Mark Sisson

00:02we're good already damn I didn't even see a countdown Jamie you're so fast uh thanks for doing this Mark appreciate it man totally my pleasure I've enjoyed your tweets I've uh checked out your your website and Mark's Daily Apple and uh all of your uh the different rules for the Primal blueprint and I I found this really fascinating because um it seems really straightforward it seems like oh well this makes like eat lots of animals insects and plants move around a lot at a slow pace lift heavy things run really fast but what you've done essentially is created a guideline for optimizing your health and your body yeah um you know I've always wanted to be healthy from a really early age like 12 or 13 and uh read a lot of books uh wanted to do the right thing um tried to figure out the the hacks uh before they were called hacks and uh got to the point where I was you know I was doing a

01:00lot of running because aerobics was supposedly going to make you live longer I was eating complex carbohydrates and a ton of them in order to fuel the aerobics I became a pretty good uh endurance athlete but I fell apart uh as a result of the training and a result it turns out of the diet so the diet was very pro-inflammatory as we say so I started doing research into uh the ways in which I could re-access this health that I was seeking from the early age uh and not fall apart and not be decrepit and beat up uh and this became my Mantra is how can I be strong lean fit and healthy with a least amount of pain suffering sacrifice discipline calorie counting portion control and everything else and where it led me was out down this path of um looking at human evolution and how we got to where we are today how we derived this genetic recipe that we all have that wants us to be strong and

01:58fit combined ing the research only in the last 10 or 15 years uh with the modern genome and and and sequencing The genome and figuring out the actual mechanism of how lifestyle behaviors and foods and sun exposure and sleep turn genes on or off uh and they can turn on genes that make us uh strong and build muscle they can turn on genes that burn fat more efficiently than say glucose uh they can turn off genes to cause us to be moody and depressed turn off jeans it might predispose us to to um to get cancer and what I arrived at was a sort of a simple set of guidelines these 10 Primal blueprint laws that not ironically emulate uh human nature and human behavior for the first 2 and a half million years of our existence so the genome was was forged in this Crucible of eat plants and animals uh avoid poisonous things uh move around a lot at a low level of activity Sprint

02:56once in a while lift heavy things every human that ever lived lived up until 10,000 years ago did that every single day and that's how those genes got passed along to the Next Generation to become us where we've screwed up is in the last certainly the last couple hundred years but starting 10,000 years ago with uh agriculture we went from being hunter gatherers and moving around a lot to being sedentary and sitting in one place and uh eating processed foods um uh not tearing uh not disposing of our waste uh lots of lots of little things that that sort of conspired to make us uh smaller and weaker and uh more susceptible to disease so you were involved in triathletes and endurance activities which kind of break down your body that's one of the big issues that a lot of people have with uh with that kind of training it's just constant and brutal and yeah it's catabolic it's it's

03:51uh you know it's a it's a great Pursuit I wouldn't take back my years as an endurance athlete I was a marathoner in the 70s uh and then I was a triathlete in the early days of Triathlon and the uh all throughout the ' 80s but the training was uh it's devastating it it really does tear you down and you the Assumption was at the at the time that you had to put more miles in than anyone else to be one of the best you had to uh you know dial everything down you had to work harder you had to suffer more you had to struggle more to achieve greatness or to or to win races um what we've discovered in the last five years is that it doesn't have to be that way how crazy is that that it's only the Last 5 Years I mean that we're talking 2010 2011 yeah um so you know a lot of this uh this new paradigm is based on science it's been brewing for 40 years but it wasn't the the the

04:44findings weren't palatable to most of the uh athletes who were training they certainly weren't palatable to the coaches who had been invested in training a certain way putting in a lot of miles eating lots of carbohydrates managing glycogen throughout an event uh which meant not only um carbohydrate loading the night before a race but seeing how many gel packs you could slam down in an hour to keep the sugar burn throughput going uh and that's certainly what my generation of athletes uh wound up depending on and and we all train that way and it and it was sort of um it was counterintuitive to think that you could learn how to burn fats much more efficiently that you could possibly go faster by going slower under certain circumstances that you could spend time in the gym doing heavy weights and have that manifest itself in uh in in better endurance so these these later sort of

05:38developments that come out of the the laboratory and come out of the uh clinical studies you know they were sort of interesting to the people who are reading them who knew how to read the studies but it didn't make it into the mainstream uh training mechanism what was the science based on where the with where people had used carbo loading and carb loading and using all those gel packs and eating a lot of pastas and stuff where did that come from like what what was the the idea behind that um it was that came from studies that that go back into the 30s and 40s but it was basically um this notion that uh the body needs to burn glucose to go fast uh that it it was assumed that you couldn't burn fat at a high rate of um throughput and if you couldn't burn fat then the only thing you could do was manage your glycogen those muscles can store 4 or 500 G of glycogen Max which is only

06:32enough to run 20 mil let's say um and uh if you couldn't so you you had to learn how to manage that glycogen so you didn't deplete it in a in a marathon for instance so you'd hit the wall at 20 mil so how do you get through the wall well you start to learn how to I mean Gatorade came out of this science the Gatorade was the great first real performance-enhancing substance that athletes used you could drink this sugary drink that had salt in it in a race and um and then Stave off that wall a couple of more miles so for years for decades um the science revolved around uh continuing continuing to try to figure out how to manage glycogen so Tim noes Professor Tim NOS out of South Africa was the go-to guy in this he wrote a book called the lore of running it's a 900 page tone he he was the um the source that everyone cited for decades when it came to carbohydrate intake and

07:31glycogen management and all of the things that had to do with um fuel partitioning during uh an endurance event and about five years ago he looked at the research partly because he was um he'd been a runner himself he'd been employing the same strategy of carbohydrate intake and carbohydrate management uh but he was a type two diabetic he become he had become despite his training a type two diabetic um I think his uncle and his father had died as type 2 diabetics so he you know he got the fear of God put in him and he started to reevaluate the research and he literally had an epiphany and goes oh my god I've been I'm the guy that's been promoting this way of training for decades and now I have to completely change my my my opinion on it and say what I told you was wrong and the body is developed and and was designed to be a great fat burning machine and not rely

08:28so much on carbohydrates and not rely so much on glycogen or glucose um and the guy is taking so much for it in South Africa they like trying to run him out of the country there's a trial going on right now really yeah here's a you know Professor Tim noes and in my mind that's the epitome of a heroic science a man of science he he's gone down a path he's dedicated his life to being the guy and then he he looks at the research and he goes holy I I I messed up this is terrible I you know I've been telling you the wrong thing and I'm willing to to basically fall on my sword and tell you that um because it's this new revelation is the truth well that's how it's supposed to be right I mean that's what science is supposed to be it's not supposed to be relying on this bad information just because you've taught it to people it's supposed to be you find the new data the new data doesn't

09:22correspond with the old data you have to let everybody know but it's like you know that's like unicorn farts I mean it's it's a really science is is kind of dirty and and uh and messy and there are no Black and Whites in science there's no absolutes there are no there's no right or wrong answer there're just theories and opinions going forward and if you're a scientist who's had an investment in your life's work being one way you're going to you're going to defend that position even sometimes in the face of new new information that that really becomes a huge issue when they deny information just because it's bad for their ego or just because it's bad for their career and they could just I mean he can I'm sure have just kept his mouth shut and just coasted and everything would have been fine it uh well it would have been fine for a while but the the the corner had been rounded

10:11I mean enough other scientists uh had had uh started to look at this and I you know he um he cited me as one of his influences in in helping to turn that corner but here's a guy he was reading my blog posts and sort of you know having a A New Perspective cast upon his information and was willing to look at some of the research that I and Rob wolf and a number of other uh bloggers in the new in the emerging piosphere we're talking about that that we are um we're born to to excel at burning fat and we shouldn't have to depend on sugar and in fact the less sugar we burn in a lifetime probably the better off we are so for the longest time when people were doing all this carbo loading and when they were um just following the old methods they were creating extra inflammation because of this food I mean this the the when you you're talking about simple carbohydrates pastas and bread and such

11:09they they cause inflammation correct so so sugar is is pro-inflammatory if you have high blood sugar levels that causes inflammation if well when you say that to people like explain to people what do what do you mean by inflammation you mean like joint inflammation like um good question so inflammation is a process in the body that's designed to deal with an insult so you twist an ankle um an inflammatory process begins the the the ankle swells up because water accumulates there the cells are being uh partly protected by the the water white blood cells rush to it to try and uh um assess the damage and and fix repair some of the damage uh there's a a long process where um the temperature the localized temperature of the are is raised um all of this is contemplated to deal with a short-term insult that hopefully uh over time it repairs um in many cases it repairs even

12:04stronger than it was before you know you break a bone and sometimes that where it broke is stronger um or a callus is an example of uh you know a stronger skin from having been irritated but the same and we can the same sort of process happens if you get um a bacterial insult if you get a microbial insult you know you get infected with somebody something and uh maybe by somebody and and you get uh uh and there's a there's a reaction to that infection um and it may happen in the bloodstream if if the um if the bacteria goes into the bloodstream then there's a there's a response to that which which is an inflammation inflammatory response uh now if you uh and by the way a lot of this happens as a result of of genes within cells being turned on or off based on signals they get from their immediate environment so genes don't work in a vacuum something has to turn

12:57the gene on or off something has to give the reason the gene reason to build a protein or have whatever action it's going to have so when you've got um let's so now let's go back to the food analogy you've got certain foods that you can eat that cause the body to um to initiate an inflammatory a what we call a systemic inflammatory response it just it just uh maybe emulates something that would have happened in an infection but now it's caused by um an an overabundance of omega-6 omega-6 fatty acids so you're literally turning on genes that are causing a systemic inflammation now over time um in in the short term not a big deal one meal here uh you know some uh some uh temporary insult not a big deal but over time if your diet is such that you're continuously um presenting these sorts of foods that would prompt inflammatory genes to turn on you get what what is

13:54known as an inflammatory response now um sugar has that response refined grains can have that response sometimes um even whole grains because of the uh there's portions of the grain that we say are natural but they're actually um uh they're they're slightly toxic to the body uh the industrial seed oils that are pervasive in our diet that would be you know corn oil soybean oil uh canola oil uh all of these can have the effect of causing a systemic inflammation or systemic inflammatory response in the body um when and a lot of times you'll like you'll see you look at the biggest loser and you go God that dude lost 25 lounds the first week that's unbelievable how how do you do that how do you burn off that much fat they don't burn off that much fat they lose that much water because by by eliminating the pro-inflammatory foods the inflammation the systemic

14:49inflammation that was causing them to carry literally 30 or 40 or 50 pounds of excess water that cause of inflammation goes away and the water goes away the swelling goes down so you could look at um the cause of heart disease heart disease isn't caused by cholesterol or saturated fat it's the proximate cause of heart disease as we know it today is is a systemic inflammation it's an inflammatory response in the you know in the in the blood vessels so when you like when you say someone looks puffy yeah like people who drink a lot of alcohol they start looking puffy that's that's actually literally water they're they're inflamed with water yeah they're they're retaining water as a result of an inflammatory response the body is having so um where we went to that from training um I don't I don't know how we you know how we get down that road but the idea of of eliminating these

15:43pro-inflammatory Foods um oh so I I'll tell you where it went um I had um arthritis in my feet at the age of 27 28 uh I had just from all this hard running and biking and from the diet because I had this systemic inflammation right I had this diet that was promoting an inflammatory response throughout my body not just in the ankle that I might have just twisted or whatever uh I had um um I had arthritis in my hands when I was even into my um even after I cleaned most of my diet up into my 40s I had arthritis in my hands or my fingers that I thought was just a normal artifact of getting old and the last thing that I eliminated from my diet was grains which I found were causing were a huge cause of issue for me when I got rid of grains the arthritis in my fingers went away all grains sprouted grains as well Ezekiel bread I mean you know yes yes let's for purposes of this conversation

16:42let's say all grains and then we'll talk about what that means over time but um getting rid of all grains uh I got rid of I had irritable bowel syndrome most of my life and I thought was because I was a type a stress Laden individual that couldn't handle it well um and that literally that IBS had run my life um that went away the um the upper upper respiratory tract infections I would get several times a year went away uh I had lingering sinus infections after I'd have an upper respiratory tract infection that those went away and I all these things I'd assumed were just a normal artifact of Being Human and getting older and part of life doesn't everybody suffer these things they went away that was a real uh Epiphany for me to to realize that if I had made I'm I'm basically a researcher and if I had done all the research and still defended my right to eat grains in the in the face

17:42of the research I was doing how many tens of millions of people you know might be affected by this so and I don't want this to be an anti-rain Crusade today but I'm I'm I'm sort of suggesting that a lot of what happens to us in uh in life um certainly a lot of the the root cause of illness or the beginning iology of disease um has deep roots in what we eat or sometimes more importantly what we don't eat one of the things you said I think that's really fascinating is turning genes on and off and for most people like me who don't have a background in medical science and don't necessarily understand genes the idea of genes being turned on or off by Lifestyle by uh dietary choices things along those lines doesn't make any sense to people they go well no no no you got your jeans or you don't got your jeans you know you either got red hair or you got big feet and that's

18:36genetic and that's it no exactly right so so yeah there is a huge assumption that uh the genes are finished when we're born you know and then we just grow and we we have our eyes and we're we're we're doomed to be 50 pounds overweight because our parents are or we're doomed to get breast cancer because our mother did or yes um jeans are at work every second of every day uh rebuilding renewing regenerating recreating US based on the signals that they get so genes are these little switches that that cause the production of proteins that actually run our body so it's the proteins they make uh that run our body whether it's muscle protein being built or whether it's enzymes to cause certain reactions to take place and um and the genes uh are basically not doing anything until they get a signal from the environment now the when I see the environment um it

19:25might start from what we perceive as the outside environment but eventually it's a biochemical signal uh or some uh sensation some transmission of information that gets through the cell to the genes themselves and causes a gene to turn on the switch to turn on the protein to be built and that manifests itself in whatever that Gene is assigned to do uh so the beauty of the Primal blueprint and the lifestyle that I've been promoting for 10 or 15 years is this notion that um we can discover these hidden genetic switches that we all have and we can make choices in our lives that direct us in uh in a direction of Health versus down this slippery slope of illness and disease and and falling apart um they're uh they're not right or wrong they're not good or bad they're not black or white they're just choices and I'm not going to criticize you for making whatever choices you make my job as a

20:23blogger and certainly uh running Mark's Daily Apple and writing the books that I write is to offer you some some U educated choices that you might elect to undertake based on what you tell me your goals are so you know if you say well I want to lose weight and I want to get stronger and I want to you know uh maybe participate in a 5k we can look at a number of different strategies whether they're dietary and I mean they the more the the better because all of these strategies will have some impact but there's certain foods you can eat that will cause you to become better at burning fat uh and will cause you to burn to to build muscle uh more effectively um there's an amount of sleep that you'll get that will reduce the amount of cortisol that you secrete the cortisol is a adrenal hormone uh that we Secret in response to stress cortisol tends to make us carry a little

