Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 457 - Benjamin Bikman

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Dr. Benjamin Bikman is an associate professor at BYU who’s research focuses on the role of ketones and insulin in the body and their effect on metabolic disorders such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and dementia. Dr. Bikman has a PhD in Bioenergetics as well as a postdoctoral fellowship with the Duke-National University of Singapore in metabolic disorders. His lab, The Laboratory of Obesity and Metabolism has two primary focuses: Identify the molecular mechanisms that explain the increased risk of disease that accompanies weight gain, with particular emphasis on the etiology of insulin resistance and disrupted mitochondrial function, and reveal novel cellular processes that are responsible for fat development and accrual, with a particular emphasis on white/brown fat and the contrasting effects of insulin and ketones. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: https://drinklmnt.com/powerproject Purchase 3 boxes and receive one free, plus free shipping! No code required! ➢Freeze Sleeve: https://freezesleeve.com/ Use Code "POWER25" for 25% off plus FREE Shipping on all domestic orders! ➢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 ➢Sling Shot: 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 ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

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Check out enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two day shipping at grilled cheese sandwich. Huh? And that's really good. I need to get that from there one day. I wonder if you get a grilled cheese sandwich with a burger, with a burger on it.

Wait, what? Well, cause I know cause like the way the grilled cheese, like I had the grilled cheese, like, uh, like a couple of days on my birthday. Yeah. like the way the grilled cheese like i had the grilled cheese like uh like a couple days on my birthday yeah and the grilled cheese um it's it's a little different than the actual burger because it's got like i don't know it has like a lot of cheese on it so

if it had you slip a burger in between there it'd be like a melt you know like a burger melt and it's toasted wait okay so just one grilled cheese has the bun right it's not bread is it yeah yeah it's no it's it's a grilled cheese sandwich like with with whatever they have you know they have what they have a bun it's a it's a double double minus the meat right it's what it is right but oh somehow like more toasted maybe maybe they do that yeah it's like more toasted and more cheesy yeah you probably yeah you could probably burger on my grilled cheese that'd be a cheeseburger yeah did you guys see in i think it was colorado they um they opened up a new in and out and there was like an eight or nine hour uh

drive-through wait for it didn't you post a video yeah i did and i just said people aren't waiting this long for five guys that's that's a great point you know what um i saw that they made this goes along perfect with our guests for today they made a um an oreo um mcdonald's thing did you guys see that no i didn't see it it's like a mcdonald's cheeseburger but real? It can't, it cannot be real. My dad sent it to me. Cannot be real. Okay. Wait, it's a cheeseburger with Oreos.

Oh, that I saw that on a meme the other day. It probably exists, man. It probably, I've seen some crazy like mock-ups like this. I feel like there's no way that's real. So I guess there's,

and now Oreo has like, and maybe they've had it for a while, but they have double stuffed, right? And I heard they have ones that go beyond that. The triple stack? I think so. I'm one of the very few weirdos that actually likes the cookie better than the cream. Oh, yeah. I don't blame you.

The cookie part's not bad. It's really good. It just feels like, I mean, all sugar like that's destroying your teeth, but those feel like they're really killing your teeth really bad. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was real. This is going to be perfect when we talk about insulin resistance today. I'm excited.

Are we rolling? Yeah, yeah. I'm excited. We got Benjamin Bickman on the show today, a double doctor, a doctor of philosophy, I believe. And then he knows a shit ton about metabolism. And we're going to talk about insulin and insulin resistance and the role that it plays. And some of the stuff that he says is really interesting, like where he'll say that the fats, a fat cell can't shrink in the presence of a lot of insulin. He said like and then he also said that your insulin needs to be low in order.

So I just find all this really interesting in contrast to maybe some of the things that Lane Norton said, or maybe it's in contrast to my interpretation of what Lane Norton has said before, because he, Benjamin will even say, Dr. Bickman or other will even say, you know, even in a caloric deficit, like those fat cells won't shrink. So I'm really interested to kind of hear his take on it. And also, too, like, is it is he speaking from like a lab perspective of like this cell is immersed in insulin or is he speaking more practically? Because I would imagine that there would be a difference, you know? So it'd be cool to, uh,

see what's up with all this stuff. Yeah. It seems like you'd probably be an advocate of fasting, keto, low carb diets. Um, a hundred percent, you know,

low processed sugar. So you're going to get that Oreo cheeseburger or what? I, I just order some. No, no. I looked on Reddit. It sadly,

it wasn't real oh if it was i would have really tried it hey we've we've invented a lot of things inside you know this i think we need to i think we need to like have a day where we just i mean we've talked about it before you know like rogan gets high we should get fat oh yeah we should just bring a bunch of just like bad horrible food at food and that's like just totally opposite of the things we talked about on the podcast we need to put it on the things that we find that like yeah i don't know things that we find like uh completely like uh repulsive you know things that were like this is so fat and so disgusting yo but then each one of us would be like i love that yo we should do that like i don't even know where i would start

how about we make a cadbury egg omelet you just hurt in his head what is a cadbury egg i'm sorry come on yo i'm sorry bro cadbury egg it's like a little it's like a little chocolate egg and then it has um like nougat on the inside or something i don't know what that shit is on the inside caramel and something ew it can't be egg omelet no i know i was kidding because it's just like okay just i don't know it's uh good like these yeah you've seen these yeah yeah i've seen those i don't know man all the names for these things i just call that chocolate egg like i always uh it's got a name but the regular chocolate itself is is supposed to be really really good like around the holidays i always say like oh i just eat the

whites so don't worry about it dude and then uh reese's christmas trees are back those are really good i don't know why the the shapes this time of year sucks i haven't given you christmas tree people giving you fucking cookies and desserts and shit. It's tough. It's tough out there. What are we going to do? Just lose? It's both. You know, when people look at the holidays, they usually say

like, oh, you know, just loosen up a little bit. You know, let yourself gain a little bit of weight. Let your hair down. None of us have any hair. Let your hair down. Let your belly out. We don't have hair hair down belly out man cadbury eggs what do you guys like better thanksgiving or christmas yeah you asked us a couple episodes ago and i think i'm still the same christmas

did i say thanksgiving or christmas um not sure i don't think christmas yeah dude there was one year i don't know what the hell my parents got us, but my brother, Mike, was so excited that he peed his pants. This one is like 20. No, I'm kidding. We were little kids and my brother, Chris, was so pumped up that he peed his pants too. And then I was laughing at both of them and I peed my pants. I was like, how old were you?

Like, how old do you think you were? I was probably only like four or three okay i was probably like three and they were they were too old for whatever they were doing or maybe i was i was probably more like maybe two or three and then in accordance to whatever else they would be yeah was it like maybe an atari or something i don't know yeah something like that. It could have been a Nintendo. That was too long ago. No. So you said you had a picture of what? We have a picture, yeah. Like where we're standing there like hugging each other and we have like this present in

front of us, whatever the hell it was. I don't even know what it was. Are your pants wet? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm not sure if I'm in the picture or not or if it's just my brothers. I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure all three of us How did your parents like react to that like what the heck's happening? My parents thought all that stuff was great

they thought that stuff was like so fun and funny like they just They they they loved it. My family is very like I don't know family oriented and like everything was always about like kids and stuff my on christmas my grandfather would um well we go to my grandfather's on christmas eve and uh my grandfather would like pretend that he caught something from santa and he would set something up on the roof he tried to like trap him and he'd like give him cookies and stuff and then he'd like write notes like hey i had to use the bathroom and there'd be toilet paper everywhere and stuff like that and you know you guys don't mind me using the bathroom i had to blow it up or something you know i said something silly or whatever but that's like a funny yeah i remember like one time

he had like a boot or something from santa one time he had like his underwear somehow randomly and we all just thought that was the funniest thing ever shit like that so i like christmas a lot it's uh it was like for us it was like a week-long thing, you know? It was an onslaught of food, too. Did you guys ever believe in Santa? Oh, hell yeah. How old do you think you were when you found out that he wasn't real? Found out what? What are you getting at?

But really. He's like, come on, guys. I think my brothers probably told me, you know? Really told you? My brothers probably our brother's ruined everything the worst yeah i don't remember i was probably pretty young though yeah just because he's not real so just because my brother and sister are like eight years older than me yeah so like i just i don't know i'm not saying like i had like i grew up fast or anything but like i just kind of was like pretty mature for my age like when i was saying like I had like a, I grew up fast or anything, but like, I just kind of was like pretty mature for my age.

Like when I was in like elementary school, like a lot, I've already knew a lot of like, that's probably why I don't still don't really like kids. It's just because like I was, even when I was a kid, I didn't like kids because I was like, man,

these kids aren't cool. Yeah. I don't know. If you say I don't like kids, I just find it such't cool. Yeah. I don't know. People say I don't like kids. I just find it such a funny thing. I think it's great. As a parent, when I hear someone say that, I'm like, hey, I'm in the same boat, man. I fucking hate them, too.

It's 100% different when it's a kid that you know, like a nephew or whatever. Yeah. But I don't know. Going to Jasmine's school like when we you know the school was open yeah i'm just seeing like kids running around just like oh you know the real issue though is it's not necessarily the kids it's their parents a lot of times you know sometimes sometimes kids are just a little out of control because they're young you know they're immature uh but like my kids not that my kids can't be a pain in the ass they

certainly can be and i'm sure many people have many opinions of them but um my my kids were never like grabby and stuff and like they wouldn't grab other people's shit like i remember i used to hate that i'm like what what kid like reaches into my fucking fridge and like goes and grabs a bunch like if you're really little, that's different. But if you're like nine or 10 and you're not like, Hey, Mr. Bell,

like, can I, or can you, or just even ask, you know, Jake or even ask, you know, whoever you're hanging out with.

But like, yeah, they just like drink all our sodas and shit. And it's just like, they're all over the place. And I'm like, what the fuck? And I don't want to be the old guy yelling at everybody.

I would say like hey you know if you guys need something just just let me know i can so a lot of times i would put stuff out for them but then they i don't know they drink one sip of like your zevia soda or whatever and then they leave it everywhere you know all the bottles of water everywhere and everything the reason i think this is so funny oh my god this is an is an African household, man. This would never happen. That kid would get hit so quick. But that's what I'm saying is people don't, people don't discipline.

They don't, you know, they don't really. And I, so for, so for me, I'm not about to discipline somebody else's kid. You know,

I'll discipline my nieces and nephews and stuff a little bit, especially if it comes to safety, you know, they're going to fucking and nephews and stuff a little bit especially if it comes to safety you know they're gonna fucking run the road or something crazy obviously i would take care of that but um every once in a while they're doing something that's a little too out of balance you got to kind of reel them in the type of discipline that like my uncle or like my family would give me would be looked at like, it's like abuse, but it wasn't, but it's just so funny. Like Andrew,

I think it's great. I think it's kind of cool. Like, I mean, they say it takes a village, right? It takes a lot of people, a lot of hands.

And if you're doing something wrong and you're in somebody else's home, you know, I think you need to learn what's right and wrong. Yeah. Yeah. There's one day my uncle popped me on the head. I'm like, mom,

she's like, what? What'd you do? Pop me. i'm like mom she's like what what'd you do pop me he's she's like yeah you probably deserved it i was doing something stupid like like always i was a stupid kid i did a lot of stupid things so it's just funny because you just smack you upside your head kind of thing like yeah yeah it's like a pop yeah i like it a nice hard pop yeah yeah i remember bart bart kwan talking about that too in his in his household like he just like he was like i'd get punched in the stomach sometimes i'm like punched in the stomach i'm like are you fucking kidding me like holy shit he's like not that hard though he's like just you know he's like when you're young you cry over everything so you know he's like you get hit here or there and you're balling yeah i think the one of them well this one sticks out in my memory the most like you know the thing like to uh open

and close mini blinds it's like a like a rod yeah oh yeah it's a good one i got one like oh fuck dude that shit hurt because i remember i did something stupid and then you know my mom had in her hand and she's like i'm gonna spank you i'm like is that gonna hurt whack like fuck yep it hurt god damn it shouldn't have asked that dumb ass question you know what like there's only a certain amount of people that will hear this and laugh and other people will be like oh my god but you know when you're getting spanked and the individual's like if you cry i'm gonna spank you more. And you're like, let's think about this. What kind of sense does that make? Or what about when you're crying, like hysterically when you're kidding?

You're just full of snot. You can't breathe. And then like the person won't let you like, it's like, I just need a few minutes, man. I'm really upset. Oh, God. Or stop crying or I'll give you few minutes, man. I'm really upset. Oh, God. Or stop crying or I'll give you a reason to cry. I'll give you something to really cry about. You're like, I already am really crying.

These aren't fake tears I got going on. I don't like this ultimatum that you've presented me with. Give me more options. You know what's funny is like, I think every parent gets in that position where they get really frustrated. But if you hear another parent, gets in that position where they get really frustrated. But if you hear another parent, if you overhear another parent being really frustrated, like that person's a fucking maniac. What is wrong with that, dude?

