 So welcome to the say starches panel. Yeah My name is Jimmy Moore and if you've never heard who all in here has never heard of the live in la Vita low-carb show podcast Hallelujah That's where they're coming from. Thank you guys So I've been doing that show for a while. I've interviewed all these guys heck I've interviewed almost everybody who's spoken so far It's such an honor to do that show So thank you for allowing me to do that and listening to it and giving your feedback but I also blog and It's at the live in la Vita low-carb blog figure that And about a year ago. It was right after the ancestral health symposium at UCLA I heard this concept that I had never really heard before in my low-carb world Okay, and it was this whole idea of safe starches I was like what the heck is safe about starch? I've always heard it raises your blood sugar level and it leads to all these conditions in your health that you don't want Okay, so being the inquisitive mind that I am I wrote a blog post called Is there any such thing as safe starches on a low-carb diet because I've interviewed this man? Paul Jammaday on my show and He talked about how his plan the perfect health diet, which we'll be talking about today is a low-carb diet and I was thinking okay starch low-carb One of these things is not like the other it just didn't make sense to me So I wanted to find out what the real deal was so I put the question out there And I asked all these people in the community. What's you think so I got all these responses and man You should have heard you would have thought I called somebody's grandma a bad name the way I got some people in the paleo community who didn't like that. I even asked the question But I think if we don't ask those kinds of questions There's no way at all that those people out there are ever gonna listen to us So we have to ask these hard questions just so we have understanding hopefully today with this prestigious panel You know, we'll bring a little more understanding to what this issue is really all about So first up let's start with the man himself who kind of coined this term You know him Paul Jamin a perfect health diet commas his website and of course his book perfect health diet and He's been doing a lot of great work. I admire this man. I think the work that he's doing Is making us think and if we stop thinking we stop progressing Okay, so Paul, why don't you tell us a little bit about? Where you came up with this idea of safe starch just let's start with a definition before we move forward How would you define what safe starches is and we're trying to keep this kind of moving? So it's gonna be like two to three minute answers. Okay. Well, I Basically carb sources are starches and sugars and And The plants with the largest number of starches are mostly grains and legumes also two verse have a fair amount and many of these plants are very rich in toxins, especially the grains and legumes and You know so much of the health benefits that come from adapting paleo ancestral diets comes from giving up those toxin rich plant foods like like wheat or soybeans and So what we coined the phrase my wife and I coined the phrase safe starches to distinguish Starchy plants whose toxins are destroyed during cooking So that they're relatively toxin free when you eat them as against Starchy plants that are still toxin rich even after cooking and and therefore are are dangerous And so we believe based on a literacy literature search that among the grains white rice Is toxin free after cooking and so we considered that a safe starch other safe starches include taro white potato sweet potato and Some others now including the one of safe starches doesn't mean they're totally free of toxins and We know that potatoes may have toxins like solanine and Sweet potatoes have oxalate some people will be sensitive to those Poor handling can produce toxins, but it but in general with good handling good preparation most people will not have Negative effects from eating these because of the the toxins Thank you. So just for kicks. I decided to look up the word safe in Webster's medical dictionary It says not causing harm or injury especially having a low incidence of adverse reactions and Significant side effects when adequate instructions for use are given and having a low potential for harm under conditions of widespread availability interesting so The next speaker is Chris Cressor who anybody here not know who Chris Cressor is. I mean really He does great work here in the paleo community and we're very honored to have him here at this ancestral health symposium Chris Cressor commas his website, but Chris as a practitioner. I know you have talked about on your podcast and you've written about on your blog many people who seem to experience Problems when they're not adding these safe starches to their diet. Do you know what's going on there? Is is there any kind of explanation as to what's happening? Yeah, I think Just in terms of symptoms I'd say the most common symptoms that I see in people who've Been on a low-carb diet over a long period of time and I don't mean to suggest this is everybody You know, this is a subsection of people who've been on the VLC diet for a long time. The main ones would be low energy cold hands and feet Anxiety depression sleep difficulties mood instability poor exercise tolerance and poor exercise recovery and For those of you who are familiar or have hypothyroidism or familiar with thyroid disorders you'll recognize probably many of these symptoms here and one of the issues is that Insulin activates the enzyme that's involved in the conversion of t4 to t3 Which is the most active form of thyroid hormone. So on a very low carbohydrate diet with very low levels of insulin People will not convert as much t4 into the active form of thyroid hormone and this is pretty well documented in the scientific literature We know that both calorie restriction and carbohydrate restriction and fasting all decrease the conversion of t4 to t3 And they increase the conversion of t4 into something called reverse t3, which is an inactive Form of thyroid hormone that's kind of like a metabolic dead end once it gets converted into reverse t3 It can't get converted back into active t3 So I think effects on thyroid physiology may be one part of it There's some other aspects of it. We probably don't fully understand But it's definitely clear to me as a clinician that not everybody thrives over the long term on a very low carbohydrate diet And in fact, I would say a substantial number of people that come to me are people that have been having trouble on a very low carb paleo type of diet and One of the first things I'll do is experiment with adding a little bit of starch