 Good morning guys, next up we've got Simon Wyatt. Simon is the founder and co-owner of Primal Fitness in Manchester. He's also a blogger at Primal Living and for the last seven years, he's been a personal trainer and nutritionist. Really looking forward to what he has to say and let's welcome Simon. Cool, good morning everybody. I had a feeling with it being first session that I was gonna have some slightly worse way of looking people. So hopefully you can take some of this in today. We'll have to re-watch the video in the future if you're not quite awake yet. Could be quite fitting though because the subject of today's talk is what you made of talking about food basically and drink and basically just the purpose of this talk is not to tell you what to eat, I'll tell you what not to eat. It's more to get to think about food and the effect it has on your body and I'm sure you're probably feeling the effect that drink can have on your body at the minute. So yeah, maybe that'll bring it home for you. So I've got a bit of a formatting issue come up here so it's a little bit small. Apologies if you can't read it but I don't think it should matter too much. What to say today? I'm gonna try and cover quite a broad range of topics. If you have any questions just make a note of them. I do have a tendency to go off on a tangent so I'll try and keep the questions just to the end and I'm gonna try and sort of hammer through this, get as much covered as possible in the 45 minutes. So I've got four topics I'm gonna cover today. You are what you eat. You are what you eat eats. You are what eats what you eat and you are how you eat. So sounds a bit mad but it'll hopefully all make sense in the end. So you are what you eat. So this is what I wanna try and get to think about. I wanna think about food basically. See a few of you eating things now. An important concept is that we are made of food, literally. What is food? Food is a source of energy. Everybody knows that calories, et cetera. It's also a source of raw materials. Potentially if you do eat it's a source of toxins as well. And also food can be a source of pleasure. So food, you know, it's a lot of different things. So food for energy, this is what people think. Oh, you know, I'm hungry, I need some energy. Or I'm tired, I need some energy. To be honest though, nowadays, food energy is not in short supply. If you look around the streets, you know, body fat is stored energy basically. And there's plenty of people with plenty of energy supply there stored ready for use. So although people say, oh, I need some energy, I need to eat. Most people are carrying around quite a lot of energy with them all the time. The conventional wisdom basically says that it's all to do with calories in versus calories out. But it's not quite that simple. Eating one calorie in food is not necessarily equate to one calorie burned or one calorie stored. There's various different things that can affect this, such as thermogenic effect. Actually it takes calories to digest food. Some foods takes more calories than others. Raw versus cooks, for example. Cooking food makes it much more digestible. You eat the same food raw, you'd actually get less calories than from if it was cooked. Meal size, you know, traditionally people said, you know, eat little and often. That could be completely backwards actually, as we'll come on to later. You eat a big meal all in one go. It's much harder for your digestion to extract all the calories from it than if it's little, small meals. And then genetics, metabolism. Two people can eat exactly the same foods. One will extract a lot more calories from it than the other. So it's not just a simple question of calories in versus calories out when it comes to, say, weight gain or weight loss, which is what a lot of people are primarily concerned with or think about. So I'm not gonna go into too much detail to say on specific goals, but as weight loss tends to be, or fat loss, should I say, tends to be a goal important to a lot of people is gonna quickly have a look at this. The big question, you know, do you need a calorie deficit for fat loss? Do you need to diet, basically, reduce your calorie intake? As with many things, it's a bit of a yes and no answer. Generally speaking, if you're taking in loads and loads of calories all the time, more than you need, your body's not gonna tap into your fat stores. Because what's the point? If you're constantly feeding it loads of fuel, why is it gonna tap into your fuel reserves? Having said that, you don't need to starve yourself in order to lose fat. You don't need like a huge deficit. And I think the important thing is that calorie deficit doesn't need to be a prolonged period of time. I think good analogy is like your bank account. If you think of like fat burning as dipping into your overdraft, it's possible to dip into your overdraft briefly and then have a big lump sum of money come in, take you back into credit on a almost daily basis if you get money in your account all the time. So you don't have to go for prolonged periods of times without with, you know, calorie deficit. Equal question. Is a calorie surplus necessary for muscle gain? A lot of you guys are gonna be interested in building some muscle. You know, you've had a lot of speakers here in the past about high intensity training, most effective efficient way to build muscle, Doug McGuff and so on. Question is, you know, how much do you need to eat in order to do that? Again, there's a belief in the mainstream that you just need to shovel down loads and loads and loads of calories, eat and eat and eat to put on weight. Fortunately, I've seen this in the past, you know, firsthand experience, people do this, they put on a lot of weight, it just tends to be fat. Energy is required for numerous things. In actual fact, the most calories you burn, you know, you're just standing around doing nothing while you're sitting here, you're burning calories. When you do activity, if you go for a run, walk, carrying stuff around, go to the gym, doing any sort of activity, you're gonna burn extra calories, but surprisingly little really, compared to what you might expect. And then equally, it requires some energy to build muscle. It doesn't require as much as you might expect though, and this is the important thing. Good analogy I saw. On Keith Norris's site, the previous speaker here, I asked the question, does a child grow because he's eating? Or does he eat because he's growing? If you