#125 - Mark Sisson: Decoding the Art of Aging: Secrets to Timeless Wellness and Health

What if in your 60s you could be in better shape, both physically, mentally, emotionally, than you were in your 20s? What if at 67 you could be someone who starts your day by swimming in the ocean, paddleboarding midday, going to the gym, uh, having a meal that you would enjoy with your loved one with a glass of wine, and making every day spectacular where your 60s are your 20s all over again? And then 70 as 30? Well, there aren't too many people that know what they're doing because they haven't done it yet, but there is one person that I've been privileged to know for almost 17 years. His name is Mark Sisson. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He has a new book he's gonna be talking about called Two Meals a Day, and he's also the creator of one of my favorite products out there, uh, that makes avocado oil. He's just been a sponsor of the show many times, uh, Primal Kitchen, and he's gonna share with us his inner secrets of really maximizing life at any age. So even if you're in your 20s and 30s, it's gonna help. And more importantly, you're gonna look and feel your best if you utilize any one of his methods. We're gonna talk about the number one diet mistake we make and how fat and sugar can harm us and cause major inflammation in our body. And you're gonna learn simple solutions to fix all that, all on today's show, guys. So let's get started. Hi, my name is Jorge Cruise and I'm known as the Zero Hunger Guy. I'm also a celebrity fitness trainer and multiple New York Times bestseller bestselling diet author with over 30 books and 12 million fans. You may have seen my work with Oprah Winfrey, Khloe Kardashian, Tyra Banks, Kelly Clarkson, or even Steve Harvey. My career started in my early 20s because I was addicted to sugar, carbs, and salty snacks, and experts told me to simply count calories to get control. They were wrong. My passion to get radical control over hunger has led me to find science-proven ways that help my clients drop 2 pounds each day and create zero hunger, body, mind, and soul. And I know I can help you too. Welcome to the Zero Hunger Revolution. Well, happy Wednesday. It is April 14th. I hope you're well, guys. I'm Jorge and welcome to the Jorge Cruise Show, or is what we're calling it now, the Zero Hunger Guy Show. And, uh, as the Zero Hunger Guy, I welcome you. This show's really all about being a place and a resource, and it really is the number one resource to help anyone overcome their cravings and, and kind of addictions to sugar, carbs, salty snack foods. These are things that I had issues with when I was a young guy, you know, in high school and college. And it's not our fault, and I always say that because these substances known as sugar and carbs, they're addictive, you know. And some people say more addictive than certain hard drugs, which, um, which is hard to believe, but it's true. So if you are trying to eat less carbohydrates, welcome.

You're going to learn a a lot of great things on today's show.

You're gonna learn about how sugar and fat actually is not good for us. That's kind of crazy. You're gonna learn about how fat with protein though can give you an incredible life. It's one of the secret ways that this man Mark Sisson helps everyone reduce inflammation. And I don't care if you're 50 like me, 60 or 70, Mark's gonna, he's turning 68 this year. But he was someone that had struggled with inflammation throughout his whole life. He was an athletic, runner and did so many high-level performance things, his joints and bones were not well. And by changing specifically oils in his diet, he transformed everything. So we're going to hear all that today. I'm super excited to share this podcast with you, but first I have to give thanks to our sponsors. So very special thank you to Elemental Labs. Uh, if you go to drinkelement.com/jorge, you get a free box of electrolytes. These are the electrolytes that I use every day when I'm on the go, whether it's at the gym or traveling to New York or LA. And when you do the value bundle, you get this value bundle for free. It's a $45 value. Simply check out the URL drinklmnt.com/jorge. That's drinklmnt.com/jorge. We're also brought to you by Julian Bakery. I love Julian Bakery because, uh, it's literally like, uh, the Willy Wonka factory but sugar-free. It's sweet without the sugar, I like to say. And they're giving all our listeners, you guys, 10% off of anything from their website. It's julianbakery.com. Uh, there's a coupon code at checkout. You have to use Jorge Cruise, all one word. That's spelled J-O-R-G-E-C-R-U-I-S-E. And finally, we're brought to you by Primal Kitchen. This is Mark Sisson's company, and he's giving us a free avocado mayo. Simply check out primalkitchen.com/jorgecruise, all one word, to get your free lemon chipotle avocado mayo. It's anti-inflammatory and delicious. You're going to love it, guys. It's what I use as a dollop. I put a dollop of it on my steaks. I put it into burgers. You can use it for anything. And they also have incredible salad dressing. So make sure to check it out, get your free avocado mayo. primalkitchen.com/jorgecruise. And without further ado, guys, if you're ready to reconnect with my dear friend Mark Sisson, he's going to share with us really the keys to maximizing our health, maximizing our vitality, and really how to redefine aging. Because it's really about understanding how simple techniques can give us a huge advantage, and more importantly, can make staying young easy. Because if you could not just keep the weight off but also stay young— I mean, I'm 50. This is my goal. So whatever age you're at, I think there's such a valuable knowledge well of, of information for Mark that you're gonna hopefully be overwhelmed. And if you just use one thing, that's my challenge, to use one thing starting today that Mark gives you, you're gonna transform your life. So without waiting anymore, guys, let's get to it. Let's bring out Mark Sisson right now. All right, here he is, Mark Sisson, the author of Two Meals a Day.

Welcome everyone to an incredibly special podcast. I am so excited because you guys know I've had an opportunity over my career, 20 years in publishing, to meet a lot of incredible people. And there's one person that has, I think, personally impacted my life the most when it comes to what I put in my mouth. And joining us on the show today is this very person. He's not only a New York Times bestselling author, he's also a student of truly ancestral nutrition, of biology, to a high degree. He's 67 years young. He just, uh, when was your birthday, Mark? Are you there? Say hi to everyone, Mark.

Hey, what's going on everyone? Um, and thanks for having me, Jorge. Yeah, my birthday is coming up. I'll be 68 in July.

So Mark, you're not allowed.

So there's that. Wow.

Well, how has, I mean, we're gonna get into everything. You have a new book out, which we're gonna talk about, which I love, of course, on intermittent fasting. You've written how many books though, total before the new one? Probably 3 or 4 others, right?

Oh no, if you count cookbooks, we're at 12 or 13, uh, because I got a bunch of cookbooks out there. But, uh, I've been writing books since 1980. My first book was, uh, was the Runner's World Triathlon Training Book, and then I wrote a book on duathlon training, and then I wrote a book called The Ultimate Lean Routine. And then The Primal Blueprint was like my fourth book by the time I really started.

That one blew up everywhere. Why don't we do this, Mark? As much as we love each other, and you've been on the show at least 3 other times, I feel like Probably the biggest question my audience has, because you guys, you know, Mark, you know, everyone listening to the show and are watching it as well understands that right now our health is more important than ever before. And I saw you on Joe Rogan just this last month. I think it was in March you were on there. And I thought that was really powerful about how your mission was somewhat modest, 10 million people to really transform how they eat. But you've elevated to, I think, 100 million people. And I'm with you. You on this, Mark. And I feel like we're the superheroes, super friends, the Hall of Justice. Uh, there's a Lex Luthor out there. I don't want to say it's Bill Gates, but Dave Asprey was on the show with me last month, and, uh, and I think he said Bill Gates is Lex Luthor. And I'm like, oh shit, we're going there. Because, you know, there's, there's some people that also care about our well-being, but I don't know why Bill Gates thinks, thinks eating synthetic plant-based meat is an option. But that's where we're at in 2021, right, Mark? These crazy things are happening, right?

