content is.

Right. Something you wouldn't expect. Like you have a salad and perhaps, I don't know, you're allergic to some kind of bacteria that's on the dirt, that's on the kale in that salad that you never would have expected to produce a pronounced blood glucose response. Your body produces cortisol, your liver responds with glycogenolysis, your blood sugar goes up and maybe your neighbor down the street has zero deleterious response to said. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

Now are there. So that would be like an immunogenic response. You also mentioned like a bacterial response. So is it then theoretical that someone with a different gut microbiome than their neighbor would have a different response to like a cookie versus a banana?

Yes. And that's really the crux of this thing is, is when they, so initially it just looked like random noise, like they couldn't get their hands around any of this stuff. But when they started applying some machine learning algorithms to this massive data set, like I want to say there was 800 people, one blood sugar sample per person per minute over the course of three weeks. And I want to say it was a million, like 6 million sample. A huge data set.

Because they were wearing continuous monitors, correct?

Yeah. And so they had to get like supercomputers in crunching on this, but trying to find some signal in that noise. And what they, they did start noticing was if you have kind of this genetic profile with this overlay of gut microbiota, which would be, you know, be the epigenetic kind of, kind of influence, if you ate foods A, B, C, you would have blood glucose response xyz. And this is actually part of what they did for the, the validation of this, this whole process is that they then took another group of a hundred people, outfitted them with CGMs, did the gut microbiome and the genetic sequencing, and then based off that, ran the machine learning algorithm over their data and then said, okay, what foods will they likely do well with? And the correlation number, like a perfect match would have been like a 0.7 and they were getting like a 0.68, 0.63, like really, really significant in that regard. So they did perform a validation kind of process on the back end of that.

Now, I don't know where they've gone in terms of those machine learning algorithms, but would someone listening in right now have the ability to say, take, let's say they've done the American gut project or they've had their gut microbiome sequenced in some way, Would they, at this point in the research, or in terms of what's available online, be able to take that data and feed it into some of the research that they've done over in Israel and actually see the type of foods that they might have a deleterious blood sugar response to do based on their particular microbiome?

Yeah, my, my understanding is currently that stuff's all kind of locked down and proprietary, but there is a company called Day 2 which is, you know, kind of ramping up in its offerings of being able to get the, the microbiome and genetic testing. And I actually went through this and really, really cool people, but I, I have some.

It's called Day Two.

Day Two? Yeah.

Sounds like a zombie movie.

It's a horrible company name.

I'll hunt it down, link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, Again, really nice people, really interesting process, but there's some, there's some stuff that I'm still not clear with, you know, so like, I'm super reactive to gluten. I have celiac. I think I also have like glutenin reactivity and stuff like that. And this would not have been picked up on this. And interestingly, I, I don't think that I necessarily have that immunogenic response that leads to elevated blood glucose with, with gluten. I've been unwilling to test that directly, but just kind of observationally, when I, when I get a cross contamination from gluten, I don't get like a blood sugar peak and crash. I feel like dog. But, you know, my problems are, are different. And so I do still have some reservations in, you know, unreservedly recommending this methodology because we're, I think we will be at a spot at some point where we're able to look at genetics, look at epigenetics, specifically the gut microbiome and maybe a few other features and have a pretty good bet that like, you have problems with eggs or you have problems with soy, or you likely have intestinal permeability right now. And so you're reactive to a million different things, but if we fix the intestinal permeability, you're going to be reactive to nothing. And I think that we will get there eventually, but I don't think we're quite there yet. And so this Day two company will run your genetic analysis, will do the gut microbiome sequencing, and then based off that, they do generate some recommended, you know, kind of meal plants. But there's, there's some, there's some gaps in it currently.

Yeah, I'm looking at it right now, though. You, it's kind of exactly what I asked you. You provide a stool sample, they sequence your microbiome, they predict which foods could be good for you or which foods would or would not increase your blood sugar levels. And then it looks like you get a personalized nutrition app. So. Interesting. I might have to. I know, you said it. There's still some foggy correlations there, but maybe I'll try this out and report to folks what I find out about my own poop.