take a child who's growing, it's the hormones that are making him grow, it's like a genetic plan, and he's gonna be hungry and he's gonna eat to fuel that. If you feed him loads and loads more calories, he's not just gonna get taller and taller, he's just gonna get fat. It's a very similar process if you're looking to build muscle. So this is leading towards, you know, how to eat later, the importance of eating to appetite and sort of listening to your body. So I sort of want to skim through that, you know, food does contain calories, you need calories to live, you need calories to move, you need calories to burn muscle, you might want to reduce those calories to burn fat, that's the general sort of concept, people have of food, which is, you know, true. But what often gets overlooked and what I really want to focus on today is that food is a lot more than just calories, you know, you're not just like an engine that burns petrol. Your food is a source of raw materials for you. And I say when you eat that food, food is another living organism or it should be, you break it down into tiny little particles, you absorb it into yourself and you put it back together as you. I think that's an important concept to try and sort of get in your head as you're stuffing down the McDonald's meal after being drinking all last night, you know, that's gonna get broken down and potentially incorporated into you. So what is it that you are made of? The body requires certain raw materials from the diet, namely essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, essential vitamins and minerals, other things like cholesterol, choline, I've put X there, shall come on to. Essential amino acids, think of them like building blocks, you know, everything's protein, amino acids, muscle. This is true, muscles are made out of amino acids, but so is so much more, you know, your brain, your hair, your fingernails, your internal organs, hormones, you need protein for digestion, for muscle contractions, essential amino acids are used for all sorts of different things and so the only place you're gonna get them from is your diet. If you're not getting the right quality in there, you know, you've not got the right raw materials to work with, then your body's not gonna be in the condition that it could be. Very similar essential fatty acids, people have heard of like omega-3s, omega-6s. These, again, are essential used for all sorts of different things, you know, your brain. When you learn a new movement or when you learn a new skill, forming new synaptic pathways, that requires omega-3 fatty acids. Inflammation throughout your body, your immune system, everything modulated by essential fatty acids, so really, really critical for health. Vitamins and minerals, again, using all sorts of different processes, using metabolism, every process in your body requires some pretty precise balance of vitamins and minerals. If you don't have them, enough of them or you don't have them in the right balance, then your just processes aren't gonna work as efficiently. And then, you know, things like cholesterol, much more lined, you know, it's not bad for you. It's bad when it gets damaged, but it's actually critical for health, you know. Every cell in your body requires cholesterol. The formation of hormones like testosterone is based on cholesterol. Making vitamin D from sunlight requires cholesterol. Absolutely critical. And, you know, you can produce it yourself, but, you know, getting it from your diet makes life a lot easier for your body. I put choline, essential for the liver. We're gonna put that there. It's like one of the more recently discovered things. And I put X there because there's still that element of the unknown now. You know, we talk a lot about nutrition. You see nutrition in the news all the time, science reports, we've just discovered this, we've just discovered that. In reality, you know, we don't know what we don't know yet. You know, there's a lot of things that still get discovered that we don't understand, which I think is why it's important to eat a big, varied diet and eat real food, which we'll come on to in a sec. Oh, more formatting issues here. So still on the subject of essential nutrition, can you have too much of a good thing? We just said, right, you've got your essential amino acids, your essential fatty acids, essential vitamins and minerals, they're essential. So we just want loads and loads and loads and more and more and more of them. That's not necessarily the case. This should say essential does not equal more is better. Using an analogy, amino acids like building blocks. If you imagine your body is like a building site, you've got builders on there. You've got a plan that you want to build. You've got so many builders. Just delivering more and more bricks at a faster and faster rate is not going to help the building get built any quicker or any better. In actual fact, if you've got builders there and they constantly having to take these deliveries of loads and loads of bricks, it's actually going to take them away from the job of actually building the building. So you're going to be counterproductive there. You've just got like bricks lying around everywhere, nightmare. You want to get sufficient, but you don't want to go crazy and just go overboard. Same with the essential fatty acids. There's a massive market now in selling omega-3 capsules because they are essential. This is important. And a lot of people are in balance. They've got too much omega-6 from eating processed foods. I don't know if omega-3. So they say, well, have all these omega-3 tablets redress your balance. A little analogy here is like ovens and fridges. You've got a house. It's pretty essential to have an oven. It's pretty essential to have a fridge. If you end up with five ovens, the solution is not to buy an extra four fridges to redress the balance. That's just madness really. There is to get rid of some of the ovens. It's a more sensible solution. And very similar to vitamins and minerals. Yes, the critical, but I generally, there's always an exception to the rule. I don't say there's one diet, there's one rule for everybody, but be very wary if you're taking any vitamin and mineral supplements because it's quite easy to have too much of one, not enough of another. Set yourself out of balance. Another thing that you don't really hear much about in the mainstream press, mainstream media is that food is also potentially a source of toxins and anti-nutrients. Real