DIET QUESTIONS ANSWERED

for podcasting. So we'll probably get you one way or the other. If you are listening on the podcast, just add us to your favorites. If you're listening on YouTube, make sure that you like and subscribe, and then you can get notifications for when we upload these. So we do these longer version ones and then some shorter topic ones. But today what I want to get into is The topic I had was your diet questions answered, and probably beyond. Of course, in modern times, if you're listening live, this is October 21st, 2021. The number one group of questions I get are COVID questions. I've done a lot of programs on that, so wanted to take a break from COVID and COVID questions. Not that there aren't any, it's just You know, sometimes it's good to mix it up, but probably the number 2 thing after COVID would be things around eating and diet. And then we, we talk a lot about the potential for toxins in your diet and environmental medicine and things of that nature. So I thought today, putting together a look into diet questions from a point of view that we really haven't done before. So And if you go back to files, you'll see that we've done things about toxins in your food, so the environmentally, etc. And we've done some specific looks into what you might describe in a cancer patient or somebody with heart disease or something. But this time I thought, well, why don't we take a look from the top down at the major types of diet plans or eating plans that people have? And of course, we're not gonna talk about every kind of way people eat around the world, but I wanted to hit the big ones because these are the ones that at least practicing in North America where I practice and live, I get the most questions about. I imagine if I lived in some other part of the world, I'd probably get different questions, but we'll do the ones that— that I hear most about. So I wanted to compare and contrast them, uh, some of these, such as in the world of vegetarian eating, what's it— what's the difference between a vegan diet and the other types of vegetarian diets? I want to kind of break that down and get into the specifics there. Uh, you know, what is a pescatarian, if you've never heard of that? Or what lacto-ovo-vegetarian, etc. What's the Mediterranean diet? You hear a lot about the Mediterranean diet or Mediterranean-like diet, partly because it's one of the diets that has probably the most amount of research around it as far as medical outcomes. So it's a pretty popular diet that people— a lot of books about it, etc. And we kind of have this spectrum of, you know, almost the opposite of the vegan world, which would be either— you might think of like the low carb or a 40/30/30 or a paleo diet, cave diet, keto, ketogenic diets, carnivore diets, etc. And so let's compare and contrast all of these things. Now, like I usually say about a lot of things, I am not going to give you you know, advice and say this, this one of these is the one you should do, this is the best, this is the worst. I'm just going to give you information about each one of them and how the diet is structured, what kind of eating you're doing, what the purported benefits of eating that way would be. And then, you know, in, in many of these cases, I may have some stories about people who were patients who tried them, etc. Because one of the things that I think off the top we might want to talk about is this idea that, is there one best diet for all humans? And the purpose of today's program is not to try and answer that question, certainly, but it's more to lay out what are available, what are ways that are available that you can eat. There are some people who I know, and also who write books and things, who very much believe that there is one way that you should eat and one way that would be best for humans to eat. And then there are other people who feel that, you know, there's probably more variety that's available, and what you pick and choose can have a lot to do with the way that your body is, your physiology is, your general overall health, etc. And so something to consider is the point of view I come from is I honestly don't believe that there is one best diet or eating plan that, you know, everyone who's a human should adhere to. Because number one, that really would never happen. Number two, it's a little presumptuous to say that, you know, you know, what maybe indigenous people in a faraway other part of the world have eaten for centuries that has kept them alive and healthy is not good for them, and they should eat, you know, this other way that we think they should eat. So I really don't want to get into, you know, that as far as, you know, prescribing diet habits for you. And what I usually say is that, you know, you shouldn't take medical advice from people on TV or the radio. or YouTube or anywhere else, because that's sort of a dumb idea. When it comes to your diet, there are some basic things that, you know, probably are universal that we do want to talk about that are probably better to do than not. When you get beyond that, though, those basic things that may tie these things together, you and your healthcare team may have different things that go into your Particular health that might lead to you either, say, eating in a way where you have less inflammation, or eating in a way where it's better for your cardiovascular output and health, or eating in a way, for example, if you have cancer, that is better than other ways to eat if you have cancer. So there's a lot of variety