And I could definitely intro you to the CEO. Leahy Siegel is the CEO, and really, again, great people, I think that they're onto something really interesting. But, you know, the, the reservation that I have is to the degree that I've had a decent amount of success in this space, I usually lead with this kind of elimination diet and, and that just, man, it fixes so much stuff.

And, and that would be similar to what you talk about in the book, right?

It is. And you know, What I ended up recommending in the book is a 30 day reset built around largely a paleo type of template. And then I recommend testing via reintroduction of a variety of foods and using seven day carb tests where we, we check the blood glucose response. And what I'm encouraging people to do in that scenario is to active elements like what's your cognitive function, how long can you go between meals, what's your digestion like? And we also then you. So those are the kind of soft, you know, soft science stuff, but important subjective elements coupled to the really objective, hard, factual, you know, observations that we get from blood glucose testing. And that was kind of the way that I navigated this, this process. I could be wrong, I may be, you know, fooling myself, but I still think there's something really powerful and important for a lot of folks to kind of give some thought towards this ancestral template, you know, and maybe calling into question some grains, some legumes, some dairy, at least in the beginning, and reestablishing normal gut microbiota or kind of shifting it in a favorable way, rewiring the neuroregulation of appetite and then circling back around and really kicking that thing and pressure testing it by the reintroduction of these foods, seeing what the subjective elements are and also, you know, looking at the blood glucose response.

Okay, so what you're saying is, is the first thing that you're recommending based off of the results of this study that was done in Israel, is before you even begin to test your blood sugar response to a meal, to identify which foods would or would not be appropriate for you and your individualized blood sugar responses is you like people to do like, almost like a cleanup diet even before they start doing that?

Yes.

Okay, so that's 30 days in your book, what's that called? Phase one.

It's the 30 day reset.

Yeah, it's part of phase one. Okay, the 30 day reset. TM, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If I had some wherewithal with that, I should have probably done that, but I kind of, I think that ship has sailed now. Yeah.

Yeah.

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Okay, so, so you do the 30 day reset and obviously it you Know, we, we don't have to, to give away everything that's in the book, but that's just kind of like eating clean for 30 days, more or less.

It's a, essentially a paleo type template. But you know what I, I pretty proud of like the triage process. So before starting that we, we get people comfortable with tracking some of these subjective elements like how long can you go between meals, what's your cognitive function, all that type of stuff. And then I recommend a battery of blood work that is like the standard, you know, total cholesterol, fasting blood glucose. We look at A1C, we look at fructosamine. We also look at the LPIR score, lipoprotein insulin resistance score. And what we've found in the work that we've done here in Reno is that there are some great things like fasting insulin. There's the triglyceride HDL ratio, there's the HOMA ir. These things are really valuable, but like the HOMA IR is a bastard to get that done. Triglyceride HDL ratio, what's the HOMA ir? Oh man, I forget the breakdown on it. But it's basically a testing protocol where you are actually doing blood samples over the course of time, getting an area under the curve for total amount of insulin in response to like an oral glucose tolerance challenge. Okay. So we're, we're doing a direct measurement of, of insulin which is, is tougher to quantify. You know, there's not really like finger stick type type activity with that, but so that one's, it's gold standard, but it's kind of hard to do and it's, it's reasonably expensive to do. So some people will use things like the triglyceride HDL ratio as a surrogate for insulin resistance. But what we've found is in particularly like police, military and fire populations, if they, they may have insulin resistance caused largely by sleep disturbances or a hypervigilant state. And the, the triglyceride to HDL ratio does not pick that up. So there's a bunch 40 to 60% of people that are insulin resistant. But it's not specifically diet driven. It's actually kind of lifestyle driven, either sleep or hyper vigilant state, like just being stressed out, those people can be missed. Whereas the LPIR score will catch all of those people. And it's cheap, it's really effective. And so we use that to kind of set the background and based off where you.

Before the 30 day reset.

Before the 30 day reset and so if you tend to be a little more insulin sensitive, then part of the 30 day reset is going to be jumping in with more carbs. If you're more insulin insulin resistant, then you jump in with fewer carbs. If you have or suspect an autoimmune condition, there's an autoimmune paleo process that, that is an option through the book. There's also a transitional ketosis option which is, is built around a low glycemic load food intake and supplemented with MCT oil and then a nutritional ketosis option. And, and I kind of, I provide a pretty good sorting mechanism to figure out, okay, who are you? Where do you want to go? Based off of, you know, subjective and objective elements, you know, which bucket do you fall into?

