Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 482: Robb Wolf on Ancestral Health, Evolutionary Biology & MORE
Episode Date: March 30, 2017In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin travel to Robb Wolf and discuss a variety of topics... autoimmune disease, protein/water fasting, Ancestral Health, epigenetics, evolutionary biology, Artificial Swe...eteners, eating disorders, keto and more. Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee, Mind Pump's first official sponsor, at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts! Robb talks about his background (Paleo) /Autoimmune explosion (5:59) Why does Robb feel the Paleo diet seems to work with autoimmune disorders? (14:05)  Robb talks about gluten and the communities behind it (21:03)  What is protein fasting and why is it a good idea? (44:33)  Do we need to hyper hydrate? (50:38)  How does Robb get someone going in the right direction (health wise)? (54:24)  Obesity/diabetes epidemic – Addiction to food discussion (58:40)  High endurance athletes and their inability to tone it down / Beat themselves up  What are Robb’s thoughts on artificial sweeteners? (1:22:45)  Robb talks about how he lives his life / What we can do to make small changes in our lives (1:30:14)  Why is Robb so motivated in the field of Paleo? (1:36:33)  Mind Pump goes to PaleoF(x) – Robb gives them his rundown of the event and what to expect (1:37:05) Mind Pump asks, what has Robb done? / Final thoughts (1:41:05) Related Links/Products Mentioned Moral Minds – Marc Hauser (book) Dr. Terry Wahl’s interview with Mind Pump Ep. 385 Water Logged – Tim Noakes (book) Charlie Foundation Adam Richman (Man vs. Food) – Kitchen Sink Challenge Zach Bitter interview with Mind Pump Ep. 367 Dunning/Kruger Effect Wired to Eat – Robb Wolf (book) Robb Wolf’s website Paleo F(x) People Mentioned: Max Planck Dr. Terry Wahls Valter Lungo Chris Kresser Adam Richman (Man vs. Food) Paul Chek Zach Bitter David Perlmutter Mark Sisson Chris Masterjohn
Transcript
Discussion (0)
One of the biggest problems that we've encountered, and maybe you guys can
agree or disagree with me, that I think in fitness is that before it used to be that there wasn't
a lot of information. Now it seems like there's too much. Well, there's just a lot of convoluted.
Yeah, information, but most of it's not accurate. Most of it's not helpful. Like, they're going to
push a study that's gonna promote them
selling their supplement, or they're gonna promote a diet
that's gonna help sell their book, or their-
A lot of bias.
A lot of bias, a lot of falsities, a lot of it
based on advertising, so say, hey, lose this much weight
in 60 days, and so people are getting.
To be shred.
I can't believe and I take it for granted
because we've been in the industry as long as we have,
we've been as professionals and this is what we love to do.
And I take for granted just how confusing it is
because we know how to sift through,
we know what's right and what's wrong.
And I get, you know, we get questions all the time
from fans and you think to yourself, like, well, get questions all the time from fans,
and you think to yourself like,
well, you should know the answer to that, but they don't.
Like, these are questions that we take for granted.
Well, this is a lot of what inspired the 30,
the 30 days of coaching for us is,
you know, how do we take all this information?
Even think about all the information
that we've put out there over the last two years,
we have like almost 500 fucking episodes.
So how did we take 500 episodes?
So daunting for just anybody to jump in.
And most people that are just now coming on board
to MindPublic, let's be honest,
the time that it takes to actually go back
and listen, a lot of people aren't gonna be able to do that.
So how do we curate all this information
and make it very, very valuable to somebody
who's just now onboarding
or maybe started just a little while back with us.
And I think that's what inspired the 30 day of coaching is how would we take somebody who
we just met and try and break down all this information that was right.
Just one topic at a time.
One day, one focus, one topic.
Let's just break down that one thing so you can understand it on a deeper level.
Our goal with the 30 days of coaching was, when someone goes through all 30 days, at the end of it, they should be much better off
and much more well informed with fitness and nutrition
and how to apply it to themselves.
Not just information,
because you can get lots of information
like you can Google protein and learn about it
or Google carbohydrate or mobility or meditation
or whatever and read about it.
But that's part of it.
The other part of it is how does it apply?
How can I apply it to myself?
Is this something that I can incorporate into my life
and how would I based on my current level of fitness,
where I'm at mentally, where I'm at with all the stuff?
And so what we've done is we've sequenced it out
over 30 days.
So every day you get a new topic.
Some of them are very basic, like proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
Others are much more, you know, relationship to food and meditation and things that have
to do with wellness and gut health.
And what we do is we send you an email with bullet points of information that we think
are important to know on it.
But then what we do is we also send you links to episodes where we discuss those topics in detail, and
not only that, but we tell you the time in the episode.
So if you get an hour long, let's say it's episode 275, and that one we cover, underlating
calories, for example, well, you don't have to listen to a whole episode.
We'll tell you at minute, 15, 35, or 15 minutes and 35 seconds, this is
when we start that, and then you could start right there and listen to as much as you need
while we're breaking it down and explaining it to you. So, again, at the end of this
30 days, you should be much more informed. And really, the goal for us is to be able to
provide this information to build our value. We really want to give back to our fans, but
also build our value because we know we have great information. There's already so much that we've already
recorded and put out there and that people having trouble sifting through it. Well, we're
showing you what we what we would give someone, especially someone just getting started or
somebody who's kind of confused. This is how we would organize it and it's free. We're
not going to charge you a dime for it and we're constantly updating it. We're trying to make it better and better. All you got to do is go to mindpumpmedia.com.
It's the first thing that pops up and just opt in and every day you'll get an email with those
links to episodes and YouTube videos and we're going to be adding study links to this if you want
to get deeper and read actual studies that support some of the stuff that we talk about. It's
awesome information. It's absolutely free.
There's nothing for it.
Again, we're just trying to build value in what we do.
And it's also a great way to share.
If you're already feel good on your journey,
if you've knew this for a while,
like it's a great way to share to someone
who is just getting started.
You can say, hey, look, opt in for this 30 days of coaching,
you'll get all the information that you need
to get you going, to really get you started, and it's all organized out for them.
Again, absolutely free.
Yeah, my favorite part about it is Doug has also created a glossary at the end of it.
So once you complete the 30 days, there is a glossary that has all the links to each specific
topic.
So you have a nice place that you can,
and I always recommend that people
save that somewhere or flag it in your email.
So if you wanna go back and reference protein,
you forgot what fat does in the body,
or you had questions about strength training.
I mean, it's a great place to reference all this
or share these references with other people.
So awesome, excellent tool.
We're getting tons of great feedback.
We've literally only been doing it for about 45 days or so. So we've
only had, you know, probably about a thousand or two thousand people go through
it and what we're getting as far as feedback has been phenomenal. So urge you
guys to get on to MindPupMedia.com, sign up on the pop-up as soon as it pops up
and then the email will start to drip to you. Share it with your friends and your
family and just kind of spread the word.
If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
Mind, pop, mind, pop with your hosts.
Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.
That's my real cookie crisp.
Kau-uki crisp.
It's a cereal made up of mini cookies.
Yeah, a small cookies.
What a...
Like, you fat fuck.
What a...
Yeah.
Oh, you like milk and cookies?
Oh, yeah, here's a cereal devoted to you, mini cookies.
Like, you know, guys, I love cookies,
but you know what the problem with cookies is?
Because we know how you like that.
You know what the problem with cookies is,
is they're kind of big, and I'd like to put more of them
in my mouth at the same time.
I'm gonna be able to fit a plethora of cookies in my mouth.
And taking a cookie and dipping it in milk,
I mean, it's like you gotta take this after.
Like what if I just couldn't spoon it in?
I feel like only.
I'm just like a sh**.
I'm just gonna put a piece in a bowl of milk
and then eat them as much as I, in fact.
I feel like chips are all the only cookies
that you're supposed to dip in milk.
And Oreos.
Yeah, Oreos.
Oreos and chips are hoier.
All chocolate chip cookies.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Now we're getting crazy.
Yeah, like because it has to be chips are hoier like hard and crunchy
and so putting in the milk kind of softens it up.
If you already have a soft cookie and you put in the milk
then it makes it like soggy.
You don't want a soggy cookie.
I know, yeah.
You want a wet cookie.
Yeah.
And you want a wet and hot and hard cookie. You don't want to wet and soggy cookie. You want a wet cookie. And you want to have a peanut butter. You want a wet and hard cookie.
You don't want a wet and soggy cookie.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really?
Yeah, yeah.
I like it. I like it either way.
Do you drink the milk afterwards?
I like you like it hard or soft in your mouth.
I like I like when the cook it harder soft in your mouth.
Sure. I like it when when pieces of the cookie
say that to me.
He doesn't have preferences.
I like it when pieces of the cookie are in the milk.
And then you have to like drink the milk.
You drink it, but it's like chunky.
Hmm.
I like that.
I just, I normally throw the milk out.
Yeah, yeah.
It's, you do what?
It's specifically for me.
The only time I'll drink the milk, like you remember
it's only for cookie.
Crispy.
Chocolate milk.
Oh my god, the chocolate milk.
I just actually put chocolate milk in.
Oh god, it's serious.
Oh my god, it's like,
Damn it, you just like tapped into the matrix. Yeah. You're in all the milk in. Oh, God, it's so fishy. Oh, my God, it's like,
Damn, it, you just like tapped into the matrix.
Yeah, it's just, you're going all the way in.
It's like dividing by zero, like I fuck.
Oh, my God.
And we wonder why at 35 plus, we're all fucked up now.
I know, right?
Borderline diabetes, here we are.
Then I wash it down with some sour patches.
Oh, my way to school, eat some gummy worms.
Hey, son, for breakfast, here's your chocolate,
chocolate milk, put it on your cocoa crispies
and then wash it down with some of this.
Oh my God, my teeth are falling out.
Some of this high sea, like super sugary, not juice.
Yeah, it's not juice.
Coolade man busts through.
Hey, good morning.
Man, we have had quite a time.
The lineup, the last couple of weeks here, man. And I keep saying that, man, good morning man. We have had quite the lineup the last couple weeks here man
And I keep saying that man. This was my favorite man. This is my favorite
It's been pretty rad to feel like each time we do an interview that they'll it won up stepping up our game
Well, so if it's us or we're getting to be just getting to meet cooler people like we there's the truth
We we met with Rob wolf fucking badass. He's a badass. We met with Rob Wolff. Fucking badass.
He's a badass.
He's definitely a badass.
What really perked our interest with Rob, besides him having a popular podcast, is he's
a former research biochemist and his specialization, a lot of the stuff he studies, has to do with
autoimmune disease and cancer, which is always fast, very fast.
Especially the autoimmune aspect of it. And he's kind of known as like one of the leaders
of the whole paleo ancestor diet, you know,
eat according to the way humans have evolved type,
that movement, you know what I mean?
Now the thing I like about Rob is when you meet with him
and talk to him about...
He's not only responsible for that.
He is responsible for that being involved
in all the crossfits, dude.
The fact that has become the official diet.
He was one of the first guys.
Yeah, he is.
He definitely brought those communities.
Yes, he is the man.
But I want to be clear, when you talk with him,
as is true with many times,
you'll get a movement that becomes dogmatic
because the followers are dogmatic.
But then you meet the person behind it and he's not.
That's right.
He's not dogmatic.
Which can we be honest?
Let's be honest.
I think at least I was a little nervous that that could happen.
When we go to meet these guys and we know that they have something like that, and we're
not like we are not fans of only this way of eating.
I thought, man, I want to be really bummed if this really smart guy is just all this is the answer and he totally was not like that.
No, he talks about how we need to look at how we evolved, you know, evolution and look at that along with what we know about nutrition.
Now, like, you need to take into, basically what he's saying is why don't these areas of science
convert like they definitely influence each other like if you study any animal right
you always look at what they evolved environment their patterns yeah what they're eating like
how all these like things that they're that's in front of them is affecting them and it's
just a rational way to look at don't I found that that was probably the one of the most
fascinating things that he brought up and it was like this light bulb went off on my head like how fucking crazy is that?
That if we were to do any research on any animal that we would take an account
Where they where they live how they sleep are they not?
Natural habitat is what their diet. Yeah, what foods are they eating? What types of things do they they pray on all these?
What have they been eating? Yeah, yeah, all that would you take it account?
But yet when we study the human, we just throw that out the door.
Well, that doesn't matter.
Right?
And how the fuck does that happen?
Well, anthropologists study the evolutionary scientists study that, but they don't study
then.
They don't communicate together.
They don't communicate with like dieticians and nutritionists and, you know, people who
work on that, you know, just nutrition.
They don't really, there's no cross-pollination there, which good and bad, right?
We do a really good job of specializing in particular areas,
which is how it in some ways, but in some ways, is bad.
I think there's more bad than good, because how can you specialize to me,
without taking into consideration all the other systems of the body?
All these systems communicate together. We know this, we know that now.
