 One of the biggest problems that we've encountered and maybe you guys can agree or disagree with me that I think in fitness is that before it used to be that there wasn't a lot of information. Now it seems like there's too much. Well, there's just a lot of convoluted. Yeah, information, but most of it's not accurate. Most of it's not helpful. Like they're going to push a study that's going to promote them selling their supplement or they're going to promote a diet that's going to help sell their book or their knowledge. A lot of bias. A lot of bias, a lot of falsities, a lot of it based on advertising. So it's like, hey, lose this much weight in 60 days. And so people are getting shredded. I can't believe and I take it for granted because we've been in the industry as long as we have, we've been as professionals and this is what we love to do. And I take for granted just how confusing it is because we know how to sift through, we know what's right and what's wrong. And we get questions all the time from fans and you think to yourself like, well, you should know the answer to that, but they don't. These are questions that we take for granted. Well, this is a lot of what inspired the 30 days of coaching for us is, how do we take all this information, even think about all the information that we've put out there over the last two years. We have like almost 500 fucking episodes. So how did we take 500 episodes? That's daunting for just anybody to jump into. And most people that are just now coming on board to my public, let's be honest, the time that it takes to actually go back and listen, a lot of people aren't going to be able to do that. So how do we curate all this information and make it very, very valuable to somebody who's just now onboarding or maybe started just a little while back with us? And I think that's what inspired the 30 day of coaching is how would we take somebody who we just met and try and break down all this information that just one topic at a time, one day, one focus, one topic. Let's just break down that one thing so you can understand it on a deeper level. Our goal with the 30 days of coaching was when someone goes through all 30 days at the end of it, they should be much better off and much more well informed with fitness and nutrition and how to apply it to themselves. Not just information because you can get lots of information like you can Google protein and learn about it or Google carbohydrate or mobility or meditation or whatever and read about it. But that's part of it. The other part of it is how does it apply? How can I apply it to myself? Is this something that I can incorporate into my life? And how would I, based on my current level of fitness, where I'm at, mentally, where I'm at with all the stuff? And so what we've done is we've sequenced it out over 30 days. So every day you get a new topic. Some of them are very basic like proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Others are much more relationship to food and meditation and things that have to do with wellness and gut health. And what we do is we send you an email with bullet points of information that we think are important to know on it. But then what we do is we also send you links to episodes where we discuss those topics in detail and not only that, but we tell you the time in the episodes. So if you get an hour long, let's say it's episode 275 and that one we cover undulating calories, for example. Well, you don't have to listen to the whole episode. We'll tell you at minute, 15 minutes and 35 seconds, this is when we start that. And then you could start right there and listen to as much as you need. Well, we're breaking it down and explaining it to you. So again, at the end of this 30 days, you should be much more informed. And really the goal for us is to be able to provide this information to build our value. We really want to give back to our fans, but also build our value because we know we have great information. There's already so much that we've already recorded and put out there and the people having trouble sifting through it. Well, we're showing you what we would give someone, especially someone just getting started or somebody who's kind of confused. This is how we would organize it and it's free. We're not going to charge you a dime for it. And we're constantly updating it. We're trying to make it better and better. All you got to do is go to mind pump media.com is the first thing that pops up and just opt in. And every day you'll get an email with those links to episodes and YouTube videos. And we're going to be adding study links to this. If you want to get deeper and read actual studies that support some of the stuff that we talk about, it's awesome information. It's absolutely free. There's no nothing for again, we're just trying to build value and what we do. And it's also a great way to share. If you're already feel good on your journey, if you knew this for a while, like it's a great way to share to someone who is just getting started. You can say, Hey, look, opt in for this 30 days of coaching. You'll get all the information that you need to get you going to really get you started. And it's all organized out for them. And again, absolutely free. Yeah, my favorite part about it is Doug has also created a glossary at the end of it. So once you complete the 30 days, there is a glossary that has all the links to each specific topic. So you have a nice place that you can and I always recommend that people save that somewhere or flag it in your email. So if you want to go back and reference protein, you forgot what, you know, fat does in the body or you had questions about strength training. I mean, there's it's a great place to reference all this or share these references with other people. So awesome, excellent tool. We're getting tons of great feedback. We've literally only been doing it for about 45 days or so. So we've only had, you know, probably about 1000 or 2000 people go through it. And what we're getting as far as feedback has been phenomenal. So urge you guys to get on to mindpumpmedia.com, sign up on the pop up as soon as it pops up. And then the email will start to drip to you. With your friends and your family and just kind of spread the word. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mindpump, mindpump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews. Let's remember Cookie Crisp. It's a cereal made up of mini cookies. Yeah, a small cookies. You fat fuck. Oh, you like milk and cookies? Oh yeah, here's a cereal devoted to you, mini cookies. Like, you know, guys, I love cookies, but you know what the problem is? We know how you like that, you fatty fat. Yeah, you know what the problem with cookies is? They're kind of big and I'd like to put more of them in my mouth at the same time. I want to be able to fit a plethora of cookies in my mouth. And taking a cookie and dipping it in milk, I mean, it's like, you got to take the time. Like, what if I just could spoon it in? What if I just dump a shit ton of cookies in a bowl of milk and then eat them as much as I can fast? I feel like chips ahoy are the only cookies that you're supposed to dip in milk. And Oreos. Yeah, Oreos. Oreos and chips ahoy. All chocolate chip cookies. No, no, no, no, no, no. Now we're getting crazy. Yeah, because it has to be, chips ahoy are like hard and crunchy. And so putting in the milk kind of softens it up. If you already have a soft cookie and you put it in the milk, then it makes it like soggy. You don't want a soggy cookie. You want a wet cookie. And never peanut butter. You want a wet and hot and hard cookie. You don't want a wet and soggy cookie. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to sog it out. I like it. I like it either way. Do you drink the milk afterward? I like... You like it hard or soft in your mouth? I like when the cookie... You like it hard or soft in your mouth? Sure. I like it when pieces of the cookie... Can you say that to me? He doesn't have preferences. I like it when pieces of the cookie are in the milk. And then you have to like... Drink the milk? You drink it, but it's like chunky. I don't know if I like that. I just, I normally throw the milk out. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's... You do what? It's specifically... The only time I'll drink the milk, like, you remember... It's only for Cocoa Krispies? Chocolate milk. Oh my God, the chocolate milk. I used to actually put chocolate milk in Cocoa Krispies. Oh God, it's cereal? Oh my God, that's like... Damn it. You just like tapped into the matrix. You went all the way in. It's like dividing by zero. Like I... Oh my God. And we wonder why at 35 plus we're all fucked up now. I know, right? Borderline diabetes and here we are. Then I wash it down with some sour patches. On my way to school to eat some gummy worms. Hey son, for breakfast, here's your chocolate, chocolate milk. Put it on your Cocoa Krispies and then wash it down with some of this... Oh my God, my teeth are falling out. ...some of this high C, like super sugary, not juice. It's not juice. And the Kool-Aid man bust through. Hey, good morning. Man, we have had quite the line up the last couple weeks here, man. And I keep saying that, man, this was my favorite. Man, this is my favorite. It's been pretty rad to feel like each time we do an interview, that it won up... We're stepping up our game. Well, raw... So... I don't know if it's us or we're getting to be... No, we're just meeting cooler people. ...cool people. Like, there's a truth. We met with Rob Wolf. Fucking badass. He's a badass. He's definitely a badass. What really perked our interest with Rob, besides him having a popular podcast, is he's a former research biochemist and his specialization, a lot of the stuff he studies, has to do with autoimmune disease and cancer, which is always fascinating. Very fascinating. Especially the autoimmune aspect of it. And he's kind of known as one of the leaders of the whole paleo-ancestor diet, eat according to the way humans have evolved type. That movement, you know what I mean? Now, the thing I like about Rob is when you meet with him and talk to him about... He's not only responsible for that. He is responsible for that being involved in all the crossfits, dude. The fact that that has become the official diet... He was one of the first guys. Yeah, he is. He definitely brought those communities together. Yes, he is the man. But I want to be clear, when you talk with him, as is true with many, many times, you'll get a movement that becomes dogmatic, because the followers are dogmatic. But then you meet the person behind it, and he's not. He's not dogmatic. Which can we be honest? Let's be honest. At least I was a little nervous that that could happen, right? Of course. When we go to meet these guys, and we know that they have something like that, we are not fans of only this way of eating. I thought, man, I want to be really bummed if this really smart guy is just... This is the answer, and he totally was not like that. No, he talks about how we need to look at how we evolved evolution, and look at that along with what we know about nutrition now. Like, you need to take into... Basically, what he's saying is, why don't these areas of science converge? Like, they definitely influence each other. Like, if you study any animal, you always look at what they evolved either. Their environment, their patterns, what they're eating, like how all these things that's in front of them is affecting them, and it's just a rational way to look at them. I found that that was probably one of the most fascinating things that he brought up, and it was like this light bulb went off on my head, like, how fucking crazy is that that if we were to do any research on any animal that we would take into account, where they live, how they sleep, are they nocturnal... What their natural habitat is with their diet. Yeah, what foods are they eating, what types of things do they prey on, all these... And what have they been eating? Yeah, all that would be taken into account. But yet, when we study the human body, we just throw that out the door? That doesn't matter? How the fuck does that happen? Well, anthropologists study that. Evolutionary scientists study that, but they don't study then... They don't communicate together. They don't communicate with dieticians and nutritionists and people who work on that, just nutrition. They don't really... There's no cross-pollination there, which is good and bad, right? We do a really good job of specializing in particular areas, which is good in some ways, but in other ways is bad. I think there's more bad than good, because how can you specialize to me without taking into consideration all the other systems of the body? All these systems communicate together. We know this. We know that now. And I think he gets into this really... Well, it's because we've been successful with it. We've been successful with this model curing anabotics and vaccines. That's debatable. Well, I don't think you can debate. Western medicine has made some tremendous leaps and bounds. Sure. And the problem is now we're encountering issues that are chronic and not acute. Like, we've dealt with the acute issues. It's the chronic issues now. It's the lingering problems that have now started to really pop up. Yeah. And we don't have... The way we've designed our system is based on how we've dealt with the acute issues, not how we deal with these chronic issues. And all he's saying is, we need to take this into account. And he talks about this quite a bit. We watched a video, a YouTube video, which I highly recommend. Everybody watch. That's amazing. It doesn't have more views. It should have millions of views. The title of it is Rob Wolf, Darwinian Medicine. But he breaks it down and explains it. And there are some examples he gives of some of these cultures where they eat high carbohydrate and high fat. And they break all the rules, yet they're super healthy. Like, how is that possible? We'll put the link in the show notes. We should. Those that don't know already too, we've just recently started that. So I know we talk a lot about either something that one of us has used as far as products or books that one of us have read or people that we're interviewing share this type of information. Now you guys can go to our website and you guys can find all the show notes for all these episodes going forward. And there'll be direct links to any of those things, if those as far as the books. So you go to minepumpmedia.com podcast and then you'll get all the show notes right there. But yeah, Rob Wolf, Ro Best Seller, The Paleo Solution. It's like one of the Bibles of that particular movement. He has another book that just came out, rather recently called Wired to Eat. We'll have links to those on the show notes as well. He's got a podcast, which is very informative. You learn quite a bit. And again, he is not nearly as dogmatic as the Paleo, quote unquote, movement can be sometimes, especially when you look at some of these people