Okay.

And based off of which bucket you fall into, like the ketosis and the transitional ketosis plans are a little bit different. And I save those for the very last chapter of the book. If it's either the basic paleo or autoimmune paleo process, then that's where you jump in on that 30 day reset, specifically with that. And then we overlay that seven day carb test after that.

Okay, gotcha. Before we jump into that, that seven day carb test, I had a couple of questions because you get into these labs that you just went over in the book. But one thing you say, because a lot of people will test this, so I wanted to ask you about it. Hemoglobin A1C, kind of like that three month snapshot of your blood sugar levels is something that you say might not be actually accurate or a lot of doctors aren't really aware of the full story when it comes to elevated A1C. Can you explain why you're not a fan of that as a go to marker for, for an accurate analysis?

I really like it, but we can get a little bit of a hip fake from it. And the hip fake comes from if someone is already eating reasonably low carb. So the, the A1C is calculated off of an assumption that our red blood cells live about a maximum of 90 days. And so they will accumulate a certain amount of advanced glycation end products, which is usually reflective of an average blood glucose level. And that's usually pretty solid in most populations. Like there's pretty good correlation there with what the real blood glucose was. But in people that generally eat kind of low carb, their red blood cells tend to live longer and they may live significantly longer. We don't know exactly what the numbers are on that, but they may Live upwards of twice as long. So you could have someone, it could be you, that you check your A1C and the A1C is like 5.8 or 5.6 or something pretty darn high. Like higher than what most people would really want or be comfort with. And it looks like your average blood glucose has been really high over time, but maybe it hasn't been. Maybe this is an artifact of you eating differently. And so that's where I recommend using another marker called fructosamine, which is a different advanced glycation end product biomarker. And if Both fructosamine and A1C are elevated, then it's like, okay, we, we almost certainly have, you know, an average elevated blood glucose. That's probably reflective for what's being reported here. If we have a high a 1C but a low or normal fructosamine, then we probably have a situation where the person is just kind of artificially seeing elevated numbers on that A1C because the red blood cells are just living longer.

Okay, gotcha. So in people who have red blood cells that live longer, which would be people on like a low carbohydrate diet, they, they would actually display elevated A1C values that should not necessarily be interpreted as high glucose unless that's accompanied by high fructosamine and high fasted glucose levels.

Correct. And it, it doesn't always happen, but it can. I and I, Kurt Harris, who, who used to be pretty active in the kind of paleo low carb scene, but he pulled like a, a Dr. Manhattan and obtained omnipotence and basically disappeared. But he was very, very knowledgeable on this stuff. And I got to pick his brain a fair amount about it before he kind of disappeared.

And it's kind of the opposite thing with athletes, isn't it? Like endurance athletes who have, I believe, higher red blood cell turnover can sometimes display, I think it would be low hemoglobin A1C even if they're eating like crappy high sugar diets and they may actually have really high blood glucose and low hemoglobin A1C.

Correct. And that's why, I mean there's a million different things that you could test and there's always like, oh, you know, this trade off of what, what's enough to be able to paint the picture you want. And it's not like onerously expensive and you know, so there's back and forth on that. But that's why I kind of settled on fasting glucose, A1C, fructosamine plus that, that LPIR score. And so we're able to get a pretty good sense of insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance for the individual. And then when we start actually real world testing foods, then we, we get a legit picture out of that.

Got it. And then the, by the way, we mentioned fructosamine a couple of times in the past few minutes. People aren't familiar with a fructosamine measurement, which isn't that common on, on a, like a diabetes evaluation. What is the fructose. Fructose fructosamine test.

It's just another biomarker that's looking at a different type of advanced glycation end product.

Okay, got it.

Yeah, definitely related to glucose, but it's happening in, instead of at the, the proteins on the red blood cell, it's a, I believe a plasma protein.

Okay, cool. So you do these tests and then you jump into, based on the results of your test, the appropriate 30 day kind of reset diet. And then after that, that's when you do what you call the seven day test.

The seven day carb test.

Okay, seven day carb test. And how does that work?

