 Welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast. Well, by now you probably heard all about the keto diet. Maybe you've heard it can help you lose weight, feel sharper, and more. Or maybe you've read those articles saying that it's actually dangerous. Well, my guest today wants to help you sort out fact from fiction. And I couldn't have asked for a better guide. He's Mark Sisson, founder of Primal Kitchen, former Marathoner, best-selling author, and all-around impressive guy. And Mark is out with a brand new book called Keto for Life. And it has my endorsement actually on the back of the book. And it's a great primer for anyone looking to try the keto diet. So on today's episode, Mark and I are going to talk about weeding through decades of diet myths, some of our favorite subjects together, the importance of adding fat to your diet, and whether long distance running is really good for you. So all of you runners, stay tuned because we're going to talk with one of the godfathers of running right here. Mark, great to have you on the podcast. Great to see you again, Steve. The last time we saw each other was Saint-Jean Capferat. What a treat that was to come around the corner and see you and your wife. It was crazy. There we are. You're going one way, I'm going the other way. And we did a double take and then stopped, you know, a couple feet apart. We passed him. Yeah, Steve. Yeah, there you go. So yeah, great to have you. So you and I have lived through the extremes of diet information, high carb, low fat, add-gons, and more. In your case, what made you realize that you were doing everything wrong? Or maybe you never did anything wrong? You know, I didn't realize I was doing things wrong for a long time. I was an endurance athlete starting out in the 70s, actually started in the 60s, but competed well in the 70s in marathons, got injured doing that. As I find out later, it was a result, partly result of the highly inflammatory diet that I was using to fuel all those miles, transitioned to triathlon and did Iron Man a couple of times, and then I got the message that, you know, I didn't want to beat myself up that much to be fit anymore. I had to retire from competition. Throughout my life as an athlete, I'd always sought ways in which I could enhance my performance naturally, legally, and that meant some sort of dietary information or manipulation, supplements if that was the case. So I was always a student of the human body, of human physiology, of evolution as time went on, of gene expression and how genetic science really factors into a lot of what we're talking about today. And I started simply understanding that fats weren't necessarily the bad guy that they were made out to be in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. So I started incorporating more fats into my diet. And as I stopped training or cut way back on my training, and I didn't need that many calories, I was adding in a little bit more of the fat. I was always eating protein. I started to look at the amount of sugar I was eating, and I thought, well, this isn't necessary anymore because I'm not running the miles. I'm not burning the calories. I'm not filling the glycogen stores and all of this. And so I started to cut back on the sugar, and I noticed I felt better from that. And so I went for another decade, writing books about training and writing books about optimizing your diet for training, starting to write books for the general public about how to lose weight by using dietary manipulation. However, I still suffered my own set of maladies. I still had irritable bowel syndrome that ran my life. I had arthritis in my feet. I had osteoarthritis in my feet that I thought was partly the result of my running career and partly just a natural artifact of being older. But I couldn't grip a golf club. And that was like weird to me. And so I had the arthritis. I had tenonitis on a regular base. I had all these itises. And it just wasn't right for a guy who was trying to be not just fit, but now healthy. And you're a world expert on health. And I'm a world expert on health. And you see this a lot in our field. You see experts who still, you know, behind the curtain, they're suffering and they've got all the maladies that they write about and talk about. So in my case, when I was 47, my wife last year, yeah, really, it's going on 20 years ago, pal, when I was 47, my wife said, look, you're writing about how bad grain is for you. Because I've done a lot of research on gluten and gliadin and zine and corn and all of the other, you know, these anti-nutrients, these tightly folded proteins. And she said, you're writing about all this grain stuff. You still have grain in your diet. What's that about? I'm like, well, I'm defending my right to eat grain because I don't think that's the cause of anything that's going on with me. She said, well, why don't you give up grain for 30 days? Well, I gave up grain for 30 days and it absolutely transformed my life. It was the most amazing transformation. The arthritis in my feet went away. The irritable bowel syndrome that again was like running my life since the age of 14 went away. The GERD that I experienced, you know, weird places like sitting back in an airplane seat or something like that in the wrong position, that went away. I had hemorrhoids for a long, much of my life went away. You know, the sinus infections that would linger after a cold, the stuffed up head that just wouldn't seem that went away. It was like, it was incredible, this transformation from having given up this one food group that I was told my whole life was an important part of the cornerstone of a healthy diet, six to 11 servings a day. Well, that was such an aha moment for me that I really shifted everything to looking at, okay, how if I'm a guy who defended my right to eat grains in the face of all this evidence, how many millions, tens of millions of people are out there suffering the same sorts of things I am. They may not be celiac, they may not be, you know, gluten intolerant on a certain tests, but there's something about their consumption of grains that's probably interfering with their enjoyment of life to the fullest extent. That became the impetus for my looking into the evolution of the human diet and how our genes, you know, turn on or off in response to certain inputs that we give them. Many of these inputs have to do with food and the foods that we choose to consume. And it really kind of opened this amazing world of exploration that continues to this day. So initially, I started with creating the primal blueprint and that was sort of based on our ancestral patterns of not just how we ate, you know, plants and animals, but avoiding toxic foods, you know, moving around a lot at a low level of activity, not marathon running or triathlons, lifting heavy things once in a while, sprinting once in a while, getting plenty of sleep, using our brain, engaging in play, all these things that I felt were sort of universal behaviors that we all not only would like to exhibit, but our genes expect of us. And if we don't give those inputs to our genes, our genes don't manifest. They don't rebuild, renew, regenerate, recreate us the way we'd like to be to be rebuilt. So started out with primal and that was when Paleo was getting on. I just primal was my own brand. And I got so dialed in with that, and I got so happy with my results. And I got, and I had hundreds of thousands of millions of people who were following my blog and, and, and reporting back about their incredible experiences, I thought, well, I could leave it at that. But you know, maybe there's more. And that's when I started looking at a ketogenic diet as what I would call next level