Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 317 - Joel Greene

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

Joel Greene is one of the smartest guests we've ever had on. He is also the Founder and CEO of the VEEP Nutrition System, the world’s first commercially available program based on targeting gut communities to effect biomarkers. Joel is a featured author, speaker, and guest in Muscle and Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness Digital Magazine, CBS Online, and Superhuman Radio. His system has also been featured on Dr. Phil. Today, at 53, on 1 workout a week, eating whatever, whenever, with no drugs, sarms, prohormones, or ergogenic aids ever, he is the world leader in hacking the body. Follow Joel on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/realjoelgreene/?hl=en Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT10" at checkout for $10 off $40 or more! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Andrew, you got ripped up for Shred Again. He lost like 20 pounds. What are you eating exactly? Yeah, well, it actually starts off with no eating, 16-hour fast, but then like one to two chicken meals while I'm here at work. And then by the time I get home, it's go time. I need something awesome to look forward to. And there's nothing better than Piedmontese Flatiron Steaks.

It has about 90 grams of protein for that whole steak, only 8 grams of fat, which fits perfectly because I'm more of a higher carb-ish, low fat type of guy. So it fits perfectly with my macros. How do they pack all that protein in there? I would wager there is something better. They're ribeyes. It's like half the fat of a normal ribeye, still juicy, still tender, still just oh so good.

Yeah, you can't go wrong. Yeah, I don't know what sorcery they're pulling over there at Piedmontese Steaks, but you guys got to head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E dot com at checkout. Enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Here, God's going to be holding your book. Oh, all right. Sounds good to me.

He's probably co-author. Probably. He may have helped in some way. Oh, there right. Sounds good to me. He's probably co-author. Probably. He may have helped in some way. Oh, there it is. Not physically, but probably spiritually he probably assisted. See if John Cena wants to be part of the book, too. There we go. We got everybody all set up.

Oh, my gosh. That would be amazing. I would geek out completely. Are you a wrestling fan? You used to like some wrestling? When I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, who wasn't? Yeah, right. And I know some, I know a couple like professional wrestlers. Chavo Guerrero. Oh, yeah. You know him? Yeah, absolutely. Super nice guy.

Super nice guy. Yeah. I've hung out with him and he tells me stories. And I just, I just like, I just like his stories. Oh, God. Yeah. Those old, those old school wrestling stories are the best. War stories. Yeah. They're crazy. They're like, yeah. Those old school wrestling stories are the best. War stories.

Yeah, they're crazy. And I'll just go through the list. I'm like, hey, man, what about Roddy Roddy Piper? Is he like really crazy? He's like, yeah, he's crazy. That's so funny. If you get around somebody like that, you're trying not to be a fan. Like you're trying not to be, you know, they call it a mark, a wrestling mark.

You're trying not to be a mark, but you can't help it. I can't. Yeah, you can't help it. You're like, oh, dude, what about the Iron Sheik, man? Is he really pissed off all the time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the deal with him? Yeah, no, it's true.

Yeah, you can't help it. What you doing here in NorCal? It's great that we had you stop by. We've been talking about getting you on the podcast again, so it's great to have you here again. What brings you out to the NorCal region? A little business, a little family business, and a little bit of business business. But I mentioned before the show I have a brother who has Down syndrome, and he's kind of been up and down with some things.

And I brought him down to my home in Southern Cal a few months ago. And he had Parkinson's onset. And I just threw, like I said, I threw the kitchen sink at him. And like literally was miraculous. Within like seven days, he went from shaking to asymptomatic. He went from not being able to walk like 20 yards to walking six flights of stairs every day and walking a half mile. And probably the biggest thing was his mood. Like in his sort of, you know, his brain and metabolic function in his brain went from going into these states of being kind of catatonic to almost 100% normal in terms of his personality.

I even filmed part of it. Yeah, why not monetize this, right? No, I just mean... I'm just kidding. Yeah, you're making money on your... Wow, dude. No, I took him to... Testimony.

You want to show other people what can be done through nutrition, right? Man, yeah, i think so it's it's um you gotta be careful about that kind of thing but for me it's just more personal it was just more about you know i'm gonna do whatever i can to help him and so um so he was really good and and he's kind of relapsed a little bit, so I'm going to work on him again. Yeah. So it was dietary changes and just some exercise that assisted? It was a host of things. So the Parkinson's symptoms are very much to do with gut dysbiosis where B vitamin production declines. And at the same time, serum vitamin D is just in the toilet. So if you can fix those two things,

what I found is that a lot of the symptoms went away. I mean, like actually it went 100% away. And you find that as a subset of aging in general. So what you find in general is as we get older, our B vitamin production just goes down. It's going down because Bifidobacteria is going down in the gut. And, and that's one of the things that Bifidobacteria does is it leads to B vitamin production. And, um, so just correcting that was a big deal. And the other thing is testosterone, just getting him to sleep more and getting, getting him to make testosterone while he's

sleeping. So he went from sleeping like maybe four hours tonight to 12 to 16. Wow. And that was huge. Was he receptive to it? Like, was he like game for it? Like, yeah, I would love, like to feel better. Wasn't on the list as an option. Yeah.

Like you're, yeah, you're making this, take that, take that. You know, I was on him like every, every hour and a half, you know, like, yeah. Combat Sports Academy is a uh gym that my friend uh jesse burdick works out he runs like a power lifting program and they have they have crossfit they have mma um really really cool gym uh but what they also have is they have a guy there that trains uh many people that are down that are down syndrome individuals as well as I think autism and some other things. The changes and the advancements that people are having, he doesn't really

try to do too much dietary intervention because he just realizes what an uphill battle that would be and it's hard with the caretakers and people that care for these people, their parents a lot of times. It's hard to get them on board with, you know, you got to kind of be mean to your 11-year-old kid that has Down syndrome. You can't feed him mac and cheese anymore. You got to kind of like make him eat this other stuff. But there has been a few individuals there that have progressed a lot faster than the other ones when there was some dietary intervention. How important is a dietary intervention for a lot of Americans that are just suffering from different ailments?

I think maybe the general public isn't even aware of how bad metabolic disorders can kind of bleed into a lot of other things and really not only just be ailments and be kind of nicks and things you're dinged up with, but they can also be affecting disease really, really profoundly. How much of an impact does your food have on this sort of stuff? I would, just from my own personal experience, I would venture to say that, you know, percent-wise, it could be quite significant to 100%. And it just depends on what you want to look at. But what I think is starting to happen in the medical community is a little bit more awareness that gut-related issues, particularly due to species and different taxa in the gut, mediate a lot of things.

And so the growing awareness of that is kind of opening the doors to accept that a lot of things that are sort of disease-ified can be powerfully ameliorated, at least the symptoms ameliorated through very specific protocols of diet and, and different inputs of food and things like that. So yeah, I, I, I'm, I'm in the camp of like, you can do a heck of a lot more than you think you can. So. And then when it comes to like the gut microbiome, we hear people talking about that so much do we need to really uh be all that obsessed with that do we need to continue to like study that a ton or do we need to wait for more research or do you just eat better no i talk about that in my book um there's a lot of myths that have grown up about the gut a bunch there's six big ones you know uh diversity and a bunch of other

ones but but the net of the gut really is that you need two bacteria and you need to focus on two bacteria. The first one is bifidobacteria. And then the next one is acromancia mucinilfa. Those are the two that you need to focus on. And if you focus on those two, you'll get diversity in the gut and you'll get the right kind of diversity in the gut. And you really don't need to worry about much else. And feeding those two is not that hard. It really, once you understand how to do it,

it's not that difficult to do. And that's really the, that's kind of the gist of it. Like if I was going to boil the gut down a couple of things, it's acromantia and bifidobacteria. And it's easy to prove. You can have diversity. And if you don't have those two bacteria in the gut, you're going to be sick, guaranteed. Conversely, if you just focus on those two bacteria, you're going to be healthy.

And not only are you going to be healthy, you're probably going to live longer, and you're probably going to be much less of a risk for a number of disease states. In terms of those two, would that mainly be supplementation or is it nutritional protocol? Yeah. Nutritional protocols. How would one, I mean, I know you probably talk about it in the book, but if the viewers could understand, how can they attack that today? Yeah. So, um, keyword is order of operations. Um, you, things go wrong in a specific order. And one of the, one of the reasons I wrote the book, um, was there's so much confusion right now about what to do. And, you know, everybody I talked to so confused. Um, and one of the reasons they're confused is because they don't have a framework. They don't have an order of operations based on what's really true about the body.

So in the case of your, these, these two specific bacteria, the first thing you... Let me just walk through the order of operations. The first thing you need to go after is acromantia. Okay, very first thing you need to do. And what you need to understand is that there's two ways that you can replete acromantia. The first way you can replete acromantia is through fasting. And it has to do with a concept I put forth in the book called bacterial guilds so what people are just starting to grab onto is the idea of substrates the idea that very specific foods can feed specific bacteria okay that's kind of level one but the the next level, the common level beyond that, is the idea of what are called guilds. And guilds are different bacteria, but what they have in common is the way they get nitrogen or the way they get carbon.

So you can have completely different species, and they have something in common. It's the way they get nitrogen. So in the body, nitrogen, you can get it through the diet. Okay. So you can get it through high protein diets, for example, or if you cease protein, then the body will secrete it internally. And when the body secretes nitrogen internally, that seems to feed acromantia what it needs. So this is one of the reasons that you'll see a little bit of a bump when you, when you fast, a little bit of an improvement in gut health is that you're making nitrogen internally now. So the big shift, the big key to understand is that individual foods feed individual species.

Okay. Macros feed guilds. So macros feed entire guilds of bacteria. And there's been some really interesting research on this when you look at like um like going sort of on the all protein camp there's there's there's pros and there's cons in my book i i call it the map of guilt and i list a little map and kind of show you the pros and cons pretty much a pro and con of every yeah diet right and that's why like i've worked with you before and you gave me a lot of great advice and you had me shifting kind of in and out of different things yeah right there's so there's there's going to be, it's just like lifting,

right. It's a lot of great benefit to bodybuilding, but maybe you're missing out on a strength component. A lot of great attributes can be acquired through powerlifting, but maybe you're missing out on some fitness or conditioning. Right. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. I want to finish answering your question there, but I'm guilty of rambling a lot. So I'm trying to be a little more succinct. Yeah. So one chapter in the book that I devoted a lot to was the idea of balance as the highest truth of health. And that I go and I just list all these disease states.

And every single one lists the word lack of homeostasis. And if you just substitute balance for that, what you get is basically every disease you can think of as an imbalance. So imbalance is disease. Balance is health. And so with this, there's the idea of what's called chronobiology,

which is that we really have to factor in timing. So we have to factor in days, weeks, and seasons. And there's truth to all that. There's a whole bunch we could talk about diurnal rhythm, but there's also weekly rhythms, and then there's seasonal rhythms. So there's just sort of an easy-to-buy-into idea that historically we had seasons. You know, we had seasons of plenty. We had seasons of lack. We had seasons of high protein.

We had seasons of having to eat grains because there wasn't any protein because all the animals were gone. And so once you get this idea of seasons, it's actually very freeing because you can have a season of just eating all meat. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But then you can have a season of, you know, cycling off that and doing other things. And so through seasons, we get balance. And that is kind of the highest truth of health. And what we'll do is a little bit later, we'll translate that mechanistically into how it works in the body.

So to answer your question, yeah. And if we, so if we, you know, I know there's some people listening that are probably enjoying some of the science. And there's some people that are going, I don't, I'm starting to really get lost right away. are probably enjoying some of the science and there's some people that are going, I don't, I'm starting to really get lost right away. Um, if we,

if we have a, a healthy diet, which I'll just say would be, uh, eating things that are natural, um, to this earth as natural as we can get them, I guess,

uh, fruits and vegetables and, um, uh, meat. And I don't know if there would be much more else in there, but if we stuck to kind of eating some of that stuff uh would we be on the right track to being healthy okay we just didn't eat

like processed stuff um yes and no um which is shocking to a lot of people but uh yes in that um modern food has a very specific effect on your body's natural inhibitory controls on eating. Modern food, what happens in modern food is when you push the energy density of food beyond a certain level, it breaks the body's controls over both satiety and hunger. That's a great way of saying it. I like that a lot. So modern food has a very special property. It breaks the body's eating controls. So there's that. The other side of that is that there's no getting away from it for most people. There just isn't. And one of the things I talk a lot about in my book is that the modern era of fitness is mimicking seasons of famine and feasting.

We're just accidentally mimicking famine and feasting. And so what happens is when you get done with the get in shape phase, i.e. the famine phase, then comes the feasting phase. We just don't call it that, you know, we just call it, oh, I'm off track. I got to get back on track. In other words, I got to go back into my famine. Okay. So what we're doing over time is we're cycling in famine and feasting. So rather than, um, I put forth something that's worked for me and, um, it's, it's, it's worked for a lot of people that I've put it forth to is that it's much more important to understand how to offset the effects of modern food than it is to completely avoid it. Because most people, like if you really, really listen to what they're actually doing, you know, like their keto Monday through Friday and then Saturday and Friday night is kind of a break. That's kind of what's going on.

So you need to be able to offset that. That's kind of the long answer to that. Makes sense. That's 600 words less than my standard long-winded answer. You were mentioning earlier the impact of walking. You said, you know, 22 minutes of walking can kind of help, you know, rid you of this. What are the impacts of even just some gradual exercise

such as walking? Life-changing, life-altering, just from the perspective of in the modern era of fitness, we have conflated the idea of working out with daily exertion. They're not the same. Yeah, going in and busting your ass for two hours straight, right? No, they're not the same. They're not the same. your ass for two hours straight, right? Yeah. No, they're not the same. They're not the same. If you look at your historical analogs of what did people always do, you know, you were just kind of exerting yourself every day, you know, like, uh, go get some water. That's the river's

a mile away. Go get some water. Okay. Um, make some butter, you know, uh, chop some wood. So daily continuous exertion was this thing that people just did. And it doesn't really take a lot of time to do that. It doesn't take that much. But the key is that you're doing it every single day, every single day. And so it's very easy to do daily exertion. Over time, what I've witnessed is that a lot of people have a very hard time

maintaining workouts year in and year out across the seasons of life. But you can exert every day. And even people that love working out. And maintaining workouts year in and year out across the seasons of life. But you can exert every day. And even people that love working out. Yeah, even people that love working out, they struggle. We see it all the time. Like, oh, man, I've been out of sorts for a little while. I've been out of the gym for two weeks, three weeks, three months.

Yep, yep, 100%. Yeah, that is a massive driver of the problem. I'm trying to find an easy way to stop saying, oh, in my book. That's okay. Refer to it as much as you want. People should grab a hold of it. It's a lot of great information. I use this analogy in the book of a car.

So if you were locked into one car for your entire lifetime and you had to pick one, you'd factor in a lot of things. You'd think, I might sometimes have to go off-road. Sometimes I want to go to the track. Sometimes I want to pull up to a nice hotel. You'd factor a lot of things in the car. What you wouldn't do is park the car for six months and not start it and then take it to the track and race the crap out of it and then park it for six months and then take it to the track because both of those things are going to just destroy the car really fast um the best thing you could do would be to your analogy of walking every day would be to just drive the car every day the car will last much longer doing it that way

and what the modern era has done is replicated the park the car and then take the car to the track and that's what a lot of people do over time you know you hear this i'm out of it and i gotta get back on track and then when they get back on track they go hard they do crossfit they do a lot of things they get injured then they're out and then they're in and they're out and they just play the cycle out and that cycle is really destructive long term now along with that uh you know keeping constant active like activity every single day you mentioned sleep with your brother and we talk a lot or we've talked a lot about sleep on this podcast not sleeping with his brother but not and yeah as it pertains to his brother yeah commas verbiage all of this yes strange comments

by more uh yeah how you um you know you you helped us sleep now you know there's been a lot of like lot of like books, Matthew Walker and Sean Stevenson, they've made books on sleep. But I anticipate that you probably have a different view on how to optimize individual sleep. Because a lot of people, you know, getting sun outside, a lot of things, there's probably more that you can do to optimize your sleep. So what kind of steps can people take simple steps or even the more advanced things that you would go towards to get better sleep each night? Uh, let me run through a list of things. So, um, uh, no particular order here. One would be, and I have a chapter on this in my book where I talk about sort of, um, what I call peak human sleep and optimizing that. Um, I would say the first thing is try to, thing is try to mimic the ancestral sleep pattern, which is basically kind of in bed by around nine or so and up like at five or six. And that pattern seems to be associated with abundant energy. Okay.

You know, and so just give it a try. That would be sort of one thing. And there's a, let's see if I can pull it up here. There's actually a graph in here that talks – that compares ancestral sleep to modern sleep because there's been some research on communities. I don't know if you guys can see this. But there's been some research on communities like the Hazda and other ones. And we can kind of see the differences between the two. And they're things like, so they sleep on hard surfaces,

we sleep on comfortable surfaces, they wake up a bunch of times during the night, but they go right back to sleep. We wake up and don't go back to sleep. And so there's all these sort of interesting differences. There's a lot of stuff in your cupboard to eat. That's why we stay awake, right? Yeah.

Well, that brings us to the next thing, which is controlling food cycles. So there's been a lot of debate about what exerts more control over sleep. Is it light and dark cycles or is it food? What is it? And so the easy concept to get is that light and dark cycles are controlled in the brain by the archaea nucleus. But light and dark cycles are controlled in the brain by the archaea nucleus. Sleep cycles controlled by the organs are controlled by inputs like food. Yeah.