Do we pick a battery of foods that we want to kick the tires on? And ideally we, you know, again, we try to do this as scientifically and consistently as possible. So what I recommend is you do this for your breakfast meal or, you know, first thing in the morning. And we try to do it as consistently as possible. If you exercise in the morning, it gets a little dodgy because I would want you to do the exact same exercise, the exact same intensity, you know, so I, I tend to recommend not to exercise, at least initially. I know you have a question on mitigative strategies and so we could, you know, maybe throw that in after this. But yeah, we're trying to make it like a scientific study. So if you drink coffee, drink the same amount, have it at the same time, you know, and I recommend the breakfast or the morning process because that tends to be the most consistency that we see throughout our day. Whereas one day you might have a meeting, another day you might be exercising all day. You know, and so when it gets later and later in the day, we have more and more variables that could really move that blood sugar response around. So we try to get as consistent as we can. We, in the book, we. And also on the website, there's a link to the website to an expanded list. But, but we have a list of foods where we are recommending a 50 gram aliquot of effective carbohydrates. So we subtract out the fiber, we get 50 grams of effective carbs. You eat that and then once you finish the meal, then we test that at a two hour mark. And if at the two hour mark we see blood sugar levels below a certain point, then we usually say, okay, that's a pretty good number to run with. If it's above a certain point, then we start asking some questions about okay, is, would it be a good idea to cut this in half or avoid it or some of the mitigating strategies that you would mention in some of your pre recording questions.

Now before we jump into those mitigating strategies, by the way, when you're looking at the blood glucose, right when you're taking, when you're consuming these 50 grams of carbohydrates, like for example in your matrices here or matrix, although I think matrices makes me sound more intelligent, so I'm gonna roll with that. In your food matrices you say for example, like 1.6 white potatoes would be 50 grams or 3.25 cups of lotus root. Whoever the hell eats 3.25 cups of lotus root, you have a whole bunch of stuff listed here that would fall into that 50 grams of effective carbohydrates category. And by the way, what's effective mean? Why not just carbohydrate? What does effective carbohydrate mean?

So it's the amount that's going to be metabolically available to your, to your bloodstream. So the fiber might get turned into some short chain fats by bacteria and stuff, but it's not going to register on the blood glucose response.

Okay, got it. So people eat that and are you looking just throw some numbers out at me, like if someone was actually eating the 50 grams and then testing afterwards, what numbers are they looking for to indicate that it would be a deleterious blood sugar response.

So I would like to see numbers at that two hour mark below 115, 115 nanograms per deciliter, which is pretty low. I had a lot of people in the medical scene that were like, oh, we don't even look sideways at things until it's above like 1150 or 160 at two hours. And I'm like, yeah, and you guys aren't really like helping, helping people. So I based these numbers actually on some pretty good studies which I got from Stefan guinea actually, which he had tracked down and looked at oral glucose tolerance tests in hunter gatherers and pre westernized populations. Oh wow. This was interesting because most of these people, they're little people, like the fully grown males are like 5 foot 2, 115, 120 pounds. Like they're small people. And there's a dilution factor that you have to consider. If you have a 200 pound person versus a 100 pound person, there's twice as much surface area and mass to just like diffuse that glucose throughout the individual. So there is a consideration there. But even with that caveat, these are small folks. They did the oral glucose tolerance test and at the two hour mark, they were routinely in about the 95 to the 110 nanogram per deciliter range, which is phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. And so I bumped that up a smidge. And you know, it's interesting because some, some folks mentioned some numbers that like Peter Attia throws out there. Like he would like to see your average blood glucose not really much above 83 to 85. He, he doesn't want to see much more than about a 10 to 15, you know, nanogram per deciliter change.

Yeah, but he's extreme. He does like 24 hour bike rides on a kidney bean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he does, he does. But you know, it's interesting. It's interesting. So, you know, he, he's really kind of geeked out on this longevity side of things. And so it's. So mine is probably a bit more relaxed than where Peter's recommendations are. But not by much. I mean, you know, we're talking about 100 versus 115, you know, is kind of some, some top ends, but it's much, much lower than what is generally acceptable within, you know, standard medical.

Right, yeah. Okay. 90 to 115. Got it. So, so, and that's within two hours after a meal. And by the way, when, when you die early, Peter is going to be standing in your grave laughing that.