and carbohydrate back into their diet And oftentimes that that tends to solve the problem My kind of general stance on this is that there's no one-size-fits-all approach many of you know my work I've heard me say that before I think carbohydrate consumption will depend on genetic and epigenetic factors Which Chris Masterjohn just alluded to earlier in in his discussion on Analyze I think it will depend on existing health conditions for example, if someone has glucose intolerance or if somebody has Small intestine bacterial overgrowth the that is a condition where they would be the the bacteria in the small intestine Which shouldn't be there in the first place will be able to you to Ferment the starches and that can cause gas and bloating and digested difficulties and some therapeutic approaches like the gaps diet Removes starches for that reason and then volume and intensity of activity would be a third factor They would determine the appropriate carbohydrate consumption including start so I think as a clinician my perspective is that it's I Try to avoid kind of making general rules that would apply to everyone because even though we share a lot in common We're also quite distinct as individuals Right good point Well, the next speaker is dr. Kate Shanahan dr. Kate comm she's got two books deep nutrition and food rules Definitely check those out. They're really good. She's a board certified family physician and Kate You have been doing a survey of low-carb dietors over the past couple months Kind of looking at what Chris was just talking about some of these issues that that long-term low-carb dietors are having and that Perhaps starch would be the answer for them Do you have any findings or any comments you want to make about how that's gone? Yes, thank you for asking so I Actually had been I'm a low-carb physician because it seems to really work for a lot of metabolic problems weight loss etc and My patients had to actually not run into any of these problems But when I heard that some people were feeling terrible after doing low-carb for a while And then adding carbs back I became concerned on two levels one was I didn't want to be Making feel people feel worse with my advice and two was if by adding back carbs I mean you could say so what they had that carbs and they feel better. They've solved their problem, right? Well, maybe maybe not maybe they're just feeding into a vicious cycle You know and their symptoms going away is continuing the progression of a different problem. So the the what I did was I First I analyzed what I was doing different And that is that when I have my patients adapt a low-carb diet I have them do it gradually and so I don't know if this is an answer But I know that my patients who did this did not run into trouble. So They adapt a diet over a period of two weeks per meal more or less Somewhere sometimes it's four weeks because they they do it with each subsequent visit So they don't get to see me again for a full month And I hadn't had people run into trouble even with what Dr. Atkins described as the low-carb flu If people are familiar with low-carbing often when you go from having a standard American diet and you drastically drop your carbs You feel terrible for a while because you're basically you had a higher sugar level set point somewhere You know above the normal range above 100 maybe 150 and then dropping it down You're suddenly depriving your body of all this ready glucose And you're gonna feel bad for a while some people and some people don't even have the low-carb flu and they're fine So that that aspect of putting it on gradually seemed to avoid the low-carb flu pretty successfully But then I wondered you know since I hadn't had people come back with complaints I Wondered what else could be the difference so I put out a little contest and got about 76 different stories and What I found that those had in common who? Had problems with a low-carbing for a long time had been doing very low-carb consistently often for you know at least six months and over a year in many cases and Very low-carb meaning like under 20 grams, which is the induction phase of Atkins which Atkins himself I think was wise maybe and in not saying you need to continue this level of carb restriction indefinitely and definitely and What I had also done with my patients was I Was I like variety in diets and so I thought it was important to allow them up to 70 grams of carbs a day So while it's important for us to spend some time in ketosis many days This is my belief Some days. I think it's important for us to actually be not burning fat Which is the state of ketosis but burning sugar and not only that Perhaps having so much excess sugar that we're able to store it as fat Because you know we know the low-carb diet is much better than the standard American diet But we don't know how long ketogenesis is good for you know, how long this is not there's no literature So little literature on ketogenesis. There's certainly no Literature whatsoever on extended periods of ketogenesis. So we simply don't know and you can imagine that in Traditional societies people would be tied to the seasons and there would be times of certain, you know, the fruits delicious irresistible abundance so Probably passed my time. Thank you. So speaking of extended periods of ketogenesis our next speaker is Dr. Ron Rosedale drRosedale.com is his website and he's one of the originators of a very high-fat modern protein low carbohydrate diet and So Dr. Rosedale hearing the first three speakers You know, they seem to kind of talk about things that run counter to what you believe as a physician and what you've seen over the years With the Rosedale diet that you've been recommending your to your patients. Can you give us your thoughts? Sure I Started putting people on a very low carbohydrate high-fat very moderate protein diet over 20 years ago As a means to treat very sick people. I was working in a heart hospital diabetic clinic and Found and just really thought it was really kind of a no-brainer to me. Why feed sugar to a diabetic? and starches turn to sugar eliminate them and amazing things happened I Started documenting Many different laboratory values and yes, I found the thyroid went down but not TSH Excuse me. TSH does not go up. So TSH and free T3 went down. It was a purposeful reduction in thyroid It is not hypothyroidism. So I want everybody to get that Concept totally out of your head That when people go on a very low carbohydrate diet, they are not going into Hypothyroidism Centenarians have the same Have a lower have an increase in reverse T3 a lower free T3 and not a higher TSH it's the high TSH that would indicate hypothyroidism where your thyroid is going down because it