S2:E7 - Mark Ottobre Interviews Jonny Bowden - Enterprise Fitness Podcast -

Welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information, but in a good way. It's the Enterprise Fitness Podcast, and I'm your host, Mark Ottobre. And today we're dusting off the vintage selection at the podcast show here at Enterprise. Did this podcast with Johnny Bowden back in 2012. Now folks, this for me is an absolute career highlight still to this day, and it's for this very simple reason. Johnny Bowden I consider my hero. He is the reason why I wanted to study nutrition in the first place. He is the reason why I got into blogging and podcasting. If you don't know who Johnny Bowden is and you're in the industry, do yourself a favor right now, jump on Amazon, type in Johnny Bowden, and buy all of his books. Just have them on the shelf. You need them, read them. Johnny Bowden is, in my opinion, a pioneer in this field. One of the nicest people I think I've ever had the pleasure of speaking to on the podcast. Wealth of knowledge and yeah, just humbling because Johnny Bowden for me is the Michael Jordan of nutrition. And you know, I think he has left a great legacy on the field of nutrition and made it easy and digestible for the general market. And I think in many ways that's what I aspire to be as a health practitioner and a fitness practitioner is to be able to put the tools in the hands of the many so that they can go out and transform their life. And I know certainly with Jonny's work, he helped transform mine and really gave me control of my nutrition and then be able to help empower others. So I'm forever grateful to Jonny, and it's with pleasure that I get to share or reshare this podcast with you. And this one's for all ages. This one is for the gym goer, the personal trainer, the nutritionist, the health practitioner, or if you're new to the world of health and fitness, this is for you. That's just how good Jonny is. And for me, he's my measuring stick too. So just want to say thank you, Jonny. Thanks for doing this podcast, and speak to you guys on the other side.

Today I have an absolutely amazing show. This guy doesn't need an introduction, as in my opinion, he is the Michael Jordan of nutrition. He is the author of some of the best books and programs you'll ever read, including 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, the Diet Bootcamp program, and one of my all-time favorite books, Living Low Carb. As a side note, personally, he's one of my biggest influences and inspirations when it comes to teaching and educating people on the topic of health and nutrition. That's right, today I have Jonny Bowden on the line. Welcome, Jonny. Pleasure to have you.

Oh, Mark, that is just the sweetest introduction. I'm embarrassed and smiling, and I appreciate it more than I can say. Thank you. I think you're too kind, but thank you so much.

It's all true. So true. So let me, the first question I'd love to ask you is, how did you get into teaching health and nutrition?

In a very indirect way. I was a musician, a professional musician for many years. And I was like many musicians, fat, out of shape, I smoked cigarettes, I came from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll era, so I was pretty much of a physical mess. And I used to tour a lot with musical theater productions and they'd have these actors and the actors were always in good shape and there's not a lot to do when you're traveling around the country in these kind of smaller towns. So I started hanging out with some of the actors and I got curious and said, "You know, how do you lift these weights? What is this stuff anyway?" I've never lifted a weight in my life. I couldn't run around the block. You know, typical kind of musician. And they began kind of teaching me some basics and I kind of started hanging out with them and I went to the gym once or twice and I just got bitten. I'm sure you've had this experience yourself or know many people who have. You kind of you get bitten by the bug and you see the transformation that takes place in your own life. And I started going from being fat and overweight and out of shape and unhealthy and a smoker, slowly started losing a little weight. I didn't do it all at once. I continued to smoke while I went to the gym, but I did start to see changes. And I started to see changes in my energy and in my sleep and in my body and in my attitude. And I just got I was just bitten by this bug and I just wanted to become like a zealot about it. Now, being a kind of, I know you're in Australia, but I grew up in New York City and I was a kind of overachieving, academically oriented kind of, you know, middle-class Jewish home. And so the first thing I thought of when I got interested in all this stuff was, I gotta get a degree in this. Because, you know, the only information available, if you really were interested in this stuff, were magazines like what we call over here Muscle and Fiction. And, you know, things like that. You know, you get all this information by the bodybuilders and it was all steroid-influenced and it was very hard to separate the, the shape from the wheat and figure out, you know, what was what. So I wanted to get some kind of education in it and I was still a professional musician, but I decided to take a course to become a certified personal trainer. And that, that just did it for me. I mean, I took that first course and I was just head over heels in love with this field. So I decided that I needed to collect a few more certifications. And I ultimately connected 7 of them. And I applied for a day job at a very, in the United States, a very famous, now very famous but not at the time, health club chain called Equinox. And at the time Equinox was one single gym opening its first doors ever in Manhattan in 1990. And I got hired as a floor trainer. And meanwhile I was still able to do my music gigs at night. And I started working as a floor trainer at Equinox, and again, with my certifications, and I just got so interested in this and so involved in helping people do it, and I wanted to know more and I wanted to learn more. I went back to school for nutrition. I got, at the time, it's now defunct, but a license called a certified nutritionist. And slowly but surely, I kinda transitioned out of the music career and I started doing this full-time. And the more interested I got in nutrition and the more I realized what a huge contributing factor that was to people transforming their body and their health. I wanted to learn much more about that. And truth be told, because I was a little bit older, had changed careers midstream, I think clients talked to me a little bit more and I started to question some of the stuff we had learned in personal trainer school about nutrition. I think you probably know that the nutrition education offered to personal trainers is very conventional. In our country, it comes from the, you know, pretty much everything that's sanctioned by the American Dietetic Association, which is probably the most Neanderthal and backwards organization that exists and probably has one of the most detrimental effects on the health of America by spewing out that same old tired crap about the food pyramid and grains and all the stuff that they teach. And so we really only had this very standard nutrition information. And at the time, the mantra of the time was low-fat diets and more aerobic exercise. The key to losing weight is just cutting calories and getting on the treadmill more and just eating a low-fat diet, except as you know, that doesn't work for everybody. In fact, it didn't work for a lot of people. It wasn't just once in a while that you'd see an exception. It was, you'd see these people on the treadmill year in and year out, chugging along mindlessly, not losing any weight, and these low-fat diets, these cockamamie low-fat diets were, you know, all the rage, and I began to question some of that, and I had the good luck luck to encounter a man named Barry Sears, who is the author of the world-famous Zone books. And Barry came to town around the early '90s and he was speaking at our gym at Equinox, and I managed to corner him. He was talking about stuff that was really revolutionary at the time, like eat more fat. Are you kidding? I mean, this was heresy. So I sat him down, we sat down for a couple of hours, he was very generous with his time, and he explained the hormonal connection to food and what really happens inside the body, that all calories aren't created equal, and really opened my eyes to a lot of these concepts that we had never ever studied or learned in quote-unquote personal trainer school. And that really inspired me to go back and get a PhD in holistic nutrition. I passed my board exam for certified nutrition specialist and got my first book deal in 2000, and I've been kind of you know, preaching the gospel of, they call me the rogue nutritionist, largely because many of the things that I teach and talk about and write about kind of do go contrary to the prevailing opinion, although I'm happy to see that that prevailing opinion is beginning to change dramatically, largely due to people like you and to other health practitioners who are starting to question some of the conventional wisdom about low-fat diets saturated fat, cholesterol causing heart disease, and all of the other things that we've been taught that are turning out to be very, very far from the truth.