Exactly.

So, exactly. You're.

So you'll have a full gluten pizza recommendations.

Yeah, either, either way though. So. So we do this Taz, we do the, do the food matrix, eat the 50 grams, do the testing, look at that number to be between 90 to 115 within two hours afterwards. And you also mentioned carb mitigation strategies and where those would fit in here.

Yeah, yeah. So let's say so like for myself, white rice tends to put me into near diabetic blood sugar levels. So I could either say that's not a good option for me or I could do something like using it after a really hard Brazilian jiu jitsu session. I could cut the amount that I have Into a smaller portion.

I could try maybe mixing it with like fish and fat.

Now those things that, it's really interesting. So when we mix, I don't know, here's, here's this slippery thing, like I don't fully know on that. So if we mix protein into this story, we get an aggregate larger insulin response which that might be good or it might be bad. So if we see people, this is where the subjective elements are really important. If you experience like a hypoglycemic event after this, and not necessarily from specifically the number that you get, but from the cognitive function, like you get hungry and foggy headed and it happens in pretty short order and it's made worse by adding protein or even fat. In some people, adding fat to a meal blunts both the glycemic response, like the rate and the total magnitude of glucose entering the bloodstream and also reduces the insulin load. But in some people the insulin load increases in lockstep with the total caloric content of the meal. So it's not universally a fix to just add more, more fat to a carbohydrate rich meal. And this is where people but, but there's a, there appears to be a threshold. So this may be a situation where the person might be able to add fat to a 25 gram rice meal and then they get that really nice mitigated mitigative effect from the fat. But it, this is, man gets complex and it's, you know, pretty individual. But it, this is some of the stuff again on kind of social media. People were like, well just put fat in it and it will fix it. And it's like, no, that doesn't, it doesn't always work out that way. And there does seem to be a threshold mechanism to that whole story.

Right. Obviously people talk about like eating protein with a meal as a potential blood sugar mitigating strategy. People talk about, you know, one of my favorites going and do a bunch of deadlifts before you have your sweet potato fries, which can actually work because I've tested when you, when you lift weights especially, that seems to really help up regulate that, that glucose transporter response. And so yeah, doing a hard workout before a meal, it certainly seems to be effective strategy. What about like pills that you can pop or herbs and spices that you can take? Like you hear about people talking about like Ceylon cinnamon or apple cider vinegar. Have you experimented with anything like that?

I've played around a little bit with the vinegar and I maybe get a 10 to 15 milligram per deciliter delta off of that, you know, lowering. I haven't done a ton with the cinnamon. Even just doing a short walk though, like an intense workout definitely works better. But even just getting up and doing a five to ten minute walk can drop that, that average blood sugar response by about 10 points. So I mean there are some really simple mitigating strategies like that chromium is another, you know, actually not just blood.

Sugar but I think based on the studies they did in Japan, postprandial triglycerides as well drop with, with like a brisk like 15 minute post meal walk.

Right, right, yeah, yeah. So berberine has some effect both short term and long term. Clearly there's stuff like metformin. So you know, there are definitely some mitigating strategies out there. But you know, with metformin it was just an interesting study and I had suspected this for a long time, but they found that metformin really wasn't improving lifetimes in diabetic users. And what Metformin appears to allow these people to do is avoid some of the direct glycemic insult of constantly elevated blood glucose levels. But it's still basically encouraging or allowing one to over consume calories, force excess energy through mitochondrial complexes and whatnot and we still get a lot of, of problems. So you know, some of these, some of these mitigating strategies need to be, you know, considered in context. If we're just facilitating the over consumption of food then that's really not going to move us in a favorable direction.