The winner is the organs. Okay. The organs are the winner. And it's easy to prove. If you want to prove it to yourself, just eat 6,000 calories after we're done today. Yeah. And then try and stay awake. Just go to Chirioscura, knock it out, and try and stay awake. Very tough. Yeah. And then try and stay awake. Just go to Churri Oscura, knock it out and try and stay awake. Very, very tough. Yeah. Conversely, um, there's, there's actually a meal sequence in

there I can give you to induce starvation and try and sleep, try and sleep when you're starving. It's really hard. Oh yeah. And like whenever, if I ever do a prong fast, it's hard to sleep. If I try to do it the second day after like 36 hours or whatever, I can't sleep. I have to eat something or else I'm not going to fall asleep. Right. So that gets us to the next thing is food patterns and food cycles. So controlling inputs of food is one of the easiest and most effective things you can do to induce sleep. So there's some new research now about small inputs of food at night um to create sleep onset and so the example i use in

the book is a grilled cheese sandwich like our friend the grilled cheese yeah uh so very small inputs at night of things like a grilled cheese sandwich will help sleep onset why is why is like that together specific like why why that works because it's delicious it's like the fat and the carbs together makes you like uh so a lot of it just has to do with, um, the peripheral clocks in the body and the way that they're activated by pulses of food. That's, that's a big, and we all know this is true. It's like when you have a certain type of meal or a big meal or the right kind of meal,

um, I use the grilled cheese example cause anybody can relate to that. Like if you have a really good grilled cheese, you kind of feel a little drowsy afterwards, a little sleepy, you know, he's like, oh yeah,, a little sleepy. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah. That's why we feed it to kids in like daycare and stuff. You've got to slow them down a little bit. Yeah, shut them up. So food pulses will induce sleep. And there's a lot to be done with food pulses during the day to control sleep.

And so there's a lot of different things you can do in that realm, like big meals at certain pulses during the day to control sleep. And so there's a lot of different things you can do in that realm, like big meals at certain times of the day will either advance sleep onset or disrupt it. In combination with that, and this sounds really hokey, but it's like pure science, it's take your hands and your feet and dip them in hot water, like 10 minutes before bed. And it sounds like snake oil, but it's like a science validated thing. What happens is if you dilate the peripheral arteries, it helps sleep onset. So that's another big one. Does that somehow maybe help kind of cool you down because your hands got hot and your feet got hot?

Something like that? It's just the dilation, dilation of the arteries. Oh, okay. I got you. Probably the biggest thing, though, that I don't think is talked about enough is inflammation. So if you get inflammation down, you're going to sleep a heck of a lot better. And that ties into its sort of partner. And think of the pedals on a bike. There's two partners.

One is inflammation and the other is hypoxia during sleep. Those two things will disrupt sleep more than anything else. And they'll disrupt your health more than anything else. They'll promote cancer onset, inflammation, all kinds of age related problems from hypoxia during sleep. And what is hypoxia? Hypoxia just means that your tissues or certain tissues are not getting enough oxygen. So when that happens, there's a very key protein. I built my book around that and macrophages called HIF1, hypoxia-inducible factor 1. There's three isoforms of this protein, 1, 2, and 3.

The one that we concern ourselves with is called HIF1. And the way HIF1 works is it's neither bad nor good. It's essential. The issue has to do with the excess accumulation of it within cells, particularly during sleep, particularly in the brain. And when HIF-1 begins to accumulate, then what happens is it's a major gene activator and it translocates into the nucleus and activates all these genes associated with absolutely nothing good. all these genes associated with absolutely nothing good so clearing excess hiv1 and ameliorating sleep hypoxia during sleep and that's going to do is going to reduce your cancer risk

um it's going to increase your energy uh it's going to knock inflammation out nothing inflames me more than not getting adequate oxygen when i'm sleeping like it happened the other night i didn't wear a Breathe Right. And I went to do some sprints the next day and I was like really sore. And I was like, oh man, I can't remember how to do that. So a Breathe Right strip can help. What about something like taping your mouth shut? Absolutely, yeah.

So there's a sequence of things you can do. The first is called the Seattle Protocol. It's very simple. It's mouth tape, Breathe Rights, a few things like that then i got like so much stuff on my head when i'm sleeping i got i got the breathe right strip going i got the mouth tape i got shit blocking out the uh you know i got i need like a whole helmet we've talked about in this podcast it's the era that geared up like biohacker you should see my wife i mean she's into it she's she's just like she's got a bunch of stuff going on yeah it's just like she's you try to get you try to just get a kiss and you can't get nothing right unless you want to kiss tape no yeah right

uh the next level though which i think um uh is is underserved is a mouth appliance and you basically just you go to a dentist and they custom fit you and then what it does is advances the jaw while you're sleeping and that's like a mouthpiece while you sleep or something that's what it is yeah it's a mouthpiece but but it just what it does so in advancing the jaw what you can do is you open the airway up and by opening the airway up um probably the single biggest thing you can do for your health i mean like above anything above anything would be that because you're you're just oxygenating much better during sleep and in terms of like probably your list of bang for the buck anti-aging i do that first before i do anything you just go to a dentist do all dentists know about this not all um i i happen to um know one dr greg gregory

clibin who um is down in irvine who uh he lectures at ucla and he's way way way into this it's like we need mouthpieces over here oh yeah yeah what are we doing we're living in the past and then i was gonna say because like i've happened i've seen like devices that are like shown like infomercials and stuff where they like have like the diagram of the chin coming forward is that the same thing or does it have to be a specific thing for each individual uh i've asked dr kleibman about that and what he's communicated to me is you really want to custom fit the thing for a number of reasons um and it gets into um the structure of the mouth and the jaw is not something you want to play with and yeah it gets into a fascinating topic when you start digging into this thing. Yeah, what about mewing? Have you heard of that?

Which is this... Mewing is like the formation of the roof of your mouth and pushing into the roof of your mouth and you can help change the structure of your jawline and it can help with breathing and it can help you be better looking because you can have

more stunning features, but I guess... Is that what you did? That's what I've been doing this whole time. It's working. The whole time we've been talking, I've been pushing my tongue in the roof of my mouth as I'm talking. Well, you're getting more handsome by the minute. Look at that. See?

It's crazy. So if I push my tongue into the roof of your mouth, will I get handsomer? Pause. Pause. Yeah. We haven't practiced that enough, Andrew. Maybe we can pause and you guys can – Get more reps in.

Try that out. But, you know, some people that have like a forward head posture and some people that are, you know, mouth breathers, you know, they've gotten some benefits from getting kind of what you're talking about. I've heard of people talk about that before and just getting better oxygen, right? Like getting, you know, more efficient, I guess, with your breathing. It actually starts during childhood. And it's a really deep rabbit hole, but it's pretty fascinating. You can make a really good case that a very big contributor to obesity begins in

childhood with apnea, with lack of chewing soft foods, with the improper formation of the cheekbones and the jaw and the mouth and all that stuff. And what you'll see is with childhood obesity, you'll see a high incidence of things like snoring and happy and hypoxic and all this stuff. And it all comes back to chewing soft foods. There's a picture in my book from a conference that I did with Quest Nutrition back in 2017. And Ron Penna, the Mr. Quest, did his handpicked kind of list of, you know, who he thought were the thought leaders, brought us all in a room, and we just shared ideas. And there was a 70-year-old man that had an appliance. Long story short, this guy regrew the bonds of his face. The hell?

Oh yeah, it's crazy. In fact, there are pictures in here somewhere. The, in fact, I think it's right here. That's wild. Yeah, I don't, oh, you can't see it that well. Yeah. In this picture here, that was just from regrowing the bonds of his face.

And doing that at such an advanced age is super impressive too. Yeah. So there's an emerging belief, or not belief, excuse me. There's an emerging view, which is a very big part of this book, is the idea of what's called mechanobiology. Are you guys familiar with it? No. We're not familiar with anything apparently.

Whoa. Dude, this is insane. How long did this take him? It was about a year. And that's from wearing the mouthpiece or some other device? He had a very specific appliance that is geared to sort of reshift the palate of the mouth. But essentially, it emulates hard chewing. That's what it did.

And if you saw that in the actual original picture, we were just kind of all sitting there and they're like with our mouths open. What do you mean by, by the chewing of soft food? So, um, getting back to this idea of mechanical biology, there's,

this is a, this is sort of a, this is sort of a, not an option to not understand mechanical biology going forward. Um, the emerging view is that cells are programmed, and they are programmed from the outside in by physical forces. So a lot of the programming for cells is mechanical in nature.

So shearing stress, traction stress, different kinds of mechanical stress actually reprogram cells. And in the case of the face, the mechanobiology of the bone structure of the face is related to chewing. So what happens is, if you look at ancestral societies, they're always doing this,

and they're always ripping off, and they're always chewing really hard. Like a dog, yeah. Yeah. Well, what it does is it stimulates, it's an epigenetic signal, it stimulates genes that cause the bones of the face to grow up and it causes the the palate to form properly it's no different from uh you know some of the studies we've seen about like

uh just you know jogging or pounding it makes the bone stronger that must uh really play into a lot of different things now that i'm thinking about it because you know if like you probably don't even get we probably don't even really make those faces anymore like the face that you would make to tear into like a ribeye and to really like try to rip the damn thing apart um and then like when we make certain faces we know like if you smile more you tend to be a little bit happier right right so it's got to be sending a lot of create it's got to it's got to make a huge difference especially over such a long period of time, right? Yeah.

Again, the case that – the strongest case is made with childhood obesity and chewing soft foods in our culture. So we've just eliminated hard chewing. And by eliminating hard chewing as a gene activator, you can take that idea and trace it all the way to the obesity epidemic if you really want to pick a position. I see. I was misunderstanding. So the chewing of soft food is bad basically you know in a sense yeah yeah yeah because you're eliminating a major gene activator got it yeah so so let me ask you this like um i was gonna ask you when you mentioned the mouthpiece would this and i know it's like all

over the world but would this mostly be like a first world type of issue because of like the type of food that kids eat here? Because I know like I have a lot of relatives in Nigeria. The foods that they eat aren't like that. And like the family over there, it's very different. Like they don't need dental work. None of my family over there has ever needed any type of wisdom teeth removal or dental work or anything like that just because of the nature of the food that they've been eating. That does not surprise me in the least.

I, um, it makes sense. I don't like directly know, have any data about outside the U S. Yeah. Um, question just estimating,

like, would you sort of say that their facial structure is a little more pronounced? Yeah. Okay. Especially up here. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

Perfect sense. Yeah. Actually. So like, do you know what fouling gum is? Would you suggest that people pick something like that up or no? Uh, yeah, I think it's helpful. I think it's, I think it's helpful. The act of, um, the act of just chewing on things that require the facial structure and the bones of the facial structure to do a lot of work, uh, is really the missing ingredient um i do i do um i'll either

you know chew raw green beans or there's actually um there's actually an appliance that i have that uh you put it in the front of the mouth and you can you can work out the bones of the face but the trick with that thing and i and i again i got with a dentist on this and asked him is you've got to you've got to do it you got to pull it out and chew it on all sides because if you don't, you're going to overdevelop one part of the mandible plate. And so you just rotate it through the mouth, and you get a hell of a workout on that thing. You got to grab that. Yeah. What should our children be eating?

I realize that's a giant question, but how can we, you know, what are some things we can do uh to help against childhood obesity because as you were pointing out earlier uh this kind of concept of of uh feeding bacteria that's that's what i see with children you know they are so excited about you know um ice cream and things like that and it almost seems like and i realize there's multiple reasons for it but it almost seems like they're like in a trance they're like hypnotized there they are by some of these sweets and some of these foods but um it appears to me in my observation uh that the gut is kind of overriding you know any sense that you might have even as you get older of kind of slowing down on some of

those foods so how do we kind of help our kids? Yeah, 100%. So first thing is to understand that the dominant species in the gut is going to program your brain to feed them what they need to live, and you're going to think it's you. My brother, his wife, when she was pregnant, was eating a lot of spinach, and her son was born craving spinach. Wow. Yeah. I've had, uh, people that have done my nutrition system who were junk food junkies and in eight days got nauseated on junk food. So the awesome news is the gut is rapidly modifiable. And in the process of doing that,

you will completely reprogram what you crave. So when kids are craving, you know, like Gatorade or, you know, sweets and all this stuff, the outside idea is you can rapidly reprogram them, their gut. So they don't even crave those things anymore. It's just getting through the pain period. It's about seven days to do it. And, you know, there's ways to do it. And an easy way to, an easy way to kind of start them off is with things like, I call it a, I call it a, in my nutrition system, it's basically a frappe. It's, you take yogurt, you take honey, you take raspberries, you take bananas, you take all these different things and you, you know, put a ton of honey on it, make it really sweet, make it really good good and just sort of start giving those types

of things and it'll start to recolonize the gut a little bit and then you can kind of wean them into other things that help with that interesting yeah what what's uh the deal with like uh you know we got prebiotics and probiotics i mean we hear we hear so much about, you know, yogurt and stuff like that. Is this stuff, is it really beneficial? Is it harmful? What is it? What is, what are probiotics? So what are they doing for us or not doing for us? Me personally, I would not take probiotics. What is going on right now is it's sort of an epidemic of SIBO, which is small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. And my personal belief is that it's due to people taking too many probiotics. And what happens is they can't 100% control where those things open up in the gut. And so what you're getting is good bacteria in the wrong place.

The thing with probiotics is there is a place for them, you know, in certain cases, like very specific conditions. That's something for like a practitioner who really knows what they're doing, you know, to kind of administer. But there's really no reason for us to go out of our way to eat probiotics to gain more health. And maybe they're not necessarily all that negative as long as we're not consuming them all the time. Yeah, you'll probably do more harm than good.

And the other side of that is the gut is so rapidly modifiable through food substrate that there's no need. I mean, you can completely and totally recalibrate the gut in about five to seven days. Ah, that makes a lot of sense because then that's what people are taking the probiotic for, right? That's what they think it's doing. Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And it's also, it's easy to prove. So if you want to prove it in the opposite way um just go eat a bunch of junk food okay and watch how bad your gas is on board oh yeah yeah your stomach blows up right yeah well that's fermentation so the key idea is um fermentation makes bacteria for every hundred grams you ferment you'll make 30 grams of bacteria right it's just a question of which direction.

And that's how obesity works. So obesity is meal-to-meal reprogramming of the gut bacteria based on substrate. So you're eating this junk, and what it does is it's you're fermenting bacteria that make you crave more junk. And then it just sort of snowballs. You can do the same thing the opposite direction, and you can rapidly ferment. Do you go into anything in terms of this book in terms of people that have IBS? Because I know a lot of individuals that no matter what they do, their IBS will go away for a small period of time. Boom, it'll flare back even if they're doing the same thing. So what, I guess, in what direction can individuals go to deal with something like that? Yeah, so the first thing to understand is you've got to kind of get into things mechanistically, looking at IBS.

The first thing to understand is that if the gut lining is worn down, normally, under normal conditions, like a healthy gut, the metabolite butyrate is kind of the bread and butter of the gut. It's what feeds the colon directly, the colonocytes in the colon and in the intestines. It helps restore the gut lining by making cross reactions that feed bifidobacteria. So that's in a healthy gut. What happens in a compromised gut where you've already got sort of inflammatory issues going on is that the main transporter for butyrate is impaired. It doesn't work. Okay. It's called MCT1. So when that transporter is impaired, butyrate cannot rescue the gut. So what you'll see is people that have issues in the gut and then they eat fibers and the issues get worse. Okay. So what's going on is those fibers are

fermenting, they're making bacteria that make buty, and then the gut can't use butyrate. So in the early going, if you've got serious issues in the gut, kind of a good protocol is to marry a combination of fasting with things like orange juice. So what you'll see in the gut… So drinking orange juice as you're fasting? In that period or outside of that period? You fast for a while, and then you have gut... So drinking orange juice as you're fasting? In that period or outside of that period? You fast for a while. Yeah. And then you have a little bit of orange juice. Okay.

Okay. And you start to introduce that in a little bit. So what you're doing is two things. Number one, what you'll see in the impaired gut is you'll see a high degree of oxidation in the gut. Okay. And so in the lining of the gut, you've got a lot of redox action going on. So ascorbate helps heal the gut.

And you'll see low ascorbate in the gut. So if you can replete ascorbate in the gut, you can get all this redox signaling down. At the same time, fasting will help acromantia to restore a little bit. And so just sort of as a starter protocol, you can kind of start on something like that. I have a guy that I was talking to that got this and and we put him on that, and it's working pretty well so far.

Is that pulp or like no pulp? You want to get the pulp out. Pulp out. Yeah, good question. Yeah, get the pulp out. Fasting has definitely – because I've struggled with IBS in the past. I think last time you were on here, we were talking a lot about my gut and everything, and it's gotten significantly better. And I think because of fasting, it has improved even

more so since then. And so I was actually going to ask you about that, but you answered it right away. So like, I mean, is it as simple as that? Like fasting with orange juice? Like, is there any other steps to this protocol that we can implement? Yeah. So the best of all worlds is a combination of fasting with very specific feeding. So what you want to do is you want to rebuild bifidobacteria in the gut, get bifidobacteria levels up, allow fasting to build acromantia up, but then feed acromantia directly through sort of feeding bifidobacteria. And then one of the things I use in the book is apple skins. So the pectin in apple skins can, it's one of the very few ways to feed acromantia directly. Another thing to consider is how much nitrogen you're getting in the diet.

So when the gut is compromised, you have to be very careful about very high nitrogen loads from the diet, because what you're going to do is you're going to change up nitrogen utilization from internal to external in the gut, and that feeds entire different taxa bacteria. So getting protein intake down, combination of fasting, combination of things like orange juice, and then very specific patterns of feeding, very specific things. So just to walk through a list, you'd want to look at things like apple skins to start. You'd want to look at things like very key things like human milk oligosaccharides. That's what you had me take to get over being lactose intolerant.

Right. And then it completely went away. Not only did it go away, it never came back. I wanted to ask him about that too. Yeah, it's fucking gone. We completely blasted it out of there. Yeah, that's amazing. I took a baby formula and put it in my protein shakes for like a month. Right.

Gone forever. Yeah. What was it called again? It's like iOS or what's it called there? It's called HMO. FOS or something? Well, it's HMO, human milk oligocytes. HMO, okay.

That's what it was. Yeah. Yeah, I have a section in my book called Carb Training, and it's in a chapter called The Three Genomes, where, long story short, all these things you think are diseases like lactose intolerance and gluten intolerance, no. Those don't even really exist. What you have is a bunch of missing bacteria. What you have is a bunch of missing bacteria. And you can train in the ability to have any kind of carb just by training in the bacteria that digest those carbs. So there's this paradox.

The foods that give you the problems make the bacteria that solve the problem. So you have to figure out a way to maybe get in small doses very very small doses of things so what i have people do typically is um just hormesis you just you start with a thimble full of whatever your your thing so let's say it's lactose you start with um like a thimble full of cheese you know just like this much just very small amounts and then uh combined with some of these other protocols you just start upping it just a little bit what you're doing every time you do that you take it in it's going to ferment and as upping it just a little bit. What you're doing, every time you do that, you take it in, it's going to ferment. And as you ferment, you make a little bit of bacteria,

and then you just start conditioning the gut, and you can train in digestion of carbs. A little bit like periodization in your training. You add a little bit each time you go back to the gym, right? Yeah, it's just, it's hormesis. It's just a food. You just perked up a bunch of people's ears by talking about possibly getting over like a gluten intolerance. Yeah.

