S2:E10 - Art De Vanny - Enterprise Fitness Podcast with Mark Ottobre

Hey, hey folks, welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information, but in a good way. My name is Mark Ottobre, owner and director of Enterprise Fitness, and this is the Enterprise Fitness Podcast. I am once again dusting off the old podcasts from the Maximus Mark Show back in the day. That content was evergreen, so I'm very proud to relaunch them and bring them back to This interview is with Art Devaney, who wrote "The Primal Diet." Great guy, great conversation. We head down a few different paths here, whether it be about Paleolithic diets and also about, I suppose, the food industry as well, we discuss. But this has got a lot of great insights. Hope you enjoy. If you like this podcast, do check us out and leave a review. Google us on iTunes, Enterprise Fitness Podcast, or check out our SoundCloud account. If you go straight to SoundCloud, whether you're an Android user or an Apple user, you'll be able to stream all of our great podcasts if you subscribe to us via SoundCloud. If you're an Apple user, why not just jump on the podcast app and search Enterprise Fitness for more great shows like this. Now, as always, I'd love to hear from you. What do you like, what don't you like? Have you been enjoying the re-release of the Max Maximus Mark Podcast show. If you have, drop us a line, leave us a review, hit us up on Facebook or Instagram. I'll speak to you on the other side. Hey 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 I'm super duper psyched for today's show. It's what I would call a cracker of an episode. We've all heard of the paleonutrition movement. Well, today's guest is one of the kings and original thinkers of the whole paleo movement. Today's guest is Dr. Art Devaney. Art graduated from Montebello High School in 1955 and signed to play professional baseball for the Hollywood Stars. He was one of the very few pro baseballers at the time to actually lift weights, a now universal practice, which led scouts to give him the nickname of Superman. Well, that nickname actually stuck, and recently the Times of London called Art Superman's slightly fitter granddad. What an awesome nickname. Dr. Art Devaney went to earn his PhD in economics at UCLA and to become a very respected scientist who's known all over the world for his articles and books. He's listed in the Who's Who America and the Who's Who in the World and is the author of the acclaimed Hollywood Economics. A lifelong student of metabolism and fitness, Art has lived as a paleo athlete for some 30 years and is called the patriarch of the paleo movement. He has blogged on the topic since 1990 and continues to blog on the subject on his Evolutionary Fitness blog at www.artbarnes.com. Arthurdevaney.com. He's the author of The New Evolution Diet, which you can purchase from Amazon. It is my absolute pleasure that I welcome today Dr. Art Devaney to the show. Welcome, Art. How are you going today?

Uh, it's going very well, Mark, and thanks for having me on the show.

Yeah, absolute pleasure to have you on. Um, the first question that we have, um, it's kind of the question that we always start with: how did you become the patriarch of the paleo movement? I mean, you were an economics professor through your, I guess, university life, how'd you really get into the paleo lifestyle?

Well, you become a patriarch by merely being old. But actually, I was into health and fitness far before I became an economist. I was into weightlifting by the age of 14, started with a 90-pound weight set in my parents' garage. And did a little Olympic lifting and competitive, one competitive bodybuilding contest that the owner of my gym pushed me into. And then, of course, I decided I didn't like professional. I did sign to play professional baseball, but I didn't care that much for that life. I really was a professor even then. In fact, they called me not only Superman in those days because I was the only guy who lifted weights in professional sports, perhaps, to my knowledge at least. And I had horn-rimmed glasses and looked rather like Clark Kent.

All righty.

The old Superman shows. But the thing is, economics and metabolism are essentially the same thing. They're both about allocating scarce resources to competing ends. and in the case of human metabolism, every cell is an independent agent that's only cooperating to sustain life through some kind of complex feedback loops, and the dance of life is one that's completely controlled by decentralized processes, with each cell trying to maximize its own nutrients and its own DNA. Somehow or other, that whole complicated process is sustained and is life, very far from equilibrium as Prigogine said. And economics is exactly the study of that kind of process, decentralized allocation processes. So actually my economics equipped me extremely well to understand. But the real turn was when my young son, my 2-year-old son developed type 1 diabetes when I was at the University of Chicago for a visit. Now, type 1 diabetes, of course, is an interruption of the insulin secretion process from the pancreas, and as soon as that happened, I went right down to the University of Chicago library and just bought all the books I could find on metabolism and diabetes and so forth. So I plunged into the study of metabolism out of necessity many, many years ago.

Right, okay. So I guess, can you just kind of set up the frame for the listeners? Is, can you tell me how we actually lived 40,000 years ago? Now I know that you make more reference to 40,000 years ago, opposed to 10,000 years ago, before rational industrial farming. I just kind of want to set it up and get the scene in the listeners' minds.