who don't really understand it. But his podcast is called The Paleo Solution podcast. Then his website is robwolf.com. Rob spelled with two Bs at the end. Yep. So here we are talking to Rob Wolf and Joy. Rob, I want you to talk about your background again now that we're on, because you had just said your background in research. And let's go over that for a second. Oh man, it won't be as good as what it was before we recorded. But way in the deep dark history, I was a research biochemist, mainly looking at autoimmunity and cancer issues and had a lot of health problems personally. And that's kind of what drove me towards this investigation into the Paleo diet, ancestral health, evolutionary medicine. Very interesting. I have two questions for you on that. Number one, what were some of the health issues if you don't mind going into. And second, we've talked about this on the show and it's not being advertised like we've had the obesity epidemic that people are talking about or the cardiovascular disease epidemic. But there is a massive autoimmune disease epidemic that seems to be, nobody's really talking about. What's going on with that? Well, we don't really know. Like we definitely, there's some interesting trends. So we start seeing these upticks in obesity and then upticks in neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, and then also autoimmunity has been on an uptick. And we have some changes in our photo period. We have significant changes that appears in our gut microbiome and the potential permeability at the gut interface. There's some great research suggesting that the gut microbiome has an input in everything from cardiovascular disease to neurodegenerative disease. Like there's a thought that specific bacterial strains may be inducing Parkinson's and Alzheimer's in some people. So I don't think anybody really knows exactly what's going on, but there's definitely a big autoimmune component to the whole story, even just the process of atherosclerosis and like developing a heart attack. Historically, we've just looked at like protein carbs fat and then we got a little more sophisticated and talked about inflammation, maybe some insulin. But now the really cutting edge lipidologists are looking at the atherogenic process as an autoimmune event. And so it's immune dysregulation and when you really auger in and look at say like the lipoproteins, they're a critical feature, not just of energy distribution, but also they're part of the innate immune response if you get an infection. And I've heard that. I've heard that like people have said that the inflammation of the heart, if you will, and that's super general, but how the plaque formation and how the body seems to pack cholesterol along the arteries is really just a response. It's like an autoimmune reaction. Like we're trying to keep things together. I don't think people realize how, because when I say autoimmune, people will think of the common autoimmune issues, but autoimmune is this umbrella that covers like neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, dementia, bone disorders like types of arthritis, skin disorders. When people are getting like heartburn, this could be something that's autoimmune. Like it's a huge umbrella of things. And we're talking about this explosion or what seems to be this epidemic that's happening. Do we see that in non-Western societies or do we see that as much in societies that are more like your hunter-gatherer? Is this more of a recent thing, I guess? It's definitely a disease of civilization. Like even if you go to places like Central America, Southeast Asia, you don't have to get paleo to see a protective effect against a bunch of these diseases. And you just don't see things like peanut allergies or weed allergies. I mean, again, we don't fully know what's going on. Some of the ideas are around this hygiene hypothesis where we're not getting exposed to enough bacteria and viruses and different immunostimulatory things in our environment. People are being born via C-section instead of vaginal birth and that can have some implications for the gut microbiome and the biome we have on our skin. As good as antibiotics are, like a little over 100 years ago, if somebody got a routine infection, a lot of times they died from it. Now we can fix that, but there may be some knock-on effects that aren't that beneficial, that may actually be challenging with the kind of chronic exposure to antibiotics. We have lots of antibiotics in our food system. So I mean, it's a really multifactorial problem. And going back to antibiotics and infectious disease, the 20th century was really about dealing with infectious disease, whether it was antibiotics or vaccines or public health to kind of quarantine that stuff and mitigate it. Now the 21st century is going to be about degenerative disease, but that one disease, one pathology kind of mindset in a magic bullet in the form of a vaccine or an antibiotic is not going to work for degenerative disease. And what we see now is a matrix-driven disease process. It's not A goes to B goes to C. It may be that there are 20 different things that may or may not flip somebody into a disease state, like developing rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis. We know that North-South latitude gradients can increase the likelihood of auto-immunity. So if you live closer to the poles, you might be at a higher likelihood of developing auto-immune disease that may be related to vitamin D. It may be related to the other secosteroids that are produced in response to sunlight that go into vitamin D. But for sure, if you, again, live further away from the equator, that increases the probability. If you get a crushing injury, it increases the probability. If you get different types of infectious agents, it increases the probability. But there's not typically any one singular thing that just causes this disease. And so if you go back to high school biology and Coke's postulate, it's like you've got a medium that is sterile and then you inoculate it with a bacteria and the bacteria grows and then you kill it or you pull some of it out and grow it somewhere else. This is part of the scientific process of establishing a causality with a disease. But when we are in this matrix story, it could be 20 different factors and factors we haven't even thought about or factors that we think may be part of it. But it's a peripheral deal, but there's something going on there. And this has been something that's really confounded the evidence-based medicine scene, which is really amazing and has really moved a lot of things forward. But when you get into this situation where it is almost infinitely complex, then the biggest benefit that I've seen is just someone that's thinking about mechanisms, experimenting in a clinical fashion. We try a protocol. We see what works. And we may not really know what's going on. And this is what makes some of the real evidence-based medicine people kind of freak out because they're like, it's pure anecdote. You can't replicate this, but there may be some of this stuff that is really, really difficult, possibly impossible to replicate. So when you get into epigenetics and talking about how many people get freaked out and how many feathers do you ruffle when you start talking about it? Because this is where people get in this... It depends on which crowd I'm in. So I was supposed to give a talk next week to one of the hospital systems here and everything was set up, everything was going to go. And then just yesterday, they were like, yeah, we can't do it. And I mean, it was a pretty big event. And then we found out that somebody in the dietetics staff there caught wind as like, oh, the low-carb paleo guy is coming in. No way. And the talk was about the neuro-regulation of appetite and auto-immunity. So we weren't even like... I mean, we weren't even going into most of the places that they would be really concerned about for right or for wrong. But it depends on who I'm talking to. What do you think that is, though? What do you think that causes... What's your opinion on what causes people to be like that when we get into topics like this? Because nutrition is in the same category as politics and religion for God's sake. It's like, you can talk about anything, you bring up religion, and everybody gets offended and scared and pissed off. You know, there's a book called The Moral Mind, and it's pretty good. It lays out this argument that from an evolutionary biology perspective, we evolved in these small group hunter-gatherers and you needed an us-versus-them kind of deal. And I think that that's still with us today. And tribalism. Yeah, just the tribalism. And so that's a really, really hard thing to shake. There's also this thing called the horseshoe theory of politics, where it's like you've kind of got the libertarians and moderates at one end of the horseshoe, and then you go super left and super right. But interestingly, the left and right end up looking really similar. They're totalitarian. They're inflexible. Yeah, I mean, they end up mirroring each other. I think that you could probably make an argument that within a given group, it's of benefit to probably have a few outside the box thinkers that would be libertarians. And then it would be good to have some more like, okay, these are the orthodox people that are staying in these lane lines, and it keeps the continuity of the society. Like there's probably some benefit there. But this is interesting, too, as we get into the social media phase where people can interface in a way that's reasonably anonymous. So they can be pricks to each other in any sense of like, you know, most of the time. It's so true. Yeah, you know, people will say things that they, in a physical setting where somebody could leap across the table and start beating you in the face. Right. There's just no sense of class or reciprocity or anything. So you get this worst element of humanity and you create an environment where that can be facilitated. And then just at our fundamental level or kind of genetic wiring, we're just kind of tribal and kind of knuckleheads. Like we're monkeys. We're monkeys and we're really prone to confirmation bias and so to circle around, even though I was maybe dinging on the evidence-based medicine a little bit, there is a reality that this is the value of science. You know, this is the value of being able to replicate studies and go deep and get validation and get statistical significance and whatnot. But you know, Max Planck observed that science moves forward one funeral at a time, you know, and there's definitely some truth with that. Like you've just got to let the old guard die off and see what the new generation's going to come up with. Oh yeah, I'm sure if Newton learned about quantum mechanics, he'd be vehemently opposed to the craziness of it, right? Right, right. You know, so from an autoimmune standpoint, I have a lot of experience, personal experience from it. And so I've been in that world. I have a very close family member who was stricken with Crohn's disease at a younger age and his mother's a dietitian. So she was very much on that side of nutrition. And we used to debate quite a bit about nutrition. And she'd say, no, you're wrong, Sal. The evidence shows that low fat is fine and that carbohydrates, whole grains are great. And I'd debate with her on certain things. And now that her child has had this, she's reexamined and gone very, very deep. And what I'm finding, and I wanted to ask your opinion on this, as I went deep into this world, I noticed across the board with autoimmune disorders, everything from Alzheimer's to Crohn's, people tend in that category where they have these outward expressions of autoimmune disease, they tend to respond better to diets that restrict carbohydrates and grains in particular. Now I know you're a big advocate for paleo type diets or ancestral type diets. Why do you think that is? Why do you think it is? Especially in those categories, if you go online and you go on the forums, and this of course is anecdotal, but we know that anecdotal and observation drive science, you go on these forums, you go on the Crohn's forums, you go on the MS forums, you go on the forums with people dealing with older people in their households that have dementia and Alzheimer's. You will find lots of consensus that restricting grain intake and restricting processed foods and eating more of these natural fats and whatever, works better for these people. Why is that? Why would that be? Because it's like these diseases aren't connected or are they? They're super connected. And that's part of the problem. I've been working on a blog post for literally a couple of years. It's something to the effect, the death of the specialist, because it's like now cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease, it's all the same. You know the history channel guy with the crazy hair and he's like aliens, you know? I wanna do like- It's all the same. Oh, I love that. But you know, people love to get into silos and it's good on the one hand because we're getting deeper on that specific topic, but then also it's almost impossible to talk to a neurologist and a GI doc and be like, hey man, you guys are dealing with the same thing. It's just some genetic and epigenetic variabilities as to this person gets gut problems and this person gets neurological problems. And you sound like a crazy person suggesting that, but there's some pretty good data that's emerging to really support that and it'll take time to flesh it out. But you know, Dr. Terry Walls is a really interesting example of this whole thing. Yeah, you know, and so she reversed her own multiple sclerosis. She did it largely with kind of a modified ketogenic, autoimmune, paleo type of approach. And she was a pariah among the multiple sclerosis society, you know, seen for years, probably four years, five years. They didn't want anybody talking about it. They didn't want her mentioned. And then over the course of time, what she related to me is at some point, there was 15 times more chatter on the MS message boards about this kind of autoimmune, paleo, than all the other methods combined, like swank and a vegan approach and what have you. And just because something's popular doesn't mean that it's right. You know, just look at reality TV and we have a pretty good example of that. I used to feel- Good analogy. I used to feel hoity-toity about being a New York Times bestselling author and then Snooki did it. It doesn't fucking matter at all, no relevance whatsoever. That's what we were talking about before we got on here is just that battle, right? I mean, God. So, you know, we still really don't know what all the mechanisms are with autoimmune disease or is it five mechanisms or is it 20 mechanisms? But there's clearly a gut interface. There's clearly some sort of molecular mimicry where some food-based proteins or some proteins that are associated with bacteria or viruses end up in this situation where antibodies are made against