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's sad actually to think that so much of, uh, our ability, our empowering ourselves to achieve good health, relies on, um, some pretty basic principles, which are wholesome real food, uh, and sunlight and exercise. And the things that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to accept and to expect. And then to think that the tech industry is going to come along and find a workaround and find a solution that is somehow circumventing what our genes expect of us on a daily basis. So, you know, whether it's, you know, talking about these fake foods, these Frankenfoods that we see in the form of Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger. Or whether it's somehow convincing the world that we have to go plant-based on everything and eliminate the concept of eating meat altogether, it's completely antithetical to good health. It's completely antithetical to who we are and what our genetic makeup expects of us. And I see it as, you know, this— as you said, the Bill Gates of the world, they're thinking that they're trying to do a solid to us. They're trying to provide us with a benefit or a service. And in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. So it's really frustrating.

Well, you know, and that's why I look to you as my nutrition mentor for at least almost 17 years. And, you know, we met before I was even in Malibu, even though you were in Malibu. You were there for 30 years, right, Mark? And I finally got there.

I was there and then now I'm no longer in Malibu.

And here you are still.

And I was there for a little bit. We overlapped for a couple for maybe a year or two before you went to Malibu. But let's, let's go back in time. And then I've got a big question because we're going to talk about— I tease this as really the number one diet mistake we all make, and we're going to talk about fat and sugar in a minute. But before we get into all this stuff, I mean, you're not Bill Gates, thank goodness. No disrespect to Mr. Gates and his new book as well. But you're a man who, as much as you're not a medical doctor, you have been exposed to some incredible opportunities to test things out, not just on yourself, but on athletes. I thought maybe if you don't mind, Mark, share with us in a minute or two, a little bit of how you got involved into fitness. Now, we all know fitness begins in the kitchen. So, we are going to link it up to where we are today. Take us back to the young Mark Sisson. I think you grew up on the East Coast, right, in Maryland, right, Mark?

I grew up in Maine. Oh, Maine.

Sorry, Maine.

Yeah.

I grew up in a fishing village in Maine. You know, I was interested in health at a very young age. And while I wasn't muscular and I wasn't athletic in the traditional sense, I didn't play football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, any of those sports, I was drawn to distance running primarily because I lived almost 2 miles from school. And so I ran to and from school every day just as a means of transportation. And over the years, I became proficient at this endurance activity. So I got into races. I raced the mile, the 2-mile in high school, and then 5Ks and 10Ks and marathons. And within, you know, after, by the time I got out of college, I was one of the top marathoners on the East Coast. And marathoning was becoming a big thing in the late '70s. Yeah.

You were in Maine. This is in Maine, right, Mark? Maine?

Yeah.

Maine and then Western Massachusetts where I went to college. And then I migrated to the West Coast and joined a track team or a running club there and trained for the 1980 U.S. Olympic trials. So that was my big emphasis and my big goal for those years of my life. And during that process, I was always interested in finding out more about how I could improve my performance, whether it was the way I was training or the foods I was eating. And in those days, one of the top authors was a fellow by the name of Robert Haas, and he wrote a Jorge Cruise wrote a book called Eat to Win, and it was largely based on carbohydrates. And so I followed that advice, ate lots of carbohydrates, like 500, 600, 700, 800 grams of carbs a day to fuel my running experience. And while my running was getting good and I was quite fast and proficient, and I was able to, I think, probably run to the best of my ability, my genetic ability, I was falling apart on the inside. I realized that I had arthritis, I had tendonitis, I had irritable bowel syndrome, I had all sorts of maladies that were negatively impacting my life. By the time I retired from competition, I realized that the food, the diet had been a negative impact on me, that I had such a highly inflammatory diet in the pursuit of trying to be healthy and trying to run all these miles that I kind of derailed my efforts to be healthy. So while I was fit and I was, you know, I looked fit, I was on the COVID of Runner's World magazine 3 times, I wasn't healthy on the inside. And so I retired. I started rededicating my efforts to—

To fixing the damage, right, Mark? To fixing. I mean, how old were you when you realized you had to stop or you would, I mean, maybe, I don't know, you're not going to lose a leg here, but you had hip problems, knee problems, back problems, or what?

Yeah, I was 28. I was 28 years old. When I realized that this was not going to work. So, I spent, really spent the rest of, have spent the rest of my life, the last almost 40 years researching on ways in which we can all achieve good health through, primarily through diet, but certainly through the appropriate forms of exercise and through spending time outside and in sunlight and getting good sleep and controlling stress and having a great relationship and being productive at work and all the things that make for an awesome life. I mean, I haven't really focused just on diet. Diet is certainly a critical component of that, and it's where I've really, I think, found the most kind of interesting, um, workarounds and interesting, um, genetic switches that we can all turn on or off. But certainly sleep and sun exposure and all these things are part of my, my life way, my, what I call my primal blueprint.

Yeah, yeah. No, and we're going to get into it. We're going to talk about the new book, the Just 2 Meals book, which I think is brilliant because it's a really great tool for people starting intermittent fasting. I mean, You know, I wrote a book similar to this, Cruise Control, and I, I believe so much in what you're doing, Mark. I feel like we're not just, um, aligned, but I feel like, you know, you've always been a step ahead of me. And I feel like there's a diet mistake— let's start with this— that most people, including— and we love Joe Rogan, I love him to death, I listen to all the shows, I listen when you're on there, you're not on there enough, which I agree with them— but tell us this idea of a combination. And even if it's a good oil, a good fat, whether it's, uh beef tallow or avocado oil, combined with the S word, and it's not sex, it's sugar. When we combine sugar and fat, Mark, what happens and why does that put us in harm's way? Because would you say that is truly in today's modern world, the thing that we are really, and I hate to be so direct, but really screwing up ourselves with this combo of fat and sugar. And it's probably not our fault because it tastes damn good to mix those two things together. But is that really a big faux pas right now?

Well, yeah, I mean, it's certainly the backbone of the standard American diet is to combine fats and sugars, right? So most people are eating poorly, who have bad— what I would call poor food choices— have all along been combining fats and sugars and certainly some, some amount of protein. And the standard American diet is one that causes this wide swing in insulin throughout the day. Where you, you know, you're always sort of eating a new meal to get energy. And then because of the amount of sugar in that meal, your insulin levels rise and the insulin takes all of the glucose out of the bloodstream and tries to sequester it along with the fat and the protein, sequester all that stuff in the cells. And so your blood sugar drops, you get hungry again and you have to eat again. And with this, you never really get the chance to burn off your own stored body fat. And so over time, you tend to accumulate fat stores over a lifetime. And that's been the experience of most Americans with the standard American diet. So now when we start— when we come to this, um, recognition that there are ways that we can rebuild our metabolism— I call it metabolic flexibility— we can build this metabolic flexibility that allows us to burn off our stored body fat when we don't eat, allows us to go through the day switching back and forth between glucose or carbohydrate energy and fat energy without, without ever feeling the difference, without feeling punky or funky or hangry or anything like that. It's this building this metabolic flexibility that we're really after. And so the book Two Meals a Day is based on the idea that we can train ourselves to burn our own stored body fat so well that we can go 16, 17, 18 hours each day without eating and have all the energy we need, have all the muscle mass we need to build, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. So, when you build this system, this new system, this metabolically flexible system, it enables you to burn off your stored body fat. Now, in building this system, what we have recognized is that you have to sort of cut back on carbs. You have to cut back on sugar and you have to cut back on carbs. So, that would mean not just pies, cakes, candies, sweetened beverages, and the things that contain sugar that we know we should, but also cut back on, uh, bread, pasta, cereal, uh, things like that. So when you eliminate the carbohydrate source of foods and the body understands that there's not going to be a lot of carbs and that the only other resource is to tap into this amazing genetic potential that we all have to become fat adapted and to burn off stored body fat and to make ketones in the process. Um, this— the body adjusts and it upregulates these enzyme systems and starts turning on these genes that build the metabolic machinery to burn fats more effectively and more efficiently. So that's all a preamble to— that all works really well if you've cleaned your diet up, if you've gotten rid of the industrial seed oils. So if you've gotten rid of soybean and canola and corn oil, if you've gotten rid of the sugars like we just talked about, if you've gotten rid of the grains and you come down to meat, uh, you know, beef, pork, lamb, turkey, chicken, uh, all kinds of fish, vegetables, maybe even some starchy tubers, um, you will achieve this metabolic flexibility. Now, uh, it's partly a result of eliminating those sugary foods. It's also partly a result of building in a lot of time throughout the day where you're not eating. And the body is now not just burning off your own stored body fat, but it's making repairs to the cells that it has inside your body. It's understanding that there's not going to be a lot of—

housekeeping, right, Mark?