Well, yes. Remember, we, well, I don't know if you know this, but we went through, humans went through a genetic bottleneck about 70,000 years ago. That was when there was this massive eruption. We're in the depths of the Ice Age and there's a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia, Philippines actually, and the temperatures plunged about 70,000 years ago. From that period until about 40,000 or 50,000, really about 30,000 years ago, there were just a handful of humans even alive. It's estimated that there may have been from 2,000 to 8,000 humans left. They were living through not only the depths of the Ice Age, but through essentially a volcanic winter on top of that. During that time, this is a period of time when modern humans emerged. They actually emerged maybe 70,000 years ago, right during that critical period. And 40,000 years ago, we start to see truly complex human thought. It's left in the art and the symbolism that we see. 30-some-odd thousand years ago, we see the magnificent cave art that still really can't be topped. And you see jewelry and human decoration and burial and social organization. It's clear that something happened to allow humans to survive during that almost nuclear winter, if I can use a bad phrase for it. It had to be the use of symbolism and cooperation. In addition to that, the brain developed prodigiously. Right around that time, beginning about 100,000 years ago, but peaking probably 50,000 to 32,000 years ago. The reason for that is we were pushed to the seashores by the intense cold, and foraging along the seashores— and by the way, you see evidence of seafood exploitation about 185,000 years ago on the southern tip of Africa, Even before that, you see that in the Rift Valley of Africa where modern humans were born, and all humans were born, and their prototypes, you see exploitation of freshwater streams and lakes. The Rift Valley is full of lakes from the folding of the earth, from the fact that India and Africa are colliding and pulling apart in different places and so there are a lot of rifts and deep valleys there. So we lived on seafood for a very substantial— even crocodile, by the way— for a substantial period of time and that allowed the polyunsaturated fatty acids that are essential for the construction of the modern, very large, metabolically active human brain. So it's a critical time, plus it's the title of one of my favorite Rock Hill Welsh movies.

Righty, righty. So I've also read other things like different cultures who didn't have as much saturated fat and didn't have the resources in their diets, just simply weren't as smart. I remember someone referencing something about the Kenyans. They didn't develop the bow and arrow, and some people have correlated it to the saturated fats in their diets. Can you provide any comments on that one?

[Speaker:DR. MARK OTTOBREMER] Yes, I think they would have had far fewer fatty acids than people living along seashores, but what did happen was there were many migrations in and out of Africa, as we know now, and the seashore and freshwater sources definitely provided probably about half the calories that humans ate 32,000 years ago. In fact, they know that from looking at the dentition, the teeth and bones of Cro-Magnon humans who were found. They were higher on the nitrogen chain, which means they were eating meat and seafood, even than the wolf. Yeah. In fact, they were pure stone cold carnivores when you include, in carnivory, you include the flesh of sea and freshwater fish. The atlatl, I don't know where that was created, but that was the precursor to the bow and arrow. That was the throwing stick with a dart-like spear that really completely transformed human hunting technology and became the basis for humans killing off many of the megafauna, many of the large animals that couldn't breed fast enough given their size. Relative to the rate at which humans could kill and eat them. But anyway, free fatty acids, a book by Crawford and Marsh, for example, The Evolution of Human Nutrition, I think is something to that effect is the title. I cite it in my book. They do credit the availability of the polyunsaturated fats, particularly the omega-3 and 6 fats, and others of long-chain fatty acids with, you know, the evolution of modern human cognitive ability and brain size. And also cooking coincided with that. Richard Wrangham has written this book on the importance of fire, something like fire is in the title. He's a professor at Harvard and he credits the development of cooking which allows us to trade stomach tissue for brain tissue. So we develop smaller stomachs, which is metabolically active tissue equivalent to brain. By the way, it turns out that stomach is part of your brain. Yeah. You probably know that. And that's why when you feel it in your gut, you really do. You have brain, You've got a lot of brain tissue down there in your gut. Anyway, by making the stomach smaller through the use of cooking, you're basically using the external environment to preprocess food, and so that tissue can be traded for more brain mass up in the cranium. So cooking was a very important feature there in addition to the availability of fresh water and seafoods.

Let me ask you on that. I had a couple months ago, uh, Adonis Vanderplant and another guy by the name of Josh— I can't pronounce his last name— Trenavalli, I think it is. And we spoke about a lot about raw food. And Adonis particularly has told me that he's lived outdoors for extended periods of time, and, you know, he's definitely in the school of thought that raw food is superior and that, I guess, uh, you know Ancestrally speaking, we, we did eat more raw food, but then there was that point where we developed fire and we started to cook the meat. So I wanted to get your thoughts on, number one, what's your thoughts on raw meats? And then number two, what's your thoughts on raw vegetables?

Okay, well, um, raw meat is a lot harder to process, and I don't think Langland would agree that eating raw meat would have been a basis for the development of modern humans. Certainly it was the basis for life among all predators, and humans are way up on the predatory chain from that point of view. But here we are, we live in this modern world, and the modern world is full of pathogens and meat processing. As long as you eat, you know, meats that are grown on free range and are properly cared for, if you can tolerate raw meat, why not eat it? But for example, sashimi and other Japanese raw foods I simply avoid now. I don't trust the oceans and the handling of food in modern restaurants with Who knows who's cooking or handling the food these days. So I think we have to also realize that we have drug-resistant toxins and pathogens living today that would not have been able to live in ancient times, and we have to respect the lethality of these toxins. And so I cook virtually everything, and I never eat hamburger, of course, because hamburger the surface is ground into the interior of the meat, so the pathogen is taken deep into the meat where it can really breed.

So you mean like minced meat, you never have any minced meat or anything like that?

Minced meat, hamburger, you know, whatever. Oh, sometimes sausage, but I cook it very thoroughly. So, and raw vegetables, I eat a lot of raw vegetables in my salads, but Again, they're a little bit difficult to process and utilize, so you have to do it a bit sparingly. I think it really convinces me that our foods largely were cooked to a significant degree. By the way, the campfire was a place where people gathered. There was safety there. There was almost always a campfire. Available to ancient humans.

Yeah.

Even though we, you and I go out there and we think we could never build a campfire, they can build one with no trouble at all.