Excellent.

So when you went to get, I guess, your certified nutrition degree, were you trained formally? Were you trained high carbohydrate, low carb? Were they teaching that as well?

I got my master's, believe it or not, in psychology. So I didn't really start studying nutrition wholeheartedly wholeheartedly until I got my certified nutritionist license, which is not terribly conventional. It was a little bit more open-minded as far as that sort of stuff goes. And I got my doctorate from a holistic place that really did— it didn't emphasize vegetarianism far more than I was comfortable with, but it was much more broadly based in terms of looking at alternatives and integrative techniques and Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. So I I wasn't really indoctrinated too much, at least at graduate school, with the high-carb, low-fat mantra, but I, you know, attended 8 zillion conferences and I read everything and, you know, you still see it everywhere. I just was not, for example, like some of my colleagues who had to go through like the registered dietitian curriculum and they are really indoctrinated with this stuff. So I was able to bypass some of that in school, but I certainly I have not been able to bypass it in the media and in the writings that we're exposed to and in the journal articles and all the other places that this prescription, which I call a prescription for disaster, but this prescription of low-fat eating and avoiding saturated fat at all costs and all of those notions, I have not been able to avoid, nor has anybody else who turns on the news or reads a newspaper, but it's kind of my mission to try to debunk as much of that as possible and to get people to see that there's really more to not only weight loss, but to health than simply avoiding fat and counting calories.

Excellent. So everyone knows what to eat in, you know, some degree, people know what's healthy, what's not, but why do you think people still choose the wrong foods?