The autophagy, we call it, right?

Exactly, the housekeeping.

So with all— no, no, go ahead.

With all those things in mind, people start to go, okay, I've become metabolically flexible, this is great. Um, I'm going 18 hours a day without eating, so my first meal is at 1 o'clock or 1:30 or whatever in the afternoon. My second meal is at 7 PM, 7:30 PM, maybe even sometimes 6 PM. Those are my only 2 meals, the 2 meals a day. So, now they are thinking I have some leeway. Now, I can start to maybe reintroduce some of the foods that I had given up for so long. That is where the mistakes start to get made. So, when people are saying, well, Mark, I did what you said. I increased the amount of fat and protein. And I cut out the sugars for a while, but now I'm going to start reintroducing the sugars, or now I'm going to start having some cereal or some bread or some—

Well, you know what I wrote down, Mark? When you were talking to Mr. Rogan, I wrote down, because he shared with you an example of how he has dessert sometimes, and I think I wrote down, don't eat sugary desserts at night. Because tell us what happens when we combine that with a really healthful meal that may be something like a healthy steak with healthy fat.

If you're taking in healthy fats, your body is adjusting to that information, the food that you're taking in, and it's not going to secrete insulin. It's, you know, fats and protein in combination have a very low impact on raising insulin. And so the body tends to utilize those component parts in real time. It doesn't have to store them and try to shunt them away or take them out of the bloodstream as quickly as it might with sugar. So let's just say you had a great day. You had, you know, some fish for lunch and a little bit of vegetables, and then you had a nice steak and some vegetables for dinner. But then you say, I had a great day, now I'm going to have some dessert.

Well— chocolate cake.

Chocolate cake. It just completely derails everything. Now the chocolate cake causes the insulin to spike sky high. That insulin is going to look to not only remove the sugar that's in the cake from your bloodstream, but it's also going to cause the body to have some— so while, by the way, while the fat and the sugar are in your bloodstream at the same time, we can get what we call advanced glycated end products, AGEs, which can literally— those are the things that in most people who don't eat healthy can clog up the works, right?

Clog up the capillary.

It's inflammation on our body. It's aging, right, Mark? Huge.

It is huge inflammation. It is a huge amount of inflammation. So, you took a great day where you were good all day long and then you had some dessert because, you know, you felt like you deserved it and it screws everything up. So, that is the toughest part about sticking with this Program. You know, it doesn't mean you can't have the joyful, delightful desserts once in a while, but, you know, maybe some blueberries with some whipped cream on it or something that is a little bit more natural and less likely to cause this, not just this blood sugar swaying and this rise in insulin, but this increase in inflammation, as you noted. And also, like with chocolate and me, for instance, at the end of the day, chocolate has caffeine in it. So I can have a piece of chocolate cake and then, like, not sleep because my heart rate is racing because of the caffeine, which causes the release of adrenaline, and the insulin is high. So my heart's beating faster. My body is, I'm basically running hotter and I'm sweating it when I'm sleeping. It's horrible. And like, why would I do that to myself, right?

Especially after chocolate cake or brownie or chocolate chip cookie. Now, how about a glass of wine? Same thing with a glass of wine because we know that's sugary.

Yeah. It depends on the wine. There are some wines that have zero sugar. So, some of the wines—

Dry Farm, is that one we like? Dry Farm, right?

Dry Farm Wines is great. You know, they're online, they ship to your home. And they're tested for their sugar content to the extent they have like half a gram or less, you know, per glass. And typically, less than half a gram means zero sugar. It doesn't mean they don't have alcohol.

They have alcohol.

They have 11%, 11.5%, 12% alcohol, which is what you're after when you're and drinking wine. But the sugar part of that and the additives and all the other things that cause headaches and hangovers are gone from these sorts of wines. So within reason, add some of this wine to your evening meal. In fact, the owner of Dry Farm Wines, a friend of mine, Todd, he's been keto for 10 years. And he got into this business because he couldn't find any wines that he drank that would, that would allow him to stay keto through dinner. So he started testing these wines for sugar and found that there were certain wines, especially from old, old-growth vineyards in Europe, that have never had issues with adding sugar, adding non-native yeast, over-macerating the grapes, adding 72 different, you know, colorants and additives without disclosing them on the label.

Well, I think that's so brilliant, Mark. And if fat and sugar is literally the thing that kills us, glycates us, ages us, makes us fat, destroys like all the beautiful things we can do here. Um, I hate to ask, and we think of sugar in the way we said, you know, whether it's in traditional beverages like sugary drinks, even alcohol, traditional alcohol, uh, whether it's cake, cookies, and all that. But now talk to me about this, because this is the thing that I think is going to blow people away, because you talk about it in your new book, um, about grains. I wrote down in my notes that grains— and we're talking, I mean, you list your 3 healthy whole grains. What are the ones that we all think Oprah, you, me are all going to decide, oh, whole grains are— these are okay. And maybe they're gluten-free grains even, right?

Well, there are very few gluten-free grains.

I mean, right?

No, I mean, no, I mean, you know, there's, there's— you can now buy bread made with, uh, you know, tapioca or quinoa breads. I mean, there are certain grains that don't have much gluten at all. Almond flour is another example of how they're making breads now. But typically, wheat, corn, barley, rye, these are the grains that we've grown up with that are the component part of cereal and breads and pasta.

And why do these grains— and how can you share this? Because I think when we think sugar, we think sugar. But carbs can be converted into sugar and grains can kill us, right, Mark? Share with us your thinking on that, because I think a lot of people think grains are high in fiber, and yet you endorsed Paul Saladino's work, uh, The Carnivore Code. And I've had, I've had him on the show because of you, and I'm very honored that he's been on here so many times. And he told us in one episode, Mark, that we don't need fiber to poop, that we don't need it. So take us down this grain-free world and why the heck, and I don't want to think it was Harvey Kellogg that did all this to us back in the Victorian time period, but we didn't always used to eat cereal and grains all the time. But why do grains kill us, Mark? And why do we got to try to do less of that too? And it's not just the chocolate cake, right?