So can you explain a little bit more on that? Yeah. So basically everything you've ever been told is wrong. And I'm completely serious. The prevailing belief is that the problem is the foods. That's based on an incorrect idea. So I just avoid all, I avoid all these things that could be problematic and I'll be good. Right. Yeah. And so from that,

you get all this stuff like the FODMAP diet and all these other things. That's based on an idea that's not accurate. It's based on the idea that the human genome controls carb metabolism. It's not accurate. Your body works on three genomes. It works on the human, the mitochondrial, and the bacterial genome. And it's the interplay of on three genomes. It works on the human, the mitochondrial, and the bacterial genome. And it's the interplay of those three genomes that dictate the active state of your body. So you can acquire the genes you need to digest all those things. And in the specific case of glutens, there's a bunch of research I list in here, like one study after another, that shows when you replete bifidobacteria in people with gluten intolerance, the words that they use in the research is sidesteps. Sidesteps gluten intolerance.

How do you sidestep an intolerance? It's because it was never there to begin with. The issue is just simply that you're missing the bacteria that have the genes to digest those things. And what there's a growing body of research on shows clearly that when you replete the phytobacteria levels in the gut, gluten intolerance goes away. Yeah, Rob Wolf used to be immensely sick from any sort of dairy at all. And he was that way with a lot of other things. I was too. was too gluten issues as well and that's how he came along with the paleo solution and that's how he's you know he's

written books and he does seminars and does all kinds of stuff but i just spoke with him a couple days ago and he was telling me that he's drinking milk wow so i mean yeah there's there's definitely there's definitely a lot of proof in what you're saying. Do you kind of think, so after listening to what you just said right there, do you think that, you know, I hear people, they kind of always say, oh, you know, we're all so different. You know, there's not one diet that's perfect for all of us. And I always kind of think it's bullshit because I think that we are so much more similar than we are different. And I understand that, like, okay, environmental, like the way that you're brought up. shit because i think that we are so much more similar than we are different and i i understand that like okay environmental like the way that you're brought up and so yeah maybe at this stage in our life let's say two individuals are both 40 years old or something maybe we have become

different but we have access to most of the same things do you feel that way hundred percent so there's this big push towards personalized nutrition. Personalized nutrition? I don't know how I'm going to do this. Or genetic nutrition? You can't just take someone else's diet. Yeah, so the 23andMe and all that stuff. So here's the thing. The macro nutritional drivers are more important in most cases than the individual ones. Example.

There's massive commonalities driving the aging process, nutritionally related. I mentioned B vitamin production and vitamin D. Those two combined, if you fix those two things, you will get a bigger bang for the buck than your massive individual nutrient analysis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The commonalities are where the bang for the buck is and when you fix the big common issues um a lot of the personal issues go away

would overeating be in that category as like the the kind of the macro thing like the people just they overeat right i mean that's a huge driver of a lot of these diseases correct what's your thoughts on that that's a it's a big topic. Really big topic. It's difficult to just give a single answer to that. But a lot of what we think of as overeating in the modern era, it's driven by fat loss. It's driven by the mechanistic outcome of fat loss. And there's all these things that happen post-fat loss that people are in the jet wash of. And so we've been looking at it like, you know, you've got to do something to take charge and solve the problem. What I've seen over a 40-year period is it's not lack of trying that's the problem. Like if you go and interview like the general population, again, are in the 12 of people that have metabolic health but when you get outside of

that and you look at you know the average person it's not lack of trying there's there's lots of trips to the gonna gonna make a change well there's a lot of people that lost a lot of weight but then they gain it back i've got a guy right now who's um my partner robert reams um we're working on a guy we just did yesterday a Dr. Phil show on this guy. And he's amazing story. But I'll tell you, he was 700 pounds. He lost 450. Holy shit.

And then he gained it all back. All back? Yeah. Yeah. And so it's not lack of trying. That's not the problem. There's an unacknowledged problem. And when you begin to survey the 88% of the population, you go, oh, how many of you have tried a weight loss program?

You're going to see mostly like 99% of the hands go up. How many of you tried two, three, four? The hands are all up. Ten. The hands are still up. Okay. So the issue isn't lack of trying. There's an unacknowledged problem.

And it's the consequences of fat loss. That's a big, big driver of what's going on. It's never been quantified. It's never been talked about, but it's the irony is this, in this entire industry that's based on something that's not true. What they're telling you is if you just shrink fat cells, you've solved the problem. Well, the irony is none of that's been based on what happens when you actually shrink fat cells. It's never even been inventoried.

If you start – I inventoried it. Here, I'll show it to you guys. I think you were talking about almost like a spider web type effect where the fat cells shrunk because you did lose weight, but they still have that flexibility to go right back to where they were, right? It taps. It's almost like they're being pulled on even when they're shrunken, right? Yeah, you can see it right there. So this is what you're up against. Okay, this is on one side of the equation is fat loss. On the other side is everything that happens as a result of fat loss.

And then when you go through new inventory every one of those things it's a reset the sorry the uh the the biggest driver of the whole thing is the mechanobiology of shrinking fat cells and it's never even been talked about or inventoried when you shrink fat cells you reprogram cells through sharing stress and tracks sharing stress and traction stress and the net result of that is for most people to lock in weight gain and part of locking in weight gain is overeating it just it doesn't happen until later and so we're not linking it to you know what you did two years ago right so it's not just losing the weight it's at the end of the weight loss trying to deal with all of these different things

that happen, like getting rid of them so that you don't have to, so you don't gain the weight back pretty much. We use these words like weight loss and intermittent fasting

and fat loss, but your body, all your body sees is shrinking fat cells. Shrinking fat cells to the body has always, there's just one word

the body understands is starvation. It doesn't matter what you call it. You can call it, you know, I got in shape. The body just saw shrinking fat cells to the body has always, there's just one word the body understands is starvation. It doesn't matter what you call it. You can call it, you know, I got in shape. The body just saw shrinking fat cells. So the body has thousands of years of programming to defend you against dying from shrinking fat cells. And all that stuff comes into play.

So you may have programmed yourself to, let's say, weigh around 300 pounds. And so I guess maybe a simplified version of maybe what you're saying, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that if you now made yourself 200 pounds, you still have that programming inside your body to be 300 pounds. No. Yeah, no. Yeah, no. Yeah, no. Yeah, no. I guess the way I would put it would be that think of feast and famine. So there's one nutritional constant throughout all of history for all mammals, and that is famine and feasting. All mammals share that. All mammals share survival defense mechanisms to protect against famine. So you guys, again, being in the 12% that actually have metabolic health, here's what you're seeing. So you'll do a contest or you'll do something,

you'll get in shape. Okay. And so just think of like a, think of like a seesaw here. Okay. So you reduce body fat. Okay. Now at the end of that, all these mechanisms start to kick in. The job of these mechanisms is to restore body fat, and usually it does this. Now in your case, what you're actually mimicking is if you use an ancestral narrative and you go back, there was a starvation. We finally killed a water buffalo, ate the whole thing, so weight came back on. But there wasn't a refrigerator lying around, so we needed to go back out and exert ourselves and get more food again. So there was this continuous exertion after putting the weight back on. You guys are mimicking that through your lifestyle.

Most people can't do that. And so what you see is they drop the weight, but they don't have the means to replicate continuous exertion. And so the weight comes back and it comes back. And actually what you're doing long term is you're locking in long-term weight gain. Yeah. So in terms of continuous exertion, cause I mean, I've heard that you mainly work out one time a week right now, or is that, do you still, do you work out more than that exercise wise?

No, it's been about, uh, I keep trying to, but it's been about once. So quite some time now. Yeah. Long time. So in, for like, do you think that, how would you, I guess, tell the general population or help them with figuring out how to do a continuous exertion of them? Like maybe just walking lifestyle, I'm guessing, is how you deal with it and not just going to the gym and exercising. Yeah. There's an idea I put in the book called the integrated interval.

And it's the idea that that young bodies have very distinct differences from old bodies um you can work out a lot and and take a bunch of stuff and be jacked and still have like an old body okay young bodies are very very different like a young body we'll do it afterwards we'll just with no warm-up we'll go spread okay young bodies can do that like all kids and all teenagers can just without any warm-up just bam take off um as you get past a certain age you can't do that kind of stuff so there's a concept in the book i put called the integrated interval which is um if you think about just if you've ever run an all out quarter an all-out quarter one has the power to wipe you out for a day yeah like like like a full-out quarter okay well if you just took that and broke it into 20-second intervals,

you're getting most of the same benefit. The trick is to do it without all the other accoutrement, which is, you know, getting dressed and warming up. It's just 20 seconds, no warm-up, back to what you were doing. 20 seconds, no warm-up, back to what you were doing. And then integrating that throughout your day every day. And if you'll do that,

the body's adaption to that is to get really strong, really fast, and condition you to stay in a certain state. And then hanging on to youth is just really about hanging on to that little fermenting ember of continuous exertion every day through these little 20-second intervals. So I'm always doing these little 20-second intervals, and I just don't warm up. I just go do them, and I go back to whatever. So that way, the exertion that you're able to put in isn't going to be that great because you're not warmed up i mean it's still hard yeah right and i'm sure you've gotten used to it and you've probably gotten better at it right but is that kind of the idea behind it you're not going to be able to go 100 right uh yeah pretty much but but to your point too you get kind of used to it and you know like when if i'm out of it and i

start doing it my my closest is maybe 60 but then if you're just doing it every day your 60 becomes 90 and you just go out and you can do a 90 wait sorry does this just look like because in my head i'm picturing you walking down a sidewalk just normally and then just going to us just taking off into a sprint is that what that kind of looks like like you just do you do something else do you everybody's like oh fuck, fuck, get out of the way. Yeah, how's that look? And I'm just thinking, it seems like you probably can't do that. Right away, hey, where are you going?

Exactly. Yeah, right. Oh, God. Is he carrying a purse? What does he got? Did you touch a small child? Exactly, what's happening here? What's this guy's issue? No, I'm a nerd, man.

Most of my day is like this in a computer, and then I'll just put it down, go do my thing, come back, and just go back to it. Where it really matters most, though, is at bedtime. That's the one that really matters. So at bedtime, there's a subset of that, which is just a couple of things involving really flexibility and circulation. And it's like brushing your teeth. I use the analogy of brushing your teeth. You put a minute at night, two minutes in to take care of your teeth. Allocating a minute or two at bedtime to a very few things has a difference over time that's gigantic.

So you mentioned flex. So what are those few things? Is it like doing one of those maybe sprints, stretching? What, what, what, what are those things?

Oh, it's a couple of yoga flows with an ancestral flat squat. Just nothing big. Just, you know, like I'll do two to four at bedtime with, with the ancestral squat. And I'm sure you guys,

dude, I need your, I need this book. Yeah. I need 20, uh, your 22 second sprints Are you actually just kind of like going outside and sprinting

Are you going to a track I mean you mentioned like that you don't need those things So you're not really changing your clothes Or anything like that or are you getting on a stationary bike Or how are you doing The only thing is I would wear different shoes I do that often here I just bounce from here And I go right in the gym and I just start working out

In whatever I have Just to you know I don't like a lot of barriers, you know, to slow me down or stop me from doing something. So I'm like, F it. I'll just go in there. This is the way I am right now and start training. Sounds like fun going and doing like suicides on the turf every day. Yeah. Like a handful of times. And then 20 seconds.

Why the 20 second sprint? Why that amount? of times and then 20 seconds uh why the 20 second sprint why why that uh amount uh that's that's kind of your your 20 second interval from you know hit training and it's about it's about without any warm-up what's at the the edge of safe to do right you know it's the repeated attempts where you're going to get injured so um if i'm really tight and doing it then i'll run within my limits but uh there's some days are better than others. And I'm just like, you know, bam, out and get it and good. But what you see.

Do you have a distance in mind? Usually about, you know, I'm shooting for 200 meters, but I'm not that fast anymore. So, you know, yeah. And I go through periods where, like, everything's clicking and I feel like, oh, wow, I've still got it. And then, you know, I have a bad week and it's like, no, you don't. No, you don't. But so there's all this research about sedentary lifestyles now. The real problem is your blood. That's the real problem. And it's the quality of your blood. And it's the mechanical nature of what's going on in the blood. And there's all these different factors. It's where your blood is being created from. Is it being created from stem cells or is it being

created from hematopoiesis? And it's the actual deformability of blood cells with age. So the real problem is that the blood itself is sort of going downhill. And so because it's going downhill, when you're sitting for any length of time you have blood that's half as efficient as it was when you were younger which means hypoxia as sort of a way of existing is sort of taking hold and so by integrating these little things throughout the day you're sort of pushing that clock back a little bit yeah i'm trying okay there's a lot there in terms of the sedentary lifestyles like for example the blood can we talk about that for a little bit yeah how does one i guess address that i mean other than like you know not sitting all day you know standing getting a standing desk or whatever

how do you address that issue what do what should people do there uh it's a it's a it's a big topic there's it's a kind of an emerging field. Yeah. And there's a lot of things that are going to be rapidly coming online. Just to give you a 20-second scope of the problem, what's happening is when you were young, your blood had a very specific composition and ratio of types of immune cells to red blood cells. Okay. And it's sort of optimal. And as you get older, you get fewer red blood cells and fewer types of immune cells and more of other types of immune cells.

The blood is essentially mimicking a giant injury is what's happening. Okay. And so what your blood is starting to do is be a pro-inflammatory medium as you're getting older. That's kind of what's going on. And that affects muscle recovery. So young muscle and young blood are two sides of the same coin. They're both related. One of the reasons you see muscle recovery decrease with age is because the quality of the blood itself is decreasing. So there's this field

called parabiosis where we're looking at, we're looking at young blood transfusions and, you know, the effect that has in the body. A couple of keys that seem to play into all this. One is timing. Two is massage. Three are, there's, there's a host of small molecule activators and key blood proteins that seem to be emerging that we can target. If we can rewind real quick, when you say timing, timing of what? So as you begin to age, there are very specific proteins. One of them is called ERK-1 half, and it is a growth protein. one half and it is a growth protein and basically what it does is it controls the stemness uh and the growth cycles of muscle and when you're younger what happens is you get done working out

erk shoots up like this okay and then it does this when you get older it does this and then it does this so what's happening is this guy sore recover this guy no recovery just sore okay yeah that's that's what's happening with age so getting erk up higher uh post workout is one of the ways that we can we can start to begin to turn turn the clock back a little bit with that one of the ways that seems to work really well, it's super simple, anybody can do is massage. So there, I was talking to Ron Penn about this, and Ron does body work a lot.

And if you're around Ron, he's just always pumped. He's just always full. He gets pissed at you too if you don't get body work done. You getting body work done? You getting body work done? And he calls you out and you're like, I didn't spend my five grand this week on this. That's his tip to be healthy.

You've got to be really well-off. Did you get your 5,000 square foot gym in your house yet? No, Ron. I didn't sell a food company yet. By the way, did you guys see the Pop-Tart? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Amazing.

Legendary food. Listen to this. They made a Pop-Tart? Yes. Listen to this. They made a Pop-Tart? Yes. Listen to this. Life is complete. I have a text on my phone of me sending Ron Penna a text probably about six months ago saying you need to tell the powers that be to make a Pop-Tart.

Really? And he said, okay, and gave me like a little thumbs up. I sent him the screen capture of that last night and he said i did tell the powers that be and we got pop tarts thank you so i way when when you guys told me i think you told me andrew that they made a pop tart then andy told me i was like i think i'm like i'm pretty sure i told him you need to make a pop tart i need to be careful because i remember like we were talking to him and you're like what what's the deal where's the pop tart and he's like uh i can't say too much but yeah

and he was yeah he was kind of like uh i think he like said something about how you can't make one or something too right he was like probably totally screwing with us i don't know ron penna works in mysterious ways and oh my god man legendary foods pop tarts that thing's going to be all over the place at the la fit expo oh yeah i'm gonna see if i can survive off just that then have you tried it i haven't tried it yet oh my gosh he gave me one a couple months ago yeah the funny thing was i was in target like a month earlier with my with my wife and i was like somebody should make a low-carb pop tart and then it's so sure enough he tells yeah yeah he brings the thing and it's like it tastes like a pop tart that's great yeah i'm gonna live on the thing

that's huge it's gonna flip the fitness uh industry upside down because people have been talking about pop tarts forever yeah yeah that's huge i think it's the greatest thing ever i really do i would love to just be in the room when joel and uh ron are speaking to each other because i'd imagine over probably like, I don't know, around the one and a half hour mark, you guys just start speaking in code. And like people around are just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're just like making sounds. They're like, what happened? Did they break? It's like, no, they're just in their own language now. We have these crazy mind melds. It's just like, yeah, we'll get together at this secret location. And then we'll just sit there and kind of go down the rabbit hole.

And sometimes it's too much for us. Like, sometimes we're just, oh, I'm a, you know. And then we got to transition into something else, something nerdy. But, yeah, he's a brilliant guy. That's awesome, dude. Yeah. And the Pop-Tart thing is real. Yeah.

You mentioned something earlier about testosterone and sleep, which I think perked a lot of men's ears when they heard it, but it was never talked about. What, what were you talking about there? Exactly. Your brother's sleeping for 16 hours or something like that, right?

Yeah. So the sex hormones just have a lot to do with staying young, you know, and it makes sense just from a, I, I like ancestral narratives, but we always have to remember that they're not facts they're just sort of stories that we tell ourselves and you know they can change but they're helpful so um an ancestral narrative is just the idea that um

as long as you're sexually viable you know you're of sort of you're kind of of a benefit and your body's going to keep you young. And so keeping the sex hormones working has a lot to do with keeping the body young. And if you can keep the body young, you'll solve a lot of problems. So getting the body to make testosterone while you're sleeping is a big, big deal, a big, big deal. And it's not that hard to do. You can do it with a combination of feeding patterns, sort of high fat at bedtime and a very few simple things. I mean, stupid simple things like ZMA and vitamin D and things like that. Okay. Is there no negative impact of

eating before bed? You know, some people think that you should eat, you know, well before you go to sleep and stuff like that. What are your thoughts on that? That fits into what, when, and how. So everything should fit into what, when, and how. And there's a, if you get away from the absolutes and then you just kind of quantify functional outcomes, like, like my functional outcome right now is I want to have a couple nights of making testosterone. Okay, great. So in order to do that, what do I need? I need a lot of fat while I'm sleeping. I need vitamin D. I need some minerals. I need a few basic things. And so I'm going to have two, three nights, maybe, maybe even one or two nights a week where I do that.