21:15bit of extra weight some of us so if I can reduce if I can increase my sleep and improve my sleep patterns uh and reduce cortisol uh it all has effect an effect back at the genene level uh to uh to to get me closer to where I want to get want to be how much do you sleep um probably nine eight and a half to nine hours a night wow yeah they say wow because that's a lot or that's that's a lot yeah um you know I have friends who who brag about getting 10 and and make no apologies for it um and and almost more more importantly is the consistency of sleep so I don't like to stay up late um because I wake up early I wake up the same time every day so if I stay what time you wake up 6:30 are you one of those get out of the house and go run around no no no I'm I'm uh no I I I sort of Mosey on down to the coffee pot and make a pot of coffee and read the paper and you know I ease into

22:07the day and I I typically hit the gym around 9:30 or or go paddle or whatever it is I'm going to do for the day I don't do it firstly in the morning I want to be kind of refreshed for it and ready for it um but then we can talk about sun exposure and we can say well you know so many people are vitamin D deficient and uh they've been that way because conventional wisdom has suggested that they stay out out of the Sun that the sun is bad for you that any amount of sun exposure is you know is going to uh cause you to get or predispose you to getting cancer well what we say in the Paleo Community is there are probably more people who have gotten cancer from having avoided the Sun than ever got cancer from too much sun and the reason I say that is because sun exposure UVB light is what that's the stimulus that causes cholesterol in the skin to convert to vitamin d and vitamin D is

22:56one of the most important vitamins it actually should be a hormone it's a but one of the one of the um implications is that vitamin D is is strongly involved in cancer prevention so the more vitamin D you have the more the less risk the lower risk you have for most cancers isn't the issue with people sun damage though the issue is no exactly so if you go out and get sunburn and I'm I've never advocated that but but there's a difference between spending little a little bit of time in the sun unprotected um and going in and putting on a shirt or even if you want to stay out putting on some sunscreen at that point versus you know just uh rubbing baby oil and uh and uh what was it iodine we used to put back in New England when there was very little Sun so you had to you had a cram for that sun tan iodine huh I didn't know about that no I did baby oil oh baby oil with

23:47iodine was even it was like uh turbocharged it was like it was like the it was like the buttered coffee of of uh suntan lotion that's what that stuff is what's the mechanism behind iodine like how does that I don't even know I don't even know but that was the again that was the old wives tale conventional okay um I went I was worst burn I ever got um uh it was U winter break or spring break I went to Williams College in western Mass we drove uh from Williamstown to Fort Lauderdale straight through whoa uh straight through uh in a BMW 2002 those are great little cars a great car four of us smelled like a goat farm by the time we got down there and uh fell asleep on the beach at 9:00 in the morning and then just burn to a Cris so from zero sun exposure you know all winter um all the way down to Florida right to the beach barbecue there you go wow yeah that doesn't sound like it's

24:43recommended no um what now just just to clarify uh inflammatory response so when you're eating grains like say if you're eating a lot of pastas and things along those lines what exactly is happening that causing an inflammatory response your body's processing the the grains and yeah so so pasta bread um a lot of cereals especially the processed cereals sugars they well so so those grains turn into sugar I mean they turn to glucose like really rapidly as soon as they uh hit your your gut and the body doesn't really know it's glucose it doesn't know the difference whe it doesn't know the difference between a bowl of Skittles producing the glucose and a loaf of bread it's it's just glucose to the body so so if you raise that level high enough um you will have some issues now if you in if you introduce high fructose corn syrup which is a which is a you know a Franken food created in the 70s

25:40to um to provide sweetness at a lower cost typically coming from corn uh now you've you're introducing yet another variable another agent because a fructose in and of itself is is um somewhat inflammatory so this is uh that's the that's the the glucose portion of what we're talking about here but then some of the grains have what we call these anti-nutrients in them uh that may cause issues with some people in their gut may open the gut wall and and cause it to literally leak fecal matter into the bloodstream whoa yeah so if you've heard of leaky gut syndrome um that's probably a reason why a lot of people uh have autoimmune diseases or at the very least uh a systemic inflammation that's fascinating and that's caused by your body processing too much glucose well it's not caused by your body processing tooo much glucose as it is a uh it's a side effect of it

26:35yeah there's a um because it's not the glucose that's causing that in that case this now we moved on from sugar and glucose being a uh a cause of inflammation to um uh certain elements in whole let's say whole grains uh that turn on certain genes that cause certain responses one of which may be in some people to open the junction between the cells lining the gut and allow undigested food particles shall we say uh to to enter the bloodstream now the body sees those undigested food particles which the gut is only supposed to really allow in uh free fatty acids simple sugars um and and uh you know uh amino acids single peptides dipeptides maybe but if you get a large undigested food particle in the bloodstream sometimes the body goes hey that's a that looks like a back acteria we better go get that thing and set up an an immune response to it so you get an initial

27:35form of inflammation where the body's just saying look there's some foreign matter in the bloodstream we don't recognize it we're going to kill it and that's sort of bad enough in it in and of itself but if you if you um if that go continues long enough for some people sometimes that uh inflammatory response that that immune response now it goes to look for similar molecules and it might see uh a a beta cell in the pancreas and go that looks just like that other thing I just set up a response for let's go kill this or it might do it with um the the um cells in the joint the condra sites in the joint and you may get rheumatoid arthritis as a result of a that's an autoimmune response the body set up setting up an immune response to itself so when you hear people talk about gluten sensitivity and you know people are trying to go gluten-free do you think that a lot of a lot of what

28:32that is is the body responding to an excess of this glucose in the body uh excess of glucose in the two different things so the glucose is one thing the the sugar is is what it is the from breaking down Breads and pastas or or candy or cakes or pies or um you know um Snickers whatever it is or soft drinks which is a huge issue um CU soft drinks are are a large part of problem but gluten is a different an entirely different mechanism now we're talking about uh a protein a protein it's a plant protein that's folded so densely that there the theory is that humans haven't had enough most humans haven't had enough time to adapt to uh the digestion of that type of a molecule and as a result uh there it causes problems within the lining of the gut right but what I was getting at was people always talk about having gluten sensitivity but really what you're saying is

29:29that a lot of what what people are having issues with is these simple carbohydrates it's like Breads and pastas so again sorry yeah sorry sorry to be that's just there's like two parts to this equation and either part is kind of bad um and together they're kind of like why would you do that so so on the on the glucose side and it's just unfortunate gluten and glucose have the first Glu but they're not related so so on the glucose side that's the sugar that's the that's the thing thing you want to avoid partly because the one of the other things that happens is even if you don't have an inflammatory response it raises insulin insulin is a is a storage hormone that tends to take every uh calorie you ate at the last meal in excess of what you needed and store it as fat now if you're a a skinny East African marathoner then you're going to burn it off but if you're a typical

30:19American eating couple hundred extra calories a day in the form of this sugar you tend to store it as body fat and if you haven't built a mechanism to burn off the body fat that causes problems over time that increases your risk for cancel that increases your risk for heart disease that increases your risk for for type two diabetes I don't think I have gluten sensitivity but I do know that when I went when I decided to go gluten-free uh I kind of quit it after a while but I did it for about 6 months my face got thinner uh I lost body fat I had more energy I felt better and uh I attributed it I was trying to figure out what it was but I I I don't think I have a gluten sensitivity I just attributed to the fact that eating all that pasta and Breads and all those things was just giving me all this extra sugar eliminating that from my diet made a difference and that so that is the sort

31:05of the first line of defense for a lot of people who want to lose weight it's just just by getting rid of those those foods and I want to say limiting yourself but you know including meat fish fowl eggs nuts seeds all the vegetables a little bit of fruit um healthy fats from oils and and nuts um you know that's a pretty nice plate of food that you can offer yourself up um as long as you get rid of the the the carbohydrates the simple carbohydrates you're well on your way to reducing the the excess body weight um which includes the excess retained water and the fullness in the face and all the things that we talk about now if you give those up and you find that you that your joints work better or that you have uh you know that your um immune system works better you don't get sick as often which is what a lot of people uh notice now we probably are looking at the fact

31:56that you might have some some level of sensitivity to gluten and gluten sensitivity exists on a spectrum of no problem at all to I'll die if I eat it and you could be anywhere in the middle uh anywhere on that Spectrum I mean this again sort of the operative uh Mantra here no no right or wrong no black or white no no good or bad just choices but if you're a person who really wants to dig deep and kind of make those those changes that are going to get you closer to your goal quicker that might be a choice you might look into so there's no right or wrong but there is a spectrum in terms of Tolerance like you your tolerance might be much better than mine and some people just really shouldn't have it in their diet at all whether some people can have a fairly good amount of it and really not have too many issues yeah we say what you know what can I get away with and that's

32:42that's sort of an interesting Concept in and of itself because PE humans you know we tend to see what we can get away with you know you might say this is this is really good for me and I'm I'm or this is really bad for me I'm never going to do it again but if I don't die from it and it there's no consequences then I'm going to take it right up to the edge and sometimes a little bit past the edge so there are a lot of people who can get away with eating a lot more carbohydrate than others even though they don't train hard and maybe not gain that much weight there are a lot of people who can get away with uh with consuming um you know omega-6 oils and not get into that pro-inflammatory state as readily or or as quickly you just you know as as Ronald Reagan said you know man's got to know his limitations or was that dirty hairy well it was both but I think it

33:27was dirty har yeah I think I think Reagan restated it later on but perhaps yeah so uh I was reading this article yesterday and I talked about this yesterday in the podcast about this woman who uh she wrote this article about she's in her 70s and how her her whole life people have been shaming her for being fat and she was sort of like trying to promote fat acceptance and you know and I I when I when I see articles like that there's two reactions to one reaction is as a a human being I look at her and I say that's poor lady you know the what a shitty roll of the dice she's got in life and she's been overweight her whole life feeling fat and gross and she's trying to get people to lay off her leave me alone and she sort of it's a very biased account and not science or exercise physiology based where she's sort of describing all the various times in her life where people

34:20have said she's unhealthy but meanwhile she's been very active and she like lists all the different things she did tree climbing and Hiking all this different stuff right which obviously to a guy like you or someone like me who knows a lot about competitive Athletics and like the the amount of calories she's actually burning out versus putting in is probably skewed it's probably up and I don't she didn't really discuss the actual what what she was actually eating she was talking about very Bland foods and a thousand calories a day that doctors are trying to put her on which is the wrong approach right absolutely and it's really when I when I see things like that I don't see a woman who's like 70 years old who's coming to accept the fact that she's overweight and it's no big deal and who you know everybody's got these you know ideas about body image that are based on skinny

35:11supermodels that are actually anorexic and yeah you should just leave me alone and I'm plump and I'm healthy and everything's fine I don't buy it I I look at that and I say this poor lady has been given a a bad set of directives she's been getting given bad information as far as her diet and you don't have to be fat like you can you can eat healthy foods and and you know and live a healthy life and your body would lose a lot of weight just eating healthy foods that's absolutely true and so that that brings us back to this you know this idea of um good or bad and and judgment yes um because you know people self judge people judge other people um I have to be very careful uh when I look at people not to make that judgment I mean my tendency is to is to say to myself holy I could I could I could fix that person or I could help that person you know what I mean and people

36:05resist that well and I don't do it I mean I say it to myself because it's it's pretty clear that um you know you have to want to change and and we we talked about what you know what can I get away with well if I can get away with being fat and people still reasonably like me then I don't have to do the work and therefore I'm not motivated to do what it's going to take to get to that point um but it's a uh it's a it's a slippery slope with with talking with people about you know like what's the ideal body composition right it's um the ideal body composition is where your body says back to you Joe man I love what you've done with the place this is phenomenal you know you've lost 50 pounds not you but you know you're you don't get sick as often you got all the energy you want you maintain it uh without a lot of uh you know dieting or anything like that you eat pretty much you know how you

36:56know you're supposed to eat but you're never hungry that's your ideal body composition man and if it doesn't look like the cover of muscle and fitness or Shape magazine so be it um by the way I can get you to that point for a lot of people where you are on the cover of Shape magazine or muscle and fitness but it's going to cost and it's going to cost not in money but it's going to cost in sacrifice and discipline and pain and and hating life so you know the science can get us there but is it worth the life the the main thing we do at the Primal blueprint is we try to live an awesome life so so in fact my tagline is Primal blueprint live awesome living awesome means enjoying as much of every moment every day as you can extracting the greatest amount of pleasure whether it's movement whether it's uh with friends whether it's food um again with the least amount of pain um but in a way

37:46that's sustainable so it it it not only benefits you right now and today but over the Long Haul you're going to live longer you're going to be happier um you won't get sick you won't tap into your 401 K to pay for a $200,000 whatever uh operation um it's about it's about how can I enjoy life right now today now back to the overweight person who's trying to trying to get to that point and I I see a lot of you know overweight people who are quite happy I guess um but I see a lot of others who are maybe hiding it and going you know I'm I'm I'm the Jolly you know fat person but inside I'm you know I'm the sad whatever the sad clown um you got to deal with that that you know there's a lot of and there's a lot of baggage so some of this stuff comes from the the changes you make in your diet so there's a lot of easy things that we can do I can I can write anybody a program that they'll

38:38love that that says um you know we're going to you know we're going to have um buttered coffee for breakfast we're going to have uh you know two eggs uh and a little bit of bacon we'll have a salad with some salmon on it for lunch we'll have whatever and they'll never be hungry and they'll start to burn fat and life will be wonderful and um and sometimes they'll get to a plateau and they'll go what happened Mark I did everything right well you know you went from you're a woman you went from 225 to 175 you know you still have some work to do but for right now you're at your ideal body composition because in terms of your body the body it's a survival mechanism you know if you if we get to this you know this sort of um uh secular uh or you know discussion about life and what we're what we're what we're after the human body is a vessel designed to carry two strands of

39:30RNA DNA into the into the future and it's a bizarre permutation of several hundred million years of evolution but the bottom line is the body is is designed to survive long enough to procreate and that's that's the reality of humans and evolution and the fact that we live longer and we enjoy life this is all wonderful and icing on the cake but from the body's perspective your ideal body composition is that composition at which again you don't get sick you move around great um you uh you you know you can meet a mate uh you have all the energy you want you're not hungry so that's and if it's if you're a woman and that's 175 for now you you got to go this is fabulous I embrace this I feel good you know whatever now if you want to get drop the next 25 pounds okay now we got to look at refiguring the the diet out and adding some Sprints in there and doing some some little tweaks

40:21in there and we'll we'll we'll get down there but it it requires number one um identifying an appreciation for what you've done so far to get to where you are uh number two it requires acknowledging any past insults in your in your life and and there's a lot of stuff going on in the mind in the brain that wants to keep people uh protected with armor um whether it's um sexual abuse whether it's uh you know verbal abuse uh uh some you know scenario that happened in childhood there are a lot of people carrying a lot of emotional baggage around with them that in some cases if you dealt with it you know in appropriate manner that might free you up to lose a little bit more weight and I've seen this happen so when you're saying armor do you mean in terms of uh like emotional armor or is it the body fat that they keep on top of them is it almost like a distraction or is it

