Diet Wars & Pitfalls - World Class Athlete Brad Kearns on Dr. Joy Kong Podcast

To nurture a body for peak performance. That's what the anti aging field has evolved from, which was to optimize the peak athletes, you know, the premium athletes, because they don't have diseases. So how do you optimize them? So in the process optimizing them, that's when we realized, okay, then we can actually help these people to prevent them from aging and from declining. So that's how anti aging medicine was started.

We can learn from elite athletes and how they perform and recover, especially in recent years, like you're telling me, most of the NFL is taking peptide therapy and integrating these new strategies. And you can see things about the red light therapy and the cold plunging. And so the top athletes are on the cutting edge by necessity and the controversy and confusion around science, especially with eating and topics like that. I pay a lot of attention to what the best, fittest people, highest performing people are doing.

Okay, so here we are.

Okay, no turning back. Thank you for starting out with us. We are warmed up. I am so honored to be on the Joy Con podcast. Big fan and I think we'll have no problem figuring out things to talk about.

Well, there's a lot to pick your brains for. Is that the right word?

Heck yeah.

So illustrious Brad Kern.

Kerns, yes.

World class athlete and you won championship and what?

Tell me about A long time ago I was a professional triathlete.

Wow.

I did that for nine years. It was really great journey and pushing the body very hard in that sport and training all day and traveling around the world. So that was like a nice segment of my life where I was like full bore into this extremely competitive and intense career track. It was something I dreamed about my whole life and then it ends at a young age and then I go on with the rest of my life. So now I'm 57 and I retired from racing when I was 30. But you know, one of the things I like to talk about most and what I stand for is like keeping that edge going your whole life and having something that drives you and motivates you and gives you like a little bit of competitive intensity to counter all these comfortable and relaxing aspects of modern life where we can just sit and watch others perform if we want. Forevermore. And then I can tell you stories about back in the day when I was really good at sports and won all these races and all those things. So, you know, my background kind of informs my, my life journey forever. And that's what's really valuable about it, is seeing what's possible at every age and Recalibrating your goals for your particular life circumstances and age group. So I'm not like some freak that's going out there and still training all day long like I did in my 20s. But I have certain priorities and things in life that mean a lot to me. They don't have to mean a lot to anything else. I'm not being filmed on television. When I'm doing, I go on the old man, the masters track meets. So I do high jumping and sprinting with a bunch of people my own age. And it's just so fun to train for it. And I go pretty slow. I mean, I'm okay, I'm ranked because not many people can still jump over the high jump bar. At age 57, I got 5:1, so I might be getting close to your head. If you want to stand under the bar next time we could practice.

So you never stopped competing, Right? Basically all these years, the triathlon, but then even after that you were always competing, Correct?

At a point I was competing against little kids, I'm not ashamed to say because it was a fun route. But I coached my son and daughter in hugh sports from like age 5 until age 15. When they go off to high school and you let them, you turn them over to real coaches. But during that time I really wanted to be a participatory coach and get into it and really experience everything and lead by example and be a role model to the kids. I mean, I was a former athlete so I had some respect. The other families appreciated my approach to coaching because I always emphasized personal growth and having fun and keeping the focus on improvement rather than the over parenting. Highly pressurized things we hear about in hugh sports all the time. So it was a great stint. But after a while I was like, you know, I'd get my competitive juices going, scrimmaging against 11 year old soccer players and basketball players. And then one time my son, you know, like we were driving home from basketball practice or something and he said, hey dad, you should probably play in your own league with the adults instead of doing all those crazy moves during our practice. Because I'm like dribbling into these little kids faking the pass, going up for the basket. I'm like, good point, good point. So I played some adult basketball and things, things like that. And then after my son was done with all his sports, then I started to drift into this track and field and speed golf and all this fun stuff that I do now.

So during the entire process you were always really tuning your skills on the Health optimization. Right. How to supercharge the body so it can hit peak performance. So I'm hoping that you can share some of the things that you have learned along all these years and, and to share with everybody because, you know, to nurture a body for peak performance, you know, that's actually, I think that's what the anti aging field has evolved from, which was to optimize the peak athletes, you know, the premium athletes, because they don't have diseases. So how do you optimize them? So in the process optimizing them, that's when we realized, okay, then we can actually have help these people to prevent them from aging and from declining. So that's how anti aging medicine was started.

Really?

Yeah. So it's about optimizing what's already good. So we can learn a lot from people who are trying to optimize from already a good place because you can teach everybody about how to stop the process of decline. Yeah. So what did you learn along the way? What were the main things that, that you thought were really important to help you with peak performance?

Well, I like how you reference looking to the elite performers of the world because like we were talking about before we recorded, there's all this controversy and confusion in the diet world. And that's kind of the world that I've been in for a long time as an author, podcast host, coach, retreat host, you know, writing books about the primal Paleo and the keto diet and all these things. And there's all this research and science and there's people shouting loud on the Internet, promoting their way of being and their way of eating, and it can really get confusing for the casual person who's just looking for some sensible advice. And same with athletic training. There's a lot of controversy about what's the best method to train, what's too much, what can be counterproductive. Because I can definitely tell you the extreme training that I did as a triathlete was in no way aligned with my health. So from ages 20 to 30, when I was at my highest level of training, competing on the pro circuit and traveling like crazy like a, like a businessman, I'd go into the elite lounges, like the premier emeritus Pan Am lounge with all the businessmen, I'd be stretching with my leg upon the table and eating my food, spreading peanut butter on my thing before the flight because I had so many miles I would go in there with. Anyway, that part was an awakening to me because at the time, all I wanted to do was was improve my time by one minute to go from 147 to 146. And so you make all these sacrifices to general health in pursuit of the highest level of fitness. Just like any elite performer in any sport, the football players we know crash into each other. That's not healthy. But even the ultra endurance athletes, like I was doing, it's tough. It's tough on your endocrine system, your immune system, your hormones. Lots of things are a struggle because you're pushing your body so hard. So then when you get spit out the other side and go, okay, how am I going to live a long, healthy, active, energetic life? It has no semblance to the stuff I was doing before riding my bike all day. But then we got to find these sweet spots and figure out what's the best way to take care of the body. So back to what you were talking about. It's like we can learn from elite athletes and how they perform and recover, especially in recent years. Like you're telling me, Most of the NFL is 10 taking peptide therapy and integrating these new strategies. And you can see things about the red light therapy and the cold plunging. And so the top athletes are on the cutting edge by necessity and the controversy and confusion around science, especially with eating and topics like that. I pay a lot of attention to what the best, fittest people, highest performing people are doing. And whatever the science says, this guy's doing it a certain way. We have to put a lot of weight toward this anecdotal evidence of the top performers.

So I know you've gone through some evolution of what you think about nutrition and what are optimal things to put in our body. You co wrote a book with Mark Sisson, right?

Oh, many, many books. Going nonstop for 20 years. I've written 21 books now or something like that. It's just a blur.

Okay.

Yeah, it's nonstop.

So you were a big fan of ketogenic diet. Correct.