Um, and there's indicative a downside, which is if I have too big have two, three nights, maybe even one or two nights a week where I do that. And there's a negative, a downside, which is if I have too big a meal, I might disrupt autophagy later on during the night. But the other side of that is I can fast in the morning a little bit and sort of offset that. And so when you put it into a functional outcome, it gets you away from the absolutes. So there's always negatives to everything. You mentioned to me in the past, I think you mentioned to me, if I remember correctly, having some issues with fasting

and how it kind of screwed you up. So we talk about fasting quite a bit on here, but I also warn people, if you're new to a diet, in my opinion, there's no reason to even try to really mess with fasting until you can get a handle on, on starting to implement some, uh, you know, nutritious foods and get used to the, get used to the diet that you selected and don't really worry about fasting for a little while. Um, and then also I've had my own issues with fasting where I fasted, uh, you know, just intermittent fasting, you know, just doing a 16 or 18 hour fast or something like

that. And then two or three days later, I found myself, you know, at the bottom of a Ben and Jerry's, you know, fish food ice cream or something like that. So how can we kind of, you know, what are some of the negative impacts of fasting and what did it do to you? Yeah, I talk a lot about that in my book. I'm here because of the negatives I experienced with what you would call time feeding and fasting in the early 90s um quick backstory uh in the early 90s uh metrics came out jeff everson was a big promoter and jeff did an article talking about how he was just eating one meal a day in the evening and so you know i'm just like okay well that's what i was that same guy who read the jeff and cory they were huge yeah yeah um so i started doing that and i went on metrics and um a lot of things in in biology do this in the short term and then this

in the long term so what happened to me was um i was ripped to the bone for a long long time about three four years and i was in that you know advice giving stage dude what are you doing and here's what I'm doing. Kind of like I had it figured out. And then about year four. One metrics packet a day. Yeah. Year four, year five, I started eating uncontrollably.

And like, I just, you know, but there was a Burger King. I was there and I didn't know what I'd done. I was like, I've never done this in my life. I'm just eating all the time. What's going on? And that set me down this path to figure out what I had messed up. And it was a long road to fix it and a long road to figure it out. It almost feel like it made you crazy in a way. I'm from a food perspective. It's just, it was the weirdest. Um, it was the weirdest sort of thing. It was just

like, just, just never, never satisfied. And, uh, it took me years to figure out what I'd done. And the research wasn't there yet on the gut hormones and PYY and all that stuff. But I had a great short-term benefit, massive long-term problems. And so I talk a lot about in the book about right now we're in this era where everybody's jumping on the fasting bandwagon. What you have to understand about the body is that there's usually most things um have a long-term effect that opposes the short-term effect i mean it's true of drugs you know i mean you go on an ssri reuptake inhibitor uh you're great for a while and then you start tanking down and it's true of food it's true of anything and so um you have to know where the road ends before you jump

on it you know so you can avoid the pitfalls. And for me, it was huge, like huge. I'd never had problems eating and I just couldn't stop eating. And were you utilizing intermittent fasting or were you doing more prolonged faster? In today's language, it would be probably time restricted feeding, you know, so I was eating one meal a day in the evening. And then if I was hungry, I'd have a packet of metrics during the day. But, uh, what I realized later on was that there were entire hormonal domains I was depriving the body of. So one of them was satiety, another was fullness, another was flavor. And all the body sees is shrinking fat cells and starvation. And the body has very specific defenses against

those things. It keeps track of that shit. It upregulates it. Yeah. It takes a while. It took years. Was this more so because of your food choices when you were eating or because of the act of time-restricted feeding? Time-restricted feeding. Okay. Yeah. For me.

So then for people that do utilize time-restricted feeding like myself, how do you combat that potential long-term effect because i haven't felt that yet but you have me very scared how long have you been doing it for uh probably like close to like a year and a half a year it'll be close to maybe two years soon yeah you're in the safe zone still yeah yeah so i'm just like yeah what what like and also when this happened to you was it a fairly sudden thing Was it gradually you just started going to Burger King and then going to Burger King even more? It was gradual. What I started seeing was the things that had worked so well stopped working as well. They just weren't working as well, weren't working as well.

And then the other side of that was I was just eating more and eating more. And I was like, what is this, man? And it was a weird thing. I started doing it in about 1992 and it was really about 1997 that it started kicking in. And it took years for me to fix. It really did. How do we avoid that? Just maybe be a little bit cautious and understand that if we are going to utilize some intermittent fasting,

that it would maybe be a great idea to take little breaks from it and things like that? Short answer, yes. Long answer, or abbreviated long answer, because I know I'm long-winded, would be if you're going to follow a strategy that is not based on what's true about your body, you're not going to be happy when you get to the end of the road. That's just the truth. So you have to understand how the body works, and you have to understand the effect of quote-unquote starvation on the body. The body has very specific mechanistic defenses against starvation. And I inventory them in the book and I go through and we look at them all one by one.

And so you're working against all of these things. So the short answer is you just have to essentially hack those things by mixing in counterpoints. So there you, you did when you did your, um, post, uh, post competition thing, right? A lot of the things you did were actually designed to counter most of those things. So there was a gut biome intervention we did with you. There was, um, a leptin intervention where it was specifically designed to counter the post fat loss leptin shift. And so you have to inventory how the body works and then you attack each point is what you do. And that's a lot of what you did. Do you still suggest fasting or do you, you know, I mean, not if you're not sleeping. Okay. You mentioned it a little bit, but okay.

Sleep is a problem. That wouldn't be a good idea. Yeah, no. So the reason we fast is to get, so let's break it down. So what are you you getting from fasting you're getting autophagy you're getting hdac inhibition uh you're getting ampk insert one activation hdac is what by the way um histone deacetylase okay uh so um let's real quick histone deacetylase so you have um the body runs on data runs on information information and instructions, and the body has a couple different ways it gets data, reads data, and a couple different points that data is moved around. MicroRNAs are one, DNA methylation is another, histone deacetylase inhibition is the other. It's probably the most important, and really what it is is in the science they use these giant words uh to confuse people it means on that's what it means that's what it means it just means on like oh we

can read it it's on okay great um so while you're fasting dna becomes readable okay that's it's a bigger topic but it becomes readable so these are things you get from fasting uh you get nad repletion all those things are present during sleep but they're stronger during sleep because uh we are diurnal creatures and those things have a natural home in what's called the genetic rush hour. Okay. The genetic rush hour is in the deep stretch of the night, roughly around 4, 4 a.m. And that's when all of the most important genes in the body are activating for keeping your body young. So sleep is intermittent fasting. It's just in the perfect timing. So right about that

stretch of the night, all those things should be going off. With age, they start to decline for a number of reasons, which we can talk about. But if you're not sleeping, you have to fix sleep first before you fast because fasting can disrupt REM sleep. So REM sleep disruption, there's not agreement on this in the science, but there's good reason to believe that it's very important. So if you're not dreaming, it's a big deal. Now, you did mention older individuals and a lot of older people. I mean, they all report, I can't sleep as much or as long as when I was younger.

My sleep is more disruptive. So, I mean, a lot of people find it difficult to fix that. How do you go about that? So there's several steps. Order of operations to fix that is part of the reason is due to a decline in NAD. So for the audience, there's a lot of talk about NAD lately, but just for the sake of going over it. NAD is what motor oil is to your car. It's not a fuel, but the engine won't go without it. Okay. It's what powers the reactions. So it's an enzyme and it's made from niacin and you need it. So as we get older, a couple of things are happening. Basically the body's treating aging like it's an injury.

So all the things that happen in an injury are kicking up. They're like this. And those things are cannibalizing NAD. Okay. So specifically immune cell populations and all this. So what you see is as you get older, you're not sleeping as well. You tend to be more inflamed. And then you get this sort of cyclical thing that's happening where the less you sleep, the less NAD you make. And it sort of becomes this wheel. So repleting and restoring NAD is step one. Excuse me. Reducing inflammation is step one. Repleting NAD is step two for very good reasons.

And then stepping the body through restoring the things that are lost. So specifically, bifidobacteria, vitamin D, all these sort of dials that just go down. And they're very simple, big things, which is why I said the macro things are bigger bigger than the individual things and i'm throwing a ton of stuff out there sorry but this is great we can dig into it yeah so then how do how do we control inflammation then how do we get that down because you've mentioned it twice now being really really important with sleep it's probably the most important thing yeah so um spinning down inflammation is uh a skill um in fact i just came out with a course on it called How to Age Better. So let me kind of walk you through the big steps of it.

First thing is do not supplement with NAD until you get inflammation spun down. The reason is that there are very specific immune cells that use NAD for fuel, and they're all inflammatory related. So a lot of the newer research is suggesting a very specific order of operations to follow before supplementing with NAD. The very first step is you've got to get inflammation down, because otherwise what's happening is taking NAD can actually fuel inflammation, because it's fueling the immune cells that need NAD to proliferate. Okay.

So let's sort of step through getting inflammation down. Step one is your dietary factors are probably your strongest controls to help get that down. So an easy basic pattern is to combine spinning up bifidobacteria in the body. So the way you would do that, I call it the two-day core pattern, is on day one, you're sequencing very specific foods in the right order. So generally your dark fruits in the morning and then more resistant starches in the afternoon. And what you're doing is you're spinning up the phytobacteria during that day. And what we're doing is we are amplifying fasting signals without fasting by getting the body to make the bacteria that make butyrate while you sleep during the genetic rush hour to amplify all those signals. So those signals are inherently anti-inflammatory.

At bedtime, there's a number of steps to ensure you sleep really well. A really great tool is called oleamide. Oleamide works on the CB1, endocannabinoid 1 receptor. And that in combination with melatonin and a couple other little hacks can help you get to sleep. But spinning inflammation down through the production of key bacteria leading into a fast amplifies all the signals of fasting without actually having to fast. And then a pattern of fasting sort of in an amplified state. So one of the ways you can do that is as you begin to fast on the second day, there are lots of different tool sets you can use to help spin down inflammation. One of the easiest and best is molecular hydrogen. And there's a number of reasons why that's true.

But molecular, you guys have looked at that before? No, I'm thinking, where do we get that? The same place we get a flux capacitor? Stop me if I'm running this too fast. Well, I'm just, I'm taking notes and I'm like, I'm going to have to Google that later. I remember when you were talking to me about fasting, you had like foods, you know, and I was like, isn't fasting just like not eating food? Fasting, you had like foods, you know, and I was like, isn't fasting just like not eating food? But you had things that are still mimicking fasting in the body and still getting the benefits of fasting.

Yeah. One of my first project with Quest was creating foods that mimic fasting. This was before there was a fasting mimicking diet. It was looking at how can we get the benefits of fasting without the downside, without the sleep disruption, without all those things. So when we look at fasting and we look at what the body needs during fasting, there's a very key idea that pops up. It's called pexophagy. So pexophagy is autophagy of the peroxisomes. Peroxisomes are these little tiny organelles within cells that primarily process long chain fats. And this gets into sort of a modified view of what drives aging. Long story short, as we get older, there's very specific changes happening in the paroxysomes that are

switching on a pro-aging program. And the irony of that is the paroxysomes control an anti-aging program so there's a switch in these little organelles and once you understand how to switch it you can actually switch on the pro-aging program or excuse me the anti-aging program the way that's done is by learning how to initiate pexophagy what pexophagy does is it clears paroxysomes out so you get rid of the ones that aren't working and you multiply brand new ones. So by keeping the peroxisomes young, a lot of inflammatory issues will go away because they mediate so many things. So amplifying fasting is a thing of spinning up very specific bacteria prior to fasting, then during fasting, taking in very specific foods. So one of those are your omega fats and oleic acid. So you've got your omega

threes and you've got your omega nines. Your first step is your omega threes, because what those do is they make peroxisomes proliferate. Okay. So if you're fasting and then you're having omega threes on top of that, not MCTs, but omega-3s, the peroxisomes have to process those fats and they're going to proliferate. Okay, and then coming into a second day of fasting, you can begin to shift substrates into oleic acid. It's just switching to your omega-9s. And what's going to happen as you continue to feed the peroxisomes these fats is they're sort of getting tuned and then long story short coming out of that and switching into glucose will induce pexophagy so what happens is the proxomes are tuned up they're proliferating they're making new ones

that they're triggering mitochondrial biogenesis you're fasting inflammation is going down and then a period of excessive feeding following that really what we're doing is mimicking famine and feasting okay um blows inflammation out turns pexophagy on and that's what you did after your um after your contest awesome now this sounds like something obviously you mentioned that this is going to help with inflammation um but you mentioned this is like maybe a two or three day process is this something that one who has this type of issue would do every few weeks, once a quarter? Like, or is it, is it like, like, yeah, how's it timed?

Everybody should do this. Like everybody, everybody, this is like a life skill. Yeah, this is, this is, everybody should learn how to do this. And it's very simple to do. Like, like really the cool thing, if you step back and look at this, I'm throwing out a lot of big words and a bunch of stuff and it's a little new and a little intimidating but at the end of the day all i'm saying is eat stuff in a pattern that's all i'm saying so is this like a weekly thing that like that's what i'm talking about is this like how

often do you do this process of eating or is this just a way you should be ideally eating all the time uh this particular piece for targeting peroxisomes, probably every two weeks, you can do. The case I make in the book, a foundation for optimal peak human health is combining fibers that produce the right bacteria with fasting, with the occasional big meal, all in kind of a sequence that I lay out in the book.

Okay. We had Dr. Tony Huge on the podcast before, and he talked about SARMs. And he was talking about the things that SARMs can kind of turn on or stimulate. And he was, even though he is like the guy that brought SARMs to the forefront, or one of the guys that brought SARMs to the forefront, he just said, look, it's not a good idea to keep these things stimulated all the time. It's good to move in and out of it. It sounds like you're saying the same thing, but just with food. Yeah, move in and out of different things.

There's different reasons to do different things at different times. And while there is a great benefit to fasting, maybe we don't want to take it too far. While there's great benefits to this and that, we've got to also realize there's kind of a yin and a yang to each thing that we do, right? I would agree with that, yeah. I tried to do a master thesis in the book of

giving people a foundation that is the single best foundation for health by balancing out a lot of different things, but then the thing that makes it unique is the sequencing and the timing and the matching to not just diurnal rhythm, but circa septum rhythm, which is seven day rhythm, and then even seasons. And so once you get that, and it sort of sinks in, you've got this thing you do, but it's built with the idea that offsetting, getting off the reservation is just built into it and i give these examples in

the book of like okay here's here's kind of like a perfect way of doing it you're you did it but then here's dinner with pizza and ice cream and the offset piece is just built into the next day so don't even worry about it and and then if you want to have a season of being keto you can do that or you want to have a season of being carnivore you can do that yeah i remember when you were here last time you talked you you know told us how we could eat ice cream and how we could eat pizza and kind of offset it. I remember when you and I were doing some stuff together, you were saying that you kind of – you like to kind of like work in threes. So you have like the meal that you just had, but what did you eat beforehand? And then what's that next meal going to look like?

And you tend to balance things out in that way. meal going to look like? And you tend to balance things out in that way. And you were talking earlier about how balance you feel is a key component to this whole thing. And so that's what you're really trying to do. You're trying to just juggle all the hormones in the body and try to have it be the most beneficial without ending up running into a brick wall of negative aspects of even something most of us would think is smart to do, which is fasting, but you could certainly overdo some of these things. And the things that are good for us can end up kind of biting us in the ass in the long run if we're not careful.

Yeah, I have a chapter in the book dedicated to balance, and there's a couple of concepts in there that I think are probably worth talking about. So, in fact, we'll just kind of read some of these. It's interesting when you look at like this. So here is, these are just quotes from the research, okay? Chronic inflammation deregulates cellular balance and can drive carcinogenesis cancer. A hallmark of aging is a decline in metabolic balance. Loss of balance in cartilage contributes to development of osteoarthritis.

Disturbance of systemic iron balance causes two major classes of disease. The disruption of dynamic circulatory balance mediated by the brain causes heart failure. So, I mean, I could have listed 100 pages of this. causes heart failure. So, I mean, I could have listed a hundred pages of this, but what, what this takes us into the camp of is what I offer is the single highest truth of health, which is balance is health. Imbalance is disease. And it brings us to a super interesting question, which is will sustained input of healthy things im imbalanced, produce health or disease long term? Ooh. Now, think about it.

Yeah. Water's healthy. What happens if you imbalance water? You die. You die. Right. You die. Yeah.

Grains are healthy. What happens if you imbalance grains? Gut injury. Yeah. Gut injury. Protein's healthy. What happens if you imbalance grains? Gut injury. Yeah. Gut injury. Uh, proteins healthy. What if you, what happens if you imbalance protein? So now, yeah, now we're getting into pissing people off territory. Let's, let's, let's just kind of dive in. So proteins healthy. But if you imbalance protein, what can you get? So you can get, you can get an imbalance of bile acids in the gut, which is inherently oncogenic. Brock Lesnar attributes all of his issues to imbalancing protein. Here's the big one. Fats are healthy. What happens if you imbalance fats long term?