stuff. You know, that's that was what got me ultimately to experimenting with now, which is the basis for keto for life, developing what I call metabolic flexibility. So you can live your life without ever having to think about counting calories or portion control or meal time or any of that other stuff. I'm going to stop you and I'm going to point out that why is it that your wife and my wife are usually so intelligent, and that if we would just listen to them, like you have, and I certainly have, it's amazing. Oh, it is kicking and screaming, by the way, I listened to her kicking, screaming, but it was quite the eye opener. Yes. Yeah. And so I had to give a shout out to sure to wives, because everything good that happens happens because of my wife. Yes, dear. So all right. So yeah, I mean, you really, and I called you a grandfather of the keto movement, but, you know, Mark Daly, Apple and, you know, the Primal Blueprint really, you know, kind of set the stage for a lot of what, you know, we now do in the ancestral movement or paleo movement. So a lot of people are confused by all these names. What's the difference between a paleo primal diet and a keto primal diet? Right. So it's it's it becomes nuanced at this point. It's really all of these diets that that tend to work mostly work because of the things you're not eating. Yeah. Okay. So when you eliminate the offending foods, when you eliminate the sugars, the sugary drinks, the pies, cakes, candies, cookies, sorry, people, the the breads, the pastas, the cereals, and you come down to this list of natural real food, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, some starchy tubers. That's real food. That's what the body is is equipped to handle. So paleo really looked at that cornucopia of foods as basically as much as you want as often as you want because you're not eating the toxic franken foods that society has created for us. Primal kind of looked at that and said, well, maybe there's some things that we can add because paleo tended to think in terms of like dairy being off limits because until we started herding animals 10,000 years ago, our ancestors didn't consume dairy. We can go into a whole discussion about why I think dairy is appropriate under certain circumstances. But all these foods exist on the spectrum too. I mean, any food that you talk about, I can I can give you exceptionally great versions of those foods and horribly toxic versions of those foods. So when we talk about dairy, for instance, you know, 2% skim homogenized pasteurized, forget it. It's nasty stuff. It's A1 casein, which is a completely different casein from which most of us evolve to digest easily. On the other hand, you've got you've got ghee and butter and artisanal cheeses, and I think they're great. Raw milk, if you can get it for some people, it's great. So dairy became one of those little touch points where paleo said we're not going to do dairy. And I said, primal, I said, look, if you're not lactose intolerant, then I think dairy's fine. A little bit of chocolate once in a while, a little bit of red wine. I mean, I wanted to be as inclusive as possible with a primal blueprint. I want to create a list of foods that people didn't feel like they were giving up. They were that they were sacrificing in large quantities all the foods, all the comfort foods that they'd they'd eaten over time. Now as paleo and then primal sort of became more mainstream, we start talking about keto and what is keto? Keto, the ketogenic diet, and it's it's a little bit of a elaborate discussion here, but the body runs on fats and carbohydrates mostly. And the three macronutrients that we talk about are fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Well, proteins are largely structural, so we want to consume protein just to rebuild our bodies. The fats and carbohydrates have been sort of the fuel that we've used. We were born with this amazing default setting that would allow us to derive most of our energy from fat, from stored body fat. In the absence of food or fuel, historically over millions of years, which was generally the case for most people, you didn't have three square meals a day, you'd go, you'd miss meals, you'd miss days, what you go days without eating and you had to maintain energy and you had to maintain muscle mass, the body evolved in an incredible system to take some of the stored body fat, combust that as fuel in the muscles, take other parts of that fat, send it to the liver and make another fuel that we call ketones. Most people don't even know about the existence of ketones, but ketones are, as they say, we're born with this amazing ability to create these ketones. The liver, under the right circumstances, the liver can make 750 calories a day worth of this fuel, worth of ketones. So the idea behind the ketogenic diet was, let's get away from this dependency on carbohydrate. Let's get away from this having to eat carbohydrates every couple of hours and have our blood sugar go up because the carbs convert to glucose and that causes insulin and insulin takes the glucose out of the bloodstream because it wants to get rid of it and our blood sugar drops and we get hungry again and we have to eat more carbs and you go on this roller coaster all day long and when I say all day long, I'm talking for decades, most people start with the first meal, their parents, the first solid food, their parents give them as carbohydrate based. So we lose this ability to burn fat, we lose this ability to make ketones and use ketones efficiently, we become carbohydrate dependent for most of our lives. So the ketogenic diet and what we call keto in general is a way of training your body to get back to this this flexibility, this metabolic flexibility where the body can extract energy not just from carbohydrates, which most people do, but from fat on your plate of food, the fat on your hips and thighs and belly, the carbohydrate on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen in your muscles, the ketones that your liver is making and you become metabolically flexible to the extent that you don't really ever run out of energy because you always have an energy source, your body knows how to take, if there's no food immediately available, the body just goes hmm, I think I'll take it off my thighs and combust it in the muscles, I'll send some of the liver, I'll send the ketones that are made there to fuel the brain, we won't need carbohydrates, we'll go as long as you want, a couple meals, a couple days, we don't care, we got this handled, so the body, we train the body to become metabolically flexible this way. The other thing, and I think the most important aspect of this, is that hunger, appetite and cravings dissipate or go away in many cases, so where most people who are carbohydrate dependent are living one meal to the next, like okay, we just had breakfast, what time's lunch? And we better have a snack before lunch. Gotta have a snack, a mid-morning, a coffee break in the morning, you know, or a pick me up because I'm gonna feel like taking a nap at 2.30 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon if I don't have a bagel or an energy bar, that's the latest one, you know, and then go home and have dinner and then maybe have a snack watching TV. This is not only antithetical to health, it's also a pattern that the predominant, like most people in this country engage in. We just weigh too much food and the problem is it's driven by hunger. You know, people actually feel hunger because it's a hormonal dysregulation that they're causing by their choices of food and so if I can, you know, educate and instruct people on other choices of food that would have a different effect and would