In this conversational interview, JJ Virgin and Ben Azadi discuss practical and scientific aspects of the ketogenic diet, focusing on metabolic flexibility, diet periodization, and common misconceptions. They describe a cycling approach (e.g., 5 days low‑carb/keto, 2 days maintenance) to avoid metabolic adaptation and preserve muscle mass. Personal anecdotes—such as enjoying an "Elvis sundae" at a high‑end steakhouse—illustrate the importance of occasional indulgence without derailing progress. The duo debunks several keto myths: keto is a metabolic state, not a diet; the classic 80/15/5 macronutrient split is unnecessary; fat tracking is less critical than protein and carb tracking; men and women respond differently due to hormonal cycles; and keto should be used as a tool, not a permanent regimen. They provide concrete macronutrient guidance (keep carbs <50 g on keto days, hit protein targets, choose lean animal protein, limit added fats). Ben shares his own high‑carb “refeed” day (400‑500 g carbs) to illustrate metabolic flexibility. The conversation then shifts to the controversy around seed oils, distinguishing healthy omega‑6 fats from highly processed, polyunsaturated oils that oxidize, generate aldehydes, and may linger in the body for years, contributing to inflammation. They recommend periodic omega‑3 index testing to maintain a balanced 4:1 omega‑6 to omega‑3 ratio. Throughout, the tone is conversational and enthusiastic, with a balanced, evidence‑informed stance.
Chapters
started going through menopause, so he's been deep in it, which is fantastic. But the way that he does his diet is he does 5 days on, 2 days maintenance, 5 days on. So he'll caloric restrict and then go into maintenance, which, you know, I'd love to see more studies because I really feel like it would also— these things would also help you not have the metabolic adaptation we so often see. Of course, having— more muscle mass would help too. So someone who's now flexible, they can use all the different fuels, do you keep them on keto or do you let them do whatever feels best to them?
I wouldn't keep them on keto. I mean, there could be a portion of the week that they could be in ketosis, like you mentioned. We're doing a podcast now, we're using a lot of energy and bandwidth, I'm in ketosis, I haven't eaten today, I drove up from Miami, so— On a day like this, like, that's a good keto day, right? But on a day that you're training heavy like you did this morning, maybe it's not a good keto day. So you would kind of adjust it according to your lifestyle, but it's important to maintain this metabolic freedom and flexibility by having some keto days, by having some caloric deficit days, and then having some caloric surplus feast days as well. I think that's important.
Yeah, it's funny, last night we went to Bernd Steakhouse, It's one of my girlfriends, Jomie's birthday. So, and then we ended up, so Burns has the dessert room. Have you ever been to Burns?
I have not.
Burns, for everybody listening, is like one of the top steakhouses in the country. And they have a dessert room, which we took, every time we'd go to dinner there, we're like, yeah, no, we're not going to the dessert room. Then we had our kids, so we took them up. And it's these train, like they're little, it looks like you're in these high-end train cars. And these most ridiculous desserts. So, last night, we go to dinner, and I love steakhouses because we literally get the same, like, bone-in New York with mushrooms, and I'm good to go. And then we're like, "Well, we're going to the dessert room. It's her birthday." And I thought about it later, because I was like, "I can't even think of the last time I actually had something like this." And I said to my husband this morning, "I never want to be that person who's like, 'Oh, no.'" I cannot have any of these things. I go, isn't the reason we're doing all of these things so that we can occasionally go and eat literally the Elvis sundae?
What's that? Yeah. Tell me about that, JJ.
The Elvis sundae was banana ice cream, peanut butter ice cream, and I don't know what the third one was, with bacon.
Wow.
Remember that banana peanut butter bacon Elvis sandwich?
That's what it's about. It was based on that.
The sandwich made as a sundae.
Oh my gosh.
That was one of the three desserts. That was one of the 3.
So American.
It was hilarious. I'm like, "Of course we have to have the Elvis sundae, of course." But we also— I looked at the whole thing and I go, "We probably ate about a third of each of them between 4 of us." And I was like, "All right, I better be able to do those things with all that we're doing." And I think that's an important message. I know we're going to talk about some of these things out there like seed oils, but I also have heard people go, "I never go to dinner, I never go out to eat because I don't want to have seed oils." And I go, I'm making my body—
resilient.