food has not been designed. There's not even really such a thing as food. Food is just a name we give to certain living organisms that we have chosen to devour and incorporate into ourselves. No food is perfect. And the effects that it has on your particular body are going to be different, depending on a number of different factors. For example, genetics. Two different people can eat the same foods, can affect them in a very, very different way. Some people can be much more reactive to one food than another. Digestive health. This is a really important factor which I'm going to come on to, like the second main part of the talk. If somebody's got poor digestion, can eat a food, you might be able to extract the same nutrition out of it or it might affect your health in a more negative way. Food preparation techniques. If you're familiar with the paleo diet, which you may or may not be, if you've watched some of the previous videos, I've seen some of the previous speaks. I think I was speaking yesterday, talking about it. There's a lot of anti-nutrients in grains, for example, that can really affect your digestion and have severe repercussions to your health. But by preparing foods in different ways, you can help sort of neutralize those anti-nutrients. And then again, quantities consumed. We've evolved, you know, we've been around for millions of years now. We're pretty potentially robust. It's not like you're going to eat one little bit of anti-nutrient and it's going to finish you off forever. You can tolerate a little bit of toxins, same with the frequency of consumption. So a lot of it's just about getting balanced, but just being aware that not everything you eat, not everything for sale in the supermarkets, wherever, is 100% safe or good for you. Finally, you know, food is also a source of pleasure. You're not a robot. There's nothing wrong with eating for enjoyment, you know, that there's often like a dichotomy scene between with, oh, you know, you can either just eat what you want, eat for pleasure, eat loads of nice foods, but you're going to get fat and you're going to get ill and you're going to die. Or, right, you've got to eat, you know, very stoic, no pleasure, just eat plain, bland, boring food, eat protein, eat this, and be healthy, so you live longer. It doesn't necessarily have to be like that, it's about finding a balance. Food can be very, very pleasurable, though I'm going to come on later on to the difference between pleasure and reward and why exactly are you eating a food? Oh, more formatting problems. Oh well. Often get asked, are there good and bad foods? I mean, I just mentioned before, there's not necessarily even such thing as foods, it's just what we're calling food. So if we look at things we're going to eat, they have different effects on the body. I did have a nice little table here, which you can't really see. So you can look at any food item under those four categories that went through before, energy, raw materials, toxins, and then pleasure. I've done a nice little color-coded table here. I've graded each topic in either green for yay, good, go ahead, amber for maybe, and red for stay away. In terms of energy, these colors are going to be very flexible, it's going to depend on your goals. I've put here foods with medium energy as a green. If you're super, super active and you want into build muscle and you want an extra calories in, then potentially high calorie foods could be in green. If your goal is to get more calories in, higher energy foods is all good. The main area that's going to be pretty much the same for everybody is the sort of nutrient value, the raw materials. So you're going to be looking, my advice in general to most people is, aim for nutrient density. You want to be looking at foods that are giving you good stuff. If what you're about to eat is going to be taken apart and put together back as you, you want some good quality stuff in there because you want to be made of good stuff, not of rubbish stuff. So foods that have got a lot of good nutrients in, high in essential amino acids, reasonable amount of fatty acids, lots of vitamins, minerals and so on, putting green, ones that are medium, putting amber, and then ones that are very low we've got in red there. Toxins, same sort of principle, so foods that are lower in toxins. Pretty much all foods, no matter how good they are, going to have some level of toxins in there, but your body can deal with a certain amount. So we've got like green there, medium, ones that have got more toxins in, pretty straightforward really, high foods that are full of toxins. And then at the bottom there, which you can't quite see, I've got pleasure as well. This is an important reason for eating things. My philosophy on health and life is you want to live now and thrive later. You don't want to eat just boring bird food for the rest of your life, just to try and live an extra five years at the end. You know, you want to be happy now and we eat good food while you're young, healthy, enjoy it, but then equally, you want to get that balance so that you can keep enjoying it and enjoying it and enjoying it along into the future. So I've got a few different categories here. The first product there I've got is a grass-fed steak. But really that could be any pasture-raised animal, like a cow, a lamb, a pig, a chicken, you know, wild game, or it could be wild fish, seafood, any sort of animal basically that's lived a natural life. Human beings were predators, were very lazy eaters. A cow, it spends its entire life just chewing grass, boring life, choo-choo-choo-choo all the day. We let it do all the hard work and we kill it, eat it, we get all the nutrients in one handy little package, it's great. So wild animals, pasture-raised animals, they're generally not super high in calories, they're sort of more moderate there. Very, very high in nutrition. They're just the best source of protein, complete proteins, best sorts of all the good fats, best sorts. People believe that vegetables are brilliant for vitamins and minerals. If you actually compare them in a graph, these nutrient-dense animal foods, particularly like organ meat, seafood and so on, are just off the scale when it comes to all these nutrients. Relatively low in toxins, the cow very kindly got four stomachs, loads of bacteria in there, breaks down all the nastiness for us, makes it into good, nice-to-eat meat, pretty low in toxins, providing it's well-managed. And then pleasure, I