And I think he gets into this real,
again, again.
Well, because we've been successful with it.
We've been successful with this model, curing.
Oh, that's the bad ex-bottom.
That's debatable.
Well, well, I don't think you can debate
Western medicine has made some tremendous leaps and bounds.
Sure.
And the problem is now we're encountering issues
that are chronic and not acute.
Like we've dealt with the acute issues.
It's the chronic issues now.
It's the lingering problems that have now started to really pop up.
Yeah, and we don't have the way we've designed our system is based on how we've dealt with acute issues,
not how we deal with these chronic issues.
And all he's saying is we need to take this into account.
And he talks about this quite a bit.
We watched a video, a YouTube video
which I highly recommend anybody watch.
That's amazing.
It doesn't have more views.
It should have millions of views.
The title of it is it's Rob Wolf, Darwinian medicine.
But he kind of breaks it down and explains it.
And there's some examples he gives of some of these cultures
where they eat high carbohydrate
and high fat.
I and high fat and how they bring all the rules yet they're super healthy.
Like how's that possible?
We'll put the link in the show notes.
So those that don't know already too, we've just recently started that.
So I know we talk a lot about, you know, either something that one of us has used as far
as products or books that one of us have read or people that were interviewing share this type of information.
Now you guys can go to our website
and you guys can find all the show notes
for all these episodes going forward
and there'll be direct links to any of those things
if those as far as the books.
So you go mind pump media.com podcast
and then you'll get all the show notes right there.
But yeah, Rob Wolf row best
seller of the Paleo solution. It's like one of the bibles of that particular movement.
He has another book that just came out rather recently called Wired to Eat. We'll have links
to those on the on the show notes as well. He's got a podcast which is very informative.
You learn quite a bit and again, he is not nearly as dogmatic as the paleo quote unquote
movement can be sometimes, especially when you look at some of these people who don't
really understand it.
But his podcast is called the Paleo Solution podcast.
Then his website is robwolf.com.
Rob spelled with two B's at the end.
Yep.
So here we are talking to Rob Wolfe.
Enjoy.
Rob, I want you to talk about your background again now that we're on because you had just Yep, so here we are talking to Rob Wolfe. Enjoy.
Rob, I want you to talk about your background again now that we're on because you had just
said your background in research and let's go over that first.
Oh man, it won't be as good as what it was before we recorded, but way in the deep dark
history I was a research biochemist mainly looking at autoimmunity and cancer issues and
had a lot of health problems personally and that's kind of what drove me towards this investigation into the paleo diet in Cessarol Health Evolutionary
Medicine.
Very interesting.
I have two questions for you on that.
Number one, what were your some of the health issues if you don't mind going into in second?
We've talked about this on the show and it's not being advertised like we've had the
obesity epidemic
that people are talking about or the cardiovascular disease epidemic.
But there is a massive autoimmune disease epidemic
that seems to be like nobody's really talking about.
Right.
What's going on with that?
Well, we don't really know.
Like we definitely, you know, there's some interesting trends.
So we start seeing these upticks and obesity and then upticks and neurodegenerative disease
Cardiovascular disease and then also auto immunity has been on an uptick and we have
Some changes in our photo period. We have significant changes that appears in our gut microbiome and the you know
potential permeability at the gut interface
There's some great research suggesting
that the gut microbiome has an input in everything
from cardiovascular disease to neurodegenerative disease.
Like there's a thought that specific bacterial strains
may be inducing Parkinson's and Alzheimer's in some people.
So I don't think anybody really knows exactly
what's going on, but there's definitely a big autoimmune
component to the whole story, even just the process really knows exactly what's going on, but there's definitely a big autoimmune component
to the whole story, even just the process
of atherosclerosis and developing a heart attack.
Historically, we've just looked at protein carbs fat
and then we got a little more sophisticated
and talked about inflammation, maybe some insulin,
but now the really cutting edge lipidologists
are looking at the atherogenic process
as an autoimmune event.
And so it's immune dysregulation, and when you really auger in and look at, say, like
the lipoproteins, there are critical features, not just of energy distribution, but also
they're part of the innate immune response.
If you get an infection.
And I've heard that.
Yeah.
I've heard that.
People have said that the inflammation of the heart, if you will, and that's super
I know that's super general, but how the plaque formation and how the body seems to pack
cholesterol along the arteries is really just a response. It's like an autoimmune reaction
like we're trying to keep things together. I don't think people realize how, because when
you know, together, people, I don't think people realize how, cause when I say autoimmune, people will think
of the common autoimmune issues,
but autoimmune is this umbrella that covers like,
neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, dementia,
you know, bone disorders like, you know,
types of arthritis, skin disorders.
I mean, you know, gas, you know,
when people are getting like heartburn,
this could be something that's odd on me.
Like, it's a huge umbrella of things.
And we're talking about this explosion or what seems to be this epidemic that's happening.
Do we see that in non-western societies or do we see that as much in societies that are more like your hunter gather?
Is this more of a new, is a recent thing, I guess? It's definitely a disease of civilization,
like even if you go to places like Central America,
Southeast Asia, you don't have to get paleo
to see a protective effect against a bunch of these diseases.
And you just don't see things like peanut allergies
or weed allergies.
I mean, and again, we don't fully know what's going on.
Some of the ideas are this, you know, around this hygiene hypothesis where we're not getting
exposed to enough bacteria and viruses and different, you know, what immunostimulatory
things in our environment.
People are being born via C-section instead of vaginal birth, and that can have some implications
for the gut microbiome and the biome we have on our skin.
As good as antibiotics are, like a little over 100 years ago, if somebody got a routine
infection, a lot of times they died from it.
Now we can fix that, but there may be some knock on effects that aren't that beneficial,
that may actually be challenging with the chronic exposure to antibiotics.
We have lots of antibiotics in our food system.
It's a really multifactorial problem.
Going back to antibiotics in infectious disease, the 20th century was really about dealing
with infectious disease, whether it was antibiotics or vaccines or public health to quarantine
that stuff and mitigate it. Now, the 21st century is gonna be about degenerative disease,
but that one disease, one pathology kind of mindset,
and a magic bullet in the form of a vaccine
or an antibiotic is not gonna work for degenerative disease.
And what we see now is a matrix driven disease process.
It's not A goes to B goes to C. It may be that there are 20 different things that may
or may not flip somebody into a disease state, like developing rheumatoid arthritis or
multiple sclerosis.
We know that like North, South, latitude gradients can increase the likelihood of autoimmunity.
So if you live closer to the poles, you might be at higher likelihood of developing
autoimmune disease that may be related to vitamin D, it may be related to the other
secosteroids that are produced in response to sunlight that go into vitamin D. But for sure, if you,
you know, again, live further away from the equator that it increases the probability. If you get a
crushing injury, it increases the probability. If you get different types of infectious agents, it increases the probability.
But there's not typically any one singular thing that just causes this disease.
And so if you go back to like high school biology and coaxed postulate, you know, it's
like you've got a medium that is sterile and then you inoculate it with a bacteria and
the bacteria grows and then you kill it and you pull some of it out and grow it somewhere else.
This is part of like the scientific process
of establishing a causality with a disease.
But when we were in this matrix story,
it could be 20 different factors and factors.
We haven't even thought about,
or factors that we think may be part of it,
but it's a peripheral deal,
but there's something going on there.
And this has been something that's really confounded the evidence-based medicine scene, which is
really amazing and has really moved a lot of things forward.
When you get into this situation where it is almost infinitely complex, then the biggest
benefit that I've seen is just someone that's thinking about mechanisms experimenting in a clinical fashion. We try a protocol. We see what works and we may not really know what's going on
And this is what makes some of the real evidence-based medicine people kind of freak out because they're like it's pure anecdote
You can't replicate this, but you know, there may be some of this stuff that is really really
Difficult possibly impossible to replicate when you get into you know
Epigenetics and talking about how many people
get freaked out and how many feathers do you ruffle
when you start talking about?
Because this is where people get in this.
It depends on which crowd I'm in.
You know what?
So I was supposed to give a talk next week
to one of the hospital systems here
and everything was set up, everything was gonna go.
And then just yesterday they were like, yeah, we can't do it.
And I mean, it was a pretty big event.
And then we found out that somebody in the Dietetics staff there caught when it's like,
oh, the low carb paleo guy is coming in no way.
And the talk was about the neuroregulation of appetite and autoimmunity.
So we weren't even like, I mean, we weren't even going into most of the places that they that they would be
really
concerned about for writer for wrong but uh...
you know it depends on who i'm talking to what do you think that is though what
you think that cause what what's your opinion on what what causes people to be
like that when we get into topics yet because nutrition is like it's in the
same category as like politics and religion for god's exact you can talk about
anything you bring a religion and everybody gets offended and scared and pissed off.
You know, there's a book called The Moral Mind,
and it's pretty good.
It lays out this argument that from an evolutionary biology perspective,
we evolved in these small group hunter-gatherers,
and you needed us versus them kind of deal.
And I think that that's still with us today.
You know, I'm so, yeah, just the tribalism.
And so that's a really, really hard thing to shake.
There's also this thing called the horseshoe theory
of politics where it's like you've kind of got
the libertarian to moderate to one end of the horseshoe
and then you go super left and super right.
But interestingly, the left and right
end up looking really similar.
They're totalitarian, they're in flexible.
Yeah, I mean, they end up mirroring each other.
I think that you could probably make an argument that within a given group, it's of benefit
to probably have a few, you know, outside the box thinkers that would be libertarians,
and it would be good to have some more like, okay, these are the orthodox people that are staying in these lane lines, and it keeps the continuity of the society.
Like, there's probably some benefit there, but this is interesting, too, is we get into
the social media phase where people can interface in a way that's reasonably anonymous, so they
can be prex to each other in any sense of, you know, most of the time.
So, tremendously. other in any sense of like, you know, most of the time, so autonomously. Yeah, you know, people will say things that they in a physical setting where
somebody could leap across the table and start beating you in the face.
Like, there's just no sense of class or, or, you know, like reciprocity or
anything. So you get this worst element of humanity and you create an
environment where that can be facilitated.
And then just at our fundamental level or kind of genetic wiring, we're just kind of tribal
and kind of knuckleheads.
Like we're monkeys.
We're monkeys and we're really prone to confirmation bias.
And so to circle around, even though I was maybe dinging on the evidence-based medicine
a little bit, there is a reality that this is the value of science.
You know, this is the value of being able to replicate studies and go deep and get validation and
get statistical significance and whatnot.
But Max Planck observed that science moves forward one funeral at a time.
There's definitely some truth with that.
You've just got to let the old guard die off and see what the new generation is going
to come up. Oh, yeah. I'm sure if Newton learned about quantum mechanics, he'd be, you know, vehemently opposed to
the craziness of it, right?
Right.
Right.
So from an autoimmune standpoint, I have a lot of experience, personal experience from
it.
And so I've been in that world.
I have a very close family member who was stricken with Crohn's disease at a younger
age.
And his mother's a dietician.
So she was very much on that side of nutrition.
And we used to debate quite a bit about nutrition.
And she said, no, you're wrong, Sal.
The evidence shows that low fat is fine.
And that carbohydrates, whole grains are great.
And I debate with her certain things.
And now that her child has had this, she's re-examining gone very, very deep.
And what I'm finding, and I wanted to ask her opinion on this, as I went deep
into this world, I noticed across the board with autoimmune disorders,
everything from Alzheimer's to Crohn's people tend in that category where they
have these outward, you know, expressions of autoimmune disease,
People tend in that category where they have these outward expressions of autoimmune disease,
they tend to respond better to diets that restrict
carbohydrates and grains in particular.
Now, I know you're a big advocate for paleotype diets
or ancestral type diets.
Why do you think that is?
Why do you think it is, especially in those categories,
like if you go online and you go on the forums,
and this of course is anecdotal, but we know that anecdotal observation drives science. You go on these forums and you go on the forums, and this of course is anecdote,
but we know that anecdote and observation drive science.
You go in these forums, you go in the Crohn's forums,
you go in the MS forums, you go in the forums
with people dealing with older people
in their households that have dementia,
and now as I'm just, you will find lots of consensus
that restricting grain intake
and restricting processed foods and eating more of these natural fats and whatever works better for these people.
Why is that? Why would that be? Because it's like these diseases aren't connected or are they?
They're super connected and that's part of the problem. I've been working on a blog post for literally a couple of years.
It's something to the effect, the death of the specialist, because it's like,
now cardiovascular disease,
neurodegenerative disease,
it's all the same.
You know the history channel guy
with the crazy hair,
and he's like,
aliens, you know,
and I wanna do it like,
it's all the same.
And yeah.
But you know,
people love to get into silos,
and that's where they kinda,
it's good on the one hand,
because we're getting deeper on that specific topic,
but then also they,
it's almost
impossible to talk to a neurologist and a GI doc
and be like, hey man, you guys are dealing
with the same thing.
