Keto, Intermittent Fasting, and Healthy Wine - Is There A Place? with Founder Todd White

Hi, I'm Natalie Jill, fat loss expert turned lifestyle and high performance coach. Welcome to Listen up the podcast. On this podcast, I do what I do best. Taking complicated information that is relevant to us now and breaking it down simply with actionable steps you can implement to level up your life. I also regularly interview some of the most inspiring and courageous men and women on the planet who at their worst, learned how to achieve success greater than anything they ever dreamed possible. Creating everything from nothing. If you are new here, I encourage you to go back and listen from episode one, when this podcast was previously called Leveling up for the Full Transformative Experience. Today on Listen Up, I'm here with Todd White. He's a biohacker who meditates daily. He's into Wim Hof, breathing, a ketogenic diet daily, intermittent fasting. And the best part, he loves to drink wine and he's a fan of wine. But the wine that I call conscious wine, and we're going to get into that, he's actually the founder of Dry Farms Wine, which is one of the fastest growing private companies in the US I love what he's done with this vision and his wine. And I wanted to pull a story like how this even came about. Thank you so much for being here today, Todd.

Super excited to be here.

So, Todd, take us back. Were you always into health, like your whole life? Were you born that way or tell us who you were as a kid? As a teenager, gosh, as a kid.

I was always interested in not sports, but really personal fitness. So I had been lifting weights and I'd been a runner since I was probably, I don't know, early teens. And that sort of, that passion just continued throughout my life. And I really started getting more serious about nutrition about 20 years ago. Probably, you know, when you're younger, in your 20s and 30s, you don't think a lot, usually don't think a lot about nutrition. But I was working out. I continued to run, lift weights and was very active. Never really into any kind of organized sports, but was just into fitness.

And then what changed that got you thinking about what you're putting in your body? Because I think it starts that way with a lot of people. They're just focused on the outside or exercise or that part of it. What was the change that had you looking at nutrition and what you're consuming.

Focused on the outside? I'm afraid so. It was kind of like, you know, how do I stay lean? And as I started to age like you, I don't look my age because I've employed a lot of biohacks over the years to sort of suspend aging, if you will. I'm 60 and so.

Which you all can't. You might not be able to see him if you're not watching the video, but he looks like he's 30, so.

He'S 30, but let's. Let's just say something short of 60. So, you know, really. And I attribute most of that to the work I've done in the last 10 years. But 20 years ago, I started experimenting with a ketogenic diet through the Atkins diet. I didn't really. Maybe more. It was more than 20, 30 years ago, 30 or 35 years ago, started experimenting with the ketogenic diet through the Atkins diet, then ketone. The ketogenic diet wasn't what it is today, and Robert Atkins was the only person talking about it at the time.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that, because ketogenic diet done wrong can actually accelerate aging. Right. Especially if we're not getting in vital nutrients. So how have you made. I'm just curious too about that. Like, do you eat vegetables? Do you have any carbs? What type of carbs do you eat when you're doing that? And why did you lean towards that diet?

Well, if we. Let's get past Atkins and come forward to about six years ago, when I started to experiment with what would be called a therapeutic ketogenic diet. Therapeutic ketogenic diet is very narrow. It's very high in fat, it's very low in carbohydrate, and very, quite, quite low in proteins. I started experimenting with it because it emerged onto the biohacking scene primarily from research being done by Dr. Dominic D' Agostino and a couple of others. Dominic is the now the best known, most famous ketogenic scientist in the United States because he's gotten a lot of publicity, and Tim Ferriss has featured him a number of times on his podcast and in his book. So I started experimenting then, but now I'm one. Now I follow what I would call a modified ketogenic diet. So because being therapeutically ketogenic is just not very entertaining from a lifestyle point of view, because the fat's very high, it gets boring. And so now the diet that I follow now is moderate to low carbohydrate, moderate to low protein, and moderate fat intake. And my fat primarily comes from olive oil.

Got it. Okay.

So. But with respect to vegetables, I eat vegetables every day. So all vegetables are carbohydrates. Right. So the really, the question is, if you're following what let's call it a low blood sugar ketogenic diet. So let's then really, what we're talking about is not whether we eat carbohydrate or not. We're talking about which carbohydrate we eat.

Right.

And then we get into the issue of how we eat it, when we eat it, how we stack it. So, meaning, you know, let's use french fries as an example. Or any kind of potatoes, which would be a high starch carbohydrate, which would normally elicit a blood glucose response, because potatoes are pretty glycemic. But I happen to like potatoes.

But if I don't know anyone that doesn't like potatoes. Todd.

But if I eat potatoes in combination with other fat and fiber or on top of protein instead of ahead of it, then the glycemic effect is much different. So, meaning what I'm trying to do is control blood sugar more so than trying to reach ketosis. Now I'm in ketosis every day because I only eat once per day.

Yes.

So I only eat at night.

Yeah. He is what he takes. You take things to a whole nother level. So not only does he do intermittent fasting on top of his keto, he does his intermittent fasting. He eats all his food within two hours. Two hours.

Not all my wine within two hours.

Okay. And we're going to get to the wine because I'm like, so excited to dive into the wine topic here.