love steak. Plenty of pleasure from eating steak. So it's top, top food, really, really top food. All these nutrient-dense animal products, they taste great, the full of nutrition, the low in toxins, good food, why not eat it? Most of the time. We then got nutrient-dense vegetables, like starchy root vegetables, got sweet potatoes on there, got cassava, all these sorts of things. Could be, if you're looking to lose fat, maybe not the best, because it is high in energy, but also very high in nutrition, compared to the speaking, lots of nutrients in there, relatively low in toxins, and tastes pretty good as well. Maybe a better choice if you're looking to lose body fat is more fibrous vegetables, green vegetables, broccoli, these sorts of things, which will be lower in energy, but still pats for the nutrition. We then start to come down the scale, sort of less good foods, but like we say, you don't have to always just eat for nutrient density. You want to get a decent amount, you want it to get sufficient, but you don't have to eat grass-fed beef liver, breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. If you did do that, you'd probably actually get too much vitamins and minerals to a toxic level. So you can have a bit of variety in there. We've evolved millions of years of making do with less than optimum food sources, but you can still make better choices. So I've got some comparisons here. I've got white bread, the stuff you get in the supermarket, the stuff you get in your bun in McDonald's and so on. It's just rubbish, really. Super high in energy, very high in energy. Now, maybe not a problem if you're looking to gain weight superactive, but along with that energy, you're not getting any sort of nutrition whatsoever. There's just nothing good in there, and you're getting loads and loads of toxins. Not only you've got toxins from the wheat, but you're buying cheap bread, probably full of all sorts of additives, preservatives, who knows what. And you can't see on the bottom of the graph, but I don't think it really tastes that good either. It's about sort of making a risk assessment. It's not an optimum food. You don't have to eat the best foods all the time necessarily, but can you make another choice? Go on here, sourdough bread. Tastes much, much better than cheap, nasty bread. Because of the preparation process, it's got much lower toxins in there because these have been broken down by the longer fermentation process. Get a decent load from a proper bakery. It's got more sort of realish ingredients in there. And there's more nutrient density because of the, again, more traditional techniques that have been developed to release more nutrition from the food. So if you're gonna eat something, between these two choices, you're gonna eat the one that doesn't taste as good, has got more toxins in it, and less nutrition, are you gonna eat the one that tastes better? It still might not be the best food. It's not as good as eating a steak, but you're gonna get some nutrition in there and it's not gonna be quite as bad for you. Similarly, nothing wrong with having a sweet treat now and again, but choice between eating something like a donut, which is just white flour, sugar, vegetable oils, deep fried, horrendous for you, like really, really horrendous health-wise. How good does it taste? Maybe it tastes good, maybe it doesn't. An alternative, eat homemade cake that's made with free-range organic eggs, grass-fed butter. Maybe we've got some nuts in there, some chocolate, some actual real food. You might actually get a little bit of nutrition from there, and it probably tastes better as well. So, my point is, really, it's not to tell you what to eat, what not to eat, but it's just to have a little bit of a think about what it is you're eating, what is in there, and what effects is it gonna have on your body. And if you are just eating something, is there another option that might fulfill the same pleasure reward thing, it might taste as good, but might be slightly more nutritious, or less harmful to you, basically. Yeah, because there is no perfect diet, basically. There's many different factors that can affect what effects the food is gonna have on your body. One of those goals, I mentioned this before, if your goal is fat loss, then you're probably not gonna wanna eat rice and potatoes, cause you're gonna get loads of calories, very little nutrition. Equally, if you're super active on a pot and some muscle, maybe you wanna eat those foods, because the cheap, the convenient, there's nothing really toxic in there, providing you're eating some animal foods with them, you're gonna get that necessary essential nutrition. Genetics, again, this plays a big part, touched on this before. Some people are super, super sensitive to gluten, for example. If you eat bread and it makes you feel like crap, obviously don't eat bread, it's ridiculous. And I said that, if you've got pretty robust genetics, having a class on once in a while, something isn't gonna do you any harm. Your health, again, if you're in really bad health, then you're gonna want to keep your diet as clean as possible, try and nourish yourself, try and repay your body. Or if you are in perfect health, good health, again, you can get away with a little bit more flexibility with your diet. Tastes important as well. On that tale before, I had a few different examples. I had grass-fed beef steak as a good example of a nutrient-dense food. If you really don't like beef steak, and eat fish instead, there's always different choices you can make based on your own personal preferences. Lifestyle, again, people can become too focused and too obsessed on diet and just let it ruin the lives, basically, because I'm not going to that restaurant because I don't want to eat that. And you end up missing out on social situations which can have a lot of positive impacts on your life. So just being able to be a bit more flexible, but then when you are outplace, it just makes more informed decisions. Budget, again, maybe you can't afford to eat grass-fed beef steak every single day. You've got to make some compromises somewhere. So using that sort of judgment, just to find a diet that fits your monetary budget as well. And then availability, sometimes you've got to make do with what you can get. If you're out and about, you might be able to get a grass-fed beef steak, so you might have to go for something else instead. Just thinking about what foods you eat and why you eat them, that's