It's just some genetic and epigenetic variability
as to this person gets gut problems
and this person gets neurological problems.
And you sound like a crazy person suggesting that,
but there's some pretty good data that's emerging
to really
support that, and it'll take time to flesh it out.
But, you know, Dr. Terry Walls is a really interesting example of this whole thing.
Yeah, you know, and so she reversed her own multiple sclerosis.
She did it largely with kind of a modified ketogenic, autoimmune paleo type of approach,
and she was a pariah among the multiple sclerosis society, you know,
seen for years, probably four years, five years. They didn't want anybody talking about it. They
didn't want her mentioned. And then over the course of time, what she related to me is, at some point,
there was 15 times more chatter on the MS message boards about this kind of autoimmune paleo, then all the other methods combined,
like Swank and a vegan approach and what have you. And just because something's popular doesn't
mean that it's right, you know, just look at reality TV and we have a pretty good example that
I used to feel good analogy. I used to feel hoidy toyy about being in New York Times bestselling
author and then Snookie did it. It doesn't fucking matter at all.
No relevance.
That's what we were talking about before we got on here.
Right.
It's just that battle, right?
I mean, God.
So, you know, we still really don't know what all the mechanisms are with autoimmune
disease, or is it five mechanisms, or is it 20 mechanisms, but there's clearly a gut interface. There's clearly some sort of molecular mimicry where some food-based proteins or some proteins
that are associated with bacteria or viruses end up in this situation where antibodies
are made against those items, and there's homology between those proteins and the proteins
in our body, and we get an autoimmune event.
And it's super complex, it's really hard to unpack,
but I will say this, we know more about autoimmune disease
than we've ever known in history.
We know more about type two diabetes
than we've ever known in history.
In 2010, there were 30,000 pubmed articles
with the term type two diabetes in it,
but yet the rates of these diseases
are increasing exponentially.
So I'm picking up an iPhone right now.
This thing is cheaper and better than it's ever been
in known history.
And the next iteration is gonna be
cheaper and better, cheaper and better.
More is law.
This thing's not, the analogy, those with medicine,
this thing should be a dial phone at this point.
Because we're not moving the needle forward at all
Under generative could it be because we don't even know where to look like I'll give you an example
Not asking the right course. You think there's a lot of hands and a lot of pockets that are pushing
Well, I mean there's all that stuff, but I mean I I'm kind of the crazy guy
That's why you're on my pump, by the way. Exactly, exactly.
Thank you.
It's part of my parole stuff, too.
We talked about that earlier.
So I'm kind of crazy.
If somebody says, hey, do you think bioethanol is a good idea?
I'm like, oh, what's the point of bioethanol?
You raise corn, you turn the corn into ethanol
to run machinery on.
It's like, OK, do you get more energy out of that process
than you put in? No. So that's a boom doggle, that's a fail. So I have this kind of crazy
notion that there are these fundamental laws of nature, thermodynamics, economics, evolution,
and if we inform our investigation from that perspective, then we start getting some really
good stuff to have. And the reason why technology has taken off the way
that it has is material science, physics, thermodynamics,
quantum mechanics, there's quantum elements
to just dealing with a GPS satellite and all that.
There's not a lot of pissing match
and contention around that, but within medicine,
which is a branch of biology,
and the fundamental tenet of biology
is evolution via natural selection,
it's a fucking shit show to get people to even say, yeah man, the evolutionary template is
maybe something that we should ask some questions, right?
Particularly for degenerative disease.
Now if you get hit by a bus or shot, evolution doesn't really matter that much.
We're in an acute care state.
And when you look at the progress that acute medicine has made over the last 50 years, it is stunning.
Oh, Western medicine rules, they can work miracles
on that stuff, but then when you hop right over the fence
to just really run of the mild degenerative disease,
like ulcerative colitis or any type of GI dysfunction,
it fails.
And it fails epically, just the proton pump inhibitors
that they're giving people to deal with gastric problems.
It's a cryo-sac, and yeah, it's increasing the rates of neurodegenerative disease. just the proton pump inhibitors that they're giving people to deal with gastric virus.
It's increasing the rates of neurodegenerative disease because those proton pumps are really,
really important and there's knock-on effects with this stuff.
So I think, you know, to the degree that this paleo diet concept has really had some legs
has been that we've looked at different disease processes like autoimmunity and GI issues
from this evolutionary template and we've said, okay autoimmunity and GI issues, from this evolutionary template.
And we've said, okay, maybe some things like grains,
legumes, and dairy, some commonly immunogenic items,
things that people are oftentimes allergic to.
And there's not a lot of contention around that.
You can just look at, you know, it's a fact.
Yeah, it's a fact, you know.
So could there be some other immunogenic issues there
that could lead into autoimmune disease?
And Lystiofasano used Ciliac disease as a model for potentially all autoimmune diseases.
So you've got a breach in the butt, gut barrier, you've got an inflammatory process, you
get this thing called a haptin, which is an exogenous protein and an endogenous protein
that gets stuck together, you get an antibody to that that and then the autoimmune process is often running.
So there's some really good proposed mechanisms and possibly more important than that.
We have some really good clinical interventions now that are showing some great promise.
Valtor Longo did a fasting mimicking diet and even that has been blowing doors off of
basic ketogenic diet or even some of these autoimmune paleo
approaches
and it appears to be this like protein recycling pressing the replay button on
the immune system
and it's incredibly powerful and it's pretty damn easy i mean you're asking
people to eat a low calorie diet for five to seven days low calorie low protein
i was so surprised when lane said that this was something that he would never do.
This was something we brought up to with intermittent fasting
because we're huge fans of it.
And I think more people should somewhat incorporate
into our life just for the health benefits.
Period.
Even I don't care, weight loss, muscle gain, whatever,
just it should be something that you sporadically just
incorporate somewhat in your lifestyle
because of all the benefits that are showing.
It's the law of unintended consequences
that as mankind just has a horrible,
we just have a terrible time working with.
Like for example, we have an acute issue infection.
Invent antibiotics, boom, we fixed infection.
Unintended consequences of that though.
What are the unintended consequences
of overusing antibiotics?
Look at food, like oh my God, we need to, you know,
people tend to be under, you know, underfed
when it comes to calories.
This is a problem throughout all of mankind.
People died from not having enough food.
We fixed it, let's grow corn, let's grow wheat.
So let's blend it.
Domesticate animals, we have all this food.
What are the unintended consequences of that?
And we tend to ignore that kind of stuff.
And that's what I think we're stuck in with modern society.
Farmer fruits and everything to be more sweet and changing that whole chemistry and everything.
That's it.
And so, when I brought up the whole commonality with autoimmune, I find it interesting now
that in mouse models, they've almost or pretty much cured depression in mouse models
by changing their microbiome.
Could depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, autism, could those all be kind of autoimmune issues?
I mean, this is a question that because there's an inflammatory component to all of those,
and now they're finding this gut connection to the mind as well. So it's kind of fascinating.
And, you know, of course, there's been some studies that show that some of these nomadic, you know, hunter-gatherer societies don't suffer from things like depression, anxiety, nearly the rate that, you know, we do in these modern society. So it's all important stuff to look at. But what is it? What is it with? I want to talk a little bit more specifically now because what I've noticed with these communities of autoimmune issues is that all they they all seem to do well when they avoid gluten, for example.
Right.
Just gluten, let's just talk about that for a second.
Like what's the deal with gluten?
Gluten and wheat in particular,
you know, there's a remarkable family of proteins
and also some sugars like some of these fermentable sugars
that go along with wheat type grains in particular.
And they seem to be really immunogenic.
Like they just kind of piss off the immune response, and we don't really know exactly why
that is, and there's two pieces to it.
There's the plant, and there's the person, or the organism eating it.
And so, on the plant side, the reproductive structure of grains is the grain itself.
That's the thing we're consuming.
So like if you eat a piece of fruit, usually you ditch the seeds,
or if you swallow the seeds, the seeds get deposited in some warm,
you know, well fed medium and you grow the seeds later.
And but with the grains and legumes,
that is the reproductive structure.
And they have some really potent anti-prudation chemicals in them.
And if you look at some of the West and the price stuff
where they talk about soaking,
implementing, and sprouting these things,
those were all an attempt to reduce these anti-nutrients
and these immunogenic proteins.
They didn't know that that's what they were doing,
but they noticed that when they did that stuff,
people suffered fewer rates of like mineral deficiencies
or the disease that we would see with these deficiency
states.
So, everything in biology has thorns or horns or poison or something to defend itself.
If you remove those things, this is part of the reason why like domesticated fruits and
vegetables just get crushed by pests.
Because they're super tasty and they're really low in tannins and toxins, which make
them taste better.
It's a littlerier to entry.
Yeah, it's a low barrier of entry to that.
So then we have to hit them with pesticides, which that has, again, knock on effects.
So we've got that side of the story, which there's definitely an immunogenic potential with
these grains.
But then you've got the epigenetic interface of the, let's say, a human being eating it.
And what's interesting is the person who expresses
silly act disease and we'll say also gluten sensitivity, but
specifically silly act disease, one of the most informative things that I find in my
research is we'll take a particular disease like
silly act or I'll even go like BRACA1, like the breast cancer gene one,
I go BRACA1 evolutionary advantage,
and you get a bunch of papers to talk about.
Ooh, let's talk for a second.
I gotta explain that.
So you're talking about a genetics,
so the breast cancer gene, this is one that,
if you get tested for it, and I know this,
because I had a family member who we tested people around her,
because she died at early age of cancer, she should enough.
And if you find that gene, you have something
like a 70-something percent chance,
they'll say, I've getting breast cancer.
And what you're saying is, you're looking at this gene
that exists and there might have been
an evolutionary advantage to having this gene.
Like, why does it exist?
Not might, it did, otherwise it wouldn't be there.
So, yeah.
Okay, go.
And this is again some of the stuff
that the standard reductionist science is just shitting the bed on, and particularly on the clinical side, because so we're telling
people, okay, go get screened, and then maybe do a prophylactic mastectomy, and we're not even,
maybe there's arguments for that, maybe not. I still think that there's a massive amount of
epigenetic input there. Like, they very rarely do genes guarantee, but specific outcome, we can tweak a lot of things
with diet and lifestyle changes and whatnot.
But we're not, again, even asking that question,
was there a benefit to this?
Like why, what is it beneficial?
Why is it exist?
So even in the counseling process,
it's like, hey, and the people with this geno,
this specific genotype, tend to have more children, they tend to with this geno, the specific genotype tend to have more children.
They tend to have fewer infectious situations,
like there's all this evolutionary advantage,
than at a pre-westernized situation would have been great.
And now, for some reason, maybe it's elevated estrogen levels,
maybe it's elevated insulin, maybe it's combinations
of these things, it may end up being a liability.
But we can manage that if we retroengineer this
and ask the right question.
So I'm gonna put this super layman terms, right?
You got this gene, which is a blueprint.
And your lifestyle diet thoughts,
whatever, all the things that can influence
how your daily life or long-term life,
all those things can tell that blueprint to go one way,
or the other, or maybe that blueprint existed
to do something, but it existed during a time when we didn't have all these other factors.
Now you throw those other factors on which is epigenetics and one of the end antenna
consequences of this gene now is breast cancer.
Right.
And in the case of silly act disease, people with silly act disease have a much greater
and enhanced immune response particularly in the gut. And these people tend to be of lineage
where neolithic farming is pretty recent
in their past, northern European.
So yet people who went from living
and scattered 100 gather groups
to larger extended family groups
and they're living in proximity with animals.
And we see this, you know, like the swine flu
and all these different things. Like when you start getting multiple species living on top of one another,
then there's an increased likelihood of some sort of squirrely event happening from an infectious
disease. So it was clearly a survival advantage for the siliac tendon, tending people to have an
enhanced immune response. But in this modern environment, when they get exposed to wheat specifically, galadin in the gluten matrix, then for whatever reason, that
tendency towards this overexpression or this enhanced expression of immune response results
in autoimmunity, gut permeability, and just a ton of different problems. But you know, all of these,
a ton of different problems. But you know, all of these,
you're really hard pressed to find a modern
disease scenario, like even things like a sickle cell anemia,
it had survival of me.
Well, area, right?
It does for malaria, yeah.
Yeah.
And what's interesting is people with sickle cell tendencies
when they move to somewhere like Europe of the United States,
you may go from a population that had a 40% penetrance of
that particular genotype, and it may be gone in like four generations, because it is nasty
enough now that there are selection pressures against it, and you just don't need it.
There's no longer advantage, but there's a lot of costs associated with it.
Yeah, a good example of what you're talking about, because when I've gotten into debates
with people who are like, no, the evolutionary fat, not that, you know, example of what you're talking about because when I get I've gotten into debates with people who are like no
The evolutionary fat and not that you know
This is what you need to look at and I'll say look here's one simple example
You can go to different regions of the world and you can clearly see a
Very big here's a very simple one lactose intolerance far more common when you go to
Africa in the Middle East and if you go to like northern European
Societies and why Northern European societies, they domesticated cattle and had dairy in their diets for a much,
much longer.