I eat most of my food within two hours, but not always. Sometimes I might have nuts and seeds later, you know, watching a movie or something. But. But generally speaking, I eat all of my food within a couple of hours. I do often drink wine after that, you know.

Yep. And we're going to get into why his wine is okay to do with that. But I have some. I'm not gonna let you go off the keto and intermittent yet because I have to have a few more questions. Do you ever fall off the wagon on that? Like, are you ever, like, you know what? I just want French fries and sour cream or ketchup. I'm going to do it.

Of course, sour cream. I don't eat a lot of dairy, but sour cream wouldn't have any adverse effect on. On ketosis because it's primarily fat, although it's dairy. I don't eat a lot of dairy, but occasionally I'll eat creme fraiche or sour cream, but that won't have any impact on my blood sugar.

The ketchup and the fries would.

The ketchup will for sure. Ketchup's primarily sugar.

Right.

And so sugar is the second leading ingredient and ingredient and most ketchups. Mark Sisson at Primal Kitchen produces a sugar free ketchup. But they're quite rare and it's quite tasty.

I've had it.

And so, but in the french fries will depend upon, you know, when I eat them, how much of them I eat, how I layer it with other things. But my point was that, you know, you can't eat enough broccoli to elicit a blood sugar response, even though it's a carbohydrate.

Correct.

I mean, you'd have to eat. You couldn't eat enough of it.

No.

Right.

And so, and so it's, you know, when we say carb, low carb, it really depends upon the quality of the carb, the glycemic value of the carb, how fast the carb will respond to a rise in blood glucose. So what I'm trying to do is maintain steady insulin flow. Insulin is a magnificent hormone that allowed us as a species to survive, but it's also one of the hormones that's currently killing us because it's overstimulated and.

It changes as we age. Like I can speak for myself forever. I could have a small amount of starchy carbs, didn't affect me at all. You know, balance it with protein. Now, if I have rice at lunch, for instance, if I were to have white rice at lunch, I will be so tired, forget about the rest of the afternoon. Get done.

Yeah, I don't eat rice, I don't eat corn, I don't eat, I don't eat grains, I don't eat flour.

And I'm assuming that's kind of what would happen to you. Correct. Like you've noticed that, like if you have white rice for lunch, for instance, you're going to be tired, foggy headed, all the things.

If I eat anything for lunch, I'd be foggy headed. I mean, I just like eating in the middle of the day. For me, I've been eating only once a day for about almost five years. So, yeah, eating in the middle of the day for me, it would just be like I would need to lay.

Down and take a nap before somebody jumps. Because I'm going to, I promise. Everyone, I'm getting to the wine. I know that was like, what we're, why we're all here for, for the wine. But I have a couple more questions about this because I'm So curious for somebody listening that's like, oh, I want to do that. I want to get into biohacking, I want to do keto, I want to do intermittent fasting. What advice would you give them? Because in my opinion, and you can tell me if you totally disagree. I don't love someone going for total shock value. Like all of a sudden I'm gonna eat all my food in two hours. What would you.

No, no, no. Well, you're going to set yourself up for failure and discouragement likely in doing that. So first of all, you know, I would, if it were, if I were advising someone on, then I would start removing. I would start, you know, sort of removing things from my diet slowly. So I would stop eating refined sugar, number one, you know, Number two, I would stop drinking anything that contains sugar or easily converts to sugar, you know, Number three. So I get rid of the sugar first.

Right.

In the near term, different opinions of thought on this. In the near term, I get rid of most fruit because most fruit's high in sugar. Not all fruits, but most are berries.

You can get away with still low prices.

Yeah, berries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries for sure. But it's just easier in the beginning for people as they're weaning themselves off of sugar just to eliminate that.

Right.

And then start eliminating bread.

Right.

Rice, corn, you know, all the big offenders for refined carbohydrate. Corn's unhealthy for a whole bunch of reasons, including most of it's been sprayed with glyphosate because it's been genetically modified. Most of the corn in the United States has been genetically modified to, to be tolerant of glyphosate. So from there you're really, you're introducing yourself into a low carbohydrate diet.

Right.

And getting rid of these sugar triggers, these highly glycemic foods from there. Once I had a couple of weeks of that and kind of getting away from those food types, then I might experiment with what's known as the lean gains or the 16:8 intermittent fast. That is eating all of your food within an eight hour window and fasting.

For 16, which is what I do. That's exactly what I do.

And I did that for two years before I went to a 22 hour intermittent fast. I'm pretty extreme in this way, so I don't recommend eating once a day for most people. But for me, it worked into my lifestyle and it works for my health and wellness goals. And it was really about for me at my age. I couldn't maintain the lean body mass I wanted, you know, that's just a personal preference of. I focus on four basic things from a wellness point of view. That's power, shape, flexibility, and balance. And shape for me was just like, that's a vanity issue. That's, you know, that's just like, hey, I want a certain shape. That's something I choose. And if I choose this shape that is going to support my power, flexibility and balance, then, you know, if I integrate into that, for me personally, I cannot achieve my goals. And as I've aged and maintained the shape and lean body mass I want without eating once per day, that's just as it applies to me. But everyone's different, right? And so. And I work with a whole bunch of biohackers, most of them younger than me, all of them younger than me. And, you know, I'm good friends with mark Sisson, who's 64, so, you know, and other people who are going through this journey. You know, Mark Sisson used to be paleo. Then he kind of started experimenting with the ketogenic diet as he got into his changes.