those items and there's homology between those proteins and the proteins in our body and we get an autoimmune event. And it's super complex. It's really hard to unpack, but I will say this. We know more about autoimmune disease than we've ever known in history. We know more about type 2 diabetes than we've ever known in history. In 2010, there were 30,000 PubMed articles with the term type 2 diabetes in it. But yet, the rates of these diseases are increasing exponentially. So I'm picking up an iPhone right now. This thing is cheaper and better than it's ever been in known history and the next iteration is gonna be cheaper and better. Cheaper and better, Moore's Law. This thing's not, the analogy though is with medicine, this thing should be a dial phone at this point because we're not moving the needle forward at all on degenerative disease. Could it be because we don't even know where to look? Like, I'll give you an example. Or do you think there's a lot of hands and a lot of pockets that are pushing? Well, I mean, there's all that stuff, but I mean, I'm kind of the crazy guy. That's why you're on Mime Pump, by the way. Exactly, thank you. It's part of my parole stuff too. We talked about that earlier. So I'm kind of crazy. Like, you know, if somebody says, hey, do you think bioethanol is a good idea? I'm like, well, what's the point of bioethanol? You raise corn, you turn the corn into ethanol to run machinery on. It's like, okay, do you get more energy out of that process than you put in? No. So that's a boondoggle. That's a fail, you know? So I have this kind of crazy notion that there are these fundamental laws of nature, thermodynamics, economics, evolution. And if we inform our investigation from that perspective, then we start getting some really good stuff to happen. The reason why technology has taken off the way that it has is material science, physics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, like there's quantum elements to just dealing with like a GPS satellite and all that. There's not a lot of pissing match and contention around that. But within medicine, which is a branch of biology and the fundamental tenet of biology is evolution via natural selection. It's a fucking shit show to get people to even say, yeah man, the evolutionary template is maybe something that we should ask some questions or particularly for degenerative disease. Now, if you get hit by a bus or shot, evolution doesn't really matter that much. We're in an acute care state. And when you look at the progress that acute medicine has made over the last 50 years, it is stunning. Oh, Western medicine rules in that area. They can work miracles on that stuff. But then when you hop right over the fence to just really run of the mill degenerative disease, like ulcerative colitis or any type of GI dysfunction, it fails. And it fails epically. Just the proton pump inhibitors that they're giving people to deal with gastric reflux. The cryo-stack. Yeah, it's increasing the rates of neurodegenerative disease. So those proton pumps are really, really important and there's knock-on effects with this stuff. So I think to the degree that this paleo diet concept has really had some legs, has been that we've looked at different disease processes like auto-immunity and GI issues from this evolutionary template. And we've said, okay, maybe some things like grains, legumes, and dairy, some commonly immunogenic items. Things that people are oftentimes allergic to. And there's not a lot of contention around that. You can just look at, you know. It's a fact. So could there be some other immunogenic issues there that could lead into autoimmune disease? And Alicio Fasano used ciliac disease as a model for potentially all autoimmune diseases. So you've got a breach in the gut barrier. You've got an inflammatory process. You get this thing called a haptin, which is a exogenous protein and an endogenous protein that gets stuck together. You get an antibody to that. And then the autoimmune process is off and running. So there's some really good proposed mechanisms and possibly more important than that. We have some really good clinical interventions now that are showing some great promise. Volter Longo did a fasting mimicking diet. And even that has been blowing doors off of, you know, basic ketogenic diet or even some of these autoimmune paleo approaches. And it appears to be this like protein recycling, pressing the replay button on the immune system. And it's incredibly powerful. And it's pretty damn easy. I mean, you're asking people to eat a low calorie diet for five to seven days. Low calorie, low protein. I was so surprised when Lane said that this was something that he would never do. This was something we brought up too with intermittent fasting, because we're huge fans of it. And I think more people should somewhat incorporate into their life just for the health benefits, period. Even, I don't care, weight loss, muscle gain, whatever, just it should be something that you sporadically just incorporate somewhat into your lifestyle because of all the benefits that are showing. The law of unintended consequences that as mankind just has a, we just have a terrible time working with. Like for example, we have an acute issue, infection. Invent antibiotics, boom, we fixed infection. Unintended consequence of that though. What are the unintended consequences of overusing antibiotics? Look at, you know, food, like, oh my God, we need to, you know, people tend to be under, you know, underfed when it comes to calories. This is a problem throughout all of mankind. People died from not having enough food. We fixed it. Let's grow corn, let's grow wheat. So that's abundance. Let's domesticate animals. So we have all this food. What are the unintended consequences of that? And we tend to ignore that kind of stuff. And that's what I think we're stuck in with, you know, modern society. Farming fruits and everything to be more sweet and, you know, changing that whole chemistry and everything else. That's it. And so, you know, I wanted to bring, when I brought up the whole, like, commonality with autoimmune, I find it interesting now that in mouse models, they've almost, or pretty much, cured depression in mouse models by changing their microbiome. Could depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, autism, could those all be kind of autoimmune issues? I mean, this is a question that, because there's an inflammatory component to all of those and now they're finding this gut connection to the mind as well. So it's kind of fascinating. And, you know, of course, there's been some studies that show that some of these nomadic, you know, hunter-gatherer societies don't suffer from things like depression, anxiety, nearly the rate that, you know, we do in these modern societies. So it's all important stuff to look at. But what is it with, I want to talk a little bit more specifically now because what I've noticed with these communities of autoimmune issues is that all, they all seem to do well when they avoid gluten, for example. Just gluten. Let's just talk about that for a second. Like, what's the deal with gluten? Gluten and wheat in particular, you know, there's a remarkable family of proteins and also some sugars, like some of these fermentable sugars that go along with wheat type grains in particular. And they seem to be really immunogenic. Like, they just kind of piss off the immune response. And we don't really know exactly why that is and there's two pieces to it. There's the plant and there's the person or the organism eating it. And so on the plant side, the reproductive structure of grains is the grain itself. That's the thing we're consuming. So like if you eat a piece of fruit, usually you ditch the seeds or if you swallow the seeds, the seeds get deposited in some warm, you know, well-fed medium and you grow the seeds later. But with the grains and legumes, that is the reproductive structure and they have some really potent anti-predation chemicals in them. And if you look at some of the Westnay price stuff where they talk about soaking and fermenting and sprouting these things, those were all an attempt to reduce these anti-nutrients and these immunogenic proteins. They didn't know that that's what they were doing but they noticed that when they did that stuff, people suffered, you know, fewer rates of like mineral deficiencies or the diseases that we would see with these deficiency states. So everything in biology has thorns or horns or poison or something to defend itself. If you remove those things, this is part of the reason why like domesticated fruits and vegetables just get crushed by pests because they're super tasty and they're really low in tannins and toxins which make them taste better. Low barrier to entry. Yeah, as a low barrier of entry to that. So then we have to hit them with like pesticides which that has again, knock on effects. So we've got that side of the story which there's definitely an immunogenic potential with these grains but then you've got the epigenetic, you know, interface of the, let's say a human being eating it. And what's interesting is the person who expresses celiac disease and we'll say also gluten sensitivity but specifically celiac disease, one of the most informative things that I find in my research is we'll take a particular disease like celiac or I'll even go like BRCA one, like the breast cancer gene one. I go BRCA one evolutionary advantage and you get a bunch of papers. Let's stop for a second. I gotta explain that. So you're talking about a genetic. So the breast cancer gene, this is one that if you get tested for and I know this because I had a family member who we tested people around her because she died at early age of cancer. She shouldn't have. And if you find that gene, you have something like a 70-something percent chance, they'll say, of getting breast cancer. And what you're saying is you're looking at this gene that exists and there might have been an evolutionary advantage to having this gene. Like why does it exist? Not might, it did. Otherwise it wouldn't be there. So what, okay, go into that. And this is again some of the stuff that the standard reductionist science is just shitting the bed on and particularly on the clinical side because so we're telling people, okay, go get screened and then maybe do a prophylactic mastectomy and we're not even, maybe there's arguments for that, maybe not. I still think that there's a massive amount of epigenetic input there. Like very rarely do genes guarantee a specific outcome. Like we can tweak a lot of things with diet and lifestyle changes and whatnot, but we're not again, even asking that question, was there a benefit to this? Like why does this beneficial? Why, yeah, why does it exist? So even in the counseling process, it's like, hey, and the people with this geno, this specific genotype tend to have more children. They tend to have fewer infectious situations. Like there's all this evolutionary advantage than in a pre-Westernized situation would have been great. And now for some reason, maybe it's elevated estrogen levels, maybe it's elevated insulin, maybe it's combinations of these things. It may end up being a liability, but we can manage that if we retro engineer this and ask the right questions. So I'm gonna put the super layman terms. You got this gene, which is a blueprint and your lifestyle, diet, thoughts, whatever, all the things that can influence how your daily life or long-term life, all those things can tell that blueprint to go one way or the other or maybe that blueprint existed to do something, but it existed during a time where we didn't have all these other factors. Now you throw those other factors on, which is epigenetics and one of the unintended consequences of this gene now is breast cancer. Right. And in the case of Celiac disease, people with Celiac disease have a much great and enhanced immune response, particularly in the gut. And these people tend to be of lineage where Neolithic farming is pretty recent in their past, Northern European. So you add people who went from living in scattered hunter-gatherer groups to larger extended family groups and they're living in proximity with animals. And we see this, like the swine flu and all these different things, like when you start getting multiple species living on top of one another, then there's an increased likelihood of some sort of squirrely event happening from an infectious disease. So it was clearly a survival advantage for the Celiac tending people to have an enhanced immune response. But in this modern environment, when they get exposed to wheat, specifically gliadon in the gluten matrix, then for whatever reason, that tendency towards this overexpression or this enhanced expression of immune response results in autoimmunity, gut permeability, and just a ton of different problems. But all of these, you're really hard-pressed to find a modern disease scenario, like even things like sickle cell anemia. It had survival advantage for malaria, yeah, yeah. And what's interesting is people with sickle cell tendencies when they move to somewhere like Europe of the United States, you may go from a population that had a 40% penetrance of that particular genotype and it may be gone in like four generations because it is nasty enough now that there are selection pressures against it and you just don't need it. There's no longer advantage but there's a lot of costs associated with it. Yeah, a good example of what you're talking about because when I get, I've gotten into debates with people who are like, no, the evolutionary fat, not that, you know, this is what you need to look at and I'll say, look, here's one simple example. You can go to different regions of the world and you can clearly see a very, here's a very simple one, lactose intolerance. Far more common when you go to Africa and the Middle East than if you go to like Northern European societies and why Northern European societies, they domesticated cattle and had dairy in their diets for a much, much longer. If you use Africa as an example, for the most part, lactose intolerance is through the roof except for a particular region where they've been domesticating cattle for thousands of years and if you look at those two people, they don't have the same gene. It's a different adaptation. It's a different adaptation but both of them helped them break down lactase. Clearly evolutionary and you made a comment earlier about just an infinite number of factors that go into how, you know, food affects us, you know, everything from activity to the types of foods we eat and all these different things. It only makes sense that we should probably default to how we probably have been eating for the last, you know, 100,000 years or whatever. I mean, that's what some of the premise behind, you know, paleo type eating comes from, right? You know, I mean, that gets sticky too because it's, do we have the same types of foods around if they've been modified? Like can you even find that type of stuff, you