It's a little kid. You want to be like, dude, it's a little kid, man. What are you doing? Oh, God. Get you to that breaking point. Anyway, we're going to be talking a lot about food today and diet and burning fat and insulin, insulin resistance. And we'll get it all explained to you because Benjamin Bickman is, I think, one of the best in the world at explaining it in a way that makes it simple,

which we all need. One of the things I heard, an analogy I heard him talk about when he was asked a question about, like, eat less, move more. And we talked a little bit about that in our previous podcast, how that sometimes is the message is quick and easy to say, but it's very difficult to do because people get really hungry. They get really, really freaking hungry. And you're trying to really manage hunger. I guess you're trying to gain control, if you could look at it that way. I think early podcasts for us, we had several podcasts where we talked about control,

controlling your appetite, controlling your hunger, controlling some of those urges. So how do you exercise and how do you have a diet that is conducive towards losing weight, helps you head in that direction? Because we know that somewhere along the line, you're going to have to pull some energy out of your the nutrients that you take in for the day in order to lose weight. But how do you do that? Not be like fucking hungry. happy medium between supplying yourself with good nutrition, good nutrients, and just not going too overboard on the caloric deficit that you're in.

And then also finding a diet that's full of foods that you like and enjoy. Here we go. Hey, boys, can you hear me? Absolutely. Yep. We got you hear me? Absolutely. Yep. We got you. Great. Okay, let me just make sure I...

Awesome. How's it going this morning? Hey, thanks. This will be fun. Yeah, we're super... Yeah, I'm doing great. Thank you. Super excited to have you on the show today.

I know you get... We're going to dive a ton, obviously, into nutrition and insulin and stuff. But what I'd like to know, starting off and just coming out of the gate here, what do you do in terms of exercise for yourself? Yeah, when I turned 40, I had decided it was time to do some things that I always wanted to. So this was, this was a few years ago now, but I'd always wanted to learn how to solve a Rubik's cube. And I'd always wanted to, I'd always wanted to do a freestanding handstand pushup, you know, like put the hands down, kick up, hold the handstand and, and do a pushup. And I got the Rubik's cube figured out in about a week. And I've been working on that handstand push-up for about four years.

But it changed the way I worked out. Up until that time, I had been doing just kind of typical weightlifting in a weight room, and then I transitioned to just pure body weight, which has been a lot of fun, actually, because it's focused. which has been a lot of fun actually, because it's focused. It's forced me to work more of my flexibility, which as I get older, I'm just convinced is one of the keys to just being comfortable and moving around comfortably. And there are just some moves. I couldn't do like a floor L sit or, or like a ring muscle up with no kipping. You know, I had to work on my, my, my hamstring, my back flexibility for the L-sit. I had to work on my forearm wrist flexibility for the, for the kind of false grip on the

rings. Uh, so I just do body weight, uh, and, and really I just kind of split my days up into what I call dynamic days and static days. And the dynamic days are just kind of typical movements, you know, concentric, eccentric movements of whatever I'm doing. And then on the static days, it's me getting to a point of maximal tension and then holding that, whatever the position is and holding it for about a minute or so. And then I just sort of cycle through, you know, I'll do that multiple times and move on to a different position on a different muscle, get to a point of maximal tension, hold it for about a minute, and then it's done. I love this. And I appreciate that you're doing that because there's a lot of people that study

it. There's a lot of people that talk about it, but you don't always have people that study it, talk about it and actually live it and do it. So I think that that's, to me, that's really important, you know, is to have people out there that are not only, you know, testing stuff in a lab, but also, you know, getting in the gym and doing some training. How important is training of any kind to the metabolism and what is it kind of doing for us? I know you talk a lot about glucose and insulin resistance and that kind of thing. So how important is it for us to get in some sort of exercise?

Yeah, it allows. It's tremendously important. And if I'll contain my answer to strictly focus on insulin and metabolic health. But the benefits, of course, go far beyond that. And so anyone listening would know that I'm not attempting to answer this in as fully comprehensive way as I could. But with exercise, part of the magic is that you now have activated, if you will, an insulin-independent mechanism of controlling glucose. So the muscle that we have is responsible for consuming up to, if not more than, 80% of all the glucose when we've eaten a meal. So if someone goes and eats a hamburger and fries, you would see that their glucose levels would climb.

you would see that their glucose levels would climb. And as the glucose starts to come back down, almost all of that drop in glucose in the blood is because the muscles have started pulling in that glucose. And insulin stimulates that glucose uptake. In a typical setting of we're eating and we're just lounging around now after the meal. But in contrast, when you are physically active and you've engaged that contraction and relaxation of muscles, now the muscle fibers have an insulin independent mechanism to pull in the glucose. Basically, those same doors that would have only been opening when insulin would come and knock on them, now open on their own because the muscle is basically demanding it. It's essentially telling the body, my need for energy right now is so great that I'm

not going to wait for insulin to tell me to pull in that glucose. I'm just going to do it. But part of the, so that's a benefit there. You are lowering your glucose and that means insulin can come down. And keeping insulin low is the key to maintaining insulin sensitivity and reducing the risk of all the diseases that come with insulin resistance. It's also the key to being lean. And if I may be so bold, it's the key to longevity, but that's a bit of a tangent, but, but nevertheless, you, you exercise, you work the muscle,

whatever it is, whatever it is, you're working that muscle, glucose will come down and insulin will come down. And insulin is low during exercise and it needs to be low. If insulin were elevated during exercise, it would be telling the body to not be using energy. You'd be telling the fat cells to be pulling in energy rather than releasing the fat to be used. It would be telling the liver to store, even the muscle. You'd be telling the liver and the muscle to store glucose as glycogen rather than mobilize that glucose and use it for fuel. So high insulin would be antithetical to the energy mobilization that we want during exercise. Now, after exercise, oh, yeah, sure, high insulin may

be beneficial, although that is debated. That is absolutely debated. This idea of you need to stack some carbs with your protein to help the anabolic effect. In fact, the evidence challenges that idea, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Nevertheless, during exercise, you are mobilizing energy, ahead of myself. Nevertheless, during exercise, you are mobilizing energy and that means insulin must be low. And so the fact that the muscle has a way of getting that glucose in, in this state of high energy demand and low insulin just sort of is a testament to how clever the body is designed. So an individual that's like, let's say an individual's out of shape, they're big. Typically that individual is insulin resistant and now they're trying to get into a weight training routine and work out and eat less food.

You were just mentioning that when insulin is high, when an individual is working out, it's negative. But that means that in most situations when these people are working out, their insulin is high. How can they avoid that? Do they need to try to fast before working out? Don't eat before working out? Is there just the amount of time that they need to become insulin sensitive? How do they navigate that? Yeah, that's a great question. What a good insight. Yeah. So some people, people that are insulin resistant would

naturally have a higher level of insulin. Their kind of baseline insulin is a little higher. So they're sort of chronically, maybe even multiples higher, two or three or four times higher than the average insulin sensitive person. But that's kind of at the moment, they're normal. And so if insulin comes down for them, their fasting insulin may be at 20, but an insulin sensitive person's fasting insulin may be at 20, but an insulin sensitive person's fasting insulin may be at five. In that person who's insulin resistant, that 20 level is kind of normal at the moment. And because their muscles are insulin resistant, that 20 is going to be okay. They're not going to, you know,

force themselves into a hypoglycemic event when they exercise. So them having a chronically higher insulin, because they're insulin resistant, it'll still be higher during exercise. But also because of the insulin resistance, that will ensure they don't become hypoglycemic, where the liver isn't pumping out glucose and the muscles are pulling it in. All of that is compromised in a way that kind of maintains homeostasis, if you will. However, over time, in the wake of that exercise session, they've become a little more insulin sensitive. They do it again, they become a little more insulin sensitive. And so slowly, actually not so slowly, in some instances, it can be profoundly quick within just weeks. In fact,

their insulin will start to come down. Now, importantly, as we are kind of converging these topics with insulin sensitivity and exercise, a study in humans found that when you took insulin resistant people and they exercised, if they finished their exercise with a carbohydrate rich insulin spiking meal, they mitigated the insulin-sensitizing effects of the exercise session. That is such a note of caution because as we see in gyms so often, you'll see some person who's likely insulin-resistant on that elliptical machine, and they're just working their guts out. But then they're sipping like a fruit smoothie or some other kind of nonsense, unfortunately, or the first thing they do is go start chugging Gatorade because they've, they, they drank the Kool-Aid, uh, so to speak, and they think it's going to help them. No, no. Uh, if you, if someone is exercising, uh, with the intention of improving their metabolic

health, a part of which, or a big part of which will be improving their insulin sensitivity. Don't finish your workout with carbs or feel like you need to even be eating the carbs during the workout. That is such an overblown, really probably just a marketing. It's just a way to sell Gatorade or other such stuff. Can we just back up a little bit and let's, in the best way possible and the simplest way possible, if you can explain insulin and are we trying to be insulin sensitive, insulin resistant? Like I sometimes, I find myself, even after studying a lot of this stuff for a long time,

kind of being like, wait, what was that one? And what was, you know, what was this? What's leptin do again? And stuff like that. So if you can explain insulin and insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance, and how someone becomes like pre-diabetic and diabetic and that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Mark. So there's a lot there to unpack, but I'm delighted to unpack it. This is because this is the only thing I know anything about. So insulin, insulin is a hormone that, that classically is only viewed through the

lens of glucose. So the average person who hears the word insulin just thinks, oh, well, that's just a diabetic and they need it for glucose control. In fact, that those ideas, that idea is so firmly entrenched in people's minds, including very educated individuals. And I do air quotes on that on purpose, because I'm one of those guys who thinks that credentials after a name really don't mean anything. It's just a sign of someone being patient enough and willing to take the abuse of academia. Coming from a double doctor over there too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would want anyone to know that there's no ego attached to any of these credentials. It really is just show me what you know. So in the case of with insulin, it's viewed classically through the lens of glucose, which is wildly unfair because insulin does hundreds or thousands of things throughout the body and different things at each cell.

Literally every cell in the body has insulin receptors. In other words, insulin has an effect that every single cell in the body. In other words, insulin has an effect at every single cell in the body. And I mean them all from brain cells to bone cells, from liver cells to lung cells. It doesn't matter. Insulin will affect every single cell in the body. And the theme of insulin's actions will be to store energy. Basically, that's the theme, the overarching or the umbrella idea, the effect of insulin at every cell.

It will be to, in some way, stimulate the uptake of building blocks like amino acids, fatty acids, or glucose, and then tell the cell what to do with it, either creating, well, basically creating bigger molecules. So insulin is anabolic in that sense, although I wouldn't want someone to think that I'm implying that it's anabolic at the muscle. That's a bit of, once again, a bit misunderstood, but nevertheless, insulin tells the body what to do with energy. And then when someone is living a life where it's chronically bumping up their insulin because they're following the standard dietary advice, right? That they're eating high

starch, high sugar meals, because they've been told to get 60% of their calories from carbohydrates. And they've been told to eat six meals a day. That is a wonderful way to make sure that insulin is elevated every waking moment and even well into the first part of the night. And chronically elevated insulin will cause insulin resistance. Now, there are other inputs that will do this, but that is a fundamental feature of insulin resistance. And you cannot separate the two, but it is one of the two sides of the coin that I'm going to call insulin resistance. So that one side of this coin, as we now sort of transition into defining insulin resistance, is the chronically elevated insulin. That is a fundamental feature of insulin resistance.

And we have to appreciate that to appreciate how insulin resistance affects virtually every chronic disease. But the other side of the coin is that some cells like the muscle, like the brain, for example, like blood vessels in some aspects of the body, they become insulin resistant. So insulin isn't doing what it used to do in those cells. So the effect of insulin is compromised. Not all cells though, but some of the cells aren't responding to insulin the same way they were before. So those are the two sides of the coin of insulin resistance. Some cells aren't responding, but others are responding as well as they ever did. Some cells aren't responding, but others are responding as well as they ever did. And blood levels of insulin are chronically elevated.

Now, these two things matter in different ways. And let's take just to highlight the relevance of this. Let's just pick two, you know, maybe very unexpected disorders. Erectile dysfunction in men. That is thought to be one of the earliest symptoms of insulin resistance. And that's because those blood vessel cells in that guy, they become insulin resistant and insulin will dilate blood vessels. It'll tell blood vessels to expand to improve the blood flow to a tissue. And in that poor guy, his blood vessels have become insulin resistant. And now the vessels don't dilate.