Well, actually there's two parts. I wanna, if you don't mind, Mark, I'd like to I'm going to take that question in two parts.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And here's why. You know, I teach a class called, on how to become a weight loss coach, and certification for weight loss coaches. And one of the first things I start with is that everybody says they know what to do, they just don't do it. I start with the premise that I'm not so sure people know what to do. I don't know that I accept 100% that idea that people really know what to do, they just don't do it. Because we have seen time and time and time again. People come into the office or they come into the gym, they go, "I know what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be having a nice breakfast of cereal and bananas and toast and orange juice and I know it, I just don't do it." And I start and say, "Wait, maybe we don't really know all we do think we know about what to eat." Because that's precisely the wrong breakfast if you're trying to lose weight. It's precisely the wrong breakfast if you're trying to manage blood sugar and diabetes. And obesity and all those things. So I usually back people up before when they tell me, I know what to do, but I just don't do it. First, I wanna find out if they really do know what to do, because very often, Mark, you'll find that they don't. The second part of the question, very legitimate part of the question, not that the first part wasn't, but the premise of the first part is the one I wanna question a little, 'cause I'm not so sure everybody knows what to do. But the second part is that even those who do know what to do, and they're right about what to do, do find this enormous challenge that you just so succinctly stated, which is that they have the information, but they don't put it in practice. So I go to, my go-to example for this is cigarette smoking. There's nobody on the planet who's smoking cigarettes because they didn't get the memo about lung cancer. There's just nobody who's going, wait a minute, nobody told me cigarettes cause lung cancer, let me throw those cigarettes out immediately. I've never seen that happen. I don't know if you have. So we definitely have a disconnect between the information and the action. And if I may give a shameless plug to my new program, Unleash Your Thin, that is precisely what that program addresses. That yes, we first, we need the right information. And that's a bit of a challenge too in this era of low-fat diets and, you know, 6 to 11 servings of greens and all of the stuff that we hear. Getting the right information Getting the information's a challenge. But the bigger challenge is once you get that information, how do you get people to respond in a toxic environment where they are assaulted with advertising for the worst kinds of foods, where every cue exists. You walk into a food court, you smell those, you know, donuts that are baking. And you go into the office and you see the snack bars. And there is 100 different cues, television commercials, a fast food food courts, all sorts of things that are just beckoning you to behave in a way that is contrary to your interests. Much like heroin dealers on every corner, it would be just like trying to stay sober and being exposed to a city like New Orleans where you can get drive-by margaritas and there's alcohol on every corner. So the bigger challenge is how do we monitor our behavior and kind of control our brain chemistry in a way that we're not constantly succumbing to these enormous temptations. And that's a very, very big issue. And as I say, that's one of the things that we really tried to tackle in "Unleash Your Thin." What do you think the key factor of why so many people seem to struggle with weight loss?

Is it, as you said, there's just so many impulses to eat all the time, or is there something more at play?

I think it's a very multifactorial thing. Multifactorial kind of an issue. By multifactorial, I mean weight gain or obesity or the inability to lose weight is never caused by just one thing. It's this, it is probably, you know, more factors than, there are probably factors we haven't even figured out yet. Genetics probably plays a small part, not a very big part, but a part. Hormones play an enormous part. Psychology plays an enormous part. For some people it's more about comforting themselves and feeling good and kind of trying to manage their depression or their feelings of hopelessness and just feeling good when they eat certain foods. For other people it's just a matter of blood sugar. For some other people it may just be a matter of, you know, of brain chemistry. I mean, these things have different contributory, they contribute different different amounts in each case. But I think some of the main culprits when it comes to not being able to manage weight certainly involve hormones. And by hormones what I mean is when you eat certain foods, your blood sugar goes up. When your blood sugar goes up, the pancreas releases a hormone called insulin, which of course you know. And insulin's job, it has many jobs in the body, but one one of its jobs is to wrangle all that excess sugar, get it the heck out of the bloodstream where it can do real damage, and feed it into the muscle cells where they can use it for energy. Well, the problem with this system is it breaks down when you overload the body with sugar because now there's too much sugar to go around, and when you combine that with a sedentary lifestyle, the muscle cells have no use for that sugar. So they start to close their doors and say, hey, go somewhere else, we don't need it. This guy's gonna sit around and use a clicker all day or a computer. He, what do we need fuel for? Take that sugar somewhere else. And when you have that kind of a situation, you've got this hormone, insulin, which is really a fat storage hormone, and it's walking around desperately trying to find a place to put that sugar, and guess where it goes? To the fat cells. So when you are creating an internal environment in which your fat storage hormone, insulin, is constantly elevated, it is gonna be fiendishly difficult to lose weight, next to impossible. So the hormonal impact of eating is, it needs to be addressed, and you don't get that by just counting calories, because 1,000 calories of pure fat will have virtually no effect on your fat-storing hormone insulin. I'm not saying that you should go out and drink 1,000 calories of pure fat, I'm simply saying that when you look at it from a hormonal point of view, fat has have the least effect on blood sugar and insulin. Carbohydrates have the most effect. So 1,000 calories of Domino sugar or anything that converts to sugar quickly in the body is gonna have a much more profoundly fat-storing effect on the hormones than say 1,000 calories of fat. So calories alone, while they are important, are not the whole picture the way we've been taught. It's what those calories are made of and what effect it has on our hormones.

Yeah, 100% agree with that, and that's really well put. So a lot of people, I guess, feel guilty—

I'm sorry, a lot of people feel guilty for eating certain foods.

Yeah. Now, I encourage my clients and listeners to eliminate all guilt entirely as it relates to food because I don't believe it's, um, it's, it's very healthy for them to, I guess, feel guilty about eating things. What are your thoughts on guilt and food? I mean, why do so many people have guilt associated with so many different different types of foods?