I don't know. So I make the case in the book that even fats if you imbalance well first of all there's a ton of research showing that you're talking about like excessive fats right no just like fats in the diet

if you imbalance fats yeah so there's a whole school of thought that or excuse me a whole school of research that shows

high fat diets are cancer promoting so then what about like keto diets what about fats from keto diets it must always be healthy right right is it not it's a good question yeah it's a good question it's worth talking about

so it turns out um i make the case in the book there's a key compound uh produced by keto diets it's uh what's called an oxidized phospholipid it's basically it's called 4-hydroxynoninal okay and when you look at 4-hydroxynoninal it's probably the mechanistic reason that explains much of the benefit of keto diets and what happens is within the mitochondria there's a special fat called cardiolipin when that fat gets oxidized it produces what's called an electrophile it's a highly highly highly highly reactive molecule called 4-hydroxynoninol. And when you look at 4-hydroxynoninol, it's a cancer promoter. But what you see in keto diets is when you go on a keto diet, oxidative stress goes up, then it goes down. So what happens is 4-hydroxynoninol gets produced and the body

upregulates glutathione production in the mitochondria. So you actually get an improvement in oxidative stress for a while. But then the thing about 4-hydroxynonino is after a while it accumulates. And so when you see 4-hydroxynonino, when it begins to get past small amounts in the body, it does some interesting things. It's a direct cancer promoter. It explains why keto diets can kill some cancer cells. In other cancer cells, they are able to diffuse 4-hydroxy-non-enol into adjacent cells where it can promote cancer. In high amounts, it makes cells explode.

explode. So there's some research now that is beginning to bubble up that shows damage within the mitochondria in animals for long-term keto diets. So it gets to this issue of, thank you, it gets to this issue of healthy things when imbalanced over very long periods, do they produce health or disease? The jury's probably out. Yeah. But there's good reason to take a look at it. So sort of a long-winded Joel explanation. Yeah. I mean, even like lifting, you know, we know that lifting is, you know, has some benefits. But if we, if that's the only form of exercise you ever do, we don't really know. We don't really know how healthy it is.

Do you feel like there's enough information? Do you feel like there's enough information? Do you feel like we've been around long enough with the right, correct scenarios to even know what the perfect diet is? Because cavemen and people from thousands of years ago, they had a diet that had less of an influence of things that would negatively impact their metabolism. But they also didn't live very long, but they died for different reasons. Now we don't have those same type of threats, but we have a lot of food options in front of us to make the correct choices. But it almost seems like up until now,

we didn't even have the opportunity to really explore how long someone can live and how long someone can live a good, strong, healthy life. What are your thoughts on that? I think that, um, so, uh, short answer. No, I don't think we have, I don't think we really have the answer to everything definitively speaking. Um, I think that, um, we're, we're, we, we're getting inklings of better versus not. But I think, again, that issue comes back to, you have to come back to what's most true about the body. And balance is the thing that's most true. And so when you look at inputs, meaning food,

you have to look at what is the imbalance that can result from sustained overdoing it from anything. And far from being restrictive, it's actually quite freeing because if you incorporate the idea of seasons into that, it gives you a lot of leeway and it makes a lot of sense. You know, there are seasons when maybe tons of meat are available and it's fine. There are maybe seasons when other things are available, like maybe certain types of fruits are in season, things like that.

And what we find is these things balance each other out. Where you can begin to get an inkling of how things work is some of the newer research looking at the effects of things that we either think are good or bad. A good example is omega-3s. So newer research with super long-lived people uh shows that high serum omega-3s in the blood um actually you die faster and the reason is because you get

oxidized fats in the blood from high serum omega-3s and again that probably doesn't mean that omega-3s are bad it doesn't mean they're bad right it doesn't mean they're bad but where you see that stop becoming an issue is like if you look at the Mediterranean diet, well, there's high fats in that diet. Nobody's got a cholesterol issue. Why? Because it's balanced out with phenols. And those phenols offset the oxidation of fats in the serum.

So the other extreme of that is if you look at fiber and protein in the gut. We mentioned earlier when we were talking to your brother about there's an adduct produced by the fermentation of meat in the gut. So fiber ferments in the gut. Meat ferments in the gut. It's easy to prove. Take a piece of meat, put it out, leave it out for two days, then eat it. Okay. Bacteria will ferment on that well there is um there's a there's a

cancer-promoting compound um o6 methyl 2-deoxyguanosine that forms in the gut when meat ferments in the gut when you add fiber in with it fiber acts like detergent and it doesn't form so there are mechanistically reasons to look at when you begin to balance things out a lot of the negatives of everything go away now that does not mean you have to eat the four group food groups at every meal it doesn't mean that but it does mean that over time things have to balance out so then how does this translate because you know that people are doing like there's the carnivore diet how do you feel day 23 world carnivore month yeah so right how what should people be thinking about when i'm using the carnivore diet as you know a way of dropping body fat etc what what should

they be thinking about long term i think it'd be highly useful um for a very functional purpose i think it'd be highly useful for a season of really wanting to put a ton of muscle on i'm just in the camp that thinks that nothing is going to be me when it comes to putting muscle on. And I think there's very good reasons to want to put muscle on for periods, particularly as you get older, particularly overcoming age-related issues with muscle, one of which is intramuscular fat deposits. You really need to knock those out as you get older okay um because they create a

feedback loop with fat that shrinks muscle um any any idea of uh like the body fat percentage of you know some people that are like 100 years old or some people that live long because you know we we talk about this quite a bit like we don't really see a lot of like jacked people like you know really being like older you know uh above the age of like 80 or um obviously like you know it's life is going to kind of like wear you out at some point and right shit will fall apart at some at some point but also even like uh you know you don't really see like someone like six five or six seven six eight we don't see a lot of like large individuals. So even in the case of getting muscle, it probably makes sense to have some muscle mass, but maybe that could also be maybe not something

that you're seeking out all the time. There's some really interesting research on muscle mass, protein intakes, age, and inflammation. So just to kind of sum it up, we're looking at And so just to kind of sum it up, we're looking at loss of muscle with age. We're also looking at age-related increase of intramuscular fat. Fat and muscle share some common signaling molecules, interleukin-1 and some other things. What happens is as fat begins to deposit in muscle, it creates a signal feedback loop that suppresses muscle growth with age. So we have to hack that. We can hack that with feeding patterns and a lot of other things. But at the same time, what's going on is the body's reacting differently to protein intakes with age. So there's some evidence that suggests lower protein intakes in about the mid-50s is

probably going to be less oncogenic in nature. You'll probably have a less cancer risk. But then as you get above a certain age, like you get above like late 60s, you actually need more protein intake because things flip. And now what you're seeing is like sort of the, you're past kind of the cancer onset phase, and now you're into the sarcopenia phase and now you actually need more protein intake this is yeah i mean this is something i've never heard anybody even talk about but um that makes so much sense that you would have you would you would have different nutritional needs at different ages i mean we i guess we do talk about it like with like a toddler or something and then and an infant and then we don't really ever talk about it any further that if you're an

adult yeah yeah yeah if you're an adult. You're an adult. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're like over the age of 16, it's like, you know, you just start eating kind of all the same stuff the same way. Yeah, 100%. In fact, so when you look at whey proteins, caseins and whey perform very differently in older versus younger populations. So, yeah, there's very different needs as you age. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is all crazy, crazy fascinating. as you age. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is all crazy, crazy, fascinating. You and I talked about Kratom in the past a little bit, and I was sharing with you, I was like, I, you know, I'm not really sure why, but man, it's helping me a lot with my fasting. Do you have a hypothesis

on that at all? Do you have a, you know, what are your thoughts on why that might be happening? First of all, I wish I knew a little bit more about it. I haven't looked at it that much, but just kind of what I do know is just endocannabinoid receptors.

So the endocannabinoid signaling has a lot to do with how well you deal with fasting. And I think Kratom probably works down that pathway, but I would be the first

person to say i'm not an expert in that right i just haven't looked at it enough yeah really say anything super smart so cool yeah like and back to the thing about aging so yeah god there's no way to make this a short answer but well you're talking to the right guy okay so like when you're looking at individuals 20s 30s 40s 50s 60, 50s, 60s, like you mentioned, you know, at 50, you might need a decreased protein to take 16, might need to increase it for different reasons. But when it comes to like other groups like carbohydrates, et cetera, the way like I know that or not that I know, but you know, a lot of people report that, oh, I used to be able to eat so many carbs in my 20s and in my 30s, I'm getting fat. And like, what do people need to be thinking about as you're getting older in terms of these different groups? Number one thing is, um, rate of aging and carbohydrates or insulin production. So number one thing, there's a school of thought that the number one thing driving your rate of aging is insulin production after age 45.

Um, so that like above any other factor, uh, you can make a very good argument that how much insulin you make past 45 is going to kind of like, you know, veer the course of what's left. So that's a big deal to think about and the types of carbohydrates that you're eating and all those things. The other side of that is that you also have to think about maintaining the phytobacteria in the gut. also have to think about maintaining the phytobacteria in the gut. And your best way to do that is through very specific types of fiber and carbs that are, for the most part, insulin sensitizers. They actually make insulin work better long-term. And so all that comes down to kind of a master thesis of when to do what. And that really is the key to everything. It's the question everybody has is what, when, and how, you out of the you know good bad is fiber good is meat bad plants

good you know getting out of that it's just everything has a what when and a how uh so your big one though nutrient wise would be um would be that the next thing the next thing is looking at um kind of kind of um fat intake and when you're doing that and what kinds of fats specific to the functions I talked about. So pexophagy is a really big one. Most of the emphasis on anti-aging in the fitness community has been on mitochondria function. I'm of the opinion that needs a rethink

just because we don't really 100% understand how the mitochondria work and targeting the mitochondria, the antioxidants may not be a great idea long-term. But something that is probably a little easier to control is pexophagy and proliferation of peroxisomes. And that can be controlled through types of fats and fasting. And so that's a big component in things. Is it a little bit hard for you to get your message out? Because, you know, you got guys like Mark Sisson and Dave Asprey, Rob Wolf. You know, you have people that are, these are all brilliant people and they're all sharing, you know, those guys have some things in common. But there's a lot of people in the nutrition space.

They have like a cold, hard stance. Like, this is what we're doing. Right. And, you know, I wrote a book called The War on Carbs. And maybe it's easier to get behind. Right. Like, all right, I'm just not going to eat any carbs. Like, it's such a simple concept.

Do you think sometimes you have a hard time maybe getting your message out or having your message be clear with sharing this idea of, like, balance? I don't know yet. That's why i wrote a book um i wrote this i've always been really concerned with truth and i i have a lot of people going like who the hell you think you are dude i think you're some expert or something and sounds like you're halfway there at least to be an expert but I kind of have to explain this from the preface of like I have literally just been that dude at the front of the line

the consumer like going you know like I could put half an inch on in a day if I work out 12 hours of curls I'll do it you know and I was that dude I've done an inch on the arms in one day I've done the program I did it too. Did it work for you?

It didn't work for me. I got sore as hell. No, it gave me like, like rhabdo, you know, it just made my arms, it made my arms swollen, but they were like effed up, you know? So this is what I'm talking about. That's been my whole life where I, I got some advice from someone and I did it. Like I did that exactly. And then I was.

Explain to these guys a little bit about this program. Do you remember, do you remember much about it this oh yeah everything yeah okay so uh late late 80s uh early 90s is this kind of we got to put this program out there again oh shit this is real i thought this was like a joke in one day yeah no this is real so late 80s early 90s is this kind of like weird time for what we call fitness and uh it like there's just a lot of bs so there's there's this stuff called hot stuff there's just all the hot stuff i think ended up having like uh diana ball in it so that stuff really ended up working pretty good yeah it did work good uh people got all puffy and jacked and like man this shit's crazy yeah yeah there was a lot of

that going on so uh there was a there was a magazine article that going on. So there was a magazine article that came out, I think it was 89, and it talked about a half inch on your arms in one day. So I grabbed like four pounds of bananas and I parked at the gym like at 8 a.m. Same thing. And then left at like 8 o'clock that night. And it took like a year to get my arms back to normal after that. I mean, yeah. Yeah, it just totally screwed you up. So you'd work biceps

and triceps right uh like periodically like the whole day yeah and i brought a bunch of food to the gym too i had like bananas and i had hard-boiled eggs and like it was like you'd camp out at the gym you know and it was like a 12-hour thing i mean yeah it was it was absolute insanity do you know who else did this one uh ron ron I'm sure. I was going to say that. Oh, my God. I'm sure we all happened to do it on the same day probably. Yeah, the same month. Yeah.

We got to relive that. We got to go down to Ron's gym. That would be fun. And all train together and put an inch on the arm in one day. I wouldn't last more than 10 minutes. But my whole life has been listening to stuff like that and then years of problems from listening to something. Where someone else made their money and I was just jacked up.

That got me to this place of what's really true versus what's not. That was a big impetus with this. The other thing too was today what we think of as this whole thing, it's in a place very similar to 1992 martial arts so you have these different schools like no dude karate's the best no dude kung fu shreds no dude like boxing will kick your ass any day of the week no dude aikido crushes it okay that's where we're at today and what hulk hogan would beat the shit out of all those people so uh and what was really true then is they all had one thing in common none of them were dealing with reality not one and then along comes mixed martial arts and redefines the map and sometimes what happens

in an endeavor is you get so far away from what's really true that there's this loud snap back to truth and what i just saw was that as a whole the industry had gotten has gotten so far from what is actually true that was the big impetus with this and um and it's like you can go down category by category man like like i have four chapters in here dedicated to body fat because because the truth of body fat has never been laid out never like like okay so um you reduced fat cells so here's what happened the extracellular matrix is going to upregulate collagen 2 plus collagen 6 collagen those uh it's also going to upreg regulate matrix melanoprotease 11 and fatty acid binding protein 4 those are going to reprogram fat cells. And what's going to happen is you're going to get all the shearing and traction stress.

I mean, like, this has never been, okay, like that's how fat cells really work. And here's the consequences of that. And also like what is the ideal human body fat level? So, and I'm sure, you know, there's some variations with some genetics and things like that, but that has to play into it too, right? That has to be a big factor. If you were, I don't know, let's say 18% body fat most of your life and you're like, man, I'd love to make some changes. And now you're living in single digit body fat land, it might be very stressful on your body, right?

Very much so. There's a lot of new revelations about what's always been true. For example, this is really interesting. As the body gets super lean, kind of like where you were at for your contest, new fat cells start to get formed. And the reason they start to get formed, or excuse me, new lipid droplets start to get formed. The reason they're getting formed is that there are carnitines within the mitochondria that are getting damaged. And these damaged carnitines are very destructive

to the mitochondria. So what happens is fat, it turns out, is a longevity regulator. And what happens is all this damaged stuff overwhelms the detoxification ability of the cell. So it gets sequestered into body fat, into lipid droplets. And the lipid droplets just kind of act like this nuclear containment facility for all the toxic aggregates. And so it kind of like protects the body from it.

And so as you're getting super, super lean. It's kind of, your body's kind of saying like, how long are you really going to do this for, dude? Yeah, you're getting sort of negative points and then the body has a backup mechanism for that so there's there's i believe that we're walking into a new era where um we're going to really look at how things actually work and get away from a lot of these narratives have you ever had an opportunity to work with a bodybuilder before yes yeah and then like how do you um i know that you have worked with me in my bodybuilding show. Uh, but you know, I was, uh, I was on a very specific diet and stuff like

that. So I didn't want to flirt with that too much, but you helped me after the contest. Um, what about, you know, uh, somebody going into, into a contest, some contest prep, like what are some things that you may have done with a bodybuilder that looks different so that people can kind of avoid what you're just, uh, what you're talking about? Or can you not avoid it if you're trying to get super lean? That's not an area that I've ventured into. And I think there's a lot of dudes that do pre-contest prep a whole lot better than I would do. Um, it's, it hasn't really been my focus. Um, I do have my areas where like, you know, if I want to get really lean or I want to help somebody get really lean, I'll do that.

I'm coming at it very differently than a bodybuilder would. So I don't know that I'm qualified to. The intuition that they have on some of it is pretty crazy. Like where, you know, my coach was like, you know, go out tonight and have a bacon cheeseburger. You know, like it was just he would see something in my body where he thought i needed very specific foods and i'm finding commonality between you know what you're saying and and what these guys are saying it was probably exactly just to offset like he knows you're in a deficit he knows your body's craving these nutrients and now your body's going to suck a lot of these things up uh yeah yeah i mean that's gosh you could do a show on that i don't know yeah when so you and i

have also discussed you know you're mentioning you know ice cream and pizza and stuff like this and you kind of already touched upon it a little bit but uh what about somebody just just you know he's talking about seasonal what about somebody kind of just taking a diet break you know can they and what about the influence of some processed foods and stuff? We know that this is going to exist in the diet anyway, because it's uncontrollable. They're, they're too delicious. The things taste too good. But does this make sense from a health perspective? Does this make sense for people to just say, you know what, for the next, you know, two, three weeks, I'm just going to, I'm just going to relax on a diet a little bit. And I'm going to, there's, you know what, for the next two, three weeks, I'm just going to relax on a diet a little bit.

I think you need some rules for yourself. You want to be careful, especially if you're heavy. But do you think this is a good idea? Yeah, this is some interesting new research starting in 2014 on the benefits of sort of the other side of dieting, metabolically speaking. the other side of dieting, metabolically speaking. So there's even very specific proteins that are starting to kind of be identified, circulating catabolic factor, other different types of proteins that are induced by overfeeding or just sort of, you know, kind of like changes in food patterns. And the net of these things, so you're changing things up, you're going on this thing that sort of at the outset seems like, wow, why would you do that, dude? You're going to get fat.

But the net result is you're actually up regulating key proteins and other things in the body that actually help you stay leaner so um there's a lot of benefit to that can be yeah can be um we have a a rap sheet here and the the guy that made it said that you eat primarily fast food oh is that legit it's 100, but it's not junk food. Okay. Okay. Yeah, no, I, I actually, there's, there's this funny thing with people that know me of making fun of me, like when we go out, cause I will, I'll eat, you know, I'll, I'll, if I want to celebrate, I will. Yeah. I actually eat very healthy. I actually really healthy. It's just that, um, I, number one, I don't do any meal prep. Um, I do everything on the go with healthy sort of fast food for the most part.