has to Here the thyroid is going down because it wants to and it's part and parcel of a Genetic phenotype of maintenance and repair that you see in calorie-restricted animals Where the free T3 also comes down? TSH does not go up and reverse T3 goes up a little bit as a means to temper the thyroid And the reason for that is for the same reason when your car works really well And it's tuned properly it doesn't have to rev as high and will still have greater acceleration and get better mileage Which in this case would extend to longevity? so there's a a genetic Phenotype there's a genetic pathway that regulates aging in virtually all animals And it's found that if you can tap into that genetic pathway really amazing things can happen in reversing all sorts of diseases from cardiovascular disease Obesity diabetes osteoporosis Multiple sclerosis brain disorders and that's because what you're doing is up regulating maintenance repair You are getting the same type of benefit that you get in calorie-restricted animals, but without calorie restricting because all of these Pathways were determined long ago when glucose was the primary fuel that didn't exist as a fuel Because you have to have oxygen to burn fat and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere When these rules were being laid out so fat fat is kind of a free fuel with as few detriments as possible Carbohydrates are either fiber or not fiber and if it's not a fiber It'll turn to sugar and that sugar will cause harm in some way shape or form It's just a matter of how much and when It'll cause glycation and more importantly than that it'll raise insulin and leptin And when you raise insulin and leptin you are doing lots of really bad things Especially long-term not the least of which is contributing to leptin and insulin resistance Which is a synquanon of accelerated aging and chronic disease and we'll get into that Hopefully if I have time now or maybe tomorrow in a talk. Thank you. Dr. Rosdale now. We'll come back to you Paul I know when I interviewed you the second time on my podcast You said you were quite surprised that people were shocked about this whole idea of safe starches being controversial And I wonder if it's just a PR A semantics type of issue Using the word safe. I know Dr. Rosdale and y'all is back and forth. What do you call it tolerably harmful? instead of safe starch I know and so Is that the issue it's just a semantic thing that maybe you're being misunderstood by what you mean when you say safe starch No, I I think there are real substantive differences between Ron and I on on this I think you know he he seems to be treating glucose solely as a toxin and You know, so there's only negative effects I think it's important to recognize that glucose is also a nutrient and And it's not necessarily a toxin We're very much evolved to have some glucose Where very much evolved to have a certain blood glucose level and either lower or higher blood glucose levels will increase mortality and disease risk We're evolved to have a certain to favor a certain carbohydrate intake So that's clear for instance It's around a 30% Carb diet by calories if you eat fewer carbs than that then your body will manufacture glucose from protein in order to Introduce more carbs to the body if you eat substantially more than that, you know, above about 40% then you'll start converting glucose to fat So your body resists having too much carbohydrate and we can also see from for instance the composition of breast milk that You know, which in all mammals and including humans the composition of breast milk is between 50 to 60% fat between 30 to 39% carbohydrate and Between 7% and 20% protein So it's a very clear Ranking of fat first carb second protein third In terms of macronutrient composition so that's sort of the natural diet and the body will adapt to different diets and When you eat different differing amounts of carbs One of the adaptations is in thyroid hormone. So thyroid hormone is a regulator of glucose utilization I When When you eat a very low-carb diet t3 goes down in order to conserve glucose. So There's less glucose utilization in the body When people are hyper thyroid to produce too much thyroid hormone Their bodies utilize more glucose. It's it's easy to become hypoglycemic if you're hyper thyroid Now It's true as Ron says that that reduction in t3 is not Does not indicate dysfunction of the thyroid gland Your body is functioning normally, but it's not necessarily optimal For you to be forcing your body to conserve glucose because it's because it's too scarce Glucose has important functions in the body Over half the proteins in the body are glycosylated meaning the only function properly if if the amino acids are bonded to glucose or a sugar derived from glucose And many of those proteins are important for long-term health For instance the primary proteins in tears saliva mucus digestive tract mucus are Predominantly sugar they have more sugar than amino acids and And without those you'll lose protection against disease some of the most common symptoms on very low-carb diets are dry eyes dry mouth and And those will go away very quickly if you eat a little bit of carbohydrate So You know and those are acute symptoms, but there's a risk of long-term symptoms and we do know in terms of genetic mutations that Promote certain diseases. There's a number of genetic mutations which impair the glycosylation of protein promote cancer promote diabetes promote other diseases and there's some Anecdotal evidence from Poland that optimal dieters who that was one of the first popular low-carb diets it's been around about 30 years and And anecdotally there have been a relatively high Number of GI tract cancers Among optimal dieters and you know people dying in their 60s from GI cancers Two of the leaders of the Upland diet society died recently and one at like 60 and one at 64 and You know if you're down regulating mucus mucus is defending the intestine against insults and If you're down regulating that it could have negative long-term effects. So I don't think we really we know there are some acute negative effects from restricting carbohydrate too much and There's a good chance. There are some chronic negative effects, too That it'll take probably decades before we can really confirm those scientifically, but The possibility is there So I think you know we have the evolutionary evidence that we do have a natural carb intake that our body wants to get and I I Think in terms of the aging literature, it's it's not that clear which carbon take is optimal for aging, but I think in general it's energy excess that that causes faster aging and So we should be able to eat a 30% carb diet which doesn't create a