Well, again, there's many reasons for that. I mean, sometimes we're guilty for eating foods that we've been taught are so bad for us, you know, and we're just like, well, I know I shouldn't be doing this, but I'm doing it. Ironically, many of those foods that we feel guilty about are probably way better for us than the ones we think we shouldn't be guilty about because they've been taught— we've been taught they're so healthy. But certainly that's part of it. I think part of it Part of it is that, you know, we humans always have a conflict between delayed gratification and immediate gratification. And here you've got this one thing that you know if you eat it you're gonna feel good, it's gonna taste good, you know right there what the pleasure's gonna be. But you also know that long-term it's not gonna serve you in your interest. If your interest is to live in a healthy, slim, sexy, energetic body that you can be proud of, you know that eating I'm trying to think of what would be, I don't know, a huge shake and fries at McDonald's or any of these ridiculously high-calorie meals of junk food. You know that that's not serving your long-term interest, but on the other hand, you've got this conflict because right now it looks mighty good and it's delicious and you know it's going to feel good going down and feel good in your mouth. So we feel a little guilty. For kind of grabbing that immediate gratification knowing full well we're going to have to pay the price later on. It's kind of like putting something on a credit card that you know you're not going to have the money to pay for. You feel a little guilty, but you're also overwhelmed by the desire to have the thing. So I think that's where some of the guilt comes in. The point about guilt is it's not— guilt is only useful to us if it serves as some kind of a guide to behavior. If it's just a way of beating ourselves up, what's the point? Then, you know, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it and enjoy it. So guilt is only useful if it gives you pause and lets you think, you know, maybe this really isn't in my best interest, and maybe there's something bigger at the end of the rainbow that's worth striving for, like living longer, not being on medicine, not being diabetic, not being obese, being able to have an active sex life in your 70s. You know, maybe there's something a little bit bigger than this stupid donut that I've just got to have right now. So I think if guilt or let's say reflection causes you to have some pause about those actions, then it's a good thing. But if it's simply a way of beating yourself up, what's the purpose?

Yeah, for sure. Do you think people eat their memories in a sense? Like when people drive through McDonald's, do you think there's a, I guess, an association with when they were 5 years old and, you know, being loved and having birthdays there and that type of thing? Do you think that that comes into play a lot?

Not only do I think it comes into play, I would say that that's one of the smartest questions I've ever been asked. When we did the research for Unleash Your Thin, and we talked about this, we looked into dopamine, which is a neurochemical, a neurotransmitter in the brain that's very involved in anticipation and in the reward system. And there is very little doubt in my mind that the these things are conditioned from very early on. If you have an association of warmth and love and comfort to say your mom's apple pie, you can believe that that association is going to persist for a very, very long time. And when you see apple pie, whether you're conscious of it or not, it's going to have a profound association to a state in which you were very happy and very content and you're going to desire that thing more, and it's mediated by this neurochemical called dopamine. And we talk about that a lot. If you can't really manage that kind of association, it's going to be very hard to stop the thing, the habit. Much like cigarettes. I was an ex-smoker, and I can tell you that there are certain times of days, certain meals, certain activities that are very heavily associated with smoking, and when those things come up, come up, it's subconscious, it happens in a flash, you get this surge of desire and it's very related to those early memories or those prior memories and I think you're 100% right in identifying that and I think that breaking that link, breaking that chain of command if you will, is one of the most critical things in breaking addictions. And make no mistake, these foods that we eat that destroy our bodies, our bodies and destroy our health and make us fat and make us sick and tired and depressed are foods we're addicted to. And I believe very strongly that the same techniques that you, that are used in conquering or working with the challenge of addiction are very, very applicable to working with the challenge of food addictions.

Definitely. Now, a lot of people, you spoke a little bit just then about subconscious motivations and that type of thing. A lot of people say they want to lose weight or they say they want to be lean. However, I believe a lot of people have, I guess, subconscious or unconscious motivations towards being the way they are. How would you help a client through that?

Well, you know, that is a very, very good question. And it really does, I think you'll probably agree, it goes a little beyond the pay scale of the average personal trainer or nutritionist. Nutritionist, because now you're talking about some deep-seated psychological stuff. And for, just for example, I mean, let me go off on a tangent a bit. We, when I was still in private practice, we, we had in the clinic a woman who had been raped as a teenager, and it was obviously one of the most traumatic examples experiences you can imagine, just unthinkable. And as it turned out, a little bit of exploring gave rise, revealed the fact that in many ways, her staying fat, really fat, in her mind, made her unattractive and therefore less of a target. It was a way of keeping people away. Now it may not have been the most adaptive or the smartest or the most empowering way to do it, but it clearly was a strategy that served this psychological purpose. And I don't know that the, that a nutritionist or a personal trainer can really work with that directly. I think that that's something that maybe needs a team effort. Maybe you need a psychologist or a therapist or a women's group or a support group or some sort of agency that works with that kind of dynamic in addition to the food and the exercise component of it, because here you're dealing with some very deep-seated self-images and defensive strategies. So I don't know that there is one way to deal with something like that, but I think that's the kind of thing you're talking about where someone gets some kind of reward out of being fat, whether or not they're the happiest person in the bunch or whether or whether or not they feel subconsciously it keeps people away from them, it helps them from being a victim. I mean, there can be all kinds of things. It can be sexual hangups where they feel by staying fat they are out of the rat race of like looking for other, you know, people of the, for partners. This stuff's kind of deep and a little bit beyond the scope of the average person working simply in health and nutrition, but it's Good for us to know about that so that we recognize that sort of thing. Much like with anorexia, you know, we were taught as trainers, we had all kinds of courses largely because of the legal liabilities so that we could recognize someone who was anorexic and who was, you know, maybe going on the treadmill for 3 hours a day trying to do the version of exercise bulimia or just, you know, and when they were in that danger state, we were taught to recognize it, but we were not taught to treat it. We were taught to recognize it so that we could farm out out or suggest or guide these people to more appropriate agencies that could help them with that. But so I think the ability to recognize that shows a certain wisdom and maturity, but I don't know that we are necessarily the right people to be handling it for them.