Yeah. Just on that before we move on from the raw food issue, a lot of people talk about raw food. They say there's a lot more enzymes in raw meat, especially, and that's probably one of the most popular arguments with the raw food issue. Do you have any thoughts, I guess, on the enzymes being available? And when you cook the food, the enzymes get destroyed. Is that false?

Yes, but the proteins get broken down because enzymes are just proteins. So you're talking about the degradation of proteins when you talk about what cooking does, and that makes them more bioavailable to a significant degree. I don't have a problem with cooking. If people want to eat raw, more power to them. I'm an agnostic on this point. I don't get religious about these kinds of these kinds of things.

Yeah, good answer. Many of my listeners train very hard, and straight after the training, they're sucking down protein shakes, like, you know, as you said before, a religious belief that they have to get the protein straight after training. What's your thoughts on protein powders and the whole, we need protein immediately after training?

Oh my, well, This is all based on this fictitious notion that there's a window of opportunity— Yeah. —to absorb. Now, what does that window mean? It means that there is a period of insulin sensitivity following an intense workout. The period of insulin sensitivity is shut down as soon as you start eating carbohydrate-laden energy protein drinks. Protein shuts— causes insulin to be released, and so insulin sensitivity collapses. Carbohydrate causes insulin sensitivity to collapse, and it also shuts down the production of growth hormone and leptin, both things that mobilize energy to build new tissues and to fuel your movement and make you burn fat. So you basically shut down fat in the post-exercise period. And if you train hard like I do and probably you do, you're looking for an intense post-exercise excess respiration period. That is where you're breathing more and using— replenishing your ATP in your cells by consuming extra oxygen during that time interval. Well, Anytime you take these protein drinks, you close the window. It's not like the window is open for a fixed period of time. Now, let's consider how much you do absorb. Suppose you take a big bolus of protein and carbohydrate right after training. Well, the window shuts pretty quickly, so the post-exercise period that you spent all this time and energy trying to create is abbreviated. If on the other hand you just eat maybe like I do an hour after you've worked out, you've allowed an hour for fat burning to take place and for leptin and growth hormone to do its role, but you've also extended the period of insulin sensitivity. In other words, the window stays open longer. And over a long period of time, there's really no difference between the amount of protein you absorb. If you consume it right after the workout or you consume it over an extended window of time. In fact, the window's open for 24 hours if you eat moderately following a workout.

What would you eat after a workout?

Well, I just eat what I would ordinarily eat. I always work out hungry because you don't want to move unless you're hungry. I mean, hunger makes you you feel like you need to move. When you're hungry, you're restless. When you're well-fed, you're lazy and you sit down, you're the lazy overeater, you consume. And well, just think about this researcher friend of mine says, and it's well known in the literature, you cannot make these caged rats or mice exercise unless you keep them hungry. If you feed them too well, they'll sit on the treadmill and just not move. Treadmill. One guy had a mouse that would sit there and the fur got sort of burned off its behind because it wouldn't get up and run while the treadmill was turning. So in fact, they have to keep the mice about 18 to 20% below the amount of calories they would ordinarily need in order to give them the motivation to— to move.

And that's a primal trigger, isn't it? Because that's how we, you know, we had to get up and hunt our food.

That's exactly right. Hunger says we better go find some food. Our brain and our whole metabolism is geared to— we shift to fat burning because that's a long-lasting fuel that we carry tons of in our bodies. We don't need energy in order to go work out. We have thousands of calories stored. In our liver, in our muscles, in the glycogen in both those places, and in our fat stores. Even the amino acids in our muscles can be used to fuel movement if need be. The human body runs on, you know, a variety of fuels, even though our primary intake sources are carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. We can run on lactate, ketones and glucose.

Yeah, absolutely. Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Mario Di Pasquale?

Yes, yes, I know. In fact, he's big on the window thing too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I just, just reminded me of what you were saying when Mario was talking about how you shut it off, and he kind of relates it to premature ejaculation. With taking the carbohydrates too early, you're shutting off the window too early, and the effectiveness of eating and the insulin sensitivity can be prolonged for a much greater period of time. But yeah, so that's really interesting. You just touched on it briefly before. I've heard you say this before in different podcasts, but eating before training, it does— so it alters gene expression negatively as well. Is that right?

It's very true, right? Not only metabolic genes such as the the genes that determine the fate of the fuels inside your body and how the cell uses nutrients, but also your mitochondria, which are the primary sources of ATP production within the cells. Well, look, gene expression is maximized, and research shows this pretty clearly, in a restricted carbohydrate setting. When you take carbohydrate, you alter the metabolism and you also alter how you shift from a process which is called autophagy, that is self-eating. When you work out when you're hungry, your body, your cells actually consume the damaged proteins inside your cells and recycle them as fresh new structures. So every workout tears muscle protein, right? Tears actin and myosin. And what's going to happen to those damaged tissues? Well, they're going to be degraded by autophagy, this process of internal consumption of damaged proteins, and they get recycled as fresh protein. So you're making, you're laying down new cell tissue, new healthy cell tissue at a much higher rate if you train empty and, you know, hungry. If you, the minute you have any carbohydrate, like if you drink or eat one of these energy bars before you go work out, and I see guys doing that, all the time. Yeah. Oh, I need some energy to work out. Yeah. Wait a minute, first of all, you're not going to burn fat now. Secondly, you're going to completely shut down autophagy because it only operates when insulin is virtually zero. Yeah. And you're going to damage proteins inside your cells, which is how you make them grow. You damage the muscle and then it comes back stronger and bigger. And so you shut both those processes down. It's really quite dumb. It sells supplements.