know? But I think that there's some really good guidelines that we can pull from that. Like when you look at some of these free agricultural societies, like they tended to eat within certain macronutrient ratios. They tended to eat a meal or two a day. They tended to go to bed when the sun went down and they got up when the sun came up. They were awash in kind of a microbial, you know, a deal when they look at the hadza, like when they butcher an animal, the stomach and intestinal contents, the guys wipe it on themselves, you know? Oh, I didn't know that. And yeah, I mean, like, it's, they literally, I mean, it's, you know. And they will eat some of the foregut contents because it's fermenting. So there's basically like sauerkraut in there. If you got a zebra and it's in the foregut, then these guys will eat that stuff. And I mean. And it's highly prized and valued. Yeah, yeah. And it's not killing them. Like it would probably crush me. Like I might not even live long enough to make the adaptation to get into that kind of approach, but that's kind of the base level norm, you know? Like I, my wife just got a Rhodesian Ridgeback and like this dog and we have a African type cat, like it's part wild cat. And so these things just hunt and kill everything on our property. But there's like mice and moles and everything and they'll go hunt them up and eat them and they eat the whole thing. You know, they're not like pulling a fillet out of it and eating that one thing. It's like raw gut contents and they're putting it down the hatch. And that's probably, like there's probably on some genetic epigenetic level expectation of that. And if we don't do that or something like that, and that's where maybe, you know, consistent fermented foods are valuable. This is where some intermittent fasting is valuable. Some protein fasting is valuable. This periodicity and also these cyclic exposures are probably important for some sort of a healthy baseline. You said protein fasting. I want to get into that because I brought that up. It's been a few episodes ago now where I talked about how I think there may be a benefit to protein fasting just because you look at the way that protein signals the body and how some of that signaling is what is a driver in cancer. And it doesn't necessarily mean if you eat a lot of protein, you get cancer. But if you have cancer, eating a lot of protein may, you know, accelerate it or make it proliferate a little faster or give it, make it more aggressive. You just said protein fasting. Nobody in our industry, especially the muscle building industry, will touch that. Yeah, that's the macronutrient you can't get enough of. It does no harm. It's thermogenic and it's great for you. Let's talk about protein fasting. Why, what is that? And why is that even a good idea? So we have these roughly three macronutrients, protein, carbs, fat. People are making the argument that ketones are a fourth macronutrient. We don't have to go down that rap hole right now. But, you know, protein makes up the lean muscle mass. It's a key factor in our immune response, our immune system. And maybe backing up a little bit. If we pulled anything out of even just a little glance at this ancestral health template, I think I could make a credible argument that chronic anything becomes bad. Chronic sun exposure, chronic lack of sun exposure, chronic overfeeding. Amen. And so, you know, there appear to be some values to turning these signal switches on and off. And also, so the Valter Longo case again. So what was interesting with that is they had a group of people with MS that they split up and they had one group that did this fasting mimicking diet. Low protein, low calorie, five to seven days. And they had a ketogenic diet arm of that. The ketogenic group did okay, but not spectacular. Everybody generally felt better, but they didn't have any like complete remission. Whereas I think the fasting mimicking group had a 25 or 28% remission. Something ridiculous. It was ridiculous, you know? And so there's something about that really just gnarly punctuated change. So they went from normal eating to low calorie, that low protein state causes a stress response. And even that, you're kind of hard-pressed. He doesn't even like to use that term. He doesn't like to use that term. Yeah, and it's really an interesting perspective. You know, he's like, no, this isn't a stress response. This is a normalizing response. The stress response is being chronically overfed your whole life, you know? Yeah, it's literally just putting things the back the way they should. Which the first time I heard that because I'm always like, oh, it's a hormetic stress response. And then he was like, no, no, no, no. And then there's an Italian thing. And I'm like, oh, okay, yeah. It's a really good point. So, you know, and there is a little bit of stuff in the literature, like the, some old Bulgarian weightlifting stuff where two days a week, they would do a super low protein intake. And then this was part of their volume phase, their accumulation phase. And then right on the heels of that, they would still kind of partition the protein, but it would be like one Mondo protein meal at the end of the day. It'd be like a bolus of protein. Yeah, and it would be like two or three hundred grams of protein. I remember this study. Yeah, definitely. And it's really interesting. And, you know, can you get a Ronnie Coleman sized person doing this stuff? I don't know. Maybe it just needs to be all drugs all the time, all food all the time. I don't know. That's a bad example too, because that's a disease state if you ask me. Forced, forced state. It kind of is. And you're using insulin and thyroid and all this stuff to kind of tweak the lepers. And, you know, I mean, there's possibly some challenges on that. You're a chemistry set by that point. Yeah, super impressive one. Yeah, absolutely, right? But, you know, for someone that's not heading super far down that path and maybe wants to strike a balance between the performance health longevity story, maybe there's some benefit. And I've kind of noticed this. And people, I think I've noticed this. There was a, the hypertrophy specific training protocol. And the guy was actually making the argument that you need to take some time off. That that consistent repetitious exposure actually ends up kind of upregulating the mTOR pathways or the myostatin pathways. And so it actually kind of inhibits it. So you need to go into almost an untrained state, but not so far that you really start degrading, but then you layer another round of training onto it. And so what I'm getting from that is that there's this periodicity in this cyclical nature and that this just chronic exposure, whether it's protein or strength training or what have you, may not have that ultimate benefit. Like we need to have some punctuation in this whole. The undulating, we talk about this because we're, I mean, we're heavy into programming, right? So, and we talk about the importance of undulating your programming. It's nutrition seems to be the same way too. The more and more we look at it, that's why we recommend even, none of us are vegan guys whatsoever, but we recommend doing a day where it's like all vegetables and no real protein for meats. And you just go all nuts and seeds maybe, or not at all, you know, just because people are especially in the fitness industry being fed this. And I remember, and the reason, I think that why we're all so passionate about it is because even being trainers at one point, I remember being that guy who, I was so afraid like not to eat my protein that like I would over consume all kinds of crap and calories or whatever as long as I made sure I got my protein intake. And then that would be like, and if you were under, you'd freak out. It would freak out like muscle is gonna fall off the next day, you know? That's the man's balance, yeah. You know, and it's funny because for a while now, I've been doing these days where I just go vegan and they're very low calorie. They're very, it's all, you know, cooked leafy greens and some raw ones and very little seeds and no legumes. And I noticed when I go back to eating protein one to two days later, I get almost this rebound like anabolic effect. And there is some science that shows that there's like this desensitizing effect from repeated exposure. So even from an athletic standpoint, it wouldn't make sense to kind of do that. Now I'm gonna ask you a question and this is gonna be controversial because I've brought this up before on the show but right now in fitness, now we're seeing people questioning, you know, doing things all the time regularly. But one thing nobody questions is that you need to drink water all the time, all day long, tons and tons of water. Now if we go back from an evolutionary standpoint, number one, there wasn't protein around all the time. When we had it, we ate it. When we didn't have it, we didn't eat it. There wasn't fruit all the time but we had it, we ate it. And when it wasn't around, we didn't eat it. We usually slept when we could and sometimes maybe it's a good idea to not sleep but usually it's a good idea to sleep when it's dark because you don't wanna be out when predators so if we continue down the evolutionary path, doesn't it make sense? And I don't know if there's any science to support this, I haven't looked this up but doesn't it kind of make sense to, rather than drinking water all day long to kind of drink it within a period of time because I don't imagine that humans were around fresh water all the time. They probably went long periods without it and then drank a bunch at a period. Do you think there would be any benefit to that? It's very speculatory. I don't know about specifically benefit but I think that, I'll answer it this way. I think that people are neurotic about over hydrating and it's just, even though I'm sitting here with my giant jug of it, but when I'm jabbering, I do- Right, that's what I'm trying to do here, Sal. But I think that that's kind of one of these neurotic, it's kind of almost this folk wisdom deal. It's like a Mark Twain deal. It's like, oh, you need to drink all this water and everything, it just sounds great and it's so reusable. Your top five tips. Yeah, and it's just, I just don't see where it's coming from and there's some decent research that very, very, very rarely do people die of dehydration. I mean, it's really rare because it's a situation where they can't get to water but the situation where people will hyper hydrate and die due to hypometremia is all the time. It's like every football season, every new recruit of military personnel, every time that there's a marathon, people hyper hydrate and they end up dead from it and Tim Noakes wrote a great book on this, Waterlogged. And so that's kind of my slippery way of not quite answering that. Well, I think what caused that is, or at least in my experience, when I'd have clients and I'd actually start to dive into their water intake is that quite frankly, most of the average Americans don't drink enough water. They're drinking all this other shit, sugary drinks and lots of coffee and so we're not getting a lot of water. So I think that was the response like the fitness industry always does is the extreme on the other side. Majority of these people where we're helping out, they're not having enough water, now you need lots of water, now you need more water. I just think it would be interesting to look at because it seems like you talk about like there's an evolutionary factor that comes into medicine, health, psychology. There's a strong evolutionary factor that we tend to ignore. And if we just keep looking down that path, I think it'll point us to some pretty interesting studies. I'd love to look at that because there's no way in hell like humans were had fucking water every hour all day long. There's no way. I'm sure we saw it and we drank the hell out of it and then went without it for hours. I'm sure it was nearby, but you get my point. Art of Annie made an interesting observation and I had a paper to support this but that mild dehydration, mild to moderate dehydration really enhanced growth hormone secretion because some of the stress response and it tended to shift you more into a fat mobilizing state and the fat mobilization was a little bit more benign with regards to hydration status and all that type of stuff. So it was pretty interesting. That is interesting. I'd like to, yeah, I find that kind of stuff fascinating and I like to go there because it's like a, it's like the third rail. Don't touch that. Now that we're getting this crazy, right? On all these things that we're speculating that might have benefit and ones that we do know already, I wanna ask, Rob, and I know you've got to have a ton of people that reach out to, after the fact, they're fucked up. They've got all, they got leaky gut going on, they got the psoriasis going on, they got all these issues that are going on autoimmune and they're a mess and they come to you for help. How does a guy like you take all the information and all the things, and how do you get someone in the right direction like that? What are the big rocks you focus on first? What are some of the struggles you notice like telling someone how to help them out? Because you gotta know it's not as kind of dry as, oh, you've been doing all this bad shit, remember? This is what you do and they fall to a T. They have things all good. You know, it's interesting because maybe 10 years ago, I would get a lot of reasonably simple to help stuff and it really wasn't getting into medical issues. You know, it's kind of like, okay, you're overweight or your sleep's disturbed. We can take some really simple boxes and get you moving forward now. The emails that I get now to your point, the people are broken because there's so much good information out there that the vast majority of people, if they've got any initiative, they've done most of the heavy lifting and it's either worked really well for them or if it hasn't, then they really need a lot more help. And fortunately, there are some people out there, you know, like Chris Cressor is an amazing practitioner and he has a practitioner training program. The Cleveland Clinic is certifying all their new graduating doctors and functional medicine. So compared to 10 years ago, like there's a lot more physicians that are maybe steeped in this kind of evolutionary medicine perspective. And so there are folks that I can refer out. I'm actually on the board of directors of a clinic here in Reno, which is a functional medicine clinic. We did a two-year pilot study with the Reno police, Reno fire department, found 35 folks that were at high risk for type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease, put them on a low-ish carb paleo diet, modified their sleep and exercise as best we could. And based off the changes in their health risk assessment parameters, it's estimated the pilot study alone saved the city of Reno $22 million with a 33 to one return on investment. So we've been