As we. As I approach 50, I see the same thing. Things start changing. I have to.

Yeah, for sure. So you make choices based on your particular objectives. Right, and my objectives. You know, the way I have sort of chopped this up and view it into sections, or what I call sprints, is that I think the sprint between 60 and 70 will be the most important sprint decade for me. I didn't think 30, 40 was a big deal. 40 to 50 is no big deal. 50 to 60 is not that big of a deal. Although things started to change my 50s, but I really feel like that how I set myself up for the next 40 or 50 years will really. This next decade will be super important.

What I love so much about this too is, and I've had a lot of guests on, and we've spoken into this before, is the type 3 diabetes, the Alzheimer's, the dementia, which is caused from these high levels of insulin. There's a lot of evidence to that.

There's no question about it. I don't. I, like many other people, perhaps you included, I believe that most chronic disease today that affects Americans and worldwide, most chronic diseases are an overstimulation of insulin. And.

Yes, and we don't talk enough about it. It's not, It's. We hear a lot about eliminating gluten or eliminating grains. We even hear talk about eliminating dairy, but there's not enough talk about eliminating sugar. And where all the hidden Sugars and the importance of that and how much we're secreting insulin and the damage of that.

Well, for the people who, you know, like, I've worn a continuous glucose monitor, I don't really have a need for one because my diet is so stable that it's just so predictable. I don't do blood testing for ketones or glucose any longer because it just, it just results in the same test all the time.

Right.

Because I have a super steady diet. I do wear. I have worn a continuous glucose and they're commercially available now for people who are interested just in health. Until about a year ago, you couldn't get a continuous glucose monitor without getting a prescription for Dexcom. Today levels and other two or three other competitors do have, do have continuous glucose monitors that are fairly inexpensive. They're about $150 or so a month. And so if you want to experiment with monitoring your blood glucose, so continuous glucose monitor is the easiest way to do it because you can see it right on your phone. But so, yeah, I think, look, I think sugar is the most widely abused and addictive drug on the planet for sure, and has done more damage to health than virtually any other commercially available substance.

No question. Okay, so now I want to ask about wine, because that is the question that I get from my audience all the time. Because I have fat loss programs, I teach unprocessed eating, I teach all these. We talk about insulin, but the next question is, where does my wine fit in? Can I have wine? So what I love about you is what you've created. So I want to talk about that journey. Like what. Why did you even get into the wine business? And then I want to talk about what your vision was for Dry Farm.

Well, I didn't get. I wasn't. Dry Farm Wines was not intended to be a business. I needed a job. I was between gigs. I wasn't working at the time, but I was really taking some time off, about six months off, just reflecting on my life at the time. And I had just started a ketogenic therapeutic ketogenic diet. I mean, like serious keto. And this is before keto went mainstream. And I was just starting to bubble up in the biohacking circles. And so. And like most things, I kind of went head in and sort of just like, okay, I want to understand this and experiment with it. And I did. But when I went keto, I had a difficult time drinking. And I thought it was just the alcohol, because sometimes people have their tolerance to alcohol when they go ketogenic. Reduces. It's a common side effect. So for me, I just thought that drinking wine was making me feel bad and I didn't think it was any longer part of my wellness journey. And I was really not happy about that because I love wine and I love drinking wine in certain amounts. And I want to talk about the dangers of alcohol in a moment because it surprises people to hear what they think is the wine guy who was here to sell wine, which is not true. What I hear want to do is educate people to be more mindful and present in how they think about their intentions of what they put in their body.

Right.

And so if you choose to drink and some people shouldn't drink at all. And it surprises people to hear me say that alcohol is a very dangerous neurotoxin and it ruins millions of lives. And, and it's not for everybody, but for me.

Can you speak for people that don't know what that means? Neurotoxic?

Well, I mean, it contributes to what that means to neurological degrade like Alzheimer's and dementia. Excess alcohol will definitely, definitely lead to Alzheimer's and dementia for sure. That's a.

So you think about the combination of these high starchy sugar diets and then adding alcohol on top of it. We're just found.

Well, we also know. We also know that sugar and alcohol are a nasty partner. And I'll tell you the quickest way to understand that because most people have had this experience. If you drink a shot of tequila, that's a very different experience than drinking a margarita or even if you have three shots, Tequila is a very different experience than having three margaritas. Sugar and alcohol make for particularly nasty partners.

Right.

And so there's not a lot of research on it, but. But anecdotally, you know how you feel when you drink sugar and alcohol together. Same thing true for beer.

Yeah.

Right.

So beer is very high in a very specific type of sugar called maltose sugar. And so. And so it's. Which is what leads to beer guts.

Right.

But so I, you know, I think that I like to approach this idea of. I'll get back to the. To how this came about, but I like to approach this idea of alcohol with something of a more mindful, conscious intention.

Right.