So that if occasionally these things come in, I'm not going to like keel over. And I think that's really the point of all of this.
I agree. I enjoy myself too. Sundays are my day for that, by the way. It's my day where I just enjoy myself. I don't restrict myself.
What's that look like? Let's live vicariously through you.
I'll have about 400 to 500 grams of carbs on a Sunday.
Wow.
It's a lot of carbs. I am active on that day. I play a couple hours of basketball with friends every Sunday as well. So, I am active, but— A lot of white rice, a lot of fruit, sweet potatoes and ice cream as well. It's what I do and I have a ton of carbs on that day. But by Monday I'm back into ketosis, right? That's metabolic flexibility.
Yeah, it's funny, we played one game one night, it was like, "What's your last meal?" No one was allowed to judge, of course, and I said, "Movie popcorn," and everyone judged me. Guys, come on! All right, well, let's dig into some of the myths around ketosis, and I'll throw out one drives me nuts, people like, "Oh, I can eat all this because I'm burning fat." I go, "You're not burning your body fat." You know, if you like load up on fat, you got to burn that first. So what are some of the things that you would love to bust here on this?
The first one is that keto is not even a diet, it's a metabolic process. And a lot of people look at it, keto diet for fat loss, keto diet for fat loss, and it can be one way to use it, but it's more of a metabolic process that's been around forever. All humans have used ketosis, all our ancestors have used ketosis when there was not food available, their body needed the ability, their metabolism needed to have that ability to shift to fat burning, produce ketones to fuel the brain so they could stay alert, hunt, kill, and stay alive. So it's nothing new about keto, it's just nuanced or new to some people. So that's the first myth I want to debunk right there. The second one, I like what you just said about the high-fat diet, right? It can be a high-fat diet and most people do it that way, because when they go on Google and type in What are the macronutrients for ketosis? It's about like 80% fat, 15% protein, and 5% carbs. So they think they need to hit that fat percentage, right? And maybe in the beginning, like the first 7 days, that might do well. As you lower carbs, you could introduce a bunch of fat. But to your point, your body needs to burn the calories and the fat that you're consuming before it burns your body fat. So the way I teach it, very similar to what you would teach, is to Have lower fat, get the fat that comes with the protein, hit your protein and keep the carbs under 50 grams so your metabolism is tapping into stored body fat.
Yeah, and it's— I mean, the reality is if you're eating animal protein, you're getting fat. That's right. So the carbs are the ones that don't come along with fat. Everything in nature that's animal protein has fat with it.
This is true. So there's no need to even track fat. Track your carbs and track your protein. Hit your protein requirement, keep your carbs under 50 grams.
And the other side of that is if you're eating animal protein, and I think you should choose lean, it's like get clean, choose lean, unless you're getting really great clean fish, go for it. And then you're making vegetables and likely you're using some ghee or olive oil or something. So when you really get through it, you're like, do you really need to add any fat? I mean, that was when I really started tracking and weighing, I went, "Oh, I'm good." You know, no, I don't need to sit there with the olive oil bottle turned upside down on top of my stuff.
Putting butter in the coffee.
Oh yeah, that never— well, Dave is a good friend, I was like, "Make mine really light." I could never handle all the fat in the coffee, it was like, "No, too much." It's a myth, you don't need to do that.
Let your body burn its own body fat for its fat source, especially if you have extra weight.
All right, so any other myths around this?
Another myth is that men and women do it the same and that's not absolutely true, as you know, women have more of a 24-hour recycling pattern for their hormones. Menstruating women have more of a 28-day pattern, and men in post-menopause are closer to the men with 24-hour recycling pattern. So it's done differently. Uh, ketosis is a stress to the body. It's, it's a beneficial stress, a hormetic stress, when done the right way. It stresses your mitochondria to actually create more mitochondria and create more energy. But if you do it too aggressively, for too long, then you lose this hormetic curve where the benefits you were getting are now becoming drawbacks. So you don't want to do it for too long. It's a tool, but not the only tool.