when you get down to the actual what you're going to eat as as you individually. But I just wanted to outline some of these areas. So another thing that we've talked about, we've had entire programs on this, is where does the idea of food sensitivity and food allergy come into how my diet might change? Well, there are people who look at Your best diet has some of these, uh, we'll call them sort of universal good things involved in it that, uh, we'll, we'll start to go through in a moment. And then after that, uh, you would be good to remove things that you're either sensitive to or certainly allergic to. And we've talked on entire programs about there's differences between a sensitivity and food and an allergy. Uh, but really anything that your body doesn't like, anything that doesn't resonate well with your body for digestion, absorption, and metabolism, it is better for you not to eat. So there are a lot of doctors and healthcare providers that will say, let's take care of the basics. And then as far as the specifics go, you're gonna eat, you know, a certain amount of, say, protein and fat and carbohydrate, but you're not gonna eat these particular foods because they're pro-inflammatory for you, or they have been shown on your testing to be allergies of one type or a sensitivity of another. So that's another sort of way to look at this and get a little bit more specific. But I wanna take the middle part of the program here and talk about some of these, call 'em the name brand diets. So the first would be, you hear about vegetarian eating and then you hear about vegans and someone will say, I'm a vegan. What does that mean? Is that different from being a vegetarian? Well, the idea really is that vegetarian eating really should be a plant-based diet, hence the name vegetarian. But within vegetarian eating, there are a lot of people who do not strictly limit themselves to, say, fruit and vegetable plant products. And they may have a largely, say, fruit and vegetable-based diet, but they may have other things that they add into it. And certainly it's, you know, always somebody's choice what they want to add or subtract. Whereas if you are a vegan, you specifically have nothing that comes from animals. Okay, now there are things that you can see online know, where you'll see disagreements back and forth about, well, if I'm, you know, if I'm being a vegan, uh, would I have something that an animal helped produce, like honey? Uh, you know, because bees help to make honey. And there's other things like that, and people make their own decisions whatever way they want to go. But the bottom line of being a vegan is you're not going to have any animal product. It is going to be a totally plant-based diet. I have friends and colleagues who are vegan and who are vegan for a number of reasons, and their bottom line is, is that they will, of course, you know, eat anything from the plant kingdom, whether that's a fruit or a vegetable or a grain or a legume, you know, all of those things. And they're recipes are made from, you know, those, uh, those categories of food, but they won't eat, for example, eggs. They wouldn't eat dairy products. They certainly then wouldn't eat meat or fish, poultry, etc. So vegan is, you can think, as far on the plant-based side as you can get. Then amongst vegetarians, uh, and it seems interesting You know, if you think about it logically, like why would you know why would you call yourself a vegetarian but then eat something that came from animals? So among vegetarians, and there's all these other subdivisions, if you will. And I this was sort of underscored. I was you know one of the things with YouTube: you can listen to interviews on demand from you know thirty forty years ago, and I was listening to. a very famous boxer, and they had been injured. They had said, well, you know, that they, they had gone vegetarian. And I was thinking, wow, I didn't remember this person going vegetarian. And, uh, they were talking about being vegetarian and they felt better and all of this stuff. And, and then they were saying, well, now the interviewer said, so you're not eating any, uh, animal products? And they said, no, I, I don't eat any meat. But they were eating fish. So a lot of times the definitions are interesting. So, you know, flesh foods would include, you know, terrestrial animals such as cows and goats and chickens and, you know, other poultry and all that, but also fish and other seafood. non-terrestrial animals, and they were just feeling like fish was not meat. And so I found that funny and interesting. Well, if you look at the technical definitions, the subdivisions of non-vegan vegetarians, then you get into things like a pescatarian. Now, often the word pescatarian is used to denote That you will eat fish and seafood, but it's broad term. If someone says, I am a pescatarian, is you're largely plant-based, but you do eat egg, dairy. So eggs and dairy products, fish and other seafood. Now, reasons people might want to do that might be that they want, you know, the protein sources from dairy and eggs. protein and certain types of fats from the fish, etc. And so that is one option that people do. Now, another thing, when we look at these subdivisions of different types of diets, a person may not want to be a vegan, so strictly plant-based only, but they might want to do something where they have some variety. And if they're adding, you know, eggs to their diet or dairy products to their diet and/or fish, that may allow them to, you know, bump up their