cause their bodies to up-regulate enzyme systems that take fat out of storage and combust it, that would up-regulate enzyme systems that help in the conversion of other fats into ketones to use as fuel that would improve what we call mitochondrial biogenesis, actually increase the number of power plants in the cell where the fat burns, improve the efficiency of those power plants, of those mitochondria. You literally repattern, reprogram your body to become fat adapted and keto adapted and it is such a sense of freedom for everybody who does this. Wow! So, how does somebody sign up for this? He's signed up. You go to the store and you buy Primal Kitchen Mayo. Well, I'm doing this for a purpose. This is fat. Yes. This is, I mean, 100% fat. Yes, basically fat. And you're telling me that one of the ways to get this is you should eat fat. Yes. But fat makes you fat. Come on, Mark. Look at you. God bless, God bless Susan Powder. Remember her? I do. Fat makes you fat. I'm like, alright, I bought into that too by the way and I know you did as well. I did. It made sense, right? It made sense. Fat doesn't make you fat and in fact, in order to burn fat, you have to provide some, typically some form of fat to stoke the fire. So it's really the absence of carbohydrate that prompts the body to go into this ketogenic state. This, and by ketogenic, we need the genesis of ketones. We're making ketones. Because typically we don't make ketones if we're living on a carbohydrate-based, carb-dependency state most of the time. There's no need to. The body says I got plenty of fuel. I've got this glucose in the bloodstream. I know you're going to eat every two hours. That's cool. Even every four hours. You know, the brain is happy with the glucose, insulin which is higher because of all the carbohydrate. Insulin locks fat into the fat cells. So you can't combust that fat. You just become, and over time, excess calories then get converted to stored body fat, which historically is awesome. Imagine, you know, a million years ago or 500,000 years ago or whatever, you come across some food and you go, okay, I'm finally finding some food after a couple of days and you don't just eat to, you know, you keep eating. Your brain is wired to overeat that food. And we evolved the system and it's so elegant. A system that takes the extra calories from that food that we overate and converts them into energy that we, instead of carrying five gallon buckets around with us, saw through the woods and everything, we store this on our hips, on our butt, on our thighs, right around the center of gravity so that we can carry it with us and have access to the fuel whenever we run out of fuel. It's a beautiful system. It's a beautiful system as long as you also have the ability to take that fuel out of storage and burn it, and that's what most people have lost. So in order to, in order to get there, you have to withhold carbohydrates. You have to say, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut back on my intake of sugars and sweets and sweetened beverages and pies, cakes, candies, cookies, and, and this doesn't mean you have to, like, vegetables are basically free on, on a keto diet. It doesn't mean you have to sacrifice. I tell people when you start keto, do not let yourself go hungry. The first three weeks, you're just going to train your body to burn fat. I don't care what happens. I don't care if you don't lose weight. I can pretty much guarantee you won't gain weight, but I don't care if you don't lose weight that first three weeks. I want your body to adapt to this knowledge that there are not going to be that many carbohydrates available. It's going to be a different situation in terms of the environment and, and as a result, and it doesn't happen in a day or a meal or a day or whatever, but over a couple of days, a couple of weeks, the body says, oh, that's what's going on. So I'm going to up-regulate. I'm going to start building more of these mitochondria. I'm going to, the brain starts to understand how to use ketones better and more efficiently. The liver starts pumping ketones out and everything's running quite smoothly. And at that point, about three weeks in, when I say you're fat and keto adapted, and that's three weeks of having restricted carbs to say 50 or fewer grams a day, we could talk about what that looks like, and you're basically there. And from, from that point on, it's really how, how closely can you adhere to a program that's within reason. I'm not saying you have to eat 50 grams of carbs the rest of your life. In fact, what I strive for with metabolic flexibility is what I call the keto zone. Once you've done the work, once you've built a metabolic machinery, once you become metabolically flexible, then I can have a day where I eat nothing, feel fine. I can have a day where I eat a lunch and a dinner, feel fine. I can have a day where I eat 175 or 200 grams of carbs and feel fine. What's the difference? There's no difference. I feel fine. That's all that matters. All that matters is I'm able to go about my life without any conscious knowledge that oh my god, I screwed things up because I was supposed to be keto and then I wasn't and I felt like crap. If you feel like crap after that, you're not keto adapted. So, give me an idea. Most Americans are not keto adapted. They don't have metabolic flexibility. They can't turn from sugar burning to fat burning. And people hear about the keto flu or the Adkins flu. How do you get people through that transition phase? So there are a number of ways to do that. In my previous book, the keto reset diet, we talked about a six-week induction phase, if you will, six weeks of transitioning stair-stepping to mostly a primal blueprint type diet, which is just basically cutting out breads and pastas and cereals, but you could still have starchy tubers. You could still have peas and beans and things like that that were natural, but would still keep you at around 100, 120 grams of carbs a day. And that just gets your body used to having fewer carbs. Most people eat three, four, five hundred grams of carbs a day. No, come on. I'm telling you no. You absolutely know that. It's scary how much the world depends on carbohydrate. So when you, but if you eliminate all the toxic foods and you come down to this list of, you know, helpful foods that are all natural, that are on the perimeter of, you know, the store, you can pretty much eat what you want. So my first rule of thumb is they say, don't let yourself go hungry. This is not about you struggling and suffering to get to a certain point. This is about you with grace and ease transitioning your body to a point where it's, first of all, okay with not eating a lot of sugar and not eating every couple of hours. And then once you get to that point, then all you have to do is find 50 or 60 grams of carbs per day that you cut from that. And then the transition becomes quite easy. Then it's, there's really no keto flu. A lot of people who claim to get a keto flu and this is a, this is a sense of like a little bit of malaise, a little bit of dizziness, a little bit of lightheadedness, because the brain hasn't yet gotten used to the lowered glucose and hasn't really gotten the message that it's fine to be burning ketones all the time. The brain actually thrives more on ketones than it does on glucose. But that transition takes a while. And any of these things that we do to the human body, you know, evolution created this amazing system as I said, and one of the aspects of the system is it, is that it, it likes the status quo until you prove to it that the status quo is no longer going to be. So if, if you do thing a meal, one, for one meal or two meals, the body goes, now I'm