working to kind of gear this thing up and take it out to the masses. And yeah, this is where when guys on the internet are like, you're that paleo, do you guys ever say the R word that ends with a D? That seems to be the one that gets me really mad. You could say it. I've got like three emails. He says it all the time. I'm not gonna say it. I'm getting better at it. It's like the one word that you will get crucified. It is the one word. We've said everything else on here, but I've got more emails. Just say imbecile. Yeah, you're the paleo imbecile. And I'm like, okay, yeah, I also run a medical clinic that, you know, did this. What do you do? Wow. Yeah, and so I mean, I'm fortunate in that I'm pretty well networked into a system of practitioners. Like we just had an email earlier from somebody they have a dear friend, friend has stage four metastatic breast cancer. What are we gonna do? And so we're hooking them up with a spin-off of some folks that are attached to the Charlie Foundation. The Charlie Foundation is a ketogenic diet clinic for kids, specifically for epilepsy and other neurodegenerative diseases. But they've also been kind of sticking their finger into a little bit of using ketosis, fasting proteins, fasting as adjunctive therapy with conventional treatment. So we're trying to get them hooked up and so- I believe the FDA is actually looking to approve fasting protocol for adjuvant therapy with chemotherapy. That just reminded me, so I gotta ask your opinion. We saw this, I don't know if it's been passed yet or not. Did you see where they're going with these stomach pumps where people actually can get surgery where they put a tube in their stomach and then they eat and they- Yeah, I mean, at a minimum it should be like old Rome where you have to go tickle the back of your throat with a feather and throw up and at least suffer the indignity of throwing up and like rotting your teeth out at some point. Make it inconvenient somehow, yeah. At least. Does that not scare the shit out of you though when you see stuff like that? And what is really crazy is that's gonna be like insurance reimbursed and tax money covering that stuff. That's what I'm fucking saying. Really? Yeah, we'll all pay for that. Well, unless, you know, government pays for all of it and then the government will tell them to fuck off. That's what'll end up happening at some point. At some point. Yeah, then they'll own your body, so. Right. Why do you think there's such, so why do you think it seems like it's almost like an addiction problem with like let's talk about America- Oh, let's talk about that period addiction because you can't say that word either to people. Oh, God, you could be addicted to food. Demonizing that kind of food. Yeah, because it's an epidemic. I don't think people realize this and nobody really talks about this, but the obesity diabetes epidemic and it is an epidemic threatens this country and we'll just talk about this country more than almost any of the threat. The biggest threat we had in modern times with the Soviet Union, they're gone now. So there's no more of that existential, blow up the whole world threat. Nobody can really do that to us now or at least there's not that risk as big as it was then. People don't realize like, if we don't fix the obesity diabetes epidemic, we're gonna go bankrupt. I mean, the military has had these discussions and they look specifically at our healthcare system and specifically diabetes as a national security issue and people are kind of like, oh, that's bullshit. It's these jihadis in the hilltops and it's like, no, that's not what's gonna take us down. Subsidized food system that's making us so sick that it's so incredibly expensive. Killing ourselves. That will take us down at the kneecaps and nobody really cares too much about it and you really are the crazy person talking about any of that stuff. We are projecting, I think, at some like 300% GDP in a very short period of time will be spent on just diabetes related stuff. Just to be. So that seems like a good angle though to really come at the money aspect of it though to get people's attention. It's not sexy or scary. Like if I'm a politician and I'm on a stage and I'm saying, hey everybody, we need to fix our obesity epidemic because that's gonna destroy our country and then the guy over there is going, no, it's terrorist and that's scarier. Like I'm asking you basically. People identify with that more. Well, I'm asking you to look in the mirror a little bit and it's changes we all need to make and that guy over there saying, no, we could just go bomb some people and we'll fix it. It's not sexy, man. It ain't gonna happen. It's the accountability ladder, bro. It's always everybody else. And then nobody wants to look at themselves and the things that they could be doing differently, right? You know, but on that addiction thing, you know, why do we tend to do this stuff? If I get this analogy right, it's pretty good. If I fuck it up, it's pretty terrible, but. We'll cross our fingers. Yeah, we'll cross our fingers. So somebody's out hiking, they trip and fall. They fall in a creek and they go under water and they go to pop their head up and they're snagged and they're like an inch below the water but they keep their head about them. They're like, okay, I'm stuck but I'm gonna wiggle this thing out. I can hold my breath. About a minute goes by and they're like, oh shit, okay, this is getting serious. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get out of here and they start thrashing and starting to, you know, blow on bubbles. And then one last adrenaline-driven explosion, they're able to break this twig that's had them pinned down. They explode out of the water, get this life-saving gulp of air. Would you guys vilify that person? Is there anything morally wrong with that person? Are they broken or are they weak-willed? No. Well, the tendency to wanna eat everything that's not nailed down is a fundamental survival mechanism. When you, again, you look at this evolutionary biology deal, if you can peel back and step beyond the last 100 years or at least 50 years of ubiquitous food and leisure and luxury, it was a tooth and nail survival struggle for everybody every day all the time. That's a natural state of human time. That's a natural state of everything except humans and our pets, which is why we and our pets are fat and dying from metabolic issues. Ironically, right? Any other animal that's wild and free, it's pretty good to go, yeah, yeah. So, you know, at this genetic level, this thermodynamic level, we are wired to eat everything that's not nailed down and then go take a nap. When a bear eats a meal, it doesn't consult its Fitbit and it's like, oh man, that was about 600 calories of rabbit and blueberries. I'm gonna do some jumping jacks and burpees to burn it off. It goes in sleeps. And this is what anything in a natural environment would do. This is our genetic tendency, but now we live in an environment where we can get an infinite variety of flavor and palate options. It can be delivered to your door, you work in your underwear, you never leave the house, you don't exercise, you pop this thing in the microwave, you've got all these other options in the pantry and so we've kind of pushed this survival tendency to a point that is maximized in a way but it's maximized in a way that makes us sick. But if you are willing to vilify people for not being able to turn down the little Debbie snack cakes and the Snickers and whatever, if you're willing to vilify those folks, then you need to be willing to vilify the person who would do anything to get their head out from under some water because they're drowning. Both of them are survival mechanisms and- That's a great analogy. It's hard to wire it, yeah. But why do you think we have like, people are overfed, right? They've got all these calories, they're overnourished from that standpoint, appetite through the roof and it's connected to the types of foods that they eat because you see in study after study, when people eat a diet that's more either paleo or keto or ones that avoids a lot of these processed foods and they're not given calorie restrictions, they're saying, okay, these are the kinds of foods you can eat, eat as much as you want or whatever, just eat until you're full or if you're not hungry, don't eat, they tend to eat less than people who can eat whatever lots of processed food. So there's that component as well. What's the one thing that will get you labeled as a disordered eater? It's binge eating. Well, eating well, typically. I mean, they might say yeah, binge eating and stuff like that, but I mean, binge eater, if you go to a dietitian, you're like, I'm a binge eater and they're like, oh, you're among good friends. Hallelujah, brother, we're there. But if you go and you're like, yeah, I eat kind of a low carb ketogenic diet then it's like in Invasion of Body Snatchers where they're like, oh, you know, it's you. And you have a situation there where the only thing that gets vilified is good eating. And what's interesting, whether it's paleo or vegan or low carb or what have you, each one of these strategies is effectively limiting palate options. If you do this kind of high carb, lowest fat, high fiber kind of gig, then there's a bunch of tasty foods that you're not gonna eat and that's fine. And there's some tasty foods that you are gonna eat. And conversely, if you do low carb, high fat, there's some great things like bacon and chicharrones and stuff like that. And then there's some stuff that you're not gonna eat. But it is inevitably that interface of these palate mixes, you know, that get us into deep water. And there's a great, as part of my book, I have a link to this thing and I have a link to it on my blog and maybe I'll ship it to you guys. But there's this guy, Adam Rickman, who did the show Man vs. Food. And he would go out and do these challenges. And so this one, I saw this like six or seven years ago just stuck in my head. It was so interesting. And I was like, I'm gonna use that someday for something. And so he's doing this thing called the kitchen seek ice cream challenge. So it's an ice cream sundae that's in a kitchen sink delivered in a kitchen sink. And it's like eight pounds of ice cream and hot fudge and sprinkles and the whole deal. And he needs to eat it in X amount of time for him to win. I don't know what he wins. You know, diabetes, I don't really know. But there've only been three people that have succeeded in this thing. And so he starts tearing into this. He gets about a third of the way through. And then he starts totally bogging down. Like he is visually like turning green and you see him trying to take a bite and he starts gagging. So I don't think anybody would argue that a well-constructed ice cream sundae tastes pretty damn good. Like we would call it hyper palatable. It probably goes above and beyond what our normal neuro regulation of appetite would turn off. But at some point, even that, you're gonna get bored of it effectively. There's this process called palate fatigue. You're just gonna be done. So in the standard dietetics model, it's like, well, his belly's full, so he's all done. What he does is really fascinating. He orders a plate of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries. And he starts taking a bite of the french fry and a bite of ice cream and a bite of the french fry and a bite of the ice cream. And he is able to finish the ice cream sundae only because he eats more food. Like 1500 calories of more food. And this is where I have some, I have some issues with the if it fits your macro folks and I'm in kind of like, battle with some of those guys. It works for some people. You can have a little portion of Twinkie and a little portion of this, a little portion of that. But it's clearly not working for the masses. The whole like eat less, move more, everything in moderation. What the fuck does moderation mean when you go down a snack food aisle in the supermarket? If you don't like the sweet, then the salty crunchy is gonna get you. I guarantee it, you know? And what's the laze potato chip line? Bet you can't eat just one. And these fuckers are winning. And just so that I completely spin out on this and this will be like the lowest rated podcast you guys have ever had. But the people who engineer these foods study evolutionary biology, they study the neurophysiology of appetite. When Facebook and Twitter were clearly becoming, they recognize them as this addictive process. They got in, they said, why? And they were, oh, novelty and novelty drives human behavior and novelty seeking and dopamine. So the people who develop addictive social media platforms, the people who are engineering these foods that are hyper palatable and legitimately addictive, they understand this evolutionary biology template back and forwards, but our gatekeepers, the dieticians, the doctors and most of the internet opinionated people, they're still in a pissing match about whether or not this evolutionary template has any merit at all. The people are making billions of dollars a year, potentially trillions of dollars a year off this. Fully get this whole thing and there's absolutely no contention on it. So yeah. I 100% agree with you. So I'm gonna give you a scenario here that might be kind of controversial and maybe it's a little too black and white. If you've got two groups of people and we're trying to get them to improve their overall health and wellness, everything from being leaner to also having better blood markers of health, triglycerides, cholesterol, the type of cholesterol, all that stuff. In group one, we tell them, here's your calories, here's your macros, stay within those. And then group two, we say, here's the food quality we want you to focus on. Avoid foods that are having the process, whatever, let's focus on food quality instead. Which group, which one would you prefer or do you think will do better in the long term? The one that focuses on food quality or the one that focuses on macros and calories? Man, it's a really good question and it still kind of boils down to what's the just kind of like environment that these people are in. Both of these things will work pretty well in a metabolic ward where all the foods being controlled as it goes in and whatnot and in this. But I will say in this free living kind of scenario, if you need a couple of things, one, you need social contact and accountability. And this is where like a health coach or a dietician that has their head screwed on straight, this is where like CrossFit gyms are really, really valuable and well run CrossFit gym, the coach is gonna talk to you about sleep and photo period, they're gonna talk to you about effective nutrition, they're gonna, there's gonna be some exercise baked in the cake, hopefully they're not giving you rabdo. And then there's a community piece but that community piece ends up being the anchor that helps to keep people moving forward. All these fit bits and my fitness pal and everything, the holy