Yeah, definitely. One of the things I just wanted to get before we move on, so the ideal training time would be, you know, as soon as you wake up, say you wake up at sunrise and train what, an hour to half hour after that?

I train just about any time I feel like it because life would have been an adventure in the Paleolithic. and we didn't have routinized activity patterns that would have varied seasonally. It would vary according to the cold and the heat and the migration patterns of animals and just the host of whether you were going to fish that day or you're going to go try to find some large game or whether you're following reindeer moving across the around the globe, you're following herds migrating. So there's just a— what I do is I train according to what I call the power law, which is this notion of fractal physiology. Humans and all living creatures don't live in a permanent state of sort of homeostasis where everything is the same all the time. Variation is in fact what What makes us alive, that's what our brains are for, is to adapt to variations in the environment that less complex animals are not capable of doing. And so I have this sort of power law training, which means that I work out at random intervals and at, not completely random, not like flipping a coin, but— About every third day I go a little bit hungry and I work out twice a week, kind of hard in the gym with weights, half an hour, no more. And then I'll go do sprinting and I'll play a little tennis and I'll just enjoy the outdoors and take walks and whatever, ride my motorcycle or whatever. All that fun stuff. All the fun stuff. Really, it's supposed to be play. Life is supposed to be playful and enjoyable.

Yeah. And the other question I wanted to ask before, just for the listeners, when you say, you know, don't have carbs before training, are you also including things like sweet potato with that category as well?

Well, work out hungry. Whatever you've eaten, you should train so hard that you're on the verge of nausea. And if you've got food in your stomach, you're gonna just —burn out earlier.

Yeah, for sure. Studying both economics and nutrition, I'm sure you've looked at this question that arises often when touting the paleo lifestyle for the masses. And that question is, we can't feed the world on a paleo diet, there just isn't enough space on the planet. What's your thoughts on that?

Well, it assumes its conclusion. Well, that's a preposterous statement. It is not even a question. Just a proposition that was probably dreamed up by some vegan. First of all, the number of calories available to humans per capita is at the highest rate it's ever been in all of human history. Secondly, virtually all massive starvations occur in agricultural cultures who are highly dependent upon monoculture, a single kind of crop or just a couple of crops. And agriculture encourages, even necessitates, 1 or 2 or 3 crops, whereas our ancestors ate from 300 to more, 300 and more wild plants and multiple animal sources and seafood sources of foods. For example, in China or in India, there's a dependence, and in all the world, there's a dependence primarily the bulk of our calories come from like 4 starchy crops now. Each one of those is vulnerable to new pests. Think of the Irish Potato Famine, the starvations in China, and the list goes on and on. Now, suppose you had a loincloth and a sharp stick, and you're out looking for food or energy. Where are the calories?

In the meat.

Where, where is the carbohydrate? There is none. There's protein and fat, and we throw away so much of our fat, or we avoid fat so religiously— not religiously, but so assiduously— that we're wasting a lot of the calories that are out there and that would have fueled our activities and our movement. So it's really a bogus, it's not even a question. Now, insofar as technology, most starvation is, one, as I said, in agricultural societies, not hunter-gatherer societies, but two, technology is easily capable of supplying the foods that are, in fact, it's already done so. The number of calories available in the world today, or even in the future if we move toward a more plant and animal-based agriculture. It is the distribution of food. So the starvations we see are always episodic and highly concentrated in the places where they have really bad government. Right? China, Soviet Union, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and so forth, all the recent starvations are the results of poor distribution of foods and wars and really, really bad government like the Soviet and Chinese collectivizations of agriculture. 25 million people died in China, you know, during the Green Revolution, you know, the agricultural revolution there.

Is this because of trying to— efforts to globalize the food supply? It should be localized?

I think we should have both operating very clearly. First of all, if you had secure property rights around the world, farmers would take care of themselves. You wouldn't have a problem. And all these pastoralists who find their lands intruded upon and get pushed out of areas or whose crops are seized by, like Chavez is doing in Venezuela now, they seize the crops, or in Cuba. No wonder Cuba has so few calories produced per capita. There's no incentive to do so. No wonder many countries can't feed themselves because they've collectivized agriculture. Look what's happened in where Mugabe has taken over agriculture. I mean, it's just collapsed. So most of the starvation we see is not from the sources that whoever thought this question up are pointing to. By the way, more animals are killed by modern agriculture because you create this monoculture and you kill the habitat of all the wild creatures that had lived there when you turn it into a vast wheat field. And guess what comes in behind? It's the vermin. The vermin have learned to follow humans and to exploit the agricultural crops that we grow. That's exactly right.

Yeah, I had Lierre Keith on quite a while back. She wrote The Vegetarian Myth, and we spoke about this very topic. Oh, uh-huh. Yeah, very, very good. Very enlightening interview. Very, very good. Science and modern nutrition have developed sophisticated food intolerance screening tests and have emphasized, you know, there's a few books that have emphasized the need to rotate foods, let's say every 3 to 5 days, depending on the author. My understanding that the way we lived 40,000 years ago, we didn't have the luxury of rotating foods or rotating food groups. How important do you think it is to rotate foods?