So. And therefore, therefore I want to drink something that's natural and I want to drink something that's added to free and sugar free and lower in alcohol. But back to how this started was I live in Napa Valley, which is the most important wine appellation in North America. I don't drink domestic wine, and we.

Don'T ralph life living there in Napa Valley, by the way. Prettiest place in the whole country.

I think it's a good life. It's a good life. I don't drink the wine from here, but it's a good life. And we can talk about why we don't sell or drink domestic wines in a moment. But for me, I was just on a journey to try to find a healthier way to consume wine, a way that made me feel good and that I was enjoying again. Through all that, initially I thought it was just I needed to lower the alcohol amount because alcohol and wine has been rising over the last 30 years, particularly in domestic wines. And so now it averages nearly 15%. We don't sell anything over 12 and a half and as low as 6%. Most of the wines I drink are between 8 and 11%. So I also drink about a bottle a day. So I intentionally drink lower alcohol so I can enjoy more of it.

Right.

Because I like the taste of wine, but I don't love alcohol. And so alcohol, to a certain extent is therapeutic, Certainly engenders love and community and bonding, and it's a great thing. But once you tip over that certain threshold, and for everybody, that's a different threshold, then we're no longer cognitively connective. We're not being creatively expressive. We're, you know, we're not. We've tipped over to the other side. That is no longer therapeutic, in my.

View, where we think we're a comedian, but we're actually getting sloppy. And now we're right, and we think.

We'Re a lot funnier than we really are. Although wine does make me witty.

Yeah, it makes me witty, too. But I think the old kind of wine really did make me think I was funnier than I am.

Exactly. Exactly. So, anyway, so then I stumbled quite by accident on the natural wine revolution, which six years ago when I started this was. I still wasn't thinking of it as a business, although I needed something to do. It was just. I was super intrigued and just trying to unravel kind of the natural. I discovered natural wine, which at that time was just really getting underway in central France. And we'll talk about what natural wine is in a moment. And so then once I started to understand natural wine, and let me give you the three pillars to what a natural wine is, because it's a very confusing term to consumers. So consumers, I say, oh, I sell and drink natural wine. They're like, well, aren't all wines natural. And no, they're not. Although the wine industry would have you believe that. Because what the wine industry does, they're.

Fermented grapes or they just, they don't get into the details.

What they don't want you to know is the dirty, dark secrets of the wine business. And that is that there is, first of all, rampant industrial and toxic farming throughout the industry. Only about 5% of vineyards are organic. So you got toxic farming. There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use in winemaking. And the reason you don't know about those 76 additives is because the wine industry spends millions of dollars in lobby money to keep contents, labeling and nutritional information off of wine bottles. So they don't want you to know what's really in it. They want you to believe that it's fermented grapes, but very often contains a lot of other things and can oftentimes contain sugar, which they're not required to report either. Now, you and I, probably most of your audience, if I consume something that comes in a package or a bottle, I always look at the contents, label and the nutritional information. Yeah, one of the things I'm looking for, sugar for sure. Sugar is hidden in everything.

It is.

And so. But with wine you don't have that option because it's not required to be labeled and consequently it is not labeled. Not our wines are labeled. Our wines have lab testing on them. Our wines are labeled. But, but your general wine conventional wines don't have any kind of nutritional contents information. So, you know, by the way, everything I'm telling you, including the list of 76 FDA approved additives, are all easily found on a Google search. Yeah, search FDA wine additives and boom, the list comes right up. Some of them are natural, in fairness, but many of them are not.

I was actually surprised when I discovered this because I'm not a big drinker at all. But I do enjoy a glass of wine. And especially as I'm aging, I start to notice, like I just don't feel great after wine. It's like, it's not worth it to me anymore because I drink wine, then I want the foods that I can't have. It messes up my whole next day or two. It's just, it's not a, it's not an enjoyable thing. So until I was learning this, it all makes sense now because I didn't have that experience with your wine at all. And that's what got me digging. Like, what is it that I've actually been drinking? And other wines. I had no idea. No one talks about that. We just lumped in one category.

Yeah, nobody has talked about this. I've told a few million people. The proof is in drinking. When you drink our wines, you feel different. They taste better. They are more alive with living bacteria because they've not been sterilized with sulfur dioxide.

You feel healthy drinking yours is how I can explain it. I feel like it's part of my regular diet. It doesn't feel like I'm putting something bad in me. Okay, I've got to interrupt for just a minute, because if you're like me and you're health conscious and you want to put great things in your body, but you also really enjoy the occasional wine, then Dry Farms is for you. It's a truly conscious wine. No sugar, no sulfides, no yucky feeling the next day, and it doesn't wreck your diet. And side note, it's yummy. It's so good. Full transparency. I've recently partnered with them because I want to get the word out about their wine. I think they are amazing. I love the vision. I love the conscious side of that. And you can get a bottle for just a penny right now. Yep, just a penny. All you got to do, go to dry farmswine.com but make sure you do the forward slash after Natalie Jill. So dryfarms wine.com Natalie Jill. And you can get a bottle for a penny. I can't wait to hear what you think of it.