Right. So have you ever seen cases where, you know, let's say for example, in that case what you just gave, where someone is I guess, trying to do all the right things, you know, that they are eating the right food, they present their food journal, but they still have this hangup about, you know, being the way they are, is it almost like they can think themselves overweight and unhealthy, even though they're doing all the right things?

Well, if you mean, if you're talking about something like body dysmorphia, where a person, you know, and I've seen this, I used to see this all the time in New York City clients, you'd see I've seen these models, you know, who were pretty thin and they'd look in the mirror and see themselves fat. Is that what you're kind of talking about?

Yeah, I mean, they actually don't lose any weight. So say for example, you have a female, she's training 4 days a week, she's eating all the right foods, yet she still has this hangup that, you know, she needs to be overweight because let's say unconsciously she can't handle attention. So therefore she puts on the extra weight, so therefore she doesn't get the attention that she might otherwise get. And she's still training and everything, but she has this unconscious motivation towards being overweight.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's exactly what we were just talking about, where this is being fed by some much deeper kind of need and probably one that's a little out of my pay scale. I don't know about yours, but yes, I certainly think that that's true. And I also think, and this is really hypothetical and maybe a little too too granola-ish or out there for a lot of people, but I think that, and this is really, there's no studies to prove this one way or the other, but I do think that on the cellular level, our thoughts and beliefs influence everything. And I don't think it would be impossible, although I would never want to go in front of a scientific group and say, this is my hypothesis, let's test it, because I'd be laughed at. But I think between you, me, the wallpost, and our listeners, is a real possibility that on some level, you know, our thoughts do influence what happens on a cellular level. Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was, you know, at the height of the bodybuilding world, used to talk about doing shoulder exercises and putting his mind into the deltoids, literally willing those muscles to grow and actually putting all his attention into it. Now, did that account for his ridiculous growth and amazing body? I don't know. But there seems to be— it's a hypothesis that makes sense to me.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So, let's say for example, I guess you just answered a whole bunch of questions with that previous answer, so I just kind of need to find out where we were.

Sure.

In, I guess, in How would you describe your health and fit— uh, health and nutrition philosophy?

How would I describe my health and nutrition philosophy?

Yeah.

Uh, well, the first thing would be, um, that everybody's different. That I would start with that. I mean, I am a huge believer in biochemical individuality. Uh, we are as distinct from one another. I mean, we all share certain things, you know, as humans, but our hormones, our enzymes, our bones, the size of our glands, the number of beta cells in the pancreas, the size of the thyroid gland, these are very, very variable things. So each one of us is different. And I think the search for the perfect diet is always fraught with disaster. What we should be looking for is the perfect fit between this human being and this program. So much like, you know, on the dating front, dating sites, I don't know if you have that in Australia, but we got a lot of social media sites here and a lot of dating sites. On the dating sites, not everybody's looking for a 6-foot-5 guy with muscles. Some people are looking for a short, bald college professor. And not every guy is looking for a blonde who looks like Pamela Anderson. Some are looking for something else. So just as we're not attracted to the same people, we don't respond equally to the same diets. And I think that a starting point for any health and nutrition philosophy should be that we need to respect our individuality, that we need to be able to maybe take a diet program, even one of my own, and tweak it so that it really fits you, just like altering a suit off the rack. So that's number one. Number two, I think that people have, you know, going back to the search for the perfect diet, people have thrived on diets high in protein, low in protein, high in carbs, low in carbs, high in fat, low in carbs. What they have never thrived on is diets high in processed foods or diets high in sugar. So when Weston Price, the dentist who wrote one of the seminal nutrition texts in the 1920s, when he went around and studied 15 different indigenous societies, looking at their teeth, their bone structure, their nutrition, nutrition, he found this remarkable variation in the diets. And some people, he found small societies up in the Swiss Alps where there was almost no communication with the cities and all they did was live on the fresh cream and milk of these cows that lived in the villages. And other places like in Greenland in the Inuit, they don't eat vegetables because nothing grows up there in the snow. Walrus meat and seal fat, you know, so it's a completely different diet. And yet in one after the other of these 15 societies, he found remarkable consistency in the health of the people who ate their native diet versus their relatives who moved into the big city and started eating processed foods. So genetically these people were identical, but as soon as they started eating processed food diet. Their teeth started looking bad, their jaw formation looked different. He has pictures in the book, they're very dramatic. You can really see these differences, they're not imagined, you just, it's apparent immediately. And I think if there's any one basic nutritional truth, it's that we were meant to eat, we do best, our factory-specified fuel as I like to say, is food that you could, I call it the Johnny Bowden Four Food Groups, food you could hunt, Fish, gather, or pluck. So if you were naked on the African savanna on the plain with a stick, what could you gather or pluck or hunt or fish? What could you pull back to the village to eat? That's a good way to look at any kind of basic nutritional truth. You know, we lived on the diet that we could hunt and fish and gather and pluck for the 2.4 million years that the human genus has been on the planet. McDonald's came around around 1957. So like, where should we look for guidance as to the natural fuel for the human body? And I think the answer is very clear. The foods that have been around the longest, that have sustained the human genius for the longest amount of time, the foods that are in their least processed forms, and again, food that you could hunt or fish, and may I point out, nobody hunted low-fat caribou, you know. We eat the whole thing, you know. Yeah. So I think that that's probably the— at the core of my philosophy is the closer you can get to the way you would have eaten that way, the better it is. Now obviously, you know, we're not gonna go out and hunt our buffalo and, you know, gather nuts and berries, but we can try to mimic that style of eating as much as possible. And I think to the extent that we are able to mimic that, we're gonna have huge benefits benefits in our health.