And now he can't get an erection. However, and so that is a consequence of insulin resistance. But in a woman, the most common form of infertility in a female is polycystic ovary syndrome. And that's the consequence of the chronically elevated insulin where her very high levels of insulin are inhibiting an enzyme in her ovaries called aromatase. And you guys have probably heard of this. So aromatase is an enzyme that converts testosterone into the estrogens, because it's a little known fact that all estrogens were once testosterone. And so if a guy is, for example, bumping his testosterone up through exogenous steroid use, he will sometimes

take aromatase inhibitors to make sure that that testosterone isn't getting converted into too much estrogens, and then he's getting consequences of too much estrogens, which no guy wants. But in each case, erectile dysfunction and polycystic ovary syndrome, each is a perfect example of, on one hand, the insulin resistance, and on one hand, the hyperinsulinemia, both of which kind of combine to create the overall syndrome or condition that we call insulin resistance. So as far as like when an individual hears this, we were just talking before the podcast and we were talking about yesterday on how to get lean. And a lot of the advice that people get is, you

know, you need to eat less and do more exercise. And Mark was just mentioning how like, you know, that's what people are told consistently. But for a lot of people that doesn't tend to work because of hunger. And we were also talking about hunger yesterday. Now, Mark mentioned to me, he asked me a question, do you feel it's necessary for people to be feel hungry? And I personally do feel that like when people are dieting that, you know, they need to feel hungry. But he also mentioned that you had a very interesting insight on the idea of hunger in the context of weight loss or fat loss. And I was wondering if we could potentially go into that. Yeah. Yeah. So I have have maybe a complicated view of hunger.

I do think there's something to be said for being comfortable with hunger, the discipline that comes with it. You know, when you feel that rumble and your stomach is trying to tell you, hey, eat something. And yet you are thinking, wait a minute, I am more than the sum of this fleshy mass. There's a part of me that is sovereign and I know I've eaten enough. Or in contrast, I know I have literally hundreds of thousands of calories stored on my body as fat. And so belly, shut the hell up. I'm in charge and I don't need to eat right now. So I do think there is a genuine value to hunger. Of course, not in the case of starvation. So I hope no one's going to, I hope people won't misunderstand me.

I do think there is an inherent discipline that must at some point be realized for someone to really be as metabolically healthy as they want. And a part of this would maybe be reflected in this, in this idea of being okay with hunger. Now, having said that, I believe that there are two, kind of two aspects of hunger. One is, I referred to it a moment ago, but I'd call it gastric hunger. And then the other one is an actual like energetic hunger. And so very briefly, gastric hunger is the hunger that someone would feel a few hours after they've eaten. And it's basically this idea that I had distended my stomach with a bunch of food, I got full, and now the food has moved from my stomach into my intestines, further down, you know, small intestine, and they feel that absence, that space, if you will,

in the stomach, the stomach is now empty, and that makes them uncomfortable. That's what I call gastric hunger, and it's acute, it can easily, well, not easily, it should be ignored. But that is so important, because there is an honest to goodness phenomenon of addiction to feeling full. of addiction to feeling full. It's an actual addiction where someone needs to feel full, even stuffed. And it's a weird thing to say. You know, there's so much discussion of, well, is sugar addiction real? I think very much that it is. But also there's this idea of, I'm addicted to feeling full. And so I know people who are morbidly obese and they will say, oh, I just can't fast. It makes me sick. And I'm thinking to myself, you can fast, you're just addicted to feeling full. It is an honest to goodness

phenomenon. So that's gastric hunger, which is acute, it passes and a person just has to grit their teeth and let it go. And then they get into this phase of energetic hunger, which is almost never really reached in a chronic setting. But that's when you are actually running out of fat mass. And that's when fasting turns into starvation. So there is a line there where you can have a morbidly obese person and they can honestly fast from any food and calories for a year. This has been done.

There's an actual case report published from the UK of a man who had fasted, literally just taking water and vitamins and minerals, and he fasted for a year because he was morbidly obese and he was simply eating his own fat for fuel. And he could do that because insulin was low. Once again, touching on the relevance of insulin, insulin dictates which fuel the body is using. If insulin is elevated, the person is stuck in sugar burning mode. If insulin is low, the person transitions to fat burning mode. But nevertheless, that's a bit of a tangent. Energetic hunger really only comes when the person is running out of fat. And as they run out of fat, they start getting low with ketones. And that combination of low ketones, because you can only make ketones from fat.

And if you've run out of fat, you can't make ketones anymore. And so that combination of now glucose being low and ketones being low, the brain senses an actual energetic kind of crisis. And that's a hunger or starvation that is such that that's the kind of hunger that leads someone to eat another human. Their hunger becomes so extreme, they would do things they never would have imagined. So those are the two phases of hunger. But even one other aspect to the energetic hunger that I just feel compelled to mention, where someone can get into this sort of faux state of energetic hunger when they eat something

really sugary or really processed carbohydrate their glucose spikes up and then it plummets to a very low level like 40 milligrams per deciliter or so that state of that rebound can be sensed as uh as a as almost a panicked frenzied hunger this can happen with someone's insulin resistant, where their insulin spike overshoots the glucose load, and then they get too low. But this is particularly a problem if a person is metabolically inflexible. And I hate to be bringing up another topic, but just indulge me for a sec. The average person is metabolically inflexible nowadays because their chronically elevated insulin means that they're stuck in

sugar burning mode. They're only burning their blood sugar or glucose, and they're almost never shifting over to fat burning. And so it's called this metabolic inflexibility because the average person should be able to eat. Well, the healthy person eat, go to sugar burning mode. A few hours later, they transition to fat burning mode, and they're comfortable shifting between the two. A person who's stuck in sugar burning mode, when blood glucose levels start to go down, the brain is so used to only burning sugar that it panics and will drive them to eat more.

However, if a person is metabolically flexible, or indeed is more of a fat burner, then if glucose is going down, the brain is so used to metabolizing ketones that there's no transition, there's no panic, that if glucose is low, the brain doesn't mind a bit and it continues as normal, burning ketones perfectly fine and doesn't stimulate the person to want to ravenously eat another, you know, 10 handfuls of jelly beans. What does some of your research show in terms of just like if you have control over your diet and you don't overeat, can we avoid most of these things? eat, can we avoid most of these things? Or is this like strictly kind of a carbohydrate driven phenomenon of getting like insulin resistance and some of these metabolic diseases? Yeah, yeah. I don't want to just say it's a carbohydrate problem. I do think that wouldn't

be that wouldn't be fair to carbohydrates because there are other inputs into causing insulin resistance and the subsequent problems like stress as someone is living a life of chronically elevated cortisol. And that could even be something maybe relevant to your audience, even overtraining that if you are putting your body into that kind of sympathetic state all the time, that sympathetic nervous system state, which I bet all your listeners are more than familiar with. But if you are stressed, if you're constantly amped up, those stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine will be up. Those are the prototypical stress hormones and they are insulin antagonists. They make the body insulin resistant. And then inflammation itself is a known driver of insulin resistance. And so this would be relevant to someone if they have a food sensitivity or an autoimmune

disease, if their immune system or an outright infection, frankly, but if their immune system is turned on and inflammation is up, inflammation will also be one of the inputs or one of the causes of insulin resistance. Now, having said those things, as much as someone can control inflammation and stress, then do it. It ought to be done, but those are also a little more ambiguous, maybe a little harder to control. Controlling the food that you put in your mouth is a much simpler, but perhaps not easy because we're dealing with habits and addictions. But that is, I argue, the most powerful lever that we can manipulate, just changing the diet to control carbohydrates. And then as I say,

control carbs, prioritize protein and fill with fat. You can do that. But again, you're dealing with addictions because no one is sitting at home on a Friday night, watching the latest Mandalorian episode thinking to themselves, Oh, man, I really need a steak and some scrambled eggs. It just, it doesn't really happen. It's really that they want something salty and crunchy or sweet and gooey, and that's going to be loaded with carbs. That is what, I mean, that's what we get addicted to. It's not, boy, I really want a hard boiled egg. No one says that. And that might be a great reason to kind of segue into, you know, talking about calories, you know, like maybe when somebody starts a diet, like it's probably not a great idea to start by

chopping out calories unless maybe you have a known history of knowing how to diet. You know, if you're a veteran dieter and you know what you're doing, then that might work great for you. But my suggestion to people is always, Hey, let's get used to these foods first. And if you feel like eating, you know, four apples in a row,

then go for it. Or if you're like eating more yogurt or if you're like eating, you know, more protein, you know, I almost consider protein to be like free calories almost like, Hey, just go for it.

And you can worry about shifting it around later at some other date if you're not making the progress that you want. I told you said a lot of brilliant things right there. Your comment about protein, I totally agree with that. But it also reflects part of the hatred that I have for calories. And I say this, I say this with a you know a modest degree of authority where i think because of my background in studying actual like energy use and in the body but i think the the inclusion of calories which used to be into the realm of nutrition and obesity

is one of the greatest travesties of modern day science can i get an amen yeah yeah good good because calories uh this is such a this we're now bringing in the realm of physics and thermodynamics which works in this sort of this this closed setting of the universe you know where all energy energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's, it's, we, we, it's just simply accounting for what the energy is converted into. And then there's this myth that the human body is somehow thermodynamically perfect. And because if we take these 10 grams of fat or 10 grams of glucose and we burn it and it gives this much heat and it can raise water this much, this much of a a higher temperature that means the human body is going to do the exact same thing

and every calorie is going to be perfectly accounted for that is absolute bs it's it's it's an it isn't is a total fallacy there are so many there's so much much nuance to how the body uses energy, including the role of hormones, which is nowadays almost totally ignored. And that has given rise to what I consider one of the greatest travesties of modern nutrition, which is that maxim of eat less, exercise more. If that worked, we would have been lean 50 years ago, because that's how long we've been spouting that nonsense. We have got to appreciate the role of hormones. Yes, the amount of food matters. And so despite what I've just said, I do think there is something to get from overall energy consumption, in other words,

calories. But if we overlook hormones and what hormones tell the body to do with the energy we've consumed, then we're missing what I argue is the most relevant variable in that formula. But more to what you'd said about protein, protein itself has a higher energy expense just to digest and absorb. So giving it a caloric value equal to glucose is absolutely silly because the body can take in that glucose with almost no energetic loss. It does it very, very well, like it does with fat also. Protein should not be looked at as a calorie because it is only in very rare instances that the body's getting any energetic value from the

protein where it's converting it into glucose in the liver. That does not happen often, even in fasted states. That does not happen until you've basically run out of fat. When you enter, when you transition from fasting to starvation, which almost nobody does anywhere in the world these days, then now you're cutting muscle to get those amino acids to make glucose to fuel the brain in that case. But protein should not be looked at as a calorie. I don't think anything should. But also one comment on protein, I just have to say this. I think that in modern day exercise, we misuse protein. Protein never comes alone in nature. So someone who's going to work out and

they're just taking some scoops of whey protein, I don't mean to sound silly, but that is unnatural. The body isn't meant to just get pure protein. God built every best source of protein to come with fat. And I think we should eat it that way. When we separate protein and fat, we are doing a disservice to the protein. One, we don't digest it as well. Bile acids actually enhance protein digestion in the liver, sorry, in the guts. And that's why when someone will typically tell me, well, I can't eat protein, it upsets my stomach. I will tell them, try eating it with some fat and let's see what happens. And almost always it feels better. And so when someone is focusing on a protein supplement, focus on one that's giving you protein and fat. And if I, I'll put in a

little plug, go to a website called gethealthhlth.com because I built something that does this. It's a one-to-one of protein to fat. And that is more anabolic than the protein alone. So egg white is the best protein for humans, right up there with whey and meat. And there's a study found that in college age males, they worked out and then they measured the degree to which the muscles made new protein. And they saw a little bump in muscle protein synthesis. Then they gave them a load of egg white, just pure egg white protein. And there was a bump beyond just the workout alone. So the protein alone had a greater anabolic effect.

And then they had them consume the whole egg, which is, I consider it a divine ratio. It's a one-to-one by mass of protein and fat. And then it went one step beyond the protein alone. There is something more anabolic about protein and fat. And back to my original point, God knew what he was doing when he put protein and fat together. And I would then say that the body is going to respond best to protein and fat. It's more anabolic. It helps us digest the protein better. And you know what? Here's a little tangent, though. The best proteins come with fat because the best proteins are animal sources.

Anyone who's trying to get their protein from plants, you are getting a lot of stuff you don't want. You're getting an inferior source of protein by any metric. But also, second, you're getting things you don't want you're getting an inferior source of protein by any metric but also second you're getting things you don't want when you take like a pea and you're trying to get a serving of protein from a thousand peas because peas are so protein deficient you get the protein but in the in the process you end up getting things that you don't want two things anti-nutrients honest to goodness that sounds like it's the stuff of myth. I encourage anyone to look this up.

Type in plant proteins, things like phytic acids or tannins or trypsin inhibitors, honest to goodness molecules that are coming with that plant protein that are going to block you from getting the protein. Not only is it already an inferior source, now you're even getting less of it than you wanted. And then second, when you enrich a plant to that degree, one of the other things you get is the minerals that that plant has been pulling in from the soil and you can get potentially unhealthy levels of lead and arsenic, these heavy metals.