We wrote a few books about the keto diet and one of them was called the Keto Reset Diet. It was one of the first books to come out about keto. So it was a New York Times bestseller. It reached number one on Amazon, and it was a great moment that we could acquaint a lot of people with this new dietary Strategy back in 2017. And now it's blown up to be this super popular overhyped thing with all the snacks and the keto bagels and all those things. And so it's kind of a little bit heartbreaking to see, like where we departed from the Scientific rationale for the ketogenic diet, which was really started 100 years ago with anti seizure tendencies. So they had drug resistant seizure patients and they tried this diet out. Dr. Wilder. And the seizures subsided because the brain was getting a better source of fuel that was less oxidative stress. That's not the same as buying a pack of keto bagels, or they call it the bacon and butter binge where you're allowed to eat these high fat foods and still be keto. And so go ahead and have your bacon strips all day and fail to reflect on the big picture inside of like, what's the best way I can nourish my body? So fortunately, the keto reset diet was like this 21 day reset program. And it was conveyed in such a way that said, here's the thing, you can go through this journey to kind of clean up your actual. Because when you're going keto, you're getting rid of all these processed carbohydrate foods, which are our main source of carbohydrates. So you're doing all these solids for yourself by virtue of going on a restrictive diet. And so by nature, all manner of restrictive diets can deliver wonderful health benefits because they're taking us away from the standard western behavior of unfettered access to indulgent foods and pushing a button now and getting the food delivered to your house or going to the Asian restaurant and seeing your blood sugar spike to 212 because they put industrial seed oils into your stir fry. And you know, all that stuff's wonderful to kind of get you on the road to waking up, realizing that these processed foods are killing us slowly and doing something different. But there's also a flip side, which I'm sure we'll get to, but hopefully that's kind of the acquaintance too. And then, you know, the primal Paleo message is get rid of the processed foods and start looking toward the ancestral health or the evolutionary health model to realize that humans have nourished and thrived and evolved on wholesome natural foods that are found on Earth rather than.

Yeah, we were talking about some statistics maybe you can share here. You know, it's pretty interesting about the human lifespan looking back from a very long time ago. You want to share?

Oh, sure. I mean, the first quip back, especially in the early days when people were presenting like this caveman style diet was, hey, the caveman only lived to 30 years old. Why should we eat those meat and eggs and fish and vegetables and fruit? And in fact, the life expectancy was around 30 something 10,000 years ago, before civilization. And then when we started to become civilized in Egypt with the cultivation of grains, and in Asia with cultivation of rice, and America is the cultivation of corn. Then we had civilization. Then we had societies living in close quarters. Then we had warfare, disease, lack of sanitation. And so life expectancy actually dipped and dipped and dipped. And the Roman Empire life expectancy was the lowest ever at 18. The human life expectancy was 18.

So you were talking the caveman time. You were saying the human lifespan was actually.

Yeah, it was like 30 something, which is not that impressive. But they had infant mortality and they had.

But if you take out the infant.

Life mortality could factor out and see.

Then you said something about the lifespan. If people pass the age of 18, they can expect to live to about 94.

Yeah, like 50, 54. Oh, 54 would be their life expectancy if they made it past infancy and teenage, you know, hardships.

So what was the 94 you mentioned?

This is a scientific term called maximum observed lifespan. Okay. And so it's from archaeology, evolutionary anthropology. They have fossil records showing that dudes lived till or probably gals, because the dudes were probably, you know, not as healthy.

But how long ago?

10,000 years ago. 10,000 years ago, the human lifespan potential was 94.

Okay.

And now with study of present day hunter gatherers, there's a few pockets left. The ache in Paraguay, the Hadza in Tanzania. And you read about these guys, the Bushmen. There are common examples of living to be 60, 70 in good health. Remember, no doctors, no prescriptions, no nothing their entire life. Ear infection could be fatal, the one that you just got your kid out of with a course of antibiotics. And so it's pretty impressive to be a badass in the jungle and be able to go to 70. And again in hunter gatherer format, especially in prehistoric times, we're not talking about drag asses that are going around in wheelchairs living to 70, it's every man for himself. Like the Klan didn't have the energy to take care of an ill person who couldn't make a contribution. They can't drag someone around, right? And so these were people that were active, energetic and healthy their entire life until they died. And they might have died at 27 from falling, hitting their knee on a rock, getting an infection like I did on mine, I would have been dead from this. I would have been dead from that. You would have been dead from this. And so it's pretty good to realize that this ancient way, especially of eating in this context, the human had a great diet and it started to go south with the advent of civilization and the cultivation of grains.

Well, can you explain that diet? Well, there's so many geological types, right. Geographical types of different climates, different accessibility to plant material. So how do you generalize the kind of diet that's called Paleo?

Yeah, good question. Because I think this is where we start to run off course and people running at the mouth, making all these conjectures and then getting them misinterpreted. So I'm going to take things down a couple notches, people, and say that a humans are incredibly resilient creatures today. We prove that we can live off of pizza, potato chips, and, you know, occasional burrito and live 60, 70, 80 years. Right. And not, I wouldn't say too impressive of a. Of a track if you're just existing and watching a lot of TV and not moving much, but like you still lived 75, smoking and drinking and doing all that. And so I want to always focus on what's optimal versus what's possible. So we come into the uplift longevity center. We're not coming in to band aid our sore elbow and go out the door. We're trying to go all the way to optimal in this entire field that you're in. And that's because we have the resources now, we have the knowledge, we have the potential and say, yes, I'm interested in being a badass at 57 or 67 or 70. You want to look the same when you're 70? You said 75. Yeah, yeah, why not? And it's possible. And so.

So back to the Paleo diet.

Back to the optimal human diet.

Yeah, because there are the Plains Indians. They were living mostly on buffaloes. Right. And they supposedly have a very long lifespan. And there are other cultures who live probably mostly on plants, I'm assuming.

Yeah, yeah.

So when we say Paleo diet, I mean there's a diversity of diet. So what are we referring to?

There's a commonly cited list when you're talking about Paleolithic eating, it's the things that existed before civilization. And so if you want to take notes, it's pretty simple. It's like meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, and that's pretty much the entirety. And insects, because they ate those, that's kind of the entirety of what the ancestral diet was. That's what they found. They would kill animals and find plants and include those in the diet. So if you start there, noticeably absent are heavily processed modern foods, including grains, which is Kind of that sticking point where it's like, wait, humans have eaten rice for thousands of years? Yes, about 10,000 years. So we're talking about before that, before wheat was grown in Egypt, we ate the hunter gatherer style diet. So that's the list of foods I gave, which is hunter gatherer diet. And you made a great point off camera. They're like, wait a second. Just because our ancestors ate this and this, do we have to do exactly that? And that's really good now because we're going for optimal instead of what's possible.

Yeah. They may not know about nutrition. Yes, they have instinctual eating, but still a lot of pieces could be missing.

They survived and they arguably thrived because we're here and we rose to the top of the food chain. And some of those branches are interesting to note because humans, we became who we are today, the smartest, most dominant creatures ever on the Earth because we gained access to nutritious foods and built a bigger brain than the gorilla who we branched off of. And the gorilla today spends all day chewing up 40 pounds of produce to fuel a brain that's a third the size of the human. So that's a vote in favor of the human diet as opposed to the gorilla style diet. She might not like that one, but what I'm getting.

Gorillas don'.

Yeah, that's right. Maybe we're worse off in some ways.

Not vicious. Yeah.

So what we're going for is like, I call it like my focus is on getting a diet of maximum nutrient density. And so when I'm eating, I want it to count. I also want to enjoy my life, but I favor foods that give me a tremendous amount of nutrition versus the bag of potato, keto, potato chips and keto bagels and sweets and treats and processed foods which give you calories but not much nutrition. And when you're kind of trying to be objective and scientific about and you're doing a nutrient analysis of 4 ounces of liver. Liver is very popular, my friend. Liver King is all over the Internet promoting liver. It's the number one food. It's the most nutrient dense food on the planet. And that's difficult to dispute because under a microscope and the analysis comes out, it's got 1,000% of your daily requirement of B12, it's got choline, it's got all the vitamins, A, K, E, all these things that are difficult to obtain from. Let's say, for example, a plant based diet where you're having salads and kale smoothies and stir Fries, same with red meat, same with eggs, same with oily cold water fish. The superfoods of the planet that have tremendous amount of nutrition. So I'm trying not to get too controversial or spout off as the guy in the yellow suit saying this is the way you should eat and this is bad. But if we could kind of, I said we're going to back up and tone it down a little. That was our goal in life, right? Get rid of processed foods. And if you're still eating processed foods right now in the diet, put the YouTube thing on pause, go to your cupboard, throw everything away, look in your freezer for frozen meals that are made with refined industrial seed oils. Corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, Most crap contains these refined oils which are dietary enemy number one. Same with the processed sugars, the processed grains. Things that mess up your metabolic function and cause you to become more dependent on these processed foods as you go down the rest of your days. Because you're not good at burning body fat efficiently. Or like in the keto space they're talking about, if you fast enough and limit your carbohydrates, you'll start making ketones, which are the good fuel for your brain. And so if you get metabolically efficient, that means you're good at burning cellular energy. Even if you skip a meal and you didn't get around to eating until 12 noon instead of your usual 8am, you're okay, you're fine. Because your body works well. And if it doesn't work well, certain signs are getting droopy in the afternoon or if you have a lot of that high processed carbohydrate intake in the diet, you get these energy highs and then you crash. That's why you got show everybody your thing. Oh my glucose monitor, continuous glucose monitor getting very popular because it gives you real time blood glucose, what's going on? And so when you feel lousy after a meal and you're wondering what happened, Perhaps you had a glucose spike and then an insulin release to kind of regulate glucose. And that doesn't feel well sometimes. But I'm excited to realize that most everything can be traced back to eating processed foods. And so when you clean up your diet, you're going to have an amazing health awakening. Even if maybe you're not all the way optimal by some certain standard like plant based is such a huge movement now, vegan whole food, plant based eating, they are systematically restricting most of the highest ranked, most nutritious foods in the world instead and favoring rice and beans and plants and kale smoothies and salads and stir fries.