So when you say healthy, what, like, what does it entail? Like when you go to a certain place, what are the things that you get? What are the things that you avoid? Um, I, I, I won't avoid anything if I want it. Okay. Yeah. But what I do a lot of is, um, I eat for function on the go and it's, so here's the crazy, crazy part. In fact, when we get done, I'll, I'll, I'll put you guys on it just for fun. Nice. It's actually healthier than just about anything you can do because what we're doing is we're, you can get so isolated on like uh you know that the

minutiae of like the food like yeah but was that chicken raised on like brazilian grass okay was he eating like was he eating like and the ancestral mouse yeah how was he taken care of okay you can get so obsessed on that that you're actually getting away from some of the mechanistic aspects of food. So, um, so what, well, I have like, um, sort of a list of, of, um, places that are, you know, on very specific days, very specific times, um, I'll go to, and I can do, uh, uh, a meal specifically to spin up the phytobacteria. And then maybe the next day I can eat very specific types of fats just on the go without even having to do anything. And because all these things fit into

a sort of connected pattern of I'm spinning bifidobacteria up here, I'm inducing autophagy here, it's actually healthier. As crazy as it sounds. No meal prep and it's actually healthier. And a lot of people think that's BS, but I didn't do that to be sensationalist. It just came out of necessity. I had this period

in the mid 2000s where I was running this company and grew up to a multimillion dollar company. And I went from being 5% body fat at the start of that job to 260 pounds of fat. Okay. I mean, I was like our revenue curve and my weight were identical and it really really bothered me because I had 30 years of fitness in at that point and I just found for me that all that collapsed when I put the ecosystem of the real world on it I was turning 40 I was working 14 hour days yeah I remember you telling me this story too you this is how you kind of landed on all this stuff is that you used to spend uh basically your whole early lifetime like training yeah and eat you know

eating correctly or correctly as you thought at the time yeah and then once that was kind of taken away from you didn't have that much time to put into it boom you gained a bunch of weight yeah what i found out i found out something the hard way um and it's it's uh it's something that's never really talked about. And I think for people that are sort of in the business of helping other people, I think a really important shift needs to happen, which is to understand that there's an ecosystem difference. And that ecosystem difference creates probabilities that are very different in both ecosystems. And so we want to have solutions for any ecosystem. both ecosystems. And so we want to have solutions for any ecosystem. And if you have a solution, it has to be designed for that ecosystem that, that, that, you know, your client is in, for

example, just for example, somebody has a nine to five and they are at their desk all the time. Maybe they can't do, you know, the 150 different exercises you want them to do every single day. Yeah. And so I, I, for me had, had to create something that worked in that ecosystem. And what I found over time was that most of the advice coming out of the fitness ecosystem just didn't translate. And it didn't translate

due to willpower or time management. It was probability. It was the probability of where your minutes go. And I just needed that for me in that ecosystem. And then that turned into this thing where like, I realized what most people were doing over time was they would try and adopt the fitness ecosystem

and then they'd fail due to time probability constraints over time. And so hacking that problem became kind of like the thing I got obsessed with. Walk us through this. You go to McDonald's in the morning. No. And then for lunch, you go to Chipotle.

No, yeah. I would never go to McDonald's. You're talking about these fast foods. So what does it look like? What exactly are these foods that we're talking about? So you mentioned Chipotle. I'll do that one. You still kind of avoid like McDonald's, Burger King, that kind of stuff?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like I said eat i eat healthy almost all the time the only difference in me is like i don't hold back from celebrating if i want to but i just offset it after i do and um and in fact if you compare me to the average person they're doing the same thing they're just not offsetting it right that's all they're they're like convincing themselves they're strict but then what they're doing is partying on the weekends and then they don't know how to offset it and there's some people that are trying to offset it but also in a very unhealthy fashion because they're like all right i'm going 45 minutes on the elliptical i'm going hard i'm starting back on monday right getting everything back on track and then they kind of continue to do that and it's that back on track thing is what most people are stuck in um and i just think i figured out a better way

which is that if you look at how the body really works, multiple times a day, you're burning fat, storing fat, burning fat, storing fat, burning fat, storing fat. So if you could take the periods where you're burning fat and make the curve bigger and the periods where you're storing fat and shrink it, okay, then you are going to increase your probability of getting what you want. It's not a panacea. You're going to always have seasons where you got to kind of get back in it, put a little more time into it. It's never going to go away.

But what you can get rid of is over time what you're seeing is this. Maybe it'd be more beneficial to not even think about being on a track. You know, like people say they got off track. Maybe it'd be more beneficial to just say like this is, I'm going to implement and employ uh what i can what i can stick to for a lifetime uh yeah it's so um plug my uh i just came out with this course called um how to eat and it's all this it's all the stuff in the book it's just more of it um but so let's take chipotle for example your website had a lot of great stuff on it too and you were sharing that with me when i was uh it had like the meal plans and everything

for you yeah all that stuff um so like uh what i would do chipotle is um i would do that the day before fast and what you want to do is you want to get uh beans, double portion, no rice. Put them in a separate bowl. Then in a separate bowl from the black beans, you want to put in double chicken, double scoop of hot peppers, and then a bunch of hot stuff. So like the grains of salsa, put that in there. A little bit of cheese.

The cheese is going to help fat oxidation. Then what you do is you go over to the ice machine, you dump ice in the beans, and then you stir it up. Turning it into a resistant starch. Wow. You're not feeding you, you're feeding bifidobacteria.

You're taking the black beans and you're turning them from a substrate that feeds you to something that feeds bifidobacteria. Then you just drain out all the water, dump, dump the beans in the other bowl. Could you picture seeing him at, you're doing this in Chipotle. Like you're trying to get,

you're trying to get soda. And he's like, get his ice on the beans. No, it's, it's a convo piece. Like I'll be in, I'll be in Chipotle doing this and people are just like kind of doing this.

Like, yeah, they're like, huh? Yeah. And then you take some hot sauce and put that on there and wow like you're gonna feel that all afternoon all afternoon so it's a gut bomb and everything in that uh burns fat and makes bifidobacteria and so here's the thing where people get derailed is is like chipotle got caught with their hands in their pants.

That's not triple organic desaturated with moon dust and pixies. You get into that whole thing. I love that voice. I love that. So you get into that whole thing. But what we're leaving out of the equation is, foundationally speaking, you have to come back to order of operations. And so keeping Bifidobacteria spun up does all these other things, long list of things that it does. And so the tradeoffs in terms of grades of chicken meat and all this stuff is offset by the fact that mechanistically

you're timing production of bacteria to the genetic rush hour. So there's a functional tool there. Okay. I can do that on the go. And there's several other things like that, that I've just, you know, developed that eliminate meal prepping and all that stuff. It's actually healthier. It's healthier.

Are you concerned? Because you said extra peppers, right? Mm-hmm. Because I looked into it too, but I guess they saute it in rice bran oil. Yeah. Is that concerning at all? So there's always pros and cons.

Mm-hmm. Everything is a series of pros and cons. There's the benefits, and then there's the negatives like like what's sugar like sugar is not all negative right right yeah i mean there's so i talk about this in the book um i call it baby talk okay the the baby talk is the what without the when and the how and the example the analogy is words like if you're a baby and you go cookie, you might get a cookie, okay? But if you want to get elected president

or you want to win the heart of that special person or get a job, learning to use the right words in the right time, in the right way has a power nothing else has. Food works exactly like that. So once you get how to use the right foods in the right time, in the right way, it's a power.

And it's true of anything in health, anything. So where the industry is at right now, 100% is, you know, just to do the voice, plants are bad. Meat is good. Fiber is bad. Is there two marks in here? You know, you're in this like 1990 martial arts, good, bad sort of thing. That's not how things work. The reality is anything can be good or bad.

It depends on what's the objective and then when and how. Timing and how it's used. And once you get that, it changes everything. It changes absolutely everything. So the negative is, you know, they cook it in these types of fat. everything. So the negative is, you know, that they cook it in these types of fat, but then the other side of it is, yeah, but you're going to be spinning up key. You're giving key bacteria, the right substrate at the right time, in the right way when you most need it, which is at four in the morning when HDAC and all these other things are going off. So, you know, where's the

way off there? Do you think a lot of the science that you've learned, a lot of things you've learned over the years, do you think that it's possible that maybe some of it might be incorrect in association back to depending on like what style of diet someone's following? So let's say, let's say for example, that we just say meat can be carcinogenic, right? Let's just say we say something along those lines. Would that be true if somebody was to predominantly only eat meat? Like, do the rules start to change when we, you know, don't have so many dietary options? That's a fantastically great question. So the history of science is the history of being

completely wrong while we were sure we were right. The earth's flat. Yeah,. So the history of science is the history of being completely wrong while we're sure we were right. The earth's flat. Yeah, that's the history of science. In fact, it just happened with cholesterol, you know, in the last year or two. It's like, ah, we were wrong. It's not HD. It's not, ah, we were wrong. So I always just try to come back to a place of, A, empiricism is extremely important.

But you have to also look at does it make sense does it kind of fit a loose ancestral narrative and then observationally have i seen this work on a lot of people and then and then even then you need a little bit of balance in there and so that's why i keep coming back to that idea of balance that, you know, in the right time, the right way, just about anything is on the table. Yeah. And I think that makes sense. And I think that's reasonable.

I think, you know, while I enjoy a keto diet and I enjoy the diet that I'm on now, a carnivore carnivore style diet, I'm also like, I also am a firm believer in, in eating the things that, you know,

the natural foods that were, you know, the natural foods that were, you know, put on this earth for us to eat, which I think would include vegetables. I've talked about it all the time here on the show. I don't have any problem against vegetables. This is a little bit more of an experiment for this month to kind of go this deep into it. I also think that fruits can be great. I also think that potatoes and rice, and I think there's a place for a lot of these different things in my diet. I don't know when I'll go back to mixing those things in, but if somebody wanted to be on a carnivorous style diet, they wanted to follow that. What is something they should really

be aware of? What's something that maybe, you know, people are just kind of diving into it because they're like, oh, Mark, you got lean, so I'm going to kind of do it with you. What's something that maybe people should know ahead of time? Is it going to be important to spin back out of this? Is it going to be important to add in fiber while you're doing the diet? What are some of your thoughts on that? Yeah, kind of high level. I think I always like to tie things to sort of a functional outcome. And I think that there can be a lot of positives to that in terms of actually bringing inflammation down. So that could be a goal I'm going after or adding muscle. That could be a goal I'm going after. I, number one, would put it to a functional outcome.

So what I'm going to do is I have a period here where I'm going to leverage the power of meat to put some muscle on for a while. And that's a really useful thing. Or I need to spin inflammation down, so I'm going to combine fasting with sort of a period of having a lot of meat, and it's going to help with that. I'm going to add this little thing here, maybe these specific fibers to sort of offset maybe the potential oncogenic aspects of meat fermenting in the gut. Generally, I'm of the opinion that in the short term, nothing's really that big a deal. Short term being even trying it for a year or two or a shorter period of time? I generally mean probably about six months is kind of my idea of the short term. And I think a lot of things, keto diet, karma, can be very beneficial in those time frames. The other thing that I would throw out with that is stop, do not pass go until you understand how body fat really works when you reduce it.

Because that is the number one thing. What happens is when you're in your 20s, have a quote in my book from joe rogan where he talks about a weight cut and he said he observed that that just seems like after a while the body develops a resistance and he hit it right in the head so we just think that losing fat is just this thing you can do it anytime you want but actually when you look at what's actually really true about how fat works um over time it your body builds a resistance to fat loss. And it makes sense if you think about just from a starvation perspective, we call it fat loss, but historically it's called starvation. So the more you starve, the body gets better at holding onto fat. So I think you have to

understand how body fat actually works and how to counter all the mechanistic adaptions to it. I think that's a really big thing. My own personal experience, I've been in the weight loss universe. What I see a lot of are people who are in their 40s and 50s, and they did it all. They did the body for life. They did Atkins.

They did everything, and now they can't lose weight. Because of just everything that they've done up until that point has made them so resistant to that. Yeah, they have a very hard't lose weight. Because of just all the, everything that they've done up until that point has made them so resistant to that. Yeah, they have a very hard time losing weight. And in the book, I explain the mechanism behind that. So what happens is body fat is not fat. Body fat is a system.

When I say system, what I mean is that you have a number of components. So you have fat cells, but then you have immune cells, a number of immune cells, a lot. So you have fat cells, but then you have immune cells, a number of immune cells, a lot. Then you have stem cells. Then you have the extracellular matrix. Then you have very specific collagens. And then you have very specific proteins. And then you have microRNAs. Okay. All these things work together as a system. That system has multiple configurations.

as a system, that system has multiple configurations. Okay. One in particular I talk about in the book is the secretory associated phenotype. This is a mode that your fat can go into where it's essentially acting like a megaphone, putting out senescent inflammatory signals across the body okay so you have to understand how your fat works and once you understand how your fat works and how that system works now it becomes about keeping that system optimized and you have to understand the mechanisms and the levers of your fat so when you lose fat you are you are creating an injury we don't think of as an injury but to understand it at the cellular level if i if your liver got kicked out of place okay that's an injury okay um in fat cells when

fat cells shrink they're they're tied to the extracellular matrix when the fat cell shrinks it breaks away from the extracellular matrix okay so so what happens is mechanobiology shearing stress happens where, if that was a house and this was a brick and this was the mortar and the brick shrunk from the mortar, all the way to the house would transfer from both to just the mortar, okay?

House might collapse. Same thing happens when you drop fat. So you create a mechanobiology effect where shearing stress transfers from the structure to a hole to just the ECM. So that's an injury. And then to fix that injury, what happens is very specific fibers grab the fat cell and pull it back in position. Well, that creates traction stress. It'd be like if I pulled my whole body from right here or if I pulled your house from one cable.

I might get your house where I want, but I'm going to injure the house. Okay. So in response to that, fat cells make heat shock proteins to sort of fix the damage. And you have all these injury related processes that kick in. You have shifts in immune cells, shifts in collagen fibers, all these things that happen. And long-term, the emerging view is that fibrosis or stiffening of the ECM is not just an obesity problem. It may just be the way fat operates. And so we are coming into a profound shift of this whole picture and understanding that repeatedly reducing body fat may be one of the biggest drivers of the problem long term. Wow.

So people need to just, you know, I guess to kind of sum some of that up, people just need to, if they, let's say someone weighs 300 pounds or listening to this right now. And they're like, fuck, man, I don't have any hope because he's telling me not to lose weight. But you're not saying I'm not saying weight, but it might be really smart to try to do it in stages, right? It might be smart to, you know, say, hey, like for this month, I'm going to focus in on dropping weight. Next month, I want to focus in a little bit more on just feeling really good. I'm not all that concerned if I lose that much weight. Was that kind of, you know, would a concept like that be something that would make sense? I would probably add on to that and say you've got to become aware of a new way of thinking about this problem.

And there are checkpoints you need along the way. So let's take some of the things that you did. One of those is a leptin checkpoint. So as fat cells shrink, serum leptin goes down, and that's setting you up to eat more long-term. So as fat's coming down, we need these checkpoints that kick leptin up. So by the time you get to the bottom, instead of leptin being here, it's up here. We've created the opposite effect.

So we've hacked that one aspect. The next aspect is the gut biome completely shifts when you drop fat and in most cases you're left with actually a weight gain sort of enterotype or gut bacteria we've got to fix that problem i think we did that one with you too as well and so you've got just all these checkpoints that are not even in the discussion right now and that really like and it's kind of that's why i put so much four chapters in here that's the hardest part of the book um to that because this in my opinion long term is really messing people up and once you get the checkpoints it's not that hard like the things we did with you weren't that

hard it was like okay dude here eat this here eat that and make sure it's at this time and make sure it's gigantic you know and that has a big, big impact. Yeah, you had very, very specific foods, and I think it would be really cool. We're going to try not to take up too much more of your time, but this is just so fascinating, and it's such an honor to have someone here who speaks so well, you know, about nutrition. Let's play a little game here, and let's throw some food towards Joel here. All right. And he can give us scenarios of like what the food can do for us from a beneficial standpoint, or you could shout out, you know, hey, tacos or something and see how he would spin away from, you know, eating a, you know, quote unquote, bad food. All right.

So I'll kind of start it out and I'll kick her off with cucumbers. What are something that cucumbers could do for us? Cucumbers are really good to start a period of fat loss. So if you combine cucumbers with avocado and asparagus right at the very beginning, you're going to get a lot of things that are extremely beneficial. Mechanistically, avocado is going to actually suppress insulin output. There's a special sugar called mannoheptulose in avocado. And what I've seen is when you combine that with cucumber, it's incredible what it does for fat loss at the very start.

So it's kind of a natural cleanse. I think you mentioned having that even before you have like a meal, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very useful at the very start of a fat loss program. And I think also too, last time you were here, you mentioned that cucumbers could potentially help against being like hung

over or something like that, right? Was that what it was? I can't remember if that's what it was. That was asparagus. Asparagus. I'll go ahead and might as well roll into that one. Asparagus is kind of like a Swiss army knife of foods. It's highly, highly utilitarian.

One of the interesting things about asparagus is that it actually helps upregulate a couple enzymes involved in alcohol metabolism. So asparagus is a really good food to eat around the consumption of alcohol. And none of these things are a panacea. It's not like you're going to eat asparagus and you're good. It's not like that at all. You're going to get a couple percent improvement. But if you learn about six, seven, eight of these things, they're super easy to do.

You just add these things in there. So asparagus is also a fantastic tool to offset with. One of the things that I do a lot is, if I go off the reservation, we go to Cheesecake Factory, and I really shouldn't have eaten that, but I did. Asparagus at bedtime sort of helps

check the destruction a little bit. Because obesity, from a gut biome perspective, is a fermentation issue. You're fermenting the wrong foods meal to meal to meal. You can take that same concept and apply it in the reverse. And you can even use it to offset foods. So you can ferment in a positive direction, ferment in a negative direction, then ferment in a positive direction, meal to meal sequencing. So asparagus at bedtime after you've really

blown it is fantastic for that. What about celery? That got popular not too long ago i have no use for celery for the most part i don't know i mean there are some functional aspects to it it just hasn't been like one of my things that i use too much um yeah because i find celery one of the things about is it makes you really hungry um and there's there's times when being hungry is good but there's better tools to to induce hunger got it. What's a better tool to induce hunger? Because some people want to gain some size around here too. Yeah.

So a combination at night. Well, I wouldn't do it at night. I'll keep you up. But lunchtime, do a combination of raw broccoli with avocado with black beans and tuna. Do those four together. That's going to be a fart bomb right there. You said raw coffee? No, raw broccoli.

Oh, raw broccoli. Yeah, raw broccoli with... Nice try, though. Let me go through this again. Raw broccoli, avocado, a little bit of avocado, some black beans, not heated, and then some tuna steak,

like lightly braised, and you'll be absolutely starving. Are black beans just, Are black beans that you get in a can from a store, those a resistant starch, just by the way they are? As long as they're cold. On the live stream, Araba asks, what about lemons?