If you use Africa as an example, for the most part, lactose intolerances through the roof,
except for a particular region where they've been domesticating cattle for thousands of years.
And if you look at those two people, they don't have the same gene
that helps them adaptation. It's a different adaptation, but both of them helped them break
down lactase. Right. Clearly, you know, evolutionary. And you made a comment earlier about just
an infinite number of factors that go into how, you know, food affects us, you know, everything
from activity to types of foods we eat and all these different things. It only makes sense that we should probably default to how we probably have been
eating for the last 100,000 years or whatever. Is that worth some of the premise behind
paleo type eating comfort?
Yeah.
That gets sticky too because it's, do we have the same types of foods around it?
They've been modified.
Can you even find that type of stuff?
But I think that there's some really good guidelines that we can pull from that.
When you look at some of these pre-agricultural societies, they tended to eat within certain
macarons or nutrient ratios.
They tended to eat a meal or two a day.
They tended to go to bed when the sun went down
and they got up when the sun came up.
They were a wash and kind of a microbial deal
when they look at the hudsa,
like when they butcher an animal,
the stomach and intestinal contents,
the guys wipe it on themselves, you know?
Oh, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, they literally, I mean,
it's, yes.
Wow. But you know, and they will eat some of the,
some of the forgot contents because it's fermenting.
So there's basically like sour crowd in there.
If you got a zebra and it's in the forgot,
then these guys will eat that stuff.
And I mean, and it's highly prized and valued.
Yeah, yeah, and it's not killing them.
Like it would probably crush meat. Like I I probably I might not even live long enough to make the adaptation to get into that
That kind of approach, but that's kind of the base level
Norm, you know like I my wife just got a rubesian ridge back and like this dog and and we have a
African type cat like it's part wild cat and so these things just hunt and kill everything on her property
But there's like mice and moles and everything and they'll go And so these things just hunt and kill everything on our property.
But there's like mice and moles and everything
and they'll go hunt them up and eat them
and they eat the whole thing.
You know, they're not like pulling a filet out of it
and eating that one thing.
It's like raw gut contents and they're putting it down the hatch.
And that's probably, like there's probably on some genetic
epigenetic level and expectation of that.
And if we don't do that, or something like that,
and that's where maybe consistent fermented foods are valuable,
this is where some intermittent fasting is valuable,
some protein fasting is valuable, this periodicity,
and also these cyclic exposures are probably important
for some sort of a healthy baseline.
You said protein fasting.
I want to get into it it because I brought that up.
It's been a few episodes ago now where I talked about how I think
there may be a benefit to protein fasting just because you look at
the way that protein signals the body and how.
Some of that signaling is what is a driver in cancer.
And it doesn't necessarily meet a few of you to a lot of protein
to get cancer, but if you have cancer, eating a lot of protein
may accelerate or make it proliferate a little faster or make it more aggressive.
You just said protein fasting, nobody in our industry, especially the muscle-building industry.
Well, that's the macronutrient.
We'll touch that.
Yeah, that's the macronutrient.
You can't get enough of it.
Right.
It does no harm.
It's thermogenic and it's great for you.
Let's talk about protein fasting.
Why is that? And why is that even a good idea?
So we have these roughly three macronutrients,
protein carbs fat.
People are making the argument that ketones are a
force macronutrient.
We don't have to go down that rapboard right now.
But protein makes up the lean muscle mass.
It's a key factor in our immune response, our immune system.
And maybe backing up a little bit, if we pulled anything out of even just a little glance
at the Sanstero Health template, I think I could make a credible argument that chronic
anything becomes bad.
Chronic sun exposure, chronic lack of sun exposure, chronic overfeeding.
And so, you know, there appear to be some values to turning these signals, which is on
and off, and also, so the Valtor Longo case again.
So what was interesting with that is they had a group of people with MS that they split
up and they had one group that did this fasting mimicking diet, low protein, low calorie,
five to seven days, and they had a ketogenic diet arm of that.
The ketogenic group did okay, but not spectacular.
Everybody generally felt better, but they didn't have any like complete remission, whereas
I think the fasting mimicking group had a 25 or 28 percent remission.
Something ridiculous.
Something ridiculous, you know.
And so there's something about that really just gnarly punctuated change.
So they went from normal eating to low calorie,
low protein, that low protein state causes a stress response.
Even that.
You're going to like to use that term.
Yeah, it's really an interesting perspective. He's like, no, this isn't a stress response,
this is a normalizing response. The stress response is being chronically overestimated.
It's being chronically overbearing. It's being chronically overbearing.
You're overbearing.
Yeah, it's literally just putting things the back the way they should, which the first
time I heard that, because I'm always like, oh, it's a Hormetic Stress Response. And
then he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no there is a little bit of stuff in the literature, like the some old Bulgarian weightlifting stuff where two days a week they would do a super
low protein intake and then this was part of their volume phase, their accumulation phase
and then right on the heels of that, they would still kind of partition the protein but
it would be like one Mando protein meal at the end of the day.
It would be like a bolus of protein. Yeah, and it would be like one Mando protein meal at the end of the day.
It'd be like a bolus of protein.
Yeah, and it would be like,
I remember this study, definitely.
And it's really interesting.
And, you know, can you get a Ronnie Coleman size person
doing this stuff?
I don't know, maybe it just needs to be all drugs
all the time, all food all the time.
I think I'm an example too, because that's a disease state,
if you ask me.
Forced, forced state.
It kind of is, and you're using insulin and thyroid That's a bad example too, because that's a disease state if you ask me. Force, force state.
It kind of is, and you're using insulin and thyroid and all this stuff to kind of tweak
the levers, and you know, I mean, there's possibly some chemistry on that.
You're a chemistry set by that point.
Yeah.
A super impressive one.
Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, for someone that's not heading super far down that path, and maybe wants
to strike a balance between
the performance health longevity story.
Maybe there's some benefit, I've kind of noticed this
and people, I think have noticed this,
there was a, the hypertrophy specific training protocol
and the guy was actually making the argument
that you need to take some time off,
that that consistent repetitious exposure
actually ends up kind of up regulating the m-tore pathways
or the myostatin pathways and so it actually kind of inhibits it. So you need to go into almost
an untrained state, but not so far that you really start degrading, but then you layer another round
of training onto it. And so what I'm getting from that is that there's this periodicity in this
cyclical nature and this just chronic exposure, whether it's protein or strength training or what have you,
may not have that optimal benefit.
Like we need to have some punctuation in this whole process.
The underlating, we talk about this because we're heavy into programming, right?
So, and we talk about the importance of underlating your programming.
It's nutrition seems to be the same way too.
The more we look at it, that's why we recommend,
even none of us are vegan guys whatsoever,
but we recommend doing a day where it's like all vegetables
and no real protein for meats,
and you just go all nuts and seeds, maybe, or none at all.
It's because people are, especially in the fitness industry,
being fed this, and I remember,
and I think that why we're also passionate about it is because even being trainers
at one point, I remember being that guy who I was so afraid
that not to eat my protein that I would over consume
all kinds of crap and calories or whatever.
As long as I made sure I got my protein intake
and that would be like, and if you were under,
you'd freak out.
It would freak out like muscle was gonna fall off
the next day, that's the magic of the nitrogen balance. Yeah, and it freak out. It would freak out, like muscle was gonna fall off the next day. That's the nitrogen balance.
Yeah.
And it's funny because for a while now,
I've been doing these days where I just go vegan
and they're very low calorie.
It's all, you know, cooked leafy greens
and some raw ones and very little seeds and no legumes.
And I notice when I go back to eating protein
one or two days later, I get almost this rebound
like anabolic effect.
And there is some science that shows that there get almost this rebound like anabolic effect.
And there is some science that shows that there's like this desensitizing effect from repeated
exposure.
So even from an athletic standpoint, it would make sense to kind of do that.
Now I'm going to ask you a question, and this is going to be controversial, because I've
brought this up before on the show.
But right now in fitness, now we're seeing people questioning, you know, doing things all
the time regularly. But one thing nobody questions is, you know, doing things all the time regularly.
But one thing nobody questions is that you need to drink water all the time all day long,
tons and tons of water.
Now if we go back from an evolutionary standpoint, number one, there wasn't protein around all
the time.
When we had it, we ate it and when we didn't have it, we didn't need it.
There wasn't fruit all the time, but we had it, we ate it when it wasn't around.
We didn't.
We usually slept when we could and sometimes maybe it's a good idea to not sleep,
but usually it's a good idea to sleep when it's dark,
because you don't wanna be out when predators can't write you.
So if we continue down the evolutionary path,
doesn't it make sense, and I don't know if there's
any science to support this, I haven't looked this up,
but doesn't it kinda make sense to,
rather than drinking water all day long
to kinda drink it within a period of time,
because I don't imagine that humans
were around fresh water all the time. They probably went long periods without it, and then drank a it within a period of time because I don't imagine that humans were around fresh water all the time.
They probably went long periods without it
and then drank a bunch at a period to,
do you think there would be any benefit to that?
I don't know about that.
I don't know about that.
Specifically benefit, but I think that,
I'll answer it this way.
I think that people are neurotic about over-hydrating
and it's just, even though I'm sitting here with my giant jug of it, but when I'm jabbering, I do get it.
What are you trying to do here, Sal?
But I think that that's kind of one of these neurotic, it's kind of almost this folk wisdom deal, it's like a, you know, marked twain deal.
You need to, you know, drink all this water and everything, it just sounds great and it's so beautiful.
Top five tips. Yeah, and it's just, I just don't see where it's coming from.
And there's some decent research that very, very, very rarely
do people die of dehydration.
I mean, it's really rare, because it's a situation
where they can't get to water.
But the situation where people will hyperhydrate
and die due to hypometremia is all the time
You know, it's like every football season every new recruit of military, you know personnel every time that there's a marathon
People hyper hydrate and they end up dead from it and Tim Noakes wrote a great book on this waterlogged and
So that that's kind of my slippery wave of not quite answering that
So that that's kind of my slippery wave of
White answering that
I think what cause that is you know or at least in my experience when I'd have clients And I'd actually start to dive into their water intake is that quite frankly most the average Americans don't drink enough water
They're drinking all this other shit right sugary drinks and you know lots of coffee and so we're not getting a lot of water
So I think that I think that was the response like the fitness industry always does is the extreme on the other side.
Right.
A majority of these people are helping out. They're not having enough water.
Now you need lots of water.
I just think it would be interesting to look at because it seems like you talk about like there's
an evolutionary factor that comes into medicine health. I call it like there's a strong evolutionary
factor that we tend to ignore.
And if we just keep looking down that path,
I think it'll point us to some pretty interesting studies.
I'd love to look at that,
because there's no way in hell, like humans,
we're had fucking water every hour all day long.
There's no way.
I'm sure we sought, we drank the hell out of it,
and then went without it for hours.
And I'm sure it was nearby, but you know,
at that point,
art of anime, an interesting observation, And I had a paper to support this, but that a
mild dehydration, mild amount of moderate dehydration really enhanced growth hormone secretion, because
the some of the stress response and it tended to shift you more into a fat mobilizing state.
And the fat mobilization was a little bit more benign with regards to
hydration status and all that type of stuff.
So it was pretty interesting.
It is interesting.
I like that.
I find that kind of stuff fascinating.
And I like to go there because it's like the third rail.
No, don't touch that.
Right.
Now that we're getting this crazy, right?
On all these things that we're speculating that might have benefit and ones that we do
know already, I want to ask Rob and I know you've got to have a ton of people that
reach out to you, you know, after the fact right there, they're all, they're
fucked up. They've got all, they got leaky got going on, they got this rise,
it's going on, they got all these issues that are going on autoimmune,
and they're a mess and they come to you for help.
How does a guy like you take all the information and all the things,
and how do you, how do you get someone in the right direction like that?
What are the big rocks you focus on first?
What are some of the struggles you notice like telling someone like how to help them out?
Because you gotta know it's not as cut it dry as oh you've been doing all this bad shit
Remember this is what you do and they fall to it to you. They have things all good
You know, it's interesting because maybe ten years ago
I would get a lot of reasonably simple to help stuff. And it really wasn't getting into medical issues.
It's kind of like, okay, you're overweight or you're
sleep disturbed.
We can take some really simple boxes and get you
moving forward now.
The emails that I get now to your point, the people are
broken because there's so much good information out there
that the vast majority of people, if they've got any
initiative, they've done most of the heavy lifting.
And it's either worked really well for them or if it hasn't, then they've got any initiative, they've done most of the heavy lifting.
And it's either worked really well for them or if it hasn't, then they really need a lot
more help.
And, fortunately, there's some people out there, like Chris Cresser is an amazing practitioner,
and he has a practitioner training program.