Well, I mean, grains, why do grains kill us? That's a little bit of an overstatement. They kill some people if you're celiac. But if you have a gluten intolerance, and, and on— and this could be on any level, I was not celiac, but I had, uh, was very, very, very responsive to gluten, and it caused my arthritis, and it caused my GERD, and it caused my IBS. And when I got rid of grains, in my case, all that stuff went away. Um, so, so we don't need grains, and grains, for the most part, as pervasive as they are, as they are in our diet again with breads and rice, breads and, and cookies and crackers and, and cereals and pancakes and waffles and all the things that we, that we eat on a regular basis. Uh, even if you don't have, uh, sort of an organic reaction to the gluten or the tightly wound proteins in these, in these grains, they still convert to glucose in your bloodstream very rapidly. So in other words, glucose is what we're trying to avoid. High blood glucose is what we're trying to avoid. And when we talk about sugars, sugars— glucose is a form of sugar. So glucose is how sugar presents itself in your bloodstream, whether it's from a bowl of table sugar or whether it's from a glass of Coca-Cola or whether it's from a dessert and whether it's from a potato or it's from pasta.

Anything, right?

Any of that pasta converts, you know, pasta and bread, uh, and, and, and cereals convert to glucose in the bloodstream very quickly. So your, your body doesn't know whether the glucose that's in it right now came from a slice of bread or a bowl of Skittles. And, uh, that's tough for some people to get their head around. Like, once, you know, once you understand that, that every form of of grain, especially highly processed grain that you're consuming, converts to glucose pretty quickly. And that counts as sugar. It counts as glucose in your bloodstream. So to the extent that you can avoid eating grains on a regular basis, I think you're better off in that regard. Now, some people would say, well, wait a minute, the the U.S. Department of Agriculture has this food pyramid, and it used to, for the longest time, recommend 6 to 11 servings of grains every day. One of those is because grains are a cheap source of calories, and so for a country that didn't have access to, you know, everyone didn't have access to great cuts of meat all the time, the next sort of best thing that the government could come up with was, well, let me get your get your protein from whole grains, and that'll, you know, that'll help get you through your day. And somehow they decided that the fiber in grains was good for your colon, and so they started to anoint oat bran and wheat bran with— and barley with, you know, heart-healthy properties because it cleaned your colon. And bound with cholesterol and did a number of other apparently magical sort of things. And people assume that, well, my colon health is dependent on my having servings of grains because grains contain fiber, and that's where I get the fiber, and it must be good. That's— I must need that in order to poop or in order to, you know, have regular bowel movements. And again, as Paul Saladino would say, nothing could be further from the truth. You do not need grains to be regular. The, the reason that we, that we excrete, uh, that we have bowel movements every day is primarily to get rid of the dead bacteria in our gut. Our gut is home to 60 or 80 trillion bacteria. There are more bacterial cells in us than there are human cells in us. So you could argue that, that we are a life support system for a colony of bacteria.. And since those bacteria turn over, they die on a regular basis, every couple of hours, every, every day, every couple of days, there's a lot of bacterial turnover and we need to get rid of that bacterial turnover. So most, most of the, the components of fecal matter should be just bacterial turnover. It doesn't need to be undigested food particles.

I was going to say, you know, my buddy, Dr.

Oz, I love him to death. And he used to do these poop demos with Oprah. And he would show this S thing that was about a foot long. It looked like a snake coming out of you. And that, I mean, and this is what I love about you, Mark, your passion, maybe at age 28, 29, once you got out of all the crazy stuff you were doing when you were in your 20s, was to find a blueprint. Correct? I mean, that was one of your best books and my favorite. And so take us just for a minute, take us back in time because you more than anyone, and I know, uh, Robb Wolf, uh, loves to study Paleolithic health and nutrition, ancestral health, but you know a little bit of what our ancestors— I think there was a name you gave them in the book, Brock, is that right?

Brock? Yeah, yeah.

So tell us what our ancestors— a day in the life, because were we eating grains? Now take us back, how many years back do we go? We're not going 30,000 or 300. What is this, like 2 million years ago?

Well, I mean, the human form, you know, the Homo sapiens, we started 2.5 million years ago. We, you know, it was a gradual evolution, goes back 100 million years of mammalian evolution, but we've been basically humanoid for 2.5 million years. And through that time, until only about 8,000 years ago, we never ate grains at all. Or if we ate grains—

Wait, wait, I'm going to interrupt you, Mark, because You know, I'm hearing everyone from Mark Hyman, Dr. Hyman, all these doctors, you know. You know, I know Marco Borrago, Beyoncé's trainer, who wrote the Green Print.

You've heard of this book, right?

And you would think a plant-based world with grains has been going on since Jesus was here. But that was only 2,000 years ago. So say it one more time, only 8,000 years ago, Mark?

Yeah, we really didn't start growing grains. We didn't figure out how to grow grains in one place and harvest them and process them until about 8,000 years ago. Now, some people would say it's between— depending on what part of the world you're in, it's between 6,000 years ago and maybe 10,000 years ago. But whatever, it's a very small amount of time that we have been consuming grain products as a species. And prior to that, we ate— we were hunter-gatherers. So we ate— certainly for a long part of our history, we ate giant giant animals, mastodons and mammoths and, you know, things like aurochs, giant precursors to cows and things like that.

But we also ate— That's the hunting.

—you know, and deer and gazelle and elk and bison and so on. But we also ate snails and snakes and newts and toads and frogs and eggs and roadkill. So if another animal killed something, we were scavengers. In fact, some of you would say our brains developed largely from access to bone marrow that we were able— the first tool we were able to use as human-like creatures was to crack open the thigh bone of another animal that had been killed and eating the marrow. So we've been hunter-gatherers for a long time, and we've only been pastoralist, we've only been farming for, let's just say, 10,000 years. All right, of that, of that time.

Hey, it's Jorge, and I just wanted to interrupt the show just for a moment to invite you to head on over and sign up for my Zero Hunger email that'll give you each day a simple what to eat to get radical control over your sugar, carb, and salty snack food cravings. And if this is something you want to conquer and make a lifestyle, the newsletter is important. It will really give you tools every day to keep building that momentum to create a lifestyle where you're in control of sugar and carbs. So if that sounds good, check it out. Simply go to zerohungerplan.com. I'll spell it for you, it's with a Z, Z-E-R-O, zerohungerplan.com, and it's all free. I'll see you there. Let's get back to the show.

Even parts of the parts of the world didn't do a lot of grain growing. They still— they learned how to raise goats and sheep and cow and cattle and things like that, that they would eat mostly. Even in parts of Africa, there was not a lot of growing. It was, until recent times, it was access to animals. It was hunting skills that allowed humans to exist. And throughout So, for all this time, we tapped into this, again, this amazing ability that we had to convert excess calories that we ate into energy that we carry around with us, conveniently located above the center of gravity. So, right over the belly and over the hips and over the thighs and the lower back. This is where we kept the extra fuel that we needed for the days when there would be no food. Our ancestors were not grazing all day long. For the most part, they were, you know, they'd hunt and they'd catch something and they'd eat it, and maybe they'd overeat it and store the excess as fat. And then for a couple of days, if there was no more food that they'd caught, or if a hunt was unsuccessful, they'd have to live off that body fat that they stored. It was— it's a great, uh, very, very elegant system of storing fat and then having the information to be able to take the fat out of storage combust it for fuel and use it to survive. Not just survive, but thrive for the next few days. Well, today, because we have access to so much food, we retain that ability to store fat on our bodies, but we've— many of us have lost the ability to convert the stored fat into energy, burn it off, and thrive for long periods of time without eating. So back to the book Two Meals a Day and, and the concept of intermittent fasting. All the good things happen to your body when you're not eating. So the—

say that, say that one more time. It's— this is the autophagy, right, Mark?

Yeah.