glucose an excess of glucose in the body and That shouldn't shorten lifespan Thank you now Chris, I know you're a big believer in no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach for anybody Is there any segment of the population where safe starches would actually end up being unsafe for them? Well, I'd be happy to answer that question Jimmy, but I want to take a step back first I think there's a real tendency to get caught up in biochemical and mechanistic arguments in discussions like this and Well, I don't doubt the importance of looking at those mechanisms The fact is that there's a lot we still don't understand and you know not too long ago We thought that cholesterol clogged the arteries and that was the cause of heart attacks And of course, we now know that that's not the case. So I think we need to clarify the debate number one Are we are we talking about starch being unsafe for? You know healthy people are we talking about it being safe for people with type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance to me Those are different discussions Number two if we are saying that starch is not safe for healthy people I think there's little to no human evidence supporting that idea and there's lots of evidence that opposes it Billions of people around the world are consuming starch safely right now as we speak and there are several examples of cultures around the world that are Consume a large percentage of calories from starch and are free of obesity and cardiovascular disease and other modern inflammatory diseases a few examples Chris master John mentioned earlier in the last presentation are the ketava in the Pacific Islands who consume 70% of their calories from carbohydrate The Okinawans who consume 85% of their calories from carbohydrate and 50% of those come specifically from starch in the form of sweet potatoes and The tuka center that get 95% of their calories from starch and they are all lean and fit and free of Modern inflammatory disease. So if we're gonna say that that starch is unsafe We have to have some way of explaining how These large these populations several different populations around in different parts of the world consume a large percentage of calories from Starch and man and managed to remain free of all of these these conditions and then professor Lieberman who kicked off the the discussion or the you know did the first presentation here at this Symposium mentioned the role that starch was played in human evolution and it gave us an alternative to fruit and protein And Chris master John showed that humans have more copies of Salivary amylase genes than non-human primates and many anthropologists believe that starch Played a crucial role in evolution and along with meat may have been responsible for the increase in human brain size So some would argue that we wouldn't even be sitting here having this debate if they weren't for starch, so And then finally when it comes to Evidence about starch or carbohydrate intake decreasing longevity. I don't think there's really any solid evidence for that in humans There's some evidence for it in C. elegans, which is a roundworm But roundworms are about a millimeter long. They're transparent and they're either male or hermaphrodite So I'm not really sure we can make those correlations There's a lot of evidence that starch consumption does not affect longevity in humans. I mentioned the okinawans earlier Okinawans that were born in 1950 or before Consumed a diet that consisted again of 85 percent carbohydrate and 50 percent of that was from sweet potatoes alone And they have the longest life expectancy at birth that's been measured yet It's 86 years for men and 78 Sorry 86 for women and 78 for men The their life expectancy at 65 is the longest in the world 24 years longer for women and 18 and a half for men for women and 18 and a half years for men They have the highest number of centenarians in any of any population Measured in the world and once again if starches is the toxin, you know glucose is the toxin That dr. Rosdale would have us believe it's it's to me Difficult to reconcile that with some of what we observe in the anthropological literature So perhaps with the caveat that those cultures are able to tolerate the starch a little better Because they've grown up in that culture. They weren't exposed to ho hosting dongs Doritos and all the stuff that we have Maybe that means all bets are off Well, I think it means that it's pretty clear that starch is safe for some people and it's hard to me It's hard to argue against that I wouldn't argue against the the idea that some people can't tolerate a lot of starch or glucose because of insulin resistance or You know type other other problems even genetic and epigenetic Predispositions that don't enable them process starch as well But to me I think we really have to separate these two conversations because otherwise We run the risk of you know throwing out an entire class of foods without really much human evidence to support that Yeah, I think one of the problems with the whole safe starts thing in my mind is It's an across-the-board thing for people in their minds. They see oh safe starts That gives me permission to have starch without any Caveats at all. I mean people will see that and go. Oh, I guess I can have a white potato never mind What it's doing to my blood sugar, you know and those kinds of things now Kate You said that you didn't really see this a lot with your patients Having them on a low-carb diet did the low-carb diet that you included which has 70 grams of carbohydrate Did it include some starch in it or how did they get to this 70? Well, my view is that sugar is sugar. So it doesn't matter whether comes From fruit or from a banana, you know something that's starchy like a potato So basically I just want to keep them away from anything processed and have them have their starches their sugars and the form of Whatever it is that is as fresh and healthy as possible. You get you even get sugar from cabbage. So The I don't really care. So we just calculate it as long as they follow a couple other rules Like that is not going to be processed again have the right fats I do include fermentation which always lowers the starch content of things like cabbage Anything that is gets fermented the the sugar content gets reduced But I just wanted to briefly address something about the Okinawan diet because I was when I was in Hawaii many of the folks were from Okinawa and I I have to I think that when Americans interpret diets from other countries we do so with a very biased and jaundiced eye and I Don't really believe what the statistics that you cited. I'm you know, I'm sure you have good reason to say what you said but I