The Cleveland Clinic is certifying all their new graduating doctors and functional medicines.
So compared to 10 years ago, like, there's a lot more physicians that are maybe steeped
in this kind of evolutionary medicine perspective.
And so there are folks that I can refer out.
I'm actually on the board of directors of a clinic here
in Reno, which is a functional medicine clinic.
We did a two year pilot study with the Reno police,
Reno fire department, found 35 folks that were high risk
for type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease, put them on a low-wish card paleo diet, modified their sleep and
exercise as best we could, and based off the changes in their health risk assessment parameters,
decimated the pilot study alone, saved the city of Reno $22 million with a 33-to-1 return
on investment.
Wow.
So we've been working to kind of gear this thing up and take it out to the masses.
And yeah, this is where when guys on the internet are like, you're that paleo, So we've been working to kind of gear this thing up and take it out out to the masses and yeah
This is where when when guys on the internet are like you're that paleo
You guys ever say the our word that ends with a D
That's that seems to be the one
Really mad you could say I got like three says it all right
I'm not gonna say it's like
He says it all the time. I'm not gonna say it.
I'm not gonna say it.
It's like the one where it will get crucified.
It is the one where we've said everything else on here,
but I've got more emails.
You say, I'm a basalt.
Yeah, you're the paleo-imbousalt.
And I'm like, okay, yeah, I also run a medical clinic.
They, you know, did this.
What do you do?
So, wow.
Yeah, and so, I mean, I'm fortunate in that
I'm pretty well networked into a system of practitioners.
Like we just had an email earlier from somebody they have a dear friend.
Friend has stage four metastatic breast cancer. What are we going to do? And so we're
hooking them up with a spin-off of some folks that are attached to the Charlie Foundation.
The Charlie Foundation is a ketogenic diet clinic for kids,
specifically for epilepsy and other neurodegenerative diseases.
But they've also been kind of sticking their finger into
a little bit of using ketosis, fasting, proteins,
fasting as adjunct of therapy with conventional treatment.
So we're trying to get them hooked up and so-
I believe the FDA is actually looking to approve a fasting
protocol for adjuvant therapy with chemotherapy. That just
remind me that I got to ask your opinion. We saw this. I don't
know if it's been it's been passed yet or not. Did you see where
they're going with the stomach pumps where people actually
can get surgery where they put his mix mix to their stomach and
then they eat and they. Yeah, I mean, at a minimum, it should be like old Rome
where you have to go tickle the back of your throat
with a feather or a crow up.
And at least suffer the indignity of throwing up
and like rotting your teeth out at some point.
It's not.
Make it inconvenient somehow, yeah.
At least.
Does that not scare the shit out of you though
when you see stuff like that?
And what, it's really crazy is that's gonna be like
insurance reimbursed and tax money covering that stuff.
That's what I'm fucking saying.
Really?
Yeah, we'll all pay for that.
Yeah.
Well, unless, unless, you know, government pays for all of it, and then the government will
tell them to fuck off.
That's what it'll end up happening at some point.
It's a point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Then they'll own your body.
Right.
Right.
Why do you think there's such, so why do you think it seems like it's almost like an
addiction problem with, like, let's talk about America?
Let's talk about that period addiction because you know, you can't say that word either to people.
You could be addicted to food.
Demonizing that kind of food.
Yeah, because it's it's an epidemic.
I don't think people realize this and nobody really talks about this, but the obesity diabetes epidemic, and it is an epidemic, threatens
this country, and we'll just talk about this country, more than almost any of the threat.
The biggest threat we had in modern times with the Soviet Union, they're gone now, so
there's no more that existential blow up the whole world threat.
Nobody can really do that to us now, or at least there's not that risk as big as it
was then.
People don't realize, like, if we don't fix the obesity diabetes epidemic
we're gonna go bankrupt
uh... i mean the military has had these these discussions and they look
specifically at our health care system it's a national security issue as a
national security issue and people are kind of like
all that's bullshit it's these jihadis and in the hill tops and it's like no
that's not what's gonna take us down our subsidized food system that's making us so sick that it's so incredibly
expensive.
Kill ourselves.
That will take us down to the kneecaps.
And nobody really cares too much about it.
And you really are the crazy person talking about any of that stuff.
We are projecting, I think, at some, like, 300% GDP and a very short period of time will
be spent on
just die obesity related stuff.
Just debuting.
So that seems like a good angle, though,
to really come at the money aspect of it,
though, to give people's attention.
It's not sexy or scary.
Like, if I'm a politician and I'm on a stage
and I'm saying, hey, everybody,
we need to fix our obesity epidemic
because that's gonna destroy our country
and then the guy over there is going no it's terrorist and that's
scarier like I'm I'm asking you basically I'm asking you to look in the mirror
a little bit and it's changes we all need to make and that guy over there saying
no we could just go bomb some people right and we'll fix it it's not sexy man
yeah and then you're gonna have to see accountability not there really it's
always it's always everybody else you know say and then nobody wants to look
at themselves and the things that they could be doing differently, right?
You know, but on that addiction,
thank you.
You know, why do we tend to do this stuff?
If I get this analogy right, it's pretty good.
If I fuck it up, it's pretty terrible,
but we'll cross our fingers.
Yeah, we'll cross our fingers.
So somebody's out hiking, they trip and fall,
they fall in a creek and they go underwater,
and they go to pop their head up and they're snagged, and they're like an they trip and fall, they fall in a creek, and they go underwater, and they go to pop their head up
and they're snagged, and they're like an inch below the water,
but they keep their head about them.
They're like, okay, I'm stuck,
but I'm gonna wiggle this thing out, I can hold my breath.
That a minute goes by and they're like, oh shit,
okay, this is getting serious.
I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get out of here
and they start thrashing and starting to blow on bubbles.
And then one last adrenaline-driven explosion
that we're able to break this twig that's had them pin down,
they explode out of the water,
get this life-saving gulp of air.
Would you guys fillify that person?
Is there anything morally wrong with that person?
They've broken or they weak-willed?
No.
Well, the tendency to want to eat everything
that's not nailed down is a fundamental survival mechanism.
When you, again, you look at this evolutionary biology deal.
If you can peel back and, instead beyond the last hundred years or at least 50 years of ubiquitous food and leisure and luxury,
it was a tooth and nail survival struggle for everybody every day all the time.
That's right. That's right.
That's right.
That's a natural state of everything except humans
and our pets, which is why we and our pets are fat
and dying from metabolic issues.
Ironically, right?
Any other animal that's wild and free,
it's pretty good to go.
Yeah.
So, you know, at this genetic level,
this thermodynamic level, we are wired to eat.
Everything that's not nailed down
and then go take a nap.
When a bear eats a meal, it doesn't consult its Fitbit
and it's like, oh man, that was about 600 calories
of rabbit and blueberries.
I'm gonna do some jumping jacks and burpees to burn it off.
It goes and sleeps.
And this is what anything in a natural environment would do.
This is our genetic tendency, but now we live in an environment where we can get an infinite
variety of flavor and palate options.
It can be delivered to your door.
You work in your underwear.
You never leave the house.
You don't exercise.
You pop this thing in the microwave.
You've got all these other options in the pantry.
We've pushed this survival tendency to a point that is maximized in a way, but it's maximized
in a way that makes it sick.
But if you are willing to vilify people
for not being able to turn down the little Debbie snack cakes
and the Snickers and whatever,
if you're willing to vilify those folks,
then you need to be willing to vilify the person
who would do anything to get their head out
from under some water because they're drowning.
Both of them are survival mechanisms.
That's a great analogy.
Now, why do you think we have people are overfed?
They've got all these calories.
They're overnourished from that standpoint, appetite through the roof.
It's connected to the types of foods that they eat because you see in study,
after study, when people eat a
Diet that's more either paleo or keto or ones that avoids a lot of these processed foods and they're and they're given
They're not given calorie restrictions. They're saying okay eat this these are the kinds of foods
You can eat eat as much as you want or whatever just eat until you're full or you know if you don't have your not hungry
Don't eat they tend to eat less than people who can eat whatever lots of processing. Right.
So there's that component as well.
So what's the one thing that will get you labeled as a disorder deeter?
Binge eating.
Well, eating well, typically.
I mean, I'd say that.
I mean, I'd say that.
I'd say that.
I'd say that.
I'd say that.
But I mean, you know, a binge eater, if you go to a dietitian, you're like, I'm a binge
eater and they're like, oh, you're a monk, good friend,, with a little bit of, how a little you brother, you're there.
But if you go on, you're like, yeah, you kind of a low carb ketogenic diet, then it's like
when in a invasion of body snatchers where they're like, oh, you know what you would, you
have a situation there where the only thing that gets vilified is good eating.
And what's interesting, whether it's paleo or vegan or low carb,
but what have you, each one of these strategies
is effectively limiting palette options.
If you do this kind of high carb, low-ish fat,
high fiber kind of gig, then there's a bunch of tasty foods
that you're not going to eat.
And that's fine.
And there's some tasty foods that you are going to eat.
And conversely, if you do low carb high fat,
there's some great things like bacon and chicharones and stuff like that. And then there's some stuff that you're not going to eat. And conversely, if you do low carb high fat, there's some great things like bacon and chicharones and stuff like that. And then there's some stuff that
you're not going to eat. But it is inevitably that interface of these palette mixes, you
know, get us.
Wow, I've never heard anybody make that water. And there's a great, as part of my book,
I have a link to this thing and I have a link to it on my blog. And maybe I'll ship
it to you guys. But there's this guy, Adam Rickman,
who did the show, Man vs. Food.
And he went out and do these challenges.
And so this one, I saw this like six or seven years ago,
it just stuck in my head.
It was so interesting and I was like,
I'm gonna use that someday for something.
And so he's doing this thing called the Kitchen Seek
Ice Cream Challenge.
So it's an ice cream sundae that's in a kitchen sink, delivered in a kitchen sink and it's
like eight pounds of ice cream and hot fudge and sprinkles and the whole deal.
And he needs to eat it in X amount of time for him to win.
I don't know what he wins like diabetes and beer wars.
I don't really know.
But there have only been three people that have succeeded in this thing.
And so he starts tearing into this,
and he gets about a third of the way through,
and then he starts totally bogging down.
Like he is visually like turning green,
and you see him trying to take a bite,
and he starts gagging.
So I don't think anybody would argue
that a well constructed ice cream Sunday tastes pretty damn good.
Like we would call it hyper-palatable.
It probably goes above and beyond what our normal neuroregulation of appetite would turn off.
But at some point, even that, you're going to get bored of it effectively.
There's this process called palette fatigue. You're just going to be done.
So, in the standard diatetics model, it's like, well, his belly's full, so he's all done. What he does is really fascinating.
He orders a plate of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries.
And he starts taking a bite of the french fry
and a bite of ice cream and a bite of the french fry
and a bite of the ice cream.
And he is able to finish the ice cream Sunday only
because he eats more food, like 1500 calories of more food.
And this is where I have some issues with
if it fits your macro folks and I'm in kind of like,
you know, battle with some of those guys,
it works for some people.
You can have a little portion of Twinkie
and a little portion of this, a little portion of that,
but it's clearly not working for the masses.
The whole like eat less, move more, everything in moderation. What the fuck does moderation mean when you go down a snack
food aisle in the supermarket? If you don't like the sweet, then the salty crunchy is going
to get you. I guarantee you know, and what's the lays potato chip line? Bet you can't eat
just one. And these fuckers are winning. And what's it just so that I completely spin out
on this and this will be like the lowest rated
in my cast you guys have ever had.
But the people who engineer these foods,
study evolutionary biology,
they study the neurophysiology of appetite.
When Facebook and Twitter were clearly becoming,
they recognized them as this addictive process.
They got in, they said, why?
And they were, oh, novelty and novelty drives human behavior and novelty seeking and dopamine
them.
So the people who develop addictive social media platforms, the people who are engineering
these foods that are hyper-palatable and legitimately addictive, they understand this
evolutionary biology template back and forwards, but are gatekeepers, the dieticians, the doctors, and
most of the internet, you know, opinionated people, they're still in a pissing match about
whether or not this evolutionary template has any merit at all.
The people are making billions of dollars a year, potentially trillions of dollars a
year off this, fully get this whole thing, and there's absolutely no contention on it.
So yeah.
I 100% agree with you.
So I'm going to give you a
scenario here that might be kind of controversial. Maybe it's a little too
black and white, but if you've got two groups of people and we're trying to get
them to improve their overall health and wellness, everything from being
leaner to also having better blood markers of health, you know,
tri-clistorites, cholesterol, the type of cholesterol,
all that stuff.
And group one, we tell them, here's your calories,
here's your macros, stay within those.
And then group two, we say, here's the food quality
we want you to focus on. Avoid foods that are having a process,
whatever, let's focus on food quality instead.
Which group do you think, which one would you prefer,
or do you think will do better in the long term? The one that focuses on food quality, or the one that focuses on macros and calories?