It's a completely different experience, particularly for women. So women are particularly sensitive to biogenetic amine, tyramine, and histamine. And so you don't have to be allergic to them to be sensitive to them. So this is the reason that many women say that they can't drink red wine now. They believe it's sulfites, but that's not true. So sulfites are naturally occurring in all wines. They're naturally occurring in anything that's fermented, and they're naturally occurring in many foods. Sulfites are not the enemy, usually. Now, if you have an excessive amount of sulfur dioxide that's been added to the wine to sterilize it as an additive, that's a different story. But generally speaking, when women say, you know, I can't drink red wine, it makes me splotchy. It makes. I get. I get stuffy. I get, you know, I get sensitivity in my frontal lobe. I get tightness here. It's like most of this is a. Is either tyramine or histamine. And, and these are exaggerated in commercial wines because of the way they're made, because the extractions that they're using.

Why does everyone believe it's a sulfate? That mean. I hear that all the time it's.

A sulfate because it's on the bottle, you know, because it says this contains sulfites. People just think it's sulfites, but that's not true. In fact, actually, sulfites are higher in white wines than they are red. And you almost always hear this problem with women, that I can drink white, but I can't drink red. So it's nothing to do with sulfites in most cases.

Yeah.

If you have a sulfite allergy, you'll be walking around with an EpiPen.

Right.

I mean, it's interesting that we've gone, yeah, we've just met. We just looked at one small thing and just said, but what's happening is they eliminate the white wine. So they don't the red wine. I'm sorry. And then that way they don't have that experience. They just keep that story going.

Right.

But it's, it's that, that's not the case. And it's not the case for our red wines either, because of the way that they're made. They're. They're not extracted in this way that commercial wines are. And when I say extracted red wines and extraction of a red wine means the length of time that the wine, the juice and the skins and seeds are in contact. What's all that mean? Well, when you make white wine, you squeeze, you press the juice from the skins, the juice runs into a tank and it ferments there. You throw the skins away. In a red wine, you press the juice from the berries, it goes into a tank, and then you take the remaining skin, stems and seeds and you add that into the tank. That's how red wine gets its color. So red wine gets its color and tannin structure from the seeds and the skin.

Right.

So macerations or extractions are when you leave the skin, seeds and stems in contact with the juice for a very long time. Now, why did they do this? They do it because it creates a darker wine. The longer the red wine soaks and macerates on skins, the darker the color the wine will be. Now, why do they do that? Because Americans believe it's a myth. But Americans believe that the darker a red wine is, the better quality it is, the better the wine is. That's not true. But that's just a common held myth.

I thought the same thing. So I didn't know that either.

Well, that leads to another problem. That leads to the problem of color agents. So because Americans have this belief, commercial winemakers use color agents to make the wine darker.

Wow. Yeah.

That's an additive that's not disclosed on the label. Of course, they used color agents, body enhancers. Sugar.

Right.

Sugar. To give wine mouth fill. They don't add sugar. I'll tell you how sugar gets in wine and answer them. One of the most common questions we get, which is, how are your wine sugar free? Aren't there sugar in grape juice? There is, and this is also how sugar gets into wine. And winemakers want sugar in wine because again, it leads to a finish, a long finish, that sugar, a mouthfeel. Sugar gives wine body and mouthfeel. So here's how. Here's how sugar gets into wine. When you make wine, you inoculate or you have yeast in the juice. Once the yeast activates, the yeast starts to eat the sugar because the grape juice is in fact filled with sugar, but the yeast eats it. And the byproduct of the yeast eating the sugar, like little Pac man, just like these little organisms that are eating up the sugar, that's their food. That's what the yeast lives on, they emit. The byproduct of the yeast is ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. So that's how you make wine. Now, how does it become sugar free? If the winemaker allows the wine to fully ferment, that means allows the yeast to eat all of the available sugar, then the. The wine will become sugar free and the yeast will die because there's no food source for them. But what's happening in commercial wines and how you get sugar in wine, it's not added to wine sugar. It's illegal to add sugar to wine, but how it gets in wine is that the winemaker uses sulfur dioxide to kill the yeast in the fermentation process prior to it fully fermenting, leaving behind a fructose and some glutose. So leaving behind sugar in the wine, known as RS or residual sugar. So you see, when you make wine, there's this little glass instrument that, that rest on the side of the tank, and you can see at any given time exactly how much sugar is left in the juice.

Right?

And so if you want sugar left in your wine, then you take sulfur dioxide, you pour it into the. You pour it into the tank, and it kills the yeast, therefore stopping the fermentation, or what's called breaking the fermentation. So that's how Sugar actually gets in the wine. But let me come back because we never really defined what natural wine means.

Yeah, I wanted to hear that because you mentioned there's three things that sort of define it.

There are three pillars to a natural wine. Natural wine is also very rare. Less than 1/10 of 1% of all wines in the world are natural. And we're the largest buyer and seller of natural wines in the world. So natural wine, one is always organically or biodynamically farmed. Biodynamic farming, for those who don't know, is a prescriptive, advanced form of organic farming. And its central pillar is that it. It is farming. In addition to being organic, it's also farmed in coordination with lunar cycles, the moon and the tide.

I've never heard of this. So this is interesting. Are there farming for food that does this too?