grail of fitness and health and medicine is to be able to take an app and get people to interface with the app and that's going to affect behavior change and they have completely failed. There was just a study that came out that there was a group of people, they were two groups of people, they were instructed in healthy eating, one group wore basically a pedometer app, kind of a my fitness pal deal, another group didn't do anything, the group that was monitoring how much they moved lost almost no weight compared to the other group. The other group lost more weight so that scrutiny and the monitoring can actually be really problematic and to the degree that I've seen people kind of spin out, the weighing and measuring of food is kind of a gateway for neurotic behavior. We see that all the time because we work in- I got to see it firsthand when I decided to get into competing and I'll never forget being backstage and seeing all these people that before I got into it, I thought like they must be know their stuff, like inside and out, I mean, to get your physique to look at that level, even I as a trainer have never got down to 2% body fat and until I got there and I started talking to these people, I was like, holy shit, like some of these guys have way worse eating habits, the way their training is, I was blown away and then I thought, okay, well, maybe it's because I'm at the NPC level, these are like the rookies, they really don't get it yet. Then I work my way all the way to the professional level and it does, it gets even crazier. You're eating disorders. Yeah, they're more neurotic and there's this crazy, it's what makes me frustrated and what I get really passionate about when I talk about this is they've made it cool. It's cool to extreme diet and then binge like crazy and excuse it with the bulking period. People don't realize what the fuck they're getting into and what they're setting themselves up for long term. And they're not taking the psychological component because it's clearly a symptom eruption. That's a tech, that's a scientific term for what happens when you restrict the hell out of yourself or look, you get a guy, a normal dude and you make him self-restrict sex. He's not allowed to masturbate, he's not allowed to have sex, let him do that and you're gonna see some symptom eruptions and they're gonna come out in weird ways in quote unquote unhealthy ways because he's suppressed it to a certain point. I want to raincoat in a hat when you buy off of me near that guy. And you see that with the, you see that with, I see it with IIF way I'm crowd. I have clients that'll hire me and they're so neurotic about counting their macros that I'll tell some of my female clients, okay, I don't want you to train, I don't want you to count for the next week. I want you to just try and eat intuitively for a week and they'll cry. I can't do that. If I go off, what if this happened? It's like there's obviously a psychological component we're not even taking into account. And almost inevitably, and this is another point that I end up just super pissing people off but similar to you guys, like I've been doing this a while, I guess like almost 20 years we've owned multiple CrossFit type gyms, I'm on the board of directors with this medical clinic but so that psychological piece that gets focused on food, it's not about the food, it's something else. It's like, daddy didn't love me, somebody somewhere told me I was fat or ugly or not worth it or whatever or even some peripheral deal but then they figure out that they're able to garner a lot of attention and they're able to exact this control on their lives from this focus on eating and fitness. And the focus on the food ends up pretty much guaranteeing that you never address the underlying issue. You're able to keep chasing this thing. It's like calculating the last decimal point of pie, you just keep going and going and going and never gets there. And I've talked to people a lot about this and people wanna hit me, they want to shoot me, like they get really angry. You're hitting me deep, man. Cause they're like, no, I need a healthy relationship with food and I'm like, no, it's not actually about the food. The food is a symptom and the other issue, who didn't love you? Who didn't take care of you? Who wasn't there for you? And then you start like it's that goodwill hunting moment where you think that they're gonna like take that. It's not your fault. Yeah, but that is ultimately where you can go with them if you can get them to embrace this stuff. But you can get so spun out on all these details around the nutrition and the food that you can keep yourself distracted over a lifetime and never actually address that underlying issue. And it's gonna have knock-on effects in every other element of your life. Your relationships with significant others, children, coworkers. And so, and this may sound like super touchy-feely. I literally have the emotional acuity of a Vulcan. Like I have to look at people and I'm like, okay, they're sad. I should respond like this. Like I don't, yeah, totally. John Wellborn and I, when we did our 23 and Me, like we are both, we have this outlier where our empathy is like six standard deviations below the norm. We're just kind of like, yeah, I just don't fucking care. Anything, you know? There's an evolutionary benefit. There's probably an evolutionary benefit to that. You're probably the person that they're like, hey, we need some people killed in the neighboring camp. Why don't you go do that? I got this. And interestingly, a bunch of seal buddies that I know, team guys, like they are similar in this polymorphism. It's just like, yeah, you're totally. That's probably right on the head then. You're probably right. We need a super objective person in our group here in order to just keep us surviving, right? I'll be the nice guy. You be the objective guy. Right, right. It's like, hey, she's too old, she might need to go. Right. Ice flow next, yeah. So, you know, and I guess I just throw that out there with some context. This was some two degree, it may be accurate. It was some pretty hard one insight. I'm a biochemist by training. I'm super reductionist. I'm 99% atheist and 1% agnostic because who knows, but I haven't seen any proof yet. So I don't have much touchy feely element to me, but over the course of time, in trying to help people, I'm kind of like, okay, this reductionist approach isn't really cutting it. And we can, it felt like this mating dance of an exotic bird. It was like, if I just bobbed my head this way and wiggle my ass, like they're gonna get it. It'll be there, you know? And it never was, it always changed. And then one day, I asked this person, I'm like, who didn't love you? And they were like, what do you mean? And I'm like, somebody didn't love you. This isn't about the food, this is about something else. And dude, it was, he was a big dude and I thought he was gonna kill me. I thought I was good. But ended up having this huge breakdown and this was kind of the insight. I'm like, oh, it's really not about the food. Like if people are really in this spot where they're like, I need a healthy relationship with the food, I'm like, no, you don't. You need to figure out what the other thing is that you have transferred the food. Well, this was the side of Paul check that I really connected with when we were talking with him because it was about, I'd say it took about 10 years into my training career before that light bulb really went off for me. I mean, I was so, because you're not taught that way. You go through school and your books and everything you read, it's all about the science and the math. Like that's what, it's, you know, it's numbers. It's like, oh, you're not moving enough. Law thermodynamics. Yeah, that's it, that's it, right? We speak to that all day long. And then I started realizing how much of a psychological component was in the success of my clients. And when I actually started to focus less on that and really dive in that, I saw this, I just saw this uptick in results for my clients because to be honest, and we've talked about this on the show before, most people fail, a lot of people fail at this. They had, they come in, oh, this is the goal. I want to look this way or do this. And as a trainer, I was always trying to provide the tools to get there, but they weren't even ready. They don't even know how to use the tools yet. So that was a big breakthrough moment for me. And here's the bottom line. Like people think, I need to work out and I need to eat right so that I'll be happy. What they don't realize is I need to be happy so that when I work out and eat right, everything works out together. It's the happy part. If that's the part that happens first, if you want long-term success, you cannot have long-term success without that. It just doesn't work. And if you don't believe me, like I've had tons of clients who are super regimented about their fitness and the nutrition who are unhappy and look to it, look to fitness and nutrition to bring them happiness. And what they end up doing is they sign up for marathon after marathon or event after event because that becomes their motivation to keep pushing their bodies. And then when they can't do it because of injury or whatever, because they've overworked their body, they go so far off the wagon that it's a horrible thing. I don't know when I had this insight, but early on, so I was always kind of a power athlete. Like I'm a little fast twitchy and I just kind of liked that stuff. And endurance athletes, I just couldn't really make heads or tails out of, but we started doing some work with some of these folks. And frequently when I would talk to them, they're like, okay, what are your goals? And they're like, I wanna do this race faster. And I'm looking at them and they're an orthopedic disaster. Like they're bilateral imbalances and they've got no core trunk strength. And I'm like, oh my God, like we need to get you fundamentally stronger before you're gonna do anything. Like they were like an energy leak everywhere. Just falling forward. Yeah, just basically falling forward. And so I would tell them something akin to the following. I'd say, for you to run faster, we're gonna have to cut your training volume by 80% for a period of time. And there would be like stark horror in their eyes. And what was going on was that all this time outside, doing whatever it was they were doing, they were running from their life, literally. Like if they had a moment alone with their thoughts, they would just go nuts. Oh, so terrifying for people. Yeah, and that was also when I ceased working with endurance athletes, but except under very rare circumstances. Again, the empathy deal, yeah. We talk about this all the time. Like high level athletes are some of the most imbalanced people I've ever worked in my entire life. They're so the hardest to help later in life. They are so good at cheating. What I mean by cheating is compensation. Their bodies have developed these recruitment patterns that are not favorable, but they're so good at them that they succeed. And in order to correct those recruitment patterns or change them, you have to regress the hell out of them. And it might even take a year of regression. And what athlete is willing to tell them, hey, listen, I know you're... Well, even if you're not an athlete, if you just have that athletic mindset, because so many of them were trained that way that it's about intensity. Everyone's intensity driven. If you just power to your goal, power to your goal. I was squatting close to 400 pounds, around 400 pounds, deadlifting close to 600 pounds. I had to regress myself to the point where I was squatting 135 pounds and I was going much deeper range of motion, changing the recruitment pattern. My deadlift wouldn't go over 300 pounds because I had to change recruitment patterns. I had to ground my feet and really change things. That was a major ego hit. Like I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna go to the gym and do that when I can lift so much more weight. And it's taken me, I mean, eight months to get somewhere near where I was before. But I had to be willing to do that. There's that huge ego factor that people don't even think about. Well, I deal with that a little bit. Like I'm really a fan of ketogenic diets. I tend to feel best while in ketosis. But I muck around with some old guy, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and it's very glycolytic. And there are some people out there that are super smart and they seem to be keto fueling some folks. Like they're doing some targeted carbs and stuff like that. But I already get the shit beat out of me at Jets and I'm just not willing. They're like, oh, it might take eight months. It might take a year. And I'm like, and it might not even work as well. That's what I'm doing. So I'm in this middle ground there of, I get like 75, 150 grams of carbs a day. So it's a lowish carb. And I feel pretty good, but I'm not as like cognitively on as when I'm ketotic and everything. So I've been playing with some intermittent fasting and that seems to pull it in a little bit there. But there's this all this alluring potential there for doing ketosis. But then I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to have Charlie kick my ass while I'm adapting to ketosis. So I mean that ego is a big deal. Oh yeah. You know who we had on the show? That's an example. That is Zach Bitter. Zach Bitter is somebody. Ultra endurance. Well, like American, I think world record, or American record holder, I should say, excuse me. Yeah. So he does that. He stays in ketosis majority of the time. But then when he gets to these races, he does give little surges. But it just takes the smallest amount of so insulin. He now needs a fraction of the carbohydrates he needed to before to fuel himself during his 100. He does a hundred mile. Yeah, races. And he says his body's so much more efficient doing that. What are your thoughts on artificial sweeteners? That's a big area of debate in our world. I think that they're more of a problem than what most people think and less of a problem than the lunatics think. So the lunatics will say that they're going to give you cancer tomorrow and they're a huge problem. And I'm kind of like, man, if you drive a car and you're worried about artificial sweeteners, you have some misplaces. Yeah, put it in context. But that said, in my experience, and also there's some literature that seems to support this, the artificial sweeteners seem to do something squirrely with that appetite. Like people just seem to eat more and they're not satiated. And in that ice cream example, it's interesting where the trick is to get people to spontaneously reduce caloric intake and do it in a way that they feel good. That's the holy grail right there. It's really kind of the holy grail and kind of the higher protein, moderate carb diets, lower glycemic load seem to work really well for a lot of people, although there's a subset of people that seem to do better on