don't believe them because the The folks who are there said that you know, they had their own gardens. They were fishing all the time rice is very difficult to grow and So they didn't grow that much of it. They just they used other vegetables green vegetables and some fruits Often would have their own chickens. So I don't see that they would have had so much starch In their diets and also in Hawaii I didn't see that they were genetically adapted to high starch diets because when they started eating Rice for breakfast rice for lunch. They got diabetes and got overweight just like everyone else So the longevity data has to be interpreted very carefully because there's so many confounding variables Not the least of which is this epigenetics sort of wild card that we don't really understand the generational influences of You know, the people that now are living to be 90 when they grew up their world was different There was no trans fat. They were everything was practically or was organic. So, you know, we are not living to be 90 Because I'm I'm not 90. I'm not even half that but so I don't know how long I'm gonna live And so we can't say, you know that the okinawans what we see them doing now is gonna make them live to be 90 So there's there's just so many confounding variables in any of this All I can say is when I when my patients keep their numbers ten generally between like a low of 20 and a high of 70 They don't of grams of carb from any source in the context of what I define as a traditional diet With the diversity of meat products that people used to eat which also includes some organ meat some bone broths a lot of stuff That talked about at the Western Price Foundation tables. If you want to go there, they'll give you more information on that As well as fermented vegetables with the probiotics. So It's not just about macronutrients. It's about how we cook our foods and there's a lot of differences even in Just preparing your starchy foods you can prepare them in ways where they're going to interact with the protein in Ways that's gonna make that starch not so safe so So in my experience in clinic, I say 30 to 70 is good And the range I believe is important and it really a traditional diet Paleo diet is one type. I believe of a traditional diet It's a traditional diet from a very long time ago that we don't have a lot of details about But we do have a lot of details about many other traditional diets And if you watch TV shows like no reservations or some of the cooking channel shows You'll get to see how much diversity people have in these other countries in their diet that we don't have and I think that's a lot of What's what's missing from our discussions on a healthy diet is a huge diversity Thank you now Ron some in the ancestral community would say oh It's not really about what you're talking about with blood sugar It's just real food as long as you stick to real food no matter what those sources of real food are potatoes fruit The it's real food then you should eat it and it should be a part of your ancestral diet. Is there anything wrong with that? Well that goes Down to the I think more basic question. Let me try and clear up a little confusion here When I first started doing this was well over 20 years ago when I first proposed a very low carbohydrate high-fat diet and Then it was met with incredible resistance There were maybe four or five people in the world that believed in a very low-carb diet Or even a low-carb diet at all at that time and they were all high protein So I'm the last person standing because of the high fat and the reason I got there was because I was looking at Commonalities among all life not differences our commonalities are much more important. Those are the things that life cannot live without So you look at cholesterol you brought up cholesterol and it's true, you know that there's and I unfortunately have to Take some of the blame For putting cholesterol on the map and I won't go into I don't have time to go into that story But when I was in medical school, it was a huge loss. It anyway got cholesterol and I know we were wrong and The reason I knew we're wrong is because cholesterol is part and parcel of all life. You can't live without cholesterol It's a part of every cell membrane So how can you say that you want to take it away? You can't have a steroid molecule without cholesterol, you know It's really important. So it's one of the few commonalities among life. It's not Whether it's there or whether it's not and in fact life is not even Determined by the parts That it is made up of life is determined by the instructions given to the parts So for us, we're 15 trillion cells and we've got hormones and other signaling molecules that tell those 15 trillion cells What to do to act collectively and harmoniously as one for the common good and all disease will be a disease and communication So it's communication and what to do with that cholesterol. So if it's not doing the proper things that can cause harm I got to the same point in calcium And I think I was the very first person to warn about the dangers of taking calcium supplementation Because if you look at somebody who who has osteoporosis they invariably have higher level There's a direct correlation between calcification and arteries and osteoporosis. You've got the calcium the body has lost the ability of Where to put it? So when you look at all the commonalities, there are certain commonalities that you just cannot get around and number one If you eat something that turns to sugar and I tell you and anybody who eats rice or starch and you have an intact Digestive system it will turn to glucose Okay, that glucose will do certain things and it'll do it and you and you and it'll do it in a cockroach It'll do it in a worm. It'll do it in everybody and some of those things will cause damage But more importantly it will raise insulin and it will raise insulin in a C. Elegans and Normally a C. Elegans doesn't eat glucose Normally, it's on a very low carbohydrate diet. It's actually on a diet very much I recommend and if you feed that C. Elegans a Small physiologic amount Concentration wise what a human would take on a safe starch diet You shorten its lifespan And that was very definitively shown by Cynthia Kenyon after I had a discussion. We're going to do that experiment. It was very cool And so there are certain things that will happen throughout life And those are the things that are most important that you really have to look at The safe starch diet, I think you know and I could be wrong so you can correct me I think a row is because of perceived Term of glucose deficiency that were symptoms from glucose deficiency which by the way I haven't seen either in somebody who