Well, supposedly we all have different genetic makeup. There are certain portions the population would do really well on mostly plants and on high carb diet. And another portion of the population do really well on high animal protein diet. So I think looking at the genetics is really important.

That would be going for optimal. And the first gateway, the first door down the hall is get rid of that processed food.

That's true.

And you don't even have to test your genetics. We know you are going to do so much better. And then you can start mixing and matching and trying things out and seeing what works. And that's kind of hard too because who the heck knows, you might think you feel great on this new regimen of having a burrito wrap at 11am and a steak at 4pm and something else. But I'm always wondering, am I at level seven right now or I'm at level nine and I want to go to level 10 or am I at level five and I want to go to level six? I don't know, I don't know what to compare to. And so I need to be open minded and think critically at all times to think like, no, I don't have this dialed right now. I feel pretty good. I compare well to other high jumpers in my age group because there aren't that many. But you don't want to relax and think that you have everything wired and then start forming fixed and rigid beliefs that this is the way to go. And you're a superior human because you're following a whole foods plant based diet when you might be deaf to some really important information about the nutritional benefits of liver and how you have to do a 21 times more complex chemical reaction to convert beta carotene into usable form of vitamin A, whereby when you're getting a slice of liver, you're getting 1,000% of your daily RDA for vitamin A. Just little spouting examples like that.

I know you've made some changes to your own diet approach, right? How long ago did you make somewhat of a shift?

Well, back in 2008 I started working with Mark Sisson, who's widely regarded as the forefather, one of the forefathers of the primal Paleo movement. And so we got together, we were old friends, we were old time athletes in triathlon and he coached me when I was a pro triathlete. So this is years later, he says, I'm on this new ancestral science and it's building into this thing That I want to form a lifestyle movement around. And it's called the Primal blueprint. And here's what you do, here's how you eat meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. No grains, because grains are civilization food and they're processed, they're high in carbohydrate, they're minimal in nutrition. Brown rice is better than white rice. It's got more nutrition. Guess what? Those pale in comparison to your sardines, your eggs, your steak, your liver, your oysters, your salmon eggs. The true foods with nutrient density. So it's an ancestral style diet. And that was back in 2008 when prior to that, I was eating what would be widely regarded as a healthy diet. No junk food, no wrapped up frozen garbage or stopping at the fast food. So I would have like meat, pasta with vegetables, broccoli on top. And I had big bowls of cereal, but it was always the good cereal without the sugar in it. It was the granola from the health food store, things like that. And so that was a huge change because it was like a cold turkey shift to like, okay, no grains. Grains aren't healthy. We're supposed to follow a grain based diet. That's the standard.

So how did that shift go? How did you do physically?

I think it took a couple months to get down off that huge carbohydrate intake. And I had been doing so throughout my time as a triathlete as well, which predated that. And so I was kind of a person that lived off of carbs and had the energy bars in my drawer because I would need to munch two or three of those a day when I was sitting at my work desk and so forth. So that was a nice awakening. I was basically like shifting from this huge bowl of cereal every morning to a huge omelet.

Was it challenging? Was it difficult for your body?

Nothing's challenging for me, Joy. Just do it. I mean, here's the thing.

But did you get energy dips during the process?

A little bit, Yeah, I think so, yeah. And I also got them before I switched my diet too. You know, like, I think anyone who's not eating like really optimally is going to be familiar with, for example, gas bloating, digestive discomfort in association with meals, elimination irregularities, energy swings, headaches. At certain times, especially when you go to busy trade shows and your brain's going all the time and you end with a headache. And stuff like that would happen to me a lot when I was an athlete, when I was a busy father, that Wasn't getting as much sleep as I got when I was an athlete, all those things. So I feel like the big breakthrough was switching over to more nutritious and less processed food, especially the grains, which.

So it did heal some of the problems that the symptoms you were discussing.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. And there's a lot of people that was life transformation, saved their life because they were highly sensitive to the gluten and the things that are contained in grains that rip their intestinal permeability and they have all kinds of autoimmune inflammatory conditions and they have, you know, life saving. I wasn't that person. I was pretty healthy before and I continued to be healthy and going strong. But again, you know, I'm going for optimal. I'm setting competitive goals and things like that. And so I guess that would bring us to the next major shifts which occurred in recent years. And that one is this. They call it the carnivore message or the animal based dietary movement. Certain leaders like Dr. Paul Saldino, Dr. Sean Baker, saying that, hey, there's a lot of evidence that these natural toxins that are contained in plants might not be good for you. And they're certainly not necessary because they're not nearly as nutritious as the animal superstar foods. And I was like, wow, that's interesting because I thought, like, a salad would be the epitome of healthy living. I mean, who criticizes salad ever, you know?

Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of nutrition. So I don't think that's, you know, I think would be, you know, presumptuous to say that, you know, the plant source of nutrition is worthless. You know, that's.

Yeah, it gets a little spicy. And like when you go into these big proclamations and you're shouting them, it can rightfully turn people off. And if you're not sensitive and you don't see any adverse effects and you've been going well with your midday salad, and you love steamed broccoli for dinner with a steak, hopefully. Right. I mean, these things are. What we're going for is feeling great and enjoying your life and enjoying the food. But for me, I was noticing that I had certain symptoms. For example, when I prepared my super duper green nutrition smoothie in the morning, and I'd throw in big piles of frozen kale, spinach, celery, beets, carrots, all the top phytonutrients and these great things. But that's a huge dose of raw produce. And when it's raw, it's Very difficult to digest versus cooked. Same with almost all vegetables. You need to soak, sprout, ferment, or cook them or they will kill you. In the case of rice or a cashew. Right. So we need to prepare these foods, make them digestible, make sure they work for us. If we have Asian ancestry, we're going to be having white rice, probably very easy to digest. If we have Scandinavian ancestry, we're going to be okay with milk products our whole life. Scandinavian ancestry has 90% lactose persistence and the world has 80% lactose intolerance. And so there's a big vote for testing your genetics or asking your mom and dad where they were born, you know, that kind of thing. So when I realized that I was drinking these smoothies in the name of health and getting my stomach bloated out for hours afterward every day, but thinking it's worth it because it's healthy, that was something I had to rethink. I was forced to rethink. And I'm like, this shouldn't happen if I'm drinking something that's boosting my health. So a lot of times we have a package deal here where we're consuming this super nutritious food. But these are known to have high levels of natural toxins that can cause disturbance in the digestive tract and also inhibit nutrient absorption.

Well, if you have a conversation with Dr. Brian Clement, you probably. That's going to be a good debate because, you know, he's a proponent of raw food. You know, in Hippocrates Health Institute, they've healed a lot of people with chronic illnesses, including cancer. It's all raw vegan.