You don't want that stuff. So that's my little plug. Don't get your protein from plants. It's unnatural. And again, I hate to say that because people will think I'm kind of some hippie, but humans, our ancestors would have never attempted to get plants from proteins. It is laughable. It is absolutely laughable to think anything otherwise. And I would laugh in anyone's face who would attempt to defend that position. So much to unpack there, doctor, but amazing information. So thank you so much. But one thing that I have a question on is when I hear somebody say, and like, and Mark's brought this up before in the past, especially with the protein, not really counting towards

your caloric values, but, you know, counting calories and doing all that stuff is confusing enough already. But if we're going to say that it is a fallacy the way you said it, what can people what metric can people use in order to, you know, make sure they're not overindulging or they're not gaining too much energy in their diet every day? Yeah, that's a that's a great question. Yes. I hate counting anything. I think that when we put someone on a diet where they have to be counting and keeping the books, I would say count your carbs or count your protein, depending on where they're coming at this. If we were talking about an overweight type two diabetic, I would say count your grams of carbs first. That would be the first kind of rule I mentioned, which is control carbs. And I would say you want to keep that, you know, some, depending on where they're starting, maybe you would say for the first phase, keep your carbs at 100 grams per day, which is very doable. And then we start to scale it down as they get more and more used to it.

So that would be one way to count something. And I appreciate that some people do want a target. So I can see the value in that, although I'm not one of those guys. But if we were looking at someone who's already lean, and now they are trying to improve physical performance, I'd say, don't worry about counting the carbs. You count your grams of protein. In that case, focus on the protein and make sure it's these animal source proteins. Be liberal with the fat.

One, let the fat stay. Never, never drop those yolks into the trash can. Keep those yolks with that egg white. But moreover, you know, liberally add fat to whatever protein you're eating, especially if it's something like chicken, which we never used to eat. That sounds silly to say, but look at meat consumption 100 years ago in the US. We didn't eat chickens. We kept them for the eggs. And now it's only our fear of red meat that has led to this obsession with chicken.

But if you're eating something very, very lean like chicken, I would strongly suggest add some fat to that. It'll help that protein from the chicken work better. So, yeah, that was Andrew who asked that, right? So my thought on that would be if you need to count something, I just don't think there's a real value in counting calories. It leads to this, I think, more of a disordered eating and an obsession with trying to – and a fallacy that we understand what our inherent metabolic rate is, first of all, which changes very much. And second, how insulin and other hormones will directly impact metabolic rate. And indeed it does. If insulin's up, metabolic rate slows. If insulin's down, metabolic rate accelerates, even to the difference of about 300 calories per day.

So, you know, that's a pretty meaningful difference. That's a stair stepper for an hour or something else. I think maybe where you're coming from, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that you're just more into food choices than really counting the calories. You know, make excellent food choices, make good food choices, eat whole natural foods as much as possible. And those things are just very difficult to get fat off of. I mean, I guess you could do it if you were on some sort of mission, maybe. I guess you could do it if you were on some sort of mission, maybe. Yeah, if we took someone who decided they were going to go full-on carnivore, zero carb, I honestly don't know whether it would be possible for them to get fat from that.

I really don't. I would want anyone to know who's listening to this, I'm speculating, I would think that combination of just pure protein and fat would, it would make it impossible. And if somehow, if the person were eating 6,000 calories a day, they would be their metabolic rate would one be higher. Because I don't believe that calories are a myth.

I don't mean to imply that. I just think our attempts to encompass this thermodynamic principle into a biological organism is, is silly. It's an exercise in futility, but their metabolic rate would be higher. They'd be producing ketones at a higher rate. And when you produce ketones, some of that opens up this new door of reconciling calories. We typically say that energy, you have to store it or burn it, you know, which is, you know, you have to exercise more, in other words, to burn more. But when you're producing ketones, you've introduced a third option here, which is wasting. Because when someone's in ketosis, they are breathing and urinating out ketones. And those are honest to goodness, energetic molecules that have the same caloric value as almost a molecule of glucose. And the person is just emitting this energy, if you will, this burned energy, because a ketone is a product of basically burning fat. And the body gets into such a high rate of fat burning that it's burning

more fat than it needs, but it can't stop burning the fat because insulin is low. So there's no check on it. And so the body's burning more fat than it needs, if you will. And now it starts pumping and making ketones, which is a very viable fuel for the body. Every cell with mitochondria will greedily use ketones for fuel, but then we start losing that energy. We're wasting it into the environment. And one last comment, one relevant to my own research. We published this just earlier this year, work we did in my lab just across the hall here. When someone is in ketosis, the metabolic rate in their fat cells actually increases by about two or three times. And that's because of a phenomenon known as mitochondrial uncoupling. Basically, the ketones are making the mitochondria in the fat cells, but not the muscle cells for all us meatheads. And I'll

even include myself in that. I want my muscles to be very efficient, but I don't want my fat cells to be efficient because if my fat cells are less efficient, now they're using energy for no good reason. They're just wasting energy, even burning through their own fat, for example. So there are these metabolic advantages, if you will, that can come from keeping insulin low. And so this idea, you know, could you get fat if you're eating 6,000 calories a day of steak and eggs? I actually don't think you could. So with all this being said, it kind of just seems like typically an insulin resistant individual is, I mean, overweight and out of shape.

That seems to be what most of them are. Now, in terms of diet strategies, it seems as if like if that person were to do a low carb, a very low carbohydrate or a ketogenic diet, along with maybe some time restricted feeding, that would be one of the best strategies to get them down to a place where now they're insulin sensitive. And when an individual is now insulin sensitive, they can then tolerate more carbohydrates if they want to in their diet. They can then potentially have a better response if they were to, because the whole idea of counting calories, one of the big reasons why I think a lot of people fight for that is people see results from that but people i think that see the best results from that are people that are already in shape and the reason

that they probably get better results from that is because well their body's doing their body's acting in a way that it's a more you can it's more cooperative let's say like you can count calories and since your body's doing what it's supposed to do, you can kind of see what's going to happen. I agree with what you're saying. You get what I'm trying to say? Yeah. There's a word I'm trying to get. Well, you have to be healthy in order to really lose weight efficiently and to be able to keep it off.

And so I think that people think they're going to lose weight and get healthy from losing weight. But you need to be healthy first in order for your body to really work the way that it needs to, as you were talking about the hormones and that kind of stuff. Yeah. So like counting calories and that type of stuff, when you are already healthier, um, it, what's the fucking word I'm looking for? There's, um, I'll find it later. But what I'm, what I want to get out here is, does that seem to be like what the best strategy is in terms of dropping weight, starting with a low carb keto type diet? And then you'll have a little bit more flexibility when you are leaner and more insulin sensitive. Yeah, yeah, right.

Yep. In fact, there's a study that took people and split them up into two groups, although they were both overweight. But one group was insulin sensitive, which can happen. There's that kind of paradoxical group of people that can get overweight but still be insulin sensitive. And that's sort of a deeper topic that we can get into later, perhaps. But then there was another group who was also overweight but insulin resistant. They put them both, and and then they then they split

them up again into two diet, low fat and low carb. And on the low fat diet, the insulin sensitive group did just fine. The insulin resistant group did not that when they put them both on a low carb diet, they both did good. And so there was this this there was this departure in how the body was responding. So I also, lest anyone accuse me of being too narrow-minded, I very much believe that there can be multiple effective diets for someone. And almost anything someone does to deviate from the standard diet, and people always want to say the standard American diet, but I've been to dozens of countries giving talks on this. And it's not the standard American diet, but I've been to dozens of countries giving talks on this. And it's not the standard American diet. It's the global diet. So the current global diet, almost anything someone does to depart from the standard global diet is going to be good.

Even if it is, heaven forbid, a low-fat plant-based diet, which I'm morally opposed to, even ethically opposed to, and certainly scientifically opposed to, you're going to be better than you were before. But of course, you will die. I mean, if someone's vegan, they will die eventually. Why ethically? Why ethically opposed to? Can you explain that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. It's because the myth of, and this is a delicate topic, because I know some people who are vegetarian feel so extremely strong about this. But I would hope that they would allow me to speak as objectively as I can and even appreciate the data. to ranching versus large scale farming, which which a vegan must rely on if they want to get their soybeans or their pea protein or their kale or whatever. That's coming from large scale farming, even if it's organic. When you come in and you clear a land of what it was natively growing and now you're farming that land, you are killing countless.

You're killing multiples more animals than ranching kills where that's these nesting ground, nesting birds, ground squirrels, rabbits, et cetera, and many, many more. As opposed to the cattle or the chickens, for example, that are getting slaughtered to feed people who acknowledge that humans are indeed omnivores and don't try to kid themselves into thinking there's something they aren't um also so that's what i mean there's that there's that ethical kind of myth that comes with vegetarianism that i think anyone who adopts vegetarianism if they're doing it because of this this this kind of big-hearted and i do mean that as a complementary term sort of love of animals and this reluctance to want to hurt animals. I'm afraid there's no way around it. And it is one of those harsh realities of life on this planet. Something must die for something else to live.

There is no getting around that in any way. Something, everything, every organism that is alive is alive at the benefit is alive because of something having died for it. I into some that creates a moral dilemma that they cannot get out of. To me, I, I believe it's something actually quite beautiful. And I think there's a lesson to be learned. I'm a very religious person also, but I think there's, we see this in the physical realm, like as I just stated, and even in this sort of spiritual religious realm, it's a beautiful sentiment that I'm alive because something died. And so we don't kid ourselves.

We're not a child. We acknowledge that. But I also think it can change the way we look at food, whether it is a plant, it's someone eating an apple. They'll think, well, I didn't kill this. Yes, you did. You've damned that apple tree by losing, by it, not being able to plant its seeds in the ground. You, you do not allow it to propagate itself.

And every living thing wants offspring. It is an inherent part of evolution. Organisms compete to have enough energy to reproduce. So nevertheless, back to my point, when we eat food, you know, in my home, with my darling wife and my naughty little children, when we eat food and we'll have a blessing over the food, which we do every time, it really is just to express a genuine gratitude, not only to God for everything we have, but also a gratitude that if we're eating hamburgers,

we're grateful for the life that was given. Even if it is a plant, you have killed that plant, unless someone only eats what's been dropped into the ground. But even then, by taking those seeds away from the ground, you have prevented that plant from doing what it wanted to do, which is propagate itself to have offspring. Something must die for something to live. That is a beautiful sentiment, but it also, in some people's minds, creates a moral dilemma. You mentioned kind of like a global sentiment, but it also, in some people's minds, creates a moral dilemma. You mentioned kind of like a global diet, you know, and right now we have this global pandemic, and maybe the global pandemic is related to the globally, you know, foul eating

habits that we've developed, you know um not just in this country but in others and then also you know a lot of country a lot of uh places from america ending up in other spots like mcdonald's and kfc and all that kind of stuff infiltrating a lot of these other countries and making them fat as well um can you explain the dangers of you know having extra body fat on you? Because I used to be of the impression, and I think that you had the same sentiments as well, I used to think that fat cells were just dormant, that they didn't really do anything. It was just extra body weight you were lugging around. But they can be really dangerous in so many different ways.

You mentioned insulin resistance, diabetes, heart disease, dementia, all these different things that could be detrimental to, but it can also be detrimental to just our overall health and our ability to be able to fight off viruses and what we have going on right now with COVID-19. I believe the fat cells that cause what's called a cytokine storm or something like that. Can you kind of go into some of that and explain some of the dangers of that? Yeah, gladly. Yeah, I'm thrilled you're bringing that up. Yeah, so fat cells are definitely a misunderstood character in the body, where historically, and maybe in some people's

minds even still, they are viewed, just as you said it, as this sort of just this side character who is inert. It's not doing anything really contributing to any function of the body. It's just a depot for energy. It'll store the energy when it's in excess and it'll mobilize the energy when the body needs it. But the truth is so much more interesting, including how fat cells play a critical role in fertility, where the reason a woman in particular becomes infertile with a lack of fat is that we must have this fat produced hormone called leptin in order to allow the body to go through normal in the woman, the menstrual cycle. And in the woman, in the case of the woman, it's because she has to bear the metabolic

burden of pregnancy. She has to have enough fat fat to even it's basically the body's system of checking itself do i have enough energy to carry this fetus and then do i have enough energy to breastfeed and that's why mommy's supposed to have enough fat on her to do that so fat is often overlooked in in a beneficial sense i think in this negative sense in the case case of COVID-19, it's also being swept under the rug where the evidence is excruciatingly clear, but not perhaps politically correct to note having too much body fat is without a doubt. Well, it appears to be the single most relevant variable in dictating or determining the degree to which someone will have a very negative reaction to COVID-19 or a very modest reaction, as many people, of course, do. So we know out of the data from New York

earlier this year, in the midst of them really fighting this battle, this paper was published looking at the pre-existing conditions and found that almost 95% of every single person who was admitted to the hospital with a COVID infection because it got that bad, 95%, virtually every single person had at least one pre-existing condition, and about 90% of them had more than one. resent because I think it reflected maybe their attempt to not point the finger at the true culprit, which is fat. So the way they listed the pre-existing conditions, it was as follows. Pre-existing condition number one was heart disease, which is a very vague term for any kind of cardiovascular complication. Pre-existing condition number two was obesity, three was diabetes, and four was morbid obesity. So they had split the obesity up into its own two categories. And when you combine the two of them, it ends up being pre-existing condition number one by a wide margin.