protein amounts and bump up this and that. And sometimes it's just a matter of also they, they would feel like they'd get bored if they were eating, you know, absolutely plants only. So a pescatarian, sort of this broad version of a of a flexible vegetarian where they're going to have some eggs, some dairy periodically, fish and other seafood. And of course, they're going to get fats and protein from the fish, seafood, dairy, and eggs. Now, there are also people who just will do one or the other of egg or dairy. So if you have an ovo-vegetarian, that's eggs and plants. Lactovegetarian would be dairy and plants. And then a very common one is a lacto-ovo-vegetarian, where you're eating all the plants and then eggs and dairy. Now, what's missing from there with your pescatarian version of vegetarianism is the seafood. There wouldn't be any fish or other types of seafood added in the lacto-ovo or either one of those type of vegetarians. Now, something I'll just say is if you're going to be a vegan or a vegetarian, you really— if you're going to do any type of these diets and you feel yourself drawn to it, get educated, talk to your healthcare providers. You want to be real educated about how to healthfully eat during that type of a diet, because something I usually will tell my doctor students is you can make any diet healthy or unhealthy. So the choices you make within your dietary plan can make your diet much better or worse. So when it comes to, say, being a vegan or a vegetarian, a lot of times people will hear— there'll be a couple of things that they're really concerned with, and it's because it's real, but if you're educated and you know how to eat, it's not a big deal. One would be getting enough B12, vitamin B12, and that's largely because a lot of the sources of vitamin B12 come from animal products, although certainly not all of them. And then the other is getting enough proteins or getting complete proteins. And so one argument that people will make for being, say, an ovo-vegetarian where they're eating You know, eggs is that they'll get a complete complement of amino acids, especially the necessary amino acids, the ones we don't make in our body. And you can do that by eating eggs pretty easily. Now, the other thing, though, is that vegans can get all the protein amino acids that they need without eating, you know, eggs or dairy or other, other stuff, or certainly animals. And the way that that is done is simply by eating the right types and quantity of food that have the different amino acids in them. Now, something that's important is you don't always have to have all of your necessary amino acids, the ones we— our body doesn't make, at one time. You can have them over a period of time, so you could eat them, some of them for your breakfast and some for lunch and some dinner and some 2 days later, because your amino acids that get reassembled into proteins in your body are stored in the amino acid pool in your liver. And so your liver is set up to have non-complete proteins coming in without the full complement of amino acids that we need and to save those amino acids for reassembly later into protein structures like enzymes and structural proteins and stuff like that. So the idea that every time you eat you have to have this mythical complete protein is not really true. You do have to get the amino acids in over your diet though, over a couple of days or so. With respect to B12, there's a lot of ways to get vitamin B12. You certainly can get it from a lot of cultured type foods. And there are cultured type foods that are, you know, like tempeh and other things like that, that people who are vegetarian or vegan will eat. And that will be another way in for both amino acids to create proteins and some of the B vitamins, et cetera. But whether you're going to be a vegan and just plants, or lacto, or an ovo, or lacto-ovo, or pescatarian, you want to keep in mind that choices matter, just as they do with any diet plan. So, you know, I've been seeing this as a meme on social media. It's sort of an old joke, is, you know, you could technically eat potato chips and drink beer. and maybe have some noodles, and that's vegetarian, right? I mean, there's no animal products going into those things. Would that be the best and most healthful diet plan? Probably not, right? So your choices within it become important. Now, in part 2, I'm going to talk about some of the things I think are universal good choices that we could all do regardless of what way we eat. So we'll come back to that. Now, I do wanna mention while we're talking about vegans and vegetarians of different types, is another type of way of eating that I have seen and I've seen people do is a raw food diet, raw food plan. And that literally means that you're probably talking about things from the plant kingdom. and you're not cooking any of them. And one of the arguments made for raw food eating is you get more of the natural enzymes from the plants as they come in. Now, there are going to be some things that are not going to be usually digestible if you eat them raw, so they usually are not part of a raw food eating plan. One thing would be most legumes, most beans, unless they're very complex protein structures are converted by heating or some other type of cooking, they usually don't digest very well. But you could say, well, you know, I've got a lot of vegetables that I can eat, you know, raw, and certainly fruit, etc. Yeah, and you're going to get a lot of the nutrients and other stuff in there. And