Raw vegan has more nutrition than cooked vegetables because when you cook it, you reduce the nutrient density. Same with meat. It just makes it easier to digest. And so now we're like on this tightrope, like, well, what can I eat that's raw?

Should I eat it raw? I don't completely agree with raw either. I mean, growing up in Chinese culture, you know, just like when you cook herbs, you're boiling so many herbs all together because, you know, in the process of cooking it, there's new compounds that can form and they can have this synergistic effect. So same as food. You know, I think a lot of when I first came to the US I was shocked when people were eating cauliflower raw. I said, you can't eat this raw. Because I had the idea I never, never would have touched it if it's raw, because it almost felt like it was poisonous.

It's so funny. For sure.

Yeah. It's like that has to be cooked, but, you know, so you have these diverging approaches. Yeah, it gets very confusing. Yeah, I love salad. So, you know. But then the Indian Ayurvedic approach is depending on your constitution. If you Lapita type, you know, you have a lot of fire, you can, you know, digest and, you know, you know, assimilate the, the raw vegetables, salads very easily. But if you're other constitutions, then it's difficult. So there, there are a lot of.

Different approaches, a lot of stuff floating around.

Yes.

But again, we passed whatever minute mark that was on the video, we passed through the gate of eliminating processed foods.

Yeah. Thank God.

So like anyone who's listening, forming an opinion, disagreeing, agreeing. When we're talking about should you cook your celery stalks or put it in the blender, we're talking about optimization instead of, hey, you're going to die. If you continue to consume these oils throughout your lifetime, they're responsible for half a million deaths a year. Directly responsible, something that we can easily eliminate and throw these bottles of things away. And so I've gone down this road for a long time. I live and breathe this stuff. And now I sit back in more reflective state realizing. And that's why I appreciate our counterpoints here because I tend to get super enthusiastic about things and be willing to share. And then it's like, well, you know, it's working for someone. They report no adverse effects. They enjoy their life, they enjoy their diet. But don't talk to me that your Nestle's Crunch bar and your Domino's pizza order. Oh, we just lost a sponsor for the show. I'm sorry, that stuff is in my opinion, and I'll share the opinion that doesn't equate with enjoying life. You're making a huge sacrifice to enjoy a few bites of pizza because it's compromising your health. And so how do we best enjoy our life? Maybe manage some of these social customs, cultural programming that thinks it's necessary to take our kids to Chuck E. Cheese for the birthday party and stuff these kids with sugar cupcakes and crappy processed food, and then teach them that that is associated with celebration for the rest of their life. So you can tell, like when my kids were little, they would get these speeches in the car. We'd be driving by McDonald's. I'm like, that's McDonald's. They're evil. The big M is evil. McDonald's kills people with bad food and then they'd repeat it when they were one and a half or whatever. There's McDonald's. They're terrible. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, just fighting that battle, man.

Yeah. So were you on carnivore diet for a while?

Well, not with this attribute of eliminating carbohydrate foods and eliminating plant foods, because again, I wasn't a sufferer that needed to desperately go and try it. But what I did was I make these little nuanced transitions to try to make a better effort, for example, to eat nose to tail style, which means adding the organ meats in. And by the way, we talked about some traditional cultures. Every traditional diet, every heritage, has organ meats as a centerpiece. Asian food across the board, every country. French food is probably the most prominent, known for having their brains and their things that are traditional French recipes. The Mexican diet with the soups and the, you know, the various, all that stuff. I mean, and we got rid of it all with the age of fast food especially. There's a great book called Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser written in like 1998 or so. And he talks about how culture experienced this massive shift starting in the U.S. thank you very much. In fact, the four major fast food chains all started in Southern California. McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Carl's Jr. In the 50s after the war. And so this transition occurred from the family home cooked meal where the kids were chopping the vegetables and preparing things from scratch and visiting and connecting as a family and sitting down to driving through the drive through because parents could now show their love to their children by buying them a hot cooked meal without making any effort. And so that's where we're now. And we drifted away from those amazing bowls of stew that your grandmother made with the eyeballs in there and whatever else, the pig's feet and all the things that a lot of people think eating liver is gross now, or eating body parts that aren't part of steak or hamburger. And so that's something to try to bring back into today's culture. It's pretty strongly supported. Like if your grandmother and great grandmother and great grandmother all ate this way and now you're saying, ew, gross. I don't want to have any kidneys in my diet. It might be a nice time to wake up.

Well, the people who are more educated, who are more into biohacking, these are the people now are leading the charge to incorporate more organ meat. Right. So I assume the masses will gradually follow if these smart, successful, healthy, vibrant people are Eating these organ meat. So hopefully everybody's gonna catch on.

Good point.

So you changed your approach recently by incorporating more fruits instead of vegetables.

I'm going down this timeline and now appreciating the animal based message where these are the most nutritious foods. So trying to make a better effort especially to be more inclusive. Bone broth is another example of a nose to tail style. The bone broth, authentic bone broth made from leaching the material out of the bones, especially the great agents that are found in connective tissue only, not in muscle meat, steak or hamburger collagen being the most prominent one. Now it's a huge supplement fascination because it has great properties and we don't get it in the diet. Then recently I was realizing with the popularity of what we could describe as restrictive diets where you have fasting as part of your protocol, or intermittent fasting or keto by nature is highly restricted because you have to limit your carb intake to 50 grams a day or below, which is almost nothing in order to qualify for the potential to make ketones. And you also don't want to eat a ton of extra protein when you're trying to be keto. And so you're kind of in this high fat diet or fasting a lot. And I've definitely been spreading this message that these things have tremendous health benefits. And it's all scientifically validated. When you're in a fasted state, your body works better than at any other time. It's better than any super juicy smoothie. Antioxidant boost. When you're fasted, you have antioxidant response, you have anti inflammatory response, you have immune boosting response, you have autophagy, the natural cellular internal detoxification process as a definition. And so your body's repairing, regenerating. The organs shrink after a five day fast because they lose the inflammation and they shed the dysfunctional cells that could turn cancero. And you have a literal health awakening from doing things like fasting. Now we also have to acknowledge that these are stress mechanisms. When you're in a fasted state, your body kicks in to an essential, essentially a fight or flight response with this anti inflammatory antioxidant cell repair. The cell repair example is easy to understand because if you're not getting a bunch of food to divide your cells and get more energy externally, you have to be more efficient with the energy inside your own body. So you're burning energy efficiently and all these things. If we now overlay that into stressful modern life where we have an assortment of stressors. In my case, my main stressors are trying to do magnificent athletic feats at age 57. That's a stressor. That's a stressor. They're both a stressor. My age and my desired workout protocol. And then I also have to write a book on a deadline and do this and do this and exist in modern life where we have all these chronic stressors. And now I'm going to be in a routine fasting protocol where I don't eat until noon in the name of getting a health benefit, and then limit my intake of carbs, for example, or whatever it is that could be qualifying as a restrictive diet that arguably would make for a more stressful lifestyle. And there's a counterpoint that if you get really good at fasting, then fasting is not that stressful. And if you work hard, and I've been fasting for many years until midday, it's no trouble for me to fast until 12 noon.

Right.

I'm not dying on the side of the road.

Some of these pioneers, I mean, like Davis Sinclair, doesn't he only eat one meal a day?

Many people like that.

Yeah, longevity, they're doing that chronically. So do we have any studies about what the health consequences of fasting chronically?

There's a big argument that it promotes longevity. There's a lot of rat studies and animal studies and studies of the C. Elegans algae creature that if you restrict its calories by 60%, it lives like three times as long. And the rat studies all show that if you give the rats less food, they live longer. It's the most profound calorie restriction, is the most profound longevity extender in the laboratory animals. Okay, here's an interesting thing to think about. The rat studies are universally using shitty rat pellet food, laboratory rat food. So it's like if you feed a rat less junk food, it will live longer than a rat who is allowed to eat as much junk food as possible.