41:18the food that distracts them the the overc consuming of food to sort of nullify the effects of the abuse or whatever trauma be any of those and all of those um but it's I I see it fairly frequently um where people will you know do everything right and then hit a plateau and wonder what I need to get to the next level and you got to sometimes you need to really do the Deep work yeah well what I try to explain to someone when they try to gain weight when people like hey I want to I want to put some muscle on um I try to explain to people that like that that is not an easy thing to do and a matter of fact your body doesn't want to do that your body has a limited amount of resour resources and it does not want to spend resources creating all this extra muscle and in order to do that you have to be uncomfortable like the it's the only way and people say oh I've been doing all

42:06this lifting I'm not ging any weight well you're probably lifting not enough weight you're not putting in enough intensity you're not uh you're not eating enough I mean you in order you have to get your body to say all right this wants to do deadlifts four days a week now or squats or you know he he's doing all this heavy stuff we have to adjust according because the the environment in which we're existing in obviously changed and now we we're going to need a a lot more muscle yeah I mean that's the again the nature of the human body is to preserve itself to pass the genetic material along to the Next Generation part of that preservation is I don't want to waste precious resources building something that I won't need right so um in in a lot of people how that manifests itself is if you don't lift weights you don't have any muscle so you have this lack of muscle this lack of of of um

42:58uh of muscle mass and you know we say well what what's wrong with that I'm skinny well you know you could be skinny but you could be what we call skinny fat no muscle you got a little bit of excess fat you're might more prone to getting type two diabetes but almost more importantly if you don't train and as you get older it becomes more and more important to maintain muscle mass um people don't die of old age they die of organ failure because they just you know something wasn't keeping up with the body but the concept of dying of quote old age is kind of ridiculous when you think about it so the typical old age scenario is you got a 75 85-year-old man or woman hasn't done anything active for years so there's no muscle mass um and because there's no muscle mass and they haven't done anything active the bones there's no bone density so the bones go hey I don't I don't want to I don't need

43:48to build a structure because this clown isn't going to the gym and doing anything to require it so I'm going to um save resources not build bone density the muscles are not building bone mass now the heart's going this is easy I can pump blood all day at at 5% of my volume or maybe 15% of my volume the lungs go hey I you know there's no no requirement for excess oxygen this this Clown's just sitting around uh in a chair all day or you know watching TV or doing minimal activity so the lungs they they sort of cease to function at full capacity same with the liver same with the kidneys and as as you uh go down this path then one night you get up to take a leak and you trip over the cat and you fall and you break your hip because the bone density sucks and now you wind up in the hospital and you get pneumonia and you die because the lungs can't expel the sputum for the pneumonia and and the

44:43heart can't keep up so you maybe you die of congestive heart failure I mean this is a very typical scenario for a lot of people and it all goes back to creating a need for the body to want to change that great um Vince vaugh and Jennifer Anderson movie where how dare you say that how dare you say that great Vince vongh Jennifer Anderson movie no such thing as ever I'm sorry there was a great line in a in a mediocre uh Vince V but the one I'm talking about where she there they're having a fight and uh and she says um honey come help me do the dishes he goes no that's all right I'm going to watch the game and she goes no help me do the dishes he goes no I'm just that's all right I'm going to be over here watching the game I'll just watch the game she goes come help me do the dishes he goes all right all right all right all right I'll come help you do the dishes she goes never mind I

45:30don't want you he says why he says I don't want you to help me do the dishes I want you to want to help me do the dishes oh Christ right so get a new chick the so the body the body sorry about that was an Arcane movie reference but the body you got to give the body the body needs to want to change right and you do that by using your your brain to elect to go to the gym and lift weights or to embark on a on a more rigorous and strenuous regimen than you had uh previously encountered well changing patterns is very difficult for people that's why New Year's resolutions are always such a joke because everybody I mean the amount of people that stick to those things that they prescribe on January 1st like this is it I'm going to write it down I'm going to January 1st from here on out it's all salads and salmon and running up hills and then come February 13th it's over it's over right

46:27back to the same thing so sustainability is a huge part of this of a any program like that and that's changing patterns and that's what we like about the Primal blueprint is that the foods are sustainable so I mean literally and figuratively the diet the eating strategy is a sustainable strategy rule number one is you never let yourself go hungry you just instead of eating a bagel in the middle of the afternoon you know you eat a a spoonful of coconut butter something that's got fat in it that satisfies and ALS you scoop coconut butter for a snack coconut butter coconut butter you know like the peanut butter oh hell yeah you kid me just take a scoop of that for a snack not but not coconut people just checked out they like this guy's are we talking about the same thing coconut butter yeah like peanut butter yeah it's the meat of a coconut it's like in an almond I mean I want a

47:13cookie man I want a candy bar I don't want a goddamn coconut tell you okay so you got to suspend disbelief a little bit here and and humor me go buy a a jar of coconut butter and try it instead of a cookie or whatever do you participate in any of intermittent fasting not really and I'll I'll tell you why um this is again about seeing what we can get away with and I'm pretty lucky that I can I can get away eating what I eat now I have on the other hand a compressed eating window so you could argue that I intermittently fast every day so I I eat from 12:3 1:00 to 7:00 p.m. and then I don't eat again so you don't eat it all in the morning there no there's no concept of the word breakfast for me I have a cup of coffee and that's it so I'll go to the gym fasted I'll do whatever workout I'm doing whether it's a um heavyweight workout or whether it's I mean it could

48:02be a leg day uh could be you know a intervals on a bike could be a two-hour paddle faster do you find that when you do that that you have less energy than if you have like some fruit the difference here is I'm really good at burning fat so I derive my energy from stored body fat better than a lot of people not because I'm genetically gifted in that way but because that's how I've lived my life that's how I've orchestrated my eating Strat stry over the past 15 or 20 years so I become I wake up I have all the energy I need I don't need to tap into the stored glucose in the form of glycogen right in my liver or in my uh in my muscles so you essentially have you follow a ketogenic diet yeah but it's not ketogenic so it's it's a high fat uh moderate protein moderate carb diet but I have enough carbs I have maybe 100 to 130 gram of carbs a day um which would

48:54be in by in in no one's estimation would that be ketogenic right but I'm good at burning fat because I've spent enough time in that sort of low carb area I've built the metabolic Machinery to burn fats really effectively so I probably you know I'm just going to suggest that I have a lot more mitochondria in my muscle cells than than other people do because of the restricting the carbs and restricting the sugars and forcing my body to become good at burning fat how does that work so how does that promot more please tell me so how does it promote more mitochondria well when it's called mitoch andrial biogenesis so when you are when you're born you're born again with this recipe that wants you to become really good at burning fat and and very quickly you change the script so you the parents feed you GRL and oatmeal and Zack and toast and whatever and uh and Pate vegetables and you

49:46become very dependent on on carbohydrate and the body says I don't need to burn fat because I'm getting fed carbohydrate all the time and a couple of responses are um I got to get rid of this excess glucose because uh if I don't it'll it's toxic body shouldn't have more than you know 90 to 100 uh your your blood sugar count should stay between say 85 and 70 and 100 Max um what is the number of when you that's um you know milliliters per deciliter I forget what the exact um number is they're all over the place with cholesterol and and and blood sugar but the point is that there's a the entire amount of sugar in your bloodstream right now is probably a tablespoon you know five grams of sugar um so it's not copious amounts and and if it rises above that um you start to get into problems that Sugar can interact with with protein molecules and cause uh reactions that lead to clogging

50:44of arteries a destructive uh destruction of of nerve tissue that's where the the diabetic damage comes from just excessive amounts of sugar that are in the bloodstream so you so the body wants to to kind of keep that level low um and if you continuously feed it carbohydrate uh all day long if you're not burning it off if you're not running 20 miles a week There's a tendency for the body to store it store the excess as as body fat uh and over time for some people that's a real problem for others who can get away with it not not so much a problem so we we're many of us are grow up depending on uh this carbohydrate as a main source of fuel uh uh and you know you eat a carbohydrate meal a high carbohydrate meal causes a surge of insulin because the insulin is there to take the the glucose out of the bloodstream and store it because again it's dangerous to have too much um but

51:39the sometimes the insulin surge is so great that it drops the blood sugar and then you get hungry again a couple of hours later that's why you have this these swings throughout the day if you're a what we call a sugar burner uh if you if you try and and look at uh a way a different way to configure your energy sources if you restrict sugar and restrict carbohydrate a little bit you don't have to you know be Draconian about it but you start to uh create the need for the body to to start to burn some of its stored body fat you say well the body goes well off I I got to save some of my glucose for my brain because that the brain runs on glucose and ketones um and I'm going to um you know I'm going to I'm going to learn how to burn fat more efficiently and in order to do that I got to build more mitochondria cuz that's where for the fat burs inside the mitochondria and

52:28explain to people what mitochondria is so mitochondria are the are the powerhouses of the cell so every cell has most cells have have mitochondria uh in them muscle cells have lots of mitochondria that are creating ATP which is the energy currency the body uses to move to to live to exist what does ATP stand for uh Denine triphosphate it's a very we're not going to get a biochem lesson right now that's okay but ATP is this is this currency of the body and and and it can be cycled using um certain different Pathways a glycolytic pathway which which doesn't require oxygen and and and one of the pathways is is using oxygen in the mitochondria so that's a very important uh place to uh not only build more mitochondria but improve the efficiency of the mitochondria and how that happens and this is the the Elegance of this again is that certain signals that you give

53:19the body by by cutting back on the amount of exogenous carbohydrate you take in those signals go directly to the that say I got to make more mitochondria and then unique to every other organel in the body mitochondria have their own DNA um no other organel within a cell has that but mitochondria have their own DNA and and the DNA and the mitochondria go well we better be more efficient at what we do so you upregulate the mitochondrial biogenesis the creation of more mitochondria and you upregulate the efficiency of the mitochondria all done at the level of Gene all done through uh a signal that you gave by in this case restricting carbohydrate and it could be increasing the amount of uh of um uh lowlevel aerobic activity you do there's and it can be both and that we talk about that in in my new book Primal endurance well I want to read your new book and I want you to mark down the M

54:12what what he just said like the the time on the podcast what time is it here like uh an hour and 10 minutes in or something like that3 minutes 53 that's it okay um that's very important I'd never heard that before I did not know that your body can change the amount of mitochondria absolutely that's that's incredible that's just from restricting carbohydrates well it's it's from a com there are a lot of things you can do there's certain forms of uh of weightlifting you can do like what um you know you you can do um sustained uh maximum power output stuff so you know you've got a deadlift what you got a deadlift Max of 500 what's your deadlift Max Joe somewhere around there so probably a little than that okay kind of Yol I'm kind of yolked um so you'd um You' do a a workout in the gym where you do um 80% of your of your Max uh so you do 400 lb and you might do

55:09it um four or five times and then rest a few minutes and then do it again four or five times and rest a few minutes and do it again and do it instead of doing three sets of 10 of whatever it is you're going to do um you you load this up you load deeper and deeper into the fibers uh to the the extent that you the the workouts over when you when you can only do one you know and and you know you can only do one you don't even try to get the next one the workouts over and maybe it's um maybe that's winds up being 15 sets by the time you're done but you've maximally overloaded so much at a high not 100% Max because that's now we're talking about danger tissue break it down but you know you can do 80% Max and do it three or four so that's one example of what of how we can and that that'll prompt those muscle tissues to to want to build more m because you probably heard you know a a

55:58truly um effective weight session causes you to burn fat throughout the day right yeah well it's one of the best ways to get lean and it's one thing that people uh sometimes uh aren't aware of most people when they want to get lean they think about cardio they start doing a lot of extra cardio I know it's weightlifting that really makes you lean yeah no I mean um weightlifting and Sprints as I say nothing Cuts you up like Sprints Hills yeah yeah Hills really do it um when you're talking about increasing mitochondria like how how much of an increase are we talking about double double yeah I mean up up to double wow yeah and what are the other effects of having double the amount of mitochondria what are the other positive benefits um you know more energy throughout the day because now you're so good at burning fat and you have all this Machinery to burn the fat um that

56:53uh you you're hungry less often and you know it's interesting when we look back at um how hunger runs our lives and again if you look at the the carbohydrate sugar burning Paradigm you get up in the morning have the most important meal of the day it might be you know a bagel some toast whatever Special K yeah yeah Special K um a glass of juice don't forget the juice got to have that instant sugar water 150 grams of sugar before you you know before you head out the door and you're not even supposed to have 150 gram of sugar in a day that's what I'm saying yeah that's what most people say well I'm I'm saying you're not supposed to have more than I like 150 is a max amount of total carbohydrates that I have in a day so sugar is is a minor minor subset of that and then but then uh you know you get to work and 10:30 rolls around and it's time for a break the break room Donuts

57:41somebody brought Donuts today all right yeah uh and then you know where are we going for lunch ah let's go to you know get a pizza or whatever and uh again another break in the afternoon then you get home and you have dinner and maybe you have some ice cream or something watching TV and the next thing you know you've you know you've taken in 6 700 gram of carbs in that day well if you're good at burning fat the first thing that happens you wake up in the morning go I don't need to eat really I don't feel like I need to eat it's I'm not hungry and and one of the things we talk about in The paral Blueprint if if you're not hungry then don't eat that's these are the signals your body is giving you and if you can get away with not eating and when I say don't eat it's it's clear it's that we have to say because I'm not hungry if you're hungry eat right but if

58:30you're not hungry then you know move on um I did a a thought experiment a while back and I thought you know it's interesting because when I was when I was in college um every one of my college buddies know me as Arnold they don't even know me as Mark they call me Arnold because when we were in college there was a TV show called Green Acres yeah and there was a pig on the show called Arnold zfl and I could eat more than anybody in in the in the college I went to including the football team and so people would call me Arnold ZL and so I I became arens Arie Arnold for most of my life just because the amount of food you just because the amount of food I could eat and um did you have like contests or is this just but I just everybody knew it's like you're going to eat that dessert you're going to eat those you're going to eat that steak you I you know I'll have that um but I was

59:18running 100 miles a week I was a skinny I weighed 30 lbs less than I weigh now but I just the throughput was was where it was um and because I had a leaky gut probably a lot of it just right out your butt went right out the butt out the butt Bob so um uh the thought experiment was that my whole life I I sort of was guilty of this like how much food can I eat and not gain weight and not be uncomfortable you know that's and I think a lot of people look that way it's like all right we're going to go eat lunch how much food can I eat and uh and and not gain weight or how much of that cake or that pie can I eat or whatever people I think tend to this is this is the what can can I get away with part of it well what if you shifted that around and you said what's the least amount of food I can eat and maintain muscle mass and maintain energy and and not get sick and most

60:08importantly not be hungry and you find if you do this experiment it's pretty interesting if you become good at burning fat your your appetite so self-regulates and so mitigates that you find yourself pushing a plate of food away after a couple of bites or not being hungry or eating just the right amount of food to to to get you through the day what do you keep your body fat at you know so I'm 62 now and you look great well thank you I mean my people would look at me and go oh you're must be six s% no probably nine maybe nine and a half maybe 10% um a lot of people lie about their body fat uh you know you hear these stories of the wide receiver that's you know two and a half 3% body fat that's not even possible it's impossible yeah yeah and and even with the bodybuilders the ones that that get down that that lean are so close to death you know that's a that's diing down that the day