Yes. Yeah, there is biodynamic farming across. It's most famously known in wine. But there are other food sources that also employ biodynamic farming. It was invented in 1925 by a scientist called Rudolph Steiner, and it's widely practiced in the natural wine world, but not exclusive. So not all natural wines are biodynamic, but they're at least organic.

Now, not to get too far off topic, because I know there's three things, but can you. I want to understand a little bit more about biodynamic farming. Like what's different in biodynamic farming than regular organic farming and then what's with coordinating it with the lunar cycle?

Well, there are two primary distinctions between organic and biodynamic and biodynamic farming. They apply what are called preparations. They're sprays that they make from natural elements from the earth. Like one is a mixture of quartz, of a quartz stone that's ground up into a very fine powder, and then they mix that with water and they spray it onto the vines. There's another preparation that's made from cow manure that is buried at certain designations on the corners of the vineyards in cow horns. And it seasons in the earth. And then they mix that up and spray it. So there's a number of preparations that are sprayed onto the vines to promote health in the, in the vine.

And then second of all, the lunar thing is the lunar.

The lunar cycle is that they, they trim. So they trim the vines based on lunar cycles, and then they harvest under the moonlight based on, based on, based on lunar cycles. And each farm is a little bit different how they apply this, but that's, that's, that's the basic premise.

Okay, so I know people listening are like what we've heard. Charge your crystals in the lunar sun.

Exactly.

We know that women's cycles can be tied to. Okay, so I don't fully understand it either, but apparently it works. So I don't know.

Here's our point of view on biodynamic farming. So does it work? Nobody really knows. But here's what we do know. I can tell you that I typically prefer wines that are biodynamically farmed. They seem to taste better. But here's the thing. You know, I always attributed it to this since there's no definitive science around it. If someone is that fanatical, right. About how they farm their land and how they produce their fruit. If they're that fanatical because it's quite extensive, these processes and preparations and farming practices that are just dedicated to biodynamic. If that. If they're that fanatical about farming, they're going to be fanatical about everything.

That's exactly what I was just thinking. And I was thinking about, I mean, just energy, energetically. Like, think about when you make a meal with love versus you're making a meal just because you're annoyed you're making it. Like, it's just. I believe there's an energy to that. So someone that's putting that much care that's coming through, there's no question there's.

An energy to it. Let me give you another example of that energy that will be apparent to everyone. If you go into whole foods and you buy organic vegetables. That's what I call kind of agra. Organic.

Right.

If you go to the farmer's market and you buy a vegetable that's grown from a small family farm, you're going to see how vivid and how beautiful. You just want to take a picture of it. It's so beautiful. The vegetables are so amazingly vibrant.

Yeah, right.

Nothing in your grocery store, even if it's organic, ever looks like that.

Right?

That's because that's grown with love and a passion and a commitment and that just. Just the love of a living soil.

I love that I can get behind that. The moon thing might take me a while, but the other part of the energetically, I fully get. I fully get that. What are the other two things you mentioned? There's three things.

So it's organic or biodynamic. Number two, this one's a little bit more complicated because people won't know anything about it. But number two, natural wines are always fermented. With wild indigenous native yeast. Now what does that mean? Well, on the skin of every great berry at the time of harvest anywhere in the world, there is yeast on the skin of the berry. That yeast collects naturally in the air through the vineyard. It's a wild yeast. It's a white waxy film. You can scrape it off with your fingernail. It's very thin, but it's a white waxy film. That's actually yeast. And so everything you need to make a natural wine is already contained in and own the grape. Well, commercial wines do not use these native yeast because they're difficult and temperamental to work with. You can't make wine in very large volumes with them because again, they're temperamental and difficult to work with. They require coddling and you have to make kind of small batches of them.

Right.

So what commercial winemakers use are genetically modified lab grown yeast. Now, we don't know what any of that means from a health point of view. I just don't like the idea.

Right.

And so these lab grown yeast are modified to be sturdy. You can make wine in very large volumes. Don't require a lot of attention. They'll also withstand. They've also been modified to withstand a higher alcohol environment. So native yeast are more fragile. They'll die as the alcohol level gets high. And then number three, you can buy these yeast and flavor profiles. Well, what's that mean? Well, you probably know some people who make sourdough bread, right. And so that was very popular, particularly during the pandemic. Well, the mother, the yeast of a bread has this, you know, a very significant impact on the character of the flavor.

Right.

It's reason some people sourdough is just better than others and just has to do with their yeast and also their flour. But, but, but yeast imparts flavor profiles. So in these modified commercial yeast you can buy flavor profiles. Let's say that you, you have a terrible cheap industrial grape from Central Valley in California and you want it to taste like it's from the Mediterranean or the coast of Italy. They have a yeast for that.

Right.

So it imparts certain flavor profiles. Natural wines are always fermented with this wild indigenous native yeast, never using these modified commercial yeast. And then number three, natural wines are additive free. We talked about the 76 additives approved by the FDA and the use in winemaking. Natural wines don't contain these additives. And so, and as a, as a result, natural wines are also still living. And what I mean by that is that, see wine has back is filled with bacteria, very positive bacteria. In fact, Dr. David Perlmutter, new York Times best selling author who has written a number of books about the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, has written two or three times about our living wines. Because the bacteria that's still alive in a natural wine is beneficial to the gut microbiome. That is not true for commercial wines because these wines have been sterilized. They've been sterilized with sulfur dioxide for what we call it kills the wine, kills everything beneficial and living inside of it, including these bacteria.