again, I'm not, you know, promoting or denigrating any of these ideas, it's just that you often Nowadays, do you hear a lot about people doing like raw food? One of the therapeutic ways that I have seen raw food diets implemented medically is by— let's say you have a person, and a lot of times this would be, say, with a cancer setting where their healthcare team has decided we want you to do a therapeutic diet to get the attention of your metabolism. And if you go back to any of the old shows on cancer and metabolism and eating and stuff, one of the universal things that I talk about is if you have more muscle-promoting metabolism— so that's both movement of your body, exercise, but also eating in a way that promotes your muscle activity and muscle metabolism, which means you're eating in a way that doesn't promote insulin production and fat metabolism. So it's low insulin and fat activity, high muscle activity. That can be a very anti-cancer and a pro-survival type diet. Well, some people will look at the options in that type of a diet and say, there's no way, I don't wanna eat meat, or I don't wanna eat a lot of meat, or barely any meat. And so there's no way I can do some of these, you know, metabolic protocols. And what we would often say then is, well, no, there's options. And if they were saying, you know, I really want to be in the more plant-based end of things, what we would usually set up is a 1 or 2 week induction period, again, to get the attention of metabolism. where they would do primarily a raw food vegetarian diet. And that would be on the end of— it turns out to be very high fiber and the carbohydrates are very complex that are in all the plants that they're eating. And so it has a low insulin load, it has a low glycemic index. And then we would usually transfer them over to whatever they were comfortable with as a maintenance type of a diet. Now, if that was vegan or one of the types of vegetarian, we would give them advice about structuring the food plan in such a way where they weren't spiking insulin. Because whether you have a chronic illness of any type or cancer or cardiovascular disease, et cetera, having your insulin and sugar bouncing around, bouncing up and down, is the worst thing that you can have because it's very pro-inflammatory. So we would give them advice within whatever they wanted to do. So whether it was vegan or a vegetarian type, or maybe one of the other ones we're talking about, and we'd give them ideas for clean eating, but also eating that didn't move their blood sugar and insulin around a lot. So that became very important. Now, when you get past what you would probably consider, say, pescatarian, the sort of, you know, functional vegetarian eating other things like eggs and dairy and seafood, fish products. So you get past that. In the middle kind of the spectrum is the diet that I was saying will probably have the most press because it probably has the most research as far as medical outcomes. And that is what is globally called the Mediterranean diet. Now, there are different versions of the Mediterranean diet, and technically the Mediterranean diet is based on what you would eat if you lived and were endemic to any part of the Mediterranean Sea area. And what you find, though, is what you eat there changes a bit based on where you are in the Med. And so a Mediterranean diet in one place may have more of certain types of fish and other things, and another place may have more of other products in it. But one of the things I think, and one of the things you think about with research, so when doctors say, well, the Mediterranean diet has the most research for, you know, cancer and heart disease and all this stuff. That's true. It doesn't mean it's the best or it's the only, or it's the only thing that has research. It just means people have chosen to study it a lot, partly, I think, because it's a very common diet for large portions of humanity. But also, if you look at the average diet that North Americans eat, which is horrible, a Mediterranean-type diet is often easy to implement. as a change with North Americans. So you, you may go and, uh, you, you know, you might approach North Americans and say, gosh, you know, we'd like you to change to a vegan diet. And most of them, you know, many of them would say, no, I'm not going to do that. Or, you know, be a pescatarian, and many would say, no, I'm, you know, I'm not interested in that. Mediterranean diet, when you look at it, you look at— they've sort of got a strata of, uh, eat a lot of this stuff, a little bit of this, and a tiny amount of these other things. A lot of people can look at that and say, well, I can eat that way. I can make choices within the Mediterranean diet. So specifically, what is the Mediterranean diet? So high intake, literally most of the resources say every meal, of olive oil. Now olive oil is one of those things that, of course, it's going to be very common in the Mediterranean. Now, Common everywhere else. One just footnote on olive oil, you can look this up, but take a look at some online resources about true olive oil and counterfeit olive oil and make sure you're using a company when you go buy your olive oil that is giving you the real thing because there's a lot of adulterated olive oil. But let's say sake of argument, that's not a problem. Olive oil is going to be a high intake thing at each meal, so it's going to provide you with fatty acids that you need. It's a stable oil, and it's a type of oil that is generally not going to be