Right. My, my, my own personal sweet potato fry trick is bitter melon extract. I don't know if you've tried that before but it has, I believe it has the insulin like compound polypept peptide P in it and then it has a pretty, there's some interesting studies on. If you look up, just go to pubmed or Google I suppose and look up bittermill and extract hypoglycemic response or blood sugar response. I know they did a study in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology where they showed a really significantly reduced blood glucose response. And I think there was another study where they found it pretty similar to that, that diabetic drug Metformin in terms of lowering blood glucose response. And that's one that you can obviously just buy bitter melon rinds or bitter melon capsules or whatever. But that's one that I keep around because I tend to have more carbohydrates for dinner and sometimes if I haven't worked out beforehand, that's something I'LL throw in there, but it seems to work pretty well. And then there are those other things that you mentioned, like metformin or the apple cider vinegar trick. Ceylon Cinnamon seems to have some decent research behind it as well. But yeah, I mean, as you've alluded to, there's also the individualized testing response based on your microbiome and your cortisol response and all those other variables that you discuss in the book. Now what about after you've kind of tested, you've done your 30 day reset, you've tested, you find out which carbohydrates are appropriate for you and which ones aren't. Then is it simply a matter where for the rest of your life you avoid those foods that cause that pronounced blood sugar response?

That's a great question. So the final part of this, I think the chapter, it's a short chapter, but it's titled Writing into the Sunset. And that's where you just have to kind of play with this stuff. I mean the goal with all of this is ultimately kind of rewiring the neuroregulation of appetite, which blood sugar control is just such a critical feature to this. But you're rewiring things in a way that you can spontaneously eat at a level that supports activity, supports good body composition, but you don't tend to do the full hookers and cocaine freak out. And you, and you start having weight and health problems. And so, you know, the, exactly how you navigate the rest of that is a, is it's a reasonably subjective kind of story. And you know, the, a lot of this is kind of focusing on trigger foods, you know, to kind of circle things back around to, to us talking about hyper palatable foods. You have to figure out a lot of mitigating strategies. Like, you know, for me, I love, I'm not that motivated by sweets, but you know, stuff like sea salt and vinegar potato chips. Like if there's an old woman between me and a bag of sea salt and vinegar potato chips, I'll push her down in the street, step on her spine and you know, grab the bag and eat it all. And so it's not that I never have those, but we, so we just had a, an Easter gig a couple of weeks back and we had a bunch of folks over that have kids around the same age as our kids. And I went and got some of like the Justin's or Jason's Honest sweet potato chips or whatever and they're absolutely amazing. Got a couple of bags of them and I knew it's like, okay, we have 15 people coming over. I'm definitely going to have a couple of handfuls of these things, but then they're going to be gone. And that's the way that I handle that. So it's not that I never have them, but I almost never have them just sitting in the pantry where 11 o' clock at night I wake up and I'm like, man, maybe just one or two of those would be good. And it ends up being one or two bags because that.

Right.

It's just the way it works, you know. So I, I do offer up a lot of, you know, kind of strategies for navigating this over the long haul so that it's not necessarily a story that you never ever have something again. But you know, you'd make it more of a dinner out or special occasions and you know, just it's kind of like good self defense strategies. Like if you don't want to get mugged, don't go to biker bars at 2 in the morning and have like your wallet dangling out of your back pocket with a bunch of hundred dollar bills dangling out. Like, you know, you just don't do that. And so similarly, if you know that you have some trigger foods, then you plan that but you know, or you let it pop up in a kind of organic way. But if you really make this whole thing, if the success is dependent on willpower, you're almost doomed from the beginning. You've got to have some foreplanning involved or we're going to have serious problems.

Yeah. I want to interrupt this show to tell you about today's sponsor, Jackson's Honest sweet potato chips. Non GMO sweet potatoes. They actually are pretty good. It's basically sweet potatoes, coconut oil and sea salt I think are the.

Oh, they're health food.

Yeah. Plus they're, they're made in the usa. You can't go wrong. Anyways though, Rob, the other thing that I wanted to ask you about was this. Speaking of matrices or matrixes, you actually have in the book kind of like this diagram where you say it's very simple. And I wanted to mention it because I love simplicity, you know, versus like complex meal plans. You have. I think it was part of the. And now I'm literally just like holding your book, trying to find the spot. But you have just like part one, choose this, part two, choose that, part three, choose this to put together a meal. Do you know what I'm talking about? Okay, here.

Yeah, yeah, here we go.

Yeah. Page 169, the Food Matrix Yeah, I was right. It is a matrix, the food matrix. Can you go into how that works? Because it looks like you say you can have 81,000 meal options from this short matrix. Just explain that one to me. It's obviously very simple concept, but just delve into that real quick.