Well, I think food variety is very crucial because, you know, every plant has only so many nutrients in it. For example, amino acids in particular or magnesium, very— two very crucial nutrients. And as I said, our ancestors lived on up to 300 plants various wild plants, so they rotated constantly. And it's well known that people who eat a wider variety in their diet tend to have better longevity. Well, I don't know how well known it is, but there are studies that support that point of view. So now rotation can be thought of in several ways. You can rotate over a season, as our ancestors surely would have done based on the availability of different crops. The Eskimo can't eat berries except at a certain time of the year, otherwise they're dependent upon animal and seafood sources. They rotate, but they rotate in sort of a seasonal way. We tend to think of rotation as sort of changing every day. We sort of reduced the complicated metric of life that would have been true back in ancestral times, down to sort of a do-it-everyday kind of mentality, a highly routinized sort of chronic way to think about living. So as long as you vary your activities and vary your food intake, whether you do it like like you mentioned, you might eat chicken for a week because you bought, you got a deal on chicken. And another week you might eat seafood. That's variation. If you integrate the variation over a longer period of time rather than just a day, like a year, we all have a fairly, well, not all, some people eat nothing but the same thing day after day after day all year long because in the modern society you can do it. In ancestral times, it would have been completely impossible to eat it, you know, even a Twinkie every day. I mean, you can eat a Twinkie every day now, but you could never get a comparable source of carbohydrate.

Yeah, every day. Every day. Yeah, that was true. Only you'd really get those high refined carbohydrates when you stumbled across a beehive, and that wasn't every day. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Absolutely. So, by the way, they— a lot of ancient humans loved honey. They would take great risks to try to capture honey, right?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I can understand why. Um, so yeah, just to catch the leader up— the, the listener up to speed, yeah, what I do is I order a quarter of a cow, um, or order 7 kilos of chicken, or, you know, 7 kilos of kangaroo, and I, I just go through basically one animal at a time until it's gone, and then I move on to the next animal. Again, my thinking is that it more closely resembles and mimics a modern caveman, so to speak. So, um, that's what we're talking about there.

Yeah, I really like that. Um, I don't quite do it that way, but because anyway, I just don't. But, uh, I would— I've been very intrigued to try kangaroo. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to come over to Australia. Yeah, definitely.

It's really good, really good. The only thing with kangaroos, you can't overcook it because it does get very tough. So you need to, need to have it probably a bit more on the rare side, because if you do overcook it, it's one of those meats. But yeah, it really is a great meat, really, really good.

Kind of like venison then, because same thing's true of venison. Yeah, tough as leather. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Um, once a primal man has developed the tools to bring down a larger game— this, this question is actually from a friend of mine who wanted me to ask, once the primal man developed the tools to bring down larger game, he would then engage in feasting. The beast had to be eaten and obviously couldn't be refrigerated. They would all sit around and eat and eat and eat and gorge themselves. Seems like the human body has an inherent capacity for overeating. So the question is, do you think it's not only okay to overeat, but on occasion to our advantage, providing it's the right foods?

[Speaker:DR. MARK OTTOBREMER] I certainly don't disagree with that description of the pattern, although in the northern environments, that you killed the mammoth, it would have been frozen and you could keep it around for quite a long period of time. Same thing's true of an animal that freezes in the north. You can exploit the food as you see fit over a fairly long period of time. But it is true, I think, meat and protein were scarce always, always, always, always. And so there was a lot of sharing and meat became basically a commodity for bringing groups together around the fire and sharing and building relationships which were so crucial to survival during the depths of the ice ages. You had to share knowledge and activity and helping one another. And so meat sharing, I think, probably is a big element of what makes us human. Now, gorging, of course, we can readily gorge, and it's the idea that you don't want to let calories go to waste because you never know when you're going to find another one. So I think that is definitely a survival advantage. It used to be thought that there was a so-called thrifty gene, that some people could store foods more readily than others, but that's been discarded now and it's clearly bogus because if you store food far more effectively than someone else, that means you don't use energy effectively, so you're not an energetic person. You're fat. And how are you going to survive? That really makes no sense.

That was, I think, one of the theories around the people born around the Great Depression. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's probably true now in India where we have an explosion of type 2 diabetes. The people who are developing it were born at low birth weight because their mother was under nutritional stress. So how does the fetus cope with that? It becomes resistant to the action of insulin because the mother is resistant to insulin too. The fetus and the mother are competing for nutrients. Here's economics again. Yeah, for sure. And so in later years when the infant grows up and it finally has adequate calories available, that promotes further insulin resistance and it's a pathway to type 2 diabetes. So Indians and Chinese who are susceptible to this— by the way, diabetes among Chinese living here in the United States is enormously high for the same reason: low birth weight, insulin resistant as infants, and then that insulin resistance is carried forward into later life when calories are abundant and the eat all this darn rice. Yeah. And so this is sarcopenic obesity is what this is called. They're skinny fat, as we call them on our website. And their body composition is not within the Paleolithic range, and their metabolism goes away. For sure, for sure.

Now, I answer this question a lot, and I kind of want to ask you the question so the listeners get it from you as well. Do you think it's advantageous to eat 5 to 6 regular meals a day like most fitness magazines promote?