higher carb, lower fat. So there's some distinctions there. I'm glad you brought that up, because there's definitely some polymorphisms in people and you've got some people that'll do keto and it just doesn't work for them. Their lipids go crazy and whatever. Then you've got people like me, keto and I'm like, I feel like God. Yeah, yeah. And can you look like this too? Absolutely, I was just gonna say Greek God. Greek God, yeah, Greek God. I'm actually Italian, I know you're Italian. My wife's Italian. Yeah, you're Italian by association. I knew I liked it. He adopted you before he got here. Thank you. So I've seen situations where people will be motored along pretty well and that artificial sweetened thing kind of launches them out. It's kind of the hookers and cocaine binge after that. Oh my God, I used that exact example we were talking about when it happens, yeah. Yeah, so that's the challenge that I have with it and there seems to be some literature that indicates that artificial sweeteners may actually alter the gut microbiome in unfavorable ways. And so there's some interesting knock on stuff with that. And also when people do artificial sweeteners as a standalone item, so you're sending a signal to the brain from the flavor experience that we're consuming calories. But then the hypothalamus is kind of like, check in the blood, check in the blood and it's like. There's nothing. You told me you're sending me something, I'm not getting anything. And so you can decouple that signaling process. I think and there's some neurophysiology papers that are kind of suggestive of this. Like I'm going out on a balcony with this deal but there's some mechanism that supports this stuff. But everything in our biological past, if you had a flavor experience, there was a caloric load associated with that. There was even a nutrient relationship to that. And it was guaranteed, it was baked in the cake. Yeah, if you had a citrusy flavor, you had vitamin C every time. Now I could have citrusy flavored sour gummy bears or whatever gummy worms. And there's nothing. There's actually extracting nutrients out of your body to process this stuff. So can we create a situation where people are really going crazy on artificial sweeteners and they kind of break the hypothalmic response to real food and then real food doesn't actually cause the satiating mechanism? I can't tell you how many people I've seen in hospital settings that were four to 600 pounds and it's like, so what do you think got you here? And they're like, it's the soda. And I'm like, was it diet soda? And they're like, yeah, you know, it was a mix but it was more often than not. They're like, I would do the diet soda. And it did something crazy to them. And you know, this is where the folks that are really into the calories in, calories out. You'll clearly thermodynamics works but what's the deeper story here? Like we don't live in a closed system. They're not, this person is not a bomb calorimeter. So how the fuck did they get 600 pounds and what are we gonna do so that they don't cost our society $100,000 on the way out? Exactly, and I'll tell you why I hate that example of the calories in versus calories out. We have examples of changing the microbiome in a mouse. It'll become obese. I could give, I could give it- At the same caloric intake. At the same caloric intake. I could, myostatin-inhibited animals don't change same calories, tons of muscle. I could take an athlete, change nothing, give them three grams of testosterone a week which is a shit ton of testosterone. They're gonna be leaner and have more muscle. There's all these different signaling pathways that can change how your body, your body fat percentage, your muscle, how much muscle you have and everything that goes underneath that that has nothing to do with calories and I don't think it's crazy to look at the sensation of taste. There's a reason why that signal exists. I'm eating something. Why does my brain perceive sweetness to begin with? It's not just to motivate me to eat more food. There's other things that happen just from having that sensation or from the brain perceiving sweetness and artificial sweeteners do that. It's tricking your brain. Well, Rob touched on that. I mean, it's so funny how the marketing, these huge companies that sell to us, they know that better than some of the damn scientists seem to know that. Let's also consider this. Like you said it earlier, we were not asking the right questions. When the majority of studies done on artificial sweeteners were done, did they look at the microbiome at all? We didn't know to look at that. We had no idea. Now we know for a fact that like sucralose, for example, in some studies will kill like up to 50% of the known beneficial bacteria like lactobacillus and Pifidobacteria. It'll kill half of it just by consuming it. So, I ask you your opinion because I value your opinion. I've heard both sides of it. I know what my opinion is and I may be a little biased, but... Yeah, and again, I think that... So I had a lot of success early on putting people on low carb diets. But what I had was a bunch of confirmation bias. I managed to really ignore the people that I broke and dysregulated their thyroid and tanked their CrossFit games aspirations by running them to low carb, because it worked for me so well. I'm like, man, this has got to work. And there's all these potential like life enhancing benefits. And man, couldn't we like fat fuel Fran? Wouldn't that be amazing? And it's like, well, it probably doesn't work. But I was so confirmation biased with that it took a pretty good bludgeoning for me to be awakened to that. And so you have these people that have a methodology and they find a cohort of people for whom it works. And that's fine. But I, and you guys talked about this before we started recording. I think it would just be good if people were a little more circumspect about like, hey, this is what I'm doing. And I recognize that it may not work for everybody. But I've got my little niche here and we're doing really good with it. You want to check out what we're up to. And or, and or look at what is it about that way of eating that it was different than what you're doing and then maybe it's not so much the, you know, this name that they're calling. It's the change of environment. Yeah, or no, we've talked about this before. Like a lot of times you get, you know, people that go vegan, you know, and they become, you know, veganism and it becomes like a religion to them. And it's like, you know, and then they're so anti meat and it's like, oh, it's so bad for you. And they demonize it. It's like the difference is you ate no vegetables before. Yeah, they ate a ton of vegetables. Maybe that's why you feel so awesome. So we talk a lot about, you know, connecting the dots and becoming more aware, you know, and it's just, and it is, it's just, we're always evolving. We've been doing this 15, 20 years each and I'm still learning about my body as I, you know, but to start to be aware of that instead of mindlessly just putting the- You guys have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? No, no. You guys haven't heard of that? Oh, it's great. It should be like the thing that, you know, is like the logo for this episode. So it's basically, it's a graph and the graph is knowledge on the x-axis and then assurances of that knowledge on the y-axis. And when you're at zero knowledge, you're at absolute surety and they call it Mount Stupid. And then- That's what I was talking about. It's just- It's deep and a mile wide. Yeah, mile wide. But then as you go on, you hit this low web where you're into it 10 years and you're like, I don't know anything, you know, which is kind of where like, I feel like I'm at now. And then as you get out 15, 20, 30 years, it never reaches Mount Stupid again because you realize you never know all of it. But yeah, Dunning-Kruger effect is pretty interesting. You end up saying, hey, I know, now that I know so much, I know- I just posted the soccer, yeah. I just put up the boss of the Socrates code this. Yeah, for sure. So do you think it's kind of a good rule of thumb then for people to just look at just evolution in general and the kinds of foods we were exposed to and just as a rule of thumb? Like, you know, if they come out with a new synthetic product or flavor or color or whatever, and they say, okay, we have all these studies that show it's safe or whatever, the complexities of how foods and things interact with our body and how our bodies interact with them and the environment, it's so complex and we only know such a small fraction of it. Do you think it's a good rule of thumb to just be like, I'm gonna eat kind of around what we've always been eating because that's probably gonna be better for me. What's been around for thousands of years versus, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's my crazy used car salesman pitches, eat largely whole and processed foods, sleep like a teenager in the middle of the summer and get a decent amount of exercise and have community that supports you in what you're up to. Like that's my crazy recommendation. I mean, it's super over the top and really nefarious and there's no way to test. And you can test all of that. It's like, just go to bed an hour earlier night, put some blue blockers on as soon as the sun goes down, dim the lights in your house and you tell me how lean you are before and after. Take a photo before, go two weeks and see what happens afterwards. And so you're out 10 bucks buying a pair of blue blocker glasses and you probably enhanced your insulin sensitivity by like 20 to 50%, reduce your likelihood of all these chronic degenerative diseases, probably enhanced your anabolic profile, your testosterone's better and it was a pair of glasses that you swiped off. I'm going to bed on time. Yeah, I've actually done that. I actually, what I do now is an hour before I go to bed and I have kids, especially when I have my kids with me, I'll turn the lights off and electronics off and we'll use candles. We'll use candles or fire because that seems to be a little more natural. And I swear to God, man, I sleep, and I was never a bad sleeper, so it wasn't like I thought I have to do this because I have a horrible sleep. I just sleep so much better now. My kids, people have trouble taking their kids to bed. They go to bed an hour later when it's time for bed and they go to bed and they sleep right away and it's that process that we don't realize, it starts before you go to bed, that sleep process starts way before that. Yeah, but I mean, maybe I am a caveman. I just don't have a really complex strategy to this stuff. You know, to eat largely whole unprocessed foods. With a little bit of experimentation, you'll figure out if you have some food sensitivities, like if you have issues with gluten or not. Again, stick it in, you know, pull it out for 30 days, reintroduce, see how you do. Play around with your carbohydrate intake. Start at the low end of things, maybe 50 grams a day and then run it up to 250 grams a day and, you know, just kind of play with that. Run it all the way down to 30 or zero for a while and just do like green veggies and ketosis. And with a couple of months of fiddling, you're really gonna find a sweet spot for yourself that you don't really need supplements, you don't need anything else. You know, I mean, if you have big aspirations of being like an elite level athlete or, you know, like a spec ops guy or something, then we're gonna have to get more granular. But those are the big picture deals. This is what we talk about also on the show. Like crazy is that, you know, this is what I also have a problem with the fitness industry is so much as marketed around the before the workout, the after workout, this pill for this, this powder for that. It's like, you got all these people that are eating all this process, shit. They're sleeping terribly. They got all this stress in their life. Six times a day. But they're spending $100, $200, $300 a month on all these little pills and powders that are, we're talking about the incremental change from that. Right, words if they just went to bed now or earlier in the night. Like it would blow, it would be like going on the three grams of testosterone a week. It's like, oh, and I just need to sleep. And it's like, yeah, and you'll keep normal test ocular. That's ridiculous. Amazing when you look at it. I have a simple, I know there's gotta be a lot of people that will appreciate this question. Brown rice or white rice and why? I'll leave that up to the gods to decide. I'm not really a big rice fan. You know, funny enough though, my wife and I did just do a bunch of experiments like wearing a continuous glucometer, wife's Italian, she has great blood glucose response and man, white rice, brown rice, purple rice, whatever the rice was. If I added a modest helping, which was about 50 grams of effective carbs, I was nearly 200 at two hours later. Like I was effed up and so not really much rice for me. Occasionally after I do some jujitsu, I might go to Thai food and get some of the like rice paper wrappers or something like that. Where do you get your carbs from? Mainly, man, sweet potatoes, apples, applesauce, right now in the summer, I'll get more like watermelon and melons and stuff like that. Do you try to eat seasonally or do you see there being a benefit to eating seasonally? Like kick it up your vitamin D in the winter time? I do to a degree. Like and we have a little three acre farm here and so we are able to get some stuff out of the garden. Actually year round now, like even in the winter we had squash and cabbage, we had some root vegetables, like some Jerusalem artichokes that just like kind of went well, but I would literally I'm like, okay, we're gonna have some Jerusalem artichoke today. I go out and pull the thing up and it would have these potato looking things on it and I'd wash it and cut them up. And so to a degree, we eat a little bit seasonally and I also just tend to buy what's cheap. And so when things are in season they tend to be cheaper and so I just kind of rotate. That's a nice little tip there. That's a nice tip. So just, you know, if you don't mind, I wanted to get a little bit more into just you as an individual as a person. What motivates you so strongly in this field of study and work? Because you have, I mean, you're obviously, I mean, if you look up Paleo, your name comes up. You've got a book on the New York Times bestseller. I think you have one that's recent. Coming out soon. Coming out soon. We'll talk about that a little bit, but why are you so motivated in this particular field? Man, so I painted myself as being this like unempathic, like soulless person and I'm gonna like undermine that mystique. But you know, when I first got exposed to all this stuff, I had ulcerative colitis so bad that I was dying literally. Like the doctors wanted to do a bowel resection on me. I'm a former California state powerlifting champion. I'm not really big, but at 181 pounds, I had a 