No one is talking about that, though.

No one's talking about that. What a lot of people are talking about that I really respect and listen to is when you're going for longevity and health span, right? Not just making it to a number, but living strong, energetic, happy, healthy life called a health span. The most prominent driver of that is maintaining functional muscle strength throughout life. So if you have strength and muscle mass on your body as you age, you're going to depart from that disastrous superhighway where people are just getting into accelerated decline associated with chronological aging because they're not working their body and they're not maintaining their muscle mass, they're not staying active. They fall, they come to misfortune. It's the number one cause of demise. The number one morbidity factor in Americans over age 65 is falling and associated consequences. That's the number one killer in the teenage to 35. It's suicide. Drunk driving. We can find ways to screw up our lives through all the age groups. But in the latter years, the golden years, all you have to do as the number one priority is start working your body and keeping it strong with walking, with doing resistance training, doing high explosive things. When you can work up to even just getting on a bicycle, no impact and sprinting for 30 seconds and resting or 10 seconds, whatever. And so if that's the top, that's the ultimate. As far as optimal, I want to go there rather than starve myself to try to set the record and beat. The current record is 122. So my motto is like, live to 123. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3, and then that'll break the record if I get to 123. But I don't want to be in some robe, shuffling along through the monastery and having lentil soup and brown rice once a day and then shuffling back to my meditation cushion. I want to beat the record in the high jump when I'm 95. You know what the record is for 95 year olds in the high jump?

No.

It's 0.9 meters, which is like less than three feet. So if I can jump into bed when I'm 95, I will break the world record. And I am focused on that goal.

I'm pretty sure you're gonna break it.

Yes. I could do five, little over five feet now if I can take it down to three feet.

That's good.

Yeah, but that's a big one because muscle mass, muscle strength, that's vitality.

I think one, maybe one interesting indicator is to look at the existing Sedenarians around the world. Are they restricting their diet? Are they, you know, only eating one meal a day? How do they get to 115?

Yeah, and it's funny because, like we'll pull something out, out of context and it's really messed up. Especially the blue zones, which I love 70% of it and 30% of it's kind of bullshit, I'm sorry to say. But I do love 70% of it going and finding these pockets of centenarians. One criticism hilariously is that the pockets they found also happen to correlate with high rates of birth certificate fraud and pension fraud. In other words, like Jeanne Calment, the oldest living human of all time, 122 years old. There's an extensive investigation as to whether this lady might be that lady's daughter because she could collect the pension for another 50 years.

Oh, for God's sake.

And they actually validated that. Yeah, this woman's legit. There's tons of records. And so she really did live to be 122. But there's a ton of people where you get the wonderful story from the Caucasus Mountains and the person's 114. It's like, nah, they're 87, whatever. But that's kind of an aside. But these cultures have these wonderful things in common, like especially Japanese Okinawa, which has been lauded as one of the greatest longevity pockets. They have great social fabric and they have ikigai, this purpose for living. And they have these small groups of social connections that they last their entire life. They get together once a week and they talk and they visit and they have this richness of the social fabric, which is believed to be a huge longevity factor. And loneliness is believed to be worse than smoking and taking 10 years off your life or some crazy number like that. Yeah. And then if you listen to a certain type of Blue Zones proponent, they'll say they all have a plant based diet. They all eat a lot of vegetables and things like that. They also eat a fair amount of meat and they also walk a lot and they also have all homegrown, locally grown foods and have all these other attributes. And so we're sitting here in the metropolises and the crazy traffic of Los Angeles and the fast food and all these things and we're going to pull out one favorite thing. Rather than get out of your car and walk to the farmer's market on Sunday in a backpack and fill it up with seven pounds of whatever you want and walk home. Whatever's in there, it doesn't matter. Even if it's a pastured chicken and two dozen eggs or it's a bunch of kale. You're just doing so fantastically well for your health and your longevity by walking a mile to the farmer's market and walking back with a heavy pack. I always want to push it out to big picture. That's why going back a while, we talk about the athletes and how they live their lives and they prioritize sleep. And LeBron James spends a million dollars a year on advanced training and therapies and coaches and experts and contraptions to get his body right because he knows the value is there. So we're kind of scrambling and rambling around a lot. But, oh, back to the restrictive diets. My recent awakening is that I'm probably not a good candidate to mess with that stuff because I'm going for peak performance recovery, more peak performance, more vitality, energy. And I measure my health and well being by, let's say, can I jump over the high jump bar? Not did I get out of the danger zone with my last blood test. So if you're going to the doctor and you got your last blood test and it's not looking good, got to get out and move more, we got to do this, we got to do that, we got to cut out the junk food. And you're on a whole different objective than someone going for peak performance. And so my thing is, like, I don't see a rational justification for me to fast because I'm trying desperately so hard to recover from the last workout and do one in a few more days. So instead I'm doing this experiment to consume more nutritious food, consume more calories every day and purposely do so and go looking for more fruit in the evening rather than kind of keeping that tight control and that regulation that health conscious people want to do. You don't want to just overeat and eat everything around. But if it's healthy and nutritious. We also said this off camera, like, it's very difficult to become a glutton when your diet is healthy, wholesome foods, there's not too many people that can raise. Yeah. Remember that time when you had too many omelets at the omelette bar? No, I don't, because I've had two in Vegas before when they make all those delicious, those all you can eat breakfast bars. And I'll just go right to the omelette guy and I'll say, hey, here's an extra couple dollars. Can you make it in butter instead of refined industrial seed oil? And I'll go get two omelets and other stuff. And I'm highly satisfied. Have you ever eaten too many steaks and felt like crap after the picnic? No. It's eating the junk. That is where you have the tendency to keep reaching into the bag of potato chips and keep going, keep going because there's no nutrition and your brain knows it tells you to keep eating processed food in a desperate attempt, a failed attempt, to get the nutrition you need. So if you have high satiety foods around, like Fruit, because it has all the water and the fiber and it tastes great and has nutritional benefits. And steak and a nice cut of fish and vegetables and stir fries. If you like that, whatever it is, you're going to feel great and you're going to naturally optimize caloric intake, appetite, energy, all those things. And we should mention appetite here, it trumps almost everything, right? Because no matter how much willpower you have and how tiger your Beijing is, you're not going to beat your actual natural appetite and your biological craving for crappy energy if you happen to be having that as a pattern in your life. You just can't, you can't extricate yourself when your appetite is telling you to eat more. And Gary Taubes is one of the great science journalists and has written many best selling books on diet. He has a great line in his book that's called why We Get Fat. And he says it starts out like, it's not your fault. He's talking to the obese population, which today is two thirds of Americans are classified as overweight, one third are classified as obese. So it's a lot of people listening said, it's not your fault. Gluttony and sloth are not the causes of obesity, they are the symptoms of obesity. And what he means by that is like someone who's in bad metabolic shape. It's nicer to say someone with poor metabolic health is sitting on the couch and people are saying those people should get off their ass and exercise more like me, and they shouldn't eat all that junk food. What's happened is that person does not have good cellular energy production. So they are tired and it's difficult to get off the couch and go walk down the street to the mailbox and walk back because they don't have good cellular energy. They're exhausted, they don't feel like working out. And when you're exhausted and you don't have good energy, how are you going to get your energy to stay awake? If you're working at a desk job, you're going to go eat some more junk food. And so the gluttony part is my appetite's on all the time because I'm not getting the energy I need. So I do need more potato chips and more ice cream. And then you get that little bump and those people should be wearing the glucose monitor to see, like, wait a second, you got issues here. Something's not working right inside. And it's most likely due to processed foods. And then the exercise part, boy, if Somehow you could get pushed up and going for a short walk, that would be nice. But I can feel for that person because I was that person when I was a triathlete and I'd go into these bomb outs, exhaustion from training and racing around the world. And in one time, two different times in my career, I was on the couch for six weeks, just bombed out. What happened? What's wrong with you? I'll tell you what's wrong. Now I know after spending all this money on all these advanced medical tests and everything's like, you're wonderful, you have great blood values, all this, all these things came back superior. I was traveling around and racing 44 races in two years all over the globe. And one time the wave ends, then you crash and burn and you realize how stressed and how crazy your lifestyle has been and you need a long time to recover. And so I felt that sense where I could not get off the couch. I sat and watched TV for six weeks. And every day I'd like, maybe today's the day I can train again because that's my identity and I'm a full time athlete. I should be out there for hours every day like I have been for years. And I'd get up and I'd maybe go try to walk to the mailbox and I'd feel like, I wish I could lay down in my driveway and take a nap right now. It just, it wasn't happening for obviously an entirely different reason than someone with obesity and metabolic damage. But when you realize it's not your fault and it's not your lack of willpower, any of those things, it's actually a chemistry problem. It can be an awakening to say, hey, it's possible here to turn this thing around. Starting with. Maybe it requires like going overboard and going for two omelets in the morning so that you may not reach for those potato chips four hours from now, nor the Ben and Jerry's at nighttime. Oh, I just lost you another sponsor. I'm sorry.

