 Welcome to the 21 convention Tampa, Florida this speech is something that we are all about here health having the best physical expression of yourself Learning your body your diet, and this is actually an interesting story that comes Man it with with on so many different levels Years ago our next speaker was not that healthy. He and his wife both scientists His wife showed Ching and him Decided to learn to get healthy in In an absolute design an absolute map and this produced the perfect health diet. Let's welcome on stage Paul Gemini Well, it's great to be here and as Steve said I'm going to be speaking about how to be healthy This is really a joint project of my wife and I We both had long-standing health problems We go to the doctors every year and and every year they couldn't help us and every year we got worse Finally things started to change in 2005 when I discovered the paleo diet and that was the first thing We tried that made a difference it had good effects and bad effects and So we figured out all we need to fix it But it was a really crucial clue because it taught us that diet was important and When we started to think about what had gone wrong on the paleo diet We realized that we had some nutritional deficiencies So we learned nutrition is important and later on we started learning more and more things So after nine years of research after about seven we published a book perfect health diet through Scribner and we've also recently started a health retreat on the beach in North Carolina and so What you're getting in the the next hour is a really rapid run-through of nine years of research and a lot of experience All right, so what I want to summarize in the talk are are the three most important factors and help all right these are the three things that will be constantly affecting your health and the most important thing to take away from this slide is You have a great deal of control over your health. So diet and nutrition you're in total control of those Lifestyle you have a tremendous amount of control over that microbes you don't have a huge amount of control, but you have more control than anyone else does all right and Your doctor has relatively little control over these you know until doctors start chaining you into their offices and feeding you Your doctor can only do so much To influence the major factors on your health So the remedies that doctors have are only playing around at the edges of your health So doctors are tremendous resources for a diagnosis for testing for advice But if you really want to be healthy you need to take charge and you need to manage these aspects of your life All right, so let's let's first talk about diet and nutrition Now let me they always teach speakers you should give people an idea where you're heading So let me just give you the conclusion How should you eat? Here's a Somewhat abstract summary of our diet But we chose an apple because it symbolizes health and we chose the yin-yang symbol because my wife is Chinese We wanted to represent the concept of balance so on the left our plant foods on the right animal foods and Basically the way you want to construct your plate construct your diet is with roughly equal parts meat, fish or eggs Some starch Typically for us it would be white rice or white potatoes some kind of sweet plant like a fruit berry carrots beets and And some kind of vegetable And then add flavorings And typically those would include some kind of flavoring fat like butter sour cream coconut milk maybe nut butters and Some kind of acid like vinegar or lemon juice And some kind of a mommy flavor Mommy comes from fermented foods and that would include things like fish sauce tamari sauce Worcester sauce grated cheese things like that so I The food will end up being about three quarters plant food by weight about one quarter animal foods it's a natural whole foods diet and We exclude a lot of things the single most important thing to exclude our vegetable seed oils So any oils high in omega-6 fat, so don't eat anything that has soybean oil in it corn oil Anything like that, and how does it look on a plate? Beedmen bop is the Korean word for leftovers basically And so this is a very typical Way you might rapidly make a lunch out of leftovers It's hard to see but there's rice in the bottom of that bowl You just throw in some leftover meat throwing some leftover vegetables You can have a piece of fruit on the side you put in the flavorings. That's a fermented Bean sauce for an umami flavor you throw in some vinegar and a little oil and Put it in the microwave. You've got a great balanced nourishing lunch. All right now What are some of the keys so I want to boil a diet down you know Give you some of the the science and help motivate And tell you what are the crucial pieces of a healthy diet? And the first most crucial piece is you have to eat on natural whole foods That means things that were recently living plants and animals. All right and Now there have been lots of technical advances in Industrial food production and they figured out a lot of things, but they haven't yet figured out how to make healthy food All right, and we know this is true even if you Look in babies. All right and baby formula and compare it to breastfeeding breast milk Breast fed babies are healthier than formula fed babies and that's true Even though the formula makers they're trying to match the milk as best they can All right, so even when we're using all of our resources of technology to try to match The natural food we still can't make it as healthy And if you look at the other foods like cake cakes cookies donuts, they're not trying to make it as healthy as regular food so you can imagine if they're still falling short with formula they're going to be falling short with everything else and People have done lots of experiments comparing industrial foods to natural whole foods. What happens? Here's an experiment from the 1970s Where they had two groups of rats one fed a diet of eggs only chicken eggs and the other fed a diet of egg beaters All right, and you know artificial made-up food