You spoke a little bit about Weston Price. Now, you know, one of the things that I guess struck me was the stuff that he did with butter, how he, I guess, drew a correlation between the potency, if you will, of the butter and the health of the culture. Can you talk a little bit about butter?

Yeah, that's another one. You know, well, let's, if you don't mind, let's just put this in context because I think the bigger question here is let's talk about saturated fat.

Yeah.

Because if you think about it, why is it that we avoid things, or why have we been taught to avoid things like butter or coconut oil or any of these things? And it's largely because of our almost religious fear of saturated fat. The fact is, and I believe this is something that is slowly, slowly beginning to shift, the fact is that we have been terribly misled about the dangers of saturated fat. That has resulted in the wholesale substitution of healthy saturated fats for very unhealthy, highly processed polyunsaturated fats like corn oil, which we, all the restaurants now use and fry in, producing all kinds of damaged molecules and, you know, carcinogens and all sorts of other things that are are really way worse than the saturated fat they replaced. There's nothing wrong with the saturated fat in butter, and by the way, half the fat in butter isn't even saturated. Half of it's monounsaturated. But the point is that there's really nothing to fear from these natural whole food sources like butter and coconut oil and ghee that's used in Indian cooking and things like that, because the saturated fat that's found in natural you know, fish or whole foods is a very different animal than say the saturated fat that's found from frying or the trans fats that are often found together with saturated fats and which in my opinion in the early studies they were all lumped together and I think much of the bad rap that saturated fat got was because people weren't able to make a distinction at that time between trans fats and saturated fats. So trans fats were doing all the damage and saturated fat was getting blamed.

Yeah, for sure. What do you think healthy people have in common?

Well, it's an interesting question because I did a book last year called The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer. And I reviewed in that book, there's a fair amount of research that's been done on long-lived societies, places around the globe where there's a disproportionate number of healthy centenarians. These are people who are living to 100, but they're not living in assisted living. They're out there, you know, milking cows at 4 in the morning and climbing mountains in Sardinia, you know, shepherding and stuff like that. Was that the Blue Zones? Well, the Blue Zones are certainly 4 of those areas. There's a couple that have been found since he wrote the book, The Blue Zones, but yes, I certainly discussed Dan Buettner's wonderful work on the Blue Zones in my book. But I looked at some other studies besides that and trying to find some commonalities among these really healthy people. And it's kind of interesting. You think, well, are they all vegetarians? No, as a matter of fact, in the Blue Zones, 3 of the 4 societies he studied are not vegetarian. The only one that is is Loma Linda, California, and that's 'cause they're all Seventh-day Adventists and it's part of their religion. The other 3 absolutely eat meat. Is it that they all eat yogurt? Well, no, they, the ones in Okinawa eat a lot of fish and the ones in the, off the peninsula of Costa Rica eat, you know, a very different kind of a diet. And it's hard to, he in the Blue Zones and then in my book, The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer, we did find certain things that seemed to be features. Beans seemed to be a staple of the diet. Of a lot of the long-lived people, but I don't think it's really one food or one thing. The pattern that I noticed and the pattern I talked about in there is one that goes beyond just diet. The most telling thing about these long-lived healthy people is that none of them live in isolation, Mark. They're all connected. They're connected to other people. They're connected to their community. They do volunteer work. They have potluck dinners. See their family. I'm not talking about Facebook, I mean face-to-face they see the people that they're connected to, and they make a contribution, and they feel necessary and needed. And this seems to be one of the best life-giving, health-promoting things that you could possibly do, and it really doesn't have much to do with diet. These people are all active. In many of these places, particularly those little corners of the world that you refer to as the Blue Zones, they don't even have They don't even know what a gym is, but they're out there gardening. They're out there mowing. They're out there, you know, as I said, shepherding the sheep in the mountains of Sardinia. They're growing things. They're, whatever they're doing, they're moving. They're active. They're getting some sunlight. They're talking to other people. They're connected. And they're mostly eating diets that are not processed foods. So even though there's a lot of variety, among the diets of the longest-lived people in the world. The one stable truth that, as I started out by saying earlier, is that none of them live on processed foods, and the sugar content of their diet is extremely low. So I think if you were looking for a few basic things to kind of hang your hat on as far as longevity goes, it would be whole foods, low sugar, exercise all the time, get some sunlight, sleep well, and spend a lot of time with the people closest to you. Make a contribution, get connected to other people. These are the things that really enhance life and longevity.