resisting that because that's not enough time for me to even think about changing. Because if I'm going to use resources, if this body is going to use resources to build more enzyme systems, to make more mitochondria, to increase bone density, to increase, those all are expensive resource using things, you gotta, you gotta figure out how to trick the body into doing that by giving the genetic signals that cause genes that, to turn on that, that build muscle, to cause the genes that turn on that make mitochondria, or that make bones stronger, or that support the immune system. All of these are well within our control as humans, based largely on choices we make with the foods that we choose to eat, how much sleep we get, how well we control stress, the types of exercise we choose to do, you know, you choose to do one type of exercise, you become long and skinny and gaunt, you choose to do another type of exercise, you become, you know, larger and more muscular and stronger. So my, my life's work has been really about identifying these hidden genetic switches that we all have, and exposing them to people and saying, here's, here's something you might try, if this is your goal. Cool. You mentioned this already, but I want to get back to this. Should you, your book is Keto for Life. Should I always be in ketosis? So that's kind of a bait and switch, I guess, because, well it's also, you've worked with publishers, and so you come up with a, you come up with a title and, and you like your title, and they like yours, and you wind up putting them together. This is, this is a longevity book. So this is, yeah, this is, this is a book about how to live a longer, happier, healthier, more productive, loving life. And so Keto for Life was, and because Keto was my last book, they needed the transition, it's, it's great. But what, what I'm talking about, and when I talk about Keto, and here's a good, a good segue to make that distinction. So Keto is a way of, of eating, a way of living, that embodies this low carb methodology. But it doesn't just require, or involve, or necessitate low carb. You can go Keto just by not eating. So if you, if you don't eat for three days, you're in ketosis. You prompt the body to, to create these ketones. Now it's a lot easier if you don't eat for three days, if you become Keto adapted. If you are a sugar burner and you don't eat for three days, you know, that's where you have the visions. That's where you see Elvis and Jesus. And I mean you see the whole, the whole thing, right? So, and the crash and burn. The crash and burn, that's the crash and burn. So to ease your way into this, this Keto way of, of eating has as much to do with how often you eat, the choices that you make when you eat, the fractal nature of eating. So as I talk a lot about in, in the book, and I, and I talked a lot on the podcast, I don't know if you know a guy named Art Devaney. Oh yeah. Yeah. So, so Art, you know, he's always been ahead of the curve on everything. And, and one of the things he started 10 years ago was this, he just says, I eat fractally. Some days I eat a meal, some days I don't eat, some days I eat three meals, some days a big meal, a small meal, and he changes it up because that's the human experience. Historically, humans didn't have three portion controlled meals a day plus two snacks, you know, plus a bedtime, pick me up or whatever. So Keto for Life is really about adopting this way, this Keto eating strategy that allows you to maintain metabolic flexibility whether you go off Keto for a couple of days and say I'm going to have, you know, I'm going on vacation, I'm going to have pasta, you know, and suffer the consequences. But, like I went, you know, I moved to Miami and my wife and I found this restaurant and, you know, I hadn't had pasta for, seriously, for 15 years and we found a pasta dish that's got this amazing, you know, truffle Alfredo sauce and it was gluten-free pasta and we like, you know, so once a week we would go there and order salmon and the pasta and split both and that would be our meal. Look, I love to eat, I love food, I want every bite of food I put in my mouth to taste great, so I'm not advocating for sacrifice and discipline and I'm just advocating for mindful eating and ultimately arriving at a place where you are so intuitively tuned into your own body that you don't need to think about it. You will go, you know, I could eat the whole cheesecake but, you know, I know that's not going to serve me so I'll have a bite. That'll serve me. You know, I can go without eating this next meal because I don't have time to eat and I've got some things to do and I'm confident that my body will have zero negative consequences from that and I won't be hangry and I won't think about not eating. I'll just, it's such, as I say, it's such a level of freedom that most people never get to experience. When you think about how much of your life is tied to eating and regular meal times and being hungry and feeding the hunger and most cases unnecessarily, like you're not really hungry, you're just like your mouth is watering because it's 1230 and it's lunchtime. You know, you bring up a good point. So many people become hangry when they start a diet. That's the low blood sugar. That's not having become fat adapted yet and that's why diets don't work if you just count calories. If you're just saying, well I'm gonna, as Keto sounds good but I don't think I could go without eating carbs, I think I'll just count calories. The discipline works as long as it does and then it stops and most people who are carb centric eaters who start to cut back on all their calories, they get hungry, they get hangry, now they're fighting it the whole way. Typically they have this entirely different physiology that when they don't eat, instead of the body just going, hey I got this, I'm going to burn fat, I'm going to make ketones, it's all gonna be great, love what you're doing. The body goes, wait a minute, I'm used to carbohydrates, what's going on? The brain starts to get panicky, sends signals to the liver, I mean to the adrenals. The adrenals secret cortisol. Cortisol then goes out and literally tears down muscle tissue to find a couple of amino acids that can send to the liver to become glucose and it becomes a very destructive process and that's the experience that most people had dieting in the 70s, 80s and 90s and when you used to watch The Biggest Loser, well you didn't watch it. Oh lord. You know you see these people lose 200 pounds in a season, 150, 200 pounds, then you hear about them three years later, they're back to where they were before and worse and bigger because they they lost muscle mass and their metabolisms got all screwed up and now it took fewer calories to fill them and yet they still had the hunger thing and it's horrible. So the the keto lifestyle really sort of fixes all that and and does so without necessitating that you be ketogenic your whole your whole life. You know the term ketosis is an interesting term because osis means an excess of something. So ketosis basically means you have an excess of ketones in the bloodstream. Well when you first start eating this way, the liver's like I can do this and the liver starts pumping out ketones and because you haven't built a metabolic machinery to burn them you you you can take a blood test and you go oh my gosh I'm four millimolar I'm six millimolar yeah I'm in ketosis well that doesn't mean anything to me that you're in ketosis I mean that's you're making ketones but if you're not using them you're not you're not getting the benefits of this lifestyle. So you have to build a metabolic machine or in there's it takes it it takes a little bit of time and a little bit of