Man, it's a really good question, and it still boils down to what's the just environment
that these people are in. Both of these things work pretty well in a metabolic ward,
where all the foods being controlled as it goes
in and whatnot in in this.
But I will say in this free living kind of scenario, if you need a couple of things, one,
you need social contact and accountability.
And this is where like a health coach or a dietician that has their head screwed on straight.
This is where like CrossFit gyms are really, really valuable.
Well run, CrossFit gym, the coach is going to talk to you
about sleep and photo period.
They're going to talk to you about effective nutrition.
They're going to be some exercise baked in the K,
hopefully they're not giving you a rabdo.
And then there's a community piece.
But that community piece ends up being the anchor
that helps to keep people moving forward.
All these fit bits and my fitness pal and everything,
the holy grail of fitness and health and medicine
is to be able to take an app and get people to interface with the app and that's going to
affect behavior change and they have completely failed.
There was just a study that came out that there was a group of people, there were two groups
people, they were instructed in healthy eating, one group wore basically a pedometer
wrap, kind of a my fitness paldeal, another group didn't do anything. The group
that was monitoring how much they moved lost almost no weight compared to the
other group. The other group lost more weight, so that scrutiny in the
monitoring can actually be really problematic. And to the degree that I've
seen people kind of spin out, the weighing and measuring of food is kind of a gateway for neurotic behavior.
We see that all the time because we work...
I got to see it firsthand when I decided to get into competing
and I'll never forget being backstage and seeing all these people that before I got into it,
I thought they must be know their their stuff like inside and out.
I mean to get your physique to look at that level even I as a trainer have never got down a 2% body fat
And until I got there and I started talking to these people I was like holy shit like they some of these guys have
Way worse eating habits the way they're training is I was blown away and then I thought okay
Well, maybe it's because I'm at the NPC level. These are like the rookies. They really don't get it yet.
And I worked my way all the way to professional level and it does.
It gets even crazier.
Right, you're in disorder.
Yeah.
They're more neurotic and there's this crazy, it's, and what makes me frustrated and what
I get really passionate about when I talk about this is they've made it cool.
It's cool to stream diet and then binge like crazy
and excuse it with the bulking period.
Right.
And it's this, people don't realize
what the fuck they're getting into.
They're not, what they're setting themselves up for long term.
And they're not taking the psychological component
because it's clearly a symptom eruption.
There's a, that's a scientific term
for what happens when you restrict the hell out of yourself.
Look, you get a guy, normal dude, and you make him self restrict sex.
He's not allowed to masturbate, he's not allowed to have sex.
Let him do that.
And you're going to see some symptom eruptions.
And they're going to come out in weird ways, in, you know, quote unquote, you know, unhealthy
ways because he's suppressed it to a certain point.
I want to raincoat in a hat with my F.I.F.E. near the end. And you see that here. And you see that with the you see that with I see it
with I a F. We have clients that'll hire me and they're so
neurotic about counting their macros that I'll tell you
know some of my female clients that click I don't want you to
train I don't want you to count for the next week I want
I want you to just try and eat it to it if intuitively for
a week and they'll cry. I can't do that.
If I go off, what if this happened?
It's like there's obviously a psychological component we're not even taking into account.
And almost inevitably, and this is another point that I end up just super pissing people
off.
But similar to you guys, like I've been doing this a while.
I guess like almost 20 years.
We've owned multiple CrossFit type gyms.
I'm on the board of directors with this medical clinic, but um
So that psychological piece that gets focused on food. It's not about the food. It's something else. It's like
Daddy didn't love me. Somebody somewhere told me I was fat or ugly or not worth it or whatever
Or even some peripheral deal
But then they figure out that they're
able to garner a lot of attention and they're able to exact this control on their lives
from this focus on eating and fitness.
And the focus on the food ends up pretty much guaranteeing that you never address the underlying
issue.
You're able to keep chasing this thing.
It's like calculating the last decimal point of pie.
It just keep going and going and going and never
gets there and
I've talked to people a lot about this and
People want to hit me. They want to shoot me like they get really angry
You're hit like deep man because it was because they're like no, I have I need a healthy relationship with food
And I'm like, no, it's not actually about the food. The food is a symptom. And the other issue, who didn't love you, who didn't take care of you, who wasn't there
for you, and then you start like it's that goodwill hunting moment where you think that
they're going to like take it.
It's not your fault.
Yeah, but that is ultimately where you can go with them if you can get them to embrace
this stuff, but you can get so spun out on all these details around the nutrition in
the food that you can keep yourself spun out on all these details around the nutrition in the food
that you can keep yourself distracted over a lifetime and never actually address that underlying issue and it's gonna have knock-on effects in every other
Element of your life your relationships with significant others children co-workers and so and and uh
This may sound like super touchy-feely. I literally have the emotional acuity of a Vulcan.
Like I have to look at people and I'm like,
okay, they're sad.
I should respond like this.
Like I don't.
I'm bad.
Yeah, totally.
Like John Wellborne and I, when we did our 23 and me,
like we are both, we have this outlier
where empathy is like six standard deviations below
the norm or just kind of like,
I just don't fucking
Anything you know there's an evolutionary benefit. There's probably an evolutionary benefit to that
You're probably the person's they're like hey, we need some people killed in the neighboring
Why don't you go? Yeah, and interestingly a bunch of seal bodies that I know team guys like they are similar in this polymorphism
It's just like yeah, you're totally we. That's probably right on the head then.
Right, we need a super objective person in our group here
in order to keep us surviving, right?
I'll be the nice guy, you'll be the objective guy.
Right, right.
She's too old, she might need to go.
Right, ice flow.
Next.
So, you know, and I guess I just throw that out there
with some context, like this was some two degree
it may be accurate.
It was some pretty hard one insight.
I'm a biochemist by training.
I'm super reductionist.
I'm 99% atheist and 1% agnostic because who knows?
But I haven't seen any proof yet.
So I don't have much touchy,
feely element to me, but over the course of time,
in trying to help people, I'm kind of like,
okay, this reductionist approach isn't really
cutting it.
And like, we can, it felt like this mating dance of an exotic bird.
It was like, if I just bob my head this way and wiggle my ass, like, they're gonna get
it.
They'll be there, you know?
And it never was.
It always changed.
And then one day, I asked this person, I'm like, who didn't love you?
And they were like, what do you mean?
And I'm like, somebody didn't love you.
This isn't about the food.
This is about something else.
And dude, it was, he was a big dude.
And I thought he was gonna kill me.
I thought I was gonna.
But ended up having this huge breakdown.
This was kind of the inside.
I'm like, oh, it's really not about the food.
Like if people are really in this spot where they're like,
I need a healthy relationship with food.
I'm like, no, you don't.
You need to figure out what the other thing is that you have transferred the food.
Well, this was the side of Paul Check that I really connected with when we were talking
with him because it was about, I'd say it took about 10 years into my training career
before that light bulb really went off for me. I mean, I was so, because you're not taught
that way. You go through school and the books and everything you read, it's all about
the science and the math. Like, that's what, it's, you know, it's numbers. It's like, oh,
you're not moving enough. Well, I'm from a dynamic. Yeah, right. That's it, right? We skip it's all about the science and the math. Like, that's what, it's, you know, it's numbers. It's like, oh, you're not moving enough.
The author of my dynamics.
Yeah, right.
That's it, right?
We've skipped that all day long.
And then I started realizing how much of a psychological component was in the success
of my clients.
And when I actually started to focus less on that and really dive into that, I saw this,
I just saw this uptick in results for my clients because to be honest, and we've talked
about this on the show before, most people fail. A lot of people fail at this. They had, they cometick and results from my clients because to be honest and we've talked about this on the show before
Most people fail a lot of people fail at this they had they come in
Oh, this is a goal. I want to look this way or do this and as a trainer
I was always trying to provide the tools to get there
But they weren't even ready. They don't even know how to use the tools yet
You know, and so that was that that was a big breakthrough moment for me
And here's the bottom line like people think I need I need to work out and I need to eat right. So that'll be happy. What they don't realize is I need to be happy.
So that when I work out and eat right, everything works out together. Right. It's the happy part.
If that's the part that happens first, if you want long term success, you cannot have long
term success without that. It just doesn't work. And if you don't believe me, like I've had
tons of clients
who are super regimented about their fitness
and the nutrition who are unhappy and look to it,
look to fitness and nutrition to bring them happiness.
And what they end up doing is they sign up for marathon
after marathon or event after event,
because that becomes their motivation
to keep pushing their bodies.
And then when they can't do it because of injury
or whatever because they've overworked their body,
they go so, they go so far off the lag and that it's a horrible thing.
I don't know when I had this insight, but early on, I was always kind of a
power athlete, like I'm a little fast twitchy and I just kind of like that
stuff and endurance athletes, I just couldn't really make heads or tails out of,
but we started doing some work with some of these folks and frequently when I would would talk to them, they're like, okay, what are your goals?
And they're like, I want to do this race faster.
And I'm looking at them and they're orthopedic disaster.
Like they're bilateral imbalances and they've got no core, you know, trunk strength.
And I'm like, oh my god, like we need to get you fundamentally stronger before you're
going to do anything.
Like you, they were like a energy leak everywhere, you know?
So just falling forward.
Yeah, just basically falling forward.
And so I would tell them something akin to the following,
I'd say, for you to run faster,
we're gonna have to cut your training volume
by 80% for a period of time.
And there would be like stark horror in their eyes.
Yes.
And what was going on was that all this time outside doing whatever it was they were doing
They were running from their life literally like if they had a moment alone
With their thoughts they they would just go not
to see that for people. Yeah, and
That was also when I ceased working with
Except under very rare circumstances. Again, the empathy deal, yeah.
We talk about this all the time.
High level athletes are some of the most
imbalanced people have ever worked in my entire life.
They're so hard as to help later in life.
They are so good at cheating.
What I mean by cheating is,
their bodies have developed these recruitment patterns
that are not favorable, but they're so good at them
that they succeed. And in order to developed these recruitment patterns that are not favorable, but they're so good at them that they succeed.
In order to correct those recruitment patterns or change them, you have to regress the
halal out of them.
It might even take a year of regression.
What athlete is willing to tell them, hey, listen, I know you're...
Well, even if you're not an athlete, if you just have that athletic mindset, because so many
of them were trained that way that it's about intensity.
Do you have any intensity?
You just power to your goal, power to your goal.
I was squatting close to 400 pounds or around 400 pounds deadlifting in the close to 600
pounds.
I had to regress myself to the point where I was squatting 135 pounds and I was going
much deeper ranges of motion changing the recruitment pattern.
My deadlift wouldn't go over 300 pounds because I had to change recruitment patterns,
I had to ground my feet and really change things. That was a major ego hit. I don't want to do that.
I don't want to go to jam and do that when I can lift so much more weight. And it's taken me,
I mean, eight months to get somewhere near where I was before, but I had to be willing to do that.
There's that huge ego factor that people don't even think of.
Right. Well, I deal with that a little bit like I'm really a fan of ketogenic diets
I tend to feel best while in ketosis
But I muck around with some old guy Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and it's very glycolytic and there are some people out there
They're super smart and they seem to be keto fueling some folks like they're doing some targeted carbs and stuff like that
But I already get the shit beat out of me at Jets and I'm just not, well, they're like, oh, it might take eight months, it might take a year
and I'm like, and it might not even work as well.
What?
So, so I'm in this middle ground there of,
you know, I get like 7550 grams of carbs a day,
so it's low-ish carb, and I feel pretty good,
but I'm not as like cognitively on as when I'm ketotic
and everything, so I've been playing with some intermittent
fasting and that seems to pull it in a little bit there,
but you know, there's this all this luring potential there
for doing ketosis, but then I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to have Charlie kick my ass.
Well, adapting to ketosis, so I mean that that ego is a big deal.
Oh, yeah. We had on the show, that's an example. That is Zach Bitter. Zach Bitter is somebody.
He's an ultra endurance. Yeah. Well, like American, I think world record, or American
record holder, I should say, excuse me. Yeah. So he's, like American, I think world record whole, or American record holder, I should say, excuse me.
Yeah, so he's, he does, he stays in ketosis, majorotime, but then when he gets to these
races, he does give little surges in it.
Right.
But it just takes the smallest amount of so insulin.
He now needs a fraction of the carbohydrates he needed to before to fuel himself during his
100, he does a hundred mile.
Right.
Yeah, races.
And he says his body's so much, so much more efficient.
Right.
Right. What are your thoughts on artificial sweeteners?
That's a big area to be in our world.
I think that they're more of a problem than what most people think and less of a problem
than the lunatics think.
So the lunatics will say that they're going to like give you cancer tomorrow and they're
a huge problem and I'm kind of like, man, if you drive a car and you're worried about artificial sweeteners, you have some misplaced
content.