followed my diet properly I Think that if you get symptoms is because you're really not following the diet You can burn two fuels you can burn sugar you can burn fat or you can burn t-tones from fat and that's it if you're on a Diet such as mine You have to be able to burn fat properly and if you can't and you're depriving yourself of carbohydrates You've got no fuel to burn and you're going to be in trouble So if you're going to follow this diet It has to be done properly and you have to really go way down in your carbohydrates and you have to eat a high-fat diet and do not make the mistake because it's made all the time of Equating all low carbohydrate diets is the same a low carbohydrate high protein diet is Extremely different and disadvantageous I might add to a low carbohydrate high fat diet Which would get very different results because the fat Can furnish ketones it can furnish a glycerol that you can use to make glucose it can It can furnish all of the nutrients that you need to burn so that you don't have to have any carbohydrates That's not the same with protein and So for instance bears when they come out of hibernation they've measured their ketones and it's quite low and It's because they're getting all of their fuel from fat The brain doesn't need to burn Any sugar at all under well-adapted conditions? The deficiency syndrome that people are talking about is because they're not adapted to a high-fat diet And we talked about kid events real quickly Kid event I totally agree with on the Okinawan's Okinawan eat a high fish high vegetable low starch diet and They've done definitive studies to show it's a low calorie diet. So they're on a low calorie diet Their longevity is no surprise the kid events is the same thing. They're a small Indigenous population that are kind of isolated they might have all sorts of mutations that might be advantageous But one of the things we do know is that they're small literally The the the males average 5 feet 4 women 5 feet 1 Small people and small members of any species live longer probably because they have low IGF 1 Now IGF 1 is very much associated with longevity a friend of mine Andre Barkey He was president American aging Association did all sorts of studies to show that aging is very much correlated and even caused by IGF 1 And one more last point you cannot confuse correlation with cause that's done all the time So any population study you're talking about you're talking about a correlation and not a cause and as Kate mentioned There are so many confounding variables such as was IGF 1 measured, you know Did they really measure everything? Maybe they live that long despite their diet rather than because of it And a lot of that could be so you can take the same population take the kid events put them on a low carbohydrate diet I bet they live even longer and who says by the way they even live long a time You know the last I heard their their average lifespan was not even long, you know So I do not understand this obsession with a kid event Thank you So Paul a lot of people may not realize but you actually have some ketogenic Diets as part of your perfect health diet for specific diseases. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so we have a We have a ketogenic variant of our diet which Which we have because I Supplying ketones can to the brain and the nerves can be therapeutic for certain neurological conditions so we've had people on the ketogenic version of our diet that I Have recovered from lifelong migraines Recovered from some mental illnesses like obsessive compulsive disorder borderline personality disorder depression and We had some kids with a genetic disorder called neuro degeneration with brain iron accumulation Which is an incredibly painful disorder. They have dystonia spasms and they're they're in intense pain die in their teens, but you know the last 10 years is extremely painful and Apparently on a ketogenic diet They don't have the spasms and don't have the pain So several kids have been in have been on our diet for for several years, but the design of our Key to the ketogenic version of the perfect health diet does include some safe starches, so the ketones are generated by Sort of flooding the liver with MCT oil And the liver will export the excess calories as ketones even if you're eating starches And so you can you can eat starches Supply your body with the glucose you need for glucose nutrition Ron made the good point about cholesterol that it's on every cell membrane. It's you know, but you can say the same thing about glucose cells cannot interact unless proteins are glycosylated so You know it is important to supply the body with glucose a lot of the negative effects on clinical ketogenic diets Were a result of not not supplying sufficient carbohydrate and protein you know, they would just give them huge amounts of fat and leave them malnourished and You know, so ketogenic diets Can be risky if they're badly designed, but they can be helpful I don't know if there's time I'd like to respond to some of the ageing issues I sort of have a bit of a middle ground in this There's not much evidence relating carbohydrates to aging. There is an inverse Correlation between carbohydrate intake and lifespan in population studies. So if you go country by country The higher the carbohydrate intake the shorter the lifespan as a role and this is true even within advanced countries like the European countries vary from like 47 percent carbs to 50 percent 56 percent carbs or so and the higher carbon takes have Shorter lifespans, but when you look around the globe, you know, every country is between 45 percent carb and 80 percent carb There aren't population studies with low carb diets my bet would be that the dependence of longevity on carbohydrate intake would have a u-shaped curve and the longest lifespans would be around Probably 30 to 40 percent carbohydrate maybe 20 20 to 40 percent and then I Had another point, but I've forgotten what it was So I'll pass that I Can finish before you I remember what it was. All right. The other point is Yes, you can in the worms on if you if you deprive them of carbs or if you make genetic changes which Reduce insulin signaling then you will extend their lifespan in the laboratory You'll extend their maximum lifespan But if you put those same genetically modified worms into the soil, which is their natural habitat They'll have a shorter lifespan than wild type worms. So they basically become very fragile To certain insults and threats and the same thing will happen if you malnourish people on glucose or protein You know, you may Protein restriction is very effective at extending maximum lifespan But it also makes you more more vulnerable to toxins