So this revised, more accurate list would be obesity and then heart disease and then diabetes. And the relevance of the fat cell then is rearing its ugly head because fat, in the case of a virus, a virus propagates through the body because its little viral particles get into a cell and then it hijacks that cell and it forces that cell to produce, to start basically becoming a factory for producing new viral particles, which it then emits into the body, infecting other cells. So this virus must get into a cell, unlike a bacteria, which is its own cell, and it doesn't need to get into another cell. A virus needs to get into a cell, and it hijacks it. The way COVID-19 is thought to get into a cell is through this little doorway called the ACE2 receptor. It basically acts as

this usher where it will bind the COVID virus particle and then bring it into the cell. Fat cells are among the highest expressing cells for this little COVID-19 doorway. And so fat cells are ready to pull in the COVID-19 virus and then allow it to start propagating and spreading throughout the body. And then also to your point, Mark, about the cytokine storm, part of the lethality of COVID-19 is the stroke that a person can have. And what happens here is what could be happening is that as the fat cells are becoming infected, they start releasing these cytokines or proteins that, one, increase inflammation throughout the body, but two, also promote clotting of the blood. And thus, this direct connection from the infected fat cell to the blood clot and the stroke, which is often what is killing a person, if it is actually a death from COVID-19. And I do say that with an exclamation mark, because I think many, many medical practitioners

are very loose with what they're calling a COVID-19 death. And that's maybe more of a political debate that I don't want to get into. But if it is honestly a death from COVID-19, much of that is stroke induced. And part of that could be because the infected fat cell is producing these cytokines that induce blood clotting. So at the end of it all, the more we are trying to be polite and not want to bring up fat, the more we're doing the average person a disservice. Because my views on COVID-19, although we have to admit, these vaccines truly have been produced in a shockingly effective rate. It is really a testament to science, what they've been able to do. But we will never eradicate this virus. We do not have a good history of eradicating viruses on the world. It is now a permanent fixture of this planet, I believe firmly. And thus, I believe everyone will get infected at some point. Do what you can. I mean, sure, sure. Social distance to whatever degree that will help.

Sure. Do that. But acknowledge that regardless, you're going to get it anyway, because most people who get it are social distancing, are wearing mask so these interventions may be helpful but they are not perfect they may be helpful so assume you're going to get it at some point shore up your own defenses take that initiative to to to take care of yourself and your family and frankly cut some fat and an easy way to do that is just to keep that insulin low control your carbs focus on protein and fat so for individuals that are actually you know what i have a cool question um and this may seem just like a dumb question but uh is it possible for an individual that seems to be in shape that looks good is it possible for them to be insulin resistant? Yeah, what a great question. Yeah. So there's a study on this. Yes, absolutely. No question that can happen. And in fact, it happens, it's almost selective across certain ethnicities.

So I did my, and let me, I'll elaborate. I did my postdoctoral fellowship in a beautiful tropical country in Southeast Asia called Singapore. It's just a jewel of Southeast Asia. Love it there. One of my little kids was born there. We have, it's kind of a second home if I were wealthy enough to go there more often. scientists from all over the world, including a guy like me, because they were interested in part to understand the discrepancy that certain ethnicities have with regards to diabetes. And basically, of the ethnicities that are predominant in Singapore, like European, Caucasian, Malaysian, Asian Indian, and Chinese, there's this very broad difference in how people, how healthy they are as they're getting fatter. And let's take the two ends of the spectrum. Take a European, Northern European, like my ancestors, my Scotch-Irish kind of Scandinavian blood, or take a man of Chinese

ethnicity, which is the predominant ethnicity in Singapore. And if they both start getting fat at an equal rate, the Chinese guy starts to suffer from this much, much sooner than the Caucasian European dude will, even though they've both gained the same amount of fat, the Chinese guy now is going to have hypertension and diabetes. And the Caucasian guy is just as fat as he is. And he's kind of doing relatively fine. They both may look terrible in their Speedos, but the but the caucasian guy feels better his his health outcomes are better and so i joke um but there's an ounce of truth to this if you want to be really fat then there's a benefit to to being a northern european caucasian there's just

you can be fatter and be healthier paradoxically whereas in this chinese guy he's putting more and more of his fat in his visceral space so the fat surrounding his internal organs whereas the caucasian guy is putting relatively more of his fat in his subcutaneous fat and there's this kind of differing effect across all ethnicities and even of course within ethnicities it's not like each ethnicity is a very homogenous group i'm not saying that at all even within ethnicities we can have a wide degree of variety in this in this overall where the body stores fat kind of phenotype or phenomenon but where we store fat matters and some ethnicities like chinese or mexican ethnic, they store it more in their visceral space surrounding the internal organs, which is more pathogenic. It's more actually inflammatory than fat that is

stored in the subcutaneous space or the fat right beneath the skin. So another joke that I tell my students, if you can pinch it and jiggle it, it's actually generally going to be a healthier fat, as much as we curse it. But also in the case of earlier, I'd mentioned a situation called polycystic ovary syndrome. Someone listening to this, maybe even a woman or a guy, you know, and his wife, he's thinking of his wife and they would be thinking, well, this person is an insulin resistant. I'm not insulin resistant. I'm lean. Even lean women with polycystic ovary syndrome, if you quantify the insulin resistance of their fat cells, they are significantly more insulin resistant than a

woman who is just as lean as she is, but doesn't have polycystic ovary syndrome. So not all people fit this kind of stereotypical body that we think of when we think of insulin resistance, like for example, a little overweight or more than a little overweight. Some people can appear to be normal weight and yet be fatter than their body wants to be. And that's a bit of a, there's a fine line there, but it's this idea of a personal fat threshold that some bodies, like a Chinese guy's body is just not built to be fat as opposed to you know a northern european you know my scandinavian ancestors uh you know where generation after generation were living in very cold frigid climates maybe they were supposed to be fatter and to supposed to have more of that fat in their subcutaneous space because that would be an honest to goodness insulation. You know, for example, so, but again, within ethnicities, you have tremendous variety.

It's because no one ethnicity is clean. You know, it's just, you know, I'm just Swedish. I'm 100% Swedish. There's always this variety that comes in any ethnicity. But nevertheless, there's general classifications that can fit in with this. And it really is a matter of where are you storing fat and what is your unique threshold for storing fat? And some people will have a higher threshold. Some people will have a lower threshold. And some people are kind of like internally fat, if that makes any sense. Like, yeah, their blood work and their readings and like it could be hereditary, could be environmental. Maybe I don't sleep well, but they may or maybe they're a triathlete, but they also drink a lot and have a couple of things in their day that are that aren't healthy practices.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well said. So that's this kind of idea, like they're thin on the outside. But if you really start digging in to their blood work, etc., they don't kind of fit the profile. And in contrast, although this is a loaded topic, you do have this class of people that can be fatter and not be as unhealthy as you'd think. That's how I'll say that, because if you're very overweight, that is not healthy. But you could have someone who's overweight and yet their blood work looks surprisingly normal. And that really is a matter of how you're storing fat. And I'll try to be brief because it's such a big topic. But as you take two people and they're both getting fat, you can have some people that get fat because each individual fat cell hypertrophies,

in other words, a hypertrophic fat. And basically the fat cells reach a maximum dimension and now they become sick fat cells or insulin resistant, pro-inflammatory fat cells. Or alternatively, you have fat cells that grow a little bit and then they recruit a new fat cell. Then they recruit a new fat cell. So no fat cell ever hypertrophies much. It's the fat tissue itself has become hyperplastic or they have hyperplasia where they're making new and new fat cells and each fat cell stays very low inflammatory and very insulin sensitive and thus the body stays metabolically reasonably healthy but never totally healthy i do not believe it's possible to be obese and healthy

but they'll be healthier than you'd expect. And so it's this phenomenon of hypertrophic fat growth, which is sick, and a person can be moderately overweight and be sick because of it, or hyperplastic fat growth, where the person can be fantastically overweight and be healthier than they should. Also, these are the people who can become morbidly obese. Most people could never possibly weigh 600 pounds. Most people, it is impossible. You could do everything you could to try to make them that fat and it simply wouldn't work. Those people who can get to five or 600 pounds have hyperplastic fat growth. And so the fat cells, they're basically their ability to continue to store fat is limitless because genetically they just have that switch turned on. Most people will have hypertrophic fat growth, which is why they most people nowadays are insulin resistant to some degree.

you can get because your fat cells will reach that point and they'll say, I'm full, I'm done. I'm now going to become insulin resistant to make sure I don't grow anymore because insulin is attempting to demand that I keep growing. It basically becomes a disobedient child. And I know a lot about that, unfortunately. I have a quick question because you did mention a lot of these Asian people as they were trying to, or as they were getting them fatter, a lot of these Asian people, as they were trying to, or as they were getting them fatter, they had a way worse response than individuals of European descent. That makes me wonder about the studies that they did about blue zones and these individuals that eat high carbohydrate diet and they're Asian, right? So if they're eating high carbohydrate diets and they're not, or it's rice, it's, it's rice, whole food, but they're not

gaining massive amounts of weight compared to, and you can't compare that to the standard American diet where carbohydrates are processed, massive amounts of sugars, all these foods being mixed together. Um, but why do those people, you know, tend to be so healthy because defenders of higher carbohydrate diets always reference blue zones. So how should we interpret that? diets always reference blue zones. So how should we interpret that? I wish I could cite the specific article that highlighted this, but just recently within the past few months, there was an article published that discussed perhaps some of the myth of blue zones, which is partly that these are all, they happen to be in relatively rural and poor areas. And so what this author was pointing out, it was that many of these people who are centenarians, in fact, were 80 year olds who had been lying on their records to basically get government benefits earlier.

Or their own records in this poor little area were so poor, were so poorly kept that you actually didn't have birth certificates for many of these people. And so many of so these blue zones may in fact be, be myths. Um, and it's just based on poor, poor, poor record keeping and poor, you know, politics or local politics. So I'll just put that out there as something for someone to chew on. But what I find intriguing is that when people are invoking blue zones, they overlook one stark paradox and that is hong kong to my knowledge hong kong is the longest lived group of people i think i think they have the highest life expectancy and i say it's a paradox because they also have i think the set the first or second i think argentina might be number one but h Kong, I think, is in the top blue zones is it could be bad record keeping, but also the nature by which they're trying to account for all this is always subject to suspicion, which is epidemiology.

They just go into an area and they say, answer these surveys about what you eat. And that is so rife with problems. Trying to expect someone to account for what they were eating over the past month or whatever that's problematic also um well or reflective of just how problematic that can be the entire diet heart hypothesis that was born decades ago this idea that you eat saturated fat and will kill you from heart disease it It was based on studies from Greece. Tragically, when they were doing these studies to try to see what these Greeks were eating in order to try to account for why they were living longer or having low rates of heart disease, they had these questionnaires

performed during Lent, and they knew they were doing it. This is documented. When they were having these questionnaires, these people fill out these questionnaires, they were doing it during Lent. And one of the things people do during Lent is they avoid meat products. I don't know. I'm not Catholic. I don't know the reasons for that.

Maybe they look at that as say, meat is just so good and you need to kind of punish yourself during Lent. So don't eat any meat. It honestly may just be as simple as that. Although you guys may know more about that. No, no, you're right. I went to Catholic school.

That's true. Yeah. It was during Lent. And so when these people were answering these questions and the scientists were then looking and saying, oh, wow, they're eating very little meat. No, they weren't in reality. It was just during that one little snippet of time

when you took the questionnaire and they knew it. They knew it was lent. They knew what they were doing. That has been documented. I cannot cite the study, but I could certainly pull it up. I show it to my students, actually, when I highlight the problems of using epidemiology as a basis for nutritional policy, you are doomed to a miserable policy. Damn. That's horrible. Yeah, it's crazy. So I know we kind of referenced it earlier, but I didn't get to really hear it from you. When an individual is listening right now, they're out of shape. They know they're probably

insulin resistant. What is their, what are their, what is their best path in terms of becoming insulin sensitive over time? I mean, there's exercise diet practices, but how would you have this individual individual approach it? Because I haven't also heard you talk anything about using potentially time restricted feeding for this, because I've heard a lot of, you know, I think Jason Fung, that's his big practice, right? He has people fast sometimes for multiple day fast, et cetera.

And that's one of his big practices to help people get out of diabetes, et cetera. So how would you have people approach this? Yeah. Yeah. So if we're talking about the solutions, either you never want to get insulin resistance or you want to reverse it, it is very straightforward. But let me also say many people listening might not think they're insulin resistant. But I would say this, if you're a little overweight and you have high blood pressure, done. You are almost certainly

insulin resistant. If you are a little overweight and you have little bumps of skin, little skin tags at your armpits or around your neck, you are most certainly insulin resistant. So these are some simple signs that a person could use that probably will indicate that they're not as good as they think they are. And if we're talking about a guy, then he probably does think he's better as guys tend to do. And if it's a girl, then you probably already are hard enough on yourself. And so, you know, you're done. But for the guys who are listening, we always think these things don't apply to us, but it very likely does. So one exercise, absolutely start moving those muscles.