associated with a lot of downstream bad oil problems. A lot of vegetables. So again, we're in the top tier of high intake— olive oil, vegetables, And then grains and legumes. So grains are fairly obvious, like wheat and spelt and all of those things. And then legumes, you know, things like peas, peanuts, beans, all of those sorts of things. So a lot of the plant kingdom there. In the medium intake would be fish and other seafood. Poultry, so turkey and chicken, other types of birds, eggs and dairy, and then red wine. Interestingly, red wine was in the medium area. Then on the low intake end would be any red or processed meats, simple carbohydrates, and sweets. Now, if you've ever looked at or traveled in the Mediterranean area of the world, you know that they do eat red meats. They do eat processed meats. They have processed meats. They certainly have sweet things and simple carbohydrates. But the idea behind this structure is that that's going to be a smaller component of what you're eating. You're going to be looking more at fish and maybe poultry. And then, of of course, grains, legumes, and vegetables. Now, if you just look at that as an eating plan, one of the reasons it's attractive is a lot of people could say, well, basically, if I take the diet I eat right now and I remove the junk from it, I can make it into a Mediterranean-type diet. So it is something. And whenever you're looking at if you want to eat cleaner and eat in a different way and all this stuff, And let's say you've done, you know, your, your reading and you really want to pick a particular one, you do want to pick a diet that you have a chance of actually implementing. So you have to be able to, you know, have access to the foods, you have to be able to prepare the foods, you have to be able to want to eat those foods long term, because of course people eat multiple times a day, so that becomes very important. Now, there's also what we would call a modified Mediterranean diet. A modified Mediterranean diet is important because that's used a lot in therapeutic interventions in, say, cancer, potentially cardiovascular disease, weight management, a lot of other things. The modifications generally are to try and decrease the amount of glycemic index and insulin load that that diet gives you. So what we normally would do when we were doing a modification is in the high, high eating areas of, you know, olive oil, fruits and vegetables, grains and legumes, we would usually have people either completely take grains out That would be the best. And then minimize legumes, or there might be one type of a grain they would leave in. But grains tend to be very insulinogenic, and legumes do as well. And then in the fruit and vegetable part of that category, we'd use— have them focus mostly on vegetables and focusing again on low glycemic type vegetables. There's not a ton of modification when you get to like fish, seafood, poultry, the sort of median areas. Some doctors will tell people to completely remove dairy, and certainly if dairy inflames you or you have other troubles with dairy, it's just best to take it out. There is a lot of association, meaning the studies show that if you have a high intake of this, you you have more of this problem. There's association studies with high dairy intake and cancer. So some concerns there. Some people remove eggs, some people leave them in. We usually in the modification would leave the eggs in, make an individual decision on the dairy. And then when it came to things like red wine, it really came down to the best therapeutic outcome outcome, especially if you're dealing with, say, cancer, would be not to have that in there. But some people, you know, liked it in there, and it's not a deal breaker, certainly. When it gets to the low-intake things, that's where a lot of modification would also take place. So there's a big difference in my mind biologically between red meat, which is a lot of different things, and then processed meats. And I think that a lot of the associations that we see with ill health, whether it's cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc., a lot of them are when you get to processed meats as opposed to just it being a red meat. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, people will— the red meat that they do have may come from, you know, a grass-fed, farm-raised animal that was raised in a fairly organic manner. or a wild, you know, a wild animal that was harvested through hunting or something of that nature. So again, there's shades of how clean a meat can be and what it brings with it. Certainly processed meats can have the potential to bring a lot of unpleasant chemistry into your body. And if you're already dealing with heart disease or cancer, you wanna minimize that stuff. Simple sugars and sweets. Again, those would be minimized in a modified Mediterranean-type diet. Well, if you look at where we started with vegans and then vegetarians of different types, and then you kind of have the Mediterranean eating plan in the middle, then you can go to the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, although the Mediterranean could be part of one of these anyway. And that would be into the world of, say, low carb and keto and carnivore and paleo and, you know, all of those type of diets. So I want to just take a couple of minutes and talk about those type of diets as well. Now, what most of those diets, whether it's a zone type diet, low carb zone diet, 40/30/30, you hear about paleo or cave diet, keto, carnivore, all