One of the questions, I guess, one of my friends always asks me, and we have a discussion about it, did these societies and these cultures eat any grains in their diet? I mean, were grains available? Was it really only 10,000 years ago that when we industrialized grain and the food supply that we actually had access to grains?

[Speaker:MARK OTTOBREMER] Well, as you know, grains are relatively new in the history of the human genus. Agriculture really is only 10,000 years old. That sounds like it's pretty old, but when you look at a 24-hour time clock and it's 2.4 million years of the human genus, that 10,000 years ago is like like half a second on that 24-hour timeframe. So these are relatively recent foods. And of course, you know, there's a very famous paper in nutrition called Cereal Grains: Humanity's Double-Edged Sword. And it's a 100-page paper in which he argues very cogently that we would not have civilization if it weren't for grains. If we, the planet is, we couldn't support 6.2 billion people wandering around hunting and gathering. So in order for cities to exist, you needed, you know, some form of food and calories that, you know, could be grown and processed and kept on supermarket shelves. So grains did probably account for the population. If you think that the planet's in good shape, it's probably due to grains. I think you could argue that maybe that's not 100% true, but—

I had Leah Keith on a couple months ago. She was interesting. What she said, yeah, about grains worst thing we've ever done in human history to the planet is grains, drying out the American prairies and wetlands and all that type of thing.

But yeah. Yeah, but it is a double-edged sword because, you know, there are certainly many things, you know, you would have indigenous people who couldn't eat. I mean, there's just a lot of things that, you know, but I think we have been oversold their benefits. I'm not someone who thinks, you know, all grains are poison and we should never I'm not saying don't touch them, but I am someone who thinks we can do perfectly well without them. And they do come with a different set of problems that many people don't really get, one of which is gluten sensitivity, which doesn't affect everybody, but it affects a lot of people. A second of which is that even whole grains raise blood sugar just as much, almost as much as the processed kind. If you look at the glycemic index and glycemic load tables, and those are tables that those are measurements of how fast a food raises your blood sugar and how quickly it raises it and how long it keeps it up there. You'll notice that the difference between say white rice and brown rice is only a couple of points. Now the brown rice has arguably a few more nutrients in it, but grains as a rule are not nutritional powerhouses. We've been taught this load of malarkey that they're, you know, you need fiber and you get Fiber from grains, well, take a look at your label of your breads. Maybe you got 1 gram of fiber in there. Most cereals, you're lucky to get 1 gram, maybe 2. So these are not fiber heavyweights at all despite the tremendous lobbying efforts of the agricultural interest to convince us that we must have grains for fiber. You'll get 10 times more fiber in a serving of beans, and avocado's got more fiber than bread, for God's sake. And avocado is a pretty high fiber food. So is pumpkin. But so we don't need grains for fiber. Most of the nutrients we get from grains are just the stuff they threw back in after they robbed it for the processing.

Yeah.

So I don't think, I don't think they're really nutritional powerhouses. I think that we could probably cut back on our grain consumption without doing any real damage to our health. And for some of us, we don't need them at all.

Yeah, for sure. Now, as you got off cigarettes and you reprogrammed your mind for health. What are some steps that people can do today to reprogram their minds for health?

Well, I'll give you just one of the exercises we did in Unleash Your Thin in the workbook. You know, a lot of us, you brought this up very brilliantly earlier when you asked about associations we have to food that, you know, go back to age 5, you know, the comfort and memories and even sense memories, like the smell or the taste or the look. So if we have all these positive associations to something, it conditions us to want it and to find it desirable. Now I'll give you an example with cigarettes. If my association to a cigarette is, wow, I'm gonna relax, or wow, this comes right after breakfast, or, you know, right after sex, you know, all the times that have been found to be the number one cigarette that people reach for. Those are powerful pleasant associations. How do you combat that? Well, one exercise we do is we try to come up with an image to compete with those pleasant ones. So for example, if you ever looked at an X-ray of a diseased lung, or if you ever looked at a photograph of one of those people who has has to talk out of the tracheotomy, you know, the hole in the thing, the voice box. Well, now suppose you, every time you thought of a cigarette, that's what you thought of. Instead of like, wow, it's going to be relaxing, I'm going to be laying in bed on the Caribbean and after sex and we're going to have this cigarette. What if you thought of that diseased lung? So you can actually reprogram yourself to condition yourself to these noxious, horrendous stimuli that are associated with the cigarette and then all of a sudden that cigarette doesn't look quite as good because when you think of it, you think of that lady who is talking to the voicemail and now, I don't know, it's not looking so good. Now am I saying that this is easy to do? No, but this is the way that you can kind of slowly but surely reprogram your brain to have some less positive associations to the things that are now derailing your health. And I think it's that kind of homework that can really be helpful in kind of demystifying some of these cravings and these compulsions to eat the stuff that makes us sick, fat, tired, and depressed.

