Paleo Nutrition Explained — What You Need to Know

This show is proudly brought to you by www.maximusmark.com and Enterprise Fitness. Hi folks, it's Maximus Mark and welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information, but in a good way. It's Maximus Radio and today's guest is Brad Kearns. Brad is a noted speaker, author, and coach in health and fitness worldwide for over 2 decades. During his 9-year career as a triathlete, he's one of the world's top-ranked professionals amassing over 30 wins worldwide on the pro circuit. Career highlights include a remarkable streak of winning 7 victories in a row, a World Duathlon Series Championship, 2 National Triathlon Championships, and ranking number 3 in world ranking in 1991. Brad has authored How Lance Does It, How Tiger Does It, Breakthrough Triathlon Training, and was a supporter writer to Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint. In other words, today we have something very special. As always, welcome Brad to the show and let's get on with the very first question. So you've authored both How Lance Does It, How Tiger Does It, Breakthrough Triathlon Training, and you will support a writer to Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct.

So what type of work did you do with Mark?

Oh, well, we've been friends for a long time and he brought me along to help work on the first book, the Primal Blueprint, with him. So, you know, we've been collaborating now for 3 years and have a couple other books in the works. And it's gone great. It's been a wonderful movement that Mark's led, and I'm happy to be a part of it.

That's awesome. That's awesome. So how did you get into writing and teaching health?

Oh, well, I was a professional triathlete for 9 years. And competed on the circuit. And during that time, I liked to exercise my brain too, so I did some writing for the magazines. And then I wrote a sort of an autobiography of my experiences pursuing a career as a triathlete and had a lot of fun with that. So I've been doing it for quite a long time and always a part of the athletic world, first as an athlete and then staying in it. Working in marketing for companies that sponsored me and so forth.

That's awesome. So, for newbies to the Paleo lifestyle, what is it and how would one get involved?

Oh gee, it's easy to get involved. I mean, there's some great resources. Obviously, Mark Stingley Apple is a good place to start with an informative article every day and tons of archives that have I think there's a tab on the homepage for beginners or getting started and just learning the basics. But if you understand the basic premise, it's pretty easy to take off from there and kind of reflect on all the ways that we've gone wrong in modern society with our diet and even our exercise methods, as well as the hectic stressful pace that we live at. So the primal theme is to sort of go back to our hunter-gatherer background that we've operated at for 2 million years and kind of model those lifestyle behaviors and adapt them into the realities of modern life.

Yeah, for sure. So one of the questions I guess I have about paleo lifestyles is, you know, one of the big movements is that we should avoid all grains as they are poisons, but surely these plants were available to our ancestors and would have been eaten in very small amounts and quantities. So do you think there's a need to completely eliminate them or can we have a little bit of them here and there.

Well, I think one thing that I appreciate about Mark's voice with this movement is he tries to paint the picture that you don't need to do anything and you don't need anybody telling you what to do as an adult human in the free world. So the best place to start from, the best mindset, is to reflect on how things are working for you and notice some of the shortcomings of modern life where, you know, a very common one is people carry excess body fat despite devoted efforts, or in many cases not devoted efforts, not doing a very good job at all. But even the people that try to do the right thing, try to eat what we're told is healthy and exercise properly, are still carrying excess body fat, still suffering from nagging health problems that can likely be tied to the modern diet, which is probably one of the biggest variables we have as far as, you know, how to take care of our health. So the grain issue, which is truly controversial and kind of a sticking point for people because it goes against what we've been told our entire life is healthy, but the rationale for that is that grains have been around as long as civilization, which is about 10,000 years ago when things start to transition across the globe from hunter-gatherer lifestyle to civilization. Cultivation of grains and livestock and so forth. So poison is a pretty strong word, but you could call it a slow poison because it's really— we're not genetically adapted to consume these foods. And the main reason being that they stimulate wildly excessive insulin production from what our genes are used to for 2 million years. So grain is a high carbohydrate food. Coupled with the processed sugars that we've been eating for the past 100 years. So we have grains for 10,000 years and we have processed sugar and sweetened beverages and things like that only in the last, in the last few generations. And together they combine to overstress the body's very delicate hormonal mechanism that regulates blood sugar, and that is the hormone insulin primarily. So when you, when you consume carbohydrate food and elevate your blood glucose, you get a sudden rush of energy But it's a very difficult thing for the body to handle on a repeated or a chronic basis because throughout our existence, we never had access to sugars or even something as concentrated in carbohydrate as a grain.

So, in the hunter-gatherer society, there really was no access to grains, is what you're saying?

They hunted animals and they gathered for wild plants, vegetables, and seasonal fruits in some cases if they were lucky with their latitude and their conditions. Over history of human evolution, 2 million years, the average daily carbohydrate intake was 100 grams or less.

Yeah.

And today, we go anywhere from triple to 6 times that, depending on how diligent we are about our diets or, you know, how much exposure we have to modern foods, sweets, and things like that.

Yeah, and just so the listeners know, I'm definitely an advocate of getting rid of the grains out of your diet. It's probably one of the smartest things you can do. I know I definitely go grainless and I feel great from it. But that is, thank you for that answer. It's probably one of the best answers I've heard is to reflect on what you're doing now and is it working for you? And if it's not, well then start asking questions. So a question that I have as well, noticing, you know, it's hard not to go on your website and notice, you know, you're very heavily involved in endurance exercise, like endurance type of sports, like your triathlons, your duathlons, and all that type of thing. And have been ranked, you know, very highly in the world doing those things. So exercise intensely for short intervals is, I guess, the more of the paleo approach with things. Yet we would have the primal man. Did the primal man have periods where they did do long endurance type of events for varying and then very intense periods of physical activity either while being hunted or gathered? So surely as humans, what I guess I'm saying is having the capacity for long endurance sessions of intensity physical activity Isn't there an occasion where we should actually do longer and more endurance type of exercise?

Hey, that's a nice long question. I appreciate that. Again, you come out with this concept of what we should do, and I think the number one thing we should do is things that are fun and enjoyable and satisfying to us. I got a lot of reward and enjoyment out of pursuing endurance sports, but Upon reflection in my 9-year career as a professional, and as you know, Mark Sisson has endurance background also, you look back and you realize that, boy, the compelling goal of competing on the starting line can wash out your health in many cases. And this is true for all the sports. Footy players or whatever you call them and every other sport, athletes push it to the very edge and a lot of times compromise their health. And especially in endurance sport, the general approach of chronic accumulation of mileage or whatever the performance standard is can compromise your health because of the chronic nature of it. So to get back to the part of your question, trying to keep pace with you there, in the primal times humans were called upon for heroic endurance feats. And one of my favorite modern examples, if you You can search on YouTube for a documentary called The Last Dance. It's about an hour long, and it's one of the only persistence hunts ever filmed by modern hunter-gatherers, the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. And these guys tracked down an antelope, I believe, for about 4 hours, covered somewhere around 30K and 120-degree heat in the desert, and finally the antelope collapsed and died of exhaustion after these guys tracked it to its death. So that's a great example of they're hungry, they're hunting down an animal, and they're performing a magnificent endurance feat. The contradiction or the contrast to today is that the athlete will go out and run a marathon or whatever their ultimate endurance achievement