that stuff. What most of those have in common is, if there are vegetables involved, they're going to be complex carbohydrate vegetables. They're not going to be real starchy ones. There's not going to be any real amount of simple sugars and sweets, and you're going to have probably a bit more protein and fat intake than you would in some of the other types of diet plans. So kind of, if we take the Mediterranean diet as a jumping off point, the next step over would be a low carb, what was popularized a number of years ago by Dr. Barry Sears called the Zone Diet. And now the Zone Diet is usually referred to as 40-30-30. So that's a 40% carbohydrate, 30% fat, 30% protein. And it was a way to get people to think about reapportioning their plate and what they were eating. Now, if you look at the way a lot of people eat and you look at it as a representation of the plate, there might be 75 to 85% of that plate that is carbohydrate, especially if you look and there's a lot of, say, noodles. Rice, potatoes, bread, these sort of things that we use, you know, as bases for recipes and/or fillers. Those are going to kick up the amount of carbohydrate. What they're also going to do is kick up the amount of insulin that's produced, which kicks up not only fat gain but also inflammation and a number of other things. So in a Zone Diet where it's a 40-30-30, you still have a fairly robust amount of carbohydrate that you're eating. But what they will tell you in most of the books, and if you get Dr. Barry Sears' book, The Zone Diet, that's where I would recommend you start, they're going to have you really do a lot of vegetables. We keep coming back to vegetables as our friend. That's because you can get your carbohydrates there. They're going to be complex carbohydrates. Hard to break down. You're gonna have good fiber, and it's good for your gut, and not a lot of insulin load from that. And then, you know, 30% fat and 30% protein mixed in. Now, what I will say is that as a therapeutic diet, the Zone Diet in people with the more common type of high cholesterol So there are different sizes and forms of triglycerides and cholesterol. Now we can look at them genomically. We used to do things like electrophoresis to figure it out. But the most common type is actually insulin-stimulated cholesterol and triglyceride increase. Let's call it a Frederickson type 4. And that is a majority of people. in North America. So if you think of that, their poison is not fat. Actually, their poison is insulin, which is triggered by sugar and simple carbohydrate. So what I would tell patients is, if you have a type 2 high cholesterol, your body— the poison is fat. So we have to be judicious about how we use fat. If you have a type 4, which is more people statistically, the number is is a high number, then type 4 people are going to— their poison is going to be insulin. So anything that drives insulin up, simple carbohydrate, sugar, etc., is the thing that you want to avoid. And so I would have people, you know, and this is going back a long ways. Dr. Sears wrote his book in, I think, the '80s, you know, so going back a ways. And I would say, well, you know, if you want to try and avoid medications for your high triglycerides and cholesterol, you can eat in this way. And I would give them the book. And, you know, this is, of course, before YouTube how-to videos and all of the other things. Yeah, you know, people had to just read. And what I would say is, you know, if you, if you want to do this, you're gonna have to educate yourself. I can help you, but I can't teach you all of this because you have to internalize it. So we get them the book, and I would say, uh, how long until you want to come back? And we're going to have a visit going through just your questions about how to do this, how to implement. Most people would be 1 to 3 weeks. If they never came back again, I knew that they either read the book and didn't like it, or they decided that wasn't for them and they wanted to take drugs for their cholesterol, and that was fine. But most people would come back and they'd have somewhere between a half page and— I had one lady that had like 7 pages of questions, and I would just go through them and say, you know, do this, don't do that, here's what they mean, and here's how to start. And there would be ideas about how to structure your meals. Now, one of the great things, because we're talking about a span of 30-plus years is now there's, you know, a zillion recipes and how-to guides and all of that stuff. So it's pretty easy to do. But back then you had to put a little work into it. But without fail, the people that I saw who did this for purposes of getting their insulin under control, lowering their triglycerides, cholesterol, where that was appropriate, everybody had an effect. on their biomarkers, whether it was getting your insulin under control, blood sugar under control, getting their cholesterol, triglycerides, all that stuff. And here's the other interesting thing. If they were overweight and needed to lose weight, they would lose weight. If they were underweight, they would not lose weight. So another real great thing about metabolism shifting is that if you shift your metabolism, especially away from insulin-type production, your body will sort out what it's doing. Now, if they aren't eating enough, then they would have to eat a bit more if they were, say, losing too much weight. But I literally had people lose, you know, 100+ pounds simply doing the Zone-type diet, 40/30/30 plan. And, you