So all the good things happen to the human body when we're not eating. You know, all the repair, all the burning off of, of, uh, dead cells, all of the, the, the combustion and getting rid of damaged proteins and damaged fats, um, taking fat out of storage, um, much of what we would call detox happens when we're not eating. We have to eat once in a while for sure, but all the good stuff happens when we're not eating. So to the extent that we can build in long periods of time every day where we don't eat, um, we'll be better off for that.

Now, Mark, I wanna, I wanna push it just a pinch further because in your book you have like a few pages dedicated to OMAD. And we know that term as well, one meal a day. And that's something on occasion, uh, people do. And I've done it. I think you've done it on occasion too, Mark. And I, you definitely have to be a little more less hungry. And I think we're going to talk about hunger in a minute too. But when you think of all the, like you said so elegantly, all the good things happen when we don't eat. Can you explain for anyone, because now I'm 50, Mark, I just turned 50 last month. I think everyone listening is over 50 on my show here. Why, if we want longevity, and you're now going to be 68 this year, right? So whether 50s, 60s, or 70s, why is this magic time, this no eating time, whether it's 17, 18 hours or say 23 hours, you know what I mean, Mark? Why is that something we should not fear? Because I think people are so scared. Now imagine we can turn off hunger. So that's sad. Why is this so powerful for us, especially over 50, right, Mark?

Well, you know, um, you say you will imagine we can turn off hunger. I think people are afraid of doing this mostly for hunger, but I think they feel like they're going to get hungry and they'll have to elbow their way through this, right? Um, but I, so I think one of the first things that happens when you develop metabolic flexibility is hunger, appetite, and cravings really dissipate, and you, and you get really good at just going through your day and not even thinking about eating and not having to eat and not being tethered to a mealtime.

And wink wink, Mark, I know you from Albu, you've been doing this kind of thing since the 1980s, correct, Mark? And you're not hungry, right, Mark?

I think so. Some people are afraid, you know, they're going to lose their muscle mass if they don't eat because that's been a big thing over the years. Like if I don't eat, I'll get, A, I'll get hangry, B, I'll lose my muscle mass or I might even, you know, get sick because I have to eat. If I don't eat, I'll get sick.

My immune system will be weak. Will be weak. Right? And what could be further than the truth, right? Yeah, yeah.

From the truth, which is the fact that your immune system gets bolstered by these periods of not eating. And, you know, my wife does a once a year, twice a year now, she does a 7-day water-only fast and she does it primarily for her immune system. So—

And may I say, she is probably the hottest woman I've seen on your Instagram. I mean, there's a picture of you. I show this to Steve Harvey, to everyone. You were in Mykonos. You know that picture of you at the pool in Greece? Yeah. And then there's one of you and your wife She is gorgeous and she's a little younger than you, but she's over 60, right, Mark?

She's 65 now. So, she's definitely, you know, but again, age is just a number. And she is probably the, you know, the fittest 65-year-old that I know. And it's got nothing to do with, you know, we're not genetically related, clearly, right? That would be scary. But we live the same lifestyle, right? And that's really And that's the proof more than anything that what we're doing works because, you know, just we both have manifested, I think, a pretty, you know, elegant, fit, healthy body at our ages, which includes being healthy and not getting sick and all of the, you know, more energy and all this other stuff, but also, you know, just looking good in a bathing suit.

Well, let's switch the conversation briefly, Mark, because you said not getting sick. I want to play with this because I know as I did, I got COVID. It last year in September. I think you had it a month or two before or after me. When did you get COVID? And then I know what you told Joe Rogan was a lot of nothing. But, you know, most people, even my age, I mean, my own teenage son, Parker, who's 17 now, he's taller than me by an inch. He's like, Dad, why can't I get vaccinated? I'm like, Parker, you know, right now you're healthy. You're good.

I've had it.

I didn't even know I had it. Tell people from your— you were 67 when you got it, or 66, Mark?

How old were you when you got COVID? 67.

I got it. You should be dead right now, Mark. You should be on a ventilator. Did you die, Mark, and are you back?

It was, um, you know, I got it, uh, I got it in November. I was, I was, I spent an hour in a truck cab, uh, having a conversation with someone with the windows up and closed circulation. So if ever there was going to be a, a time, you know, when I was going to get it, that was it. And and, um, that person tested positive the next day. So I knew, uh, I mean, I didn't know I had COVID when I was, you know, having the conversation, but the next day they tested positive. So, um, I, I came back to Miami. I figured I'd been exposed, whatever. And, you know, I had minor, minor symptoms. I had, uh, some GI symptoms. The first thing I had was GI symptoms the first day, which lasted about an hour, and that was— then that was was over. And then I had some sniffles and a little bit of cough for 2 days and it was gone. And I, I'm like, then I did, I will say I lost my sense of taste and smell for a week. And that was a little freaky. And so that's, I wound up losing some weight because I realized how important smelling your food and tasting your food is to, to thriving, you know, and being able to, as we said in the beginning, you know, we're wired to overeat food. That's a problem. For modern times. For our ancestors, it was the only way to do it. You're wired to overeat because you can convert those excess calories into fuel. But if you're not smelling the food and tasting the food, that wiring goes crazy and you just don't feel like eating. So that was the only issue I had with it. But I felt great the whole time. I mean, I, you know, I never was— never chills, never had fever, never had body aches. It was just like the mildest summer cold I ever had.

Well, Mark, I think as you told Joe Rogan, you were preparing for this your entire life, right? I mean, you really as an athlete, have never had a lot of extra body weight. I mean, you have a six-pack. I'm not going to ask you to show it, but we know you have one. You always do. Uh, maybe you'll show it at the end of the show. But here's what I think. The one thing you told us when we talked about this diet faux pas, this combo of fat with sugar— sugar and carbs feed viruses, and COVID-19 is, is its form of a virus, right, Mark? And so when you're not eating sugar and you don't have this weight gain, and I think what the science has shown for anyone that's listening to us, right, Mark, that most people can predict if they're going to be at risk for a bad— I don't know what you call it— a bad interaction with COVID-19 if they're overweight. And I hate to call them sugar addicts, but what's another way to call this?

It's standard American. Yeah, standard American diet. And, you know, most, most people who eat this way and who don't exercise well are either type 2 diabetic or pre-diabetic or have metabolic syndrome. So, you know, that's a big, a big, uh, lump sum of people that would be 70, 80 million people in this country who are either obese or have blood sugar management issues. And again, COVID thrives in that sort of environment. So if you take obesity blood sugar management, i.e., diabetes, and bad diet, um, vitamin D status, because that's a— that's another big one for COVID, um, and even things like, um, like, uh, cholesterol levels. And I, and I don't mean low, you know, like, I think high— higher cholesterol levels can be— yes, for COVID. So especially if you have high HDL levels, uh, that's protective. And anybody who takes, you know, a statin is actually not just lowering their LDL, they're also lowering their your HDO.

So, well, and I remember what you shared because, you know, I probably heard your interview. I thought it was so— such a great interview you did with Joe Rogan. I probably listened to it 3 times, and you mentioned the greatest—

9 hours, Jorge.

That's 3 hours. I'm a little bit of a fan guy here. I've been your fan for a while. I would call you my, my man. I've been on the Mark Sisson, uh, cheerleading squad for a while. I mean, before Primal and before all that. But you said the greatest hoax in medicine was statins. And you know, my audience, they worry about heart pressure, disease, cancer. Tell us for a minute, Mark, why? Because you're someone that you wouldn't lead us the wrong way. I know that you have a heart of gold. You are doing this not because you have to. You've worked your, you've put your time in. You do this right now with us even, just because you want to empower those 100 million people or more, hopefully. I mean, I bet your number is going to grow by the time you're 70. But why is cholesterol so good? And why is the gauge that we gauge it right now so wrong? And why are statins like literally the greatest hoax? I mean, take us in this direction.