61:01before the contest to get there and they better they pack it right on afterwards so so um yeah so the body fat thing is uh I I've stayed at this same vi v visible I should say um body fat level since I was in my 20s so this is a result of a lot of strenuous exercise a lot of longdistance running a lot of the the different things that you participate in as well as this body burning fat primarily because you're talking about if you've been in this same body fat percentage most of your life yep you haven't adjusted what what how old here's what happens now so your 40s when you adjusted your your diet in my 40s so so what happens now is I I don't run at all I I was a career runner for the first part of my life and uh uh I haven't run a I have not run a mile in like 13 years what do you do now for exercise so I lift uh twice a week I do an upper body sort of full full routine

62:02I don't separate you know chest and tries and back and buys and all stuff I just do a full routine that's a smart way to do it that separating stuff is kind of malarkey well it's that's separating stuff as if you don't have a job and what's good for a body you're going to go to the gym every day and do two hours and whatever but yeah um I I try to get some long either a paddle or a hike in once a week um I do a pretty focused uh interval ride on a bike but half an hour once a week and then my big thing you me like a stationary bike yeah yeah stationary bike and then I and it's I go to the gym not to ride the bike but to catch up on my reading oh okay you know so I read while I'm on the bike and whatever right um but uh then the the Big Workout for me is my Sunday ultimate uh frisbee game so you laugh like it's you get to some image of some pastoral hipsters Barefoot I don't even know

62:54exactly what ultimate fr is it's the greatest game ever in look you get excited got to get you out Joe your whole demeanor changed your smile widened your eyes lit up what is Al what are you doing ultimate it's just um it's a it's a very fast-paced game it's uh played on a field like a football field or a soccer field two teams trying to advance the Frisbee down the field by making completed passes to their teammates when you're a passer you can't you can't run but everybody else on your team is trying to get open so they're running trying to get away from their Defenders you complete a pass and eventually if you complete a pass over the the end zone or the goal line at a point and uh but if at any point in time oh Jamie just put some on the board here oh there you go these guys yeah check that out so yeah so watch here you go yeah so uh you know at any point in time

63:40well they need some black people in the sport cuz first of all that white guy was running slow the other guy would have definitely got to that yeah anyway it's a pretty it's a pretty athletic game these are I don't know who this is this is a tell you what they're not black yeah there is a good layout right there okay um that was a good catch actually no and we but we have those you know every week that we play a bunch of those so it's a very fast-paced game and and if you if you lose the um frisbee if it's turned over by your teammate you either drop it or something it becomes the other team's uh frisbee going in the opposite direction and now you got to get back on defense and defend the same guy that was defending you most cases okay so if you throw the frisbee and the other guy doesn't catch it then the other team gets it correct and they got to try and do the same

64:23thing interesting Okay so you're sprinting a lot on Sunday a lot I mean we have you know soccer players come out and basketball players come out and they go dude this is I couldn't walk on Monday after that game that's that's just ridiculous so you no running except except sprinting except you know 8 to 10 second bursts and how that how that plays out for me is um you know some of the recent research is you go instead of doing intervals like the old days where you do 60 seconds or a minute and a half interval um as a marathoner I used to go to the track and do 16 time 1/2 Mile mhm you know uh at race pce so uh now we're doing allout sprints 10 seconds 15 seconds maybe 20 seconds but you're Max Max Max the whole way and then a a sufficient enough rest and come back and and do it again and do it six seven eight five six seven times and you're done that workout is over and you have

65:13um acred the benefits probably at a greater rate than you would have had you done the old method of training which was to do you know again repeat quarters or 200s or whatever so do you think that a lot of what the old methods were're doing was just is just people getting through with mental toughness and you're you're getting some benefit of it but you're also kind of breaking yourself down too much you know it's yeah so most of endurance Athletics is is pain management and overtraining it's yeah it's like um half the races that I was I thought I was most prepared for um I sucked in because I was overtrained I left everything on the training field that's a big problem with Fighters as well with UFC fter it's AIG issue try to figure out what is the right amount of work you should do and especially with Fighters because in U mixed martial arts they're dealing with different

66:08disciplines you have your grappling you have your striking you have putting them all together you have submissions you have takedowns you have a bunch of different things you have to train as well as rigorous strength and conditioning programs and there's a lot of debate as far as what should you put uh most time and effort into and some of the more successful people it's really kind of interesting have been going away from skill training during camps when they prepare for a fight and going almost exclusively to strength and conditioning programs with very minimal skill training where the strength and conditioning program takes precedent over everything else which I I find very fascinating the idea behind that being you already know how to fight so what they're going to do is get your body to a place where it can function at the highest work rate and a big factor in

66:52that is maintaining uh a healthy heart rate and make sure making sure that you don't overtrain making sure that you have enough recovery time 100% agree um we we say that in in um training triathletes and Runners you're you know it the amount of time you spend on the bike after you've been doing it for a couple years you know how to ride so so let's train the component let's break the race down into its component parts you know how can you how can you um sustain your power over the next three hills to where your output on the third Hill is essentially the same as it was on the first Hill versus in the old days where you were 100% going over the first Hill and then 90% over the second Hill and 77% going over the Third Hill because you didn't you hadn't trained that part of your of your um in your in your regimen the one of the things we say to endurance athlet is how many races have

67:42you finished where you were out of breath and and maybe you had to Sprint you know to because you were neck and neck with some guy but most endurance athletes don't finish a marathon out of breath because long ago their form fell up heart um their their muscle tissue started to break down because they hadn't trained for sustained power and so the the the aerobic part of it was like we could do this all day long you're just going slow because you didn't you didn't train appropriately so there's some strength training components like even to something like a marathon running you absolutely yeah so now we're we're saying that the next you know the next breakthroughs in in Marathon running will come from somebody who has who has trained ketogenic and we didn't talk about that yet but you know has restricted carbs to the extent that they um cyclically they know how to

68:32access ketones which are a byproduct of fat metabolism and they can use the ketones in place of glucose or glycogen uh they can use the ketones to fuel the brain to to will them to continue the pace uh they've done the work in the gym where they can maintain uh sustained power output over 26 miles and not have it fall apart and not have form Breakdown 22 miles into the race uh and and if you put all of these these different component parts together now you and and do it with a with an elite a world-class athlete you know now you look at at the next level of Records being broken the problem is it's so antithetical to the way we've trained for the last 40 years that you take uh an elite um professional Runner who's already had some amount of success and you go dude uh we want to shift everything around it's going to cost you the next 18 months to adapt but there's

69:25good chance that you'll be better the guy's going to go yeah I don't you know so hard for people to change yeah and it's so hard well it's so hard to to give up something give up something that's working right you know to to get to that yeah um I want to go back to something you said while you were just explaining that that you you get someone to train ketogenic yep and what do you mean by that so now you there are periods of time when you're restricting carbs so much that you're you're creating uh more ketones which are this product of fat metabolism so you've already become good at what we call you become fat adapted as we say you become good at burning fat and now you're building further metabolic Machinery that accesses ketones better so now ketones which we we refer to as the fourth fuel so you'd have proteins fats carbohydrates ketones are the fourth fuel the

70:13body uh we evolved to use ketones very efficiently there was there were times throughout millions of years of human evolution where it wasn't like you skipped lunch it's like you skipped last week eating right and you had to maintain muscle mass and maintain uh thought capability and maintain speed and health um despite not eating anything and the only way to do that was to access was to access the stored body fat that you'd stored from overeating or eating slightly more than you needed at the last time there was actually food present which is why we're all wired to overeat and this ability to uh to use the byproduct of the fat metabolism to fuel the brain so ketones actually the brain loves to run on ketones uh one of the things that happens in particularly in endurance contests and I suspect it happens in MMA fights toward the end of the fight is um you know you you feel

71:07gassed and you run out you're starting to to run low on glycogen and you're starting to um to really feel like the wheels are coming off more often than not it's the brain just it's a lack of glucose to the brain the brain isn't being powered enough and the Brain goes uh time out we got to we got to we got to pull over the side of the road take a nap so it'll make you mentally exhausted because your body's running on glycogen and glucose rather than fats exactly exactly so so when you run out of glycogen and glucose um the old theory was well the reason that you hit the wall in any of these events or you Bonk as they say uh is because you've depleted glycogen so much the muscles can't function anymore well the research now shows that you never really deplete the glycogen in the muscles if you go from 5 00 or 600 gram total in the body you never get lower than 150 so there's

71:59always some glycogen left so what's going on well it's the brain and it's lack of access to glucose that is shutting you down and Tim NOS the guy we talked about Professor Tim NOS at the beginning of of the show here um he coin of phrase the central Governor theory of the brain and he said the reason a lot of people hit the wall isn't because they're out of glycogen but it's because the brain a as an override mechanism says in order to prevent further damage we have to stop and and it it manifests itself as a as a sensation of tiredness and whatever now if you could find a way to bypass that uh and and keep the brain going because remember it's it's the brain running on glucose uh that once it runs out of that fuel says um I'm sensing there's no fuel so we're going to pull over so that's what ketones do so when you become good at accessing stored body fat and

72:52producing ketones and you've built the metabolic machinery particularly in the brain to use those ketones and we know from history and from genetics and from modern science that that the brain runs really well on ketones now you found a a substitute fuel for glucose so you can run out of glucose and yet the ketones will keep the brain you know revving and uh and and guiding you at the same Pace again provided you've done the the work in the gym to maintain the um the form and the power uh and it's a so you know this is all I'm I'm going to say kind of theoretical now because the real world records haven't been broken yet some are being broken in the ultra events the 100 mile uh run there are a number of guys doing ketogenic and low carb training who are breaking records like crazy Um Zack bidder uh is a guy who in the in the lab has shown that he could derive

73:4496% of his total energy running 7 Minute miles from fat so in other words at seven minute miles which is like race pace for I mean it's what am I say race Pace Sprint Pace for most people it's not that fast for a marathon or or even an elite Runner an elite Runner but it's a it's a substantial pace and for for a guy running a 100 miles uh it's a pretty good clip and to derive 95 to 96% of all energy from your stored body fat or from exogenous fat that you're eating and just a tiny bit required from glycogen or glucose I mean I think 30 or 40 years ago we would have said Not only was that impossible that was like twice as twice times impossible well the benefit of that for athletes has got to be incredible in terms of motivation in terms of enthusiasm towards the end of the race or an end of a fight or something along those lines where your body would run out of the glycogen or

74:41the glucose and instead you have fat to burn so your your mind doesn't drop off as much your mind doesn't hit that wall that should be hu I mean that alone should be motivation enough for people to at least attempt to pursue that y now when it comes to highly glycolic experiences like MMA and you know you can't you can't derive uh a a substantial part of your energy from fat that still has to come from from glycogen why is that well because uh there's a point at which uh your your throughput of oxygen you know when when I'm talking about um endurance athletes they're measuring their output over two three seven hours you know now you're talking five five five minute uh now you've got a uh you know you you got a that same output is concentrated now and you're going um at a at a fairly High rate although you know you see them you know they're jumping around and dancing

75:34around and you know moving back and forth so there's recovery periods in there but you still have to have that 100% GL intense glycolic output so when you're in a hold and trying to escape or when you're you know you're trying to defend or trying to you know come in for a barrage you have to be at 100% of of output but it's brief periods of time so conceivably you could train in the gym to access that part of of your um body that burns fats that burns ketones um you know almost the most important part would be making weight you know if you if you're look especially in MMA it's about power to weight ratios to to a certain extent I mean there's a lot of obviously skill but but a power to weight ratio if I'm if I'm you know 142 pounds I don't know what the weight what the divisions are but if I'm if I'm um carrying around I'm at 165 and I have to cut down to 142 to get to my division um

76:28I'm going to lose power but if I maintain that power and I never I never even get up to 165 anymore because I'm not gaining fat because I've learned how to burn fat and I could stay effective and functional at at at the weight that I'm at that has benefit you know and it's a power to weight ratio concept so you would have to have some sort of a hybrid diet then in in something like MMA yeah so so once you've built the metabolic Machinery to burn fat and to burn ketones it doesn't go away when you start eating carbohydrates so you can you can do what we call the cyclical approach where you spend uh in in the early phases of your training you become really good at burning fat and and you do stuff that's that's contemplated to to make you the best possible fat burner you can be uh then you might introduce some carbohydrates uh the day before a really hard glycolytic workout it

77:17doesn't that doesn't turn off your fat burning that doesn't even really negatively impact your you know ability to handle ketones um if if you do it for six weeks you do nothing but cars for six weeks then it all shifts back again up regulation and down regulation of of enzymes based on Gene input a gene expression but if you built the metabolic machinery and you keep coming back to it then you can craft a strategy where you say well tomorrow we're just going to do um 100% glycolytic stuff it's be be prepared to you know puke all afternoon or whatever you have uh you know 150 gram of carbs in a sweet potato that for dinner that night you topped off your glycogen stores you're still good at Burning fat you have all the glycogen that you even could possibly have loaded if you'd just been a carbohydrate based athlete ever since you just pick the the times when you're

78:04going to up the Annie with with ex extra carb intake and you make sure it's not sugar but it's you know a good um you know a starchy carb in this case something like a sweet potato or you know yam or something like that so how do you regulate the amount of sugars that are in your body do you limit the amount of fruit that you eat do you uh or how do I personally can you eat as much fruit as you like um or is that not a good idea it's just not a good idea it's just it doesn't uh most fruit some amount of fruit is good but I think what what cracks me up is the number of people who say I'm on a I'm on a very healthy diet I'm eating uh you know 12 servings of fruit a day and I go to jamb juice and I get a big fruit smoothie and I go dude you're taking in more sugar than you know than a guy is drinking two six-packs of coke so even sugar that comes from fruit is not necessarily

78:54healthy correct now now again all these things exist on a spectrum right I might have blueberries every day cuz I love blueberries grew up in Maine you know picking them wild so I love blueberries but they're low in sugar they're tart they've got antioxidants in them um and I don't overdo them but you know do you limit yourself to like a cup or something like that yeah I don't even limit I at look at $4.99 a a pack for organic blueberries I limit myself based on budget not right not on any other metric um how many servings of fruit will you allow yourself in a day oh just because um I don't feel the need to eat fruit it doesn't it doesn't I don't have a craving for it um maybe you know maybe two servings is the most I'll eat in a day some days none um but I don't you know bananas um some of the citrus fruits some of these things can be way overdone pretty quickly and I'm not

79:52necessarily saying don't eat fruit I'm just saying don't consider fruit the healthiest possible alternative to you know bread and pasta and then replace all of the calories you got from bread and pasta and cereal and whatever don't replace that with fruit but figure out a way like vegetables for the most part are the ideal source of carbohydrate in our diet they're locked in this fibrous Matrix um it's you know they're basically low glycemic index so they kind of drip into the bloodstream at a at a reasonable Pace don't cause uh a huge surge in GL glucose so celery with coconut butter would be a much healthier alternative than a banana no not it again not not Health healthier is the wrong term I mean we're making choices here based on what we're trying to accomplish right no good or bad no right or wrong but but in a in in a you know like in a perfect world celery with