I think another thing that people are not taking into account is whatever you're eating, putting your body, you're not necessarily extracting nutrients because our microbiome may not be optimal. Women not have the, you know, enough of the digestive enzymes to help us digest what we put in our body. So I think that's another big factor that people shouldn't ignore. I mean, of course they need, you know, a qualified, you know, doctor to really help them. You know, not your regular doctor, sorry to say. But doctors who are familiar with functional medicine who are actually up to date with the newer evidence in medicine, which would take many years to get to the mainstream. But you know, it also is reminding me because I've done, I've gone through my own evolution. I've tried vegan diet. You know, after watching forks over knives and, and you know, I did okay. But I think a lot of times, you know, someone may do okay on a diet, especially in the beginning, but over time, if it's something very restrictive, you're missing certain kind of nutrients, you're going to start to see issues.

A vegan diet is extremely high risk. I don't want to outright criticize it and sound like a wise ass. It's just high risk and you have a possibility to thrive and optimize, like you said, possibly due to genetics or almost most likely due to genetics, but it's just high risk because you're cutting out the most nutritious foods. But what was your question?

But for people who were only eating a carnivore diet, I think someone told me Paul Saladino actually incorporated plant sources.

He famously is one of the leaders of the carnivore movement. So he was gung ho on eating only animal foods, which it turns out is basically a zero carbohydrate pattern. And we know from there's lots of examples of people that can actually do pretty well with very minimal carbs and being in long term ketosis for years. There's a bodybuilder and power lifter in Mexico named Luis Felicenor and he's a real expert and he has a huge operation called ketogains Online where he helps people through the ketogenic diet, responsibly applied, lose weight and feel better and perform. And so here's a guy who's rip city and he doesn't eat carbs. And you know, I saw him on stage at one of the conferences. He's like, how long you been doing this keto thing? He's like, since 2001. It's like, okay, I guess that's a, I guess he's a success factor that shows it's possible to operate in different metabolic structure than the average person. And so he's making ketones all the time. His brain's running really well on ketones. To the point a super highly adapted keto individual can be 2/3 ketones and 1/3 glucose. Where most of us are 99% glucose. Maybe we wake up in the morning for an hour and we're putting in some ketones because we've been fasted since we slept and then we have orange juice and then we go to mainly carbs. And same with the muscles can get adapted to perform on mostly fatty acids, prioritizing the ketones for the brain. And so we have this elegant. Mark Sisson calls it a closed looped system where you don't really need to worry so much about your diet because your energy production, your cellular energy efficiency is really great just from these internal mechanisms. And we can make sugar that we need from ingested protein, even from fat. But these are a little more complex chemical reactions.

Well, I'm assuming he's eating nose to tail. He's eating everything that's in if he's just eating the muscle.

Sean Baker eats just the muscle really. And he's world record holding rower in the Concept2 rowing competition where they time you in the stationary rower. He's my age, a little younger. He's like 55, world record and he's 6 3, 240 ripped. He's on Instagram showing his amazing workouts and he's like not in that level of sophistication as some of the others. Like Dr. Saladino is really going for the nose to tail and all that. He just eats a bunch of steaks from Costco and performs like an animal, top, you know, top level performer.

Well then why, what made you decide to incorporate more fruits?

Yeah, good question because you just told.

Us how amazing these people did.

I think there's a lot of people now rethinking the positioning and the application of these tools. I love that term tools. Mark Sisson all the time when he talks about keto. It's a tool, it's not a lifestyle. It's a tool to use to fine tune your metabolic flexibility, especially if you have metabolic damage. But I think the greatest benefits come from people that need to go a long way toward cleaning up as opposed to. I'm past those hurdles where my blood work is pretty good, my body fat is pretty good, my insulin is low. There's no drama when I do my continuous glucose monitor. To the extent that I stop doing it, they're like, hey, you want some more for free? With my association with Nutrisense, one of the great companies that are doing this, I'm like, no, give them to someone else. All I see is nothing happening. Or you have your desired spike after a meal. We should mention that if people are familiar with those, you get a spike, it comes back down. So it's called glucose variability and you want tight variability, you want appropriate numbers fasted. We go to the doctor we do our glucose once a year, it's 100. Okay, that's good. So we want appropriate fasted glucose. We want excellent variability. So if it does spike, it comes back down, it doesn't tank, it comes back down. And so you're looking for a graph like this, that's fine, like a EKG graph, right up, back down, up, back down. And then the third one is standard deviation that you want minimal overall standard deviation. In other words, you don't want going up to 180 and then back down to 90. You want to go from 100 to 140 and back down to 100 so you get a lower standard deviation number. Those are the three main goals of your.

If you're eating all meat diet, it's going to be like this. It's going to be a pretty flat line.

Yeah, it's going to be low, it's going to be 68 or something. You know, George Cahill, the researcher at Harvard, did these studies back in the 50s or something 60s where he was able to starve people in the name of science, which is really hard to get this research. It's mostly rat studies like we talked about. But he put these people on like a 40 day fast and their ketones went through the roof, their insulin went down and their glucose went down, but they were able to go into good fat burning mode and high ketone production in order to survive the ordeal. But you asked me a question. So it's like I'm always looking for optimal and the addition of nutritious, easy to digest carbs. So that was Saladino's contribution saying, hey, I'm eating fruit and honey now, everybody. And people criticize him like, oh, Mr. Carnivore Guy is now eating fruit and honey. But he was noticing some problems like cramping and some associated issues with perhaps not eating any carbs. And carbs fuel the muscles, they fuel the brain. We just have used this term, I think inappropriately when we say carbs. I'm cutting back carbs. And what we really mean is cutting out nutrient deficient processed carbs is how we should verbalize that rather than saying I'm on a low carb diet. Well, if your low carb diet is low in carbs, but the carbs you eat are the keto bagels and whatever crap. Who cares if we can distinguish between nutritious plus easy to digest carbs and the vegetables. And that argument about the categories like leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, things that are known to be super healthy with all those high scores and micronutrients and all that, those also could be categorized as difficult to digest, especially if they're raw and especially if you're sensitive. So it seems like a new trend where people in pursuit of fitness goals and have good metabolic health are not needing fasting so much, certainly not needing keto, and warranting just going for more nutritious intake. More intake of nutritious foods. Dr. Tommy Wood, one of the great leaders of ancestral health, a big athlete himself, he says, I tell my active, healthy fit clients to eat as much nutritious food as possible until you gain a pound of body fat. Horrors. And then you turn it down a little bit. But okay, you gained a pound of fat by really going for it and trying to eat as much fruit and steak and eggs and all these sardines, everything. And now you know, okay, I don't need to stuff my face quite to that extent. And then you go back down and you feel great. And that's a mindset or let's say a philosophy that would be that I would kind of nickname eat more, move more lifestyle goal. Because if you're eating more, you're going to have arguably more energy because you're consuming nutritious foods. And there's this, what's the term where you have more thermo. Your body takes extra calories and finds a way to get rid of them. So you start tapping your leg more. And people that have good metabolic function are like, they have fidgety things going on.