You know, I have to be very— I have to be careful with your audience because I don't want to— I don't want to piss off anybody that's, that's, uh, taking, taking statins and, and to think that I'm, uh, going around their doctor.

But here's the thing, no, always check with your doctor. I'll say it for us, always check with your doctor.

But now go ahead. Um, in my estimation Uh, cholesterol— the molecule cholesterol is one of the most important molecules in the human body. So, uh, we need cholesterol to make vitamin D. We need cholesterol to make sex hormones. We need cholesterol— the brain is largely cholesterol. Uh, nerve cells have a lot of cholesterol in them. Most cells, most cell membranes have cholesterol. Um, you need cholesterol to make bile to be able to emulsify and digest fats. So cholesterol is one of the most important molecules in the body. And the body makes 1,300 to 1,400 milligrams a day of cholesterol regardless of how much you eat, right? Like regardless of how many egg yolks you eat or how much saturated fat—

butter, it's just, it's required.

Yeah, so the body, body wants to make cholesterol. It uses these lipoproteins to transport cholesterol throughout the body. So when we talk about our cholesterol levels, we're basically talking about LDL cholesterol, low-density lipoproteins, to which cholesterol attaches and goes to the cells, and then HDL, high-density lipoproteins, which bring the— recycle the old cholesterol back to the liver to be recycled. So it's a transport system, and in it, uh, you know, we see some association over the years that some people who have have arterial plaque or coronary plaque, coronary artery disease, that the plaque contains some cholesterol. And so it's a long process of getting to this plaque, but basically the association was so strong for such a long period of time that people thought, well, it's cholesterol. We lower cholesterol, we'll have less plaque, uh, and we'll have fewer heart attacks.

This was in the '70s or '60s?

60s, '70s. What was the name of the researcher that you mentioned on the— on that podcast? Well, Ancel Keys, but that was more of a saturated fat association. But at any rate, the drug company started thinking about, um, the concept of, of lowering, uh, cholesterol in general throughout the body. And, uh, so that's been like a primary focus for a lot of medicines, particularly cardiologists, for the last 30 years, is putting people on statin drugs, especially people whose total cholesterol is over 200. Well, my cholesterol is 265, and I'm proud of it. And my cardiologist, who gets it, who understands this whole thing, is like, nah, you're great, Mark. First of all, all that matters is my plaque score. So if I've had a calcium score, a scan or something like that, that shows zero interference, and I'm 67 years old, I'm not about to be gaining more and more plaque as I get older. Based on my cholesterol level. Where it becomes important is when you talk about the information or the, the, the involvement of oxidation and inflammation. So, so if your diet is highly inflammatory and you have a lot of oxidative products in it, like for instance industrial seed oils, uh, that are highly oxidative, uh, and so between your sugar intake, your industrial seed oil intake, you have— you now have an inflammatory diet that's causing a lot of oxidation, one of the things that can happen is the artery, the cells lining your arteries can get damaged, can get inflamed. And that's when—

They protect themselves, right, Mark? It's almost like a protection mechanism to cover them with cholesterol so you don't die. Is that— and yet it can kill you as well. So it's like a double-edged sword, right?

Right. So you need to understand— hey, can we put a pause for a second? My plumber's trying to get into my building. Let him in. Let him in. Is this Mark? Is this Mark? Okay, never mind. Too late. Okay.

Do a pickup for us. Mark has got a real life. Yes, you have a real life. You have a real phone. All right, what were you saying? So you were saying about oxidative stress.

So it's oxidation and inflammation that are culprits here. And to the extent that you can reduce oxidation and inflammation, it almost doesn't matter what what your cholesterol levels are. And especially if you're somebody who— if you— even if you have relatively high cholesterol levels according to the population norm, but you're, uh, you've done a, like, a scan, a coronary artery scan, a calcium scan, um, you can do a carotid scan, and these are ways you can see, well, there's— if there's no plaque, then it, it doesn't matter. Now, even, even knowing that, the industry tends to prescribed statins to lower cholesterol in people, um, because for somehow they vilified this amazing molecule. They vilified it. And the problem with that is that when we see cohorts of people who have cholesterol, total cholesterol, say 140 and below versus those who have 200 above, the ones who have 140 and below, yeah, they got low cholesterol, but they die of all-cause mortality. All other causes of death are greater for the most part, uh, in, in that lower cohort than in the higher cohort. So it's a, it's a, it's a false sort of, um, sense of security you get from, from doing this. And, and then, you know, they talk about number needed to treat. So for every, uh, cardiac event that gets avoided, uh, through the use of statins, they have to treat something like 200 people to, to, to prevent one cardiac event. And by the way, that cardiac event could easily have been prevented if somebody approached it from the dietary standpoint and said, look, your diet is very inflammatory, it's highly oxidative. If you just cut back on the industrial seed oils, the sugar, and the grains and just eat real food, A, you wouldn't need to take the statin to lower your cholesterol, and B, you, you wouldn't have an inflammatory diet, so you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't even be forming plaques and doing all the things that, that, uh, you know, we think we're avoiding by you taking a drug. Meanwhile, statins have side effects, and a lot of people complain. I'm— so many people stop taking their statins because of the side effects and then don't tell their doctor they've stopped taking them, which, by the way, is a bad— a big mistake. It's a bad choice to do that. You have to tell your doctor everything you're doing. Anyway, I didn't want to go back down this, this, um this pathway here, but it just comes back to the fact that, that we— that medicine and tech think they can fix us without fixing our diet, you know. And so when, when Bill Gates says, well, we should eat nothing but fake meat or lab-grown cell-based meat, you know, and the doctors say, well, uh, you should take your statins and you could continue to eat poorly, just take your statins, uh, or, you know, the American Diabetes Association says Well, as long as you take your drugs, you can have dessert. I mean, you know, it's just ridiculous how we're being sold this bill of goods, all in the name of selling more drugs.

Well, and I feel like what our show is all about, this idea to turn up people's hunger so we eat less sugar, because mainly from my perspective and everyone that's listening, we're all a bunch of sugar addicts. And I think that's just the way we're wired because it's something we genetically are drawn to. It makes us feel good. And if we can control that, and you know, I've been a big fan of Robb Wolf's Elemental Labs, and I know you, you enjoy those products too, because the mineral deficiencies that we've experienced, uh, and, uh, you know, Dr. James D. Nicolai Antonio, the Salt Fix guy, all guy. Yeah, yeah, he did a great thing on our show. He talked about how these minerals are so important, and, you know, he took it up further to talk about when you add the salt to the meat, it's kind of what our ancestors did for thousands of years to preserve the meat, right, Mark, before refrigeration.

I mean, he's a good example of educating people on how the medical community has vilified salt for 40 years. And, and in all these diets that eliminate salt could be worse than, than not having any, you know, than, than too much salt.

So, Mark, when you prepare a steak, because I know you enjoy good steak, and then I want to wrap up with how you enjoy food because you have created I think the best food company on earth is Primal Kitchen, which makes food awesome. And, and you know, whether you're eating one meal or two meals, I do one, you're doing two. On occasion you do one meal as well, right, Mark? On occasion, very often I do one.

I do, I go dinner to dinner to dinner sometimes.

Yeah, and I love that as well. So let's do this for people that are scared of salt. Give us your one minute on why you use salt with your meat, because I love salt, and salt with protein is good, right? It's salt with sugar is what, uh, Dr. James D. Nicolae Antonio says.