there's an area where you you have to be disciplined about it but and there's certain workouts that you can do that will enhance the effect more quickly but there's a point at which you become so keto adapted that the liver which started out going frantically pumping out ketones and you pee them out and that's why you show purple on these pee strips and you breathe them out and that's why your friends would stay away and now the liver's going see I know what you're doing here you're not gonna you know you're not gonna fool me I want to save I want to conserve energy because that's a human that's a human experience is to not use resources waste resources and and the body recognizes that once you get keto adapted and fat adapted most of the work you do throughout the day can be fueled by fat so your muscles are now they're not burning glycogen in a little bit but they're not they're mostly burning fat and you can do 85 90 92% of all your work just burning fat and that's a beautiful thing so now you're as you're just walking around the day or you're doing you know minor tasks and even going to the gym you're mostly burning fat now the brain doesn't burn fat the brain is using the ketones so you got the muscles using the fat the brains using ketones you don't need glucose very much at all a little bit for red blood cells and a few other things but your body actually makes glucose it's I it's again it's so elegant Steve so you got a triglyceride that the the three fatty acids get combusted the glycerol becomes part of a mechanism that makes glucose right it's it's so elegant it's almost like a closed loop so your liver just goes oh I see what you're doing when you go to the gym and you do all this work your legs you might do a leg day and your legs require 30 times as much energy to go through that work while you're doing your legs how much energy does your brain require same as usual same as usual so the brain just goes like this all day long right and and if all you're doing is supplying ketones for the brain the liver gets it the liver goes I'm just gonna pump out enough ketones for the brain I don't need to waste these resources and pee them out or or you know exhale them or sweat them out and so what you find is that people who have been in a keto lifestyle for a long time don't even register as in ketosis on these monitors because they're so well adapted the body's just got it dialed in it's it's a it's such a beautiful thing this this body that we have that's great information because I have a number of patients and as you know and in all my books I have a chapter of the keto plant paradox system and a ton of my patients will come in and say I'm in ketosis and you know my my strips say I'm ketosis or my breath machine or my blood says I'm really in ketosis I'm in huge ketosis and I haven't lost an ounce this doesn't work yeah and I think your explanation is incredibly good yeah that just because you're pumping out all these ketones doesn't mean you're actually using them no and in some cases people will use the sort of the the dirty keto or the short cuts and they'll say okay I heard MCT oil is a is a is a great substrate to make ketones so they drink MCT oil it's you drink too much and you and you have some digestive upset but that's true or ketone salts and because they think what they're doing is they're chasing the ketones and you got to chase the results yet you don't it I don't care about the ketones I want the results and the fact that I know what's going on below the surface I know that you're making ketones that's all like that I care about so if you show me that you're in ketosis that's great I think that's an awesome first path for you in a first couple steps but do the work do the you know work out in the gym and and then what you will find and I bet this is happening with with your patients we don't need to eat nearly as many calories as we think we do I I amaze and almost scare myself on how few calories I eat some days and I'm still carrying a little bit of you know mass here you know muscle mass and it's it's amazing to think that this system that we evolved can become a closed loop if you think about it this way all right you don't eat for say you don't eat for three days what happens body goes well if you're keto adapted which you already are if you're an ancestral human or keto now okay the body will take fat out of fat stores and you know I'm 10% body fat and I have enough fat on me to walk 300 miles without you know last a long time last a long time so the body takes a fat out of fat cells and it uses it for daily you know for daily movement and getting around it sends some of that fat to the liver to become ketones and as I said that liver can make up to 750 key calories worth of ketones a day it takes some of the glycerol from the triglyceride molecules uses that as a substrate to make that whatever little glucose for 40 grams a day or something like that that it needs and then a whole new set of variables enters and I think this is amazing there's a there's a genetic response an epigenetic response to these changes that causes protein to be spared so whereas on a normal day we probably eat too much protein and certainly from one meal to the next if we eat too much protein it's easy we just deeminate it and pee it out but now the body tends to spare protein and if you're not burning protein because you're not supposed to combust protein protein supposed to be for structural repair repair then you've got this system that is burning fat creating ketones a little bit of glucose sparing protein and so when you see people who do who been good at this will fast for five days and and not lose much in the way of muscle mass a pound pound and a half which they get back as most of that is glycogen and water and they're burning off fat and I suspect most of the fat they're burning off is visceral fat which is another major reason to do fasts once you get keto adapted and get metabolically flexible but this closed loop is so cool because if you think well how many calories do I need to get buying a day and you probably don't need that many if your liver's cranking out five six hundred enough for the brain and your and your body is can combusting fat for energy and your sparing protein you probably didn't need that many calories to get through a day in the first place it might be twelve hundred eleven hundred twelve hundred calories for some people some people thought up until now they did the the the math online and oh I can have eighteen hundred seventy five calories a day well you can and you make maybe can get away with it but that doesn't mean it's good for you I want to take a little bit of a diversion here and say most people tend to see what they can get away with so most people in life are like and it's human nature and I'm not I do it is I'm not judging but you know like how little work can I do at work and still get paid and not get fired right and and you know how how easy can I do this workout not get caught by my trainer what but one of those things is how much food can I eat and not gain weight what's the biggest amount of this meal I can eat and not feel like a pig what's the biggest piece of cheesecake I can have and and not feel guilty about having had that and so we tend to ask permission like okay they filled my plate up that must be a serving it must be okay or they gave me a you know cheesecake factory gave me a slice this big they call that one serving so as long as I don't have two servings I'm good to go meanwhile you're you know your granny might have made you a cheesecake and she cut you a little slice like that well that's what granny thinks is a serving so the idea really is like people will say