80:44coconut butter is a great choice and a banana at the right time is a maybe a better choice like postwork workout Banana's good choice right yeah I mean it depends on who you are if I I fast after the workout too because that's it's kind of interesting there's so much of of these little nuanced science bits that you pick up and I've been in the supplement business for 30 years designing supplements for other companies and one of the supplements I made a bunch of years ago um for a very large company today um was a post-workout drink and everybody loved it and everybody thought it was a greatest thing they' ever tasted and it was and it had um uh you know it had it had carbohydrates and it had some protein it had some creatine and it was a great drink but the purpose of the drink was to recover from the hard workout you did today so you could do the again tomorrow and that's not

81:39how I train anymore so I don't do two hard days in a row so for that particular purpose if you're going to train hard every day and you want to replace glycogen then that's a strategy and that's a choice if you say well we're going to do some hard glycolic work today we're gonna for whatever reason going to do some hard glycolytic work tomorrow then then let's have a post-workout high carb relatively high carb um supplement because there's this window in which the body manufactures glycogen refills glycogen stores at a higher rate just post-workout that was the whole reason for the post-workout um meal that's why people like to drink chocolate milk right exactly exactly but if you are um you know so so if you're going to go uh from day to day then that's probably a good thing now another strategy would be to go really really hard today do a deep leg

82:32day and then fast well what happens when you fast is you don't replenish the glycogen but you preserve the pulse of of growth hormone and testosterone that happens as a result of the leg day which we you would otherwise blunt by taking in a sugary drink whoa okay so again these are it's it's it's complex and yet it's pretty cool the science is pretty cool so uh insulin uh has an effect on growth hormone and testosterone actually lowers it so if you are eating a work a post-workout meal that's high in carbs because you want to refill the glycogen stores so that you can do it again tomorrow um then the post-workout meal will cause a rise in insulin which will blunt the uh glycogen excuse me the growth hormone and testosterone pulse that you got from that workout but you'll have glycogen stores slightly more ready for the hard workout again tomorrow now what are you trying to

83:30accomplish here be what what I'm saying is I'd rather just do the workout really hard get all of the benefits the growth benefits that I'm looking for and not have to do it again tomorrow I want to work as little as poss I want if I'm GNA do a leg day and puke you know for because of it today I don't want to do it again tomorrow I'm only working out to get the benefits I'm not working out for the sake of working out I'm not working out every single day because I just love to go to the gym and some people do by the way and I'm not going to judge that but if I'm working out to get the most amount of benefits I can from the work that I've chosen to do and in this case that includes my strategy post-workout that make sense it does but it's fascinating because I've never heard that before that there's a catch 22 so refueling the the glycogen levels actually deplenish the

84:22theet blunts the best word yeah deplenish that's not even a word I like it you make it up let's tra trade market right now deplenish Deen I just said it like it was real too um but I've never heard that before so there's there's got to be a catch 22 in there then it seems like so is there a negative effect of having those hard workouts more than one day in a row and would you be better off and would you gain more if you went the way you're doing it by not replenishing I'm saying you do wow now it's even for an elite athlete that's competing in a sport like say mixed martial arts or something along those lines you know it depends on what the game plan is for the week and what the game plan is to get you into the ring or to get you to the starting line and in this case if if we say um you know you're doing um uh let's just use a leg day again you know you're doing hard legs you you you

85:21don't want to do it again tomorrow so there's no need to to take the post-workout drink because here's what else the other thing that happens is if you have if you wait a couple of hours maybe you have in an hour or two you have a meal but it's not even a high carb meal it's just a regular meal it's not high carb it's not contemplated to to increase glycogen stores but within that meal and within the next meal and within the next meal your body will re it'll replenish glycogen eventually it'll it it wants to do that it's not you're not preventing it from replenishing glycogen so there's no immediate um urgency to do it with a with a post-workout drink if the meals planned for the rest of the day or the next morning have some amount of carbohydrate some of which will go to replenishing glycogen so you you might wind up instead of having restored you know 275 grams of glycogen you restored

86:16230 big deal what about the benefits of forcing your body to do more work to up your conditioning level and would that be mitigated or would would some like what you your strategy being to not replenish the stores after the workout and to not have those hard workouts two days in a row if you if you instead had the hard workout went through your idea of allowing your body to have its natural uh uptake of testosterone and growth hormone because of that hard workout then giving yourself adequate time to recover before engaging in the next hard workout would you in fact have more progress than keeping slamming your head up against the wall which is at least with like uh wrestlers and for mixed martial artists A lot of the time that's the standard operational approach is to beat your body down to be absolutely exhausted and you think that's in fact maybe counterintuitive I totally think I I

87:16totally think that is wow I mean the the notion that um and again this is endurance sport and and mixed martial arts are are very similar and it's about pain management it's about it's about managing um literally uh pain and perceive pain um and exertion over time um so you know to the extent that you can um that you can train in the gym in selective areas that all come together in the fight that's a legitimate choice but another choice and the one for the last 30 years is sort of the rocky bboa Choice which is just go hard every single day and build up the because maybe when it maybe it's the you know the fifth round and mental toughness um really comes to play there and you're able to dig deeper just because you know how to beat yourself up yeah so it's not to say that one's better than the other they're just alternative strategies one of the greatest Runners the country ever

88:13produced Steve Prefontaine was fairly talented he was not the most talented runner in the world and uh and he would he would go to the starting line and he'd look at some guy who was who was clearly uh more talented but hadn't had they'd run the Sim similar times and Prefontaine would look him in the face and go dude he said you may be more fit and more talented than me but I'm willing to die for this I'm willing to hurt more and and he was and that's he could dig dig deep and maybe it was a result of his 120 mile weeks of training and and beating himself up every day I suppose there's value in that in a sport where you know from the time the gun goes off till the time you cross the finish line you're never saying to yourself in a marathon this is fun let's do this again you know you never if you're at the elite level you never say that right so it's about pain

89:03management and there's there's a legitimate strategy in maybe having some days where you do what I outlined and some days or some weeks where you do what you outlined is are they mutually exclusive though like here's the question like do you have to beat yourself up in order to be mentally tough can't you be mentally tough just through meditation I I I agree I don't think you have to beat yourself up to be mentally tough and the danger there is you literally beat yourself up the danger is you overtrain and maybe the maybe doing that and trying to force yourself into these mentally tough exercises is actually a form of weakness because you're not able to look at your body objectively you're not able to assess it in more of a scientific fashion I mean I'm telling you back in the back in the day when I was doing um training for marathons and triathlons um I find my self worth as

89:56based on the previous workout I'd done yeah you know and you and you skip a day and you feel like slacker and a poser and a loser um and and yet um I I was chronically overtrained all the time I wish I had those days back because you know I would have I would my career would have been extended on the other hand if I had him back I probably wouldn't have arrived where I am today through the pain and the suffering and the sacrifice you know and trying to figure out how to fix that yeah yeah yeah yeah um my friend Steve Maxwell who's a strength conditioning coach says that you should monitor your heart rate every morning and um if your heart rate is over a certain beats per minute it's O over what it's naturally normal five plus beats per minute you should take the day off that's one that's one um modality that's one protocol um there's now heart rate variability which which

90:49looks beyond what the heart rate is and looks at the at at the time between the beats and suggest that um if there's greater variability if there's more time or there's there's you know 08 seconds here and 1.1 second here and 7 and 1.1 that that's better than having 0.9.9 9.9 it's sort of counterintuitive because You' think the heart you'd want the heart to beat metronomically yeah but if it's be beating metronomically it's a sign of overtraining and really yeah overtrain yeah it's a sign of even if it's a low heartbeat um so if you wake up and you got 40 beats per minute but they're all the same equal beats yeah I mean you're that's not going to happen it's typically going to be um higher with if you've overtrained as well as having a a metronomic um interval to it now um but there are programs you can get so you can wear your heart monitor okay and get these HRV heart rate variability

91:40programs and they'll literally tell you you they'll score you for the day do you use those I don't um primarily because um I have uh premature ventricular contractions so I'm I'm now um at 62 I've been doing this for 40 years um actually 50 I started running when I was 12 uh Jesus to and from school just like that nut brown African lad you know uh with my Converse uh you know uh sneakers on and um so I've been doing this a long time and I spent so much of my career stupidly foolishly maxing my heart rate heart rate out every day so I've uh I've I've written about this for last two decades about how training for endurance competition is somewhat antithetical to health and certainly training the way we used to which is accumulating miles and miles and miles in in a in a at a heart rate that we call the black hole which is um it's too high to benefit uh on a regular basis

92:43but too low to um to create sort of the interval training uh deal it's a u again explain it in the book but we we spent uh um years and years and years decades training a lot of athletes at say anywhere from 75 to 85% of their max heart rate for an hour two hours three hours at a time well over time the heart responds to that and gets it gets thicker the the heart muscle gets thicker and thicker um partly it's like the heart can't doesn't have a say in it so your brain tells your legs to run right and the heart goes I got to I got to keep up with this cat so the heart's pumping away and pumping away and pumping away and if you do this enough day in day out day out over years the heart starts to get damaged a little bit and in some cases it gets thicker The ventricle gets thicker and thicker because it's growing muscle yeah but it's it's a it's not necessarily a good

93:35kind of thicker so it's um it may be stretched uh you know too much it may just not have it may not recover when you go to the gym and you say uh we're going to do uh you know uh 200 preacher curls of 75 lbs you know you're you're you you're going to say well you know my Bice well maybe your biceps can handle that Joe but mine can't so um you know cuz they'll they'll fry they'll shred but they feel you feel it the pain is there well the heart doesn't feel that kind of pain so if you force the heart to have to keep up and it's a demand organ it just it just feeds whatever the demand is from the body uh and if that's um held at too high a heart rate for too long over decades it can manifest itself in problems there's I there's an epidemic of aib atrial fibrillation in my generation of runners from that very problem so anyway having said that so I have the occasional premature

94:28ventricular contraction which is just a couple of cells in the heart maybe a thickness in The ventricle that misfire every once in a while it's not it's not like threatening it's not it's just annoying but it it it makes my HRV look really good because because I have this big interval between beats sometimes you know but it's a it's a false positive wow that's fascinating so you don't necessarily monitor your heart rate because of that no so kind of more go on the way you feel yeah and again you know I'm at my at my age I just want to have fun I just want to play I I I don't I'm not seeking to win any age group competitions anymore those days are long behind me it it hurts too much it's it's too much you know I'm I'm trying to extract the greatest amount of pleasure out of my life so when I when I go to the gym it's pretty much contemplated to um to do as little as possible that

95:19keeps me looking good naked but also uh keeps me somewhat immune from injury that's very honest of You by the way whatever you know I don't even care about that anymore yeah yeah no I I'm going to care about that till the day I die but uh but but but for the most part it's about um it's about avoiding injury when I'm playing so if I'm playing frisbee you know I'm I'm sprinting uh I'm I'm keeping up with 20s somethings on a on a long bomb run to the end zone uh and then have to come up you know turn around and come back and and get them on defense um that that that has some cost attached to it some some metabolic costs for an old guy like me so the stuff I do in the gym is try is trying to keep me from getting injured knock wood and uh and then I spend time on you know I'll paddle for two hours and it's the best upper body workout you'll ever get pad yeah stand up

96:08paddling yeah and uh um you know it's fun and I I don't think oh God when is it going to be over I'd think oh I got to get back because I got a meeting you know I'm out hanging out with dolphins and whales and looking down at fish and catching a wave once in a while so I'm trying to I'm trying to have I'm trying to have fun when I when I move when I work out I did some uh paddling uh a few years back I did a canoe trip down the Missouri River and uh it was I was shocked at how tired my arms got I'm like this is like a legit workout like I thought I was in pretty good shape I'm like it's going to be nothing paddling say no it's hard that's take some good shots when you know after paddling and that's how I I I treated it as a workout too I just decided like okay we're doing this for a couple hours a day I'm going to go hard I'm going to just I'm going to leave out there on the

96:54river you know and we were with some other guys we were in another boat I was trying to kick their ass so I was just trying to stay ahead of them the entire way and calling them and yelling at them yeah but it's great it's lat workout it's serratus you know it's deltoids it's everything one of the big issues with uh Jiu-Jitsu competitors and uh people just practice even as a hobby is um is joint injuries inflammation the joints and um and also spine injuries a lot of bulging discs a lot of things along those lines do you think that some of that could be mitigated by reducing the amount of inflammatory foods you know you you've got such a a trauma based sport um maybe a little you know if you're uh if you're 10% less prone to getting the disc issue or um or the joint the joint pain as a result but a lot of that is just the brute just the brute force of the impact and and uh you

97:52know that's just that's a choice that you make to be in those Sports well um not even impact like with grappling a lot of it is just it's just twisting twisting and constant pressure and just the the day-to-day grind I think jiujitsu is one of those Sports where uh a lot of recreational practitioners they get really addicted to it because it's really fun you know you're essentially you're having a life or death struggle with someone and you can tap out and then go right back at it and it's it's very different than a lot of other other martial arts in that way that you can you can kind of do it uh full blast right whereas sparring like kickboxing and things along you really can't do it full blast for very long because the the body just can't take it the head can't take it especially yeah um but with jiu-jitsu a lot of guys are injured and they they they just wrap themselves up

98:40and kind of go back in or they say oh I'm just going to roll light and my necks bother me just just lay off my neck and I always wonder like is there maybe a a dietary choice that could perhaps limit the amount of inflammation that you're experiencing after these brutal workouts depends I mean if if the if the diet is currently horrendous then there's probably some amount of some amount of um of uh you know uh management of that that could that could be increased and Pain Management could be a little bit better and less inflammation for sure but if the diet's already you know good then um you're still you're still uh putting the body through some unnatural torsions I'm just amazed that when you were talking about your hands and arthritis deep into your fore that you were able to mitigate that just by changing your diet it was so powerful it was uh it was really actually the

99:30most powerful thing for me was the IBS because it it literally ruined my life or ruled My Life um but but the arthritis thing was like I mean I i' play golf with friends and I I like I can't even grip the freaking club the way I need to yeah and now you have no problem you know I'd meet you and I'd go is Joe gonna try to out broch shake me you know take take me to the ground with a you know with a firm with a firm grip they get the tips of your fingers those those tips of the fingers I hate those yeah um so that's that's very well I'm very careful shaking hands too because I know a lot of people with broken hands CU Fighters especially like after fights you have to be real careful like I give them like the most gentle handshake possible um what other um what other ways do you think there are what dietary ways to reduce inflammation other than uh reduction of grains or or elimination

100:27of grains you know I say if you if you get rid of the industrial seed oils so you replace the soybean oil the canola oil um the corn oil and and look at the labels of the ingredients CU they're all over the place what is the the different what's the different mechanism in the body as far as like the way your body processes soy oil or corn oil versus uh coconut oil just the profile of fatty acids and these are polyunsaturated fatty acids and sometimes they're partially hydrogenated sometimes they've got they've been processed with um sort of nasty processing agents like nickel and uh and they've been uh they've undergone enough alteration that maybe they contain some trans fats trans fats are known to be pro-inflammatory um uh the Omega 6 by the way Omega 6 in and of themselves are not they're not bad there there's Omega 3 there's Omega 6 there's 9 There's 7 there's 12 there's