Yeah, so years ago we had a client, a really funny gal, but she came in one day and she just looked like Eeyore. It looked like somebody had run over her dog and her best friend had died. And I'm like, what's wrong? What's going on? And she's like, I'm just bored. And I'm like, bored? Bored of what? She's like, bored of eating this stuff. You know, like, how are you bored? Like, you know, boredom for me denotes that you're getting over exposure to something. And I was like, you're not bored, you're just a cookie addict. You know? And so I went up on the board and for some reason I was thinking about like this Chinese food menu kind of deal, you know, one from column A, one from column B. And I have no idea why, you know, the popped up this way, but I. I made a list of proteins, and then I made a list of like carbs and vegetables and then a list of fats and a list of spices. And just really quickly I was like, okay, if we multiply this by this, by this, we add like four or five thousand different meal combinations. Because it's like, if you have. In, in the book, I think I've got like 25 protein options, 25 or 30 carb options, vegetable options, five or six oil options, and then like 20 or 30 spice options. And so if you go across the top of it and it's like, okay, chicken breast plus broccoli, plus coconut oil plus ginger. Coconut, broccoli.

My kids could freaking do it.

Garlic.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and. And you just go through it. And so this is where you, you, you know, just in the book alone, if you just look at that food matrix, there's 81,000 potential food options. And this is hilarious. Some of the Amazon reviews are absolutely amazing. So, so one guy gave me a four star review. He said the book deserves five stars. But USPS delivered the book late, and so I'm giving it four stars, which made me literally want to become a serial killer and start murdering people. And then the other one was the book claimed that there were 81,000 recipes in here and there were nowhere near that many, and the person was completely banned. So the whole math part of the food Matrix.

It is true though. I mean like, like on the page after the matrix you point out how the fact that you could pick like eggs and cantaloupe and rosemary in thyme and have a recipe and it is kind of true. Like a lot of times we don't think about that. It's like, I think in, in Tim Ferriss's book, the the Four Hour Chef, right, he's got like a matrices for scrambled eggs or you can literally like for the rest of your life just eat scrambled eggs with that matrix and have thousands of different scrambled eggs options. But I think that if anything, if you're listening in, that single page is worth it just to grab a whole bunch of different cool food ideas if you're into simplicity. And there's obviously a ton more in this book. Rob walks you through the, he walks through a bunch of recipes. The last 30 pages or so of the book are just some, some pretty good recipes from Asian short ribs to garlic cilantro shrimp to seafood chowder. All sorts of stuff in there. And then he has the seven day, the seven day test and then the 30 day reset and kind of all the, all the details of the Israel study that we talked about and a lot more. It's actually a really good book. So anyways, if you're listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wired that's where you can access the show notes. And I will link to everything from the previous episode where we talked about a day in the life of Rob, to Stephan Guinea's Hungry to Eat book to that Day two website that Rob mentioned. Maybe we'll even throw some. Maybe we'll throw a link to Jackson's Honest sweet potato chips in there.

Rob.

Yeah, and perhaps our favorite porn websites since that came up too.

Oh, just, just throw pornhub in there. Okay. That's kind of a one stop shop.

Yeah, so. So they say never been, but I've heard of it. And then of course even that book, your Brain on Porn, which actually is a really good book for those of you who want a good argument about why porn sucks. Anyways though, all that's going to be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wired and Rob, thanks for coming on the show. Well, thanks for writing this book and also thanks for coming on the show, man.

Hey, man, huge honor. You do just amazing work. So it's a ton of fun always to get to spend a little time with you. Thank you.

Word man. And I look forward to us going out and maybe shooting a rabbit sometime or something and mixing it up with.

I'm looking forward to it. And you will be at Halo Effects, right? You are getting in on that gig?

Yeah, but I don't think we can shoot rabbits there.

Probably not. Probably not. But Chris Kresser did say that there's going to be a surf park that should be opening then, so.

Maybe we can go check that out.

Hell, that has to do with rabbits, but sounds like fun. All right, well, cool. We'll call it a wrap there, folks. Again, BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wired where you can grab this podcast, all the links to it as well as the previous show with Rob. Rob, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

All right, folks, this has been Greenfield and Rob Wolf signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.

Sa.