and threats I believe Chris master John has done a lot of good blogging about that and You know, so as a practical matter for your life expectancy, I Don't think people should expect it's going to be greater on a very low carb diet We'll talk about that Okay, so I want to leave plenty of time for you guys to ask questions because you probably don't want any questions about this topic But I'm just kidding so we're gonna try to leave about 10 minutes for that So I'm just gonna ask whoever's left on the panel has anything else. They want to say before I go to that Chris. Yeah, just a couple of points In a healthy functioning Metabolism, I'm not sure eating glucose and having insulin go up and storing glucose in the cells is a problem I actually think it's a normal physiological process and You know short of insulin resistance leptin resistance and other metabolic issues I don't see that that just strikes me as normal human physiology Another thing that's worth pointing out is even though I do agree that a low-carb diet is often the best choice and starting place for people with metabolic issues It's worth noting that other approaches have also been shown to be effective in the scientific literature So low-fat diets, although not as effective as low-carb diets do cause fat loss even without voluntary calorie restriction Crash diets like calorie restricted diets this 800 calorie diet that some of you might have read about it was published Earlier this year where diabetes type 2 diabetes was almost completely reversed in a number of patients And even after they went back on their normal diet for a period of time And then how many of you have heard of Chris Voight and the potato diet? Anybody show hands here. This is a guy who ate nothing but white potatoes for two months That's it only potatoes. He lost 21 pounds Pardon me Yeah So he lost 21 pounds. He cut his triglycerides in half. He cut his LDL by 40 percent and His fasting glucose went down from an average of 104 to begin with to 94 After the study Period was over and he had a lot of improvement and other metabolic markers that were measured too So I'm not suggesting the potato diet is necessarily a healthy choice. I don't use it with my patients in the clinic I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who'd be willing to do that to tell you the truth, but I am suggesting that the glucose is not Not a toxin certainly for healthy people and in normal amounts and possibly not even for people with metabolic issues Well, I interviewed Chris Voight on my podcast and he was miserable eating that every day So not very recommended So anybody else? Sure, but no you go first I'll take everybody's time Yes, we know Just real quick I wanted to say one other part of the non-aging phenomenon Stealing time On my low carb contest one of the things that I found also in those people who had been low carb for a long time I had problems was that they had kind of gotten into a serious rut where they were doing the same thing over and over and And part of it is just that the the lure of convenience right it gets easier to do something And you do it again and again, you know, especially if it made you feel good in the beginning But I noticed that there were many people who had just very ultimately restricted diets And I think that One of the things that we can just totally lose sight of this whole what are we really after when we eat? It's not macronutrients. It's it's it's Information from the earth, you know the the earth Has all kinds of chemicals that it produces and we need lots of them And so, you know food is information and what we want to do is try and get the most Diversity of that information The same diversity that our ancestors got and so they expect what our ancestors got and this is why I think Understanding traditional diets all traditional diets, not just the paleo diet So if you're Chinese Japanese Russian, whatever and you know a lot of those kind of recipes Then then those are gonna be good for you and in some level You don't need to worry so much about the macronutrient content because you can get some stress just you know Oh my gosh, am I doing doing this right? Am I gonna live forever? Am I you know Losing my chances enjoy your food get the information from the earth and as high as quality as you possibly can and that Seems to keep people out of all kinds of trouble Thank you and Ron. Can you do in a couple minutes? Sure Well, will you do India time? First of all what nobody is saying that glucose is not a Nutrient that is necessary, you know Of course, we have desirable Glication it's part and parcel of many different body parts That's not the discussion. The discussion is do we have to eat it? And so that the question really in this whole debate boils down to Is it better to eat the glucose or make it via new gluconeogenesis? That's really what it boils down to and that begs the question. What's wrong with gluconeogenesis? Is it bad? And that has to be further elaborated on by because there's different substrates for gluconeogenesis The only bad part of gluconeogenesis might be if you have to eat up your own lean mass Okay, that means if you have to get the glucose from protein and that's why a long time ago I started putting people on a low Protein diet not a high protein diet because I was treating a lot of diabetics and I didn't want them We know the diabetics make a lot of their glucose when they wake up in the morning from protein And they lose lean mass and I found when I put people on my diet They actually gained lean mass almost uniformly without exercising So they were not only not burning up their lean mass they were adding to it because we were becoming at that time I thought more insulin sensitive and that's proving to be correct the other substrates for gluconeogenesis Which are ketones and recycled lactate and Glycerol from fat are extremely safe and extremely easy and there's multiple studies I don't have time to go into right now that show that they're much healthier for you Burning ketones is far healthier for you than burning glucose It's healthier for nerves. It's healthier all the way around and George Cahill from this beautiful University Who's one of the leading experts on starvation physiology? And that's really what we're talking about here and he mentions himself that when we're talking about starvation We're talking about carbohydrate starvation. Is there a problem with carbohydrate starvation? And he says no it says that under adapted conditions the brain requires Virtually no glucose intake that it can adapt to burning ketones and the glycerol from fat and blah blah You don't need to take it in at all and in fact functions much better, which I think you might have even