101:20all these but the the 3 to6 ratio is the one that's gotten the most over the last decade omega-3 fatty acids are found in uh you know fish you know krill oil or fish oil things like that that's supplement with fish oil a little bit yeah not a lot but a little bit um couple of capsules um every other day oh really the other day yeah I'm uh and I and I manufacture them too I mean it's it's part of my my um my line of products but because my diet is pretty much based on um an otherwise healthy intake of Omega-3s and more important a reduction of Omega 6 so it's it's not that Omega-3s are by themselves anti-inflammatory they are and Omega 6 are pro-inflammatory but it's this ratio um there's some requirement for Omega 6 in the body but when the ratio gets way thrown off it tends to be a proinflammatory reaction and where do Omega sixes come from the those are the

102:12industrial seed oils that we talked about so there's a slight benefit to having some industrial seed oil well no no there's a slight benefit to having Omega 6 from other sources so what the other sources um you know any any most uh fish will also have 06 um you know they're they're everywhere they're in any kind of fatty food um nuts will have them uh that's probably the source that most people in on the Paleo movement get the Omega 6 from um but yeah there it's it's about sort of the totality of the diet not and and it's largely a result again of what you're not eating what you eliminate from the diet that has the greatest effect not what you're eating so when people say well paleo diet I mean I've had such great results on the vegan diet or I've had great results on uh you know on some vegetarian diet go well you know you're you're not eating the same we're not eating so the

103:04fact that you get your protein from you know uh plant sources um I'm maybe going to suggest you could have more protein but it's not that big a deal it's really about what you've eliminated right that that has the greatest impact on your health yeah I have conversations like that often with people that are vegan when they start talking about all the different things they eat how much better they feel and and I I tell them listen I eat all the same things you eat like my diet is pretty vegan other than meat yeah I mean most of what like this morning what I had I drank a kale shake so I blend kale with cucumbers and I know it's gross but it makes me feel amazing I blend kale with cucumbers garlic um celery uh Ginger and a pear I throw a pear in and uh I blend that up oh in a half a beet I blend that all up and I ate an elk steak so the two things together that's that's what I eat that's

104:00my lunch you know that's what I had I didn't eat breakfast I just ate lunch today now how does it how does the kale Shake taste like yeah doesn't tast good so one of my rules is I don't one of my rules is I don't put anything in my mouth that doesn't taste awesome but it feels good man I'm telling you I eat that I get this burst of nutrients I'm going to I'm going to keep doing it all right well not going too terrible with a full pear in yeah you know cuz the full pear I mean it's a big Bartlet pear blunts a little bit of the garli very yeah it's very uh sweet but is that too much sugar that one pair just depends on how much what your sugar load is over the course of a day if that's if that's the only sugar you get pears are pretty high and you know they're they're pretty high in sugar but um if it's a whole pair I don't think it's I eat a pair before a yoga class too that's what I

104:46always that that gets me through a yoga class cuz like I feel is pears your favorite fruit or something I like pears for you it's totally good I just you're the first first guy I've known that's favorite fruit is a pear really I mean I like a pear but I uh I like mangoes mango are my also favorite mango are awesome yeah I I take sliced mangoes I'll do that what what would be better pears or mangoes no no no no again no difference difference difference but fruit is what I usually choose before I work out but now I'm thinking that maybe fruit is a little too high in sugar listening to you or I should limit the amount of it I have in a day and again if you if if you like where you're at and everything's good life is wonderful and you enjoy it then I'm not going to tell you to stop doing it well I'm all about optimizing I mean I I'm I if I can Chuck down those kale shakes I'm

105:31obviously willing to eat some horrible to feel better um this not it's not that horrible I I kind of exaggerate a little bit my tolerance for gross food is pretty high I can I can I can eat it do you ever eat any of that on Fear Factor yeah I ate a bunch of oh good good I ate uh eyeballs sheep's eyeballs I ate superworms those are those worms they use uh on cadavers to clean up bones yeah I ate a tomato hornworm that was pretty gross I ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach that was the one I that's the one I think I would have drawn the line at that one was the easiest to do really yep yeah it's all psychological with that's chewy but it's very mild like it has almost no flavor it was all just in your head that was no big deal at all the really hard things to eat it's really interesting the smells were probably the the hardest part and a big fact in the smell was the

106:26um they would add this really expensive cheese they would go to this Beverly Hills what is a form what is one of those places called where they sell the cheese ferie anyway it was a very expensive type of French cheese that just smells like death because cheese a big part of what makes a cheese fragrant or interesting is the culture which is actually bacteria yeah so we would buy this bacteria ladent cheese that smelled so bad they would take it and they would open the little cup the little plastic tub in front of me and sticking in front I like oh and they' be like dude that is expensive really expensive and we would throw that into like a blender full of maggots and that's what would make it disgusting the maggots on the on their own really didn't have that much of a smell or taste it's more psychological than it is anything yeah yeah a lot of the stuff on Fear Factor and then there

107:24was a lot of it was just the sheer volume like they would have to drink you know a gigantic blender filled with this horrible and this the amount of mass that you're putting in your body and you have like 3 minutes to do it or whatever and keep it down and keep it down yeah you I think we gave them like they had to keep it down for like 30 seconds or something like that so then at the end of that 30 seconds they would Sprint towards would everybody hurl oh yeah I saw more people I've probably seen more people throw up up than like a very small percentage of the population than most ERS right yeah well maybe ERS would have me like nightclub bouncers might have me if you if you put in 20 years as a nightclub bouncer you probably see more people puke than me cuz you're seeing it every night me it was only one day a week yeah but one day a week I would watch at least two people just hurl

108:16just projectile vomit yeah but uh again more psychological than anything you know the uh the actual Taste of those things especially the roach was nothing it's like really no big deal like if I was was I was starving somewhere and I found like a big batch of uh hissing cockroaches those Madagascar ones I would definitely scoop those up and eat them well you know um uh there's a a bar company called EXO that makes their bars out of cricket protein and uh I'm an investor in their company there and I'm fascinated by the concept that that uh you know billion and a half two billion people around the world eat insects all the time and think nothing of it yeah well that's what a lobster is one of the things that we found out when we did Fear Factor was if you have an allergy to shellfish you also have an allergy to roaches we found that out the hard way cuz a guy who listed shellfish as an

109:07allergy ate a roach and got really sick we had to take him to the ER they got to give him an adrenaline shot the whole deal so the the enzymes apparently are very similar but you could eat those bugs and there's very high in protein and very good for you and they could also be an excellent source of protein for uh a inexpensive source of protein for a lot of people no the the Cricut thing is very sustainable it's like 20 times less resources fewer resources than to to an equivalent amount of uh steak and also equivalent amount of amino acids it's like a oh very good profile yeah yeah that's really fascinating to me that you could get like really high quality protein from Bugs H we're we're prejudiced against bugs I guess I mean I'm trying not to be anymore do you eat your bars oh yeah all the time all the time I all the time just because I don't I don't use those

110:01kind of snacks I make my own bar but because the the guys who started EXO are really on to something and they're trying to they're trying to change the way the world thinks about uh sourcing protein so the the first hurdle they have to overcome is making a bar taste great and not turn people off because crickets because it's crickets and you you know there's not like heads and antenna sticking out of These Bars it's powder it's been ground down to a fine powder and it basically looks and probably tastes the same as whey protein isolate does yeah once it's ground down once it's ground down um do you lose any of it when you're dehydrating it or grinding it down or turning it into a powder pretty it's it's it retains its properties pretty nicely so there's no benefit whatsoever to eating it fresh um not necessarily no I mean if you can compact more into a I mean that's the

110:47beauty of of I think insect protein powder is to be able to fortify Foods uh that that otherwise you know if you other rather than having 40 crickets right on a stick you know to to have the powder equivalent in a bar is kind of a neat way of doing it I've eaten crickets like that too like roasted crickets they don't taste bad at all they're not bad it's all in the head it really is it's all in your mind like you you you chew them they're crunchy and they're roasted over a fire they're actually not bad at all they're I mean they're sold this delicacy in in the streets of you know in Bangkok and most of Asia yeah especially if you put some spices on them or something like that they can actually be quite tasty like maybe some butter some oil and some spices on them yeah we have these ideas about different things that are good to eat and not good to eat and just more based on custom

111:33than anything in a lot of ways yeah I wonder how many people that are vegan would be willing to eat bugs you know vegan as far as I know it goes against their their religion which they don't even want to use honey no it's it's crazy no that's so that's funny you say that because we've got a a bar that we just int introduced with grass-fed uh whey protein icelet and and uh um it's got collagen in it it's a great bar um and we tried to make one for the vegan community and because it has honey in it as as a sweetener the vegan said we we can't we can't eat because it has honey it's bees you know that's those bees are slaves man yeah well whatever it's uh okay whatever they want you know you want to go that way yeah honey is awesome you is there any like nutritional benefit to being a vegan or is there deficits you know involved in it um I think that's probably some foods that

112:31you're not getting that would provide uh micronutrients that micronutrition that would be beneficial to you in the long run and and yet the human body is so freaking uh adaptable to to any sort of dietary strategy I mean you know you see uh 8ot tall uh Africans you know that go play in the NBA that grew up on uh you know 500 calories a day in Cow Patties yeah um you know during the Irish Potato Famine people live for six weeks on shoe leather and seaweed I mean the human body is pretty adaptable so you on that one hand um you can't describe the perfect diet so if you're choosing to be vegan and that's what you want to do and and you're mindful about it um and you're not militant about it and not trying to convince everybody else that that's what they ought to do then then go for it well that doesn't exist yeah there's so few people that's that's a requirement that's the Unicorn Fart a

113:26requirement of membership yeah um H what like what what are the there's there's a few plants that do have a full complete amino acid profile right like quinoa is one of them yeah I mean there's great plants I don't I wouldn't say they have a full amino acid profile it's what's lacking well there's probably if there's nothing lacking it's the it's the relative amounts that that make the difference so it's a protein efficiency ratio right uh the the the um the protein amino acid score that that uh really determines whether a protein is is exceptional and that's where the you know meat and eggs and and uh you know that Dairy and things yeah someone was trying to describe that to me the amount of broccoli you would need to get the same amount of protein and amino acids as an 8 O steak is something insane it's like 2 pounds of broccoli yeah it's not I don't think it's insane I just think

114:18it's uh because they those same people will argue that there's um there's you know that that it's a on a on a I think it's on a per pound basis it's almost like it has the same amount of amino acids I forget where I where I heard that some some vegan cited that to me and I I know that broccoli does have some amino acids in it you just have to eat a big bowl of it if you're vegan that's what you do anyway so uh I'm not going to you know criticize that choice I just think that um if you're missing certain amino acids you better balance it with something coming from legumes or some other source you have to figure out what amino acids are lacking based on what plant the human diet was always based on a wide variety of things you were taking in just you know not not just one kind of thing but something off of this shrub off of this bush out of this ground and

115:02a tuber here and some quail eggs here and you know was always a 200 different choices uh within a f mile radius or whatever you can just get whatever you get your hands on and that's where the insects came in that's where the you know we don't talk about you know amphibians but imagine living on frogs and snakes and and eggs and uh uh you know in wheat grass and just it's uh it's pretty amazing the variety of foods that we can eat so typically you start your morning off with butter coffee with MCT oil is that what you put I don't I just eat uh regular coffee regular coffee just I I don't I don't I'll have uh buttered coffee every once in a while but I don't I don't feel like I need the calories to get my day going I just want the cup of coffee you just want the caffeine just want the caffeine and I actually don't want to um I don't want to interfere with burning off my own

115:51body fat so uh not that it interferes with it but that's 500 calories that that or 250 calories coming out of the coffee that otherwise is coming off my you know my gut interesting so when you wake up in the morning it's all dependent upon how hungry you are yeah so if you're hungry maybe then you'll have some butter coffee Y and if you're not hungry you'll just have regular coffee black uh no a little bit of cream but just enough to color it yeah mhm and like uh your first meal of the day is probably lunch yep and what what is that uh usually a salad I have a big ass salad I call it and uh it's um you know it's lots of greens and some form of protein might be salmon might be chicken from last night's dinner might be uh tuna um and what like what size like an 8 O portion no no it's a b no I mean as far as protein no not much protein I'm that's the other thing that I've

116:44realized over the years is that we don't need that much protein and even if you're doing work in the gym you know you don't need 200 gram of protein a day that's you just can't process that well what is that from That's from the bodybuilder powerlifting mentality so that's that's from the muscle and fitness days and that's from Dave Draper and his freaking you know blender full of stuff who Dave Draper oh my God you don't so Dave Draper is before your time man so he was on the original uh Southern California blonde bodybuilders he was in every ad for for shakes and and mass gainers and things like that mass game yeah that's all sugar right a lot of those things oh that those are that's n Nast y stuff that's just like cheap cheap ass protein and high fructose cor yeah there he is yeah stay yeah on the beach hello ladies so that guy uh would Advocate

117:38massive amounts yeah but I mean that guy you know when you when you can process when you're taking in uh you know superum levels of steroids you can process all kinds of uh protein look at them today is that today Jamie uh more recent 200 yeah still looking pretty good he's probably about 70 there Yol 60 what 63 63 right there he's your age yolked as look at him maybe he does a little steroids too what do you think you think could be huh but uh so people using needing protein it's you know maybe women probably need 50 to 75 maybe 80 grams a day um even guys you know training fairly hard no more than 130 140 grams a day now what is what's the muscle and fitness mentality or the powerlifting mentality it's like there's a certain amount of grams per pound of body weight they describe well you know that's all over the place so it might have been one gram per pound of body weight or 1.5

118:36grams per pound of body weight 200 gram a day for me or yeah a gram I'm 200 lb so I have to have 200 gram of protein that's a shitload of protein how much is a steak like a 12 O steak 50 60 Jesus Christ yeah so i' have to four Stakes yeah I mean by the time you cook that down yeah might be less right what about eggs how much is an egg seven or eight per egg yeah that's why these guys would do a whole dozen eggs in their Shake um you know that'd be 70 or 80 uh or 80 or 90 or whatever grams of protein plus some powder in there and but you know the what we learned a long time ago is a body really can't handle more than 30 35 grams of protein at a sitting so the rest of it turns into um you know the farts yeah so if you're if you're eating that's one thing if you've ever been around people who drink a lot of protein shakes and eat protein bars they're farts are

119:30brutal like bodybuilder type dudes and that's just they just they have too much protein right among other things yeah yeah a lot of that is you know they haven't um who knows what's going on with their with their gut bacteria too yeah that's a lot of protein to put in there they're probably if they're eating that much protein they're not eating much in the way of vegetables and those Muscle Milk type supplements although they are delicious there's a lot of sugar in those damn things absolutely yeah all those bars a lot of bars have a lot of sugar in them this is a giant issue yep yeah H so um you think that these guys these bodybuilder guys or powerlifter guys that are operating on that inefficient method of you one gram per one pound if they had reduced it they would still have the same amount of gains and maybe their body would operate more efficiently are we talking on the