And one, it's because of the mechanism we talked about earlier, this insulin-independent glucose uptake, which can just help control the glucose and control the insulin. But every little ounce of muscle you pack on, you've expanded the drain for pulling in glucose from the blood. Basically, you've made yourself that much more insulin sensitive, which is why at the lower end of exercise, perhaps, if someone is trying to, like they're asking themselves, all right, what can I do with the two hours that I have each week to most effectively as possible improve my insulin sensitivity? Resistance train. each week to most effectively as possible improve my insulin sensitivity resistance train increase your muscle mass because muscle mass is going to be the biggest predictor of how insulin sensitive you are because by mass muscles the biggest insulin responsive tissue so get some muscle on those little bones you know grandma or anyone else some muscle. And then, and to do that effectively, just one other tangent, go to failure. Whatever you're going to do, go to failure or work yourself up to that point where whatever you're doing, you're doing it to failure. If you're just doing

some pushups, maybe for the first few days, you're doing it until it's burning. And then you stop if you're starting from scratch, but eventually you want to get to the point where you're going to failure to just maximize that time and maximize um some of the anabolic effect of that but but i i honest to goodness i mean this i would genuinely defer to you guys on that so exercise though whatever you're going to do do it now with regards to food that is the elephant in the room i'd laid out out a couple of my pillars earlier to how to eat smart, and I'll just reiterate them. Control your carbs. Focus on the least starchy, least sugary foods. If it's grains and any processed foods, avoid them.

When it comes to carbohydrates, avoid any carbohydrates that come in a bag or a box with a barcode. Focus on real carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables in particular, and you're generally going to be okay with that. Second, prioritize protein. Make sure you're getting around one to one and a half grams of protein per kilogram of ideal body weight. And if we're talking about someone, if someone's listening and they're very, very overweight, you know, that would put you into a realm of you eating genuinely too much protein for what your body needs. So put that amount at what you're wanting to get to. If you weigh 250 and you think you ought to be 200, then look at that. Well, that's

pounds though, so I'm mixing up my units here. But one gram per kilogram of ideal body weight, one to one and a half. And the older you get, one of the myths, the older you get, the more protein you need. We become resistant to the anabolic effects of protein as we age. And so the older you get, the more you need to be at that higher end of the protein consumption. So that's a general range. But of course, it can go higher in people that are, you know, very muscled and really working out a lot. But that's the second one, prioritize protein. And it has to come from animal sources. Anything else, you're wasting time and money. Third, fill with fat.

Don't be afraid of fat. Fat has no effect on insulin. So be liberal with it when you're adding it to these protein-rich foods. But one important caveat, in nature, fat and carbs don't come together. They don't come together. Except for one exception I know, which is milk. They don't come together except for one exception I know, which is milk. And milk is high in all three macros, which means it's a perfect cocktail for growth,

which is why that mom mammal will make it for her baby because those three high macros will help that little chubby baby grow healthy quickly. So the role of dairy, I'm a little conflicted on adults drinking dairy, but I would say if you're drinking milk, make sure it's full fat milk. Don't take that fat out. God put that fat there for a reason. Who the hell do you think you are to take it out? So eat it with fat. Then my fourth pillar is now fasting, and that is my, I sort of say, tongue-in-cheek, watch the clock. And there are multiple different ways to fast.

Indeed, Jason Fung, whom I consider a friend, I know him well, he uses multiple interventions, like a 1-1 or a 5-2 or an 18-6. So there are many, many ways to do this, whether it's different day fasting or time-restricted eating within a 24-hour window, anything you can do to take a break from food will, one, help your discipline, which is a very, I think that's an eternal lesson, frankly, improve your discipline, but also it'll give your body a break from insulin, especially in the morning. If someone is going to be strict or fast, let your breakfast be the one meal you scrutinize the most because you have worked hard overnight to bring your insulin down. And as insulin has come down, now you've shifted to fat burning. Don't stop that. Most people do,

unfortunately. They wake up, they eat two bowls of cereal or five bagels or whatever, and they spike up their glucose and insulin. Then they do it again two hours later and two hours later. And every waking moment is spent elevated insulin, which means they're stuck in sugar burning mode. Good luck becoming insulin sensitive and burning fat. So really, I'd say anyone listening, start tomorrow. Get smarter about your breakfast. Throw away that cereal, toss out those bagels and that toast or whatever else you normally

eat. that cereal, toss out those bagels and that toast or whatever else you normally eat. Either fast through breakfast and drink a cup of tea or something like that, or eat breakfast, but focus on protein and fat. Eggs are a breakfast staple. Eat eggs, eat some bacon, eat a steak or whatever, but focus on protein and fat. Let that low insulin state that you finally achieved throughout the night, let it stay low as long as you can into the day. And so my personal philosophy as a middle-aged guy who is imagining someday being a very fit, healthy grandpa, which I really think about,

despite being up to my eyeballs and my kids still. But it's a long game here, right? But I will, I'd be very strict with breakfast and lunch. Those are two meals that I can control perfectly with no impact negative or any other way on my family. And so breakfast, I make breakfast for my kids every morning. It's just part of the family dynamic. And I want to, I want breakfast to be a good meal

that gets them a lot of protein and fat. So I will put eggs into whatever I can and shove as many eggs in my kid's mouth as I can. Um, in fact, the way I do it, I now the default breakfast, cause the kids just love it so much. I will make crepes. I will put nine eggs in a blender and one cup of flour, actual honest to goodness flour for the kids. I don't mind if they're getting some flour. And I make my crepe so that every one crepe they eat has an egg in it. It's one full egg per crepe. And I'll put a little swipe of Nutella on, which I don't mind a bit for my kids. And I roll it up and I, each of my kids eats about three or four of those crepes. And I'm thinking that is a win for dad because my kids just ate three or four eggs. But if I scrambled them up,

they, Oh, I don't want to eat these eggs, daddy. They become little whinier, little whiners and nothing I can do. I, you know, I can't force my kids to eat these eggs, but if I just put a little bit of flour in it as a crepe and a little bit in a tellip, they love it. So, but, but at the same time, I don't eat that with them. I'm talking with them. We're having, we're, we're kind of gathered together. You know, part of our dynamic, we might read a little bit of scriptures for the day or have a little prayer as a family, but I'm talking with the kids and I'm just sipping on a cup of yerba mate. Typically, that's typically my breakfast, unless I've had a very hard workout

the day before, basically legs. If I had legs, I did the day before, then I will take a little bit of the shake that I mentioned earlier, actually, um, the, the health code shake. Um, and I'll warm it up and I'll kind of, I'll drink it in a kind of almost like a, like a cocoa, but it's just protein and fat. And then lunch will also typically for me be either whatever leftover meat was from the dinner before the day before or some hard-boiled eggs that i just keep a stash of or once again the shake um that i that i mentioned and then dinner is dinner with the family um whatever it is so last night my my oldest daughter who is in a chinese immersion program you know which we joke

about now it's going to be wonderful when the Chinese communists take over. She's going to help us be higher up in the party, unfortunately. I say that kind of tongue-in-cheek. But nevertheless, she did really well on this Chinese test. Super well. Like highest score in the class. And so we said, all right, you get to pick dinner. And she wanted to go out for Indian food.

And I am, there's no way I'm going to go get Indian food and not eat my body weight in garlic naan. I can't help it. I can't help it. That damn Indian food, it's just too addictive in that sense. But that was dinner with the family. And so, you know, I could have. I could have looked at the curry and just been picking out the pieces of lamb. But then dinner is a social event. Dinner is a family event.

And I will eat what my family is eating. Now, thankfully, with my wife being very much on board, dinner is typically pretty smart, following the pillars I mentioned earlier. typically pretty smart following the pillars I mentioned earlier, but not always like when we went out to dinner for Chinese food. I mean, for Indian food, I ate dinner with my family and I enjoyed every bite. And so I'm kind of practical about dinner. And I think because I am healthy, I've been doing this long enough and I'm very strict with my other two meals in the day. I can have a little bit of that wiggle room. But I have been sensitive to that just because of what the impact might be. I want my kids to grow up eating real food, but I also don't want them to look at food in an unhealthy way. I see so many students here as a university professor, unfortunately, so many young women who have eating disorders. And I just, I don't want my

daughters, especially to look at food as anything other than something to be enjoyed and as a fuel for the body. So I want my kids someday to go to college and they'll open up their fridge and they'll see something called skim milk or low fat yogurt. And I want them to say, what on earth is this? What is skim milk? You know, I want them to grow up eating fat and protein and just real food. And again, my primary role in my life is husband and father. And so me being a scientist and anything else is far, far below. But I think if I do that, well, if I can combine some of what I've learned as a scientist, I think it can help me be a better husband and father and a better father in this case and help my kids grow to love what their bodies are capable of doing and realize that if you want a lot out of your body, you've got to put good stuff into it.

Anyway, that's a tangent, though. How do they get on the parenting? I think that's great. tangent though how do they get on the parenting no i think that's i think that's great and you know what you end up with is your kids aren't really ever on a diet or don't really know or think that they're on a diet this is their normal and their normal is not that odd you know it's not like you're uh you know having them on a strict keto diet and you're not pricking their fingers and checking their ketones and making it all uh uh, you know, weird. But I think that that's great. And I cook for my kids a lot too. Um, I used to, they, they kind of don't, can't stand it anymore cause they're, uh, 13 and

16. But no, I think it's, it's a, it's a great, it's a great value, you know, to teach your kids, you know, how to eat and they should be eating a lot similar to yourself. You know, I get people that ask that question a lot. It's like, well, if it's good for you, why are you feeding them pizza? You know, it doesn't always make sense. You have a kid's menu. I am a little repelled by kids' menus because it's just like candy foods. Like French fries and grilled cheese.

You're like, what is this? I have a selfish question. I have a very selfish question. easier like what is this i have a selfish question i have a very selfish question um you were mentioning and i want to go back to you had like the avatar of the uh individual with european descent who gains fat and is able to you know they're able to handle it better because of potentially maybe their ancestry and cold or whatever you mentioned mexicans as Asians. Do you know any type of avatar for the way that Africans handle food when they get much fatter or maybe do you have any type of idea what that looks like? Has there been anything done in regards to that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There has been. That's a great

question. I did my Ph.D. in North Carolina and one of the scientists just down the hall, his entire grant funding that he had was to look at the differences in, he used women, I don't remember the reason for that, but he was looking at women, white and black women, so Caucasian and African ethnicities, and measuring the differences in the degree to which their muscles were burning fat. And remember, I'd mentioned earlier this idea of metabolic flexibility, which is basically, can you burn fat when you need to burn fat? And the black gal's muscle was burning less fat than the muscle from the white gal's. And so there was this, what appeared to be a kind of fundamental alteration. And without a doubt, the black community suffers from much higher rates of

these metabolic problems of obesity, diabetes, hypertension. That's a very real phenomenon. And indeed, I think it's relevant, even most especially at this moment in time, as there's these comments that, you know, COVID-19 is reflecting this kind of underlying racism. I don't think it's reflecting a racism, although people will say that. But where people will say how it's inflicting minority communities more, I think that there are – well, I'm getting off on a bit of a tangent, but I started. But I think there might be some causes for that. causes for that. One, I think is a strength that in many minority communities, what they do better than many white communities is there's more of an intergenerational connection. And I actually do think that's a strength. I love that about many, many communities where there's just more of a social dimension. You're just doing more with members of your extended family. And so one,

that sort of can perhaps increase the risk of spreading a virus. But two, and I think this is also relevant, there are differences in vitamin D levels across ethnicities. And vitamin D appears to kind of block that receptor, that doorway for COVID that I mentioned earlier, where COVID can slip into the cell. Vitamin D blocks that from happening. mentioned earlier, where COVID can slip into the cell, vitamin D blocks that from happening. And one of the problems of our very kind of sedentary stuck inside under artificial light all day lives is that you aren't making as much vitamin D. And one advantage to being as pale and well, sickly pale as I am, if it weren't for my freckles, I'd have no color on me at all. But I can be in the sun for 10 minutes and make all the vitamin D I would possibly need.