Okay.

But it also, it McDonald izes the wine. And what I mean by that is it makes every single bottle taste the same. You get no bottle to bottle variation, you get long shelf life.

I've never heard that.

Yeah, you get long shelf life, you know. And so where natural wines are not preserved and sterilized, therefore, natural wines are generally meant to be drank in the first two or three years. They're not something you lay.

You're not aging them forever and ever.

No, no, because they're not, they're not preserved in that way. And the bacterias will deteriorate. They're not preserved to be laid down for 20 years.

Got it?

Now, some will age longer than others, but for people who drink natural wine, they don't care about aging. You know, they're not trying to age wine. 90% of all wines drank within 24 hours of purchase in the first place.

Right.

So it's, you know, aging wine is a concept that doesn't apply to almost everyone. Right? So, so this freshness and you know, that's one of the things when you eat the way we do and then you live the lifestyle we do, then you appreciate freshness. And as you know from drinking our wines, they are lighter and fresher.

Right.

And they're more conducive to drinking with the type of diet that we consume.

Right.

Which is lighter, fresher, more real. These are honest, real wines that haven't been altered. It's the way wine was made a thousand years ago or even a hundred years ago. Now, there's no international certification for natural wine. Now dry farm wines, my company does have a seal and certification, but ours goes way beyond just being natural. So natural is the foundation. So it's organic. It is fermented, wild native yeast. It's added to free. But then we have a number of criteria over and above just being natural. We require the wine to be sugar free free.

Okay.

And we lab test it. We lab test every wine that we sell and the Reason we lab test it is because only the only way to know for sure whether there's sugar in wine is to test for it.

Because even the taste on the bottles it says less than 1%. Is that correct?

So is that what it says is less than 1 gram per liter.

Got it. Okay.

And a gram of sugar in a liter. Now wine bottle was 3/4 of a liter. 750 milliliters. So less than 1 gram per liter by law and statistically is sugar free.

Makes sense.

Now to give you an idea of how prevalent sugar is in wine, we lab tested the top 20 best selling wines in the United States last year. And of the top 20 best selling wines, only two of them met our criteria for sure. Wow. So the other 18 failed on sugar as we view it.

Wow.

And so that's, you know when. So we're sugar free. We're also lower in alcohol, so we don't sell anything over 12 and a half percent. We also measure sulfites to make sure that there's not been the addition of this sterilization and preservative of sulfur dioxide.

Right.

We do not allow more than 70 parts per million. That's a measurement scale that natural. Our Average wine has 39 parts per million of sulfite. It can't. Sulfites can be naturally occurring. Up to 70 parts per million. We rarely see it. The US legal limit is 350 parts per million. But again we restrict anything at 70 to ensure that no one has used the sterilization process.

So wine can fully be healthy and add so many benefits if it's this type of wine, if it's processed this way. And that's why it's not affecting your ketogenic diet. It's not affecting your intermittent fasting. It's not affecting any of that. Is what if I'm hearing correctly.

Yeah. I mean it doesn't take me out of ketosis. Plus I enjoy it, you know, it's, it's, it's delicious. And I drink about a bottle a day. But again, I'm drinking much. You know, I'm drinking 10 or 11% alcohol most days, sometimes lower. We have wines down as low as 6%.

So at the beginning of this, when we started recording, I, you had said, I never intentionally got into the wine business. How did this go from an interest of yours to okay, I'm onto something, this is a business. And going to one of the fastest growing private companies right now.

Yeah. So how that happened was that we, I started sharing these wines as I discovered Them and started doing lab testing on them and quantifying them and thinking about analogy, which is the science of winemaking. And I started sharing them with other biohacker athletic friends of mine. They're like, oh, wow, this is great. You feel great. I mean, this is like. This is just so much better. I had stopped drinking wine. Like, where do you get this? I'm like, where? You can't. So I called Dave Asprey of Bulletproof Coffee, and who at the time was hosting the world's kind of preeminent biohacking conference called the Bulletproof Conference, which is again, now it's called Upgraded Lab. The next conference is in Orlando in a couple of months. But. But. So this was six years ago. So I called Dave Asprey and was like, listen, you know, he doesn't. Dave doesn't really drink much. He's not super high on alcohol, but introduced the product to him and his team. And the person who ran the conference was actually a big wine drinker. It was a woman. And so I introduced her to it, and she was like, oh, my God, this is like, this is incredible. And so you need to be the official wine for Bulletproof. We've never had an alcohol. And so you need to be the official wine. So in that year, in 2015, we became the official wine for Bulletproof. At that conference, I met Mark Sisson, who was there as an attendee, and maybe he was speaking, but so I met Mark and then. Who was. Who had previously been a big wine drinker but had stopped drinking wine. And so Mark invited me to his house, and I did a wine tasting for him and left a bunch of wine behind. And about a week later, he emailed me. He's like, oh, my God, I'm a believer. This is, like, totally works. Like, I was dubious. I was skeptical. I didn't think this was going to make a difference, but this is huge. And so then I was a guest on Dave Asri's Bulletproof Radio, and then I was a guest on Mark Sisson's Primal Kitchen or Primal Blueprint. And so it just started from there, you know, became a business. Because I love that story.

