 Thank you very much. You guys hear me? Okay. Let me squat down a little bit so I can actually talk on this deal. First let me thank my good friend Matt LaLonde without Matt and Rob Wolfe and Amy Kubel for her masses of amounts of research that she sends us daily. I don't think a lot of this would be possible. So, oh nice. Thanks Matt. All right. You guys still hear me? Okay. This whole deal really started about four years ago. I was approached by a mom who has a 17-year-old son. He was kind of a little bit overweight, but not that. She wanted him to get fit before he went off to college. Now based on Dr. Lieberman's definition of fit, I've kind of changed mine, but for her, she wanted him to look better. First place we started, especially with a kid who's never really trained or ever done anything, oh volume. So we started working with a 17-year-old kid and the first place we sent him out to actually do was get some blood work done. You know, as a smart trainer and coach and you know not really having an experienced training average to normal people, I figured you know what? Let's get a blood work and get a snapshot of what he was doing. So we sent him out, get his blood work. He comes in, he brings it to me, he sits down and I open it up and I get this like horrified look on my face. His fasted blood glucose was 137. So for those of you guys know and I have a cool slide for it, he's diabetic. 17-years-old, pretty severely diabetic. So we sit down and you know, I never really dealt with this. So I, you know, start the first place I would or wherever I should, which is, so what do you eat? What aren't you gonna eat anymore? And more importantly, what is diabetes and disease of carbohydrates? So we get into this deal and he gets this kind of ghostly look on his face and then turns to me and goes, what about chocolate cake? So you know, from my previous job, which I'll go into a little bit, I've taken quite a few blows to the head. So I have a certain you know, lack of emotional intelligence, probably similar to Matt's Matelon's tact when dealing with normal people. You guys obviously all know Matt. So I look at him like no chocolate cake. So he starts crying. And in my head, I'm thinking, oh, obviously I'm getting somewhere with this kid. He looks at me and he goes, my grandmother made me a chocolate cake every single birthday in my life. Are you saying to me that my grandmother is doing something that has hurt me? And I looked at him and was like, yes, more tears follow. And at that point, I go, well, when's your birthday? And I'm expecting him to say like next week. And he's like nine months from now. So I started realizing the really the hormonal physiological emotional, you know, affective food. And I didn't really understand it because just my history, I played 10 years in the NFL. Actually, my last year, a couple years ago was here in Boston, I got hurt in the last preseason game. And that was the end of my 10 year career. And before I actually came out here to play, I had been training with my brothers in a gym. And this is when this happened. So I really thought about it. And I'm being a fairly unemotional individual. I wasn't looking to comfort him. I was more thinking, wow, if the wrong foods could do this, what could the right foods do? So this is where this thing really kind of came from. And I was fortunate to, like I said, do a plate for a decade. And early in my career, I knew that if I ate enough protein, I could recover and get stronger. If I ate enough fat, I could eat enough calories to really get a caloric surplus to keep my size and my strength. If I ate enough carbs, I was easy for me to really ramp up my athletic performance because I really knew from a young age that, you know, carb amount really dictated by energy output. If I'm training twice a day on the field for three hours, I have to eat carbs. I knew that when I ate a low carb diet, I was tired. I didn't move as well. And I didn't perform as well. So I'll imagine that carbs matching athletic performance. So when I really looked at my training, when I looked at my nutrition, when I looked at my supplementation, I use this term that I, you know, you guys will know what the Olympics happening, performance enhancing. So if I use the term performance enhancing with you guys, you're going to think of what some Eastern Bloc weight lifter, you know, taking some drug that only Matt can synthesize in the lab. But I think that was kind of misguided in that, especially with that word performance enhancing, you need to look at what is training optimally, you know, where the things I was ingesting into my body, optimizing my performance. So it was an easy way for me to examine my athletic career. And was I doing in my or was I doing everything in my power to be the best? Now, something that we kind of need to understand a little bit is peak athletic performance has little to do with health. We're an ancestral health symposium, we're honestly talking about eating for health and how to be better people. I didn't really care about that. I just wanted to be better. I wanted to be stronger. I wanted to be faster. So realizing one going back to, you know, really looking at this kid and his emotional breakdown with the with the cake, I wanted to start examining what's the most powerful anabolic substance we can put in our bodies, it's food. You