But that said, in my experience, and also there's some literature that seems to support this,
the artificial sweeteners seem to do something squirrely with that appetite.
People just seem to eat more and they're not satiated. And in that ice cream example,
it's interesting where the trick is to get people
to spontaneously reduce chloric intake,
you know, and do it in a way that they feel good.
And then the whole thing right there.
It's really kind of the holy grail
and kind of the higher protein, moderate carb diets,
lower glycemic load seem to work really well for a lot of people
although there's a subset of people that seem to do better on higher carb lower fat
So so there's some distinctions that we brought that up because there's definitely some polymorphisms
You know in people and you've got some people that'll do keto and they're they're they're just doesn't work for them
They're blipits go crazy and whatever and you've got people like me keto and I'm like I feel like God yeah, yeah, yeah
And uh you look like it's absolutely I'm like, I feel like God. Yeah, yeah. And you look like it too.
It's absolutely, I'm just gonna say Greek God, Greek God.
Yeah, Greek God, definitely.
I'm actually Italian, I know you.
Okay, I know you're in my wife's Italian.
You're Italian by association.
Yeah, that's good.
I knew I liked you.
He adopted you before you got here.
Thank you for that.
So I've seen situations where people will be motored
along pretty well in that artificial sweetened thing kind of launches them out.
It's kind of the hookers and cocaine binge after that.
I use that exact example we were talking about.
It happens.
Yeah, so that's the challenge that I have with it.
There seems to be some literature that indicates that artificial sweeteners
may actually alter the gut microbiome
in unfavorable ways.
And so there's some interesting knock on stuff with that.
And also when people do artificial sweeteners
as a standalone item.
So you're sending a signal to the brain
from the flavor experience that we're consuming calories.
But then the hypothalamus is kind of like
check in the blood, check in the blood.
And it's like, there's nothing.
You told me, you're sending me something,
I'm not getting anything.
And so you can decouple that signaling process, I think.
And there's some neurophysiology papers
that are kind of suggestive of this.
Like I'm going out on a balcony with this deal,
but there's some mechanism that supports this stuff.
But everything in our biological
past, if you had a flavor experience, there was a chloric load associated with that.
There was even a nutrient. And there was a nutrient profile. And it was guaranteed. It was baked
in the cake. If you had a citrusy flavor, you had vitamin C every time. Now I could have citrusy
flavor, you know, sour gummy bears or whatever. Right. And there's nothing there's actually extracting nutrients,
that everybody to process the stuff. So there's, you know, can we create a situation where people
are really going crazy on artificial sweeteners and they kind of break the howtipothelmic response
to real food. And then real food doesn't actually cause the satiating mechanism. I can't tell you how many people I've seen in hospital settings that were four to 600
pounds.
And it's like, so what do you think got you here in the like, it's the soda and I'm like,
was it diet soda?
And they're like, you know, it is a mix, but it would more often than not.
They're like, I would do the diet soda.
And it did something crazy to them.
And you know, this is where the folks that are really into the like calories in, calories out,
you'll clearly thermodynamics works,
but what's the deeper story here?
Like we don't live in a closed system.
They're not, this person is not a bomb calorimeter.
So how the fuck did they get 600 pounds?
And what are we gonna do so that they don't cost our society
a hundred thousand dollars on the way out?
Exactly, and I hate, I'll tell you why I hate that example
of the calories in versus calories out.
We have examples of changing the microbiome in a mouse.
It'll become obese.
I could give, I could give it the same chloric intake.
That's the same chloric intake.
I could, myostatin inhibited animals.
All of it, don't change, same calories, tons of muscle.
I could take an athlete, change nothing,
give them three grams of testosterone a week,
which is a shit ton of testosterone.
They're going to be leaner and have more muscle.
These are all these different signaling pathways
that can change how your body,
you know, your body fat percentage,
your muscle, how much muscle you have,
and everything that goes underneath that
that has nothing to do with calories.
And I don't think it's crazy to look at the sensation of taste.
Like, there's a reason why that signal exists.
I'm eating something, like why does my brain perceive
sweetness to begin with?
It's not just to motivate me to eat more food.
There's other things that happen just
from having that sensation or from the brain
perceiving sweetness and artificial sweeteners do that.
It's tricking your brain.
Well Rob touched on that.
I mean, it's so funny how like the the marketing these huge companies
that sell to us they know that better than some of the scientists seem to
get it and let's also consider this like you like you said it earlier we were
not asking the right questions when the majority of studies done on
artificial sweeteners were done did they look at the microbiam at all
we didn't know to look at that. We had no idea.
Now we know for a fact that like sucralose, for example, in some studies will kill like
up to 50% of the known beneficial bacteria like lactobacillus and pifido, you know bacteria.
It'll kill half of it just by consuming it.
So I ask you your opinion because I value your opinion.
I've heard both sides of it.
I know what my opinion is and I may be a little biased, but yeah, and again, I think that
So I had a lot of success early on putting people on low-carb diets, but what I had was a bunch of confirmation bias
I managed to really ignore the people that I broke and
Disregulated their thyroid and tank their cross-fit, aspirations by running them to low carb, you know,
because it worked for me so well.
I'm like, man, this has got to work.
And there's all these potential like life enhancing benefits.
And man, couldn't we like fat fuel,
friend, you know, wouldn't that be amazing?
And it's like, well, it probably doesn't work, you know,
but I was so confirmation biased with that that it took
a pretty good bludgeoning for me
to be awakened to that.
And so you have these people that have a methodology
and they find a cohort of people for whom it works.
And that's fine, and you guys talked about this
before we started recording.
I think it would just be good
if people were a little more circumspect about like,
hey, this is what I'm doing.
And I recognize that it may not work for everybody.
But I've got my little niche here,
and we're doing really good with it.
You wanna check out what we're up to.
And or, look at what is it about that way of eating
that it was different than what you're doing?
And then maybe it's not so much the,
this name that's the change of environment.
Yeah, or we've talked about this before,
like a lot of times you get people that go vegan,
you know, and they become veganism,
and it becomes like a religion to them.
And it's like, you know, and then they're so anti-meat.
And it's like, oh, it's so bad for you.
And they demonize it.
Yeah, that's like the differences.
You ain't no vegetables before that.
Yeah, you ain't even that type of vegetable.
Yeah, maybe that's why you feel so awesome.
Right.
So we talk a lot about, you know, connecting the dots
and becoming more aware, you know, and it's just,
and it is, it's is, we're always evolving.
We've been doing this 15, 20 years each.
And I'm still learning about my body as I,
but to start to be aware of that
is that of mindlessly just putting the-
You guys have heard of the Dunning Kruger effect?
No, you guys haven't heard of that?
Oh, it's great.
It should be like the thing that is like the logo
for this episode.
So it's basically, it's a graph,
and the graph is knowledge on the X axis,
and then assurance of that knowledge on the Y axis.
And when you're at zero knowledge,
you're at absolute surety,
and they call it Mount Stupid.
And then there's this.
So that was how it is.
It's deep in the mile.
Yeah, mile wide.
But then as you go on, you hit this low eb,
where you're into it 10 years and you're
like, I don't know, any gang, you know, which is kind of where like, I feel like I'm at
now.
And then as you get out 15, 20, 30 years, it never reaches Mount Stupid again because you
realize you never know all of it.
But yeah, stunning for your effect is pretty interesting.
You end up saying, hey, I know, and now that I know so much, I know I just
know the
Socrates code. Yeah, for sure. Do you think so? Do you think it's kind of a good,
good rule of thumb then for people to just look at just evolution in general and
in the kinds of foods we were exposed to and just as a rule of thumb like you
know, if they come out with a new synthetic product or flavor or color or
whatever and they say, okay, we have all these studies that show it's safe or whatever
The complexities of how foods and things interact with our body and her bodies interact with them in the environment
It's so complex and we only know such a small fraction of it
Do you think it's a good rule of thumb to just be like I'm gonna eat
Kind of around what we've always been eating because that's probably gonna be better for thousands of years versus yeah
I mean it yeah, that's my crazy use car salesman pitches,
eat largely whole and processed foods, sleep like a teenager in the middle of the summer,
and get a decent amount of exercise, you know, and have community that supports you and what you're up to.
Like, that's my crazy recommendation, you know, I mean, it's super over the top and really nefarious and there's no way to test.
And you know, you can test all of that.
It's like, just go to bed an hour earlier night,
put some blue blockers on as soon as the sun goes down,
dim the lights in your house.
And you tell me how lean you are before and after.
Take a photo before, go to weeks and, you know,
see what happens afterwards.
And so you're out 10 bucks buying a pair
of blue blocker glasses and you know see what happens afterwards and so you're out 10 bucks buying a pair of blue blocker glasses and you probably enhanced your insulin sensitivity by like 20 to 50%
reduce your likelihood of all these chronic degenerative diseases probably enhanced your
anabolic profile your testosterone's better and it was a pair of glasses that you swiped
off.
I'm going to bed on time.
Yeah, exactly.
I've actually done that. I actually what I do now is an hour before I go to bed.
And I have kids, especially when I have my kids with me,
I'll turn the lights off and electronics off.
Go all candles.
And we'll use candles.
Yeah.
We'll use candles or fire because that
seems to be a little more natural.
And I swear to God, man, I sleep so much.
And I was never a bad sleeper.
So it wasn't like I thought I'd have to do this
because I have a horrible sleep.
I just sleep so much better now.
My kids, like people have trouble taking their kids to bed
They go to bed an hour later when it's time for bed and they go to bed and they sleep like right away
Yeah, and it's that process that we don't realize that it starts before you go to bed right that sleep process starts
Way before that so yeah, but I mean maybe maybe I am a caveman like I just don't have a really complex strategy to this stuff
You know to eat largely whole-unprocessed food.
With a little bit of experimentation, you'll figure out if you have some food sensitivities,
like if you have issues with gluten or not.
Again, stick it in.
Pull it out for 30 days or introduce, see how you do.
Play around with your carbohydrate intake.
Start at the low end of things, maybe 50 grams a day, and then run it up to 250 grams a day. And you know, just kind of play with that.
Run it all the way down to 30 or zero for a while and just do like green veggies and ketosis.
And with a couple of months of fiddling, you're really going to find a sweet spot for yourself
that you don't really need supplements, you don't need anything else.
You know, I mean, if you have big aspirations of being like an elite level athlete or,
you know, like a spec ops guy or something,
then we're gonna have to get more granular.
But those are the big picture deals.
This is what we talk about also on the show,
like crazy is that, you know, there's this,
this is what I also have a problem with,
the fitness industry is so much as market around
the before the workout, the after workout,
this pill for this, this powder for that.
It's like, you got all these people that are eating all this
process shit, they're sleeping terribly.
They got all this stress in their lives.
Six times a day.
But they're spending $100, $200, $300 a month on all these little pills and powders that
are, we're talking about the incremental change from that.
Right.
Where's if they just went to bed an hour earlier night, like it would blow up.
It would be like going on the three grams of testosterone a week.
It's like, oh, and I just need to sleep.
And it's like, yeah, and you'll keep normal testosterone.
I'm just thinking.
Amazing what you look at.
I have a simple, I know there's got to be a lot of people
that will appreciate this question.
Brown rice or white rice and why?
Uh, I'll leave that up to the gods to the side.
I'm not really a big rice fan.
You know, funny enough though, my wife and I did just do
a bunch of experiments
like we're in a continuous glue cometer,
wife's Italian, she has great blood,
blood glucose response and man,
white rice, brown rice, purple rice,
whatever the rice was,
if I had a modest helping,
which was about 50 grams of effective carbs,
I was nearly 200, two hours later.
Like I was F'd up.
And so not really much rice for me,
occasionally after I do some Jiu-Jitsu,
I might go to Thai food and get some of the rice paper
wrappers or something like that.
Or to get your carbs from.
Mainly, man, sweet potatoes, apples, apple sauce right now.
In the summer, I'll get more like watermelon and melons
and stuff like that.
Do you try to eat seasonally,
or do you see there being a benefit to eating seasonally?
I can get up here vitamin D in the winter time.
I do too a degree.
Like, and we have a little three acre farm here,
and so we are able to get some stuff out of the garden
actually year round now.
Like, even in the winter, we had squash and cabbage, we had some root
vegetables, like some Jerusalem artichokes that just like kind of went wild, but I would literally
I'm like, okay, we're gonna have some Jerusalem artichoke today. I go out and pull the thing up
and it would have these potato looking things on it and I'd wash it and cut them up and
and so to a degree we eat a little bit seasonally and I also just tend to buy what's cheap
and so when things are in season they tend to be cheaper
and so I just kind of rotate.
That's a nice little tip there.
That's a nice tip.
So just, if you don't mind,
I wanted to get a little bit more into just you
as an individual, as a person.
What motivates you so strongly in this field of study and work?
Because you have, I mean, you're obviously,
if you look at paleo, your name comes up.
You've got, you know, book on the New York Times best seller.