mentioned as far as epilepsy they're even using it now for For that sort of thing so that's something that's you know really important to to understand when we talk about aging What is really being discovered in aging is that? There are Pathways or is a particularly common pathway that? seems to be uniform across all life in other words. It's really ancient that Senses the amount of nutrient availability and adjusts reproduction accordingly and Evolution is for reproductive success. It is not for a long post reproductive lifespan So anybody wants to do just what's natural what you're really saying is that after I've had children and given them enough Opportunity to stand on their own two feet that I'm perfectly fine with dying because that's what natural is Okay, so get that out of your head all we have to go by if we want to live a long post reproductive lifespan is science What we have to do is use nature's tricks that allowed life to live through reproductive years and carry them on post reproductively and the main trick is a genetic pathway that can greatly Upregulate maintenance mechanisms such as DNA repair and autophagy and intra cellular antioxidants not extra cellular So that it can outlive a perceived famine the nutrients that Regulate this nutrient availability are insulin m-tor for protein insulin for glucose and probably Leptin for fat and when you keep them all low and they're kept low by very low carbohydrate and As low protein as you can get without getting it to protein deficiency You is shown that you will up regulate that genetic pathway that will up regulate repair mechanism that will make you healthier all the way across we're not just talking about Living a longer average lifespan what we're getting at is science is able to greatly extend a maximum lifespan Losing weight is an irrelevant story. Anybody can lose weight. The best thing to lose weight by the way is to take cyanide You know, and you'll lose weight, you know, so losing weight in health. It's not the same thing. So forget that But we're after is health and health and living a longer maximum lifespan are totally tied together I can assure you if you're unhealthy, you're not gonna live a really long life and so It's these repair mechanisms that we have to tie into and when you eat glucose when you eat a safe starch in every single one of You I promise you will raise your insulin Your glucose might even stay fairly normal, but you're doing so at the expense of raising insulin You are substituting one evil which is hot blood glucose for another even worse evil called high insulin And I gave a talk back and I think 1993 it was the first talk given on the detriment of high insulin We called what about insulin became quite famous And it's set the stage for everybody is talking about an insulin insulin today and everything I said in that talk is new information today I talked about the glycemic index. I talked about glycation. I talked about small densely I talked about everything 20 years or nothing you're hearing today is is really new It's just taking that long for that information to get around it hasn't changed So there are some things when you talk about the basics that really don't change and the things that don't change are the Commonalities among all life not the subtle differences not the change in the color of our eyes the way our eyes work are fundamentally the same And that's what's important to life and that's what you have to keep in mind And I can summarize everything there is to know about health and nutrition and it's this that your health and longevity Will be dependent on the proportion of fat versus sugar that you burn over a lifetime Period and if you eat starches and if you eat sugar it shuts off that burning and You will be less healthy for it and there's a lot of science behind what I just said And I don't have time to go into it now if I have some time tomorrow when I talk, I'll do it then Thank you very much. Thank you, Ron All right, so we have about eight people and I ask questions and four minutes great So let's start with you over there I'm a family physician, so I you know treat patients and they have to be responsible for outcomes And I think I agree with Lustig and Johnson that you can't just talk about sugars In this country in this country We get a lot of our sugars from fruit toasts in the form of sucrose high fructose corn syrup And there's no ancestral diet that I'm aware of that contain the combination of excessive fruit toast and high glycemic carbs That's the American diet That's what's killing us. It's driving We now think brain dysfunction a lot of psychiatric disorders a lot of metabolic disorders So, you know, I think if we didn't have excessive fruit toast that causes insulin resistance You could probably consume starches with with a lot less negative impact But nobody in this country is free of insulin resistance. That's right few people in this room We all have diabetes Well, it depends on what you call diabetes if you define diabetes by insulin resistance or left in resistance. I do Right, and so you should eat a diet to treat diabetes everybody So there's no such thing as some healthy people and some unhealthy people. We're all unhealthy to a degree So I mean if you come from a culture with no excessive fruit toast eat potatoes and rice and so forth You're probably okay. Nobody in this room qualifies that I know of well That's one aspect certainly fruit toast I talked about fruit toast a good two decades before Lustig did and told about the detriment of fruit toast and it's certainly something that's bad We're talking about life is is going to be constant battle between damage and repair Okay, if we could repair damage as fast as it occurred. We would live forever Okay, most people are talking about the damage that's occurring and we have some control over that damage Okay, oxidation causes a lot of damage. I can't tell people to stop breathing Okay, so oxidation will occur but we have most control over repair of damage and that repair of damage I cannot say enough about because it's so important It's regulated by nutrient sensors that fruit toast does regulate to some extent So we have to look at the parts we have to look at glucose and fruit toast and cholesterol and everything as to how they affect Hormones that regulate the integrity of the relationship among the 15 trillion cells things are somewhat complicated all I know is in managing thousands of thousands of patients if they limit their fruit toast I mean so we're running at we're actually out of time now. So it's bad. I agree. It's not the only thing Thank you very much and if you want to ask these guys any questions, they'll be up here a few minutes, right? They will now