565 squat, 565 dead, 345 bench. I'm embarrassed. No wonder he didn't blink. Can you set your numbers? Yeah. Oh, you've been working out for a couple of months. He has longer limbs than I do. Yeah, longer limbs than I do. That's a good excuse. So I was decently kind of fast twitchy. I was reasonably lean, reasonably muscular, although my doughy Northern European ancestry, like I was always kind of chubby in the midsection, you know, it was like high carb deal and all that. But I shifted my diet to vegan, which I actually blamed a lot of the problems on veganism. And I think now looking back, I also moved to Seattle and I was starting a graduate program and I was waking up before the sun came up, got home before the sun or after the sun went down. I'd been doing that for like two years. So stressed. It's so stressed, maxed out, like I was like, oh, I can get by on three or four hours a night of sleep. No, you can't. Or if you can, maybe you also need to be eating some animal protein and getting some sun on your skin. You know, I'm still in my 20s, but the long and short of that is that I had ulcerative colitis so bad. I'm like 175 pounds right now. At the low web of my ulcerative colitis, I was 130 pounds. Oh, sure. Malabsorption issue. I mean like I was dying. I would eat 4,000 calories, but it would go out the same way it went in. Hair was falling out, nails were splitting and everything, I had multiple nutrient deficiencies. And then this idea of a paleo diet got on my radar and it's kind of an interesting story how that occurred. But I started fiddling with this and I mean it was like someone throwing a lifesaver, you know, a life preserver to somebody drowning. Like it just saved my life. And I started playing around with this stuff and had the chance to start doing this in a gym setting. A good friend of mine, Dave Warner, who's a former SEAL, he's also an engineer. We started working out together and in 2000, 2001, we found this weird workout online called CrossFit and we started fiddling with that and they were into the paleo type diet and I'm like, oh, I'm into this too, you know? So there's this good synergy there. And before we knew it, we had like 20 people that we were working out with that we were basically training. And so we reached out to the glass men's and I wrote them an email, hey, we really like what you're doing. We wanna open a gym, call it CrossFit. What do you think? And they're like, go be a chief. So this was the first CrossFit affiliate gym in the world. And so I started working with a lot of people and I would see folks and I'm like, man, I think you've got autoimmune stuff. Why don't we try doing this? And we remove the grains and maybe pull out the legumes and dairy and lo and behold, they would get better and their GI problems would get better. But this was like, again, 2000, 2001, I would navigate my life and meet people constantly that I'm like, oh man, I know what's going on with you. But then it's almost like one of these M night Shalaman movies where like you can see the future. You know that the person's gonna walk out the door and they're gonna go get in a car accident. You need to do something to stop them, but you also need to do in a way that you don't look like a crazy person. So I had like a good 15 or 20 years of trying to help people, but do it in a way where I didn't appear to be a crazy person. You can't just jump in there and like grab them and be like, for the love of God, you have to get off and gluten, you know, this thing that you have. And so, you know, I've always just enjoyed helping people and have had some success with it. So you get that feedback, but my wife's mother died from rheumatoid arthritis complications three months before I met my wife. And the interesting thing with that is that the rheumatologist who worked with my wife's mother was the rheumatologist who worked with my mom. And he was the one that discovered that she had celiac disease and intolerance to grains, legumes and dairy. That's what alerted me to that, but he didn't connect the dots with anybody else. And so my wife's mother died at the age of 50. It was a horrible series of medical missteps that brought her to this situation. And if one person at one point, anywhere along that line, had been able to intervene and put this idea in front of them, she'd probably still be alive. Like if I went and pulled in my Gmail and I just searched rheumatoid arthritis resolved or something like that. Just in my own email, I probably have like six or 700 testimonials, which that's six or 700 anecdotes other than the fact that most of them have accompanying blood work. So at some point it's like anecdote kind of matters and this circles back to Terry Walls when we're starting to study this stuff. But anytime that I kind of get beaten down a little bit, I just think about my wife's mother and the thousands of people that I've met and I just did an event in Portland and this gal showed me a picture of herself from a year before she was wheelchair bound from multiple sclerosis. And now she's like up running around doing some sort of a fitness practice. And she's like, I followed your book and the multiple sclerosis went into remission and I've got my life back and I thought I was gonna die. So I kind of, you know, I mean, when I feel like there's a critical mass of this stuff then you'll go to, if you go to my website, there'll be a gone fishing sign and I'll be in Nicaragua like farming coconuts. But until then I just kind of feel like it would be morally reprehensible for me knowing what I know to not at least put it out there so that people have an option. It's not to say like I really try to avoid the religious dogma around this stuff but if somebody's really sick, I just want them to know that you might have an option. Like the standard of care might not be the totality of what you have available. Do you think getting ulcer of colitis was kind of a gift then in that sense? It definitely was. It would have never pushed me along this track, you know? And this is one of the interesting things of the Wolverines among us, you know, they never have that crisis. They never have that point where they hit the brick wall and they think they can do anything. And they oftentimes don't have a lot of sensitivity to the fact that there are people that are really, really, really broken. There are a lot of people in the fitness and nutrition scene that they will trot out like, oh, I worked with this professional athlete or whatever and it's like, okay, that's cool. You helped an adult play a child sport and make a lot of money. Good for you. That's awesome, you know? And it's like, I say this with the utmost honor, but I've been on the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Committee for seven years. So I go speak to the SEAL teams and special boat teams about sleep and nutrition and stimulants like caffeine and nicotine. And I'm not particularly good looking and these guys could get anybody that they want to come do it and they keep inviting me back. So the only thing I can assume from that is they're getting some value out of what I'm offering to them. And so, you know, like our police, military and fire, it's a huge honor to work with those people. And I want to help them any way that I can. People who have chronic degenerative disease that they think they have no other options. I want to work with those people. And so as cool as like the elite athlete is or the real jacked, you know, fitness competitor, that stuff's awesome. But for me, it's just, it doesn't light the fire, you know, when you've got someone whose kid had, you know, unresolvable epileptic seizures and you hook them up with the Charlie Foundation and they get put on a well-managed ketogenic diet and the kid is completely normal and killing it in school. You're like, fuck, yeah, that was awesome. Well, enhancing a life is one thing. Changing or saving a life is another, you know. I mean, that's totally. So can you, we're getting ready to go to Paleo FX for the first time ever. Nice. Can you give us a little bit of history on in the rundown and what to expect for us? Like we've never been there before. We got it, we heard it from Ben Greenfield the very first time, did a little bit of research on it but don't know much, I'm sure. Obviously you're welcome. Oh man, it's the Paleo Nerd Fest. I'm not sure what to say about that, you know. Do you have to have like special hats or shirts or anything? They really frown on that, the more nude you are kind of. Oh, I see you, I see you. With the whole cave band. Oh, we'll fill it right in. Yeah, yeah. I'll be sure and shave. Perfect, perfect, yeah, yeah. It's a great time. They hold it each year in Austin, usually in the spring or the early summer. Super hot chicks there, not quite to the density of like a CrossFit Games event, but really pretty good. Great, we all have girlfriends and wives. He's just ruined it for us. Well, I'm taking my wife. I'm bringing a pail of sand to the beach, so I'm one up, you guys on that one. But really wonderful people. Usually some great presentations, although it's not an academic meeting, like there are some good academicians there. David Perlmutter I think is doing the keynote. Oh, I love him. Crushed the keynote last year. Love him. He's really amazing. And he's pretty jacked, like when you see him, he's not super tall, but like thick neck and thick traps and everything, like he definitely knows his way around a barbell. So I really dig that guy. But what else about paleo effects? Really good food. I mean, Austin has great food, but they always have great food at the event. And then last year, I roped him into having a huge section in the middle of the event matted with jujitsu mats, and we had a big jujitsu thing out there. No way. So like in between every one of my presentations, I would basically run out, roll until it was like two minutes before my presentation, then I would go up there and like, my shirt was stuck to me. I had like blood dripping in my eye and everything. And I'm like, where have you been? Oh, nothing. So there will be jujitsu there. Dude, you're speaking my language. I trained for a while years back for about six years. And it's one of my favorite sports. Definitely the thinking man's martial art. I know it's gonna piss off a lot of people who do other arts, but I'm a little biased. Rob, do you meditate? I do, but I use a meditation app called Brainwave. And I just find that I'm too squirrely too high. So jujitsu is my meditation. That's why I asked you, because people like you who tend to be so driven, and who admittedly you drove yourself to illness because you were so focused on what you were doing, that's why I asked you if you're a meditator. Have you identified that being an area you need to? It's a huge area of improvement for me. And like if I'm tracking HRV and I do that five minutes of breathing, even once a day, like that HRV score improves immediately. How about exploration with things like ayahuasca or psychedelics to expand that side of you, that empathetic or non-empathetic side? You don't get a chemistry degree at Chico State University wanting to make a lot of money. Put it that way. It'll be my own bleak answer to that. So we just become best friends. Best friends ever. What a great PC way to put that out. So funny and true story, when I was doing my undergrad, I wanted to do an extraction out of a San Pedro cactus, which contains mescaline. And so I went to my professor and I'm like, hey, I'm wanting to do a natural products extraction and then actually a synthesis so that we get, validation of the natural product. It's a very normal thing. Like you do a synthesis starting with like Gallic acid and then you converge on this thing. I was like, what are you thinking about? And I was like, three, four, five, tri-methoxyphenolethylamine, you know, just kind of like totally like off the thing. And he's like, what type of methodology are you using? And I showed him and he's like, I can save you 15 steps. And he reaches in his file drawer, pulls it out and hands it to me. I'm like, oh, this is why you're a professor at Chico State University. So in the San Pedro cactus that I used, I actually got a trimming off of it from the dude that used to run the botany scene there. So I got this mescaline containing cactus extracted it and, you know, did the full natural products extraction deal and then did a synthesis using a Gallic acid backbone. And this was all funded by the Chemistry Alumni Reunion Symposium summer internship deal. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's fucking rad. That's so rad. Well, hey man, it's been excellent talking to you. Great hanging out with you. Hopefully for sure we run into you at pay off. Oh, you know, on that note real quick before we sign off, because we will probably be interviewing and talking to people over there, anybody we should make sure we talk to that maybe we haven't met or talked to before. Oh man, tons of people. I know that's, I know there's gonna be a lot. Somebody you're like, you know, if you get a hold of this guy, don't miss it. Grab onto this person. Definitely Mark Sisson. And not just because he's like a big wig in the scene, but Mark's just like super accomplished in so many areas of his life and a really awesome dude. Like great at business, amazing relationship with his kids. He's still married to the same person. You know, I mean, it's like he's kind of cool dude. You guys already know Ben Greenfield. Chris Kressers, I would argue possibly the best clinician in this like ancestral health evolutionary medicine kind of interface. Like he is a brilliant guy. Like I feel like an idiot next to that guy. Like I'll feel a little hoity-toity and then I hang out with him and I'm like. We'll feel like the R word. I don't know. Yeah, the R finishing with a D. And then Rad. Rad, yeah. We'll feel real rad. We'll feel rad. Chris Masterjohn, if he's there, like that guy, like if you want to get, he's so well versed in so many things, but if you really want to go down the rabbit hole of fat soluble vitamins and their implications on health, like vitamin ADK, the interface between those and zinc and testosterone production. Dude, he like, I feel like I have a decent steeping in that, but I am pressed to keep up with him and that's just on his podcast material, which I know he waters down for the general consumption a little bit. So definitely Chris Masterjohn, yeah. Excellent. Well, thanks for my pleasure. Yeah, thanks, great. Listen, if you like Mind Pump, go to mindpumpmedia.com enroll in our free 30 days of coaching. Every day you're gonna get an email with a new subject and links to episodes where we talk about that subject in detail. Also, you can find us on Instagram at Mind Pump Radio. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal. Justin's at Mind Pump Justin and Adam is at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps anabolic, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. 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