And where I've used it in the past has either been to break someone free of insulin resistance or cancer or seizures. Those are like, to me, the 3 big applications. Oh yeah. Am I missing any?
No, that works really well. Or if somebody has a weight loss stall, and they want to change things up, be a little bit aggressive for a little bit with ketosis, which is a very low carbohydrate diet, it could work really well for that. Another myth is that all keto fats are created equal. Just because something is keto-friendly, it should be healthy, but that is not true. And arguably, with the seed oil thing and the bad fats, more people in the keto space are consuming these bad fats than maybe people outside of the keto space, because they're focusing on a high-fat diet, and typically they're eating a ton of these rancid fats, these seed oils. Oh boy, yeah. Just because it's keto-friendly doesn't mean it's health-friendly.
The whole keto food, ultra-processed food thing reminds me of gluten. So when I first started pulling people off gluten, I remember this one gal came back and she was so pleased with herself because she'd found all this gluten-free junk food. I was like, "Why are you eating cupcakes and cookies? We weren't eating these before. Now you found gluten-free ones and you're eating all this garbage. Stop it." And you see the same thing in the "it's keto" and you look at it and you're like, this. So let's dig in. I'd love to hear what you think about seed oils because I kind of— well, let's see what you say and then I'm going to kind of see some of the things I'm thinking about with them. So first tell everyone what they are.
So seed oils are classified also as vegetable oils, also linoleic acid, these are omega-6 fats. I'm going to start by saying that Not all seed oils are bad for you. Not all omega-6 fats are bad for you. Actually, healthy seed oils and healthy omega-6 fats are crucial for the cell membrane.
Yeah, they're essential.
They're essential, yeah. So it's not that all seed oils are bad. Now, there are a lot of clips out there, especially with me talking about seed oils, and it's easy to take a clip and interpret that as Ben saying all seed oils are bad, but it's the processed ones that are the bad ones. And the reason why processed ones are so bad for us is because they're very unstable fats. They're polyunsaturated fats. The word poly, we know, means many. So these polyunsaturated fats contain many double bonds. The more double bonds a fat contains, the more fragile these fats are, the more aggressive they attract oxygen. So the way they process these oils, as you know, uh, JJ Virgin, they use heat, oxygen, and chemical agents. So they turn these fats rancid, they bottle them up, we use them to fry and cook with, heat them up even more, and they're very unstable. It's like biting into an apple, leaving it on the counter, coming back 5 hours later, it starts to turn brown. That's kind of what's happening to our cells. And the problem as well is they stay in our body for a very long time. Some studies suggest that the linoleic acid in the vegetable oil, the half-life is about 680 days, meaning if we stopped eating them today, about 2 years later, they're still, in our body fat creating inflammation. And one more point, there's a study called, from Dr. Martin Grootveld, I put this in "Metabolic Freedom," where they looked at French fries cooked in vegetable oils. A 5-ounce serving of French fries contains about 20 to 25 French fries, and it produced the same amount of aldehydes, which are cancer-causing carcinogenic, as 20 to 25 tobacco cigarettes. Essentially, JJ Virgin, one French fry fried in vegetable oil is equivalent to one tobacco cigarette smoked.
I don't even know what to say. I've never heard that one before. That's crazy. I know. That's crazy. Well, it's always been my thinking on these seed oils is that— and I'm glad you brought it up that way— these double bonds, it seems like it should be the opposite, but single bonds are the strong ones and double bonds, one can be broken apart. So all of a sudden you've hit it with oxygen, heat, bam, these things break apart and they get oxidized, they become bad, they're rogue. And that really, like, if you had a very clean oil that wasn't processed like that and you are in the right balance, this could work well. And when I say that, like, I think we all should, along with the fasting insulin and the vitamin D, like, do an omega-3 index test once a year. Now what's funny, this omega-3 index test is going to look at how much omega-3 you have, and then it's also going to look at your 3:6. And what was interesting for me is I actually, you know, they say what, in primal times we were 4:1 of our 6:3, and that is to keep our inflammation in check, in balance. If you have too much one way, like if you're too high on the 6s, you'll be very pro-inflammatory. If you're too high in the 3s, you could be cut and bleed out. So, you know, there's a balance there.