the important thing. So just moving on slightly now, I've banged on about grass-fed beef steak quite a lot. And that's because equally important is what you eat is what you eat eats. Just as I mentioned there, that the food that you eat is taken apart and put together as you. So the food that the food you eat eats, confusing yourself now, also does the same. So the diet of the animals that you eat or the way the crops are produced that you eat has a massive impact on the quality of the food itself. So we've got benefits of pastured meat and wild fish. Basically pastured meat is free-range meat that is allowed to grow out in Rome and eat its natural diet. So cow should eat grass, sheep should eat grass, chickens and pigs should be able to forage and scratch for whatever they want, an omnivorous diet. Unfortunately, a lot of industrially produced meat is just force-fed grains to fatten them up quickly. And if that happens, it has lots of negative effects. The meat ends up, oh, I made a typing error there. Lowering omega-3 fats, that should say. So less of the essential fatty acids. Oh no, I'm confusing myself. Yeah, this is the benefits of the grass-fed beef. So the benefits of the grass-fed beef is it is lower in omega-6 fats. The fats that are just prevalent in all the processed foods nowadays can just really bad news for your health. Much higher in micronutrients. Because they're eating the natural diet, lush green grass, that's what gets converted into all the vitamins and minerals. Higher in protein, because most of the meat you get is from obese, sickly cows, just not good. Much lower risk of food poisoning from them just from better animal husbandry practices. The cows you get from these industrial farms is just, the conditions are so bad, they're chronically infected with diseases and they have to use just routine antibiotics, which then grows antibiotic, recent strains of bacteria. It's just seriously bad news and not nice at all. Tastes better. Going back to this thing, taste is important. It's important to eat food that tastes good and well reared animals just taste so much better. Animal welfare, better for the animals, happy meat, karmic justice and all that. It's also better for the environment, much less use of pesticides and fossil fuels and so on. And better for your local economy as well, if you buy it local, just get money back in there, support your local businesses. And very similar with organic veg. Again, I should say potentially higher in micronutrients. It does depend how you farm it. Probably five hours to go and plant some carrots in my backyard with the most nutritious, but on a well-managed farm, much higher in micronutrients, lowering chemicals, as you're not using all the pesticides and so on. And again, tastes better for growing well, better for the environment. And yeah, on the budget thing, if you do get your own little vegetable patch, it's free, bargain. So yeah, recover that you are what you eat and what you eat is taken apart, put back together as you. But you're actually the only 10% human. You've got trillions of bacteria that live in your stomach. You've actually got 10 times as many bacteria living in your stomach as you've got cells in your body. And there's more and more research coming into this field now. And they're actually starting to class these bacteria in your stomach as an organ. It's even referred to as the second brain. I think you're gonna see more and more about it in the media as time goes on. But yeah, the importance of gut flora is just mind blowing really. The basics, important for digestion. I mentioned before the cow, it's the bacteria in there that break down the grass and turn it into the cow. It's very similar with those food we eat is actually metabolized predominantly by the bacteria in your stomach. They make available the vitamins, the minerals, release the proteins and so on. They act as an intestinal barrier. So they're like your first line of defense. They control what comes in and out of your body through your digestion. So if you've not got healthy, robust digestion, it can start to let things through that shouldn't come through. Your immune system, your immune system is modulated by your gut flora. Again, your first line of defense against bad bacteria, infections and so on. If you've not got healthy gut flora, you're much more prone to illness and disease than if you don't and it's critical in terms of autoimmune diseases as well. And then stress and emotion. This is the really mind-boggling part. The bacteria in your stomach affect your personality and your behavior. Quite an interesting study. Recently done on mice. Feel sorry for the mice a bit really. They get mice, give it antibiotic so it's got no gut flora. They throw it in a bowl of water. It's called the water stress test. Basically the mouse that doesn't have any gut flora just panics, flails around there like that for 30 seconds or so and then just gives up. Just gives up on life. They take mice with healthy gut flora, throw it in there. It just paddles around calmly and just keeps trying, keeps trying, keeps trying. They leave them in there for six minutes. I don't know why it's a six minute mark. Obviously they're fairly nice scientists because they don't just leave it to drown. After six minutes they take it out and it never gives up. And the only difference between them is the bacteria in the stomach. And humans are so totally different. There's more and more research coming out showing the bacteria in there actually produce hormones like serotonin and so on and it actually affects your mood and your whole outlook on life which is very strange to think about. Many years ago Hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut and this is ever more coming to the forefront of the research. The situation called dysbiosis which is essentially an imbalance of the gut flora in your stomach. You could either have not enough gut flora or the wrong types of gut flora in there. This is going to affect you in many ways. Potentially impaired digestion. So basically you can eat loads of nutrient-dense food but if you do have your little helpers in there to extract that nutrition for you you just can't get anything out of it. Autoimmune diseases. So there's many of these like multiple sclerosis, arthritis, lupus. There's a big long list and it seems to be ever growing and becoming more prevalent. And this is now the finding the links is all to do with the gut flora. Because they're not managing