and the rats that were fed the natural eggs The mothers had healthy pups and the pups grew up just fine but the mothers fed egg beaters had these little scrawny pups and they died a few weeks after weaning and all right, so These artificial foods are not healthy replacements for natural whole foods and They probably Will never be Okay, so you want to eat natural whole foods now. How did we go about designing our diet? We called it the perfect health diet. Why? Because that's our that's our goal, you know, they say your reek should exceed your grasp it will inevitably so you should reach as high as you can you should reach for perfection and That's what we were aiming for We had no idea what were the crucial elements of diet and nutrition So we just decided we try to make we wouldn't try to figure out what was important we just try to make everything perfect and That was that was why it took us seven years to write our diet book But it also came up with a really good diet and our general strategy was to look at every known nutrient That the human body needs and figure out how to optimize its amount. All right now every nutrient If you keep the context of the rest of the diet fixed The amount of the nutrient that you get is going to affect your health according to this pattern So if you're deficient, you're going to have terrible health As you add more your health will get better and better and then you'll get enough so that your body has as much as it needs and Your health will plateau and then eventually you'll be taking too much and it will become toxic And I'll just give you a few quick examples. Here's optimal sodium all right What's your chances of dying based on different sodium intakes? and you see here I've It's basically the same u-curve but flipped upside down because it's easier to measure deaths than health and So what we see is there's an optimal amount There's a u-shaped curve and it turns out That's about the amount of sodium and two teaspoons of salt per day but All living things have sodium in them and so you get some sodium through food So you should actually be eating maybe half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of salt per day Here's another one calcium and here Plotted vertically as the likelihood of fracturing your hip. All right, and you can see there's again. There's a there's an optimum All right, so we went through all the known nutrients Tried to find the optimum amount and then worked backwards to food and says all right We're gonna eat a natural whole foods diet. What combinations of foods do we need in order to achieve that? All right, and we got that food plate All right So what you want a mix of starch a mix of sweet plants vegetables meat fish eggs, and then the various flavorings all right now there's a lot of evidence that people are malnourished and There's good reasons to think that they should be malnourished the way they're eating All right, but here's just one example from the Iowa women's health study. They looked at elderly women and See what was the effect of taking supplements and basically for nearly all nutrients The the women who took the supplements had like a 20% lower chance of dying All right, and the exceptions there are the ones that increase the risk of dying or iron So basically if you're not menstruating or pregnant It's very difficult to become iron deficient very easy to get too much You should pretty much Never supplement iron if you're a man or a postmenopausal woman and in fact you should consider donating blood regularly to get rid of it Folic acid is another one It's easy to get an excess of folic acid, especially since they fortify all kinds of foods with folic acid nowadays and vitamin a that's really Link to vitamin D deficiency so vitamins a is fine if your Vitamin D is normal, but most people are vitamin D deficient But most foods, you know show up most supplements show up as highly beneficial and why because people are very malnourished So let's look at on the right is a natural whole foods diet all of these fruits vegetables plants seafood meat fish eggs All of those things are very high in micronutrients. They have a lot of micronutrients per calorie but what are people eating a lot of it's like things on the left and People try to make them healthier by buying you know back to nature 100% natural triple ginger cookies But if you look at the ingredient list, what are they eating? They're eating flour starch sugar oil are the top three ingredients and then a bunch of flavorings and Basically, what's happened the food manufacturers have extracted ingredients from plants, you know like starch like oil like sugar All right But they've thrown away all of them micronutrients that were in the plants and all of the other nutrients and they've just put in flavorings and so you're getting essentially no micronutrition and lots of macronutrients all right and That is something that just started happening a Little over a century ago. All right. It's it's really a recent development and human evolutionary history All right now it turns out when you look at diet there are certain nutrients that are really crucial and that It's even you can easily miss in a natural whole foods diet All right, so if you just take your starch your sweet your vegetable your meat and Flavor it then you might easily be missing some key nutrition and therefore We recommend that people eat what we call supplemental foods We call it that Because we want you to think I need to take these routinely just like I would a supplement You know so eat these foods either daily or weekly On a regular schedule and key foods eggs. All right, so if you think what's in an egg yolk? It's all the nutrition a chicken embryo needs to develop and if you know in pregnancy That's when we have our highest nutritional needs You know you're building a whole creature. All right, so egg yolks have to have the nutrition to build a Whole creature and similarly fish eggs extremely nutritious So if you wanted you could substitute caviar for your eggs, but it's really important to get some kind of egg every day