well how much of this can I eat and what can I get away with I've a couple years ago I just thought you know that's a that's a strange way of looking at it I go to the gym and I see people on a treadmill 45 minutes 50 minutes in the treadmill why are you running so much oh because I love to eat wait a minute you're doing all this work struggling and suffering and sweating and groaning just so you can have a few more bites of something you probably shouldn't have in the first place like that is so you realize how just bizarre that is and yet people do that I look I exercise because I love to eat I drank eight diet coke today so I could have more to eat I mean no perfect example a perfect example you can't you carry this you audit your your day you know and you carry this little tally pad with you okay I can have this tonight because I didn't have that for lunch and it's crazy so I thought it's at one point I said you know let's let's flip this on it's on edge and say what's the least amount of food I can eat maintain muscle mass maintain energy not get sick not to cold and most importantly not be hungry because hunger ruins everything hunger hunger is the great destroyer of any of these programs so I started looking at what's what was the least amount of food I could have and it's and it's a time it's like half of what I used to think I needed yes I'm not to get by in a day it's not much and I think so I think when people are consistently you know people some people use keto as an excuse to eat more food because they're eating a lot of fat right they think a lot because I'm glad you said that yeah um how often do you think that is happening in the in the keto movie I think less so now because it got called out a bunch of a bunch maybe a year or two ago I was one of the people calling it out but you can't you can't hide behind that some of the early studies on keto diets ketogenic diets would show that you could eat 4500 calories a day and not gain weight and you will like how could that be well how that is is if you're eating mostly fat a little bit of protein and no carb you don't create any insulin an insulin is a nutrient storage hormone so you're not storing fat your body's figuring out a way to combust it by thermogenesis and a number of other probably unhealthy ways in which to dispose of this excess energy but because you're not creating insulin you can't you can't really store it I mean protein is a does have an effect on insulin but but yeah high fat really high fat like 90% fat you know 10% or 15% protein diets yeah so but that was interesting because because people read that study and thought well okay I can eat 4500 calories a day I'm not getting weight but you're not going to lose weight because the idea behind losing weight is you want to lose fat you want to burn fat you want to combust the stored body fat and so when you get good at when you get keto adapted and and you're in that keto is what I call the keto zone and metabolically flexible then you can play around with eating smaller smaller smaller quantities of food and that's really when you're like every time you think you need 500 calories to get through the next six hours you think well I could eat a meal or I could take it off my butt or my thighs and and my body won't know won't care won't won't you know have any negative consequences either way so I may as well choose not to eat this meal and and and lose that and burn combust that body fat but mark aren't you going to get hungry as I said that it's it's so crazy what happens to your appetite when you develop this metabolic flexibility the reason you have an appetite for the most part is this these you know leptin and grayland balance and and insulins involved there and glucagon and there's these hormones in the body that are sort of trying to keep you homeostasis and we screw we screw it up and throw it off with this high-carb diet once you get you eliminate the carbs and you get to the point where you're eating quality fats and quality proteins and a little bit of vegetables and well or a fair amount of vegetables for that matter you you get to the point where the body always has energy like the first thing that happens with with people who go keto is they they they sort of like they can't eat three meals a day because it's just too much food so most people wake up in the morning and I promote this I say well just see how once you're keto adapted see how long you can go without being hungry in the morning and most people within a couple of days go I made it to noon no problem I have a cup of coffee myself at 7 o'clock in the morning and then I don't eat till 1 30 some days don't eat lunch and it's and I work out in the morning I work out fasted I don't eat after the workout I don't feel compelled to I recognize that there's a there's an effect of working out fasted and then not eating afterwards that causes the body to release a pulse of growth hormone and testosterone and if you eat a post-workout meal right after say doing a heavy leg session or a heavy training session if it's a high carb meal then the insulin in that meal will blunt the the growth hormone and the testosterone spike and that's what I used to do my whole life was I would you know again back in the 80s and 90s the mantra was eat a post-workout meal that was 10% or 20% protein 4 to 1 carbohydrate protein and you'd you take advantage of the glycogen re-synthesis window which your body makes like a gin anyway even when you don't eat any carbohydrate at all all this does is speed it up and why do you want to speed it up well theoretically in the old days you want to speed it up because I'm gonna go run 15 miles again tomorrow and the next day and the next day which is as we know ludicrous since you brought that up many of our listeners don't know this but you were an incredibly accomplished endurance endurance athlete I mean incredibly don't be modest you had a lot of serious health problems can you talk about that for a moment well so the as I said the the when I was a runner exclusively I ran 100 miles a week on average some weeks I went 120 and some weeks I only ran 80 for years at a time and that's when I developed osteoarthritis in my feet which I presumed was a result of all the miles that's when I had the worst of my IBS my irritable bowel syndrome that's when I had the itises and in fact it wasn't even the the arthritis my feet the caught that prompted me to quit becoming a elite marathoner it was tendonitis in my hips that just would not resolve and that's really I think as I look back on it it's the diet the highly inflammatory diet certainly not helped by by the pounding you know of a hundred plus miles a week on a body it was probably only designed to do 50 or 60 miles a week so those were very frustrating times for me because I finished fifth in US national championship in the marathon in 1980 qualified for the Olympic trials of course 1980 was the year that we didn't send a team to the Olympics and and then I two years later finished fourth in Ironman in Hawaii and you know so I had I had a certain level of of expertise and prowess and endurance competition and later on I said do you know the VersaClimber that Jim I set the world record for the mile climb in that 5,280 feet 22 minutes and 40 seconds and I don't think it's been broken since I yeah so anyway so I was chasing you know performance my whole life and thwarted it turns it seems at every turn by my my diet which I only discovered after I long since retired people would say well if you had to over again would you would you go back and change your diet and I'd say no because actually the way I got to where I am now was so profound I probably wouldn't have appreciated it if I'd