know, then adding exercise and doing other stuff, but really it was the diet that drove it. And then I had, you know, tall, low body mass people, you know, tall, thin, athletic folks, and they didn't lose a pound. And it's because what it's shifting, if you have excess fat, is going to help you burn the excess fat up. If you don't have excess fat, it's not going to be a problem. Okay, well then, I'm going to guess 20 years ago, but it's actually been around since the '70s when they called it the cave diet. But in the last 20 years, you've heard a lot about the paleo diet, right? Well, paleo diet or cave diet, and this was literally popularized in the '70s. Forget the doctor's name, but they called it the caveman diet. We call it the cave diet, I guess. But this is essentially— the theory was that, you know, let's go back to what people ate in their hunter-gatherers. So stuff you could get, you know, vegetables and fruit, nuts, roots that you could dig up, meat of various types. And the things that didn't have are interesting if you think about the insulin question, which is no grains, no dairy, no sugar, no legumes, no salt, no alcohol, no coffee, and no processed oils. So if you look at what you take out, you basically have vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and some meat, right? You don't have any grains, you don't have dairy, you don't have sugar, you don't have legumes. You're taking out all the things that would spike your insulin anyway, and you're eating a very basic diet. Now, what we know now due to genomic studies of both the makeup of early humans and you know, also they've sometimes found stomach contents and feces and all this other stuff, is people may not have eaten exactly that way. So this whole idea of Paleolithic and this is what they ate may or may not have been true. And of course, wherever you were in the world would be quite different. But the idea of the diet, it did work for people. This was used a lot, especially from the '70s through the '90s, for allergic people because it took away grains and sugar and alcohol and all this stuff. And so it became— you could make it into a hypoallergenic diet. And so it's still, you know, not a bad thing to consider, especially if you have someone that looks at different diet plans and your goal really is to get that insulin under control and lower the insulin output of the person so you decrease their inflammation. They could look at this and say, well, I could work with that. I can eat fruits and vegetables and nuts and roots and meat and kind of make a diet plan out of that, maybe easier than I could with the Mediterranean diet. And again, the bottom line is it's getting people to do these things. So that's a very still common type of a diet that now what we call paleo diet. What I would say is with the paleo diet, just like any of the other ones, just like we said with the vegan and vegetarian options, is you can always make a diet healthier or less healthy. And so with your choices, when you're thinking of what vegetables you're going to eat, what fruits if you're going to eat fruit, you know, what kind of roots and meats and stuff like that, you want to make good clean choices. And then we get kind of to the other end of the spectrum, which would be a carnivore diet and then ketogenic diets. Now, carnivore diet has been around forever, but basically that is eating meats and animal products. So that would be— a lot of people on carnivore would eat meat and eggs, and then some of them will add dairy. Some of them will just add certain types of dairy, like, you know, high-fat dairy containing things and cheese and stuff like that. A lot of people on a carnivore diet don't drink milk, mostly because milk itself has a high amount of milk sugar. So if you look at, you know, the amount of carbohydrate in milk versus cheese, for example, it's, it's very different. One of the things with the carnivore diet that I've seen with people who have done it is that their insulin output is essentially flat because they're not eating much that requires insulin to be produced by the body. So if you look at it from that point of view and you think that insulin spiking and release is going to be part of the problem, a lot of folks who I've seen do this wind up, you know, kind of like I said with the Zone Diet and stuff, they'll lose weight, their blood sugar control improves, all of that stuff. Now, just the same, as I mentioned, if you're going to go and be vegan, you want to do a lot of research and educate yourself and work with healthcare practitioners used to dealing with that diet. if you're interested in doing a carnivore diet, you really want to be educated too. And the choices that you make within a carnivore diet, again, can lead you to more or less health with that. So just keep that in mind. And the last specific diet I just want to mention is very popular now. Again, it's been around for a long, long time. It was originally developed for children having seizures, and it is still prescribed for childhood epilepsy, and it's the ketogenic diet. And a ketogenic diet is— so if you think about like a carnivore diet, there's gonna be like a lot of protein and fat in there, not a lot of carbohydrate. A paleo diet, there's gonna be a lot of protein, some carbs, and some fat. Ketogenic diet, in order to make ketones in the body, pushes the body all the way over the other direction and you have a majority of your calories coming from fat. So about 75% fat, about 20% protein, about 5% carbohydrate. So