It's, it's kind of like the, the fat and sugar, same thing. Yeah, there's no— there are very few places in your life where sugar by itself is beneficial. The only thing I'd say is, um, you know, you're better off being a fruitarian and eating a lot of fruit sugar than if you combine fat and sugar together. In other words, either eat a highly— a primarily fat sort of keto-ish paleo low-carb diet with no sugar, or eat all sugars in the form of fruit, but don't combine the two of them because that's where you get into trouble. So you're choosing, even if you do fruit, by the way, fruit, natural, right? It all, it exists in nature. Grains don't really exist in nature. We have to process the crap out of them to make them compact globs of carbohydrate, right? If you were to go out into a wheat field and just try and eat the wheat grains, good luck. I mean, good luck getting enough calories doing that. It's by processing them and glumping them all together that we have, you know, thousands of, of, uh, of grains at one time where the problem comes in. So, so back to salt. I salt my meat because, A, it tastes better, and I always, always salt to taste. So I'm somebody who lets my— I let my thirst, for instance, dictate how much water I drink. I let my, my, my taste buds determine how much salt I need on my food. And if I feel like I need more salt, I'll take more salt. I trust that my body is going to, um, gonna, um, inform me of exactly what it needs.

Yeah. And, and this idea that, uh, the, the wheat and the barley are hard to eat just straight off from wherever, from nature. What are your thoughts? Because I know a lot of our, a lot of, a lot of people listening have asked about nuts because a lot of these nuts, even almonds they come in these hard shells, right, Mark? And it's hard to get them out of there. What are your thoughts on eating nuts? Because I know Saladino recently— Dr. Saladino says he's cutting back on them. There, there's some toxicity there. And I used to eat a lot of nuts back in the day, uh, you know, I thought I was a squirrel once, I think. But do you squirrel out anymore? Do you minimize?

Same thing. I've cut way back on, on the, uh, consumption of nuts as well for a couple of reasons. First of all, they do the processing nuts, like you say, if we had to get at every nut by cracking the shell, we would dramatically curtail the amount of nuts we consume. So the fact that somebody's done that for us and processed these into either a bag of nuts or a nut butter or something like that is, is kind of unnatural and providing an unnaturally large supply of linoleic acid. And so, you know, Robb Wolf is one who would say— who would have said years ago he looks at nuts as little bags of linoleic acid. And linoleic acid is not what we want to be taking in, right? Um, inflammation, Mark, right?

Inflammation. Is that why? Yep, yep.

And high in omega-6 fats, and again, they're pro-inflammatory. Very low in omega-3s, which are the more beneficial fats that we might get from, say, oily fish. Um, so yeah, I've cut back on my consumption of nuts. And then the fact that You know, the nuts that you buy in the store, sometimes they go rancid. These oils can be rancid, which is even worse than just the polyunsaturated nature of them. They become, uh, they become oxidized and spoiled, and now they're, now they're just downright bad for you to consume.

So if we were to go down the aisles of the store and do a little shopping, what would you tell anyone right now? We got a lot of moms, a lot of grandmas, a lot of grandpas I mean, I got teenagers that are old. You got a grandkid now, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what would you tell people in this stage of life? We're not, you know, we're in that 50 and up group. When we go to the grocery store or Costco, wherever we go, where do we go? I mean, I always, when I hit Costco, I go to the back because that's where the meat is, right? I go get my meat. I may pick up some avocados. I try to get Primal Kitchen avocado or the mayo that you guys have, which I think is And by the way, your new pesto mayo, Mark. Yep, it's great.

Delicious. Yeah, yeah, thank you. We got a pesto mayo, we have a new buffalo sauce, it's crushing it everywhere. Uh, we've got some new, um, pasta sauces. And you know, you might go, well, wait, Mark, you just said don't eat pasta. Well, our pasta sauces are great with like spiralized zucchini, you know, and zucchini's so toxic.

Yeah, correct, correct.

So, uh, but take this to the Costco or the grocery store, where do we go? Do we go right to the meat aisle?

Well, I feel like I would say yes.

No, yeah, no, for sure.

I, I get all the things you said. I mean, I get meat, I get—

give us our best meat. What do you get, Mark? Give us some red meat, some chicken, some fish. Give us what you get.

You know, I get New York steaks, I get— I mean, grass-fed if I can. I get New Zealand or Australian lamb, uh, I get ribeyes, um, I get, um, flank steaks sometimes. I mean, it really depends on what—

any bacon these days or no?

Um, don't you— I don't—

I never liked bacon that much. I'm not a big bacon fan. And, uh, and I think bacon's been overdone in the paleo community. I think a little bit of bacon is probably fine. I think the way people are selling bacon is you can have all the bacon you want on, on paleo or keto.

It's about burgers, hot dogs. I do burgers. I do sausages.

I do hot dogs once in a while if they're, if they're great, you know, great tasting. I don't, I don't live on them, but I don't, I don't exclude them just because they're processed meat.

Um, and then I do—

how about poultry, Mark? Poultry?

Not a big fan of poultry anymore. Um, I do fish.

Uh, I do, I do, you know, eat, uh, a fair amount of fish.

I try to have— um, I have a restaurant right near me, and I'll usually get either some raw ahi tuna or as a poke or some version of that.

On a daily basis.

Do you still like sardines, Mark, or no?

Uh, yeah, once in a while I like sardines. They're more of a snack food for me than a meal food. Um, and I don't— because I don't snack that much. I mean, the 2 meals a day, it really works. It's like you have a meal and then you wait a while, then you have another meal. There's no snacking in between. There's no need to snack. You're not hungry.

Take a minute and tell everyone what we just described. All that meat, all that fish, high protein is satiating, correct, Mark? Tell us why. Why?

Because, because we evolved to consume largely animal protein. And so, uh, the, the idea that, um, first of all, we don't need that many calories. So, so if I can get by on a couple of pieces of meat, small pieces of meat in a day— and, um, when I say small, it doesn't have to be small small, I mean anywhere from 4 ounces to 10 ounces or 12 ounces, um, per meal, uh, and then I don't need that much in the way of vegetables anymore. I used to, I used to eat a lot of vegetables.

I don't anymore.

I don't feel the need to. I feel, you know, lean and fit and I burn fat and I'm metabolically flexible and metabolically efficient. I sleep well. I get plenty of sunshine. I'm active, you know, so it doesn't— I don't require— one of the things you learn from 2 meals a day is that that's all you need. You don't need 3 meals a day. People used to say you need to eat 3 meals a day.

Jorge Cruise: Or 6 meals a day.

Or 6. Yeah. You know, it is not necessary to eat that much and it is probably better for you to eat as little as you can get away with without being hungry, right? Hunger ruins everything. So, don't let yourself get hungry. But if you can at the end of a meal go, "Ah, I am not that hungry for the next bite. I am going to push this away," knowing that there is food around the corner if I ever need it, that is a skill that we develop and that is really probably one of the most important skills is to understand.

And if someone says that is an eating disorder, Mark, what do we tell someone?

Well, as long as you're in tune with your feelings, as long as you're not doing this, you know, to get, you know, ultra skinny, if you have tapped into what is truly hunger and not hunger and you're not fighting it, I think people who are, you know, who are anorexic or orthorexic or bulimic, you know, are fighting an urge. And it's the fighting of the urge that makes them feel empowered. I'm not fighting an urge here. I'm like, I'm hungry or I'm not hungry. And if I'm hungry, I'm going to eat. And if I stop being hungry, I stop eating. It's that simple.