that intestinal barrier so undigested food proteins get into your bloodstream and then they're not modulating your immune system correctly so you start mounting an immune response against these undigested foods but then this gets confused and starts turning on your own tissues. Not nice situation. So reduced immunity. If you don't have like a little ecosystem of good bacteria in there your stomach's just like a petri dish waiting for whatever comes in first. You're getting infected with like, you know some sort of horrible bacterial disease. It's deeply unpleasant. And then inflammation. These gut flora seem to have an integral role in managing inflammation in the body. They're now linking inflammation to possibly the root cause of like heart disease, diabetes, cancer all the modern diseases of Western civilization. You know, seem to have at least a strong connection in these gut flora. So looking after them probably a very good idea. And finally, mental illness. The really bizarre one but in the same way we have it's called the, well the intestinal wall. We also have what's called the blood brain axis which is mediated in a very similar way. And you start to let these toxins through into your bloodstream, through your gut. It's potentially can get into your brain as well. And there's been found strong links with conditions such as schizophrenia and depression and gut flora as well. So really, really is important stuff. So a few things that can cause dysbiosis. Main one's probably antibiotics. Antibiotics is just like a nuclear weapon. It's very indiscriminate. So you get an infection, some sort of, you know, bad bacteria in your stomach. Take antibiotics, it just wipes everything out including all the good bacteria. Then in this petrified situation again, if you get good bacteria back in there then that's great but because you've got no defences there's a strong chance you could get bad bacteria straight back in there and it just starts on this vicious cycle of illness. Bad diet. This is where we come on to the you are what eats what you eat. They're just in their way and we're just like a big sort of vehicle. Big food collection machine for these little guys in here. There's trillions of them. This is why they affect your mood and your behavior because they want you to go out and get foods for them to eat. But if you just shovel crap down there that they can't digest on, they'll starve all the good ones. And potentially you can be putting food down there that's actually feeding the bad ones that are making you ill. So this is where diets are very important for the gut flora. Stress. It's like a feedback, feed forward mechanism. Having the wrong sorts of gut flora can affect your reaction to stress and being very stressed can affect your gut flora. And then just a lack of exposure. Not really maybe a situation for you guys or maybe something to think about in the future. The critical time for getting your gut flora is during pregnancy. As the baby's born and then while being breastfed, when you're born into this world, you're actually inoculated with the first gut flora when you come out the birthing canal and then you're topped up with breast milk. Nowadays, some people have in cesarean sections the missing that first inoculation and then either being fed formula, which doesn't contain any, or just breast milk from mums who've got rubbish diets or had loads of antibiotics, just never getting it in the first place and it's just setting you up for failure basically. So how to restore balance, that's the question. You've got to look after these guys, you've got to protect them, you've got to nourish them. Main thing is just eating real food. Say I tweet about this quite a lot, hashtag like jerf, just eat real food. These guys have evolved with us for millions of years to eat just a natural diet. They feed a lot on mainly vegetables. So this is one good reason for eating some sort of fibrous veg in there, getting some prebiotic foods. Reduce your sugar consumption. Tends with the bad bacteria just thrive on the sugars. There's even some theories there that the hormones released by the bad bacteria or the really sort of fake hormone. So you get that in Dauphinrush when you eat the sugars because they want you to eat them. And it's, you know, could be to do these bad bacteria keeping them that cycle of eating the sugary foods. Experiment with starches and FODMAPs. FODMAPs are like fermentable, olgi dye, mono and polysaccharides. They're just like indigestible plant starches that these little guys can thrive on. They might have to be careful. If you don't have a bit of dysbiosis, you can cause you a bit of digestion or the digestive distress at first. So you might want to build up slowly. Fermented foods. These are really important. So things like yogurt, like proper live yogurt, good source of food for them and also contain the sort of bacteria themselves. Things like sauerkraut, fermented vegetables, cheeses, all these sort of things are a good source of not only food for them but a good source of the actual bacteria themselves. Put probiotics question mark and actually buy probiotic capsules now. Potentially they can help, but again, you've got to get all the previous ones lined up first. If you think of like probiotics as like seeds, just go and throw seeds on a barren garden. They're not going to grow. You've got to get the conditions right. You've got to get the foods in your stomach right for them to thrive on first. And then a bit of trial and error and patience. I mean, it's not necessary that, you know, you can actually know you've got dysbiosis. Some people suffer really badly with like IBS and IBD and just general digestive distress going, bloating and gas, but some people don't. So, you know, and it might be that if you are suffering from all those conditions and you start to make these changes, digestion might get a little bit worse to begin with. You've got to persevere with it, try including foods, not including foods, just because you're not suffering though and you can eat loads of junk and don't feel any of the effects doesn't necessarily mean that you've not got issues in there. So it's still worthwhile bearing all this in mind. Again, onto the final section now, the talk. It's very, very important what you eat. You know, for all the reasons we've just covered. However, I'd say it's equally important how you eat and what you think about when you're eating. It's possible to eat a diet of 100% clean foods. You