I love that journey, because I think sometimes the best businesses come out of a conscious choice and out of solving a problem. So you were basically solving a problem for yourself. You were sharing it with others. You weren't saying, I want to figure out how to form a company to make lots of money. That's not where you were starting with. You were starting with, there's a problem That I have. I'm into biohacking, healthy eating, all these things. I like wine. This isn't working. You did that for yourself. You shared it. You realized that a lot of people in the health space have that same question or problem. And I love that story. It's such a great way to form a business.

Yeah. It turns out that it worked out all right, and now we help, you know, lots of people live a healthier life through drinking wine, which was just.

Which. Never thought probably you would tie those words together at one point.

I didn't. You know, I lived in Napa. Didn't even occur to me. You know, sort of what was in wine. Nobody really talks about it. Not even. Not even here, where wine is the predominant industry. But nobody talks about additives in wine. Even if you talk to people who work in tasting rooms or people in the wine industry, they don't know anything about them. I mean, we'll have people apply to work with us that live locally and might work in tasting rooms or even in wineries. They don't even know anything about it.

So good. Now, I'm not a huge wine drinker, but as I said, I enjoy it. And I'm totally sold on dry farms now. Like, I. It's so good. It's so good. I'm not at a bottle a day. That's. Not that it's not in my near future, but I really do enjoy it. And for those of you listening that want to try it, by the way, they. There is a promotion if you go to dry farmswine.com forward slash, Natalie Jill. Make sure you do. Natalie Jill. Because you can actually get a bottle for a penny. There's a promotion there, so I want you to try it. My favorite right now is the sparkling. I love the sparkling. That's. Yeah, those are my favorite. And I love. I love. Actually, everyone I've tried is great. Your rose. But the sparkling is my favorite.

Nice. Yeah. We have white, red, orange, and orange. Wine is.

I haven't tried that one yet.

It's not made from oranges. But orange wine is when white wine experiences some skin contact, like red.

Okay.

And it creates an amber color to the wine, but it does have a certain complexity and structure that most white wines don't have. They're quite rare, but we have a few of those. And so rose, sparkling.

So good.

Everything. And, you know, they're all from these. We work with about 800 tiny, small family farms around the world. I love that most of them are in Europe. We have five producers in South Africa and five growers in Chile and Uruguay. But the majority, the majority are spread across Europe and they're just like these.

So you also created an awesome vehicle for all of these small growers that were really into it. You're actually helping so many people because you're not only helping the health community with this, but you're helping all of those.

The small growers, farmers who believe in living soils and who believe in. It's a lifestyle for them. There's nobody getting rich in natural wine there. You can't make it in large enough volumes to scale it. So I mean, these are just like farmers who care about the future of their farm for their children. They care about living soils. They care about, you know, we also don't allow irrigation. Name of the company's dry farm wines. That means that all wines are dry farmed. Can't use irrigation. Saving just on the 800 farms we work with, it saves 16 billion gallons of water a year by not watering grapevines.

16 billion.

Yeah. So anyway, so it's, you know, there's, there's, there are. And all these facts are on our web pages on our website as well. So. But yeah, it's just, you know, it's a real, it's a real pleasure. I'm leaving for Italy in about 10.

Days and no bread and pasta while you're in Italy?

No, no, no.

Oh my gosh.

Vegetables and olive oil.

That takes some serious willpower there.

I just don't feel good when I eat it.

No, I'm the same way. I'm sometimes I'm great. I'm actually celiac, so I'm grateful. I can't have traditional bread or pasta. I can't have that anyway. But it doesn't stop me from wanting the gluten free stuff, which is even worse sometimes. It's even higher glycemic.

So I don't, I don't eat any of it.

Yeah, I can't, I don't eat the.

Fake stuff or the real stuff. But again, if I were going to eat anything, I'd eat the real thing. Yeah, yeah, I just, I'm not into fake food.

Yeah, I'm not either. I'm not either.

Like, like even. I don't do, I don't do artificial sweeteners. If, you know, if I want something sweet, I'll just eat sugar.

Yeah, you want the real thing?

Yeah, I just don't like the taste of them.

Yep. Well, thank you so much, Todd, for being here today. This is so helpful. Everyone run out and try the wine. It's so good. Try the sparkling. That's my favorite.

Great.

Thanks for having me today. It was a lot of fun.

Thanks Todd. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen in as my guest today. If you found this episode valuable please share it with friends and on social media. I don't advertise this show so I rely on word of mouth and reviews to get it out in the world. The biggest thank you that you can give me is leaving me a review and a nice one. I hope. By the way this is how others find these episodes. If you do leave me a review, be sure to Message me@supportataliejofitness.com with a screenshot of your review because I would love to send you a free digital download of my DSR journal as a thank you. And please don't forget to connect with me on social media at Natalie Jill Fit on Instagram and Facebook.

Sam.