It's completely ludicrous. It's suicide too, because remember, there has to be what they call a postprandial state. That is, there's a period of time after the meal or you never burn fat. Exactly. So only when you sleep do you burn fat for a person like that, and so that kind of frequency keeps your insulin— and Barry Sears promoted this idea too— keep your insulin in range, in the zone, but it keeps it chronically elevated. So the basal rate of insulin release is always relatively high and it never falls to a low. So it's like having a little loud noise irritating you all the time. Yeah, your metabolism turns off to it, and so you actually defeat your insulin sensitivity by doing this. The best thing to do is to have low insulin. One, you won't age at the same rate. My insulin's at the bottom of the range the lab can measure, my fasting insulin. But when I eat, my insulin jumps up, those nutrients go right where they're needed, and then the insulin goes back to virtually nothing again. So I'm not turning on my aging pathways. The insulin IGF-1 pathway is the aging pathway. The more you activate it, the more rapidly you age, the less resistant to stress you are, The more damaged proteins and accumulated toxic fats you have inside your body. Remember, the fat inside your body has a shelf life, and the longer it stays on you, the older your fat cells are, the more toxic they are because they become rancid. Right. That's it. And they produce free radicals which age you and damage you and damage your DNA. Cellular tissues. So it's stupid unless you have a bad liver or something, a bad kidney.

Yeah. What about when people say— this is another question I get a lot— is, you know, what about the metabolism? Don't we need to eat 5 meals a day to keep our metabolism burning?

It'll wake up when you eat. What's the point? You never switch to fat burning if you always have food coming down the pike. You want to be primarily a fat burner. That's the safest fuel, most stable fuel. It's the densest fuel to burn. When you burn carbohydrate, you damage your mitochondria. They produce lots and lots of free radicals. They therefore are damaged by the free radicals that you're producing. The result is they commit cell suicide and the density of your mitochondria over a long period of time will decline and their function will decline. And once your mitochondria start to go away, you are in an energy crisis. So what happens is the body becomes fatter in order to supply more fatty— free fatty acids to the mitochondria. So somebody who has low mitochondrial density and function, you can guarantee is going to be fat because that's the adjustment that body has to make in order to supply extra fuel to the weak little pitiful mitochondria that it has. So it's all, most of the things that people talk about are completely backwards, I think. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And I guess the other mentality, and I try and tell as many people as possible, obviously all my clients, listeners, you know, one of the questions I always get asked is, "How many times a day should I eat?" And I always retort with, "How many times a day do you want to eat?" And that's, yeah, I think that's really at the core of it. People need to kind of get out of this I need to be told by someone else how many times a day I need to eat. You need to start really listening to your appetite, listening to your hunger. When you get hunger, that's gonna tell you, hey, you need to move, let's eat something. And not reaching for a bag of chips or something like that, eating a proper meal is really what it's about.

If you eat real food, you're hungry, and you exercise in a fun but somewhat intense way, your appetite will completely guide you. Your energy requirements and what you eat. I eat usually 2 meals a day, sometimes 4, sometimes 1, sometimes none. Yeah. Remember in medieval England, and a lot of you people in Australia came there from England. The convicts.

Make sure you mind your bags when you come over here.

The norm was 2 meals a day. Yeah, exactly. About 10 o'clock, you know, they'd eat something after they'd gone out to the fields, and then around 4 o'clock they'd get home because dark was coming soon. And so 2 meals a day was pretty much— 3 meals a day and more than that is a completely modern notion that's only possible in a society like ours where we have food, you know, right down the hall anytime you want it, or right across the street, or Yeah, what have you, in a refrigerator. I actually—

impossible. So I was gonna say, I actually spoke to, um, I think her name's Lynn Oliver. She's the editor for the Food Timeline, and I asked her where the whole concept of 3 meals a day came from, and she actually got back to me and she said it was from 18— the earliest in print from 3 square meals a day was, I think it was 1857, and it was from the British Navy. And what they actually used to do is serve, um, their meals. They had 3 meals a day, but they actually served it on square plates. So that was the kind of the where it came from. But yeah, she said exactly the same thing. Love it. It used to be, it used to be getting it, not meals, but it used to be talked about as getting a bite to eat or getting something to eat because people just didn't have the money to, you know, sit down and eat 3 meals a day. Just was not possible.

Is that absolutely? Yeah. Well, that's so, so that's where 3 square meals a day comes from. Yeah. That's, that's where I'm at.

Interesting. There's been a lot said about intermittent fasting. It's a topic that I actually haven't covered at all in previous shows. What's your thoughts on intermittent fasting?