120:20juice or off the juice uh okay that's a good point you know yeah so um back they're on steroids process back to your point about um you know I'm a hard Gainer and you know putting on muscle is is is difficult um most people are overweight don't want to hear this but putting on muscle is much more difficult than losing body fat you know you take aund 165 pound guy and you say I you he says I want to put on 20 pounds of muscle ain't going to happen you know might put on 10 lounds of muscle might put on seven over a very uh focused period of time it might have to work hard to keep it on yeah cuz that's the body also going if you don't create on a daily basis my requirement to continue to maintain this muscle mass I'm going back down to where I was right that it seems to me that there's like a a number of days or years or whatever it is that you maintain that body mass where it

121:10starts to become normal then your body says well this is what we weigh now yeah and then you you maintain it but there's this touch and go period say if you weigh 165 and you put on that 10 lbs like boy you got to keep pushing for all a long time for your body to say listen this is what we weigh we need all this power we need all this horsepower and we we're going to be able to carry a lot of heavy all the time yep exactly um yeah did you bring your own honey is that what's going on over there no no no J what is that that's your honey I'm having some like thisy here this guy's serious brings his own honey no no no but Honey's good for you isn't it raw honey no how dare you I know who are you it's not it's not good for you it's not going to kill you and any like that's one of those moderation Foods if you you want to use it to like in this case I put a couple of drops in the in

121:57the tea but I always hear it's really good like raw honey who do you hear it from not the vegans who know that people make honey yeah I don't know it's just uh it's something that I've always heard is it's not it's not bad it's just high sugar it's it's a form of sugar and if you overdo it then it's probably not as wise a decision as to cut it back so we got to your lunch your lunch which a big ass salad with a small amount of protein so maybe like 4 ounces of protein or something along those lines okay like piece of chicken or a piece of fish or something like that and then um what about dinner um dinner I I like to have a steak I got this wagu short rib that I get um you like that stuff huh it is so good but it's all fatty yeah that's the point you like that that's the point man yeah and uh cuz you like fat yeah no my diet is probably 55% of my calories come

122:45from fat but wagu is a lot of cornfed animal all right so I I make a little bit bit of an exception there um I can get uh grass-fed when I you know when I when I look for it at PC greens where I shop in Malibu but um or you know Whole Foods or whatever but this this wagu uh is just such delicious so you like nice tender juicy fatty steak is there any benefit like what are the health benefits of eating grass-fed meat and using grass-fed cow's butter yeah it's really interesting because um one one of the things I I just kind of have to raise my eyebrows at is I hear about grass-fed whey protein isolate right so you have grass-fed whey protein it's whatever they put in the drink well the reason you eat grass-fed cows is because the fatty acid profile is more um it's it's a more desirable fatty acid profile the protein complement is the exact same in a cornfed steak or a grass-fed steak

123:46you just can't tell the difference in the protein it's the fatty acid profile that's different the other difference might be the residual hormones and antibiotics so when they raise cornfed beef and they start from an early age that's not the the cow's native diet so they the cow tends to get sick get infected and so they have to use antibiotics and they have to use uh and sometimes they use growth hormone just to get them off the lot quicker so but but the the the reason to have grass-fed beef is the fatty acid profile is is much more desirable uh and yet it's still it's still fat so it's just a couple of uh different versions of steric acid and and different uh versions of the saturated fat that you're talking about so it's not even like this life or death decision that you make like if I have uh a a wonderful cut of cornfed steak I'm going to die and if I have grass-fed I'll live

124:40forever these are just choices and if if you if you can find a great tasting grass-fed steak by all means have it if you can have a great find a relatively inexpensive you know lined line caught wild salmon a probably a better choice for your stated goals than some farm raised salmon so yeah the farm raised salmon it's a it's problematic because of their diet right y but so back but just back to the the grass-fed thing so so when you get to grass-fed whey protein isolate whey protein isolate is 90 to 95% protein they took all the fat out of it so it doesn't matter they they all the good fatty acid profile that was in it because it was grass-fed is now gone okay so it's like a marketing strategy to call it grass-fed way Protein Isolate so it's not bad but it's not any better no it's it's definitely not bad it's it's not demonstrably better to have grass-fed way Protein Isolate versus

125:34just regular what about grass-fed butter you know grass-fed butter fat that right yeah yeah absolutely that's all fat so that there's that's and there's an example of that's the exact opposite now they took all the protein out of it and now just giving you fat so grass-fed butter is a great choice and what is the difference in the profile the the fatty profile of a grass-fed butter versus same as it is with the meat so when is that difference um I can't I can't cite the the research and I can't cite the breakdown of the of the fatty acids it's just that they're more uh appropriate for uh a cow that was raised on its native diet J Pull It Up pull pull up what is the difference between the fat CU I've heard it but I can't cite it when somebody wants to bring it up I I I prefer the taste of grass-fed meat cuz it's a leaner like more dense meat it's more like a Wild game right than um like

126:24a a ribeye from a cow that's fed corn but you're saying that like Health Wise grass-fed ribey is pretty good pretty good yeah it's more of a fatty cut yeah um so but you're saying there's not that much of a difference in terms of like the health benefits if if you can get uh again a a humanely raised uh cow that was uh not given antibiotics or hormones um you're pretty close to where you want to be and so I'm suggesting that the fatty acid profile isn't going to be hugely different isn't the issue with cows that when you give a cow grains their body isn't designed to process it so they develop a lot of infections correct and that's that's why they use the antibiotics yeah so isn't that I mean just automatically problematic if you have a grain-fed cow not necessarily so a lot of times you'll have a cow that was raised on grass and then finished with grain right um and there's

127:17different types of grain so some it's not automatically problematic um it it could be but if you look for the cows that were pastured up until a certain point and you know again they might have been grass finished sometimes they'll they'll say grass-fed and they won't they won't tell you it was grain finished and when they say grain finished how much time do they spend feeding with grein just a couple weeks that's it yeah okay so they just fatten up for the last couple weeks before the end yep and so they don't have enough time to develop a lot of the massive issues that they might have if they were uh corn their whole life in theory so um you'll you'll eat a little bit of steak and uh uh steamed vegetables that's when I have my big plate of broccoli or broccolini or brel spouts or you know whatever and what about like drinks what do you drink mostly just water or I used

128:08to drink wine at meals I don't drink a lot of water I'm I'm uh I'm soothing a throat today but um with this but normally I wouldn't drink much uh much water during the course of the day I let my thirst mechanism you know just sort of tell me what to do and I don't get thirsty that often I mean I used to go on 50 m bike rides and not get thirsty so I've got really yeah yeah is that just weird just you yes I know other people like that yeah um a lot of people are of the belief that you should drink water all the day so you have to pee all the time CU you're flushing your body I don't I don't buy that at all I think it's unnecessary it's probably yeah it's a I definitely don't agree with that concept um might you might want to do it once in a while just to you know do your own little cleanse or whatever but I don't think as a rule of thumb that that there's any particular health benefit to

128:52that what about the toxins man what about the toxins man D fleshing the toxins out man I didn't pee clear I need to drink more yeah that's that's um I think so yeah um I know a lot of people who still do it I know a lot of you know people at the gym bring their gallon jug of distilled water in or whatever the hell it is well distilled water is real bad right r r water yeah yeah because when you drink distilled water there's no minerals in it just it actually robs your body of minerals cuz it like takes the minerals out right yeah um so don't drink unless you're thirsty no no I mean that's my rule of thumb and I and I don't so what do I drink with meals um until recently I was drinking um wine with meals how come he stopped so uh I've written a lot about wines over the years and and how uh you know the research shows at wine drinkers live longer than tea tolers

129:41Resveratrol all that stuff and uh there's a lot of good compelling evidence to drink wine and yet at at the root of the matter wine is still a source of ethanol ethanol is toxic to the body so you're putting a toxin in your body every time you drink wine um started to look at that in my own case and realized that I wasn't sleeping as well as I wanted to and sleep's a big thing for me so um but I was a two glass a night Wine Drinker for 30 years um just it wasn't dinner if I didn't have wine and um so I went on a 30-day which I do often I went on a 30-day experiment of one see what happened cut out the wine um felt great uh slept better and I was never really I never woke up hung over I mean I've never my kids have never seen me my kids are 22 and 25 they've never seen me drunk my wife has never seen me drunk it's not like I was abusing anything but I had this regular

130:32pattern of drinking wine so I went off it and I realized that I was benefiting from it uh so for the last year and a half I really cut back on the I still have a glass or two what was the benefit that you watched I I didn't wake up at 3:00 in the morning and then not be able to get back to sleep for an hour that was the big thing that I noticed for myself was I would fall asle sleep really easily and then I would wake up 2 or 3 in the morning and have a tough time getting back to sleep and that sort of subsided when I went off the wine so the that's that's the result of the effect of alcohol your body processes the alcohol the alcohol is a depressant noxia out your body processes it and then once it's done processing it then your sleep cycle is Disturbed so you wake up is that what happens Chinese medicine says that that's when your liver is working at at 3 3:00 in the

131:17morning so maybe that's when the real processing was starting to take take place or the I don't know you know what I'm not a huge adherent of Chinese medicine I'm not suggesting that it's not an important thing to look at but in my case the Sleep benefited tremendously so did you feel any better other than the sleep yeah I mean I think so I mean I didn't really notice like I say I never woke up hung over I never I always felt refreshed waking up but I didn't I didn't like not getting that sleep and and having to and then in my case because I'm a I'm not good at managing stress and I have a fair amount of stress just business stuff in my life so that's you know when you can't sleep at 3:00 in the morning that's when all the business kind of starts to circulate in the brain you know and how's this going to happen and how are we going to do that so so I didn't like

132:00that part of it um so a year and a half I went without drinking wine and I replaced it with um I used to be a prodigious Beer Drinker before I gave up the grains um and uh and I started I found a couple of um non-alcoholic beers that I like and so again I it was for me it was about the Habit the ritual of dinner so I needed I couldn't just drink water I hate I hate drinking water with dinner so I wanted to find something to replace the ritual part of the wine and I found these non-alcoholic beers I drink so I had one with dinner uh at night maybe one and a half are these non-rain made no they're they're made with grains but it's not they don't affect me uh to any extent and uh and so that's that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half and then recently um I came across a guy who was looking at paleo wines and and I I'm going dude if you coined a new phrase it says a

132:59marketing Ploy no there's these wines there are 300 wineries in the world among the tens of thousands uh that don't use additives or sulfites or or colorants or falah or any of the that we put in wine in this country so if you look at what how wines are made in the US some of the more um desirable wines from a nose perspective have all kinds of crap in them and there's like 87 approved additives that the government allows us wine makers to put in their wines and that's the that causes you to get to hangover and feel bad from drinking the wine particularly the red wines uh and wake up in the middle of the night and and not be able to sleep so um this guy approaches me one day actually I met him at um at a conference and uh he started to tell me a story I'm I'm not I'm not buying it you know you got these wines that don't have that won't cause you to fall asleep or don't won't

133:59cause you to wake up in the middle of the night he goes I was like you Mark I gave up drinking wine and I'm I love wines but I gave them up because I didn't like what it was doing to me and I found this new these new wines so he sources wines from around the world that are made in wineries that don't use any of these additives and I and I he gave me a case of them to try different brands and different things and none of them from the US they're all from Europe or South America or whatever um and these are wineries that have been around for 300 years they just never bought into the concept of adding to wines right and you know I realized I some of these wines I can drink and enjoy and feel a little bit of uh taking the edge off and then go to bed and have no ill effects at all so I'm sort of wow opening my mind to the fact that there's some some paleo type wines out there

134:48that don't have the additives in them in them that um that consumed in moderation are probably enjoyable and potentially helpful that term paleo seems to be a loaded term because people connect it with the idea of the Paleolithic error and what people ate at that time but it's not we're not talking about that when you're talking about paleo W I know yeah you know what I mean like it seems a weird it's a weird term yeah and he doesn't he doesn't really use the term he uses um natural yeah um but but it the market to which he was catering at the time itself toale commun fits the Paleo Community yeah yeah it's almost like they need a better word than paleo because it's not necessarily even what people ate during the Paleolithic Era you're just reducing grains or eliminating them and yeah and concentrating on fats that's not necessarily what people ate during the P

135:41pale I mean I mean that's one of the great misnomers that general public has about the paleo diet is that if a caveman didn't eat it then we shouldn't eat it well none of this stuff existed in caveman nothing that we eat even even the stuff we get out of the ground or off the trees didn't exist then it's all been manipulated by farming and and and uh you know whether it was inserting Gene it wasn't inserting genes but we still did genetic manipulation of of foods to get them sweeter and more protein or whatever maybe it's a load of term maybe we need a new term I me something like Primal maybe or right well Prim Primal blueprint hey that's a good one maybe you should uh run with that I I'll try it I'll see primal's probably better than paleo right I thought from the beginning I I started uh my project uh writing the blog in 2006 and I knew early on I wanted a brand that was sort

136:30of unique and separate from paleo I thought paleo had too much baggage from caveman on it yeah and Primal sort of has a primary you know first importance kind of thing as well as um as well as going back to Primal times and Primal urge or whatever so um hence the term Primal blueprint and my Primal Fuel and my food products Primal kitchen they're all kind of based around that so these additives that they're putting in wine is just from an economic standpoint allows them to process to Wine no no no it's from a consumer uh demand point of view so you know when you get some of these um I don't want to name names but some of my favorite really expensive California wines that I used to love because of the way they taste they were thick and and Rich looking and you know oy and all this it's just all additives all crap they're putting in there because that's what the consumer thinks

137:23is is going to make for a sophisticated wine wow and all that is chemical additives that with your body yeah not all I mean enough that they all do wow that's bizarre I never would have thought that when I think of wine I thought wine is just fermented grapes and they go through a process and they store it and yeah my friend Maynard makes one I need to contact him you know you know the band Tool yeah Maynard the least singer he he has an awesome Wine Company caducus wine do they make their own wine or they own wine he grows his own he's crazy though he's I mean I know a lot of people that grow grapes in Malibu but none of them make their own wine they they they truck it out to some Distillery to make and when they truck it out this guy takes it and throws a bunch of in well whatever the the the grower of the grapes who's got his own label will say I want it to

138:15have this these properties it's got to be you know this this color and this thick and and sometimes if the grapes don't you know can't in and of themselves provide that I mean a lot of the stuff comes from the a lot of the tannins in wine come from the grape skin M and uh to get the deep deep deep deep rich color you have to you have to um mash the grapes up and the skin up even more and more and more so more of that Tann and to get the red the Deep Red colors in the wine they they have to provide more of the skin and that's what's causing a lot of the Tann and so for some people who have issues with the that you hear about the histamines and wine again that's the that's the marketplace demanding a deep red wine and so it's a color issue it's part of a color it's could be color could be again some of the you know adding sugar to the wines a lot of the US wines have a lot