But you have so much of a darker complexion than me, which is an advantage. You know, if you had put me at the equator in Africa, I would have died from every form of skin cancer possible. You could be in the sun all day and thrive. You'd be perfectly fine. And so that's the benefit of a darker complexion, of course. You are physically, you are literally built for more sun exposure than I am. The downside is in our false fake light environment, you would need to be out in the sun maybe five to ten times longer than I would be in order to make as much vitamin D. And all the more,

this is all the more compounded by being locked down where people, they literally cannot even go outside and get the sun that they need to make vitamin D. So one of the very few supplements I am an advocate of is a vitamin D3 plus K2 supplement. Everyone who's listening, if you're worried about COVID, that is one of the actual clinical trials that has been published, putting people on very high doses of vitamin, a form of vitamin D3. It statistically, it meaningfully reduced their risk of a COVID-19 infection. So anyway, so vitamin D, but then kind of to wrap up that sentiment, why might someone of African descent suffer more from fat as opposed to someone of European descent? It could be also a difference in wear and a relatively higher amount of visceral fat compared to someone of Caucasian or European ethnicity. But I can't help but come

back to that first study, which itself may be a consequence of elevated insulin. If an African woman's muscles are burning a little less fat in the U.S. than a European woman's muscles, it could be an underlying elevation in insulin in the African woman's body. Because if insulin is high, fat burning is lower. Because if insulin is high, fat burning is lower. But regardless, all of this long-winded explanation, there is. So I would say on the spectrum of who can be fatter and healthier, Europeans kind of are going to be the best in that regard. They can be the fattest and paradoxically the healthiest. And Chinese or Asian ethnicity would be among the worst. And Asian Indian is almost right there as well.

And then Hispanic. And I'd say African ethnicity is going to be in that kind of top half. You can have a black guy who's fatter than a Chinese guy and be much healthier. So now, everyone, please appreciate I'm kind of listing this with absolutely some speculation. I'm kind of filling in some blanks because I know of no study that's kind of put this all out there. But I'm filling in some gaps. But even everyone listening who has some Hispanic or Latino blood or ethnicity, rather, they're going to be also pretty compromised. And that's why Mexico, the mortality rate of

COVID-19 in Mexico is multiples higher than what it is in the U.S. And that's because perhaps obesity is worse in Mexico than it is in the U.S. We are so no one hates America or scorns America as much as Americans, unfortunately. And so it's it's Americans who always think we're the worst at everything when in reality, even when it comes to body fat, we are not. In fact, we're not even close. We're not even in the top 10 of being the fattest. Mexico is fatter than the United States is. And that may be why at least part of the reason why COVID is so disastrous there right now and through the Middle East as well.

Frankly, you mentioned many times a lot to unpack. Isn't that a lot? Yeah. You mentioned a couple of times now that it's a lot harder to burn fat kind of in the presence of insulin. But I would also imagine I've heard you talk before about being anabolic and catabolic and how you don't want to necessarily be anabolic all the time and that it's important to have the catabolic properties. I would just imagine that you probably don't necessarily want to be in a fat burning mode all the time as well. It's probably not very natural for our body to be in that state all the time.

It's probably not very healthy, right? Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Excellent point. Yeah. So I do believe on the anabolic catabolic side, I think that that's very misunderstood, even in the context of longevity, where people will say you need to eat less protein because protein activates mTOR, and that's going to make you age faster. That's just so silly on its face.

It's so silly. And it's not at all validated in the data. The truth is, once you get to the age of 65, the most the guys who eat the most protein live the longest and so you need mtor and anabolic reactions activated sometimes you need them turned off at other times um so you have to be cycling through the anabolic and the catabolic processes to maintain lean mass and just be healthy in general um but then mark i forgot your second yeah when it comes to uh insulin um you were mentioning that uh you know kind of in the presence of insulin, it's hard to burn fat, hard to lose fat. And I'm just imagining that we probably don't want to always be in this fat-burning mode. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Thanks.

So I think in that state, there's something that I call an inverse metabolic inflexibility or reverse inflexibility, where the average person, due to chronically elevated insulin, is stuck in sugar-burning mode and they have a hard time getting into fat-burning mode. Conversely, if someone's been adhering to a low-carb diet for a long period of time, I think they can go into this inverse inflexibility, where they are burning more. They're kind of stuck in fat-burning mode. And this is the reason you hear some people say, well, long-term adherence to a low-carb diet causes physiological insulin resistance this is why they're saying that although that term is terrible and it is inaccurate so i i disagree with it on principle what happens is if you've been stuck in fat burning mode and now you go eat two bagels your glucose will go higher than

it did before and stay higher a little longer because you just you've turned off glucose burning you're you're really i mean you're just not you've not been you've not been using those metabolic processes as much so they've turned themselves down but that is not the same as insulin resistance not it is not the same they've simply become kind of glucose intolerant, where they've turned off glucose burning. And so I do think there's potentially value to what some would call cyclical low-carb diets, or what I call practical low-carb. Because for me, like my diet that I outlined earlier, where dinner is with the family, pretty much whatever it is, if there's a way I can make it low-carb and not alter the family dynamic then i will but i'm not going to try very hard to do that i think that there's if there's any

value to doing that one it is better for perhaps long-term um adherence where you allow yourselves this this shifting into carbs but it's also just very practical maybe metabolically the upside is it just allows you to stay truly flexible that your body is used to seeing some carbs not all the time you'll get them and it remembers what to do with them it shifts to sugar burning mode and then it shifts right back to fat burning mode so i guess i'd say try to spend as much of the day as possible in fat burning mode and that'll be the key in other words low insulin to improving insulin sensitivity or maintaining it and maintaining or improving your body fat. You know, a lot of people that

listen to this podcast are chasing being as big as they possibly can be or as muscled as they possibly can be. Right. So they like like March. Mark was asking that prior question. Is there a detriment to always being, you know, always chasing burning fat? But is is there a detriment to always being, you know, always chasing burning fat, but is there also a detriment to always chasing gaining muscle, eating multiple meals a day? Many of these people like,

like, you know, we mentioned to look like they're in shape, they're muscular, maybe they're lean, maybe they're just not too lean, but very muscled. But they,

they're constantly eating and they're constantly doing that and they look healthy. Is there a danger in that in the long run? Yes, I believe there is. So if insulin is chronically elevated, they may be gaining muscle perfectly well, as well as they want. They will be gaining fat to some degree. Now, maybe you would say, well, their metabolic rate is just so high because they're working out for three hours that it's mitigating the fat retention to a degree that might happen. But the consequences of chronically elevated insulin go well beyond the fat cell where elevated insulin is a significant risk factor for dementia. It's a significant risk factor for hypertension and dyslipidemia and infertility and fatty liver disease. So you could conceivably have a guy who's just yoked and ripped, and yet he is not metabolically as healthy as he might be. Now, if he is ripped and lean, he's probably doing okay. But if he is

just yoked, but it's kind of yoked with a layer of fat on top, I wouldn't be surprised if he's not healthy. He may be strong and most certainly is, but he's probably not healthy. And I suspect he would have high triglycerides, high blood pressure, even fatty liver disease. Those are not good things. And indeed, this is all kind of even related to one of my sentiments with bodybuilding and supplement or drug use. I do not think it's justified for a guy to use insulin, or I will say abuse insulin. I do not think that should be on the list of things he's doing. In fact, this may sound terrible, although Mark with Chris, and indeed my true respect for what Chris has done, I think a guy would be better and healthier using anabolic steroids than he would be adding insulin to that cocktail.

I do not think insulin should be part of the cocktail that that guy is using in order to try to get as big as possible. First of all, insulin doesn't appear to be that anabolic in muscle, to be honest. And moreover, when you're pumping up insulin you are doing all kinds of things you don't want doctor i just want to double check are you doing okay on time i just read your email and i just realized that it said uh your time not pacific time yeah yeah if we five to ten minutes that would be great got it thank you Got it. Thank you. Yeah, I think, you know, you nailed all this information really, really well.

I would love to know, did you have your philosophy background first before you started to dive into all this? Like, what's the background and what was the transition? Yeah, yeah. So my evolution on food occurred within the last 10 to 15 years. And that was, so I was, prior to that, I was just as much an advocate of low fat and low saturated fat as anyone. I had been taught that as a student in exercise science and nutrition classes that I took. I was as steeped in that dogma as anyone. And when I was working as a personal trainer, which I pray to, I never have to do again because I hated every minute of it. But I was desperate as a master's student in exercise science. I was certified as a trainer, but I truly did hate it. But I would tell people trying to lose weight,

you just got to watch that fat and you got to cut that fat. And they would ask me, well, I had a friend who just lost a lot of weight through the Atkins diet. And I would say the same comment that everyone would say this canned response full of scorn and what I thought was just dripping with intellect. I would say, sure, they'll be lean, but they'll die from heart disease. What a stupid thing to say. What I should have thought at the time is, one, I should have respected the experience that these people were having without mocking them or discounting them because I thought I was so much more informed.

And what I ought to have done at the time, which I did later, was to truly sit back and ask myself, what does the actual published human clinical data say? What does the actual published human clinical data say? And even in the context of weight loss, when you have compared a low-fat diet to a low-carb diet, the low-fat diet never wins. Of these dozens of clinical studies that have been published, the low-fat diet never wins. And that should have been the beginning of it. For me, it wasn't. It wasn't until about 10 years ago. We'd done some studies in my postdoc lab we were injecting insulin into these animals and but we were only allowing them to eat as much food as the other group we were pair feeding them it was the exact same amount

of calories and these insulin injected animals were fatter than the other animals were and that was the beginning of of my loss of innocence and And it was me then saying, well, this doesn't fit the paradigm that I've been taught. What else? How else have I gotten this wrong? healthy, the need to avoid insulin resistance, the more I have appreciated that likely the culprit in most people is going to be the incessant consumption of carbohydrates, and it is not the fat that's really the problem. Although even now we've gotten that wrong too, with the rise of all these fake seed oils like soybean oil, etc. Those are not good fats to consume. So as much as I am an advocate of fat, I ought to have mentioned this earlier. I'm an advocate of animal fat and fruit fat and the fatty fruits or coconuts, olives, avocados, what our ancestors have been eating for thousands of years, because it's easy to get fat from the flesh of a fruit. It is very difficult to get fat from seeds like soybean oil and corn and and those are new fats and we are poor poorly adapted to consuming those

man this i guess this would be the last question for me um you you actually mentioned longevity in the beginning and then you talked about a little bit towards the middle of the podcast but as far as uh insulin insulin sensitive sensitivity relates to longevity. How can we think about that? Yeah. So one of the strongest or most consistent features of what's called familial longevity, so one generation after another living a long life, is insulin sensitivity. In fact, that's the title of one of the manuscripts that I'm thinking of when I say that, how insulin sensitivity predominates across familial longevity. Much of the focus of longevity has focused on a protein called mTOR,

which is kind of the prototypical anabolic protein in the body everywhere, not just the muscle, everywhere. And it tells a cell to grow. It tells it to make bigger molecules. It is anabolic. People, when you can keep mTOR turned down, fruit flies and mice and these little kind of other models of research that we use, they live longer. But now, and so this has led some to say, well, then let's keep mTOR turned down in humans. And then what they do is this one very prominent group, they would say, well, protein amino acids will spike mTOR. So let's just have them eat less protein. And in animal models, that has some evidence to support it because rats don't eat the same kind of diet as humans do.

Not at all. And so there's, of course, yeah, surprise, surprise. But people have used that as kind of leverage to say, well, the same thing should happen in humans. But the human data simply don't support it. Like I said earlier, over the age of 65, the humans that eat the least amount of protein die the most. They have the highest mortality. That, to me, immediately refutes the whole idea right on its face. However, let's pretend that in humans, mTOR still matters.

If mTOR is chronically activated, it makes the cells basically age faster because you are never allowing it to go through autophagy. This process that I'm sure everyone knows about, that's the process of allowing the cell to basically clean through the clean house. But if mTOR is chronically activated, you can't do that in the body, the cells are aging faster. So then let's say, let's assume, and that is an assumption, let's assume mTOR is that critical mediator of aging. And we want to keep mTOR turned down, all the more reason to scrutinize insulin because molecule for molecule insulin activates mTOR more than leucine even which is the most

anabolic amino acid of all of them it activates it more than even leucine does but the difference then so one insulin activates mTOR even more than leucine but the problem is that insulin can be chronically elevated. Like I'd said earlier, if you're eating the typical dietary advice, which is high carbs, six meals a day, your insulin is elevated all the time. No one's ever eating protein all the time. You eat a protein-rich meal, amino acids have gone up and they've gone down. In other words, mTOR went up and went down. That cyclical activation of mTOR is essential for muscle growth. And indeed, the chronic activation of mTOR is counterproductive.

The muscle becomes resistant to mTOR's anabolic effects. In fact, my colleague, two doors down, is an mTOR AMPK expert. And he could elaborate on much more detail than I can. But when mTOR is constantly activated, you start to lose the anabolic effect. The muscle is constantly being told to grow, grow, grow, and the muscle starts to say, you know what, forget you. I'm not listening anymore. And now it starts to become catabolic, even though mTOR is screaming at it to be anabolic. So all the more reason to watch your insulin. Don't worry about your protein. We're meant to eat protein. It is one of the

primary blocks, building blocks in the body. Get it. Enjoy it. Worry about the insulin, not the protein. Doctor, thanks. Thank you so much for your time. Where can people find out more about you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks, guys, so much. First of all, never call me doctor. I should have said that at the beginning. You're not my student. I'm one of those guys who thinks a degree means nothing, whether you're an MD or a PhD or any other kind of D. Never call a person doctor unless they are either your professor or your physician. Otherwise, it's first name only as far as I'm concerned. But yeah, yeah. But thanks again, guys, for the time. What a fun chat and what a great, But thanks again, guys, for the time.