Well, I didn't invent it, but I was one of the very earliest proponents of intermittent fasting. I did it, I began intermittent fasting. It's a fractal or chaotic pattern of eating that coincides with my fractal or chaotic pattern of exercise. And by the way, you can measure your fractal variation and get an assessment of your health. If your health is not so good, you're going to find there's very little fractal. Your heart beats more like a metronome than it beats like a natural living heart, which has a wide range of beat intervals and scales that it operates on. Yes, so you can read a little bit about fractal physiology in my book, and I have a few posts on my website about it as well. So this goes back to Mandelbrot and the notion of a fractal dimension, and it turns out that human beings are these decentralized self-organized systems, and fractal variation is essential part of how we are, our metabolism and our physiology is really organized. Well, I happen to have built a very complicated model of the Paleolithic energy, life energy landscape, and I found that about a third of the time our hunter-gatherer ancestors were pretty damn hungry. So, and it was unpredictable, you know, you kill a large animal, you feast for a few days, and then you go out and you hope you find something. You might go a week without hitting anything but a few berries and a few slugs to eat. So, that's how I came into it. And then I heard a talk at the Calorie Restriction Society where I was a guest and gave a talk myself. A doctor at Stanford had actually tested intermittent fasting and it had— you can eat the same number of calories, let's say, in a 2-day period eating every other day or eating, you know, splitting the calories and eating the same amount each day. Guess who will have the better metabolism and the better body composition? The one who fasts. The random eater, the one who eats intermittently. It has a profound effect on our metabolism and our body composition. Every experiment that's been done on intermittent fasting— by the way, intermittent fasting doesn't mean you restrict the total calories you eat, it just means you vary the intake over, say, a week or every other day or every third day. My pattern is to typically under-eat on them every sort of on an average of every third day, right? Um, but I don't under-eat in any real sense of the word. I probably average 4,000 calories a day. Yeah. Um, but that's a— that's not— again, it's not a chronic day after day after day after day. Your metabolism just can't handle that. You're far more healthy and have better body composition if you have that— take that same pattern and break it into 5,000 one day, 2,000 another day, 3,000 another, and so forth. And your appetite, as you said, once your metabolism is adjusted and you come into a sort of a healthy fractal variation in the way you live your life and work and play and eat, you have no problem. I weighed 200 pounds for about 60 years. Yeah. And I have no clue how many calories I really eat. I just calculated the other day what my BMR was and, you know, did a little bit of math on it that I had never done before. So, and I'm no fatter. I mean, a lot of people are weigh the same weight for 30 or 40 years, but they have no muscle left and they have a lot of fat and they still weigh the same. Yeah. No, I have the same body composition that I've had, you know, since 17, 18.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Another question that you probably get asked a lot, obviously this isn't taking into account when you fast or when you're in intermittent fasting, but do you eat meat with every day? Do you eat meat when you're obviously when you're not intermittent fasting, and isn't that dangerous?

Not at all dangerous, and I do, although, you know, modern meats are not up to the quality of the meats we had or the variety. So I eat a wide range of meats. The only time meat can be a problem for somebody is if they have damaged kidneys And their kidneys are damaged, not from eating meat, but from free radical damage typically from their, you know, lifetime of a bad diet. They deplete the glutathione in their kidneys and their liver. Their metabolism goes away. They drink a lot of sports drinks. Fructose in their soft drinks, so they damage their kidneys and their livers. Only people who compromise their kidney function are at any risk at all of eating— of having harm from eating meat. And the fat's not a problem so far as you balance the fats that are in there with— by the way, I trim most of my meat and I don't eat really fatty meats, but that's just sort of my preference. There's really no evidence that's particularly a problem. Yeah, for sure. Look at it this way, the first study that was done on this, which is still the one that's always cited about the danger of excess protein consumption, first of all, they weren't taking in the proper cofactors and nutrients. The protein wasn't in the context of fat, it was more or less like a dose of almost pure protein. But secondly, they drew their conclusion based on the fact that the kidneys had adjusted and became larger, like that was, you know, they were becoming too big in some way. Well, that actually turned out to be the way the kidney adapts. When you eat a high protein diet. It's perfectly healthy adaptation. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we've got time for just one more question. And I'll shoot to a Facebook question, I'll ask this one. George asked, I kind of know the answer to this one already, but I'll ask it anyway. Paleo diets say we should all avoid grains and they're poisonous, but surely these plants were available to our ancestors and they would have eaten them in small quantities. Do we really need to eliminate them completely?

Well, you don't need to do anything you don't want to do. Your health consequences will be better if you do eliminate grains because remember grains are the seeds of plants that are not mobile, so they have pesticides in them, the lectins and other toxins. Most of the most lethal Most of the poisons come from plants and snakes, of course, but like ricin is made from— that's the favorite Soviet KGB poison for knocking off spies. It comes from the castor bean. So yes, there's a great deal of lectin. Lectin is a protein that includes It's a class of proteins that includes gliadins and glutens, but there are many others. And lectins are very— they're quite toxic. So here's the other point. I don't really try to mimic with any kind of authenticity what our ancestors ate. And there is some evidence that seeds would have been eaten, that were eaten, even roasted, you know, maybe 30,000 years ago, but it would have been the last choice. It would have been a poverty food during very difficult times before, you know, otherwise the calories, as we concluded, is in the animals. So that's the take. If you proceed on the basis of evolutionary biology and evolutionary metabolism, Then you have a more sophisticated view of what you're trying to do. You're trying to take in nutrients that are healthful and to sort of reduce the load of toxins and things that alter gene expression, and certainly lectins completely alter gene expression. Yeah. For example, the locus that preys upon the— oh, there's a tree that grows in Australia, tamarisk tree. It doesn't grow flight wings, flight muscles if it ingests the seeds of the tamarisk tree. The tamarisk tree has developed a toxin that interferes with gene expression, so the flight muscles never develop. So it's evolutionary warfare.

Yeah, so you just touched on then, you know, you don't mimic the exact diet. Would you include any supplements into your regime, or is that out of the question too?

I do, because let's face it, our foods these days are far less nutritious than they would have been in ancient times. For example, there's a preference for less, less tasty, let's say, fruits and vegetables. Minerals, of course, make vegetables kind of bitter and not as pleasant to the modern taste as maybe they should be. Well, it turns out that most of our foods and our water supply have been depleted of magnesium, and the rise of depression around the world is almost surely connected to depletion of magnesium in the modern diet. Right. Yes, and it's also true that the antioxidants, the phytonutrients and so forth, are less dense now in modern foods. So I do take supplements. I make sure to take magnesium, and in fact, I just developed my own supplement in conjunction with Dr. Damopoulos. Who holds the patent on a form of glutathione that is absorbable. Right. And so, I believe also—

Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, how much magnesium would you take a day?