I think you have one that's,
I'm an out soon, yeah.
I'm an out soon, we'll talk about that a little bit,
but why are you so motivated in this particular field?
Man, so I painted myself as being this like unimpathic,
like a soulless person, and I'm gonna like undermine
that mystique, but you know, when I first got exposed
to all this stuff, I had all sort of collided so bad
that I was dying literally.
Like the doctors wanted to do a bowel resection on me.
I'm a former California State Powerlifting Champion.
I'm not really big, but at 181 pounds,
I had a 565 squat, 565 dead, 345 bench.
No wonder who didn't believe you said your numbers.
Yeah.
Oh, you've been working out for a couple of years.
He has longer limbs than I do.
Yeah, that's a good question.
So I was decently kind of fast twitchy.
I was reasonably lean, reasonably muscular,
although my doughy northern European ancestry, like I was always kind of ch twitchy, I was reasonably lean, reasonably muscular, although my doughy, northern European ancestry,
like I was always kind of shubby in the midsection,
you know, it was like high carb deal and all that.
But I shifted my diet to vegan,
which I actually blamed a lot of the problems on veganism.
And I think now looking back, I also moved to Seattle.
And I was starting a graduate program.
And I was waking up before the sun came up
Got home before the sun or after the sun went down. I've been doing that for like two years
So stress it's a stress maxed out like I was like oh I can get by on three or four hours a night of sleep
No, you can't or if you can maybe you also need to be eating some animal protein and getting some sun on your skin
You know, I'm still in my 20s, but the long and short of that is that I had ulcerative colitis
so bad, I'm like 175 pounds right now.
At the low web of my ulcerative colitis, I was 130 pounds per malabsorption issue.
I mean, I was dying.
I would eat 4,000 calories, but it would go out the same way it went in.
Hair was falling out.
Nails were splitting and everything. I had multiple nutrient deficiencies. And then this idea of
a paleo diet got on my radar and it's kind of an interesting story how that occurred.
But I started fiddling with this. And I mean, it was like someone throwing a life saver,
you know, a life preserver to somebody drowning. Like it just saved my life. And I started
playing around with this stuff and had the chance to start doing this in a gym setting,
a good friend of mine, Dave Warner,
who's a former seal.
He's also an engineer.
We started working out together,
and in 2000, 2001, we found this weird workout online
called CrossFit.
And we started biddling with that.
And they were into the paleo-type diet.
I'm like, oh, I'm into this too.
So there was this good synergy there.
And before we knew it, we had like 20 people
that we're working out with, that we're basically training.
And so we reached out to the glassmins,
and I wrote them an email, hey, we're really like what you're doing.
We want to open a gym, call it CrossFit.
What do you think?
And they're like, go be achieved.
And so this was the first CrossFit affiliate gym in the world.
And so I started working with a lot of people.
And I would see folks that I'm like, man, I think you've got autoimmune stuff. Why don't we try doing this? And we
remove the grains and maybe pull out the legumes and dairy and lo and behold, they would get
better and their GI problems would get better. But this was like two, again, 2000, 2001,
I would navigate my life and meet people constantly that I'm like, oh man, I know what's going on with you.
But then it's almost like one of these M Night
shalamon movies where like you can see the future.
You know that the person's gonna walk out the door
and they're gonna go get in a car accident.
You need to do something to stop them,
but you also need to do in a way
that you don't look like a crazy person.
So I had like a good 15 or 20 years
of trying to help people, but do it in a way where I didn't appear to be a crazy person. You can't just a good 15 or 20 years of trying to help people, but
do it in a way where I didn't appear to be a crazy person. You know, you can't just jump
in there and like grab them and be like, the love of God, you have to get off and gluten,
you know, this thing that you have. And so, you know, I've always just enjoyed helping people
and have had some success with it. So you get that feedback. But my wife's mother died from
rheumatoid arthritis complications
three months before I met my wife.
And the interesting thing with that is that the rheumatologist who worked with my wife's
mother was the rheumatologist who worked with my mom.
And he was the one that discovered that she had celiac disease and intolerance to grains,
legumes, and dairy.
That's what alerted me to that, but he didn't connect the dots with anybody else.
So, my wife's mother died at the age of 50.
It was a horrible series of medical missteps that brought her to this situation.
And if one person at one point anywhere along that line had been able to intervene and put
this idea in front of them, She'd probably still be alive. Like if I went and pulled in my Gmail and I just searched,
rheumatoid arthritis,
resolves or something like that,
just in my own email,
I probably have like six or seven hundred testimonials,
which that's six or seven hundred anecdotes,
other than the fact that most of them have a company
in blood work, you know?
So at some point, it's like anecdote kind of matters
and this circles back to Terry
Walls when we're starting to study this stuff.
But anytime that I get beaten down a little bit, I just think about my wife's mother in
the thousands of people that I've met and I just did an event in Portland in this GAL.
Showed me a picture of herself from a year before she was wheelchair bound from multiple
sclerosis and now she's up running around doing some sort of a fitness practice and she's like, I followed your book and the
multiple sclerosis went into remission and I've got my life back and I thought I was going
to die.
So, I kind of, you know, I mean, when I feel like there's a critical mass of this stuff
that I'm going to, you'll go to, if you go to my website, there'll be a gone fishing
sign and I'll be in Nicaragua, like farming coconuts, but until then, I just kind of feel like it would be morally reprehensible
for me knowing what I know to not at least put it out there so that people have an option.
It's not to say like, I really try to avoid the religious dogma around this stuff, but if somebody's
really sick, I just want them to know that you might have an option. Like the standard of care might not be the totality of what you have available.
Do you think getting all sorts of colitis was kind of a gift then in that sense?
It definitely was.
It would have never pushed me along this track.
This is one of the interesting things of the Wolverines among us.
They never have that crisis.
They never have that point where they hit the brick wall and they think they can do anything.
And they oftentimes don't have a lot of sensitivity to the fact that there are people that are
really, really, really broken.
There are a lot of people in the fitness and nutrition scene that they will trot out like,
oh, I worked with this professional athlete or whatever.
And it's like, okay, that's cool.
You helped an adult play a child's sport and make a lot of money.
Good for you.
That's awesome.
You know, and it's like, I say this with the utmost honor, but I've been on the
Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Committee for seven years.
So I go speak to the SEAL teams and special boat teams about sleep and nutrition
and stimulants like caffeine and nicotine.
And I'm not particularly good looking. And these guys could get anybody that they want to come do it.
And they keep inviting me back.
So the only thing I can assume from that is they're getting some value out of what I'm offering to them.
And so, you know, like our police military and fire.
It's a huge honor to work with those people.
And I want to help them any way that I can.
People who have chronic degenerative disease that they think they have no other options.
I want to work with those people.
And so as cool as like the elite athlete is
or the real jacked fitness competitive,
that stuff's awesome, but for me it's just,
it doesn't light the fire.
You know, when you've got someone whose kid had
unresolvable epileptic seizures
and you hook them up with the Charlie Foundation
and they get put on a well-managed ketogenic diet and the kid is completely normal and
killing it in school.
You're like, fuck yeah, that was awesome.
Well, enhancing a life is a good one.
Changing or saving a life is another.
Right.
Right, totally.
So can you, we're getting ready to go to pay the OFX for the first time ever.
Nice.
Can you give us a little bit of history on in a
Run down and what to expect for us like we've never been there before I
We got it we heard from Ben Greenfield the very first time did a little bit of research on it
But don't know much. I'm sure obviously you're welcome. Oh, man. It's the paleo nerd fest. I'm not sure what to say
You know, it's like special hats or shirts. They really frown on that the more nude you are kind of I see
I see hats or shirts. They really frown on that. The more new you are kind of bad with the whole cable.
I will fit right in. Yeah, all the shirts shave. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's a great time.
They hold it each year in Austin, usually in the spring or the early summer. Um, super hot chicks
there. Not not quite to the density of like a CrossFit Games event, but uh, really pretty good.
Great. We all have girlfriends of wire. Well, I'm taking my wife to the list.
I'm bringing a payless hand to the beach.
I'm one of the guys on the line.
But it's really wonderful people.
Usually some great presentations,
although it's not an academic meeting,
like there are some good academicians there.
David Pearlmutter, I think, is doing the keynote.
I'll love him.
I'll love him. Crush the keynote last year. Love him, really amazing. Brain I think, is doing the keynote. I'll love him. I'll love him.
Crush the keynote last year.
Love him.
Really amazing.
Brainmaker, one of my favorite books.
He's pretty jacked.
When you see him, he's not super tall, but thick neck and thick traps and everything.
He definitely knows his way around a barbell, so I really dig that guy.
What else about PaleoFX?
Really good food.
Austin has great food, but they always have great food at the event. And then last year, I roped them into having a huge section in the middle of the event,
matted with jujitsu mats, and we had a big jujitsu thing out there.
Like, in between every one of my presentations, I would basically run out, roll until it
was like two minutes before my presentation, then I would go up there and like, my shirt
was stuck to me.
I had like blood dripping in my eye and everything and like, where have you been?
Oh, nothing.
That's awesome.
So there will be ju-ju-ju-ju to there.
Did you're speaking my language?
I trained for a while, years back for about six years and one of my favorite sports.
Definitely the thinking man's martial art.
I'm not going to piss off a lot of people who do other arts, but I'm a little biased.
Rob, do you meditate?
I do, but I use a meditation app called Brainwave.
Okay, I just find that I'm too squirrely too.
So Jiu-Jitsu is my meditation.
That's why I asked you because people like you who tend to be so driven,
and who admittedly you drove yourself to illness because you were so focused on what you were doing.
That's why I asked if you're meditated.
Have you identified that being an area you need to...
It's a huge area if you meditated. Have you identified that being an area you need to?
It's a huge area of improvement for me.
And like if I'm tracking HRV and I do that five minutes
of breathing even once a day,
like that HRV score, it proves immediately.
Yeah, how about exploration with things like Ayahuasca
or psychedelics to expand that side of you,
that empathetic or non-epithetic side that?
You don't get a chemistry degree
at Chico State University wanting to make a lot of money.
Just put it that way.
It's still, it'll be my oblique answer to that.
So we just become best friends.
That's the answer, ever.
So what a great PC way to put that on.
So I funny and true story, when I was doing my undergrad, I wanted to do an extraction
out of a sandpade route cactus, which contains mescaline.
So I went to my professor and I'm like, hey, I'm wanting to do a natural products extraction
and then actually a synthesis so that we get validation of the natural product.
It's a very normal thing.
You do a synthesis starting with like Gallic acid and then you converge on this thing. He's like, what are you thinking
about? And I was like, three, four, five, tri-mythoxyphenolethylamine, you know, just kind of
totally off the thing. And he's like, what type of methodology you're using? And I showed
him. And he's like, I can save you 15 steps. And he reaches in his file, or pulls it out
and hands it to me. I'm like, oh, this is why you're a professor at Chico State University.
So, in the San Pedro cactus that I used, I actually got a trimming off of it from the
dude that used to run the botany scene there.
So I got this best-selling containing cactus and extracted it and did the full natural products
extraction deal and then did a synthesis using a Gallic acid backbone.
And this was all funded by the Chemistry alumni reunion symposium summer summer internship
deal.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's so rad.
Well, hey, man, it's been excellent talking to you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hopefully for sure we run into you at pay off.
You know, on that note, real quick, before we sign off, because we will probably be interviewing and talking to people.
Are there anybody we should make sure we talk to that?
Maybe we haven't met or talked to before.
Oh, man, tons of people.
I know, that's, I know there's gonna be a lot.
Somebody you're like, you know,
if you get a hold of this guy, don't miss.
I really have on to this person.
Definitely Mark Sissen,
and not just because he's like a big wig in the scene,
but Mark's just like a super accomplished
in so many areas of his life and a really awesome dude like
Great at business amazing relationship with his kids. He's still married to the same person, you know
I mean, I kind of kind of cool dude. You guys already know Ben Greenfield
Chris Cresser is a really I would argue
Possibly the best clinician in this, like, ancestral health evolutionary medicine
kind of interface.
Like, he is a brilliant guy.
Like, I feel like an idiot next to that guy.
Like, I'll feel a little hoity-toity and then I can out with him and I'm like, well,
I feel like the R word.
I don't know.
Yeah, I got it.
The R finishing with the D and then, um, Brad.
Brad, yeah, yeah.
If you'll, if you'll,
Brad, um, Chris Masterjohn, if he's there,
like that guy, like if you want to get,
he's so well versed in so many things,
but if you really want to go down the rabbit hole
of that soluble vitamins and their implications on hell
like, vitamin 80K, the interface between those
and zinc and testosterone production.
Dude, he, like, I feel like I have a decent steeping in that, but I am pressed to keep up
with him.
And that's just on its podcast material, which I know he waters down for the general consumption
a little bit.
So definitely Chris Master, John, yeah.
Excellent.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for my pleasure.
Thank you.
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