know, you're just getting all your organic food delivered to your house and you're staying in there and you're meticulously preparing it and just eating liver and broccoli every day. But you could potentially still make yourself sick just through stressing about it and worrying about it and just not having a life, you know. Nobody wants to be like that. Equally, you could eat all the right foods but just eat far too much of them and still, you know, not being the best health or you could eat not enough of them and yeah, be starving and you don't want that. Conversely, you can have a bit more of a relaxed and happy attitude to life and the foods you eat and that'll give you a lot more wiggle room, you know. As long as you know you're covering your bases, getting your essential nutrients in there, you're not having too many of the toxins and overloading yourself. You can just be a little bit more relaxed about what you eat and have a bit more freedom. So, I mean, obviously it's a massive broad subject this which we don't really have to go in time to in full detail but this is a quick overview. And the most important thing is just to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. This is such, you know, an overlooked thing. You know, people just don't realize what hunger is anymore because you just eat because it's breakfast time, eat because it's lunch time, eat because we've gone out or have a snack or there's a machine there. Just constantly bombarded with food and the need to eat and few of us really truly appreciate what actual hunger feels like because we've never really been hungry and we've just not had time. Really learn to appreciate what hunger is. I'm gonna come on to intermittent fasting briefly here and that'll help you understand what real hunger feelings are. And then when you do eat, when you are hungry, learn to really taste and appreciate the food that you eat. How many times you just shove something down and it barely even touches the side and you don't even register it or you have something that's supposed to be like really delicious treat and you just snapped it down and it's not even appreciated it. Everything in moderation, maybe. I think there's some elements truth to that but then including moderation, the famous phrase, there's nothing wrong with having a very occasional binge but do it mindfully and really enjoy it while you're doing it rather than just mindlessly stuffing food down all the time. I mentioned for the difference between pleasure and reward. I think this is a really critical, important thing. People make associations between food and emotion. People end up just binge eating on food to try and solve some sort of other problem. I think with all things in life, you should always do whatever you're doing be it eating, be it an activity or a pastime for the pure pleasure of doing itself and not for some sort of intrinsic, sorry, extrinsic reward or punishment for other behavior. I'd say binge eating on highly rewarding foods is possibly the biggest enemy to health, physique and longevity that there can be. Some of the characteristics of rewarding food just to be aware, since we're very, very energy dense with the perfect combination of fat, sugar, texture and flavorings. Essentially, the most rewarding food tend to be the manufactured foods. Food manufacturers have got very clever at making foods that you just can't stop eating because they hit all these rewards. They automate them exactly the same every time. So it hits those exact sort of memory sensors and they generally associate some sort of memory or emotion and they're very clever with the branding and so on. Real food can taste just as good. You make your own meal, you're a good chef. You can make it taste amazing but you never get that sort of uniformity so you don't get that same sort of binge eating effect. Nobody ever binges on steak and broccoli even though it tastes really good. It's like biscuits and crisps and manufactured foods where you just lose that control. So just to finish off quickly, intermittent fasting, mentioned the thing about hunger before. We've been conditioned to just eating all the time. Lots, we've been lied to basically. Breakfast is not important, not at all. There's no need to eat lots of little small meals. There's a good website, knolls.org where you recommend to eat like a predator, not like a prey. Herbivores, they just graze constantly all day. The predators come along, have one big meal, eat it and then chill out. And don't feel hungry. Traditionally, it was being hungry that would make you out and hunt. It makes you alert, it makes you active. You've got plenty of energy stores, you're not gonna pass out or go feeble if you don't eat all the time. Intermittent fasting which is basically going periods anywhere between 16, 24 more hours without eating anything has been shown to have real benefits to life extension. Reduces the inflammation which I mentioned before which is a root cause of much metabolic syndrome. Helps improve your digestion. Often people's digestion is just overloaded from the constant work it's having to do. It never gets a chance just to rest. I'm very good for fat loss but without muscle loss. Again, it helps you create those temporary calorie deficits so you can burn a bit of fat, then have a bit of a feast afterwards, build some muscle. It's really convenient, you know, you can be stressing out where I'm gonna find some decent food around the city center. It's just Greggs and pasty shops and McDonald's. Just don't eat, it's easy, wait till you get home and eat some proper food. People tend to have really high adherence to it cause it's just easy to do. It's free, it doesn't cost anything, you don't need any equipment. And yeah, it does allow for some feasting. It means you can have those big, high satisfying meals and not having to eat like little rabbit meals all the time. There's a few different approaches which I'll skip through here. You can do like 24 hour fast couple of times a week or you can just skip breakfast every day. And if you're not quite ready to go the full hogget, you can go sort of halfway by just doing some macronutrient fasting. Either just eat protein dense foods, lean proteins which fill you up, start being hungry but pretty low in calories throughout the day. Probably burn some fat or just skip the protein and just eat carbs and fat through the day. And you get a lot of health benefits of the intermittent fasting like autophagy and so on. Just