started out that way so well suppose you had a perfect diet you know I wrote in my last book about the dangers of marathons and long distance training an opinion yeah I wrote a book a couple years ago called primal endurance and it was basically my capitulation it was my I had enough friends who said I don't care what you say Mark you had you ran marathons you enjoyed it you got a lot of it I want to run a marathon damn it how do I do it and I'm like all right if you're gonna run a marathon I'll show you how to do it with the least amount of pain suffering sacrifice and so on and and so I would certainly train what we call train low race high we train low carb I would race with my carb tanks more full I would make my long slow runs longer and slower and I would make my short fast runs shorter and faster I would do much more strength training in the gym I develop what we call maximum sustained power over time so I'd be much more methodical about about breaking the component parts of competition down into their essential elements when you're an endurance athlete particularly a runner you just run and typically and the reason I talk about making my longer runs longer and slower is we we talk about this maximum aerobic function that we have and so we use a number 180 minus your age so if you train at 180 minus your age the lab results across thousands of people have shown that that's the heart rate at which below which you're using mostly fat so you're using a lot of oxygen and mostly fat above that heart rate you're starting to burn more glycogen and you're tapping in the glycogen stores now why is that important well if you want to run long distance you want to get as much energy from fat as possible you don't want to tap in your glycogen stores but people will come back to me and say well wait a minute if I if I train at 180 minus my age and I'm you know I'm 30 years old or whatever and I'm training at 150 mark I can race at 165 or 170 I can train all day at 170 175 and I'm going so slow at 150 and my answer is well okay you're going slow because you suck at burning fat you're good at burning sugar I was great at burning sugar I mean I was you know I ran how I ran burning but burning mostly sugar but I also did a number on my heart from having done that I ran in what we call the no man's land for the longest time of black the black hole of training where you're not going slow enough to improve aerobic capacity and you're not going fast enough to improve anaerobic threshold you're just beating yourself up you're practicing herding literally and that's what so many runners do in this black hole of training at you know heart rate of one of like 80 to 87 90 percent of their of their max and they spend 50 percent of their time training in that black hole with no appreciable benefits that's why I see these guys like well how many marathons you do this year I did eight marathons this year oh really what you know okay well I did 340 342 345 346 and 340 okay well that like you're doing that much work you should really improve but they're just practicing to run that same speed the whole time so there's a way to do it but and I am this is what I tell people Steve I as I say all right if you want to run a marathon I'll let you run to you run one to finish that's great that's a belt buckle thing that's a life a bucket list thing if you really like if you really like it I'll let you run one more to see how fast you can go and if you haven't broken three hours as a man you're not a runner find another sport that's that's pretty much the way I look at it all right good advice from the guy who hate to piss anybody off there who's the avid marathoner but okay so you know your book is not just about eating it's it's an amazing exercise program what should your our listeners who want to get more exercise but you don't want to go do a marathon it got give me a couple things I mean walking is still the best thing anybody can do like you know I saw you and your wife and we were out doing a hike around San Jean cap for I don't know if you did the whole oh yeah we do that thing because we because we rarely do that small cap where we saw you but walking is spectacular it's what it's the most human of all activities we're bipedal by the way how do we not fall over every just like we're like a segue that you know how we maintain this upright position walking of course you know swimming and easy cycling with an occasional hard session thrown in but if all you ever do is walk you're 80 percent of where you need need to be and I'm talking you know walking an appreciable amount walking 30 to 30 minutes to an hour a day on average so some days it can be an hour and a half and some days nothing that's really the best and then I and I think two days in the week two days in the gym per week is is all you need in terms of lifting weights any more than that and you're kind of you're either not doing it hard enough when you're doing it or you're you're not going to the gym for the right reasons you just want to chat it up and see people which a lot of people too oh yeah yeah yeah so all right you do recommend a few supplements I want to talk about three of them collagen so collagen should be the fourth macronutrient in my mind we have you know fat protein and carbohydrate I think collagen should be a separate category because I think it's it's a critical component of it's the collagen in our body skin hair nails connected tissue tendons ligaments fascia is all collagen so the most prevalent amount of protein in our body is of collagen in nature it's it's collagenous material and there's certain collagen peptides that we need to get in order to keep up with the turnover of collagen and we don't get them in the standard diet today until 200 years ago or a hundred years ago you know we ate all parts of the animal we ate nose to tail so you ate you didn't eat just eat the choice cuts of meat the prime rib and the T bone but you ate the knuckles and the and the gristle and the organs and if it was chicken or fish you ate the skin and if it was after all of the nether parts of the animal were consumed you took the carcass and boiled it down and made a stock and everybody did that and so we all had access to collagen over the years as that sort of fell by the wayside at least in the fifties and sixties your mother my mother they took Nox gelatin for their nails and then we had Jell-O we had Jell-O which was you know give it whatever a sign at whatever value you want it was a source of collagen it's gelatin gelatin collagen pretty much the same thing so kids got collagen in their diet from gelatin well after Jell-O had a little bit of falling off because of sugar and sweetness and stuff like that in the last 10 or 15 years there's no source of collagen in our diet for anybody and so we're seeing like among elite athletes in you know basketball players who are tearing MCLs ACLs and to kill these tendons and the surgeons will say geez I used to be able to like have to hack through these these sinewy parts now they cut like butter it's because people don't get enough collagen in their diet so I'm a huge fan of consuming collagen I take my company makes a collagen supplement that's how much I liked the results I got when I started taking collagen I do anywhere from 15 to 25 grams a day but you're not telling our listeners to go eat Jell-O look somebody's gonna hear crap Jell-O is Jell-O is look if you're not eating if you're not eating collagen in any other source Jell-O is a great source Jell-O is a good way to get it so I'm just saying minus the sugar well they make it without you know they make a low sugar Jell-O now so I have to say that go ahead how about vitamin D so vitamin D Steve