I don't know. That's a sign of good metabolism.

Maybe a little bit higher or appropriate body temperature. Rather than the millions of thyroid sufferers who have these weird symptoms that seem to be normal, especially females, you know, they don't know any better sort of thing. They have lower body temperature, they have afternoon blues, foggy brain function, maybe poor performance at workouts. If they are trying to while they're doing keto or while they're doing fasting and then they're going doing a crazy CrossFit workout or something, trying to keep up with you on YouTube with that unbelievably insane short distance workout. Those are occasions where if you're not fueling yourself appropriately and you're trying to push the body with fitness goals, it's trouble. And I'm raising my hand because I'm thinking, like, we used to go on long hikes once in a while, like meet up with family members and go to Yosemite and hike for five hours. And I was so, you know, fat Adapted. I didn't really need all the food and all the junk that people were carrying along. And I felt fine for like two or three hours. And then like after four or five hours I start to really feel like hell. And one time, like the end of the hike, my sister's like, maybe you should try eating more food. And I'm like, what for? I'm not hungry. But it's when we get fat. Adapted. You can relate to this. Like you really aren't hungry for breakfast. And someone said, hey, you hungry? And you're like, no, I'm fine. I'm going to go do a workout, then I have a meeting, then I'm going to be in the office and I'm going to grab lunch. And it's no problem. But you're tapping into stress mechanisms to get through that busy, hectic morning, especially the workout without food. It's just a fact. And if you're highly adapted, then it's not that stressful. But again, back to my question of what's optimal for me. My new experiment that's lasted five months now is instead of a morning of going with the flow and having some chocolate, like I'd usually I'd say fasting until noon, but not really because I'd have dark chocolate or whatever. I'd nibble on chocolate and then have a big proper meal at midday. Now I have this huge bowl of fruit on purpose every morning and a huge protein smoothie where I throw in liver chunks, frozen fruit, a bunch of whey protein, a bunch of my little supplements like creatine, glutamine and 24 capsules of ancestral supplements, the organ pills that we talked about. So if you really don't want to consume heart, kidney or liver at your next meal, you can get them in a bottle. Now I promote a product called Mofo for male hormone optimization. And it's great because it contains these freeze dried animal organs that might gross you out if you were to slice up some testicle and fry it up. Even though it has good nutritional benefits, might not be high on your list of things and you might not find it at your local grocery store. So that's like my super fuel for the morning and I feel great afterward. I don't have a sugar crash from all the fruit that I'm not used to eating because I have good metabolic health. I can process these, this energy fine. And if I did have these crashes that people talk about are like, I'm sensitive to carbs, I do better on low carb. It's largely Driven by a foundational problem of having poor cellular energy production, largely driven by having those seed oils in your diet or a lot of processed carbohydrates like your go to bagels, pizza, Slurpees, things like that. You were talking about how the gut doesn't work well, there's this thing called endotoxins. They're internally manufactured toxins. And the digestive tract releases these endotoxins into the bloodstream, especially when you consume processed sugary like Slurpee or a soda. And so when these endotoxins are circulating, your gut doesn't work well, your mitochondrial function is disturbed. And so that shot of energy that you just took interferes with your long term ability to, to process energy optimally. And so if you're sticking to the healthy, nutritious foods like my bowl of fruit and my big smoothie, I'm going to take those calories, put them to good use, feel active, alert and energetic.

So you feel better during the day and you're not gaining fat.

Right?

Right.

Yes.

And you're.

That is correct. No fat gain. And that's a wild one because I'm eating many more calories on purpose as an experiment, waiting to see where the fat's going to come in. And all I'm finding is perhaps I'm recovering better. So I'm doing more workouts and I'm doing my workouts a little better. My times are a little faster, I recover a little better. My afternoon is tapping my feet and having a nice podcast with Dr. Joy Kong instead of taking my usual nap that it's been my, you know, when I was back in a triathlete, I took a two hour nap every day because I was so beat up from all the hard work. So. Yeah, and then you were going to ask me something else. Do you feel.

No. That's interesting. So you actually, you didn't really increase your workout that much?

Not much, but a little bit.

And they're going better, but you're not gaining weight. So where did that those calories go? Right.

That's the question. This guy, Ryan Baxter, who was on my podcast, he's a primal health coach, but he's an engineer by trade. He's got a job, a life, a family, and he likes to work out. And he's not an elite performer, but he's a healthy, fit, active guy with a very nice diet. And he also quantifies exactly what he eats for years on a spreadsheet, the exact calories every day. So he's like a great Talk about showing me the science. He did an experiment similar to mine where he consumed an additional 700 calories of nutritious foods per day for a year. At the end of the year, weighed the same. Same good body composition, all that. So where did that go? We have a lot of dials that are on between 1 and 10, or in the case of spinal tap 1.

And 11, that helps with our homeostasis.

Well, we have reproduction, repair, growth and locomotion are for. There's A quote from Dr. Herman Ponce. Reproduction, repair, growth and locomotion are a zero sum game. If you locomote too much, like you exercise too much, you're going to turn down your reproductive function. Your libido is going to drop. A female elite athlete is going to experience loss of menstruation amenorrhea. It happens among the elite distance runners and women that get their body fat down too low because they're working out too hard. And so that's like the most extreme example of. Now you have departed from your most prominent evolutionary biological drive of reproductive fitness. That's what we're here for, literally is the only reason. And so if it's like, yeah, my libido is kind of dropping because I've been training harder, you got a very serious health concern. You are trashing your health by definition because this is our most prominent biological drive. So I want dials on 10 all the way, including when I'm messing with the locomotion dial and perhaps trying to turn it up to 11 foolishly. And I'm totally guilty of that my whole life because I like to do it. Sometimes I overdo it. You reported after your famous YouTube workout that you were sore and so tired after.

Only for 10 days.

Yeah, only for 10 days. So that dial went up to 12. And the repair and the growth, the proper muscle tissue synthesis rather than growing muscle tissue, making it stronger. I'm not saying you want to get bigger, but getting stronger muscle protein synthesis. That was all devoted to repair because you did too much eccentric contractions. And so it was like repair, repair, repair. Everything else is toned down a little bit. And yeah, this is fascinating. I don't like that. I mean, I never.

No one ever put it in that way that, you know, proper resources, energy resources, you know, to allocate to different bodily functions. I don't think that's really talked about in a diet debate very much.

Or the exercise. I mean, it should be like very prominent where I don't want to turn down my immune function, for example, but when I Was pro triathlete, traveling around, racing, training. I got colds probably five times a year. Wow. And it was like, no big deal. Here's another cold. It was just normal. And all the athletes would get sick, you know, and a cold's not gonna kill you, but like five colds a year for 10 years, that's 50 colds. And I've had like maybe two since 2008. And that was cleaning up the diet and getting rid of those processed carbohydrates and seed oils. Beautiful.

Yeah. This has been so illuminating. I'm learning so much. I think before we wrap up, I just want. I think some people may not understand about the seed oil aspect. So maybe you can educate people on what do you mean by seed oil? Why is it so bad? And what kind of oils are they, and what are the good oils?

Oh, boy. Yeah. We'll do a whole show with an expert to clean it up a little bit. As I understand, the fat is described by its molecular composition. And so we have saturated fat, and then we have unsaturated fat. You probably heard terms like polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, which are things like olives, avocados, high in monounsaturated fat. And so those are generally regarded as heart healthy and recommended to consume. The saturated fats are things like animal fats. So in the. The meat, the egg, things like that. And there's a lot of controversy around that, but we're now seeing that these are also healthy and have minimal health objections.

And also coconut. Coconut oil.