Lemons are kind of a great little add-on to a whole food cleanse. They're good for that. I haven't used them too much myself for anything other than that. Or lemons with citrus make for a really good like kind of natural salad dressing when you're, there's a couple of, there's a couple of like mega fat loss, like meal combinations that I've done with people. And you just need some flavor somewhere in there. And

lemons are really good for that. If you have too much flavor deprivation while you're experiencing fat loss, your mind goes, you upregulate the archaic nucleus in the brain and then you just eat like crazy. So, uh, do, uh, lemons help, um, do lemons help you digest collagen a little bit better? I don't know the answer to that. Yeah. I've heard somebody say that maybe vitamin C might play into it. So some people talked about squeezing a little bit of lemon I don't know the answer to that one. Yeah, I've heard somebody say that maybe vitamin C might play into it. So some people talked about squeezing

a little bit of lemon in some bone broth. But what about something like cereal? Thank you. That was just, that is. Yeah, that's why I asked it because I was thinking, when I think of you, I think of cereal. Which one?

Well, I love cereal for sure. Like, I guess I can't really do a top three, but the top three that come to my my head is uh cocoa pebbles for sure yes i mean come on yeah cinnamon toast crunch yes there you go there you go i keep asking ron i gotta ask ron to do that one yeah yeah and then uh it's a tie between legit just regular cheerios and back to fruity pebblesbbles. The place I would use those, there are times when you need to 2x calories, and it's actually very good to do. So, again, one of the ways you can maximize muscle growth is to amplify starvation signals. So the more you get the body signaling starvation, the more it's going to put muscle on.

And it just makes sense if you think about it. Like Like if you just run through that narrative, it kind of makes sense. And then in a practical sense, it actually works. So coming off a very specific kind of fast where you've been amplifying the signals of starvation, in fact, you can even do it with food, you need two X calories for about 10 days. And it's very difficult, uh, the two X calories sometimes. And so that's, those things can be kind of perfect in,

in that space. They can be really useful in that space to do that. And, and it's very beneficial because you have to combine it with a training, a lot heavier, two X in calories and a few other things. But during that period, um,

fruity pebbles are very useful. So this, this comes together with like ice cream and stuff too. Like that's where all that type of stuff clumps together, correct? Not necessarily. So sometimes you just go off the reservation. Yeah. Sometimes you just do. And there's just no rhyme or reason to it.

And that is a section of the book I talk about, The New Science of Meal Sequencing. And it's actually a pretty fascinating topic. It's basically like once you understand how meals are working, I give a very easy way to have dessert. And the reason is the previous meal has dictated what you're going to eat and you're just not going to eat dessert versus if you ate, um, you know, like cucumbers and avocado for one meal, the next meal, you're much more likely to, uh, not just eat more, but eat things that have a ton of flavor. Okay. So, and that's exactly how obesity works again. So another aspect to obesity is the signaling meal to meal is creating this snowball where it's making you meal to meal want more things that are worse and worse and worse. You can take that and you can make that work in reverse. Okay. And so one of the ways you do that is by understanding how meals sequence together. And it's this idea that here's your pizza and ice cream meal. Okay. And then there's a meal before that, that is doing a bunch of very specific things like offsetting the damage to the

gut bacteria, a bunch of other things. And then the post meal is also offsetting a lot of that damage. So, and then you can go down the list. It's like, okay, well, gut bacteria, we have to fix this, check insulin function. We have to fix this, check, check, check. And so you can go down the list. It's like, okay, well, gut bacteria, we have to fix this. Check insulin function, we have to fix this. Check, check, check. And so you can use meal-to-meal sequencing to increase insulin sensitivity, increase or decrease energy harvest from food. So decrease the calories yielded from food and all these other things that are all part of the new science of meal sequencing. Do you think that, because we've talked a little bit about this before, there's some people that they can have a little bit of these foods and have great self control. And there's some people that if they do have a little bit of these foods, they go

off the reservation, which is why they just choose to abstain. But your idea of balance is if you want to have it, know how to deal with it. So can this of i guess help those individuals that feel that they have to abstain get control of that is there a way for them or is that just a personality type of idea um i i would say that it's not a perfect answer but to give you the general parameters of it there are mechanisms that are within your control meal to meal. Again, coming back to the gut bacteria. So if I have the pizza and ice cream meal, what that's going to do is the way obesity works is it's going to ferment bacteria in my gut that are going to make me want more pizza and ice cream. Okay. So one technique is prior to that meal, I can push the gut the opposite direction. Okay. And then after

that meal, I can push the gut the opposite direction. Again, what that does is it's going to blunt some of that, not all of it. Again, there's no panaceas. There's just, there's 10 improvements of 5%. That's what there are. And each one of these will give you 5%. So it's going to blunt some of that. The next problem you have is the effect on insulin function and the effect of energy dense food on the body's controls over satiety and all those types of things yeah you can hack that through timing so there's certain times where you can insert those things and the effect can be blunted so makes a lot of sense and how would the timing work? Just a certain amount of time beforehand you would eat something.

Like you mentioned to me, positive effects of having, I think it was whey protein shake and some olive oil about 30 minutes before a meal. Yeah, that's one way to do it. And people think this is hooey. Like when I'm talking about it, it's like, dude, you're so full of crap. Because they haven't really heard it before. That's, that's part of the reason why. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess some of the, some of the, like some of the like shade thrown last time was like, like, yeah, but they certainly just never heard it, you know,

because really like people are listening to people that are, you know, trying to get bigger for like bodybuilding or powerlifting. And, you know, you hear a little bit of talk about performance, but you don't really hear about functional food, not for function of like, you know, how your body like lifts in the gym and stuff like that, which I know that this would still have a huge benefit on that. But this is to improve the function of the way that you're digesting and the way that you're consuming and the way that you're absorbing the very food that you're eating. And I don't, we've just have never, we've never had anybody else on this podcast before talk about any of this before. So this is very new to a lot of people.

That's why a lot of people might be like, oh my God, this is such bullshit. Yeah. I hope they're not believing this guy. Yeah. I hope Smelly doesn't eat a garbanzo bean. Yeah. I get it yeah i get it i get it uh so the answer to your question is circucept and rhythm um for that piece of it um

so if you look at uh mondays sorry what garbanzo beans oh yeah he told me garbanzo beans i think i can't remember yeah no yeah they're very functional they're so one of the things you can do with garbanzo beans are actually um they're a super fantastic tool number one um if you're a vegan they're like your go-to for protein source i mean like a lot of people don't know this but like 45 grams of protein in a cup of garbanzo i mean they're yeah there's a ton of protein in garbanzos but the next thing is they have very unique oligosaccharides in them and they sensitize insulin. So if you know you're going to have the pizza and ice cream meal, garbanzo beans at the previous meal actually help insulin work a little bit better.

You're going to get a couple percent bump on the way insulin works. So they're very, very, very, very functional and they feed the gut. Cool. How about a question that a lot of people probably have? they're very, very, very, very functional and they feed the gut. Um, so cool. Yeah. How about a question that a lot of people probably have, um, before working out, I think you do some super specific things, but how can they, what should, or yeah, what kind of things should they potentially eat before having a workout or yeah, before a workout to make them perform better? Um, it depends on the time and the type of workout and all these different types of things, but let's but let's just go down the list.

So go-to, which I don't think is new to probably most people in this audience, is that workout on the morning of a fast. Okay, let's start with that one because that's kind of the most important. What I would add to that discussion is that you have amplified bacteria prior to that, and you've amplified the genetic rush hour prior to that. So're getting all this sort of signal induction for amp k cert one and all these things we want to activate then coming into that workout a few things just really stand out above others which are um if you want to train fasted then coming into that uh small molecules can be fantastic so berberine for example example, come into that. And very specific types of fats can change things quite a bit.

So what would berberine do? Berberine is going to help activate the AMPK pathway. Okay. It's going to activate the youth extending, life extending benefits of sort of that fasted workout. Your ancestral narrative is freezing

your ass off in the morning hunting food sprinting and carrying something heavy okay so starve state freezing um deadlifting essentially in spring those those are that's kind of like that rings the dead lifting in the snow yeah yes yeah which eliminates 99 of the population we invented society to not deadlift in the snow. Uh, but so coming into that workout there, so sprints and deadlifts are like, uh, hugely beneficial, uh, give a lot of reward points for keeping everything young in cycles. Like you don't want to do that all the time. Sometimes it's, sometimes you need to cycle coming into a fast fasted, but then other times giant meals are extremely useful, particularly post-workout coming out of a fast or even going

into after a fast. And you're just going to get a completely different type of workout. So you can do the same type of workout coming off a fast with either fasted or giant meals, and you're going to get different outcomes sometimes you need massive inputs of food to spin inflammation down and i think it's a mistake i know i made that mistake i was uh in the early phases you know 2011 10 i was fasting all the time i was always sore and it was only it wasn't only till i added big meals in that i started getting resolution of inflammation down what are your thoughts on feasting like Like, uh, you know, really, you know, getting after and packing in a lot of food. Is that

when people do eat, is that a smart thing to do? You know, some benefits to it? I mean, you're mentioning some of them. Yeah, I think it's essential. I think, I think feasting is essential for weight maintenance longterm. I think you have to longterm have periods where you're feasting and they are best accompanied. In i have it in the book like really kind of fill yourself until you're kind of uncomfortable type thing coming off of starvation so what you want to do is amplify starvation signals and then come into feasting and then the body puts muscle on like crazy and putting muscle on is very very important for longevity hugely Hugely important. Yeah. Don't you end up doing that? Like yourself?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yesterday I had chicken, steak, pork, eggs, and bacon. Like just, you know, enormous amounts of it. It was so good. This is an often, and this definitely breaks the rules of World Carnivore Month. I'm not doing that necessarily, but I went to Five Guys and I got two 4x4s. Oh, that's amazing.

Yeah, I had some fries with that. I had a ribeye at home. And I didn't get to eat the Cold Stone because I wasn't hungry enough. So I'm saving that for later on. Birthday cake? I don't know. Yeah. So that's not something I do very often.

But there are days that I like, I'll eat way more. I just feel that I have to eat so much more food just because I like, it'll help me feel better. How long does it take you to eat that amount? Like, do you sometimes, like I sometimes will eat for like two hours straight almost. It took me like 80 minutes yesterday. But you recover much better.

Oh yeah. I feel great. You're right. Yeah. I feel great today. You can kind of like, you kind of feel it when you're eating you're like i i definitely need more food right like yes it's in your head and it's and you're still not feeling like you know uncomfortable and once you get that uncomfortable feeling like i think i i think i got it yeah good enough exactly but in the past

that uncomfortable feeling i'll just eat through it yeah i can't eat through it now that's outstanding yeah gotta have that mindset yeah uh are you familiar with like uh these carb partitioners or like these uh is this something that you can take before a big meal and it will supposedly push like the bad carbs like directly into your muscles like berberine does that to some extent helps uh yeah glucose disposal and all that yeah there you go that's yeah yeah i mean yeah i mean that's Yeah. There you go. That's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a, I would say that it's a small piece of the equation, but there are some very good tools.

Again, it's all what, when, and how. So berberine is like the big gun, the big bullet in the gun, and you don't want to use it that often. Like you want to save that one for like, like you really messed up, like you need some help. But the other, some of the, some of the lesser ones like gofala poke acid or some of those things are very good little additives, but I would combine them with meal sequencing and I'd also combine them with just understanding

the different mechanisms. So the gut biome, insulin sensitivity, all these other things, combine it with that. And I think that's the misnomer of the environment we're in right now is like everybody's looking for the what like oh you know it's beetroot dude beetroot six ball you know no man it's nad dude nad like just take it's amazing and that's just not the truth this is like nothing works that way it's so what you can do though is is there are very useful tools and once you understand what, and how you can use those tools to get measurable

effects, measurable effects. And then like I'm 55, I don't, I'm on anything. You know, um, I eat pretty much whatever I want. I don't work out that much. And I managed to stay fairly lean year round. Um, and it's because I'm getting these little bumps in things. I'm not getting a hundred percent, but what I am getting is this, this thing that happens over time for most people, I'm pushing this down and I'm pushing

the slant down. Now that doesn't mean that every now and then I still have to, you know, kind of have a few months where I spin things up and push this here. But what I'm not getting is this thing that happens to the populace over time, you know? Yeah. And then are you able to like chase down a bad meal or do you have to do everything pre bad meal no it's before and after got it so yeah it's you're coming into the meal you can you can set it up on a there's a checkbox you can just set the checkboxes up and then after the meal you can do the same thing you know and above that pattern in the book i have what's what i call the two-day core pattern. That inherently offsets just about everything, just by the nature of what it is.

So you're cycling one day to the next, and there's a bunch of mechanisms all interlocking that just, you know. So if I did one unit of it, like morning and then lunch, and then dinner was, you know, cheesecake and you know soda whatever then the next day we'll offset a chunk of that got it awesome man this is a lot of great a lot of amazing information what you got i don't want it there's one last thing i wanted to ask i know i want to keep keep me here for four hours yeah that's fine you mentioned something about the industry focusing a lot on like mitochondrial efficiency and stuff like that and there's like i have a red light machine at home and i use that do you think that's beneficial or no or is it because you said there are some risks and that piqued my ears a little bit so i'm just wondering what are your

thoughts on that stuff fits into the again so the the good bad paradigm is you know red lights good blue lights bad you know plants are good meat's bad blah blah um red light is extremely beneficial uh in the context of what when and how so by itself it's not a panacea you will talk to people who do red light therapy then they just swear by it it's like the greatest thing ever um so by itself it is incrementally utilitarian and if you combine it in the right time in the right way example would be you amplify fasted signals the day before you're taking some small molecule activators at night to amplify signal pathways for amp k all that stuff and then you're coming into your fast the next day red light on top of that now you're really talking i mean that's fantastic so yeah it'd be very very very useful i think what what

would it do like it like what would it do exactly to amplify, just amplify everything that you've been doing or what, what is it exactly? So it's just another way you're coming into inflammation from another angle. Got it. Okay. And so everything else you're doing is helping inflammation and then you're adding sort of another layer to help, help it out. And I believe that twice a year, everybody should do what I call the inflammation spin down. And it's a very specific five-day period of just knocking inflammation down. New research. So there's a lot of confusion about aging and there's some new concepts in the air right now, DNA methylation, one of them. And so what I've done for a number of years is looked at different researchers. And what you a number of years is looked at different researchers

and what you see is that when you look at different researchers they're going to give you a different worldview it doesn't mean they're wrong it just means that they're just doing research down this one sort of lane and when you go look at a different researcher looking at something entirely different you get sort of a different worldview and it doesn't make either one of these guys wrong but what it does is give us to this place of like we don't we don't know like we don't have all the answers yet okay so we're just looking kind of for you know the scatter graph of like where where's the center we can all aim for so what you see is when it comes to aging the the belief that's bubbling up right now is that well it's telomere length and and dna methylation that's that's bubbling up right now is that, well, it's telomere length and DNA methylation. That's the thing, man. That's the thing.

If we just hack that, then we're good. Well, counter to that, there's research now with sanitarians, so people who are over 100 years old. And it shows that telomere length is not the driver. It's not the primary driver. Inflammatory markers are more the driver past a certain age. markers are more of the driver past a certain age. And what sanitarians seem to do is they have this sort of low-grade inflammation that's acted in a hormetic way with them that other people don't have. So they've been able to upregulate their inflammatory response, and that's why they're able to live so long. In terms of measuring biological age, there's this idea that, well,

DNA methylation is how we know biological age. Well, now there's other ways. There's serum glycans, which are blood sugar proteins. There's new tests that probably are more accurate. And there's even more recent tests now looking at different types of blood proteins in the serum that show distinct phases of aging. So 34, 60, and 78 are the three major waves of aging. And we can measure those by blood proteins not related to DNA methylation. So all that says that inflammation really is kind of your meta driver of a lot of things. And immunity is kind of this crux variable in the equation. We don't have all the mechanisms figured out. And we don't even understand very key aspects of the mitochondria, like hypoxia-inducible factor.

We don't really understand all that. But we can kind of start to gather around some generalities and do some things that kind of make sense around that. And spinning down inflammation seems to make a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I remember you talking about having like you know specific days in your diet or specific meal plan in your diet for uh kind of like anti-cancer right and is that what you're kind of talking about when you're talking about inflammation is that that would be probably

anti-cancer right yeah they're two sides of the same coin so i've never heard anybody talk about their diet in those terms too yeah no it's uh yeah, you can do very, very, well, this is my opinion. I think that very powerful things are possible through dietary modulation to reduce risk of cancer onset. And a lot of those mechanisms target inflammatory things. And at the end of the day, it's just a to-do list. That's all it is. It's just a different list. That's all.

And at the end of the day, it's just a to-do list. That's all it is. It's just a different list. That's all. Do you believe that all diseases are metabolic and can be fixed maybe through nutrition or even avoided altogether? No. No. There are clearly a range of issues that drive disease.

Some of them are metabolic, maybe more than we might even think. But then are other things related to um some things are just purely hereditary other things are environmental um so it's a mix where does cancer fall into that cancer cancer is that's a fascinating topic um cancer first of all cancer is a disease of growth okay that, that's what cancer is. Without growth, there's no cancer. Okay, in other words, if cells cannot divide, then there's no cancer. Okay, when you look at growth and what drives growth, metabolic factors are probably much bigger than has been taken into account. Simply because of the signal pathways that drive cancer. has been taken into account simply because of the signal pathways that drive cancer. So there's a very few specific signal pathways involved in driving growth, and those have very specific things like food. Food is very important in driving cancer. But then there are very specific

junctures and things that happen. One of those is called the epithelial mesenchymal transition. And it's where cells in the endothelium, in the blood, sort of detach, you know, and kind of float around and become oncogenic. So arresting cell cycle growth has a lot to do with cancer onset or preventing cancer onset. And a lot of that is metabolic. It can be controlled through controlling signal pathways by controlling food. So not 100%. Some things to do with cancer are driven by very specific proteins in signal pathway cascades that turn on, on, on, on, and then one gets locked in an on position, doesn't go back off. But personally, I think that cancer is one of those areas that the metabolic component and the inflammatory component related to redox or oxidation

probably is a much bigger thing than generally we give it credit for. Did you work with Ron on the keto pet sanctuary at all? No, not at all. I know he had that with the dogs on the uh uh the keto pet uh sanctuary at all no not at all no i know he i know he had that with the uh the dogs on the keto diet yeah i mean he's done some amazing things yeah i mean really amazing things uh we were having lunch a couple months back and uh started talking about that and he was telling me like the cancer incident rate with dogs now is is i don't remember the exact number i don't want to quote him, but it's yeah. Through the roof astronomical and I is related to food. Yeah.