What a fun chat and what a great, unique audience for an egghead like me. People, I'm moderately active on social media. Mostly that's oddly that's Instagram, but people can find me there at Ben Bickman, PhD. No C in Bickman. Ben Bickman, PhD. I used to be more active on Twitter, but it's just become a political cesspool. And I find that I just don't care to be on there anymore. Also, go buy my book, Help Out a Poor Professor. The name of my book is Why We Get Sick. And it's basically, well, at book length, I go into some of the details that we covered over the last hour and a half. Just what is insulin resistance? Why does it matter? And

what to do about it? And it matters more than you think. And then I mentioned this meal replacement shake that I created, and that was just born out of a desire to kind of provide a low-carb option. But I understand that it might make it sound like I'm a shill, so I won't elaborate too much. I just didn't think there was a great low-carb shake out there, certainly not one that was built on a one-to-one ratio of protein and fat, so I went and made one. people can learn more about that at get health and that's H L T H get health.com. And I also provide blog content to that as well. So those are the mechanisms for reaching out. And I encourage anyone to find me, ask me questions or connect with me. I, uh, I'm not recalling the stat, but I think it's something like, I think they think that half the population in the future may end up with dementia.

Right. And so a lot of the things we talked about here today, this management of insulin is really critical. I think some people can say, hey, well, I'm not really fat. You know, it's not really a big deal for me. But I think that, you know, people should be paying attention to this, especially as they get older. They should be exercising and paying attention to trying to control their insulin because, I mean, it just seems like an awful disease, you know, losing your memory. I think you lose your memory, you lose yourself, really. Oh, I totally agree.

Indeed. I agree. Indeed, when I'm asked explicitly, why do I adhere to a low-carb diet when I have no family history of diabetes, very little instance of obesity, I eat a low-carb diet because I have a very healthy respect for cancer, having lost family members to cancer, and Alzheimer's disease. And wouldn't you know it, both of them, to varying degrees, are intimately connected with insulin resistance. Thanks again for your time. Have a great rest of your day. Boys. Thanks so much. This was great. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Wow, dude. So that was like, that was like an, first off you, you told us, I don't know if you said it on air or beforehand, but you told us that he's able to explain such like really difficult concepts

so simply. And this is the best that I've understood. It didn't get too crazy. Yeah, it really didn't. Like you could follow along and at the end of this podcast fully understand the way insulin works and how it works with each diet and how it works with unhealthy individuals. It was so that was an insulin masterclass, man. Yeah.

He crushed it. No need to go to school. Nah, fuck that. Dude, that was some, yeah, some really good information. Damn. Definitely pricked my ears when he was talking about the, um, like the one-to-one fat to protein ratio having a more anabolic effect. He's a boiled egg boy.

I love it. Yeah. That's good that's sick yeah i want to look more into that one for sure because man that could change up a lot of my diet there's a book called the war on carbs and the one-to-one ratio actually works out really well for, for ketogenic diets. I don't think, I don't think that your food at the end of the day needs to represent that, but I do understand what he's saying. I think, you know,

dropping a little bit of fat into your whey protein shakes, whether it's via, you know, 2% yogurt or whatever it is that you're using. I think definitely makes some sense. We've talked before about having your protein shake with something, how it seems to make it more stable in some way, makes it less,

less rumbly in your, in your stomach and stuff like that. But he had a lot of, he had a lot of great points and great insight. And I think that, you know, I just think that like Alzheimer's dementia are just really scary shit. And it's really,

really brutal and difficult for families to go through. You know, when you have to, you know, you meet with this older person and you have to tell them over and over again who you are. And then they kind of remember and they forget a lot of detail. I mean,

it just seems like really, really seems sad, you know, and I don't know if it's completely avoidable, but if we can like mitigate it a little bit just by you know maybe not cutting out sugar and carbohydrates all together but just cutting back on them that's shit that sounds really like a good deal to me yeah yeah my um my grandmother she had dementia and it was uh yeah it was it was terrible um i just well they're frustrated too

it's not like they don't know no exactly that sucks is that they kind of know too so but like the like the aggression comes out too yeah because they can't quite comprehend what's going on they think that you know but anyway that's a whole nother thing but yeah you're absolutely right shit cut back a little bit a little bit of the carbs and sugar so that does sound like a very good trade-off. You know, what he was saying in terms of weight loss, though, there was a lot that was clicking in what he was talking about because I remember that at times when I was working with much heavier individuals in the past that when you try to just get them to eat a certain calorie amount,

a certain amount of protein, carbs, and fats, they wouldn't trend in terms of weight loss like healthier individuals. And that was what I was trying to get at when I was, I couldn't think of what I was trying to mention there, but it's like you can project a relatively healthy individual when they're tracking their macros. You can easily kind of project how their weight loss is going to go because they're insulin sensitive and they're healthy. And it tends to just be like clockwork in terms of the way they lose weight. But a much unhealthier individual that is insulin resistant, that is heavier,

that has problems with food. When you do the same thing and they're counting their calories and they're exercising, it's like things just don't work the way you want them to. They don't lose weight much easily. They have much longer trends of stagnation, but you start to see reports of people when they start going on a ketogenic diet and they are unhealthier and they start doing some fasting, then things just shred off because they're starting to become more insulin sensitive and the body's actually responding to food the way it should. So it made so much sense when he explained that. There's so much that goes into it too.

I mean, somebody who is heavy, they may have already tried, they may have already utilized some caloric deficit or what they thought was caloric deficit. They may have been really hungry. They may have kind of yo-yo dieted. And I hate to say this because it just sounds like you're just like throwing out all the science, but like their metabolism and their hormones are kind of screwed up. And I think that the truth is, is that in order to, in order to lose weight and be fit, you have to become healthy first. And I know that sounds weird, but like if you can address a couple of issues and knock those out, like a habit of like walking, a habit of, you know, trying to get a little bit more sleep, a habit of trying to get rid of some alcohol, cigarettes, just some of these habits.

Maybe play video games too much and, you know, it's impacting other parts of your life. Maybe you're too stressed. it's impacting other parts of your life. Maybe you're too stressed. It's, it's not impossible to lose weight and you certainly can, and you can be on a diet and you can restrict the calories and you can start to work out and you can lose weight, but you're really,

it's just like a really tough uphill battle. It's like you're pushing a snowball, you know, up a hill and it just keeps rolling and rolling and getting larger and larger and larger. And you're like, shit, man, this is getting to be too hard to push. And eventually, uh, eventually, unfortunately, you're probably going to give up. And not only will you give up, you probably will like go the other direction.

You'll probably like be like, fuck man, I'm hungry. And once you start to kick the, once you start to bring those habits back, then you're like ferocious with it and you kind of lose yourself in that. And then plus you're going to feel bad about that. You can be like, man, here I am again. This happened to me again. I told myself I wasn't going to do this. I lost 40 pounds.

Now I gained 30 of it back. And you're just like, I'm a piece of shit. And you're just going to keep kind of rolling down that hill. And it's, it's, uh, it's really tough. But if you can start to manage some stuff and start to get a it's, it's, uh, it's really tough, but if you can start to manage some stuff and start to get a little healthier, that's why I usually recommend people try to move first. I, I, I guess you could kind of put it either way. Like you can either get it done in the kitchen or you can get it done through exercise. But I personally think for people that aren't in a

lot of pain or aren't injured or something like that, some sort of movement, I think, is where you should start. And then maybe see if you could say, shit, man, I have like four Cokes a day. I'm going to see if I can have two, you know, or just replace them with a diet soda or something, you know, just some small changes. But I think a lot of times people think they need to change everything all at once. January one, that's it, man. Changing everything.

No carbs, whole month of January world carnivore month. That's what I'm doing. I'm going all in. I'm going to lift five days a week. And on the two off days I'm doing, you know, hit cardio,

right? They have this whole plan. And you're like, man, that's great. That enthusiasm is great, but are you going to be able to actually do it because that's all that really matters yeah real quick would like to highlight uh he only mentioned that his name was jc but he started august 1st at 340 pounds started doing 10 minute walks along with the war on carbs and he's now at

215 what yeah he says he has 60 more pounds to go and would like to be featured on the show but um maybe we'll do a call-in show with him but yeah that's amazing right he's in 350 it's 350 to 215 no sorry oh 340 340 to 215 it's 125 pounds yeah 10 minute walks in the war on carbs it's crazy yeah and he's probably eating food that he enjoyed i mean that's the tough thing is you gotta try to find when somebody's like all that diet didn't work for me i think they're kind of saying it didn't fit well with their like personality it didn't fit well with the foods that they are used to or the foods that they like but for me like eating an omelet or something like that, I love that shit.

I love bacon. I love cheese. When Benjamin was talking about making those crepes. Yeah. I was like, man, I want to go home and make some crepes today. When he said whiny kids, I saw Andrew's like eyes go. It's just funny because he's funny because he seemed like so reserved. But a couple couple times when

he was frustrated about something he probably has spent his whole life kind of pulling back and so every once in a while when he's mad about something he was kind of really mad about it it just cracked me up because i hate that i hate that yeah well yeah he's just you know like you know where he's you know giving out this amazing information then you all my whiny kids and i was just like it's so funny because he's because you hate kids too right but also he's just like a normal person you know he's you know a double doctor and he has all these degrees and all this and that and crazy information and oh he also gets annoyed with kids too that's sick appreciate it yeah that's awesome yeah i love his I love his,

I love his explanation on the blue zones because I have so many, I have so many personal friends in my life who continue to reference that like they're either going plant-based or getting rid of meat and they're telling me how unhealthy meat is and all this stuff. And they're constantly referencing that. So I just love his simple explanation on that topic. Yeah. The blue zone,

the blue zone stuff has been kind of blown apart pretty good. I think I, but I don't know, you know, it's, there's always a couple sides to every story, right? So I'm not really sure,

but I, you know, I also think that like, it's easy to look at these places where they just don't eat that much. I mean, when he said like, they're like, it's obvious.

Like if you don't eat that much, I think if you are eating like some sort of reasonable amount of protein and you just don't eat that much, you'll live fucking forever. You know, you'll you'll live a really long time. I mean, yes, getting in the right nutrients and all this stuff. But a lot of stuff that we do, I think, is overkill. I've said it on Joe Rogan. He kind of he tried to like kind of brush it off. But I'm like, Joe, it's not going to be like they're going to be like, oh, there's Joe Rogan. He kind of, he tried to like kind of brush it off, but I'm like, Joe, it's not going to be like,

they're going to be like, Oh, there's Joe Rogan. He's 140 years old. Like you're not, you don't get that advantage just from eating better. Like it doesn't work that way. And you also aren't assured that you,

you can be, you can be a good person. You can do all the right things. You can eat all the right foods and you can still have a horrible, horrific death that goes on for months or sometimes years of cancer treatment or whatever. That's the reality of it. We don't have the knowledge yet to bypass that. And you can't do it just through saying, hey, I'm just going to only eat meat or I'm just going to eat meat and vegetables.

You can help yourself to probably live a longer and stronger life and have more life while you're here. That makes sense to me. You can be more active and you can have more fun. That makes sense to me. But you're not a shirt shit, man. You're not. Yeah, absolutely. Well said.

Take us out of here. I will. I was made at that time. We have a follow up. Got to get the knees involved yeah this is a different object now it feels weird check out for the wind if you miss it too strong all right all right sink it sink it come on i don't have anything to throw okay see and then i have to like curve it because it's curved i think the trash the trash can is gonna need its own camera yeah we need to put a camera right oh yeah we're trying to actually all right new studio idea trash can camera camera

yep all right anyway uh thank you everybody for checking out today's episode sincerely appreciate it uh you definitely learned something today so uh if you have something that you think is extremely valuable please share it with somebody else because yeah, they're going to learn something as well. Please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram at MB Power Project on Twitter. Oh, and a quick shout out to Piedmontese for sponsoring this episode. Promo code Power Project for 25% off your order and links down in the description below. And my Instagram is at IamAndrewZ. And if you want to sound off on like

video games and stuff hit me up on Twitter at IamAndrewZ as well and Seema where you at? I am Seema Yen Yang on Instagram and YouTube and Seema Yen Yang on Twitter Mark it is crock pot season ladies and gentlemen I had some of that crock pot meat last night some piedmontese in there freaking amazing

so good I didn't throw the standing rib roast in there so they don't have a heart attack but i do have one for christmas i have one that's great do they have any meat for chicory boards um you know what they have all kinds of shit that i don't know about yeah they do they yeah because somebody bought me like uh our family friend bought me like a bunch of stuff from piedmontese and i'm like i didn't even know they had this shit they're like beef. They have beef sticks.

They have, um, and the freaking beef jerky is amazing. Yep. Their beef jerky is good. Their beef jerky is really good. It's not like you're, you know, chewing on it all day, killing your, killing your jaw. But anyway. It's spicy though. I remember that.

Well, they have, yeah, they have some different flavors. Anyway, at Mark Smelly Bell, strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch y'all later. Bye.