can go to GNC, you can look on the internet. Anything they sell is not nearly as anabolic as the food that you can consume. So much like our 17 year old diabetic friend who selected the wrong foods, what are the right foods? And more importantly, how do I ramp up performance in the way that we really kind of found this was by improving immune function? So for the last five years of my career, I played on a severely damaged right knee. My knee was inflamed and swollen from 2004 through 2009. And the problems that I had from those years still plagued me today. This inflammation resulted in osteophytes baking down to bones, disintegrating of cartilage, and these kind of bony orthopedic changes, you know, will hamper me until they either give me any replacement or I just suffer with it forever. But if we look at the information in the body that results from eating foods that damaged the gut, you see more of a systematic effect that's similar to the damage in my knee. While the effects of this are much more severe than breaking down cartilage and bony changes, they can be reversed as a small intestine is extremely anabolic and can heal, whereas my knee is just screwed. So the gut represents the largest lymphatic tissue in the whole body. The task of intestinal immune system is differentiating the harmless from the harmful. In a normal environment, tolerance is extended towards the non-pathogenic stimuli through effective immune responses are generated towards dangerous pathogens. If inappropriate responses develop, inflammation results. So much like an injury where I took a helmet to the knee and damaged my knee, all of a sudden inflammation is a result. If all of a sudden the wrong foods are introduced, inflammation in the body. So this inflammation results in a weakening of the immune system. And we found a direct correlation between immune function and recovery and athletic performance. So I know this sounds crazy, but athletes with stronger immune systems are able to train harder, recover faster, and basically increase their athletic performance. So we basically looked at eliminating the foods in the substance that damaged the immune system and caused inflammation. We found this great physical development. This improvement came in, like I said, faster recovery, more volume. And we just saw our athletes being able to go out and train harder by just really focusing on fixing this immune function issue. So since you guys are here at the Ancestral Health Symposium, can you take any guesses on what the foods were? So high volumes of protein from pasture rays and animal proteins, mono-insaturated saturated fats like coconut oil, olive oil, animal fats, carbohydrates from roots, tubers, and veggies, and white rice if people tolerated it. Not only enough, we found that everybody we trained with tolerated white rice. So we supplemented with some high-quality whey protein from grass-fed cows and we combined it with a pretty trick supplement that we found called hyperimmune milk protein concentrate. They basically pulled a lot of the stuff out of the raw milk and were able to powderize it. The other part was copious amounts of raw and pasteurized milk. So creating monohydrate, fish oil, branched chain of minnows, and quality daily vitamins were thrown into the mix. So by limiting processed foods, gluten, MSG, hypericose corn syrup, and limiting sugar, we saw athletic performance increases. So pretty wild, huh? You guys are on board still, right? Okay, good. So the other key one, and I know a lot of people in here are going to equate consuming milk and drinking dairy and really eating dairy is like consuming poison. But what we found was that raw milk and fermented dairy like full-fat Greek yogurt and raw cheese to be extremely beneficial towards gut health and boosting IGF-1 levels. So I have a good friend, a guy named Dr. Tom Inkledon out of Arizona. When I first actually contacted him, we were talking about drinking raw milk and he relate a story to me that I'd heard when I was a young athlete about a trainer named Vince Garanda back in the 60s who trained Arnold Schwarzenegger and many of the lifters. He prescribed this deal, he called the Stone Age Diet. What do you think was on the Stone Age Diet? Yeah, meat, roots, tubers, bulbs, and copious amounts of raw milk. So that was a probably handfuls of Diana ball in there too, but he didn't write about that. So the other key thing I asked Tom, I said, do you think it's odd that we're the only mammals to really consume milk past weaning? Or do you think that, you know, it's weird that we consume another animal's milk? And I always kind of was a little on the fence for it and then he said to me kind of this brain bomb where it was like maybe we're the only mammals that were smart enough to figure it out. So I took that and really realized like maybe there were some benefits towards it and we saw some great athletic improvements but all this is good without some real-world examples. So my first subject, there we go, my first subject is AJ Roberts. He's a 27-year-old male powerlifter trains at Westside Barbell out in Columbus, Ohio. When I met AJ, he had his, he basically was ranked fifth all time in the world in the 308 weight class. He had a total of 2,650 pounds in the bench squat and deadlift and for those of you guys that lift weights, you know, that's a lot of weight. He