Blew me away. Cool. I mean, hopefully they can find more research because, you know, I know that plagues, uh, you know, millions of people. Um, what about something like, uh, autism? You know, it's something we hear quite a bit about and it seems like it's, it seems like there's more and more kids that are autistic. I'm not sure if it's, they have more ways of diagnosing it or I don't really know what's going on, but will a food intervention assist these kids from maybe perhaps no longer being autistic or will it just assist them maybe in some other ways? Like how powerful would it be? I think it could be extremely powerful. There's, there's clearly, um, there's clearly a, a gut bacteria component related to autism and the presence of certain species, uh, seems to really play a part in autism. Um, so

I think that, uh, food and very specific patterns of food and substrate targeted to grow species in the gut. I think, I think it could be very, very powerful for that. Does it at all have a, or does, you know, what the mother eats during pregnancy have any effect on the onset of autism? Actually, yeah, there's some really good research on that. So there are, I can't remember the name of this. And it's, I actually have this in my cupboard. There's a, darn it.

This is one area I'm drawing a blank, but yes. So the administration of certain prebiotic elements during pregnancy potentially, or even just shortly after birth, potentially has the ability to definitely dramatically impact onset. And I'm just blanking on the exact substance in the study, but I actually went and bought this stuff as a result of it. So yeah, definitely. That gets into what's called transgenerational epigenetics. I did a podcast on this a couple of years ago. There's a worldview that you can explain the entire obesity epidemic purely by somatogermline, by what mother eats passed on to children and programming, metabolically programming

the egg and sperm for food preferences. And it takes four to five generations to fix. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So if you look at like- So like what somebody's doing to themselves right now- During pregnancy. Can negatively impact. yeah yeah so if you look at like what somebody's doing to themselves right now during pregnancy

can negatively impact well i guess that totally makes sense but to put it put in perspective like this you could be negatively impacting or positively impacting uh five generations down the road hundred percent yeah so shit um i better watch what i do yeah no it's very well it's it's a it's a burgeoning field but um so it what is new information is wild it's crazy right yeah that's fucking crazy yeah you can actually explain the obese if you go back and you look at the onset of certain types of foods in the american diet in the 50s and somatogermline uh transgenerational epigenetics you can make this case that the obesity epidemic sprung up there and it's just playing out. Right. Yeah.

It's interesting. Speechless. This is a great episode. One of the best. Damn. Can I go real quick back to sleep? Yeah, for sure. Have you ever messed with the chili pad? I've not, no. no no it's just a

pad to keep you cool at night to keep your body temperature down yeah i've heard about that yeah so i'm just curious about that one are there any special little like tools that you use other than like potentially not that but are there any other tools you use for sleep outside of you know your nutrition and everything uh you mean like like things to buy potential appliances i want to build a faraday cage that's like on my list to do a faraday cage yeah what is that uh so it's just um you can get sheets now they're aligned with copper and then you can completely block all yam while you're sleeping and i've i've talked to people that have done this you can block out what all electromagnetic oh yeah yeah and people that i've talked to that have

done this swear by it huh yeah so is ben greenfield doing this yet yeah probably right with his tin hat just blocking all the wi-fi signals and stuff dang yeah i definitely want to play with that i want to try it got it for sure yeah cool um so you had mark on a certain protocol when he when he lost a ton of fat and then he came out of it. What did you get? I mean, I know it was awesome because I was eating some of the similar things that he was at that time. And he just texted me, hey, have a big old hamburger, have fries, and then finish that up with a grilled cheese sandwich. But not like a homemade, like cheap one. Go out to a restaurant

and have that thing and have at it. And I'm asking because I actually dropped the most body fat that I ever have in my whole life recently. And this was at the end

of last year, so I don't know if I missed my window of recouping. He's asking for permission for grilled cheese sandwiches right now. But genuinely,

what would be the best way to recoup after dropping so much body fat when when was it when this was uh right before christmas so a month ago exactly so good timing okay so first thing you've got to jump on is and this is a little tricky just timing wise but um so start with leptin so So leptin drives food intake. And you've got to get that back up while not gaining weight. So there's some very specific patterns you can implement. you want to you want to shoot for you want to shoot for about a two three day period of

of 2x in your calories kind of in a sequence so breakfast would be super huge like you want roughly thousand calories at breakfast 1500 before breakfast you need to set that up with a couple of things. So before breakfast, start with the whey protein shake, add some olive oil, add some cinnamon to that, wait 30 minutes. Okay. Take a little bit. I would probably do like an alpha lipoic acid or maybe berberine. The protein and olive oil and cinnamon is helping to regulate blood sugar for what you're about to eat and help with insulin or something like that? Yeah. What we're doing is we're going to shift the postprandial glucose peak a little bit with that. So we're going to drop the highest peak, and we're going to push it back a little bit by having that 30 minutes prior. Then at breakfast,

there's a couple combinations or ways you can do this. One is healthier, one is less healthy, and you'll do both. So the less healthy one you do on Sunday morning, the more healthy one you do on Wednesday morning. So the more healthy one, what you'd want to do is you're going to get in about a thousand calories, okay? But you need to add a few kind of healthy things to the mix so a really great start or foundation is steel cut oats raw okay like put some water in put them in the microwave for like five seconds add a little bit of cinnamon add honey to that okay that's it's kind of like to start then throw in probably 10 egg whites um three or four eggs um then you'd want to throw in probably 10 egg whites, three or four eggs, then you'd want to throw in a giant, giant plate of blueberries, like more than a half plate, three-fourths of a plate in that range. So what

you're doing with that is we want to get phenols in your blood up, okay? We want to get your serum phenols up. What that's going to do is it's going to create a buffer zone to offset oxidation of things we're going to put in you later. It's also going to help keep you from gaining fat again because serum phenols in the blood, they have very specific effects on gene activation when it comes to storing fat. Probably two slices of toast along with that. I would do sourdough, throw some butter on it. So, you know, covering about a thousand calories. That's the healthy version of that. Okay. Then as you're getting into midday,

that chipotle meal I gave you would be a really good one to do. And then prior to that chipotle meal, probably have a couple cheese sticks to set it up with. And then as you get into dinner, the trick here is you need a massive amount of food, but it's got to kind of be functional. One good way to do that would be spaghetti squash, meatballs,

cheese, you know, like a really giant spaghetti dish, but you're using spaghetti squash kind of as the base for that. And so when you kind of look at that whole day, it's a ton of calories, but it's very healthy. But what you are getting is you're getting a ton of flavor. Okay. You're getting stomach distention, but you're also getting a lot of functional properties. Okay. What this is for is you're going to set up now Sunday with that. And then Sunday morning, I'm going to repeat this, but instead now you're going to go for flavor. So, you know, pancakes, eggs, bacon, you know. Now he smiles. Yeah.

I smile because you look right at me. Yeah. So. I'll do like double take. Huh? Yeah. Yeah. It's got to be very, very, very big meal.

So what we're looking to do with this here is we're looking to create tremendous amount of satiety, tremendous amount of fullness. Okay. And just a tremendous amount of sort of like pushing back against leptin so i want to get i want to get serum leptin levels kind of where they should be okay then coming into lunch um you need another preload meal prior to that so cheese sticks or whatever you want to have soup okay so what you want to do with soup soup is incredibly incredibly uh filling drive he was telling me to eat uh pho i'm like what the hell is pho yeah thai yeah thai soup i guess right yeah so that's amazing what we're doing here is we're stacking one after another of like satiety satiety

satiety like satiety we're trying to push leptin back up but we're not doing it really in a way that for the most part is going to add a lot of fat on you. If anything, it's going to have actually the opposite effect. Hopefully we'll want to get some of the, some of the feasting blood proteins going with this kind of thing. Okay. Um, then at dinner with that, I would do a giant bowl of chili with some cheese on it. Okay. All right. So that's, that's kind of like a starter kit for the post-fat loss leptin box to check. But that gets you down that road of very often when you look at failure rates for fat loss, 50% of it is two things. It's the energy gap, meaning metabolism is lower, leptin is higher.

So you're going to eat more and you burn less okay so if you can push leptin down a little bit so keep you from eating more and then get metabolism up we're going to offset a good chunk of that so that gets you in the in the universe of beginning to really hack that that that's crazy that's that's exciting for one but um i i wanted to ask because like uh so in sema's doing all my nutrition help and all that. He's coaching me through it. And, you know, he obviously after I had a photo shoot, so after that was over, it was like, okay, let's, you know, you have a little bit of freedom now. And so that little bit of freedom led to a little bit more eating than I should have

been doing. And what ended up happening was like, oh man, I look terrible. I feel terrible. I probably gained at least four pounds i'm so i dropped down to 171 i'm like i'm at least at 175 i checked i'm at 172 and then even today i dropped back down to 171 yeah and the only reason why i like i'm really concerned is because like i lost the look but the weight stayed the same so i didn't know if like it's because I added fat or I lost muscle or like I didn't know exactly like what was going on. Because I definitely look different, but I weigh the exact same.

Just sodium alone, you know, would account for some of that. Maybe training motivation too. Absolutely. Maybe you're not as pumped, you know, to go in there and kill and totally kill it. Yeah. Yeah. And then I think the energy levels too have dipped down, but I think that's also like just the motivation and the mindset. Yeah. Um, energy gets into, so, uh, generally speaking, when, when the body's, um, very lean, you're going to have higher energy and you're going to be, you know, especially when you're burning fat, you're going to have, you know, you're, you're, especially when you're burning ketones, you're going to have

a ton of energy and then slamming all this food in there and all the substrate and kicking insulin up again like that, you're going to feel a little bit of a dip, but I wouldn't worry too much about that. Um, I think it's, I think overall, like, so if you make, if you make the most important thing, you know, the shredded abs look for life, which has no bearing in reality than anybody lives in other than, you know, someone that that's all you do. The other side of that is to really just maintain the benefits of what you've achieved forever. And so there's all these counterpoints you have to start checking the boxes off, you know, and we haven't even gotten into like all the genetic activation that happens post post maintenance. Yeah. You're almost out of the woods too because it takes about six or eight weeks to kind of be in the clear of like having your head be back to normal and a

bunch of other things and then one of the things that got me really excited when i first talked to joel um you know he was he was more about like kind of the end result like like what's it going to look like two years from now three years from now four years from now and that's the thing that's exciting is that you know you you go through different spots now and it's going to look like two years from now, three years from now, four years from now. And that's the thing that's exciting is that, you know, you, you go through different spots now and it's easy to get like up and it's easy to go down in terms of how happy or excited you are about the results or a lack of results sometimes. But you're always going to be moving towards the bigger picture,

which you have been the entire time. So, you know, that's, and Seema and I usually just tell you to chill the fuck out and usually everything's good because we know that you're going the entire time. So, you know, that's, and semen, I usually just tell you to chill the fuck out. And usually everything's good. Cause we know that you're going to be consistent. We know that things will come back around for you and you'll, it just, uh, it just all takes time.

But, you know, that's what I love so much about the principles that you're sharing with us is like, you know, if, if people can look like this in their, in their mid fifties,

then, then that, that's the goal, right? Not, not just to be jacked in our 20s and then be fat when we're 50 yeah absolutely and mark's totally right i'll come in i'm dude i look terrible like you look the exact same like are you sure that is a terrible feeling

though to have a day where you just feel fat or flat you know or you just don't yeah you're just not feeling it for whatever you're like man i need get bigger. What the fuck's going on here? Thank you for that. I mean, thank you for everything, but especially that. That was really cool. Yeah, sure. For sure. Cool, man.

Thank you so much. Where can people find you? VeepNutrition.com. Get the book there. Get it all. Peace Human. Yeah, you should get it all. There you go. Everyone's question always is, is is it on amazon or will it be it will it will be not yet

um i'm i'm in the process of like really learning the publishing market and with a book like this that was so science intensive um i really wanted to get my feel on the buyer and, and like the feedback and be very close to the ground, you know, in the early going here. So, and I'm learning, there's no money in books,

you know, there only isn't, but it's this, I did more because I've just, I've been on the receiving end of just stuff that messed me up for years. And it kind of came out of that that whole thing so you know hopefully people find it beneficial so um do you have a youtube channel and social media and stuff like that okay so i just got an instagram i need your

help everybody please come like uh find me because i feel like a complete um yeah loser doing that now yeah yeah I need follow me and then don't have a YouTube channel yet what's the Instagram name oh real Joel Green okay

I don't know yep and then no don't have a YouTube channel yet I'm probably gonna start one I just

be honest I know you need to in today's environment it's that whole thing of like once you commit to doing it it becomes what you do

yeah and you're married to it now yeah and you're kind of stuck to it yeah what about uh maybe uh doing like a podcast or something like that would that be something you you might do or something because i think like the main thing is just to figure out a way to get your message out there i'm sure you're aware of like someone like peter itea yeah you know you know you're familiar with that name yeah just uh you know you having a microphone set up and speaking into your microphone about something in particular that that either popped up in your head or i mean you talking for 15 minutes like that's a that's a great piece of content uh that the world could really use you know so i encourage you strongly to try to jump

into something like that because i think it would really be it is a pain in the ass you know it is a pain in the ass but uh in whatever least amount of pain you can handle you know try to either do youtube or potentially do like a podcast type of thing yeah thank you for that i i need to uh just jump on that now i getting this thing done like took so much out of me to get it done that you said like three years right three and a half yeah i'm just coming online now for like, you know, the rest of everything else. How in the hell did you learn this stuff?

I mean, are you like a food scientist or are you a professor? Like, what's your goddamn deal? I get asked that one a lot. Could you imagine, could you imagine like, you know,

me and Nseem are being meatheads and we're talking about like our diet, you know, and this guy chimes in with some of the stuff that he knows. We'd be like, what? What's going on over here here how do you know all this shit no i just i just think it was necessity really you know i just it was

necessity i um along the way i created this uh software program and uh we started selling to like hospitals and stuff and then they started you know sticking the the phd in front of me and you know i had to solve that dude And so it was a lot of it was necessity, but then a lot of it too was, um, it's just kind of been this thing I've always been into. And I, I just, I got bamboozled so much for so many years that I just got to a point where I was like, you know, I just gotta, I just gotta learn this for myself. You know, I just remember, uh, 1989, I have to remember this champion nutrition. Remember 1989, I don't know if you remember this, Champion Nutrition came out.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the guy lives in the area. We're supposed to have him on the podcast soon, the creator. Okay. So Metabolol 2 had MCTs, the fatless fat, on the label. And I read that, and I was like, that was the era of no fat. So I was like, how can I have fat? I have no fat.

That's impossible. So I started like, I've got a fat, I have no fat. That's impossible. So I started like, you know, looking at MCTs cause, cause that was just unheard of back then. And then Vince McMahon did the WBF and they put everybody on the keto diet and, you know, so all this stuff, like I was just kind of on the front line of like, what the hell is this? How does this work? And trying to figure it out. And, um, probably for me, a lot of the issues I had just running into problems with things really drove it. You know, my own personal issues of just what happened because I was doing things that people told me were good for me. Are you like by name like a nutritionist or a doctor?

No, I don't make any claims. I'm a consumer. That's what I am. I am a consumer who just, you know, finally just said, um, enough's enough. How'd you get involved with, uh, Ron Penna and Quest Nutrition? Cause it seemed like he, he brought together kind of like a, a superhero, uh, you know, league of extraordinary gentlemen kind of thing that he, uh, had going on over there. extraordinary guy he uh we were um we we were both in the technology industry back in the mid 2000s and we both were running these companies and he he was one of my customers actually i didn't even i always talk to mike mike osborne i didn't even know that that uh so long story short i was friends with one of his guys and just purely by a fluke like in 2012 we kind of caught up and i didn't

know i didn't know about i just knew about their clothing i was like hey michael man those are pretty cool clothes man where'd you get those and he's like oh joel come on down the protein bar is kicking butt and i'm like what protein bar you talking about he's like quest man i'm like what you're he's like we're quest i'm like you're what so next thing you know i actually i'm in front of ron and i had created my nutrition system and ron was really passionate about nutrition and literally he gave me 30 seconds we got in a room and he tried to blow me out of the water and i started i went into some bio babble and he was like okay you know so next thing you know we start talking and that just led to like literally years of talking about

stuff um and then 2015-16 uh we got on this convo about methionine restriction that i was into and um and ron was pretty fascinated by that he's like that's our thing that's what we're gonna do and so that led to you know come into quest and being part of that whole sort of magical picture for the time that it was there which was i just you know like man um talk about like being being part of a thing where you know everybody there is just some genius it's something that you know nothing about and you're just kind of like wow yeah i mean it was pretty cool it was really cool and that was that was all ron putting that together you have any travel coming up or any seminars coming up? No, nothing yet.

I'm just getting out into the market to start driving all this. I just literally got, you know, the birthing was done, and now I'm, you know, off to the races with this. Yeah, I remember you were on Kyle Kingsbury's podcast. So hopefully we can set you up with some other podcast people so we can keep getting your message out there and people can learn more about this book. Thank you so much. I sincerely appreciate it.

Where can people find you, Andrew? You guys can hit me up at IamAndrewZ on Instagram. Make sure you're following the podcast at MarkBell's Power Project Podcast at MBPowerProject on Twitter and TikTok. And make sure you are subscribed on iTunes and please leave a review. Twitter, and TikTok, and make sure you are subscribed on iTunes and please leave a review. And before I forget a huge shout out to Piedmontese Beef for sponsoring this podcast. That's piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout, enter promo code power project for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two day shipping. If my name was Nsema Ema yang where the heck would i be on

instagram and uh all over the place that exact thing and see my e on instagram and youtube and see my yin yang on twitter and tiktok so it's not it's not big daddy anymore i don't know what you're talking about weird weird dude anyway how about you mark we're on day number 23 of world carnivore month thank you guys for joining in on that If you want to find out more information about the carnivore diet, check out my YouTube channel, which is Mark Smelly Bell. Also Instagram, Mark Smelly Bell, and Twitter as well, and TikTok. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you all later.