139:02of sugar in them like a like a fairly high sugar content the guy I'm talking about here who who led me down this uh this road and sort of opened my eyes to this he's been in ketosis for two years and he couldn't drink wine cuz the sugar would take him out of ketosis the sugar and wine so that's sort of one of the reasons he got started on he was a lifetime Wine Drinker grew up in Wine Country up in in Sonoma and um and had dealt dealt in the business and sort of left it because he got disenchanted and then came back when he discovered that there were these wines that have no sugar that have no s or you know minimal sulfites I mean all all natural uh fruits and vegetables have some amount of sulfites but not added no added sulfites um uh and and none of these 80 or so approved uh added ingredients that can affect the color and the smell and and the and the thickness that is really

139:55interesting that's something I never even considered I never even thought there was additives and wine I just thought it was just grapes I thought it was pretty simple well is there American companies that do this is there anything local um I don't know I mean he's the the the things that he's given me are um uh all from from other countries that sounds so counter intelligent intuitive that we grow so much wine in California but to get wine without any in it you'd have to get it from Europe because we're so concentrated right now at least this part of the country is uh on you know natural foods and you know grass-fed beef and organic vegetables the fact that we would have wines at almost primarily yeah that's nuts oh it is um and it may be that I'm you know that I'm that he hasn't sent me any that are from the US but most of these are from from other uh and where would you

140:47order something like that I want to try that now because I I like wine I love red wine uh dry wine farms is the guy is the name of the company dry wine dry wine farms all right dry yep I always think of dry as like uh that's like the way like kind of white wine that people like a dry white wine right yeah H I just never would have believed that it was the additives that are causing all those issues well so now we're back to that that initial discussion we had about it's what you don't eat right that really affects you more than what you do eat and yeah and so if you're getting um you know uh you're eating appropriately grown cuts of meat and organic vegetables and you're cutting out the the organic I excuse me cutting out the industrial seed oils cutting out the sugar cutting out the processed grains and some of the other grains and in their place you're

141:39and you're cutting out in this case crappy wine and and and substituting fruits vegetables meat fish foul eggs nut seeds and now we have you know again I'm if we want to enjoy life and that's one of the things that we might consider an enjoyable part of life is is partaking of a glass of red or white wine with dinner now it's kind of back on the menu for some people that's interesting that's really interesting that so but it's not necessarily on the menu for you no so uh and having said that um I'm not finding myself back in that situation where I'm drinking uh wine with dinner again because I've I've I still recognize for myself that it's the ethanol that I'm not I I just I intuitively I don't like putting that amount of ethanol in my body on a regular basis so once in a while as a hormetic you know uh uh insult if you will that's fine the body will adapt to

142:36it and and use it as to its benefit but on a regular basis probably so just the sheer alcohol content of wine was causing an issue it wasn't just the the additives no so so the the additives were probably causing the issue because with with these wines I wasn't waking up in the middle of the night and I was so I felt as if I hadn't had the wine so what's the ethanol ethanol is is that's the alcohol that's the form of alcohol in the wines right but it's not the additives no no no the no that's what you're trying to get at is is ethanol is the is the alcohol and the wine that's what gives you lit right that's not what's being added added so but you had decided that it wasn't the ethanol no it wasn't the ethanol but I still didn't like the idea it's not about the issues as much as it's just um it's like I can I can consume a fair amount of sugar over the course of a day and not have

143:28not gain weight and not have it affect my blood sugar what I just choose not to because I know it's bad for me right so you know the even like a glass of wine once in a while it's fine yeah once in a while it's fine but but hasn't there been show hasn't it shown that there's some longevity benefit to yeah so do you think that's the Resveratrol which is an antioxidant I I think I think I could be wrong but my interpretation is some of these studies is that you take two cohorts of people who have each of whom have a shitty diet mhm and are going to die of heart disease in large numbers and you give one of the cohorts two glasses of wine a night and you give the other glass or the other cohort none and over time you look at the two groups and you realize that the group that had two glasses of wine ton night didn't have as many cardiac events probably because their blood was

144:17thin from from the wine or something you know it's like it's not that it's bestowing longevity on these people it's that they're not dying at the same rate from their shitty diet because some my guess is it's probably some artificial blood thinning that's happening or something like that huh but why is it a it's sort of conventional wisdom that it's Resveratrol well Resveratrol is one of the components of wine but but you you would have to drink you know 750 glasses of wine to get the amount of Resveratrol that you can get in a Resveratrol capsule it's there's not a lot of Resveratrol and wine there is some and it's it's a it's a well studed um you know component of of wine uh in fact there have been companies founded on just providing Resveratrol as an anti-aging uh nutrient but it's not there's not a lot of Resveratrol and wine and I'm not and I don't think any of these Studies have

145:13ever pointed to the fact that it's the Resveratrol in the wine that you're drinking that's conferring longevity on this group versus that group do you think there's any benefit in consuming exogenous ketones uh no not unbalance I think if you're an athlete and you're looking to um to maximize performance there might be places in which you could consume exogenous ketones first of all if you haven't if you're not keto adapted it's it's a joke there's no reason to take exogenous ketones if if you're fat adapted and keto adapted um there may be a reason to take exogenous ketones in in an event um instead of sugar but like say if you're going to run do something some sort of I could make that argument and yet to to my knowledge there aren't many great tasting Ketone salts so now you've got a palatability issue as well with a lot of these things right have you tried

146:08them no I haven't but I've been fascinated by ketogenic diets over the last couple months I've been really considering trying to I mean there's there's some potentially good science there but I can't give you a practical right now uh where it would um where it would work other than in some Elite event where where somebody was uh you know racing all out for hours and and was completely keto adapted prior to the event and you know was was so good at um at uh using ketones in the brain that they could they could hold off bonking for another hour or two so they would take uh some sort of a ketogenic supplement in their water or something along those lines yeah yeah or not not not necessarily water but some yeah some drink would probably be the easiest way to do it so if you were going to recommend someone to try to make your body more fat adaptive um what would be

147:00the first step just just radically cut back on sugars should you do it slowly should you tap her off or should just just give them up um either way I mean it's easier I think if you if you just give it up you just you know go all in um if you're somebody's been depending on sugar your whole life and you're you know you're doing four 500 600 grams a day of carbohydrate uh then um you know going down to 100 or 120 is going to be painful for the first couple of weeks and when I say painful we have this thing called the low carb flu so you go from your body your brain expecting to have you refuel every meal for you know every couple of hours every day with carbohydrate to then um uh reducing it down to 120 150 grams a day the brain starts to go what what's going on here I mean um the muscle haven't yet built the metabolic Machinery to burn fat they're working on it and they're upregulating

147:54the the genes are turning on to create the enzymes but they're not there yet takes about 21 days to do this so in the process the body is expecting sugar and if you're trying to work out at the same time you're going to be screwed because now you have your sugar depleted and you haven't learned how to burn fat yet and the brain is depleted and so the brain goes I was I'm foggy I can't think I've got a headache I'm dizzy this sucks I'm going to eat a bagel and that's what happened to me when I did that the Atkins died for a while many many years ago a lot of people get derailed the first or second week yeah yeah so you have to not train during that time or at least not train cut it way back don't do any glycolytic training so just ride the bike easy go for a hike or do some stuff like that but you can't really train train hard when you're doing that and

148:38how long does it take to adapt so one or two weeks um people get through that fog and then they'll they'll be good um I have a book called The 21-day total body transformation it's the 21 days is about how long it takes to get 80% of the benefits of becoming a a fat burning Beast is what we call it a fat burning Beast I like that yeah yeah so you got to commit to it and you've got to assume there's going to be an adjustment period yeah yeah and and in that adjustment period it's not going to be I mean for some people it's minimal it's they just feel a little bit um low energy or whatever other people get you know headaches and woozy because that's the brain again recognizing that there's no glucose it hasn't yet built the metabolic Machinery to burn ketones um even though the body may be producing ketones and and when the body produces ketones um you can either burn them as

149:32fuel or you can spill them out in the urine and the breath and so a lot of people who have not yet become keto adapted like a sugar burner carbohydrate dependent person will still produce ketones if you skip two meals you know you wake up in the morning you're basically fasted if you're a sugar burner and you wake up and if you don't eat breakfast you you might smell ketones on that person's breath or they might you know pee on a strip and it shows a certain amount of ketones in the blood in the in the in the urine because because the body's just getting rid of the ketones because it can't burn them doesn't have to burn them yet so consuming exogenous ketones doesn't uh accentuate a ketogenic diet or do accelerate I don't know I don't know enough about uh the clinical trials are going on right now but my assumption would be that if you take exogenous ketones and you're not

150:19fat adapted to to adapt it it's not going to necessarily prompt you to to become that unless you've done the dietary manipulation as well okay so there's no uh shortcuts to that transitionary period between uh a glucose-based diet and a fat-based Diet there's just going to have to be a transitionary period I I think so because like I say I think I think if you skip a meal you're producing ketones right so just and you're pissing them out so adding more ketones is just going to piss out more ketones so you're going to show by the way you're going to be a superstar when you piss on the Strip cuz you got your ketones plus the exogenous ketones but this all starts great yeah but this all but I feel like but I'm doing but the strip says I'm doing great right yeah okay so the strip's not nearly as important as the actual physical performance and the way you

151:03feel so no matter what you're going to have to go through a trip so if you like say look just me guy like me if you if I had a shitty diet I'm eating spaghetti all day um you would recommend that for a couple of weeks I just take it real light and make this adjustment make commitment to making the adjustment in the diet doing a fat-based diet with very low sugar very low carbohydrates cut out the grains entirely you get all your carbohydrates from celery and lettuce and vegetables and some fruits and just make a commitment to it yeah and and part of that commitment is I'm not going to train like a banshee for the first two weeks I'm just going to I'll train but I'll do easy stuff and that's what the first chapter in our book which should be about diet is about training and about low training which book which the Primal endurance book um that just came out a few weeks ago um

151:56the first chapter should be about diet because that's clearly one of the most important parts but we talk about training first because we figured enough endurance athletes would read the book that if they read the diet part first they would continue training at the high level and and and embrace the diet and then fall apart right so we got to get the training dialed in first for those people and say you got to here's why you have to cut back um here's why you can't exceed a rate of 180 minus your age for the first couple of weeks uh training uh when you're doing longdistance stuff and at that rate you'll be burning mostly fat so you'll be accentuating what's going on on the dietary side which is restricting carbohydrates and providing more fat more healthy fats for your body and creating more mitochondrial biogenesis and upregulating those mitochondria to become efficient at

152:42burning fat how long does it take before your body reaches the optimum level of mitochondria I mean I'm we see um athletes who are still uh who get 80% of their benefit the first three weeks and then and then another 10% the over the next six months and then the final the final benefits kick in the last six months because it sometimes you lose your your your topend power diminishes as you become fat adapted so you got to get that top end power back but that's what we build in the gym um so it's a it's a longer process but once it Happ so it's like 80% and then six weeks later another 10% and then six week six could be 6 months later another another 10% so in the course of a full year you're still slowly adapting yeah I think I think within a year maybe a little bit more than a year you can if you do everything right you can be this completely rebuilt engine that's amazing

153:37so and then there's got to be some benefits in terms of longevity in terms of your ability to do work over long periods of time like well one of the things that that's most compelling is uh again coming from an endurance Community where marriages fall apart because the guy would rather go for a 100 mile ride on Sunday morning than stay in bed and cuddle with the wife you know or would would rather that's why marriages fall apart that's one of the reasons but I thought it was money yeah well it is money the $8,000 bike uh to go on the on the ride um so um where are we going with that uh longevity yeah marriages fall apart yeah yeah so so the longevity part um one of the things that happens is you you you train less there's less total training time to get the results that you wanted because you're doing it U methodically and you're not just putting it all out

154:30there every day and crossing your fingers and saying well I'm training as much as this guy so I must I better be as fast or faster than he is right you're doing a an approach that's very uh scripted and detailed and methodical at one on one um end of the spectrum on the other end it's also sporadic and fractal it's like I wake up today and I don't feel like doing what I had in my plan take the day off cuz if you're if today's the day you're going to go hard and you feel like do not go hard there's no magic there's no benefit there's no there's no points that you gain from doing it in fact it'll it'll take you down the toilet so you you learn to become intuitive about your training and periodicity is one of the words we talk about where you periodize you there's there's moments where you're there's times when you're going very make your longer workouts longer and

155:18slower and you're hard workouts shorter and harder um and and in the in the middle of these um you know be intuitive about about how you feel how much sleep did you get uh are you fueled appropriately for today's event are you do you have a uh is there a purpose to today's workout other than just go accumulate Miles because I'll feel like I'll feel like a a slob if I don't uh and and if you could get around all that you can you can start to see some amazing benefits with less pain and suffering and sacrifice less being beat up less burnout um less time and and presumably if you do it right better results anyway than the old than the old Paradigm so that's going to cause a real dilemma with people that are obsessed with the work rate obsessed with uh just doing more than anybody else obsessed with proving to themselves that they push themselves they put in all those

156:12hours and accumulate and looking at it they look at their you know like a lot of people have apps on their phone measure how many I know oh it's 9: at night we just finished dinner honey I only have 16,000 steps I got to I'm going to walk back to the hotel or the house you know cuz I got to get to 20 yeah it's it's that stuff is so ridiculous and yet you know I was there I was one of those people who um you know lived my life based on the amount of miles I accumulated and and measured my selfworth uh on whether or not I could hang with everybody I ever raced or race with in a workout you know I never let anybody half whee me on a bike ride uh in in any workout and it was it was fun I guess and it was part of my lifestyle but it's not you got to go back to the to the essence of why are you doing this if you're doing it just to to hang out people used to say hey

157:01Mark you're so disciplined man you're you're out there and you're riding 60 miles 100 miles some days you're running 10 you are so disciplined and my the joke is I'm thinking to myself you kidding me I'm not disciplined I discipline is going to work and and you know putting in a full productive eight hours and then finding a little bit of time time to work out or maybe hang out with a family it is it was so easy for me to get on the bike and go put some miles in or go for a run and and shrug every other Duty off you know and that's the one of the dangers of being an endurance athlete it's addictive it's a it's a it's a very addictive Pursuit you are creating especially if you're beating yourself up every day you're creating endorphins ex endogenous morphine like substances that sit on those same receptor sites the painkilling sites and the pleasure giving sites that you would inject

157:49heroin to achieve now you're just doing it naturally and you're doing it every single day and you crave it every day and if you take 5 days off you feel like you go with through withdrawal so there's that part of it as well that we have to look at why do people do this yeah the obsessive aspect of it the obsessive aspect of it and The Addictive aspect of it yeah that's interesting man well listen man this has been probably one of the most informative and interesting podcast I've ever done I really really appreciate you taking your time and coming here and sharing all this information I'm going to have to listen to this thing three or four times to uh to get all of it and and your book so please tell us the book again the name and how we get is it Amazon yeah it's on Amazon it's Primal endurance it's on Amazon um my website is marks daily apple.com um so a lot of the stuff we

158:34talk about here has been broken down into blogs with 4,000 posts over the last 10 years um yeah and um encourage anybody to to give it a go well I'm giving it a go man I'm you've really convinced me I'm sold I'm I'm going to radically reduce sugar I'm going to cut out all my grains and I'll keep everybody posted cool I'll hold you to it man please do please do I really really appreciate it thank you very much Mark all right folks we'll be back tomorrow with uh Hannibal burus see you then bye-bye