this again, kind of like the Zone Diet and the carnivore diet, your insulin is going to be very low. It's not going to be stimulated by the ketogenic diet. The extra amount of fat as opposed to protein is there so that your body is pushed into using fat for energy. Now, your body can use carbohydrate for energy or fat for energy, and for every unit that goes in, you get twice as many calories out, twice as much energy out from the fat as you do from carbohydrate. Now, you can also burn up proteins, but that's more of an emergency thing. So if you have mostly fat and then some protein going in and almost no carbohydrate, your body is going to go along. It's not going to release insulin at all, which is fine because you don't need insulin if you don't have any carbohydrates going in. Nothing really for it to do. It's going to be released at a really low and slow rate. Your body is going to burn the fat preferentially so you can get this real high-value energy out of it. And you are going to raise— you're going to induce what's called a nutritional ketosis. So the reason I say nutritional ketosis is there's a disease that can kill you called diabetic ketoacidosis, and that is a metabolic disorder when you run out of insulin. That's not what this is. So that's super high levels of ketones. This is a metabolic nutritional ketosis Where you have ketones then that are circulating around and they can be used for various purposes within the body. So it's a ketogenic diet. Now, if you're using it for something real critical, such as seizures or cancer or something of that nature, you really want to be on top of it. And so people will get tracking software They will get a meter system to check their ketones through the day and their, their sugar and their insulin, and they will track that, and their healthcare team will review those things. So a lot of people say they're doing keto, and really they're not. They're doing sort of a weird, you know, maybe a low carb or something else, which is fine. It's just if you're using ketogenic diet as a therapeutic outcome to get the ketones, you really have to be monitoring it. And that's especially true in cancer, certainly, and neurology, looking at seizures and things of that nature. Well, that gets us to the end. We just have a couple of minutes left, but one of the things I wanted to kind of end with was, okay, so we've looked at these categories of diets as we go through, and When we think about categories of diets, I said there's things that we can do to make things either better or worse, no matter how we're going to eat. Well, this— if you're listening, you won't see anything up there— this is a triangle. And it has, of course, a base, and then it goes up and gets smaller. And this is an educational tool that we would use with patients to try and say, regardless of what direction you're going to go— modified Mediterranean or keto or Whatever, you should be doing these universal things. So the first thing, which I've actually done other programs about, is some time restriction to your eating. Basically, you don't eat while you're asleep, hopefully, and you add a few hours on at each end. There's some human data now that shows that if you go to 12 or 13 hours where you're just drinking water, you're not eating, say overnight, and a little extra time before bed and after bed, 12, 13 hours and your likelihood of surviving and not having recurrence of cancer is better. Some other really good things. So it's a pretty easy intervention. Next thing is stop eating junk, essentially processed and poor quality food. So, you know, you could eat all the right macros, but if it's full of chemicals, you're going to be in big trouble and the chemicals are not going to help you. In any way, shape, or form. So stop eating junk and processed and poor quality food. Then the next level— so we've got a bit of time-restricted eating, stop eating processed and junky type foods. Next one is decrease simple carbohydrate intake. So the easiest way to look at that is look at the glycemic index. I've had you do that before. And if you look at a high glycemic index food, you didn't remove those. Okay, because they're going to stimulate sugar and then insulin, and that's not what you want. And then depending on the type of diet plan you have, and this would fit for everything with the exception of the carnivore diet, increasing high-fiber vegetables. So you're getting more vegetables that have a lot of complex carbohydrate and they're harder to break down. Then everything after that becomes very specific. The specifics are usually those things that you either can sort out yourself or culturally appropriately or work out with your healthcare team. But that is it for us today. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. We've been talking about your questions on the major types of diet. Certainly not every diet was covered. We got into why these diets exist, why people think they might be good for them, and some things that you might want to look into. If you're going to do it or if you're thinking about incorporating this type of eating. So I'm Dr. Paul Andersen for Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Andersen. It's been my pleasure speaking to you. And again, if you're listening to this on one of the pod burners, make sure you add us to your preferred list. If you listen to this on YouTube, please like, share, subscribe, and hit the notification bell as well. But that's it for today, and I'll see you next week. You've been listening