Yeah, that's, yeah, definitely. If you told someone to, I guess, stop eating one certain food, what would it be?

Sodas and French fries.

Sodas and French fries.

Yeah, you know, I always say with foods, Foods are like friends. You know, there are very few foods or people that are all bad or all good, you know? You might have a friend who is just terrific to go to a sporting event with. You love to go to a basketball game or whatever, you know, you love to talk sports with them, but maybe that's not the friend you would talk about the intimate issues in your marriage. You know, maybe that would be a different kind of a friend. Well, much like with food, you take wild salmon. One of the greatest sources in the world of protein, of antioxidants, of selenium, but has no fiber. You take a high-fiber food that maybe has no protein or no omega-3s. So no food really is perfect and gives you everything you need. And likewise, most foods are not really all bad either. You know, even something that might be high glycemic might have a lot of particular nutrients that would be useful. French French fries and sodas are pretty much pure evil. There's just not one good thing in them on any level. There's no way to say, well, it doesn't have this, but on the other hand it has this. No, it has nothing of any value. All it does is damage to you. There's not one good thing to say about either one of those two things. And so if I were gonna take two things out of the average diet, it would be French fried potatoes and sodas.

Excellent. I guess this is the last question, but where do you see the state of the world's food supply? What do you see?

You know what, I'm gonna have, I think I might have to tell you that that one is beyond my pay scale because that level, I'm always in awe of the people who do study that sort of thing because it really requires a knowledge of economics, politics, health policy, international trade. I mean, a lot of stuff that I am just not, knowledgeable enough to make any kind of a statement that would be worthwhile. I'd be like an actor giving their thoughts on political policy. I mean, I'm just another citizen with an opinion on that. I don't know enough about that. I think, you know, my little neck of the woods, my niche is in helping the individual make the right choices given what's available and, you know, how to get better things available to more people I have to leave to people who hopefully are passionate about that and have a lot more knowledge about that than I do.

Is it www.johnnybowden.com?

Right, and it's no H in Johnny, J-O-N-N-Y B-O-W-D-E-N. And if people would like to see my new program, all you have to do is put a forward slash and then write unleash, U-N-L-E-A-S-H, and you'll see my Unleash Your Thin program. And I'd love people to come to my website visit my site and subscribe to my free newsletter and stay in touch with me and write me and anything else you want to do.

It's a great newsletter. I've been a part of it, I don't know how long, but it's been a number of years.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's a great newsletter.

Thank you so much.

How long have you been blogging for? About 10 years.

10 years. Wow. Yeah, it's unbelievable.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for the call today.

It's been my pleasure, Mark. And keep up your wonderful work. You're really one of the leading lights. It's an honor to do this with you and I appreciate you having me.

Thank you so much. I look forward to doing it again soon.

You bet.

No worries. Take care, Johnny.

Bye.

Alrighty, folks. There it is. The interview with Johnny Bowden. Hope you enjoyed that one. Hey, look, I need your help. I'm looking at bringing back the podcast show. I mean, I already am bringing it back because you're listening to it, obviously. But no, looking at doing some new shows. Who do you want me to interview? Who would you like me to interview? What do you want me to discuss? Let me know, leave it on our Facebook page. It's Enterprise Fitness Melbourne, or just Google Enterprise Fitness or Facebook in the search bar, Enterprise Fitness, and like our page and send us a private message. Simple as that. Can't get any easier, folks. And also like my page while you're at it, Mark Ottobre, and that is like the month October. So if you look up an Italian calendar, You will see "Ottobre" is the month of October, which is my last name. So, I'm named after October. Yes, yes I am. So, anyway, moving forward from that, this podcast is proudly brought to you by Enterprise Fitness. If you do need any body transformation advice, help with competing, or just, you know, want to get in best shape possible for that special someone, which can be you, you're a special someone, give us a call, 1300 887 143, or shoot us an email at info@enterprisefitness.com.au. Www.fitness.com.au. At the time of this podcast, I have the young, fine Andy, or Andrew as I like to call him, manning the phones because he is a man, so that's technically correct. He's manning the phones and he's ready to speak to you and take your call. So if you need some help there, reach out. Now, I hope you liked my somewhat comical, comical, not really that comical, But quizzical, quirky, quirky promo that I just did on Enterprise Fitness. Yeah, I suppose it's quirky. But anyway, I'm quirky, so I hope you enjoyed this show and look forward to the one next week where I re-release another episode. Till I speak to you next time, train hard, supplement smart, and eat well.

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