Well, it depends on how depleted you are. Most people are quite depleted. Vitamin D and magnesium deficiencies are very common now. They have vitamin D tests, they also have magnesium tests I take— well, of course, I eat Brazil nuts, which are very rich in— I eat a lot of nuts and they're rich in magnesium. I eat a lot of green plant foods that are rich in magnesium. I supplement with about 800 milligrams. 800 milligrams, yeah.

That's what the great late Robert Crayon recommended as well. Oh, good.

Yeah, yeah. That and vitamin D, you know, of course I get a lot of sun. Here in Utah we have a very intense sun. I'm sure you do in Australia too, but I still, on days when it's cloudy and I don't get outside much, I might take 5,000 units of vitamin D.

Alrighty. So tell me— Sorry?

Yeah, go ahead. I haven't been sick in 30 years. Let's just put it that way. It really works.

So where can people go to learn more about you?

Well, the easiest place is my website, but they can also Google me. I'm sort of all over. Google in various ways, my various careers as an economist and as a fitness guru and so forth. But my website is probably the most reliable because it comes from me, and it's at www.ArthurDeVany.com, and DeVany is just D-E-V-A-N-Y. Cool. It's a French name, actually. Devane is really—

Devane, how you pronounce it, yeah. Yeah, and they've got, you've got photos up there of you working out, articles about training, heaps of different stuff. And obviously, can you get the book, "The New Evolution Diet," from that website, or do you have to go straight to Amazon?

It, I have a link to Amazon or Barnes Noble or a couple of other booksellers. In fact, you can buy it cheaper Amazon or Barnes Noble than I can buy it from my publisher. Same with everyone, hey.

Yeah, it's always funny that way. Go for it. Yeah, and what, what does the future hold? What are you working on at the moment?

Well, interestingly enough, I've worked very intensely with Dr. Demopoulos on this supplement. I'm very intrigued in taking this evolutionary perspective deeper into the sense of the gene expression and the whole notion of the genome and the biome, and so I'm getting into genomics and pathways that alter the aging process itself. And of course, insulin IGF-1 pathway has been identified, and I talk a lot about it in the book. But I'm trying to work a little bit more on that. And then I've formed a company to try to exploit my book Hollywood Economics as well. That is, certain things, ideas I developed there, I've taken and tried to patent the financial instrument for hedging risk in motion pictures.

Right. Sounds very cool. So what final thoughts do you have, or you want to, you know, final things to, I guess, sum it up?

[Speaker:DR. MARK OTTOBREMER] I just think people ought to relax a little bit more, not keep too wrapped up in advice from different sources. All science involving living things must rely at some point upon evolution and evolutionary processes and gene expression. And by the way, it's a very hopeful message that comes out of my my perspective and the perspective that maybe others have as well, which is that you're not stuck with your genes. You can alter the way they express themselves. You can completely transform yourself. And I just go to the picture of Otto and Ewald that I put up on my website many years ago, back in the '90s. Two German twins, one's a runner and one's a weightlifter, identical twins otherwise. You cannot imagine two people who look any more different than these two do. Same genes, different bodies, simply because of the way they live and what they do and how they alter their gene expression. So this is all called epigenomics. It's altering gene expression through things that you do and eat and how you handle your stress. Absolutely.

Well, that's a really good, good message, and I think a lot of people need to hear it living in this day and age, thinking that what they've got is what they've got and they can't do anything about it. You need to inspire some health and fitness into everyone and most importantly, get the education out there so they can change. I always say with things like motivation, motivation just makes people do dumb things faster. So, it really needs to come back to education.

That's well put. Yeah. I've enjoyed the interview very much, Mark.

I've really enjoyed speaking to you as well. Thank you so much for coming on.

Well, your readers are lucky to have your show. I mean, it's really been fun and you have a lot of sharp things to say. Thanks. Thank you very much.

Have a great day and look forward to seeing new books in the future.

Okay. No worries. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Art.

Bye. There it is, folks, the podcast that I did back in the day with Dr. Art Devaney. Great guy, lots of sharp things that he shared. Shared on that interview. Really enjoyed that one. So check out his book if you haven't already. It's an oldie, but it's a goodie, The Primal Diet. You can grab that one on Amazon. Now, if this is your first show that you're listening to, maybe you've been listening to us for a while, subscribe to us either on iTunes or on SoundCloud. Both of those are good. Make sure you like us on Facebook and subscribe to us on YouTube for the latest videos. A couple of releases, we've released a new a new Enterprise members site just exclusively for our Enterprise members who's training with us so they can get even more immersed in the experience of being an Enterprise. Also just recently created what I call the Enterprise user manual, and it basically assists my trainers in Enterprise taking people through getting the results. Like you'd go to buy a car, you'd buy, you get a user manual with the car. Same idea here. So if you haven't checked out other episodes, other episodes that I recommend is the one I did with Johnny Bowden.

Check that one out.

I'm going to be re-releasing the one I did with Dr. John Demartini probably next week. So if you're listening to this kind of in the future, it will already have been released. But that's a great one. It's a half hour. It's a quick one, but we talk a lot about the psychosomatic of diseases. So once I've pretty much uploaded all the old episodes, looking to take this podcast show in a new and fresh direction. Love to hear your thoughts. What do you want to hear from me and the team at Enterprise? What would you like to see?

What do you want to learn?

What do you want us to investigate? So we've got a podcast to do, but we want to hear from you, our audience, of how we can deliver you the good stuff. So till next time, folks, train hard, supplement smart, and eat well.