Coconut oil is highly saturated, and so it's a good choice to cook with because saturated fats are more temperature stable, because, as the term suggests, they're saturated. The hydrogen sites on the molecule are saturated. And so when you heat it up, it doesn't explode into reactive oxygen species. Unlike the polyunsaturated, highly processed industrial seed oils is the correct term. A lot of people call them vegetable oils, but it's when you're extracting oil from something that doesn't really want to give the oil naturally, like an avocado or an olive. Olive oil, they call them first. Cold pressed olive oil is the best olive oil. Where they take the olive, they press it cold, no heat, no chemical solvents, no high temperature machinery, and you get the oil and it looks dark green with this intense flavor. That's a good oil. And the bottled canola oil, corn oil, soybean, sunflower, safflower, these are things that have been heavily processed using chemical solvents, using high Temperature processing. So what you're actually looking at there is something that already has sustained oxidative damage. So it's truly like a cancer producing cellular destruction in a bottle. Dr. Kate Shanahan says if you consume vegetable oils, it's like consuming radiation in a bottle. That's how bad it is for your health instantly. Like an instant disturbance in healthy arterial function and healthy mitochondrial function.

And it's so deceiving because if you look at the word sunflower oil, it's like, what can be wrong with sunflowers and oil from sunflowers? So I think it, you know, and they are hiding everywhere in lots of snack, healthy snacks. They're using sunflower oil and people, you know, think, oh, that's sunflower, so can't be that bad.

And canola oil is, you can go Google canola oil and see that it's high omega 3 and it's a good choice. And Whole Foods still has canola oil on their shelves. And despite their supposed commitment to the highest thing. But the research is mounting that these are responsible for a lot of deaths every year because they contribute to heart disease, cancer, Instant disturbance. Your arteries function inappropriately for up to 24 hours after consuming one dose of French fries. This is from Kate Shanahan. Again, by contrast, a cigarette causes an eight hour disturbance where your arteries aren't as smooth and supple, the nitric oxide goes down, which is important for healthy arterial function. So a cigarette will knock you out for eight hours, hours. It's an acute poison to the body. But the vegetable oils, in this context, it's something to consider. And then by the way, if you say I'm going to cut those out, you're getting rid of all this junky food that has no nutritional benefit anyway. And then the last remaining one, which is the sad part is like most restaurants use these oils to cook their delicious entrees in even the very high end restaurants or the medium like the chains and of course the fast food restaurants are routinely using these. And this is new stuff. Like in the last 30, 40 years, the widespread advent of these where if you went to McDonald's back when I was a kid, they cooked their french fries in lard and then we went that massive shift away from saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat at the recommendation of government authorities to switch from butter to margarine. And that was one of the biggest killers in the history.

Yeah, yeah. What about grapeseed oil? That's something that I've heard some, you know, in health podcasts, some Doctors are saying, oh, that's good. But then I also saw that it may also be one of the.

Yeah, I think it's in the category. And when you think about even olive oil, this distinction, first cold pressed is really important because they banter about terms like extra virgin and you can go to Costco and buy the big giant jug for $11 from Italy. And so what that bottle represents is first the plastic contamination, but also quite likely a very long shelf life. So it's been around for a year before you're opening it up and consuming it. And the research shows that they're often cut with inferior types of oils, especially avocado oil, which is like the new darling in the health food space. They studied like, they did an analysis of like 130 different brands and almost all of them were cut with other offensive oils and just didn't have what they said was on the bottle because there's such minimal regulation.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Avocado oils are more expensive. So they probably are making really good money by doing that. Wow, that's. That's terrible.

Yeah. But you know, if you stop cooking with these oils and be rigorous when you go to restaurant to try to ask them to cook the meal in butter, if you're going for the omelette at the omelet bar or just ask the staff if they can help you say you're allergic to them. That's what I do. Otherwise they don't pay attention, you know, like, yeah, okay, well, we'll try, you know.

Okay, that's good advice. Yeah, I like that.

And it's like they don't have any taste. So it's like, we're not asking you to cut out sugar for the rest of your life and no more treats. Like, that's a little bit harder of an ask. But this is a no brainer just to switch. And you switch. If you have margarine or margarine like products in your refrigerator, throw them in the garbage can right now and go back and get butter and the traditional fats.

So you said these vegetable oils damages your blood vessel function for how long?

For up to 24 hours. 24 hours after serving a french fries. This was on healthy college students. The study that I've heard Kate recommend and we can link to, we have an interview that's pretty short where she just goes to town with her husband talking about the dangers of seed oils on the brain. Especially like the brain cells are especially sensitive to oxidative stress. And so like when you're, you're Literally consuming radiation in a bottle because you're consuming reactive oxygen species, especially when they're heated up. So cooking with the oil and then all the processed foods have been cooked with the oil so they've been heated.

This makes eating out very difficult.

It's rough. And I think your blood sugar spike that you showed on your Instagram.

Oh boy. Those Chinese foods, dosing the oils, supposedly pretty benign. Vietnamese food, you know, rice paper.

Yeah. I mean it was the stuff. It was stuff as a cooked in, almost certainly.

Yeah. Yeah, boy. Okay. Well, this has been illuminating and a lot of wonderful bits of information. I think it's clearing up a lot of things that a lot of people are struggling with, especially if you're interested in health, that you want to optimize your health. And then you're seeing this plethora of information out there and it's really confusing. I think this really helps give some perspective to really what options may be the fundamental approaches. And I love the part about nurturing your body's various functions by putting enough nutrients. So I'm going to do that experiment. I already eat a lot, but I can try to eat some more. But I think there's one time I think I remember having some carb cravings at night and I'm wondering if it's because I wasn't getting enough nutrition, if I was restricting myself too much, especially with protein. Maybe there wasn't enough protein, Wasn't much. Animal products.

Yeah.

I'm wondering if that could be. Because now I've incorporated more animal products, of course, grass fed, wild caught. And yeah, I don't really have that, that sort of craving. So I'm wondering if that's your body's signal that you're not getting enough nutrition.

Yeah, the body's smart.

Yeah.

And you get a carb craving because the body's looking for glucose. And it's very smart. It'll go get it, it'll walk you right. And lead you right to the appropriate food. But if we.

I'm wondering if it's actually needing nutrients.

Like other sources of nutrients, you know, like, I guess you could call it like a deficiency in your energy state, your low energy state. I think at least in my personal experience, it's also from a burnout day because we go so hard these days and we're not really meant to be that way. And like, I mean people of my age group, you're probably too young to remember, but like half of my life was spent without the Internet or mobile device or any of that. And now the second half, it's, you know, come to be so prominent. But I remember those days where I had more downtime. I wasn't listening to podcasts at 2.0 speed all the time. Every time I exercise or every time I drive in the car, I'm always stimulating my brain and learning more.

I love it.

It's great. I totally love it. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to go back to the licking the stamp. Dear Joy, thanks for having me on your podcast. Oh, I need to put a 14 cent stamp and then another 34 on there because the price just went up. Don't want to go back there, like knowing that were trying to take on so much and those crash and burn episodes that I had so often as a professional athlete, it was rough. It's a rough way to go.

Interesting.

And you know, if you want to go for the gold, you're in that category where too bad. But those guys are really good at resting too. And I will say, like, during that 10 years of my life, I was asleep for half of my life. I slept 10 hours every night.

Really.

And I took a two hour nap every afternoon. And if that two hour nap was disturbed, like there was too long of a line at the post office to send the thank you note to Joy Kong. I was all cranky and my workout in the evening was worse because I didn't have my full two hours. So it was just, I was a sleep machine and then, you know, putting out too much energy.

Yeah.

So there's a, there's a better way to balance. But I think part of that balance today, of course, is sleep, nutritious food, but also just chill time where we're not on the device and we're looking out and staring into space or whatever.

Nature and meditation.

Right on. Love it.

So, okay, so we're gonna wrap up here and we would love for you to participate. And if you have comments about your own dietary successes or obstacles and leave a comment, I think it would be a very interesting discussion. So thank you very much and thank you, Brad, for a great conversation.

Thank you.

Sat.