why do they call it a vitamin it ought to be a hormone it is a hormone but it's it got classified a long time ago and that science for you the science is settled and it's a vitamin vitamin D is probably the most important single vitamin of all of them and you know it's it's integral part of the functioning of cells it's you know we we our immune system depends far more on vitamin D than on vitamin C for instance oh yeah you know and you know critical component in the body's ability to recognize pre-cancerous conditions and make the repairs to them and typically if we're out the sun we have this again we have this design system that says we get 20 minutes of of a sun time a day on unprotected skin and the body takes cholesterol yeah the much maligned molecule in the skin converts to the vitamin D and we're good to go most people don't spend time out in the sun most people have been scared away from the sun by their dermatologists people in northern climates who don't have access to sun for most of the year because of where they live the like those people should all be taking vitamin D and you ask which form you know ergo calciferol coli calciferol mushroom-based I like I like a blend of all three of those because some people absorb different versions of it better than others and you know you might have a different opinion on that but I like to have people have if you're not getting any sun like even like I'm tan most of the time but if I'm not in the sun for a couple weeks I start down on vitamin D it's that important to me I want to have high levels of vitamin D throughout my body me too me too alright so we got a couple of primal kitchen plant paradox compatible products here tell me all about primal kitchen so when you clean up your diet you get rid of the sugars and the industrial seed oils again you get rid of corn oil and canola oil and soybean oil and processed hydrogenated oils and trans fats and you come down to this list of healthy choices vegetables eggs chicken fish meat it could get a little boring unless you figured out a different method of preparation or sauces and dressings and toppings and things to put on these foods to give them variety so that you would eat them and want to consume them on a regular basis so I've been writing about food for 15 20 years I recognize that nobody was making the kind of sauces and dressings and toppings and condiments that I would like to have exist the kind that you could use with reckless abandon throughout most of our lives well this is you know use mayonnaise sparingly it tastes great but it's bad for you you know or as Oprah used to say we'll take your fork and go dip a piece of lettuce and then go show it to the salad dressing and then you know and then and then eat it or dip your tongue your that's right dick your fork in the salad dressing and then go stab some lettuce please I'm like you know I want to have I want something to taste great and is good for me and the more I put on my food the better it is so we launched Primal Kitchen with that exact that that mission statement which is to make you know helpful eating exciting and fun again and our first product was this Primal Kitchen Mayo which is made with avocado oil organic eggs from Caged Free Hands organic vinegar from non-gmo beets no sugar it is it and it took off it's you know it's been for years been the biggest selling condiment in all of Whole Foods and we're now in 20,000 stores throughout the country with us and that sort of begat a whole new we have four flavors of mayonnaise we have 14 flavors of salad dressing and the dressings all use avocado oil as as the only oil in the dressing and avocado oil is recognized as the highest heart healthy you know it's got the most mono unsaturated profile of any of the oils that you can get typically well so you you've recently sold this company yeah a big food company yes I take it you're actively involved yeah hundred percent I'm that's my face on the label right there man that's me so how how do you prevent what's happened to other people when big food takes a really good company over I don't know what you know what you hear about other companies recently because it's not happening recently recently what happens is big food goes wow these guys are really crushing it they know what they're doing we've sort of lost touch with the marketplace so they bought us because of what we bring to them and we bring so so and by the way they bought us and then there's like they're like okay we're not going to touch you go do what you do so we still have our offices in oxenard we still have everybody that was you know with the company when it got acquired everybody is going about their business we still have great r&d sessions what what craft Heinz has done is given us resources so we have more distribution we have a little deeper pockets to sort of do some r&d and stuff but no we are we will not be changing this at all and if we do it's because I say I found a better way not a compromise and and I think that's you're going to see more and more of that that big food is now acquiring the you know the better what they call the better for you category with an eye toward not toward diluting it and making it worse but an eye toward like learning like okay this is clearly where the consumer wants us to go and some of the brands that we have can never get there because they're iconic and we can't change those so this is the face of the future that's great to hear yeah yeah because I have some friends who are sat richer but sadder and wiser because their products have gotten changed by big food but okay so that covers a lot that's really good and we've dazzled people with your knowledge that I've been thankful enough to her here for years so where as if anybody really needs to know where can they find oh you know Amazon Barnes and Noble everywhere books are sold keto for life yeah and your products are everywhere yeah they're there you know we have the mail and some of the products from Costco or and you know Target Whole Foods Safeway Kroger Publix but you know on down the line pretty much everywhere now and Instagram blogs where so I'm Mark Sisson primal on Instagram it's just a fair amount of just shirtless shots of me so you don't go there then I've got Mark's Daily Apple on Instagram and Mark's Daily Apple dot-com is the blog yeah now in our 13th year 14th year and going strong you know an article every day for 14 years yeah and I think that's it all right cool great to see you you too man all right well we'll see you in the south of France sure all right time for an audience question Janine Jackson on YouTube asks I am wondering if there is a way to prepare corn that removes the lectins it is quickly mentioned on one of your vision videos that the process used to make corn masa may do this I am hoping to return corn tortillas and grits to my diet I'd also love to add polenta and plain tortilla chips I bet you would there's no human need for corn corn is one of the most mischievous molecules that you can eat and quite frankly if you are gluten sensitive or gluten intolerance 70% of you will react to the molecules in corn as if it was gluten so yes the Indians were smart enough to treat corn with lie to produce hominy I can tell you the stories of what happened when corn was introduced to northern Italy and look up the word Cretan sometime and you'll find out the horrors of introducing corn that was not treated with lie so I mean millet makes a great polenta makes a great oatmeal makes a great grits you don't need corn in your diet just stay away from it that's all before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes Google Play Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you