help your body rest and recover from digesting all the time. So I'm fast running out of time here. So I'm just gonna finish with a little bit of summary. Take home points from today really in three notes. You just concentrate on nutrient dense foods and reducing your toxins. Make decisions, make conscious decisions about what you eat. Before you eat it, think, why am I eating this? What's it gonna do for me? That's the important thing. Nourish and protect your gut flora. Remember, you're eating for 10 trillion. So think about what effect that food's gonna have on the guys in there. And then finally, eat mindfully. Whatever you eat, actually enjoy it. Think about it, eat it, consume it and learn to appreciate true hunger and cravings. And that's about it from me from today. Say if you want more information, I've got a blog, primalliving.co.uk and I'm on Twitter under that, Simon Primal. If you're around the Manchester area, wanna climb some trees and throw some tires around in the park, got primal fitness. And then if you're after some grass-fed beef, got grass-fed beef UK on Twitter, green pasture farms, got pastured pork, chicken, lamb, and beef on there. So that's everything I wanted to get through today. And then if you've got any questions about anything, I think we've got five minutes to do questions, yeah? Cool. Yeah, you're right there, was it? Rob? Yeah. What are the effects of alcohol on your body, particularly on your gut flora? Well, this is a debatable one, which I have looked into because I'm a fan of a bit of real ale from now and again. This is one of the things about moderation is important. You know, there's been some people that said alcohol can be effective gut flora, but then there's also been studies on alcoholics and some alcoholics have got perfectly normal gut flora. So it's obviously not so clear cut. Alcohol obviously has a lot of effects on your body as a whole. Yeah, it's a top tin, basically. So it's like the other things. You've got to do that risk assessment. Yeah, there's some toxins in there. It's not the most nutrient-dense food, but you get a lot of pleasure out for it. So it's getting that balance, you know? There's a reasonable amount. There's plenty of research that shows a few drinks a week. Actually, you know, you've got lower BMI, and I probably have a longer life expectancy. So, yeah, moderation. How do you, and should you incorporate intermittent fasting in an extremely active lifestyle? So if you exercise every day, for example? I would say there's a couple of different approaches. You can just throw yourself in there and try a full 24-hour fast. So there's a lot of benefits to fasting, sorry, to training in the fasted state. I've had, actually, a lot of PRs in terms of deadlifts and so on, while fasted, and sprints and all sorts of things. Don't know whether that's placebo effects or what. And, yeah, you're probably gonna burn more fat while you do it, so, yeah. I would recommend just, yeah. Do you know I'm training in the morning or the evening, or? Yeah. I mean, the easiest one is just do a morning workout, fasted, and then eat, you know, an hour or two afterwards and see how that goes for you. Hi. What are some good examples of lean protein foods? Of lean protein foods? Yeah. Say something like a rump steak or something like that is pretty lean. Just, you know, I mean, there's not necessarily a benefit to eating lean meats, per se. Is this in terms of, sorry, the macronutrient fasting? Yeah. Like cottage cheese is always a good one. Or chicken, but only typical bodybuilder foods, really. I mean, that's what they do, just eat very low calorie, protein-dense foods. It's not, they're not good because they're low fat or good because they're low carb. It's the fact that they don't have carb or fats means they've got less calories, so, yeah. If availability and budget wasn't a problem, what's the ideal breakdown of fats, protein, carbs, and what's the ideal protein per body weight and calories per day? I would say I don't think there is one, honestly. I really don't think there is one. I think you shouldn't go too overboard on protein. I think there's a lot of supplement companies wanting to push you to have loads of protein powders which aren't necessary. Say, you know, somewhere roughly in one gram to a gram and a half per kilo of body weight, maybe. But even that, you know, probably just anywhere between the sort of 70 to 120 gram range per day is fine for everybody. And then whether the rest of your calories come from carbs or fats doesn't really make too much of a difference. You know, there's people who do really well on both sides. The problems seem to occur when you combine the two and again, it makes food highly rewarding. You just eat too much of it. This is why I say eat for nutrient density, you know, rather than carbs, proteins, fats. Hi, just with traveling around, I'm doing a bit of traveling for the next six months and I might struggle with some of those, like being able to eat that great quality food while I'm traveling. But just realize that gut flora seems like a very important issue. Is there any sort of way I can sort of maybe a good daily ritual for having the yogurts and those kind of foods? What's an advisable sort of daily routine for? Yeah, I mean, yoga is a good thing. Friday you can tolerate it. And you know, a lot of people can because it's lactose that tends to cause the digestive distress if your lactose intolerant. But one of the reasons these fermented foods came about was the bacteria, you know, they metabolize the lactose so it makes it easier to digest. I mean, you'll probably find as you travel around and say, look into the local cuisine, most traditional places have some form of fermented foods, you know. And yeah, yogurt now tends to be available everywhere. What I'd say is be really careful on the yogurts. Get the natural full fat yogurts, not necessarily for the fat, but because in the low fat ones they put loads of sugar in there. And again, we're getting to, you're getting some of the good bacteria in there, but then you're getting the food for the bad bacteria and it's counterproductive. So just, yeah, natural yogurt with some fruit, you know. If you're pretty active, you know, bananas are a good prebiotic as well. So like sliced banana and yogurt is a pretty good gut flora boosting food. Cool. Well, thank you very much. It was a nice speech to you today. And yeah, I'll be around throughout the day and tonight for any more questions. Thanks.