had this goal of basically being the best in the world. So he trained it pretty much the strongest gym in the world. His gear was right, everything was right. He was just missing a huge component and when he approached me, he said, you know, I just don't feel like I'm recovering in between workouts and of course much like our friend with the cake, I was like, well, what are you eating? And, you know, his diet consisted of three to four pizzas a day. You know, pasta, McDonald's, they had a deal where they had to go spend 40 to 50 dollars a day either at Taco Bell or McDonald's and they just were a complete mess. So I said, AJ, here's this deal. I have this idea about how we're going to clean up immune function. So we ended up prescribing the diet. We talked about a few minutes ago and the big one for him was he was having a thyroid issue, which amazingly went away when he stopped eating wheat. So I know, crazy. So we started working together, fast-forward four months and he goes out to the world championship and he basically set a world record at 28, 25 with an 1140 squat, 870 bench and 815 deadlift. Nothing changed and he added 175 pounds to his total. So now he was the strongest guy in the world at 308 pounds and he figured what else do I have to do? Met his goal and retired. So we were pretty proud of AJ and definitely good, but you know one example and we have dozens of these, but the other key one is Stan Efforting. Stan is a super heavyweight class winner at the Mr. Olympia Masters in 2009. In 2011 he set the world record in raw powerlifting with a total of 2,226 pounds. Now this is a little different than AJ and that Stan went out there and just did this lift with just in a set of gym shorts. So he squatted like 860 bench 600 pounds and deadlifted in the 8s. Extremely strong man. Any ideas what Stan's diet looks like? Consumes about 8,000 calories a day. 50% of his total chloric intake comes from coconut oil and a little bit of olive oil. The rest comes from red meat, grass-fed and a small amount of white rice. He consumes a half to one full gallon of raw milk in his post workout meal. Right there he's standing at about 4% body fat. When he set the world record he was probably like 5% body fat. So what we've seen with our subjects and I'm only using two and I've dozens of others is we've seen a way to really almost turn this diet and really more important than what we're doing here in kind of a different way. By really focusing on cleaning up the immune function through health of the small intestine and using some you know some supplements and some probiotics and kind of that raw milk we found that increased gut health actually resulted in better athletic performance. So I actually finished a lot faster so I'm actually going to open up for questions. No questions? Oh yeah please thank you. Thank you. I appreciate your concern for talking about gut health and working out. I would just make one point at the Digestive Health Institute we've been looking at diet and digestive problems and just one point on the white rice is I agree with everything you said by the way and it's outstanding but the white rice can have some white rice has a lot of resistant starch in it such as basmati or other types of rice long grain white rice but sorry just a little bit more. Jasmine rice or sushi rice has all no resistance starch in it so it would be a little more gut healthy in terms of bacterial overgrowth, cybo so it would come under the something like fruit toast, sucrose, lactose, other resistance starch. Cool. Nice. Thank you. I have one question. Oh, actually we need to switch now. I'm sorry. Okay thanks. Okay. Yeah I can answer it after. Yeah just a question about how much you have your athletes change their diet day to day based on what that day's programming is. It kind of basically really the calories I mean I'm not a huge fan of just a flat baseline in terms of calories. I'm more of a fan of kind of almost a similar kind of anabolic diet in a lot of ways and that we cycle it where usually it's I usually hire a carb day on heavier days. The problem with AJ and Stan is that every single day is a heavy day. When you squat a thousand pounds I mean even you know for those you guys that know Louis from West Side Barbell they do dynamic work at 50% for their squats with 25% of band tension so I mean they're going in and doing you know 12 sets of two at 750 pounds. You know they're going in and benching you know singles at 900 and they're coming back and doing dynamic work in four and 500 and they're doing sled pulls. I mean the amount of volume that these guys were doing and what we really found where this thing got extremely trick is you know to be an elite athlete it's just not a 15 minute workout four times a week. These guys were training three four or five times a day seven days a week. They knew that when they could ramp their volume up to 14 between 14 17 even 21 workouts a week you know broken down almost like a Bulgarian type deal they knew that their training went up. The key was could you get them to recover so my deal was especially with AJ's we ran him a little higher carb and I know where Stan was more into body fat ran an extremely low carb but I know on Stan's big squat days he definitely ate a lot more carb so it was just a matter of really cycling it based on what they needed for the volume.