So finish taking us to the grocery store here, whether it's Costco, wherever. We hit the meat aisle. We got our meat. Would you guess the next stop, since we're going to skip over a lot of plants and all that, is the fat aisle, right? Fat? Yeah.

I mean, I, you know, butter.

I'm going to get my mayo. I'm going to get my oils. I'm going to get my butter.

Walk us through your You are walking through quite nicely. First of all, I don't shop. My wife shops. So, but yeah. But that is the day. But I get, you know, coffee. I am a big fan of coffee. So, I will get some coffee, you know, organic, fair trade, and then some whole cream, some organic whole cream for the coffee. Some, again, some butter, some ghee, some mayo, some healthy fats. Uh, you know, I get, I get avocado oil sent to me on a regular basis because this would be the Primal Kitchen.

Tell us about Primal Kitchen now because we haven't actually told them what Primal Kitchen is. So take a minute out and tell us what you did, what, 5, 6 years ago you created a company, right? Yeah, yeah.

So I created a company to make sauces, dressings, and toppings that you could put on food to make it taste better but also impart even greater health benefits to that food. So the avocado oil-based mayonnaise is the best, you know, the healthiest version, or the better— I can't say healthy on, you know, it's an advertising no-no, so you have to say better for you version. Avocado oil-based salad dressings, avocado oil-based barbecue sauces, and all these things that you put on food to make it—

and not to interrupt you, Mark, but the mayo that most people have consumed for, I don't know, 40 years is made with soybean oil, correct?

Yeah, what most people are used to is, uh, some mayonnaise that's made with one or more of soybean, canola, uh, corn oil, safflower, sunflower oil.

These are all very inexpensive oils that are highly processed. And, and yeah, thumbs down on those because they cause inflammation.

And that kind of was your, I think, motivation, probably that. And a lot of the salad dressings, what are they made with, right? If they're cheap cheap soybean oil, canola, right? And even if you go to Whole Foods, does Whole Foods still use that in their deli?

Yeah. Canola is still in their deli. Yeah. Holy shit.

When are they going to start using Primal Kitchen?

Well, they would, except they're trying to cut costs and Primal Kitchen stuff, because it's better for you and hard to come by, is a bit more expensive. And they're trying to, you know, to their credit, to, for their shareholders or their owner Amazon, they're trying to save money. So whatever.

So going back to the store, we got our meat, we got our protein, we got our fat, we got coffee. What else are we getting in the grocery store?

Walk us through as we leave the store. That's pretty much it, Jorge. I mean, blueberries and raspberries. Salt? Blueberries. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I get some, you know, some Himalayan sea salt. Some real salt. And I mean, really, it's a pretty— my, you know, my diet is pretty simple that way. And again, if I've gotten salad dressings from the Primal Kitchen aisle, I've gotten a bunch of my favorite salad dressings or my— or the ketchup, which is an unsweetened, organic, all-natural, great-tasting ketchup that I might put on a burger or something like that. But that's it.

Yeah. No bread.

You're not getting any grains. No bread. No grains.

How about these people that say white rice is okay, dates are okay. Honey. What do you think of these? French— I mean, what are your thoughts on honey and bread and dates?

Dates are the highest sugar, um, food you could probably eat. So I'm not a big fan of dates or date sugar. Um, you know, honey's It's fine once in a while. If I have some Greek yogurt, I'll put a little tiny bit of honey on it or something like that.

Do you do monk fruit or stevia these days or no?

Yeah, well, we do both. We have a combination of both that we use in our products for any kind of sweetener that we need to put, put in our collagen products, you know, or our Primal Fuel or stuff like that. We would use a combination of stevia and monk fruit. Yeah. Okay.

And you know, we haven't talked about collagen, but that's a form of protein, bone broth, right, Mark? Whether it's from a soup or a protein shake or a beverage. I mean, Primal Kitchen, you guys have the most delicious tasting collagen out there. And most times, I don't know, collagen tastes like, well, like nothing, right? I mean, you make it taste good, Mark. Why do we have to worry about that? Because I want my skin to look good. You've got great skin, you've got great hair. Most people don't have any hair by 50, so we're ahead of them. Why is collagen so important, Mark? Because you made that— was that the secondary product after the healthy fats you guys did? For, uh, yeah, probably.

Yeah, probably. Yeah, I mean, um, collagen is like the fourth macronutrient. So you get fat, protein, and carbohydrate. And I think collagen should be its own food group because we don't get much of it in our diet. Um, it's a specific blend of, um, amino acid, uh, peptides. And, uh, uh, it's used to build, uh, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, connective tissue, fascia, skin, hair, nails. So 30% of our body is collagenous material, and we don't get the raw materials to repair it. So I feel strongly like I want to, I want to take in 20 or 30 grams of collagen a day if I can, to, uh, you know, to make those sorts of repairs to that kind of, uh, connective tissue. All right, well, the time has come, Mark.

It is time to say goodbye, almost. But before we say goodbye, can we see the abs, Mark? I gotta see those abs. Come on, you're trying. I'll show you my abs. My abs have gotten better. They're, uh, they're not as very— drum roll. Whoa! All right, Joe Rogan did not get that. No, no, no, no, that's an exclusive. Um, for anyone out there in their 60s that think what they just saw was CGI, it was not.

Believe me, you set me up here. I didn't have good lighting, I didn't have whatever. Oh, please.

Jorge Cruise. That's with bad lighting, right? Yeah. Well, Mark, for anyone right now that whether they're my age, 50, because, you know, I didn't have a midlife crisis. I probably had one when I was 40. But anyone, let's end on this positive note because you're America's coach here, I think. You know, you really, especially anyone over 40 needs to listen to you. You listen to a 20-year-old and you're 50, I think, you know, you see these Instagram influencers, God bless them, but they don't know what it's like to be 67, right, Mark? Yeah. You're there. What is your pep talk to anyone who's in that stage of life, say in their 60s? And I don't care if it's Miss Oprah Winfrey or Ellen DeGeneres or Mr. Steve Harvey. What do you tell someone who says, "Ugh, I'm too old." No, that's what I say.

It's never too late to start. I mean, I work with people who start when they're 60, 65, and then they get amazing results and then they're excited because they know they can continue to get results for the next decade or two before there's any kind of a drop-off. In fact, they're just going to improve, improve, improve if they take these steps. So, uh, that's the most exciting part about this whole thing.

And, and if, if there is someone out there who says I'm too old and they hear you and they see you, they want to follow you, we're going to give them all in the show notes your, your website. Um, but what is right now your— outside of this book being brilliant, because I think what you did in this book, Just Two Meals, It's more than just an intermittent fasting book, wouldn't you say, Mark? It's a manual that's been updated because you started with a blog years ago, Your Daily Apple, and you've written all these books. I don't know, 14, you said. It's really the best of everything because I think even if you're not doing 2 meals a day, uh, it has all the latest information. You've updated and simplified it, right, Mark?

That's the whole point is I want that. I want this to be easy for anyone to do.

All right, today's episode is complete, guys. Thank you so much for listening, and I want to ask you to please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, uh, and please leave a review on Apple as well. Give it 5 stars if you think the show has helped you in some way to transform your thinking. I hope it has. And more importantly, share your comments, your review of what today's episode did for your what you got out of it, because I think that is how we spread this. And for me, this is a revolution. This is not a podcast, this is a way of life. And I hope to transform over a million lives in the next couple years, and I need your help. So please become part of the Zero Hunger Revolution by leaving that review on Apple Podcasts and subscribing today. Thanks so much, have a great one, peace and purpose, and I'll see you on the next episode.